History of English Literature, Volume 4: Early and Mid-Victorian Prose and Poetry, 1832–1870 [New ed.] 1789972027, 9781789972023

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History of English Literature

History of English Literature Volume 4

Early and Mid-Victorian Prose and Poetry, 1832–1870 Franco Marucci Translated from the Italian by Jean Ellis D’Alessandro, Patricia Robison, Bernard Wade and Elizabeth Harrowell

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: Early and mid-Victorian prose and poetry, 1832-1870 / Franco Marucci. Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2019] | Series: History of English literature ; 4 | Translation of Dal 1832 al 1870, Il saggismo e la poesia, volume 3, tome 1 of Storia della letteratura inglese. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018014106 | ISBN 9781789972023 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: English literature--19th century--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR461 .M335 2018 | DDC 820.9/008--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014106 Originally published in Italian as Storia della letteratura inglese – Dal 1832 al 1870 – Il saggismo e la poesia by Casa Editrice Le Lettere (2003). Cover image: J. McNeven, The transept from the Grand Entrance, Souvenir of the Great Exhibition (1851), William Simpson (lithographer), Ackermann & Co. (publisher), V&A collections. Cover design by Brian Melville. ISBN 978-1-78997-202-0 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-229-0 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78874-230-6 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-231-3 (mobi) © Peter Lang AG 2019 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 

ix/I

Introduction1/I § 1.

The identity of the English writer after 1832

3/I

  2.

Art as mediation

9/I

  3. Victorian poetry: Post-Romantic, Biedermeier, Spasmodic and proto-Decadent

13/I

  4.

The hegemony of the novel

18/I

  5.

Victorian psychoses

27/I

  6.

Fluctuations in taste and criticism

34/I

  7.

Social and political chronology of the Victorian Age up to 1870

40/I

Part I

The Scaffoldings of Victorian Thought

49/I

  8–9.

Thomas Arnold of Rugby

51/I



§ 8. The educational system, p. 51. § 9. The Rugbeian forge, p. 57.

vi/I 

§§ 10–25.

Carlyle

62/I



§ 10. Chaos into cosmos, p. 62. § 11. The debate over de-Christianized religion, p. 70. § 12. Hitler’s tears, p. 77. § 13. Biography, p. 79. § 14. The transcendental essays, p. 84. §§ 15–16. Sartor Resartus (§ 15. The autobiographical pastiche, p. 92. § 16. The paleosemiotics of clothing, p. 97). § 17. The French Revolution, p. 103. § 18. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, p. 107. § 19. Past and Present, p. 114. § 20. Cromwell, p. 118. § 21. Latter-Day Pamphlets, p. 123. § 22. The Life of John Sterling, p. 127. § 23. Frederick the Great. Carlyle’s seven years’ war, p. 130. § 24. Reminiscences, p. 134. § 25. Last works, p. 137.

  26–32.

Newman



§ 26. The charismatic defector, p. 140. §§ 27–28. Apologia pro Vita Sua (§ 27. Occasion, background and objectives of the intellectual autobiography, p. 149. § 28. Drifting to the shore, p. 154). § 29. The poetry. The Dream of Gerontius, p. 161. § 30. The novels, p. 170. § 31. The Idea of a University, p. 178. § 32. The Grammar of Assent, p. 185.

  33.

Froude

190/I

  34–39.

Macaulay

196/I



§ 34. The ‘great apostle of the Philistines’, p. 196. § 35. Biography, p. 204. §§ 36–37. The essays (§ 36. The organic idea of historico-literary culture, p. 206. § 37. The struggle against intolerance, and the evolution of progress, p. 211). § 38. Lays of Ancient Rome, p. 218. § 39. The History of England. A romanticized polyptych of the Glorious Revolution, p. 221.

140/I

vii/I 

§§ 40–43.

Mill

227/I



§ 40. The theorist of humanized utilitarianism, p. 227. § 41. The mental phases up to the ‘crisis’, p. 232. § 42. The philosophical essays and treatises, p. 240. § 43. The defence of individual freedom, p. 244.

   44–57.

Ruskin up to 1869



§ 44. The myth-maker, p. 250. § 45. The arbiter of taste, p. 259. § 46. Biography up to 1869, p. 263. §§ 47–50. Modern Painters (§ 47. An anomalous treatise of painting, p. 270. § 48. The interdependence of truth and beauty, p. 275. § 49. The general theory of the development of art, p. 279. § 50. The painter as mountaineer, p. 282). § 51. The Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 286. §§ 52–54. The Stones of Venice (§ 52. The romance of a buried civilization, p. 291. § 53. The effulgence of the Venetian Gothic, p. 297. § 54. The corrupt Renaissance, p. 300). § 55. Other works of art criticism, p. 304. § 56. Moral fables for the young, p. 308. § 57. Palingenetic dreams of a tribune, p. 312.

   58.

Darwin and Darwinism

322/I

  59.

Spencer

330/I

250/I

The Index of names and Thematic index for Volume 4 can be found at the end of Book 3. Part II The Poetry of the ‘Defectors’ from Oxford and Cambridge

1/II

viii/I 

§§ 60–73.

Barrett Browning



§ 60. The deputy Poet Laureate, p. 3. § 61. Beyond romance, p. 11. § 62. Biography, p. 17. § 63. Scholarly and Homeric poetry until 1833, p. 20. § 64. The Seraphim and the Arthurian ballads of 1838, p. 26. § 65. A Drama of Exile, p. 32. § 66. Ballads of medieval frustration, p. 34. § 67. Towards an aesthetics of the constructive word, p. 40. §§ 68–69. Sonnets from the Portuguese (§ 68. Browning courted in verse, p. 45. § 69. Sonnets on Eros disguised, p. 49). § 70. Casa Guidi Windows. A homage to the Risorgimento, p. 55. §§ 71–72. Aurora Leigh (§ 71. The failed masterpiece, p. 60. § 72. The reconciliation of poetry and philanthropy, p. 69). § 73. Final poems, p. 75.

   74–99.

Tennyson up to 1874



§ 74. An exile from the palace of art, p. 80. § 75. The two voices, p. 87. § 76. The ‘stupid’ Tennyson, p. 92. § 77. Posthumous fame, p. 97. § 78. Biography, p. 102. § 79. Criteria for discussion, p. 108. § 80. Tennyson’s precocity, p. 109. §§ 81–82. Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (§ 81. A poetry of musical lyricism, p. 118. § 82. Metaphysical quests and imaginary escapes, p. 123). §§ 83–85. The 1832 poems (§ 83. The socializing of the Romantic demiurge, p. 129. § 84. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and repressed eroticism, p. 137. § 85. Idylls and political poems, p. 148). §§ 86–88. The 1842 poems (§ 86. ‘The Two Voices’, p. 152. § 87. Action and asceticism, p. 161. § 88. ‘Locksley Hall’ and other poems about crossed lovers, p. 167). §§ 89–90. The Princess (§ 89. Reformist mediation and chauvinistic feminism, p. 173. § 90. The lyrical interludes and the intercalary songs, p. 181). §§ 91–94. In Memoriam (§ 91. Genesis and organization, p. 183. § 92. The therapy of pain, p. 192. § 93. The Deus absconditus and

3/II

80/II

ix/I  blind evolutionism, p. 200. § 94. Cosmic finalism regained, p. 204). § 95. Poems after In Memoriam from 1850 to 1855, p. 210. §§ 96–97. Maud (§ 96. The ‘monodramatic’ rewriting of the trauma of first love, p. 214. § 97. Amour fou healed by war, p. 219). § 98. Poems from 1855 to 1864. The poet of the people, p. 225. § 99. Poems from 1869 to 1874. Lucretius, p. 233.

§§ 100–103. FitzGerald

§ 100. From the would-be creator to the orientalist forger, p. 239. § 101. The dialogue Euphranor, p. 245. §§ 102–103. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (§ 102. Omar reborn in the sceptical nineteenth century, p. 252. § 103. The conceptual arabesque, p. 259).

   104–132. Browning up to 1869

239/II

§ 104. A defector on the loose, Spasmodic and politicized, p. 265. § 105. The ‘white light’ and the ‘prismatic hues’, p. 272. § 106. Mechanisms and horizons of Browning’s dramatic monologue, p. 277. § 107. Foreshadowings and influences of Browning’s art, p. 281. § 108. Biography, p. 289. § 109. Pauline and the essays on Chatterton and Shelley, p. 300. § 110. Paracelsus. The failed search for absolute knowledge, p. 306. §§ 111–112. Sordello (§ 111. The travails of a Romantic soul in the Italian Middle Ages, p. 313. § 112. The double defeat of the poet and politician, p. 320). § 113. The theatre, p. 325. § 114. Pippa Passes. Asolo’s naïve spinner, p. 332. § 115. Dramatic Lyrics. Psychic unbalance, p. 338. §§ 116–117. Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (§ 116. Scenes from Renaissance and contemporary Italy, p. 348. § 117. Other lyrics with love-related themes, p. 355). § 118–119. Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (§ 118. The Christian confessions under scrutiny, p. 358. § 119. The temptations of ascetic life, p. 363). §§ 120–123. Men and

265/II

x/I  Women (§ 120. Monologues and poems on conjugal love, p. 367. § 121. Monologues and poems on pictorial, musical and literary art, p. 376. § 122. Monologues and poems on religion and theology, p. 386. § 123. ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, p. 396). §§ 124–125. Dramatis Personae (§ 124. Faith threatened by evolutionism, p. 401. § 125. Autobiographical and occasional poems, p. 413). §§ 126–132. The Ring and the Book (§ 126. Materials, sources, structural organization and conceptual framework, p. 418. § 127. The fresco of seventeenth-century Italy, p. 432. § 128. The two ‘Half-Romes’ and the Tertium Quid, p. 437. § 129. The two monologues of Guido Franceschini, p. 445. § 130. Giuseppe Caponsacchi and Pompilia, p. 456. § 131. The lawyers, p. 466. § 132. A resolution or a re-opening of relativism?, p. 478).

§§ 133–147. Clough

§ 133. A ‘submerged’ poet, fathoming psychic division, p. 490. § 134. Biography, p. 502. § 135. University poems, p. 509. § 136. Ambarvalia. Early signs of bivocal poetry, p. 511. § 137. Adam and Eve, p.  518. §§ 138–139. The Bothie of Tober-na-vuolich (§ 138. The joyful parody of academia, p. 520. § 139. The bothie, an exportable microcosmos, p. 525). §§ 140–141. Amours de Voyage (§ 140. The withdrawal from action and the epistolary game, p. 531. § 141. The personal debacle reflected in the fall of the Roman Republic, p.  536). § 142. The poems of ‘juxtaposition’, p.  539. §§ 143–145. Dipsychus (§ 143. The staging of the conflict between conscience and the world, p.  543. § 144. The ‘double-minded man’ and the tempting Spirit, p.  549. § 145. The final scenes. Dipsychus continued, p. 555). § 146. Completed and unfinished poems from 1850–1853, p. 557. § 147. Mari Magno, p. 561.

490/II

xi/I 

§§ 148–170. Matthew Arnold up to 1870

567/II

§ 148. Subdued Romanticism and classical aspirations, p. 567. § 149. From the poet to the essayist and to the theorist of integrated literature, p. 580. § 150. Range and argumentative strategies of Arnold’s essays, p. 596. § 151. Biography, p. 604. § 152. The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems. The triad of poems on controlled empathy and the ‘wide’ vision, p.  609. § 153. The stateless cosmos and the philosophy of active stoicism, p. 618. § 154. Poems of the ‘ebb tide’, p. 624. § 155. ‘Empedocles on Etna’ and the tragedy of selfdevouring thought, p. 633. § 156. Arnold as Tristram, and the two Iseults, p. 639. § 157. Post-Tractarian disorientation and the temptations of communitarian salvation, p. 649. § 158. Balder Dead and Merope. Reworkings and updates of myth, p. 658. § 159. The epicedia of the 1860s, p. 666. § 160. Further poems of the 1860s. The conquest of the euphoric word and the vision of a new world order, p. 676. § 161. The essays on the Homeric translations, p.  682. §§ 162–164. The first series of Essays in Criticism (§ 162. Implications and applications of Arnold’s ‘criticism’, p. 691. § 163. The historical and literary perspective, p. 697. § 164. The essays on religion, p. 704). § 165. On the Study of Celtic Literature. Political separatism cured by philology, p. 709. § 166. Friendship’s Garland. The first, satirical and parodic work of the political writer, p. 715. §§ 167–168. Culture and Anarchy (§ 167. The synthesis of Arnold’s neo-humanism, p.  721. § 168. Waiting for a re-Hellenization, p.  726). § 169. Educational writings, p. 732. § 170. Secondary and university education in Europe and in England, p. 737.

The Index of names and Thematic index for Volume 4 can be found at the end of Book 3.

xii/I  Part Iii

The Pre-Raphaelites

1/III

§§ 171–180. Patmore

3/III

§ 171. The singer of hearth and home, p. 3. § 172. The second, mid-Victorian outsider, p. 11. § 173. Biography, p. 21. § 174. Youthful poems of frustrated love, p. 25. §§ 175–176. The Angel in the House (§ 175. Scenes of domestic happiness, p. 28. § 176. Angelic catechesis and ironic distancing, p. 33). § 177. The Victories of Love. The polyphonic, reversed rewriting of The Angel in the House, p. 40. § 178. The Unknown Eros. The Eroica Symphony of virginal love, p. 49. § 179. Final idylls of senile love, p. 58. § 180. Essays and aphorisms, p. 60.

   181.

The Rossetti family

   182–195. Dante Gabriel Rossetti § 182. An Anglo-Italian Janus, p.  66. § 183. Painting into literature and non-figurative poetry, p.  79. § 184. Biography, p. 83. § 185. ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and other poems in the sensual Stilnovo style, p.  86. § 186. Rhapsodies on disappointed waiting, p.  93. § 187. From Christian to diabolical art …, p. 97. § 188. … and on to the phenomenology of the real, p. 102. § 189. The prose stories, p. 108. § 190. Painting up to 1865, p. 112. § 191. Rossetti the Dante scholar, translator and critic, p. 117. §§ 192–193. The House of Life  (§ 192. Stylistic contamination and structural unity, p.  125. § 193. The esoteric and Dantesque texture, p. 129). § 194. The final ballads, p. 137. § 195. Development and influence of Rossetti’s portraits, p. 141.

62/III 66/III

xiii/I 

§§ 196–206. Christina Rossetti

145/III

§ 196. Dante’s ‘sister’, p.  145. § 197. Culmination, decline and revival of Rossetti’s poetry, p. 154. § 198. Aporias under scrutiny, p. 159. § 199. Biography, p. 165. § 200. Poems on unrequited love, p. 170. § 201. Poems with a rural background on pairs of sisters, p.  176. §§ 202–203. ‘Goblin Market’ (§ 202. The allegory of rewarded expectation and intermediary experience, p. 180. § 203. Further symbolic implications, p. 192). § 204. Fairytale ballads and dream fantasies, p. 195. § 205. Apocalyptic visions and religious self-probings, p. 199. § 206. Narrative and devotional prose, p. 206.

   207.

Pictorial Pre-Raphaelitism

213/III

   208.

Minor Pre-Raphaelite literature

221/III

   209.

Woolner

222/III

   210.

William Bell Scott

226/III

   211.

Allingham

229/III

   212.

Procter

234/III

Other Poets and Poetic Movements

243/III

§ 213.

245/III

Part Iv

Barnes. The minor ‘classic’

xiv/I 

 214.

Cook

257/III

  215.

Ingelow, Greenwell

263/III

  216.

Victorian women poets

273/III

  217.

Victorian nonsense

280/III

 218–221.

Lear

283/III

§ 218. Genesis and morphology of Lear’s limericks, p.  283. § 219. The individual versus society, p.  289. § 220. Further nonsense poems and prose, p.  294. § 221. The landscape designer, painter and diarist, p. 297.

 222.

Humourists

302/III

  223.

Chartist poetry

304/III

  224.

The Spasmodics

305/III

 225.

Bailey. Festus and vulgarised Faustism

309/III

  226.

Dobell. The second Titan

313/III

§§ 227–228. Smith

319/III

§ 227. A Life-Drama, p. 319. § 228. Dreamthorp, p. 324.

   229.

Ebenezer Jones

331/III

   230.

Taylor

332/III

xv/I 

   231.

The reawakening of drama. Boucicault, Robertson336/III

Index of names

345/III

Thematic index

367/III

Abbreviations I. Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, London 1993. BAUGH A Literary History of England, ed. A. C. Baugh, 4 vols, London 1967. CRHE The Critical Heritage of individual authors, London, with editors and publication years indicated in the bibliographies. 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). MVO 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. NCF Nineteenth-Century Fiction. OCE G. Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus, 4 vols, Harmondsworth 1970. PGU The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. B. Ford, 7 vols, Harmondsworth 1968. PHE M. Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, Eng. trans., London 1969 (1st Italian edn La crisi dell’eroe nel romanzo vittoriano, Firenze 1952). PIO M. Praz, Poeti inglesi dell’Ottocento, Firenze 1925. PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. PSL M. Praz, Storia della letteratura inglese, Firenze 1968. SAI G. Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature, London 1948 (1st edn 1898). SSI M. Praz, Studi e svaghi inglesi, 2 vols, Milano 1983 (1st edn 1937). TAI H. A. Taine, History of English Literature, Eng. trans., 4 vols, London 1920 (1st French edn 1864). AVP

TCR TLS TNE VAL VP WOL

V. Woolf, The Common Reader, First Series, Harmondsworth 1938 (1st edn London 1925), and Second Series, London 1935 (1st edn London 1932). The Times Literary Supplement. K. Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties, London 1954. G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature, London 1913. Victorian Poetry. R. L. Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England, London 1977.

Volumes of the present work will be cited as follows: Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 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. 3, Oxford 2018. 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.

Introduction

§ 1. The identity of the English writer after 1832 All attempts normally made to pinpoint specific years as the beginning and the end of literary movements are inevitably arbitrary or compromise solutions, and as such to be avoided. One such is the convention of locating the beginning of the Victorian Age at 1837 and making it end in 1901, in exact coincidence with the reign of Queen Victoria. Unlike the many -isms that crowd the history of artistic and literary movements, Victorianism has in fact no intrinsic historical-literary reference points, whether concerning time-space or tied to conceptual categories (such as Classicism, Modernism, Futurism, or even Romanticism), nor does it give rise to colourful metaphorical associations (such as Vorticism, Dadaism, etc.), since it derives its name – coined in 1851, perhaps on the lines of ‘Elizabethan’ – from a monarch who was its symbol and emblem by definition. It has often been noted, though, that Victorianism existed before Victoria came to the throne, and that the period stretched beyond her death. Hence, many have pinpointed an event that took place before the coming of Victoria, and marked more tangibly and concretely a turning point in the sphere of culture and literature: the First Reform Bill of 1832. In that year, a limited democratic renewal took place in England, which led in turn to a vigorous reforming zeal that clearly influenced the fate of the arts, or at least those aspects of history shaping their destiny. The periodization of Victorianism after 1832 is more controversial. Instead of its bi-partitioning, from 1832 to 1870, and from 1870 to the end of the century, which is also followed here, many opt for a tri-partitioning into early, middle and late Victorianism. The cusp years have been viewed variously as 1848 or 1851 or 1855 – between the early and middle periods – and as 1867, 1868, and 1870, between the middle and late. Some have even considered dividing the late period still further into two half-periods turning on the year 1890. The political event symmetrical to the First Reform Bill, and no less important in its social repercussions, is the Second Reform Bill of 1867. This was a ‘leap into the dark’, according to Disraeli, while Carlyle saw it as being the end of ‘poor old England’. Gladstone’s first ministry began in 1868, France’s defeat by Prussia was in 1870, when the first signs marking the end of English hegemony in Europe began to appear. Added to all this, there was the great economic depression of 1870. A break at 1870,

4/I Introduction

with the division of the whole into two thirty-five-year periods, has the further advantage of being natural, and has a more specific literary-historic significance, because by 1870 a number of important writers were dead; it also signals the mutation in technique and style of others, and marks a perceptible change in horizons and ideologies. In fact, around this date cluster pointers to a new poetic sensibility, that of aestheticism – from the poetry of Rossetti to that of Swinburne and to the poetic manifestos of Austin and Buchanan, not to mention the reactions of their predecessors, from Browning to Tennyson and Arnold – that will form one, or rather, chronologically the first, of the lines of development in late nineteenth-century English literature. Not all Victorian writers can be fitted completely into the arc 1832 to 1870. In fact, after 1832, Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Southey were still writing, and after 1870 Tennyson and Browning, and others, like Meredith, had much of their literary career still to come. If, apart from Wordsworth and Coleridge, or Blake, the Romantic poets were dead before they reached the age of thirty or forty, leaving in their wake a highly concentrated production, many Victorians were quite longlived and left behind them many volumes of work. Such longevity meant, on the artistic plane at least, that they were slow in updating the forms and contents of their art. In this, they were very different from the few who had, paradoxically, the good fortune to die young and who were, therefore, authors of an explosive poetic output that could be defined as synchronic, and whose epitome might be Hopkins. The chronological criterion followed in this History requires an explanation of the apparent anomalies inherent in such a method. The production published by the Romantic poets after 1832 has been treated in Volume 3 of this work; writers born after 1800 and up to 1830 belong here, while those born afterwards find their place in Volume 6. There are, of course, the odd exceptions. If it is true that in 1870, or round about that date, a further change in sensibility can be discerned, which was as strongly felt as it was resisted by the writers then living and active, it seems indispensable that the above-mentioned major endurers are dealt with at two separate times, both before and after that date, and appear in part in this and in part in Volume 6 of this opus. 2. The repercussions of the First Reform Bill on post-1832 literature were, generally speaking, twofold: firstly, the modest euphoria of writers,

§ 1. The identity of the English writer after 1832

5/I

some of whom initially sided with a political cause only to cool down later and take up more conservative positions; secondly, a substantial revision of the modes of literary transmission. In order to understand Victorian literature in its complexity it is necessary, although insufficient in itself, to examine the role played by the writer before and after 1832.1 We need to start from the unprecedented rise in literacy. Mass schooling was one of the reforms promised by Victorian governments and promoted by private initiatives and religious charities. From this joint propulsion, various ventures got underway, such as the widespread proliferation of debating clubs, of evening courses for workers, and lectures – often held by famous names in the scientific and literary worlds – stimulating a desire for further knowledge. The newly literate reader was seen as a possible consumer once the working day in the factories and mines was regulated and reduced, affording workers moments of leisure. The publishing industry quickened into a new life owing to the common reader being stimulated to read, as many books, magazines and newspapers were present on the market and priced as cheaply as possible. The lowering of prices, in turn, was due to improved printing technology and to the creation of open-access, or circulating libraries. These libraries lent out books fairly cheaply, thereby making them accessible to a growing number of readers. Thus, in a short while, unscrupulous publishing houses, fuelled by greed, published works to satisfy all tastes, even the most reactionary – including pocket editions, cheap journals, and horror stories – and attracted a huge variety of readers. The Victorians were the first to sell literary works in pamphlet form and in weekly instalments, and to transform an elite literature into one for the masses. Furthermore, it was in this period that the term bestseller, later overused and abused, was coined. The main problem facing political power during the first fifty years of the century was how to promote schooling while at the same time keeping it harmless. If, at the end of the eighteenth century, the greatest impediment to the expansion of

1

I am here indebted to R. D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900, Chicago 1983, the best-documented and most authoritative work on this subject.

6/I Introduction

education in England had been the fearsome spectre of the French Revolution, and terror at the possible spread and influence of Paine’s pamphlets – so much so that Sunday Schools for the children of workers were commonly thought of as nurseries of Jacobinism – in the nineteenth century the educational objective became that of moulding the ‘intelligent artisan’, the mild, virtuous and obedient worker. The burgeoning importance of the Victorian writer was recognized officially in the growing prestige of the Poet Laureate, an honour that led to a blunting of the genius of famous poets like Wordsworth, or that incurably broke the spirit of others who held it, like Tennyson. It meant – except in Wordsworth’s case, who, in accepting it, asked to be exempted from such obligations – that the poet was expected to contribute lines for the birthdays of the royal persons and other celebratory events, such as, in wartime, victories, inspiring episodes and acts of heroism. The Poet Laureate was the prime cultural intermediary and agent of consensus for the Crown; but, at the same time, other well-known writers became beneficiaries of pensions, life endowments, and honorary appointments. 3. The greater part of Victorian publishing will not be examined here, in so far as it belongs either to the anonymity of consumer literature aimed at exploiting the schooling of the masses, or to the sphere of edification and popularization, which, the statistics show, reached astronomical circulation figures. Many writers and their works, in fact, were ready to serve the new objectives of social integration, or were persuaded to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by the market. Hence the weakness of the boundary between the original and the stereotyped in low and medium low level Victorian literature.2 However, even the most limited range of texts with an overt aesthetic end reveals dependence on the prevailing social situation. Arnold, using the German word Zeitgeist, sketched the outlines of

2

Some of the greatest Victorian novels – Jane Eyre and Hard Times, for instance – begin in a school, or reflect the spreading of literacy in its early uncertain steps, with its utilitarian and scientific leanings, not always viewed in a positive light. Much Victorian prose has an educational bent, and especially that of Matthew Arnold who, for many years, held a post with the Ministry of Education as an inspector of schools.

§ 1. The identity of the English writer after 1832

7/I

the historical-cultural juncture in a time that seemed to him to be an age of ‘expansion,’ on account of its materialistic, economic and scientific progress – of which he certainly did not unconditionally approve – as against the preceding age that had been one of unmoving and stagnant ‘concentration’. Nor would he have had difficulty in recognizing himself as the most significant of the reformist writers, intent on correcting the socio-political model. Not even the Victorian poets could escape the laws of the market, because they had to be saleable if they wanted to publish, and they had to publish if they wanted to make themselves known. Some could not resist the temptation of imitating, or even outdoing, the novelists in trying to gain popular success and make money. The writing of poetry was widespread in the early decades of the nineteenth century. It was a popular hobby that could be cultivated in various ways, and that was, at an amateurish level, taken up by many young ladies of good family. The first circle for experimenting with the writing of poetry was the family; then came the schools where young adolescent poets could spread their wings; and, finally, the launching pad came with manuscripts that circulated among a homogeneous and likeminded group of friends and university companions. The public schools and the colleges of the two major English universities organized competitions in recitation and the reading of poetic excerpts as well as sponsoring prizes for poetry. A further, almost obligatory requirement for the would-be poet seeking an imprimatur was to be awarded the Newdigate Prize, even though this was not in itself a guarantee of success. This competition had been held at Oxford since 1806 and was named after a local politician.3 The competition was won by Arnold, Hopkins and Wilde, while Clough was a narrow runner-up. The difficulties would arise when the would-be poet left the university circle and took flight towards printed publication. Here, he had to face the tricky problem of the homogeneity of his readers. The Victorian poets who wanted to break through had recourse to a practice 3

The prize was set up by Sir Roger Newdigate, represented under the name of Sir Christopher Cheverel in George Eliot’s short story ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’ (see Volume 5, § 186.5). The Newdigates were landowners in the Nuneaton area where Eliot’s father worked as farm manager. The length of the poem was limited to a maximum of 50 lines, and from 1806–1826 the subject were the plastic arts.

8/I Introduction

every bit as pragmatic as that of the successful novelists. In the career of the two paradigmatic poets, Browning and Tennyson, the formula of a miscellany of medium-length and short poems prevailed with a peculiar coincidence and synchrony of dates (in Browning’s case everything is relative and a question of scale). They avoided writing single, extended poems, risky simply because they had perforce to conform to a specific genre or to a certain register, and, in so doing, they inevitably pleased one section of the public while dissatisfying another. The criterion behind the many collections of poems published by Browning and Tennyson right up to the 1850s was to offer a variety of poems that bordered on cacophony. Both Tennyson and Browning indicated in the titles of their works the composite nature of the collections and the genre groupings, if not the theme itself: dramatic poems, lyrics and romances. The most authentic and fraught or, as it may be, enigmatic voice of the poet was limited in each collection to no more than four or five compositions, while the many remaining poems touched on an ample range of options and voices, and slavishly followed current tastes.4 According to Elizabeth Barrett Browning the poet was forced ‘To work with one hand for the booksellers, / While working with the other for [him- or herself ] / And art’.5 4. For the Victorians, Tennyson’s In Memoriam represented, par excellence, a test of the reader’s sensitivity and of his or her acquired critical

4

5

‘sing thou low or loud or sweet, / All at all points thou canst not meet, / Some will pass and some will pause’, as Tennyson wrote in 1833. Even Arnold in 1852 planned heterogeneous collections in which long dramatic poems alternated with short lyrics, following the criteria of the miscellany. The poet’s conditioning is noted by Aurora Leigh, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s eponymous poem, when she moves her first steps as a freelance writer in London: ‘My critic Hammond flatters prettily, / And wants another volume like the last. / My critic Belfair wants another book / Entirely different’. This underlines the dilemma between originality and repetitiveness, the latter being almost a sure guarantee of success. In fact, the poet notes, immediately after, that ‘The public blames originalities’. A well-known recipe for success was apparently to avoid ‘abstract thoughts’. The crisis as to the destination of poems in the nineteenth century would peak in Hopkins, who had by his own personal choice no more than three readers, and not at the same time.

§ 2. Art as mediation

9/I

capacity, as well as of the role they expected poetry to play. It was with reference to this poem that the critic F. W. Robertson6 fixed as a norm the limited accessibility of poetry, which ‘requires a study as severe as that of mathematics’, and should not be taken up by those who ‘feel it as a mere form of distraction or amusement to fill in a lazy hour’. Even Browning distinguished poetry from ‘smoking a cigar,’ while Arnold asserted that poetry was a genre that called for a greater awareness and a wider knowledge than any other, both on the part of the writer and of the reader. The novelists were still, or perhaps especially, considered to be writers who by implication ‘knew’ little. Many poets continued to address the erudite reader, and this meant that they could put into their poems the whole curriculum of classical studies undertaken at the university. Classicism, and especially Hellenism, practised as a simple transfusion of cultured references, unites Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, and a minor poet like William Johnson Cory. Except for Browning, all had read for a degree at Cambridge or Oxford, where Jowett’s school of classical studies flourished.7 § 2. Art as mediation Right up to the coming of Rossetti, post-Romantic aesthetic ideologies and pseudo-ideologies wavered between an absolute concept of poetry and its supposed dependence on the movement of history. Macaulay, in an essay on Milton in 1825, outlined a pseudo-Viconian literary theory where poetry was seen as a variable in the development of civilization, and a variable without a future since its language was highly imaginative. He felt that poetry was bound to succumb in a civilization that had been progressing from perception to abstraction.8 It is a framework that can be traced in The Four Ages of Poetry by Peacock, in an essay on poetry – in other respects notably modern and wholly centred on technical and structural problems – by Leigh Hunt, and – as will be shown more clearly later – in the two essays

6 See Tennyson: In Memoriam: A Casebook, ed. J. D. Hunt, London 1970, 114. 7 See § 149.3 n. 24. 8 § 37.2.

10/I Introduction

on poetry by Mill,9 as well as in Heroes and Hero-Worship by Carlyle. The decade 1820–1830 was a dark age for poetry, a period of literary blight, as an unprecedented battle was waged against the imagination. Right up to the 1840s two schools of thought coalesced in this crusade, evangelicalism and utilitarianism, a hybrid union that shared an objective, even though setting out from very different positions. The evangelical publishers concentrated on religious tracts, sermons, and books of devotion; and numerically these made up the lion’s share of published matter. Such propaganda attempted in vain to ostracise the novel, and highbrow literature generally, on account of the immoral and corrupt ideas that these purportedly spread;10 but its intolerance of poetry was no less harsh, in that poetry was regarded as a surrogate for religious faith and, therefore, included in the range of secular distractions. Only the Bible and literature of a religious bent were to be allowed.11 Likewise, poetry was belittled by the Utilitarians who saw it as an innocent amusement on the level the a child’s game of push-pin, although more often it was rejected as being a ‘mystification’ of reality. 2. However, not even after the weakening of evangelical and utilitarian prejudices did conditions become more favourable for an authentic literary renewal. The lack of any leading arbiters resulted in debates taking place in the numerous magazines and periodicals now on the market. The success and the large popular following of Victorian magazines was attested by their ubiquity not only in aristocratic clubs but in middle-class homes too, where, like three-volume novels, the monthly issue passed from hand to hand and was read by all the members of the family. Aesthetic theory could do little else than uphold the taste that these magazines contributed to

9 10 11

§ 41.4. A Victorian non-evangelical prudery in an age still chronologically Romantic may be seen in the purging of Shakespeare, in 1818, by Doctor Bowdler, hence the verb to bowdlerize. The bibliolatry of the Victorians was due to the widespread and obstinate penetration of evangelicalism, and led to an injection of biblical language easily seen in almost all the writers. Carlyle, Arnold and Ruskin abound with biblical echoes, rhythms, allusions, cadences and moulds that an attuned ear can easily catch.

§ 2. Art as mediation

11/I

create. It tended therefore to the conservative and was hostile to innovation, and two of the greatest poets of the age fell victim to it as a consequence. Targets of a cruel belittlement, both Tennyson and Browning were blocked by a paralysis that seemed irreversible. The reviewers used their influence in a prescriptive and corrective manner, but, lacking any firm aesthetic basis on which to lean, theirs was simply a series of subjective exclusions. Taken as a whole, the Victorian artes poeticae, even the best known, fell short of the breadth and foresight that had happily characterized the age of Romanticism, simply because a climate of marked dilettantism had come to the fore, that was against any over-subtle speculations, except perhaps for the abstruse studies – with their precocious psychological criticism – of a E. S. Dallas. Matthew Arnold’s subsequent, powerful theoretical system belied his own most creative and personal poetry, and began from the middle of the century to establish canonical requirements for a simple, imaginative and objective poetry of universal breadth. He did this partly by sketching a kind of identikit of the non-poet or the bad poet, the poetaster – the poet who was abstruse, a rationalist (being satirical and non-lyrical), or subjective, mannered and eccentric. Arnold was a committed supporter of simplicity of style, of the need for poetry to be readily understood, and of an imagination tempered by reason, and therefore of ‘imaginative reason’. Though convinced of the essential primacy of the emotions, he was intolerant of their possible excesses, and tellingly his criticism was directed at the morbid stances and the ‘allegories of mental states’ which in his view made up much of modern-age poetry. His paradox lies in the exaltation of poetry as an expression of the universal, a poetry which is greater in inverse proportion to the echo of personal experience. The supremacy of ideas as the prevailing norm of the late-Victorian aesthetic creed derived from this, as did the criteria of critical evaluation. It was due to its lack of ideas, of an ‘intellectual atmosphere,’ that Arnold downgraded Romanticism to no more than an episode, a minor current in European literature. At the same time, he consolidated the almost unanimous consensus of his age on the didactic function of literature. Already for Carlyle – as will later be the case for his declared disciple, Ruskin – the poet was required to play the role of the spiritual guide, of the sage, of the prophet, of a seer partaking

12/I Introduction

the divine Idea, if unaware of the processes by which genius worked. He was the preacher and commentator of the Infinite, the one able to capture the eternal essence hiding behind appearances, and he puts this down in a material form. Carlyle defined poetry and literature in general as nothing more than ‘a branch of religion,’ and Ruskin placed religion before all aesthetic absolutes. Arnold argued by contrast that it was poetry that had now to embody, and become a substitute for, religion. He openly espoused an aesthetics of the contingent, emerging from the crises of the times. In an age when religious dogmas were wavering and doubt creeping in, poetry was given the task of consoling and heartening mankind. 3. Victorian criticism gradually broke down the inferiority complex of the novel towards poetry. But the leading critics took no part in the debates which were conducted in magazines from the 1840s onwards, aimed at vindicating the artistic dignity of the narrative genre.12 Arnold, in particular, wrote not a single line on contemporary English novels, and Carlyle and Ruskin only the odd few. Mill had asserted years before that much of the most beautiful poetry was written in the form of the novel, and that almost all good novels contained authentic poetry, even if pure poetry’s higher position was, in theory at least, unassailable. All the great Victorian poets and novelists dreamt of becoming the dramatic genius of their age, from Tennyson to Browning, from Arnold to Dickens and on to Hopkins, but it was a dream that they never realized. It is for this reason that there is no important dramatic theory before Oscar Wilde. The nineteenth century was in fact an age of great dramatic actors, rather than authors, from Kean to Macready, Irving and Fanny Kemble. Yet drama and the dramatic element emerge and are recouped in Victorian poetry and fiction in a degree of genre hybridization, so that the principal poetic form of a temperament like that of the Victorians, inimical to lyrical effusion, becomes the dramatic monologue. On the other hand, the decline of drama favoured the rise of the novel, and many potential dramatists, Dickens among them, opted for this genre even though they ‘would have enjoyed being dramatists had the conditions of the theatre, financial or

12

See R. Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850–1870, London 1959.

§ 3. Victorian poetry

13/I

otherwise, been more favourable’.13 This explains why curious and witty dramatic or melodramatic solutions can often be found in Victorian novels, their running gags and lively road scenes, as also the frequency of street players and improvised actors and of references parodying Shakespeare, or even of actual rewritings of Shakespeare’s plays. § 3. Victorian poetry: Post-Romantic, Biedermeier, Spasmodic and proto-Decadent Victorian poetry began under the guidance, accepted with deliberate caution, of the protagonists of Romanticism. From the viewpoint of social history and of mores, Romanticism stretched into the early 1820s with the last glows of the Regency period, when the parade of vice, dissipation, Byronism and Shelley’s fame, together with a light-hearted, carefree life, and the so-called ‘Regency fashion’, continued to triumph. The dandy survived well into the 1830s, and Browning at the time of writing Paracelsus still loved to appear at receptions in flashy yellow gloves. Bulwer Lytton was known as Byron’s double, and Carlyle thought of him and of the ‘dandiacal body’ in Sartor Resartus, to criticize the soullessness of contemporary society. A witness to this was duelling, which remained the usual way to solve quarrels. The rethinking of Romanticism began when Byron, who, having been saluted at his death by nearly all the young Victorian poets with loud dirges, fell under Carlyle’s blows and became the fixed target for all the mid-term aesthetics, from that of Newman to that of Mill, until he finally reached his lowest ebb in Arnold’s essays in the 1850s. Shelley, on account of his atheism and his political radicalism, was taboo, except for Browning, who had become infatuated with him when still young. Of the great Romantics only Wordsworth, who had taken shelter in the Lake District, survived well into the age of Victoria, venerated but also maligned. It was due to the high death rate during Romanticism that an empty space was slowly formed and was filled by minor writers. It was only in the early 1840s that Tennyson gained public recognition and prestige, while Browning had to wait until the 1850s. This empty space was seen as

13

TNE, 14.

14/I Introduction

the last chance for poetry and duly lamented, or welcomed according to the point of view taken. It was therefore characterized by the emergence of an English Biedermeier clearly visible in the relaxation of the remaining few survivors – in Wordsworth himself and in Coleridge – and, as we have already seen, at a slightly higher level in the essays of Lamb, De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Peacock, as well as in the novels of Austen and Scott.14 The Biedermeier hovers impalpably not only over early post-Romanticism but it stretches right through the later, mature Victorianism. It can be seen in the manifestations and well-known categories of the picturesque and in the rural idylls, in the devotion to common things – needles, pins, feathers, matches, objects of loving collections – in the nicknames and pet names that were regularly given to members of the family, and in the cult of domestic pets – cats, dogs and canaries – often monumentalized in elegies and funeral laments. This contrasts so greatly with the Romantic representations, suspended and spasmodic, of the winged and rebellious bird of prey. The eclipse of the heroic spirit of Romanticism, examined so matchlessly by Mario Praz, led as a consequence to the celebration, not of the femme fatale and of free and extramarital relationships, but of marriage and of the hearth, of which the ‘angel in the house’ was an emblem – though partly misunderstood, as we shall see – in a very popular poem by Coventry Patmore. However, the sudden narrowing and lowering of the perspective was almost never peacefully accepted, and up until 1850 at least many poets tried to keep alive the solipsism and the Titanic stance of Romanticism under conditions of dramatic contention. A minor school of poets made this spasmodic impetuosity, and Romantic hubris, its standard and aesthetic hallmark. Between the two well-distinguished genealogical lines in Romanticism, that of Wordsworth and Coleridge and that of Keats, the Victorian poet chose the latter, aware that Byron’s miraculous equation between the absolute poet and the poet dedicated to a cause – between the poet of self-worship and the poet of action – or even Shelley’s, mediator between a poetry committed to civil rights and the estrangement

14 See V. Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier, Cambridge, MA 1984, and my discussions in Volume 3.

§ 3. Victorian poetry

15/I

from the world into the kingdom of beauty, was no longer possible.15 Up to 1850, Victorian poetry could be considered proto-Decadent. The critic and reader of Victorian poetry is in fact often led astray by the propaganda of Carlyle who, by demolishing Byron, had become the champion of a spiritual literature intent on regaining a transcendental dimension. However, almost no one followed Carlyle, who patronizingly advised poets not to write poetry, because he held it dangerous and definitely contrary to the ideals that he defended. Ruskin rediscovered beauty though never disjoined from metaphysical teleology, and he preached it as being the new way to salvation for the people. Novelists were in close contact with reality, as they had to cater for a public that wanted it reflected – and even emphasized and caricatured – in their works. This public judged it inadmissible to cultivate impalpable and sophisticated metaphysical questions. For the whole of the first half of the century, poetry instead tried to avoid any public involvement and to contemplate isles of purified sensations, ecstasies veined with meditations and dappled with feelings of slight unease. Where should he take refuge? Every poet had a different reply to this question once it was decided that the actual world was not his natural habitat. Flights into a dreamland, simply imagined, alternate with real flights away from England and often leading into Italy. Others instead looked to find an anchor in an authentic and absolute faith – often discovered in Catholicism – capable of exorcising the innate crudeness of the world. In the former case the momentary ephemeral escape gave back desperate, broken, defeated poets, no longer lucid masters of themselves. It is enough to think Tennyson’s ‘palace of art’, of the lotus-eaters, of the lady of Shalott, to perceive a widespread desire to escape and to reach a paradise of irresponsibility and of apathy. In one of the few cases where the inertia described by Tennyson is overcome – Ulysses – the encounter with

15

Some key Victorian poetic texts will be examined in this volume as discussion and reception in parabolic form of the transition from Romanticism to Victorianism. Deconstruction takes for granted that the whole of the Victorian period is nothing but a protracted Romanticism, or one of its tails, and, on the basis of revisionism, anxiety of influence and misreading, reintegrates every single Victorian poet into such a paradigm.

16/I Introduction

the world is destructive and leads to death. Then there is Arnold, a poet that ardently desired to discover a way of exorcising the reigning vulgarity that he sought not to face, and from which he mentally exiled himself in an area of quiet peacefulness. However, it was the Hellenic peace of the layman, that of the wise and the Stoics, and that of all the great aphorists. When he realized he could not change the world he decided to change himself and from 1850 on he transmuted a heavy-hearted poet into a sage and an essay-writer, ready to face life.16 2. We shall however need to get used to see in Victorian literature, even only up to 1870, multiple genealogies and parallel developments that will reveal its richness and its complexity. Having already noticed the ontological, pragmatic division between poetry and the novel, in the field of poetry itself there is a basic, even chronological gap between two schools of thought that constitute inevitable points of aggregation, with signs and aims that cannot be ignored. One is the ‘school’, though never officially recognized as such, of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, and another is that – for some time fully working – of the Pre-Raphaelites. A third, very small literary forum, already touched on, is that of the Spasmodics. Two of the great Victorian poets, Arnold and Clough, studied at Rugby under the personal guide of the legendary headmaster, and continued their studies at Oxford, the natural outlet for those coming from Rugby. They entered a university into which other poets had flowed, coming from the public schools, though not necessarily from Rugby, where they had absorbed the precepts of Arnold’s pedagogy. Except for Browning, who had studied privately and then for one single year went to London University, the great Victorian poets born before 1825 all came from the public schools or from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. They may be called ‘defectors’ from Oxford and Cambridge for the very reason that, having entered the universities in the 1830s as pupils of the public schools, and impregnated with Dr Arnold’s pedagogical ideals and with a fanatical and fighting Protestantism, they were first torn by the fervid Tractarian propaganda and then, already 16

An epigraph of the whole of Victorian poetry is in the XXIV of the ‘Stanzas’ to Obermann by Arnold: ‘Ah! Two desires toss about / The poet’s feverish blood. / One drives him to the world without, / And one to solitude’.

§ 3. Victorian poetry

17/I

wounded, fell prey to the new biblical criticism that reached England from Germany. This crisis indelibly left its mark.17 They deserve this appellation – defectors – for the supplementary reason that, as poets and writers, they left the university where they might have undertaken an academic career loaded with honours, if only they had been prepared to underwrite the Thirty-Nine Articles, and instead went on to embrace the existence of the restless traveller, of an exile from home and of a nomad, like that mythical figure of the ‘scholar-gipsy’, a term that Arnold applied to Clough. This latter poet never escaped from the quick sands of Rugby’s Arnoldian teachings, and even Matthew Arnold only just managed to exorcise the figure of the father by fleeing from his orbit under the strength of his own ideas, or by riskily conciliating his father’s Hebraism with Hellenism. Tennyson himself is not far from this matrix: he was educated at home and studied later at Cambridge where the Tractarian echo was weaker, but he experienced with the same anxiety the religious dilemmas raised by biblical and lay science. We come full circle only in 1849 when the Rossetti family, and with it Pre-Raphaelitism, appeared on the scene. D. G. Rossetti entered the poetic arena from an opposite starting point – he was imbued with 17

Whether the ‘defectors’ came from Oxford or Cambridge makes very little difference because students left university bearing the same hallmarks. Thackeray ingeniously used two palindromes to earmark the interchangeability, Oxbridge and Camford. A proper section of Victorian literature is that of the ‘university man’. During and after the 1830s he is a torn doubter like Clough, but before, and sometimes even after, he is a vicious young man, a gambler, a drunkard and a lady-killer, a Don Juan with no scruples, and a rake. In poetry we have the dynasty of the Hewsons after a poem by Clough (§§ 138–9); in Dickens’s novels there are after all very few university students, except perhaps for Steerforth. The great portraitist is Thackeray. According to Thackeray, it was easy to become a snob at Oxford; one got into debt, drank, then went on the grand tour, picking up on the way the vices of other European capitals. The two universities were little ‘worlds in miniature’, separated from the real world, and into which the students were thrown with no preparation or with a mistaken idea of life: they formed, in reality, schools of selfishness and perversion. A slight knowledge of the classics and of mathematics, and the now evident failure of the ambition to become a gentleman, was the high price to pay. However, Trollope, who had never been to university, painted a university student who turned his back on vice in Frank Gresham in Dr Thorne.

18/I Introduction

the esotericism and mystical spiritualism of his father, a scholar of Dante, with the world of the refined and decorative art of the early Italian painters, with the dark, Gothic tradition – and due to his studies, undertaken in London and in schools of art, he was almost completely insensitive to the Tractarian diatribes. Immune against all influence stemming from Rugby, Rossetti deviated the course of English poetry towards the true and official aestheticism of the 1870s and beyond. He was its real father and originator because, over and against the heaviness of content, he aimed at the self-enclosed form; and he taught a soberer and more self-contained art, and put an end to the tradition of the ‘rumination’.18 Needless to say, the Rugby model was slow to die even in the heyday of Decadentism, and in that English branch headed by Rossetti, and those small fry who seemingly escaped its net – like Pater and Wilde – prove how easy it was to reconcile it surreptitiously with the new aestheticism. § 4. The hegemony of the novel The statisticians and the archivists of nineteenth-century Victorian literature tell us that more than 40,000 novels were printed over the whole period. This enormous estimation can be reduced by 99 per cent more or less by pinpointing the novels that are really lasting, excluding all the ‘silly novels’19 long swallowed by oblivion. Trollope, for instance, openly admitted the short-lived nature of the novel, and humbly recognized the hope that a few of his better novels might be read perhaps for another quarter of a century, thereby postulating the obsolescence of the genre compared to the eternity of poetry. Thus both the greatest novelists and the lesser ones felt the danger that lay in waiting, that is, that their novels could be drowned in ephemerality. They worked for a double system, for the market that had its rules and consumed ruthlessly title after title, and for the future audience and an implicitly ideal reader. On close reading, it is now apparent that most novels, far from amorphous, were marked by an internal order meant to impress a distinct coherence on them. Dickens, a storyteller who 18 19

The term was coined by T. S. Eliot in his essay on the Metaphysical poets, when speaking of the lengthiness and verbosity of Tennyson and Browning. So defined and discussed by George Eliot (Volume 5, § 185.4).

§ 4. The hegemony of the novel

19/I

acted haphazardly, was guided by intuition, and collected en route suggestions and extempore stimuli, cannot be synthesized. There is in him a conceptual and symbolic coherence in the form of a variegated paradigm or a leitmotif, such as the struggle against profit or the fractured identity. In other great novelists there is a connective thread that can be followed; in some others, like Thackeray and Trollope, the necessity for order was responded to with the contrivance of the cyclical novel. When we come to George Eliot, we face the author of the most coherent and most intimately interwoven novel of the entire age. Not one of Eliot’s protagonists returns on the scene in a subsequent novel – there are no rebirths, the times of the novels are not progressive, and the settings are changeable; yet, in spite of this formal absence of any cyclical organization, George Eliot wrote a single novel – a universe, a compact macrotext. 2. The heterogeneous canon of the Victorian novel may be classified by making use of a few generalized criteria that are almost self-evident: gender, style, technique, time, place, invariants. Gender covers both the male novel and the women’s and feminist novel, the latter characterized by an agonizing and often courageous spirit of enquiry into the material, spiritual and marital conditions of the woman. A fairly large group of female writers ensures that the canon of the Victorian novel is at least sexually mixed. Stylistically, side by side with the unofficial ‘new Baroque’ or romantic school of Dickens, and Meredith’s manneristic novel, lies the dry and Austen-like fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell and Anne Brontë; alongside the new Gothic of both Dickens and Charlotte Brontë comes the naturalistic realism of Thackeray and Trollope. The narrative voice is in nine cases out of ten that of the omniscient novelist, a supremacy that flings into relief the rare cases of first-person narration, or of that of ‘retransmission’, as in Wuthering Heights. On the other hand, the Victorian serial novel has by definition a complex plot and is therefore multiplot and multifocal.20 Time and place are two complementary functions. The very first Victorian novels, or rather, it might be said, pre-Victorian, by Bulwer 20 B. Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot, London 1959, 89, observes that such a technique had an influence on Griffith’s film Intolerance. Griffith pointed out that he had been inspired by Dickens’s ‘cross-cutting’, or by his violent contrasts and antitheses. The

20/I Introduction

Lytton and Disraeli, have London for their backdrop and were classified by contemporaries as ‘fashionable’ or ‘silver fork’ novels. As Dickens narrates in Nicholas Nickleby, the circulating libraries wrote the titles of this kind of novels in cubital letters on the glass window of their vehicle, and they lent the books out weekly or even on a daily basis. Dickens even inserts a small touch of parody of his own invention to recreate the atmosphere typical to this kind of novel. It was one that delighted the young ladies and those of the lower middle class that affected a refinement of taste, inasmuch as it was stuffed with words in French and revolved around vaporous and impalpable plots, delicate idylls, the etiquette and the rituals of the balls, the aristocratic banquets, hunting scenes, the life in the clubs, the Opera, the drawing-room skirmishes, and the gossip about everyday events.21 The young Dickens lifted the curtain on a London world that, whether known or only partially known by the protagonists, who were often hangers on in the outskirts, was shown to be all made up of malefactors: it was a world of speculation and ambition, a vortex that crushed the pure yokels or the country dwellers. In London round about 1830 there had been a sudden quickening in the rhythm of life, beautifully described in the prelude to Felix Holt by George Eliot in 1866, in the form of an imaginary journey by coach by the alter ego of the narrator in the company of a loquacious coach driver, from the south of England up to the offshoots of Scotland. Whosoever tried to narrate the epoch around 1830 recalled the dusty paths furrowed by the wheels of carriages, the inns where horses were changed, the mugs foaming with beer, the smiles of the plump and malicious servants,

21

American director has also to his credit a 1908 film remake based on ‘Enoch Arden’ by Tennyson. See M. W. Rosa, The Silver Fork School: Novels of Fashion Preceding ‘Vanity Fair’, London 1930, repr. Port Washington 1964, especially 14–54. This vogue, which derived from the eighteenth-century novel of manners by Burney and Edgeworth, with ingredients from the picaresque and from the German ‘apprenticeship novel’, stretched from 1825 to 1850. Rosa argues that the apex of the fashionable novel comes with Vanity Fair, and that, therefore, Thackeray is the continuator of the novelists that he so disliked. See also, on the fashionable novel by Bulwer Lytton, M. Sadler, Bulwer and His Wife: A Panorama, London 1933, 115–27.

§ 4. The hegemony of the novel

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and the unmissable figure of the efficient and busy inn-keeper – some of the fixed elements of Dickens’s picaresque at its very beginnings. The mailcoach transported post and passengers, and its arrival was announced by the sounding of the horn that was a signal for merriment and a sudden shock for the sleepy routine of the village, where the old people lamented that life had become so hurried. They were unaware that another type of acceleration would soon be impressed on their lives by the systems of transport. The picaresque novel suffered a crisis, was emptied of its realism, or got imprisoned in nostalgia, by the railway network that spread throughout England from the early 1830s (the first line was inaugurated in 1827). The geographical centre of the eighteenth-century English fiction shifted to the countryside and to the south and central districts, and the novel became a novel of the industrial areas also due to the fact that five of the greatest Victorian women novelists were born and lived for many years in counties like Warwickshire and Yorkshire. The clerical and religious novel came to the fore largely due to the fact that the writers themselves belonged originally to the evangelical movement or to the Dissenters. In the south and in rural England time was relatively slower, the daily discussions concerned the poor harvests and the agricultural problems. Nature was wild, harsh and ‘barbarous in beauty’, and the squires on their estates looked scornfully on the world of commerce, for nothing was admitted to exist outside the limits of their visual perspective. This pastoral plain was a Protestant one, while Dissent had put down roots from the beginning in the central mining district and in that of the weaving industry. In the industrial novel, the compactness of the rural community breaks, and the very countryside presents violent contrasts as open fields and nature, green and fresh, stretch out near the mines and the factories. 3. The religious, the ecclesiastical and the clerical novel are not really coincidental categories. They could actually be considered to be the opposite, especially if we mean the narrative of introspection and of religious enquiry into the existential, or the purely objective representation, humoristic and comic or even satirical as it may be, of the laity or of the worldly and secularized clergy. In English fiction of the nineteenth century, the religious novel is on the whole less represented than the ecclesiastical – and less represented, and artistically less significant, than that in the

22/I Introduction

European narrative tradition of the same period. In the above sense, Disraeli kept it on a high level of writing using the form of a spiritual journey to the springs of an authentic Christian faith and to its Jewish foundations. The direct repercussion of the Tractarian movement in the early 1830s was the autobiographical novel of Newman’s conversion. In the following years and decades, there emerged a narrative – often of a lower if not poor value, and often by women – where usually an Anglican priest, or a serious young man about to take orders, yields to the temptation of the Church of Rome, but such temptation is nearly always refused at the very last minute. Another class of the Victorian historical novel looked back to the early days of Christianity, or was set in other anticipatory epochs of the past, shaken by very modern dilemmas concerning the authentic faith and the conflict of confessions. Canons and priests, who were also novelists such as Kingsley and the Catholic cardinals, Newman and Wiseman, were authors of romantic plots inhabited by imaginary historical figures of women martyrs, like Hypatia, Callista and Fabiola. English historians of Christianity had been interested in Girolamo Savonarola, and his Italian biography by Pasquale Villari (1862) was translated in record time. The most famous Savonarolian novel of the nineteenth century is George Eliot’s Romola, but the most subjective and autobiographical religious novels written by women demystified the accepted Calvinism by advocating the New Testament law of pardon; and the paradigm governing Wuthering Heights, Mary Barton, Sylvia’s Lovers and Adam Bede is the transition from revenge to pardon. The ecclesiastical novel is distinguished instead by the frequency with which curates, pastors, rectors, deacons, archdeacons, and Anglican bishops, fill the scenes. A realistic novel ought by definition to represent a life in which the figure of the priest was an integral part of society, as against that of the Catholic countries where such a figure is marginal to the social texture. While the Catholic priest was unmarried and, therefore, had no family, the Anglican minister and the Dissenter is frequently seen with a plotting and jealous wife, and children to bestow in marriage. Trollope had the brilliant idea of weaving a cycle of novels not too far from the truth, around the marriage plots and the ambitions of ecclesiastical dignitaries in an imaginary small southern town with a cathedral rising in the centre. They concerned worldly clerics and ministers who were in competition for

§ 4. The hegemony of the novel

23/I

livings of a variable income, the concessions of which were in the hands of families of high social standing in the county, or of bishops, titleholders of the dioceses. Thus there were ecclesiastical sinecures available, and a hierarchy of appointments avidly sought after. The squalid goings on of absenteeism marked Eliot’s and Trollope’s curates, who enjoyed a good life and were not active in charity or even in their liturgical offices. But there were two other figures, one of the curate coming from a Tractarian past, who had returned to the Anglican fold after spasms of conscience, and the other the upright, virtuous curate, often with numerous children, who, on account of a pride typical of poverty, did not run after the richer benefices and got by somehow though not very well. The widest and most realistic representation of the Anglican cleric in its variety can been seen in Trollope and George Eliot. Trollope alone in his early Irish novels contemplated the various aspects of the Catholic ecclesiastic, often carefree even though bitterly anti-English. Dickens tacitly never aimed at the Anglican minister as such; his hunting ground was the hypocritical evangelical Dissenter, but wholly Anglican is the dark world of the city of Rochester, all around its cathedral in Edwin Drood. 4. The temporal criterion is valid both for the historical time of the plot and for the date or the decade of publication.22 In the first case, it is easier to reconstruct a grid that connects the most calamitous historical events of the immediate past. The two historical novels by Dickens were dedicated, one to the French Revolution and the other to the anti-Catholic riots headed in 1780 by the lunatic Lord Gordon; another, covering the Glorious Revolution of 1688 with its aftermath and offshoots, was narrated by Thackeray, the major author of novels set ‘one hundred years earlier’. A large number of the novels set in the year 1799 and at the beginning of the new century, 1800 or 1801, stand out, like Wuthering Heights, Adam Bede and Sylvia’s Lovers. Vanity Fair is the greatest and perhaps the only Victorian novel to introduce Napoleon – therefore, necessarily, of the events of the year 1815. But the great symbolic and most frequented date in the Victorian novel is 1832, implicitly confirming its value in the temporal scansion, both 22

As is done in the classic TNE, for the novels of the 1840s.

24/I Introduction

historical and cultural. The novels set in times after 1832 offer only vague indications of the exact dating: they are never exactly contemporary, and each novel is always, except for Hard Times, imperceptibly backdated. A complementary classification is no longer one of theme and setting referring to a definite historical moment, but of great novels written over the years and having only blurred homogeneity. Some of these appeared in the golden years 1847–1849, or in the year 1859, dates which were especially remarkable and rich in masterworks. Sensational novels and detective stories flourished and reached their peak in the decade 1860–1870, and Collins, Reade, Le Fanu, Braddon and Mrs Wood, are all followers of this genre. In a certain sense many others, and even those of Trollope himself as he admitted, possessed an undercurrent of mystery and intrigue, with the ingredients of murder and adultery, of bigamy and blackmailing, and of deceit and fraud, while the structural qualities were set once again along the lines of the serial, with the prominence of the plot that captivated and held the attention, creating suspense, and a mixture of Gothic realism and romance.23 The preceding link for the sensational novel was the Newgate novel, a prison story fashionable in the 1830s that had come into existence due to a changing urban context and to the necessity, invoked by the new middle-classes, for a greater surveillance needed to face an increased crime rate. In both narrative genres a new character is outlined, that of the detective, at first an untrained amateur and then later a professional.24 An intrinsic countersign of western middle-class fiction, cutting through all genres, is the unvarying theme of a marriage – or rather, since the Victorian novel was weighty, of more marriage plots than one, in the guise of a connecting framework, or as an indication of the primary content of the story. Writers flocked to this theme, and it ran throughout the whole canon of 23

One of the most informative essays on this is by P. Brantlinger, ‘What is “Sensational” about the “Sensation Novel”’, NCF, XXXVI (1982), 1–28. 24 K. Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel 1830–1847, Detroit, MI 1963, 15, lists only eight or nine titles by Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens, and Thackeray, as having the right to belong to this genre. In the preface to Uncle Silas Le Fanu finds the term ‘sensation’ too vague: even Scott was sensational for Le Fanu, since there is not one of his stories without deaths, crimes, and in a certain sense mystery.

§ 4. The hegemony of the novel

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Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, and even of George Eliot. Hence the result is a narrative that, on the whole, has little variety and whose plots are rather monotonous and show a certain similarity. The realist novels of Dickens and Thackeray repeated time after time the theme of fallen aristocracy, a class of people now reduced to poverty, and wishing to marry into the middle classes with no rank but moneyed. Dickens in particular closes his acrobatic marriage alliances between classes that should never mix, and that usually never did mix. Next to a mean and cynical calculation, and impeded by the pride of the nobility or by the middle-class family only looking for money, the marriages of unsophisticated youngsters are crowned with the help of disinterested beneficial forces, for example with the unforeseen philanthropic gesture of a distant relative. Hence the ever present last will and testament of the now converted old miser, someone who had money but no children, and often left his fortune to the one who merited it most. Trollope, in his well balanced novels, favoured the equation between love and interest, for it was not always right to divide them but rather it was better not to separate them; and he emphasized the necessity for self-determination in those of a marriageable age who were subject to a certain amount of pressure and interference from their relatives. 5. Lengthy novels in three volumes were the standard Victorian size right up to the early 1870s. This was, in fact, the usual format chosen by all the great novelists of the period. They were often read as serials more than a century and half ago by a public who warmly welcomed them, but the later common reader definitely found and finds them today less to his and her taste, both because of the quicker pace of modern life and because from the end of the nineteenth century on a new aesthetic horizon came to the fore, one of briefness, of lightning quickness, of a single plot circumscribed in time, and of a narrating voice no longer so markedly omniscient. Contemporary sensibility is recalcitrant in coming to grips with the less well-known serial novels by Dickens and Thackeray, and prefers on the whole those sober short novels that some novelists wrote in spite of themselves, and ignoring the rules of the market, and that publishers either refused or published as exceptions, like The Professor by Charlotte Brontë, or Agnes Grey by her sister Anne, or The Warden by Trollope. Rather than the long and big novel, it has appreciated and revaluated the more fleeting

26/I Introduction

and occasional long short story, perhaps never part of a collection, notably the Christmas stories, to which belong small and exquisite masterpieces by Dickens, Thackeray and Mrs Gaskell. In conclusion, an attempt must be made to answer a question: why does the Victorian novel, that in terms of quantity overreaches all other European fiction – let us just try to conflate Thackeray, Dickens and Trollope to see the result – and that is at the centre of a very intense attention by academic criticism in the English-speaking world – not enjoy an equal popularity in Europe, even among the generally well read? Why is War and Peace a timeless classic and a milestone by definition; why do The Red and the Black, or the novels by Balzac or Madame Bovary, or psychological novels like Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov enjoy universal fame? Only Vanity Fair – or Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, but they have been reduced to classics for the young – have a more ample and widely spread fame among the English novels. But who knows and would be willing to call the novels by Trollope classics, which they are for the English? A certain international circulation began only with the novels of two English writers, one half English and the other less than half, Henry James and Conrad; or with the first early translations of works authored by the Decadents, such as Wilde. The first answer that comes to mind is that the nineteenth-century Victorian novel is – as more than one critic has noted – a novel circumscribed both by time and space. It is a heavily insular and provincial period piece that is unable to go beyond those limits and those boundaries and reach an absolute dimension.25 The English socio-political setting in the nineteenth century has nothing about it that is epic, heroic, and libertarian: the battle for widening the franchise had petered out in a tepid revolutionary spirit that had little to compare with the movements of 1821 and 1848 in a Europe trodden on and redesigned by the Holy Alliance. Only in England, as I mentioned, was the clergy socially integrated, and the ambition to make a career mixed roles in a society that tried, regardless, to keep the props of class differences. A couple of English novels have entered the group of the major European social novels, Mary 25

W. Allen, George Eliot, London 1965, 184, admits that George Eliot may be compared with Tolstoy but not inversely, and that Middlemarch is not only much smaller but much narrower than War and Peace.

§ 5. Victorian psychoses

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Barton and Hard Times, both as documents of social agitation by workers; but little is said in them of real politics. The parameters of the Victorian religious novel are difficult to understand by those who know little of the history of the English Protestant sects, because they are formed around internecine diatribes and positions as vague and as evanescent as are the misty boundaries of Dissent itself. On the other hand, as I mentioned, the English clerics were always more noble and less vulgar than the weak Don Abbondio in Manzoni’s The Betrothed, but undoubtedly meaner than the sublime spiritualists represented by Fra Cristoforo or Cardinal Borromeo, not to mention the torment of the Innominato – who however was not a priest – or of Julien Sorel. These are all isolated figures, whereas in Trollope, just to give one example, a choral dimension is set up and every cleric is a part of a compact social fabric – though not a precisely harmonious one. The literary sensibilities that took place in Europe and in England itself following the great vogue of the novel from 1830 to 1870 and beyond were in the end impervious to the comic and satiric novel. In the period between the two World Wars, it was logically expected that the rising Marxism would have little use – even among the rather feeble English Marxists like Orwell – for satirical novels, which were completely reformist in character.26 § 5. Victorian psychoses Matthew Arnold’s cleverness and skill lay not in the therapy, which failed, so much as in the diagnosis, incontestable and precise, that he applied to the ‘spasmodic’ element that fluctuated freely and continued to fluctuate in Victorian poetry. Spasmodism crossed over the boundaries of the little school that had been given that epithet, and whose accepted founder was Philip James Bailey, the author of Festus, and whose two official associates were Dobell and Smith.27 Arnold’s 1853 Preface, which did not mention them, aimed specifically not so much at the historical Spasmodics and at some of their recently published poems, as at that larger Spasmodism that he called by a different name, the poetry of ‘mental states’. Far from being 26 The theory put forward by the Yale deconstructionists is that the Victorians are our contemporaries and that, therefore, modern sensibility began with them. 27 See below, §§ 224–8.

28/I Introduction

the conqueror and the teacher of an Olympian calm like that of Sophocles (as preached by Arnold), and of the absolute dominion over one’s psyche and one’s own impulses, each one of the major Victorian poets will appear to us in complete subjugation to these impulses, and a psychotic and schizophrenic personality, affected by what Chesterton colourfully defined as ‘a splitting headache’.28 The Victorians were only superficially devoted to compunction and morally irreproachable; they led, in fact, a daily battle to hold at bay the most obscure and the most morbid sides of their natures, and even more so in a society that called for strong and severe codes of self-control, in which the whip was used to call to their senses all deviators from the general norms of mental cleanliness and responsibility, which, it was hypocritically believed, everyone should follow. This is the reason why writers were so eager to empathize with, and find an identification in, officially condemned sensibilities and psychologies, like those investigated and explored through the innocuous, neutral expressive vehicle of the dramatic monologue. Or why the writer analysed the irregular forms of social life and chose as protagonists thieves, murderers, and adulterers, and studied in the most subtle and radical manner possible since the Elizabethan drama, that endemic lunacy with which, in reality, at least one of the children in the Victorian family was frequently affected. Victorian literature not only consecrated and bequeathed to its descendants the dramatic monologue, but in practice refounded ex novo the literature of the double that had come to light with Hogg, was consolidated by Tennyson and Arnold, and flared up in its most well-known and memorable form in Dickens and in Stevenson. It is a kind of literature that reveals a pathological dissociation as much in the character as in the author. Dickens, in particular, offers a divided psyche and the symptomatology of this division – one face is shown the world, and another conceals brooding inner passions – in the amazing figures of his doubles. One of the evident problems that the characters in Thackeray fight against is the lack of communication. This is, in the end, the reason why the Victorian writer is often symbolically projected towards symbolic doors that open towards the abyss of the unknown; and, therefore, 28

VAL, 63.

§ 5. Victorian psychoses

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why his works become the exploration of the unknown. This door is always suddenly closed, but only to be reopened: hence the inconclusive repetitions found in many Victorian poems that morbidly open and reopen within their own formal boundaries what has already been closed. Now, this abyss that is explored represents many things at the same time and has many different sides to it. It is the abyss of impulses and of instincts, it is the abyss of escaped responsibility, it is the free life of the senses no longer suffocated and repressed, it is the abyss of evil and the diabolical, it is the abyss of the night and of Tristram’s nothingness, it is the abyss of moral transgression, and finally it is the abyss of chaos before all teleological order. This evasiveness is voluptuous but disturbed by the pricks of conscience, and the writer is ideally, to quote Arnold, in utrumque paratus. When the vision fades re-entry into normality overhangs all inexorably. This is the case in ‘The Two Voices’ by Tennyson, where the sinuous night-time meditations end with the first signs of daylight, almost sarcastically placing God and the family as deterrents to such morbid fancies. It happens in ‘Goblin Market’ by Christina Rossetti, the epilogue of which deflates a mysteriously restless ‘Christabel’ to the level of an edifying Victorian morality; and the same happens in Arnold’s ‘Resignation’, where the transition to the hypostasis of a God that calms and solves the enigmas raised by the poem is far too easy and abrupt. The three major Victorian poets of the first generation, Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, until about thirty or forty years of age, were not only sceptics that wanted to verify continually their impaired faith, but were also neurotics. Some of the other more meaningful Victorian poems prior to 1850 are ‘thoughts of a suicide’, which was in fact the original subtitle of Tennyson’s ‘The Two Voices’. Tennyson lived through a decade of silence, from 1833 to 1842, in the state of mind of a potential approach to suicide, from which he escaped with In Memoriam. ‘Empedocles on Etna’ by Arnold was conceived in 1849, or perhaps even before, and concerns instead a real suicide seen while taking place, a decision made after a lucid analysis of the inanity of every other way of escape. It was an analysis – as the manuscripts point out – that Arnold himself had gone through. Not to mention Arnold’s other, contemporary alter ego, Tristram, who lets himself die because of the impossibility of an absolute and eternal passion.

30/I Introduction

2. The Victorian poet29 was unable to find an ubi consistam in a society given over to the material, and he aspired, if at all, to a utopian reconstitution of a community of wise men. All the ‘defectors’ had a solitary childhood and an adolescence just as closed and irksome, and remained largely unmodified even at the university. Tennyson associated only every now and then with the Cambridge ‘Apostles’ and more often than not deserted their meetings. Arnold, as a student, masked his unease by taking on the airs of the dandy, and like Clough fruitlessly probed the various currents of thought that in the 1830s were battling at Oxford. Normally no community was formed but at most a couple. And it was a symbiotic and often hierarchical relationship, even though strongly dialectical and, in some cases, fanatical: Tennyson and Hallam, Arnold and Clough, and later Hopkins and Bridges. Passionate aesthetic debates, dissertations on the essence of poetry, clashes in interpretation and taste, and sudden and shared enthusiasms, often led to the birth of a poem, a culmination reached, more frequently, by the apparently weaker member of the couple of friends (Hallam was more gifted than Tennyson, and Clough than Arnold). Such solitude was objectivized in the deliberate choice of a decentred home – as with Tennyson’s on the Isle of Wight – or of exile, as in the case of Browning. This alienation was only slightly hidden from the group of acquaintances that both frequented, and actually confirmed by the extremely cold tone of the sketchy short letters sent to them. The schizophrenia of the Victorian poets was not just psychic but intellectual and ideological. One of the epistemic tracks of the age is that of the conflict between an absolute but weary dogmatism and a relativism that was almost always the winner, and was the true philosophy of the century – an evolutionist philosophy of flux 29

If the group of the Victorian writers being referred to is not clearly specified – poets or novelists – surprising misunderstandings arise concerning the definition of the relationship between the writer and society, as in the historical clash of positions between E. D. H. Johnson, The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry, Princeton, NJ 1952, for whom all the Victorian poets were more or less alienated and in conflict with society, and R. D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas, New York 1973, according to whom the Victorian writer was fairly at ease in the times in which he lived and criticised his society severely at times, but was not a misfit or an outcast, rather in some cases he bowed to the strength of conventional pressures.

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that unhinged all the theories based on ‘fixed points’, originally learned from Heraclitus by the university classicists. The ideological fluctuations of the Victorians were fed, before the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, by two books that raised scandal and clamour, Principles of Geology by Lyell and Vestiges of Creation by Chambers. Victorian science was a boomerang because those three books together, to which one must add the vast production of T. H. Huxley, contributed to shatter into fragments the widespread and triumphal ideology of progress and to put forward serious doubts as to the finalism of the cosmos.30 The feeling of decadence and decline is expressed in a negative, apocalyptic and demoralized vein that stems directly from Arnold the poet. Not only did evolutionism, geology and biology, sweep God off his throne, but they received support from biblical exegesis. Anxiety, the main characteristic of the early twentieth century, was announced, circumscribing the hegemony of evangelicalism and overturning the image of an age of great believers and great converts, with a desperate scepticism and a morbid interest in systematizations and layman readings of the Christian faith. These had been inaugurated by Das Leben Jesu by Strauss, translated by George Eliot in 1846, but preceded by the very similar speculations of English theologians. Religious doubt is indeed the stigma of the Victorian writer as is the smug possession of an orthodox faith, and there is perhaps no other age that has questioned itself with such dramatic insistence on the silence or the hidden presence of God. Even the divine image, judging from the apprehensions of the divine by the poetic ‘I’ and its manifestations in the poetry of Keble, Newman, Browning, and even Clough, becomes a double, two-faced God, successively and oxymoronically inflexible and piteous,

30

Actually very few writers, and an even lower number of poets, believed that after 1832 the new period that was opening was one of progress: the hardened and obsessed hymnists and panegyrists of an unstoppable progress were simply the philosophers and the utilitarian pseudo-philosophers like Macaulay and Mill, or the evolutionists like Darwin and Spencer. Thomas Arnold of Rugby, with whom this Volume will open, was among the first to perceive around about 1832 that his was a time marked out, unknown and unforeseen, and one heralding a ‘revolution’, which he described in terms almost exactly like those of Ruskin’s ‘storm cloud’ many years later (§ 8.3).

32/I Introduction

punishing and loving. The ‘disappearance of God’ is, in turn, the premise to the Victorian infatuation with esotericism, Spiritualism and mesmerism, which attracted not only sincere and fanatical adepts but raised an ambiguous and amphibian curiosity even in apparently ferocious mockers like Browning, and perhaps George Eliot. 3. Victorian schizophrenia found a tangible expression in three images and two structural devices that recur with symptomatic frequency in both the poetry and the novel.31 In ‘Dover Beach’ by Arnold – in the wake of Vico and of one of the most read Graeco-Roman philosophers in Arnold’s time, Marcus Aurelius – the poet offers a key to his understanding of the position taken by the Victorian intellectual when faced with the questions of faith and of the human condition, such as found fertile soil among a small number of the sceptical intelligentsia, rather than among the middle-class masses that fattened the novelists’ purses. Such a key may be found in the theory and image of the tides: with inconsolable clarity Arnold places a temporal groove and bewails the inertness that seems to have interrupted the cyclical rhythm of time and the advent of an age of stable low tide. He asks doubtfully if a high tide can ever follow,32 and answers in extremis that faith, like history, has always been regulated by a ‘good’ cycle and by an alternance which is just as sinusoidal. The second recurrent image is that of the veil that covers things and makes them unknowable and

31

32

Armstrong (AVP, 1–21) justly points out the dangers inherent in any reading that does not take into account phenomenology – and Bakhtinian polyphony – and the margins of textual ambiguity, as much formal as linguistic and cultural. Her less convincing construction of a composite reading practice is a curious updating of the Empsonian concept of poetry as ambiguity in the light of selective, too eclectic and heterogeneous loans from poststructuralist and twentieth-century epistemology. The elegiac theme of the end of whole historical cycles is found, for example, in the following thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, on whom Arnold wrote an essay: ‘In like manner view also the other epochs of time and of whole nations, and see how many after great efforts soon fell and were resolved into the elements’ (IV, 32); ‘Think continually […] how many cities are entirely dead […] Helice and Pompeii and Herculaneum, and others innumerable […] always observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are’ (IV, 48); ‘some part of the universe’ is ‘administered according to definite periods’, or cycles (V, 13).

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incomprehensible, and envelopes God and the beyond. In Tennyson’s poetry and in the Rubáiyát of FitzGerald, the veil darkens what lies behind and will be torn aside only on the moment of death, when it will offer a blinding view of future things.33 Finally, the image of the prism and its facets that deviate, break and distort the light that passes through it, an image used by Browning in 1845 in a letter to his future wife, Elizabeth Barrett. The refraction of a changing, mutable reality that cannot be recomposed in a unified version and vision offers a key to the reading of Browning’s works, though it is not circumscribed to them alone. In Browning’s masterpiece, The Ring and the Book, the cognitive inquiry starts from an absolute relativism that cannot be recomposed in the totality of its contrapositions and reaches a dogmatic stance offered anyway – as in Arnold – in extremis.34 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë looks towards Browning and then to Conrad in a technique that morbidly encapsulates the narrators and the plots and then expounds the story through the filter of a vicarious narrator. The ideological and spiritual loss of bearings was reflected, or more exactly refracted, not only in Browning’s dramatic monologues, but also in the alignment of settings and perspectives that informs the rich narrative subgenre of the backdated novels, which corroborate the theory of an unchanging and unresolved metaphysical and religious quest. The poetic and narrative relativism is an open profession of the not only strictly literary but also, as it were, of the cognitive limits of realism.35

33

A Schopenhauerian image, almost oriental, but already found in Marcus Aurelius (V, 10). 34 See on this L. Stevenson, ‘The Relativity of Truth in Victorian Fiction’, in Victorian Essays: A Symposium, ed. W. D. Anderson and T. D. Clareson, Kent 1967, 72–86. 35 See my own ‘La scrittura prismatica. Istanze antirealistiche nel romanzo vittoriano’, in Realismo ed effetti di realtà nel romanzo dell’Ottocento, ed. F. Fiorentino, Roma 1993, 111–25, on Victorian relativism and on the encapsulation of the narrators in Emily Brontë, in Browning, and in the novels of Wilkie Collins and Stevenson, where use is made of the analogies found in the polyphonic novel of Dostoevsky, as studied by Bakhtin in his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Eng. trans., Ann Arbor, MI 1973.

34/I Introduction

§ 6. Fluctuations in taste and criticism The expression ‘Victorian’ is an open exemplification of the trails of a collective connotation, of a range of nuances and semantic incrustations that, like a metaphor that becomes a catachresis, have been consolidated by use, almost in fact at the level of denotation. To define anything Victorian for many years meant and implied everything and the opposite of everything according to the general judgement that, in various moments, was given to Victorian culture and to the values of Victorianism, and above all according to the particular historical moment when such a judgement was given. There were no nuances or allusions in the little-known writer Edwin Paxton Hood who coined the term36 when, in a chapter of a book celebrating the splendour of the age, he spoke of Victorian prosperity as that of the most admirable spectacle on the face of the earth, and added that the sky had never gathered together elsewhere such a dazzling constellation of its most beautiful gifts. There were none even in J. A. Roebuck who, in a public speech held in Sheffield in 1865, praised the country’s unequalled happiness and prayed that it might last for a long, long time yet. This wish and its utterer were often quoted by Matthew Arnold, but in a way that showed his disapproval, it being rather seen as one of the many evocations of his bitter enemy, Philistinism. The early critics of Victorianism were the more cultured Victorians themselves, like Arnold, followed closely by the less well-disciplined family of Swinburne, Pater and Wilde and, with them, Hopkins. All of them began to doubt and reject, though still from inside its chronological boundaries, what they believed were its founding tenets. Such relativism involves, in fact, the very use of terms and referents by creating curious quid pro quos. Arnold reacted against a certain kind of Victorianism but, as has already been said, he himself was held to be quintessentially Victorian – for instance – by Hopkins, and he was the target of his anti-Victorianism. Whether Hopkins himself is to be considered a typical Victorian, or one sui generis, or a true and almost unique anti-Victorian, is a moot point and one hotly debated in criticism and taking up many pages in Volume 6 of this work. Tracing the history of the fin-de-siècle reception

36

A. Briggs, The Age of Improvement, London 1959, 446.

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of Victorianism and then that of the early twentieth century equals, in fact, to going back over the stages of a ferocious revolt of sons against fathers, which erupted in the name of an arbitrary and partial absolutization of one or more elements of the system, due to the objective lack of compactness of the Victorian cultural system itself and to its conflicting internal state.37 Hence Victorianism is the sum of its readings, given in the course of the 120 years that separate us from its chronological ending. 2. The opening of the twentieth century was characterized by a sudden pruning of the Victorian tendrils present in the artistic and literary culture of England and by a revolution in taste and sensibility that reached well into the fields of architecture, interior decoration and household furnishings. The new literary dictators were pitiless in applying the law of retaliation. What has already been said with regard to terminological relativism comes through clearly from the reconstruction of Chesterton who, in The Victorian Age in Literature, of 1913, curiously dubbed Arnold a ‘Philistine’ and called some of the Pre-Raphaelites and aesthetes mere amateurs. This verdict was taken up literally by Lytton Strachey in his essays in Eminent Victorians, almost all of which are full of nuances and allusive ironies, and of which the most cutting is one on Matthew Arnold himself. It opens with a memorable comparison of the Victorian age as a strange fish in an aquarium, which one does not know whether to admire or to look at askance due to its contortions. Ignoring the sterile and ephemeral arguments of the Bloomsbury group, in many ways an emanation and offshoot of Wilde’s aestheticism, the early twentieth-century avant-garde movements promoted the dismantling of the nineteenth century – identified ipso facto as an age of obscure and nebulous literature – in the name of a poetry at once harder and healthier, as Pound put it, clearer and more limpid, and less prolix. The Imagist poetics prescribed, as against the watered-down poetry and the lifeless prolixity of the Victorians, the juxtapositioning of images, the visualization of meanings and the direct suggestibility of words without spurious moralistic tails being attached. In their widespread feeling, that of a tabula rasa and of a spasmodic search for models that 37

The pioneering book by J. H. Buckley, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture, London 1953, centres round this.

36/I Introduction

could be examples for the twentieth-century writer, the Romantics and the Victorians were the first to be excluded from all consideration, along with the Georgian poets, their later epigones. It is symptomatic that every time T. S. Eliot tried to furnish names of poets to exemplify the dissociation of sensibility or other expressive vices, he invariably mentioned Tennyson and Browning. Of all the works by Tennyson only In Memoriam corresponded to the Eliotian criterion of the greatest economy of words, but Eliot esteemed this poem at most for its musicality and its technical and prosodic skill, like a work by a minor Virgil unable to think and to express complex, subtle, surprising sensations. From the viewpoint of the evolution of poetic and literary forms, the immature and empty-minded optimist Browning was for Eliot, in The Sacred Wood (1920), a poet that like Wordsworth had vainly tried to invent new forms in which to enclose new impressions, while ‘Tennyson, who might unquestionably have become a consummate master of minor forms, took to turning out large patterns’.38 The work of demolition was taken up and completed by Leavis, the last major flogger of Victorianism. The target in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) was the so-called ‘Victorian poetic’, that escapist vein found mainly in Swinburne, in the Pre-Raphaelites, and in Morris, and from which not even Yeats was completely free. This viewpoint was not modified in his later books. In The Great Tradition (1948), Leavis made a similar selective operation, wiping the slate clean and eliminating minor or uninfluential writers in the field of the novel. But by 1948 Leavis was a latecomer and an isolated voice, because a process of historical documentation was underway, largely independent of questions of taste or perhaps called forth by a nostalgic need to salvage an age now considered innocuous. The impact of the Victorians was nevertheless more subtle, more masked, more hidden 38

Eliot almost never dealt with the novel and especially the Victorian novel in his essays, and the underlying premise is that the novel was the quintessence of the melodramatic and of literature for entertainment (that is, ‘low’ literature.) The boundary between drama and melodrama is vague for Eliot (in the nineteenth, as against the twentieth century, there was no distinction between genre and objectives, and the word ‘novel’ was a comprehensive term). For this very reason, Eliot was tolerant and even eulogistic in one of his rare essays on the novelists Wilkie Collins and Dickens.

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and definitely vaster than the militant writers in the first thirty years of the twentieth century had been prepared to admit. Browning’s poetry contains many of the presuppositions of that experimentalism and that revolution in the poetic language whose champions had been paradoxically, like Eliot, its bitterest adversaries. Pound, more sincere than Eliot, openly pointed to Browning as his ‘father’. Browning opened the way to the dramatic principle and to the impersonality of the twentieth century, and was among the first to take up the rhythms and tones of the idiomatic and spoken language. With The Ring and the Book – as Henry James astutely noted – Browning had taught the novelists their art more than any other nineteenth-century professional novelist. Empson and the New Critics showed in turn that Tennyson’s lyrics were linguistically and rhetorically only slightly less sophisticated than those of the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, and that he exploited the techniques of ‘ambiguity’ and ‘irony’ then reputed to be a primary and specific ingredient of poetry. He was also seen as being one of the real precursors of symbolism, of the objective correlative and, above all in the Idylls of the King, of the use of the mythical and archetypical method. And Matthew Arnold was discovered to be the predecessor of Yeats in his neoclassical stylization. The greatest twentieth-century rehabilitation, however, concerned Hopkins, as I shall amply discuss when his moment will come. Immediately after 1918, at the dawn of a new sensibility, his poetry remained the only and truly surviving one in a period in which, as Arnold had foreseen in his essay on Joubert, many were the writers that had waned with the passing of time, were exploded and in fact deleted. However, at least two poets, forgotten by the English themselves, deserve a serious reconsideration, and they are Arthur Hugh Clough and Coventry Patmore. 3. Recent criticism has proposed two or perhaps three points de repère that are worthy of being examined and briefly dealt with. Every critical method has had its say on Victorian literature, from historicism to Marxism, whether crude or more sophisticated and ‘neo’, to Bakhtin’s polyphony, to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to reader’s response criticism and to deconstruction and feminism, to name but a few. Naturally the point is not whether to disapprove of this or that approach, but to see which are the emphases of the text, and to discover the agreement between a text

38/I Introduction

and the most natural way of explaining it or the one that interprets it at a deeper level: a principle that has to do with what was once known to structuralists as the ‘dominant’ of a text, which the clever critic is called to identify. Generally speaking, the latest tendency has been rather that of applying to the text, deductively and from outside, a series of epistemological foundations, or that of attaching to it forced and debatable secondary derivations using the text as a free and very vague stimulant. From time immemorial later interpretative keys have been used according to the undisputed law that literature not only precedes but also succeeds the movement of ideas; it is the task of the critic to weigh up with his or her sense of balance anticipations and interactions that, unawares, a text, unbeknownst, effectively contains. A recurrent objection is that a certain kind of recent criticism – of Victorianism, and of literature in general – creates in an artificial manner the complexities that it wants to demonstrate are present in the text, and that, therefore, this complexity does not exist, at least not in the forms, in the modes and to the extent which are suggested. A second and more widely diffused critical tendency is one that has thrown into complete discredit the glorious historico-critical method of research, that discounts the formative experiences, the books both illuminating and ‘galeotti’ (as for Dante’s Francesca), the personal meetings between master and disciple, fruitful but always dialectic and variously controlled. From the early 1970s on, all literature, and the Victorian in particular, has been re-examined from a new point zero, and practically rewritten. The basis of this revolution is that there is no longer a psychic, rational and volitional unity of the writing subject; even more radically, what he says is only an enunciation for which he has no responsibility, even though he thinks he has; it means something different from his intentions, and something of which, in fact, he is unaware; nor is there any sense in taking for true the intentions of writers or their declarations of poetics.39 Each text must 39

Just to give an example and perhaps clarify the point, Angela Leighton in her brilliant introduction to the anthology Victorian Women Poets, London 1995, xxxv– xl, discusses the conversion to Catholicism of some Victorian poets (Howitt and Parkes), or one that was only contemplated, or only just avoided in the case of others, like Greenwell and Christina Rossetti. The reasons for such a common attraction

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be read in a deviated manner, but not for the skill of the writers or for the proverbial Victorian reticence. The fact is that the subject no longer dominates and no longer knows him/herself. A third, even less satisfying approach is that of reading a poem or a narrative following a kind of biography based on pure speculation or on the supposed surfacing of possible skeletons in the cupboard. An uncontrolled pseudo-Freudian criticism has recently grown in an attempt to individuate always and anywhere an oppressive father and a sweet-natured mother as a compensatory agent, with the usual formation of traumas, psychic blockages, and often secret and internally concealed tragedies in the writers their children. Some ‘new’ biographies of Victorian writers40 have been promoted by publishers announcing scoops and other ‘upsetting’ revelations, as they are termed, and any even minimal trace is often fancifully suitable to establish secret same-sex relationships or inclinations, masked, repressed or redirected. There is on my part no a priori refusal – on the contrary a moderately faithful curiosity – in the face of Derridian and deconstructionist procedures or findings. At the bottom of it, the contradiction between poetics and the written word, or between the intention of the poet and the product itself, is an axiom as old as literature itself. It will be the work of future is not that these poets had examined the different confessions and were rationally convinced of the decision they were about to make; on the contrary, that attraction is to be attributed the ‘authoritarian as well as richly decorative atmosphere of Catholicism’, which ‘provided a “home” for the sceptical, aesthetic imagination – a home which had the advantage of still not being part of the English establishment’. Above all, finally, the Catholic Church had always been associated ‘with foreigners, Italy, the Irish and the poor’. 40 Jan Marsh writing on Christina Rossetti (§ 196.1, bibl.) reveals that Christina was raped by her father when still a child and that they carried on an incestuous relationship. John Maynard (§ 171.1, bibl.) accepts the speculations of earlier biographies to construct, or rather not deny, an image of Patmore who – on the basis of an uncertain vow of chastity made to his second wife – was sexually repressed. According to Maynard, Patmore had an incestuous tendency for, or perhaps even kept an incestuous relationship with, his daughter, a nun, who had been given his first wife’s name. His daughter candidly admitted that she had loved her father very dearly. Some biographers also assert that the morbid attentions of her tyrannical father towards Elizabeth Barrett Browning were incestuous.

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years to say whether the theory of fragmentation and the impossibility of reassembling the disintegrated subject is a new and lasting psychological basis, or simply a cyclical and passing fashion. The Victorian writers held a contrary opinion, even though what they said could be deconstructed as supreme denegation. Patmore, for instance, believed in a unified consciousness and in man as ever vigilant and integral; one of his essays is, in fact, entitled ‘Poetical Integrity’ and it opens affirming the correspondence between what a man is and what a man writes: ‘a man’s action […] may belie him: his words never’. Thackeray, too, in Roundabout Papers, asserted that ‘a man’s books may not always speak the truth, but they speak his mind in spite of himself ’. § 7. Social and political chronology of the Victorian Age up to 1870 Immediately after the Congress of Vienna the Tory party had formed a line of protection for the landed proprietors in order to keep public order under control. It was ready to suffocate, as has been mentioned, any hotbed of Jacobinism. During the Napoleonic wars all industrial activity in the cotton areas and mining districts had practically come to a standstill, and even the demands of the workers had quieted down. The tensions re-exploded in 1819 when about 60,000 workers, who had met in a park in Manchester to listen to a speech by a radical speaker, were rushed upon by the horse-guards and eleven were killed and 400 injured. The workers dubbed the attack ‘The Peterloo Massacre’, a term that was punned on that of the glory gained at Waterloo, and worked to discredit the prestige of the Tories and of the moral conqueror of Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington. Repressive laws were immediately passed, and so severe that they held in check the workers’ agitation for almost two decades. The 1832 Reform Bill, brought in by the Whigs, was not a democratic measure, in the strict sense of the word; rather, when it was approved it was denounced by many newspapers and pamphlets, even though workers were led to believe that the Reform would eventually benefit them. The whole manufacturing class from the industrialists in Manchester to those in other cotton and mining centres had pressed for electoral reform. At the same time, the bill aimed at redesigning the electoral map long unchanged in England. Prior to 1832 the ‘rotten boroughs’, left empty due to the migration from the

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country to the towns, sent members to Parliament, while overpopulated urban centres had no representative. Already under pressure, due to the demonstrations sparked by the industrialists tired of the slowness of parliamentary procedures, from 1830 Grey’s Cabinet had promoted the debate on Lord Russell’s plans for a wider active participation in politics by the middle-classes, despite opposition from the Tories and the House of Lords. The Reform Bill was approved thanks to the voluntary absence of some Lords, and all together it gave thirty per cent of the male population the right to vote. Among the numerous novels circling around the year 1832, George Eliot’s Middlemarch clarified that in the suburbs the debate on Reform was not felt, and that the bill was even contested by the most distant rural communities, an apathy that comes through even more clearly in Felix Holt. On the other hand, it fired and fuelled the claims of the workers right up to 1850. 2. In comparison to continental Europe, England had no 1821 and no 1830 – of which Clough, Arnold and Meredith felt the loss, romanticizing with a touch of envy the Milanese, Roman and Venetian insurrections. But it did have an 1848 under the form of the blander Chartism. Those dates and the relative events were only partly shared in England, and their echo came about much later. The European regimes severely repressed any aspiration to freedom, while English intellectuals could boast of a model of their own that ensured the biggest number of rights to the citizens and the most humanitarian and progressive politics in the whole of reactionary Europe. England was the country where Mill’s treatise on liberty had been written, where the police went unarmed and where political exiles, Italian, Spanish, Polish and mid-European, and the real revolutionaries headed by Marx, took refuge. The hardships of the worker in the factories and the mines, already denounced by Engels in 1844, were described in real detail and with frankness by the social novelists of the 1840s, who furnished a rather inflated idea of the news which for the rest came largely from hearsay or through the brief reports made by ministerial inspectors. Mary Barton by Mrs Gaskell shows a close-knit community of workers who retain their sense of dignity and personal cleanliness, offer mutual support to one another, and even have a certain aesthetic taste. On the other hand, the government faced the unease and the threats of disorder

42/I Introduction

by emanating reforms that, although always a little late in coming and by their nature grudgingly granted, in the long run provided concrete concessions that would not be repealed. There was, therefore, a consistent and efficient attempt towards keeping the peace at home that was lacking in the dictatorial and despotic European monarchies. The English government, finding support and inspiration in Bentham’s utilitarianism – just to limit ourselves to the more decisive measures taken in the 1840s – set up the workhouses for the needy, regulated more than once the working hours in factories and mines for women and children, and lowered the price of wheat and, therefore, that of bread.41 The following twenty years brought in numerous other laws, all of a democratic bent. The century closed, however, with a deficit, the only partial recognition of the civil, patrimonial, and electoral rights of women. 3. Radicalism and the Anti-Corn Law League were on the whole two strictly parliamentary movements. One of the leaders of the League was Richard Cobden, a politicised industrialist from Manchester, and the other was John Bright, a formidable speaker of Quaker origin, and son of a miller. They appealed to the people and incited them to keep on fighting. Sincerely on the side of the hungry population, they were at the same time convinced that only a laissez faire policy could favour and bring prosperity to the manufacturing industry. Having reached its objectives the League broke up in 1846, and its founders became the main exponents of Parliamentary radicalism and were the inspiring fathers of the Trade Unions; officially recognized in 1871,42 the Unions would have 2 million members over the next thirty years. As the new century opened, Radicalism had already become an extremist wing of the Whigs, as it was later to become of the Liberals when the Party took this name. The aristocratic radical, devotee of the cause of the workers, also took the stage in Victorian novels and poetry. Bright’s programme after the stabilizing of the 1850s 41 The Poor Laws of 1834 were passed to remedy unemployment, but they failed to get to the roots of the causes of poverty, and drew the proverbial satirical darts of Dickens and of almost every other novelist. In the workhouses the subsistence level provided was to be no higher than the lowest of an employed worker. 42 This recognition was helped on by the riots in Hyde Park on 23 July 1866.

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was a passionate but civil contestation of Home and Foreign Policy carried out by the British governments. The Second Reform Bill of 1867 was formally approved by the Tories but was strongly supported by the radicals, who flaunted it as their own personal success. Chartism instead was an exclusively extra-Parliamentary movement that, originating in a Workers Association founded in 1836 in London, gathered adherents from among the cotton workers in the Midlands and other scattered centres in Birmingham, Leeds and Wales. The members met at night, much like the Carbonari on the Continent, to incite armed insurrection, and the strongest of the six points at the basis of the movement was the request for a statute and for universal suffrage. Chartism failed largely because of the conflicting personalities of its two leaders, the Londoner William Lovett who refused the use of violence, and the much more passionate and violent Irish journalist Feargus O’Connor. The first Chartist convention in the spring of 1839 had over a million signatures, but the demonstration that was to present it in London and force Parliament to vote for it was peacefully dispersed. An attempted insurrection at Newport that aimed at gaining the release of an agitator left twenty-two dead. A second petition was launched in 1842 with 3 million signatures, but was also rejected by Parliament, while a general strike planned for August was called off by O’Connor, who was unable to control the situation. Chartism was practically dead, and its ending was due largely to an improved economy, to the increase in the number of the employed thanks to the expansion of the railways (with 400 new concessions approved in the biennial 1844–1846), and to the new Factory Acts. The third petition of the Chartists, presented at Westminster in the early days of April 1848 with the rioters shouting ‘sell your clothes and buy a sword’, was placated under a heavy rainstorm with the arrest of the leaders. It was followed by the ready approval of a special law of repression aimed at the intimidators of Parliament, and by further military preparations and the constitution of units commanded by the old Duke of Wellington. 4. The undoubted protagonist of the political scene of the 1840s was Sir Robert Peel. He was not, in spite of appearances, an illuminated Tory. Rather, he was famous for being a turncoat, and for the ease with which he passed measures that, until a little before, he had fought against, and

44/I Introduction

that he accepted simply as an extreme remedy, since any other choice had proved impossible. The first of these was in 1829 the approval of the law abolishing discriminations against Catholics, extorted by the Irish Nationalist League of Daniel O’Connell. This ‘treacherous’ gesture was fiercely criticized by the old Tories of the Church of England, but it was made much of by O’Connell, who began to ask loudly in Parliament for the union between Ireland with England to be abrogated. A further controversy was the protest of the Catholic leaseholders against the tax paid to the Protestant Church of Ireland, which in 1835 brought about Peel’s first fall at Russell’s hands. Back in power, Peel had to turn his former protectionist policy completely upside down when the potato famine broke out in 1845, bringing with it in the following years over a million dead and the mass emigration of another million – or perhaps even two – to America. The repeal of the Corn Laws was decided at the last minute in an attempt to remedy the damages caused by the famine, and it was opposed by the right wing of the party led by Disraeli. Serious repercussions of an economic nature followed because the landowners were no longer protected, and also because a sudden flow of wheat at more competitive prices came from America. Peel died in 1850 by falling from his horse, opening the way in the party to Disraeli, who had already brought himself into the limelight by his uncommon cleverness as leader of the conservative backbenchers. Immediately after his nomination, however, he too presented himself in a new guise as a laissez faire politician. The followers of Peel, among whom was Gladstone, moved into the Liberal Party along with the Whigs. 5. Several historians who wrote of the age of Victoria during or after the World Wars of the last century were led to idealize the twenty years 1850–1870 as the best time to be born or reborn in. Wages increased more than prices, which meant that there was more money available for buying, and the ‘workshop of the world’ had now to provide not only for a national market but also for a European and even an American one. New commodities and inventions, from that of the railway and of steam shipping, to stamps, telegrams, and photography, were the indicators of the economic well-being. The sense of this sudden inebriation – the sense of an England satisfied of its economic affluence, of its technological

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progress, and aware of its role as an axis of the world – was tangible in the organization of the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, an immense glass-house erected in Hyde Park in which the marvels of science, and of the techniques and the craftsmanship of various countries even outside Europe, were put on show and visited by millions of tourists. Such wellbeing had, however, its detractors. Carlyle and Ruskin were critical of an industrialized and mechanized society that dried up all and every spiritual stimulus. It was also mined by an impalpable sensation of impermanence, one that could lead as much to a sudden overturning of status and to the meteoric rising of exponents of the lower classes, as to the breakdown of the middle-class entrepreneur. This prosperity was based largely on stock market speculation, and fraudulent bankers, swindlers, debtors, or pleasure-seekers that lived riskily beyond their means, were characters found in everyday life, and frequently taken up and scrutinized by the novelists. British foreign policy under Palmerston, with its ‘splendid isolation’, was contravened in March 1854 when Britain decided to side with France against Russia in the Crimean War. Britain was practically extraneous to the controversy that had started it, but entry into war could be justified to the country as having the aim of limiting expansion by whatsoever power threatened British supremacy, such as Russia with respect to Turkey. The war was also stupidly hailed by some poets and writers as proof of the prosperity and authority reached by Britain – hence it was a test of power – as well as a healthy outlet for a class of youngsters physically and spiritually rusty after half a century of peace. During the war the unequalled and exemplary devotion of Florence Nightingale shone; however, ironically, this was due to the deficiencies in sanitation and strategy that were denounced in an enquiry and led to the fall of the government. Palmerston strove to support Italian independence, but he was not a real friend of Italy, as his aim was that of weakening Austria without strengthening France overmuch. Britain could not but look passively at the rise of Prussia, which was much more damaging for her, since she was first victorious over Austria in 1866 and then over France in 1870. The more serious problems facing the government at home, once they had solved those of the Chartists, concerned Irish terrorism. In 1857 the Fenian Movement was founded in New York and led to an explosion

46/I Introduction

in a London prison in 1867. In India the mutiny by some native troupers in 1857 was suffocated by reinforcements and resulted in the dismantling of the East Indian Company. 6. A few words must be given to Queen Victoria since not even a brief outline of nineteenth-century English literature can close without. What made her, although perhaps not immediately, the most beloved monarch in English history is the launch of a new model of sovereignty which she retained and exemplified for the sixty-four years of her reign. It was supported by her discretion in using political influence, her balance and wisdom. She had the ability to understand and the skill to remould the values of a civilization based on seriousness and solidness and on the sacred values of the family. She did away with the frivolous and pleasurable way of life associated with kings, and rife in her predecessors, and which would still be carried on by many of her descendants through to the present day. Later in life, she became stocky and fat, and had nothing in common with the physique du rôle of the more romantic and legendary queens of history. When she was young she had been slender, rosy and rounded, fresh and carefree, but already judicious and decided in her ways, determined not to let herself be corrupted, and committed ‘to do one day her own part’. At the sudden death of William IV she acceded to the throne miraculously intact from a suffocating environment where quarrelling, rivalry and hypocrisy were rampant, and without having been overpowered by the mental preparation thought necessary for one having to face the life as queen. Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, and one time husband of Caroline Lamb whom he had divorced on account of her love affair with Byron, after a wild life-style had remained faithful in his affection and willingly became the wise old counsellor, tactful and innocent, to a queen who could have been his daughter. Her devotion to her husband, the Prince Consort Albert of Saxe-Coburg, who had been educated in idealistic German philosophy and was a lover of the most various humanitarian and scientific projects, was exemplary. His counsel was also held in great esteem by politicians. The deep mourning that struck her at his death, in 1861, lowered still further the queen’s glamour, and ever afterwards she dressed in plain, solemn, black silk clothing and wore legendary widows’ caps. But this habit, by making her seem more human, endeared the queen to the people. At the same time,

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widowhood encouraged her independent spirit, which showed up in her unchanging submission to the last desires of her husband, whose work she had promised to continue, although her withdrawal from the public eye was much more evident. In reality, after 1861 Victoria, who lived most of her time out of London and in her Scottish castle at Balmoral, exercised a very discreet but energetic influence from behind the scenes. The bad opinions she had of some politicians were well known, though voiced in private, while she put on another face in public. Her antipathy for Peel and later for Gladstone as he backed Irish autonomy are as well known as is her benevolence for and harmony with Disraeli. Victoria, who had German blood in her, imprudently favoured Prussia against Austria, without knowing that shortly it would be first a rival to Britain and that later it would replace it as an economic and political power in Europe. After 1876, when Disraeli proclaimed her Empress of India, Victoria, having survived no less than seven unrealistic attempts on her life, and having denied rumours of her abdication, rose to become a visible symbol of the British Empire, which was slowly extending its dominion over the world.

Part I 

The Scaffoldings of Victorian Thought

§ 8. Thomas Arnold of Rugby* I: The educational system Thomas Arnold (1795–1842) is known the world over as Dr Arnold of Rugby, this being the name of the English public school of which he was headmaster. He radically changed the school. He was a pedagogue and historian, a translator of Thucydides and a preacher, many of whose sermons were published in his lifetime. He was also the author of pamphlets and theological treatises aimed especially at the Tractarians and the Catholics. His significance is less in his written works than in his prestige and stature as an educator, and in his organizing ability that allowed him to impose a model of teaching that lasted for at least three generations in English boys’ public schools. At Rugby Arnold widened the curriculum of the subjects taught and reorganized the teaching system. His fundamental innovation was the appointment of senior boys as monitors responsible for the development of the younger boys. In the curriculum he introduced or strengthened the study of philology, history, languages and mathematics. In anticipation of Hard Times he opposed the ‘mere fact system’, which meant filling the pupils’ heads with notions that were instilled as in neat little packets. His principle, set out in a letter of intentions in March 1827, was that the school was a place of Christian instruction, a place in which to mould ‘Christian gentlemen’. He preferred moral uprightness to cleverness, and he privileged the hard-working rather than the talented. The extremely rigid selection that the pupils had to face before being admitted to Rugby meant that the survivors were forever grateful to Arnold, and their letters of appreciation fatten Stanley’s biography. Shortly before they left Rugby Dr Arnold would advise his pupils against taking up certain professions and avocations. The four instruments that he felt fundamental

*

The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, 2 vols, London 1844, by A. P. Stanley, a one-time pupil of Arnold at Rugby and later Dean of Westminster, is essential reading. It includes a highly representative selection of Arnold’s letters, notebooks of journeys, and diaries. The third of the four chapters in L. Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, London 1918, is given over to Arnold. B. Willey, ‘Thomas Arnold’, in NineteenthCentury Studies, London 1949, Harmondsworth 1964, 59–81; N. Wymer, Dr Arnold of Rugby, London 1953; E. L. Williamson, The Liberalism of Thomas Arnold: A Study of his Religious and Political Writings, Bloomington, IN 1964.

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The Scaffoldings of Victorian Thought

to the shaping of a Christian were discipline, education, religious services (such as he himself held in Rugby Chapel) and personal action. 2. In the pupils at Rugby, Stanley writes, ‘the chief impression was of extreme fear’.1 It was, actually, just that, an impression, because the headmaster alternated severity with sweetness. His manner was dry, brusque, and laconic, but he joked and smiled with the little ones whom, like Jesus, he took on his knee, and in the family he had his moments of tenderness and indulgence. He was like the Victorian God, irascible and benign, or like a Zeus, both thundering and yet offering quiet peacefulness. He was a good reader of character, and in his approach to the pupils he was like the confessor for Catholics. He fought, as he admitted, an all-out struggle against the evil that was latent in his boys – that evil that, for his son Matthew, as well as for Stevenson, was incarnate in man’s ‘second being’. He frequently quoted the Gospel parable of the wide and narrow gates, and he put down the uncontrolled, excessive and loud-mouthed amusements to the ‘revellings’ against which St Paul warned.2 As confessor, he had to find answers for, and face, cases of conscience and of loss of faith; the therapy he advised was strength of will and prayer. Each crisis had to be accepted seriously as a test. His desire to Christianize the school arose from the fact that in the early nineteenth century the irreligious spirit was seen as rife among the students. Their sins, though, tended to be trivial matters such as unpaid debts. Arnold saw around him young people only vaguely faithful or who had lost their faith completely, and, therefore, all easy prey for Satan. Medical students were ‘degraded’ and ‘materialistic atheists’ who passed their time in the greatest dissoluteness, while he noted in others a ‘restlessness’ and a ‘paradox’ which led them to debate ‘things that had been immutable for centuries’. In particular, by means of an overeasy shortcut, the young were ready to yield to the seditious preaching of the Tractarians,

1 2

Stanley 1844, I, 138. Stanley 1844, II, 211: ‘There is no earthly thing more mean and despicable in my mind than an English gentleman destitute of all sense of his responsibilities and opportunities, and only revelling in the luxuries of our high civilization’ (cf. Galatians, V, 21). See also Matthew Arnold on ‘revelling’ in § 152.4.

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and this he judged a dangerous, desperate jump into blind fanaticism; and he did his best, though in vain, to limit its persuasiveness. 3. Thomas Arnold was also one of the first to perceive and interpret mystically some of the events that radically changed the face of England, all of which happened around the year 1830, such as the unrest in the countryside in 1830, the cholera epidemic in 1831–1832 and the consequences of the First Reform Bill that were feared by many. When he was on holiday in the Austrian Alps in 1830 he wrote a letter in which he described the July 1830 revolution in France as an historical watershed, and the words he used are almost exactly identical to those used by Ruskin many decades later to describe the ‘storm cloud’. In fact, it was heralded by a sudden darkening of the sky, a violent, rushing wind, and all the premonitory symptoms of a gale.3 In the same letter, Arnold showed he was uncertain and perplexed concerning the coming Reform Bill, and pessimistic with regard to the changes it would bring about. Between the serious and the comic, the symbolic and the perfectly literal, he was indeed the first Victorian apocalyptic. His was a fear of the end of the world seen as divine punishment for ubiquitous evil, and it extended to visions and hallucinations of various weight and seriousness. Men had failed to make the earth like the heavens, and themselves similar to Christ, and to make the kingdom of the world become a civitas Dei. In spite of everything, however, he did fight to found the City of God in this world, as his son Matthew conceded in ‘Rugby Chapel’. The letters are full of premonitions of those ‘periods of judgement that are known as the Coming of the Lord’. In 1831, Arnold could even refer to the Irvingites – a minor sect of New Pentecostals – as a sign 3

In a letter dated 1831 (Stanley 1844, I, 302–3) Arnold points out that an improved knowledge of the atmospheric phenomena is called for, and that there seems to be a ‘“morbus coeli”, which at particular periods favours the spread of disorders’, and thus, by means of the atmosphere, cholera spreads. In another letter, dated 1837 (Stanley 1844, II, 81–2), Arnold hints at the ‘storm cloud’, which he describes as an impetuous, icy wind in the middle of June, ‘cold from all points of the compass’. He observes that such an inexplicable phenomenon induced him to fear earthquakes and eruptions ‘before the end of the year’. In a letter to a pupil (Stanley 1844, II, 220–2), Arnold warns him against ‘the secret influence of the air in which you are living for so large a portion of the year’.

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of the imminent coming of the Day of Judgement, of the end of one of the ‘aeons’, or eras of the human race that succeeded one another following a dynamic cycle. This was a view he transmitted almost unaltered to his son. Of far greater menace, though, were the admonitory symptoms he saw in the cholera epidemic of 1831 and in the rise to power of the Trade Unions. Every so often, Arnold glimpses the ‘second phase’ of the Apocalypse, that which would lead to the edification of the New Jerusalem. In these cases, a period of ‘fearful visitation to terminate the existing state of things’, was desired and invoked, no longer simply feared; this was something that only angels could know, the end of ‘the whole existence of the human race’. Arnold felt however that such a moment was still to come: ‘we are ingulphed, I believe, inevitably, and must go down the cataract; although ourselves, i. e. you and I, may be in Hezekiah’s case, and not live to see the catastrophe’.4 In contrast with his son Matthew, Arnold held that the universe was unknowable in its wholeness, and that science was not able to penetrate its mystery. Science was at best able to formulate vague cloudy hypotheses which cancelled each other out. Similarly, the origin of ‘moral evil’ was unknowable. However, it should not perplex man but rather stimulate him to weed it out (this would have been the answer of a Stoic to an Epicurean who denied the good government of the world by the gods). For Arnold, as for all mystics, there was an ‘invisible world’ of which man was perfectly unaware, so unaware that its supernatural character could only be judged by the moral character of the assertions that it sanctioned: only thus could man distinguish the differences between the revelations made by God from those made by the devil. 4. Literature, according to Arnold’s educational system, rigidly came to be finalized to cognitive and moral aims, and there was no place in it for any kind of ‘Elizabethan’ ornateness or verbal ostentation. This explains, at least in part, the fact that Arnold is stylistically a writer who said what he had to say without worrying too much about how he said it. He was well aware, almost deliberately so, of being rough, hurried, and slipshod. When he was little more than twenty-five years old, he, like Carlyle, closed

4

Stanley 1844, II, 148.

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his Byron and never opened any other contemporary poet afterwards. He renounced without regrets all the authentic creative ambitions he might have had when a student. This does not mean that he did not read poetry and novels from time to time, but the pride of place was always given to authors who sacrificed the autonomous word for a moral aim, particularly Keble, the author of the most popular collection of sacred poems in the early years of the century, and Wordsworth, whom Arnold often visited after buying a house for his holidays near Wordsworth’s sheltered spot at Rydal Mount. A surprising coincidence with the positions of the evangelicals makes of Arnold the first critic of literature as a form of escape and entertainment, and a direct corruptor of the young. The immaturity of his pupils, he maintained, came partly from the ‘great number of entertaining books’ they read, like The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, which satisfied the boy but hardly prepared him for any other serious reading. Similarly, Arnold disapproved of the theatre, and especially of comedy, and the concept of ‘seriousness’ and spirituality that Arnold, the son, claimed for literature came from this veto, as did his aversion for the theatre, although potentially it held great possibilities for the education of the masses. 5. Dr Arnold, who wanted to be read only by his circle of close friends, nevertheless deserves to be remembered at least for the few pages of his journals that Stanley reproduced in his biography. In Italy, where Arnold went as an historian to read in the libraries, he did all he could to repress his envious admiration for the physical beauty of the countryside and for the persuasive, superstitious nature of the monuments and the churches. He found himself in the same contradictory quandary as Ruskin and other compatriots who, in order to widen their education and open their minds culturally, had to visit a country whose cultural traditions they fiercely hated. His notes on the cities in the Papal States bristle with vituperations and gibes, biased thinking and anti-Catholic itches. It is highly premonitory, or rather it reinforces an age-old English topos, that he should close his journal exclaiming that at long last the journey was over and that he never felt so well anywhere else as in England, with much the same reaction as in Tennyson’s ‘O my darling room, my heart’s delight’. The pages that describe his arrival in England after the long tour of 1841 endorse the Biedermeier taste of the Victorians. They exalt the comforts of known places, even the

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modesty of the English countryside (which has nothing sublime or intangible about it), and its inimitable flora, its misty mountains and its domestic affections. He was genuinely anxious and worried in the final pages because he wanted to offer this diary to his wife for whom it was written. The intimate diary that he kept in the last few months was that considered by the Victorians as the ‘second’ diary, the first and more public one being simply a chronicle of facts and events. Arnold in this diary – and this is confirmed by the last few witnesses at the time of his death – proved how the whole of his day was taken up by devotion and prayer and how his mind was fully absorbed in the recital of the psalms and by short prayers. He himself when alive had composed prayers and hymns following the Protestant tradition and had had the pupils recite them at various times of the day. 6. The son of a modest custom’s officer on the Isle of Wight, Arnold took a first class degree at Oxford and stayed on as a fellow at Oriel. In 1817 he was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal for essays in Latin and English. While at university, he had discovered not simply ancient poetry but the philosophers and the historians, above all Aristotle and Thucydides, and he sent his son Matthew to Oxford just because Aristotle was not studied at Cambridge. He was ordained deacon and, having married the sister of one of his university friends in 1820, he settled near London where for several years he coached students privately preparing them for the university. He was elected Headmaster of Rugby in 1827. This came about in a rather unorthodox fashion, after he had made a last minute application. He got appointed largely thanks to a letter of presentation from the provost of Oriel, Hawkins, who had foreseen that Arnold would change the system of education in England. In 1835 he declined nomination to a Bishopric (though this perhaps would have allowed him to dedicate himself to the reform of the Church), and then became an examiner in the University of London. He resigned from this post in 1838 after refusing to give way on the point that education might be or could be separated from the Christian religion. In 1841 he received and accepted the prestigious post as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, where he gave eight lectures. He died following a heart attack, attended by his wife and two of his younger children. He was buried in Rugby school chapel; ‘Rugby Chapel’ is the title of a poem Matthew wrote in his memory.

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§ 9. Thomas Arnold of Rugby II: The Rugbeian forge From the pulpit at Laleham young Thomas Arnold delivered sermons with a rough vehemence that edged on fanatical delirium. He urged the necessity to apply the Gospel to daily events and even to political life. He was stubborn by nature, and threw himself head first into quarrels and debates and never moved an inch from his position. He was a Latitudinarian in his religion because he believed in a Church sufficiently broad to include all Christians except for the Quakers and the Catholics. He excluded the Jews. Keble, who was godfather to little Matthew and a frequent visitor, was shown the door when he joined the Oxford Movement. Insofar as the common basis of a civil society was Christianity, Arnold was actually the first centralizer and the first destroyer of pluralism. Such an all-embracing Church, as Hooker, Burke and Coleridge had already maintained, was a synonym for the state: ‘it seems to me that the State must be “the world”, if it be not “the Church”’.5 The state should not provide simply for the material needs of its followers but also for the religious ones. The Dissenters had to be brought back into the fold, for Arnold was fully aware that their numbers and their strength could sway the results one way or another. His son Matthew would have agreed with his father that in the age of Elizabeth a serious mistake had been committed in excluding the Puritans. Now the Anglican Church had to draw them back. He was tolerant, like his son, and willingly conceded that the Irish had a right to a Church of their own and one aided financially by the State. He was the first to sketch an analysis of Puritan ascendancy among the English middle-classes, and the first to diagnose the ‘great damage’ that had come from Dissent. These points were later to be developed in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy.6 The Puritan could not taste what there was of ‘beautiful’ and ‘sweet’ and ‘ideal’

5 6

Stanley 1844, II, 142. A passage in a letter (Stanley 1844, II, 190) echoes closely the germinating nucleus of the book, since Dr Arnold asserts that the monarchy and the aristocracy are ‘two precious elements’ but guilty of ‘insolencies’. He concludes that ‘neither will be wise in time.’

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in Christianity.7 The characteristic faults and flaws in the English mindset were for Arnold the ‘narrowness of view, and a want of learning and a sound critical spirit’, such as were exhibited by the Dissenters in an ‘almost comic fashion’. Between Catholicism and Non-Conformism Arnold maintained a position of impartiality. He thought that the most blameworthy part of Catholicism was ‘Priestcraft’, in other words the interposition of numerous ‘human mediators’, or interpreters, between God and man. He added that on one hand the Puritans and the evangelicals, though rejecting Catholicism, discredited the authority and the power of the Church, and on the other that they were as foolishly bibliolatrous as the Catholics were superstitious. 2. In advance of his son’s thinking, Thomas Arnold mused over pleasing ambiguities and primitive speculations concerning the mixing of races and on the cycles of civilization. In his first lecture as Professor of History at Oxford he described the decadence of the Roman Empire before its regeneration by the Germanic element. He had blind faith (far more than his son did) in the Germanic element, energetic, fresh, decisive, male, and incorruptible. This element had been historically present since the end of the Roman Empire. He also valued the Celtic element. In his diary of a journey taken in 1828 he spoke of his stupor and his joy at finding himself in the land of the Saxon and Germanic progenitors, uncorrupted by the Romans or by whatever other mixture. He was in the birthplace of ‘the most moral races that the world had ever seen’, with their healthy laws, moderate passions, and stable domestic virtues. It followed that the German element was the regenerating force in modern Europe. He repeated the traditional judgement on the Irish as being ungovernable, and a people who when emigrating to England had brought with them a barbaric element. As an historian Arnold worked on continual parallelisms between past and present. He studied Thucydides not as a philologist but drawing from him lessons that could be fitted to the present day. Likewise, the pattern of the present was recognizable in the past. He believed thus indirectly, 7

The Americanization feared by Thomas Arnold (Stanley 1844, I, 363) was identified, as for his son Matthew, with a fastidious Protestantism that quarrelled over words, losing sight of the beauty of the Gospels.

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like many Victorians, in Vico’s sequence of historical cycles: in order to know the present man had to go back to the past, time and time again, ‘till we connect our own time with the first century, and in many points with centuries yet more remote’. We know that Arnold in 1836 had wanted to write a book on the ‘Theory of Tides’,8 and that he saw the political and social upheavals and read contemporary history under the metaphor of the ‘tides’ (as in ‘Dover Beach’), and this brings us straight to the deepest symbolism in the poetry of Matthew Arnold.9 3. His basic objection to the Tractarians was that they tended to replace ‘spiritual Christianity’ with rites and extravagant celebrations. He firmly rejected the theory that the Church was the medium between God and mankind. The regular clergy presented themselves as a channel of grace and salvation, but Arnold denied that a clerical government handed down by mystical succession from one priest to another was apostolic. In the decade 1833–1843 the two main contenders in England were Arnold and Newman, who met personally only in February 1842 at Oriel College during a meal. The passionate debate on the via media was resolved by Arnold in his own favour. He discussed at length and repeatedly in his letters of the extremes and even of the extremisms of which Hopkins too spoke in the 1860s to his parents and friends in Oxford. These extremes might have been, but according to Thomas Arnold were not, Newman and himself. The problem was how to stay in the middle. Staying in the middle, which Arnold believed he could do, meant staying actually at the other extreme from where Newman was. Paradoxically, Arnold criticized the Newmanites more fiercely than he did those who were already Catholics, because the former were neither wholly Catholic nor separated from the Anglican creed, but continued to sit on the fence holding Protestant titles and nominations. The one, the Catholic, was an ‘honest enemy’, the other a ‘traitor’. Arnold’s judgement on the Catholics always followed the cliché of an aberrant but fascinating superstition that inspired greatness. The tones of Arnold’s polemics degenerated when Tract 90 was printed and Arnold accused Newman of very grave moral delinquency. The accusations against Newman’s followers – of 8 9

Stanley 1844, II, 63. § 154.

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being genuinely diabolical forces and the re-incarnation of the Antichrist – persisted daily, and were loud and stentorian like biblical anathemas. 4. Arnold’s organic vision of the irradiating centrality of religion meant that moral and religious influence could and should have ipso facto political results. The hegemony of religion required the banning of all extremisms. Popery and Jacobinism were two faces of a single medal, just as the ‘mortal ulcer’ of Chartism and the radicalism of the 1840s had been attempts against the principle of the unity of Church and State. According to Arnold revolutions were useless in England because they would have favoured the well-to-do rather than the working classes. The abolition of feudalism was after all already a fait accompli. Arnold said this despite the fact that he was one of the few who were fully aware of the ‘terrible conditions’ of the workers – which, as he wrote to Carlyle, he wished better documented. Whenever he could Arnold often went to visit them and comfort them in their hardships. By means of enlightened philanthropism of this kind many Victorians still believed it possible to reform society, in keeping with those that I shall call the ‘white utopias’ of Matthew Arnold, Pater and Hopkins. These utopias were animated by an authentic missionary spirit, voiced by a real desire to leave for far off lands where they might form a ‘society full of hopes’. 5. With Dr Arnold the first of a triad of Victorian educators entered the stage. His pupils at the public school became Newman’s university students, while Carlyle consoled the disappointed ex-university men. Thus, these three figures imposed a triadic pattern of authority (though not exactly of collaboration) on the aristocratic, middle class, and well off youths of university age. The authority was Anglican or moderately evangelical, not Dissenting. The pattern is epitomized by three places – the public school at Rugby, the University of Oxford, and the house in Chelsea where Carlyle lived. From these three places the training provided was both direct – with pupils growing under the wings of the masters – and indirect. Throughout the country other headmasters adopted Arnold’s ideas on education, Newman’s magnetism radiated beyond his physical presence in Oxford, and Carlyle was known and followed through his books and his reputation. The genealogy was male, but this indirect diffusion did not leave out the women, some of whom found Tractarianism, with its devout

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and almost Catholic repercussions, very appealing. The first to be moulded by Dr Arnold of Rugby was Matthew, his most famous son. This influence lay principally in the importance given to the classics, in the excellence conferred to continental cultures, especially the French, in the awareness of the weaknesses inherent in English education, in the sense of the state, in the connection between religion and culture, and finally in the centrality of the Christian message.10 The scientific Zeitgeist, though, led Matthew Arnold to religious positions that were theologically anti-dogmatic and purely natural. Dr Arnold believed in miracles and held the Holy Scriptures to be the depositaries of the whole Truth, in which the divine was directly visible; in contrast, his son held that vast portions of the Bible were pure invention of a fairy-tale type. If the theology professed by Matthew Arnold is examined in depth it can be seen that none of its reductionist points came from his father, who believed in the full divinity of Christ. The most conspicuous legacy was essentially methodological, and it was absorbed at Rugby at an early age, on the school benches where the young Matthew sat. Here he inherited the painstaking accuracy of his future approach to the Bible, that rigorous etymological and philological method that he used, perhaps even too often, against his enemies. Dr Arnold transmitted to his son a constructive criticism, one he even used against Newman, aiming not simply to destroy, as he claimed, but to combat his ideas with positive notions and a truth that was ‘neither destructive nor negative’. The myth of Dr Arnold was that his training gave his pupils the ‘souls of saints and the bodies of Vikings’.11 This tradition survived at least up to the 1860s, but would be mocked and challenged by the Decadents and by figures such as Lytton Strachey in the early twentieth century.

10 What is religion for Dr Arnold? ‘Nothing more nor less than a system directing and influencing our conduct, principles, and feelings’ (Stanley 1844, II, 78). Such a definition would have been echoed distinctly in the theological works by Matthew Arnold after 1870. 11 PSL, 521. A fictional reconstruction of the Rugby epos and a tribute to Arnold’s ideals can be found in Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes (Volume 5, § 157.2).

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§ 10. Carlyle* I: Chaos into cosmos This antithesis, which amounts to an optimistic creative fiat, is one of the most recurrent in the writings of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and one which he was apt to repeat. It encloses the ultimate scope of his thought. 1

*

Centenary Edition, ed. H. D. Traill, 30 vols, New York 1896–1901; the arbitrary and inaccurate edition of Reminiscences, ed. J. A. Froude, was revised by C. E. Norton, London 1887, and followed in the Everyman edn, London 1932, which adds a memoir by Christopher North. Anthologies are edited by G. M. Trevelyan, London 1952; by J. Symons, London 1952; by A. Shelston, Harmondsworth 1971; by F. Kaplan, Cambridge 1984. The letters were printed in various partial editions according to the addressees: from 1814 to 1826 and from 1826 to 1836, ed. C. E. Norton, London 1886 and London 1888, with two added volumes, New Letters of Thomas Carlyle, ed. A. Carlyle, London 1904. Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, ed. A. Carlyle, 2 vols, London 1909. Correspondence with Goethe, ed. C. E. Norton, London 1887; with Emerson, ed. J. Slater, New York 1964; with Mill, Sterling and Browning, ed. A. Carlyle, London 1923; with Ruskin, ed. G. A. Cate, London 1982. Letters of his wife, Jane Welsh, edited by T. Bliss, London 1950 and 1953; Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh, prepared by Carlyle himself, were edited by Froude, 3 vols, London 1883. The complete edition of the whole of Carlyle’s and Jane Carlyle’s letters, The Collected Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle, with various editors, Durham, NC and Edinburgh, 1970–, reached in 2016 the year 1865 with vol. XLII. Life. The first historical biography by J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 4 vols, London 1882–1884, will be quoted by Roman numbers of volume; reference is made in my discussion to this undoubtedly indispensable and fundamental study and to the criticism it received of being arbitrary and indiscreet. D. A. Wilson, Carlyle, 6 vols, London 1923 (very accurate but almost an inventory); E. Neff, Carlyle, New York 1932; J. Symons, Thomas Carlyle, London 1952; J. L. Halliday, Mr Carlyle My Patient: A Psychosomatic Biography, London 1949 (a Freudian, clinical-phantasy approach with some hints of truth); I. Campbell, Thomas Carlyle, London 1974; F. Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle, Cambridge 1983; S. Heffer, Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle, London 1995 (after many post- and anti-Froude biographies it returns to being pro-Froude); J. Morrow, Thomas Carlyle, London 2006. A synchronic biography of Carlyle and his wife is found in E. Drew, Jane Welsh and Jane Carlyle, London 1928; in O. Burdett, The Two Carlyles, London 1930; in J. S. Collis, The Carlyles: a Biography of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, London 1971. Criticism. H. Taine, L’idéalisme anglais: étude sur Carlyle, Paris 1864; E. D. Mead, The Philosophy of Carlyle, Boston, MA 1881; E. Jenks, Thomas Carlyle and

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It constitutes in fact a paradigm, if not the paradigm, encountered time and again in the various moments of change in human history, as well as in the private biographies of the great personalities that have made history. Such John Stuart Mill, Sunnyside, Kent 1888, repr. Bristol 1990; J. Nichol, Thomas Carlyle, London 1892; P. Hensel, Thomas Carlyle, Stuttgart 1901; W. S. Johnson, Thomas Carlyle: A Study of His Literary Apprenticeship, 1814–1831, New Haven, CT 1911; L. Cazamian, Carlyle, Paris 1913, Eng. trans. London 1932; A. Ralli, Guide to Carlyle, 2 vols, London 1920 (a Carlyle encyclopaedia consisting largely of synopses); G. Fornelli, Tommaso Carlyle, Roma 1921; M. A. Hamilton (with Introduction by H. J. C. Grierson), Thomas Carlyle, London 1926; E. Neff, Carlyle and Mill, New York 1926; N. Young, Carlyle: His Rise and Fall, London 1927 (the work of an historian, severe on the errors found in Carlyle’s three historiographic works); B. L. Lehmann, Carlyle’s Theory of the Hero, Durham, NC 1928; W. H. Dunn, Froude and Carlyle, London 1930; H. J. C. Grierson, Carlyle and Hitler, London 1930; C. F. Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought, New Haven, CT 1934, repr. Hamden, CT 1963; L. Fermi, Thomas Carlyle, Messina-Milano 1939; L. M. Young, Carlyle and the Art of History, Philadelphia, PA 1939; E. Bentley, A Century of Hero Worship: A Study of Heroism in Carlyle and Nietzsche with Notes on Wagner, Spengler, Stefan George and D. H. Lawrence, New York 1944; A. Obertello, Carlyle’s Critical Theories: Their Origin and Practice, Genova 1948; D. Gascoyne, Thomas Carlyle, London 1952; G. B. Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus: the Genesis, Structure, and Style of Thomas Carlyle’s First Major Work, Princeton, NJ 1965 (a valuable and pioneering enquiry into the genetic, formal and organizing aspects of the work); A. J. Lavalley, Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern: Studies in Carlyle’s Prophetic Literature and its Relation to Blake, Nietzsche, Marx and Others, London 1968 (debatable in its general perspective and in the evaluations, about which see § 11.3); CRHE, ed. J. P. Seigel, London 1971, 1995, 2013; M. Goldberg, Carlyle and Dickens, Athens, GA 1972; W. Oddie, Dickens and Carlyle, London 1972; G. H. Brookes, The Rhetorical Form of Carlyle’s ‘Sartor Resartus’, Berkeley, CA 1973; P. Rosenberg, The Seventh Hero: Thomas Carlyle and the Theory of Radical Activism, Cambridge, MA 1974; Carlyle Past and Present, ed. K. J. Fielding and R. L. Tarr, New York 1976; K. Harris, Carlyle and Emerson: Their Long Debate, Cambridge, MA 1978; W. W. Waring, Thomas Carlyle, Boston, MA 1979; A. L. Le Quesne, Carlyle, Oxford 1982; J. D. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History, Oxford 1985; R. ApRoberts, The Ancient Dialect: Thomas Carlyle and Comparative Religion, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA 1988; S. Helmling, The Esoteric Comedies of Carlyle, Newman and Yeats, Cambridge 1988; M. Timko, Carlyle and Tennyson, Houndmills 1988; M. Hardman, Six Victorian Thinkers, Manchester 1991, 5–41; C. R. Vanden Bossche, Carlyle and the Search for Authority, Columbus, OH 1991; The Carlyle Encyclopedia, ed. M. Cumming, Madison, NJ 2004.

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a formula became an axiom when Carlyle himself, with his ‘conversion’ in 1822, having passed the youthful phase of Romantic and post-Romantic despondency, and aged now twenty-five, ‘closed his Byron’ and turned his back on a life without meaning, in which he himself was but a spiritual wanderer, and enthusiastically recovered his bearings. The chaos he had lived in was ideological as well, and it was exactly the state of mind into which he had been thrown by sensist and sceptical thinkers; the conquest of the cosmos restored to him a faith that was lost, a faith that, though strengthened, was however not exactly the sure biblical faith of his childhood. These are passages and transitions that I shall need to clarify in all their subtlety. Chaos was what Carlyle felt surrounded by, and with which his contemporaries grappled as they wearily tried to reach the cosmos. He sought to help and exhort them to reach this goal. The metaphor also refers to the making of his works, which were a painful shaping of the cosmos, or of a finished organism, from chaos. Carlyle as a public author never left fragments or works in progress, but everything in him gives the impression of being formally and conceptually squared, so that the spasm and the superhuman effort needed are hidden under the smoothness of the finished text. In the noblest sense of the word, Carlyle can be defined an editor, right from Sartor Resartus where he pretends to be someone who rearranges in a coherent biographical story the chaotic ‘six bags’ of an imaginary German professor. From this imaginary editor the move to the real one, to Carlyle the historiographer, is but a step away. In this capacity he laboriously undertakes the heavy work needed to reorganize an enormous mass of annotations, drafts and notes, in other words of a rough, unshaped matter. In a metaphysical and metahistorical sense, human history was for Carlyle one of gradual – or when necessary even an accelerated and violent – evolution, moving from chaos, or from disorder, or from anarchy, to order and, therefore, to a cosmos with an orderly structure – a structure which had dangerous political implications, as we shall see. This fashioned a priori a series of categories or moulds to which the historical praxis had to correspond, and which in turn explained the whole of reality through the use of summary paradigms and imperative reductions. The intellectual evolution of Carlyle can be seen as an attempt to reconcile two Weltanschauungen, the Calvinism of his Scottish inheritance

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and German transcendentalism, with, in the middle, the negative moment represented by Gibbonian and Humean scepticism.1 His German idealists also had natural collusions with medieval sacramental and symbolic thought. Carlyle touched only briefly on the Middle Ages and spoke instead much of Fichte and of German Classical-Romantic transcendentalism. There were, however, among them, poets like Novalis who looked back to the cosmology and the ideology of the Middle Ages, based on organic and wholly ‘symbolic’, rather than allegoric, correspondences between the universals and their terrestrial copies. Carlyle believed that history is regulated by the cyclical mechanism of creation-destruction-regeneration, or of life-death in life-new life repeated ad infinitum, in line with the essence of the medieval notion that all renews itself by regressing. Given his nostalgic use of retrospect, he should probably be seen as the real leader of Victorian medievalism, a medievalism which flowered to full life in writers one or two generations younger – Ruskin, Hopkins – whose ideas then blended with those of the Decadents. 2. Chaos evolves into cosmos thanks to the hero; it is the hero who in the historic actuality is the intermediary driving force between two poles.2 Pagan, humanized God, prophet, poet, priest and conqueror, and so on, these are the discoverers of the ‘revealed secret’ of nature that no one else can see, for nature is but the ‘vesture’, the dress or sensuous appearance of the divine reality. Man and all things are but its shadow, a transitory clothing that hides the eternal splendour. If Carlyle’s transcendental vision and the theory of the hero had two sworn enemies, and two targets by definition, these were the Enlightenment’s scepticism, carrier of intellectual and moral doubt and insincerity, and Bentham’s utilitarianism. But no less ferocious was his polemic against a mechanistic vision of the universe and the scientific concept of progress that deprived man of the 1 2

In 1830 Carlyle was approached and courted by the Saint-Simonians. He greatly admired their anti-mechanistic programme, but rejected the utopia of the re-edification of Christianity. Goethe, when he knew of it, begged him ‘sich fern zu halten’. Carlyle (since Burdett 1930, 71) has been accused of having a male chauvinist conception of the hero, and of never considering a heroine – with the partial exception of Joan of Arc, briefly mentioned in On Heroes and Hero-Worship.

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‘sacred infinitude of nescience’. Like Ruskin, his disciple, Carlyle believed in the limited power of scientific knowledge. The world was still magic, inscrutable and miraculous, in spite of all the sciences and all the encyclopaedias: in those laboratories of the skies, he said, man was inclined to lose sight of the divine. As a test of this, Carlyle’s hero is the man who can look into and see behind and beyond appearance until he penetrates right through to the substance. In this sense the hero par excellence is for Carlyle a writer, since he is the only one who can codify in written words the results of his investigation into the mystery of the universe. But it was also true that each one of Carlyle’s active heroes is, more or less (if indirectly) a religious writer, or rather a poet, who makes man a participant in this mystery: ‘He who, in any way, shows us better than we knew before that a lily of the fields is beautiful, does he not show it us as an effluence of the Fountain of all Beauty; as the handwriting, made visible there, of the great Maker of the Universe?’ Writing is therefore an act of adoration, and literature an ‘apocalypse of nature’, a revelation of the divine in the earthly and daily life. In the words of Isaiah, who narrated his own election as prophetic minister, the writer touches the hearts ‘as if with a live coal from the altar’. The most arbitrary and the most fascinating historical explanation offered by Carlyle is undoubtedly that of the stages in the struggle against appearances to regain reality. The seed from which all modern history grew was that of Luther’s Reformation, the second act was the English Revolution set in motion by Cromwell, and the third the French Revolution. The conceptual structure built by Carlyle seems to crumble in the face of the Reformation. How could the cult of the hero be traced in Luther, who seemed, like Protestantism, to have destroyed it? Was it or was it not Protestantism that elected as supreme pontifex the ‘private judgement’ arrayed against the adoration of the heroes? Was it not, rather, the progenitor and promoter of all the dethroning and democratic revolutions of the future? Carlyle’s way out is that Luther discredited the false sovereignties and inaugurated the true ones; furthermore, the resort to ‘private judgement’ led not to the extinction of the cult of the hero but to its exact opposite. In short, Protestantism marked the return to truth and sincerity. The ferment for Reform culminated in the French Revolution, a further revolt against chimeras. But history for Carlyle was

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still a great clash between progressive and regressive ideas or between the angelic and demonic principles, a clash in which the angelic was victorious and yet it was almost immediately ready to let itself be attacked once again by the forces of evil. Such ‘infernal element’ is latent in man, and always ready to show itself. Carlyle openly defended the French Revolution and in so doing boldly challenged those contemporaries who feared its possible recurrence. For him this revolution had been not a collective idiocy, but a real apocalypse in an artificial world, a sort of necessary evil, truth itself ‘enveloped in infernal fire’. The French Revolution, which had appeared to overthrow the cult of all the heroes, throwing them into the mud and erecting in their place freedom and equality, had been in this view a moment of transition from a false to a true heroism. 3. From a strictly chronological viewpoint Carlyle’s historiographical triad ought to be reordered and to be read as follows: first Cromwell, then Frederick the Great and, finally, the French Revolution. But the French Revolution had to come first, Cromwell second, and Frederick was written last. It is unhelpful to put the three books in succession because they portray different latent ideologies and a progressive ripening, if not revision, of Carlyle’s thought. From being revolutionary, democratic and Romantic in 1836, Carlyle became monarchic and theocratic in Cromwell, and a supporter of enlightened – and in as much as it was enlightened, de-Christianized – absolutism in Frederick. The weakness of this outline is that there is not a single historical moment in which Carlyle finds a perfect adherence to the model he had in mind. Neither the medieval theocratic society, nor the Cromwellian protectorate, which were imbued with the religion that Carlyle himself predicated, believed in a God and practised a faith that were, in an absolute sense, not true. Man had to act according to those enlightened moments as they came to him from time to time, and those two periods were asymptotic to his ideal. Carlyle’s evolutionism, subtly enlightened in spite of his intentions, designs a gradual transition of society and of history in such a way that each age could find its adjustment near to an idea that could never be viable. On Heroes and Hero-Worship does nothing more than indicate, as it unfolds, the type that was necessary to historical development, from the humanized God to the Napoleonic hero. However, Carlyle’s historical thought turned ipso facto

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into an enquiry on the present: ‘For the whole Past, as I keep repeating, is the possession of the Present; the Past had always something true, and is a precious possession’. The evidence of this link between past and present was not immediately perceptible, but the multiple facets of Carlyle’s competence were developing into an organic whole, and were in step with a steady evolution of styles and genres. In order to set the demiurgic force in motion, deified men, heroes, Titans were needed. As an historian Carlyle is on the side of the great (or reputed) heroes, and his favourite historical figures share this title. Each historiographical work becomes a collection of heroes and their actions. The review of past heroes sadly showed up the meanness and the non-heroic nature of the present-day pretenders to the role of ‘hero’. At this point in Carlyle’s work the two steps from the historian tout court to the militant interventionist, and from there to the blunt commentator on the contemporary political scene, become apparent. The two competences were never separated but were interactive. At a very early date, in the 1830s, Carlyle had thought it possible to mould his age with a number of highly refined and very indirect essays, and later with extravagantly sophisticated, elitist and burlesque literary experiments. The only extended example of creative literature in Carlyle’s work – Sartor Resartus – is a parody of the novel. This tough-minded, granitic thinker was thick-skinned and uncompromising. He was also an anomalous burlador who sought to be entertaining and playful. The formal, procedural and especially tonal evolution of Carlyle’s essay – a register that would in due course become bitterly and dystopically apocalyptic – ran in parallel with the fact that few listened to his warnings and, therefore, that he had little practical confirmation of the impact of his writings. This led him to see his contemporary society as ever more, and irremediably, distant from the fixed points of his transcendental and heroic ideology. 4. When Carlyle came to write as an historian of literature tout court or as a literary critic, he put the author first and then considered the work. Of Jean Paul, Schiller, Goethe, Dante, Shakespeare, and Burns, and so on for every other writer that he examines, Carlyle gives biographical sketches which also contain short critical analyses of their works (or in some cases

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exclude them completely).3 This was programmatic. The Divina Commedia by Dante, the plays of Shakespeare, the lexicographic and critical activity of Johnson, and the poetry of Burns, are all in his view a means used to portray the heroic figure, or at the most to ‘get a glance, as deep as is readily possible for us, into the life of those singular centuries which have produced’ them. Thus, Dante becomes the speaker for medieval man, and he completed a work that lasted through ten centuries and continues to speak through him and is the incarnation of the most noble idea after northern paganism and the word of Mahomet. By the same token, the plays of Shakespeare were just so many ‘windows’ that opened and allowed glimpses to be seen of the world that was in him. History was a bible, and literature was truth, that is a gradual and fluid revelation of the divine, veiled or luminous as it was actualized in history. Carlyle’s veneration for Homer, a Greek bible, and for Shakespeare, stemmed from here, for Shakespeare would have been able to make a bible out of history and he was, therefore, Carlyle’s favourite, particularly on account of his history plays. Carlyle’s aesthetics is one of exclusions, because he aprioristically reduces literature to a small number of tyrannical axioms. The writers that come up to his standards can be counted on the fingers of one hand. This is the result, perhaps not of Carlyle’s literary ignorance, but of his pragmatic calculation. The canon of the herowriters cannot be stretched very far if it is postulated that literature is only noble if it combats a metaphysical duel with the world of the shadows. The etymological suspicion that literature was ‘fiction’ ruled over Carlyle, and that term referred not so much to the novels traditionally intended, as to the fact that it meant radically false news, and that it covered or deformed the truth. The only literary genre capable of shedding light on truth was that of the historiographer, and the only vehicle that could match it was prose. Carlyle preceded Pater, but for opposite reasons, in maintaining the 3

The starting point in Carlyle’s essays is often a graphic portrait, which is then commented and paraphrased on the page. Immediately after in order of importance came the letters. One of Carlyle’s late essays, on John Knox, turns around a series of authentic and fake portraits of the Scottish reformer (§ 25.3).

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prime position of prose as against poetry, as concrete, capable of adhering to the facts and less prone to deceit. English Romanticism in particular had nothing to do with the German one. Carlyle spared not even one of the Romantic survivors that he met in London when he was just starting out, nor even those who had only recently died. Coleridge was the unhealthy father of Oxfordian Catholic ritualism, Shelley a pale ghost too weakly to ‘climb the Alps’, Wordsworth had his origin in Coleridge, and was secretly very full of himself. Only Byron received a qualified endorsement for the simple reason that Carlyle felt his Titanic stance contained something good and redeemable. The minor Romantics, disbanded in London in the 1820s and 1830s, did not even have that heroism of poverty and humility that had been so nobly illustrated by Burns and Johnson. Lamb and Hunt, Carlyle thought, were poor sick old men, always rather silly, boasting and somewhat over-estimated. He looked around seeking the authentically heroic and found only false heroes, with the surprising exception of the decidedly non-heroic Southey. § 11. Carlyle II: The debate over de-Christianized religion Carlyle, shaper of the world and the creator of a cosmos that drives out chaos, was chronologically the second of the three master shapers and thinkers who stood on the threshold of the Victorian age. His impact can be gauged by his own assessment of the works of other writers. These were never eulogies, but rather ‘verdicts’, delivered on publication. His authority, whether as a friend or simply as an acquaintance, drew other writers to visit him as if in a devout pilgrimage and in the hope of finding enlightenment. He thus secured both critical eminence and perceptible and feared dominance within the literary world. No one was a more severe and rigorous critic than he as he worked to maintain and keep literary activity in England at a high level. His dominance lay not in an articulated and orderly belief system but in a powerful spiritual authority. The root of this was his firm critical attitude towards materialism, scepticism and atheism. He challenged a poetic voice which he saw as solipsistic and self-regarding, inducing it to become public and pragmatic; he pushed novelists to write novels that could be translated into a political action, and were driven by a Pauline moral and didactic fervour, although they suggested solutions

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which were impracticable. George Eliot admitted that Carlyle had changed the direction of the nineteenth-century novel4 by teaching that followers of Scott were down a blind alley, and by undermining, with his own Sartor Resartus, the novels of ‘fashionable’ life and gallantry written by Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton.5 Carlyle’s judgements of the novel, although unheeded, put the novelists in a quandary, for while they did not discourage them, they widened the gap between the novel as an entertainment and the novel with a prophetic bent. Nonetheless Carlyle, who initially managed to deceive the authentic communists, drew his followers back further and further away, directing them towards reactionary and conservative positions. All the social novelists in England rejected not only the violent but even the quietly reformist Trade Union actions, and were in substance suspicious of democracy, holding as they did that the proletariat was incapable of guiding itself. Consequently they looked to a reformed, enlightened aristocracy as the saviour of the country. All the attention that Carlyle placed in sanity, often recalled in the proverbial formula mens sana in corpore sano, makes him the spiritual father of the ‘muscular’ novelists, who detested cant, the unctuous language of hypocrisy, and were proudly intransigent Protestants and nationalists, though in a more practical sense. Kingsley, especially, would have read and taken Carlyle’s teaching to heart as an antidote to the temptations of Newmanism.6 The teaching of Carlyle was, whether directly or indirectly, surprisingly technical due to his artifice of the editing of another’s manuscript in Sartor Resartus, and to that of the multiplication of the inner voices. Here, and in his historiographical writings, Carlyle, though abiding to factual truth, was a subjective recreator, and the novelists took from him the art of the evocative chiaroscuro sketch and the visual and even pictorial possibilities of the descriptive page.7 His multi-vocalism and stylistic mannerism propagated right up to Browning – whose monologues have the associative flash, the elliptical

4 5 6 7

CRHE, 409–11. These arguments are developed in TNE, 150–6. Volume 5, § 150.3. As Froude (IV, 284–5) first noticed.

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pace, the richness of hints, and the anti-classical instability found in Carlyle’s style – and to the early Meredith.8 The curious fact was that from the same matrix several disciples branched off and went their separate, even opposite ways. Carlyle is at the same time one of the fathers of the most medieval of the Victorian poets, Hopkins – except for a few points that place them poles apart.9 If the world is recognized but as ‘vesture’ of the Absolute, if the actual is a copy of the ideal, the soul forming the basis of things – and if, added to this, human society must be a civitas Dei, or a new theocracy – does not all of this correspond to the intimate essence of the medieval, ‘symbolic’ cultural type that Hopkins delineated a century before Yuri Lotman?10 In politics, both were enlightened reactionaries who believed in monarchic and hierarchical principles, fought against democracy and denounced all forms of anarchy and secessionism. Hopkins weakly rejected Carlyle’s mannerism and took his distance from many of his principles, but he glorified his gigantic genius which – a pure and free genius, though badly used – he compared with that of Shakespeare. There is only one thing missing, the key-stone, and that is undoubtedly far from irrelevant: they do not agree on religion and on the concept of God, possibly metaphorical in the former, literal in the latter.11 2. We have thus come to the fundamental question concerning Carlyle’s position in English culture in the middle and later years of the nineteenth century: the true nature of the religion that he sought to bring back into

8 9 10 11

Volume 5, § 208.3. Carlyle wrote in fact an essay entitled ‘Jesuitism’ (§ 21.4). It is, however, ferociously anti-Jesuitical. See Y. M. Lotman, ‘Il problema del segno e del sistema segnico nella tipologia della cultura russa prima del XX secolo’, It. trans., in Ricerche semiotiche. Nuove tendenze delle scienze umane nell’URSS, Torino 1973, 40–63. Hopkins’s first assessment in 1868 clearly shows what Carlyle represented for many conservatives. They felt that he placed a limit to relativist, immanentistic, sceptical and utilitarian thought. In his ‘red letter’ of 1871 Hopkins acknowledged that the world had come to the stage Carlyle had long predicted, that is, the sheer inefficiency of the powers that be. At the same time Hopkins imputed to Carlyle a certain lack of concreteness; even Shooting Niagara, though containing practical suggestions, was for Hopkins too vague.

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the modern world. From Carlyle’s extremely ambiguous religious teaching everything and the contrary of everything was derived: that is faith and a positive need to believe, as well as that negative thought that recharged itself later on, and which became, though it was Carlyle’s main enemy, a paradoxical boomerang. Both forces felt themselves authorized to find in him their own reference point. His message was that man had to work hard and fight strenuously – but, it was objected, for which earthly and supernatural goal if the Calvinist afflatus or even an ancient, secularized Stoicism were missing? The same person who had kept many of his contemporaries from the dangerous slope of misbelief and led them to the Christian fold, was but a cheat, because he himself believed in a God that was not exactly, or had nothing to do with, the God revealed through faith and the Church.12 If critics have found it hard to define the essence of religion for Carlyle, this is due to the objective ambivalence of the writer. However, to look at it squarely, such ambivalence is that between Carlyle the public figure and Carlyle the private one, the Carlyle of the letters and diaries, and that of the volatile statements which the numerous close friends and acquaintances collected, having stepped over the threshold of his London house in Cheyne Row after 1834. Among these the first and most authoritative ones were left by his biographer, Froude. It is a recognized fact that Carlyle fought the gangrene that had hardened religion and reduced it to mechanical and dogmatic formulae and made the Churches secularized institutions. He was ruthless against the Catholic and to a lesser extent the Anglican Church, though he kept wishing for its renewal. Yet the whole of Carlyle’s work speaks of God and of history as His incarnation, and he never gives a sign of warning or makes his reader suspect that these terms are anything but purely periphrastic.13 On the first page of On Heroes, rather, the deChristianized Carlyle asserts that religion is not an allegorical phenomenon

12

13

Halliday 1949 is the only one who, in the strict sense of the word, puts between inverted commas the name of God when discussing in a fairly balanced way Carlyle’s relationship with all things religious (203–5). Critics mainly start by saying that it was a synonym, meaning, however, that it was not. Matthew Arnold, unlike Carlyle, considered himself a believer in a God who was on the same plane as ‘righteousness’, thus an unrecognizable surrogate of religion.

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but a living, pulsating symbol. The religion of a human being ‘is the chief fact with regard to him’. Religion is then examined in heroes who were all fervent practising believers in a personal God, and even reformers, people like Mahomet, Luther and Knox; he never hints at the existing tradition of clerical Dissent or of heresy or of abjuration. On account of his presumed irreverence and for his attacks against ecclesiastic institutions, Carlyle was mocked and criticised above all by the orthodox Protestants like the bishops and prelates of the Church of England. Conversely, the Dublin Review’s Catholic commentators noticed with satisfaction that Carlyle never spoke disparagingly of the Catholics14 but rather showed admiration for the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, and they assimilated him far better.15 Privately, instead, Carlyle rarely spoke about God. When he was unable to do otherwise he was vague on the subject; he digressed, he refused to give definitions or make distinctions about the One or the Trine, whether personal or impersonal, and he ended up by saying that no man could dare define him.16 It was Froude who made Carlyle into a new critic of the Bible, a precursor sharing the same doubts about revealed faith as Strauss had already done. Like Strauss he applied to religion an evolutionistic key.17 Froude, an atheist and a Tractarian renegade, spread for all the image of a Calvinist without theology and of an unbeliever.18 Yet the same biographer, who informed the reader that after 1835 Carlyle stopped

14 15

CRHE, 88–101 and 226–35. For completely diverging opinions see for instance Jenks 1888, 36, who thinks that Carlyle’s life was replete with the divine presence and of the faith of Isaiah and Ezekiel, and Chesterton – quoted in Tennyson 1965, 278 – who held that his faith was so strong that Carlyle could even speak about God in a jesting manner. 16 Froude, IV, 260. William Allingham had heard Carlyle affirm that the world was the work of an intelligent Intellect and was governed by Eternal Wisdom, even though we cannot and we never will be able to see how all this comes about (Kaplan 1983, 531). 17 Froude, IV, 260–4. 18 Froude’s The Nemesis of Faith (§ 33) was judged by Carlyle to be not worth the paper it was written on (Kaplan 1983, 437). For another, even more disparaging judgement, see § 33.2.

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going to church,19 published a letter expressing straightforwardly Carlyle’s conception of a personal and humanized God to whom it is right, or rather indispensable, to send one’s prayers.20 Orthodox faith resurfaced again in Carlyle after the loss of his father and his wife, whom he felt and trusted that he would reach in ‘Sleep Everlasting’. At the time of Froude, and even after, the nihilists glimpsed in Carlyle the belief in a world without God. Nietzsche held him an atheist like himself, but one who did not want to confess it. Was Carlyle really and spontaneously a believer in a simple faith, the faith of his fathers, which he felt ashamed to declare openly in its naked essence, and which he tried to modernize, to beautify, to adorn with the clothes of German transcendentalism?21 Could Carlyle for sixty years really thunder like a biblical prophet reborn, though aware that he was using purely linguistic hypostases? Did he use an inspired language, mixed with biblical echoes, just as a consequence of a rooted family habit?22 Or, finally, could and did Carlyle want desperately to adhere to a revealed religion that in his inner being he knew he did not possess? 3. The answer came partially from a Freudian and proto-deconstructionist criticism that concocted a spiritual biography of Carlyle starting from the works – therefore taken as a subjective confession rather than a public prophecy – to reconstruct the man with his ‘aporias’ and in his complexes of frustration. In the studies by LaValley (1968) and by Rosenberg (1974) Carlyle is not only a non-shaper but above all someone who had himself been un-shaped before he became an un-shaper in the sense that has just been seen. Far from ideally turning back he – and this is the most sensational discovery – was ‘modern’, a man that silently joined with thinkers and writers who were by definition precursors of highly advanced existential

19 Froude, III, 45. 20 Froude, II, 17–18. 21 This line is taken by Young 1927, 123, for whom Carlyle was so dominated by the religion of his childhood that he had difficulty in telling his people that he had lost that faith, and tried to avoid the issue or be vague. 22 Gladstone left a pointed supposition reported by Kaplan 1983, 332, to the effect that Carlyle ‘assumed the phraseology of a Christian’ and that this was deceitful on his part, though probably due to self-deception.

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and intellectual enquiries, such as Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Marx, and even Kierkegaard.23 This operation seems possible not only by making absolute the mythological and metaphorical assumption of Carlyle’s religion on which so much has been said, but also by taking into account the delay with which the third triadic moment comes on in Carlyle, that of regeneration after destruction, or its precariousness. As has been mentioned, history teaches Carlyle that, unfortunately, every equilibrium eventually turns into a disequilibrium. These modernist interpretations then fall back on a cosmic fatalism that is in its final analysis negative, or that, as we noticed, is influenced by Schopenhauer’s pessimism. They must needs be based, therefore, on Carlyle’s apprenticeship, that of a man uprooted from his land, a challenger who mirrored himself in the supreme and Olympian spiritual equilibrium of Goethe, who was so completely different from him but to whom Carlyle in an asymptotic sense was so close. According to such a reading Sartor is an open text that marks not just the attainment of certainties, but also a time of waiting. It is an attempt to discover the self; and the faith that is reached, the ‘everlasting yea’, is an unsatisfying surrogate of the true faith. Even the story of the French Revolution is in this view a tour de force in which the historian only just manages to check the demonic that threatens to reduce an organic cosmos to anarchy. It is the production of a lacerated and anguished Carlyle, torn between radicalism and its denunciation. It is useful to underline the ‘anguish’ of Carlyle’s ‘conversion’, but it is arbitrary to cut off the post-1837 works by judging them inferior, apparently only because the shaping design is clearer and more marked. Was Carlyle still bogged down in doubt in Cromwell and Frederick the Great? It is also strange that the works written by Carlyle after 1840, since he died forty-one years later, should be classified by some critics as ‘late works’! LaValley concludes for instance that only Past and Present is the ‘true continuation’ of The French Revolution, rather than Heroes, Cromwell and Frederick, which are but ‘expansions of that minor 23

This is too much. As Chesterton pointed out, Carlyle was deaf to the ‘complexity’ of things, that is, he reduced all to his rough pre-constituted grids (VAL, 53). Orwell too remarked that Carlyle made continual use of the same few, ‘worn, rather mean ideas’ (OCE, vol. I, 56).

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drive towards epic heroism, philosophical finality and militarism which lay outside the more profound and realistic directions of the early historical work’.24 The point in question that even the supporters of an unstable Carlyle allow, is where to put this stabilization. With Past and Present it is over and done with, not to talk of the other works that followed. § 12. Carlyle III: Hitler’s tears Round about 1840 the conservative Disraeli upheld and propagandized the ideals of his ‘Young England’, which were similar to those of Carlyle. Morris saw in him the father of English socialism and Burne-Jones and the later Pre-Raphaelites were warm sympathizers. Engels praised Past and Present and the careful, and according to him supportive denunciation of the miserable state of the working classes. All this proves that it was easy to misinterpret Carlyle and be influenced by him. Mazzini was struck but without any fanaticism, for he was aware that Carlyle inspired revolutionary and radical movements but did not take part in them, and had on the whole little faith in political actions tout court. He realized that Carlyle was interested only in man as an individual, and that he did not really care about the people.25 Carlyle was more a defeatist than a fascist, because those social models that he was designing and recommending, should they ever have been implemented, would have been found by Carlyle himself old-fashioned, obsolete and gangrenous the following day. Every equilibrium was by definition always temporary. As a politician, he would probably have been a disaster. Peel, the strong man whom Carlyle decided to elect as his imaginary heir,26 died too soon to offer Carlyle the promised ministry that he had reserved for him. How could England be regenerated in 1840 by copying the way of life of a monastery of the year 1200, which is what he hoped for in Past and Present?27 And how could he found a state and make it work on the basis of a transcendental philosophy? Even his hero, at first the thinking hero, writer and philosopher, then 24 25 26 27

LaValley 1968, 182. A significant testimony of Mazzini’s position may be found in CRHE, 250–63. See Froude, IV, 46–9. It was a flight from the world into an idyll, for Vanden Bossche 1991, 113.

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prophet, and man of action, would have had to found a theocracy that had never existed.28 It is largely due to this that Carlyle has been presented as the hidden or the explicit inspirer of the many totalitarian philosophies and ideologies that were formed as the century came to a close and that continued to flower well into the new. The historian Young, who wrote in 1927 and thus could only foresee the coming of Nazism, even though fascism had raised its head menacingly on the horizon, said that a true history of Frederick the Great – a warmonger, and not a pacifist as Carlyle saw him – easily would have picked out the link between the Seven Years’ War and the First World War.29 In Italy an interest in Carlyle grew during the fascist ventennio, and a booklet by Fornelli in 1921 briefly noted with pleasure that the pro-Germanic prophecies of Carlyle had had a miserable and resounding defeat after the Great War. So the author would have liked Carlyle born again to see him swallow the Germanic debacle and the Franco-Italian comeback. In the 1930s a pamphlet by Licciardelli and an article by Rebora30 underlined the agreement, whether intended or not by Carlyle, between his and Mussolini’s socialist agenda. In his Berlin bunker, Hitler died reading Frederick the Great with tears in his eyes. There are differing views pro and contrary to Carlyle’s position as a precursor of fascism. Starting from the cons, it must be said that in all his enquiries into history Carlyle did try to be unprejudiced and to write objectively, and this would put him beyond suspicion. His genealogy of the hero was not made up of preconceptions and discriminations; his main requisite, itself a very wide category, being that of sincerity. Carlyle bowed before the heroism even of those whose ideological patterns he did not share – from Mahomet, a hero inasmuch as he was prophet, but precisely, as Carlyle declared loudly, a

28

W. E. Aytoun, the author of the most exhilarating of many critical assessments, was the first to put his finger on this ulcerous sore (CRHE, 321–33). 29 Young 1927, 328–40. 30 One of 1931 and the other of 1934 respectively (see Fermi 1939, 148 n. 1). Fermi’s book, well balanced and elegantly written, reveals however a certain imprudent and smug fascist triumphalism when alluding to the virtues of the race sung by Carlyle, as against ‘the anarchy of cosmopolitan ideologies’, and ‘the efforts made towards the physical renewal of the race’ (ibid., 37).

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sincere prophet, to Dante. Due to his deep sincerity Dante was like an ancient prophet, whose words sprang from the depths of his heart. Carlyle’s heroes were often the anti-heroes of history or the victims of popular or historiographical distortions, not just and not always the winners. This is the case for Mahomet, for Cromwell, for Rousseau, and for Dr Johnson. But man needed to be constantly revising and increasing his acquired knowledge, because not only the theory changes but also the praxis could degenerate and authorize armed revolution. Carlyle eventually became, subtly and dangerously, a champion of interventions consecrated and imposed by historical Necessity. It was for this reason that On Heroes fell under suspicion and was considered unhealthy, and that it was seen well into the nineteenth century as a legitimization of authoritarian power. Some other blemishes were imputed to him. For instance, he did not know the Graeco-Roman world and he never wrote on it; he was an expert only on German culture and on the Bible; he favoured the Teutonic element – but so did Dr Arnold – as against the Gallic, and in fact mythicized the Saxon and Viking roots and sang of Odin and the ancient dynasties of the Norwegian kings. In addition to this there is an anti-Jewish feeling in his writings. It was soon axiomatic for English left-wing thinkers like Orwell that Carlyle was one with the inspirers of fascism along with Fichte and Nietzsche. Lukács, underestimating him, considered him an apologist of capitalism, a romantic and aesthetic votary of the hero, a revolutionary degenerated into a brutal reactionary. Even Bertrand Russell hinted at the developments, almost unwanted or unforeseen, of a ‘soft-hearted’ permissiveness that pointed directly towards Hitler. This is, however, as he recognized, a convenient generalization, ‘too schematic to be quite true’ and, therefore, purely ‘mnemonic’.31 § 13. Carlyle IV: Biography Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan, a small village in the western Scottish lowlands, and was the eldest of nine brothers and sisters. His father was a master-builder with a taste for the picturesque and the imaginative use of

31

HWP, 618.

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figures of speech. His mother was illiterate but learnt to read and write so as to keep in touch with her beloved son, and she reminded him constantly of his religious duties both when speaking to him and in her letters. The family was hardworking and busy, used to struggling, hard as a rock, strong in their religion based on the daily reading of the Bible and on Sunday in Church, and proud to belong to a branch of the Presbyterian faith, the Burghers, that was severely observant to the Scottish Covenant. They accepted without question the chosen ministers of the faith, who were freely elected without any hierarchical imposition. His ambitious father never thought that education could weaken or destroy a faith so blind and strong in his first-born, and pushed him towards the career of a preacher. The other children were successfully encouraged to find their places in the different professions open to them. The biographers and psychoanalytic critics insist on seeing an Oedipal struggle with his father, unknown to Carlyle (or of which he was only vaguely conscious), and in his relationships with new fathers and, as a father, with adopted children. The famous and much lamented gastric disturbances that afflicted him all through his life have been said to find their origin in these child-like complexes. Traces of a psychosomatic illness have been discovered in some of his written works. From his early days as a pupil in his native village and in the nearby town of Annan, Carlyle grew up as an impatient, nomad-like and thick-skinned investigator seeking to find his proper place in the world. He resisted all notions of compromise. He went to the University at Edinburgh, the modern Athens, in 1809, when just fourteen, and showed a strong bent for mathematics and the sciences. Irascible and rather misanthropic, he kept largely to himself apart from a few friends. There he read everything he could lay hands on, borrowing books from the library: much later, when elected Chancellor of that university where he had studied without enthusiasm and without shining in any way, he coined the celebrated aphorism that ‘the true university of these days is a collection of books’, that is a library. He had not yet reached the stage of religious doubt, but his faith was already shaken. At the end of his course of studies he entered into the probationary triennium in order to become a minister. To that end he gave two sermons at the university on the theme of the prodigal son and the existence of a ‘natural religion’. From 1814 he taught mathematics in a primary school at Annan, and then

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took up another teaching post at Kirkaldy from which he resigned in 1818. The religious and professional crisis that overtook him was set in motion by reading Gibbon, who undermined his faith in the biblical miracles; and his doubts were strengthened by the French encyclopaedists and the Scottish sensationalists. He then went through a period of apathy and veritable ‘chaos’. He told his parents of his decision not to become a minister in the Church, which they accepted with great understanding; and he started listlessly to study geology and jurisprudence at Edinburgh, considered emigration to America, and had his first and unfortunate love affair with a young woman of middle-class upbringing, who rejected him because he was poor. At this point, he began a desultory collaboration with reviews and encyclopaedias and made scientific translations for the Edinburgh literary market. The German world came into Carlyle’s life through his reading De l’Allemagne by Madame de Staël, while the knowledge of the German language itself from the very first was a necessary addition to his course of studies in geology, and his interest in German literature is clearly shown from the outline of a fairly immature essay on Faust. The future and great Germanist32 learnt German from a non-German acquaintance who gave him lessons in exchange for lessons in French, and he visited Germany for the first time only in the 1850s. He kept himself by acting as tutor to two young children of a rich family, the Bullers, with whom he made his first disappointing journey outside Scotland to London. Once there he took the opportunity to visit Coleridge with whom, however, he was deeply disappointed. In July 1824 Carlyle ended his stay with the Bullers with another celebrated and revealing sentence: ‘I was selling the very quintessence of my spirit for £200 a year’.33 This meant that, having reached independence, he now had to earn his living with his pen.34

32

See Tennyson 1965, 66–7, for a review of English Germanists in the first decades of the century – Coleridge, Scott and other lesser critics – and Carlyle’s place in those studies. 33 6.7.1824. 34 Carlyle unsuccessfully applied for a place as lecturer at the university, although once he presented a reference letter from Goethe. On account of his scientific skills,

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2. Over the following years he penned the stillborn novel Wotton Reinfred – a Carlylean Werther – and sketches that turn on the love for a woman by two rivals, and on the dilemma of the world and of the spirit. Apart from this he completed an important translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister that was reviewed by De Quincey, and a small collection of poetry of little value. His ‘conversion’ in July or August 1822 was mistakenly and romantically attributed to his being introduced to Jane Welsh, and due to this error Froude put it a year earlier, to July 1821. It is also known as the ‘Leith Walk conversion’ because Carlyle found his will to live once more and had what was obviously a mystic experience when going to the sea near Edinburgh, in search of coolness on an exceptionally hot and sunny day. Slim and tall, handsome, and at that time beardless,35 Carlyle fell in love with Jane, the one-time fiancée of a friend, Irving, from his own home town. Irving, a preacher with a promising future, had introduced him to her. The engagement led to a series of letters that in terms of intellectual fervour and for the nobility of the sentiments expressed are only slightly inferior to those of the Brownings. Jane herself had a notable literary talent and had written a tragedy at the age of fourteen, but she forsook this budding talent and only traces of it survive in her letters, in her memories and in her conversation. Carlyle overcame Jane’s mother’s resistance and they were married in 1826 after Jane, who had been left an orphan following her father’s death, had renounced her part of the family inheritance so as not to wound her husband’s pride. She patiently put up with Carlyle’s moodiness and instability in that ‘gloomy home’ at Craigenputtock, a farm where they lived, exiles in the country, for six years. She took on all the household duties and coped with the problems of domestic economy, while Carlyle spent his time closed in his library reading and writing, and

35

probably not very great, his name was put forward for a place as astronomer at the London Observatory in 1834, again without Carlyle getting the post. Like so many is his day, Carlyle let his beard grow, for it was a sine qua non for a prophet after the Crimean War in 1854, and in line with the fashion established by the ex-servicemen. The beard suited him, as can be seen in the splendid photographs that were made in later life, and in the many painted portraits, by Millais (defaced by a suffragette in 1914), by Whistler and by Watts.

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the distractions were few and far between. Froude surmised that Carlyle was selfish, an egoist who looked only for a companion to make his life happier and easier, and that he never gave a thought to having children and forming a family. This early portrayal was very influential over the years and caused an instinctual hostility to Carlyle. Froude was a sincere and dedicated admirer of his master but he wanted to reveal the darker side of the man as well. The marriage was unhappy, but not unconsummated on account of Carlyle’s impotence (as Froude affirmed, and this view was followed by numerous later biographers).36 In fact, Jane seemingly had a miscarriage shortly before they moved to London in 1834. Certainly it was not a passionate love story, and the proposal Carlyle made was accepted by Jane admitting that she did not love him, or at least not in such a way as to cloud her judgement, but seemingly this did not cause his fascination for her and for others to fade and wither. Later photographs show a woman aged before her time – she had had a small but sharp figure with a graceful physiognomy – deadened and dull, grey-faced, with sad eyes, severe-looking, defeated and hollow-cheeked. 3. Once in London, and settled at the legendary number 5 Cheyne Row in the suburb of Chelsea, Carlyle rapidly became a focus for the radical intellectuals of the day, especially after the publication of The French Revolution. The manuscript of this book was accidently burned by a housemaid while it was in Mill’s care. Mill offered Carlyle 200 pounds for damages; this highlights Carlyle’s generosity, always shown at every opportunity. As time passed, Carlyle began to yield to the odd worldly temptation, although actually he led a very retired life, writing, reading, shaping and moulding consciences, and untiring in his ever more raucous prophesizing. From 1842 his financial situation eased on account of an inheritance received by his wife, but his psychic ailments grew worse, and he suffered from dyspepsia and insomnia in particular, while even Jane had her bouts of depression due to the insensibility of her husband and to jealousy. Carlyle was not the only man to have a platonic feeling of sympathy for Harriet Baring, the 36 In his biography Heffer 1995 picks up the hypothesis of Carlyle’s impotence and defends Froude, but also takes for granted some dates which are now unanimously rejected (such as that of his ‘conversion’ in 1821).

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first Lady Ashburton. Jane, who was well aware of this feeling, felt she was being overlooked. Jealousy was certainly one reason for her deterioration. In 1864, when Carlyle with enormous fatigue had finished preparing Frederick the Great – years of work that had kept him segregated in his library – Jane was run over in the street and had to face a lengthy stay in hospital. She died a few months later during a coach ride. Carlyle received the news on his return from Edinburgh where he had freshly become Chancellor of that university. Only then, and for the first time in his life, did he discover the absolute untiring devotion Jane had always showed him and he was bitten by the pangs of remorse. After this loss, he retired more and more from the world and was cared for by a niece. In the last fourteen years of his life, though he remained clear-minded, he had to dictate his writings, but he produced only a few thin books. He now spoke mainly through published letters, for instance when he expressed his approval of the repressions of the anti-slavery rebellions by Governor Eyre in Jamaica, or hailed the Prussian victory of 1870 over France, or made known his support for Russia against Turkey in 1878. It was expected that he would be buried in glory in Westminster, but he was interred instead according to his wishes, in his native Ecclefechan, near his parents. § 14. Carlyle V: The transcendental essays Life of Schiller (1825, later translated into German under the auspices of Goethe, and enlarged in 1872), contains in nuce the model for Carlyle’s biographical-critical essayism and is a first depiction of the heroic writer who ‘feels nobly and acts in accordance with justice’. This writer speaks of high and philosophical matters to the ‘immortal part of man’ and is at the same time an untiring seeker of the sublime. Schiller was chronologically the first of those writers of a past generation who lived in the greatest historical density as though consumed by an inner fire, and were nevertheless capable of sacrificing their health and often their lives for an ideal. They were therefore isolated and torn spirits, but still a beacon for humanity; they were artists above all, of a kind prematurely extinct, who made the gap between the sublime and the prosaic seem impossible to be filled. The Carlylean idea of literature and of literary criticism consisted in a reconstruction of the man from his work, so as to draw a portrait of

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him and to investigate how a writer that pursued the sublime dealt with the commonplace. A writer’s works are for Carlyle simply ‘copies of the mind’. Carlyle subdivided Schiller’s brief career into three periods: infancy, youth, and maturity. These were governed by an optimistic teleology and by a ripening of talents that had always been present in him, but in a latent and immature state. They were tested at first only in books and then later in life itself. The natural talent, having had its wings cut, struggled against restrictions and oppressions stemming both from home life and from the school, but it managed to free itself thanks to the burning energy that welled up from the inner being. Schiller’s biographical thread is followed along general lines without superfluous and circumstantial pedantry, and it becomes the story of a soul more than anything else. It is often interrupted by a detailed discussion of the works, the more important parts of which are given in translation. Schiller had been right from the beginning, for Carlyle, as much objective-dramatic as subjective, and the common, recurrent theme that can be traced in his early tragedies is that of the Titan trying to free himself from the chains of daily life. Die Räuber brought to the fore the romantic dreamer of ‘towering greatness’, disillusioned and trapped. In this sense Wallenstein is judged Schiller’s dramatic masterpiece, but Carlyle also has a few words of praise for a heroine so fearless and real like Joan of Arc and for the simple and courageous rebellion of William Tell. As a dramatic critic, Carlyle was above all interested in the ideological and allegorical conflicts that form the background of the tragedies, and in the success, the truth and the psychological power of the characters, as well as in the concatenation of the parts. The ‘feeling of presence’ is the principal requisite, and a tragedy is so much greater when it allows the reader and the spectator to mix with the actors themselves and be a direct witness to the action. Schiller is lifted to the rank of the greatest nineteenth-century tragedian in Europe after the Elizabethan period. The only term of comparison that Carlyle can find is Alfieri; even Goethe’s Faust is given a lower rating. At the same time, Schiller’s life is placed in the political and cultural context of the Germany of the second half of the eighteenth century. The profound differences between Schiller and Goethe miraculously flowered into a long and fruitful friendship. Pages as much admiring as detached and lightly ironic are dedicated to the ‘German spirit’ that had arisen on

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the basis of the obscure idealistic philosophy of Kant, and to the life of the little courts where timid princes reigned and the progressive thinkers found it hard to emerge. For the rest Schiller himself, who sang the praises of freedom, had taken sides initially with the French Revolution, but he had cooled and had finally dissociated himself from it after the execution of Louis XVI. 2. Carlyle’s critical essays began to appear in a thick succession from 1828 and were then collected by him in several volumes. They are largely ad hominem essays, given over to writers who were nearly always, and for the most part, German, and all of them of a deductive nature. They make use of some prearranged clichés because they examine ‘transcendental’ writers, many of whom were, in fact, the German Classic-Romantics of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century.37 One further reason is that they depict the figure of the poet-priest or minister, of the seer of the absolute, sincere and genuine, able to penetrate beyond what is the appearance of things, and often a fighter against the material adversities and the misunderstandings of his time. Such a corpus was the reservoir of two of the greatest among Carlyle’s works, Sartor Resartus and Heroes. These essays introduce in fact Carlylean heroes such as Luther, Johnson and Burns, along with others that will not appear in Heroes. Formally, they are long, well pondered, stylistically luxurious essays, in spite of the fact that they were commissioned and written to cover the needs of everyday life, and in the greatest poverty. Carlyle had built himself up as an expert on German literature, but that is insufficient to account for writings linked by axioms that are recurrent, are expanded and echo one another in essay after essay. One may ask whether it was Carlyle’s interest in German literature of the late eighteenth century to suggest the omnipresence of the transcendental, or if he had adopted that period because it offered him a natural field to test pre-existing principles. Whatever the outcome, the fact remains that Carlyle finds this transcendental stance in a great number – one might say the majority – of German writers of the late eighteenth 37

Rightly – from his point of view – Carlyle excluded from this pleiad Heine who, the least open to a transcendental perspective, had to await other essayists of an Enlightenment tendency, like Matthew Arnold, in order to be revaluated.

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century, from Richter to Goethe to Schiller to Herder and on to Novalis. The scope of these essays, however, was not purely archaeological. Carlyle made the great works and the great figures interact with the present. Poetry, he said, is not play but inspiration and it harbours in itself spirituality and divinity. It expresses the whole of man’s being and in a musical manner. Such criteria condemned a priori the literature of his time, English in particular and a fortiori that written in prose, because it was spiritually and practically as distant from the ancient heroic epic as from the most recent German literature.38 The tight relation between the literary-critical essays and the two masterly sociological essays, ‘Signs of the Times’ and ‘Characteristics’, lies just in this, that these latter are not detached from but propaedeutic or successive to the former; and that post-Romantic, and incipiently Victorian culture, betrayed a basic estrangement from the transcendental vision that the German literature exhibited so gloriously. These two essays, theoretical in their nature, are genuine masterpieces in lucid and subtle reasoning while also being extremely provoking. They in fact admonished in a way that made many laugh or smile because of their utopian idealism. On account of this, even the critical and biographical essays on German literature by Carlyle are didactic and implicitly persuasive. In the 1820s and 1830s he still had faith in the force of his persuasion, needed in a moment in which the world had been conquered by scepticism. Scepticism had overcome the transcendental vision, but it was only a temporary setback and the latter would reassert itself. And yet, little more than thirty years old, and so engrossed in his mission, Carlyle every so often allowed himself some vagaries. We are immediately certain that Professor Sauerteig, whom he quotes with obsequiousness in long extracts, is but a counterfeit and an inexistent figurehead, or at least we suspect that the English critic whom he cites approvingly is himself, Carlyle, as the author of previous reviews. Such innocuous jesting heralds the falsettos of

38

Far from surprising is Carlyle’s paradoxical eulogy, among so many candidates with a name, of the unnamed ‘Corn Law Rhymer’ (actually Ebenezer Elliot, on whom see § 223), who wrote poems of radical denunciation, but mitigated by reverence, and, therefore, for Carlyle, religious poetry.

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Sartor Resartus, that supreme prank.39 With similar alternative hypostases Carlyle shaped a double of himself, one with an even freer and more outrageous voice, and more authorized to turn out paradoxes. He stripped off the clothes of officialdom. The limit of these essays taken as a whole is the boomerang effect of their forced application of prearranged and in the long run simplified grids, and of those very argumentative formulae that Carlyle had fought against. Everything hinges on the clash between the transcendental writers and those who are not, above all the French or Frenchified sceptics. The essay on Diderot, in particular, comes across as mechanical in its application of the two principles that abstractedly fight one another, and of that of the supremacy of the transcendental epochs over the sceptical, which ‘disappear from the sight of posterity’. This body of essays, initially fairly unified, breaks up round about the middle of the 1830s owing to the exhaustion of the range of the great literary heroes and to Carlyle’s fatal falling back on minor figures, less convincing in view of his theory of the transcendental, such as Walter Scott, who no longer finds a place inside the heroic lineage. 3. The origin of these essays lies then half way between the obligatory and occasional choice suggested or imposed by contingent motives, and the free and conscious exploration. They move on, in fact, from a book that recently had been published, then they leap completely over this opening hint and push the book into the background. Carlyle often mildly praises it at the outset and ill-treats it later. A panorama of German literature, philosophy and civilization in the late eighteenth century takes shape asystematically in these reviews that gradually become essays. This panorama regresses to the alpha point when Carlyle comes to deal with ancient authorless writings (the Nibelungenlied and the early German literature right up to the animal fable), for here no biography could be written. Passages of these

39 This copious production forms thus a prelude to Sartor, which is an imaginative effort partly in the dominion of fiction. This development is almost the same as in George Eliot, who underwent a similar preparatory apprenticeship in less time and, objectively speaking, with inferior results before she matured into a novelist. In his recapitulatory essay on Goethe, the last of many by Carlyle on his works, Professor Teufelsdröckh appears with his future nom de plume.

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essays would flow modified into later works. All or almost all, of a biographical nature as they are, pave the way for Sartor. Inserts of romanticized and empathic biography are interspersed with authentic or partially authentic quotations placing the original German word in parentheses. The internal teleology constantly found is the intimate bond of German literature with transcendentalism. Carlyle is instinctively partial to poor writers who do not adore Mammon. The outcast and the exile not only became his fixed idea but an actual synonym for the writer as a prophet and an honest seer, intent on the search for the truly religious in his particular and concrete existential situation. The incomparable Fichte had been the theoretician of the universe as a travesty of the divine; and forced or authentic as may be the case, the pattern of German literature is for Carlyle the battle between scepticism and religion and between Enlightenment and Romanticism, which became cosmic at the end of the eighteenth century. And the interest in religion, whether a revival or latent, can be traced at a lower level even in the mediocre and minor figures. The first essay that we know by Carlyle was deliberately dedicated to Jean Paul Richter, an undisciplined stylist and the author of humoristic and structurally disunited novels, but also the exponent of a philosophy that is anything but sceptic. In this formative stage Carlyle put almost on the same plane the gifts of humour and transcendental philosophy. The words describing the eccentricities of the German author are interchangeable, and seem to describe the future style, and even a little of the present style, of Carlyle himself. But it may be added that the content itself, though less loaded and defined, was just as prophetic. Richter too, in fact, called Diogenes by Carlyle, was religious in his own way, and held the world to be a ‘vesture’ of the never changing absolute.40 If Carlyle had stylistic affinities with Richter, with Goethe – to whom longer, more numerous, and more admiring statements are dedicated – a complete sage and poet-hero comes to light: a ‘clear-minded and universal man’ that had responded with equilibrium to the problems of his time. More than one book could have been made from the lengthy essays that Carlyle dedicated to Goethe. In one of the first, Faust is read as a struggle 40 Carlyle was also impressed by Richter’s autobiography, entrusted to an imaginary alter ego.

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between the demonic and the angelic in an epoch when people believed in the material presence of Satan. In others he put Mephistopheles in the centre as the enemy of all lies. In spite of this, Goethe remains more than anything else the embodiment of a historical paradigm, that of the reaction to the death of religion, of the soul and of the worship of the invisible, for which philosophy and literature were to be blamed. Goethe continued to buzz around in Carlyle’s thoughts, and the last essay dedicated to him is an epitaph that once again confirms his stature as a seer and keen observer of the secret of nature.41 4. The writer as hero of the end of the eighteenth century in Germany, certainly misunderstood but still Titanic, imperceptibly mutated into an elegiac anti-hero on English soil. Burns, whom Carlyle held dear because he was a fellow countryman (and always would remain one of his heroes by definition), had fought against his times and circumstances with the wrong weapons. Nevertheless he had been successful. He was more a man than a poet, therefore, because he was inadequate if judged on the basis of the more demanding requisites of literary art. Carlyle’s second English literary hero, Samuel Johnson, had much in common with Burns. He was a rare poet in an age of ambitious writers who worked for the market. He was an outcast, keenly genuine even though not excellent, whom the mediocre but not unworthy Boswell had done well to immortalize. Carlyle approved of Johnson’s conservative ideas – there was thus something genuine in this political position – but he disapproved of membership of a party, because honesty and independence are essential. Johnson was unique. He had remained faithful to a transcendental vision in an age of doubters, and Carlyle compares him to his advantage with his countryman and peer, Hume. In the essay on Scott in 1838 Carlyle is first praise-giving, only to eat his own words along the way. Scott was not perhaps a great man but he was noteworthy and popular in the best sense of the word, so he is the confirmation of the human need to adore heroes and great men: a genius 41

In order to fit the figure of the great German poet into these lines, Carlyle had recourse neither to Werther nor to Faust, nor even to the first Meister, works still unripe, but to the inferior Wanderjahre. Novalis was the real mystic and the most idealistic of the idealists, and he prefigures the philosophical tenets of Sartor Resartus.

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in extenso, not trivial, without fire but genuine. And yet Scott was one of the healthiest men in that he was a source of comfort in an age without faith and terrorized by scepticism. Carlyle has his difficulties in adapting him to the image of the poet-prophet, both because Scott was a novelist and because his novels had been harmless pastimes for lazy people, and had as their protagonists only superficial characters. 5. The phase that historically had preceded German transcendentalism was that of the French encyclopaedists and of the French Enlightenment. The polar opposite of Luther was Voltaire. A demolisher of the Christian religion, a ‘hero’ who belittled everything irreverently and was ambitious and selfish, he is for Carlyle the first ‘external’ anti-Christ, flanked some years later by Ignatius of Loyola as the insidious, ‘internal’ enemy. Diderot was instead the founder of the new ‘Church of the Anti-Christ’.42 According to Carlyle in the 1830s, the disadvantage inherent in the English cultural model was its leaning towards the French – or towards their popularizers – rather than towards the Germans. The theoretical essay ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829), written formally in the wake of the repeal of the Test Act and of Catholic emancipation, is a worried announcement of the invasion or reinvasion of scepticism and secularization, and of the death of ‘religion’. The age was marked by a rampant mechanization that rebounded not only on religion but also on politics and associated life. ‘Characteristics’ (1831), stylistically immaculate, is imbued with never failing clear-sightedness even when faced with the most uncomfortable paradox. It opens as if in the tone of a moral fable, explaining that the healthy body is one in which all the faculties cooperate, and none overcomes another. However, the healthy body does not know that it is healthy and only the sick man is aware of its imperfect working. The lesson to be drawn is that there had been in history healthy and youthful ages in which body and soul were in harmony, and ages that had been ailing, in which they were divided and improperly working. The scope of the essay brings to light the poor 42 Cagliostro, a singular kind of imposter that might have interested Browning, is an exemplar of ambitious quackery, or ‘falsity’, at the end of the eighteenth century. According to Carlyle, such figures come across when civilization is passing through periods of decadence.

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state of late nineteenth-century society, mainly due to the supremacy of science. Carlyle was, together with Arnold, the first Victorian essay-writer to react to the triumph of science and lift up an anachronistic hymn to the impenetrable mystery of the creation. Thus the necessity and superiority of ignorance and unawareness is insisted on – of the unconscious, as Carlyle says, expressly using this word destined to become so distinctive in the century. His theory is that the great artists, like the great athletes, cannot explain their performance. Developing this theme Carlyle argues that what is spoken of even too often – a form of knowledge, therefore – has already passed out of sight. Even society is a body, but organic and therefore mystic, and this leads to the rejection of conscious, artificial, oversystemized societies, and to his nostalgia for ‘whole’ societies, in which philosophy is at the service of religion and its medieval ancilla. An overinquisitive age may complacently loose the possession of what is the object of its enquiries – and the system, declared in perfect order, is in reality out of order. ‘Characteristics’ points to and anticipates Past and Present. It registers the absence of authentic religion and denounces the disappearance of God in the present. The Church snuggled down comfortably in its doubts, and literature, ‘a branch of religion’, had exhausted its inspiration.43 The mere necessity of philosophy was an evil. The hope, in conclusion, was that, the bottom having been reached, from the bottom man could rise again, and that the fever of scepticism would burn itself out. § 15. Carlyle VI: ‘Sartor Resartus’ I. The autobiographical pastiche Neither the common readers nor the cultured were sufficiently prepared to receive Sartor Resartus (sketched as ‘Thoughts on Clothes’ in 1831, published in instalments in Fraser’s Magazine in 1833–1834; Emerson had its episodes collected together in a volume in 1836 in America, but as a book it was available in England only in 1838).44 This is clear from the astonished and dumbfounded remarks made by the early slow-witted critics, 43 In a rapid survey Carlyle recalls the useless, vain and empty efforts in Byron, Shelley and the English Romantics. 44 The book was refused by the publishers because the market was down due to the political ferment of the First Reform Bill.

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which Carlyle amusedly collected and republished as an appendix. They pointed at the violent style, at the harsh constructs of German flavour and at the daring neologisms, no less than at its abstruse philosophizing. An American reader naïvely protested that he had never come across Carlyle’s figurehead, Professor Teufelsdröckh, in Germany, and that he had looked in vain for the town of Weissnichtwo on the map and he could not find the sites of other invented place-names. This experiment in an inconsequential genre, uneven and highly idiosyncratic, was not unprecedented. It looked back to the English and European eccentric tradition of Peacock, Richter and Sterne, all writers who, along with Carlyle himself, foreshadowed the early work of Meredith.45 Prior to Meredith, a closer disciple was to be Thackeray with his various early experiments with indirect speech and with his fictional autobiographies, sometimes centring on a wanderer in Germany, in which an alter ego speaks a kind of nuanced slang, but devoid of philosophy.46 None of Sartor’s early critics fully appreciated the revolutionary and pioneering nature of its communicative model. In Sartor Resartus the subject matter is that of the philosophical essay, but the vehicle is a kind of autobiographical novel, so that the outcome is the hybrid of an autobiographical and essayistic novel right at the very beginning of the Victorian narrative tradition. As an autobiography Sartor deploys malice and mischief wholly foreign to autobiographical writing in the high Victorian period. As an essay in the form of a conversation it makes use of a risky and acrobatic rhetoric that aims straight at its target. The strategy used is that of lethal irony combined with a limited and partial assent to the theories and ideas that are presented. It is the dissociation between the historical author and the internal author, between Carlyle and Teufelsdröckh. Only a few of the Victorian novelists would write in the first person (though there are fine examples of first-person narrative in Dickens and the Brontës); and of these almost none made use of an internal editor who is also an unreliable

45 The title and in part the content owed quite a lot to the current ‘style’ of Fraser’s, which published columns with Latin titles verging on the manner of nonsensical literature (Tennyson 1965, 133–41). 46 A parody of Carlyle can also be seen in Arnold’s Friendship’s Garland (§ 166.4–5).

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narrator, and one dependent on circumstantial evidence.47 As a pure novel Sartor is nothing, for the action is schematic and unclear, the plot always a pretext to break off in subjective generalizations and extravagant digressions. The secondary characters are undefined, the dialogue inexistent, the typical occasions of romance rejected or unexploited. Carlyle thus challenged the Victorian realist novel in advance of its development, writing what one may call an anticipated parody of the form. He gathered up the disjecta membra in a manner which anticipates a distant future, ‘modern’ if not already ‘postmodern’. However, the non-consequential procedure, with its jumping from one point to another in response to free solicitations, is deceptive. The book is not as loose as it looks. It has three parts of about ten chapters each, making a total of thirty-three chapters like the age of Christ, knowingly organized ‘retrospectively’. The mature ideas and the introduction of the biographical figure of the now aged Professor come in the first part, then a flashback retraces his life from his birth on, while the third is an amplificatio because it takes up once again, and develops in a rhapsodic manner, points raised in the first. It is due to this that Sartor becomes at times repetitive. The rhythm is ternary and approximately dialectic, in that it mimes an inner ideal journey from faith to indifference and back to a strengthened faith, or from construction to destruction to reconstruction.48 2. The oblique and teasing nature of Sartor, published in the same year as Dickens’s Oliver Twist, does not obscure the historical context. Many writers of the period (the 1830s) dreamed of a humanity enriched and ennobled by idealism. In his ‘novel’ Carlyle was with those looking towards a renewed and energized society with high moral aspirations (sometimes rather over-didactic, as in the work of Disraeli and Bulwer

47 In a radically different ideal climate Lockwood in Wuthering Heights is close to him (Volume 5, § 140.1–3). 48 Sartor is thus truly a chaos that becomes cosmos and therefore unity. The organic metaphor is studied by Tennyson 1965, 164–73: the tree, the roots, the leaves (of the banyan tree) are metaphors that stand for clothes, body and soul. The internal chronology, however, is inverted, according to Tennyson, from the present to the past to the future, that is, from naturalism to natural supernaturalism.

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Lytton). It is not surprising that Dickens and Carlyle have some targets in common: for instance a school system based on utilitarian principles and a university syllabus which was excessively pedantic; faithless, and deceptive human relationships and the shallow, currently fashionable figure of the fop or dandy. The bizarre organization of the text was designed to mask the raw anger seething within the writer. Carlyle was driven by accumulated rancour. Sartor abandoned the classic and ordered form of biographical writing dedicated a few years earlier to Schiller. Carlyle patches together a ‘biography’ which is wildly chaotic, disconnected, and one that disregards chronology. It can be better understood as Carlyle’s thinly masked autobiography imposed or ‘planted’ on his invented philosopher. Whether ‘biography’ or ‘autobiography’, it has a guiding principle: there is no work into which an enquiry is made that does not have to be integrated with the biography of its author. Hence the connection between the work and the writer is kept in sight. The narrative voice, which in Schiller’s biography was ‘official’ and anonymous, taking its rhythms from the educated prose of Victorian critical journals, here becomes complicated, parodic, mannerist, and unrecognizably eccentric. It also offers stylistic self-parody by pretending to attribute the most unpardonable stylistic idiosyncrasies and the most exalted speculations to an imaginary author. This second voice (the one which rejects the vagaries of the Professor) is also the voice of a reader hostile to the book, in other words the voice of the present-day philistine. Sterne is mentioned several times, but Swift even more often.49 In his teleological and in extremis optimistic dialectics, the point of departure, luckily not a definitive one, is the reduction of man to body and matter, and nothing but a ‘biped’; immediately after this, degraded man is lauded as equal to God.50 The gist of Sartor is the reconciliation of

49 The central idea of the philosophy of clothes is taken from Swift’s A Tale of a Tub. 50 God and the devil, or rather, even worse, the excrement of the devil, are joined as if in a hendiadys in the name and surname of the Professor. The term Teufelsdröckh contains however a cross-reference in German and in Scottish to asafoetida, or a herbal medicine that helps digestion and soothes stomach pains, a disturbance from which Carlyle himself suffered (Tennyson 1965, 220).

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descendentalism and transcendentalism, of a cynical and pessimistic view of man-matter with that of spiritualized man. 3. Carlyle disguises in Sartor the first twenty-five years of his life.51 He then posits a biographical gap between the young student who has found again a constructive faith and is fully formed, and the Professor now old, who on the last page is still alive in Weissnichtwo, but has just mysteriously disappeared. Life had provided material for the Bildungsroman since the classic Wilhelm Meister by Goethe, and Carlyle in particular reread his own life-experience updating and reconsidering it as he wrote (and adding a little falsifying sentimentality). In disguising himself as a German professor he offered homage to the Calvinism of his childhood, severe but, seen retrospectively, fertile. His presentation of himself as an orphan brought up by righteous peasants was a thanksgiving to his parents, ‘divine’ messengers who had taught him the religion and the philosophy of work, despite the fact that the career of Teufelsdröckh makes of him an abandoned and then saved Moses. Teufelsdröckh’s childhood is a Wordsworthian unconsciousness, an oasis of immaculate unity with nature, with the animals and with mankind; and a providential unawareness of the ‘decadence’ of the world. This Eden-like happiness is, however, sullied on entering adolescence; and the thirst for the absolute, just conceived, can find no relief in school or at the university. So that the denial and the betrayal of the beloved – the floral Blumina – pushes the youth on a physical and spiritual pilgrimage narrated in the autochthonous and Goethian picaresque manner. The Wordsworthian natural world, lived as though a mystic and fearsome personal experience that the scientists boasted of having explained right into its most hidden creases, is ‘an absolute infinite depth’, only ‘partially known’ to mankind. It is a miracle that renews itself day after day, knowable at the deeper levels only thanks to the stupor of childhood. Teufelsdröckh’s clash with the scientific mentality of the time brings to the surface Carlyle’s indignation with current modes of

51

Rue St Thomas de l’Enfer, the symbolic place of the Professor’s ‘conversion’ (on the extremely subtle implications of which see Tennyson 1965, 189 n. 26), has been identified as a crossroads in Edinburgh.

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intellectual enquiry, expressed in thinly disguised derision of the methods of the scholastic institutions of his time. The teachers of the Hinterschlag Grammar School cultivate the growth of the soul in words, but the only thing they know about the soul is that it has ‘a faculty called Memory, and [that it] could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch rod’. The university has a positivist mindset (as did Edinburgh University when Carlyle was a student) and is a sworn enemy of mysticism, devoted as it is to moulding sceptic, or boastful, students, resistant to every spiritual influence. The collapse of the values that had propped up until that point Carlyle-Teufelsdröckh is nearly complete, and the Professor can feel he is living through terrifying ‘paroxysms of doubt’, his heart giving way and the world, a radiant and divine creature, becoming transformed into an empty Hades and an extinct Pandemonium. But a subterranean, helpful design guides his wandering footsteps, the crisis shows itself to be transient, a vortex in ferment, and a purgatorial (rather than a damned) itinerary. For the moment Teufelsdröckh lives in the deepest doubt, feels God irremediably distant and has the feeling of being in a vacuum; and finding no promise in the stormy skies he thinks of suicide. In this phase Teufelsdröckh is, and not by chance, like Christ tempted in the desert by Satan, a Christ humanized that as his double yields to the devil. Thus that divine-demonic cypher implicit in his name emerges. At the same time, the competition is Faustian, because Teufelsdröckh feels incited to deny God. But at the very last moment before total defeat he overcomes the funereal pessimism and as though coming out of a baptism of fire he enters into a spiritual rebirth. The paradigm is metaphorical and actual at the same time. Carlyle as narrator, commenting on the scene, identifies his present state in the world with the ‘everlasting no’ of Teufelsdröckh, or at least with the ‘centre of indifference’, but he teaches that like Teufelsdröckh it can attain the ‘everlasting yea’. § 16. Carlyle VII: ‘Sartor Resartus’ II. The paleosemiotics of clothing Carlyle displays an in nuce semiotics when he sets out a rudimental, proto-Barthesian Système de la mode. Just as for the semiotician a dress can express a world or tout court a fashion, for the Victorian prophet clothes may be the object of a cult and an end in itself (the dandy). Or they can

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reveal, in their variety of cut, in the quality of the material, in the flashiness of their style, and in their placing in the hierarchy of clothing, a whole existential philosophy, or even what is going on in the world. Instead of following the aseptic analysis of a signic system, Carlyle privileges this latter aspect. He sees in fashion a mirror of the cultural tendencies; by watching its happenings he builds up a series of extra- and meta-vestimentary considerations and digressions, circling around the opposition between being dressed and being naked. A persuasive message follows suit. The age, rather than heaping ever more clothes on the skin and thickening the protection given by clothing, ought to undress and travel along an inverse line towards primitive nakedness. ‘Nakedness’ is a term that Carlyle uses appropriately (even if hyperbolically), hoping for the recovery of the correct usage of dress. But he also uses it in a metaphorical sense, by developing in the course of the book, while looking for other relevant echoes, symbolical implications, since ‘the essence of all science lies in the Philosophy of clothes’. For instance, he applies the alternative naked body/dressed body to the sphere of language itself, since ‘an unmetaphorical style you shall in vain look for’. It must be said at this point that the ‘philosophy of clothes’ foreshadows at the same time the recurrent Victorian enquiry into what lay behind the veil,52 and the related metaphysical investigation into the last things. Sartor verified romantically and fideistically what Carlyle’s successors in their anguish will find it hard to believe, that the real is only the clothing of the essence and, therefore, a transparent veil. 2. Actually, the vestimentary metaphor integrates with that of cooking. The civilization that Carlyle paints is definitely alimentary, and thus its soul is synonymous with the stomach and the belly is the ‘great reality’. Due to the influences of this evil hegemony the universe has become an enormous manger. The imprint of the times was fatuity, a life that was only skin-deep and of which the dandy had become the emblem. In the final chapter Carlyle rails against the ‘fashionable novels’ of Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton, and against a literature that chose for its characters those who lived for nothing but clothing, contrasting to them the Irish poverty-stricken eaters

52

See in particular Volume 4, § 196.3, on ‘The Lifted Veil’ by George Eliot.

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of potatoes.53 The accused he singles out are the institutions, the Church and the State. The Church, infected by a worldly spirit, ‘had gone dumb with old age’, or was mumbling ‘prior to dissolution’, when instead it ought to have been a preaching and prophesying Church. A good part of Sartor Resartus, and certainly a destruens one, denounces the philosophy and the practice of the contemporary establishment. The historico-social situation taken as a reference is that of an optimistic and self-satisfied England, economically well off, living a new Golden Age but, to tell truth, ‘defunct’, due to the laziness of the rich and the uneasiness of the poor, and also to its avidity, overeating, atheism, and anarchic tendencies. The application of the philosophy of fashion to history was meant to open the eyes of those who politically could not see, that is of the powerful and of those in a position of authority. If these were to undress even only mentally, the perfect equality between all men and the original injustice that lay at the root of class division in society, would have come to the open. The subversive Teufelsdröckh comes under or near the spiritualist in the course of his disenchanted observation of the social and political mores of the day. There is practically no sphere or branch of the contemporary world which Teufelsdröckh-Carlyle with his Jacobin radicalism, and (detested) Sansculottism, does not denigrate or admonish. He is a caustic and savage critic of arrogance. As a champion of the workers, the exploited, and the destitute, he seeks to crack their passive acquiescence and their satisfied acceptance of the status quo. This programme for equality, which was based on removing crowns and figuratively undressing the powerful, plays on a further semantic reduction of the clothes metaphor. If society was originally in a ‘state of nakedness’, the acquisition of a political conscience consists in looking fixedly on clothes ‘till they became transparent’, and in discovering thus the profound and immutable essence of mankind. The rehabilitation (and therefore the superiority) of the obscure but honest workers, contrasted with the dubious fame and unjustified prestige of the powerful, is one of Carlyle’s principles. In fact, by the side of Teufelsdröckh the Sansculottist, Teufelsdröckh the tender-hearted philanthropist appears, 53

The very latest cue, named without veils, is Pelham by Bulwer Lytton, who had compiled a kind of handbook on fashionable dressing (Volume 5, § 2).

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overwhelmingly sincere and overflowing with admiration for the low born but active craftsman with his rough beauty and hidden divinity. 3. With this central denunciation of the age as a whole there are shafts of comment on other aspects of the contemporary world. When describing the visit Teufelsdröckh made to the battlefield at Wagram, Carlyle – the militarist was still to come – expresses his hatred of all warmongering politicians and the absurdity of war itself. War is nothing else but a system by which the governments solve battles on the international front by sending the unwary and blameless soldiers to butcher each other. He also attacks sarcastically Malthus and the policy to limit childbirth, then he touches on the ‘European Mechanizers’ and the utilitarians who ‘stripped’ man of his spiritual interests to reclothe him with simply material ones. The abyss that had been dug between the poor and the rich was invisible to many. Yet in their roots and underground ramifications the two ‘sects’, the dandies and the poor, stretched throughout the whole fabric of society. The risk that was run was to separate and split the English nation into two masses deprived of means of communication, or two electric poles that threatened to bring about a new universal cataclysm. The objective of bringing the ‘two nations’ closer, which was to be the hallmark of Disraeli and the ‘Young England’ movement, obviously finds here its first formulation. Now, such alarmist radicalism actually hides a form of wise Victorian moderation. The cures pointed at are all of a spiritual order, and concern the individual and not the State; they are not in other words translatable into concrete reforms or into laws and least of all into instigations to revolution and insurrection. As early as the 1830s Carlyle knew how to make an evocative diagnosis, but he was at a loss when it came to making real proposals. He was unable to say more than that it was necessary to recover the spiritual dimension of man, his sacredness and the respect due to ‘Good-breeding’. In as much as this spiritual dimension was independent from riches and from social extraction, it would lead to the dissolution of class distinctions and to equality. Like Arnold in Culture and Anarchy, Carlyle stigmatizes ‘rebellious Independence’ and hopes for a return to obedience by both the individual and the community, and for the recognition of an authority that is a reflection of the divine by which it has been invested. But a motif comes to the surface, later central to Carlyle and to the whole period: the

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thirst for enlightened guides and beacons of wisdom. Therefore there dawns the ‘hero-worship’. 4. The opposition between nakedness and clothing shadows a further distinction: clothing is all that is external and transitory, a temporary crust or super-structure, while nakedness is the spiritual and unchangeable essence. As the pages turn, undressing accumulates moral significance: the recovery of lost inner being, the re-awakening of a religious cast of mind that had become sleepy, the rediscovery and recreation of the bond between the human and the divine. Teufelsdröckh quotes meaningfully, as the ‘most remarkable incident in Modern History’, of an incomparably superior importance with respect to the wars, the battles and the truces, the sewing of a hood of rough leather – and, dressed only in that, the flight to the woods and a life of prayer – by George Fox, the cobbler founder of the Quakers. He was an authentic sartor resartus who in dressing up in a new habit put off the old one, ‘Slavery, and World-worship, and the Mammon-god’. The Pauline teaching and example will have been fulfilled when man and nature are no longer as fields of purely physical and material energy but reflections of something other than themselves. Setting aside anthropology and positivist physics, Carlyle sings of man and nature as a book, a text, a language of God, according to an image that is retraceable virtually everywhere in the patristic literature of the Fathers of the Church down to Dante and to the Platonists of the Renaissance and beyond. This image is emblematic of the fideistic and antiscientific mystical inclination of the medieval mens. At the summit of his personal Calvary, Teufelsdröckh finds a harbour in the vision of a man no longer self-sufficient and without connections, faber suae fortunae, but strongly chained – and as such supremely valued, he who was nothing – to a universal design, and partaking of a nature which is no longer an opaque collection of mechanisms but a transparent emanation of the divine, a living ‘Garment of God’.54 The meditations of Teufelsdröckh repeat the mysterious

54 The Professor speaks with a curious frankness on human presumption, on the smug professions of greatness and of omniscience in the moment of the greatest development of the technological civilization, calling things ‘by their mere dictionary

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absurdity whereby man, an ‘omnivorous Biped’, is, at the same time, a ‘divine Apparition’. In his penetrating search to see under the appearances, and never tired of pursuing the essences, Teufelsdröckh repudiates the disjunctive nineteenth-century vision and attains that typical of medieval man. He brings in fact to light, after patiently digging, the invisible web of similes and of mirror-like correspondences that reigns between its parts, its symbolic quality and its pan-emblematic character. 5. Sartor Resartus inaugurates a form of prophetic writing which would be echoed by several enlightened writers of the later Victorian period. The materialism dominating contemporary society did not stop Carlyle from predicting, as an act of faith, the revival of lost values and a spiritual resurrection. Having identified the signs of the times with the cataclysms and the calamities described in the Book of Revelation, he did not forget that that book closes with the vision of a new heaven and a new earth and with the building of a new Jerusalem. In the face of blindness and paralysing doubt, Teufelsdröckh’s personal calvary is an exemplum to think about and to follow. ‘Society […] is not dead: that Carcass, which you call dead Society, is but her mortal coil which she has shuffled off, to assume a nobler; she herself, through perpetual metamorphoses, in fairer and fairer development, has to live till Time also merge in Eternity’. Like Carlyle, Matthew Arnold would also explore the problem of finding certainty in an alternating cycle of ages of faith and disbelief, and would ask in his poems and in his essays the self-same question: do we need to despair, or can we hope that a better time can come? As he brought Sartor to a close Carlyle seemed to see encouraging signs almost everywhere around him. The very Church he had abandoned as defunct he now found changed and alive, stirred by symptoms of reawakening and a wind of renewal and of prophesy. Also, especially, he saw within literature a new flowering of prophets and utterers of the divine word – among whom, of course, he included himself. names’: ‘We emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished earth; then plunge again into the Inane’. I only hint here that this conceptual and metaphorical antithesis – of man who is first nothing then immediately everything, wastage and a Divine double – resembles closely that of the ‘Heraclitean Fire’ sonnet by Hopkins, one of the many major poets influenced by Carlyle.

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§ 17. Carlyle VIII: ‘The French Revolution’ The French Revolution (1837)55 was conceived and developed jointly with Sartor Resartus, as is confirmed by Carlyle’s biography and by its publishing history. It applies and traces in a given historical paradigm the same private and conscious inner development of the invented alter ego of Sartor, right up to the point of making one book a derivation of, or a pendant to, the other. It is not simply a question of terminological borrowings that are easy to find. The philosophy of history in the two books operates in the same way, bringing rebirth from death, and pivoting on the principle of panta rei (that is, the invisible progression towards a ‘prescribed issue’). The philosophy of clothes is made use of again (as a way of penetrating historical events), and Calvinism with its irreconcilable polarities, divine and diabolical, is likewise never lost sight of. Both schemes are invoked as part of a resumed debate over the individual man in relation to history. The thinking is Hegelian and triadic in structure: it foresees creation, then destruction, and subsequently improvement, rebirth and regeneration.56 Seen in the light of The French Revolution, Teufelsdröckh is a post-revolutionary who has preserved that good seed, that Sansculottist spirit that must be wholly distinguished from the body, a spirit that ought 55

The preparatory studies did not all flow into this enormous historiographic work and left a few loose ends. The sketch ‘The Diamond Necklace’ (1837) is an inconclusive, tasteless and disappointing essay which hints at the broken, intuitive and eye-catching style at work in The French Revolution. A long essay on Mirabeau (1837), on the other hand, places this figure in the category of the men having originality while re-using the formulas and the diagnoses dear to Carlyle the historian: a disorderly ferment of minor men realize something great that gives birth to three heroes, Napoleon, Danton and Mirabeau. The Marquis of Mirabeau, the father, was a kind of French Jean-Paul Richter, and Gabriel Mirabeau was born in the same year as two other great men of that century, Goethe and Burns. 56 A coexistence of the dyadic with the triadic principle, also in the number of metaphysical moments and phases, has often been noticed in the structural organization of Carlyle’s critical essays. The name of Hegel does not appear in Carlyle’s readings but is mentioned in Sartor, and starting from that there have been attempts to establish whether or not there was any relationship with Carlyle (see Fermi 1939, 123 n. 1, following Elton). The reading of Hegel is instead documented by Tennyson 1965, 170 and n. 1.

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not to have died, though the French Revolution quickly got rid of it. Further, the two works are enlivened by an identical stylistic exuberance. The historiographic method is not that of the pure, professional historian. Although Carlyle keeps faithfully to the facts he is never pedantic. The line of events is maintained, but interrupted by digressions. The inner logic is poetical, associative, digressive, not traditionally ordered, and the descriptive pace is broken by sudden emotional outbursts and by visionary flashes. These features, such as the picturesqueness and the gallery of chiaroscuro portraits, were noted and praised by reviewers. Carlyle allows himself to surrender to enthusiasm; he gives way to his partiality for apostrophizing and, notably, he identifies with his impassioned protagonists. He becomes part of and feels himself to be one of the revolutionaries.57 The Revolution is raised in this work to the supreme epic episode of human history. The descriptive language is never neutral but is coloured with quotations from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from Greek and pagan mythology and from the poetry and heroic literature of all times and places:58 it is a true and proper Baroque feast of the associative ‘demon’. His readiness to coin new words and to engage in etymological word play is astonishing, though it remains controlled: the syntactic economy and the tyrannical brevitas are far from Baroque. In the second of the two volumes Carlyle writes in even shorter and terser paragraphs that are made up of small sequences of phrases and subordinate clauses separated by a semicolon or by a colon. They seem to stress a telegraphic or rather a stenographic manner, a form of private, highly hermetic notes, or a voice like that of the historian Tacitus, paratactic, speaking as if in dispatches with no connecting links. 2. From an historical point of view, The French Revolution is a work of Romantic-Victorian inspiration, perhaps more Romantic than Victorian, 57 Among whom he selects Danton, a sincere advocate of peace. But Carlyle raises a hyperbolical hymn or monody to Mirabeau, the Queen’s counsellor and bulwark of the monarchy, a Titan to whom, however, no allowances can be made as a man. 58 See his fondness for the repetition of the Homeric distinctive epithet: the ‘sea-green Robespierre’, or the timid and incorruptible man; Marat, ‘the friend of the people’ and the meditative Stylite; Lafayette, the American Scipio on his white horse; Danton, the energetic Titan.

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and decidedly democratic. It is a fearless, enthusiastically radical reading that saves of the revolution much more than his countrymen would have done and did (obsessed as they were by fears of the revolution and by the possibility of a similar uprising in Britain). History reveals itself to Carlyle as a competition of metaphysical forces. His ‘history’ is thus ‘meta-historic’, a realization of ideals in the midst of the incongruous and fluctuating chaos of the actual. The Sartorian concept of a powerful wave, or malign mass in movement, operates here, although within it the ‘good’, or right understanding of social order, can work and triumph. Like Arnold in his more optimistic moods, Carlyle believed in the theory of the tides. He saw a guided succession of periods of low and high tides, though, even more than Arnold, he insisted that the faithless ages, called by Carlyle ‘decadent’ in the literal sense of the word, should be suppressed, and he held it unfortunate to be born in one of these. History comprised vectors of which the single individuals are an emanation. A consequence of a perfect symbiosis between form and content is an excessive use of the synecdoche, or the tendency to see the ‘-isms’ as antagonists, and the group or the party rather than the actual exponents. The central thread of the two volumes, which were subdivided in parts with each chapter given a title, is the unsuccessful flight of the rulers to Varennes in June 1791 which led to the fall of the monarchy. The final point is set in October 1795 when the Revolution that had given its early warning signs in the distant year 1774 formally ended. This had been an age without spiritual guidance, or dominated by weak and Machiavellian guides. It was, therefore, in Sartorian terms, an age of the ‘everlasting no’, of scepticism and of the disappearance of faith; it was, above all, an age of pleasure that said to itself that ‘pleasure is pleasant’. According to Carlyle, any such contingency called for its nemesis. The inertia, or even the wellbeing of those years, were forerunners of disorder rather than the calm placidity of silent growth. It was a false age of gold, one of a godless rationalist philosophy; the age of Mesmer and of Montgolfier certainly, but one of sin that awaited its punishment. The sacred had collapsed, leaving a falseness that had to be overcome and be cured. With the States-General Carlyle hails the arrival of a new system: lying and falseness were dying, and the Third State was about to unwittingly take on the mission of regenerating France, provided it found a true guide. Carlyle reviews in his mind’s eye the

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candidates in that assembly and asks which of them would be the greatest. He does not conceal his admiration for Mirabeau, but he has already made up his mind (though he puts this in the form of a question) concerning the ‘vilest’, Robespierre. And yet ‘the deep fixed determination to have done with shams’ can be traced even in this corrupt assembly that has very few beliefs, or that believed in what was completely false. According to Carlyle, the idea become incarnate always loses something of its immaterial, ideal fire. Immediately after he scorns the projects of the National Assembly, ‘waste paper’ that would dry up in the face of concreteness. The reading of this episode points to Carlyle’s latent lack of faith in a parliamentary system, and even to his approval of fanaticism if only it is fighting against formulas. The greatest gain of the Revolution had been the coming to the foreground of patriotism and of Sansculottism. Up until this point Carlyle has had no doubts and has never drawn back from his interpretation of the early phases of the Revolution, because it was historically inevitable that the existing order had to be destroyed, if corrupt and unhealthy. Sansculottism was a manifestation of intrinsic growth, a growth that must pass through death and decay until the organism is cleansed and made whole once again. It was, thus, a sign of progress, even if it had to open a way towards order via chaos. Carlyle asks himself at this point what was and what is a revolution. He answers that since all is in perennial movement, it means a sudden change of speed and, therefore, an abnormal acceleration in the course of events. Such ‘hot frenzy’ could be placated only after order had been established and its target reached. Even the guillotine is justified, because it is the systoles and diastoles of the ‘whole enormous Life-movement and pulsation of the Sansculottist system’. Before the regicide, France was ‘naked’, that is Sansculottist – the Sansculottes were literally ‘sans culottes’, the most naked and the least dressed – and the king himself was naked, or only in his bare skin before dying. ‘Kingship is a coat’. After the regicide, however, an insurrectional movement asserts itself, come from ‘Tophet and the Abyss’. It is only here that Carlyle hesitates and digs a furrow that he forbids himself to cross over. The degeneration of Sansculottism into pure disorderly chaos is explained as being the temporary prevalence of the demonic over the angelic or divine – which divine, in certain historical moments, could and had to be destructive, not creative. An example of

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the ‘destructive and self-destructive’ moment can be found in the utterly inexplicable and mysterious motive that guided the hand of the assassin Charlotte Corday.59 After this, an unceasing parthenogenesis came into being, set in motion by the two parties fighting each other. The winner of this fight was split in turn into two further parts. The only positive entity in this disintegrating drift were the people, who never stopped believing in the dream of a rebirth, such as at the epoch of the Crusades, or of Luther’s reform, or of the Scottish Cameronians. The end of the Revolution foils their hopes. The Revolution becomes an unworkable or failed revolution, because it is accompanied by the symbolic rebirth of the dandy – a ‘cloth animal’ – and of a jeunesse dorée. With that, Carlyle confirms the return to the pre-revolutionary, ‘overdressed’ society, precisely the emblem of the post-revolutionary Europe in Sartor Resartus. Nonetheless, Sansculottism must live and actually does live on, but transformed in its purest essence. It is still able to discard the ‘garnitures, ways of thinking, rules of existing’ founded on ‘old cloth and sheep-skin’ which cannot last. At the beginning of 1791 a simple king could not control the unstable situation; a real man was needed, and such was that taciturn lieutenant with his olive complexion that answered to the name of Napoleon Bonaparte. § 18. Carlyle IX: ‘On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History’ The most popular of all Carlyle’s works, On Heroes had its origin in a series of six lectures given in May 1840 and published the following year. More exactly it formed a third cognate work which expounded with few added notes and many repetitions the tenets of the history of philosophy already outlined in Sartor Resartus and The French Revolution. The external dress is completely different, however, and in the place of the inspired poet Carlyle presents himself as a lecturer who keeps in check the linguistic and associative excesses, aims at making himself understood, and with a humble and smooth didactics attempts to benefit the dim-witted. It is not, however, a vulgarization or a simple summary of Carlyle’s thoughts

59

For Orwell (OCE, vol. I, 57) in the scene that describes the death of Marat ‘every semicolon is an insult’.

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for the general public. On the contrary, it is supported and animated by an exuberant rhetoric that aims at presenting a theory. This theory, however, wobbles in some of the examples given and contradicts itself in very risky contortions.60 While Sartor had one single burlesque hero, six or eleven historical or historico-legendary heroes, all different and yet all alike, and all projections at once of a transparent personal mythology and of a unilateral reconstruction of European history from its beginnings to the present day, are biographized. They also therefore embody an idea linked to the evolution of English history.61 Ideologically On Heroes is, therefore, like many of Carlyle’s books, an acrobatic feat. He plotted out an ideal grid, and fixed to it a previously planned, subjective and personal identikit. He then worked out how to apply it to a series of ‘heroes’ through time. This hero-type was, needless to say, a religious hero, gifted with a close and authentic contact with the sacred, or rather with that divinity that historical contingencies presented to him as such. The hero filled with this sentiment courageously and brazenly got rid of quackery, of all the falseness and lying of institutions committed to formulas

60 One for all: the ferocious disavowal of formulism, or formalism, is reversed, later in the book, into the admission that formulas are originally good or rather indispensable, and that religions may be reduced to formulas. These become negative when they can no longer be animated by the substance and are, therefore, dead. The same is repeated in the last chapter of Past and Present. As has been said, it is difficult to find a correspondence between the more recent heroes especially and the heroic role. Many contemporaries, in fact, judged acrobatic and contradictory the criterion of choice applied by Carlyle, and they doubted that Burns, for one – a drinker, and a philanderer whose record was unclean – could be eligible for a premiership (see CRHE, 181). 61 The first hero that is examined, Odin, was a Scandinavian hero and member of a civilization that along with others gave birth to the British civilization, as the scholars of mythology and ancient languages were beginning to document at the time. Carlyle as etymologist then retraced the ancestral sediments of the personified divinities in the English and Scottish dialects. The ‘roots of the English words we still use’ may be found in the Scandinavian language of Odin. A continuity can be found even in the field of pure mythology, and specific derivations exist between the Scandinavian fable and English, Irish and Scottish mythology. And, Carlyle notes, even Hamlet by Shakespeare is a northern myth.

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and, therefore, decayed. In so doing the hero draws to himself a great following of amazed people sensing that God or the divine is embodied or shadowed in him. The popular following was, however, always bound to the written word of the Creed. All Carlyle’s heroes are vocal heroes, that is, they all have an ideal book which identifies them or of which they are the authors. Without this they would have been nothing, or worse than nothing. Odin invented the runes and, therefore, the alphabet, and made himself a myth in the northern sagas. Mahomet had the Koran, Dante his Comedy, Shakespeare his tragedies. From the point of view of the Protestant Reform the invention of printing had been vitally related to the affirmation of the hero. However, Carlyle’s historicism, together with his Romanticism tinged by popular traditions, prevented him from introducing any criterion of an absolute truth and from applying it to each of the historical religions. It was enough for him that the hero was sincere with respect to his faith, even if later ages might judge that faith erroneous and superstitious. The times alone when they lived give a heroic stature to the deified man like Odin, to the prophet Mahomet, to the poet Dante and to the playwright Shakespeare, to the priest Luther, to the writers Burns, Johnson and Rousseau, to the commanders Cromwell and Napoleon. Times change and with them the way the hero is viewed, but not the hero, who is a unique type. It is only, conversely, the ‘sphere’ that has accepted him, the ‘type of world’, that would call him divine, or prophet, or poet. Actually, Carlyle’s hero does not simply have a mystical contact with the sacred and with the divine, but in various ways he moves in the historical and the temporal world. Religion and action are related, and the hero is more of a hero if he is a reformer and even a revolutionary warrior.62 Carlyle is now explicit that between the two Romantic movers of history, the idea and the people, there is an intermediary: the hero, a flash in the sky, a fire that lights the way for anyone waiting for it, or rather for the common mortals. History is the history of great men who have acted in it. It is, therefore, the history of their actions as a guide for the masses, who have no other task except that of putting into practice the thoughts of 62

A reviewer (CRHE, 186) saw a pugnacious radicalism as the unifying factor in these heroes.

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those great men. The great leaders of the modern age had jointly written, logically and consequentially, the script of a tragedy in three acts. Luther, with his revolt against appearances and his return to reality, had lit the spark for the Glorious Revolution, the ideal forerunner of the French one. Carlyle seems now more careful in his support for the French Revolution, which had been shortly before so passionate; but he does not deny that every revolution, and especially the French one, ‘madness clad in hellfire’, called for the use of the sword and the shedding of blood. The conclusive outcome is not, however, an archaeological but once again a militant one. Carlyle does not hide his nostalgia for a more sacred and reverential age, marked out by a greater contact with the divine. On several occasions he praises theocracy, the dream of Knox and Cromwell. In so doing he admits to a kind of frustration. Each one of the three revolutions had become an involution, and the gangrene fought by the revolutionaries, which had apparently been defeated, had gradually relapsed. On Heroes sags in all senses, both because its reasoning shows signs of fatigue – Carlyle always tries to squash any suspicion concerning the eventual littleness or meanness or weakness of the hero – and because the heroes, and in particular those closer in time, were after all heroes-to be or ineffectual ones. 2. From the very first page of the first lecture Carlyle launches a ferocious argument against the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that had derided and rejected ancient paganism as a product of quackery. He also fights, in this and in each of the following lectures, the theory and any theory that considers religion an allegory – which would mean a clear-minded suspension from and a conditioned adhesion to all things religious – maintaining rather that allegory, if anything, follows faith, and not vice versa.63 Taken out of context, this preamble could induce one to think of Carlyle as the most fervid and orthodox of believers. Primitive man was Plato’s child open to the divine and offered a primitive, medieval and sacramental glimpse of creation, which reveals the Creator in the stars and in the blade of grass, windows of the infinite. But the scheme is Viconian in that man places himself first in relationship with nature and its power, 63

Carlyle echoes Macaulay (§ 37.2) in affirming that Malebolge was absolutely real to Dante.

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and only later discovers that all power is moral. Mahomet is the immediate and provocative test of Carlyle’s historicism. He was a sincere prophet and one sincerely inspired by his god, even though subject to error. When forty years old, he made the fundamental discovery that men and things are the outer dress and shadows of the Eternal Splendour.64 It is here that Carlyle makes the disconcerting assertion that Islam was nothing but a ‘confused form of Christianity’ and one of its ‘bastard kinds’, yet, even so, a ‘living’ kind. At the same time, Mahomet’s religion was a continuation of that of the Scandinavians. ‘It is Scandinavian Paganism, and a truly celestial element superadded to that’. Carlyle not only absolves the Islamic prophet from every accusation of sensuality and pride, but justifies the armed struggle to spread the Islamic faith, as a new idea is necessarily at a disadvantage in the beginning. Even Christianity had not disdained to use the sword: ‘I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of ’. 3. In the third lecture the hero-writer bursts onto the stage, in a way more in keeping with the changing times and therefore in the successive theatres of civilization, such as those of the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, of the Reformation and of the sceptical age. This new hero that history invokes is a poet hero, which is almost a synonym for a prophet. No longer a god incarnate, he discovers Goethe’s ‘transparent secret’ invisible to all others, that is that nature is the image of God and his ‘vesture’. Carlyle ventures into aesthetics making a distinction between the prophet-seer that had grasped the divine mystery on the moral side, and the seer-poet who on the aesthetic side picks out and collects the ‘true Beautiful’, or the ‘beautiful True’, once again following Goethe. Poetry is defined a musical thought, a song in adoration of the enclosed and veiled divine mystery in the world. The Book of Dante dramatically proves that where there is music and melody in a sentence there is also a hidden meaning, and

64 The Koran, a farrago without head or tail, is for Carlyle indigestible for the western peoples but appreciable in its sincerity, ‘the faithful struggle of an earnest human soul towards what is good and best’. There are no miracles described, but there is a sacramental view of nature, which is the shadow and mirror of God.

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that word and idea go hand in hand. In Dante this song with its harmony and melody can be traced, because the poet had been able to put into music and into rhythm a noble and elevated thought, and it was because of this that rhyme becomes tolerable. Furthermore, it is significant that Carlyle should subjoin that Dante’s Inferno is not in itself a masterpiece, and that the trilogy finds its ideal completion with the Paradiso. Dante indeed prophesized Carlyle in his dyadic-triadic dynamics, envisaging the competition between light and darkness or between divine and diabolic. This competition was always won by the divine which, however, become too self-assured, ended up being reattacked by the demonic. Dante, therefore, expressed with an even greater and infallible certainty Carlyle’s own finalism, according to which everything was to be created, destroyed and regenerated and, thereby, saved. Dante was chosen by him as the herowriter because in and through him the medieval man spoke, and because in his poem the incarnation of the highest and most sincere essence and religion of Christianity could be evinced, or rather of the moral law and of the kingdom of moral man. Yet Carlyle had to admit that this hero was no longer or was not yet the persuasive hero and the armed leader, though he mentions Dante’s various public duties.65 If Dante described the ‘intimate life’ of the Middle Ages, Shakespeare represented the ‘external life’ of post-medieval Europe. Yet this no belittling of Shakespeare, since he too was a product of the Christian or rather Catholic faith, and had written plays that were so many ‘windows’ on the world. If Shakespeare was a prophet and a melodious prophet of true Catholicism, the carrier of light from heaven, with Johnson and eighteenth-century literature the task of the biographer of heroes seems sadly to come to an end. The man of letters hides his divinity, or at least those around him are blind to it. He becomes a poor creature struggling alone against the chaos surrounding him, and in particular against a world become sceptic, because such, sceptic, is the eighteenth century. It was Dante, after all, who had launched this model of hero, as is revealed in the scorn with which he refused the alms proffered by Cangrande. Dante was the first of the useless writers, one of those 65

It is anyway noted or augured by Carlyle that Dante and his poem will be the ideal guide to the Italian Risorgimento.

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‘accidents’ in a society where he roamed unknown ‘like a wild Ishmaelite’.66 Carlyle was the only one to be certain that the world as it was known in his day and age was changing, that scepticism was ended and a transcendental vision was successfully making its mark. Rousseau, Johnson and Burns were searchers of the truth rather than carriers of it to mankind. Johnson’s originality was reduced to an uncertain struggle against predominant falseness. Rousseau was a fanatic, though sincere, and his main merit for Carlyle was that he had written ‘unhealthy’ books that had however sparked off the French Revolution. Burns was the natural man, instinctually and rough, and dear to Carlyle for his Scottish birth. 4. It cannot be denied that Carlyle’s hero, in his purest and most efficient essence, is, although his species is unique, the reforming hero, and, therefore, a revolutionary; with the proviso that revolution is not just – or rather properly speaking is not at all – political, but, since Carlyle fights for the recreation of a theocracy, moral, that is religious or politico-religious. In the age of Luther, Dante’s theorem had become as obsolete as that of Odin, and Catholicism had exhausted its function. But as usual Carlyle has recourse to argumentative legerdemain. Sincere idolatry is like the stupor of the poet, but the prophet throws himself against insincere idolatry, that is idolatry transformed into sceptic doubt. In other words Carlyle admits that Dante’s Catholicism was ‘true’ and that, therefore, there was no sense in that shout that echoed throughout England, of ‘down with Catholicism’. Moreover, given the fact that man’s activity is a constant revision and an increment of all his acquired knowledge, theory as well as praxis change, and such a process opens up the way for an armed revolution. Carlyle is then a courageous champion of interventionism and of revolution, if history called for them and when they were supported by ‘sincerity’. Protestantism had not been and was not against the adoration of heroes, only against the false ones. ‘Private judgement’, to be sure, leads not to the extinction of hero-worship but to its continuation, and this is 66 Carlyle reveals the dramatic status in which the non-consumerist writer found himself in his time, and parenthetically reconsecrates his function. He calls for a ‘sacerdotal caste’ receiving a life pension for the benefits he procures for society, and one that will replace a Church now fallen from its role as dispenser of truth.

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why it became the progenitor of all the dethroning and democratic revolutions of the past and of the present. While in Germany Protestantism had degenerated into sterile diatribes, in England it flowered as an authentic, heartfelt emotion. Luther lay at the back of Knox who, by starting off an insurrection that was also cultural, transformed Scotland from a rough, turbulent and tribal country; and the line had continued directly through to Cromwell. Carlyle had here to face the most difficult task in the whole book. He had to vindicate Cromwell from every accusation of insincerity and religious hypocrisy. He had to make a hero out of a man who was far from talkative and was even a stammerer, and had left nothing written though he had preached and prayed. Obeying a divine investiture Cromwell took the rudder with supreme courage, but his aim was not to dismantle the sovereign rights of the king. Carlyle holds such rights divine due to his staunch faith in the action and function of symbols. A king was elected when he was judged ‘able’ according to the ancient etymology, and elected means divine. But when he was ‘not able’, he had to be dethroned. On the other hand, Cromwell had no other choice left but despotism in order to avoid anarchy. Carlyle’s last hero, Napoleon, was far from being as great as Cromwell. He was in his way sincere as he rebelled against contemporary scepticism; but his faith in God and in democracy as against anarchy are proved by Carlyle through frankly weak anecdotes. Napoleon, having reached a position of command, allied himself with the False and gave way to egoism and to ambition. The verdict passed by history is that his far-sighted nature, full of Italian initiative, was overcome by French megalomania. § 19. Carlyle X: ‘Past and Present’ ‘Chartism’,67 a militant essay of 1839 – a pamphlet, more exactly, and organized in ten short chapters each having a title – ideally precedes Past 67 ‘Chartism’ was written as events precipitated, inducing Carlyle to leave Cromwell temporarily aside. The Chartists dissociated themselves from the pamphlet, feeling that Carlyle had completely misunderstood the meaning of their movement. Anyway the topic was not Chartism but the ‘condition of England’ (Young 1927, 159).

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and Present. It faces squarely up to the ‘English question’ and the very latest political news, which had been dominated by the Chartists’ claims and agitations right from the early 1830s. Carlyle opposed this movement because he judged it brutal and destructive, and the expression of a radicalism without religion. The pamphlet established in Carlyle a kind of argument aimed first at ascertaining the truth through a clear-sighted and provocative reading of the facts and then offering remedies. Did not statistics say that all was well in England? The fault was just due to this very instrument – statistics – closely bound up with a mechanized civilization. False statistics, therefore, that never got to the roots of the ill-feelings of a working class paid with the lowest salaries, especially in Ireland which was on the brink of rebellion. Carlyle’s paradoxical insinuation is that it was the better-paid workers who shouted and took part in Trade Union activities. He still sympathized with the workers’ claims but took his distance from their violent methods, and while sensing that there could be potentially an English French Revolution he called for a stop to the government’s laissez faire attitude and for an enlightened government to be set up, sustained by the Church and the aristocracy. The democracy that had been greeted and approved of in revolutionary Paris was silent in London in 1839, or rather it was denied. The people had to be guided from above and could not be self-governing. Carlyle is passionate in his plea to the aristocracy which, he affirms, has to model itself on the benevolence and the guiding function it had in feudal times. This very guidance is rejected by the workers, and out of this frustration Chartism has been born. The new political class should have understood that the best for the country was not a further extension of the franchise. The people should not be given generous and unmerited help, but they should put into practise the religion of work, and if work was insufficient in England emigration to the colonies was the remedy. 2. As may be surmised from the binary nature of its title, Past and Present (1843) shuttles between the present ‘condition of England’ in the 1840s – an England torn by a trade unionism now institutionalized in Chartism, and, in spite of this, a staunch supporter of a market economy that favoured the rich – and an idyllic, medieval past that could teach the government the correct policies and inspire a Pauline reversal of values. Essentially, like all Carlyle’s works, this is a hybrid, mixed book, even more

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polarised than some of his other works. It resounds with invective and sarcasm, it sketches out a kind of brief sociological analysis, it contains some pseudo-philosophy and some political discussion. And yet the hurried and pressing militant attitude is suspended in one at least of the four parts, giving way to a utopia or a fantasia that mitigates the pressure of contemporary issues, and that, setting the diatribe aside, starts off a vivid anecdote. More than any other of Carlyle’s works Past and Present could be attacked for its enlargement of, and the emphasis given to, his ideological tenets without adding any novelty. It is the most logorrhoeic of Carlyle’s works up to this date, and even the most undisciplined, even seeming improvised and chaotic in its structure. Here chaos never becomes cosmos. This is due also to the fact that the gravity of the political and social moment called for a radical discursive change, from the metaphoric and the figurative to the literal, and for the abandonment of the oversophisticated filter that, in Sartor, had failed to work. Only in a more direct way – but Carlyle never lost the vice of paradox, of verbal coinage, of the etymologic play with words – and only through repetition and the obiter dictum could the social fabric be struck at efficiently and be reborn, or could one manage anyway to be persuasive. Carlyle is again an apocalyptic preacher. He can see no salvation and he only threatens damnation. The prologue is that of a fanatical seer, as divine nemesis was about to attack the nation as it walked towards its suicidal death. Rather it was the whole of western civilization that was literally burning. The final pages offer, however, a pale hope, and make Past and Present – always rather inexplicably – a positive apocalypse. The repercussions of this book were for a brief period enormous. From its premise – the political crisis in England, the gap between the ‘two nations’, the rise of Chartism, the iniquity of the Corn Laws, and laissez-faire economy – Disraeli’s, Gaskell’s and Kingsley’s immediately subsequent social novels will derive. Dickens had already hit the nail on the head concerning the conditions of the workhouses, that is homes for workers that were able but redundant, therefore unemployed. 3. To anyone used to Carlyle’s forgeries and apocrypha, the story of the diarist in macaronic Latin, and his ‘scrupulous’ and truthful transcription of the memories of the monk Jocelin de Brakelond of the monastery of St Edmunds at the beginning of the thirteenth century, smell of a second

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Sartor. The editor of that work venerated the German Professor just as this monastic Boswell in Past and Present spies on his Johnson in the figure of Abbot Samson. Does this elusive manuscript exist, or is it all a sham?68 The transcribed and glossed text ends when the new ‘paper bags’ end, and Jocelin is silenced for the same reason as is the editor in Sartor. The story introduces a feudal seigneur adored by his rent-payers. He is animated by a sincere faith in God and by a sense of justice that finds its equal in an evangelical poverty in spirit. He loses his life as a martyr when resisting a band of invaders. In the first of many parallels, these Danish warriors in a still Saxon England stand for the Chartists with their ‘points’, which were formerly axes and other arms. On the spot of the saint’s martyrdom rose the monastery of St Edmunds. The foundation and the life at the monastery are the pretext for painting with love an idyllic England where paradoxically feudalism, like the one the French Revolution had destroyed simply because it had become degenerated, was perfectly efficient. There true religion – unlike Methodism, or a dubious or Catholic-oriented one – festively freshened all. Imperceptibly the third becomes the first person, and Carlyle, or his fictive ‘I’ enters and exits from the identification, but more and more often becomes one and the same with it. The election of the new abbot proves that the election of the guide must be the investiture of the most ‘able’, the one who alone could command because he has obeyed and is prepared to serve rather than to be served. The present world takes a lesson from the medieval monastery. The enlightened abbot makes the deficit good with his new economic management and applies meritocracy to the internal government. An abbot such as Samson is a new Carlylean hero, and more precisely that priest-hero and that reformer such as was needed in modern times. His story represents a version of Carlyle’s hero-worship, though not in this case of a universally known historical hero. This is then a story of a cryptic heroism, but one no less didactic in intent. His example teaches a

68 The story of the monk was in fact taken from a medieval chronicle reprinted in 1840. Carlyle read it after a visit to the actual monastery of St Edmunds, made to document his research for Cromwell.

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religion that was naturally integrated into daily life, and discards any kind of methodical doubt as an instance of empowered egoism.69 4. The hypostases to be defeated in the present are given a name in Past and Present: ‘Mammonism’ and ‘dilettantism’. With the former, Carlyle means the insatiable demon of enrichment and a market economy that irreparably damaged the workers; with the latter, the absence of a suitable political class, or rather of an active and enlightened aristocracy. Rebirth could not come from mechanical means, but from a self-examination leading to the rediscovery of the soul rather than of the stomach, therefore of the spirit instead of the body. The civilization that was to be rebuilt had to be founded on a work ethic, where work meant for Carlyle ipso facto ‘worship’.70 The peroration attributed to the honest, silent, rough English worker whose enemy is laziness, and who knows the greater happiness of frugality, is very much felt. Having assented to the talented aristocracy, Carlyle greets the ‘captains of industry’, especially the textile manufacturers who were working hard to better the conditions of the workers. These were few and far between, but they had begun to appear in the ‘condition of England novels’. The past induced however to think that time did not necessarily mean progress and that the best and, in fact, the only form of government was a feudal and theocratic one. It suggested that the greatest English governor had been Oliver Cromwell. § 20. Carlyle XI: ‘Cromwell’ Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches: with Elucidations (1845) comes as a long-expected confrontation. Cromwell had gradually become for Carlyle the greatest Englishman in history along with Shakespeare, and with Burns and Johnson only a step further down. Until then he had referred

69 Abbot Samson before being nominated undertakes a journey to Rome like Luther. Carlyle scourges the ‘stuffed dummy’ – this image speaks against itself – of a Pope who, suffering from rheumatism, is substituted by a kneeling cardboard outline to which he lends only his head. However, Carlyle has to admit that even this degenerate form of religion is better than no religion at all. 70 Actually Carlyle paraphrases the Benedictine maxim ‘ora et labora’, by saying that working is praying.

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to him continually in his writings, or rather and more often, he had taken every opportunity to bestow a word of praise on him. Cromwell is in fact an Englishman who becomes, in the most precise political sense of the word, Carlyle’s greatest hero as a man and in the indissolubility of thought and action. Such a dyad becomes a triad of attributes if one thinks of Cromwell’s particular and all in all no less monumental, and exceptional written, or more precisely, transcribed production, as letter-writer and orator. This historiographic work by Carlyle is undoubtedly less creative and imaginative than The French Revolution, but it is as subtle and lively, always welling up from the heart and from the firm and convinced approval of its hero. The one-time reviewer of biographies began to teach the art and the practice of the biographer. It is he himself who then wrote an ‘expressive’ biography reaching through to the heart of his subject. He penetrated the spirit of his time, something he had always wanted done, and that became necessary in order to remedy the uselessness and the disinformation of biographical works and of the contemporary experts on political matters. Methodologically, Carlyle wanted or would wish to disappear and pass the word directly to his subject, but he inevitably had to weave the biographical thread himself until the time letters written by Cromwell are at his disposal. He therefore retraced the early steps of the hero as in a traditional biography, going back to the ancestors, the parents, his childhood, his studies, the early local political activities and his parliamentary engagements together with his duties as a careful landowner. However, not even at the opening of Cromwell’s political life did Carlyle the historian step aside and become the philologist and the humble reporter. He refrained from following the events step by step and from keeping with painstaking accuracy to the evidence. On the contrary little by little he enthuses and gets excited. He enters the personality of Cromwell and becomes one with it, even inserts his own comments between parentheses when he cites the speeches by Cromwell, whom he interprets, reinterprets, distorts, urges on and in fact makes him say what he thinks but does not say, as if Carlyle were hidden among the listeners of those times.71 In his introduction, 71

In Young’s opinion (Young 1927, 213), there are ‘several thousands’ arbitrary manipulations by Carlyle lent to Cromwell’s speeches.

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seldom so crystal-clear, he tells straight out his own idea of Cromwell’s Puritanism and of the historical meaning of the Commonwealth. Those fifteen years marked the end of a centuries-old episteme which was, by and large, that of the Middle Ages. Hopkins will take up and adopt this habit of fixing cultural watersheds, even though he will place the end of the Middle Ages one century before owing to confessional reasons. According to Hopkins, the event that had broken the continuity and violated the social and medieval epistemic compactness in England was the Protestant Reform, which had brought in the de-Christianized, secular, ‘horizontal’ modern world. Carlyle, instead, considered the Reform the last buttress. They are two equal and yet contrary historiographic hypotheses. Above all the two writers shared the conviction that civilization had irreparably overstepped the age of the faith of yore, but that it ought to return to it. This is said in limine, in the opening page of Cromwell. Cromwell’s Puritanism was ‘the last glimpse of the Godlike vanishing from this England’, and with it the kingdom of God vanished, followed by the kingdom of the nonGod, or the devil. After that date a century-old historical continuity, a world closely built on the faith in God, ‘such as many centuries had seen before, but as never any century since has been privileged to see’, had been broken. Carlyle interpolates that Cromwell had thought that with his coming the ‘fifth monarchy’ had come, or the true theocracy and the kingdom of Jesus on earth. On a purely hypothetical plane, Carlyle felt that the death of Cromwell severed a practically universal regenerative project which would have changed English history. Cromwell’s England led the coalition of European Protestantism and, therefore, of the authentic divine forces in battle against diabolical Catholicism, embodied in the kingdom of Spain. Carlyle sadly deplores the fact that Puritanism eventually killed itself, and in a veiled manner picks out the seed of its ruin in the ‘pedantic’ parliamentarianism dogging a Cromwell who proved too hesitant and an even too stern defender of civil rights. Had he lasted another ten years the monarchy would not have risen again with its own strength, and Ireland would have become a Protestant territory or rather a Calvinist one. Even the Protectorate belonged to the group of providential events, of those historical turnings predetermined ab aeterno and whose time was beaten rhythmically by fate, like the French Revolution. These events were then

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like clashes between forces of a contrary sign, and yet these major happenings were all related to each other, almost like magnetic fields on which the different hypostases descended from above. This network is not only of nominal or associative recourses. The Presbyterians and the Independents are the ancestors of the Girondins and of the ‘Montagne’ a century later, but with the difference that Rousseau was their inspirer and the English correlatives could be found in the true believers in Christ. The Levellers dangerously prompted the Sansculottes and even the Chartists with their ‘six points’. The final general corollary concerns a historiography that should be truly magistra rather than academic. Contemporary society, witness to a present scarred by the discontent of the workers, by famine and political corruption, had now to find a stimulus to thrust forward and turn towards God. Cromwell, in particular, outlined an ethic, or simply a practice, which was clear in its demarcation of good and evil, and had no place for the tolerant, ‘modern’ nuances concerning their boundaries, for benevolence, the doctrine of universal pardon, or even the application of Rousseau’s sentimentalism. 2. As far as Puritanism is concerned the typical Englishman had to bridge a gap of knowledge and to pay off a debt of gratitude, for too often the experience of Cromwell had been passed over without anyone being well aware of what it had been and, at times, even doubting that it had actually come to pass. Thus something needed to be done to change this state of things, and an attempt be made to reopen without any prejudice the dusty proceedings compiled by diligent stupidity. Was the seventeenth century really so ‘unintelligible’ and vague? And were the Puritans superstitious bigots, dedicated to the despicable vice of ‘hypocrisy’? The task that Carlyle undertakes was to turn upside down the judgements passed by the sceptical historians, whom he impersonates with a happy neologism calling them, one for all, as ‘Dryasdust’. Immediately after this he positions the heroic equation that Cromwell is the centre of the Puritan fifteen-year period that took its name from him, resulting in a ‘Cromwelliad’. The origins of Puritanism are traced to a class of university professors and of devout middle-class men who from the beginning of the sixteenth century began to call themselves Puritans. Such a movement grew and considered itself to be ‘by far the best part of English thought’. The divine hand behind the unfolding events was

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recognized when in 1616 Cromwell entered the University of Cambridge, for it was the same year in which Shakespeare – and perhaps Cervantes – died, as if with a providential coincidence. The reconstruction of the intimate life of the young Cromwell is only conjectural on account of the lack of data. Carlyle gives no credit to conjectures and legends, but admits the fits of hypochondria and that the Calvinist conversion assured Cromwell of his own salvation. When he shifts to Cromwell’s own words, he warns that his letters are not orthographic and that they are oxymoronically ‘mute’, yet the man was there, and moreover a great man. This theory of a Cromwell rough in his use of words was an understatement and is not tenable. His letters were in fact largely lapidary because they were written in the form of despatches, but they show that he recognized that his actions had been undertaken as if instigated by God. The Irish campaign demonstrates his energetic and at the same time subtle strategies, for when the governors of the resisting cities send finicky petitions Cromwell pulls them to pieces, empties them and holds them up to ridicule as an experienced rhetorician would do. His parliamentary speeches – lengthy, inconclusive, full of circumlocutions, so that to call them sibylline is to say the least –72 are anything but those of an ignorant or a ‘dumb’ person. Carlyle works hard, for instance, to sort through the really false or tortuous, even Jesuitical, contortions with which Cromwell beats about the bush when he is offered the crown. These speeches or orations highlight a seventeenth-century association of sensibility elevated to mystic levels, for only the saints or the possessed could interpret the events in a similarly anagogic sense. In fact, Cromwell the man of thought and of action sprinkles these speeches with quotations taken from the Bible and the Psalms. He signed the death sentence of King Charles I, a deed unheard of and like the Crucifixion, but one that had the result of punishing criminals, sweeping away the ‘cobwebs’, and introducing a government based on truth and heroism. Cromwell was however careful when he decreed the abolition of the monarchical principle. On the other hand, the fatal, historical entrance of the mechanical and of aridity into Puritanism, together with a fossilized bureaucracy, 72 According to Saintsbury (SAI, 760), Cromwell’s letters are penned ‘in the most obscure jargon that ever called itself English’.

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occurred when it became a parliamentary force. The divine flavour had vanished from the lips of man and with it the inextinguishable fire of transformation. § 21. Carlyle XII: ‘Latter-Day Pamphlets’ Does then Carlyle’s transcendental essay-writing end suddenly in 1832? The essays scattered in magazines beyond this date respond more and more to current events and lack specific literary references as well as the anchorage of textual and philological criticism. They often consist of comments freely given there and then about political events and national and international questions. The latter of which was the Franco-Prussian War, to which Carlyle applied with some difficulty his own key of the absence of heroes in the present.73 The essay written in 1843 on the Paraguayan dictator Rodríguez Francia is the most lively, the lengthiest and most varied of all those produced in Carlyle’s second phase. It is not an extemporary curiosity, because there emerges not only an apologia for the dictatorship but also the approval of a ‘healthy’ and ‘necessary’ despotism. This theory was taken up again in the opening speech to the students of the University of Edinburgh in 1866, focused on the celebration of the gospel of work and on the necessity of the study of history. Carlyle here praises Cromwell but leans towards Machiavelli when he infers that in every historical time democracy lasts but a short while and that a dictator is necessary to recompose the bits and pieces of the shattered community. He posits but does not solve the question as to whether a dictatorship is a means to reinstate a purified democracy or an end in itself. A speech on the rights of black people in 1849 picks out its contingent enemies in philanthropic liberalism and in scientific politics, and proceeds to emphasize once again the doctrine of work as against philanthropism, since it leads the worker to sloth. Hence the point is not to abolish slavery nominally but to work to save the soul of the black person: filling just the body would be hypocritical. Carlyle was theoretically favourable to abolishing slavery, but the world

73

The same is said for the Italian operas staged in London!

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had always been divided ab aeterno into the governing and the governed, the servants and the masters. 2. The year 1850 marks the precocious beginning of Carlyle’s decline, showing us a writer that, almost gasping for breath, clings on to ideological sediments now obsolete, and to unsuitable and repetitive remedies. That year also manifested a new reactionary rigidity that led many of his faithful followers to abandon him. Ten or even fifteen years before he had been a juggler who could amusingly weave a fantastic picture of a time which was far off, and between the serious and the joking could exhort the age to mend its way. In 1850 he was found, in fact, absolutely unprepared to face the wave of revolutions in Europe and their repercussions in England. The polarization of social conflicts, the sharpened bitterness of the workers’ discontent, the rise in importance and power of the proletarian movements and, therefore, of Chartism, and the call for an extended franchise – these were just a few of the events that were heart-rending. Carlyle found himself at sea because people no longer paid any attention to him, and two years after the revolutions in Europe he made himself heard with a voice which was tremulous but still often booming or else raucous. The volume of sound in Latter-Day Pamphlets is on a par with his secret admission of fear – the fear that the ideological model so dear to his heart might come to nothing, and the fear for his own personal uselessness. In short, he found the signs of a revolution, or a new revolution, at home. The former student of the French Revolution saw around him the semblances of a static, corrupt and decayed political power, and of a tired, discouraged and oppressed people. Yet he could no longer hope for and support that bloody revolution that he had greeted as a dolorous necessity at the time of Louis XVI. His programme was reformist, inflammatory at least partly, but of a right-wing matrix, not to say reactionary. He now condemns democracy outright and he also condemns gradualism, supporting a maximalist programme, however abstract in its nature. Let no one use indulgence, he thunders, to prisoners who have knowingly erred, but let them be inflexibly punished. The death penalty? A hallowed right. Universal franchise? A colossal mistake. Parliament? The ‘long Parliament’ of Cromwell’s day was fine, but the present day Parliament had no power and was a slave to the press. In short, who was supposed to govern? Carlyle leans towards dictatorship

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with an angry, apocalyptic and rather blind involution. The people would be thirsty for guides, but for true guides, that is leaders teaching the truth rather than hypocrisy, and ‘able’ men at the head of a cabinet of equally ‘able’ ministers. And the people must work hard without expecting petty philanthropic supports lulling them into a lazy inertia. Not revolution, but, if still possible – though hopes were now reduced to a simple flicker – a complete reform of the system is what is asked. 3. The eight Latter-Day Pamphlets are virtually saturated and overwhelmed by contingent disputations. Like the thoughts attributed to the alter ego Sauerteig,74 they show ‘marks of haste and almost of rage’: a strong and vibrant anger, even injurious and Swiftian in the various situations when Carlyle lets himself go to splenetic dystopian fantasies.75 The procedure is more exactly digressive and repetitive, and improvised, as it moves from target to target with thrusts which are never definitive, and with hardly varied transcendental proposals. The titles of the single pamphlets work therefore mostly as an indicative summary of the underlying idea. Carlyle, on principle, never turns his back on the need for renewal, such as he had seen enacted two years before during the continental revolutions of 1848, which had reverberated even in England. What is surprising, instead, is the credit given to Pius IX and to the rule of acting according to truth that had guided the Sicilian and Parisian revolutionaries. That had seemed to him the ‘barbaric’ resurfacing of democracy, a repetition of the flight of the monarchs and the conquest of power by the people. It was just an episode, however, and followed by a ready return to order but also to disorder, because a certain ‘rock-like base’ had not come to light. This anarchy has made a clean sweep of ‘false’ majesty, it is true, but it has nevertheless been anarchy. The rhetorical question is whether democracy can be a carrier of truth after abolishing deceit. For Carlyle it is clear that the world is monarchic and hierarchic. Emancipation was universally and loudly called for, but this was folly. In England he invokes the anointed king and wants

74 § 14.2. 75 Like the ‘decalogue of the pigs’ that would express the reduction of the soul to the functions of the stomach.

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him to come forth openly, and strongly exhorts the ‘captains of industry’ to find work for an organic people, not for a disorderly mob that gloried in their emancipation. In designing the new Downing Street, Carlyle’s stress falls on the need to keep the colonies tied to the motherland, while there is a clear refusal to governors who had become too understanding and bland. In nuce, Carlyle’s thought on Ireland is similar to that of Hopkins some time later. Ireland is the image of sheer, separatist anarchy in need of a strong controlling hand.76 Recalling a Swiftian sociological report, Latter-Day Pamphlets lashes the empty parliamentary oratory and demagogy. The defence of historical parliamentarianism from the Conquest on up to the Long Parliament, means a defeat of Parliament itself. The worship of the false hero or of the idol was rampant. A statue supposed to personify a worthy person of the British railways, and paid for with public money, even if never realized, brought home to a sadly embittered Carlyle the extent to which popular ‘reverence’ had changed. English geography, as novelists were never tired of repeating, was rapidly changing due to the ever-expanding railway lines. 4. All of this is not after all novel to those who know Carlyle; these pamphlets simply reaffirm the same arguments in formulations that are different only because they are figurative. The eighth pamphlet is however exceptional, as it presents a topic which had never been tackled, and whose intriguing title is ‘Jesuitism’. It is the most poisonous, acid and mystifying of the book’s pamphlets, as with Ignatius of Loyola Carlyle presumes to identify the devilish schemer of the ruin of the ‘genius of humanity’ over the last two centuries. It is indeed true that he forgets his object as the pages flow on, and that, perhaps, he would have been the first to admit that some assertions are vague, poetical and far-fetched. Objectively, Carlyle makes an effort, though he tries to repress and limit it, to say all the good possible of the virtues and the historical worthiness of the Jesuits, and above all to show his appreciation of their missionary spirit. Loyola it was who had perversely taught humanity to place salvific formulas above reality, who had founded with Jesuitism an agency that coordinated and incited 76 The term ‘civitas Dei’ was used explicitly by Carlyle and by Hopkins, whose common political objective was the reconstitution of a Commonwealth.

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a ‘somnolent contempt of the divine ever-living facts’. Briefly outlining Loyola’s biography Carlyle accuses him of a sensual and even sexual weakness that the Basque soldier was unable to repress. He believed, for Carlyle, that the universe was simply a brothel or a kitchen, and having discovered his own sinfulness he refused to weaken his ego and tried alternative forms of satisfaction for his ‘pruriency of appetite’.77 Subtle mental processes guided him to be the spokesman of the Pope against the so-called infernal forces, which were instead divine forces and he the emissary of the Antichrist. After so many positive Carlylean ‘heroes’, Loyola is the supreme anti- and counterhero, or false hero in history, coming immediately before Voltaire. It was however a gross error to think, as Carlyle does, that England had been swept clean once and for all of the Jesuits, because a true and proper ‘witch-hunt’ was about to be set up by the novelists, especially the ‘muscular’ ones.78 However, it was enough that Loyola had existed because, starting with him, ‘all men have become Jesuits’, that is followers and adorers of falsity. He had also ruined the fine arts and poetry, both made Jesuitical, that is slavish to falsity and dispensers of falsity, with no prophetic virtue. § 22. Carlyle XIII: ‘The Life of John Sterling’ One might wonder why Carlyle wrote this biography (1851) of a mediocre, honest man of the Victorian literary backstage, journalist, poet, dramatist, novelist, and failed writer of short stories, and never held in great consideration. It was a tribute from a friend to the dead man who had corresponded at length with Carlyle himself when alive, and had discussed his ideas and works in letters and other writings, providing one of the earliest critiques of Sartor Resartus. He was thus for Carlyle a kind of testing ground for his theories, which Sterling evaluated and sometimes challenged in a context of absolute frankness. A sort of private Boswell, Stirling had to be shown in a far different light from the picture by his literary executor, his professor and tutor at Cambridge, who had pointed his finger at Sterling’s daring, not to say heretic, religious ideas. This small book 77 See Halliday 1949, 12–14, for an amusing though exaggerated reconstruction of Carlyle’s ‘discharge’ on St Ignatius of his own sexual repressions. 78 See Volume 5, §§ 149–57.

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takes the shape of Carlyle’s ancient and consolidated biographical essay, or even of the essay tout court. It starts off from the evidence and the rectification of the previous incomplete or even mistaken information concerning Sterling, and aims at making an objective and profound study of him so as to furnish from close up a faithful image of the man. But there is a third reason as to why Carlyle wants to speak of this close friend, and it is that Sterling offers him a natural example of the hero, though a rather particular one, a hero whose spiritual physiognomy is equal in part to that of Carlyle himself. This hero, it must be clear, is a minor one and such as could be found only in the present day and age, and yet even so – history could not be falsified – an unfulfilled and questing hero. Sterling is indeed presented as an anti-sceptic who also remains a fearless and incomplete believer, to use Carlyle’s terminology, in that he wearily adheres to an everlasting ‘yea’ but he does not live it through to the extreme consequences. In order to reach this point, Carlyle follows the pragmatic instructions of the traditional biography, that is a detailed and active inspection of the subject’s genealogy and of his ‘inarticulate’ and verbally ungifted childhood, and of his studies. The son of a ‘bound Prometheus’, Sterling had inherited a restless character rich in very noble but often very unfruitful enthusiasms. He stayed at first with his parents at home, and then with his own family, and lived in various parts of England. Tuberculosis forced him to search for favourable climatic conditions in the colonies abroad, in southern France and in southern Italy and in the more temperate areas of Devon and Cornwall. At the University of Cambridge, according to Carlyle, Sterling had received a smattering of classical culture, the only thing required of him, rejecting the dusty and fossilized formalities of the curriculum. He left Cambridge without a degree and with no definite ideas about his future. However, as a compensation he had discovered he was a gifted speaker and developed a great interest in politics. In the young twenty-one-yearold freshly come from Cambridge in 1827 Carlyle greeted and approved a political radicalism that was a reflection of his own youthful battle against humbugs. Thinking back on himself in 1857 Carlyle confirms that radicalism is a typically youthful fanaticism that – and it is right that it should be so – was destined to pass away on reaching maturity. Sterling was a

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radical, but only ‘for the time being’.79 The reason why this biography of Sterling is so often quoted among Carlyle’s writings is due to a digression. A portrait of Coleridge is inserted for the only plausible reason that the great poet, now old and rambling, was frequently visited by Sterling, who was deeply struck and influenced by him. It is one of the most balanced and clearest of Carlyle’s closing speeches against a contemporary master of thought – but an irremediably sterile thought. Coleridge in the 1830s had pinpointed the evils of the age with words almost exactly like Carlyle’s – atheism and materialism, and corruption in a paralysed and static Church. Yet Coleridge indicated as remedies only the Kantian categories of knowledge and logic, and a cloudy theosophy not enlivened by a vibrant and constructive faith, but sunk instead in a passive nirvana or extinction of the will. Coleridge’s influence had led to the recent rising of a clericalism that was over-ritualistic, mystical, and superstitious in form, to which he gave the name of Puseyism, a religion that held too closely to the ritualistic and was the exact opposite of the true religion. In the wake of Coleridge, Sterling, animated by a fervid activism, became an Anglican minister, but only for eight months.80 In looking into the fanciful literary production of his friend – who, despite Carlyle’s attempts to dissuade him, stubbornly insisted writing dramatic poetry – Carlyle reaffirms in the conclusion his diagnosis. He was an imperfect, or perhaps it would be better to say an incomplete hero, due to his having had such a short life. He died in 1844 just before his fortieth birthday. From a religious point of view, Sterling

79 In 1830 he had been the romantic organizer of, though not a partaker in, the unfortunate expedition headed by the Spanish expatriate General Torrijos, which set off with an English ship to Gibraltar where a rebellion against Charles X was supposed to arise. It ended tragically and without any result, with the arrest of the rebels by the Spanish police. 80 This decision was reflected in the only novel written and published by Sterling, the title of which, echoing Disraeli (Volume 5, § 14), is Arthur Coningsby: a student settles his religious anxieties and overcomes a crisis by becoming a priest.

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was an Arnoldian stateless citizen,81 flung into a vacuum or stranded in the middle of nowhere, and someone who had left the Church but had never come across another complete form of religion to put in its place. Even after leaving his ministerial office he remained a weak, fully compliant churchman who lacked the necessary ‘veneration’ – the terror and the fear of the true religion – and had not made religion the centre of his life. § 23. Carlyle XVI: ‘Frederick the Great’. Carlyle’s seven years’ war This third, enormous historiographic work by Carlyle, Frederick the Great,82 was published between 1858 and 1865 in six volumes. It is a monument of erudition and research that took seven years – fourteen if those of preparation are counted – to be completed, and amazing if one thinks of the few instruments he had on hand. The new re-creative effort was not only the fruit of a more objective and even purely informative approach, and of a loving but less extravagant dedication to the facts, but also of the simple transcription of the testimonies and to the humble, almost chroniclelike reconstruction of the great wartime activity. The precise intention in this Titanic epos was to re-establish the correct historical facts beyond and beneath the ‘muddy incrustations’ that lay heavily on the figure of the Prussian monarch. He had been a victim of mistaken bibliographical information and of popular mythology. Carlyle also wanted to document the continuous rise of eighteenth-century Prussia as a cardinal power on the European chessboard, and as a supplementary focus, alternative to Austria, in a Germany consisting of scattered little principalities. He postulated thereby a clear trait d’union with contemporary geopolitics and the warning signs of Bismarck’s chancellorship. Was this then a finally and fairly neutral Carlyle, less fighting and militant, without magniloquent rhetoric, and one who rather than falsifying facts left the word willingly to other protagonists? The reply that comes after perusing the various tomes is that 81 82

§ 153.1. There is a distinct verbal echo in the words that place Sterling in the crowd of ‘noble seekers, and strivers towards what is highest’. Frederick the Great was written in a soundproofed room prepared especially for him in his home in Cheyne Row. Carlyle went to Germany twice for research and was awarded the Prussian Order of Merit in 1874.

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Carlyle incorrigibly bends history to his own preconceptions. Frederick the Great is a work definitely dictated by an enthusiasm – not always corroborated by the facts, if not directly denied – for a new and largely fanciful figure of a political and religious leader at one and the same time. The Prussian material, this half a century of the eighteenth-century reign of a versatile monarch endowed with every gift – unbeatable military strategist, and iron ruler, but brought up on sceptic Parisian culture – was in truth highly refractory to Carlyle’s grids. Ideologically Carlyle’s problem is how to reconcile an adhesion to the full sovereignty of Frederick – if not to his tyranny – and, at the same time, to the French Revolution, a revolution that had swept away the monarchical principle (and of which Frederick had never had any inkling). This work was, therefore, in Carlyle’s historical synthesis, an acrobatic challenge, for he wanted to show how high the model of monarchic absolutism could reach and function; and that, in short, absolutism was not on principle anathema, but even just the opposite. The narrow contiguity of the two events – the zenith reached by Prussia and the fall of monarchic France – was the acrobatic demonstration of an absolutist model that was ‘false’, and that in its falseness had to be removed, and of the goodness of another that in another part of the world was ‘true’. If this is the case Frederick the Great can then be seen as the welling up of an absolutism, and even an authoritarianism that push aside in Carlyle any youthful, romantic faith in a revolutionary democracy. 2. Carlyle enters thus into the lion’s den facing a hostile century, that of godless eighteenth-century scepticism. He becomes, actually, unthinkingly elastic and almost naïve.83 Frederick does not deny, but lowers the level and also the intensity – and deconsecrates – the categories of the Cromwellian leader and of Carlyle’s politico-religious hero. Carlyle passes silently over historical demerits and cultural blunders of which the contemporary and

83

Some years later after the essay written in 1828, Carlyle explores the movements of Voltaire, that troublemaker and destroyer of the religious sentiment and of the sacredness of life. He feels sorry for him, however, when he sees the philosopher reduced to the state of a poor devil, now obsequious and even sycophantic to a king who, in the past, has been so anxious to have him as a friend, and now can hardly stand him: this Voltaire ‘is dear to Frederick and also to us’.

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successive historiographers had accused the Prussian monarch.84 In following him from his childhood he finds in him minimal signs of honesty, sincerity, and hostility towards hypocrisy and falseness. From a young boy Frederick had always said what he thought; therefore he went against the current trends, a rarity in a century of deceit, and due to this he had to keep a difficult and explosive balance. And if he was reticent it was to defend himself from the foxy slyness of the diplomats. As an historian, however, Carlyle has to admit that the king who acceded to the throne in 1740 no longer embodied the heroic model of an anointed king and of an ‘able’ man, that is of an ardent promoter of a theocratic project. Frederick was a typical sceptic of his time, a rebellious youth and later a courageous, but Frenchified king, and an aesthete that amused himself playing the flute. He was curious – but nothing more – about literature, as he was about theological and spiritual culture. He had misinterpreted, according to Carlyle, the gospel of Voltaire, which was not a ‘go’spel but a ‘ba’spel’, that is the word of the devil. However, with time he set aside Voltaire, for he was provided with far greater sincerity of character and a far stronger intellect. He nevertheless surrounded himself with friends of dubious standing, rather decidedly mediocre, and that was because he did not love the substance of wisdom, but the esprit, or rather the rind and its outer covering. In an ideal comparison with Cromwell, Carlyle’s hero par excellence, Frederick comes off one step down if not much lower in heroism. His towering political standing coincided with a secular, pragmatic, very clear-sighted adhesion to truth, above all intended as Realpolitik. Even in his absolutism – he was the author of Anti-Machiavel – Frederick was an upright official, or as he loved to define himself, a servant of the state. Nor does Carlyle hesitate to emphasize his noble gestures, such as his writing his will just before the wars; or the poison that as a Stoic – or a Spartan – he took with him just in case. As a strategist he was equal in subtlety to Napoleon, who had learnt much 84 Some of the main limits of Frederick which Carlyle slides over are his having ditched and turned his back on the German literary culture which was just then nascent, due to his fanatical support for all things French, and his ideological obsolescence. On the human plane, Carlyle builds a false image of a kindly sovereign, though severe with his washed-out queen. Their childless marriage was simply a failure.

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from the history of his battles that he had studied thoroughly. The name of ‘Great’ ascribed to Frederick was hyperbolic, and largely due to Voltaire; and yet even Pitt’s England, shortly after the victory at Leuthen, spoke of him as a ‘Protestant hero’, and as the champion of Protestant Christianity. Carlyle’s most revisionist or mythological feat of acrobatics is just this, to make Frederick, a godless Voltairean Mason, a similar reincarnation of the flag-bearer of Protestant faith, although – but Carlyle would have loved to deny it – ‘He is nothing of a Luther, of a Cromwell’. Frederick tolerated beliefs, although he himself was not particularly religious, and with his attitude he set the example of a monarch who was an onlooker detached from religious contentions, moderate, balanced, never involved. Or rather, it might be said, he had his own religion, but in ‘blighted forms’, of which he had a ‘great quantity’. The distance between him and Luther was short, inasmuch as both were convinced that there was never any need to mask the truth, and they both struggled against hypocrisy. He was, ‘in this sense’, a sense undoubtedly either very broad or very narrow, ‘the chief Protestant in the world’. Inevitably the diagnosis worsens with time, since Carlyle has to come to terms with the ipsissima verba of the king. Frederick did not believe in divine justice and not even in a divine providence, and held it impossible that an unfathomable Demiurge could interest himself in ‘such a set of paltry ill-given animalcules as oneself and mankind are’. But in the place of the ‘true’ religion he had Carlyle’s other, secular religion, that of duty. 3. The impression of a classic biography is attenuated by the shrewdness of Carlyle’s irony and parody, and by a bizarre and unexpected multivocalism. The historiographic text is, in fact, a mixture, because panoramic and official reconstructions in larger typeface, yet without pedantry and always light and personal, alternate with large sections often in smaller typeface that encompass a varied and heterogeneous material. In these, imitations of military bulletins, in which the phases of wartime activity are minutely described along with dates and times together with abundance of news and curiosities, are followed by the insertion of maps and diagrams and contemporary testimonies translated from the German and from the French. Then there are extracts from the letters of the protagonists, anecdotes of various nature and digressions which are often invented and where Carlyle the juggler and forger is ready to show up. The aseptic voice of the

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historian alternates with that of the protagonists, but there is also an ironic alter ego, or the eternal second soul or the irreverent voice of Carlyle himself, in the figure of the imaginary historian Smelfungus. The eponymous hero is called immeasurably late into play and to the limelight. The history of Brandenburg and of Prussia up to 1700 and, therefore, of the German basin right from its origins – a prohibitive wilderness of names, marriages and vicissitudes – is however no idle curiosity. With far-sighted intuition Carlyle traces the links in history and finds prophecies and premonitory signs. Barbarossa is a Carlylean ‘king’ that tames anarchy and is an ‘able’ ruler; and there is no better chance than this to push home his point on the Reform to which Brandenburg had adhered, and to approve and to call to mind that nemesis had descended on those nations that like Italy had not adopted it. Almost a third of the work is later dominated by the figure of the king’s father, Frederick William, and by the documentation of his tempestuous relationship with his son. In the background, there is the figure of the beloved sister Wilhelmina, who was equally unhappy and left a valuable memorial, with the Queen Mother and the domestic scenes at court. The main subdivision is between Frederick’s childhood and his irresponsible and rebellious youth. To nothing came the treaties for his marriage with Amelia, the daughter of George II of England, cousin of his father the king. The fulcrum is the very slow (and therefore, at various points tedious) reconstruction of the Seven Years’ War. The invasion of Silesia in 1740, when Frederick had newly become king, is dubiously presented by Carlyle as a war of religion, of Protestants against Catholics and Jesuits. The true and proper seven-year conflict, started in 1756, was, according to Carlyle, a defensive war that vindicated Frederick from the accusation of being an enemy of humanity. The last twenty-two years of his life after the end of the war in 1763 are compressed into little more than a volume. Frederick had at that date moved out of European history, the political axis verged towards the west and the ‘celestial-infernal’ event of the French Revolution, the supreme consummation of all the ‘deaths of anarchy’. § 24. Carlyle XV: ‘Reminiscences’ Carlyle’s youthful and transfigured autobiography is Sartor Resartus, but a better ordered documentation of his life, ideas and inner vibrations

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is in his diary and letters, while in the middle there is that almost private document, Reminiscences.85 Its planless, unconnected chapters, always titled after the names of people recalled in a moment of still warm emotion and pain at their disappearance, cover without reciprocal stitching the successive phases of Carlyle’s life up to 1866. It is clear that its pages were not destined to be published, that their publication was a violation of his most sacred and chaste affections, and that they were personal outpourings written for himself, as is witnessed, exceptionally, by the veneer of the unfinished. Each single piece seems written in the form of entries or fragments of a diary. The book as a whole has not a linear flow but its pages follow one another transgressing and often subverting the time-scheme. Thus a very particular flux is created, which is at the same time a kind of stream of consciousness and a memorial wave that visibly differs from Carlyle’s finished style and has the mark of spontaneity, unsuppressed in a subsequent reorganization. This of course foreshadows stylistic choices that will be deliberate with later generations of writers. This secret and partitioned autobiography by Carlyle is a still new solution with respect to the numerous alternatives offered by biographies written by others, which were always feared by the Victorians who were or would have been their subject. The noble tribute to the people who have passed away, and who were known to and frequented by him, forms a resultant screen, from which the very personality of Carlyle powerfully emerges. 2. The memoir on his father was written soon after his death, and it is a kind of funeral dirge in various movements. It registers as if in a diary

85

Reminiscences was written more or less in 1866–1867, apart from his father’s memoir written on the spur of the moment in 1832. The title was given by Froude, who printed the manuscript after Carlyle, now shaking with age and dying, handed it to him telling him to do what he wanted with it. Reminiscences transformed the censor who had called everyone and everything stupid, and who had been a fearful oracle, into a pitiful man devoured by remorse and by a sense of guilt, and ready to break into tears. But in flinging the hero off his pedestal Froude incurred the criticism reserved for those who ‘denude the king’. His edition was not trustworthy, for there were numerous mistakes made in reading Carlyle’s writing. This was remedied by Norton’s 1887 edition.

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the date and the hour in which the single entries were penned. It has, therefore, the strong and vibrant flavour of a free memorial stream. We receive a confirmation that Carlyle’s father is a familiar ‘hero’, as he shares many points with the historical hero. At the top of the list are truthfulness, honesty, then an untiring intellectual curiosity despite his poor education, his colourful and metaphoric use of language (but he did not know the meaning of the word metaphor), his dislike of the vague, the abstruse and the sophistic, and his liking for all things tangible and concrete. His religiosity has elements that seem to Carlyle like those of Goethe (and Carlyle relieves his pain by sprinkling his text with rather bombastic German sentences). In this funeral dirge he celebrates the manly and frugal roughness of a Scotland peasantry that trusted in tenaciousness and in the ethics of work. It was aware of the Lord’s award. The second long piece is dedicated to his wife died in 1866, and it is the most soul-destroying. The pain of this loss throws the organization of Carlyle’s memories into complete disorder, so that they come forth jumbled up in what is the most shattered tribute of the whole work.86 The portrait does nothing but confirm Jane’s gifts of humanity and the sacrifice freely made by a woman who could have had a future of her own, and instead assisted her husband with uncomplaining devotion during the early difficult years of marriage, as a devout and careful housewife. Heroic gifts are ascribed to her, but hers was also, first and foremost, the domestic heroism of a woman who did not draw back from milking the cows and cooking tasty bread in the oven. The visual range takes in other people of the family circle, and includes Carlyle’s Scottish and London acquaintances too, so that an invaluable archive is made of London literary life at mid-century. The tumultuous surge of memories settles in a calmer memorial vein with the evocation of Edward Irving, a friend of Carlyle’s youth, who had been a brilliant preacher in the Scottish Kirk. However, he had moved to London where, after an early promising start, he suffered a psychophysical decline due to problems with his 86 Carlyle’s opening pages incorporate memories written by his wife’s best friend Geraldine Jewsbury, which form a vivid glimpse of a precocious, fiery and impish tom-boy and of an emergent talent. An incorrigible revisionist, Carlyle accepted these memories, but took his distance from them, because they were ‘mythological’.

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community and to his adhesion to Pentecostal positions. In 1866, almost thirty years after Irving’s death, Carlyle remembered the strong ties they had once had. For this very reason the internal procedure of the recollection is laid bare. The figure of his long gone friend functions as the regulating background and as a point of reference, in the form of the periodical visits that the two friends made to one another after having lived together for so many years and after having shared so many formative experiences. In the intervals between one visit and another a Scotland and London diorama takes shape, with anecdotes and descriptions of marginal figures given as if freewheeling. The preacher Irving followed a tragically inverse journey to that of Carlyle, due to the speciousness and the simplicity of his faith, for which Carlyle never tired of reproaching him.87 § 25. Carlyle XVI: Last works One of the only three unitary works written in the last fourteen years of his life, the political pamphlet Shooting Niagara (1867) curses three disasters, recent or still pending: the victory of democracy, the collapse of the Church and of religion, and the triumph of economic liberalism. The blind fanaticism that greeted them is explained with the recourse to a bitter play on words: not the German Schwärmerei but the almost synonymous English homophone ‘swarm’, the swarm of bees attracted to the hive. Carlyle, who was writing shortly after the end of the American Civil War, leaves no doubt that he had supported the South. He indicated that he ‘rather like[d]’ the African slave, whom he described as ‘a poor blockhead with good dispositions, with affections, attachments’ and as ‘the only Savage of all the coloured races that doesn’t die out on sight of the White Man; but can actually live beside him, and work and increase and

87 The other more concise pieces of Reminiscences, which summarize Carlyle’s literary apprenticeship, are animated by a sharp and felicitous taste in noticing human idiosyncrasies. One is written on the slightly superficial and histrionic figure of Judge Jeffrey, who was also the editor of the Edinburgh Review in which Carlyle’s early essays on German literature had appeared; other sketches are dedicated to Southey, Wordsworth and to the dreaded critic, he too from Edinburgh, who crushed Tennyson so painfully (§ 81.1) and wrote under the pseudonym of Christopher North.

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be merry. The Almighty Maker has appointed him to be a Servant’. Thus the other metaphor latent in the title is clear: it refers to the turn for the worse of a society unable to see or imagine what was at the foot of the falls. The old recipe, that the aristocracy was trustworthy and still had cards to play, receives the only correction in an oligarchic sense: a ‘small aristocratic nucleus’ was all that was needed, that is a handful of people modelled on Carlyle himself, vigilant against lies, able to open other people’s eyes and gifted with religion and reverence. Immediately under comes the second figure, that of the silent or ‘Industrial’ hero, who has been by now almost co-opted into the aristocracy – in short, the practical aristocrat allied with the ‘titular’ aristocrat. It is clear that in the last, or almost the last of his works, Carlyle still fondled the idea of the feudal aristocracy and held high the portrait of the master who commanded, administered justice and banished the refractory. 2. Early Kings of Norway (1875) seems at first sight a hurried and even oversynthetic compilation, and one declaring its derivation and its plagiarism from a handbook of a German scholar on the history of the Danish people, printed several years before. The result is a concise historical sketch that moves forward in agile little chapters that are singularly quiet for the voice of a Carlyle. They cover an arc of almost three centuries, from 860 to 1170, and deal with the happenings in the ancient realms of Norway, Sweden and Denmark sung by Snorri. There is here a silent extension of Carlyle’s canons and historiographic procedures to a different time and geographical scene, now situated near the boundaries between history and legend. Carlyle the revisionist is still animated by the objective of rectifying encrusted visions and, therefore, not true or only partially so. Specific issues are raised, but are not solved. Dates that had been handed down and consolidated versions are contested or questioned. A framework of narrower relationships between the Scandinavians and the nearby England is brought into view, and they are looked at from the other side. Carlyle invariably applies his notion of history as continuity and contiguity of facts. A defined present is always rooted in the past; therefore every historical work is synchronic, genealogic and diachronic at the same time. As in Frederick the Great, history is always both collective and individual, but Scandinavian history was made up of and identified with several

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protagonists in succession, useful in showing – as if in a demonstration of the theory of historical recourses, or better still of anticipations – the repetitiveness of certain models. Carlyle retraces among the many kings immortalized by the sagas a scansion between anarchic kings and others devoted to order, and history as a non-linear succession of thrusts ahead or thrusts backwards, either towards and away from order. This proves that his grids worked in a completely natural fashion and in all kinds of historically given periods. Some Norwegian leaders had been aggregators, others had incited and perpetuated separation, some had become Christian and promoted their religion, others had remained pagan. Among the former there were also those who had precociously adopted utilitarian politics and were the forerunners of Bentham’s principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Others instead were those who, though religious, were dangerously polluting such a feeling with an excess of ritualism (and Carlyle does not hesitate to call them proto-Puseyites!). 3. The Portraits of John Knox (1875) constitutes in turn a largely repetitive enlargement of Carlyle’s ideas on John Knox, the Scottish Luther, prophet and visionary gifted with a kind of biting humour who had first appeared in Carlyle’s Heroes lectures in 1841. In an orderly manner, and with a spate of quotations, Carlyle recalls Knox’s early and courageous interventions in favour of the Scottish Reform, then his long European pilgrimage, and the extenuating resistance against the Queen Mary Stuart. At the same time his theological and apologetic works are examined and praised in highly eulogistic terms. Carlyle had never forgotten his ferocious partisan argument against sixteenth-century corrupt Catholicism that made Knox a useful internal ally and the precursor of Cromwell and the co-founder of English Puritanism exiled to America. The frame of a similar panegyric is quite new, and brings to mind Wilde in ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, because, faithful to his title, Carlyle begins and ends with a curious examination of all available portraits of the reformer, among which only one is presumably authentic. The late revisionism of Carlyle targets an inaccurate book of icons of Protestant reformers published in Geneva in 1580, and in so doing he throws aside other successive etchings, all coming from the first false model that had been taken for authentic. He concludes that the only one plausibly true is the copy of a portrait now lost

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and once the possession of a family of the Irish nobility. Carlyle reproaches his compatriot painter, Wilkie, for having copied from this false portrait ‘the intolerablest figure that exists’ of Knox. In this novel capacity as art critic Carlyle humbly asks the experts to authenticate the portrait that his intuition tells him to be the true one. His rough pictorial and aesthetic viewpoint is enclosed in the assumption that there is an agreement between the writings and the actions of the character – his ‘inward physiognomy’ – and his physical and pictorial representation. § 26. Newman* I: The charismatic defector An aphorism by John Henry Newman (1801–1890) marks the scope and meaning of his presence in English culture in the nineteenth century: 88

*

Collected Works, 40 vols, London 1874–1921; a selection of Newman’s writings, ed. C. F. Harrold, in 12 vols, New York 1947–1949, was interrupted after the eighth. A digital edition of Newman’s collected works is online on The National Institute of Newman’s Studies website. The numerous, separate and annotated editions include An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, ed. J. M. Cameron, Harmondsworth 1973; Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. M. J. Svaglic, Oxford 1967 (the best), ed. I. Ker, Harmondsworth 1994; The Idea of a University, ed. I. Ker, Oxford 1976; The Grammar of Assent, ed. I. Ker, Oxford 1985; Loss and Gain, ed. A. G. Hill, Oxford 1986. Anthologies edited by W. S. Lilly, London 1949; by G. Tillotson, London 1957; by I. Ker, The Genius of John Henry Newman, Oxford 1989. Letters ed. A. Mozley, 2 vols, London 1891; ed. C. S. Dessain et al., 31 vols, Oxford and London 1961–1984; Autobiographical Writings, ed. H. Tristram, London and New York 1956; Letters and Diaries, 32 vols, various editors, Oxford 1978–2010; Sermons 1824–1843, Oxford 1991–2010. Life. W. Ward, Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, 2 vols, London 1927; J. Lewis May, Cardinal Newman, London 1945; M. Trevor, Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud, and Newman: Light in Winter, London 1962, abridged edn in one vol. London 1974; C. S. Dessain, John Henry Newman, London 1966 (all of them fervidly hagiographic); I. Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography, Oxford 1989, 2009 (authoritative intellectual biography); S. Gilley, Newman and His Age, London 1990 (more vivacious); V. F. Blehl, Pilgrim Journey: John Henry Newman, 1801–1845, London 2001. Criticism. The following repertory excludes several hagiographic and popular works, and others of a strictly ecclesiological approach. R. H. Hutton, Cardinal Newman, London 1891; H. Brémond, Newman. Essai de biographie psychologique, Paris 1906; J. J. Reilly, Newman as a Man of Letters, London 1927; F. Olivero, La teoria poetica del Newman, Milano 1930; F. Tardivel, La personnalité littéraire de Newman, Paris 1937;

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‘True religion is slow in growth, and when once planted, is difficult of dislodgement’. Newman operated within the religious sphere, and his commitment was to the steadfast defence of the faith won. His religious conversion John Henry Newman: Centenary Essays, ed. H. Tristram, London 1945; C. F. Harrold, Newman: An Expository and Critical Study of his Mind, Thought and Art, New York 1945, Hamden, CT 1966; W. E. Houghton, The Art of Newman’s Apologia, New Haven, CT 1945; A. D. Culler, The Imperial Intellect: A Study of Newman’s Educational Ideal, New Haven, CT 1955; J. M. Cameron, John Henry Newman, London 1956; L. Obertello, Conoscenza e persona nel pensiero di John Henry Newman, Trieste 1964 (with a useful survey of Italian and international criticism); The Rediscovery of Newman: An Oxford Symposium, ed. J. Coulson and A. M. Allchin, London 1967; G. Levine, ‘Newman and the Threat of Experience’, in The Boundaries of Fiction, Princeton, NJ 1968, 164– 258; D. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold and Pater, Austin, TX 1969 (lists the borrowings between the three writers); T. Vargish, Newman: The Contemplation of Mind, Oxford 1970; D. A. Downes, The Temper of Victorian Belief, New York 1972, 82–124; O. Chadwick, Newman, Oxford 1983; John Henry Newman: A Man for Our Time?, ed. T. R. Wright, Newcastle upon Tyne 1983; S. Helmling, The Esoteric Comedies of Carlyle, Newman, and Yeats, Cambridge 1988, 97–153; John Henry Newman: A Man for His Time: Centenary Essays, ed. D. Brown, London 1990; I. Ker, The Achievement of John Henry Newman, London 1990; Newman after a Hundred Years, ed. I. Ker and A. G. Hill, Oxford 1990; G. Sheridan, Newman and His Age, London 1990; S. A. Grave, Conscience in Newman’s Thought, Oxford 1990; M. Hardman, ‘Newman and the University’, in Six Victorian Thinkers, Manchester 1991, 114–140; The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman, ed. I. Ker and T. Merrigan, Cambridge 2009. On the Oxford Movement in the history of religion and literature, and on Newman as its inspirer, see R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement, Twelve Years, 1833–1845, London 1891; J. E. Baker, The Novel and the Oxford Movement, New York 1932 and 1965 (purely card-indexing); B. Willey, Nineteenth Century Essays, London 1949, Harmondsworth 1964, 82–110; O. Chadwick, The Mind of the Oxford Movement, London 1960; The Oxford Movement, ed. E. R. Fairweather, London 1960; M. Maison, Search Your Soul, Eustace: A Survey of the Religious Novel in the Victorian Age, London and New York 1961 (this too a list of titles); S. Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church, Cambridge 1976; WOL, passim and 41–71 on Newman’s novels; G. B. Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode, Harvard, MA 1981; H. Fraser, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature, Cambridge 1986, 7–66; MVO on Keble’s echoes in Hopkins. Tractarian poetry is studied and indirectly retraced in several recent monographs on Hopkins, to whose bibliography (Volume 6, § 190) the reader is referred.

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was an inner travail that lasted no less than thirteen years, an agony at the ‘Anglican bedside’, as he himself termed it. The slowness with which he converted, by 1845, to the Roman Catholic faith, was proportional to the firmness with which he then treasured it. Central to this process was ‘development’ (a metaphorical development, like that of a plant). This was a both a figure which he applied (in a book published in 1845) to the history of the Church and also a personal, secret evolutionary mechanism. In neither case was the development inconclusive or permanent. It was rather oriented towards a stable point and directed towards a fixed goal. Given this understanding of his central commitment, the question that immediately arises is what is the legitimate place in the history of English literature for a Catholic convert who was later to be a priest and then a cardinal (and who was subsequently canonized). The first answer that comes to mind is that Newman was not only a religious writer (of theology, of preaching, of apologetics and of Church history) but was also a writer tout court. He was a serious imaginative writer, both a poet and a novelist, and he was also an illustrious, and for some unsurpassed, memoirist and polemicist.1 The second and most important reason is that Newman’s spiritual pathway was a paradigmatic and public one, an exemplum that made history, unreachable but tantalizing for many other writers, novelists and, in particular, poets. ‘I have ever made consistency the mark of a Saint’, is another of Newman’s memorable aphorisms. Newman’s life and reputation has parallels with Carlyle, who was his near-contemporary. And in Newman, Carlyle and Thomas Arnold of Rugby was established a triumvirate of shapers of the young English university students born between 1820 and 1850. The threefold reverberation flowing from them virtually ended towards the end of the century. 2. No reconstruction of the central characteristics of Victorian culture can ignore the resemblance among these three figures. Arnold forged at Rugby practically – no comparison can be made between the written productions – future ‘gentlemen’ according to principles not unlike those set out in Newman’s Idea of a University. The only difference here was that 1

He made use of what Saintsbury calls the eighteenth-century ‘Georgian’ style, the ‘best, for all purposes, in English’ (SAI, 791).

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Arnold depended on the guidance of the Bible alone, whereas Newman felt that that principle was not only inadequate and also aberrant from a doctrinal point of view. As early as 1833, the Anglican Newman (as he then was) surprised the English in Rome with the provocative question, ‘But is Arnold really a Christian?’2 The paradox lies in the fact that Arnold was held by Newman to be a Latitudinarian, that is a priest whose doctrine was compromised by a liberal spirit. Although this was anathema for Newman at the time, he would later put forward his own idea of a liberal culture which was far too progressive for ultramontane English Catholicism. Arnold’s students reached Oxford from Rugby during the 1830s full of anti-Catholic sentiment, but once there they could breathe in a widespread, disguised or explicit local feeling for the Roman Church. Carlyle and Newman had much in common and their influence was not, therefore, incompatible and contrasting but surprisingly harmonious, though for the two men the term ‘religion’ had slightly and perhaps even radically different meanings. The profession of faith in Newman the Tractarian, which in the Apologia amounts to three fundamental points, could have been endorsed, as far as two of them are concerned, by Carlyle. They are sacramentalism, the battle against liberalism, and faithful adherence to the dogma. Only on the latter cornerstone their collision is head-on. The surprises for a reader wanting to make a synchronic comparison between the written works of one or the other are unimaginable and never ending. The definitions left by Newman on religion and God could in fact be taken without altering a word for Carlyle’s and vice versa. The reform that Newman supported was naturally not the Protestant one, but a ‘second reform’ that would de-form and destroy the English Reformation.3 With regard to style, content and 2

3

Gilley 1990, 99. There is nothing to prove that Newman and Thomas Arnold’s knew each other personally (but see § 9.3), nor that Newman and Carlyle ever met. Newman was to debate at length with Kingsley in his most famous work without ever having met him. Newman granted that Carlyle was a genius (Ker 1989, 193), while, according to Froude, Carlyle said Newman had the brain of a rabbit. Both held that utilitarianism confused or could lead to confusing spiritual well-being with that of the body (Carlyle’s ‘stomach’). Like Carlyle, Newman rejected universal suffrage, and denied that it was a natural right. As far as history is concerned, he contested the legitimacy of the Puritan revolution as he did that of the French

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type of intervention, the difference is abysmal. Carlyle the historian is quick, inflamed, imaginative, stormy, always ready to take off in Pindaric flights, and hence elliptic; Newman the logician is a quiet master of circumspection. He was a fence-sitter who avoided a forward step unless reassured by a solid apparatus of guarantees. Carlyle makes much more noise than Newman, but that doesn’t mean that he spoke with greater effect; Newman is quieter, but wounds more deeply. The two different rhetorical genres are those of movere (Carlyle) and of docere (Newman). The fundamental divergence between the two thinkers was however that Carlyle had complete faith in the permanency of dynamism, while Newman held that dynamism had an end and a purpose, beyond which dynamism gave way to a perfect and fully satisfying stasis. History, according to Carlyle, as has already been pointed out, was a pattern of disorder, a disorder that as soon as it settles into order fatally breaks down once again and falls into a new disorder (and perpetual dynamism is a feature of Carlyle’s most illuminating essays). Newman’s intellectual process shows an antithetic mark and two ideal tempos: research and constancy. A change took place in him when he was forty-four years old, that is almost in the middle of his walk through life, and this change lasted until he was eighty-nine. Until 9 October 1845 practically never a day passed without Newman changing or revising his opinions; after that date nothing changed in his system of reached certainties. Newman, the student of ‘development’, had reached a point of no return, had ended his own development. The words with which the fifth and last chapter of Apologia opens – ‘From the time that I became a Catholic […] I have had no variations to record’ – are the confirmation that for precisely twenty years Newman had had no longer opinions but had held certainties, those defined in 1870 in The Grammar of Assent. The latter book, had there been any need for it, establishes in ‘persistence’ the inalienable and intrinsic character of certainty. This intellectual fixity accounts for the nature of my following discussion, achronic rather than (Note A of Apologia). After Gladstone had asserted that it was impossible to be loyal English citizens and good Catholics, Newman wrote one of his numerous apologies in the form of a letter to the Duke of Norfolk, Newman’s masterpiece in the field of political theory.

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synchronic. ‘Before’ and ‘after’ in Newman’s Catholic ideology do not exist, only synchrony and co-presence do. 3. The essence of faith defined by Newman only seemingly contradicts the sense of immutable and infallible certainty. Newman’s contemporary interlocutors whispered about his possible scepticism, and saw in him a probabilist, reminding us today, far from extravagantly, of Kierkegaard.4 The theologian Hutton5 took the view that, in order to avoid or control the anguish caused by such probabilism, Newman as a Tractarian longed for an institution which could offer security, protection, and dogmatic warranty like a strong Church. In this view the ‘jump’ from faith as probability to the complete assent to the Catholic dogma may appear rather sudden.6 Actually, though, Hutton shows that Newman does nothing but extract and treasure all the objectively available evidence. He accepts the limits of the intellect, and faith leans on what one may call a margin or residue of evidence. Newman, for example, accepted the post-Scriptural miracles only selectively rather than en bloc. If, however, faith is based on ‘antecedent probabilities’, and if it varies according to the moral temperament and requires personal predisposition of the individual – if it is, as is commonly said, a gift of God – might it be not the case that Newman remains subtly bound to that evangelical Calvinism that he claimed to have rooted out? A drastically simplified summary of Newman’s faith would be to say that he who has faith is someone who already has it. ‘We believe because we love’, implies ‘we believe because we already believe’. This predisposition to faith by divine grace was witnessed by Newman in his own family, as his brother Francis eventually became an uneasy sceptic. For Newman, faith, in the last analysis, belonged not to the domain of logic and of sense experience but to that of feeling and the will; it was not a conclusion arrived at from

4 5 6

See on this a synthetic and wise reference in Svaglic 1967, 565. Newman held, even when a Catholic, and simply as a hypothesis, that even if he had had ‘ten thousand difficulties’ in believing, taken all together they would not have made a doubt. Hutton 1891, 50–1. Vargish 1970, 47.

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an argument or discussion, but ‘the result of an act of will, which follows the conviction that to believe is a duty’.7 4. The shadow of Newman, who was shy by nature and averse from proselytizing,8 enshrouded, even involuntarily, all the English Oxfordians by 1870. His myth began to take shape at the end of the 1820s when as an Anglican university preacher he delivered his sermons from the pulpit of St Mary’s. These both showed his profound knowledge of the Christian doctrine and overflowed with spirituality. His magnetic personality and his famously beautiful voice brought ecstatic musical peace to doubtful and agitated souls. There were fewer direct witnesses of his charismatic preaching by the early 1840s, because by this time, driven on by his keen examination of the revealed faiths, Newman had abjured Anglicanism and become a Catholic. He had chosen to go into ‘exile’ at Littlemore, just outside Oxford, and subsequently founded and led the Roman Catholic Oratory in Birmingham. His notoriety, which had hitherto been restricted to the university, now spread, and he aroused the obvious condemnation of the established Anglican Church, of university teachers and a number of influential public figures. Yet he had been almost forgotten at Oxford when in 1864 his Apologia pro Vita Sua appeared and brought him renewed attention and a fresh readership. The greatest successes of Newman as a soul-shaper were harvested within the narrow circle of the adherents to his Oxford Movement. They were therefore ecclesiastics, pedagogues and some other public figures. His magnetism made less impact in the literary world, yet without him Victorian literature would have been deprived of Hopkins, and Clough and Matthew Arnold would have written a different and less dispairing kind of poetry. Newman influenced profoundly and shaped the destinies of adepts of the via media, in other words people who were in perpetual anguish. Many, like Pater, stopped short of commitment to Catholicism. Pater paused before taking that last step and was unable to cross the ford and reach the other side. The only eminent poet who took the same spiritual journey was Hopkins. Here Newman may have offered 7 8

Ibid., 82. J. A. Froude, instead, not only defined him ‘a power in the world’, but saw him as being similar physically to Julius Caesar.

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ill-judged guidance, for, having led him into the Catholic fold, he advised him to become a Jesuit priest. As poet and novelist Newman always obeyed the warning with which he addressed the artists, that art was ad maiorem Dei gloriam. Hopkins’s writing, by contrast, was the product of a state of perennial contradiction and division. He was unable to overcome the conviction that the practice of art was independent from his priestly vocation and untouched by the lure of public fame. Newman was a voracious reader of novels and by the end of the 1840s he was among the first to understand the power of their widespread popularity and to use them as a forum for religious debate. He was a skilful polemicist and he exploited the novel not as a simple narrator, although he had the gift and the predisposition. Had he lacked the controversial flair Newman the novelist could be closely compared to Alessandro Manzoni in his providential view of life; a view which was, therefore, anti-naturalistic and anti-deterministic, and was thus in tension with the contemporary secular and social concerns of the French and English realist novel.9 Much of Newman’s large output comprises writings of apologetics, and is doctrinal, polemical and pedagogical. It can therefore reasonably be argued that he belongs less to literary history than to ecclesiology. Newman is the British standard bearer of a closed and conservative orthodoxy that takes up the challenges thrown by contemporary evolutionists, reductionists, and scientists. The place that he occupied for a good half-century in England was not that of the hermit in his den, typical of other nostalgic medievalists. He was a primitivist – or rather, to be more precise, a patristic – and this is different from being a medievalist. If Hopkins found in St Simeon Stylite his alter ego, Newman was inspired by a worldly, witty and ever serene saint, St Philip Neri. His religiousness has therefore a Renaissance, Baroque and even Tridentine strain. 5. In Anglican circles Newman’s conversion was considered a vile betrayal. A further twist to this is that once converted to Rome he was suspected of heresy by the Roman Church. As an Anglican priest who had converted he seemed to be removed from the great causes of nineteenthcentury Catholicism, such as the infallibility of the Pope, the question of 9

It is superfluous to underline that the life and work of both Newman and Manzoni revolve around the central experience of conversion.

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the temporal power and the ecclesiology of authority. This was because he always held the primacy of the conscience to be superior to Catholic practice.10 The Catholic hierarchies misunderstood him, to the extent that he was presented as the precursor of Modernism. In the years when religious Modernism was fashionable Newman enjoyed an ambiguous esteem, but his reputation sank in 1907 when Modernism was condemned. Froude pointed out, and perhaps rightly – bearing in mind Carlyle’s perspective on the matter – that Newman might have been a different man had he known German. By mid-century German had been established as the language of theological scholarship and biblical criticism. Newman was also unfamiliar with Italian theology, but he was at home with French theological writing and with Chateaubriand, de Maistre, Lamennais and Lacordaire. His conversion to Catholicism was thus anything but a triumphal march, despite the seeming easiness of his temperament and the eternal smile on his lips. He was unsuccessful in several of his initiatives, whether as Rector of the new Irish Catholic University established in 1858, or as editor of the Catholic periodical The Rambler. A twin oratory was founded in London by Newman’s rival, the zealous Italianate Wilfrid Faber, and a projected new translation of the Bible with Newman as co-ordinator came to nothing. From the point of view of the history of Catholicism in England, he must be seen as a third figure – in fact the greatest – of a triad made up of Cardinal Wiseman, his open supporter, and of the extremely thick-skinned Cardinal Manning. Manning was an eminently practical prelate, jealous of Newman and certainly quicker at seizing the initiative in making a rapid career for himself. Having succeeded Wiseman as Primate of England from 1865, Manning thwarted Newman on several occasions, as did other prelates loyal to directives from the Vatican. Above all he was forbidden to found a Catholic oratory at Oxford. The letters sent by Newman to Manning and to the Pontifical Secretary Monsignor Talbot were often vitriolic telegrams that, we can easily imagine, left their recipients flabbergasted. Manning 10

As we read in Newman’s Loss and Gain the actual Papacy did not correspond to the result theoretically to be drawn from the development of the Christian doctrine. However, in 1870 Newman made known that he only approved of the untimeliness of the declaration of the infallibility of the Pope.

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was also forced to swallow the nomination of Newman as cardinal in 1879. This nomination was due to Leo XIII who wanted to give a tangible sign of reconciliation to the various national Catholic Churches of the Continent. Still, Manning gave a noble funeral oration after Newman’s death. Newman’s vibrant and indefectible ecumenism made him a prophet whom Catholics rediscovered almost a century later, and a precursor of the Second Vatican Council, which some regarded as Newman’s own Council due to the frequency with which his name was evoked by the Council fathers.11 § 27. Newman II: ‘Apologia pro Vita Sua’ I. Occasion, background and objectives of the intellectual autobiography Newman’s works up to 1845 are all reabsorbed and synthetized, in their most essential and anticipatory constituents, in Apologia pro Vita Sua. This work comprises both Newman’s intellectual autobiography and, indirectly, his purely human one up to the age of forty-four. One may follow its linear progressions as an alternative to a traditional biography, with small integrations from later biographies written by others. Apologia reorganizes an itinerary of such pinpoint precision in its forward movement, and one so captious, that the neophyte wishing to go through it in detail risks losing sight of the supporting scaffolding, unless he is already well grounded in matters theological. Newman’s writings before 1845 had been in turn Anglican, anti-Catholic and then Anglo-Catholic, and finally vaguely and problematically Catholic. They are, therefore, largely theoretical, homiletic, doctrinal, and rooted within the history of the Church, the heresies and the schisms, and they deal with the revision of the Anglican theological doctrine. From this textual body, closed in 1845, the poetical works and two novels must be looked at and discussed apart as having greater autonomy and a real literary interest. But they are touched in passing in Apologia. In retrospect the man and the thinker 11

Svaglic 1967, xii-xiv. Newman prophetically heralded the theology of the laity, one of the fundamental principles of post-Council Catholic theology. Ker 1989, ix, felt that Newman, who was then simply ‘venerable’, would have deserved to be among the Doctors of the Church.

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of 1864 could retrace a better defined and oriented teleology in his own intellectual experiences than the younger man who was living thorough the sequence of those experiences. But it would distorting and unhelpful to bewail the temporal lapses, the flagrant absences of facts and names, and omissions of other kinds in the Apologia. Sharp distinction between what is true or false, or ‘reticent’, is out of place in the Apologia – which, it must be said once again, gives an idea of Newman’s conversion as he remembered and reconstructed it later. In this book Newman put into perspective his spiritual apprenticeship according to the outlook both of 1845 and of 1864. It must nevertheless be kept in mind that these two dates overlap, and that the certainties reached in the one will be exactly those of the writer in the other. Hence it is limiting to call the Apologia an autobiography, because it is an apologia in the classic and literal sense of the word, and one that from the specific use of the Latin title knowingly claims its inclusion in the great century-old repertory of ideological battles. Any comparison with St Augustine’s Confessions or with the spiritual and often mystical autobiographies of the evangelicals and of the Calvinists at the end of the eighteenth century, which Newman had read, has little importance. The Apologia is a detailed account of ideas, or ‘opinions’, that even at a distance of more than twenty years were so clearly outlined in Newman’s memory that he could go over them once again and re-examine them as though that intellectual process were a fresh experience of the day before. The work communicates the sense of a complete involvement of one’s personality, of a never failing daily immersion in the search for the true faith. Newman had indeed no ‘romantic story to tell’, but occasionally the neutral argumentative register gives way. ‘I felt as on board a vessel’, he says, and one that had to throw the ballast overboard; this nautical metaphor is ever present in Newman, perhaps because it had its roots in a voyage to Sicily taken in 1832–1833, the true turning point of his conversion. The image was picked up again at the end, the end of an intellectual journey, when happily the ship had reached harbour and had been anchored in the port ‘after a rough sea’. 2. What were the reasons then that induced Newman in January 1864 to violate his ‘secretum meum mihi?’ Never was such a crucial work due to so banal, if not casual, an occasion, or to such a very small diplomatic

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incident. It could have been immediately hushed up, but instead it grew to have an epochal resonance. Charles Kingsley was the treacherous originator of the incident, since he was the author of a parenthetic barb against Newman camouflaged in a magazine review (the review itself had nothing to do with Newman). This review was however sent to Newman for his perusal by a Yorkshire Catholic priest. The editor’s reply to the first of Newman’s letters opened his eyes to the fact that the review, which had appeared anonymously, was not by just any unknown person but by a university professor of history, which Kingsley was at the time. Newman felt impelled to ask both for an immediate explanation and for a public recantation. This was for two reasons: Kingsley enjoyed high academic prestige at the time, and the work that Kingsley had reviewed was a history of the Elizabethan Age, in other words the historical moment that had given birth to the English schism and, therefore, to the century-old prejudice against the Catholics. In addition, there probably had been an unacknowledged personal motivation. The author of that historical work was James Anthony Froude, the brother of Hurrell Froude, a deeply loved Tractarian and contemporary of Newman who had died young in 1836. Hurrell Froude had been Newman’s natural right-hand man, if not the co-founder of the Tractarian Movement; as such he had been another in pectore Catholic like Newman. Froude the historiographer, also one of Newman’s pupils, was instead a Tractarian renegade.12 But what defamation did that review contain? The passage in question was only five lines long, and in it Newman was accused of falseness and sly craftiness, like all Catholics. He was also declared an open apologist for slyness and doubledealing. Froude added, with a cryptic allusion to his hobby-horse – the unnatural nature of priests being celibate – that slyness had always been used as the weapon with which the Catholic saints had tamed their carnal appetites, which was as much as saying that he did not swear that every one of them had always been chaste. Newman sensed that he had reached the moment to counterattack. Public opinion was against Newman because as a sworn enemy of the Catholic faith he had first become a defector from 12

§ 33.

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Anglicanism and subsequently a Catholic convert. The years from 1833 up to the present had been for Newman full of suspicion, of rumours and of scandals. In the Apologia he discharged a primary personal purpose woven with a collective one of no less importance. He defended himself but, at the same time, he aimed at restoring the good reputation of the Catholic clergy, which had been smirched by the same accusation of falsity. The prejudice that weighed most, and which had become by now insupportable, was that he, Newman, as a ‘hidden’ or disguised Catholic had plotted well before 1845 to make Catholic converts and had kept up secret contacts with clandestine Catholicism in England. It was the selfsame, subtle, recurrent machination that Kingsley himself was displaying in his novels set in Elizabethan times: a plot structure in which a priest, often a Jesuit, tries to entrap the doubtful and secure their fortune to the Roman Church. This view of Catholic priests was also illustrated by Disraeli, Reade and Henry Kingsley in contemporary settings.13 3. Newman had no intention of letting Kingsley get away with it. He had already defended himself (though with less force) but now he decided to go ahead with a reasoned demonstration of the crude groundlessness of the accusation. The Apologia came out in a first edition in serial form on successive Thursdays, in seven numbers between April and June in 1864. Newman felt that he needed to strike while the iron was hot, so Apologia adopted the same kind of serial publication that was currently favoured by novelists. During 1865 the first two of the seven sections, which contained the chronicle of the conversion and a series of answers in detail to Kingsley’s slanders, were summarised and conflated in a preface. It is this second version approved by Newman that has come down to us. Between the first and second edition Newman tried to smooth over any marks of haste and of urgency, and Kingsley is never named. Hence the discourse is not a cross-examination but a monologue. Such an editorial decision was perhaps necessary but also unfortunate. The Apologia of 1865 is everything but a masterpiece and anything but the masterpiece by Newman; or, more precisely, it is that, but in its enlarged form, which means taking 13

See Volume 5, § 17 (Disraeli), § 167 (Reade), and § 157.1 (Kingsley).

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in the preface, the material thrown aside, the notes and all the appendixes. Its weakest aspect is the doctrinal subtlety and the constant reference to a myriad of minor and fleeting personalities. Newman frequently quotes himself, summarizing or even repeating verbatim the content of his earlier writings. He also inserts ellipses that lead to odd and at times disconnected episodes. Many of these facts and these people, and much of the doctrinal content, were understood by the cultured in 1864, or perhaps already even then only by an elite of professional theologians. Apologia proves scarcely serviceable in our time except for the pure adepts, and needs an ample glossary. Inevitably this continually interrupts the reading and compromises the pleasure that could be found in it. The parts omitted and the addenda taken together form a second centre. The notes marked out in capital letters are admirably clear, and the preparatory NewmanKingsley exchange has an archaic robustness which re-echoes the great philosophical and theological challenges of the Middle Ages. The reader has to go from page to page holding the thread of disquisitions that at times seems nominalist or quintessentially sophistic. The papers from which the Apologia derives form a little epistolary novel, made up of letters by anonymous writers who are soon unmasked, or apologies that are taken for attacks, of interventions, skilful parries and pointed thrusts. Kingsley did not want the work to get out of proportion. He sought to withdraw from the quarrel, but Newman had already got him in his grip and in a kind of argumentative blackmail. Somewhat lazily, Kingsley was quick to acknowledge that Newman was unbeatable in his sibylline fence-sitting. Newman in turn admitted the ‘tentativeness’ of his thought, and that he had fought using the doctrine of ‘economy’, or reserve, or in other words of the step-by-step revelation of the truth and even of the plan of God by God himself. Kingsley lost his bearings in the course of the argument, but, surprisingly, was in the end vindicated. Newman argued to too great an extent and at too great length on the Catholic art of equivocating, and on the legitimacy or, at least, the non-sinfulness of a lie. Kingsley was later induced to use a rudimental deconstructionism when he wrote a detailed pamphlet rightly called ‘What, then, does Dr Newman really mean?’ There he insinuated that perhaps Newman himself did not know at that time what he was trying to say. It was Kingsley who

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brought out in Newman that teleology recognized ex post by Newman himself.14 § 28. Newman III: ‘Apologia pro Vita Sua’ II. Drifting to the shore Much as Carlyle had read the sceptics and encyclopaedists, such as Hume, Paine and Voltaire, the teenage Newman’s religious doubts developed as a consequence of the routines of Anglican worship. At the age of fifteen he moved from Anglicanism towards Calvinism. Calvinism offered certainty, a conviction that he belonged among the ‘elect’. Immediate influences here were the autobiography of the theologian Scott (and other preachers) as well as the example of his first schoolteacher. He had thus absorbed ab ovo the powerful and fiery Antichrist of the evangelicals, and the current vituperative condemnation of the Pope as Antichrist. In his account of this stage Newman makes, in the Apologia, a distinction between the imagination – unconscious, spontaneous – and coldly reasoned judgement; these were two contrasting entities. It was as a consequence of a mystic flash of inspiration that he remained celibate all his life (an indirect refutation of Kingsley’s innuendo about his emotional nature). He partially overcame his youthful Calvinism as a consequence of reading Bishop Butler’s Analogy. This famous work reached a conclusion about the existence of God on the basis of an accumulation of probabilities, not by a direct demonstration founded on evidence. Newman’s doubts about the Anglican position developed during the writing of his first book on the Arians of the fourth century, in 1832 (though there had been an earlier indication of his doubts in his reaction to Keble’s apostasy sermon).15 His book on the Arians was a history of the Arian heresy and of the Councils that condemned it. The significance that Newman attributed to tradition here seems more Catholic

14

15

Kingsley was voicing, as I am saying, a widespread suspicion among the English with regard to the falseness of the Catholics, and when Newman’s epoch ended Kingsley’s prejudiced impatience revived. Kingsley, after all, got easily and readily back on his feet (Svaglic 1967, xli n. 2). For further information on this revanche by Kingsley, still alive today, see Helmling 1988, 249–51 n. 7. See Volume 3, § 221.

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than Protestant or Anglican. The originality of his study lies in assigning the origin of the heresy to Antioch rather than Alexandria, and to Aristotelian rather than Platonic influence. The point here is the parallelism noticed between Arianism and contemporary liberalism. Newman’s problem at that time (a problem with unforeseeable consequences) was how to keep the Anglican Church distant from liberalism. He was still unaware that Anglicanism was itself a hypostasis of liberalism. Slowly an idea grew in him of a Second Reform, along with the suspicion that the English Church was not the organ of a ‘catholic’ and apostolic Church, that is universal and supranational. The first part of the Apologia ends with the narration of a voyage to Sicily that Newman, feeling exhausted after concluding his book on the Arians, had taken together with the Froudes, both father and son, in 1832–1833.16 The episode is narrated in visionary flashes, and the Roman scenes, the meetings with the future Cardinal Wiseman, the Easter service, the Sicilian illness and the invocation for ‘light’, all wheel around one after the other. In Sicily, Newman the rationalist lost control of the diabolic-angelic element and thought he was receiving arcane warnings and Pauline signs. Newman’s biography is marked, in the rereading made by its own subject, by similar swerves and by intuitive flashes that surprise an overvigilant reason. 2. Newman, who did not know Kingsley personally, condemned the intellectual position rather than the individual who held it. He hated the sin but not the sinner. He was very firm in professing absolute objectivity. In order to do this, he had to show that his own conversion to Catholicism was reached not (or not primarily) through direct contact with English Catholics but rather by extensive reading and objective and independent inquiry. English people who flirted with intellectual Catholicism were nevertheless horrified by what they perceived as the corruption and vice of Roman Catholic countries in general and of Italy in particular. All the fervour of Newman and the Tractarians was exclusively mental and intellectual. Three phrases, or headings, came to be associated with the movement of which Newman was the father. The first is the Oxford Movement, 16

What a difference between this voyage and the journey to the East taken at the same time by Disraeli (Volume 5, § 9.2).

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the second is Tractarian and the third (and most persistent) is Puseyism. Most of the Tracts for the Times were published anonymously and were the expression of a group; those which were not anonymous were signed by Pusey. While Newman and Hurrell Froude and others were ‘no one’ in particular in 1833, Pusey had a high reputation. He was known at Oxford as a man of great learning and a prestigious university professor. Newman never claimed more authority than was his due, and indeed the Oxford Movement, however understood (Tractarian or Puseyite), continued to exist, somewhat weakened, after Newman’s conversion to Catholicism.17 He recalled that he always left his disciples free to make their own choices and that he had neither the capacity nor the vocation to be a tyrannical leader. He was a democrat directing a free platform, presided over by a ‘spirit’. He was reluctant to discuss and display his early principles and claims to revealed truth, as guaranteed by the word of God, though he did stir the consciences of his followers by pointing out to them certain fixed points and immutable guidelines that had to be kept. He imposed strict limits on potentially hazardous lines of inquiry.18 What he found congenial in Keble was the indication of a ‘Butlerian’ probability (as one might phrase it) that what was believed was always more true than false (and that, therefore, there was no point in having doubts about it). Newman always had a natural resistance to innovations and to a censorious critical spirit. For thirteen years he tried to give up the contortions required to find a via media or middle way between Protestantism and Catholicism. Indeed, as early as 1833 he knew that Rome could not make any compromise with Anglicanism without the latter’s formal acceptance of the theses of the Council of Trent. 3. The cultural origin of the Oxford Movement was composite, a spontaneous meeting of initiatives and suggestions from diverse and convergent sources. Newman dated its beginnings on 14 July 1833 and put it down to Keble’s sermon on national apostasy. That was a protest against 17 18

Newman was not present both at an early meeting – that for some laid the foundations of the Movement – in the summer of 1823 at Keble’s (with Froude, Wilberforce and other Oxonians [see Svaglic 1967, 495]) and at another in July 1833. See the eighteen ‘theses’ in Note A of the Apologia.

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the Erastian politics of the Whigs, who had introduced a bill wanting to suppress various episcopal sees and to abolish clerical grants. One of the ideological cornerstones of the Movement was the reaffirmation of the divine origin of the Church, which had become a clerical institution managed and manoeuvred by Parliament. The Church should instead be independent and it alone was entitled to the right of defining belief. Its theological flaw consisted in the fact that the Anglican Church held that faith was founded on the Bible, while instead, for Newman, its depositary was the Apostolic Church. In this way Newman and his followers began to raise doubts concerning the justification by faith alone contained in the Eleventh of the Thirty-Nine Articles. For the Tractarians, however, the only and true direct descendant of the Apostolic Church was the Anglican Church, which was the primitive church cleansed of all Roman corruption. Behind all this, behind even Newman’s conversion – obviously bearing in mind that that this was a well-grounded and perfectly conscious decision – lay the English nightmare of schism, and the century-old yearning to be part of a cultural organism in which England found herself at the moment simply peripheral. The historical example on which the Tractarians based themselves was that of those Anglican bishops – the so-called ‘non jurors’ – who had refused to submit to William and Mary in 1689 – thus becoming the first anti-Erastians. They had been faithful to an earlier oath sworn to King James, and had thus created a small schismatic Church. Only one third of the Tracts, the first of which came out in September 1833 after Newman’s adventurous return to Oxford from his continental journey, were written or edited by Newman himself. The first three were loose sheets of four, four, and seven pages respectively; the following ones became slowly longer and longer. Their distribution was widespread, and they reached the suburban English curates, delivery being ensured by pony express carriers.19 The initial note was resistance to ecclesiastic liberalism. This was immediately opposed by the more fearful sympathizers. At the same time the usages and rites of the primitive Church were examined as models for the desired reform of the Anglican Church. Newman insisted on three

19

Gilley 1990, 116–19.

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points: absolute faith in the dogma, a visible Church connected to the invisible, and a definite refusal of Romanism (though from one of Keble’s poems he had learnt the need to ‘speak sweetly’ of the ‘fallen sister’). All rational approach to the Catholic faith was blocked by feelings of hostility, although this prejudice was eroded by Hurrell Froude, a champion of primitive Christianity and also of the Marian cult. The emotional answer that Newman had experienced in Sicily was thus overturned, for there feelings had spurred the onlooker to, rather than distanced him from, Romanism and a faith noticeable in the fervour of the poor peasants seen at church. In a book of 1837 Newman had focused for the first time on the relationships between the two faiths, and elaborated his theory of a via media, called ‘no servile imitation of the past, but such a reproduction of it as is really new, while it is old’. The extremely subtle distinctions launched in this book evidence the desire to erect an unconscious barrier. There were Catholic teachings, dogmas and traditions of which the first had been accepted by the Anglicans, the second only in part, and the third decidedly condemned as popular errors. Ergo one could read the Thirty-Nine Articles as being not anti-Catholic. Newman, immediately afterwards, looked at himself in the mirror, and discovered with horror that he was a schismatic thanks to the study of another heresy, that of the Monophysites. He applied to it a parallelism that was later morbidly exploited by the historical novelists of the two successive generations. That is, he retraced in the past religious dilemmas that were at the same time contemporary and also future. A beautiful, dramatically relived passage in Newman’s Apologia narrates how he found himself, at the end of that book, despoiled, naked, that is without a positive theology and with the feeling that the Catholic Church embodied more truthfully his three principles. With amazement he felt he had to begin an alternative pars destruens of Catholicism, since the old accusations were dead. Equally gradual was his distancing from the more conventional prejudices that saw the biblical Antichrist in the Pope and in Catholicism. After the summer of 1841 Newman, still formally an Anglican, was called on to dissuade the young who, influenced by the Tracts, were on the point of converting to Rome. He replied that this would have tempted others if his positions were not accepted by the Anglican ecclesiastical hierarchy.

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4. In Newman’s view of the matter, acceptance of Catholicism did not necessarily follow from the slow death of Anglicanism, but from his personal viewpoint he now understood the he had either to go ahead or turn back.20 A further justification for holding back was what he perceived as the absence of holiness in the Roman Church. Still, despite his hesitations and doubts in his exile at Littlemore, it was believed that he was shaping various Catholic sympathizers and steering them to the monastic life. He rather over-scrupulously dissuaded every one of his followers from becoming Catholic. After the ninetieth Tract was condemned in 1843 and publication suspended, Newman resigned from his post as Anglican minister and, in the meantime, held epistolary communications with the Anglican Bishop of Oxford as well as with converted Catholics. In 1864 he tackled the objection that he should have left Anglicanism earlier. His hesitation had been a measure of his honesty, and reveals that for a long time he was far from certain of the step he was about to take, as the numerous protestations of Anglican orthodoxy witness, up until a few hours before his conversion. He tested himself resolutely by writing his fundamental Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.21 Originally the book was supposed to show that the two confessions had at least the same assurance in proclaiming that theirs was the true faith, but the summation of Butler’s probabilities started leaning towards Catholicism as the work proceeded. The choice being forced on him had become either Catholic or atheist, rather than two ‘homes half way down the road’. Anglicanism had become openly and flagrantly schismatic. The Church of Rome of the present differed from the Church of the Fathers, and also from the early Church, but remained consonant with it. It was recognized as a fruit born from the seed, and different from the seed, but only as the grown plant is different. One only needed to pick out the criteria of true and false developments 20 In 1841 an Anglo-Prussian agreement in view of the appointment of the Protestant bishop of Jerusalem was denounced by Newman as another blatant example of separatism: if bishops appointed by England and Prussia were to alternate, Anglicanism was coextensive with Lutheranism (BAUGH, vol. IV, 1293). 21 The book, which applies a vague evolutionary key fourteen years before Darwin, was first published in 1845 and completely revised by Newman for the 1878 reprint.

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(or to identify only those that in appearance were developments). He had unknowingly traced out the mise en abyme of his own career, and the historico-doctrinal development was reflected in the mental and personal itinerary of his conversion. The Development was not closed at the end of 1845 because it was submerged by the movement of events. With the fifth and last section of the Apologia the story of Newman’s ‘opinions’ ends. His conversion was a certainty that did not need further revisions. It had become a granitic belief that could no longer be modified. 5. The other founding members of the Oxford Movement were Pusey, a university professor of Hebrew; Keble, a poet and preacher who, once he had left Oxford, took up a tranquil life as a country curate; Church, a headmaster and dean; Mark Pattison, another rector, who was also a literary critic, polemicist, scholar of the Renaissance and author himself of a very sincere autobiography about his religious conflicts. Newman’s ascendency can be gauged by the number of converts to the Catholic faith (estimated as at least a hundred) and by the fact that for many years all the English converts after 1845 attributed their conversion to him. Face to face with this substantial mass there was not only the tail-end of the Oxford Movement that Pusey, above all, continued to keep alive, but also the boomerang effect that struck a circle of followers and sympathizers who became atheists. Hurrell Froude’s younger brother, James Anthony, is a classic example. Further, many Englishmen, concurrently with Newman, were in step with his progress but never made his final courageous decision. They were inclined to waver on the border between the two confessions. The anguished, doubting, undecided young man became a familiar and contagious figure. In the literary field Newman’s influence generated a narrative subgenre that became very popular, if undistinguished. The so-called Tractarian novel is today exemplified by books filed away in dusty archives and written by long forgotten authors. They included a series of minor women writers (to be dealt with as they appear on the horizon).22 In a very general sense, any Victorian novel that introduces Anglican Puseyites (with a degree of suspicion or with a polemical spirit) is Tractarian at least e contrario. Such novels were written

22

Disraeli, a kind of loose Tractarian, lost faith after 1850 and Newman’s defection.

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by Charles Reade and by the two Kingsley brothers. On the other hand there were ‘Tractarian’ novels, like that by James Anthony Froude, that become anti-Tractarian and anti-religious. Still others, like John Inglesant by Shorthouse, fall well beyond 1870. Tractarian poetry, like that in Newman’s little volume Lyra Apostolica in 1834, is on the whole equally undistinguished. Except for the Tractarian originator Keble, who has already been discussed with the Romantic poets because of his association with the vague sacramentalism of the late Wordsworth, and Digby Dolben, no other Tractarian poet is worthy of being treated and evaluated separately, and almost all may be discussed in relation to Hopkins.23 The Tractarian vein was subject to hybridizations, for example with the devout côté of the Pre-Raphaelites. In this sense Christina Rossetti comes forward as the Tractarian poet par excellence, along with the early Hopkins.24 § 29. Newman IV: The poetry. ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ Newman, as is often remembered, was the son of a banker used to drawing up accounts (though the economic crisis that followed the Napoleonic Wars bankrupted him, and he was obliged to work as manager of a distillery). Newman’s mother was the descendent of Huguenot refugees. From her he inherited an almost feminine sensitivity, witnessed by the facility with which the inflexible and often cold and cutting polemicist was moved to tears when struck by the loss of friends and loved ones. As a child, in collaboration with a school friend, Newman had written a poem (now lost) on the massacre of St Bartholomew. This precocious piece, together with his undergraduate poems, has been used to argue that as an adolescent and at Oxford, even before he rejected the idea of being a lawyer and put on the priest’s cassock, he vaguely thought of becoming a poet. Further, the argument is that Newman embraced theology and then

See, for a panorama, M. Johnson, Gerald Manley Hopkins and Tractarian Poetry, Aldershot 1997, and Volume 6, § 213. 24 Newman’s influence on the two Catholic poets, Francis Thompson and Coventry Patmore, was limited if not nil. Patmore had been converted, in fact, by his historical rival, Cardinal Manning, and according to Newman he mixed sensuality with religion in his poetry. 23

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Catholicism for their aesthetic and ritualistic appeal. On the ‘romantic’ genesis of Newman’s Catholicism, thanks to the contact with that mediator of Wordsworth, Keble, one may agree. However, such an agreement can only work on condition that this origin does not become radicalized, and Newman’s Catholicism is not presented as ingenuous and spontaneous. His Catholicism is intellectually elaborated with painstaking accuracy, under the thrust of that doctrine and that practice of ‘development’25 which was in effect to rapidly drain his Romanticism of any aesthetic mark. As a matter of fact, in The Idea of a University, where Newman recognizes the high educative function of the great literature of all times, aesthetic religion itself, as we shall see, is stigmatized as being an anti-religion. To speak then of Newman as a Romantic and post-Romantic without keeping this in mind, lowers him to the ranks of those minor Tractarian curates, rather amateurish and affected, who were satirized in the novels, for example, of Kingsley and Thackeray.26 2. The 1829 essay ‘Poetry with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’ is in itself nothing more than an ‘irreverent’ and confused school exercise, but it seems to radiate a glimmer of that ‘real apprehension’ of which the author would have been the champion. Newman sided against Aristotle, whom he accused of having a ‘cold’ and ‘formal’ conception of Greek plays – the tyrannical category of the plot – and of being unable to appreciate what in it – the characters, the passions, the enchanting beauty of the poetry – struck and seduced the imagination. Aesthetics did not lean on reason, if a fortiori even faith didn’t. Once finished with his attack on Aristotle, Newman ventures into some rather chaste precepts that denote the effects of the precipitous demonization of Byron, then in fashion among the

25

The most exhaustive discussion of the incipient Romantic Catholicism of Newman is in Fraser 1986, which shows how Catholicism could represent the spirit of poetry in the Tractarian imagination, much more so than Anglicanism. 26 As far as I know no one has refuted Vargish 1970, 49 n. 1, on the meaning given by Newman to the term ‘imagination’, which he often uses, and which is not the same thing that Coleridge intended; for ‘imagination’, therefore, one must understand more or less Coleridge’s ‘fancy’ (ibid., 48). Newman did not read Coleridge before 1835.

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critics.27 Poetry in Newman’s argument is nothing more than a string of beautiful natural scenes to which the poet adds small moral and gnomic lessons. The rectitude and the religiousness of the poet are the same as poetic sentiment,28 and narrative poetry consists in functions that make each happening an ideal fact; each poet moves from experience, but does away with its individuality and peculiarities, and thus performs an abstraction. The aesthetics of the present and of the concrete is ruined by the emphasis put on the generalizing faculties of the particular. Newman sees this privileging of particularity as a distinctive feature of poetry. This approach seems to have brought Newman into a blind alley, or rather to a circular and obscure piece of writing that is far from his ‘development’. From this he then claims, abruptly, as the presumed ‘result of the theory explained above’, that ‘revealed religion’ is inherently poetical, because it discloses an originality that satisfies the intellect and a beauty that satisfies the ‘moral nature’. The evangelic virtues of humility, of kindness, of compassion, and of modesty are also said to be particularly poetic. This youthful essay is thus among the many post-Romantic aesthetics representing the transition to the Victorian morality in art, or from the cult of beauty tout court to truth. 3. Newman’s poems were collected for the first time, together with those of other Tractarian friends, in 1834 in the anthology Lyra Apostolica. The complete 1868 edition, Verses on Various Occasions, was personally edited by Newman because, he said, those early poems had not been held to be worthless by some friends and critics who had read them as they gradually appeared. That collection opened with ‘ephemeral effusions’ written when Newman was only fifteen, and at least a third belong to his younger years and to the university period. There is quite a distance in time between poem and poem – they are always dated – until the rhythm of composition suddenly quickens in 1833. Nothing sets them apart initially from the poetry of the university student of the time – Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, even Hopkins – because they consist of meditations and introspections of the solitary person who every so often puts on the mask of old age and 27 28

§ 3.1. Carlyle’s (§§ 14.4 and 18.3) and Newman’s opinions on Burns tally, as Newman too thinks Burns had retained something of a virtuous nature.

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of white-headed wisdom, as is often found in the young Tennyson. Hence they voice a post-Romantic longing for death, but one which is preceded by another, more realizable (but equally frustrated) desire to tear away the ‘veil’ that separates man from the knowledge and the direct vision of God. In his Latinized syntactic inversions and in the archaic lexicon, there emerges a debt to the late Augustan reflective and didactic poetry. We also sense a deafness to Romantic morbidity except for a few echoes of Byron. Collins and Blake can be felt nearer, just as Wordsworth’s lesson in the overecstatic and mannerist naturalistic openings seems to be missing. Side by side with the religious vein of short self-contained lyrics (often made up of three stanzas, and undoubtedly sincere in their conviction), Newman wrote an alternative group of pieces suitable for an ‘album’. These are short laments and elegies for kind-hearted women friends (or a sister) celebrated now because happily taken to heaven. The religious feeling, spasmodic at times, is channelled towards that asceticism that is occasionally discussed (and sometimes satirized) in Tennyson’s early poetry. The separation from the world, the search for the solitude of the cloisters, the sense of sacerdotal ordination as of that of a ‘champion’ armed for the Lord, are chords that resonate well before the foundation or indeed the idea of the Tractarian Movement. Newman harped on a desperate need for purification and blamed himself for an undefined ‘sin’; at the same time he called on a God who was not merciful and benevolent, but vengeful and punitive. 4. The year 1833, when Newman journeyed to the Mediterranean and to Italy, was the most intense and significant of Newman’s life. Short poems followed one another daily, and at times with even more than one written on the same day. They formed a verse diary of his journey. These were different from the verse diaries requested by publishers from the fashionable writers of the day. Newman’s were not occasional poems descriptive of the countryside. He dealt with cultural suggestiveness and with the interior echoes it aroused. The approach to faith is described in a manner far more elliptical than the interior journey in his Apologia. The visit to Greece taught Newman to appreciate the importance of the Greek patristic tradition (Clement, Origen, Basil and Athanasius) fortifying itself against the early heresies. The Holy Land was nearby. Newman never actually visited it, but its proximity stimulated his empathic sympathy with the spirit

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of the biblical patriarchs, whose presence in his works is signalled either through poetic paraphrases or in short dramatic monologues. He compared himself to Moses, the guide who led the elect to a short distance from the Promised Land but was never allowed to crown his mission. He now openly invoked a life of holiness and commitment; a commitment not to personal spiritual fulfilment in isolation, but to full and engaged missionary activity. Therefore he invokes light – blinding and full, not a twilight or a dusk. This is the theme of the only lyric by Newman which became universally famous, ‘The Pillar of the Cloud’.29 This was soon to be adopted as a liturgical hymn by both confessions. It testifies to his renunciation of a quasi-satanical ‘pride’ and independent initiative in the search for the truth (identified with the ‘liberalism’ which he opposed). The duty of the individual in quest of holiness was submission to God and self-abandonment into his hands. Southern and Mediterranean Italy appeared to Newman still to embody the ancient pagan world not yet Christianized. He raises a question about his own lack of originality in his thinking about this: ‘why, wedded to the Lord, still yearns my heart / Towards these scenes of ancient heathen fame?’ Newman’s journey in 1833 can actually be seen as the forerunner of Arthur Hugh Clough’s journey in 1849, when, full of doubts, Clough also travelled to the torrid Italian south. In the poem ‘The Good Samaritan’ Newman continued to be troubled by suspicions that the Roman belief could not be the true one; this was as he walked along the roads of the city that he experienced as simply ‘sultry’,30 and where he suffered a minor collapse. His more speculative lyrics from this journey identify the barriers still to be overcome: liberalism, passive indifference, the shattering of belief, the need to arrive at a unity of faiths. ‘The Elements’ bursts with anguished clarity over the perceived limits of human knowledge; the mind is unable to penetrate through into the mysteries of creation. 5. After his return to Oxford the personal and confessional vein in his writing dried up. The overtly Tractarian lyrics that he was now writing

29 The shape taken on by God to guide his people out of Egypt (Exodus 13, 21–2). 30 See, for Clough, § 142.1.

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mark a retreat into more conventional liturgical poetry, psalmodies, litanies and the like, often translated with cold precision from Catholic breviaries. Taking himself rigidly in hand Newman decided that it was his duty to refrain from even a poetry of a religious and inquisitive nature, because such work was in itself self-gratifying. The only long composition of this period was a choral ‘contrast’ between angelic voices favourable to marriage and others to celibacy. The guideline for a long series of translations of prayers, lauds, for morning, for vespers and for compline, was Keble’s The Christian Year, because it formed a calendar of poems which were always varied in metre and in rhythm, and that, though not original in kind, laid emphasis on divine action as illumination and purification. Newman’s lyrics, by now Catholic, which soon appeared from 1849 onwards, adopted an easy, naïvely devout and candid fairy-tale tone, heard almost at the same time in the St Dorothea poems by another convert, Hopkins. Mary the Virgin is a ‘pilgrim queen’ that narrates in a slightly naïve Pre-Raphaelite way – 1849 was the year when Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood was founded – the story of the incarnation and of the passion of Jesus. There are also various tributes to St Philip Neri that paint the image close to Newman’s heart, of an active piety working in the world, for he was by now distant from the eremitical monasticism idolized by the Tractarians. This Catholic poetry is, on the whole, weaker, more lifeless and more conventional than Newman’s Anglican and Tractarian verse, because of its over-emphasized hagiographic nature. It was in other words a book of prayers and meditations, requested by duty and by his profession, at the sole service of the Catholic apostolate. Therefore, it consists of lyrics written more and more sporadically, where the thought of death slowly prevails. 6. Newman’s second known poem, written when only eighteen, already revolved around the theme of the joyful meeting with death, but this perspective immediately became more dreaded owing to the consciousness of sin and, therefore, to the fear of damnation and of Hell. At the time of his Calvinist conversion, while still a young man, Newman had had the certainty of being among the elect, but he was at the same time faced with a God who was above all Judge: ‘Along my earthly life, the thought of death / And judgment was to me most terrible. / I had it aye before me, and I saw / The Judge severe e’en in the Crucifix’. Various trials and foretastes of the

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hora novissima lead to The Dream of Gerontius31 (1865), from which this confession is taken. In Gerontius Newman imagines the death of an old man and consequently ‘dreams’ his own assumption into heaven, or rather into the fire of Purgatory. The entrance into Purgatory follows a flashing and painfully piercing vision of God. This extraordinary masterpiece has a double identity. It is undoubtedly the longest poetic composition planned by Newman, and an agonizing and in the end joyous spiritual testament that closes his poetic career, sealing it many years in advance of his real death. It is also his most convincing and inspired poem, because from a Christian-Catholic perspective it rewrites the age-old archetype, ushered in by classical literatures, of the journey beyond the world and of the soul face to face with the afterlife. It is thus at one and the same time a personal document and an emblematic and collective contribution to a very long tradition. It has something of that devotional, didactic and liturgical spirit that is found in the medieval Everyman, which it recalls in the often marvellously varied choral cadences in alternate rhyme, and in the occasional quotations from the Church service for the dead.32 The closest models for the central dramatic action of Gerontius (its account of the return of the good Christian to the Father), are those of Dante’s pilgrimage and of The Pilgrim’s Progress by Bunyan. Other dramas dealing with the way of the soul, Marlowe’s Faustus (especially its astonishing finale) and Goethe’s33 Faust, and many earlier treatments of the Faust legend, stand at a distance. 31 32

33

The Dream of Gerontius was written in just three weeks after an illness and a visit by a doctor who gave little hope to him. The fear of dying had already struck Newman violently during his ‘Sicilian illness’ of 1833. The late Roman and above all the Christian medieval period were after all full of examples of the literary genre of the ‘dream’, whether that of Scipio, or of the ‘holy rood’, or of Piers the ploughman. Reilly 1927, 126, notes that the imagined journey into the beyond was morbidly dear to the tradition of the ‘mesmeric tale’ (see Volume 5, § 196.1), where cases of life-in-death are frequently narrated; and he quotes the story ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ by Poe. Apart from this, in Gerontius we can trace the poetical topos of ‘Lazarus raised from the dead’, with which Victorian poets often expressed their inquiry into what lay after the ‘crossing’ of the ‘bar’. Echoes of which – the ‘salvation’ of Gretchen who has been ‘judged’ – are in the song of the Guardian Angel that rejoices at the salvation of Gerontius.

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They are relevant, though, to this discussion if only by way of contrast. The seven phases of Newman’s dramatic action start from the slow unfastening of the soul chained to the body of the old man, assisted on his deathbed by his dear ones and anointed by the priest. After this, it is no longer Gerontius that speaks in a monologue but his soul that pauses in an intermediary state of life-in-death. The poem seems here literally to echo Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, where the attendants on a deathbed ask themselves doubtfully whether the dying man is, or is not, dead, or is still alive. Newman’s enquiry into the afterlife, pursued throughout the whole poem, could indeed be termed ‘metaphysical’. In the second act, Newman silences completely the interminable and quibbling Victorian questions about the nature of the other world; and having skipped over them he tries to represent the invisible, the unknowable, and even the unascertainable, describing for the first time in Victorian poetry (with the possible exception of the diaphanous central figure in Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’) the physical and corporeal insensibility and dreamy weakness of the soul, now fleshless, as it waits to be judged. The soul’s apparent state of free floating is an illusion, because it is safely caught by a force that guides and pushes it. In human terms the journey to the presence of the Omnipotent is long, but perceived as long only within an earthly conception of time and space. The measurements of time and space in the kingdom of eternity are completely different, if they exist at all; possibly they are only mental or theoretical dimensions.34 Newman does not explicitly anticipate eternal damnation for Gerontius. Still less did he fear his own damnation. Both modest and intensely self-aware, he knew that he was by nature a sinner but he judged himself worthy at least of Purgatory. Within the poem he has Gerontius recite a solemn, orthodox Creed in which all heresies are 34 Even in the afterlife the knowledge of God remains, to those who are condemned to Purgatory, one by ‘signs and types’; the soul is ‘wrapped and swathed around in dreams, / Dreams that are true, yet enigmatical’. Theologically speaking, Newman puts forward a theory that is questionable – and one still being discussed by Catholic theology – concerning the Last Judgement: that all souls are judged immediately after death with a personal judgement, called by Newman a ‘test’ of the Last Judgement, which instead is collective and takes place at the end of all time.

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firmly denied. The soul that reaches judgement is witness to the frustrating impotence of the fiendish demons that craw and cackle their useless curses and brazen taunts in the anti-chamber of the Court of Justice. Their tuneless choirs recall, though, the less than biblical rivalry between angelic and diabolic forces as they fight for their human prey. The poem closes with the entrance of the judged soul into Purgatory. This was obviously that part of the Catholic doctrine which was most difficult for Protestants to accept. The desired meeting with the Father is the cause of a painful injury that, by virtue of an intimately oxymoronic term, will be a ‘febrifuge’ that will smooth away the pain. Newman’s Purgatory here is Dantesque in its vision of God, but only momentarily. It is a vision at once blissful and insupportable due to the piercing pain that it provokes: a ‘fire’, in fact, ‘without light’, and the condemnation to the darkness after the extreme radiance of the vision. 7. The Dream of Gerontius fascinated almost immediately at least two major artists working in different fields. Hopkins derived from Newman his God, creator and destroyer, of the ‘Deutschland’, and the dizziness of man on the edge of the terrible abyss of nothingness, yet secretly bound in the divine vice-like grip, and not abandoned to himself in the end. It was, therefore, a God, like that of Newman, who was unknowable, and a synthesis of opposites, for whom ‘the long is the short, the quick is the slow, the near is the far’. And Hopkins’s ‘terrible’ sonnets are his purgatorial night. The musician Edward Elgar set The Dream of Gerontius to music exploiting its timbric variety. The cadences of Gerontius follow one another in ingeniously free stanzaic forms, in lines of great syllabic width and variety of rhymes, almost edging on blank verse. The officiating priest and those present at the bedhead chant litanies of accompaniment, and the demons speak in a broken and syllabled style, while the angelic choirs never speak but, as the stage-directions point out, sing their lines. Elgar caught therefore that boundary between word, song and sound that a poem can only evoke. T. S. Eliot, as well, much later, echoed Newman in his dramatic monologue ‘Gerontion’. The similarity between the two compositions, which may initially seem obvious, is in fact fairly slender. However, one should note that Eliot’s instinctive and ubiquitous allusiveness enables him to reflect Newman in his other meditative poems. This is

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particularly true of his penitential poems following his conversion. These are purgatorial in inspiration, having as an ideal epigraph ‘il foco che li affina’ (‘the fire that purifies’). § 30. Newman V: The novels The two novels Newman wrote were designed to document and justify his conversion, to be works of edification and to spread the word of God. In one he staged, under a tenuous veil of autobiographical disguise, a close battle between the faiths and the confessions of his time, from which the Catholic faith comes out victorious. In the other, he offered a bracing exemplum drawn from an episode of martyrdom – completely invented, though in a framework of historical truth – dating back to the years of primitive Christianity. The merit of the former, Loss and Gain35 (1848), is that it tells us a lot about Newman’s view of himself as an example to others. It fixes with precision the steps whereby an Anglican, once he has realized the objective doctrinal flaws of Anglicanism, can or, better still, must, draw near and accept Catholicism. Newman affirmed, and demonstrated, that the Catholic faith could be reached without any external solicitation (or rather, notwithstanding any solicitation), by means of a detailed investigation of the theological controversies. This takes place in absolute isolation and within the theatre of one’s own critical conscience. According to Charles Reding, the protagonist of the novel, the conversion is ‘entirely the working of [his] own mind’.36 Charles Reding is a Newman twenty years younger with the same intellectual temper as the original, the same firm aversion to all forms of liberalism and the same advocacy of the dogma (‘it need not be denied that those who are external to the Church must begin with private judgment; they use it in order ultimately to supersede it; as man out of doors uses a lamp in a dark night, and puts it out when he gets home once he has reached home’). Reding displays also Newman’s commitment to ritualism and celibacy and shares his artistic 35 36

This title, which reprises a frequent contrast in Newman’s poetry and sermons, contains at the same time a vague utilitarian and economic metaphor which was echoed in that of various anti-Catholic pamphlets of the time. Before converting Charles has entered just one single time into a Catholic church.

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tastes, architectonic and musical. He is different from Newman, though, in that he accepts the Catholic faith during his university studies. His intellectual development is just as carefully worked out as Newman’s, made up of very prudent acceptances and exclusions and always after profound consideration. The novel is thus an essay in methodology, or a ‘grammar’ of conversion, or simply a correct and rigorous exercise of reason, for Newman does not so much debate the essence of faith and the act of believing as absolute in itself; rather he is in search of the Christian confession that can with the greatest legitimacy call itself Catholic, in the field of faith already revealed. The historical and current religious alternatives are represented by Charles’s college companions, and by the tutors of the university, in whom Newman disguised many of his interlocutors and several Oxford friends and enemies. These figures comprise and represent a range of views: from the orthodox Anglican to the evangelical,37 from the aesthete almost, or would be, Catholic who returns to his orthodox position (that is, Anglican), to the agnostic, from the supporter of the middle way, the via media, to the Latitudinarian preacher.38 Once he has concluded the pars destruens Charles accepts Catholicism in its essence, that is, as the Christian faith that offers, in the light of a critical examination of the Holy Scriptures and of the objective weaknesses of the non-Catholic confessions, the greatest guarantees and the most authoritative proof of its link with Christ. Nonetheless, his conversion is completed not by skipping superficially over but by being objectively aware of the imputations of Anglicans and Protestants – and even evangelicals – against Roman Catholicism. The accusation, widespread in anti-Catholic propaganda, of corruption in the Vatican is not glossed over but pushed aside with the objection that the possible corruption in the visible Church is one thing, but the infallibility of the Church

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Charles feels let down by the vagueness, ignorance and intolerance of the evangelicals for theology. Agnostic liberalism is attacked in the character of Sheffield, the inseparable companion of Charles, who proclaims that everything is false and is looking for ‘views’, but never accepts any one of them. The close friendship of Charles and Sheffield breaks down on the eve of their exams, when the former discovers that his friend has not ‘that vision of the Invisible that is the life of the Christian’.

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as the only depositary of the divine Word is another.39 The end of the novel disappoints our expectations, in the sense that it lets us think that the step Charles takes in his conversion is more against Anglicanism than in favour of Catholicism. The Catholic part of his conversion is in fact confined to the last chapter, when Newman, in describing in a rather out of focus autobiographical vein the arrival of Charles at the convent of the Passionists, touchingly recalls the life of the founder of that order and the events of its settling in England. The great step is taken with all the hesitations, the uncertainties, and even the last minute rethinking provoked by his affection40 for his dear ones, for his friends at Oxford and for Oxford itself. Here, all the implications of the ambiguous title are developed and enriched. The good gained by Charles is enormous, but only equal to the melancholy and to the nostalgia for an entire world and for the community of life in Oxford and its poetry: ‘Whatever he was to gain by becoming Catholic, this he had lost’. 2. The occasion and the impulse for Loss and Gain came from another novel, published in the same year 1848, by Elizabeth Harris, who described the case of a repentant convert who returns to being an Anglican. Newman, who was then in Rome waiting to receive Papal authorization to found his Oratory, took up the challenge and wrote the first of his many successive 39 The old Principal refuses to let Charles continue to stay in the College to prepare his exams, because he fears that he might introduce the young freshmen to some ‘subtle Jesuit’. It is also rumoured that Charles’s companion Willis, who has converted before Charles, is a ‘concealed Jesuit’. The anti-Italian and anti-Catholic prejudices are shown in the words of Willis himself, who has returned from Rome, ‘a city of ruins’ and of an undeserved fascination. The sight of Roman Catholicism is thus, in the end, more than anything else a disincentive to conversion. Another reflection of a classic controversy is Willis’s defence of the authenticity of the relics against the scepticism of Bateman, the pastor who wants to draw both Reding and Willis back to Anglicanism. 40 At home – where time passes spent in boring and banal discussions – Charles is soon misunderstood and becomes isolated, while his mother dreams of seeing him an Anglican curate in a parish, following in his father’s footsteps. His father, who dies shortly after Charles has started his second year at school, sends his son Charles to Eton rather than having him educated at home, because he fears his isolation and because – as he admits – it is difficult to read into the heart of men.

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‘replies’, using the same weapons as the writer who had provoked him. Such instant genesis cannot be overlooked when judging this novel. Verdicts have in fact been too often conditioned by the professional bias of critics and readers who ask the Victorians simply for a kind of comic novel providing good entertainment, or a love story crowned by marriage, or satires on society, or deep self-probings. Certainly Loss and Gain has no tight plot, and the characters are and remain – Charles Reding included – abstract dimensions and representations of well-defined religious positions, and count according to the negative or positive incidence that they have when faced with the protagonist’s conversion. The novel is, therefore, too much like a treatise and a debate and is, except for the elegiac close and few other moments when Newman tries and manages successfully to describe and to narrate,41 a chain of ‘Platonic’ dialogues with intercalary stage directions, and transcribed in all their digressive fluidity. It is, however, invaluable as a document, since it allows the lively conversations of the Oxford students of the 1830s to be heard, along with the serious conversations that took place in the middle-class homes in that period,42 which were always prim and deferential. The choice of celibacy, and the antipathy of Reding for women,43 have repeatedly led some to suspect that Newman was 41 Among these may be mentioned the debate taking place in one of the first scenes when the university students are having breakfast, dining on sausages, cutlets, and other food; also the caricature of Vincent, the tutor who loves stuffing himself and drinking hard; or Charles’s talk with the vice-Chancellor. A grotesque sketch, recalling Dickens’s technique, is the assault suffered by Charles a few hours after his arrival at the Passionists; it is carried out by a series of bizarre characters who, dramatizing the temptations of Satan or the chaos of interior voices that stand between Charles and his goal as a test to be overcome, try with the most divergent strategies to win Charles back to the Anglican fold. 42 Among the many topics are the architectural innovations and the restoration of churches, the musical tastes (for Gregorian chant, Mozart and Beethoven), the 1848 revolutionary movements, and even – an issue that was then hotly debated – the most suitable vestments to be worn by an Anglican curate according to the liturgical circumstances. 43 This can be seen in a scene in a bookshop, where Reding witnesses the tenderness of a companion, just ordained Anglican curate, towards his young wife whom he has just married.

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a homosexual. All things considered this is a rather impertinent question, although it continues to be asked. Loss and Gain confirms the Apologia and the intellectual and theological hypertrophy of the Oxonians at the time. The characters are not ‘not true’ or victims of Newman’s ‘reticence’ as was said reproachfully,44 but are thinking and non-sentient beings that considered secondary all and every appeal to contingent issues. In this precise sense Loss and Gain is a deeply realistic novel. 3. Callista, which came out in 1856, up to a point as a further ‘reply’ – to Hypatia by his historical enemy, Charles Kingsley – was published in a collection of Catholic novels on martyrs and Christian saints inaugurated by a novel by Cardinal Wiseman.45 In spite of the very modest aesthetic ambitions, there is a perceptible descriptive intent and sometimes an almost voluptuous indulgence in natural scenes, which can be seen as being deliberately compensatory compared to the complete lack of outside settings in Loss and Gain. These glimpses seem to convey the perfume of wild and primitive Africa where the novel is set, which, as has been hypothesized, were inspired by Newman’s journey to Sicily. The episodes of local colour, the accounts of paganism and the cruel exotic cults, and above all the intoxicating persecutory madness in the plague chapter, are all unheard-of anticipations of Flaubert’s Salammbô (which came out in 1862 and, curiously, takes place in a framework of completely pre-Christian paganism, between Carthage and Sicca) and of Marius the Epicurean by Pater. At times, there are even echoes of the fable: the overly perfect and too happy village of Sicca, a little Eden; the new golden age, such thanks to the natural fertility of the soil and the joy of living; the step-mother, a witch, and the beautiful potter Callista. The recognizable hand of Newman as historian and essay-writer is revealed in frequent digressions that are remote from the story and sound like pages from a manual on the life and costumes of the late Romans.46 In the apostrophes to the readers, in the admonishments 44 See on this Levine 1968. 45 Volume V, § 153. 46 Attacked for presumed historical inaccuracies, Newman pointed out, when the book was reprinted in 1888, the legitimacy of poetic licence, and that he had written the book for the Catholic readers and for their edification.

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and in the appeals to the imagination, Newman reappears once more as the edifying apologist. There is no space for any narrative illusionism, given the constant and explicit contrast which is pointed out between past and present, and the ever more compelling and precise parallelisms between a story set in the third century after Christ and modern times. 4. Callista is, in fact, an example of that passion for the past that infected Victorian literature, and of the widespread genre of the historical novel set in phases of transition from Graeco-Roman paganism to the Christian Word, and hinged on archetypal figures that respond to this historical shift with a refusal, or, more often, with an untamed curiosity and an anguished doubt. The situation of the Proconsular Africa of the third century, where Christianity struggles to establish itself as the only religion in the midst of pagan superstitions,47 mirrors that of nineteenth-century England. It reverberates even in the form of a conflict for supremacy that implies, for the Romans, the cult of the spirit and ideals of Rome itself as a religion.48 The two novels by Newman are thus alike – and they complement each other – because both have at their centre a conversion. This conversion no longer fades into melancholic nostalgia as in Loss and Gain, but leads up to a martyrdom, serenely and firmly accepted. The example of martyrs and the recollection of an imaginary period when faith was on the wane, are likewise veiled therapeutic remedies for an age of tepid and sceptic faith like that in which Newman lived. The plague caused by the invasion of locusts is an episode that pushes forward and fuels all the turns and twists of the narrative,49 and is kindred to those ‘signs of the times’, to those divine, apocalyptic admonishments that many Victorians felt around

47 ‘There is such a racket and whirl of religions on all sides of me, that I am sick of the subject’, declares Arnobius the rhetorician and fanatic of Greek culture. 48 Jucundus cannot get the idea out of his head that the Christian cult and the Imperial cult must mutually exclude each other. In Aristo, Callista’s brother, a character from Loss and Gain reappears, that is, Sheffield, who reduces everything, even faith, to an opinion. 49 This episode (in which there is also an assault to a bakery) recalls a famous chapter in Manzoni’s The Betrothed, especially for the representation of the suggestibility of the masses.

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them.50 The link between the two novels is also found in relation to the hierarchy of human nuptial love and divine love. In fact, whereas Charles Reding, unlike Newman, does not become a priest but chooses celibacy, it is for Callista to demonstrate the compatibility and mutual enhancement of divine and human love: she becomes a martyr well aware that she is going to die as a bride of Christ. In the novel the conversions are, if we look carefully, two if not three. The tenuous plot has, in fact, Agellius, a tepid Christian and the son of a legionary married to a witch in his second marriage, fall in love with the pagan Callista but wanting to marry her as a Christian. His uncle is a sceptic and a pagan who supports the engagement and the marriage simply because, through love and marriage, he hopes to put an end to what he judges is nothing but a passing fancy of his nephew. Callista resists Agellius’ courting, but once she has received the first impulse towards conversion, her ardour and faith are greater than his. Agellius’ brother, Juba, is the person who takes the longest step, from egocentric pride and a spirit of rebellious independence (added to which there is a small fable-like and sensationalist element in the form of his adoration of the devil), to the liberating folly that transforms him into a mere ‘slave’, in the end exorcised by touching martyred Callista’s feet. He will die, but baptized, facing the tomb of the woman, who, through her martyrdom, has become a saint. Apart from the witch, the mother of the two brothers Agellius and Juba, only Jucundus, their uncle, remains till the end an unredeemed hedonist or a sceptic epicurean whose philosophy is summed up in the affirmation that ‘all is vanity but eating and drinking […] we should be happier if we were all hogs’. 5. Like Browning’s Cleon,51 Callista, a potter who ironically produces statuettes and pagan idols, represents at the beginning of the novel the peak of Hellenic dissatisfaction. Blessed by physical and spiritual gifts, she has fruitlessly absorbed all the philosophic and religious pre-Christian culture; tired of life and full of nostalgia for Greece, the seed of conversion is sown in her by her lover Agellius, whom she asks to tell her more about his 50 It is emblematic that Callista’s death as a martyr immediately sparks off the beginning of a religious reawakening at Sicca. 51 § 122.6–7.

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God, but even more so by the constant memory of her own Greek slave, Chione, martyrized, and by Bishop Caecilius, the future Saint Cyprian.52 This seed takes root without her being aware, inexplicably unable to make out whether it is reason, impulse or sentiment that pushes her on. The only thing she perceives as certain, when mistakenly arrested as a Christian and put into prison, is that the Christian God, unlike those of paganism and unlike philosophy, answers those who adore him (‘an echo implies a voice; a voice a speaker. That speaker I love and fear’), and who loves those who love him, as he has shown by becoming incarnate, and whose Love manifests itself in the friendship and the reciprocal love between men and in their readiness for self-sacrifice. What Callista believes, she believes because it is guaranteed by the moral stature of Chione, Agellius and Caecilius. If Callista reaches faith through a completely intuitive process, different from Reding’s in Loss and Gain, the definite assent is reached with agonizing slowness and once again weighing the loss with the gain. At her trial, Callista, terrorized by the instruments of torture, has no strength to declare that she is a Christian, although she refuses to make sacrifices to Jupiter, and has understood the vanity of idols, for as yet she still has not reached faith in the being who was incarnated to destroy them: ‘she was losing earth without gaining heaven’.53 The complete overthrowing of the human law occurs when the Gospel of St Luke, given her by Caecilius, makes her gush out with words that describe her own vanished beauty and yet with it the glow of a more divine light in her looks. Here she perceives that power is weakness, success is failure, dishonour is glory. Well beyond any oratorical or apologetic intent is the description of Agellius as he stands looking at Callista’s body. As a human being, he can hardly understand how God could allow the destruction of one of his marvels, or more precisely the mystery as to how paradise can be reached through the suffering of nature. Though it ends in tragedy, the novel has also a happy ending, because the tragedy is sublimated in a Christian death that is a superior form of life, 52 53

Along with Arnobius and Firmian, who put in a very brief appearance, he is part of the group of historical persons in the novel. This examination is given in the form of minutes of a trial, and excerpted from the imaginary Proconsular proceedings on the ‘passion’ of Callista.

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inasmuch as Callista, by dying, saves Juba, while Agellius becomes a bishop, a martyr and, finally, a saint. § 31. Newman VI: ‘The Idea of a University’ In 1851 Newman was nominated Rector of the newly instituted Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin, where three decades later Hopkins was to teach, and where Joyce was a student after a further fifty years. In that year the echoes had hardly fallen quiet of an odd court case with grotesque twists: the zealous denunciation by Newman of an unfrocked Italian Dominican priest, Giacinto Achilli. This priest was spreading trouble in England by discrediting the Catholic Church in public lectures and was tolerated, if not edged on, by Russell’s government, which had recently swallowed the reinstatement of the Catholic dioceses in England. Achilli sued Newman for libel and won the case. Newman had to pay 100 pounds in damages that were generously provided by his parishioners. The negative outcome of this trial, in which the Judge absolved Achilli for lack of evidence, was one of the small life’s ironies for a supporter of ‘faith without proof ’ like Newman. His distrust of the Irish university project (should there really be a Catholic university?’),54 the theoretical and practical differences with the Primate of Ireland – who wanted to declass the university to being a seminary for priests – the diffidence of the locals (who suspected Newman a ‘foreigner’, though Catholic), and the scarcity of funds, made him hand in his resignation in 1858.55 Like the Apologia, which chronologically precedes it, The Idea of a University is a disorganic but far from occasional book. It in fact gathers together texts first given in the form of prolusions, lectures and talks over a seven-year period, and then grouped in two cycles,

54 There was little agreement even within the Irish Catholic curia, as some bishops upheld the ‘Queen’s Colleges’, that is, ‘independent’ institutions (though almost all the students were Catholics), of which three were already operating; other bishops were in favour of the foundation of a programmatically confessional university. This background is accurately studied by Hardman 1991, 126–34. 55 Newman, who had taken office in May 1854 as Rector in St Stephen’s Green, the headquarters of University College Dublin until recently, resigned stating only a part of the truth, that he could not divide himself between Dublin and Birmingham.

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one of nine units all dating back to 1853 under the title of ‘Discourses on University Education’, and the other of ten, more scattered through time, entitled ‘Lectures and Essays on University Subjects’.56 From the practical failure of that initiative, a book took shape that clarified the systematic if not axiomatic concept of Christian culture and instruction, and made a diagnosis of the historical plight of European culture, which called for the recovery of a strong, hegemonic and civilizing function of Catholicism.57 As pedagogue and educator Newman was no neophyte due to his long experience as a student and lecturer at Oxford, where he had taken a stand with concrete proposals for the reform of curricular organization. He himself was the founder of an oratory that had formative and pedagogical tasks as well. His nineteen essays maintain an air of the affable conversation, at times witty, always reassuring.58 There was no need for a kind of radical rhetoric, for Newman expounded to people of the same religious confession an ideological system projected and clearly built without apparent blind spots. There is no contradictor this time, even though Newman pretends to evoke symbolic and emblematic enemies along with others that are perfectly real, thus betraying the need for controversy. The tone becomes emphatic only when the speaker – and, therefore, the apologist – illustrates the benefits to civilization brought by the Catholic Church, or loudly voices the belief in a God revealed, omnipotent and Creator.59 Newman indeed speaks mostly in the absolute, and contextual and circumstantial signs are inexistent, so that hypothetically these speeches could have been given in London or

56 The two were gathered together in a single volume in 1873. 57 It seems perhaps to be stating the obvious to base a lengthy essay, such as that by J. M. Roberts, ‘The Idea of a University Revisited’, in Ker and Hill 1990, 193–222, on the assumption that Newman’s idea is out-of-date in the light of the future debate on university education. 58 The distinction between the diligent and careful student and the inattentive and lazy one is taken up in a short, ludicrous, semi-epistolary chapter, which simulates a test in Greek and in Latin. 59 In one of these hymns creation is the ‘garment’ of God, Carlyle’s term par excellence (§§ 10.1 and §§ 15–16 passim). Newman makes an encomium for St Philip, a saint who had lived in the world and not a recluse.

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elsewhere, because in principle they are theoretical and abstract.60 The general argumentative plan is that education ought to be examined in a non-confessional manner. Newman underlines the fact that he is reasoning in the first place from a non-Catholic and only broadly ‘cultural’ point of view. Actually, however, if in theory a university is entitled to teach neutral and non-religious culture, in practice the Catholic Church is necessary in order to watch over the integrity of culture itself: ‘knowledge and reason are ministers to faith’, where faith is explicitly Catholic. 2. Newman felt that the modern world, whether Protestant or atheist, could be drawn back to the Catholic faith in the near future. His moderate anti-medievalism silenced all catastrophic and apocalyptic terror of an unrecoverable time that was destined to end. He affirms, in fact, that it was preferable to live in his present, when misbelief struck openly, instead of in the turbulent, unstable, unbelieving Middle Ages scarred by heresies, when friend might stab friend in the back. Face to face with chronic nineteenth-century spiritual ailments, Newman does not lose hope; he is inflexible with economists, scientists and atheist philosophers, but he talks to them; and he has a romantic and autobiographical penchant for the literati and the humanists, even when going against his own principles, because he has to admit that modern literature is largely non-Christian. The Idea of a University is not thus a new idea, because it is one inscribed within the utopia of the ‘English gentleman’, as Newman readily admits. The definition of this term made him think hard on several occasions. He is a gentleman who must operate not in a private, solipsistic sphere but in a social dimension, and it is therein that culture is useful. But this he can do 60 Only in one lecture, the ninth of the second cycle, there occurs a more concrete reference to Irish matters, and Newman ventures into a panegyric of the poor, oppressed, but always very Catholic Ireland, which had shone through the centuries for its native genius and its gift for abstract and especially theological speculation, and for which, according to Newman, there was a brilliant future. In that Irish Catholic University in Dublin, evening classes had had of necessity to be set up, and Newman, approving, takes advantage to heavily criticise English schools for workers, sometimes held in the evening as well, for two reasons: firstly, the lecturers, often writers of fame, narcissistically showed off their eloquence, and, secondly, the culture provided was a distraction or a palliative, and did not stimulate the mind.

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only if endowed with ‘strength’ and with ‘grace’ – this latter being a term with something Hellenic about it and one that will be taken up by Matthew Arnold. Formally, Newman’s idea of the University bases itself on the axiom that knowledge is not an end in itself but is instrumental. However, an undeniable, unused margin of amusement and of intellectual food remains. In defining the correlated term ‘culture’, the moving force of the ‘gentleman’, Newman, unable to resist a biting satire of journalism, of the culture of the ephemeral and of the rapid change of opinions, accepts without alarm the enormous widening of knowledge in the middle of the nineteenth century. The problem he faced was how to harmonize in the present two extremes, how to conciliate the dominant scientific – but not scientist – trend with the religious tradition. A university ought to impart scientific and even literary disciplines often not directly religious nor even moral, and Newman willingly admits that science, unless it attempts an approximate and ambitious theology, has its own legitimate autonomy and its own sphere. The question asked above, if a Catholic university should exist, is answered affirmatively – but, at the bottom of it, only because Catholic instruction ensured equality in a country that was mostly Protestant, so that with the institution of a university an evident discrimination had been remedied. Newman avoided all gratuitous mention of Catholic integralism, but he had no difficulty in admitting that the Church in its century-old history had trusted to whomsoever had, apart from his belief, truly and correctly investigated within the boundaries of his own knowledge. The paradox lies in this, that Newman, even as a Tractarian engaged in a crusade against ‘liberalism’, as a Catholic should be the supporter of an extremely liberal view of culture, and that this neo-liberalism should rouse the suspicions and the ostracism of his own hierarchy. For example, he thought that the Catholic Church should not restore censorship, and that the Inquisition was not an emanation of the Church but an illiberal and political state institution. If a liberal outlook could by itself steer culture towards the Catholic faith, then the Catholic university ceased to have any function and usefulness, and the battle was raging elsewhere. 3. Once this point is clarified, the pedagogical aberration against which Newman fights is the nineteenth-century parcelling out of knowledge. Culture, on the contrary, had to be kept unitary, which is how he wanted

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it and how it ought to be. The objective at which he aims is to re-establish a hierarchy in the syllabus of the university studies. The increase of knowledge, which Newman judged staggering ‘in the last twenty years’, resulted in a chaotic and unguided transmission and absorption of notions and led to, or favoured, misbelief. Indeed, the mind had to be kept active to be able to digest and compare. Newman’s diffidence towards university institutions, especially those newly established, and to the ways in which they were run in the present, was the same as Carlyle’s.61 Culture is defined as a mosaic of separate but closely linked branches – a ‘liberal’, ‘useful’ culture in the noblest sense of the word, capable to favour the search for the absolute truth. The historical benefits of liberal culture had been the elevation of mankind and its dignity and the limitation of sensual appetites; it had also bridled down its desires pointing out the ideal of a moral life. The cultivation of reason and, therefore, the self-same liberal culture ‘lead the mind to the Catholic faith’, except for the fact that reason left alone risks becoming deified, and knowledge to guide towards a ‘spurious religion’. The latter means a religion that fails to reach the Creator and only perceives the necessity to do one’s duty; or it is an ‘aesthetic’ religion, only sensitive to the sweet, and not the dramatic and punishing sides of religion.62 Newman’s second assumption is that theology had to be reinstated as a university subject, or rather it had to be its supporting axis and reference point. God is known to be certain, and, therefore, a knowledgeable object, or rather he is the ultimate end of all knowledge. In this passage the future expounder of the ‘grammar of assent’ and the apologist of rationalistic fideism is revealed. Faith is not a Lutheran and Protestant ‘sentiment’. Having rejected pietism, Newman attacks the mechanistic conceptions also denounced by Carlyle, since nothing moves simply because of the laws of physics. There is instead an artificer behind the scenes, one who is neither a pantheistic,

61

Newman, who quotes some lines by Crabbe that he had kept in mind since a boy, agrees with Carlyle as to the superior ‘self-education’ of the child in the bosom of nature. 62 Leaning on Gibbon, Newman traces the portrait of pagan morality already instinct with Christian spirituality in the figure of Emperor Julian. Pater will later choose, as its emblem, Marcus Aurelius.

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theistic or even natural God nor an anima mundi, but a Creator distinct from the creature. 4. This reciprocally respectful harmony between science and the single spheres of knowledge is one of Newman’s fixed ideas. Many contemporary sciences crossed the limits given them and entered the competences of others; physics and the ‘philosophy of science’, in particular, theologized. Newman actually advocates a one-way pact of not interference. Each science, sovereign in its own right though respectful of its limits, must be subordinate to the primacy of religion, with the consequence that the selfstyled harmony between the sciences is weakened, and a tangible conflict of supremacy reintroduced.63 Nothing is pushed aside in the universitas, but since the top of the hierarchic pyramid is God an inclusive systemization of knowledge is postulated, indexed and reordered.64 The genealogy of the cultural tradition is not much different from that of Carlyle. It was inevitably European and it had its centre in Europe, or it had become European after the re-absorption of Oriental cultures and after Rome had become the centre and point of fusion between Athens and Jerusalem. Newman’s enemies are the immanentists, the sceptics, the deists and the Enlightenment tradition. Among the modern British philosophers he virtually excepts only Bacon and Berkeley. The essayists of the Edinburgh Review reverted to Locke and had raised their voice against the uselessness of humanism. Newman criticizes Hume for his vague theism, not yet a revealed faith, and for his adhesion to an indeterminacy of an Epicurean kind. Pages of courteous and at times cutting disagreement are dedicated to Shaftesbury, who anticipating Keats had maintained that truth is beauty, and approved that sensuality that he had set out to fight.

63

Newman says this to the medical students, as a kind of example: a missionary sister, advised by her doctor not to go amidst those with infectious illnesses, has the right to transgress his orders if her religious superior authorises her to do so, with the inner consent of the sister herself. 64 The metaphor of the army and of the empire – that of Ancient Rome – is chosen on purpose. Rome stands in fact for the Church and for Catholicism, as it subjected different kinds of peoples, but to shape, and fuse, them into a greater social organization.

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5. Newman tries to settle the classic diatribe of the relationship between science and faith by turning to the legitimacy of the two separate, but separately coherent explanations of the world. It was clear that the two methods were divergent: science was experimental, theology deductive. The latter operates by consulting the ‘old answers’, and discovers truths already fixed ab aeterno. Newman shows an explicit and unconditioned openness to scientific speculation as long as it works within the ‘narrow range of its competences’. Even an idolater, Newman goes so far as to say, can act as a scientist with the approval of the Church. However, the secret erosion of science made such a view of faith seem in the long run strange and unacceptable, and miracles and the other legendary facts in the Bible inadmissible. More precisely, Newman postulates a knowable natural universe, and an unknowable supernatural universe, or knowable only thanks to the intervention of divine revelation. The two universes are overlapping, and communicating, yet substantially separate, and what is separated does not need conciliation. Physics looks into pure phenomena, it does not get to the primary driving forces, exactly what theology does. Yet, in the physicist, the physicist and the man of faith can coexist in their different, and successive, competences. Nonetheless, this does not answer the question about the existence of phenomena of an arcane or miraculous nature. Newman makes no concessions with regard to the immutability of revealed principles entrusted for ever to the faithful, who are not to question them. Even though as an ex-Protestant he holds back from giving credit to a free interpretation of the Bible, and admits the undue trespassings on the part of theology, he defines the contrary, Baconian attempt to make theology, which is deductive, subject to experimental methods, as being worse. Explicitly, science faces a threshold that it must never cross, disoriented by the contradictions represented by the mysteries of nature. In Catholic scientists a temporary conflict between natural scientific data and the Revelation may be allowed, and that must be accepted as mysterious, because it is not given them to sound the mystery. The result is that the final agreement between faith and science is always in fieri. 6. Among the spheres of knowledge that threatened to go beyond the limits was that of art. In principle, Newman condemns the artist that

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forgets the heteronomy and the subordination of art to faith, and practises it with a narcissistic end. He finds examples in music, painting and architecture, and argues that even the Gothic style, the most religious, may be guilty of – pace Ruskin – a similar self-satisfaction. Notwithstanding this, the teaching of literature had to be tolerated if not increased in Catholic universities, even though it was largely immoral. The stress placed on the goodness and on the necessity for a creative literature is actually almost residually pagan. Newman praises literature as a powerful, emphatic expression of the subject; style is the man and the great writers find on the whole a means of quasi-extrasensory expression in line with their idea and their emotion. Echoing Longinus he greets the exuberant, tumultuous flow of the word. The autonomy of art cannot be suppressed and Newman lays down his arms. A new Catholic literature could not in the present be thought of nor produced, and had to flow in the current. The great English literary tradition, whether one liked it or not, was Protestant. A meagre satisfaction was that, as far as morality was concerned, the other continental literatures did not enjoy any better health.65 In the end, Newman concludes, English Protestant literature had been more moral, more respectful of human values, even more Catholic than other self-styled Catholic literatures. § 32. Newman VII: ‘The Grammar of Assent’ If two of the three main and better-known theoretical works by Newman are partly formless miscellanies, The Grammar of Assent (1870)66 is immune from this fault and has the merit of being an organic treatise of pure philosophy. However, it still has a double and hybrid nature, being a work of instrumental logics that oversteps the boundary and gets near to being a theodicy, or rather a short summa theologica. It begins à la Spinoza, rigorously lemmatic and more geometrico; then it lowers its geometric rigour and accumulates the demonstrations, with examples taken from good sense,

65 Newman, on Voltaire, is of the same opinion as Carlyle (§§ 14.5 and 23.2 and n. 83). 66 In order to write this book Newman, though invited, declined taking part in the First Vatican Council as theological advisor.

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from minor news items, and less often from the cultural repertoire.67 As a logician Newman clashes with the tradition of the purely sensationist, pragmatic and empirical theory of knowledge, which had come to light in England, and by the agency of Locke and his followers. Newman’s duel with Locke, concerning the guarantees that regulate the delicate passage from inference to assent, is fought fearlessly. Still more marked is the disagreement with contemporary philosophical tendencies, equally empirical, evolutionist and, above all, reductionist in religion. Ipso facto Newman formulates a new dogmatism. His logics would be rigorous, were it not that he quickly succumbs to a romantic, enthusiastic and personal theory of knowledge. Each man as an individual can find his way to assent, helped not only by reason but by the imagination and the heart. Every pure or formal act of knowledge must be translated, for Newman, into a vivid and emotional experience. The ultimate aim is how to avoid contaminating assent with inference. One can assent to a doubt about an assertion, but not have ‘half assents’. Newman therefore postulates a form of total adherence of the human personality – mind, intellect, and will – to certain propositions, among which are those of religion, not nominal and generic – like the one at the time when Newman was writing – but made up of certainties, by definition permanent, infallible and irreversible. Assent always occurs in the actual individual who thinks and believes, and it rests on proofs that are ‘informal and personal’, and cannot be traced back to ‘logical rules’. The second nineteenth-century tradition from which Newman takes his distance is thus that of negative existentialism. His ‘grammar’ is antipodal to the philosophies of doubt, of the precariousness of knowledge and of cognitive desperation. His first presupposition is that the real is totally intelligible, and that religious faith is only to be explained, in its abundance of uncrushable certainties. Newman claims to accept the instruments of

67 Philology, jurisprudence and – pour cause – child psychology help with their case studies to confirm the procedure of logics. In order to invalidate the syllogism Newman makes use of a rather inappropriate philological example, that of the amendments of Shakespeare’s plays through time. And to show that syllogisms work only as a sum of probabilities he refers to the genuine or manipulated transmission of the classics by scribes.

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pure logic but with a secret bias: he must demonstrate a system of preconstituted acts of faith that have to be accepted as a whole without any hesitations. And it was far from exciting for him to look without finding: ‘certitude is a natural and normal state of mind’. Truth, once discovered and become one’s own, is for ever truth. The disagreement with other relativistic philosophies, then rampant – Pater’s for example, in 1870 just being formed – is clear-cut, because the mark of truth is its persistence. There are no different truths according to the subjects, but ‘truth there is, and attainable it is’.68 The third part of the Grammar argues the point that natural religion exists and is based on conscience, which instils into man the sense of a God who is above all a Judge, and on the traditions of ancient peoples and the transmission of the apostolic faith. Natural religion ‘prepared’ the way for revealed religion, it was the germinal stage and the stepping stone. The only true revealed religion is the Christian one, because it is universal, and the development of the only monotheistic religion since the beginning of history, subsequently transplanted into the Roman world thanks to the miraculous ‘thought of Christ’, of which the martyrs were witnesses.69 The Grammar of Assent is the most evident illustration of the internal mechanism of development in Newman’s work. The ideas here so patiently documented are an expansion and often, at the same time, a literal quotation, but never a rectification, of more concise and sometimes meteoric statements put forward in other writings – sermons and public letters – of the end of the 1830s and of the early 1840s, where Newman addresses the theme of the ‘contrast’ between religion and faith and, explicitly, the ‘usurpation’ of reason.70

68 Newman states that he is not interested in investigating how one becomes certain of an assertion; for him ‘certainty can be experienced.’ 69 The demonstration of Roman Catholicism as the only visible Church had been already carried out in Apologia, and he does not go into it here. 70 This can be seen in particular in the seven letters, signed ‘Catholicus’, and addressed to The Times in 1841, and known as ‘The Tamworth Reading Room’, in which Newman, taking his cue from the institution of a popular library, criticized an opening speech by Peel, the promoter of that initiative, and his optimistic prediction that a secular and scientific education would benefit the masses.

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2. Newman is interested – it is his starting point – in defining inference and assent to propositions that must be the object of ‘apprehension’ rather than of ‘understanding’. Assent is distinguished as being either notional or real, and of the two the one that interests Newman is the latter. A convinced mental assent must find support either through direct knowledge, or through memory, or through the guarantees offered by others, but not through notions and, therefore, not through abstracts. Assent thus means apprehending propositions as things or experiences and not as notions. It then becomes clear that for Newman inference and assent are not two distinct and separate processes. Inference can be defined a logical procedure that is also a form of weak or only formal assent. Yet in the early stages he introduces the notion of an authoritative assent that is stronger than any inference; or an assent by faith that professes to be without understanding. For example, one can assent to a mystery if apprehended, and even to an inference, because a mental notion is always unfaithful to the real. Apprehension itself may not correspond to a thing of which we have not an image, so that believing does not mean experiencing. Newman moves to his fundamental distinction, that between theology and religion, by stating that the former is a notional assent, the second is real. Real assent is always unique and personal, that is faith is a private act, and one’s impressions are unique, even when from this private process a common collective assent is reached, while the inferential process is common to all. This general theory, incidentally, is rather Romantic, because reason becomes a double-edged sword and at best simply an intermediary, though irreplaceable. Only real assent, Newman affirms, becomes operative, enflames, takes possession of and involves the whole subject, not the notional which is inert. The phases of the cognitive process are knowledge, ‘view’, act of reason, assent, that is faith. The organ of faith is the heart, because it is reached not through reason but through the imagination. Reason controls the imagination, which however is superior to it, so that religion cannot support itself without theology, and yet it would be wrong to stop at theology. Newman proves the existence of God as the first principle – even theistic, but always personal – not on the basis of the usual tests of the architect of the world or of the first cause, or of nature created by a creator, but as an overpowering interior experience. Real assent is possible because – a

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fundamental experience in the infant – the conscience, the natural seat of the divine, finds the image of a personal God. Later this sense of the divine can be identified and corroborated by the Revelation. The first part of the treatise ends with two demonstrations, that God is One and that he is Trine. The acceptance of the Trinity is not only notional, because God is multifaceted, elusive and ungraspable in a single apprehension. In fact, faith in the Trinity comes from a separate acceptance of all the propositions that concern it as a trine entity; and such simple propositions, united one with the other, constitute a mystery. 3. In the second part of the Grammar Newman reverts from theology to pure logic, with the distinction between simple and complex assent, both distinct from inference. The two processes are out of phase, not consequential, and not complementary. Inference cannot lead to assent, and assent can be withdrawn even in the presence of inference. Simple assent is intuitive, flash-like, undemonstrative, and concerns moral law, or the supreme entity. It becomes complex when it is reached by means of inferential arguments and demonstrations, or when the latter derive from it. Actually, not even assent is enough for Newman, and it is not the point he wants to make, which is instead that of reaching a form of pure and unconditioned assent untouched by doubt, an acceptance that is uncrushable and unmodifiable, or in other terms ‘certitude’. The attainment of certitude does not exclude the possibility of wrong processes while reaching it, but without invalidating its existence.71 Long and laborious pages are dedicated to pulling inferential and syllogistic logic to pieces, and for the very same reason as elsewhere, that a syllogism is too generalizing, and by making the sensible universal it does not take into account its variety and individuality. Newman is far from deaf to the problem of inference on the

71 The Grammar was criticized in Catholic circles when it appeared because it did not furnish a clear theory on the way to distinguish between true and false certitudes (Ker, The Genius of John Henry Newman, 37). The four main procedural objections to the book (to which Hopkins, dissuaded by Newman, wanted to write a commentary) are listed by Ker 1989, 647–9. Other very subtle perplexities are put forward by H. Meynell, ‘Newman’s Vindication of Faith in The Grammar of Assent’, in Ker and Hill 1990, 247–61.

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basis of proofs, but falls back to a probabilistic theory, the proof being the ‘limit of converging probabilities’. Whereas many contemporaries made a state of uncertainty absolute – it is enough to think of the poets and of the biblical new critics, who were not satisfied with the indirect evidence offered by scriptural sources – to Newman the sum of probabilities was more than sufficient.72 But how could the gap between inference and assent be filled? By the ‘illative sense’, another mechanism of the intellect of Newman’s invention. That was equal to an innate and intuitive sense, to a logical-demonstrative ‘bridge’ that allowed a personal, truly accurate confirmation not of proofs but of heaps of probabilities that come close to the proof, and are the closest one get to the proof and to what can be gained from the proof. § 33. Froude* In February 1849 an Oxford don1 publicly burnt in the Common Room at Exeter College a copy of the novel The Nemesis of Faith by the then thirty-one-year-old James Anthony Froude (1818–1894). Born in Devon, Froude was the son of an austere Anglican ecclesiastic, and had been fellow of that College from 1842. He had belonged to Newman’s circle together with his elder brother Richard Hurrell Froude, who died still young in 1836 as a staunch Tractarian. James Anthony had been asked by Newman to write some parts of a collection of biographies of English medieval saints. An Anglican deacon since 1845, he then underwent a religious crisis that 72

Newman notably approves of the method of the historian Niebuhr, who based himself on the inner test, on the probability that is ‘almost a proof ’, and on ‘divination’, in resolving uncertain historiographic questions.

*

A reprint of the second edition of The Nemesis of Faith is edited by R. Ashton, London 1988. H. Paul, Life of Froude, London 1905; A. Cecil, Six Oxford Thinkers, London 1909, 156–213; G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, London 1913, 332–39; B. Willey, More Nineteenth-Century Studies: A Group of Honest Doubters, London 1956; W. H. Dunn, James Anthony Foude: A Biography, 2 vols, Oxford 1961–1963; WOL, passim and 389–402.

1

William Sewell, a former Tractarian, and the author, among other things, of a hostile review of Carlyle’s The French Revolution.

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led him to give up his Oxford fellowship, as requested by his superiors, because when the novel came out that fellowship was incompatible with the positions expressed in it. Froude is actually the only writer who was directly a disciple of Newman’s, and the only literary personality of note in the rather anonymous following of Tractarianism – even if after 1845 he became, ironically, an ex-Tractarian and an ex-Newmanite and, therefore, also an anti-Catholic. At first sight, no written work could have been more gratifying than The Nemesis of Faith to the Protestant establishment, to High Anglicanism as a guardian of its own orthodoxy, and even to a large number of simply faithful adherents of the Low Church close to evangelicalism. In fact, Froude narrated, though in the form of ‘confessions of a sceptic’, the story of a young university student surrendering to Newman’s magnetism. This surrender is followed almost immediately by firm abjuration. However, this pars destruens was not then balanced and completed by an equivalent construens, and the confused, fragile and passive Markham Sutherland, as soon as he is appointed an Anglican minister and parish priest, leaves his mandate and is temporarily suspended a divinis by his indulgent bishop. We may suspect that the reasons for the burning of the book, a sensational measure of an unusual Counter-Reformation type, were not after all simply the theological ones of an atheistic manifesto. The Nemesis does not say this,2 and the doubts concerning the cornerstones of the Anglican Church were in fact offset by a detailed and very analytical refutation of Newman’s positions. Froude had certainly made a mistake. He had been too quick to declare his liberal, and therefore ‘broad’ theology, and to apply an evolutionary key to religion. He could not hope for immunity. Froude’s charges brought against the clerical class are poisonous and embarrassing,3 but in reality there is not a very great distance between

2

3

In the preface Froude emphasizes that he has not intended to pull the Bible to pieces, but simply to point out the need to read it as a human document and therefore subject to error. That the Oxford Movement, by wanting to re-establish the doctrinal aspects discredited by biblical criticism, ended by leading its adherents on to the verge of atheism, was a later interpretation put forward by Froude himself (Ashton 1988, 21). ‘as a body clergymen are so fatally uninteresting.’

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some of Froude’s arguments and those brought in a more measured manner by Arnold two decades later. The Nemesis of Faith was burnt not simply for its theological heresy. There is a scandalous appendix about the story of the adulterous love of the main character for a woman who is already married, and of an unrepentant death unreconciled to the Church. This nemesis overtaking an individual priest was the product of an impasse between Newman’s position and Protestant orthodoxy. The former priest is pushed to the edge of suicide. It is both the crisis of a single figure and an example of the self-criticisms experienced by young Oxonians.4 2. As was to be expected the preface to the second edition denied that the novel was autobiographical, defining it as the tragedy of a hero distinct from the author. The ostensibly classical balance (supported by the novel’s Greek-sounding title) did not convince Carlyle, who wrote that The Nemesis was ‘a wretched mortal’s vomiting up all his interior crudities, dubitations, and spiritual agonizing bellyaches into the view of the public, and howling tragically, “See!”’5 The Nemesis of Faith appeared at a time when Newman had been abandoned by some of his ardent former followers. Instead of advancing to a new start they had ended bogged down in a kind of marshland.6 In the same period as this novel by Froude we find poems by Clough and Matthew Arnold which were presenting alternative versions of post-Tractarian disillusion. Simultaneously they were targeting a university model which specifically thwarted sexual desire. All three writers react to this by resorting to fornication (signals of desperation rather than liberation).7 Froude’s attempts to mask the autobiographical elements of 4

5 6 7

In the preface, Froude presents Markham as the victim of religious ‘destruction’, but a destruction not caused by him, rather to be intended as the state in which religion found itself at the time. He blames, that is, exogenous causes, not subjective ones. Markham is no longer Froude from the moment when he is unable to win through to freedom and joy by getting rid of the yoke of an oppressive religion. Letter to J. Forster, spring of 1848, quoted in WOL, 402. ‘I go round and round and always end where I began, in difficulties’. ‘The Lieutenant’s Daughter’ – one of the two short stories included in Shadows of the Clouds (1847), the first narrative attempt published by Froude under the pseudonym of ‘Zeta’ – describes, in a series of feverish tableaux, a young woman’s leaning towards prostitution, a fashionable Victorian theme and a scenery very similar to those in

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his book resulted in a mixed and oblique form which can be seen as anticipating modernistic experimentalism, with internal chapters which observe different narrative conventions and thus dissolve the normative unity of the narrating voice. In the first, and epistolary part of the story, Markham sends a dozen letters to his friend Arthur informing him of his doubts on the choice of a profession after getting his degree, and of his reluctant decision to become a priest. This resembles Clough’s use of alter egos. The second part is a long summary, at first lyrical then tenaciously argumentative, of Froude’s preceding infatuation with Newman, which was succeeded by violent dislike. The third part is an objective narrative written by Arthur, the editor. He narrates in third person his friend’s holidays on Lake Como and his passion for Helen, a married woman, until the tragic death of her young daughter and the providential saving of Arthur’s friend from suicidal designs. A fourth voice, the voice of Froude as now undisguised author, is that of the preface to the second edition. This preface works within an evolutionist framework like that of Arnold’s theological works. It asserts that contemporary man cannot accept the supernatural in the current Zeitgeist. The preface was not written with the intent of destroying religion. On the contrary, it is in support of a more authentic and truer religion which is not separated from actual worship. 3. Anglican priests preached to the poor of the cruel and punishing God of the Old Testament, a God who frustrated their hopes. Froude denounces the Puritanical and Hebrew-like Anglicanism of which Matthew Arnold would speak, but without its antidote, Hellenism. The Old Testament two-faced God, who should have been only ‘all-bountiful’ and ‘all-just’, is the same God that a little later will unsettle Browning’s Karshish,8 and embodies the enigma triumphantly solved two decades later by Hopkins in the final lines of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. The Bible had to be rewritten, as Arnold insisted, for the benefit of the poor. It was not enough to distribute copies without comment, even if they were translated into

8

Dipsychus by Clough (§ 143.2). The second, ‘The Spirit’s Trial’, has as protagonist an autobiographical alter ego ruined by paternal severity and by the humiliations undergone at school, such as Froude himself had experienced. § 122.6–7.

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the various languages spoken in the most faraway countries of the world. (To achieve this was the objective of the Bible Society to which George Borrow9 belonged.) Where the Bible appeared to condemn the iniquity of the Jews, for example, it needed to be toned down and domesticated. The bloodthirsty God displayed by that branch of theological orthodoxy was also the God held guilty of having asked for the sacrifice of Christ for redemption.10 In the ‘confession’ the tone waxes lyrical because Froude remembers the naturalness of the spontaneous creed of childhood, with its hues of Wordsworthian bliss and echoes of Pater’s rapt mysticism of the ‘child in the house’. Markham sees himself in the free and rebellious child who hates the Sunday catechism and the prayers and psalms which praise war and seek revenge against the enemies of God. He also at the same time applauds the inspiring stories of the patriarchs. Like Kingsley and like-minded former Tractarians, Froude regarded Newman as a sly, wizard-like manipulator of consciences whose followers had been drawn into gross mystification. Both Kingsley and Froude turned their backs on Tractarianism as they fought against Newman’s encouragement to renounce the world. Instead they took up the flag of an active, war-like and expansionist Protestantism. The last part of the novel is the worst: mawkish, sentimental and wholly invented rather than drawn from experience. It is a Maupassant-like story of a loveless marriage and of a husband who abandons his wife in the arms of her lover, thus condoning her adultery. A mannered fatalism spoils these pages. The Italian descriptive scenes and the local figures are anonymous and rather colourless, and the little swimming incident that provokes the death of his mistress’s small child is casually 9 10

Volume 5, § 159. An essay by Froude in favour of the free discussion of theological questions examines the truthfulness of the Bible, and thus tackles the widespread Victorian dilemma of the ‘testimony’ with redoubled and even more paralysing scepticism: ‘Human testimony […] under the most favourable circumstances imaginable, knows nothing of “absolute certainty”’. Even the eye-witnessing, often invoked as a guarantee, is relative, incomplete, or subject to error: ‘Two witnesses in a court of law, while they agree in the main, invariably differ in some particulars’. More than any other Victorian, Froude amasses proofs that are destruentes. Renan is also quoted to support the assertion that miracles happen for those who are prepared to believe in them, and that they, including those of Christ, were never carried out in the presence of sceptics.

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presented, as are Markham’s own guilty feelings. Helen is an immoraliste and right to the end she gives a different and blasphemous interpretation of the misadventure: divine punishment for having married without love.11 4. Froude was rejected by his family once he had resigned from his office as deacon, and he took refuge in Wales where he made a living by publishing commercially successful historical works. Subsequently he moved to Devon, where he was Kingsley’s guest. He left four volumes of essays on various topics, was editor of Fraser’s Magazine for about fifteen years, and in 1892, as a sort of late compensation,12 was appointed to the chair of History at the University of Oxford, succeeding his most hated detractor, Edward Augustus Freeman. His History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, a monument of Victorian historiography begun in 1856 and completed in twelve volumes in 1870, shows the influence of Carlyle’s hero-worship against all fatalistic conceptions of historical events. Froude was immediately praised for his ability – the gift, after all, of a novelist – to sketch out and reconstruct history, and the fascination of this work is still intact due to its precise, accurate and ever sober style. Contemporaries took the view that Froude’s historical analysis was one-sided, and indeed it is true that he was far from objective. He avoided any topic that threatened his preconceived interpretation, and in addition he could be careless and inaccurate when copying and interpreting documents in the archives. As an ideologue he extols the Protestant Reformation in a ‘muscular’ manner,13 that is as a propulsive force and as an exporter of the British civilization in a world enslaved by Roman Catholicism.14 The antiCatholic prejudice always made him praise Henry VIII, whom he saw as Newman’s ‘diabolical’ fascination led Froude to make the rescuer of his alter ego a Catholic priest passing by, who is clearly a double for Newman. It is actually only a superfluous element, which delays the end of the novel, pervaded by solitude and doubt. 12 Froude had been already reinstated in Exeter College in 1856, after signing the ThirtyNine Articles, some of which had been attacked by his hero Markham Sutherland. 13 He was in fact Kingsley’s brother in-law, having married his wife’s sister in his first marriage. On his relations with the ‘muscular Christians’ see Volume 5, §§ 149.1 and 157.1, and VAL, 62. 14 One of Froude’s most well-known essays is dedicated to the underrated British naval triumphs and to the invincible Elizabethan sailors who carried the torch of Protestantism into the world against Spanish obscurantism. 11

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acting in the name of the will of the whole nation. For this reason Froude excuses Henry’s tyranny and brutality. In other works by Froude we can see him subscribing to the dawning ideology of imperialism. This is apparent in his accounts of travels in far-off lands – Australia, and the East Indies – under British colonial dominion. Froude championed Carlyle, and was the editor of his and his wife’s unpublished work. A magisterial biography of Carlyle is Froude’s second major prose work. § 34. Macaulay* I: The ‘great apostle of the Philistines’ The case of Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), Lord Macaulay from 1857, is quite different. Religion, central and a priority for Carlyle and 15

*

Collected Works, ed. Macaulay’s sister Hannah, Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols, London 1866; The Works of Lord Macaulay, 12 vols, London 1898. Letters, ed. T. Pinney, 6 vols, Cambridge 2008; a selection is edited by T. Pinney, Cambridge 1982, 2008. Selected writings ed. G. M. Young, Cambridge, MA 1952; ed. J. Clive and T. Pinney, Chicago, IL 1972. An abridged version of History of England is edited by H. C. Trevor-Roper, Harmondsworth 1979. G. O. Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, London 1876 (quotations will be taken from the New York 1876 edn; reprints Oxford 1932 and 1961; see also, edited by Trevelyan, who was Macaulay’s nephew, Marginal Notes by Lord Macaulay, London 1907). Reference will be made to the first historical discussions by G. Gilfillan, ‘Thomas Macaulay’ (1854) and ‘Macaulay as a Historian’ (1856), gathered together in A Gallery of Literary Portraits, London 1927, 112–60; by W. Bagehot, ‘Mr Macaulay’ (1856), then in Literary Studies, London 1879 and, in 2 vols, London 1944 (vol. II, 198–232), and by Taine in TAI, vol. IV, 227–84. J. Cotter Morison, Macaulay, London 1882; S. C. Roberts, Lord Macaulay: the Pre-eminent Victorian, Oxford 1927; L. Strachey, Portraits in Miniature, and Other Essays, New York 1931, 169–80; A. Bryant, Macaulay, London 1932; R. C. Beatty, Lord Macaulay, Victorian Liberal, Chapel Hill, NC 1938; C. Firth, A Commentary on Macaulay’s History of England, London 1938; PHE, 102–17; G. R. Potter, Macaulay, London 1959; K. Young, Macaulay, London 1959; D. Knowles, Macaulay 1800–1859, Cambridge 1960; J. R. Griffin, The Intellectual Milieu of Lord Macaulay, Ottawa 1965; G. Levine, ‘Macaulay: Progress and Retreat’, in The Boundaries of Fiction, Princeton, NJ 1968, 79–163 (excellent on Macaulay’s ‘submerged life’ on the basis of his private diaries); J. Clive, Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, London 1973 (careful and well-documented reconstruction of Macaulay’s intellectual growth and political career, mainly Indian, up to 1838); J. Millgate, Macaulay, London 1973; M. Cruikshank, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Boston, MA 1978; A. Bryant, Macaulay,

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Newman, loses this primacy in Macaulay. But the paradox is that Macaulay is an apologist of religion, but only in the precise sense that he is a guarantor for religions, or for those confessions that, as history teaches, existed in the world and had lived side by side, and had more often bitterly fought one against the other, in each European civil and political system from the Protestant Reform onwards. These had for him the same right to exist and the same freedom of worship. This tolerance, which the monarchies and the single nations had not always observed – and least of all the English one – constitutes one of the cornerstones of Macaulay’s political thought. Thus Macaulay reconstructs, like Carlyle and Newman, the history of the last two centuries, and often examines the same events, the same people, and the same epochal watersheds, but only to give of them a different or reversed reading. He was completely indifferent, for example, to Newman’s concept of ‘development’. Truth was not fixed once and for all and not entirely contained in a past time where it had patiently to be sought out and elaborated. History was rather made up of twists and turns that closed forever a determined phase, whether in the field of pure and applied knowledge or in that of political institutions. In Macaulay the law of progress regulates both scientific knowledge and human institutions, but with two exceptions. Poetry could only exist thanks to a primitive attitude, to an ideal emotional return to the age of the man-child, full of imagination, and somewhat mad. Theological reflection is also out of phase, because while science has advanced, theology – like natural religion – has not made any progress. Macaulay’s History of England begins pour cause not from the beginning, but from a revolutionary moment that is the only and true beginning, a beginning which throws the whole previous history into nothingness, relegating it quite literally to the domain of prehistory. Macaulay, who defined himself an agnostic or at the most a theist, elaborates these premises from a layman’s point of view, that of an objective and neutral commitment to the respect of civil rights. If he is a supporter of London 1979; O. D. Edwards, Macaulay, London 1988; J. Cotter Morison, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Honolulu, HI 2003; R. E. Sullivan, Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power, London 2009; S. Bronzini, Macaulay e la storia, Lecce 2013; Z. Masani, Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist, London 2014.

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anything he is that of a party or anyway of an ideology that proclaimed its impartiality and was committed to the safe-guarding of minorities. ‘Free enquiry is simply to open our eyes and look at the world in which we live’: this perhaps rather boastful historical phenomenology, this Machiavellian method of following ‘the effective truth of things’ usually deprives his writings of all immediate and militant polemical vis. 2. Macaulay is, with Carlyle, the greatest English nineteenth-century historian.1 He is this because his survival is not due to the correctness and authoritativeness, fatally impermanent, of his as of any other historiography. He is less trustworthy and more biased than Carlyle, but to point out and correct his errors and the deliberate, artful omissions would be a waste of effort on my part, and this is anyway something already done by professional historians. What has greatly interested posterity is, in both Carlyle and Macaulay, their arbitrariness, and, therefore, their significance in the history of thought. It is, for the literary historian, the essayistic counterpoint between objectivity and invention, resulting in a hybridized ‘historical novel’ of a peculiar stylistic mould; it resides then in that aesthetic margin that historiography usually overlooks or neglects. Macaulay and Carlyle, who did not esteem one another in the least, were in fact almost fellow-countrymen – Macaulay’s father was Scottish – and shared some views or opinions that, when organized in a ‘cosmos’, added up to an overall incompatible theory. They were essay-writers and polemists, but Macaulay was a poet and not a novelist, while Carlyle was neither poet nor novelist. They cultivated two epoch-making, historiographic and argumentative styles. In 1825 an essayist evidently made his mark for the bite of his prose rather than for his contents. Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, who published Macaulay’s first essay, wondered where on earth Macaulay had picked up such a style.2 He was to perfect with time an antipodal idiolect to any form of Baroque and Romantic intemperance. Its chief virtues 1 2

He is only second to Gibbon in English all time historiography for Potter 1959, 35. The reasons for Macaulay’s immediate notoriety, which are partly inexplicable because, after all, due to a single essay, were the crisis of criticism after the decline of the Romantics, the fact that Macaulay had the right patrons, and that he was considered a white hope in the circles of the Whig aristocracy (BAUGH, vol. IV, 1327).

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are neatness, clarity and refinedness; it looked back to the most limpid and golden examples of Latin concinnitas. To give an example: he composes mostly in paragraphs made up of separate sentences that do not consist of more than one main clause and are, as a consequence, very short. Only a relative clause here and there ripples and branches them out to greater length. In this governing paratactic measure, the choice of words is made with the greatest precision; in turn sentence is bound to sentence in a rapid logical chain. The rhetoric used is that of amplification, of multiplication through examples, of antithesis. The rhythm is that of an almost stanzaic parallelism thanks to the ample use of anaphora; sooner or later a pointed and often biting epigram is encountered. Everything seems to become simple under Macaulay’s pen, as Bagehot was the first to notice, and to cease to be problematic or debatable. To miss nuances in Macaulay is tantamount to invoking a linguistic means that Macaulay had never contemplated, uniquely intent as he was to provide an efficacious and unambiguous communication of concepts and ideas. These procedures found an application in his monumental History of England and, before that, in a grandiose body of essays on historical and historico-literary topics. But Macaulay was also a statesman and a member of Parliament, he held various administrative offices and delivered at Westminster speeches and addresses that left a lasting trace and rightly give him a top place in English parliamentary oratory. Such political militancy was always faithfully exercised in support of the Whigs, whose historical merit is summarized by Macaulay in their simply having favoured the aim of the happiness of the national community in a regime of tolerance. In the Whig tradition Macaulay recognized a more efficient past tradition than that of the democratic Americans, the French or the socialist revolutionaries. His political theory is antidemocratic, but e contrario, since what the utilitarians asserted was not true, that is that democracy was a better safeguard for the happiness of those belonging to the community. The balance of powers, according to Macaulay, was only ensured by a mixed system, parliamentary and monarchic at the same time. 3. In a polemical 1829 article, ‘Mill on Government’ – where the reference is to Mill the father and not the son – Macaulay had taken his distances from an aprioristic and roughly simplified utilitarianism, but he did not found a third or fourth movement capable of opposing the vaguely

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mystico-religious ideology of Disraeli’s ‘Young England’, or the political project implied by the Oxford Movement or the neo-theocracy of Carlyle. His refined and liberalized utilitarianism acted in an impersonal and anonymous way, and never gave origin to any sect or group of adepts. Macaulay had in fact no magnetic personality, and he was the first of the ‘eminent’ Victorians to be doubted while still living, and thus to be bequeathed to the twentieth century with authoritative negative judgements that have never been reappraised and corrected. His case today is desperate, and no one has recently revalued and championed him convincingly. His popularity and his success met with no opposition at first, each of his works having an extremely high circulation, and the profits rose in proportion. His History beat all records of sales and payments. This unstoppable rise stirred the diffidence of a class of intellectuals who thought they could dispute a series of approximations, distortions and possible falsifications of perspective. We may summarise the criteria on which this dissension was based as follows: Macaulay was immune from any Romantic enthusiasm, rather a cheap follower of the Enlightenment, a secular thinker, a pragmatic politician and, finally, a supporter of the status quo at the service of the imperial establishment. Among the most important contemporary stances – if we except the scathing criticism by Christopher North, dictated by purely personal hostility – the two vitriolic demolitions of the early 1850s, by the Scottish critic George Gilfillan, are eloquent, though they were in themselves a sheer and unhealthy verbal delirium. They came from evangelical and Calvinist Dissent and therefore they branded the Philistine Macaulay with the arms of another Philistinism.3 This maladroit critic could shape his violent attack by accusing Macaulay of having connived with the Papists in his essays, or of not having sufficiently execrated them on the strength of his tolerance. Gilfillan, moreover, made himself Carlyle’s mouthpiece, for he was one of his dauphins, by adducing that Macaulay’s historical view had not taken into account the primacy of the ‘soul’ – a transcendental viewpoint

3

On the other hand, British criticism came largely from the cadres of evangelicalism and Calvinism. It is symptomatic, as I shall notice later, that Newman left no abusive words against Macaulay.

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which was exactly the same as Carlyle’s.4 Politically – this was Gilfillan’s next accusation – Macaulay had withdrawn his initial esteem of Puritans adopting an open pro-Catholic and even a pro-Jesuitical stance, denounced by the critic in delirious and fanatical tones. Religion re-emerged as a litmus paper. Protestantism, if anything, was alive and kicking in 1850, the year of the ‘Papal aggression’ and of the still open wound of Newman’s defection – unlike Catholicism, by then half-dead. Macaulay’s essay on Bacon, which praises the experimental scientist but lays bare the mediocrity and the meanness of the man, was based according to Gilfillan on Carlyle’s misunderstanding, that ‘every real greatness is moral’ and that a great scientist must be on principle also a great man, an axiom on which even Newman, directly influenced by Macaulay, had his doubts. Actually, Bacon is cut down to size by Gilfillan by simply comparing him to Plato, the presumed founder of that transcendentalism which, after many theoretical deformations, had reached Carlyle. Bacon had in fact ignored ‘the depth of the infinite in the soul of man’. Macaulay, as historian, was also accused by Gilfillan because he had not given preference to the heart and to the ‘genuine imagination’, those gifts that – finally making himself clear – had animated The French Revolution by Carlyle. Macaulay had furthermore been guilty of badly representing Scotland and, in particular, the Highlands of which he was the degenerate son. That Macaulay’s History should be found by Gilfillan lacking in ‘general principles’ not only suggests a radical doubt concerning a phenomenological concept of history, but it also implies, perhaps, that even a history informed by general principles different from those expressed by Gilfillan would have been just as condemnable. Macaulay’s coldness and insensitiveness were also noted in the

4

Gilfillan compares Macaulay at length with Burke, but seemingly as if he were thinking of Carlyle. The epithets he uses, such as ‘a man of genius’, or rather a ‘prophet’ with an ‘uncontrollable power’, whose writings are ‘burning coals’ of his ‘flaming genius’, fit Carlyle more than Burke. Carlyle is even more explicitly referred to by Gilfillan when he mentions Macaulay’s silence over Boswell’s ‘heroic’ worship of Johnson, and, therefore, accuses him for not having made a hero of him. The comparison between Burke and Macaulay – to Macaulay’s detriment – is also made by Bagehot.

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more benign but weaker essay by Bagehot, written from the point of view of a moderate form of Toryism,5 and more secretly from that of Carlyle. As Bagehot warned, one should have ‘a passionate and religious nature’. 4. Macaulay was not then received as the antidote to Carlyle’s dictatorial dogmatism by virtue of another kind of dogmatism, softer, blander and more lucid. Carlyle, no matter how disappointing he had proved, had resisted far better and had remained more trustworthy at least in the eyes of a certain wing of the English intelligentsia. At the end of the nineteenth century critics retrospectively denounced the need, as yet unsatisfied, for a vigorous prophet, for a thinker who could provide strong answers, and reassessed Macaulay once again using Carlyle as a measuring stick.6 Saintsbury, who was not a detractor, added that Macaulay had been unable ‘to understand the intangible’, that in other words he was not enough of a tightropewalker, that requirement necessary to save the Victorians from oblivion and scorn. The history of twentieth-century criticism on Macaulay may be summed up in the condemnation of his lack of complexity. He did not correspond to that favourite cliché of the anguished, divided writer with qualms of conscience that critics cherished; he was Olympian, without deceitfulness, and even sexually ‘clean’, or so it seemed. His objectivity, the absence of rumours concerning his private life, the lack of an autobiography, hushed up any biographical romance, and made people feel nostalgic for an emotionally ‘intense life’. An eighteenth-century aura seems to hover around Macaulay, a neutral and imperturbable spectator of events.7 No 5

6

7

In his debatable and inaccurate chapter on Macaulay, Taine asserts the exact opposite, that Macaulay is always ‘passionate’ in dealing with his topic, that he has an ‘energetic, sustained, and vibrating tone’, and that his thought is an ‘active force’, and that with his ‘vehemence’ Macaulay ‘masters the heart’ (TAI, vol. IV, 249–50). Morison 1882 disproves Macaulay’s fine and skilful essay on Ranke, because, substantially, Macaulay does not speak negatively but even too favourably of the Jesuits, and seems to silently confirm the rather more sectarian and unsustainable analysis made in Carlyle’s essay (§ 21.4): ‘The Jesuits still exist, and are hated by many’. The question that Macaulay asks – why Catholicism lasts – was in fact one that concerned the untouchable Newman, too. Why did Macaulay never marry? This question, all things considered, has never had an answer. Clive 1973, 256–88 and 499, after mentioning a few, timid and short-lived

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defence of Macaulay will here be attempted, and no claim will be made of having discovered in him unsuspected germs of modernity. I would only emphasize, in his case, the inappropriateness of the label of a ‘stupid’ writer that many modernists tagged to eminent Victorians like him, starting with Matthew Arnold.8 A rich store of biographical anecdotes was resorted to, for example, to illustrate his pedantic taste, or his crass ignorance of the visual arts or of music, or the little attention he paid to the great changes that were feverishly taking place around him, in the field of science, of theological and ecclesiological speculation, and of literary criticism itself. Praz made in his Hero in Eclipse an amusing reappraisal of Macaulay’s stupidity, both his own and that presupposed and generated in the reader. But it is a splendid, one-sided parody that uses the writer to reinforce the myth of a silly and on the whole bourgeois century, one that Strachey had been guilty of transmitting to anyone in need of a brief summary of such a complex age. Macaulay admitted he was incompetent in philosophy,9 but perhaps only half-jokingly (even Carlyle amiably said that Kant was abstruse). But it is wrong to say that he did not know the art of argumentation. He had no truck with metaphysics, and deliberately; but his polemical essays, where he skilfully pulls to pieces the positions of his adversaries, are not greatly inferior to Newman’s. Macaulay’s stupidity was actually the originality of a thought that was far from current, and phenomenological and unwieldy because immune from repetitive prejudices. The absence of moral emphasis and of the tones of a preacher that he was reproached for, are elements needing to be re-assessed. Finally, it is commonly said that Macaulay considered literature as an instrument; but if so, what could then be said of Carlyle? Macaulay’s essays and diaries are spattered with

8 9

youthful infatuations, concludes, with a Freudian diagnosis, that Macaulay, who was not a homosexual as Strachey maliciously hints (see PHE, 109), got rid of the trauma caused by the twisted relationship with his own father, by being a father to his two sisters Hannah and Margaret, both much younger than he, and who had a devoted affection for him, of a daughter-like nature. In his essay on Joubert (§ 163.7), where appears the judgement I have used for the title of this section. Trevelyan 1876, II, 214.

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critical viewpoints and incidental appreciations that, far from obtuse, on the contrary are rather penetrating, for example on Bulwer Lytton’s and Dickens’s fiction. The latter was naturally less appreciated because of his iconoclastic extremism and for his stylistic flaws.10 § 35. Macaulay II: Biography Macaulay came on his father’s side from a Scottish Presbyterian family with a long tradition – his great grandfather and his grandfather had been ministers in their native Highlands – and on the side of his mother from the Bristol Quakers. She was the daughter of a bookseller and a close friend of the famous evangelical poet Hannah More, who judged very promising the religious hymns the little Macaulay improvised. When Macaulay was born his father Zachary was a member of the Clapham sect of evangelicals and Quakers who were engaged in denouncing all kinds of social abuse and supported of the abolition of slavery. He would also later manage a newspaper which became the expressions of this group. Before 1800 Zachary Macaulay had, however, lived a wild and unquiet life, to say the least, which had reflections on the education of his son. As a youth Zachary, who was an alcoholic, had suffered the classic Calvinistic anguish of the damned soul, but he had become detoxified. And he had been sent, when eighteen, to Jamaica, as administrator of a sugar plantation, torn by a guilty conscience for conniving with slavery. A further experience saw him governor of an adventurous colony of freed African people in Sierra Leone, where a company with an English licence aimed to make profits masked with humanitarian ideals. Once back in Scotland, the family that Zachary Macaulay had set up had no financial problems, and Thomas was sent to schools with excellent private tutors, who were soon amazed at the way he devoured books and at his prodigious memory and glib tongue. In those schools he was trained in the classics and acquired that meticulous erudition that exudes from his writings. Actually Macaulay, as a reaction, shortly before going up to Cambridge had distanced himself not only from the evangelicalism of his father, adopting a semi-agnostic position,

10

See excerpts from the diaries and letters in Trevelyan 1876, II, 44, 105–6, 109.

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but also from Toryism and from pro-Black philanthropism. At home it was not permitted to read novels before midday or one could only during school holidays, because, according to his father, they were ‘intoxicating as a glass of liquor’ – with an implicit personal reference. This paternal prohibition influenced, at least up to a point, the choice of a surrogate for the novel in the future historiographer.11 After his degree, brilliant despite his limited propensity for mathematics, and having gained a university scholarship that gave him just about enough to live on and that ended anyway in 1831, Macaulay studied in London for the bar without practising. His legal competence would be useful to him later on in life, when he had to deal with many technical details covering the trials of the Stuart era. Gifted and brilliant, he was soon in the good graces of Lady Holland, the daughter of a slave-owning planter. He was elected in Parliament in 1830 for the Whigs thanks to Lord Lansdowne, who had ceded to him one of his ‘rotten boroughs’; and he could not but make his maiden speech by perorating the abolition of all discriminations against the Jews; some others he gave, admired even by the opposition, were in support of the First Reform Bill. In 1833 he voted against his own government on the question of the abolition of slavery, and for a question of principle – the law was too light for the son of an anti-slavery campaigner – he resigned. Elected as a compensation Government Commissioner of the Supreme Council, a controlling organ of the East India Company, he sailed for Calcutta in 1834 accompanied by his sister Hannah. His salary as member of the Supreme Council was of 10,000 pounds a year and was largely saved. An interesting, separate chapter, usually written by historians, could be here devoted to Macaulay’s activity in India in the spheres of penal legislation and education. His framework of thought, which in the present day cannot appear anything but prejudiced and condemnable, was Anglo- and Euro-centric. The English in India could only be the exporters of Christian culture and ideals, and act with the aim of forming an elite of Anglicized natives to act as a buffer. His colonial attitude was double-edged, respectful and condescending, and at bottom pessimist, because he felt the moment not yet ripe

11

Levine 1968, 109.

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for India to free itself and push ahead under its own steam: the civilized Indian had to adapt himself to the only possible way open to him, that of the English gentleman. Macaulay, the enemy of tyranny, was forced to recognize the need for an impartial despotism.12 These guidelines were set out in detail in his Indian ‘minutes’. In London, where he returned after four years in India, he took up ministerial positions, becoming Minister for the Defence in 1839. He was not re-elected because Melbourne’s government fell in 1841, but was again in office in 1846 as Paymaster General, a sinecure. In 1847 he left politics, but resumed his political life once again in 1852. Shortly afterwards he definitely abandoned politics due to ill health and also because he needed more free time to complete his History of England. In 1856 he asked for a government pension. Death overtook him in 1859 in his luxurious Kensington house, where he had been lovingly looked after by his sisters and had amused himself in the garden as a diversion. He was buried with honours in Westminster Abbey. § 36. Macaulay III: The essays I. The organic idea of historico-literary culture Macaulay’s thirty-odd Critical and Historical Essays, which were discussed, hotly debated, highly praised or vituperated as soon as they first came out, had been separately published from 1825 to 1842, and they were collected in volume in 1843. Taken as a whole they are, in fact, a monument with few equals in the prose of the first half of the nineteenth century, or even in the second. Only Carlyle’s can compete with these by Macaulay. They were, it is true, all of them written in a hurry and as the occasion arose; but we may doubt that they were destined for an immediate use, and that Macaulay did not think of posterity. The volume edition, necessary to stop unauthorised and unrevised American pirate editions, testifies to the opposite. Macaulay took the chance to clean up the collection and prepared a complete edition that became one of the best-sellers of the century. A comparison with the two series of critical essays by Matthew Arnold, the only other essay-writer in the nineteenth century that we can think of, is 12

Clive 1973, 467, 469.

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not on equal terms, mainly because Arnold was a cultural historian with strong literary and religious interests, and a more influential, personal and eclectic literary critic, whereas the aesthetics of Macaulay, almost purely an historian, is amateurish and rudimental. He was, in fact, almost solely an historian. Carlyle instead can be seen, as I hinted, as a direct competitor, if not an antagonist. All the essays by Macaulay saw the light as long reviews – often so long that they seem today like short monographs – that almost immediately drop their nominal cue to go into more general argumentations. Both Carlyle’s and Macaulay’s essays began to be printed in the middle of the 1820s and in the same Scottish magazine, the Edinburgh Review, which, long-sighted, had managed to obtain the collaboration of the two most promising emerging geniuses. The plan of the essay – though this is far from being a distinctive criterion, and though it was a current practice – is in both biographical, with a slight variation in Macaulay. The works written by the authors, when available, are dealt with by Macaulay more deeply, more lengthily and with greater importance given to their autonomy of form and content. Form and content, however, are for Macaulay a hendiadys, and the author or the public figure stands, as in Carlyle, against the background of an epoch and of a system of thought, of which they are the representatives. The expository style is visibly antithetic: extravagant, inventive, unbridled, impatient in Carlyle, coldly neoclassical, balanced, slightly academic, and sometimes pompous in Macaulay. The fundamental agreement between the two lies in the fact that both interpret in their essays, in a virtually silent dialogue in the absence of cross-references, the same historico-cultural segment, the one extending, through various bloody or bloodless revolutions, from the English Reformation to the present. The historical material, subjected in both to a similar concentration, is however distributed and emphasized in a dissimilar manner. Macaulay, who wrote only a few essays on non-English or non-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century topics, passes over in rapid synthesis what Carlyle regarded as milestones in English history, and that, as such, deserve a deeper and wider enquiry – what he did in his historiographic works. The respective teleologies are different. To confine ourselves to the essays, Carlyle read the eighteenth century as a century steeped in disbelief, and barely redeemed by a few independent, heroic spirits and by the pre-Romantic and Romantic German

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transcendentalists. The latter are never mentioned by Macaulay, who deals with Johnson from a completely different viewpoint, repeatedly introduces Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists but without any animosity, and pre-empts Carlyle with a literally antipodal essay on Frederick the Great. Looking at the individual judgements extrapolated from the essays, on the same figures and on the same historical events, their agreement may seem greater than that resulting from the general framework. The nineteenth century was for Macaulay, in open disagreement, exactly the apex reached by the development of civilization. 2. Macaulay gradually envisaged and constructed in his essays his fixed system of judgement on the evolution of English history, and on its cardinal points, such as the Reformation, the Civil War, Cromwell’s Protectorate, the Glorious Revolution, the Hanoverian reign of the Georges, the English role in the Napoleonic Wars and the post-Napoleonic restoration of the status quo. One of the interpretative keys, if not the main one, is that of political tolerance and of the safeguard of the rights of minority groups:13 it is the axis, therefore, of the inexorable progress of institutions, at least the English ones, an aprioristic postulate that Macaulay traces, with some gaps, in the phenomenology of the actual. The Leibnizian concept, passionately believed in, that the present English civilization was the best of the possible worlds, was not really a pre-concept, because Macaulay applies this key in a mathematical, rigorous and, as a consequence, partly self-damaging manner. It meant not scorning the past but historicizing it. Macaulay held with Carlyle,14 quoted verbatim, that the two ‘revolutions’ characterizing modern history had been the invention of the press and Luther’s Reform. And yet, like Carlyle, Macaulay threw water on the fire of the English Reform: the despotic power of the Pope had been transferred

13

14

The 1831 essay in favour of the abolition of ‘civil disabilities’ of the Jews recalls, in its warm pro-Semite sympathy, the analogous position taken by George Eliot in one of the essays of Theophrastus Such. The English state, however, is praised precisely for having integrated the Jews in the best possible way, thus suppressing any residual rancour. In the essay on the memorials of Hampden (1831).

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to the king, and Elizabeth had, in fact, persecuted and sent Dissenters to death. The whole Stuart century is for him dominated by the struggle of Parliamentarianism, finally victorious against despotism. In 1760 Macaulay identifies an apogee, or a zenith of this historical process following Pitt’s victories and diplomatic triumphs: internal peace is not threatened, tolerance reigns, there are no persecutions and the standard of life is at its heights. And yet, almost immediately all had crumbled. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century a revolutionary wave had risen everywhere, which had been ‘a rising up of the human reason against a Caste’.15 The French Revolution is the explosion of anarchy, remedied and corrupted – the date of the essay is 1835, a few months from The French Revolution by Carlyle – by a new despotism, but it still remained ‘a great blessing to mankind’.16 Macaulay’s essay on the historian Mackintosh summarises English history as a history of progress, and progress of the institutions, but with an image that will later be used by Arnold, of the rise and fall of the tide.17 His various historical essay can be seen as preparatory chapters for an English history of the eighteenth century, and the absence of that section in the History of England may be said largely compensated by them. The two very ample essays on Pitt the Elder, in particular, form a detailed and exhaustive overview of at least the second half of the eighteenth century, a century in which Britain re-examined its international relationships and negotiations in all their aspects, and in many of its contexts and scenes; this at a time when Pitt was passionately advocating in Parliament the abolition of excise duties, and England was facing the threat of rebellion and secession among its American colonies. At the same time Voltaire was being courted by Frederick of Prussia and a war involving the whole of Europe was breaking out. All Macaulay’s essay on these topics comprise meticulous reconstructions of well-known events, recalled with vigorous synthesis and at the same time with acute and analytical precision. He displayed an infallible

15 16 17

Essay on Burleigh (1832). Macaulay, however, had added in his essay on Mill: ‘But would France have gained if, ever since the year 1793, she had been governed by a democratic convention?’. § 154.1.

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mastery of the subject within the constraints of the time and in relation to the documentary evidence then available to him. The protagonists on the historical and political scene are always closely and effectively portrayed, both in their vices and their virtues. Macaulay rehabilitates and pardons his subjects more often than he condemns them; he is aware at all times of the mitigating circumstances and the venial weaknesses and failings of the individual. 3. An organic idea of English culture was elaborated by Macaulay by verifying his earlier postulation concerning the development of culture. He distanced himself from the notion that there was a ‘year zero’ of English culture (a date which for Carlyle and Arnold was identified with the Celtic, Saxon and Norman periods). For Macaulay this date was to be sought in the Elizabethan sixteenth century. Since then, more or less stably, the preceding ages had always been, from a cultural and purely speculative point of view, inferior to those following. Literature is studied mainly as a phenomenon collateral to and derived from culture. Milton, first examined intrinsically as a poet, is evaluated in his stature as a pamphleteer in the feverish period of Cromwell’s Protectorate; the climate of the Restoration dramatists is revisited with the conclusion that their licentiousness was the consequence of the unnatural ‘holiness’ imposed by the Puritan faith and, in the last analysis, by an intolerant regime. The opening sentences of the essays on Addison, Fanny Burney and Johnson warn that these writers can be understood only if placed against the background of political and cultural history. The history of literature tout court, however, contradicted the principle of the progress of arts and of knowledge, and seemed not to progress at the same pace. Poetry is primitive and belongs to the primitive ages, in the sense that only those who had remained child-like in spirit, or psychopaths, could practice it. In this sense it is unable to survive within a technological civilization and is subject to obsolescence. This apparent contradiction is resolved in Macaulay’s thinking by pointing out the prose-like and objective poetry associated with the figure of the adult poet, favoured by the Zeitgeist. The axiom of the decadence of poetry in the modern age – posited in his first published essay, in 1825 on Milton – obliged Macaulay to distance himself as far as he could from a Romanticism which he perceived as mechanical, imitative and, above all, nostalgic. In the 1830s Romanticism

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seemed to him the freest and most independent of all literary and cultural developments, challenging the cold rules and technical formality of eighteenth-century poetry. He simultaneously admired Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and (in part) Byron, but was at the same time, given the nature of progress referred to above, one of the few Victorians explicitly hostile to the cult of a vaguely or authentically religious Romanticism, and to its propensities to the past. In 1825 he could not debate directly with the exponents of medieval or neo-transcendental Romanticism. He may have been unaware of them, or possibly he deliberately ignored the German Romantic poetry that Carlyle had introduced to the English. Tennyson was a much younger man, a mere beginner, and Newman had yet to come out with his first Tract and inaugurate the Oxford Movement. In 1830 Macaulay bullied the innocuous Southey, who as laudator temporis acti was one of Newman’s pets, and one that even Carlyle saved, the only one from among all the Romantics. He was one the first early witnesses and diagnosticians of consumer literature, and, foreshadowing George Eliot on the ‘silly novels’,18 panned in the same year the overpraised poem of a very mediocre Romantic epigone, and with him the newly born caste of the writers who were no longer independent but caught in the clutches of a changeable market. This 1830 essay was the only one written on the works of living artists. Macaulay would later present the novels of Fanny Burney as a gallery of humours, eccentrics and men on the street, but without ever quoting Dickens, whose name is made, and fleetingly, only in essays after 1840. § 37. Macaulay IV: The essays II. The struggle against intolerance, and the evolution of progress In order to discuss Macaulay’s essays as a whole in greater depth, and according to their main connective threads, it is more profitable not to keep to the chronological order in which they appeared, and to reorganize them – thus putting into relief the panoramic and exhaustive study of English culture that takes shape – as separate chapters, though linked, but not in 18

Volume 5, § 185.4.

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a consecutive manner. The primary focus is England from the fifteenth century to the present day, however against a European chessboard already, in itself, interrelated. The arrangement of these essay could be tripartite: essays on people and historical periods, essays on thinkers and literati, essays finally dealing with the latest present day topics.19 But, in practice, this separation is largely overcome, as each of them is informed by a coherent idea. Following this arrangement, combined with the chronological order of topics, the first essay by Macaulay is that on Machiavelli of 1828. It is rather weak in its assumptions as it applies to fifteenth-century Italy Gibbon’s scheme of a fading thirteenth-century civilization, and traces the presumed immorality and the cynicism of the Florentine Secretary back to a relativistic conception of the moral code, for Macaulay typical of the times. Machiavelli not only and not simply did not condemn immorality, but was at once the enemy of despotism and an admirer of democracy, the patron of tyranny and a republican. His was a normal elasticity of interests in a climate that no longer cultivated the myth of the glory of war, but entrusted it to mercenaries. Morality had become a matter of ‘taste’, and someone like Iago would not have been condemned but understood, if not admired. Macaulay’s essay on the well-known historical work by Hallam, which, also of 1828, covered the times from the Reformation to George II, applies, casting aside all indulgence, the rigid rule that the state must be no repressor but rather should safeguard the liberties of all its citizens. Macaulay levels a violent reprimand against the indecision, or the half measures, of Henry VIII, and even on the reign of Elizabeth his disagreement with Hallam is clear-cut. The Queen was a persecutor, and so was her ‘regime’. Having reached Cromwell, Macaulay justifies heavy-handed violence – Hallam himself had made a comparison, later taken up by Carlyle, between Cromwell and Napoleon, in favour of the former. The praise of the Puritan civilization is somewhat weakened by the fact that immediately after 1660 corruption was once gain widespread. Macaulay, for the first time, ventures here to outline the development of freedom during the age of the Hanoverians. His thesis is enlarged in the essay on Hampden, the

19

Morison 1882, 70, divides them differently, into four groups.

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leader of the Long Parliament, where Macaulay reaffirms that violence and capital punishment – inflicted on the Governor of Ireland, Strafford – were justified, as they were during the French Revolution, by ‘public danger’. The essay on Bacon of 1837, which caused a wasps’ nest of polemics, after a long biographical section takes the philosopher back to the fold of utilitarian thought and to humanitarian philanthropy; or more exactly sees in him a radical revolution in the history of thought, which formerly had been only, and abstractedly, speculative.20 Eighteenth-century history is dealt with in essays dedicated not only to the great statesmen, such as Walpole and Pitt, but to various minor figures of politicians and Hanoverian diplomats, as well as to two legendary governors of Bengal, Clive and Hastings. The essay on Lord Clive reads rather like a very tense and tightly woven novel, and revisits the example of an adventurous heroism that was every Englishman’s pride. In 1840, when Macaulay was writing it, Clive was still alive and Macaulay could sketch from the life the type of man who was to be found later so frequently in Victorian fiction, that of the enriched, vulgar, sybaritic, and fairly dark-skinned official with his damaged liver and with his heart in an even worse state, like Amelia Sedley’s brother in Vanity Fair.21 The essay on Frederick the Great (1842), the second having a non-English theme and the last in order of time and of writing, is the most fluid and imaginative of Macaulay’s historical essays. The Frederician epos, on which the poet Thomas Campbell had written as an historian, is retraced up to the end of the Seven Years’ War, with a promise, not 20 Newman too reverted to Bacon, but to approve, though cum grano salis, a form of utilitarian liberal culture (§ 31.4). Launching a lengthy parallel, Macaulay discredits Plato, who made gods of men, while he praises Bacon who – thus in a rather Machiavellian way – considers them for what they are, simply men. In Macaulay’s opinion, Bacon was a moral philosopher and a believer in Revelation. Newman, as a pedagogue, disagreed with Macaulay, who thought that the university should not contemplate theology as one of its disciplines (Clive 1973, 113–4). 21 Volume 5, § 73.4. Macaulay sketches a self-portrait, because at about twenty-five he was plump and dressed like a dandy but without any taste, flaunting embroidered waistcoats and kid gloves. Like Thackeray’s Jos Sedley, he was at bottom an incompetent, he did not ride, was no archer or fencer, not even a swimmer. He just took long walks, always with a book in hand (see Trevelyan 1876, I, 118).

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kept, to complete it in a subsequent essay. Macaulay’s ‘Frederic the Great’ was perhaps the spark that provoked Carlyle’s work by the same title ten years later. Macaulay, in fact, makes the Prussian monarch anything but a hero, painting him as a mentally handicapped person, unable to learn French and with no taste for poetry – a Machiavellian lout and the author of a carnage of such proportions simply for expansionist aims and for ambition. He had been a crafty and diabolical administrator, but also a perfidious liar. Macaulay, however, credits him with the greatest virtue, tolerance. 2. Macaulay’s essay on Milton (1825) oozes with mannerisms and is written in a florid and uncontrolled diction, as Macaulay himself later admitted and regretted. It contained the first formulation of the Whig historical vision; but this takes shape only in the second part, more concerned with Milton the Puritan and Roundhead, and supporter of the constitutional rights, than with Milton the poet. Macaulay deliberately draws a parallel between the reigns of Charles I and James II; asserts the need to use force as a last resource; confirms the necessity of democracy even in conditions of political immaturity; absolves Milton from the charge of being a regicide, adding that anyhow even regicides have their extenuating circumstances; and finally extols the ravishing lyricism of Milton’s prose. The aesthetics displayed at the opening is that of the Romanticism of primitive poetry, not abstract but perceptive, whereby the poet is not distinguished from the painter who lets himself be suggested by, and gives vent to strongly individual visions. The argument moves on from the assertion that Milton was great because he had struggled against an age unsuited to the flowering of poetry. ‘As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines’. It had been relatively easy to write great poetry in the ‘dark centuries’, but it was much more difficult to do so in a scientific age. Echoing Vico, civilization had moved from perception to abstraction, from generalization to particularization, and if this is true science gains, and poetry loses, ground. With the passing of the ages an ‘analytical’ poetry had been consolidated that is not ‘the business of the poet’, whose ‘office’ is ‘to portray’, not ‘to dissect’. The second theoretical point is that the poet is a sufferer possessed by a ‘fine frenzy’ or by the ‘truth of madness’, while the third point is that poetry produces an illusion in the imagination and that it is, therefore, like a magic

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lantern and uses words merely as instruments. Macaulay concludes that there will always be less poetry in the future and more progressive ages, or that it will only come from those returned to the state of childhood or will have gone backwards along the path of civilization. In the panoramic rereading of Milton’s works, he pinpoints its salient characteristics in the imprecision of his associations, pervaded by an irresistible and indescribable evocativeness. Comparing Dante to Milton, and even to Shakespeare, became from Macaulay onwards a recurrent argumentative exercise. While Dante is an objective realist intent on making all concrete, Milton is subjective and evocative; and Milton is unreachable, thus superior to Dante, in dealing with the supernatural. Dante is only picturesque in the supernatural, Milton picturesque and mysterious. 3. Boswell (‘Samuel Johnson’, 1831) was re-evaluated by Macaulay before Carlyle, but not for sensing the heroic in him. The theory set out in ‘Milton’ is applied once again to establish that he was a ‘great fool’, qua ‘a great writer’, who registered in a really sincere naïve-like fashion what he saw with his own eyes. Macaulay’s Johnson has nothing to do with Carlyle’s, because not even a shade of religious afflatus could be found in him, and no fear of God, nothing of a suffering and strenuous independence in a very difficult, and by then godless, society.22 The great lexicographer is presented more than anything else as an unpredictable and bizarre extrovert. In the essay on Southey, and on his imaginary conversations with Thomas More first published in 1830, the reader relishes a kind of bullying, dry, apodictic, cutting tone. Southey had proved once more a nostalgic Tory who feared the ruin of the age in which he lived, and who idealized the Middle Ages. Those who, like Macaulay, thought the present to be the best of possible worlds were bound to be annoyed, and this essay was a discordant voice that lashed the widespread worship of the past. Macaulay was, at that time, the main opponent of the Apocalyptics, or more exactly a virtual one, since Carlyle, Newman and Dickens were still to come and voice that sentiment. Industrialism does not bring ruin, nor does it stupefy; civilization

22 According to Morison 1882, 98, Carlyle’s essay (§ 14.4) was a ‘hidden response’ to Macaulay’s essay.

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had made evident progress that could be measured by the increase of per capita income, by the much lower rate of mortality, and by the extension of political rights, which in 1830 was about to be debated and approved in Parliament.23 The verdict on Byron, taking a hint from Thomas Moore’s biography, was that, as was to be expected, ‘opposite extremes’ coexisted in him, something for which he is understood, admired, defended and, in the end, cleared of all charges. The justification of Romanticism is that – with an ingenious semantic play on words – it was ‘correct’, meaning that it matched object and representation. The mechanism of progress in the arts explains how the ‘cold’ Augustan poetry was overwhelmed by Romantic ardour.24 Byron had not completely conformed with this poetic ‘revolution’ begun by Cowper in English literature, as there was in him something false and insincere. The state of literature in 1830 was represented by the minor poetaster and plagiarist, Robert Montgomery. Writers courted the public with works of low quality, but Macaulay sees signs of the rebirth of excellence, and denounces mediocrity to raise the literary standards. 4. ‘Gladstone on Church and State’ (1839) is one of the clearest of all Macaulay’s essays, and it is also the closest he got to a subtle and captious argument worthy of a controversialist like Newman.25 Given its topic, it is theoretical and also militant, in fact written while the Tractarian debates were well underway. Of this it bears visible traces. Odd, isolated assertions

23

This preference for the ancients over the moderns, a congenital weakness and one historically out of date, was retraced by Macaulay in Sir William Temple, Swift’s patron (in Macaulay’s 1838 essay). Temple, taking up a position in the querelle, maintained that ‘human race is constantly degenerating’, an assertion that Macaulay rejects. Macaulay recanted his attack on Southey in an essay of the same year, praising Southey’s own edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress. 24 It is a weaker argument to hold that Elizabethan drama was superior to the Greek. Even Hopkins would later underline the anxiety of the truest and higher poetry to break away from the chains imposed by rules. 25 Newman, in The Idea of a University, quotes approvingly an ingenious, and very famous passage in which Macaulay, to justify the tolerance and the legitimacy of the various confessions, imagines the prayers, each said according to his own faith and each listened to by his own God, of the fighters of the different but allied armies on the night before the battle of Blenheim.

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could be taken for fine Tractarian gold, but when assembled they are just the opposite. Macaulay refrains from overt polemics towards the Tractarians, and confines himself to mention Tractarianism as one of the religious currents of the time, which proved that the Anglicans were neither a single nor a united Church. He struck while the iron was hot with a proposal that undermined tolerance, promoted by the then promising Tory Parliamentarian Gladstone: a state must have its own religious confession and must contribute to spread it and otherwise impose it. This assumption is denied by Macaulay by replying that while the state must provide for the material necessities of its people, with regard to the spiritual needs it should be more possibilistic. Newman himself admitted that a good governor or leader might not perhaps be a good Christian, even though he would not have approved the stress laid by Macaulay on the uncertain status of the true faith, on the plurality of beliefs, and on the religious errors with which history was paved, and that this should thus exonerate the state from being confessional.26 A theocratic state was equally inadmissible for him; on the contrary he sponsored and fought for the equal rights of all the confessions, and was in favour of protecting all minority groups and all forms of religious dissent. Gladstone’s theory, or proposal, as Macaulay points out with good reason, would have led to intolerance and persecution. Gladstone meant, as state religion, the Anglican Church, the one truly Catholic and apostolic Church, taking for granted that it was the true and only faith, and using the same argument for the ‘truth’ of Catholicism as Newman’s in reversed terms. Unknowingly, Macaulay slips into the role of Newman by calling into question the Anglican claims to a direct apostolic succession. The state ought not to lord it on religious faiths because they are all either all right or all wrong. In both cases, however, they all have a right to public financing.27 Macaulay’s thesis in his review of Ranke’s History of

26 ‘free enquiry on moral subjects produces discrepancy’. 27 Each single state ought then to favour the spreading of religion to the greatest number of its subjects. Ultimately, the serious flaw of Macaulay’s advocacy for tolerance is his admitting as religion – though a pluralistic one – none other than the Christian, and the exclusion from this pluralism of Asiatic paganism and idolatry. In line with this principle, the English in India could and ought to spread Christianity.

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the Popes (1840) is that the theological debate was from time immemorial at a standstill, and that it too transgressed the law of the progress of knowledge. All of this authorized a profession of absolute, stoical epoché, or suspension of judgement. Actually, once again Macaulay becomes the unwilling apologist of Catholicism against Anglicanism, as he realizes that Catholicism had passed unharmed through four Reformations and as many homicidal attempts at its life. He can, therefore, pretend to candidly praise a figure, that of St Ignatius, and a religious order, that of the Jesuits, which everyone in England ferociously hated, and which shortly would be the victim of Carlyle’s treacherous attack.28 § 38. Macaulay V: ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’ Macaulay had a natural gift for poetry. When still a child, he had learnt to memorize various English classics, like whole books of Paradise Lost, and before he was eight he had written massive Scottish and Ossianic epics, and had won the poetry prize twice at Cambridge University. Small playful poems, burlesques and satires, some of which seem to have a touch of nonsense, were improvised by him on the spot and read extempore when at home or sent by letter, but they were never collected or published in his lifetime. According to his own directives – aesthetic, evolutionary and, therefore, historical – poetry stricto sensu had a Damocles’ sword over its head, because only a poet become a child again and partly mentally insane, and, therefore, paranoiac, could write it in the present day and age.29 The poetry that Macaulay did not perhaps write, and anyway did certainly not publish, is lyrical and subjective, and expressing uncontrolled effusions. Lays of Ancient Rome, conceived and partly written in India, completed in loco in Rome after his return to England, and published in 1842, makes up, with the addition of a few free verse lyrics which were just as famous, the complete poetic canon of Macaulay. It is a canon 28

§ 21.4. See the fine remark that Catholicism had far-sightedly succeeded in handling the religious ‘enthusiasts’, that is, the fanatical holy founders of monastic orders and brotherhoods which had been accordingly approved and had been fully integrated, whereas Protestantism had pitilessly marginalized them, splitting into sects. 29 For an ampler examination of Macaulay’s aesthetics, see Levine 1968, 103–6.

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that had thus to be presented and justified either as a transgression or as an exception. The four Roman ‘ballads’– the tale of the heroic undertaking of Horatius Cocles, the battle at Lake Regillus that instituted the feast in honour of Castor and Pollux in Rome, the touching story of the attempted rape of Virginia, and the prophecy of the victorious war against Pyrrhus – made an immediate echo and received a critical consensus that would last right up to the early twentieth century. This was largely due to the narrative rapidity of stories easy to follow, to the clear diegetic scansions, their euphony and fluid and rhythmic variety. Matthew Arnold was the blatant exception. Such popularity, however, was the fruit of a misunderstanding, that of an inspired and emphatic primitivism, whereas it was a faked or a copy of the primitive, and the result of a cold, unsympathetic experiment. Just in this sense my opening assertion may be qualified: that primitivism had no influence over, nor held any fascination for, Macaulay. The same misunderstanding can be incurred even today by those who have never read the general Preface affixed by Macaulay, or the short prefaces written for each single poem. In the lengthy general Preface,30 learned and at the same time lucid – perhaps the most polished prose ever written by him – Macaulay explains the raison d’être of a collection that is perhaps the most indirect poetry in the whole of the nineteenth century. Its existence, in fact, is due to a pure philological challenge. He shifts the weight of the Lays on the historical thesis that he has to support, and of which the poems that follow are but the examples and addenda in the guise of exercises. Roman historiography, that is, leant on myth and on the undocumented, and Roman historiographers incorporated in their histories legendary oral versions of events and ‘verse romances’ which were handed down as historical but were not. This legendary historiography had been quickly swept away by the ‘advancement of knowledge’ and by the evolution of literary forms. It is to this stage of historical evolution, therefore, that poetry theorized as ‘frenzy’ and as imaginative in the essay on Milton concretely corresponds: the poetry, in other words, of the oral ballad, of the storyteller, of the minstrel. Macaulay speaks pour cause of ‘poetic history’, and introduces the 30

Macaulay as philologist, no less than Macaulay as historian, hazards hypotheses which are, to say the least, debatable.

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antithesis between poetic and historic. Anyone wishing to catch the man behind the mask of the philologist will notice that there was something too hard in his decreeing the death of the poet-child in the modern age, and that Macaulay secretly rejected his own theory.31 2. ‘To reverse that process, to transform some portions of early Roman history back into the poetry out of which they were made, is the object of this work’. This sentence is immediately followed by the expected information that the author is speaking in place of the ancient minstrels who addressed a pre-Christian audience. Therefore these ‘ballads’, dated 1842, join the hegemonic canon of the Victorian dramatic monologue. The theoretical premises are deductive and extravagant, but the formal result is the same as in Tennyson and above all in Browning, with the difference that mimesis, in the two major Victorian poets, does not annul and eclipse, in the last analysis, the distinct and even at times powerful personality of the real author. In Macaulay, instead, the voice of the monologist, being that of an epic storyteller, draws all the attention away from itself and brings it to bear exclusively on the events narrated. The ‘ballads’ are thus the work of an impassive historian far from the crush: objective tableaux, flat and without depth. The ‘dramatic propriety’ that is called on – the sympathy, that is, with the cultural and cognitive horizons of the Roman minstrel – turns out into a desperate undertaking and a general objective, to be accepted only in the intentions. Each minstrel is identified, though remaining anonymous, according to the quantity of his knowledge, which increases in accordance with the cultural development of Roman history. The second already has a slight veneer of Greek erudition. This operation, sophisticated and intellectualistic, addressed, first of all, if not exclusively, a public of cultured readers, refined and capable of understanding its ante litteram ‘estrangement’. The Lays were instead, for generations of schoolboys and for a public of average culture, a kind of popular and alternative

31

Chesterton (VAL, 34) makes it clear that beside Macaulay the consciously Philistine bourgeois, there was the unconscious Romantic in love with ‘great things’ and the ‘romance of history’, expressed in the highly suggestive chains of names and surnames ‘that he did not make’.

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form of illustration of some famous episodes of Roman history. Without the prefaces they seemed recitals meant for the simulacrum of ‘the top of the class’, sketched out in Macaulay’s own image and likeness. His mastery of metrics is shown at its best, with syncopated prosodic measures and lines of various syllabic length. And yet both in the dramatic form and in that of the monologue, as in the poetic vocabulary, Macaulay is not at all original. What he does is a huge and shameless plunder, partly thanks to his prodigious memory from which long buried but well-known cadences and stock phrases come to the surface. Macaulay himself declares he is imitating Homer in some of his syntactic, appositional and linguistic solutions, but actually the great repertoire and reservoir is Romantic, from Scott to Percy’s Reliques, to Keats and Coleridge, and even to Byron, to whom some, perhaps unintentional, falling-off into the grotesque, into the comic and into bathos, are due. The critic who had pitilessly caught red-handedly the plagiarizing Montgomery was not himself blameless. § 39. Macaulay VI: ‘The History of England’. A romanticized polyptych of the Glorious Revolution The five volumes of The History of England from the Accession of James II came out between 1848 and 1861, the first two in 1848, the next two in 1855, the fifth posthumously and edited by Macaulay’s sister Hannah, Lady Trevelyan. This work was conceived and planned on the spur of the moment, and its idea grew in Macaulay’s mind in India, when he suffered the loss of his other sister, Margaret. As he disclosed, he became aware of a blatant historiographic gap concerning the historical moment that had led, without interruptions and according to a continuous progress, to the shaping of present day England. He prepared and wrote a work with which he identified himself for over twenty years – considering the preliminary phases – and one that anyhow he never managed to conclude. Its magnitude can be gauged by the fact that Macaulay did not want to write a history of England from the origins to his day, but took it up after due consideration even more than in medias res, starting from the rise and fall of King James II, from where he was to move forward to end at the year 1830. He intended to concentrate, therefore, on an arc of only 150 years. It was a plan that failed glaringly, and that, had it been carried through to the end at the

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same pace, would have needed a good fifty or more volumes, and would have been the most exceptional historiographical enterprise ever attempted.32 As often happens his planning – worked out with a tyrannical metronome that recalls Trollope’s daily rations of written lines – was too optimistic. Macaulay was caught off balance by his death, when he had covered only one tenth of the 150 years of that arc of time, that is fifteen years – the same extension and proportions as Carlyle’s Cromwell – and when he had still to finish the fifth volume. He had taken the history up to 1702 and to the death of King William. Many historians, writers and thinkers in the early decades of the Victorian Age and beyond had been looking for a keystone to their national culture and history. It all depended on finding a reform, on identifying a revolution or the revolution par excellence among those that punctuated English history. Carlyle situated this turning or departure point in Cromwell’s theocratic Protectorate, Disraeli in medieval feudalism. For Macaulay it was the Glorious Revolution.33 Newman too dreamt of a Reform, but he never went looking for it in the past, as it was a Reform still to come, a Second Reform which would occur in the future or in the immediate present, and one that he went on to ‘develop’ in the return of England to Catholicism.34 The Oxford Movement, as far as it was a political ideology, had already looked back, before Macaulay, to those crucial fifteen years in English history, but in order to judge in an opposite way the resistance of the ‘non jurors’, the bishops who had refused to submit to William.35 If so, from opposing historiographic and ideological visions, tendentious interpretations and veritable ‘apologias’ were born, whose object was to defend not only transitory political projects but the fathers themselves of those visions. Owing to this clash the hero of one writer 32

Which then – as Morison 1882, 143, notices – would have taken 150 years to be completed! 33 This keystone was upheld against the professional and traditional historians, such as Fox, Mackintosh, Robertson, Voltaire, Gibbon, and Hume. 34 § 26.2. 35 § 28.3. In Macaulay’s pointed and cutting pages on the ‘non jurors’ there may be an undercover vein of contention against Newman. Macaulay minimizes the ideal significance of the gesture of the bishops, who did not fight for liberty and order – which can justify violence – but out of pure bigotry.

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becomes the black beast of another. Historiographic objectivity was even more difficult to reach in a spectrum as complex as the English, so fragmented into so many and so exclusive ideologies and pseudo-ideologies. Hence the accusation so sincerely and passionately made against Macaulay by the English right up to the present time, that he had wronged such and such a figure, or sect or current of thought by the wilful distortion of facts. The historiographic perspective of Macaulay, who chose as his fulcrum the landing of William in England and the flight of King James, was not different in principle from that of Carlyle, student of the French Revolution and of the Civil War under Cromwell. Macaulay interprets history in terms of anarchy and order, an order that was to overcome anarchy, with the only advantage that the 1688 Revolution, compared to Cromwell’s or to the French one, had been carried through without shedding blood. Macaulay honours Cromwell, but gives the Glorious Revolution far greater importance. Without the dethroning of the Stuarts by William, England would have become a tyrannical monarchy like the French one; it evolved instead into a ‘limited’, or parliamentary monarchy, based on the principle that, as for Carlyle, monarchy is contractual, and divine if and when the monarch is found ‘able’ to reign. The 1688 Revolution was ‘conservative’ and it aimed at restoring the status quo. Its great merit was that of having avoided a second ‘destroying revolution in the nineteenth [century]’. ‘It is because we had freedom in the midst of servitude that we have order in the midst of anarchy’.36 The flattering final assessment of the Glorious Revolution is that it brought benefits across the board. Religious tolerance had been introduced, and Presbyterianism in Scotland re-integrated, thus placating its grumbles; a financial control by Parliament had been imposed on the Crown; and it had regulated justice and granted and safeguarded the freedom of the Press. In the age of William, and of the subsequent ascendancy of the Hanoverian Whigs, infringements and abuses of power that were not to be found in absolute monarchies and in primitive societies, had not ceased; but these are the risks for those that are free. The loss of the American colonies, and the troubles with Ireland, become a kind of dead 36

Macaulay was an enemy of violence, rather than its subtle apologist like the radical and ‘Sansculottist’ Carlyle of 1837.

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body, were no doubt its small defeats.37 But Macaulay’s aprioristic conviction is that from William on there had been an uninterrupted ‘improvement’, physical, moral and intellectual. Both Carlyle and Newman applied this positive evolutionism, which Macaulay adopted in a more simplistic sense. His History is a work at once historical and quietly militant, that is post-1848, focusing on that far off fifteen-year period without explicit admonishments to the present. He smugly noticed that England had been saved from the violent insurrections that had recently exploded in the citysquares all over Europe, and thanks, in the last analysis, to William. This, at least, was a distortion or an omission that all could see, because England had just tamed, and with difficulty, the riots of a workers’ movement like Chartism, which was, in one of its elements, a violent one.38 2. Why then was the History such an overpowering success and one without precedent in England and in the whole of Europe? It sold like hot cakes because it catered to anti-Catholic patriotism, and bolstered the pride of the middle classes that was now the bulk of the population. But the true reason is perhaps another. It took the place of the novel and was an able subterfuge and surrogate to it. Tendentiousness is controlled and camouflaged, the strictly political analysis not invasive, and the rhetorical appeal kept to a minimum in a narrative and descriptive tapestry. History is explained and made easy, the full development fragmented, moreover, almost in instalments following the serial system, and the narrative breaking off naturally at the end of each volume.39 Macaulay made no mystery that in this he was influenced by Scott, and his historiographic poetics obeys the commandment that the historian must not only list the facts but

37

38 39

In the seventeenth century the Whigs had become intolerant and had formed alliances with the Puritans. Once they shook off this alliance they could apply tolerance even to the Catholics. Yet the Irish problem remained an open wound, and it was not enough to abolish wrong and repressive laws to heal it. Macaulay gave a speech in Parliament against the Chartists (VAL, 31). On the ‘souls’ of Chartism, see § 7.3. It has been noticed that Macaulay could have suggested to the novelists the multiplot structure, ‘quilted’ and interwoven, of the kind found, by definition, in Middlemarch (Levine 1968, 141).

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narrate and recreate them, and that he is then an historical novelist, a poet and playwright that drew the public away from the professional novelist. In the Prologue, written in rhythmic and pompous syntactic parallelisms of an epic type (‘I shall recount […] I shall relate’), Macaulay applies the metaphor of the painter to himself and indirectly claims as his own the chiaroscuro technique. What a profusion of medallions chiselled with a great love for detail, what a gallery of curiosities, of weaknesses, of sly craftiness, and of acts of tenderness is the History. The novelist’s counterfeiting of history is blatant especially when Macaulay turns to the dialogue; the very concept of the historical, that is the temporal movement, is contradicted by the static cameo; and the consequence of a history conceived as a novel is the narrative pausing to paint an all-round portrait. Macaulay excels and exceeds in the excursus, for he puts landscape ‘paintings’ before narrating events, underlines the differences between the past and the present of the places, indulges in the descriptions of the traditions of a class or of a clan. The Scott-like novelist is, however, stylistically a Gibbon. His more typical stylistic unit is the short syntactic member; sentences are dry, terse, imperious; all is concise, clear, clean, and polished. Gradually these small ‘tesserae’ form a mosaic, and it is this that makes Macaulay seem analytical and exhaustive at the same time, never elliptical and suggestive. Rarely if ever do we find that Macaulay makes an explicit appeal to the reader, or that he apostrophizes him roughly, rudely, noisily, as in Carlyle and in Dickens; he does not look for the reader’s consensus and never forces his opinion. And he is never the fat jester and never has recourse to the witty or hilarious remark; the general tone is that of the cold naturalist. The horrid, blood-curdling detail is offered unveiled but also without emotional involvement; the massacres of which history is full are episodes described without balking before crude details that had been often even amplified. Memorable is the execution of the rebel Monmouth, whose head refuses to let itself be cut off and with the reluctance of the executioner, the inhuman yells of the victim and the on-lookers grabbing all they can lay hands on; or the death of the wife of a Scottish chieftain at Glencoe, left naked by her killers and whose rings are bitten off her fingers. 3. Macaulay does not situate the alpha of British history in the AngloSaxon period, nor even in the Norman, but in 1215 with the signing of

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the Magna Carta. Three centuries had to pass before Parliamentarianism and constitutionalism could gain ground and ‘progress’ take off, with the exception of a moment when the Stuarts tried to arrest this forward movement and ‘put the clocks back’. The progressive radicals had to act defensively right up until 1688. The Whigs had already secured the dignity of royalty while reserving the right to say no to the person. Since the time of Charles I there had lacked the hero capable to bring about a non-armed revolution, and violence overflowed. Hence, the Stuart period is seen by Macaulay as a break in the line of progress, though after Cromwell a second chance was vainly offered the Stuarts; as a result constitutionalism turned violent. Under Charles II the Tories had triumphed, and Macaulay onesidedly reconstructs the two areas of consensus to the Tories and the Stuarts, which were the landowners, a rough, primitive, drunken and reactionary class, a servile and worn out patricianship, but unswervingly on the king’s side in case of danger, and loyally keeping to a line of stability. The clergy was battered, socially marginalized, broken into a peripheral mass and into a more cultured London elite, tolerant and Latitudinarian. Macaulay raises no objections to Charles II, but condemns James II, a timid and Frenchified anti-constitutionalist, a sly dealer and clearly a Papist. When facing the short reign of James II, Macaulay’s target are the Quakers, and that Fox with his ‘leather breeches’ so highly praised by Carlyle, as well as the maybe hypocritical Penn, one of the King’s advisors. As far as hypocrisy is concerned, Macaulay echoes Carlyle and Kingsley by offering a poisonous digression on the Jesuits. He also supports the rumours that the Queen was not pregnant and that the witnesses present at the birth of the heir had been bribed, that the newly born child had been secretly taken to the court in a basket and that the whole thing had been staged by the Jesuits. James clung to the pro-French Jesuits who challenged the Pope, whose main concern was a stable England, whether Anglican or not. James II committed the error of reimposing Catholicism to Ireland, thus alienating the English colonists by expropriation of their lands, and again later by sending a battalion of unwelcome Irish soldiery to a land that had not suffered oppression from an army for ages. Of the seven bishops who opposed James and who were put on trial and then absolved, some were among the heroic ‘non jurors’ to William. Actually James, with his

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§ 40. Mill I: The theorist of humanized utilitarianism

intrigues, ended up by making enemies either of the masses, who although undecided, and sitting on the fence, were still sane enough to smell a rat and reject falsehood, or the academic world jealous of its independence, or the Catholic middle class moderately adverse to despotism. Macaulay points out that William, safely landed at Torbay without striking a blow, joyously asked his general staff what people thought of Calvinism and predestination. The November date coincided with the centenary of the defeat of the Invincible Armada, and in a November eighty-three years before the Gunpowder Plot had been averted. In itself the Glorious Revolution was bloodless. The subsequent shedding of blood was due to James’s ambitious and presumptuous efforts to regain his English throne. It was James who was responsible for William’s sanguinary campaigns in Ireland and especially in Scotland, where the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon stocks, unlike Ireland, had blended peacefully together.40 William was not a Whig, but he then supported that party, thus putting an end to any idea of an armed revolution and also to the rise of the Tories to power. This prince, the son-in-law of James, was practical, tolerant, rational, in no way romantic, a Calvinist and a courageous and indomitable leader; and it was he the only, real hero for Macaulay. § 40. Mill* I: The theorist of humanized utilitarianism There are various reasons why John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), the penultimate among the great figures of English philosophical thought debuting 41

40 One of the indelible stains in William’s repression, which Macaulay minimizes or rather distorts, is that of the Glencoe massacre, that is, of a strong Jacobite clan hiding in the Highlands. The narration of this episode is one of the best, most dramatic, and well-known cameos in the History. Macaulay’s purely narrative gift is also thrown into relief by a second, anthological episode, the failed foundation of a Panamanian colony in Darien by some pretentious but courageous Scottish navigators. *

Collected Works, ed. J. M. Robson et al., 33 vols, Toronto 1965–1991, also incorporating the letters. Separate editions of the Autobiography, ed. H. J. Laski, London 1924; ed. J. M. Robson, Harmondsworth 1989. Essays on Bentham and Coleridge, ed. F. R. Leavis, London 1950. Editions of Mill’s essays are Mill on Politics and Society, ed. G. L. Williams, London 1981; On Liberty, with The Subjection of Women and Chapters on

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or flourishing between the 1820s and 1830s – and among them undoubtedly the most philosophical in the literal sense of the word – may be included in a history of literature, or indeed above all in a history of literature. The first reason is that Mill too is not, all things considered, a philosopher that is entirely or even sufficiently ‘pure’. His strictly heuristic works – two systematic, and anything but agile treatises of logic and political economy – had great success, gained the consensus of the cognoscenti, and were reprinted many times and adopted as handbooks in schools and universities. Nowadays they are obsolete and dealt with briefly, in a summary fashion, indulgently if not decidedly severely, in the philosophical repertoires themselves. Mill was, in fact, that eclectic, theoretical and practical thinker Socialism, ed. S. Collini, Cambridge 1989; On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. J. Gray, Oxford 1991. An abridged edn of Principles of Political Economy is edited by J. Riley, Oxford 1994. Life. A. Bain, John Stuart Mill, London 1882; M. St Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, London 1954; R. Borchard, John Stuart Mill: The Man, London 1957; N. Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: a Biography, Cambridge 2004; R. Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, London 2007. Criticism. E. Jenks, Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, Sunnyside, Kent 1888, repr. Bristol 1990, 105–244; L. Stephen, The English Utilitarians, vol. III, London 1900; B. Willey, Nineteenth-Century Studies, London 1949 and Harmondsworth 1964, 151–96; R. P. Anschutz, The Philosophy of J. S. Mill, Oxford 1953; K. Britton, John Stuart Mill, Harmondsworth 1953; M. Cranston, John Stuart Mill, London 1958 (a very useful survey); H. O. Pappe, John Stuart Mill and the Harriet Taylor Myth, Melbourne 1960; T. Woods, Poetry and Philosophy: A Study in the Thought of John Stuart Mill, London 1961; J. B. Ellery, John Stuart Mill, New York 1964; F. Parvin Sharpless, The Literary Criticism of John Stuart Mill, The Hague-Paris 1967; F. Restaino, J. S. Mill e la cultura filosofica britannica, Firenze 1968; Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J. B. Schneewind, London 1969; W. Thomas, Mill, London 1985; M. Hardman, Six Victorian Thinkers, Manchester 1991, 90–113; The Cambridge Companion to Mill, ed. J. Skorupski, Cambridge 1998; D. A. Habibi, John Stuart Mill and the Ethic of Human Growth, Dordrecht 2001; F. Rosen, John Stuart Mill, Oxford 2013. The bibliographical gap between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, which may be noticed even in this essential bibliography, was due to philosophical tendencies divergent from Mill’s empiricism (Restaino 1968, vii-viii and 455–70); a strong revival of interest has taken place in the last few decades, with a massive quantity of specialist studies and essays.

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whose existence was possible only in England. He debuted when not yet twenty as a political agitator; did some journalism and founded and edited radical magazines. Those two philosophical treatises were accompanied by numerous, shorter interventions whether of accusation or of proposal, and had a somewhat militant and contingent flavour and ardour. Three of his universally most famous works are pamphlets written in the heat of the moment, in which an abstract theory is applied to a contemporary issue. Mill’s public career had its natural outcome in a parliamentary term of office that he held from 1865 to 1868. To say that Mill was a nineteenth-century English thinker implies the absolute naturalness with which a philosopher – or even, hypothetically, a priest or a Catholic cardinal like Newman – could be, at one and the same time, a novelist and a poet – an ambition that perhaps Mill harboured, as will be seen, in a certain moment of his life. One may speculate that an interest in Mill today lies in his being a writer tout court rather than specifically a philosopher. Or, more exactly, he is at least as interesting as a literary subject as for his speculative objectivity. This hybrid vocation is verified by the fact that Mill left an autobiography which is one of the main literary documents of the age, a private testimony that is valuable not only for its human contents but partly also for its noninstrumental merits of style. Here, the philosopher splits his personality as he reconstructs his own history, and, to a certain extent, he becomes an inventive writer. In this hypothetically objective and progressive summary of his intellectual history, various independent romanticized and poeticized episodes are inserted, such as the legendary epics of his oppressed infancy, the rejection crisis of hard-line utilitarianism and, above all, the romance of a very noble extramarital relationship. This layer of romance, with its ‘sensational’ elements, attracted posterity, encouraging biographical criticism to probe into unknown and hidden areas of the author’s life. After his rejection of utilitarianism, Mill became a rigorous philosopher as much as, in parallel, a reader and student of poetry and literature. His intellectual course was deviated by a poet, Wordsworth, and his ‘libro galeotto’ was The Lyrical Ballads. He dedicated two insightful essays to the aesthetics of poetry, and other reviews, far from routine ones, were written on Browning’s and on Tennyson’s early poetry. But the purely theoretical ideas of Mill, expounded in his pamphlets, already circulated in a mediated

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form, and were taken up or satirized in the literature of the time. Bentham’s utilitarianism, in Mill’s softened and more liberal version, was indeed the premise of the British reformist legislation concerning the workhouses and work in factories and mines. However, while it became the ideology of the burgeoning Philistine middle class it also became, in its often misunderstood aesthetic reverberations, anathema to the humanitarian, spiritualist and apocalyptic writers. His principal interlocutors were a novelist, the Dickens of Oliver Twist and of Hard Times, and an art-scholar turned into an economist, Ruskin. Other poets and other novelists – Tennyson, Arnold, Wilkie Collins, and the early feminists – later took up, due to unwitting mediations, Mill’s campaign for electoral reform and for the extension of the franchise, and against the social, political and matrimonial discrimination of women. They also took from the same source the anti-Philistine accent of an anti-conformist culture of the individual. Mill, however, joins the ‘unity in diversity’ of early Victorian thought, principally, after all, because he takes up and settles the challenge thrown by religion. He claimed to be the most non-religious of the early Victorian thinkers. Intact from the habitual collusions with German new criticism, he embraced, lucidly but not arrogantly, his own solitary path towards agnosticism. 2. Religion, the common origo, was not repudiated by Mill. According to him, he had never even considered it. The intellectual trajectory that began from such an agnostic position, accepted ab ovo, was, however, the result of a stubborn, laborious investigation into the same cruces debated by Carlyle, Newman and others, a diatribe conducted in books and in impassioned formative and personal contacts. The evident variant was in Mill that of re-evaluating the eighteenth century, which Carlyle held hostile, Newman had jumped clearly over, and Macaulay had praised but only because it had marked the height of freedom and tolerance. Carlyle ad Mill, who enjoyed a short-lived friendship, had actually opposite ideas concerning that century.1 Mill found there a blossoming of secular thought that 1

Mill’s admiration for Carlyle in 1830, or immediately after, was limited to a poetry capable to ‘animate’ him, that is the beauty and the seduction of his style; it did not reside in a ‘philosophy’ capable to ‘teach’ him. This basic difference was overcome, but only for a brief while, with regard to the French Revolution, on which Mill had

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Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian, had drawn from the philosophes, generating an indigenous English current whose first disciple was Mill’s own father, James. This utilitarianism,2 rather closed and suffocating, after 1828 was subjected by Mill to a form of eclectic moderation. It was freshened with the oxygen of poetic Romanticism and with the culture of the sentiments, and grafted on Comte’s positivism. Like Macaulay, who knew nothing of the latter and adhered to a wholly spontaneous positivism, Mill prophesied an unstoppable progress in the individual, both in his isolation and as a social being, that is in the areas both of personal culture and of social history. It is the same framework of thought that will pass on to philosophical narrators like George Eliot and Meredith. And yet such progress had to be supported, and a real cooperation of the best efforts of the single individual and of the community was needed, because progress was threatened by a fatal deterioration of human things. The brain had to be kept awake and trained to retain a lucid and firm possession of truth, to allow every individual to continually justify to him-herself the objectives of one’s actions. Carlyle might perhaps agree with Mill, but only in the abstract, on an unrelenting struggle against all forms of prejudice, against all historical incrustations, and practically against every social convention that had not been reconsidered by the intellect. Mill’s militant agenda included even that reform of the state which was the expectation and the aim of Newman and Carlyle. He was in fact an authoritative leader around whom the radicals and the democrats gathered at the time of the First Reform Bill and beyond. Carlyle having returned to reactionary positions, and Newman simply opted for a spiritual and religious revolution, Mill became the standard bearer of English democratic reformism in the nineteenth century. Actually, this leading position in the political culture of his time does not suffice to make him a forerunner or a promoter of revolutionary thought. The reform that he envisaged was a utopian rebirth that had no roots in actuality. His campaign for the extension of the franchise was compromised by hidden,

2

collected ample annotations that, as he admitted, were generously passed on to Carlyle. The term was taken, Mill says, from the Annals of the Parish of the Scottish novelist John Galt.

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and at times even explicit oligarchic and even aristocratic sympathies. He thought democracy applicable only to fully civilized societies. The socialism of the one-time people’s tribune was weakened by his invincible diffidence towards the masses, and his anti-slavery commitment was in contradiction with his open support for colonialism. According to a penetrating definition by Marx, Mill never said one thing without immediately affirming the opposite.3 The mental habit that he boasted of – that is, ‘of never accepting half-solutions of difficulties as complete; never abandoning a puzzle, but again and again returning to it until it was cleared up; never allowing obscure corners of a subject to remain unexplored’ – witnesses Mill’s intellectual probity, but applied literally gave rise to an instability in his thinking, to an intellectual and emotional insecurity, and to a form of precariousness that have reminded some critics, and not without reason, of Kierkegaard.4 His agnosticism, so categorical in appearance, came back under discussion in three posthumous essays ‘on religion’, in which the idea of a morally perfect but not perfectly powerful God comes into sight, a God needing man’s cooperation in the struggle against the negative principle of the world, whose finitude is evidenced by the destructiveness of nature that is his mirrored image. Here, on the other hand, Jesus is simply a noble, analogical ideal. § 41. Mill II: The mental phases up to the ‘crisis’ The priceless historical value of Mill’s Autobiography, which was the most lasting of his writings,5 lies in an umpteenth paradigmatic experience. It was published in 1873, and can and must be read in parallel with Newman’s Apologia of 1864, to which it is, for proofs which are glaringly evident, a reply, and of which it is an alternative version, without any mention whatsoever either of the work or the author. It is, like Newman’s, a ‘history of opinions’, or the summary of an uninterrupted intellectual development, through formative steps taken by Mill under the watchful eye of his father. These steps were also self-educating, thanks to personal 3 4 5

Woods 1961, 68 n. 1. Marx had read Mill, but Mill hadn’t read Marx. Cranston 1958, 6. Laski 1924, xx.

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meetings with eminent personalities from the world of culture and to his voracious and precocious reading. Books and theories were perused keenly, absorbed and sifted. Mill’s formative canon is pour cause irremediably divergent, say, from that of Newman. The fundamental difference lies in the fact that Mill’s development was not towards but away from the revealed faith. The branches of knowledge were ordered and hierarchized for him by his father, who established the primacy of the Greek civilization and, therefore, of the apogee of secular and pre-Christian culture. Religion, even only as a problem, was postponed, and immediately removed from the domains of liberal knowledge in the consciousness of the child, by means of an autocratic injunction, his father’s, which would be later revised but substantially never rediscussed. There was no place, then, in Mill’s vast curriculum as a student, for the book of books, the Bible – so much so, in fact, that Mill called Benthamism a ‘religion’. Methodologically, at the end of their laborious and even daily search for their respective fundamental principles, Newman and Mill both declared themselves satisfied, and informed the reader that the evolutionary history of their opinions was at an end, and all intrinsic reasons to continue the autobiography were no more. The words with which Mill opens his seventh chapter – ‘From this time, what is worth relating of my life will come into a very small compass; for I have no further mental changes to tell of, but only, as I hope, a continued mental progress’ – literally repeat those written at the beginning of the fifth chapter of Newman’s Apologia, describing the conclusion of his voyage to the Catholic faith.6 In both cases, the sowing time is so long that it causes a visible disproportion between the parts, and reduces that of the harvest. Indeed two thirds, or four fifths, of Mill’s work, like Newman’s, cover about thirty years or half of his life. The terminus ad quem, or end of the journey, was for Mill 1840, for Newman 1845. The end result of the necessity to mark an intellectual evolution with clarity and accuracy

6

Just as amazing is the use of the same nautical imagery by both in their moment of crisis: ‘I was thus […] left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a wellequipped ship and a rudder, but no sail’.

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is a certain aridity.7 Mill’s Autobiography is a work practically without a human background, without self-standing narrations of events, and without any concessions of an evocative or lyrical nature. The only exceptions are the story of his emotional reawakening on reading Wordsworth, or the remembrance of the surprising inner rapture, reverberating on the page, felt after first meeting his future wife Harriet. This relationship embodied Mill’s utopia of a perfect conjugal union, made of sensual and intellectual ardour. Like the Apologia by Newman, Mill’s autobiography is the primary biographical source for his scholars, providing as it does a documentation of his life which is strictly necessary but obviously not sufficient in itself. The further advantage for the non-specialist reader is that it reduces to the essential – and puts into perspective, naturally one incomplete and variously arbitrary – his main theoretical works.8 2. Today’s reader, who has absorbed and metabolized some largely accepted pedagogical parameters, may be led to feel sincerely sorry for the child, or should we say the new born infant Mill, for having been subjected to the worst, most deleterious, and most unjustifiable educational experiment, which he later stigmatized, though only in part. Such an acceptance is paradoxical in a future or rather contemporary theoretician of intellectual freedom and of independence from all subjection and constriction (‘On 7 8

This aridity was exaggerated if not vituperated by Carlyle in one of his one-sided verdicts (quoted in Jenks 1888, 123). A rather academic, though keen debate was held in the past to verify how much of Mill’s instability was due to his mistress and later wife Harriet Taylor, mythically promoted by him to the rank of ministering angel and intellectual beacon, and to whom he regarded himself far inferior, although others found her a vain, arrogant and even tyrannical woman. Mill, who had met Harriet in 1830 and had become infatuated with her, and who in 1836 had lost his father, might have felt freed from the heavy weight of his prior ideological subjectivity only to fall under a second kind of influence. Pappe 1960 tried instead to show the groundlessness of the assumption that Mill was completely under her thumb, and that he had written some, or part of his essays, almost under her dictation. Many of his essays in the last decade or even twenty years were however, as we shall see, undoubtedly revisionist. Mill, for example, pushed by his wife, got closer to socialism without ever formally becoming a Party member. From 1858, now a widower at Avignon, he was looked after by his stepdaughter, and, after 1868, when he was not re-elected to Parliament, he continued living in the French city, where he died in 1873 and was buried there next to the tomb of his wife.

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Liberty’ was in fact written almost at the same time as the Autobiography). His father James, who was responsible for that experiment, was Scottish like Carlyle, and like Carlyle he was about to become a Presbyterian preacher when, after a religious a crisis, he emigrated to London. There he completed a controversial and provoking history of the British colonization of India, and started writing as a philosopher and pamphleteer driven by a ruthless, stubborn and masochistic Benthamite faith. He wanted to make his first and eldest son John into a kind of thinking machine, a laboratory test-tube, right from the age of three, when he started filling him with classical culture and subjecting him to a severe intellectual apprenticeship. He forbad him leisure and play-time and limited his reading of imaginative literature. By robbing him of his childhood he wanted him to become an adult who was absolutely and completely rational. The early pages of Mill’s autobiography blatantly tip upside down the stereotype of the Victorian novel for children from Dickens to Meredith and on to Butler, a novel that was an uninterrupted vindication of the rights of childhood against the imposition of adults, of preceptors and, more often than not, of fathers. This education that Mill narrated he had had, hinged upon two great and unique anomalies compared with the majority of Victorian children and adolescents from good families. He not only abjured religion as an adult, but he claimed his diversity because, as he said, he had never known it. With him the cliché of the Victorian gentleman falls apart. The absence of the religious quest could persist because Mill was not a ‘defector’ either from Oxford or Cambridge. He was the only great Victorian thinker and writer who purposely did not receive an academic education. In his recollections he gives a balanced judgement of the gains and losses of his own educational ‘system’. The school and the familiarity with other boys would perhaps have had a ‘degrading’ effect on him; yet his father, he says, didn’t provide him with a valid substitute for the practical influences that might have accrued from those frequentations. There is still more reason to feel sorry for Mill as he did not have the consolation of a mother and as she is never even mentioned in this reconstruction.9 However, the imagination and pure intellectualism, the division of which would be the luckily 9

A brief mention was taken out of the published version, and is quoted by Woods 1961, 43–4.

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failed hypothesis of the schoolmaster Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times,10 competed in him unconsciously. The boy fed the former unbeknownst, compiling stories from the classics, practising in a non-mechanical way the prose composition, imaginatively sympathizing with the Roman plebs asking for justice, and for the ‘Roman democratic party’. It is no wonder that the enfant prodige hated writing English poems, even if simply as a pure and mechanical exercise and copied from Pope. He was allowed to read and, with due moderation, practise writing poetry by his father for two reasons: the first, opportunistic, was that poems had more strength and conceptual grasp than prose; the second, that by writing poetry one could cut a good figure because poetry was held in consideration far beyond its merits. But Mill at that time obeyed his father because he had to, and without getting any real, deep pleasure from the poetry. His preference, before he was fourteen, went to works of experimental science and logic, thanks to which early on he acquired the ability to pull any piece of faulty reasoning to bits. At that same age, he already possessed specialized notions in a wide variety of subjects, was familiar with Platonic philosophy and the maieutics of Socrates, and with political and economic theories thanks to his being personally known to David Ricardo, a close friend of his father. The reader of Mill’s Autobiography is surprised to find that Newman and Mill’s father took two altogether divergent directions after reading the same book – Bishop Butler’s Analogy – which was corroborating for the former and conducive to doubt for the latter. ‘Who made God?’ is the answerless question that leads to the epoché of Mill the father and the son. Over Mill the father’s agnosticism, a good Scotsman’s, there hovered an exquisitely Calvinistic element: how can a creating God tolerate evil, and, above all, how can he create having already predestined, that is to say condemned, many of his creatures to Hell? His intermediate stage towards agnosticism had been, in fact, Manichaean. He bequeathed to his son a creed of severe, profound secular morality, Socratic or rather Epicurean, or, if one prefers, utilitarian. During a visit to France in 1820, when he was the guest of Bentham’s brother, a general, the French Revolution was

10

Volume 5, § 49.2.

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presented to Mill’s intellectual analysis. He was immediately a supporter of the Revolution, like Carlyle. He saw it as the historical explosion of the democratic spirit and of the struggle against despotism. The first twentyfive years of Mill’s life, reflected in the Autobiography, are also a catalogue of books and a curriculum studiorum. He drafted at sixteen his first essay, where he maintained that there was no moral superiority of the rich over the poor. He founded a utilitarian society with the aim of debating contemporary issues with other promising youths, and was taken on as a functionary of the East India Company. At first employed as a copyist he was then promoted to white collar jobs and was later nominated Head of Office. He began publishing in newspapers, with denunciations against bad government and the legal system, and advocating a reform of politics. With the Westminster the organ of the English Radicals was officially born in 1822, and the principal contributors were Mill the father and the son. 3. Mill’s 1826 ‘conversion’, or ‘crisis’, was due, he said, to the suffocating hypertrophy of the logical and analytical components over those natural to ‘poetical culture’. It was therefore imputed to his father, who had openly discredited ‘sentiment’ to him, and even earlier to Bentham, for whom poetry was a ‘misrepresentation’11 (and in 1825 Macaulay had added that poetry declined as civilization advanced).12 Mill reacted against his father’s educational experiment having however felt in himself not the aberration, but the inadequacy of it, and answering with a Carlylean, angry ‘No’. A way out was found in the dependence of the mental and moral world on associations, pleasing if bound to images and memories that were beneficial, otherwise ‘painful’. With two corollaries: one should not make happiness the primary object of life, but the second, as though pursued en passant; and one should cultivate the ‘passive susceptibilities’. The consequence was the discovery of a more powerful relationship of empathy and solidarity with mankind. In the field of studies and of human intellectual activities, this meant rediscovering poetry and art as expressions of feeling as against pure reason. It meant re-establishing, in other words, the integrity of the individual. Indirectly Mill too traces out a paradigmatic version 11 12

§ 2.1. § 37.2.

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of the reception of Romanticism. He closed his Byron, the mirror of his anguish, and opened Wordsworth, thereby establishing the importance of ‘states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty’. The emotion provoked by a phenomenon was no long seen to destroy but to work side by side with his cognitive analysis. The contemplation of nature was his saving, due to pleasing associations that, as a child, the fourteen-year-old Mill had tasted for the first time during a trip to the Pyrenees. What Mill did after the crisis was an attempt not to destroy, but to rebuild the Benthamite and utilitarian theoretical system in a more liberal, up-to-date way. 4. It might be surmised that Mill discovered when he was twenty that he had been unwittingly a poet, and a Romantic poet, in pectore, and that he had contemplated the idea that he might be reborn as such by inverting the road taken by Matthew Arnold (which was to be from an ardent Romantic poet to a balanced essayist). Mill applied to himself not only the experiences but also entire passages of Wordsworth’s poetry, and described his own ‘dejection’ with Coleridge’s lines. He wrongly ascribed to Bentham the aspiration, shared by Browning in the same years, to be ‘a reformer of the world’. Perhaps until 1826, and until he completed his treatise on logic, he went through a negative moment that corresponded to the nadir of his Benthamism, a rejection for which Harriet Taylor, presented in the Autobiography as an alter ego of Shelley, was partly responsible. The poetic ‘phase’ of Mill’s spiritual biography is witnessed by the reviews he wrote of works by de Vigny, of Tennyson’s collections, and of Pauline and Paracelsus by Browning, and by a two-part essay on the essence of poetry, ‘Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties’ (1833, later revised in 1859). In the first part of this essay Mill extended into an aesthetic theory his personal experiences, asserting that poetry is not to be found in its mere metrical form but speaks in ‘musical sounds’, and can therefore use as its vehicle painting or sculpture or even, in theory, narrative prose. Yet differences are clear, for the more cultivated minds delight in poetry, while the lazy and frivolous read narrative. Turning Macaulay upside down, no less than Bentham, Mill reviews the historical and mental evolution of man to insist that poetry is congenial to the progressive ages and to persons of refined sensibilities and of a high intellectual level; it is the novel that is the pastime of rough

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and uncultivated minds. Poetry does not reside in the object described but in the ‘mental state’ with which it has been contemplated. The objects are described in poetry not in the way they are but in the way they appear: by means of, and painted in the colours of the imagination set in motion by the affections. Poetry gives a congenitally false or ‘coloured’ description of reality, rather than the precise one of the naturalist. This is not all: ‘eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard’, hence the intimate, self-confessional, soliloquizing effect of poetry. ‘A poet might write poetry not only with the intention of printing it, but for the express purpose of being paid for it’; yet it will be impossible to call it poetry if from the lines of the poet ‘every vestige of such lookings-forth into the outward and every-day world’ is not erased. If the ‘expressive act’ is not an end in itself, but a means towards an end, and if it aims to persuade or influence, poetry dwindles into eloquence. In the last analysis, as in Romantic aesthetics, poetry resides in the organic fusion between poetry and poet, and in the mental associations. The second part of ‘Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties’ would seem to deny the postulate posited in the first, that poeta nascitur. Indeed Mill reaffirms that the poet works through associations. The emotions are ‘the links of association by which their ideas, both sensuous and spiritual, are connected together’. The poet thinks poetically, that is, not in a successive or consecutive fashion, but synchronically, and, therefore, great poetry lies in the fragment, rarely in the long poem. In other words, the poet must needs be possessed – italics are Mill’s – by feeling, and the sensation felt must be ‘organic’, and unconscious. If this does not happen ‘his poetry seems one thing, himself another’. The two parts of Mill’s essay would thus seem to prove that Shelley had overtaken Wordsworth, the latter appearing to Mill to lack the characteristics of a poetic temperament and of immediate emotion, because intent on transmitting thoughts, while Shelley overflows with the superabundance of his feelings. There is no explicit trace of this Shelleyan phase in the Autobiography, perhaps because it marked a temporary limit to Mill’s emotional and associative romanticism. But the twisted, tortuous and surprising conclusive argumentation, that the ‘poetphilosopher’ is superior to the poet of nature, is a symptom of the instability that was slowly developing in Mill’s thought. In his review of Tennyson’s poetry we read indeed the confirmation that every poet is a ‘great thinker’

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and has a philosophy, and Shelley is criticized for his incomprehensible vagaries. The purpose of poetry is now the ‘intellectual search’ and its action on the souls of the readers. The means have to be adapted to the ends and feelings kept under control. § 42. Mill III: The philosophical essays and treatises In a strictly philosophical sense it is somewhat ironical that Mill’s father, James Mill, the author of a second fundamental opus – an enquiry into the ‘phenomena of the human mind’ – should foment his son’s romanticism by making him develop and elaborate a psychological associational theory within, if not against, the Benthamite system. On the other hand, the ‘radical philosophers’ of the early 1820s were, to tell the truth, pseudoradicals devoted to a liberal culture and to the arts. Bertrand Russell jested over the fact that this group, to which Mill had belonged in his youth, was made up of amateurs who did not know, or who arrogantly undervalued, German thought, and whose sources were simply the encyclopaedists and, especially, Helvétius, and whose two guiding principles, that of happiness and that of mental association, were derived from Hartley.13 In the Autobiography, on the other hand, Mill, remembering his membership in the Utilitarian Society from 1822 to 1826, coins the label of ‘Utiliarian Radicals’, thus indicating that a fusion had taken place between the Benthamite branch – very little or not altogether left-oriented – and radicalism. In the intense fervour of this affiliation, in Mill’s perorations there surface ideas destined to ripen in his most famous treatises, like the defence of freedom and the support of female suffrage. The idea of progress was derived from militant radicalism and theoretically developed from utilitarianism, with the addition of the views of the Enlightenment philosophes, the fathers of the French Revolution, of the Saint-Simonians and of Comte. Mill, at this stage, felt it possible to fight for a future that could fuse the best of the ‘organic’ and ‘critical’ proposals of the Saint-Simonians

13

Russell’s discussion of Mill in HWP is brief and disappointing, perhaps because Mill had been his godfather. Russell, in fact, dedicated to him a better-organized portrait in 1955.

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and that could orient itself towards the Comtian ‘third stage’. He, in fact, confesses in the Autobiography that he had always been a utilitarian, even though in 1828 he had turned his back on ‘sectarian’ Benthamism. Bentham himself had fought for a good government and for the extension of the franchise, even though he had been rather cold concerning the rights of man. Mill owed to him his stubborn opposition to any kind of culture of renunciation and of resignation, typical of evangelical devotion, and to any kind of Christian mysticism that entailed the acceptance of suffering. Human perfectibility was already compensated in Bentham by historical precariousness: man was liable to error, readily influenced by superstition, and fascinated by asceticism. In addition, Bentham was always ready to accept the fact that egoism got the better of altruism. Mill’s 1838 essay on Bentham, seething with his recent romantic eruption, is focused on a very simple question: that Bentham’s ethics is not only rough and ready, but that its flaw lies in its circumscribing the morality of an action to its innocuous consequence with respect to the aim of one’s or others’ personal happiness. Invariably and fanatically associational, Mill urges that, concerning an act, the ‘mental states as its causes’ be considered, that is to say the reason or the motive of the action. Equally overlooked by Bentham was the link between the act and the ‘whole moral being’ of its executor. Jumping ahead we can observe that Mill much later, in his 1863 essay ‘Utilitarianism’, turned back on his tracks. This essay is the revision of a revision, and in it Mill is more faithful to his master than in that of 1838. Mill now aims at reconciling utilitarianism with the various current-day moral philosophies, from which, in his view, it is not too divergent. The happiness of the utilitarians is not the ‘swinish’ happiness of the Epicureans, rather it is essentially an intellectual happiness: not an exalted happiness but one more softened and serene. The owner of it is the ever-present, cultivated, self-controlled Victorian gentleman, acting for his own good and for that of the community. He is the savourer of the pleasures of art and the cool spectator of life. Even those willing to renounce happiness and sacrifice themselves, do so for the happiness of others. Jesus himself was a utilitarian. Utilitarianism, on the other hand, is not a cold calculation of consequences, nor is it godless; on the contrary it accords with all religions that believe in a God wishing the happiness of his creatures, and

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it approves the internal and external sanctions common to the other moral laws. Utilitarianism, moreover, does not exclude virtue, contemplated as a means to reach happiness, which is its end. Justice – which means punishing the guilty for the evil done – is in itself based on the concept of utility. The serious flaw of ‘Utilitarianism’ is, in turn, the equation of the ‘desired’ with the ‘desirable’.14 Hume had already warned against putting on the same plane ‘is’ and ‘ought’. In 1863 Mill ultimately reinterpreted romantic passion as a malady, and ‘Utilitarianism’ is, if anything, the result of a senile, more undertone Romanticism, which elevates and ennobles utilitarianism, showing that it is not incompatible with heroic enthusiasm, and above all identifying it, essentially, with a virtuous life, made up of the refined pleasures of the spirit. It is also true that it is a newly shaped utilitarianism, deprived of its Benthamite fundamentals: a version of a kind of humanistic Romanticism, if this oxymoron is passable. 2. The solemn oath taken in A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (initiated in the early 1830s and concluded in 1843, re-issued, and revised, eight times until 1872, and subtitled a ‘view of the principles of evidence’) consists in a self-prohibition to collude in any way whatsoever with deduction. Written against all aprioristic forms of intuition, it gets caught in a vicious circle when it tries to find the proof of induction – in the last analysis – in an induction. Its newest idea is the attempt to base this induction on association and on mental perception, such as had been transmitted to him by his father and, before him, by the philosopher David Hartley.15 Gnosiology is thus led back to psychology, or to a series 14 15

The objection probably dates back to Jenks 1888, 129, and is repeated by Russell, by Cranston 1958, 12, and after him by almost every other scholar. The use of deduction is readmitted – a further symptom of the instability of Mill’s philosophical system – only in the domain of sciences like botany, physics, chemistry, and zoology. In the sixth and final book Mill turns to a confused philosophy of history, of behaviour, of human nature, deductive apparently only to make it match Comte’s far more dogmatic system of the three stages. Mill calls ethology the study of the formation of human nature, in which a principal role is given to association, since volition is led back to a succession of mental states. Ethology is a deductive, hypothetical and probabilistic science, developing by forming hypotheses which are then verified by experience.

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of relations of ‘states of conscience’; and assent – on which Newman was to question himself in his fundamental Grammar of 1870 – is for Mill a ‘mental state’. Mill’s Logic, as described in his Autobiography, sounds as a prior reply to Newman’s, because truth is not verified by ‘intuition’ or ‘consciousness’, but by observation and experience. If, as a consequence, the major premise of a syllogism is nothing but a series of particular observations without any universal value – if there are thus no a priori principles that determine the connection of causes with effects – knowledge has anyway an objective value due to the uniformity of natural phenomena: what is experienced in one case will be valid in another, similar to it; what is valid for a single individual will also be valid for his class. Experience is useful to decide whether the experience is trustworthy: riskily, ‘we make experience its own test’. Principles of Political Economy (1848, revised in the second and third editions of 1849 and 1852, and republished in no less than thirty-two editions over fifty years) was set off, not by chance, by the reflections provoked in Mill by Macaulay’s cutting reviews of his father’s essay on government, which argued the inductive nature of political forms.16 On the contrary, a series of principles from which to deduct these had to be fixed. Mill reveals in his Autobiography that one of these was the neverending progress of mankind. The capitalistic system could be redeemed for Mill with a more equitable distribution of wealth and by moderating a regime of unlimited productivity that escaped all control. The workers were to be recognized as a political subject with decisional power, but invited to contribute in a Malthusian fashion by limiting births. Mill hoped for a stationary phase in evolution and a productive and economic stagnation; this would not be an evil, since it would have permitted spiritual improvement or made it easier. In the second edition of the System, Mill’s wife, Harriet, more left-wing than he, convinced him to suppress, or rather to overturn, his negative remarks against socialism and communism.17

16 17

§ 34.3. Cranston 1958, 16–17.

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§ 43. Mill IV: The defence of individual freedom Mill was elected in Parliament only in 1865, for the constituency of Westminster, and, in character with his principles, only because asked to – and it might even be said begged to – by his Party colleagues and by the workers. To them he had presented himself with the open admission, welcomed by an acclamation for his sincerity, of his suspicions on the working classes, and with the clause that since it was a public service the electoral propaganda was to be completely free. In Parliament he soon proposed a very advanced solution to Irish irredentism. He also supported the right to representation and the extension of the franchise to women. He favoured the anti-slavery campaigns and criticized severely the bloody repressions carried out by Governor Eyre against an uprising in Jamaica (the very same that were approved of with cynical sarcasm by Carlyle). Very few were the actual results at the end of his mandate. As a compensation three essays by Mill concerning political science, besides his Autobiography, enjoyed a large popularity and are still universally known today. They closely touch on historical questions that are still topical, and are of a halfway nature between the militant reformist proposal and pure speculation. They impartially make war against prejudice, even though they replace it with a series of other biases – or, at least, principles, opinions or notions bound to his own temporal and cultural horizon. Mill was unable to conceive any other end to human society than that of looking ahead, and no other commitment for himself than a strenuous struggle, optimistically victorious against all the inimical forces of conservation. He was always on the side of the minority groups, but gave way here and there to the prejudice of a superior aristocracy of thought, which implies that he relied after all on an intellectual élite as the moral and effective guide of a nation. A representational government is conditional, on the other hand, because Mill dangerously argues about a ‘sane despotism’ and too often turns to the example of barbarous or savage peoples for whom a democratic system is not suitable. He speaks of colonial government giving the existence of colonialism for granted. The rights of women themselves are pleaded with an impassioned but romantic feminism. Actually Mill feared the collective mediocrity implicit in the concept of democracy, because it oppressed the individual. The latter was natural, society artificial. The freedom he wished

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for was social and especially intellectual independence: a freedom intended as the individual’s claim to his own autonomy, thus the humanist’s freedom as such and of an Erasmian type of eccentricity and diversity. Mill’s work ends up being a book of social behaviour, or bon ton, of ‘nowhere’. In this harmonious and therefore somewhat utopian world each person thinks for himself, carefully attentive not to harm anyone else, but rather to favour the well-being of all. 2. On Liberty (1859), inspired and partly written by his wife Harriet, deals not with the ontological problem of the conflict between necessity and free will, but with that between government authority and the individual in society. The enquiry holds even in representative societies, in which a democratic government, the expression of the majority, can limit the freedom of the community itself in its wider sense, and set up a tyranny of the majority. As a matter of fact, the only authorized form of intervention of one individual over another is for Mill is self-protection, or the prevention of damage to others. Repressive measures are not authorized as ‘means for the benefit of others’, but only justifiable for their ‘safety’.18 The peroration of freedom of thought, of expression, and of association, falls after all into the same utilitarian framework as Macaulay’s ‘tolerance’. Both thinkers held that it was necessary to remind their countrymen of it after the comeback of despotism in 1848. On Liberty is indeed an anti-Catholic and pro-Protestant essay, in the precise sense that freedom of thought, Mill says, had been historically more favoured by Protestantism than by dogmatic Catholicism, the proclaimer of papal infallibility. That Mill had got rid of revealed religion is however denied by the never spent polemic fire blazing over this issue. The argumentation of the necessity for the freedom – or the fluidity – of opinion, is that certitude is reinforced by doubt, as Browning maintains in ‘Mr Sludge, “the Medium”’.19 The hidden target is the previous apologetics of Newman, which was to culminate in The Grammar of Assent. 18 19

It is peculiar that Mill uses the term ‘doing as we like’, which would be taken up by Arnold (§ 167.2): this line of conduct is approved, but only if it does not damage others. § 124.4–5. This is very much Browning’s idea, that thought not contradicted by heresy ‘is cramped’.

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These are two different responses to the same necessity, that of a ‘lively’ or ‘vivid’ assent (the adjectives used by both). Mill glaringly disagrees with Newman because he reads history in an opposite way: it is the believer, regarding himself infallible – and imposing a dominating and repressive ideology – who is called to defend himself, rather than the unbeliever. The repression of ideas, according to Mill, had been carried out in all times, nor was it true to say that truth elbowed its way through notwithstanding persecution. Compared to Macaulay, Mill extends to its extreme limit the concept of tolerance. It was not tolerance that which included Christian confessions and excluded, for instance, the Islamic faith. In the present day, persecution was no longer physical but creeping. Mill mines, if he does not destroy, the centrism of certitude and of the typically western certitude. Those who know they have certainties – as Browning again would never tire to repeat – ‘have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them […] and consequently they do not […] know the doctrine they profess’. Mill thus advocates, in a rather selfdamaging way, a permanent revisionism of certitudes, which must always be subjected to the careful inspection of the contrary opinion, and which always lie as on the knife’s edge. Even the concept of Christian morality is subtly relativized. It is not absolute and it depends on other moral laws; and this is the reason why the Christian ethic is one among many. In the second chapter, liberty becomes the antidote of conformism – that is, the absence of a healthy individualism – and also of abnegation and of the annulment of personality, this time supported – Mill asserts – by English Dissent. Another anti-religious barb is thus tossed in open support of pagan ‘self-assertion’. Over against the mystique of resignation there arises a new contagious heroism, that of the integral individualist, a man in perennial ‘development’. But development in Mill is different from Newman’s use of the term, because it is individualistic development. Man is an individual but he also belongs to society, an obsessive reminder to be found in all Victorian revisitings of solipsistic Romanticism.20 20 Mill’s affirmation – ‘I’m the last person to undervalue the virtues belonging to the individuality of each one, if they are such, that are only second in importance to those social’ – could perhaps constitute the ideal epigraph of the most intriguing

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3. Considerations on Representative Government, a long 1861 essay in eighteen chapters, affirms the primacy of the representative government. It goes on to discuss its general applicability, though with some exceptions. It lists its functions and possible weaknesses, and faces the question as to whether the government is, or ought to be, representative of the whole spectrum of society, or only of its majority. Finally, it considers the electoral system, the duration of Parliaments, the executive, local and colonial governments, and federalism. The kind of government is for Mill freely chosen by the members of the community, who shape it – except in the case of barbarians and savage tribes – by common consensus. This does not prevent Mill from being concessive on despotism, a form of government necessary only for a short period and in conditions of anarchy. Moreover, no government is absolute but must be adapted to the local situation, uses, habits and the various national traditions, and nation by nation. On the aims of governments Mill has no doubts. They are to preserve the public good, to promote order and progress, and to spread virtue and intelligence. Aristocracies and monarchies can act for their own interests rather than for the general one; and yet within the numerical majority in a democracy particular interests may arise and be pursued to the detriment of the minorities. Power, for Mill, congenitally corrupts, and ‘sinister’ interests are a risk for any government, even a democratic one. By democracy Mill means government of the people by the people, with the implied hope for a continual confrontation between majority and minority. Only with a proportional system, inexistent in England, the representatives of the minorities could be safeguarded, and this because of the age-old principle that progress comes from the joint force of the strongest powers in collaboration with the weaker ones. Universal suffrage is defended by Mill except where the voters are illiterate or do not pay their taxes regularly. Voting should not be by secret ballot, except in the case of a tyrannical regime or of savages. The candidate was furthermore to be exonerated from electoral expenses, just as parliamentarians should not receive a salary. Mill sketches the utopian identity of a committed and charismatic politician to whom the electoral Victorian tale on the reception of Romanticism, ‘The Lifted Veil’ by George Eliot (Volume 5, § 196.2).

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body has entrusted the term of office by instinct, by serendipity, but also advisedly. The Greek examples that Mill recalls authenticate such a chimera of this man called to govern the community. If there is little sense in having two Houses, and Mill is an unicameralist, rather conservatively he foresees a first House controlled by men of ‘merit’. This body of experts, to be found among the early holders of State nominations, and persons of culture, is not chosen by popular election, but following a thorough examination of their general culture, classical and academic. Decentralization may be allowed, but it must be coordinated by a national government of solid principles, must be endowed with greater experience and have a wider overall view, that is not limited to petty details. Was it possible and advisable to hold together artificially and militarily individual and separate nationalities? The question, brought to the fore by the European uprisings, receives a smooth, velvety answer: the ethnic minorities have to be integrated into a wider political organism. It is with a certain shiver that we read Mill’s optimistic assertion that Ireland was then perfectly complementary to England. He has no doubts that ‘free states […] may possess dependencies’ acquired by armed conquest or by colonization, but passes immediately on to the question as to how they ought to be governed. The form of government in the colonies is double and distinct: self-government can be conceded to colonies that have the same level of civilization as the mother country, not to those of an inferior level. He accuses the corrupt colonial politics of exploitation and of interference, defining it, however, nothing but a memory from the past. In practice, he is against all and every shift, in the name of equality, towards a parity of powers or towards a limitation of the undoubtedly superior powers of the central authority. The prospect of a rumoured Australian-Afro-American confederation is dismissed in the name of the benefits of the colonial system, which have a national and supranational scope. It was only necessary to lighten and reduce any disparity. With regard to India, Mill affirms the necessity not of a substitute British government, but of a ‘delegated body’.21

21

On Mill’s colonialism, see Habibi 2001, 184 and 191–205.

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4. The Subjection of Women, a pamphlet in four chapters written in 1860–1861 but unpublished until 1869, asserts energetically the pressing need for a revision of the relationship between the two sexes, which, by thoroughly eliminating discriminations, must be one of ‘perfect parity’. Male supremacy is due not to tradition or to experience. It is only a pseudotheory, a mitigated ancestral slavery, the camouflaged and subtle law of the strongest. There was no scientific or psychological theory that could authorize anyone to say that there were objective moral and intellectual differences between the two sexes. Marriage is investigated by Mill as an historical example of the complete subjection of a woman to her husband, one softened but not unknown in the late nineteenth century, because it was still supported by male chauvinist legislation. Good and loving husbands and down-trodden wives were exceptions that confirmed the rule. Ultimately, even the concept of equality in marriage is utopian according to Mill, and it is in fact the mythology of his own marriage with Harriet Taylor. It means the union of two temperaments in a climate of reciprocal enrichment, aiming at cultivating the strongest community of intentions with equal rights; it is the cell from which ‘the moral regeneration of mankind’ could come. The key point is that of opening the way for women to the civil service on the basis of a free competition system. Mill held that the assertion that women were unsuited to hold power was denied by the brave, efficient and vigorous queens in history; rather, women are practical and intuitive and their temperament is complementary to the more torpid one of man. Women are by nature highly strung, but hardly so if engaged in tasks that they can handle better, and are easily satisfied in their undertakings. Mill however verges on the ludicrous by asking himself seriously whether the female brain is smaller than that of the male, and therefore whether the woman is less intelligent – contemporary science had not settled this question. Were women incapable of being philosophers, scientists and artists? The twentieth-century reception of women’s literature has completely rejected Mill’s opinion that Victorian women writers were derivative from male authors. Such presumed inferiority was, according to Mill, only due to the fact that women were discriminated, and had not been able to frequent and benefit from the cultural tradition, or had been forced to be imitative due to the male monopoly. Had they lived as

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separate and isolated beings, women would have written a literature with its own distinctive traits, and the parity of the woman would have been, in conclusion, an advantage both for the woman and for the man. In fact, the whole of society would have enjoyed and benefitted from a double quantity of mental energies. § 44. Ruskin up to 1869* I: The myth-maker Basically until the end of the 1970s John Ruskin (1819–1900) was presented by the British intelligentsia and by art experts (such as Kenneth Clark 22

*

Library Edition, inclusive of his correspondence, ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, 39 vols, London 1903–1912. Separate and more complete edns of Ruskin’s letters are The Gulf of Years: Letters from John Ruskin to Kathleen Olander, ed. R. Unwin, London 1953; Ruskin’s Letters from Venice 1851–1852, ed. J. L. Bradley, New Haven, CT 1955; The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin’s Correspondence With Margaret Alexis Bell and the Children at Winnington Hall, ed. V. A. Burd, London 1969; Letters to His Parents 1845, ed. H. I. Shapiro, Oxford 1972; Sublime and Instructive: Letters from John Ruskin to Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, Anna Blunden and Ellen Heaton, ed. V. Surtees, London 1972; The Ruskin Family Letters, ed. V. A. Burd, 2 vols, Ithaca, NY and London 1973; The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, ed. J. L. Bradley and I. Ousby, Cambridge 1987. Diaries, ed. J. Evans and J. H. Whitehouse, 3 vols, Oxford 1956–1959, and, ‘of Brantwood’, ed. H. Viljoen, New Haven, CT and London 1971. Selections, ed. A. C. Benson, Cambridge 1923; Ruskin as a Literary Critic, ed. A. H. R. Ball, Cambridge 1928; Selected Writings, ed. P. Quennell, London 1952; Ruskin Today, ed. K. Clark, Harmondsworth 1962 and London 1964; The Genius of John Ruskin, ed. J. D. Rosenberg, Boston, MA 1963; The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1965; Praeterita, ed. K. Clark, London 1949 and Oxford 1978, and ed. A. O. J. Cockshut, Keele 1995; Selected Writings, ed. P. Davis, London 1995; Fors Clavigera, ed. D. Birch, Edinburgh 2001. Life. W. G. Collingwood, The Life and Work of John Ruskin, 2 vols, London 1893; A. C. Benson, Ruskin: A Study in Personality, London 1911; E. T. Cook, The Life of John Ruskin, 2 vols, London 1911; P. Wilenski, John Ruskin, London 1933; D. Leon, Ruskin: The Great Victorian, London 1949; P. Quennell, The Portrait of a Prophet, London 1949, and John Ruskin, London 1956; J. Evans, Ruskin, London 1954; J. Abse, John Ruskin: The Passionate Moralist, New York 1981 (with detailed clinical hypotheses); J. D. Hunt, The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin, London 1982; T. Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years, London 1985, and The Later Years, London 2000 (the most authoritative biography); W. Kemp, The Desire of My Eyes: A Life of John Ruskin, London 1991; J. Batchelor, John Ruskin: No Wealth but Life, London 2000.

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or Quentin Bell) as an amateur not devoid of genius (and to this thumbnail verdict Ruskin’s reception in his lifetime can be reduced). At the same time, in America and at the University of Yale a school of thought headed by Harold Bloom had slowly started to raise Ruskin to the rank of the Criticism. Some penetrating presentations before 1900 are included in the Critical Heritage, listed below. A. C. Meynell, John Ruskin, Edinburgh and London 1901; F. Harrison, John Ruskin, London 1902; R. G. Collingwood, Ruskin, London 1922; G. Hough, The Last Romantics, London 1949, 1–39 (classic, and still useful, short introduction); J. Autret, L’influence de Ruskin sur la vie, les idées et l’œuvre de Marcel Proust, Genève 1955; H. G. Viljoen, Ruskin’s Scottish Heritage: A Prelude, Urbana, IL 1956; R. Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950, London 1958 and 1963, 137–61; J. D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius, New York 1961; Q. Bell, Ruskin, London 1963 and New York 1978; G. P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin, Princeton, NJ 1971, and Ruskin, Oxford 1985; J. C. Sherburne, John Ruskin or the Ambiguities of Abundance, Cambridge, MA 1972; R. Hewison, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye, London 1976, and Ruskin and Venice, London 1978 and, as editor, New Approaches to Ruskin, London 1981; J. Clegg, Ruskin and Venice, London 1981; R. E. Fitch, The Poison Sky: Myth and Apocalypse in Ruskin, Athens, OH 1982; E. K. Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder, Cambridge, MA and London 1982; CRHE, ed. J. L. Bradley, London 1984; P. L. Sawyer, Ruskin’s Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, Ithaca, NY and London 1985; G. Wihl, Ruskin and the Rhetoric of Infallibility, New Haven, CT and London 1985 (with an appendix on Ruskin’s influence on Proust); John Ruskin, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1986; H. Fraser, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature, Cambridge 1986, in part. 112–36; D. Birch, Ruskin’s Myths, Oxford 1988; M. W. Brooks, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture, New Brunswick, NJ and London 1987; C. Ruggiero Corradini, Saggio su John Ruskin. Il messaggio nello stile, Firenze 1989; M. Hardman, Six Victorian Thinkers, Manchester 1991, 42–72; The Lamp of Memory: Ruskin, Tradition and Architecture, ed. M. Wheeler and N. Whiteley, Manchester 1992; S. Emerson, Ruskin: The Genesis of Invention, Cambridge 1993; S. P. Gordon and A. L. Gully, John Ruskin and the Victorian Eye, New York 1993; The Dominion of Dedalus, ed. J. Clegg and P. Tucker, St Albans 1994; Time and Tide: Ruskin and Science, ed. M. Wheeler, London 1996; Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, ed. D. Birch, Oxford 1999; M. Wheeler, Ruskin’s God, Cambridge 1999; Ruskin and the Twentieth Century: The Modernity of Ruskinism, ed. T. Cerutti, Vercelli 2000; Ruskin and Modernism, ed. G. Cianci and P. Nicholls, Houndmills 2001; D. M. Craig, John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption, Charlottesville, VA and London 2006; Ruskin in Perspective, ed. C. Casaliggi and P. March-Russell, Newcastle 2012; W. Henderson, John Ruskin’s Political Economy, London 2012; The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin, ed. F. O’Gorman, Cambridge 2015.

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greatest Victorian art and literary critic. The former position errs by snobbishness and condescension, the latter is perhaps overgenerous, dictated by Ruskin’s presumptive and actually aprioristic ‘belatedness’ with respect to the Romantics and, particularly, to Coleridge and Wordsworth. Some of the keystones of Ruskin’s visual aesthetics are debatable or at any rate insufficient. Such are his axiom of the truthfulness of art, of moral beauty, of the primacy of landscape art and of the painter as ideally a mountaineer, or his ostracism against trompe l’œil and the overuse of chiaroscuro. Equally idiosyncratic is his fanatical support of Turner, whom he placed above all the ‘old masters’, with the consequential, unconditional demotion of many great predecessors. Only slightly less serious is the fact that Ruskin based some of his theories on paintings that later critics established as of dubious attribution, or made by pupils of great masters, and on minor and later works by famous painters which he thought incomparable masterpieces (such as, to mention only one example, Veronese’s Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, seen in Turin in 1858). For Ruskin, the vision of this painting had represented a major turning point in his aesthetics and had also helped on his conversion to a less Puritan religious sentiment. Just as misleading is Ruskin’s enthusiasm for the Gothic at the expense of the Renaissance, or his theory of a Romantic Middle Ages, that is of an age that had been far from ‘dark’, as tradition has it, but resplendent with sweetness and light. On the other hand, none of Ruskin’s books contains a systematic literary aesthetics, even though some authors and some literary masterpieces, like the Divine Comedy, were immensely dear to him and were known down to the smallest details. He introduces and examines them whenever possible in a subsidiary fashion, and with comments that, though keen and penetrating in themselves, are always debatable and highly personal. All of this is just simply to suggest that the centre of gravity, in Ruskin, needs to be shifted from that of the objective and heuristic critic of the arts to that of the subjective writer, and, in the last analysis, to that of the myth-maker. When all is said, it is only in this role that his greatness can be measured and admired. Bell and Clark, indeed, added to their seemingly limiting judgement, and almost echoing each other, that that amateur wrote like an angel, that he had certainly said a lot of stupid things about art, though he was one who knew how to deal skilfully and with vivacity with things

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boring, so as to make seem anything but boring. This ‘angel’ was that tall and upright figure standing out silhouetted among the rocky heights of the Alps with his look lost in the sidereal spaces, with which he seemed to be in close communion: the emblem itself of the sublime, immortalized in a well-known painting by Millais. In short, the scholar looking for impartial aesthetic foundations rejects, or at least historicises, that subjective falsification, that detachment from, and break with, the norm, that mania and even that phobia that are among the most highly desired primary ingredients of literature. The three sides of Ruskin’s myth-making are the personal, the cultural and the mythic stricto sensu. Ruskin reads and interprets art according to his Puritan education and to his unhappy biographical experiences. The cultural myth is that of ‘vital’ art and beauty, the pulsating beauty of the Gothic, which was also the architectural translation of the immature beauty of female childhood. Ruskin’s myth, in its proper sense, was Greek myth, rethought in its visionary admixtures with Christian myth, an operation that, launched in 1869 with The Queen of the Air, lies outside the range of this volume.1 From the cultural myth of the Gothic came the apparently most concrete, and less private section in Ruskin’s writings, that of his social criticism. This is, however, a mistake, because the revitalizing and transformation of society and of the working classes by art, was itself an intermediate myth that would resist well after 1860. 2. Ruskin’s mental illness was diagnosed as early as 1933, in Wilenski’s classic biography.2 Ruskin was a psychopath and a manic depressive all his life, though with alternating deteriorations and periods of remission. His least appealing characteristic, attested by many acquaintances, was his ‘egotism’. His self-assertiveness coexisted with an instinctive and shadowy sense of reluctance to frequent salons and artistic societies. His relationships with powerful circles of followers or artistic blood-brothers – the Pre-Raphaelites, the Christian socialists, the early aestheticians – were brief and stormy. He was a loner, and lived in exile, far from the bustle of

1 2

See Volume 6, § 39. Ruskin’s penetrating studies as a student of Greek myths can be seen in D. Birch’s books listed in the bibliography. See CRHE, 374 (a review of 1879) for a very explicit diagnosis.

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London during the last years of his life, so that several of his contemporaries maintained that Ruskin was an ‘influence’ but not a ‘living personality’.3 His obsessions – for roses, for young girls in the flower of their years, for fire-flies and for light in the darkness,4 with many others – induce one to analyse him under the species of what literary psychoanalysts call ‘obsessive metaphors’. He is the Victorian author to whom it is most appropriate and legitimate – along with Hopkins – to apply that recurrent network of representative images as theorized by the French critic Charles Mauron.5 It cannot be ignored or overlooked that Ruskin had paedophiliac leanings; his attraction to young girls cannot be seen as innocent and paternalistic. His biography is punctuated by infantile loves that were enjoyed and foretasted, and that dried up when the young girls became adult. Ruskin was unable to form relationships with adult women because he was psychically trapped at that stage of infantile love. Like Kafka, growing up meant getting dirty and becoming infected. His were sexless and asexual loves, unequal in every case because of the difference in age, like that of the old men for Susanna – a recurrent theme in many paintings of that pictorial art that he morbidly studied. He had had more than one fiancée before he was twenty, and his marriage failed because he could not accept that his wife, Euphemia Gray or ‘Effie’, had become a grown woman and was no longer the little girl to whom he had dedicated a story. The fixation with young girls developed, through external but very influential events, into an obsession with the ‘motif of the rose’, or of the Rose that had lost its bloom. After the failure of his marriage with Effie, that is, there came into the life of the middleaged Ruskin the type of little girl still in her bloom. This was the moment of Rose, Rose La Touche, and after her, in the very last years of his life, of

3 4 5

CRHE, 337. This isolation was also noted by Vernon Lee (CHRE, 378). Stephen (CHRE, 423) was of opinion that Carlyle had had a stronger influence. BAUGH, vol. IV, 1343. C. Mauron, Des métaphores obsédantes au mythe personnel. Introduction à la psychocritique, Paris 1963. In 1883, however, this personal myth had already been more or less guessed by Vernon Lee (CHRE, 378–85).

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the young art student Kate Olander, whose name recalled another flower.6 After the death of Rose, Ruskin, like Rossetti when he lost Elizabeth Siddal, entered into a twisted, visionary and metempsychotic state of delirium. Little Rose appeared to him as the reincarnation of Carpaccio’s St Ursula or of Dante’s Beatrice. The Ruskin of the last twenty years of his life, haunted by the ‘storm cloud’, tormented by visions of cats and peacocks, resembles one of those spectral souls that people the stories of In a Glass Darkly by Le Fanu.7 One of Ruskin’s favourite pictorial subjects was in fact one that immortalized little girls, so that he could satiate himself and satisfy this complex. His gallery of little girls, both painted and in marble, begins with Ilaria del Carretto of Lucca. He had seen her marble grave for the first time in 1845, and various books of his touch on the later incarnation of this simulacrum.8 The model of infantile purity in flower and its decline in adulthood was extended to the whole course of architectural art. He loved forms that were fresh and gushing, the non-finite, the phenomenon caught in fieri, as in the Gothic. When history made the architectural and decorative forms old, a sense of tiredness, of stillness, of finitude, even of decrepitude and rottenness emanated from them. Such was the Renaissance. An aesthetic clue, just as obsessive, is therefore his preference for unfinished or imperfect art forms. The painters with whom Ruskin mostly identified himself were two. With Turner he had a more self-aware and personal identification, of the type which often came like a thunderbolt to Victorian writers (Hopkins was to discover that he was the reincarnation of Duns Scotus). When in 1851 Turner died, Ruskin was named executor in his will, but he declined this responsibility because Turner had given almost all his works to the nation. Ruskin planned to write a full biography of Turner,

6 7 8

Even Tennyson, hurt by another Rose, for a certain time, when young, embroidered poetically his own ‘roman de la Rose’ (§§ 78.3 and 96.1). Volume 5, § 177. It comes as no surprise that these girls he adored had, at least in the portraits that Ruskin sketched of them, the same physiognomy, as if they were the incarnations of an obsessive image already present in his psyche. The portraits of Effie and Rose are similar (in their look, in their melancholic face, in their hair divided at the front). See Clark 1964, and the illustrations between pages 26 and 27.

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but he merely drafted a general catalogue of his works and imagined and projected a magnificent gallery destined to house them all. An associative and somewhat daring general observation about Ruskin is the conjecture that intense love of a work of art is the obverse of disappointment in love, a disappointment for the withered girl-child in flower, no longer virgin because of sexual experience. One of Ruskin’s lifelong love and hate relationship was in fact with the ‘sensual’ seventeenth-century painter Salvator Rosa. He accused him of having loosened all moral restraint, and of having been dishonest and untruthful. The cameos dedicated to him in Modern Painters, especially in the fifth volume, are too overloaded, thunderous and fiery to lack this personal resonance. A further index of Ruskin’s personal myth is his horror of pollution, a word whose Latin root means ejaculation. This explains Ruskin’s nostalgia for rivers whose waters are still clear and crystalline, before they become sewers, and for a nature not yet corrupted, literally virgin, before it was grooved – that is, raped and deflowered – by the railways covering it with soot.9 3. Art, for Ruskin, is feminine and incarnated in cities evoked in his imagination as feminine. Modern art, in particular, from the fall of Rome onwards, resembles for him a prim virgin who loses her chastity due to the sin of sexual incontinence, and becomes a prostitute. This design is not only a reflection of the obscure biographical curse of a now married man, but it is also the frame of reference – the scarlet woman of the Book of Revelation and the Antichrist – by means of which Protestantism at its most fanatical anathematized Catholicism. Ruskin the art critic, actually, always judges as a prophet under the mark of  biblical scandal.10 He naturally glossed over his roots: ‘I’m no Puritan’ – he stated in 1865 – ‘and have never praised or advocated puritanical art’. His unyielding biblical aesthetics, however, lacked the equivalent of a great English national art. The exaltation of Turner in Modern Painters is an attempt to oppose a high-level, specifically Protestant art to one overtly Catholic. In spite of his disapproval of the ‘muddy stream’ of the Renaissance, he could not free himself from the 9 10

As in the ninth letter of Time and Tide (§ 57.7). Ruskin’s frames of reference are not simply allegorical, but anagogical, and, as has been acutely discussed by Landow 1971 (321–457), based on biblical typology.

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implicit admission that the irreligious and pagan Renaissance was the period of Italian art that he secretly loved most. It is, on the other hand, rather too mechanical to posit that Gothic art, very beautiful and very sincere and very religious, almost suddenly degenerated after the Reform into a nerveless and vicious art. The oppressiveness of the Bible was never done away with, no matter how many Promethean attempts Ruskin made – like Carlyle – to shake it off.11 Ruskin’s theory of the painter vacillates because it is the painter himself who has to face an ever more anguished – and, except in a few cases, never definitely victorious – conflict between satanic self-assuredness and self-sacrifice. In a confession Ruskin could maintain that the painters of the school of Fra Angelico were ‘poor, weak creatures’ compared to the Venetians, that the greatest artists were presumptuously ‘brutish’, and that a painter of the first order was not a pious soul but a man of the world and somehow evil – ‘A good, stout, self-commanding, magnificent Animality is the make for poets and artists’. But, as a theory, this went beyond him and disturbed him, since he had always thought that purity gave strength.12 However, Giotto at Assisi proved to Ruskin that it was an error to insist that religious painters were weaker than the irreligious ones,13 and Giotto is placed over Titian. Newman himself had been more 11

12 13

For Landow 1971, 243–4, Ruskin remained a fervent evangelical Protestant until 1848; he then went through a crisis of faith which lasted until 1858, and was an agnostic until 1875. After this date he embraced a religion that was vaguely secular. In 1869, in Time and Tide, Ruskin lists five very indistinct categories, later reduced to two, regarding faith in the literal truth of the Bible: truth may be integral, that is, coming from the first to the very last word from God, or it may consists in a simple ‘reserve’ of human wisdom, equal to the results of other efforts made by mankind to formulate truths on existence and human history. Ruskin seems by now to put himself in this second category of more balanced scholars and thinkers. Having spent so much time in Catholic countries and among their art, he was eventually about to yield to the lures of the enemy, and a sacristan in Assisi, where Ruskin spent part of 1874, was certain of an imminent ‘little’ miracle of the saint. Ruskin thought he had himself become a Franciscan tertiary, having dreamed of it (Wheeler 1999, 219–33, where Wheeler rightly scales down the hypothesis that Ruskin became agnostic and secularized). Quennell 1949, 146, and Quennell 1956, 19, undated declaration. Hough 1949, 28.

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elastic in linking the worth of artistic products to the moral stature of the producer, and more concessive in admitting that a good artist might not be a virtuous man.14 Nature itself was witness to the cosmic battle continuously played out between the forces of good and evil. If the Alps were the direct revelation of a beneficial will in the creation, volcanic eruptions – which had to be kept distinct from all other manifestations of the organic life – represented a symbol of unredeemed evil and of the Evil one himself. The dangerous nature of art, also an obsession for Hopkins, made Ruskin say, or at least very cautiously add, that art itself is superfluous and useless in any comparison with nature, since nature is the best artist. 4. Ruskin thus believed in a gradual fading of the more genuine religious sentiment from the end of the Middle Ages onwards. This was accompanied ipso facto by a deterioration in the quality of painting. Beauty, free from every element of sin and corruption, had been painted only by Fra Angelico, while Raphael had already painted a Cecilia who was a plump, sensual, dark-eyed Italian model. After him, with Correggio, Reni and the Venetians, the beauty of faces had become spent and dimmer. The Renaissance revival of ancient art could have theoretically led to a rebirth, but Renaissance itself was not immune from a growing corruption of the spirit. The poles were represented for Ruskin by Angelico’s imagination, used to ennoble the Holy Scriptures, and by the exhibitionism of the painters who followed him – that is, from art used to illustrate religious facts to religious facts used to provide material for art. With Salvator Rosa painters had abandoned the faith of their fathers and had become almost atheists, and a classical school had been formed that was supported by an up-to-date 14 § 31.3–5. In The Two Paths (§ 55.3) this comment is made: ‘I do not say in the least that in order to be a good painter you must be a good man; but I do say that to a good natural painter there must be strong elements of good in the mind, however warped by other parts of the character’. The debate was raging during those years, and Meredith, reviewing The Stones of Venice, observed that ‘Painting is not a moral quality, but one of the fine arts; and a good landscape is a good landscape, whether it has been painted by a saint or a sinner’ (CHRE, 156: on the identification of Meredith as the anonymous reviewer see the editor’s footnote, ibid., 143). See also the equally perplexed opinion of S. Brooke, in CHRE, 356. But the question comes up in almost every subsequent review, right up to the end of the century.

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carpe diem. At the end of the sixteenth century, art had become a form of ‘entertainment for the indolent’, and satiated ‘those who swam in luxury’. As in the decadence of the Roman Empire, it pandered to the ‘filthiest passions’. Ruskin ultimately posits, before Pater, a medieval Renaissance in which the spiritual afflatus dies out and one breathes only quiet and harmony. It is not by chance that he mistrusts asceticism and monasticism and disapproves of the materialist as much as of the ascetic, the former because too worldly, the latter because too little worldly. Medieval monasticism had been healthy in so far as it had not removed man from practical and active life.15 Ruskin idealized a small, imaginary, closely knit and harmonious group of cultural animators of early Florentine humanism, formed by solid life- and spiritual relationships between painter, poet and philosopher. As against this, modern society was a disintegrated and no longer organic whole. The prophecy of a regeneration of nineteenth-century society springs from a nostalgia for a Gothic age in which men worked ‘with joy’ and ‘with love’ in the ‘chorus of human fatigue’. In Ruskin’s day, instead, each creature was ‘only one atom in a drift of human dust’.16 This idealization of an organic society, and of a symbiosis of art, society and religion, was handed on to George Eliot and especially to Hopkins, under the auspices of Girolamo Savonarola. But Savonarola is bypassed or ignored by Ruskin, perhaps because he was undoubtedly a late comer. § 45. Ruskin up to 1869 II: The arbiter of taste Ruskin then belongs to ‘the scaffoldings of Victorian thought’, but at a later stage than the thinkers discussed until now, and for two very simple reasons. His writings began to appear and to become influential from 1843, twenty years later than Carlyle’s early works, and ten years later than Newman’s. The second reason is that his early writings, dealing with art, are thematically displaced, seemingly anodyne rather than prophetic and In a parenthesis in Modern Painters, volume 5, Ruskin lists three types of medieval asceticism – religious, military and economical – all of them implying the rejection of pleasure and of knowledge for the sake of some other thing; none of the three is however ‘a healthy mental state’. 16 From The Study of Architecture in Our Schools. 15

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militant, or such only indirectly or in nuce. It was from the actual, or more precisely from the eternal and constant, repeatability of the Gothic that Ruskin’s third myth, that of the regeneration of society through art, was born. Ruskin took just a few years to be convinced that art was a phenomenon of vast social import, and painting tout court an over-elitist activity. Painting had been universal, and of a public radius, in ancient times, but it had been gradually relegated to museums, art galleries and the salons of the rich. In the present day and age its life was circumscribed to exhibitions. Architecture, on the contrary, had far more public repercussions, so that the ideal Ruskinian artist becomes an architect, painter and sculptor at the same time; hence Ruskin’s profound esteem for Giotto and for Michelangelo. The Gothic civilization had created a democratic art, integrated and available to all. The utopia of a revival of society redeemed by art and by the artists – and ideally Gothic artists – forms the theme of the so-called second Ruskin. This presupposition is irreconcilable with – and, on the other hand, foreign to – the programmes of the great exponents of nineteenth-century social thought, with whom Ruskin found unwittingly that he had some objectives and some targets in common. However, Ruskin’s criticism of capitalism, his denouncement of exploitation and of surplus value, and of the excesses in free exchange, did not in any way imply the support of class war as an automatic consequence. On the contrary, Ruskin was a transversal thinker who could define himself, almost in the same breath and without feeling any embarrassment, the reddest of communists and a Tory ‘of the old school’. It was on account of his unexpected eclecticism that he was able to attract the approval of antithetical spirits such as Tolstoy and Gandhi. His master, as he often repeated, was Carlyle,17 and together they formed a tandem of Scots, one by birth and the other by descent. Both strenuously expended themselves in the re-Christianizing of society, and, therefore, in a resistance not only to all and every collusion with Catholicism but also to every other rationalistic, illuminist and deistic view of religion. Between superstition and rationalism, ‘a thousand-fold 17

In the appendix to the third volume of Modern Painters he recognizes himself ‘coloured’ by Carlyle, from whom, however, he is distinguished by a firm, dry rejection, often reconfirmed, of German metaphysics.

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rather let us retain some colour of superstition – as Carlyle had said – so that we may keep also some strength of religion, than comfort ourselves with colour of reason for the desolation of godlessness’. 2. Following this cleavage between aesthetic and abstract thought and applied social thought – a point that I will take up below – Ruskin’s influence in the mid- and late nineteenth and in the twentieth century was very unequal. The dynasty of the Ruskinians was thinner in terms of direct followers, while it was subject to crosses with disparate influences. Hopkins, a Catholic and one of his followers, had other masters besides Ruskin. He learned from him his love for the visual arts and the impassionate contemplation of beauty, of ‘barbarous’ beauty – an adjective that they share –18 and a beauty natural and artistic at the same time, which is in Ruskin, as it is in Hopkins, at least in some of its uses, not only the primitive and rough beauty but also beauty as an end in itself.19 Pater was a Ruskinian renegade who wrote of the authentically modern and, with less preconceived passion, of that Renaissance that was Ruskin’s constant target.20 Ruskin tried unsuccessfully to bend the Pre-Raphaelites to his own aesthetic tenets; but Morris religiously venerated, and reprinted with beautiful decorations, the chapter on the ‘nature of Gothic’ from The Stones of Venice. Aestheticism as a whole was a development of Ruskin’s idea of the primacy of art over life. In a wider sense, Ruskin taught at least three generations of Englishmen and Americans to look and appreciate pictorial art and continental architecture, while tolerating the tendentiousness and 18 19

See below, § 51.1 n. 54. Ruskin’s blinding personal experience of beauty becomes Hopkins’s inscape, as is recognized in the introduction to Praeterita (Oxford 1978, xvii–xviii) by K. Clark, who also finds that – an unusual compliment to the Jesuit poet – many of Ruskin’s pencil sketches are similar to Hopkins’s. Ruskin, who had taken professional lessons in design and painting and was a teacher of design, was actually an excellent illustrator, vignettist and etcher, even if what he produced had, according to him, only a mnemonic value. 20 The concept of the modern, on which Pater so often paused with sophisticated and even captious analyses, was certainly used in subtle polemic against the adjective that appears in the most celebrated work by Ruskin, which Pater never mentions in his writings.

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arbitrariness of his judgements. The professional scholars of architecture have documented Ruskin’s irreplaceable role in the history of Victorian and post-Victorian architecture. On the other hand, those scholars have also pointed out the artificial nature of the tripartition of Ruskin’s works into writings on art, politics and society. On closer inspection, they form a web. ‘Transition’ is the rhetorical mark of his discursive style. Transition is with Ruskin, first and foremost, ideological, that is an intellectual and anything but linear development from one position to another. The books Ruskin wrote often overlap, never start from zero. They add, improve and complete previous axioms; just as frequently they contradict one another. The reader has to get used to such almost imperceptible landslides in his thought, especially on aesthetics, and to the continual updating of his map of the historical evolution of art, to his depiction of the artist, and to his idea of the relationship between artist and art consumer. Transition is also a primary element of his argumentative procedure. It is often a transition from the factual to the metaphorical, biblical, anagogical and typological plane. Just as common is the logical saltus within a discursive chain only apparently closed. Ruskin is the only major Victorian who eccentrically, but constantly, writes in numbered paragraphs, each of which contains an infinitesimal fraction of his general argument. The abrupt anecdote is a saltus, as well, but back from the abstract to the concrete. The numbered paragraphs conclude at times by announcing a theoretical point that still has to be demonstrated, but those that follow may start off with a reminiscence, with a curious bookish detail or with something remembered during a journey. His procedure is the umpteenth mediation between instrumental and self-reflexive writing, and his art criticism is eminently an ekphrasis, a series of words that mime the paintings the describe, real paintings that he had before his eyes, or views of nature, so as to re-create in words the landscape that the painter translated into forms and colours, and that the onlooker had personally seen only a short while before. In all of his works concentration is weak, the expressive order threatened, and thematic continuity fluctuating; and his discursive chain is a kind of unstable, precocious stream of consciousness. Ruskin was born a prolific poet right from his childhood, and his poems have been recently re-evaluated after having been for long confined to the domain of youthful immaturity. Thackeray’s daughter observed that Ruskin

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had the gift of a true novelist. This gift never fully flowered, but it may be witnessed and valorised in the more descriptive parts, in the recollections and in the sketches of his autobiography, Praeterita. On the characteristics of The Stones of Venice as a sui generis ‘novel of Venice’, on his youthful story The King of the Golden River, and on the dramatic parody The Ethics of the Dust, more will be said and at greater length below. § 46. Ruskin up to 1869 III: Biography up to 1869 As has often been said, Ruskin’s Praeterita, chronologically the last of the great Victorian autobiographies, condemns the professional biographer to paraphrasing, at least in the initial phases of Ruskin’s life. I too will use it here instrumentally, with the obvious proviso that Praeterita has its own artistic and literary autonomy as a non-biographical, and therefore, to all effects, a purely literary text. It belongs to the ancient tradition of the ‘confessions’ and to the genre of self-probings, and as such it witnesses the creative and inventive ability of Ruskin, which is, as I mentioned, always unexpressed. At first blush the only other autobiography similar to it is Mill’s, but only because Ruskin was an enfant prodige whose parents, although in a much more amiable way, condemned him to a severe apprenticeship of studies – the cornerstone of which, unlike Mill, was the Bible.21 But it is in the last analysis unique. Ruskin wrote it between 1884 and 1889, with the longest gap between lived and written life compared to any other Victorian autobiography. He looked at himself not only without any real empathy but as if he were dealing with another person. Like a true novelist he eclipsed himself in large portions of the text, or relegated himself to the background to the advantage of the choral scene. Occasional episodic sketches have something Dickensian about them, or a touch of that gentle and rather unreal pathos found in Cranford by Mrs Gaskell.22 Frank,

21

22

Ruskin too boasted of having early discovered a method, in his case the ‘analytic power’ and that of getting ‘to the bottom of things’. In Mill’s education there was no place for the Bible, and Greek came first and got the better of Latin. Ruskin, who was immediately introduced to the Bible, began his Greek when he was about eleven. In particular the sketches of the maternal and paternal aunts, of his cousin Mary, or of the benevolent but inefficient Telford, partner to his father.

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talkative, relaxed: this is how Ruskin described the way in which it was written. In homage to his declared ‘principle of pleasure’, painful events of his life were purposely never mentioned or were left out, and only the joyful ones included. Thus, the autobiography becomes in these cases untrustworthy like few others, both because it is an ex post teleological reconstruction and because it is an operation of conscious censorship.23 No behind-the-scene story is given, for example – after the many narcissistic descriptions of his female conquests – of his engagement and marriage with Effie.24 Nor was he interested, unlike Mill and Newman, in listing in detail his precocious readings when still an adolescent, or in going over his intellectual development. In Mill there is an evident effort to present himself as an adult child who never had a childhood; Ruskin candidly and unashamedly dwells on his infancy which, he says, had been almost timeless (‘I already disliked growing old’). Recollections flow on without rules like an ungoverned wave, but in the end they must settle and let themselves be organized in three books, with each chapter having a title describing a biographical phase with a poetic or mnemonic or associative image; these chapters are in turn subdivided into small self-enclosed sections. These separate sections, in themselves very short, easily readable one by one, and easily extrapolated from the diegetic thread – and not by chance numbered as in musical suites – comprise anticlassical, disorderly and digressive sentences often dictated by a mnemic and semi-oneiric logic. Ruskin readily confesses such zigzagging or to and fro movement of memory, and the absence of any ‘formal chronology of plan’, which, coming as it does from spontaneous associations, results in only seeming repetitions. The discursive range varies from easy-going, banal and ingenuous observations to others that are harder and more difficult to decode, owing to far-fetched and completely personal references and to the abrupt transition from the factual register to one metaphorical and figurative. Indeed some short chapters or single sections of Praeterita are In its second and less obvious meaning Praeterita, that is, ‘past things’, means ‘things passed under silence’, and it has in fact the same root as the rhetorical term ‘preterition’. 24 There is a notable jump forward or chronological empty space after 1849 and in the following decade, where the diegetic texture is discontinuous and given in the form of diary entries. 23

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the best illustration of Ruskin’s Pindaric flights and of his technique of transition, which, rapid and unannounced, tries the reader to the limit of his or her patience. This is also the reason why we perceive here the mark and flavour of two other, primarily lyrical, autobiographies, Pater’s ‘The Child in the House’ – austere, shadier, but equally sensitive and intimate – and Proust’s Recherche. Proust admired and wanted to translate Praeterita. At about halfway from the end Praeterita takes on an even gratuitous and improvised progression, and becomes prey to a chaotic and extravagant associationism. Its distinctive mark is that of Ruskin’s last works, that of the open archive and of the heterogeneous file.25 2. Ruskin’s life suggests, like that of Thomas Mann – the author, after all, of the second most celebrated ‘death in, or of Venice’ in the whole western canon – the parable of the decline of the merchant class or its dissolution into the hypostases, or simply the hypotheses, of solipsistic and self-destructive art. Hanno Buddenbrook, the last of a dynasty of merchants, dies of typhoid fever while playing the piano; Ruskin, an only child, dies of old age, but, sexually impotent, is left equally without heirs. Ruskin was born in a family given to commerce with a rather common aesthetic taste, as he recognized. It was, however, the right kind of humus for the formation of a sincere appreciation of art. He preferred to embrace art rather than following in his father’s footsteps, and became the leading critic of capitalist accumulation. He gave away a good part of the patrimony inherited from his father, roughly amounting to 120,000 pounds, almost to the point of impoverishing himself. He also decided to sell for a few pence the copies of his own works, which were mainly addressed to the workers. His father, a native of Edinburgh, was the owner of a flowering firm

25

The temporal planes and as a consequence the points of view are criss-crossed and mixed up – as in a game of mirrors – because Ruskin creates a refraction of perspective, that of the old man who sees himself young, who notes in his memory the different reactions to the experiences had as a youth and as an old man, and that as an old man re-reads and re-orientates the interpretations of the youth in the pages of his diary. Praeterita is the most metaliterary of all Victorian autobiographies because it reinterprets many of Ruskin’s works, and thus in a certain sense transforms and rewrites them.

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for the production and sale of sherry; having followed classical studies in his youth he possessed some culture and literary curiosity. From his pious mother, Margaret Cox, a Calvinist and the cousin of her husband, and she too a Scot, Ruskin absorbed from every pore the knowledge of the Bible, which was read to him from first to last page each solar year, and of which many lines and whole passages were known to him by heart. Neither one nor the other parent was young when Ruskin was born, and as he grew up, due to typical senile anxiety, they protected him from possible dangers and made him the centre of their attention. Praeterita narrates how they made him read, even on Sundays, books of edifying authors like Bunyan, whom Ruskin cherished for their purely imaginary aspects, and therefore against their grain. As an older man he was pleased to remember, a little fiendishly, that he had cheated everyone, because, as he recalled, he had not become an evangelical curate. The severe religious education he had received had been a boomerang. His apparent repudiation of the Puritan religion was to come, however, much later, and was put down to his reaction to the monasticism of the Carthusians of the Grande Chartreuse, too much estranged from the world, and to his preference for other fighting saints and for the beauty of the illuminated missals. So a way of life closed for the boy who had been taught the moral necessity of being sad on Sundays.26 3. Like the father of John Stuart Mill, Ruskin’s parents kept him from the levelling and ‘degrading’ influence of the public schools, but the suffocating air of this family environment should not be exaggerated since, in his memories, it was neither sad nor gloomy. It is true, however, that his companions were limited so as to keep him from dangerous contacts, and that he was never given many toys, that he did not care for sports and never became proficient in them. At four Ruskin could read and write, and at seven he penned a story. By the time he was eighteen he had written hundreds poems that showed his great ease in imitation and were published 26

A page in Praeterita describes the gradual interruption of the habit of the daily reading of the Bible after he was fourteen, and the petering out of an inherited belief: ‘I virtually concluded from my general Bible reading that, never having meant or done any harm that I know of, I could not be in danger of hell’. This breakdown of religious faith, as I have said and shall discuss, was largely a misrepresentation.

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by his father in 1850. In Praeterita, his reading experiences are kept in the background, submerged by an over powering subjectivism and by the proneness to sketching. However, his father read extracts from Scott’s novels and Shakespeare’s plays to his wife and son after supper, and as a teenager Ruskin became infatuated with Byron. Later, when travelling, he took with him just Johnson’s collections of The Idler and The Rambler in four volumes for lack of space. When he accompanied his father by coach outside London to visit clients, he avidly took in the natural scenery and the people seen in the streets. In the handsome mansions of the nobles and the nouveaux riches, where his father sold wine, he saw buildings in style and paintings by artists on show in the rooms, and it was in this way that he formed his early artistic education. He reveals in Praeterita that sight was the keenest of his senses, and narrates that the first window in the house that he had looked out of gave on to a complex, but ‘delicious’ phenomenon, small drops of water filtering down into buckets. Immediately after he recalls the four windows of the coach, offering him panoramic views of scenes of the English countryside.27 The associations emanating from personalized and anthropomorphic places were of the same nature as in Pater’s ‘child in the house’. His home was in Herne Hill, which in the early years of his life was surrounded by an immaculate scenery that was to be slowly spoiled due to the removal of the Crystal Palace and the dirt left by visitors. The symbolic and sacred devotion for the inner space of the house was less felt in Ruskin than in Pater, because for Ruskin the house was simply a place to look out of. Ruskin would have three houses, all surrounded by greenery, where his own sense of home developed. Besides that of Herne Hill, where the family had moved in 1823, there were the homes of his maternal and paternal aunts, in Perth and in Croydon, one Scottish, the other in the suburbs of London, close to streamlets running with crystalline waters and full of little multicoloured eddies. As a child Ruskin did not boast any special gifts, only the ‘patience to look’ and the ‘keenness to feel’, and 27

The motif of wonderment runs right through Praeterita, and its origin is the contrast between the common and even vulgar aspect of his own house and the Scottish castles, visited by Ruskin as a child, and the contrast between his own house and the sublime views of the Jura as a young boy.

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to this he attributed his later ‘analytic faculty’. This analytic faculty was, for example, cultivated by pulling the petals off flowers and getting at the seeds, or going inside caves to satisfy his precocious passion for minerals. 4. In 1834, Ruskin had a ‘quadrilateral plan’ of his ‘fortifiable dispositions’, one for the contemplation of the sea and for ‘scampering’ over the moors, one for the engraving of landscapes, another for architecture, and the last for geology. At fourteen he saw the Alps and Lake Geneva for the first time with his parents and his cousin Mary, and during this journey he drew his first vignettes, satiating that cult for mountain scenes that had been ushered in by Rousseau and had then invaded the world. The educational limits that later in life Ruskin imputed to his home environment were that he had never had anything to love nor anything to endure, because he had been carefully protected from all suffering and pain. When at eighteen he fell in love with Adèle Domecq, daughter of one of his father’s partners and an Anglo-Spanish-French Catholic gentleman, he sent her loads of poems modelled on Shelley. However, the young girl, who had grown up in Paris, treated him coldly, refused his courting and married a baron three years later. Another possible, combined marriage, to the daughter of a bottler who had an office on the ground floor of his father’s firm, was refused by Ruskin because the girl was too dark and insufficiently ethereal. A further engagement, with the daughter of Walter Scott’s son in-law, came to nothing. Ruskin sadistically recalled that all these youthful flames wasted away very early on. 5. Ruskin entered Christ Church College at the University of Oxford in 1836 as a ‘gentleman commoner’, or as a paying student with particular privileges. He seems not to have been impressed by the preaching and the presence there of Newman,28 while Pusey is recalled in Praeterita as

28 ‘Ruskin seems never to have been aware that such a person as Newman existed’ (L. Stephen, an obituary of rare synthetic clarity, in CRHE, 415). He loved nonetheless medieval art, and so passionately as to make one wonder why he had never become a Catholic [ibid., 423]). However, in 1839, as Praeterita reveals, Ruskin lamented to his tutor the ‘torpor of the Protestant churches’ and of the crusade against the ‘diabolical fire’ of Papacy. It is a page that pinpoints his romanticized Protestantism, not alien to the fascination of ritualism, as a seventeenth-century ‘Cavalier’ rather than

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‘a sickly and rather ill put together English clerical gentleman’, and rather absent-minded. His mother moved to Oxford to follow him in his studies and to be the onlooker at the brilliant career she envisaged for him, first as university student, then as winner of poetry prizes (like the Newdigate won by him in 1839, with a poem recited at the Sheldonian theatre), then as a religious poet, and naturally as an Anglican minister and vehement preacher, and finally as the Bishop of Winchester and Primate of England. Ruskin gained a good but not brilliant degree only in 1842, after a period of rest due to sudden symptoms of tuberculosis that had called for an immediate journey to southern Italy. This journey ended in Venice, the lagoon city that he would visit, before dying, no less than eleven times.29 Mother and father made the best of a bad job and encouraged the artistic leanings of their son who, after his degree, had refused to take holy orders. The years until 1848 were filled with various journeys taken with the aim of widening his knowledge of painting and architecture. He was in Switzerland in 1844, in 1846 in France, and then in Lucca, where he discovered, on a visit to the tomb of Ilaria del Carretto, the art of sculpture. It was a love that found its first outlet in Spanish earthen wares and other bric-à-brac of no value.30 At the Campo Santo in Pisa Ruskin studied and venerated the purity and the childlike simplicity of the medieval creed; in Verona and Venice he discovered Tintoretto, who would be for him just as decisive as the explosion of his interest in the art and history of Venice. His marriage, combined by the parents of both, with Euphemia Chalmers Gray, always known from then on as Effie, was a hurried and badly chosen affair. In 1854 it was declared null, and Effie, with the complicity of Ruskin himself, became the wife of the painter Millais and bore him several children.31 Ruskin returned to

Roundhead. In Ruskin’s only tout court theological piece of writing, ‘Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds’, there is a hint to the ‘blindfolded eyes’ and the ‘traps’ of the Tractarians, but there is also the condemnation of all forms of Erastianism. 29 See Clegg 1981, for a discussion on the diverse and later Venetian experiences. 30 This change is confirmed in the epilogue to the second volume of Modern Painters: ‘I […] felt that […] my life must no more be spent only in the study of rocks and clouds’. 31 A destiny similar to Meredith’s (Volume 5, § 210.2).

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living with his parents until their death.32 The year 1859 marked the turbid beginning of his long and unreturned love, continued into his old age, for Rose La Touche, a young Irish girl affected by a hereditary taint, and mentally instable, to whom Ruskin had given painting lessons. § 47. Ruskin up to 1869 IV: ‘Modern Painters’ I. An anomalous treatise of painting The seed of Modern Painters, the first volume of which came out in 1843 anonymously and was signed by ‘a graduate of Oxford’, was the reading of the poem Italy by the minor Romantic poet Samuel Rogers. A copy of this poem had been given to Ruskin by his drawing master when he was ten, and it was illustrated by Turner, the centre of gravity for the whole of this work. In 1836 Blackwood’s had published a crushing demolition of this painter, stimulating an immediate and passionate reply by Ruskin, who, in the meantime, had met Turner personally and had got his father to purchase some of Turner’s designs and pictures that were religiously guarded and contemplated in his house at Herne Hill.33 Modern Painters was finished in 1860, with the fifth volume, after seventeen years of composition, during which time almost annual pilgrimages had to be taken by Ruskin to places in the French, Swiss and Italian Alps and to the art cities in Italy. The work, conceived and begun without hesitations, with few preliminary tests and almost no bibliographical background (since ‘English speculation on such matters was nearly a blank’),34 has then the 32

It is of course ingenuous to affirm that ‘neither the marriage nor its annulment influenced seriously the habits and the books’ of Ruskin (Harrison 1902, 57). 33 As in the case of Browning’s Duke of Ferrara (§ 115.3), but with a very different intent – that is, the Puritan penitence for having indulged in looking at unholy things – these paintings by Turner were covered with dark drapes on Sundays (Harrison 1902, 95). Ruskin’s letter in defence of Turner was not published because Turner had persuaded him not to; it was then lost and eventually published in the ‘Library Edition’. 34 As noticed by Leslie Stephen (CRHE, 415, above-mentioned obituary of 1900). Without reverting to Dryden, Joshua Reynolds had written appreciative discourses on painting, mildly contested by Ruskin at the beginning of the third volume. The Sketches of the History of Christian Art (1846) by Lord Lindsay were favourably reviewed by Ruskin. The only other art critic active at the time was Thackeray

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sanction of the exceptional. Ruskin would always include exterior opulence among the requisites of a work of art, next certainly to the clear chasing of the details, and two other works of his were to have a similar, encyclopaedic elephantiasis and an identical aspiration to totality. Many others remained as mere projects in his old age.35 And yet the genesis of Modern Painters was occasional, in the form of a progressive manifesto that extolled modern art, or of a controversy that was narrow and temporary in its scope, of a rather parochial defence of recent English art as against minors like Salvator Rosa, Cuyp and Gaspar Poussin, and even a great and more esteemed painter like Claude. This comparison, in those seventeen years and in those five volumes, was slowly extended and in part modified, but never was the superiority and the centrality of Turner put into doubt. At the same time this vindication was based on a theory, thus resulting in a sui generis treatise of pictorial art. Modern Painters will be dealt with here in its ideally synchronic and undivided unity, despite the fact that the five volumes came out distant one from the other and even in the midst of others under publication, thus witnessing an aesthetic thought in evolution, transformation and continual redefinition. Each volume is the expression of an intellectual phase, and a reply to current topics, just as it is the proof of a gradual extension of Ruskin’s known repertory of pictorial art. Turner, the invariant, was assessed little by little, against the medieval Florentines, Giotto and Angelico, and against the original Pre-Raphaelites on one side, and the Venetians, who were initially not or less known to Ruskin, on the other. The aesthetic categories, from simple and rough, became complex, sophisticated and enriched, but often also confused by an excessive definitional and taxonomic propensity. All five volumes, and

35

(compared with Ruskin in Hough 1949, 1–3). The only other writer who was a lover, expert and connoisseur of the fine arts was Browning, who removed the dust from that obscure preview of Modern Painters, The Art of Painting, in All Its Branches by the seventeenth-century Dutchman, Gerard de Lairesse (§ 108.2). Ruskin is credited with having planned colossal works in various volumes, including one in twenty-four, on topics such as the fifteenth-century history of Florence, a biography of Scott, one of Xenophon, a commentary on Hesiod, and a survey of geology and botany in the Alps (Harrison 1902, 157–8).

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especially the first, were glossed by Ruskin in the subsequent editions, with the result that there is a thick network of internal cross-references, of  ‘avant textes’, prefaces, afterwords, appendices and footnotes. Modern Painters constitutes, therefore, the first of Ruskin’s ‘open’ works, and such a fluid state suggests that one has to be extremely careful when encountering dry and rigid definitions that are in fact often adjusted and corrected at a later stage. This warning regards, above all, judgements passed on single painters, whom Ruskin often demolishes in one volume though having praised them in a previous one. The same painter can sign a masterpiece and immediately after a common and mediocre work, and even one single painting can enclose sublime details and others that are execrable. Ruskin’s stylistic mismatch consists in a discontinuity in tone. The governing principle in Modern Painters lies in a transition that is violently Pindaric by nature. Cold aesthetic disquisitions alternate with rapt ekphrases of a painting; the geological and botanical catalogues with a page from a diary, with the anecdote, with the prophecy, with the verbal picture and with the pictorial equivalent in words, for example of particular glimpses of the sky, of the various and changing forms of the clouds and of peculiar effects of light. 2. It is extremely difficult to find an agreement between the formative experiences from which Modern Painters derived. Undoubtedly, Ruskin’s aesthetics suggests distinct echoes of the Romantic cosmos, organic and epiphanic, and rejects all mechanistic explanations.36 The equation posited by Keats in the famous distich of his most famous poetic ode – and one that Ruskin as it happens does not cite – is taken up at the opening as a form of continuity and interdependence. Ruskin’s volumes were, with the exception of the third, replicas of one another, inasmuch as they are concentric rediscussions of the fundamental axiom that ‘beauty […] blossoms out of truth’. At the same time, the instrument responsible for the expression of beauty is the imagination, a concept taken from Coleridge but modified and made more complex. Ruskin’s sacramentalism was however, in the 1840s, already derivative, in particular from Keble, a disciple of Wordsworth, from the Tractarians and from Carlyle, with further loans

36

See, in particular, Rosenberg 1961, and Sherburne 1972, 1–25.

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from the Platonists and from the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets. The reader who opens Modern Painters, however, gets the impression that Ruskin conceives pictorial aesthetics as an exact science, and aims to gloss and enquire into a scientific concept of art, almost as if art were, above all, a faithful illustration of physical and natural laws – rather than, or not yet completely, an activity existing by itself. His obsession with formal distinctions ordered by letter and by number, and the classification of the natural species, is continued right into the fourth and fifth volumes. On the other hand, the immaturely theoretical emphasis, placed on art as the vehicle of ideas and the producer of impressions, and especially on the relationships between ideas, comes from another contemporary source, Hartley’s associativism as revised by Mill.37 The ideas transmitted by art are ‘noble’, and Ruskin is here indebted to the humanistic utilitarianism founded by Mill and also (to a greater extent) to the moral aesthetics of the evangelicals. The last two volumes deny and categorically reject Ruskin’s initial scientism, since by now the mystical interpretation of art, biblical and prophetic, had overridden every science. Each experience of real nature reflected in a painting translates and modulates into a prophetic reading, and it is in the Bible that Ruskin finds the key to every aesthetic and artistic praxis. He admonishes that civilization, western and modern, is declining, as man had gradually become deaf to the biblical message and blind to the forms of nature inhabited by God and which are his manifestation. On the other hand, artistic history teaches Ruskin that during a certain period – from the Middle Ages up to the Venetians – art had grown in its coefficient of truth to nature and thus in its ability to penetrate its mysteries and its divine epiphanies. The superiority of the moderns over the ancients, the central thesis of the treatise, may appear a figurative application to the field of art of the noted querelle that Macaulay had brought back into fashion, settling it in favour of the moderns.38 Ruskin, that is, was not immune from evolutionary and positivist contaminations, even though he never would

37 38

§ 42.2. In Modern Painters Ruskin agrees with Mill; only from 1860 does their disagreement become clearer and irreconcilable. § 37.3 and n. 23.

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have confessed this.39 The conclusion arrived at in Modern Painters, unveiled in the last few pages, has definitely nothing to do with the dominion of art, because art is defined the instrument for the correction and redemption of society. Almost lost in the fogs of delirium, when closing Modern Painters Ruskin denounces the absence of, and the present need for, religion, the principal nexus with Victorian thought. The recovery of God and the dimension of the divine, and the recognition of a mankind not brutalized, had to come from art. The Wordsworthian epigraph kept in all five volumes was knowingly chosen. It both revealed the young scholar’s ‘arrogance’ and it contained the whole development of Modern Painters. In it Ruskin attacked, in the words of the poet, a contemporary philosophical thought no longer aiming at an enquiry into the inexhaustible teachings of nature, a nature become the ‘mirror of the superb love of itself ’. It then contained the project of the social and human use of art, or rather of its redemptive capacity. 3. It was very difficult to understand nature because nature, the home of God, was after all mysterious. But the seventeenth-century painters were to be blamed for not having humbly tried to draw closer to its manifestations in order to paint it with the greatest truth allowed to human eyes. Claude had been the first to paint the light of the sun and nature as an end in itself, but without taste and with a general uniformity in the details. Salvator Rosa had done even worse, and only slightly better the two Poussins. In Rembrandt the fanatical use of the chiaroscuro had damaged faithful representation beyond repair. The dawn of a reborn, or revived, faithful natural painting could instead be recognized in the English painters. Turner had surpassed all his predecessors in rendering the mutability and the specificity of nature, the first to design with the utmost truth the sky, the clouds, the mountains, and the trees. The disconcerting premise of the test for the truly pictorial is however in Ruskin that nature is the best

39 In Spencer’s essay ‘What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?’ (1859), the philosopher thought of annexing to his evolutionism Ruskin’s ‘criticism’, on the basis of the fact that ‘progress in painting implies a growing knowledge of how the effects of nature are produced’.

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painter, and the apparent paradox that landscape painting is, when all is said and done, superfluous. The painter, in the last analysis, is impotent: ‘The picture that is looked to for an interpretation of nature is invaluable, but the picture which is taken as a substitute for nature had better be burned’. No artificial colour was equal for Ruskin to the pigments of nature; even the greatest landscape painter, therefore Turner himself, imitates and mimes nature. This drastic inferiority was lessened but not denied during the progress of the work. Turner was not only defended by Ruskin in 1843 as a painter of what he had seen and loved since infancy, but also as the one who had imprinted a national mark on his painting. He was by definition the painter of atmosphere, of mountains and of rocks, of trees and of the rough sea; the master of pure raw colours and the inimitable recreator of misty shadows. From the very beginning of Modern Painters the references to Turner take on, indeed, a mythological rather than a scientific role: the role of a priest of nature, of a ‘prophet’ sent by God to praise and glorify him. Heroes and Hero-Worship had been read by Ruskin as part of his preparation for his work in the summer of 1842, and this is what he said of it: ‘Art, no less than other spheres of life, had its heroes’, and the mainspring of the artist is ‘sincerity’. Who is then Turner if not one of Carlyle’s heroes in a parallel field to that of the divinized men, the poets, the religious reformers, and the leaders, and one that has behind him other heroes, his spiritual brothers already sung and idolized by Carlyle, like Homer, Dante and Shakespeare? Turner was tout court, for Ruskin, ‘the greatest man of our England’. § 48. Ruskin up to 1869 V: ‘Modern Painters’ II. The interdependence of truth and beauty The first volume of Modern Painters (1843) blatantly shows the seams between a series of notes on painters, probably its original layer, and a theoretical project that was organized later. It opens with even too many general definitions of aesthetics, but soon becomes an agenda which is precisely militant and one-sided. The pictorial knowledge that Ruskin had on hand was at that time limited to the paintings at the National Gallery of London and, nearer his house, at that of Dulwich. Copley Fielding, Harding and Stanfield, Ruskin’s so-called ‘truthful’ painters, are today little more than

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names. On the other hand, Ruskin exhibits a strange, visceral aversion to Constable, inept, according to him, even in the rudiments of drawing, and without any real knowledge of nature. Ruskin’s scientific competence crops up in his constant reference to botany and geology, and in his references to the shapes of the clouds and the varying aspects of the sky. These forms were not only unknown to, but even intuited imperfectly by, the Old Masters, who had given a superficial, sketchy and untrue representation of them. In such descriptions of natural landscapes, of skies and of clouds, one perceives a slight postponement and instrumentality of the pictorial repertoire itself. Ruskin wants to test and expound the personal emotion of direct experience, and only afterwards verify the faithfulness of the pictorial version. The ecstatic ekphrases, and the empathic paraphrasing of the paintings, are the ersatz of an impotent painter, unable to express himself in his very vehicle. Ruskin confessed in Praeterita to having become an art critic because he could not do anything with his hands. The first volume of Modern Painters was the joint creation of scientism and of the heroic theories of Carlyle. This can be assumed from a notion of pictorial art as contents and as a vehicle of ‘great’ ideas, from that of the ‘power’ of the painter – that feeling, immediately perceptible, of his great effort while painting – and from the equation between a great work and a great man. The perfectly completed painting is an act of demiurgic if not divine creation, in which, if ‘nothing […] is fortuitous or conflicting’, nothing is studied and all is spontaneous: ‘the moment he can make us think that he has done nothing, that nature has done all, that moment he becomes ennobled, he proves himself great […]. We honour him most when we most forget him. He becomes great when he becomes invisible’. The painter’s mission, like that of Carlyle’s hero, is to guide the onlooker to know nature, a nature thus anthropomorphic, and directly a divine or Trinitarian hypostasis.40 It

40 The earth is like the naked body before it is dressed, the mountains are the stretched out muscles of the body, the planes and hills are the body as it rests and as it stretches out. In this live contact with nature is the germ of Ruskin’s secret sympathy for the immediate sketch en plein air. The faithfulness of the painter to nature must not however fall into over-faithfulness, that is, become a photographic copy. Natural power has to be seen in movement, and Ruskin seems to approve of the incomplete

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is that of placing before the eyes of anyone who does not think and does not look, new evidence of the constant work of the divine power, intent on ‘glory’ and on ‘beauty’. The knowledge of nature is, according to Ruskin, mystic and empirical exactly as in Carlyle, and directly ocular, not that of the mechanistic sciences, which Ruskin always disapproves of when and because they presume to sound out the final – that is, divine – mystery of creation. Painters could run into two sins of differing gravity. The first is the omission of and the indifference towards the beauty of creation. This does not mean that nature is always beautiful, because it is also certainly ugly, but not systematically so, and whoever represents it always in its exceptions falsifies it. The second is the sin of pride, committed by the painter who is not gifted with love and reverence for what he is painting, but is merely intent on self-reflection and smugly pleased with his own image. The archetype of the painter unfaithful to his mission is traced, already at this early stage, in Salvator Rosa. 2. With the first volume of Modern Painters Ruskin has only argued the faithfully imitative and didactic function of painting. Everything is still to be done and to be defined on the ground of beauty and the sublime,41 whose theory has been only outlined. The second volume (1846) of the treatise starts from a firm controversy against the utilitarian theories of art put forward by Mill and the Benthamites, which were tantamount to denying art itself. Acting on a different semantic level one reaches a different definition of ‘useful’ art, a spiritual one created to witness and magnify the glory of God. The aesthetic faculty lies in the capacity of art to stimulate impressions of moral beauty, but the Puritan fear resurfaces in the theoretical possibility of sensations left to themselves, in their pure, untempered state. There exists, that is, an education of sensation just as

and the unfinished – one of his fixed ideas – because the relationship between power and perfection is proportionally inverse. 41 In the third volume (footnote 1 to § 12 of chapter 3) there is a precise definition of the relation between truth and beauty: ‘High art differs from low art in possessing an excess of beauty in addition to its truth, not in possessing excess of beauty inconsistent with truth’. Ruskin’s sublime is not Burke’s, but he sees it rather as a stimulator of ‘greatness in feelings’.

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there is also a moral duty to cultivate this refined taste, or to refine taste. Some of the marks of beauty are gradation, curves, proportions, the eternal quiet, symmetry, wholeness.42 The even more devotional and epiphanic emphasis of the second volume, which in Ruskin’s subsequent notes was disparaged as ‘the most affected and the weakest’ of all his books, was due to his writing it in the wake of a shadowy and never admitted Tractarian influence.43 Compared to the first volume the notion of painting as a pure transcription of phenomena is limited and qualified, a change due to the action of the imagination. By privileging the ‘ideal’ over the ‘realistic’, among the numerous categories that were attributed to the imagination, Ruskin contradicts the principle of an art that is, above all, true. By means of an accurate knowledge the painter makes an effort to represent and bring to light the ideal form of every object historically spoiled by the ‘devil’s work’. In the only moment when he deals with portrait painting, Ruskin remarks the need for the painter to penetrate the internal conflict between good and evil, and praises the portrayer that has been conscious of this conflict and condemns the painter who has portrayed only the evil or the appearances. The selective function of the imagination works by taking the stains of sin from the face and from the body, and by censoring vanity and sensuality, ferocity and fear (the nudes of Titian and Giorgione are redeemed by the glorious colouring). The highest of the categories of the imagination, the contemplative, permits the divine or supernatural to be represented by means of its signs, its anthropomorphic forms, its visible and invisible influences, or its simple appearances. Turner, for most of the volume, is left in the shade because, in the meantime, Ruskin had discovered Tintoretto. 42 Ruskin was forced to contrast the concepts in order to make very subtle distinctions that appear after all artificial, such as the one of the ‘typical’ sensitive beauty – a suggestiveness of the divine attributes as also of infinity, very similar, in Ruskin’s words, to that sung by Leopardi – and of the ‘vital’ one, the sympathetic astonishment of the onlooker, to whom it seems that all creatures do ‘what God makes them do’. 43 This Tractarian vein was recognized between the lines by the reviewers (see CRHE, 78; on its agreement, at least terminological, with Carlyle’s transcendentalism, see § 10.1). In the meantime Ruskin had read, and quotes from De la poésie chrétienne by the Frenchman Rio, and Hooker, the Elizabethan theologian examined and approved by the Tractarians; he also mentions the medieval Primitivists.

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The epilogue, once again, goes over the phases of the journey through Italy in 1845 that had ended at Venice, after the ideal stopovers at the Campo Santo of Pisa and in the Florence of Ghirlandaio. § 49. Ruskin up to 1869 VI: ‘Modern Painters’ III. The general theory of the development of art That the third volume of Modern Painters lacked a tight organization was admitted by Ruskin without hesitation in its subtitle, ‘of many things’. In other words that hybrid, inclusive, not to say chaotic technique that was to gain ground in Ruskin’s middle and late periods is here foreshadowed. These ‘things’, in the usual oscillation between the theoretical and the militant, were some provocations Ruskin had received in the decade that separated this volume, published in 1856, from the second of the five of the work. It appeared after Turner’s death in 1851, and after the foundation of Pre-Raphaelitism, welcomed by Ruskin with explicit appreciation,44 as also after the ‘Papal aggression’ in 1850, at which indirect perfidious barbs are instead directed. Photography – at least in black and white – threatened to replace painting, but not for Ruskin. Shortly afterwards, in 1853, a second and parallel enquiry into art was published, The Stones of Venice, though it had been completed before this volume. The shadow projected by the latter work over Modern Painters was the nightmare of the corruption of the very foundations of art, an art only beautiful without being truthful, and only self-mirroring. It was the acrobatic saving of Venetian painting after the downright condemnation of its Renaissance architecture.45 44 The Pre-Raphaelites were defended by Ruskin in a later work (§ 55.2) because of their keeping to facts, that is, to natural phenomena drawn from reality. They showed their devotion to the ‘true’ and to the ‘finish’. 45 The theory of the grotesque is, with a few differences, the same that Ruskin at the time had already propounded in The Stones of Venice, as will be seen later in this discussion. In the appendix to the fourth volume Ruskin seemingly formulates a further theory of the three pictorial schools: the ‘great expressional’ represented by the medieval colourists like Orcagna, Bellini, Perugino and Angelico, and by the Pre-Raphaelites as its modern representatives; the ‘pseudo-expressional’ and the ‘grotesque expressional’. The latter, distinct from that of the ‘imaginative grotesque’, hinges on the appearances of a strange or faulty beauty, found in ancient and modern

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At the same time, Ruskin qua writer has become suddenly aware of his public, and patiently and understandingly sets out his aims, summarises and facilitates his arguments, aware of their possible monotony, and asks himself even questions like a ventriloquist. That is, he mimes the possible objections that a candid and obtuse interlocutor might put to him. This is the most improvised, the most pleasing and discursive of the five volumes, and at the same time the most interesting for the student of culture and aesthetics. Among the ample digressions there is one, typological and thus pioneering, on the three cultural types, medieval, Renaissance and modern, and on their respective ‘landscapes’. As an extempore literary critic Ruskin discusses, in almost traditional essays, some representative writers that gave their mark to those historical times – like Dante, whose Divine Comedy is read in terms of its ‘landscapes’, or Scott. As a critic of style Ruskin introduces and explains the theory of the ‘pathetic fallacy’, afterwards accepted in the critical jargon in a somewhat distorted way. By it Ruskin meant an exceptional and often unhealthy and therefore largely unjustified use of metaphor, and as such admissible only in cases of adequate emotional sympathy on the part of the poet.46 2. In the first of the three historical epochs, Homer’s Greeks had shaped a mythology that placed the deities in the clouds, but the gods were allowed to descend from their heavenly home and could be met daily; they were co-present and camouflaged in the flowers and in the rocks. The Greeks were therefore already medievalists, even though pagan, used as they were to seeing the beauty of nature and of the human body. Ruskin re-echoes the Hellenic ideal of Arnold, but has to turn to lateral and secondary Homeric passages to demonstrate that they had constantly under their eyes

sculptures with elements of the caricature. The caricature is not scorned, although it has an inferior artistic value, and Ruskin praises the contemporary caricaturists, like Leech and Cruikshank, who illustrated serial novels. 46 The premise of the pathetic fallacy, the attribution of human or anthropomorphic sensations to inanimate things, is the outright and sarcastic condemnation of Berkeleyan idealism in all its ramifications. The aesthetics of the control of passions on the part of the poet recalls that of Arnold as the critic of poetic morbidity (§ 161.1–2). Both formulate the desire for a classical and disciplined poet.

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a pleasing, serene, and terse landscape. This sentiment of a plain, pleasing and useful nature had been handed down and on through the centuries, but had become corrupt, as can be seen for Ruskin in the landscapes of Claude and his followers, reduced and made banal in the definition ‘a bay of insipid sea, and a rock with a hole through it’. The typical medieval landscape had no rocks and no mountains, and its central symbol was a garden in flower. It was, therefore, contradistinguished by a deeper sense of poetic delight in nature and as a place of communion with the divine. Ruskin’s medieval landscape is a softened one, with courtly, chivalrous, even hedonistic Renaissance traits, where dancing and convivial meetings in fields offered pleasure and delight. The Greeks had paradoxically a greater sense of the divine. Actually this seems a distorted, misrepresented Middle Age. The obverse to healthy earthly pleasure was the monk’s or the penitent’s retirement into the mountains, following Christ’s example, to mortify the flesh, fight a battle with the devil and meet with the angels; it was this that gave the mountains that feeling of holiness and terror at one and the same time. Mountains were then at once the place of Christ’s penitence and his transfiguration, and the retreat of the anchorites. Monasteries – especially and usually those in the mountains – were for Ruskin the result of a need for moral self-flagellation and a form of punishment. Still more open to debate is that the aesthetic sense of beauty, in the body and in the exterior forms of nature, had become an end in itself in the Middle Ages, that medieval man was led ‘to alter and simplify’ the beauty of nature and to stylize it, and that a ‘loss of sense of actual Divine presence’ had, meanwhile, intervened. In this way flowers and leaves became stylized, mere signs of mountains, rocks and clouds. Ruskin’s verbose, obvious and laborious exegeses of Dante claim to prove that the fourteenth-century medieval man saw nature as the expression of God; that, unlike the Greek man, colour was held by him to be sacred,47 and that those centuries, mistakenly labelled as ‘dark’, were instead glittering with light. The weaknesses of this Dantesque 47 The corollary was a moral – and at the same time anagogic and even imaginatively Calvinistic – doctrine of colour: colour always revealed the divine. Ruskin separates the adepts of local colour from those of chiaroscuro, regarding the former as Godfearing and the latter as proud. Even in the animal kingdom moral qualities could

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digression lie in a discussion of medieval landscape only made by means of literary rather than pictorial examples. Furthermore, the generally dull colour of Dante’s mountains is fancifully attributed to the fact that the rocks in the Apennines are uniformly grey. Ruskin found that modern landscape had its crowning symbolic mark in the cloudy, darkened, and misty sky, which had lost all feeling and signs of the divine presence and radiance. Historical rigour, even though only apparent, yields here to the sudden prophetic diagnosis. The return to nature is the antidote to the cult of ugliness, and at the same time it can bring modern man close to the sacramental perspective. The only alternative to Turner in the gallery of sacramental modern artists is Scott.48 Ruskin, who had grown up reading his novels, remembers him as a humble and unaffected craftsman that, by detaching himself from Romantic subjectivity, became the descriptive poet of an animated, feeling, and yet objective nature. But Scott, who did not always draw a moral from his landscapes, had no religious faith, was nostalgic for the times of yore, and, in an underhand manner, a Romanist. § 50. Ruskin up to 1869 VII: ‘Modern Painters’ IV. The painter as mountaineer The fourth (1856) and the fifth (1860) volumes of Modern Painters are full of lengthy disquisitions on geology and botany and on the study of atmospheric phenomena. The three kingdoms are thoroughly and – from Ruskin’s point of view – lovingly investigated; the argumentative tone borders on the naïve as if he were addressing young listeners or neophytes, as will be the case later with Ethics of the Dust. And an abundant use is made of vivid, imaginative and understandable metaphors. In the ever changing conformations of crests and of aiguilles Ruskin seeks to retrace the curved line of beauty, even if the curve has to be interrupted and counterbalanced by the straight line, as the light from the dark or from the shade. He reasserts that the able painter of the human figure is also able to paint leaves as well, be discerned in colour, as colour was vivid in beneficial animals but dull, opaque, grey and brownish in sly and untrustworthy ones. 48 One would have expected to hear Wordsworth mentioned, but Ruskin surprisingly accuses him of being sentimental.

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as the unskilful Dutch have shown, while Turner is supreme in painting trees and leafy branches, but only because he had seen them and not because he understood the laws of botany.49 Even geology is for Ruskin legible in an anagogic manner, because every rocky state is the allegory of a greater or lesser aggregation of the social cosmos and of human creation. The three stages of the aggregation of rocks portray ‘total disorganization’, whereas cohesion is the ‘perfect state of brotherhood and strength in which each character is clearly distinguished, separately perfected, and employed in its proper place and office’. But the mountains are the face of divine wisdom and bounty as they are of his wrath, that is, they are the expression of the two-faced God of so many Victorian evangelicals. The clouds, in particular, in their most varied shapes and in their most varied and documented manifestations, are the epiphany of the Creator, and in the ‘pillar of cloud’ God lives, as Newman well knew.50 The unavoidable evolutionary question, with regard to the mountains, is not only how they were modelled, but into what forms they will be changed in the course of time. And, furthermore, was this present state of the earth a reflection of Eden or its ‘ruin’? If on earth and under the earth a ‘gradual but destructive change’ is going on, if the inexhaustible energy of the volcanoes has been discovered, then the earth already contains the instrument of its own annihilation, which will take place when the earth is completely ‘polluted by sin’. The architect of the universe has himself prearranged the law of the gradual destruction of the universe.51 But here Ruskin halts, and answers his own question with the enigmatic and sibylline refrain, ‘Behold the cloud’. 2. The best paintings have their cradle in the mountainous areas, and the worst, like those of the Dutch, in the plains. Ruskin’s ingenuous historical survey of the evolution of art – architectural, sculptural and pictorial, French, Italian and English – is completed by noting how dependent art

49 Flowers are not often painted by artists because held to be inadequate to express the sublime, and loved only by children and neglected by minds of the first order. 50 § 29.4. 51 Ruskin tests the two geological theories popular in his time, catastrophism and gradualism (§ 58.1), leaning towards the former: he conjectures that ‘convulsions’ have determined the present day structure of the Alpine mountains.

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was on the greater or lesser distance of the artists from the hills. In England, the decline of the visual arts is attributed to the level conformation of the country, responsible for a more reflective, concrete and less dreamy attitude. But the hills mixed with plains are also instrumental in bringing out the literary talent. Extravagant results are obtained by the rigorous application of these deductive equations. The Olympian Shakespeare would never have been able to remain a playwright if he had been born among the mountains, and the hackneyed comparison between him and Dante is favourable to the latter because Shakespeare’s limit was his inability to rise to the ideal and to the conception of true virtue. The question, just as prohibitive, that Ruskin faces here is how anyone can maintain that Turner paints the colours of nature, how Turner can be defined distinct and limpid when the incontestable evidence is that of a misty and nebulous painter. To begin with, he says, the cloudy and the misty elements are part of a nature that is ever changing. Turner’s mysteriousness is due to the infiniteness of nature and even more to the inability to see it completely and perfectly owing to a flaw in the eye and, therefore, in the human senses. The painter could not gain access to, let alone represent, the most hidden precipices and the mountain caverns. Turner had not painted shapes but light, as an object gradually fades in the distance. Thus, all great paintings are distinct and indistinct at the same time. In the end Ruskin, far from getting round the thorny question, stutters and twists in search of an answer: Turner is the only one, or that rare artist that every two centuries or so becomes ‘dark with excess of light’. Other examples are found in some of the very greatest poets that overstep the clearness of normal beings and deviate into semantic density and ambiguity. The elevation of the subject calls for a spasmodic concentration that, expressed in words, or verbal and pictorial forms, is received as ambiguous. There were for Ruskin in nature an unknowability and a vagueness that produced the ‘mystery of its own clarity’, but that was also the residue of the imperfection that weighed on life on earth.52 52

In the fifth volume another question echoes forth: should rain and the rain-bringing cloud be painted? Is the rain beautiful? The angel of the sea is the cloud that gives life to the drought, and, after all, the cloud bringing rain offers the most beautiful and coloured shapes among all the clouds. Here the explanation is not biblical, but

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3. Ruskin also reaffirms that nature lavishes to the observer more suggestions, warnings and lessons – expressly ‘religious’ – than any painting. This makes the uselessness of landscape painting even more conspicuous, the only exception being the contemplative kind that paints nature ‘in its own powers’. It is the latest version of Ruskin’s aesthetics, now under the influence of the imperative of art as the expression of some ‘vital and spiritual factor’, or rather of the relationship between art, society and the worker’s conditions. The circle of Modern Painters closes emphasizing this moral, devotional art as symbol of the undivided humanity of the body and the soul. That art that intensifies only the spiritual errs like that that intensifies only the naturalistic. The curious and as usual twisted Ruskinian theory is that religious painting does not contemplate death and corruption, and is an evasion from the world, while true art must become aware of the world with its pain and its finiteness, because only in such a way can it aspire to the afterlife. Rather, art – and this is a truly Calvinist frame of reference – is a ‘victory over the evil’ present in the world. Ruskin’s last version of the universal history of art in Modern Painters follows the guidelines of man’s competition with death, with fate, with sin or even with nature. The Greek and Homeric tragedy had expressed man’s rootedness in the world; Florentine art, characterized by asceticism, had not only imagined the glories of paradise but honoured bodily suffering, and had been antagonistic to the Greek. Even the Venetians began as ascetic artists, but historical vicissitudes made them more attentive to the practical and to the corporal. The Venetians had pride, were distracted by the merely pathetic and humble aspects of the agricultural and natural countryside, and as a consequence their landscapes lack the rural scene or the work in the fields. The Venetian was nevertheless the last pictorial school of believing painters, such as represented persons absorbed in prayer, and saints and Madonnas mingling in everyday life. Their limit? The very pleasure of the painter himself and of his customers, and the absence of a persuasive and missionary force in their religious paintings. After the Venetians, Dürer and allegorical; the cloud is visibly anthropomorphic, its fringes are the hair blowing in the wind like the hair of a witch, and they look like it. Obsessed by his dark nightmare, that lasting one of ‘storm clouds’, Ruskin coins the epithet of the ‘Medusa cloud’.

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Rosa were characterized by a desperate, dramatic awareness of the power of death. After them came the classical school of Claude and Poussin. It was at this moment that the rationalistic ‘abyss’, or that of secularism, opened. Religious subjects continued to be painted, but without an authentic religious feeling; and no true humanity showed through the rural paintings. Turner, evoked for the last time in a parallel with the life of Giorgione, had not only nature to paint, but also the fatigue, the pain and the death of man. He is not then a landscapist and the naturalist and the painter of clouds and of the effects of light, but the painter of allegory and myth. The interpretations of Turner’s paintings of the Garden of Hesperides and of the Golden Fleece, with which the fifth and last volume of Modern Painters closes, remain among the most delirious and bizarre ever excogitated by Ruskin, who saw in them intuited, or perhaps knowingly represented, the spirit of avidity and of profit, and, therefore, a politico-social allegory. § 51. Ruskin up to 1869 VIII: ‘The Seven Lamps of Architecture’ In The Seven Lamps of Architecture53 (1849) the number seven recalls, among other symbolic associations, the seven cardinal virtues; and the lamps remind one of the Gospel parable of the wise and the foolish virgins. The title was devised to connect and organize jottings, scattered notes, paraphrases and ekphrases of Italian and French Gothic art. Ruskin had collected ideas centring on it, mainly reformulations or refractions of the same unified vision. He had come to see a European longitudinal axis of Gothic, one rising with homogeneous traits from southern Italy and Florence, extending to France with its cathedrals and reaching right up to Northumbria in England. This Gothic civilization was based on the subordination and incorporation of every other visual art to and into architecture. The visual artist unites in himself the painter, the sculptor and the architect, the last one distinguished from the simple builder – just as architecture is distinct from the simple act of building – by virtue of the addition of something 53

It grew on the spot from the various journeys taken by Ruskin in the Italian peninsula and to Venice, and was written after his honeymoon spent in Normandy with Effie, or more precisely in the time lapse between the last part of the third volume of Modern Painters and the beginning of the fourth.

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beautiful and not necessary compared to the plain constructive function. Architecture finds its true element, according to Ruskin, in that margin that lies beyond and outside its function. Art is a rational and sensible expression, the joint product of the heart and reason, with the aim of illustrating the beneficial influences of creation – imitated, and certainly selected and reimagined – and of lending pleasure and a moral sense to the onlooker. The narcissistic ostentation, the uncontrolled seduction of ‘barbarous beauty’ are invariably anathema for Ruskin.54 Not by chance the evolution of architecture from the Romanesque onwards is seen as a metaphysical agon with Calvinist tints: an Adam’s fall, or a Luciferian rebellion. The artist had shamelessly let the passions get out of control and instead of serving, had become rebellious, and refusing to reflect creation had only longed to make himself beautiful, thereby committing a sin of pride. The good forces of Gothic were overwhelmed because of sin, or at least of a lack of willpower and moral strength in the artist. When Ruskin speaks of the decline and corruption of Gothic every metaphorical halo disappears from his images, and its ‘doom’ is a universal and literal Judgement, a divine nemesis.55 The contemporary implication of Seven Lamps is that architectural monuments, both sacred and profane, constitute the memory of a nation, to preserve which is its civic and moral duty. This also implies that Ruskin’s imaginary interlocutor is the ‘young English architect’ invited to take cognizance of new architectural guidelines. These are summarized as the imitation, with some licence, of primitive and national Gothic. Ruskin confronts, in fact, the first aesthetics of kitsch, but precisely denies it the statute of an aesthetics. The signs of the civilization of the ugly are to be found in the Greek friezes and in the gilded and Baroquely spruced up façades of the London

54 This adjective, ‘barbarous’, is used in a wider but not completely dissimilar sense by Hopkins in a sonnet. It means here in Ruskin colour arranged in graceful ways, but ‘for the sake of colour itself ’. In The Stones of Venice the adjective is often re-used with the meaning of ‘primitive’, but at times it refers to the architectural activity of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which only aimed to put itself on show. 55 Only Venetian architecture, whose source was the Byzantine overabundance, succeeded in extenuating the search for effects, as is discussed at greater length in The Stones of Venice.

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shops. In a far-reaching, surprisingly modern page Ruskin excoriates the new architecture of the railway stations, noting the jarring note between the ease and rest necessary to aesthetic contemplation and the essence itself of the railway, its speed and hurry. The ugly life of mid-nineteenth century certainly had to be softened and beautified, but respecting the times, the opportunities and the destinations of artistic decoration. 2. This treatise had been preceded in 1837 by ‘The Poetry of Architecture’, a university essay signed with the Greek pseudonym of ‘Kataphusin’. Its programme, as hinted by the subtitle, was the study of architecture in the various nations ‘considered in relation to the natural scenery and the national character’. The revival of Gothic had already been warmly supported by the greatest Victorian neo-Gothic architect, August Welby Pugin. However, Pugin was a Catholic, and he advocated a return to the values of Catholicism, and was therefore a precursor whom Ruskin rejected.56 The technique of juxtaposition was taken as much from Pugin’s own work Contrasts (1836) as from Carlyle’s Past and Present. Pugin had enriched his book with the illustration of an imaginary medieval city, walled and towered, with well on show not only the crenelated walls but also the church spires, therefore the image of faith and harmony and a hortus conclusus. Carlyle had imaginatively rebuilt a thirteenth-century monastery as an admirable microcosmos of balance and of ‘order’.57 In the ‘lamp of sacrifice’ chapter Ruskin calls for the subversion of a century-old architectonic practice, because the construction of churches ought not for him to receive a payment and a profit, but to be a gift, a gift that is ultimately the restitution of what God had already given to mankind. The argumentative ‘transition’ – to the biblical and the anagogic plane – is immediate: the two biblical Testaments form a whole and are thick with ‘typological’ foreshadowings, and the sacrifices in Leviticus find a counterpart in the ‘new law’ until the present day. Let then man pay the tithe of what God had given him, even in the form of gems, gold, vestments and decorations that tempted Israel 56 57

See Hough 1949, 26. Just as implicit is Ruskin’s disagreement with the positivist demolition of Southey, nostalgic for the medieval cosmos, made by Macaulay (see Bell 1978, 15–7, and § 36.3). On Past and Present see § 19.

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to idolatry. In other words architecture could be reconsecrated and recover the splendour of the golden calf if only the rich would sacrifice a tenth of the brilliance of their houses to edify the house of God.58 The ‘truth’ in architecture – the second ‘lamp’ – consists in the principle of well conducted work using the right materials, and in the functionality of ornament, never reduced to an ‘incrustation’. Ruskin launches his most resolute attack against the late Renaissance tradition of trompe l’œil, against the artifice of overlapping and of stratification, as also against the use of support structures with the sole aim of creating illusive perspectives. He does not admit any other building materials except stone, wood and marble; he banishes iron, which mixed with glass was the new European architectural formula which the English themselves were about to put in practice with the Crystal Palace.59 Mechanical work and mechanical decorations were false, because not done manually; false – with another premonition under our eyes even today – were the imitations of jewels, costume jewellery and pinchbeck. The essence of architecture, according to Ruskin, lies in the idea of the power or the magnitude and the stateliness of forms, and in the imitation of a nature created and, therefore, changing, and colourful and shady. The two chapters on the ‘lamps’ of power and of beauty move from the axiom that art imitates natural beauty, but in its degrees, and chooses and selects

58

It must be understood that embellishing the churches does not increase in itself the act of adoration; architecture remains a means, whereas it is an outward end and vanitas in Catholicism. 59 A polemical article, ‘The Opening of the Crystal Palace’ (1854, originated by its removal from Hyde Park to Sydenham), sarcastically notes that an iron and glass cathedral – in fact a bazar of useless utensils – had been erected completely out of harmony with its context, that is, in a desert of poor workers’ huts such as was suburban London. The presumed new architectural iron and glass style could not have been crushed more strongly. Other targets in this article are the widespread triumphalism that made one forget the recent death of Turner, Tintoretto’s paintings in Venice being damaged by the rain for lack of a roof – an almost proverbial blame hereafter – or the breakdown in the work of restoration underway in European cathedrals, especially those in the city of Rouen. On the whole the article, with its outpourings of apocalyptic anger, is a protest against the effacement of all traces of ‘consciousness of the past’, under the unrelenting action of the civilization of progress.

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in its environment especially the highest and most frequent forms, not the exceptional ones, and therefore normally not what in nature is less good, ugly or even monstrous. In Gothic architectures Giotto’s campanile is the insuperable and supreme model, and in recalling it Ruskin expatiates on a dream-like memory of the humble origins of Giotto the shepherd and the painter-sculptor. Architecture, working on inert materials, must at the same time bear a trace of the energy spent on edifying with them. The ‘lamp of life’ means that there may be a dead architecture but there must be a living imitation. Decorative regularity is compensated by variation and it is, therefore, slightly asymmetrical, as in St Mark’s in Venice, where it expresses the daring of the imitator comforted by the irregularity of nature itself. If in the last of its services architecture is the servant to memory, and the living guardian of the history of a nation and of a civilization, Ruskin contrasts it with the ephemeral, squalid architecture of the English suburbs: all architecture ‘is built to last, and built to be lovely’. And ‘when we build, let us think we build for ever’.60 Contemporary restoration of ancient monuments, one of his recurrent targets, destroys what is living and is the alibi for the neglect of the monuments. Ruskin exhorts his countrymen to the civic duty of respect for architecture, and takes the opportunity to allude, far from approvingly, to the 1848 upheavals. A balanced society, one that has eliminated the rivalry between rich and poor, and thus cured of its tensions, would rise from architecture, that is from a new philosophy and practice of labour, and from pleasure in manual work, the antidote of laziness, the father of all vices.61

60 At the end of a sinuous discussion of the picturesque as parasitic, peripheral and decentred sublimity (for example in shades and details, beautiful in themselves but functional, and becoming central and primary), Ruskin declares that the picturesque, a symptom of degeneration in painting, is acceptable and valuable in architecture, as the expression and the sign of time and duration. 61 In Lectures on Architecture and Painting, held in 1853 in Edinburgh, Ruskin invited the English architects to adopt Gothic, with its pointed arches and gable roofs, without overlooking decoration and ornamentation, which consecrate the bare building to God. The challenge of a return to Gothic was taken up by various professional architects, and Seven Lamps provoked deeply felt protests. The ‘rhetoric

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§ 52. Ruskin up to 1869 IX: ‘The Stones of Venice’ I. The romance of a buried civilization ‘All great European art is rooted in the 13th century’. This assertion synthetizes the programme and the main, but not the only aim, of The Stones of Venice.62 Ruskin is absorbed in his apologia of fourteenth-century Gothic architecture and by the examination of its cycle – birth, rise to its apex and decline. He passionately extols Gothic as a rough style, expressive of serious and noble religious sentiment born from a healthy northern stock transplanted to the south, with its complement of an equally healthy grotesque and healthy style. And he watches scornfully and disappointedly the grafting onto it of the corrupted Renaissance. The opening of The Stones of Venice is in a style, in a theme and in an arpeggio completely new for Ruskin, as it is a preparatory historical survey, that of the century-old history of Venice, subdivided into a long democratic period followed by an oligarchic one or by a form of elective monarchy. The theory or pseudotheory underpinning this excursus is precisely the connection between religion and politics. A healthy religion, he says, had become, with time,63 only a superficial religion, cynical and politically deceptive. This watershed is placed in 1418, or at other times in 1423, years in which the phase of a religious and authentic art, represented by Giovanni Bellini and in the sarcophagi of the pious Mocenigo and of other devoted doges, was supplanted by a second, exemplified by the sarcophagi of other sensual doges. With Titian and Tintoretto religion had become externalized, formal and no longer authentic, or simply decorative. After Tyre, Venice, and after Venice, perhaps England. Ruskin owed openly to Gibbon’s historiography such cyclical recurrence, of birth, apogee and death of a buried

of infallibility’ – also the title of Wihl 1985 – was amusingly denounced in a long review by the journalist J. M. Capes (see CRHE, 111–26 and in particular 113). 62 This work was the result of two winters spent by Ruskin in Venice in 1850 and 1851. The first volume came out in 1851, the second and third in 1853. The second edition of the third was published in 1867, making the chronological arc of the work only slightly less ample than that of Modern Painters. 63 The year of grace, and the apex of Gothic, is the Dantesque ‘mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’, that is, 1300, which was also, roughly, the middle year of Giotto’s life.

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civilization. Ancient Rome is for Ruskin the preparatory historical link with the Venetian cycle, owing to an identical and fatalistic action of corrupting forces that had eroded the lymph and energy of a civilization that had reached its maturity. There was, however, a second, and more important, reason: such corrupting forces had been, for Ruskin as well as for Gibbon, those of late Roman Catholicism, much degenerated from that humble and vibrant faith of the early believers. At the end of incredible discursive acrobatics and disquisitions, Ruskin reaches a concrete proposal for the current times, in the form of an open support given to the ‘revival of a healthy school of architecture in England’, together with a heartfelt invitation: ‘In this architecture let us henceforth build, alike the church, the palace and the cottage’. That was an architecture for all times and for all uses, public and private, sacred and profane, official, civil and domestic. The mania of Venetian Gothic spread from this work contagiously, and there soon rose in England cusped arches, leafy capitals, flowery engravings and polychrome effects in stone, marble, bricks and encaustic, all employed to brighten police stations, town halls, schools, public toilets, gin shops and emporiums.64 The Gothic was the most stable of all the architectonic styles, but the true reason for Ruskin’s preference was because it was ‘healthy’. The figure of the artist was seen as a noble and great spirit through which God spoke. This integrated artist was master of himself, a unison of heart, intellect and soul, and he was able to express himself through the use of his hands, which shape and mix materials found in nature. Artistic expression was not, in Gothic art, a closed and solipsistic circuit, rather it had been available to the public as the transmitter of the values intuited by the artist. Just as the artist is whole, art addresses the whole man, a synthesis of body, intellect, heart and soul. The architectonic building as seen by Ruskin speaks, acts, pleases like a human being. In Ruskin’s analyses the several architectonic components vibrate and quiver as if they were human, because behind the building the great and sincere man, if such a one existed, could be perceived in all his power.65 64 Bell 1978, 47–8. 65 Architecture was born from man’s attempt to adapt the constructive principle to his environment, an axiomatic discovery – perhaps indebted to Darwin and Spencer –

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2. The exceptional, lasting fame of The Stones of Venice was originally due to the fact that its reading became propaedeutic in England after 1850 for art students, and – by virtue of the extremely detailed analyses of aspects and elements of the Venetian churches and palaces, and of the two principal monuments – the inseparable vademecum for the cultured AngloAmerican travellers to Venice.66 A purveyor of advice and information even of a practical nature,67 Ruskin presented to the English a city just emerging from the failure of the provisional government of Daniele Manin, where the passions of the irredentists were on the whole rather tepid due to the mild and tolerant Austrian rule. The Venetian community was not in other words too dissatisfied. It was indolent and rather mean, devoted as it was to everyday trafficking, and insensitive to the inestimable artistic treasures that were wasting owing to their negligence. Ruskin’s exegeses of the Venetian monuments are indeed not absolute. They are presented, on purpose, as transcriptions of visits made on a certain day and at a certain hour, and always narrated in the present tense. In the three historical and interpretative chapters on the Torcello architectural site, on St Mark’s and on the Ducal Palace, a symbolic, and yet at the same time real itinerary is outlined, one that the tourist could follow for him-herself. The tourist is not by chance continually called ‘the traveller’, and invited to go on foot and

which had quite a number of applications. For example Ruskin’s dissertation on the typologies and the constituents of the wall is conducted by noting that the cornices took on historically different shapes according to the northern or southern climates, that is, rainy or dry. The single block columns are typical of volcanic areas, those consisting of more blocks are found more frequently in other non-volcanic areas. All the taxonomies of the first volume, far from inert, sooner or later are revealing, and are kept in store to classify and date, where necessary, particular monuments or architectonic elements in the two following volumes. 66 Ruskin gave in the appendixes an alphabetical guide to the monuments in Venice, where one can find detailed analyses of the most important paintings in the galleries and churches in Venice, with judgements and opinions that became epochal, both for their acuteness or for their arbitrariness. 67 In an appendix Ruskin explains in great detail the rowing techniques of the gondola, as well as the gondoliers’ system of verbal signals, especially when gondolas meet at the bends in the canals and waterways.

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by gondola along the calli and the canals, and to stop at and contemplate the interior of Torcello, or the portals of St Mark’s, or to enjoy the view from the Ducal Palace and reread and admire the very varied decorations in the capitals. That was a Venice not always known or even surely identified, a precocious Daedalean maze which invites the tourist to follow on the heels of the author, and search for that balcony or that mullioned window in a hidden corner at the end of an itinerary, or a certain house or a palace without a name. The inequality of the three volumes is one of contents, tone, and objective appeal. The abridgements of the work, which were made almost immediately and are today the version mostly read of The Stones of Venice, concerned the first volume, which was removed almost in toto, and a great part of the digressions and of the purely technical analyses of the second. But even this abridged version, including the chapters on Torcello, on St Mark’s and on the Ducal Palace, together with that on the ‘nature of Gothic’, retains an incomparable cultural value. The objective limits of The Stones of Venice began to surface little by little as the severe Puritan taste that had inspired it was found to be an over-rigid and mechanical cage to be rejected, and as art critics gradually found out that several of Ruskin’s most thorough investigations were conducted on paintings that were not only of dubious value according to common and unanimous consent, but also studio works and in some cases not even that. 3. The aspect of the Stones that will never cease to fascinate is the creation, among the most evocative and powerful ever given, of the imaginary archetype of the buried and lost civilization, now reduced to its glorious ruins. With loving patience, that is, Ruskin reconstructs, reimagines and reinterprets Venice like a hazy and multicoloured mosaic, a stratigraphy of pure and bastard styles. He also depicts it in the constant and dissonant counterpoint of a past pulsating under the stones, and of a present ruin which – as we shall see – is doubly symbolic. The radiance from the surviving works of art does not make any impression on the degraded, unworthy, and stolid mankind of daily Venetian life, evoked by Ruskin in flashing and rapid fade-outs. The first of these is found in the very famous last page of the first volume, played out on the slow reversal of illusion and expectancy. In the form of a vivid and quick diary annotation, and with an abrupt transition from the expositional, architectural handbook-like tone

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kept page after page,68 Ruskin narrates in it the journey of a tourist from Padua to Venice along the River Brenta. The waters of the river are slimy, oily and yellowish, and the villas so often sung in poems, and recalled in the memoirs of travellers, look like a sequence of casts of a second-rate Renaissance. In a tavern in Mestre two porters, a premonitory and miserable sign of usury, quarrel about the carrying of the tourist’s luggage. Then the barge moves among the tufts of high grass and mud, and the last few edges of earth appear furrowed by railway lines, while smoke rises from the dome of a church. This strange suspense seems to dissolve suddenly when the traveller communicates that he thought he was in Manchester! Instead, ‘It is Venice’. I have dwelt on this passage to subjoin that The Stones of Venice is not only, or not altogether, the most ‘closed’ and therefore organized of Ruskin’s major works and treatises of art, as has often been said, so much as an experimental, intermittent and camouflaged form of an essayistic novel. It is a ‘novel of Venice’ in three volumes, after all the most classic Victorian format; more precisely it is the founding romance of the ‘death in Venice’ theme. There is, structurally, no abysmal difference between this ‘novel’ of Ruskin and Marius the Epicurean by Pater or the memorial novels or the romanticized travel diaries of Dickens or Thackeray. Minimal narrative cells or sketchy traces are always on hand to create the background of lived experience and to break, vary, and accompany the theoretical digressions. Venice is discovered little by little, and the visits all occur in set situations, and all in that precise moment of time, and made by a traveller who is a distinct autobiographical stand-in. It is this diaphragm that is the spy of a both creative and evocative écriture. The plot, no doubt discontinuous, is however no longer simply referred to a human person. It also a cultural design, the biography of an anthropomorphic and personified Venice, always in fact designated with the third person pronoun. Before Ruskin, Venice was, in the literary imagination, the universal symbol of

68 The invitation to the imaginary companion, who is also the expectant reader – ‘And now come with me, for I have kept you too long from your gondola’ – sounds very similar in wording and syntax – though less inspired and elegiac – to the opening of Arnold’s ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’ (§ 157.3–4).

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pulsating life. With The Stones of Venice there came into being the archetype of the dead or dying city. No longer the commercial, unlimited civilization as in Shakespeare, or the licentious city, frivolous and carnivalesque as in Byron, but rather the foggy, decaying, crepuscular or nocturnal necropolis. Only Clough in his Dipsychus, and with his Venice so originally sinister and alienating – whose remarkable oneiric potential is today belatedly recognized –69 can compare with Ruskin. In the wake of this Ruskin of The Stones the principal and more memorable recreators of this myth will act, from Henry James to Wagner and Thomas Mann. Whether he had read Ruskin or not, Mann took from him the autobiographical simulacrum of a traveller looking for survival and clinging to the evanescent appearances of a childlike, hermaphroditic, still raw and unripe beauty. For Ruskin, who did not know Schopenhauer, Gothic and anthropomorphic Venice is an adored feminine body whose heart beats its last pulsations in the present, but is already inert and cadaverous in the lower and upper limbs. Venice is imagined as a prostitute, or a ‘desolate vestal from the sea, drunk with the wine of fornication’.70 Into such an image and a vision or hallucination was the trauma of Ruskin’s broken marriage translated. The Stones of Venice started to burgeon as Ruskin perceived that his myth of a love for a girl who could never grow old was crumbling away. In her deposition at the trial for the annulment of her marriage, Effie mentioned the ravings of her husband, who refused to have sexual relationships with her so as to ‘keep her beauty whole’.71

69 § 143.2. 70 Similar metaphors, echoing the symbolics of the Old Testament prophets, can be found at the close of numerous sections, and also hover elsewhere, in particular at the end of the third chapter of the third volume. Undoubtedly, the archetype of the city turned from a chaste maiden into a prostitute was Dantesque, and traceable in an Italy, and therefore also a Florence, become ‘Lady no longer of fair provinces, / But brothel-house impure’ (H. F. Cary’s translation). 71 Quennell 1949, 67, and Evans 1954, 135–7.

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§ 53. Ruskin up to 1869 X: ‘The Stones of Venice’ II. The effulgence of the Venetian Gothic The whole of the first volume of The Stones of Venice is of an explicative and didactic nature, and verges on the facilitated text, the almost ingenuous maieutics and the present day interactive courses carried on with the help of images. At the end the aspiring architect, or the keen and ever attentive learner, can hopefully soar with their own wings. Ruskin’s prose shines here for its functional, limpid yet not cold quality, every so often punctuated by small witticisms. Excepting the head and the tail, one can easily affirm that the whole heart of the volume is food for students of architecture, and that it tastes hard and indigestible for the common reader. Its punctilio and overrichness of details make it even tedious. All theory of the evolution in art is postponed, or more precisely anticipated in the form of quick parenthetic hints. The assumption underlying Ruskin’s idea of the decoration of the naked architectonic structure is always Puritan and Calvinist, because to decorate means to enclose nature in art, that is, nature created by God rather than that which man himself has created (such as armour, or ships, or other mechanical implements, and perhaps even with self-satisfaction). However, even when taking the decorative object from the natural kingdom men may fall prey to the possible vice of a ‘lateral’ focalization, or may choose natural but ignoble objects, improper to art. Another obsessive axiom concerns the co-operation of the ornament and its subordination to the total effect, instead of being an end in itself. Decoration is the conscious or unconscious imitation of constant natural forms, which gives pleasure to the onlooker in accordance with a law given to man by the Creator. The artist does not replace nature intending to improve it, as Raphael would have said, but to explain it. Art is at least a surrogate for a human kind that no longer has direct access to nature. A naïve catechism illustrates the resilience of the arch in the following definition: ‘the arch line is the moral character of the arch’. The artist remains a Lucifer or an Adam who must overcome temptation, for, if it is not resisted, it entails the Fall. That same arch, if tempted, ‘will fall’. This anagogic motif is however surprisingly denied where it might have been taken for granted and where it would have been easier to find it. In other words, who would not have bet that Ruskin should give credit to the legend that the aerial forms of

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Gothic were due to the medieval aspiration to the heights and to religious enthusiasm? Well, it is for Ruskin a false, undeserved poetic symbolism, because it is the humidity of the northern climate that warmly advised planning super-elevated buildings! 2. The plan of the second volume is to follow and document the architectonic development of the Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance styles in the history of Venice. The Lombards took northern Gothic to Venice, but it did not always blend harmoniously with the Arabic influence, thus giving origin to a Lombard-Arab-Byzantine Gothic, the best in all senses. This Arabic influence in Venice had been active until 1180, and later Gothic stretched to the early years of the fifteenth century. This was the apex of the Venetian Gothic civilization, which saw the full realization of the alliance between a society and an art which were both respectful of God and sincerely religious. Remedies to the corruption of the faith were found by the Protestants, who wanted to keep the faith by getting rid of art, and by the rationalists, who threw away faith but kept art. The latter were none other than the first Renaissance men. The Renaissance was thus cause and effect of ruin. The complicity of the Roman popes consisted in tolerating, if not favouring the transformation of art into nerveless and sybaritic paganism. Nothing had remained straight after the Protestant secession. Ruskin was absolutely certain of the results of an internal test, that where the capital disappears Gothic is nearing its end and about to enter a phase of barbarous experimentation and transgression of the rules. In the chapter on the nature of Gothic he classifies the mental expressions and the material forms of the Gothic style. This discussion, later read religiously by Morris and by many aesthetes, establishes that in the golden days of Gothic men worked happily, while in the present unsatisfied workers looked for compensation and pleasure not in the product of their work but in wealth, and were envious of the better off. This is how Ruskin explains the disappearance of the submission, of the devotion, and also of the reverence of the worker. In this chapter he returns to his theory of the three pictorial and artistic schools, the purists, the naturalists and the sensualists. Only the naturalists are in the right because they see good and evil as parts of the divine plan; the third are ‘sinister’ in name and in deed. Ruskin’s naturalism is tantamount to the ‘truth’ of Gothic as an expression

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of peoples no longer devoted to frivolous pursuits such as hunting and war, but to a life more in communion with nature. Certain architectonic solutions of Gothic were due for Ruskin to the action of abstract principles of statics, as well as to a greater familiarity with vegetation. To Torcello, and to its cathedral bathed in light and decorated with rough and essential mosaics, Ruskin dedicates a limpid chapter aimed to highlight the most ancient layer of the Gothic of the lagoon. He does not only attend to the forms, but enquires into the historical and psychological circumstances and the religious mentality that brought the cathedral into being, built in a hurry by exiles who were fleeing, faithful and trusting in divine help. At Murano the architectonic detail becomes more asphyxial; but recalling the rules established in the first volume Ruskin gives detailed indications in order to assign and date the overlapping styles.72 Ruskin narrates his walk to St Mark’s through the calli crowded by people who, insensitive to art, ogle him from the shops. He then outlines the history of the foundation of the basilica to exemplify its mixed style and therefore the principle of ‘incrustation’. St Mark’s seemed to him emblematic of medieval criteria of city planning and of the idea of a homogeneous context incomprehensible for the nineteenth-century man, in that domestic architecture was in harmony with the sacred. The question faced and settled is whether the St Mark’s mosaics were effective in teaching religion. In an epoch of illiteracy, Ruskin replies, they had had the task of illustrating the Bible on walls for the benefit of the population. The final appraisal of Byzantine Gothic, which survived around St Mark’s in a few ruined palaces, is that of a civilization devoted to the crucifix, which was to be seen displayed in every house, and represented in paintings rich in colours that were the gift of God to Creation, and a sign of seriousness, rather than of loud-mouthed joy.73 Divine punishment struck the Venetian community because it had stained itself with sin, since in the Ducal Palace the teaching of the Bible, 72 73

The slowly growing stupidity of the Venetians in 1851 – the passers-by, the sacristans – is in open contrast with the praise given to the Byzantine artist who expressed his devotion in his work, and kept his own self out of it. One of the entirely subjective axioms in Ruskin is that colour is a divine attribute in nature, and that the atheistic painter uses invariably dead, cold and ‘valueless’ colours.

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decorated ‘on its right’ – that is, inside the cathedral adjacent to it – had been disobeyed. § 54. Ruskin up to 1869 XI: ‘The Stones of Venice’ III. The corrupt Renaissance The shorter third volume of The Stones of Venice takes up the study of the decline of Gothic due to the coming of the Renaissance, in its three forms of the ‘early’, the ‘Roman’, and the ‘grotesque’ Renaissance, this latter being a corruption of the Renaissance itself. More precisely, two schools born of Gothic are more documented than the Byzantine style in Venice. One is primitive and one is later. The later one began to use ‘immoderately’ decorations with figures of flowers and leaves. The transition from the one to the other occurred in parallel with the fall and disappearance of authentic religion, as evidenced, according to Ruskin unequivocally, by the juxta­position, in the Venetian buildings, of Gothic and Renaissance capitals. This view stems from the application of a biblical and apocalyptic scheme: ‘sin is not in the act, but in the choice’. On the basis of this the absence of certain elements is justified, as not deliberate but dictated by sheer necessity, while other innovations are instead condemned. The Gothic style is compared with a human being that yields to temptation, but the unanswered question is the reason why he or she yields. Is it for the intrinsic force in temptation or is there an age-old curse that cannot be escaped, that ruins and rots everything that is good in a civilization now at full maturation? Gothic becomes languid, enervated, and enters a phase of ‘over-luxuriance, over-refinement, over-lusciousness’,74 words that sound prophetically like the description of the sensibility of the true Decadents that shortly after will appear on the scene. Ruskin’s chapter on the Ducal Palace is, at least in part, one of the fundamental chapters of The Stones of Venice. The architectonic history of the building seems surprisingly to propose a violent and inexplicable gap with regard to its style, but Ruskin finds the imprint of its decoration vaguely present in the apse of the Frari. The

74 This intemperance and incontinence concern colour especially, always like a libidinous impulse that has to be controlled.

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first remarkable feature of this chapter on the Ducal Palace is its meticulous and neat ink-drawn table of the plan and of the aerial view. Then in vigorous essential lines the history of the stages of the building of the monument is traced in words: a ‘Palace Serpent’ that with the passing of time has eaten its limbs, each successive layer having cancelled the preceding one. In 1423 the first hammer stroke had destroyed the ‘talisman of her fortunes’, paving the way to the decline of Venice. A great part of the chapter is dedicated to the cataloguing, rather like a guide with brief personal judgements, of the allegorical and grotesque figures of the capitals of the columns, of which Renaissance replicas existed, systematically classified by Ruskin as artistically worthless. This analysis is carried out following the guidelines of a confrontation with the allegories of Virtue in Dante, Spenser and Giotto. 2. The Renaissance had been for Ruskin parasitical, similar to a cruel animal that throws itself on the remains of what is good in its prey, for example by replacing first of all the delicate, decorative details of Gothic with others having no life in them. This metaphor of the parasite becomes widened and branches out, because the three Renaissances, with their growing degeneration, were grafted onto the Byzantine style, onto the Gothic style, and, in a kind of horrid incest or a monstrous experiment of genetic engineering, onto itself, giving life to what is literally a horrifying ‘embryo’. The second chapter in the third volume, dedicated to the ‘Roman Renaissance’ is really a pendant to that on the nature of Gothic. Of almost every constitutive element of Gothic, Ruskin’s Renaissance exhibits the contrary. It sought perfection whereas art is by nature imperfect; it boasts a classical enthusiasm that, though a positive phenomenon in painting, is not positive in architecture. The most incisive sections are devoted to the Renaissance artist-scientist, proud of being one. Here Ruskin forgets that he had clearly indicated in Modern Painters that the painter, for the sake of truth, must be provided with a good knowledge of botany, geology and of atmospheric phenomena. Or he just hints to it since he admits that this knowledge can degenerate into rationalism, into an art, that is, cerebral and cold in its preciseness. He therefore reasserts that the artist intuits, not just already knows, and that it is good to know but the cognitive datum must produce an emotional experience. The portrait of Ruskin’s Renaissance scholar and ‘grammarian’ is amazingly consonant with that of Browning’s

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famous monologue, as well as with that of the Roman Bishop at St Praxed’s, vain and thirsty for glory, whose utmost aspiration is a sumptuous sepulchral monument, with marble friezes and an epitaph in Ciceronian Latin.75 Italian, and indirectly Venetian architecture became ‘Roman’ due, above all, to the fact that it was inspired by the forms of Ancient Rome; but ‘Roman’ was a clear barb, for it was understood to mean ‘Catholic’. The new architectural pomp was supinely accepted by the new aristocracies deaf to the needs of the poor. The weak, laborious demonstration of the reasons for the corruption of Gothic – that Ruskin believes he can pinpoint in the sarcophagi of different epochs in the Venetian churches of the Frari and of St John and Paul – is that the average or general sensibility had become corrupt, and this led to a more degenerated art. In other words, an epochal determinism was at work, a tyrannical tendency from which there was no possibility of escape. In such a situation, Ruskin did not even think that pure or simply mediocre Gothic artists could possibly exist. A similar, Gothic and Renaissance monster presents the already seen phenomenon of the shifting of attention from the content to the vehicle of art. For example, the draperies of the sepulchral monuments gradually obtained the whole attention of the artist over the angels that drew the marble curtains, until the angels themselves disappeared. At the same time, the new humanistic Weltanschauung had the body, in funeral monuments, no longer reclining and inert, and seemingly under the yoke of death, but as though it were challenging death. The dead were sculptured in an erect and courageous posture in this softened sepulchral art, and death was even masked as life. Once again, Gothic art is the virgin of Babylonia corrupted and become the prostitute in Isaiah. It was not only a cold and formal art that kept to narrow rules, but an unfaithful and pagan art. 3. The unavoidable aesthetic trap was that a grotesque Gothic does exist, and is indicated by Ruskin himself as a highly commendable art form, while the Renaissance grotesque was the ‘perpetuation in stone of the ribaldries of drunkenness’. How can one explain the spirit of scorn, of mockery, of insolence in art? The disappointing and confused third

75

§ 116.2.

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chapter, and penultimate of the third volume of The Stones of Venice, tries to excogitate captious distinctions in order to save the Gothic grotesque and, at the same time, condemn the Renaissance grotesque, which seemed to Ruskin completely and powerfully to be embodied in the marmoreal head at the foot of the bell-tower of Santa Maria Formosa.76 Ruskin was disturbed and upset by its monstrous expression, by its fiendish sneer, by its tongue hanging out of its mouth, and he saw it as the image of a pleasure deriving from the contemplation of a beastly vice. The nature of the healthy grotesque is instead found in the acrobatic, oxymoronic conjunction of the playful and the terrible. Play is necessary to man, as he cannot have his thought fixed all the time on God; play – the noble play of cultured minds at rest – becomes a need for the lower classes exhausted by brutalizing work. But there is also an immoderate kind of play, that of individuals given over to laziness, vice and pleasure. With that Ruskin marks out a distinction between ‘the fruits of a rejoicing energy in uncultivated minds’, and another play consisting of a ‘restless and dissatisfied indulgence in excitement, or a painful delving after exhausted springs of pleasure’. The second component of the grotesque, the ‘terrible’, stems from the Calvinist awareness of a nature that carries the signs and premonitions of the angry, accusing and punitive face of the Creator. It is Ruskin’s firm conviction that good and evil are mixed in creation; therefore, the terrible or the sublime are held back and let loose unbridled by the sense of death and of sin. Now, while the noble grotesque pertains to an artist’s mood, and is a suspensive practice – the artist jokes with the terrible without recognizing in that moment its terribleness, he knows he is joking and ‘pretends to joke’ – the ignoble and apathetic artist does not understand anything of all this, and just makes an effort and becomes excited. Dürer exemplifies the grotesque sublimated into beauty or into noble terribleness, but Raphael is criticized for his late shift to a senseless grotesque. The highest expressive form of the grotesque, according to Ruskin, is free imagination, as in dreams or in the Dantesque vision, a vision the fuzziness of which is due to the fallen human nature, 76 In Ruskin’s opinion this church, which was given its present aspect in the late seventeenth century, was built originally for the greater glory of man, rather than of God.

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and that could be governed and systemized only by a calm mind, rather than by agitated and unquiet one, which is like a chipped and distorting mirror. In Venice the grotesque had been impeded by the Byzantine, then trodden on by the Renaissance, but it had enjoyed a healthy life in painting and in the popular mind. § 55. Ruskin up to 1869 XII: Other works of art criticism While his first two masterpieces were underway, and between the publication of one or the other of the volumes that made them up, Ruskin, whose fame as a theoretician and art scholar had rapidly risen, accepted the ever more numerous invitations that came in from various parts of England to give opening speeches and lectures in schools and in academic and artistic institutions. He immediately took to the idea because it was a means of getting close to the people, and because from this tribune he could correct immediately and efficaciously incautious or misunderstood affirmations of his books, answer the criticisms he received and even the bashing of his enemies, just as he could add codicils to his theories. Several of Ruskin’s ‘books’ from 1850 on begin to be mere transcriptions of these oral interventions, which had an even more pronounced rhapsodic and improvising mark and could easily range from the technical disquisition to the personal anecdote. The second aim that spurred him to take advantage of public lectures is didactic, in that they gave him the opportunity to shape young English artists, painters and architects. He thought he could lead them towards a healthy and noble art, which was again naturalistic, adhering to nature and consisting in an interpretation and explanation of nature itself, rather than a means to gratify the pride and the skill of the artist. These ‘books’ were thus a gloss and a literal repetition, or an amplification, of the aesthetics formulated in Modern Painters and of the theory of the development of art in The Stones of Venice. From these lectures on art, and from an absolute thought on art, an immediate application gradually arose: Ruskin started preaching an artistic and at once social gospel, against the dictates of an aseptic market economy, the market, too, of a commercialized art. 2. He thought he could detect in the Pre-Raphaelites some of the principles of his aesthetics, and supported them in four open letters sent in 1851 and 1854 to The Times following the presentation of some of their canvasses at

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the Royal Academy, which afterwards became universally famous. Actually, they had not been mauled by the critics.77 In 1854, in a more ample piece of writing, ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’, he reverted to the subject but ended up by leaving it, because it gradually becomes an almost monographic essay on the evolution of Turner’s painting. Ruskin was not blind to the faults in the Pre-Raphaelites – the occasional vulgarity of the features in Holman Hunt, the imperfections in the use of colour for flesh-pink, even their ‘Romanist and Tractarian tendencies’ – but he praised them because they contested the grand style of Reynolds and were close to Ruskin’s idea of the ‘modern painter’. He underlined the mere ‘labour bestowed’ on those works, and ‘their fidelity to a certain order of truth’. In ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ he tried to make a difficult synthesis, that is the reconciliation of the ‘symbolic realism of the Pre-Raphaelites’ with ‘the abstract hyper-realism’ of Turner.78 Turner had set off towards the autonomy of colour and the supremacy of form but only to revert to an even greater, more powerful fidelity in his representation of nature. Paradoxically, Ruskin observes, he had an extraordinary mnemonic capacity that led him to recall everything except his own ego, that ‘I’ that was so dangerous if not kept out of the picture. Of his other works of pictorial analysis, ‘Giotto and His Works in Padua’ (1853) is a tribute to a happy artist, healthy and accurate but not formal, blossomed forth from the historical cross between cold Byzantine art and the rough and exuberant Gothic style. Giotto was a near Byzantine at the beginning for Ruskin, but he then became a ‘daring naturalist’ who, on account of his devotion and love, was a forerunner of the Pre-Raphaelites. Though not a great painter he certainly was a great man, gifted with a neat but not finished line and with colourism anticipating Titian, but at the bottom of it rudimental in his human figures. Ruskin rereads one by one Giotto’s paintings of the Scrovegni chapel, of which he had made remarkable engravings, leaving favourable judgements on almost all the episodes of the story of Jesus. As an art teacher Ruskin wrote Elements of Drawing (1857), a manual for painters 77 The close analysis of Hunt’s paintings The Light of the World and The Awakening Conscience inquires with a few generous and subjective opinions into their ‘typological’ and allegorical density. 78 G. Leoni, Introduction to J. Ruskin, Turner e i Preraffaelliti, Torino 1992, xxi.

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from life, rich with reflections and advice on the way of painting shadows and the reflections of light, the movements of the sea waters and the forms of the clouds. All these forms, always evanescent, had to be sketched when seen on the spot, because memory could not retain with the necessary precision their continuous evolutions and metamorphoses.79 The didactic aim is more pronounced in the opening speech held at the School of Art in Cambridge in 1858. A generally sure method, Ruskin says, is that of letting the eyes guide one, so as to see things as they are, and, therefore, clearly and according to truth. Other recommendations regard ‘finite’ art, that in order not to be conventional required the greatest sincerity. At the same time, the pleasure deriving from one’s own work had to be the aim of the young students. The first to enjoy the painting was necessarily its author himself. Such aesthetic enjoyment, such pleasure of the eye for beautiful, pleasing, simply splendid things, was unknown until then to the taste of the English. The conclusive paradox of an author who confesses with a boutade to be one who contradicts himself at least once, is that the pleasure of painting must be first admitted and then immediately removed, as the artist working just for this pleasure gets exhausted in the operation. Art is ruined and becomes enervated by the excessive cult of luxury. For this reason Ruskin insists to his listeners that there cannot be a noble art but in a flourishing state, and vice versa. 3. The first of the five lectures of The Two Paths (1859),80 which were held in various English places between 1858 and 1859, is the liveliest and the more substantial. Ruskin provokingly asks himself the question, stemming from his own artistic theories, of how a great art, such as that of the Italian Catholic Renaissance, could go hand in hand with sensuality and become a propagator for vice. The reply is that such degenerating

79 The pendant to this handbook, The Elements of Perspective (1859), was also for students studying drawing. It is the most technical and scientific work ever produced by Ruskin, subdivided into problems and questions with their answers, and with a set of graphs based on the laws and calculations of Euclidean geometry. 80 The bifurcation in the title given to this collection of lectures on various themes is, vaguely, that of the artist faithful to the ‘chain of natural facts’ and the one who is indifferent and places self-complacency before it.

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phenomena can only be put down to the dissociation of the artist from nature – to the lack of representative truth, to the greater emphasis put on pleasure in his work and to his self-complacency. An astute diversion to Gothic sculpture is taken to demonstrate that artistic truth comes from the contemplation of nature rather than from abstract and idealistic concepts of symmetry and harmony. The second lecture, given at Manchester, aims to illustrate the link between, as we might say with Rossetti,81 ‘hand’ and ‘soul’. In other words it opposes and rejects any reduction of art to the pure mechanical sphere of manual chain production.82 The third returns to Gothic decoration, truthful representation of nature brought alive by the imagination, and the fourth deals with vanity, or rather to the ‘idiocy’ of any attempt to create a new English architectonic style. Towards the end of the fourth and in the whole of the fifth a new and more detailed analysis of the function of art in the modern and contemporary world is brought into play. Ruskin heartily recommends to the artist to keep his mission disinterested, to resist the temptation of worldly fame and to love art not for money. Thus, he launches the utopia of an artist become philanthropist, pedagogue, preacher among the poor, and traveller in the countryside in order to witness the uncorrupted state of nature. The final digression is a moving and quite frank panorama of the oppression of the workers by the rich, who lacked the capacity to sympathize with their hardships and exhorted them to a dignified resignation. The Cestus of Aglaia (1865–1866) is, stylistically, Ruskin’s most experimental collection of essays up to its date, yet it is ultimately spoiled by an exotic and pretentious vagueness from which rather trite and banal sapiential considerations burst forth. There are diverse themes and they can be synthetized with difficulty as those of the minor arts, that is the arts of ‘the black line, as produced in steel and

81 82

§ 189.1–2. It seems to me a blunder to assert that ‘whenever two artists are trying to do the same thing with the same materials, and do it in different ways, one of them is wrong’. In the third lecture, at any rate, Ruskin hopes that the china factories may furnish ‘educational instruments’ rather than ‘mere drugs of the market’.

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wood’. The work was lovingly dedicated to the etchers,83 often obscure and unappreciated, but worthy of admiration because they help to make known masterpieces that otherwise would not have been available. The mechanical art that threatened to replace etching – perhaps visual art itself, but Ruskin denied this – was photography, a mechanical art in itself with nothing human in it. He defines it the echo of a ‘conversation of which it omits the most important syllables and reduplicates the rest’, whereas the art of design is that of ‘selected truth’. Ruskin never tires of repeating to the etcher that the artist differs from the machine, because he is gifted with the faculty of choice, a choice, therefore, of subjects that are healthy and moral, not only remunerative. The chapters in the second part digress on the chiaroscuro art of Rembrandt and on the painting of ugliness ‘in candle-light’, on water-painting and on illustrated books. According to Ruskin, English art itself, Turner having died, tended towards the dangerous slope of mass production, if not towards its uselessness. The market favoured the affirmation of a hundred poor artists rather than ten who were excellent. The former were needed to cater to the aspirations of the new middle classes. Even children’s books were affected by this artistic decline. ‘The continual desire for new exhibitions means that we do not care for pictures; the continual demand for new books means that nobody cares to read’. Ruskin is already the full supporter of a ‘sealed’ culture of a medieval type, eternal, perennial, and never more to be surpassed. § 56. Ruskin up to 1869 XIII: Moral fables for the young The short story The King of the Golden River, originally written in 1841, ‘to amuse a little girl’ – actually the little Effie, later to be his wife – was published in 1851, and was the tangible proof or anyhow the promise of a narrative talent left to evaporate, even though the mature Ruskin belittled

83

A child half-asleep on a river seen once by Ruskin in Turin is dreamily evoked as the emblem of the etcher’s patience. A very similar passage, among the numerous introductory ones to the single chapters, expatiates on the marvels of the steam locomotive and of mechanical art; and by the force of associations Ruskin digresses from the steam to the ‘spirit’, or the pneuma of human art, endowed with a spiritual power active in the soul.

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the story in Praeterita defining it a mixture of Dickens, Grimm, and ‘true Alpine feeling’. It was due to its origin that it has always lain in the margins of the Victorian narrative literature for children, as it adumbrates that personal, paedophiliac myth that, as a literary product, attains its highest transposition in The Ethics of the Dust. The second prophetic premonition concerns a capitalism that exploits those underneath and sells at double the real value; the premonition, therefore, of Ruskin’s obsessive battle against usury that broke out in the 1860s. The three brothers of the story, two evil and drunkards and the third naturally good, are taken from the traditional ‘morphology of the folktale’. Gluck is blond, white-skinned and blue-eyed, while at least one of the brothers has a symbolic name, Schwartz. In two hard black stones the two evil brothers are eventually transformed as punishment for their hard-heartedness at the end of the story. This trio lives in a charming Styrian valley whose surface, though not benefiting from the natural irrigation of a fine river descending in a waterfall from the highest mountain peaks, even in the twilight appears like a golden carpet, and is very fertile because it is rainy.84 This allows the two miserly brothers to make profit and to vex their fellow men like hard manufacturing capitalists – aiming only at accumulating, without giving even the surplus to those who suffer – as well as their own younger brother, miraculously able to put his generous nature to good use. The reader, in the first scene, is for a moment struck by the analogy between little Gluck – who is turning the spit with the roast of mutton and not of pork, while outside it rains hard – and Silas Marner in the homonymous story by George Eliot.85 But the little cook boy is no such a misanthrope, he does not abandon his spit, and welcomes spontaneously the funny ‘Southwest Wind, Esquire’, thus challenging the authority of his brothers and showing admirable moral elasticity and readiness of spirit. He cuts a slice of the roast to offer to his guest, just a moment before his brothers reach him, blocking his courtesy and beating him. The revenge of Southwest Wind consists in the sudden ruin of their harvest, which obliges the two brothers to turn to being smithies and above all 84 The beneficial cloud bringing rain had already been distinguished from the stormy and evil cloud in Modern Painters (§ 50.2 n. 52). 85 Volume 5, § 194.3.

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counterfeiters, that is to set up a furnace where they melt gold mixed with copper. At this point, the story begins to make greater use of the devices of the fables with the anthropomorphism of the natural forces and with the Ovidian motif of metamorphosis. The first scene is a simple warning, as nature, in Ruskin a divine intermediary, warns man to charity, and metes out a remediable punishment, the equally symbolic, biblical desolation of the fertile land. But the evil brothers do not understand this. The second anthropomorphic metamorphosis is that of the king of the golden river, a dwarf that ‘comes out’ of the decoration on the cup Gluck has put to be melted in the furnace. The trial, the centuries-long pivot of the fairy-tale, is that prosperity will be given to the one who pours three drops of holy water in the river. Each of the two evil brothers makes an attempt and fails, because they impiously drink part of the water from the flask without wetting the lips of the poor beings, or even their own animals that, like Christ on the Cross, beg for it. The mission of their brother Gluck is successful just when he believes he has disobeyed his task; that is, when with superior moral independence, by making an heroic effort and refusing to quench his own thirst, but also refusing to pour the water in the river, he gives a dog almost dead a drop to drink. This gesture of charity brings about the hoped for miracle. The valley is again fertile in virtue of the river that, as in Coleridge running underground, gushes out to water the valley, which verifies the allusion present in its name, the Treasure Valley. 2. Dedicated to the ‘little housewives’, young pupils of a girls’ school at Winnington where Ruskin had given lessons in drawing, The Ethics of the Dust (1866) is apparently the explanation, in the form of a humoristic and light fairy-tale, of some complicated questions of geology and crystallography. It should be understood that this is not the pure transcription of the lectures with their relative discussions, but an imaginary recreation in a semi-dramatic form. It is preceded by a true and proper table of the characters, of whom one is the old Professor – Ruskin himself – and the others his group of pupils, all given picturesque names and some of them colourful, and whose ages vary from nine to twenty years. These pupils are substantially stylized, because they are always and only introduced as listeners and learners who ask questions and make objections and are questioned; and they are always curious, ingenuous, impatient, and at the same time ostentatious

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with their Professor. They follow the Professor, without being annoyed or even terrorized, in his most impervious and unchecked digressions, seeming to know by heart Modern Painters and the preceding works by Ruskin. Brief and cursory stage directions reveal the whispers, the amazed glances, and the occasionally thoughtful faces. Ironically, this experiment constitutes simultaneously a timid incunabulum of Victorian dramaturgy fully set in the contemporaneity – if only there had been a more clearly defined and more various context and some more persons in the background, and if the female interlocutors had been not only purely dialectic voices, and the Professor not simply a scientific popularizer. The fable-like metamorphosis – at times even with cartoonist traits – of the mineral kingdom – the crystals endowed with sensitive life, and with good moral and antagonistic impulses of vices and of virtues –86 was needed by Ruskin to give free rein to his usual Pindaric transitions. Like Blake, he could truly always see ‘the world in a grain of sand’. Such a function of an irradiating centre of associations is here found in the crystal. However, the felicitous choice of some of the illustrations, the interludes of pure dialogue, the friendly skirmishes, the episodes of drawing-room comedy and of scholastic humour, do not make up for pages and pages of abstruse mythological phantasmagoria, for the overlapping of anecdotes within anecdotes, and the forced allegories. The ‘ethics of the dust’ is the moral lesson of energy, of toughness and of strength to which these women still in fieri are called by the example of the rocks. The passiveness of contemplative life is a theme that Ruskin does not let slip. He takes in fact advantage of it to brand, like a ‘muscular’ novelist,87 medieval monasticism, to the extent of giving a judgement much more sparing and limitative than usual on Fra Angelico. The feminine decalogue, which might sound daring, and whose description given by the Professor rouses the puritanical protests of the pupils, does not exclude, but rather joyfully valorises – as wifely endowments far from discreditable – dancing,

86 To the ‘behaviour’ of crystals Ruskin applies a metaphor resembling that of Gothic attacked by the parasitic Renaissance, since similar minerals, that is, parasitic, attack pure crystal from the outside, thus determining its ‘decadence’. 87 Volume 5, § 157, and passim in §§ 149–56 on Charles Kingsley.

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the elegance in the way of dressing, and even the skill in cooking the meals. The word ‘diamond’ and its process of geological formation spur Ruskin to accuse current political economy, and to admonish that every time an object is beautiful but useless it is a germ of miserliness, and that, therefore, every good must be shared. The admirable, amazing phenomenology of crystals in nature, and the laws of their formation and diversity, are mysterious, and elicit from Ruskin a sincere profession of faith in the positive evolution taking place in the cosmos, an evolution towards ‘beauty, and order, and permanence’. The Ethics of the Dust lies thus at the crossroads of pedagogy, popular science, and political economy. § 57. Ruskin up to 1869 XIV: Palingenetic dreams of a tribune Ruskin’s works of political economy, most of which came out in the decade 1860–1870 as collections of public lectures, openly show the influence of Carlyle’s preaching. Carlyle had been the first to rise up against an uncontrolled commercialism left to itself without correctives, and against its supporting myth of a man as a ‘pure desiderating machine’. With his critique against surplus value as the origin of capitalism Ruskin aligns himself directly with Marx, just before coming to a sudden stop when faced with the spectre of absolute freedom and equality, and making a definite turn backwards to the status quo, and the handing over of the rudder of the national ship in troubled waters once again to a renewed, redeemed and reformed aristocracy. Both Carlyle and Ruskin called for long surpassed and even feudal social categories to be brought back, in other words the utopia of the harmonious medieval community. Therefore when they venture into the concrete, both verge on the impractical and extravagant reformist proposal. Ruskin found his own space because he was more untiring and more pugnacious than Carlyle in countering the absolute liberalism of Mill and the political economists of the time, the so-called ‘Manchester School’. Above all, his gentleman worker has not only re-acquired reverence towards his superiors but he is valued as an integral part of an ‘aesthetic’ society, in which even manual work has suddenly become a pleasure and a gratification, and useful products elevate the standard of life. In Carlyle’s thought there is no place for the world of the arts, let alone for the visual arts, even as a complementary factor in redeeming society, while they are

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the fulcrum in Ruskin’s. Secondly, Ruskin relies rather more than Carlyle on the lecture as a means of reaching and inflaming the public directly, and he invents another channel, that of the open letter. In his hands the open letter becomes a flexible and very suitable instrument for his thought, always wandering, unstable, lacking in concentration, and knowingly and complacently the prey of his associational demon. 2. The continuity between art criticism and political prophecy, hinted in The Political Economy of Art88 (1857), is completely realized in the essays collected in Unto This Last89 (1862), the first publication of which, in the Cornhill directed by Thackeray, had to be interrupted due to the contentions, not exactly orthodox, Ruskin was putting forward. The objection to Mill’s economy, which, turned upside down, became a mainstay of Ruskin’s own, is Mill’s own premise of a man reduced to being a soulless ‘skeleton’ – to his being, therefore, only an accumulator of wealth. The first essay of Unto This Last advocates a capitalistic system the end of which should not only be the profit for the employer, but one able to provide for the real needs of the people. The paternalistic master, who treats his workers kindly and offers them a fixed wage, is the final reincarnation of Ruskin’s noble and great individual, such as had been the painter, then the architect, later still the cultured gentleman: a kind of heroic helmsman of a ship, for whose safety he is ready to lay down his own life. Ruskin then concentrates on the definition and the meaning of wealth, which is a relative term, inasmuch as the other side of wealth is the poverty of those who have not become rich. Wealth is not an objective value, but instead, in Ruskin’s definition, it is equivalent to the power the rich hold over their fellow men, or the authority and skill to control large masses of men. Even the most insatiable of rich men would realize that his wealth is useless unless he had servants 88

The focus of the two lectures is the market of pictorial art, and their objective is the creation of a national taste that should position art at the right height. Their nature is thus pedagogic, and Ruskin’s intention is to exhort painters to paint fulfilling works made with materials able to resist the erosion of time. The target is the current and diffused destination of money, used to buy ephemeral goods (with a harsh criticism against expenses for clothing and jewels) and no longer invested in objects of art. 89 This title was taken from the Gospel parable of the vine-dressers.

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allowing him to enjoy it. The leitmotiv becomes that of riches finalized to the accumulation of useful goods.90 In the present day, not even the wealthy bought, nor did they accumulate, what was most worthy and precious. Before orchestrating this theme, Ruskin pauses at length on the ‘right price’ and with a compelling argument shows how the surplus of a capitalist who takes on work paying it at half price originates a chain of damages, among which his own iniquitous accumulation of surplus and the blocking of the workers’ advancement. Only one objection Ruskin does not solve: how and where can those inefficient workers be employed that have not been taken on, in other words unemployment. The fourth essay attacks Mill and the peremptory exclusion of every moral consideration from the sphere of economy. For the one and only time Ruskin has recourse to an anagogical escape route that is also captiously etymologic. The Latin valor means ‘for life’, that is an economy should be intent on production and on the exchange of objects needful for life and its continuation, not on the sterile re-production of capital as such. Ruskin’s utopian state of ‘the greatest number of noble and happy human beings’ echoes in its formulation the slogan by definition of utilitarianism, but actually turns it upside down.91 3. The most universally popular work by Ruskin as a political writer is Sesame and Lilies92 (1865), the coupling of two lectures given in Manchester in 1864. The opening of the first seems to penetrate into a territory never before systematically trodden by Ruskin, that of literature tout court. 90 Ruskin praises Dickens without reserve for his representations – in the recent past, since he had not yet written Our Mutual Friend – of the curse of wealth, and the murky circumstances that have generated richness and the use that man has made of it. 91 Just as unsolved is the question of overpopulation, with regard to which Ruskin limits himself to excluding the Malthusian solution as well as mass colonization. 92 At first sight the title is based on a complex and composite extended metaphor: the sesame is a seed that is scattered over the crust of the bread by the Arabs, and bread is the book, that is the food of contemporary man. The legendary sesame opens up, on the other hand, the doors to the royal treasure, of those ‘kings’ treasuries’ that form the title of the first lecture. The lilies in the second are, for Ruskin, an emblem of femininity.

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Visual art is not the object of the enquiry, and it is not even dealt with en passant; the pedagogical, sociological and at the same time literary question, is what are good books, how we read and should read them. The recipient would seem to be childhood, but the more realistic, intermediate one proves to be the parents and educators to whom the child’s education is entrusted. However, Ruskin’s unpredictability is such that, with irresistible transitions, a number of other, interrelated questions comes to the fore little by little, and, after various passages, the model of English capitalism ends in the dock once again. Indeed there is a curious but, after all, not surprising correspondence between Ruskin’s axioms and the educational theory of the university curriculum set out by Newman in his almost contemporary essays gathered in The Idea of a University.93 Ruskin assigns to ‘liberal’ culture the same formative value, and the same conservative function as a frontier, that Newman had pointed to in order to forge Irish Catholic gentlemen. Ruskin, in fact, does not deny that culture has a healthy instrumental value, instrumental above all in helping the young and the students to become men, and to attain ‘advancement in life’. This final destination is of course understood to refer to anything except fame, notoriety, vain ambition and the satisfaction of pleasure. Man works and puts himself on show not for vanity but for the sake of duty. Ruskin does not banish ephemeral and popular literature, just as much as he warned against a pernicious eternal literature; he transfers to the literary sphere the sanction of seriousness and nobility, and the sacred and missionary spirit, which he recommends to the visual artist. When literature is great, the reader enters with it the royal ‘court’ of the aristocracy of the spirit; is stimulated to a new outlook, rather than gratified and pandered by hearing his prejudices echoed.94

93 § 31. 94 The most modern note in the essay is the indication of a sophisticated hermeneutics of the literary word, helped by philology, historical semantics and etymology. This familiarity could help one to notice and decode the ‘masked words’, the translations now accepted of ancient words of which the original meaning had literally been lost, and that had become dead words and metaphors. A passage from Lycidas on the keys of St Peter is subjected to a semantic close reading to explore, in the light of its etymology, objective nuances in the text, as much as to denounce more freely

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Thanks to a deep and controlled reading of great books he matures and perfects the education of his passions and emotions. The next step is one of the most brilliant examples of Ruskin’s insouciance in the art of transition, because it concerns the transition of the gentle-man to the ‘gentle-nation’. Only thus can the invective, until then held in reserve, explode against the English and, in general, the European system based on ‘brutal competition’, and against profit.95 The admission of small areas of sanity barely tempers a diagnosis that is otherwise shaken by explosions of obsessive black humour. The contrasting utopia is a society of men, philosophers and readers, artists in spirit and in fact, and transformed into a museum, a library, or a garden. The book had to regain its value not as a chattel, or as an object of interior decoration, but as nutritive bread.96 A sarcastic, conclusive invitation is addressed to the State asking it to give funds for books and libraries and for the purchase of collections of precious fossils, instead of wasting huge sums of money on enlarging the railway network. In the second lecture Ruskin draws up the corresponding profile of the gentle-woman. The peroration of equality between the sexes is the same as in the later classic treatise by Mill on the subjection – and therefore on the necessity for the emancipation – of women. Ruskin launches a pleasing, even though superficial literary survey to demonstrate the antiquity of the archetype of the woman as heroine and wise governess of an adventurous and always restless man. Actually, her status is that of the angel in the house, quoted verbatim from Patmore: the house as a sacred oasis of rest, protected hermetically from the whirlwinds of the world. Ruskin’s fake, reactionary feminism can be measured by the prudent limitations he suggests in the curriculum of studies for women. This curriculum has a merely

the incompetence of the higher echelons of the Church, who were not ‘pastors’ and did not work for the good of the community. 95 The denunciation of the insult to poverty represented by the workhouses clearly echoes Dickens. 96 And, if such, not an ephemeral possession, that one could give away or resell, and not even, for the reader, a simple item from the circulating library. Its sacred value had to be extended to the pleasure of touch, together with that of sight, thanks to a binding preferably in morocco-leather.

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instrumental aim, that of soothing, loving and understanding her husband. If the ideal image emanating from the first lecture is an iridescent garden offering the services of a library and a museum, the second inebriatingly fades out into a garden of flowers where a romanticized couple of man and woman celebrate their harmony. 4. The workers from an evening school, the rich capitalists on the occasion of the inauguration of the Bradford Stock Exchange in the heart of the mining district, and the pupils of a military academy were the auditors of three lectures – of a not immediately apparent homogeneity, and among the most incisive and provoking of the 1860s – gathered in 1866 under the title of The Crown of Wild Olive. They are not, taken as a whole, revolutionary appeals, rather the most guarded effort, along with the contemporary essays by Carlyle and especially by Matthew Arnold, to appease the working classes. Ruskin praises their hidden resources of dignity, going as far as to ask that they should get a higher representation as long as the status quo was kept in a society by definition unequal. In the preface Ruskin evokes the loathed iron civilization which, with a perfectly transitional argument, is also the civilization of litter, of dirt and of the pollution of the beautiful sources of the rivers, and of that river, in particular, that had made his infancy pleasant and Eden-like, because it ran through the countryside where one of his aunts lived.97 This litter was by association like the oyster shells and the cigarette ends that were scattered in a certain recess of a tavern in Croydon and behind its iron railings, put there to protect the place – according to the new dictates of art – and paradoxically to gentrify it. Those iron bars, covering that slight stench, had needed three times as much work in their making as would have been necessary to clear the sources of the river from detritus! Work in iron triplicated the profits of the capitalist,98 and thus raised the price of beer or caused beer to be sold watered down. 5. In the first essay, ‘Work’, Ruskin attacks the productive system asserting the necessity to control and limit it so that only useful, socially and morally healthy products can be manufactured. But the widespread 97 § 46.3. 98 Dickens would have drawn a much more positive portrait, because partly utopian, of the ‘ironmaster’ in Bleak House (Volume 5, § 47.5).

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and acritical subdivision between the rich and the poor is relativized and reduced to that between those who work and those who are lazy. On the basis of this Ruskin subtly refutes the Marxist concept of the division of labour and also of class struggle. The key point of the argument is not so much capitalistic accumulation, as accumulation as an end in itself, that is making money ‘for a game’, without knowing how to use it, or using it to buy useless goods or spending it on lazy or capricious activities, such as hunting, clothes or weapons. On the question of the harder manual work Ruskin is just as cautious, and, intent on placating the workers’ agitations, he limits himself to reaffirming evasively the necessity of a ‘wise’, gratifying, honest and joyful work, distinct from one just ‘stupid’, only bringing about disorder and death. The second lecture, ‘Traffic’, which reverts to the architectonic and functional iron civilization,99 and attacks accordingly the civilization of ugliness, seems only apparently to move away from the sphere of economy and politics. Taste is a pleasure taken in good, perfect things that merit love (the paintings of Teniers are evoked as the ‘prolonged contemplation of a vile thing’). However, the political implications of such a conception of taste are that, once more, Ruskin suggests a rapprochement between the classes in the name of a criterion which is not really political: ‘when you have diffused your taste, where will your classes be? The man who likes what you like, belongs to the same class as you’. Contemporary art was emblematized in the erection of the Stock Exchange, a monument to the goddess of abundance that was only such for the privileged. The third lecture, ‘War’, is on a really different theme, and seems to launch the most provoking and scandalous of all Ruskin’s ideas, that great art is based on war. The great artistic civilizations drew vital lymph and topics for their artistic images from war, whereas the periods of peace have always coincided with the decline of the arts, and war and not peace has been the cradle of the great civil virtues. The spirit of war is not identified for Ruskin with the war of the masses with its gratuitous massacres, but with a ‘creative’ spirit, an energy and an obstinacy that found expression in a ‘game’ as beautiful as it was fatal. Ruskin means the conquest of evil, the defence of a good cause or an offensive war between elect champions of a nation, not between 99 ‘You have at present in England only one art of any consequence – that is, ironworking. You know thoroughly well how to cast and hammer iron’.

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armies of poor peasants thrown into the battle willy-nilly. Nostalgia for the chivalrous ages and for the single combat animates these pages, and this combat is always Homeric or medieval in spirit, that is the on-looker is a lady who has inspired it and at its conclusion gives the prize to the winner and hero. This is not, therefore, an apology of war, and much less of a war of expansion of an oppressive tyranny. According to Ruskin, the modern British soldier had to model himself on this defender of the rights of the weak, and defender of the nation not simply because it was his duty. 6. Munera pulveris (of 1872, and made up of six chapters deriving from four essays that had appeared in magazines ten years before) also implacably attacks Mill’s theories. Ruskin takes up his own theory that wealth is what is intrinsically worth and has no truck with other false values; nor does it consist in an enforced need or in a good of hardly any or no usefulness. He fights, besides, against every false concept of self-productive wealth not put at the service of the community. All economic systems had to answer to the aim of extending, defending and comforting human life; and whatever does not concur with this aim lies outside the range of economy rightly intended; the goodness in a good is intrinsic and not relative, or the fruit of particular historical circumstances. The constitutive factors of work and of commerce are examined within the framework of the absolute honesty of the parts involved, of a right profit firmly kept distinct from surplus, which is synonym for usury. Political proposals that are new, but impractical, are put forward by Ruskin regarding the reduction of the ‘mechanical’ quotient of work. Criminals had to be sent to the furnaces as punishment, and some of the manual agricultural work ought to be taken on, as a form of compensation, by the intellectuals. Munera pulveris is by and large the most technical of all of Ruskin’s writings on economy. The first paragraphs consist of the entries of a ‘reference dictionary’, and even in its development the discussion takes up some of the classic terms of economy, but redefined and emptied of the meaning they have in Mill, in particular, and in the other political economists of his school. Ruskin even parodies Mill’s neoclassical and frozen elegance in examining the quite similar case studies of the violations of liberty and of the systems of government. The argumentative result ends by being the contrary. Ruskin is after all elastic concerning the forms of government, provided each one consists of wise and noble men appointed to safeguard the common good. He rejects the epithet ‘sentimental’ coined

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for his economy, but in fact earnestly appeals to Dickens’s ‘heart’ from which alone the sharing of wealth can gush forth. Socialists had not managed and would fail to wipe out the tendency that pushes man to greed.100 Munera pulveris has left disappointed and perplexed more than one estimator of Ruskin and of Ruskin as a political thinker. It is even more prolix and more wandering than any other of his books, but, together with The Cestus of Aglaia, it presents the premonitory symptoms of the free mythological arabesque. He finds the final support of an argumentation by going off at a tangent that leads towards an anagogic interpretation. Usury is attacked on the basis of extravagant references to Homeric and Dantesque passages and far-fetched and decidedly exoteric speculations. The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest are introduced abruptly and largely without any need to demonstrate that they foreshadow the opposition between the laws of charity and usury, and the ab aeterno distinction between free and enslaved spirits.101 7. Time and Tide, written in 1867, announces the genre of Ruskin’s major work of his second phase, Fors Clavigera, which will be a great, virtual collection of ‘open letters’ having as their subjects all that passes through the writer’s mind. Indeed Fors Clavigera will be a farrago of thoughts, fancies, instant reflections written on the spur of the moment because otherwise they would be forgotten, as also small and banal comments on news items that are interpreted by pointing out, disconsolately, indignantly or severely, their moral lesson. Those of Time and Tides, like the ones of Fors, are only falsely realistic; they are, rather, refined and formalized, and we easily detect the same veneer of parody found in the epistolary novel made up of letters written by only one of the two counterparts. The twenty-five letters of Time and Tide were written in the wake of the workers’ agitation for the electoral reform in 1867, and they were actually sent to a ‘cork-cutter’ by an ‘old friend’ of his same class, whose role was that of the prompter. The aim with which they were written was that of soothing and ennobling the worker, of 100 The defence of slavery is explicitly made against Mill and assents to Carlyle. The invective against the North American Unionists is the clearest of the echoes to contemporary events. There was, on the other hand, a slow return to dandyism and a rush at investments in superfluous expenses like fashionable clothing. 101 Extravagant and acrobatic allusions are found in the names of Shakespeare’s characters: Portia is Portion, and, therefore, the Wheel of Fortune; a chain of imaginative derivations goes from ‘cher’ to ‘caritas’ to ‘carus’ and, finally, to ‘cheerful’.

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co-opting him in political power, and making him a more highly integrated and more equally treated element of the social spectrum. This is what Arnold was trying hard to do in this same period in his best-known political book.102 Ruskin himself classifies these letters, significantly, as ‘against anarchy’, adding that they were an answer to a situation of unease that could not be resolved, but only mitigated (Ruskin never contemplates, for all the possible concessions he makes, the elimination of class boundaries). The education of the workers, therefore, is warmly recommended as a means not for climbing the social ladder but for gaining esteem and that same respect and reverence as was due to those above them. A greater wealth and well-being would give the workers the loisir necessary to become lovers of the liberal arts; and the standard of living had to be improved starting from their entertainments, Ruskin venting all his sarcasm against their present vulgarity and degradation.103 In the meantime, the worker had to be assigned a place coherent with his natural aptitudes or formative circumstances, which would have helped him to complete his rise to nobility. The working classes, anxious to enter Parliament with their own representatives, are reminded by Ruskin that they had no ideas to sponsor, were unprepared for parliamentary debates, and would have been overcome by the rules of the game. The aristocracy, dissuaded from exploitation, is finally recalled to its responsibility as political guide. As a good leader, or an enlightened and paternal king, the capitalist is authorized to keep his profits, but he should pay salaries according to the rank and even to the sudden and unforeseen necessities of the workers.104

102 §§ 167–8. 103 Gustave Doré had recently illustrated and disparaged the Bible with rather obscene vignettes; in the London theatres a show of Ali Baba was put on where the actresses, young girls, smoked on the stage. In the case of Eyre, the repressive Governor of Jamaica, Ruskin agreed with Carlyle (§ 13.3), that is, he approved Eyre’s conduct because it was necessary to keep public order. With regard to the American Civil War, Ruskin declares himself in favour of some form of slavery and, therefore, of slavery, but he is against the buying and selling of slaves. 104 The utopian disposition of the late marriages of the young female workers contemplates their celebrations according to collective rites that recall those of the brides in Santa Maria Formosa in the Venice felix of the Middle Ages, as remembered in The Stones of Venice (§ 54.3), and all the more so because these contemporary brides are given the very Ruskinian epithet of ‘rosières’.

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§ 58. Darwin and Darwinism* Without going back to Anaximander and Heraclitus, and to the eighteenth-century myth of the ‘ladder of life’ and of the ‘great chain of being’,1 evolutionism gained a more solid scientific basis in the early years of the nineteenth century with the biological theories of Lamarck – who discovered in the environment the necessity for change in the organs and reassessed the laws of adaptation – and with the catastrophism of Cuvier. The latter was practically the equivalent of an anti-evolutionism, as it derived from the assumed discontinuity of the history of the earth, broken up by cataclysmic revolutions decreed by supernatural interventions, that is new creations after complete destructions of life. Such a doctrine spread under the name of ‘special’ o ‘exceptional creation’, and seemed to postulate a God incapable or unwilling to remedy the damages he himself had caused.2 Actually, it had been thought out as just one of the few and simplest attempts to reconcile the evidence of the new geological discoveries with the biblical story of Creation. Such theories were taken up and contested, especially the latter, by the English naturalists Charles Lyell and Robert Chambers in their books Principles of Geology and Vestiges of Creation (the first in three volumes between 1830 and 1833, the second in 1844). Lyell combated the creationists and the catastrophists with his own theory of uniformity, that is of a slow and smooth evolution of the species. Chambers *

On the literary repercussions of Darwinism see L. Stevenson, Darwin Among the Poets, Chicago, IL 1932; L. J. Henkin, Darwinism in the English Novel 1860–1910, New York 1940; G. Roppen, Evolution and Poetic Belief: A Study in Some Victorian and Modern Writers, Oslo 1956; M. Peckham, ‘Darwinism and Darwinisticism’, in The Triumph of Romanticism, Columbia, SC 1970 (1st edn 1956), vol. I, 176–201; G. Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and NineteenthCentury Fiction, London 1983 (an early investigation into the linguistic and stylistic features of The Origin of Species); R. M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphors: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture, Cambridge 1985; G. Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction, Cambridge, MA 1988.

1

See BAUGH, vol. IV, 1299–1308, for the best available exposition of evolutionism in literary histories, and one on which much of this section is based. See § 50.1 for an echo of this theory in Ruskin, thus rather a Cuvierian.

2

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touched on the hypothesis of a system independent of divine creation, without excluding that man might come from a lower species. The books of Lyell and Chambers had widespread collateral repercussions, because by discussing the existence of extinct fossils they had woken a widespread anxiety concerning the future of the human species. In Memoriam by Tennyson, begun in the early 1830s, and Browning’s Paracelsus, of 1835, were the earliest poetical works to be influenced by these distressing and alarming questions raised by early evolutionism. After 1859 evolutionism became an essentially English speculative branch, and was called Darwinism or Darwinian evolutionism, owing to the publication in that year of the evolutionistic text, par excellence, of modernity, The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Darwin came from Shrewsbury and was the grandson of a poet and scientist who had carried out research on the mutability of the species, on the transformation of organisms and on the heredity of characters. As a student at Edinburgh and at Cambridge, Darwin was undecided whether to take up medicine or theology, and finally owed his vocation to his embarking as an unsalaried naturalist on the brig Beagle, bound to the South American seas to carry out cartographic and geodetic research. The crossing took five years, from 1831 to 1836, and resulted in the journal of a ‘naturalist’s voyage round the world’ printed in 1839. The incubation of the theory of natural selection lasted for about twenty years. It had loomed to him from the time when he had set out to circumnavigate the world. Having reached the Galápagos islands he had noticed that, with the same climatic and environmental conditions, the flora and the fauna had different aspects from island to island. Experiments carried out as a breeder in his own farm induced him to prematurely print a theory that had been independently devised in a shorter essay by another physiologist and naturalist, Alfred Russell Wallace, then on a voyage to the Tropics to collect fossils. The 1200 copies of the first edition of The Origin of Species were sold out on the very first day of its publication. What was then Darwin’s great merit? A Copernican, or Newtonian revolution, comparable to the discovery of the laws of gravity by Galilei. Darwin pushed aside the hypostasis of a human being placed ab aeterno at the top of creation in a static hierarchy of organic forms. In so doing he integrated Lamarck, both because variation is for Darwin indefinite, and because the change that takes place in the

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environment may, but may not correspond to a change in the individual. Natural selection was suggested to him by Malthus, as he openly admitted, because Darwin established the principle that variations depend on the struggle for life, with the consequent extinction of the type or the species that does not encounter favourable environmental conditions.3 Immediately after the publication of Darwin’s book other scientists began to adjust his theory and to enlarge upon the daring corollaries that were implicit in it. It was actually Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), with his book Man’s Place in Nature, who picked out in 1863 the most scandalous and revolutionary of the clauses in evolutionism, man’s derivation by degrees from the lower species. The rapidity with which this deduction took on was due to the fact that it had already been secretly weighed up at least since the appearance of the early studies on fossils by Lyell and Chambers. Huxley’s book is in fact an exhaustive review of the available documentation regarding such subhuman species from 1600 onwards. The following work by Darwin in 1871, The Descent of Man, pushed on an open door, as Huxley had already held a public and successful lecture on evolution at Oxford, and written various successive essays on the closeness, as a minimum, of the human structure to that of the more evolved primates. But Darwin’s was a more authoritative, more definite, and more peremptory voice in affirming the ‘descent of man from some form of inferior organization’. The fundamental extension provided by The Descent of Man lies in the demonstration of not only physical but also physiological, mental and moral isomorphism between man and animal. 2. In The Origin of Species Darwin attends to a patient, eased, relaxed explanation and classification of his experimental findings. He lacked the vocation of the popularizer and the strong temperament of the romantic champion willing to fight for an idea; he was, in fact, rather sickly and lived as a recluse on a farm in Kent, leaving challenges to others. The legendary diatribe between Darwin and religion, which lasted almost half a century, was not sparked off by Darwin, who querulously admitted that he struggled to discover a providential design in the evolution of the universe, but was 3

Russell (HWP, 697) comments that Darwin derives natural selection, widening it, from the economics of the radical philosophers.

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unable to find it. The term ‘agnostic’ was bandied around by its inventor Huxley, grandfather to Aldous the novelist and son of Cardinal Newman’s primary school teacher in the London suburb of Ealing. Huxley’s career ran parallel to Darwin’s, but he did not have his regular education and was self-taught. He too had been employed on ships in scientific expeditions; once back home he became an untiring public speaker who, echoing Spencer, longed to impress the importance of science on education. An exuberant and versatile writer, he was always rather prolix and vague, but capable, in a few extravagant exempla, to show his potential talent. The memorable dialectic clash in 1860 with the Anglican Bishop of Oxford – Samuel Wilberforce, who, having scornfully rejected from his point of view the descent of man from the animals, was in his turn the victim of a killing reply – gave Huxley the nickname of Darwin’s ‘bulldog’. From then on Huxley wrote many essays on evolution and science, and gave dozens of lectures that repeatedly reverted to the structural gap existing between a gorilla and a chimpanzee on one side and man on the other, which was less marked than that between the first two and other inferior species of monkeys. The anatomic, osteological and vertebral similarities between man and monkey were cautiously said by Huxley to lead not to an absolute certainly but to a probability of a descent from structurally inferior forms. With Evolution and Ethics (1893) Huxley came to intuit the boomerang that was latent in Darwin’s system of evolution. The evolutionary process was contrary to the advancement of civilization and also to the existence of the moral sense, and had to be fought; man had to battle with all his strength and make an effort to remain human, dedicating himself to helping his neighbour. Huxley, who was also a lukewarm supporter of feminism, fought to get Darwin’s body into Westminster, but was against the same honour being offered to George Eliot, because one thing was freedom of thought and another, completely different, was moral laxity. 3. Darwin spends many pages, in an independent chapter in his autobiography, to reconstruct his slow approach to agnosticism and the clear opposition, from his point of view, between the myth of creation narrated in the Bible and the data obtainable from scientific observation. The law of natural selection was accepted by some contemporaries without any problem, but by many others with a mixture of anguish and astonishment,

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both because it established almost for certain that man had evolved from inferior forms, and because, with the support of the latest discoveries of other sciences like astrophysics and thermodynamics, it seemed to turn upside down the traditional finalities and the eschatology of the cosmos. This latter, fearsome eventuality was, on the other hand, joyfully greeted by the neo-Apocalyptics, who felt the end of the world to be at hand, and with it Christ’s ‘second coming’. In short, there was a euphoric but also acritical acceptance of Darwin, because that theory, if true, could be a new nihilist and existentialist philosophy – and, as Nietzsche said, a certificate of death in advance for mankind. The process by means of which a substantially romantic theory that hypothesized a progress towards ever more prodigious targets, could change into its opposite, was due to an objection that called for a different unity of measure in the historical perspective. Chance and imperceptible mutations would have needed times far longer than those postulated, or necessary, according to Darwin, for the origin of species. Furthermore, the earth, according to Lord Kelvin’s objections, would have a limited life due to its increased cooling and to the dispersion of solar energy. The fin-de-siècle apocalypticism was the reverse side of Darwin’s optimistic prophecy of the biological perfection of ‘every physical and intellectual gift’, and of the certainty of a ‘future of incalculable length’. As if this were not enough, Darwin proclaims in the final words of The Origin of Species that man, having come from an inferior species, was on his way to becoming a superman due to natural selection and the struggle for life, and was destined to a ‘progress towards perfection’ of all his ‘corporeal and mental endowments’. But on the other side of this triumphalism comes the reminder that ‘natural selection acts by life and death, by the survival of the fittest, and by the destruction of the less well-fitted individuals’. Just as periodical is the reminder of the erosion and of the definitive elimination of intermediary species overcome in the struggle for life, and therefore of the implacable and destructive action of every trace of certain species on the part of nature. Darwin’s natural selection constitutes an alternative to Carlyle’s theory of the hero, on which it throws a kind of ice-cold shower because man, of semi-divine birth for Carlyle, is made to ascend from the animal species. At the same time, it destroys a cultural hypostasis, of a man deified and master of the universe, one that had been shaped and had

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had currency since fifteenth-century humanism.4 The automatic corollary to this is the deposition of God, or of a creating divinity, replaced by an anthropomorphic and demiurgic nature endowed with a directional and discretional ability for genetic programming. 4. In the ecclesiastical circles the Broad Church supported Darwin’s theory since the publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860, and not all the orthodox believers turned away from it. It was Huxley who corrected the current opinion – that evolutionism was irreducibly antagonistic to religion – and who insisted that evolutionism left things, as far as the Creator was concerned – and the old demonstrative proofs of the existence of God – exactly as they were, and that the Nature of the evolutionists was not necessarily against the ideals of justice and equality. Newman’s armistice with evolutionism stemmed from the basic axiom that religion was not required to give any rejoinder. For him the Christian, as well any other revealed faith, was not expected to adjust its own truths to that and to all the other future hypotheses put forward by science; nor was it sensible to expect the Bible to have spoken the language of evolutionism and of all the other future sciences. In other words, Newman said, it was science that had to adapt itself to faith and not vice versa. Ruskin, as has already been mentioned, distanced himself, horrified, from Darwin, while Kingsley pointed at the ‘missing’ or ‘transitional’ link, which Darwin and his followers had been unable to prove. Kingsley’s twofold objection was in fact that while admitting that man comes from the monkey, the monkey is not man and has not man’s perfect brains, but only a series of instincts, and that, therefore, there is an inexplicable saltus between them. Darwin did not underestimate the problem, but imputed the lack of evidence to the fact that the intermediate species – inasmuch as they were unsuited to the struggle – had become extinct and had not then left any trace of themselves, not even as fossils. The more fervent and daring spiritualists, often Catholic, later intuited the possible and painless mediations of evolutionism. Hopkins wrote at least one sonnet that was clearly evolutionist, wheeling around, as it does, the

4

Beer 1983 (see in particular 51–7) insists on this, showing Darwin’s difficulties in using a language by definition anthropocentric.

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metaphor of the Heraclitean fire that makes everything permanently fluid, even if it is a movement having the Resurrection as its goal. Concerning the unbiased reception of evolutionism by the world of religion – and neglecting the complex developments of evolutionist thought from then until today – at least one of its outgrowths will be Bergson’s spiritualism and another the specifically mystic and Christological one of Teilhard de Chardin. In the historical immediacy the doctrine of the modification of the species – or rather of a mutation that had already taken place – and of the continuous progress of creation was held as an auspicious form of cultural mediation by the socialist, radical and Marxist ideologies. Marx had half a mind to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin. At the same time, however, evolutionism, like a double-bladed weapon, by foreseeing that the reward would go to the craftiest, strongest, and most highly endowed with initiative, could seem an analogical acceptance of middle-class commercialism,5 of the pitiless law of a free market and of the most cynical competition.6 Insofar as it seemed to foreshadow the supremacy of the strongest, it was also easy to postulate a cruelly eugenic nature, and to derive therefrom the programmed elimination of the weak, of the undefended, and of the imperfect. Orwell maintained that a dangerous distinction between the superior and the inferior races came into existence, one that would come to an end only as a result of the terrible atrocities of Nazism. He accused Darwin of having been the first to suggest a kind of racial mysticism and to have ‘played’ with a cult of northern Arianism much like that of Hitler.7

5 6

7

OCE, vol. IV, 46. This is a competition that is even sexual and erotic, analogically described in the animal kingdom in the fourth chapter of The Origin of Species, especially referring to cockerels and using euphemistically, but with an unmistakable echo, the term ‘vigorous male’. On the Victorian and Darwinian myth of fecundity, see Beer 1983, 123–5. P. Tort, Darwin et le darwinisme, Paris 2014, argues that the first to falsify Darwin was Spencer, who derived a primitive kind of eugenics from the theory of natural selection. Tort’s defence of Darwin is intended to free him of all falsification and future exploitation: he was neither eugenist, nor racist, nor neo-Malthusian, nor imperialist, nor a supporter of slavery, but an enemy of all these labels.

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5. Attempts have been made to make of Darwin’s evolutionism one of the keys, if not tout court the key of English literature in the nineteenth century, and of 1859 an epochal watershed. Hence literary Darwinism competes today for primacy with other totalizing foundations like gender, feminism, Freudianism or the anxiety of influence. It must be premised that even before 1859 – but even after, for example in Meredith – English writers and poets shared an often romantic evolutionism of a teleological nature.8 After 1859, undoubtedly, some novels and poems were written in the direct and declared wake of The Origin of Species, and by writers who knew Darwin’s work well and were knowingly engaged in observing its operations. George Eliot, who knew Spencer personally, uses recurrently and purposely words that belong to the evolutionist vocabulary, and the celebrated metaphor of her invention – the ‘web’ in Middlemarch – may be considered as an echo of Darwin’s notion of the close relation of the forms of organic life.9 Other works, such as Kingsley’s and Butler’s, were written as polemical, conservative reactions, and in the modes of novels of imagination and of fairy-tales, with descriptions of metamorphoses of men into animals and of animals into men, and with examples of prehistoric, embryonic and regressive life. Darwin’s ‘plots’ mean that science and its hypotheses enter into the field of the novel, such as in those of the later Wilkie Collins, with his doctors, scientists and wizards, or in the very early science fiction with its genetic experiments, and in the reprise – but much later than our watershed, 1870 – of the myth of Frankenstein.10 The reconstruction of the spontaneous correspondences – often unwitting and, at times, even denied – between the Darwinian picture and nineteenthcentury literature and of their related weight, has been more arduous and arbitrary. A provoking essay by Morse Peckham insisted on the fluidity of

8

See Peckham 1970 (in particular 187), who justly emphasizes that many works recognized as Darwinian, such as some by Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne, were written without any conscious references to Darwin, or misunderstanding his theories. 9 This point is developed by Beer 1983. 10 The first chapter of The Origin of Species on the ‘variation under domestication’, where cattle breeders experiment so as to get more highly prized animals, contains the prophecy of modern genetic engineering and of programmed embryos.

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Darwin’s text, which went through notable textual emendations in the various editions, and on the need to distinguish the objective datum from opinions and misunderstandings, and concluded that The Origin of Species ‘has had a much minor impact than other orientations’.11 The interest of the nineteenth-century novel in the family, in hereditary and legal questions and in the verification of descent, or in the search for lost parents and for their ‘origin’ by orphans, is of course linked to narrative realism; and the interconnection, the interdependence, and the multifocal structure – the choral form, in antithesis to that with a single character as protagonist – are also conventions of the serial.12 § 59. Spencer In his autobiography (posthumous in 1904) Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) confessed he had read with disappointment mixed with gratification The Origin of Species by Darwin in 1859. It had showed him that he had been mistaken in thinking that the sole cause of organic evolution was ‘the inheritance of functionally-produced modifications’, but he was happy to find that it remained a ‘partial cause’ which had to be linked to that of ‘the survival of the fittest’.1 Spencer, on the other hand, never hid his having purposely avoided enquiring into the origin of life,2 even though, as will be seen, he devoted himself to an in depth study of its final destination. Evolution – in Spencer’s meaning, of a series of transformations of matter from stages of incoherent homogeneity to others of coherent heterogeneity, while movement accordingly transforms and reduces itself – was then established as a cosmic mechanism, a general key applied to human history, 11 12

Peckham 1970, 201. Some Darwinian traits in Victorian fiction highlighted in the bulky book by Levine 1988 are, in Dickens’s plots, the interrelations between the characters, the energy of pulsating life, the inclusion in it of the atypical; in Trollope’s, the adaptation of the misfits and the unpredictable action of chance in the choice of husbands and wives.

1 2

Autobiography, London 1904, vol. II, 57. In the essay ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’ (1857), the law of the passing from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous is however traced, following the German biologist von Baer, in the development of the embryo and in the growth of the sun from a great and undifferentiated nebula.

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and one suitable for relating every branch of knowledge and every event of common and organized life. Evolution, thus understood, moved towards the final integration of all heterogeneities, up to the point in which, however, every once in a while and in a cyclical manner the solution would have passed into a dissolution. The colossal fatigue of Spencer were the ten volumes of a ‘system of synthetic philosophy’ that, though planned and announced in 1859, took over thirty years to complete. As an application of the principle of evolution to each particular science and branch of traditional philosophy – metaphysics, ethics, sociology, psychology, pedagogy and politics – this ‘course’ was a new summa of knowledge that no one had ever attempted in England since the times of Hobbes and Bacon.3 2. Born in Derby, his mother a Quaker and his father an evangelical school teacher, Spencer is a denial of the hereditary nature of character, at least since religious faith was not genetically transmitted to him, and far from becoming even more fervid it ended by being corroded. He did not go to university, but not because he was indigent, since one of his paternal uncles, a minister of the Church, who had educated him privately, would have been willing to finance his studies at Cambridge. He worked instead as an engineer in building the railway lines that in the early 1840s were expanding outwards from London to the mining districts.4 When he received an inheritance he left this work, moved to London and dedicated himself fully to the career of a writer. He worked as a reviewer and collaborator for magazines and in 1851 he met the young George Eliot, then sub-editor of the Westminster. The friendship that developed between them was platonic and Spencer, who never married, limited himself to advising her to switch to writing fiction and introduced her to her future partner, George Henry Lewes.5 Beatrice Webb, née Potter, the daughter of the president of

3

4 5

Systematic psychology has in Spencer the aim of studying the psychic life from inorganic forms to those organic, and also to see how the mind works, even in the field of art. There were for him in man a priori psychological forms that were however a posteriori in the species, and these came down to man from a preceding species that had acquired them empirically. The railway engineer is often found in contemporary fiction, as in Cousin Phillis by Mrs Gaskell (Volume 5, § 117.3). Volume 5, § 184.5.

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an important railway company, left a pleasant and lively twentieth-century biography of Spencer,6 and humorously showed his eccentricities, those of a clown with thousands of idiosyncrasies. 3. Until the end of the nineteenth century Spencer enjoyed unlimited prestige and as a philosopher was flattered and praised even in Russia. He provided a pseudo-philosophical version of the basic ideology of the industrialist, individualistic and pragmatic middle classes, for whose benefit a clever, unscrupulous, brilliant collage of various philosophical currents was concocted with hardly any original ideas. The apparent family of Spencer is that of the secular, liberal English thought of the nineteenth century, with its convinced tolerance for religion, though equally firm in its agnosticism. His ideal ‘party’ is that of Macaulay and Mill, the former a witness – though prematurely dead – of an evolutionism still in a free state, the latter an equally unflagging theoretician of progress. Spencer’s scornful view of the past, and the discrediting of primitivism, clashes – it must be repeated – with the positions of the primitivists and the medievalists, who upheld the opposite, that history progresses by regressing. The description of the great benefits brought to civilization by railways – partly dictated by a smug philistine taste –7 contradicts the nightmare of the ‘diabolical’ locomotive that tormented so many Victorians.8 The essay ‘What Knowledge Is of Most Worth’ (1859) establishes, or at least hopes for the primacy of science in a liberal curriculum of studies, which was still solidly based as in olden times on the classics and on mathematics. All of Spencer’s publications of a pedagogical nature aim at demonstrating how out of date a glorious educational system had become, and sets out the foundations – although the Christian socialists had already made use of such a curriculum in their schools for workers – for the technical college. All other kinds of knowledge had to be subordinated to this subject

6 7 8

Contained in My Apprenticeship (1926). With a similar argument Macaulay criticized Southey, saying all the good possible about the incalculable advantages of a mechanized civilization (§ 36.3). A comparison should be made between the praise of the practical advantages of the railway, at the end of Spencer’s essay ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’, and the visionary description of the train in The Cestus of Aglaia by Ruskin (§ 55.3 n. 83).

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matter, even that of the arts, both visual and musical.9 Amidst the various branches of applied and practical knowledge, and in the light of the idea of progress, Spencer’s pedagogy, which stigmatized and rejected corporal punishment for boys, favoured the prevention of criminal offences and the re-education of criminals, was influential in the reforms of prison legislation and was re-echoed by Charles Reade in his novels. Spencer’s ethics is a variation of utilitarianism, because it has its roots in the aim of creating the greatest happiness for all. This would have come about with an ‘absolute ethics’, a stage in which moral obligation is no longer felt as such. On the other hand, the comfortable, optimistic and easy conciliation, or the non-belligerence of faith and science, cures and stitches up the injuries of the Victorian period, and offers a mediation called for by generations and generations of doubters. Spencer’s Absolute, a ‘force’ that urges and presses from behind things,10 reformulates the old demonstration of the first principle in Paley’s natural theology, of which the English were well aware. But Spencer does not move on from there towards revealed religion. The two, parallel paths to the same mystery, those of faith and of science, led both to an insurmountable wall. Spencer was then crushed by the early Marxists who, on account of his political and evolutionist theories, saw in him a conservative philosopher who shored up a virtually unmodifiable status quo. Hardly less lenient was the opinion of liberal Catholics like Chesterton, who found him a co-founder of anarchy, and the author of ‘sacred books for a rising generation of rather bewildered rebels’.11 4. Spencer’s treatise of 1884, eloquently titled The Man ‘versus’ the State, is a rejoinder to Mill. It accuses state repression and advocates an authentic liberalism – not the present, degenerated one of the Liberal Party – as a means to limit the excessive and despotic power of Parliament. The object

9 10

11

Sesame and Lilies by Ruskin (§ 57.3) sounds like an implicit reply, of a rigidly antiscientist kind. The theory of the phenomenon as a manifestation of the Unknowable is a compromise that could well fit Carlyle as well as the transcendentalists. The sense of the mystery of nature could have been shared with Ruskin, but Spencer doubted that there is a key to penetrate it, whereas Ruskin found it in the Bible. VAL, 233–5.

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of the four chapters is militant, and therefore the language used is hyperbolic and somewhat provoking and sarcastic, while hard, lapidary sentences characterize the openings: ‘Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression and by aggression’; ‘The great political superstition of the past was the divine right of kings. The great political superstition of the present is the divine right of parliaments’. In other essays of political science, like ‘The Social Organism’, the discussion of the analogies between the organic kingdom and the historical evolution of political forms is as fanciful as an allegory. An essay that recalls in its title the more famous one by Mill,12 places itself in an even more extra-parliamentary position and contests the principle itself of the goodness inherent in a representative and democratic system. In this way, and by another road, Spencer reaches the same goal as Carlyle, as well as his indifferentism, in Shooting Niagara. More monarchic than democratic, and perhaps secretly a supporter of a monarchic absolutism, Spencer felt he had to write an essay of recantation addressed to those who, like Huxley, accused him of being an anarchic and to share the ideas of Proudhon: ‘I hold that within its proper limits governmental action is not simply legitimate but all-important’.

12

§ 43.3.

Part II 

The Poetry of the ‘Defectors’ from Oxford and Cambridge

§ 60. Barrett Browning* I: The deputy Poet Laureate Elizabeth Barrett’s (1806–1861) father published her first work in 1820 when all the major Romantic poets were still alive, and nearly half of her poetry was written and published by 1844 before she was forty. This was 1

*

Complete Works, ed. C. Porter and H. A. Clarke, 6 vols, New York 1900, repr. New York 1973, now superseded by The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. S. Donaldson, 5 vols, London 2010. Youthful works are gathered together in The Enchantress, and Other Poems, London 1913, in New Poems by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. F. G. Kenyon, London 1914, and in Hitherto Unpublished Poems and Stories, with an Edited Autobiography, ed. H. B. Forman, 2 vols, Boston, MA 1914. Separate edns of Sonnets from the Portuguese: ed. F. Ratchford and D. Fulton, New York 1950; ed. W. S. Peterson, Barre, MA 1977; ed. M. Wein Dow, Troy, NY 1980; of Casa Guidi Windows: ed. J. Markus, New York 1977; of Aurora Leigh: ed. G. B. Taplin, Chicago, IL 1979; ed. M. Reynolds, Athens, OH 1992 (the 1859 text). Aurora Leigh and Other Poems, ed. J. R. G. Bolton and J. B. Holloway, Harmondsworth 1995 (the 1856 text; the Sonnets from the Portuguese are reproduced according to the ms. version). Anthologies of poetry and prose are edited by A. Meynell, London 1925; by C. Ricks, Garden City, NY 1970; by M. Forster, Baltimore, MD 1988; Aurora Leigh and Other Poems, ed. C. Kaplan, London 1978; ed. P. Nye, Harlow 1999. The Brownings’ correspondence is being published, with sumptuous apparatuses, since 1984, in an edition of more than forty announced volumes, for the Wedgestone Press, Winfield, Kansas, ed. P. Kelley, R. Hudson and S. Lewis. Separate edns of the letters are The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. F. G. Kenyon, 2 vols, London 1898; The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–1846, 2 vols, London 1899 and, ed. E. Kintner, Cambridge, MA 1969 (a selection ed. D. Karlin, Oxford 1989). Letters to R. H. Horne, 2 vols, London 1876–1877; to her sisters, London 1929; to the Greek scholar Boyd, New Haven, CT 1955; to the painter Haydon, Cambridge, MA 1972; to M. Russell Mitford, 3 vols, London 1983. A biography in letters is P. Lubbock, Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Her Letters, London 1906. Diaries, ed. P. Kelley and R. Hudson, Athens, OH 1969, and ed. E. Berridge, London 1974. Life. Some titles, also referring to Browning, will be reincluded in his bibliography. L. Whiting, The Brownings: Their Life and Art, Boston, MA 1911; A. B. Nicati, Femme et poète: Elisabeth Browning, Paris 1912 (with abundant intercalary translations, among which that of all the Sonnets from the Portuguese); B. Benvenisti Viterbi, Elisabetta Barrett Browning, Bergamo 1913; O. Burdett, The Brownings, London 1928 (on the courtship of the two poets); I. Cooper Willis, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London 1928 (short, demythologizing monograph); I. C. Clark, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Portrait, London 1929; D. Creston, Andromeda in Wimpole Street: The

4/II The Poetry of the ‘Defectors’ from Oxford and Cambridge

a date by which Tennyson was only recently recognized as a significant poet with his 1842 collection, and Browning was practically unknown. So were Arnold, Clough and the Rossettis, all of whom were at early stages Romance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London 1929; L. S. Boas, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London 1930; V. Woolf, Flush, London 1933 (formally the biography of Barrett’s spaniel; a sharp, creative account of the years 1842–1854); F. Winwar, The Immortal Lovers, London 1950; B. Miller, Robert Browning: A Portrait, New York 1952 (contains a psychological portrait of Barrett); G. Artom Treves, Anglo-fiorentini di cento anni fa, Firenze 1953, 111–34 (on the Florence years); D. Hewlett, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London 1953 (the first fully documented biography); I. De Biasi Vitali, Vita di Elisabetta Barrett Browning, Milano 1955; G. B. Taplin, The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London 1957 and 1970 (fragmentary as a biography, but useful for the detailed story of Barrett’s reception and for the comparative criticism of the textual variants); D. Cowlin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London 1968; E. C. MacAleer, The Brownings of Casa Guidi, London 1979; M. R. G. Mander, Mrs Browning, the Story of Elizabeth Barrett, London 1980; C. Du Bos, Robert et Elizabeth Browning, ou la plénitude de l’amour humain, Paris 1982; D. Karlin, The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Oxford 1985; M. Meredith, Meeting the Brownings, New York 1986; M. Forster, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London 1988 (the most reliable and balanced biography, based on the enlarged edition of the letters and on the diaries); P. Dally, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Psychological Portrait, London 1989; J. Markus, Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, London 1996; M. S. Pollock, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning: A Creative Partnership, Aldershot 2003.  Criticism. F. Zampini Salazar, Roberto e Elisabetta Browning, Napoli 1896, and La vita e le opere di Roberto Browning ed Elisabetta Barrett-Browning, Torino-Roma 1907 (preface by Antonio Fogazzaro; a survey of the main works of the two poets with a lengthy anthology of their letters); G-M. Merlette, La vie et l’œuvre d’E. B. Browning, Paris 1905 (a massive critical and biographical study, with vast analyses of the poems); K. E. Royds, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Her Poetry, London 1912; O. Elton, The Brownings, London 1924; L. Pratesi, L’italianità nei canti di Elisabetta Browning, Rocca S. Casciano 1928; V. Woolf, TCR, Second Series, 202–13; M. H. Shackford, E. B. Browning; R. H. Horne: Two Studies, Wellesley 1935; C. Bax, The Poetry of the Brownings, London 1947; L. Iannattoni, E. B. Browning, con un saggio di bibliografia italiana, Firenze 1953; M. L. Giartosio de Courten, Ba (Elisabetta Barrett Browning), Firenze 1956 (a sympathetic, romanticized portrait devoting huge space to the correspondence); J. M. S. Tompkins, Aurora Leigh, The Fawcett Lecture 1961–1962; C. D. Abrahall, The Young Mrs Browning, London 1962; A. Hayter, A Poet’s Work and Its Setting, London 1962 (by far the best overview of

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of establishing audiences for their work. After 1844 Barrett published her most esteemed and most balanced work, Sonnets from the Portuguese, a collection following the guidelines of her future husband’s courtship. Only Aurora Leigh, her most imposing, but not her most continuous poem, nor her most valid aesthetically, was written after 1850. By then, Tennyson had reached and consolidated his position as the greatest English living poet, Browning had attained success with Men and Women, and, after the poetic overcrowding in the years 1849–1850, both Clough and Arnold Barrett’s poetry to date; highly readable, it is most alert to the stylistic, technical, thematic and political aspects of the poetry; finds Barrett’s greatness in the short poems while judging the two alleged masterpieces failures) and, abridged, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London 1965; M. J. Lupton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Long Island 1972; V. Radley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Boston, MA 1972; E. Moers, Literary Women, Garden City, NY 1976, passim (Aurora Leigh in the context of the emerging women’s literature); Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, ed. S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, Bloomington, IN 1979; P. Colaiacomo, ‘“Ancor non t’ho detto che t’amo”. Il discorso d’amore di Elizabeth Barrett Browning’, in Come nello specchio. Saggi sulla figurazione femminile, Torino 1981, 11–27; S. M. Gilbert, ‘From “Patria” to “Matria”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Risorgimento’, PMLA, 99 (1984), 194–211 (a fundamental essay of a systematic feminist approach, which will be discussed below); S. S. Agajanian, ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ and the Love Sonnet Tradition, New York 1985; A. Leighton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London 1986 (selective textual readings from a rigorously Freudian and feminist standpoint, to illustrate a poetics ‘centred on the father’), and ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’, in Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart, Harvester 1992, 78–117; D. David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Ithaca, NY 1987; H. Cooper, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Woman and Artist, Chapel Hill, NC 1988; D. Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry, Chicago, IL 1989 (feminist-oriented reader’s guide with special emphasis on the unpublished poems); G. Stephenson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Poetry of Love, Ann Arbor, MI 1989; M. Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London 1995; L. M. Lewis, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Spiritual Progress, Columbia, SC and London 1998; Critical Essays on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. S. Donaldson, New York 1999; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. H. Bloom, Philadelphia, PA 2001; S. Avery, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tavistock 2011; M. C. Martinez, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh’, Edinburgh 2012. Journals dedicated to the life and works of the Brownings are: Browning Newsletter, Studies in Browning and His Circle, Browning Institute Studies (1971–1990) and Browning Society Notes.

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had become known, as had the Pre-Raphaelites. It is no coincidence that Elizabeth Barrett, who had been jokingly nominated in her family circle ‘Poet Laureate of Hope End’, lost that title by just a hair’s breadth in 1850, when Tennyson became the real, national Poet Laureate. Barrett then debuted slightly earlier than any other poet her contemporary, and for this reason it is necessary to deal here with her at length before introducing Tennyson and Browning, and instead of confining her – as is usual in literary histories – to an obligatory appendix following the discussion of her husband. This decision is supported also by the fact that she is the most visible and closest descendant of Romanticism. Her life as it unfolded had much in common with those of the Romantics, naturally with a change of sex which, however, was never felt by her to have any weight. She died young, her passionate love of freedom being almost a concomitant cause, in poetic terms, with her death; she burned for Greece and Italy, and she was an exile in that same land where Byron had lived for many years and where Keats and Shelley had died. She made her name as a Romantic visionary, with imitations of the great nineteenth-century libertarian odes. For her ‘the poet’ was and continued to be the poet-patriot perishing under the blows of tyranny. Such were Byron, the Spaniard Riego, or Rhigas Pheraios, the translator into Greek of the Marseillaise who was shot by the Turks in Belgrade; or, belonging to a genealogy later enriched by new stimuli coming from the Italian Risorgimento, Victor Hugo, Silvio Pellico, or the less well-known Laura Savio. At the same time, for Barrett poetry satisfied a Romantic, hungry need and was the answer to an imperious vocation, a sacred fire that made life and poetry indissolubly one and the same. Barrett’s periodical mythopoeic poems up to 1844 and beyond depict a poet acting in a milieu even more hostile than that of the Romantics, as he sings of what is beautiful and good to an imperceptive mankind, as if he were a mouthpiece through which God speaks. Barrett’s ‘poet’ is thus an intermediary between the visible and the invisible, and to this invisibility, precluded to other mortals, her lifted eyes are always turned. The book of nature opens wide to this poet – always typologically male – in an uninterrupted series of flashes of the divine, without no echoes whatsoever of the laments over the ‘hidden God’ of Tennyson, Browning, Clough and Arnold. It is a hypostasis, therefore, of the biblical God speaking directly

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to the heart of each man. Like most Romantics, Barrett was early familiar with the mystics and the spiritualists, and she was not only, with Patmore, among the enthusiastic followers of Swedenborg, but she had a singular and morbid attraction for the séance, for the enquiry into the beyond and the links between life and the afterlife. But destiny does not look benignly on such a poet, because the world rejects him, only to bewail him when it is too late. Barrett’s poet is always by definition young, and always dies young. The poems of 1844 already show a youthful poet that, limited and still incomplete, is destined to overreach himself. As Arnold did in ‘Resignation’,1 Barrett claims for the poet a wide knowledge, which means knowledge not only of beauty but also of pain, whose emblems are those of Calvary and Christ crucified. On the basis of the 1844 collection Barrett’s poetry could be defined as a poetry which displays the curse of living. It is a poetry of resignation and of the awareness of a blight that is the inheritance of man, a kind of disconsolate arpeggio on life as a kingdom of pain and on the transitoriness of human things – which also includes (a theme touched on at the same time by Patmore)2 the form that is the most deceptively resistant, the faithfulness of two lovers. The complete and euphoric reconciliation of the private with the public sphere came about in Aurora Leigh, in many ways to be considered a paradigmatic work even though it appeared rather late in the transition from Romanticism to Victorianism. The enquiry into the meaning and the efficacy of poetry in an age where transformative action was imperative, as was the battle against iniquity and privilege, finally produces a subversive poetry that works against injustice and ready to fight in favour of the poor and proletarian classes in England and elsewhere, and of the oppressed in nations not yet independent. The pivot of this turnabout is ‘The Cry of the Children’ (1843), a poetic manifesto of strong civil and militant inspiration against the exploitation of children in the mines. Poetry was for Barrett still able to transform the world; and the faith in such reforming and palingenetic

1 2

§ 152.7. § 171.2–3.

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action is the conclusion of the passionate debates between Romney Leigh and Aurora Leigh in the homonymous poem. 2. Edgar Allen Poe, Barrett’s most clear-sighted contemporary interpreter along with Patmore, had confusedly remarked,3 with a typical example of his pedantic and involute prose, that she was, right up to 1844, and together with Tennyson, the link with one of the facets of English Romanticism. With Shelley, Poe said, she shared an uncontrolled lyricism, the fire of ideas condensed on the page and the daring of thought and expression. In more recent times it has been better ascertained and documented that, in advance of Tennyson, she inaugurated a renewal of Victorian poetic techniques;4 and that, in the impossibility to establish a definite priority,5 Barrett and Tennyson had at least proceeded with the same speed on their independent walk. Be it as it may, the two poets share in their exordia the same inventive ease, an extreme linguistic care, and even a refined cultivation of the eccentric or coined word. Prosodically they exhibit the same variety of rhythms and metres, and a flexibility of genre ranging from the ‘vision’ to the ballad full of colour and archaisms, and from the sonnet to the long narrative poem. They have themes in common: funereal melancholy, visionary mysticism and the rediscovery of medieval chivalry with its tales of love, devotion and death. This is the same pre-Romantic genre of Scott and Coleridge, that of the romance or ‘romaunt’, of the ‘lay’ and the ‘rime’, of the narrative ballad with strong elements of stylization to be found in the refrains, in the rituals, and in the atmospheres. In Barrett, as in Tennyson, there is also, as a recurring metaphor for the sterile solipsism of the artist, the motif of the trapped woman and of her meeting with the world, coinciding with her acceptance of its seducing but fatal call. However, Barrett handles such themes less effectively than Tennyson because she is inclined to be diffusive and to accumulate stylistic devices as an end in themselves. And yet it is also true that some at least of these medieval ballads, whose cycle closes formally in 1844, stand up to comparison with Tennyson’s and can be easily considered 3 4 5

In an essay of 1845, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’. Hayter 1962, 37–57. Barrett always denied receiving any direct influence from Tennyson’s poetry.

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as their rivals. The appearance of these ballads gave her a widespread and clamorous contemporary popularity, fed by the myth of her being a ‘recluse’, and, as such, invisible, whose contacts with the outside world were only through letters. The Pre-Raphaelites idolized her and included her in 1849 in a ‘List of Immortals’. Ruskin’s admiration was immediate, as was Swinburne’s, and, on the other side of the ocean, Emily Dickinson’s, a kind of twin. The verdicts of these admirers are still valid today, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning is, with Christina Rossetti, not only the greatest English woman poet of the nineteenth century, second only to Dickinson, but also the third greatest English poet within the timespan from 1820 to 1850. A revisionist twentieth- and twenty-first-century sensibility has ended up overturning many features of Barrett’s poetry that were criticized in their day as deplorable flaws, and finding them lucid and daring anticipations.6 Barrett had in fact been the victim of nineteenth-century linguistic purism, which had already reached its peak with the academic and minute criticisms of Poe’s review, targeting the artificial and mannered lexicon, the grammatical violations and neologisms which he could not find recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. Long-standing complaints about her work were grounded in the presumed slovenliness and imperfection of her rhymes, usually admissible only for comic and occasional poetry. Was she not, though, breaking with the past and escaping from being trapped within a particular generic identity? The criticism that rehabilitated Barrett is the same that after 1918 gradually discovered Hopkins almost on the basis of the same requisites. It was a criticism that, having shelved the canon of metrical correctness and that of claritas no less than that of concinnitas, turned to appreciate the opening up of forms, controlled obscurity and verbal creativity.7 If Barrett has been forgotten until fairly recently – removed from the high quarters of the palace and confined to the servants’ rooms,

6

7

Marked disagreements are still possible today, and may be incidentally proved by the space given to Barrett in anthologies. In the Oxford Anthology a bare ten-line, rather negative introduction is followed by just one poem, while in the Norton Anthology a two-page introduction precedes a fairly wide selection of poems. Apart from Hopkins, Dylan Thomas has also been frequently named for the acrobatic rhymes (see Hayter 1962, 46).

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to use Virginia Woolf ’s witty metaphor – it is due to reasons, or rather to misunderstandings and prejudices, which are valid for many other poets of the period, but also inherent in all or a great part of the second phase of Barrett’s poetry. The modernists could not refuse to take up a position of firm detachment from the posturings of a rather superficial Romanticism and from a contradictory and at times ambiguous liberalism, evident, above all, in the passionate support she gave to Napoleon III’s politics. Barrett was for the whole of her life, as her denigrators kept repeating, a hypochondriac with extravagant manias, like that of wanting to dress her own son as a girl. For more intrinsically poetic reasons, she fell into disgrace on account of the often incongruous didactics and the excessive use of rhetoric especially in her late poetry. These denigrators were not completely wrong, because both Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh, though rich in subtle ideological proposals, are, from an aesthetic point of view, unsatisfying works, and in some way failures. 3. Despite such reservations, Elizabeth Barrett Browning – who, if one must give credence to her alter ego Aurora Leigh, cultivated the dream of a second nationality, giving herself a very pious and common Italian, or rather Florentine, mother –8 became in Italy the most widely known English writer and the most revered in the century. Italy, on the whole, was grateful to her while alive and for a long time after her death, due to the warm, passionate moral support given to the cause of Italian independence, especially in the songs and patriotic lyrics collected in Poems before Congress and in the very last few poems posthumously published. A dozen or so biographical and critical studies, often massive, and centred on the poet and her husband in a romanticized joint examination –9 are incunabula that revel in the legendary. Undisciplined and full of inaccuracies they prove, together with numerous early translations, the vast, deep and pioneering interest that Barrett raised in Italian culture towards the end of 8 9

See § 71.4 on Aurora Leigh and the feminist interpretation of the ‘search for the mother’. Zampini Salazar 1907 led the way to a type of approach to the two poets that was simultaneous and parallel and was continued until the 1930s also in England and France: a biographical-critical study of the two poets united in an undividable whole.

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the century, and with a slightly lesser intensity for the whole of the first half of the twentieth. Towards the turn of the century books on Barrett were written, or translations from her works were made, mainly by women, or more precisely by the exponents of the national intelligentsia during King Humbert I’s reign, often marchionesses and countesses or high middle-class ladies. They saw in her a model of enlightened but not over-revolutionary feminism, one morally flawless and touching in its pureness and dedication, strongly militant in support of the ideal against the prevailing wave of secularization and materialism. From her late poetry, which celebrated the traditional values of love, family and patriotism, the Italians believed they could draw a lesson for the destiny of Italian poetry itself. The novelist Antonio Fogazzaro was the great champion of Elizabeth and Robert Browning and a tireless animator of studies and translations of Barrett’s works in the early years of the twentieth century. He greeted the ‘great and virile […] mysticism’ of the two poets, opposing it to ‘that hysterical mysticism, effeminate, Christianized but only in words, rather than in facts’ that had at that time, according to him, ‘its hour in art’.10 The anti-Victorian reaction of the early twentieth century, which was in fact a typically British and native phenomenon, had no reason to set in in Italy, and this explains, along with and apart from the patriotic debt, why Barrett’s fame lingered on. Towards the mid-twentieth century tender and nostalgic greetings could still be read, addressed to the recluse poet who had been snatched away and saved by Browning, though intermingled with inflexible and discriminating reassessments.11 § 61. Barrett Browning II: Beyond romance Throughout her adult life and career Barrett was both a poet and a wellread scholar. Her first ‘spiritual country’ was not Italy but Greece. Greek literature inspired her first poem that was not discarded. Her second, An Essay on Mind, vaunts an extravagant and encyclopaedic culture, and the 1833 collection came with an immature translation of Prometheus Bound 10 11

In Zampini Salazar 1907, xiv. See for the former Giartosio De Courten 1956, and for the latter the Preface by De Michelis to his translation of Sonnets from the Portuguese, Milano 1966.

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by Aeschylus, later completely redone. A long essay on the Christian Greek poets appeared in 1842 in a journal, together with an excursus on English poetry from the origins up to and beyond Romanticism. In 1844 she collaborated with the versatile Richard Hengist Horne in the compilation of a survey of contemporary English poets, a series of critical portraits in which the hand of one is undistinguished from that of the other. If, apart from her poetry, there is a second collateral activity worthy of being mentioned in Barrett, this is not translation, erudition, or literary criticism, but her letter-writing. Some critics have recently shifted the centre of gravity of Barrett’s oeuvre from her poetry to her letters, so that the alleged, declining interest in her poetry has been answered by a renewed and far deeper interest in her correspondence. Hers is above all one of the biggest collections of letters that have come down to us from the proverbially very prolific Victorian letter-writers. It is as various and polyphonic in its richness of correspondents and in its alternating registers, as others that, in poetry and in prose, writers of the eighteenth century and of the current day – Clough in Amours de Voyage and Patmore in The Victories of Love – were inventing and creating. Her appetite for words is satiated in letters that witness at the same time her desire to unveil herself and her urgent need to communicate, and in a form that was for her, a sickly recluse as she was, practically a substitution for the actual, physical meeting with the addressee. In her letters she could sound as garrulous and expansive as she was reserved, taciturn and almost self-effacing in her very rare personal contacts.12 Unlike Tennyson and Browning she was never a reticent correspondent. She poured herself out in her letters, and she had no objection to them being published and made known; indeed she wrote trusting that they might one day be perused and studied. Like all Victorian collections of letters these by Barrett form an invaluable ‘photographic’ document of the times, revealing as they do, according to her humour and to whom the letter was written, the daily, multicoloured Victorian life of comedy and tragicomedy. The courtship letters are embedded in this flow, like a poem, or a novel within a novel or within an epistolary poem. They cover more

12

Hayter 1962, 237.

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than 1,000 pages in the published edition in two volumes. These letters preceded or followed ‘only’ about ninety visits made by Browning to Barrett from January 1845 to September 1846, the date when, the two poets having become inseparable as bride and groom, they no longer exchanged even a note. If it is true, as has been said, that Barrett’s letters are an art work, this collection is one a fortiori. Its techniques and strategies are nowadays X-rayed and the whole body of letters is constantly restudied with all the attention worthy of the cult of a relic. The high-level aesthetic debate taking place in letter after letter has been enquired into and followed up, as if it were an ideal workshop for the poetry of both. Likewise, the dialectics, the skirmishes, the toing and froing of the attacks and the parried thrusts, worked out in a climate of unreachable subtleness, have been closely examined. On the part of Browning, who had been and would remain after these letters practically dumb, this subtleness often verged on those squirms that he himself called ‘convolvuli’. 2. One of the most harmful outcomes provoked by this correspondence, and deriving from the electrifying and suspenseful story that it encloses, has however been that of unwittingly feeding a mythologizing biographical industry that has conditioned, and often replaced, the critical investigation of Barrett’s poetic works themselves. From the earliest, appearing in 1888, there have been a number of biographies in rapid succession, all of them exasperatingly identical and, therefore, practically useless. They deal with the already known, only inspired by the glamour of the romantic figure of an invalid poet in exile. As could be expected such a canvas – only this, and closed in 1846 – tickled the interest of the theatre and the cinema. In 1930 the dramatist Rudolf Besier wrote a play with a Freudian background, and this pièce was then filmed in Hollywood. All biographies should stop at September 1846 and at the couple’s departure for the Continent following their marriage. After the poetry of childhood and of her reclusion, Barrett’s life was ruled by prose and routine,13 and included very few events of real interest. Its tired rhythm became that of meetings, holidays, and to-and-fro movements between Florence, Rome, London and Paris, only, 13

The only attempt made to get out of the impasse of the engagement and flight, and to enquire into their married life, is that of the biographer Markus 1996.

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if at all, revived by the misadventures and the escapades of the servants and the cooks. Virginia Woolf was quick to understand this and showed great skill when in 1933 she made use in Flush of an ingenious trick. Decentring Barrett’s biography she narrated it from the point of view of a dog, reducing Barrett’s life, in this way, to the six-year lifespan of that beloved animal. In the best of cases any account of the second half of Barrett’s life cannot but be based on the very testimony of the people who knew her, that is on ample extracts from the letters to and from them, provided with notes. The married happiness of the Brownings was authentic – a somewhat more brilliant copy of that of Coventry and Emily Patmore – and not one single attempt to destroy their myth has found real proof to the contrary, despite the repeated attempts that have been made, the discovery of new letters and the publication of the diaries. Nothing has come out from these that was not already known, or imagined, and they have left unquenched that thirst for sexual scandal which, for example, eventually sullied the record of the almost saintly Patmore.14 Basically, psychoanalysis has produced few results and these, badly used, have led to arbitrary deformations and distortions of the personality of the poet.15 A ‘psychological portrait’ constructed by a psychiatrist16 on the basis of a youthful poem – which is, as will be seen, undoubtedly enigmatic and disquieting – has raised more questions than it has solved. 3. Over the past few decades Barrett has been a hunting field for feminist criticism, and even now she is being very closely monitored by a group of specialists who have contributed to a shifting of critical perspectives on her and, at the same time, to re-animating the interest in her poetry by giving new impetus to a debate considered by many as virtually closed. These scholars have repositioned Barrett’s poetry in the canon as one of the basic nineteenth-century chapters in the history of feminism, together with the novels of the Brontë sisters and the poetry of Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson. The reverse side of this criticism is nevertheless that it sometimes reduces her poetry to a simple document of, and instrument 14 § 172.6. 15 As in Miller 1952. 16 Dally 1989.

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for, the advancement of the rights of women, such as Barrett would never have her art to be considered. In the chorus of nineteenth-century women writers, Barrett certainly committed herself against the women’s subalternity and supported the struggle for equality and the right for a woman to have her say.17 The feminist critics themselves have however admitted that her poetics did not contemplate distinctions of gender, that she knowingly wanted to belong to a male tradition in the name of a role that does not recognize sexual polarities, and that she held herself in such sense to be a Poet, not a ‘poetess’.18 The mechanism that governs Barrett’s poetry and especially Sonnets from the Portuguese is, as will be seen, the exchange of genders, a modality of adaptation and of appropriation of the erotic, male literary tradition. Barrett’s first important scholar concluded that she was a sui generis, mild feminist, who maintained that the role of woman should be and should continue to be the usual one, and that there was nothing in it that substantially needed changing.19 4. A much more useful approach is that of a reading of Barrett’s oeuvre as a hidden ‘struggle against the father’, meaning by this not only her rejection of the literary, historiographic and ‘patriarchal’ tradition, but also the need for a reform of a male-based family-life system. Such a reform, once come about, would have had healthy repercussions on contemporary society. All of this has naturally a psychological basis – as we shall see from the biography – in her vehement battle with her natural father and with her sisters in her family of origin, and with all the other male and paternal figures with whom she came into contact.20 But even this kind of approach has its contra-indications, because it must drastically exclude from Barrett’s canon many works that do not fit in with that motif (notably Sonnets from the Portuguese), while it restricts it only to those poems that confirm it,

17

The peak of male ostracism against Barrett and the figure of the female writer was reached in the bristling obituary by Edward FitzGerald, who invited the gentle sex to look after the children and the cooking (cited in Mermin 1989, 248). 18 She felt it was silly even to think that the nomination of Poet Laureate should go to a woman simply because a Queen was on the throne (Hayter 1965, 5). 19 Hayter 1962, 135 and 184–5. 20 See Leighton’s 1986 convincing analysis.

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such as the two works unanimously recognized as being her most faulty and unsatisfying, Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh. According to the most systematic and rigorous feminist criticism of these two works,21 in the former Barrett’s personal history – the Oedipal disappointment felt towards her father – interweaves with political history – the betrayal of the Florentines by the Grand Duke in 1851. In turn Aurora Leigh dramatizes the break up and the reconstitution both of the self and of the family by means of a ‘visionary’ synthesis of interpersonal relationships. The underlying, complex symbolic design is aimed at the utopia of a mixed community, male and female, where, however, the father figure is abolished and only that of the ‘mother’ is admitted. In the light of the epilogue of Aurora Leigh Barrett’s viewpoint is, however, at least ‘quasi-feminist’,22 since male cooperation remains necessary in the ‘matriarchal apocalypse’. Political, spiritual, and biological renewal on the earth requires human sacrifice, the abdication of the male and, on a theological plane, the action of the Father. In fact, in Poems before Congress, the redemption of the ‘matria’ is worked by Napoleon, a traditional male, and by other male heroes. ‘Inevitably the reality of patriarchal history […] obliterated in Barrett Browning the implicit but impossible dream of a matria’.23 With her palingenetic view of society and of humanity, though from a woman’s point of view and through complex passages and a series of subtle distinctions, Barrett does reach in Aurora Leigh substantially the same results augured by male poetry, and shares the visionary goals common to many other Victorian poets. Family and Oedipal rebellions were fought by Tennyson and by Arnold, and even by others, if we mean by this the repudiation of a historical tradition that had led to the present iniquities, and that had to be replaced by a new principle of order. Specifically, according to Barrett, society had to be regenerated by an ideal and ‘lyrical’ love, a love that she still found in wedlock, and which centred on the maternity of the woman. It is true that such married bliss is reached, in Barrett’s poems, at the end of a parallel 21 22 23

See S.  M. Gilbert, ‘From “Patria” to “Matria”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Risorgimento’, cited in the bibliography. Ibid., 209. Ibid.

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odyssey of the two spouses, which is a painful journey of formation and expiation for the woman, but even more so for the man, who is rehabilitated but only after a severe symbolic punishment. Once the new decalogue of marriage is in force, the redemptive journey begins, both in literature and in life. In Aurora Leigh the poet romantically stands still just when she has reached the unison, without invading Patmore’s symbolic space; and yet she accepts the ideology of this poet, and she too affirms the ‘victories’ of ‘conjugal­ love’.24 § 62. Barrett Browning III: Biography Who was then really Elizabeth’s father, a tyrant and yet at once much beloved by his daughter and by his other eleven children? And, above all, why was he that? Up to the time when his daughters reached a marriageable age, and until he became a widower, and while he had no financial problems, he was an affectionate father with manias for grandeur, and delighted to have such talented children and cultivated their gifts lovingly, especially that of his first born. His own father had died in Jamaica leaving him an orphan, and he moved to England while still a child to be entrusted to a lord. Sent to Harrow, he was brought to book for a supposed offence made to one of the older students (he had burnt his toast at breakfast), and he left Cambridge too without a degree. He then married in a hurry a descendant of a family that, like his own, had colonial roots and interests. During Elizabeth’s early years – she was known in the family with the pet name Ba – her father inherited a sugar and cotton plantation from his maternal grandfather, in whose honour he changed his own surname, Moulton, into that of Moulton-Barrett. With this inheritance he built at Hope End, in a thermal area of Herefordshire, a sumptuous mansion surmounted by Moresque turrets, surrounded by a park and overlooking a small lake. Elizabeth grew up there light-heartedly, precocious in her study of Latin and Greek, taught her by the preceptor of the eldest of her brothers. According to a legend spread around by Thackeray’s daughter in her memories, she used to hold the poems of Homer in one hand, reading

24 See, for Patmore’s The Victories of Love, § 177.

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them in the original, while she held a doll in the other. The whole family, a few years later, got together to listen to her reciting her poems. Her father, first reader and critic for the young poet, or rather her only public, had the Homeric imitation The Battle of Marathon printed at his own expense in 1820. This work and the following brought her to the notice of an eightyyear-old scholar, Uvedale Price, and also to that of a blind Greek teacher, Hugh Boyd, he too a spontaneous admirer in the neighbourhood. The uneven, rough relation with the latter – for long months only epistolary, both for Elizabeth’s congenital fear of personal contact, and on account of her father’s prohibition, since he feared infractions of etiquette, and opposed private visits – lasted until 1846, with a few veneers of platonic love,25 such as she later felt for other senile figures. Boyd followed Barrett’s movements like a shadow until she left for Italy. Anyhow the legendary serenity of this Eden-like nest cracked when Elizabeth, at fifteen, fell from her pony Moses while trying to saddle him, thereby permanently injuring her backbone, or so it was believed. The actual dynamics of the accident has never been cleared, and it left, or perhaps masked, a sense of malaise that can be ascribed to her having reached puberty26 and to a re-awakened rivalry with her siblings. Morbid and not always limpid affections reigned in the Barrett household, as they did in Tennyson’s, and not only between children and parents, but especially between siblings; love and rivalry united and divided, in particular, Elizabeth and Edward, the eldest of her brothers. Two consequences27 derived from the fall from her horse: she began to take laudanum, and in 1832 her father moved the family first to Devon due to financial losses, and in 1835 to London. Her injury got worse and in 1838 she had a lung haemorrhage and was taken to Torquay for a cure.

25 Forster 1988, 56–7. 26 Forster 1988, 22. 27 Actually three, if one takes into consideration those on the literary and artistic plane, such as the magniloquence and the ‘exaggeration’ that have made readers often speak of similarities and affinities between Barrett and the Spasmodics, traced back (see Willis 1928, 33, and the balanced discussion by Hayter 1962, 58–68 and 199–200) to the stimulating and exciting effects of the drug, especially on an auditory and visual level.

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In 1840 she lost her brother Edward. He drowned during a boat trip, and she felt responsible for the disgrace since she had kept him there in spite of their agreement. She composed the noble lament ‘De Profundis’ for the occasion, but did not publish it for many years. 2. At the beginning of the 1840s the Barretts were living in a luxurious house at number 50 Wimpole Street, in the centre of London. Whether her illness was imaginary or real, Barrett, by now well known, spent her days in the house on the sofa while the spaniel Flush played at her feet (he lost himself repeatedly, or rather he was stolen by a gang of professionals, and then ransomed with big tips. The dog died in 1854 and was buried in the penetralia of Casa Guidi). She hardly ever went out and never in winter, when the ivy-framed windows of her bedroom were left hermetically closed for long periods. Thus the legend of the recluse started to spread. She declined invitations, never received people at home unless they were exclusively picked friends, and held only epistolary contacts with the outside world. It was then that her father, since the three elder daughters were of an age to marry, began to show himself inflexible and inexplicably to forbid them, and not only they but also the other children, to get married. His behaviour cannot be understood exclusively as torturing paternal possessiveness. The prohibition was not the result of his sexual disturbances (he never remarried after being left a widower), nor was it a form of jealousy and revenge for an incestuous relationship (alluded to in Besier’s play), desired but frustrated. The prohibition extended to his male children and his two younger daughters. Possibly the root of his behaviour was religious obsession. It has been suggested that, being a widower, he became more assiduous and scrupulous in his faith and even more fervid in the observance of the dictates of the Bible. No marriage in his eyes could be absolutely righteous.28 A recent revelation of the biographers is that he knew for certain that there was mixed blood in his wife’s and in his ancestors veins, and perhaps even in his own (hence the slight Creole colouring of Elizabeth and her nickname ‘my little Portuguese’ given her by Browning). He knew, that is, that he was remotely a bastard, and thus

28

Forster 1988, 99.

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a possible father of bastards, and he did not want to contaminate the race or to be the transmitter of bastard blood.29 Browning unchained her from her father but also from her own chains. The match-maker was one of her distant cousins and an amateur poet, John Kenyon, later a generous benefactor to the couple. At the birth of their son he credited them 100 pounds a year and at his death left them in inheritance a good 11,000 pounds. As has been often said, the married life after 1846 brought no surprises, but her father never made peace with her, even after the birth of her son Pen. The couple lived in Italy, between Florence and Rome, until Barrett’s death in 1861, with odd trips to England and other journeys (to Paris where she was received by George Sand in 1851), surrounded by a cosmopolitan society of expatriates, artists and English and American literati. The early biographers, but also some of the later ones, have strenuously defended the image of a model couple, but according to others the marriage gradually changed into a kind of ordeal, especially on account of the disagreements that arose especially over Barrett’s infatuation with Spiritualism, a passion not shared by her husband. They also disagreed concerning the education to be given to their son, who never became a scholar as his mother wanted. The truth as usual lies somewhere in between. The couple were anyway divided in death. Browning is buried in Westminster Abbey and Elizabeth Barrett in the English cemetery in Florence, not far from another exile, Clough. § 63. Barrett Browning IV: Scholarly and Homeric poetry until 1833 Barrett’s emulation of the Romantics, which extends to the works of 1838, is visible in her early attempts to weave vast symbolic and visionary frescoes, objective and formally closed. They reject the use of the first person chosen in the introspective and confessional poetry written by all the subsequent Victorian beginners. Like the adolescent Tennyson, she was not discouraged but stimulated by the great Titanic and Faustian creation. At the same time she passionately participated in public events of great echo. She hailed Byron with two twin compositions on hearing

29 See the article by A. Hayter, ‘Sun, Air and Voices’, TLS (23 February 1996), 3–4.

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of his death fighting for freedom, as every poet should have done. She took up an empathic and instinctive stance for heroes, and especially for manly, historical heroines like Teresa del Riego, wife of a nationalist Spanish patriot sentenced to death in 1823. She thus sang in these poems the two nations that were, at that moment, politically enslaved, Greece and Spain. Spain was very close to English hearts, and in her favour risky and utopian expeditions to help were organized, in one of which Tennyson took part personally.30 In its development, Barrett’s poetry until 1838 confronts three main myths as reference points: the myth of Greece and of the semi-divine man; the biblical myth of the Fall and banishment from Eden; the Arthurian myth, that, still vague, was to blossom to full life in the 1838 collection. No narrative ballad appears before this date. In The Battle of Marathon (1820) the principle of sympathy is almost self-declared, as though the poet ideally aspired to live again in an epoch when, even prior to Eden, the divine was mixed with the human and revealed, although only ‘obscurely and mysteriously’.31 In that epoch not only had the clear separation of mankind between the humans and the beasts come about, but also the ‘otherness’ of mankind, connoted as the possession of something commune cum diis. Significantly poetry is the prime source of deification, and it ‘elevates the mind to Heaven’. Poetry arises historically as the inspirer of the civil and political organization and the transmitter of the awareness of the ‘likeness of man to his Creator’. 2. At the age of fourteen, Barrett proclaimed herself, in the dense and long preface to The Battle of Marathon, a follower of the Romantics, and of Shelley in particular. She recognized the spiritual power of poetry as first among all the arts. This preface is, all things considered, more interesting than the actual poem. It betrays only very few signs of humility and of captatio benevolentiae due to the inexperience of youth, and a great desire to be taken seriously, not just to be considered as a simple phenomenon of female precocity. She is strong with the sense of her own poetic mission, of the sacred investiture of poetry, of belonging to the family of the last Romantic survivors, now thinned out with the death of Keats and Shelley, 30 § 78.2. 31 The epithets of the hero are ‘divine’ and ‘godlike’, and his eye ‘is on fire with Pallas’.

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but still represented in 1820 by Byron, Moore and Scott. The subject of the poem, in Barrett’s intentions, was to lift and inflame, inasmuch as its subject was civil passion, the recollection of a gesture of resistance and of victory, with the help of the gods, against arrogance and against the thirst for power and the oppression of freedom. It was in fact the loss of freedom that had historically initiated the decline of the great past civilizations, and the reason why great poetry is ‘the mother of freedom’. The Battle of Marathon, in four books of largely unvarying iambics and in couplets, gives much more space to the ranting apostrophes of the captains of the opposing forces lined up against each other (and supporting the strategies of either fence-sitting or of activism) than to true and proper warfare. The formula is that of the historical poem faithful to truth, narrated as if by Homer and Virgil with the help of the poetic imagination. On the other hand, it falls back on that kind of verse adaptations of episodes of Graeco-Roman history that was the consolidated didactic practice, often in the form of competitions and prize-winning awards, in English public schools and universities. 3. The most important point in the preface concerns the justification made for the use of mythology in the poem. Barrett is averse to all forms of estrangement. Whoever narrates things of 2,000 years previous must become one with the personages and their epoch; nor should the readers feel the time lag. In other words, the writer must reduce to a minimum the discrepancies by creating a false perspective. The mythological gods were felt and believed by the ancient Greeks to be the inspirers of their actions, as gods that intervened and favoured one or the other of the heroes, often even deceiving, disappointing or setting snares. In this anthropological premise a kind of nostalgia can be sensed for those heroic times when the god was not absconditus but acted and interacted sometimes in an even over-anthropomorphic guise in human lives – or so the pagans believed, who saw explicit signs of being listened to and of receiving answers, whether of approval or disapproval, in the thunder, in the lightening, and in natural catastrophes.32 Both the preface and the poetic text make no mystery of the 32

Sometimes the answers of the gods, believed or misunderstood, authorized uncivil and condemnable acts, such as the killing of a Persian emissary described in the poem.

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fact that Barrett’s model is Homer, in particular in the long catalogues of the characters and in the scenes of the heroes that, ready for battle in the early morning, put on their armour, or in the description of the chariot of Miltiades, decorated with episodes of warlike heroism like Achilles’ shield, or in the hysteria of the mothers with children in their arms and the hand to hand fighting delayed until the fourth and last book. The technique of imbricating episodes within episodes, like the very long one on the mercy of a Greek for the courageous Persian that he must kill, is also Homeric. Looking at its date this poem is the first Homeric remake in Victorian poetry, and paved the way for Arnold’s and, above all, Clough’s similar works. But far different is the type of this operation. Barrett moves in the ambience of imitation and sympathy, Clough reinvents an art of Homeric inspiration using parody and recasting.33 4. The more brilliant and yet more falsely modest preface appended to the very strange poem An Essay on Mind (1826) clearly states that poetry can also be ethical and philosophical (a tradition illustrated by Lucretius, Dante, Pope) and that, on principle, a similar kind of poetry is not inferior to the purely imaginative one. Barrett actually thought of the indivisibility of poetry, philosophy, mythology, and theology in Homer, that is of a poetry as a superior means of intuitive knowledge, indeed as ‘enthusiasm of the intellect’. Poetry, that is, was the inspirer of great political and social events, and – a position very close to that of Ugo Foscolo – a monument to the greatness of a nation. The theme of the poem, philosophically very weak and simplistic, concerns the operations of the mind, romantically descended from the sublime heights to the human prison34 and fused with matter, and from that moment on engaged in the various areas of speculative

33 34

False gods are blamed for the subsequent course of history, that is, for the fact that the Greeks, while able to withstand the Persians, due to the internecine decline of freedom had to yield the sceptre of the world to the Romans. § 138. Intelligence comes to men in varying degrees and quantities, assisted by ‘genius’. Like the divine word for Hopkins, genius comes either as a violent eruption or with a sweet, persuasive action. This ‘genius’ is one of the first of Barrett’s celestial exiles, a seraph that descends, heavy with dust, on earth and intermittently and epiphanically visits mankind only to vanish immediately, or almost immediately. Barrett hints at a

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and practical knowledge. This shows the need to re-solder the bonds that unite Creator and creature, sky and earth. An Essay on Mind is, therefore, unusual, eccentric, and of an eighteenth century, Popian mould, as can be immediately seen in its title and in its metre in rhymed couplets, and also in its aphorismatic, antithetic, punning, and catechistic-prescriptive procedure.35 This denotes and betrays an unsystematic familiarity with the luminaries of philosophy and aesthetics, together with an extravagant scholarliness limited to minor, and more often than not unknown authors. Each successive point of the argument is illustrated with long lists of examples and names of writers, quoted with approval or condemnation. It is a kind of Burtonian compilation that reveals the authors Barrett confronted herself with at that stage of her formation. It could be seen as a kind of reverent walk in front of the great spirits of every epoch, called forth on purpose as though pausing before Foscolo’s ‘sepulchral urns’.36 Through a guided and one-sided analysis of the various fields of knowledge – of history as teacher of life, of science, parcelling and incapable of unitary visions, and above all of captious metaphysics – An Essay on Mind moves to the triumphal panegyric of poetry, which makes visible and tangible the ‘invisible’ and is therefore the promoter of goodness, of virtue and of the conquest of freedom. This is why the poem ends by being a lament for the poet par excellence, bound to the struggle for freedom, that is Byron, who had died shortly before; and why it ends, by association, as a committed hymn to the imminent freedom of modern Greece, the cradle of ancient freedom and yet a servant in the present day and age. The reasons of poetry prevail over those of science,37 which makes man feel equal to God in his

35 36 37

distinction between ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’, but she does not quote Coleridge in the notes. Its hybrid structure can be seen in the prose synopses placed before both books and put there to facilitate the reading. Still more singular is the apparatus of notes in the appendix, such as would have been proper to a philosophical essay. The poem sometimes digresses into little demonstrative scenes of which a very incisive one is that of Thucydides who, as a child, conceived his vocation to be an historian on hearing Herodotus speaking. Less kissed by genius, the critics were necessary, as well as the poets, because without them the poets would have written worse.

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presumed omnipotence and makes him forget that he is nothing.38 As against this, Barrett praises intuition, which she defines as an ascent in concentric and converging spirals towards the discovery of things ‘that we do not know’, and obtained by starting with the things ‘known’. Poetry is thus by definition an immediate vision of the harmony between mankind and the suprasensible, as against the fragmentation made by science and the pure wordiness of metaphysics.39 Written in 1826, An Essay on Mind proves a very early reaction against the progress of utilitarianism, which condemned and belittled the rights of poetry and a fortiori its divine source; and it heralded Carlyle’s, Patmore’s and Ruskin’s crusade against science, blind to the harmonious frame of creation. 5. The lyrical ‘I’ bursts out, unburdens itself, and grieves, but only in a fairly short appendix at the end of An Essay on Mind. Here the vibrant hymn to freedom and the emboldened invitation to action clashes with, and more often yields to, a sagging, elegiac, nerveless and bitter vein. The few love lyrics adopt a timid change of gender perhaps in homage to the male tradition (an elegy in quatrains disguises the passion by staging a love grown cold between an Englishman and a French girl), while the devotional poems witness with transparency a tormented search for an anchor in the sea of relativism. Much has been said by Freudian and psychological critics about the overloaded and exhibitionist fragment ‘The Tempest’, on account of the conjectural and, in some measure even unconscious, transpositions of family conflicts. Here a female figure from the depth of a wood invokes a storm to break out, and between reality and hallucination discovers the body of a ‘relative’ to whom she is linked by a ‘hatred’ that in life had been perfectly reciprocal. In the climactic scene, lit up by the

38

39

A science that deifies man is always preferable to a philosophy that makes him a worm. The veneration for Greek heroism is replaced by a more wavering vision of mankind, which can be noble as well as abject. The cosmos contemplated by the scientist is, however, a mechanistic one, and he is ‘Too apt to watch the engines of the scene, / And loose the hand, which moves the vast machine’. British diffidence against metaphysics, and the awareness of linguistic snares, may be sensed, in a modern key, in the wish, formulated by Barrett, for a language without words in a future world.

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lightening that breaks from the ‘entrails of the firmament’, with the woman that touches and turns the head of the dead man with her hands, critics have traced the dawning of Barrett’s lasting struggle against the father figure (or possibly against her brother Edward, one of its surrogates), and of her ‘appropriation of the word’.40 This fragment is in fact largely an imitative cast of the visionary and hallucinatory poetry of a Burkean matrix,41 and of the horrid and pre-Romantic numinous. § 64. Barrett Browning V: ‘The Seraphim’ and the Arthurian ballads of 1838 Barrett’s shorter poetry from 1838 to 1844, which represents her definitive artistic consecration, grew around, or more exactly in the middle of, two inferior poems, biblical in theme and inspiration. These are The Seraphim and A Drama of Exile, which reveal the tenacious, residual aspiration to grandeur and the still active dream of fame, the ‘idol’ which, painfully, some poems of 1833 acclaim. Both trace consecutively the parable of a humanity undeified, dispossessed, driven from Eden where it had been similar to God. The Seraphim, a play for voices, published in 1838 for the first time under Barrett’s real name and immediately and cavalierly hailed by the critics, shows in fact that her personal myth was reflected in 1838, after the Homeric one of the divine hero, in the biblical and Christian one and in the story of the Cross. This story was better suited to an adult condition of pain and inner conflict that had overcome her joy in adolescence. In the preface the progress suggested is that from the triumphal hero, an arrogant and challenging Prometheus, to the dolorous hero, Christ; or from the Titanic pronouncement, ‘I will have my revenge’, to the celestial ‘I can pardon’, a trajectory performed by, and as if coming from the pen of an Aeschylus who had been born, and had written, after the Revelation.

40 See Dally 1989, 22–3, and Leighton 1986, 46–54. 41 ‘A Sea-side Meditation’ investigates, quoting Burke literally, the incomprehensible mystery provoked by a pleasant shudder, such as that experienced when facing the sea during an imaginary walk.

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Actually, the poem has nothing Greek about it,42 except perhaps for the noble solemnity of the choral sections. A tender elegiac vein prevails in the dialogues along with a diaphanous surreal atmosphere. A felicitous idea, in particular, is that of moving and decentring the point of view of the scene of the Calvary, thus creating a deceptive and relativistic perspective, in the form of the comments and reactions of two angels, latecomers and hesitating, in the vortex that has drawn all the celestial population towards the Cross. The Passion had to be shared, but not without nostalgia for a God who knows no pain. It is meaningful that the two seraphim remain in the air, that they come down from Paradise but do not land, continually tempted to turn their eyes towards the empty throne, as if separated by a diaphragm from the reality of the Cross to which they are estranged. The seraph Ador, especially, hesitates, but not out of pride, but because he cannot bear to see God humiliated. The question that rises in the two creatures, ‘cold with the weeping which mine earth inherits’, and remains unanswered, is whether really and truly the Passion will redeem the ‘ruin’. The epilogue is entrusted to the voice of the poet off stage, announcing the Resurrection with the exact words found in Clough’s ‘Easter Day II’.43 As in Clough and in several Victorian poems of this nature, an uncertain internal debate, as if on the knife’s edge, is abruptly followed by an even too facile resolution of the dramatic doubts. 2. The other side to the refusal of corruption before the Fall, and off key, lies in some slight, but in the end inexorably vanished glimpses of fertile 42 A more precise literary debt has been searched for, apart from the Bible and Milton, but unsuccessfully, and the names of some Christian Greek poets lovingly studied have been put forward together with that of Dante (Hayter 1962, 32–4), of Edgar Quinet and of his Prométhée and of Klopstock’s Messiah (Merlette 1905, 47–50 and n. 4). Thanks to her scholarliness, Barrett could perhaps even find inspiration in the biblical scenic poems of de Vigny, and especially in Éloa, while Lamartine’s play La chute d’un ange is from 1836. 43 § 142.1. Inspired by the Gospels are also other poems in the same collection, a berceuse of the Virgin who lulls her son’s sleep and foresees her future pain, and some hymns and paraphrases of the Psalms. These hymns, like The Seraphim, hinge on divine love becoming hate, but the apparent gap between the human and the divine is overcome thanks to the mediation of the Son.

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lands, submerged in an exotic nature, scented with perfumes and inhabited by a fascinating animal life, modelled on places of Barrett’s infancy at Hope End.44 Nature is also placed in opposition to the socialized world where the ‘voluble heart’ rules, while nature offers ‘stable sentiments’ of compassion. Yet ‘The Earth and Her Praisers’ concludes that the earth is always beautiful but – the gap is unbridgeable – its beauty is always inferior to that of heaven. ‘The Soul’s Travelling’ presents no oneiric evasion and dwells directly, in its long and irregular sections, on scenes of town life, on the poor on the pavements, on the luxury of the ladies, on the children crying bereft of their mothers and in poverty, and on a funeral procession that winds along the overcrowded streets. Nature itself, in ‘Man and Nature’, is subject to seasonal cycles, and wizens and fades, so that man can be, he alone, ‘bright without the sun’. The myth of banishment from Eden is disguised and domesticized in one of the most famous of Barrett’s gems, in the pathos of the captured sea gull, taken from the ocean and soon dead in its prison, and of the doves who have fled from their tropical nest and have been transplanted to the city.45 3. The Seraphim was the longest and the opening poem of an extensive collection, comparable in its proportions and in its polyphony to those with which Tennyson (the only one to precede Barrett), Browning, Clough and Arnold debuted from the early 1830s to the end of 1849. Its mixed, eclectic type (with the exception, in Barrett’s case, of humour and light verse) was apt to meet and flatter current taste. There were gathered together short, naïve poems and paraphrases of the Psalms, laments and homages paid to living poetic worthies or to the lately dead (to Felicia Hemans, died in 1835, and to her disciple Letitia Landon or L. E. L.; and 44 ‘Hector in the Garden’, in the 1850 collection, calls up again the effigy of the warrior, adorned with flowers, plants and leaves made by Barrett in her garden when she was nine; it is, therefore, a tender elegy to lost childhood, which closes by greeting the departure of a ‘Hector twice dead’, as a warrior and as a floral statue. 45 ‘The Sea-Mew’. In ‘My Doves’ there is an almost literal anticipation of Hopkins’s ‘Heaven-Haven’: ‘I will have hopes that cannot fade, / For flowers the valley yields’. Perhaps Hopkins’s imitation is not quite so specific, because we find this imagery also used verbatim by Christina Rossetti: ‘flowers never fade’ occurs in a youthful poem of 1846 (see her Poetical Works, London 1904, 88).

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another noble lament is recited on the tomb of Cowper). Along with these were included poems written in the first person, memories, dreams, reminiscences, confessions of discontent, of sadness and of tears. Some others had their first publication in the Annuals, as texts for illustrations written on commission for her correspondent Miss Mitford, a task that was not accepted in the spirit of routine but resulted in poems that rate among the best of Barrett’s. Formally Barrett discovers in 1838 the narrative ballad of archaic and Arthurian theme, revolving around a plot that is usually even overrich and unnecessarily complex, and prodigiously varied in metre poem after poem. Clearly the term for comparison, and perhaps also the source of these ballads centred on the motif of love that almost immediately vanishes and dies deluded, lies in the 1833 poems by Tennyson. The settings of desolate plains, the vague oneiric scenes and the laments of the women waiting; the world, in short and by definition, of the two poems by Tennyson on Mariana and ‘The Lady of Shalott’, with the quotation, often literal, of the watery tomb46 and with the very same stylistic mannerisms and archaisms, the choruses and the medieval stylizations (the horses ornately dressed, the hunting scenes with the pack of hounds and the sound of the horn, the minstrels and the jousts) – all this seems to come directly from Tennyson. This Arthurian scheme, as has been earlier said, forms Barrett’s third myth of reference, and its recurring leitmotivs are the reminder of tout passe, the ephemeral nature of love, and life yoked to death from its first pulsations. A ‘curse’ lies on this symbolic world, and this term is ubiquitous. This collection, appearing in 1838, was published just one year after the accession to the throne of Queen Victoria. Seen in perspective it includes, however, few examples of political poems and of poems of protest, and the two for the queen are unusually mild, controlled, and conventional in praise. Of the two ‘The Young Queen’ overflows with admiration for the humble courage with which the very young queen accepted the crown, but also dutifully laments, as did also Clough, the death of William IV.

46 § 84.2. Barrett referred to herself in her letters to Browning as a ‘Mariana on the farm with the ditch’.

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4. ‘The Romaunt of Margret’ opens as a Tennysonian recreation of dewy twilight scenes and of the pale moonlight, which seems in the long run to absorb all the compositional tension. After many delays and descriptive preludes the narrative mechanism gets going with a question: does anyone in the world love this woman who seems to live solitary as the sun? The woman tries to convince herself of the stability and the immortality of human love – love of her brother, a knight, of her sister, and of her father. No one, as the river cynically reveals to her, loves her for herself, but rather for purely material profit. The climax lies in the revelation of the presumed eternal love of her beloved, who however is already eaten away by the worm of death: a single coffin for two lovers symbolizes the transience of love.47 With the same slowness, and with a diffuseness more than Wordsworthian, the ballad ‘Isobel’s Child’ gets under way as the wake of a mother over the blessed sleep of her small son while the tempest rages outside. She entrusts him to God, and prays him to keep him from the curse of living and to destine him for great things. But when the tempest outside ends, and the moon comes out and the dog scratches, then the look of the child, now awake, becomes immediately serious, dark, and threatening, like that of an adult who, during the night, has experienced pain. Like the child of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’, he prefers the blessed, blinding vision of God and the upper spheres, and asks to return to this Paradise, aware of the life that awaits him. The dramatic efficacy of the ballad lies in the fact that only at the end is it revealed that the whole speech of the child has been a dream, or the auditory hallucination on the part of the mother, who discovers that, in the meantime, the child has died. This poem reassesses the egoistic and possessive love of the mother; rather it punishes it, and in so doing it exhibits its secret bond with The Seraphim. Isobel too, a disappointed and nostalgic seraph, dreams of an unsullied earth and thinks of ‘Adam’s taint and woe’; likewise her child longs for the angelic purity that he has seen in his dream. At the end of the lyric the mother convinces 47 In a personal perspective the moral of the romaunt is that, having understood the faithlessness of any other love, only maternal love is constant (Leighton 1986, 62). In ‘A Romance of the Ganges’ the opposition is also between a passing romantic love and faithful paternal love, but love, in this case, of a dead person.

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herself that her prayer is ‘mean’ and accepting the plan of God welcomes death as it comes and separation from the world.48 5. All or almost all the ballads of 1838 have as protagonists female figures. The novelty and the importance of ‘The Poet’s Vow’, which among them all is the briskest and the most vigorous, is that Barrett disguises herself for the first time as a man, who is, moreover, indubitably a poet, and one who lives isolated, incapable of understanding and even of desiring the love and the life of the community until it is too late. It is thus a parable of the sterile and punished solipsism and of the opposite and necessary commandment of love. The ‘vow’ to desert human society is a form of protest against the ‘curse’ of the earth, and the fool enacts it to the extent of ceding his promised bride and his goods to his best friend. He is deaf to the pleas, as he is to the example of the sacrifice of the Saviour for mankind, and also to the prayer of the pilgrims heading for the chapel. With a sudden turn the ballad shows the tomb of his fiancée in front of the poet’s door and he reads her will of vain implorations but also of firm criticism on him. Naturally, at sight of this the poet raises an unending lament and dies, slowly sinking down on her coffin, become now the tomb of two lovers rightly condemned for their foolishness. His Rosalind, who knows she has to die, and tells her nursemaid to place an epigraph on her tomb and then asks for her coffin to be left open and carried to the poet’s court by carriers singing a hymn, are all literary citations, or recastings, taken on purpose or casually, from ‘The Lady of Shalott’ by Tennyson. The refusal of the poet also recalls the hesitation of the two seraphim; he detaches himself from the world whose filth he sees, and becomes an exile believing in that way to escape ‘Adam’s taint’ and the woe his Adam sent. He may even appear fiendish when he is given the warning that ‘God’s chief angel waiteth for / A brother’s voice, to sing’.49

48 The motif of the child unaware of life, or very precociously warned of its curse, is found in various lyrics; that of a pure but transitory love in the dramatic monologue ‘The Exile’s Return’, delicate and Patmorian in imagining the meeting in the herafter between the husband and his wife, whom he finds dead on his return. 49 With an allusion to the Victorian image of Satan as the solo singer in the angelic choir. A second poet, proud, superficial and boasting, who believes himself to be

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§ 65. Barrett Browning VI: ‘A Drama of Exile’ In the second and even larger dramatic dialogue on a biblical subject, A Drama of Exile (1844), Barrett recognized in planning it her most important work to date. She also pointed out that this too was a slightly deceptive and prospective vision of the Fall: a vision on the part of Eve and of her pain, in which she identified herself: ‘I also an exile’. The play actually deals with a collective exile, and is recited by the spirits of Eden that touchingly sing to the exiled of all the perfumes and fragrances they have lost. Even Christ is an exile, ‘from His heaven, / To lead those exiles homeward’, and also, and first of all, is Lucifer. Lucifer, a development of the hesitant seraphim of the previous poem, despairs that God can redeem and set right that ‘home destroyed’, and by him destroyed; such desperation is at the root of his lasting rebellion against God, despite the fact that he has been offered forgiveness. A symptom of the obsession with, and concentration on the Fall and its consequences which is at work in all of Barrett’s early poetry, the term ‘curse’ is even more ubiquitous, as the mark that weighs on post-lapsarian mankind, and as the condition from which man has to find a way to recover. Eve, Adam, and Lucifer himself agree, on the other hand, in seeing not a diabolical being and even less a Titan, but a solitary figure desperately needful of company: ‘None saith, Stay with me, for thy face is fair! / None saith, Stay with me, for thy voice is sweet!’ Never in the play is the name ‘Satan’ used depreciatingly, but he is always called Lucifer, that is he who still has, and could regain any time, light. And Adam is not the Promethean challenger, but the champion of mankind rising once again after the Fall and resuming the journey, conscious that he is still the son of God: ‘I […] / Made like God, and, though undone, / Not unmade for love and life’. 2. Barrett’s self-critical judgement in the preface is disproved in a poem that is wordy and bombastic, especially in the dialogues between Adam and Eve, that never keep the plot moving, as well as in the over-repetitive songs of the ‘earth spirits’ and in the inconclusive dealings between Lucifer and Adam. Barrett’s intent, at least in this work, though definitely something the divine perfection of creation, and misunderstands nature, appears in ‘The Earth and Its Praisers’.

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other than pure imitation, was that of miming the solemnity of Milton and at the same time to lighten it with lyrical and choral insertions. And undoubtedly in the dialogues she touches a variety of registers among which is the rough and colloquial one of Lucifer, who with his rather loud and rough replies provides a continuous countermelody to the solemn diction of the angels, and to the tragic and pathetic tones of Eve. As with many of the satanic embodiments of the time,50 Lucifer is at first the melodious chorister whose song becomes that of a solo singer who is finally, once he has been driven out, dissonant. Similar oscillations bring to mind the Mephistopheles of Goethe and of Clough – the Clough of Dipsychus – as does the petulant and vulgarly persuasive voice of the malign spirit, especially each time that, in Barrett’s poem, Lucifer tries to draw Adam back on to his side.51 Even more spontaneous and pertinent is the parallel with Clough’s Adam and Eve, which perhaps was inspired by A Drama of Exile, though Barrett’s poem is more finished, sidereal, and wide-ranging, and less murky and dark. Barrett does not even mention Cain and Abel, who were instead of great interest to Clough who, in his turn, could not but leave Christ out. Their positions on the two progenitors, however, are not distant. Eve, desperate, takes heart once again in extremis thanks to Adam, who has the courage and the humility to start all over again from nothing. 3. A Drama of Exile has a small excellence in its essential and at times almost expressionistic scenic solutions, first of all in the fixity of the scene, placed in a symbolic, desolate plain, and in its tight, obsessive temporal unity, limited to the span from the morning until night. The opening occurs immediately after the Fall and outside the gate of Eden now closed for ever, darkened by a cloud and hung over by the shadow of the fiery sword. A clamour of voices brings the poem to an end, among which can be discerned that of Gabriel and particularly that of Lucifer, now amorphous and diaphanous, as he stands truly and definitively alone: ‘I shall stand

50 The redemption of Lucifer was at the centre of the works of the Spasmodics, and of Bailey in particular (§ 225). 51 See respectively, for Dipsychus and for Adam and Eve by Clough, §§ 143–45 and 137.

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sole exile […] / Made desolate for fruition’.52 The play closes neither with a dialogue nor with a monologue but with a stage direction and a sound, that only a stage production could set off and perhaps amplify: the ‘sound through the silence, as of the falling tears of an angel’, tears that express all the commiseration reserved for Lucifer. § 66. Barrett Browning VII: Ballads of medieval frustration A Drama of Exile and Other Poems, in two volumes, was the largest collection ever published by Barrett. It includes the greatest number of her most famous ballads and, together with those of Tennyson, though inferior to them, some of the most notable in the mid-Victorian period. There is actually no variation in form and content from the 1838 ballads. The scenario is mostly chivalric, like that of Tennyson’s Idylls, with the moor, the plain and the castle; but the plots, unlike Tennyson’s, are frequently original and the fruit of fresh inventiveness. They are rhythmic, tightly organized ballads, and rich in coups de théâtre that are not only romantic but also of a supernatural and diabolical nature. Metre is prodigiously varied and changing. Thematically, they are ballads of renunciation and frustration, and the invariable opposition is that between courage and cowardliness. As a consequence the characters have flat, stylized psychologies, and embody the types of the courageous knight and that of the traitor, or of the lady who waits faithfully but is then disappointed, on the model of Tennyson’s lady of Shalott and Elaine. Such indomitable heroines, like the bride who disguises herself as a page to follow her groom to the Crusades, or like the resigned embroiderer Bertha, have death as a common destiny. Death surprises them either in a gesture of abnegation and of heroic sacrifice or

52

The personal myth of the Fall, the prohibition to take part in the divine gifts (symbolized in the Eucharistic image of the cup of wine poured, and the crumbs of bread left uncollected) was confessed in 1844 for the first time in the form of the sonnet, with discomforting visions of the unredeemed decadence of the world succeeded by proposals tenaciously aimed to established or re-establish contact with God. Only Christ can compensate for the ‘desolation’, comparable with that of the exiled Lucifer, and increase the value of the time of abandonment. Intermittently, pain is justified and finalised to the obtainment of the celestial vision.

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in a slow fading away. Other brief elegies and monologues, even more reminiscent of those of the early Tennyson, are spoken by women in love, abandoned and betrayed in a grey and melancholic nature. These ballads roused the fervent admiration of the Rossettis, that of Browning (with all the biographical consequences, as has been said) and, overseas, that of Poe. The subsequent reception has not been very flattering, rather at times even too severe,53 at least up until the psychological and feminist critics began to reappraise them under a new light and to show the subtle, and at times completely unsuspected counterpoint of personal allusions. It is undeniable that not even these ballads are free from Barrett’s flaws, first among which a lack of concision and of narrative inevitability. But almost no other Victorian was exempt from them. 2. It is inviting, provided it is not purely instrumental, to re-read the whole series of these compositions as though they were an encoded transposition of Barrett’s unhappy spiritual condition in the early 1840s. She was by now vowed to a voluntary reclusion, and repressing her sentiments she had neither the fulfilment nor perhaps even the hope of love. It has often been noted how the dead mother as much as the father, with whom she had by now an openly conflictual relationship, and who had forbidden her to marry, appear to the feminine protagonists – because such is always their sex – under the form of visions, apparitions, even nightmares. In this way it is possible to interpret ‘Bertha in the Lane’, a tense and quick-paced ballad in the form of a dramatic monologue which tells of an embroiderer who, no longer in the flower of her years, prepares a wedding dress for her younger sister, promised to her own one-time lover.54 Having noticed the denunciation of an ideal of sacrifice that is in the end suicidal, the fact cannot be ignored that Bertha, like Barrett, is the elder sister in her family and has taken the place of the mother. A weaker ballad, ‘The Romaunt of the Page’, perhaps symbolizes both the determination of feminine initiative in love, possible only with a temporary exchange of roles between male and female, and anyway doomed to fail, and, at the same time, a burning need 53 54

See, for example, the unfavourable reading by Hayter 1962, 80–6. An echo of the dynamics of renunciation and enjoyment, with the obvious recurrence of a couple of sisters, will be found in ‘Goblin Market’ by Christina Rossetti (§ 202).

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for strong and genuine feelings, or even a new legislation of love. By her absolute devotion the page, who is a bride disguised, makes the knight, her groom, cut a poor figure, for he is not only proverbially ‘feminine’, absentminded, light, presumptuously sure of himself, but also conceives of marriage as simply a gesture of routine, made almost yawningly and while about to leave for the far more exciting crusades. His bride is immobilized, as far as he knows, in the conventional role of the chatelaine in waiting.55 Even the protagonist of the Coleridgian ballad ‘The Rhyme of the Duchess May’ wants to choose her future for herself – she is then a preview of Aurora Leigh – and is contrary to a marriage with the son of a count, decided on only for the mirage of the dowry.56 A prodigious satanic and noir scent oozes from ‘The Lay of the Brown Rosary’, a poem very close to Bürger’s ‘Lenore’ and to the diabolical and perverse plots that D. G. Rossetti would shortly write. With its collection of Gothic and Pre-Romantic ingredients – the ruins, the night, the rotting ivy, the tombs, the amulets, the owl and the toad, the sinister and blasphemous sisters – this poem delighted Edgar Allan Poe immensely.57 Among Barrett’s phantasmagorias, this is the richest in covert and disturbing admissions of her autobiographical dilemmas and may be read as an obscure denouncement of paternal love and dedication, with its paralysing force towards heterosexual love, and

55

The superior presence of spirit of the page is shown by his having saved twice the life of the knight, one even inside his tent. He then notices the arrival of the threatening Saracens and intuits the danger; an unforgivable fault is that the knight should leave the page among the pagans with a mocking smile on his lips. After a blunt huddle the page, now revealed to the reader as the bride of the knight, is shot. 56 The unusual placing of the refrain at the centre of each stanza, anticipating the general theme of the funeral and of death, will later be adopted by Rossetti. ‘The Romance of the Swan’s Nest’ is highly emblematic in its pessimistic ending, predictable from the beginning, as it tells the story of a young girl who dreams of showing the swan’s nest – that is, the alcove, surrounded by phallic rushes – to the lover she longs for; she thinks about it until she becomes aware that the nest has gone, and that the rushes have been nibbled by a mouse. 57 In the second, dialogued section, a kind of dialectic competition between angels and demons as they contend for the sleeper, the similarities with Goethe’s Faust are more clearly highlighted.

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fought up to the point of wishing for infantile regression. It even reveals a contemporary nostalgia for childhood and for death as a child,58 that is for an early age when Barrett could still enjoy her father’s love and before her fatal breakdown during adolescence. The woman in the poem wants death to be delayed, a deferment of ultramundane time so that she can once again grasp the hand of her dead father. She obtains it by denying God and making a pact with a satanic sister ‘with a black rosary’ in the name of the love of her suitor who has left for battle. On the day of the wedding, however, the priest deliberately misses out the name of God in the rite, among the murmurs of those invited and of the relatives, and the kiss of the groom, before he dies, is transformed into a mortal sting. Between the two contenders for the love of the young woman, her father definitely prevails, because before the ceremony ends, and as an angry sign of her defeat, she denies the pact and throws the black rosary on the ground, thereby signing her own death warrant. If this is the case, the ballad harbours an enormous and disconcerting transgressive potential, because sexual love, incompatible with the paternal one, can exist only in an appeal to the forces of evil and by transgressing a divine commandment.59 3. ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’ was probably written in a great hurry to fill in an empty space in one of the two volumes of the 1844 collection; but it is miraculously felicitous in its winking at the tradition of love poetry, in its narrative rhythm, in the fineness of the touch, in the sharp and elliptic details, and in the delicately and clearly outlined psychologies. It stands out and differs notably from the rest of the poems because, amid the very few, it overcomes the stylization of the ballad and the structural conventions of the chivalric and Arthurian theme and is set in the present (and in the tangible Sussex), even though it is slightly back dated. Moreover, it foreshadows a positive outcome to the motif of courtship, though in a visionary mode and with a perhaps deliberate, even mawkish ending. In the first of the two parts the ballad is in the form of a letter to a friend from a poet who despairs of ever winning the love of an inscrutable yet exciting 58 59

See, more in detail, Leighton 1986, 34–8. In a less turbid fashion these agonies – the prohibition to love – would have been experienced by many other Victorians (see § 156.2 for Matthew Arnold).

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chatelaine who has inexplicably invited him. The conclusion, in the third person and at a later date, recalls with stupor and incredulity the victory of love over this woman whom he had believed to be cold and distant, but who had confessed to the crying poet, who had then immediately fainted, that she had found in him a noble and virtuous man, and that his poor birth was unimportant. The poem was, in fact, a calculated trap and a masked courtship in verse addressed to Tennyson and, above all, to Browning.60 Browning immediately picked up the challenge and replied shortly after with ‘The Flight of the Duchess’. All of this occurs by using the same device of role-exchanging that has been seen in ‘The Romaunt of the Page’, that is Barrett’s disguise as a humble and poor poet in love with a Coleridgian Geraldine61 who is also, although only masked as such and only temporarily, a belle dame sans merci.62 The mythopoeia of this ballad thus anticipates, at the same time, that of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, by placing a difference of worthiness between the man and the woman, first in favour of the latter and then in favour of the former, and for the moment symbolically connoted as a difference of class (he the son of peasants, she noble). The regal, angelic and divine apotheosis of the woman is also suggested, which in the sonnets will be transferred to the beloved man. The small rural court where the ballad takes place, and where Geraldine, singing, entrances her guests, is transformed in the sonnets into the musical palace from which the poet and minstrel will be exiled. In both cases love blossoms in the name of an absolute and unprecedented purity of feeling, irrespective of all current prejudice.

60 The poet Bertram – a literary name, found in Shakespeare – is invited to entertain the guests in the little court of an aristocratic lady, and reads passages from the Dolce Stilnovo and the Elizabethan poets, and also from Tennyson and Browning, the last cited with a very precise and charming metaphor. At the same time, this suggests that the setting is contemporary. 61 Geraldine is also the woman sung by the fifteenth-century poet Surrey (as we saw in Volume 1), but also that of the granddaughter of Anna Jameson, the author of a book that had brought Surrey’s poetry to Barrett’s notice. 62 It has been rightly pointed out that the title can be read as ‘The Courtship of Lady Geraldine’ as much as ‘The Courtship by Lady Geraldine’.

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2. The suitor in ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’ is at the same time a poet, and the poet typologically portrayed by the Romantic and early Victorian aesthetics, whose image was dear to the young Barrett herself. He is the immature singer of the good and the beautiful, derided or at the most tolerated by the nobles; he vainly defends the idealistic concept of poetry before a world sunk in the material. Lady Geraldine herself desires only a ‘poet in his youth’, an echo of nature, and a complement to the twilight music of the woods. But in the ballad the poet becomes aware of his limits and transcends them, and before the close violently repudiates a poetry that is simply a romantic hymn to the shows of beauty and welcomed by the nobles for the very fact that the satiric sting of the serpent is ‘innocuous’ in it. His counter-attack – in itself the worst section of the poem – contains in nuce the aesthetics of Aurora Leigh, the aesthetics of an absolute poetry that deliberately descends to face reality and transforms it with its fire. This manifesto, for the very reason that it is one of the later pieces in the collection, truly unblocks a stance that could be defined as the selfdestructiveness and, with it, of the impotence of the Romantic word, the same that we find voiced in a spasmodic sonnet of the same period63 as the expression of the interiority and of the soul, a pressure that is a birth so painful that it breaks the orifice from which it gushes forth, scattering the soul freely in the air like a beneficial gas. In the sonnet purposely titled ‘Insufficiency’ the word is thrust back down the throat by the ‘curse of nature’ and the poet awaits the time of her liberation, looks forward to a shout which, freely uttered, could gush out perhaps only in the afterlife. The yearned for ‘dread apocalypse of soul’ is the blissful and horrid vision of the ‘infinite’ to which the poet, a new Moses, aspires, and at once the Apocalypse as cataclysm and annihilation. Such a poet – isolated, solitary, vain, then scorned, or come daringly close to the blinding awareness of his mission, and in that epiphanic moment stricken and stiffened in death –64 63 ‘The Soul’s Expression’. 64 The poem ‘The Poet and the Bird’ foreshadows Wilde as it narrates that the poet banished from society, and exiled because he sang overmuch of things divine, receives the support of the nightingale, which stops singing so as to die with him. The poet is also the rose in ‘A Lay of the Early Rose’ that only the bee pays homage to while

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is central to many other poems of enquiry that form a little internal cycle. The range of poetry, Barrett thought at the beginning of the 1840s, had to widen out into a form of adult knowledge, of knowledge of beauty and at the same time of truth, or more precisely of the union of beauty and suffering (‘not to suffer, is to want / The conscience of the jubilant’). ‘The Lost Bower’ also confirms that childhood means an Edenic ignorance of ‘thorn’s-breadth more of red’. In the interminable sequence of its Dantesque tercets, ‘A Vision of Poets’ unravels as a spiral of cognitive ordeals inserted one inside the other in the framework of a dream in which a poet, unable to sleep, meets in the wood with a second Beatrice who guides him in his walk.65 The great poets, who at the climax of the vision welcome him in a church, are in fact the representatives of the equation between beauty and truth, who in order to honour this identification have died as martyrs. Immediately afterwards the crowd of imitators – the emulators, not true but false poets – arrives, driven away with proud scorn. The poet kneels and is accepted in a dream by the true poets; but in the end a crowd of little white-dressed angels explain that he is dead, give his spiritual testament and describe his funeral. § 67. Barrett Browning VIII: Towards an aesthetics of the constructive word Barrett’s letters confirm that, by 1844 or a little later, she had begun to plan that epic of the present which became Aurora Leigh, that is an ambitious romantic poem capable of facing directly, and subverting, the poetic conventions of the age and presupposing a constructive use of the word, far different from that in the vicious circle of the ‘young poet’. That meant a poetry apt to preserve its Romantic origin from the absolute spirit, but at once capable of tackling reality ‘without a mask’. The historical moment

all the others ignore it, and it anticipates ‘an unpreparèd season’. ‘The House of Clouds’ recalls the isolation from the world in Tennyson’s ‘The Palace of Art’, and confirms the alienation and the otherness of the poet, who is always turned towards the immaterial and the divine. 65 In the listing of literary glories the ballad recalls An Essay on Mind and is slightly earlier, even in the abstruseness of the details and in its visionary quality, than the triad of poems on controlled empathy by Arnold, especially ‘The New Sirens’ (§ 152.5).

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called for a decidedly strong, filter less word, oriented to the present, as also others would feel asked to do in that decade. Some poems of 1844 lead directly to the centre of this aesthetic revision, which quickly entailed the sacrifice of all diaphragms, all courtly stagings, all archaic ornateness and all residues of personal myth, whether Greek, biblical or Arthurian. The lyric ‘The Dead Pan’ dismisses the pagan and mythological gods in stanzas that repeat the title in the refrain, which following a tradition recalled in the poem, was heard by sailors on board a ship at the death of Jesus. The poem is set in the form of an interrogation, or an address to those gods that have passed away, and that do not reply having been scattered to the four quarters of the globe,66 and are no longer called on by the poets. The poet herself almost angrily admits the inexorable twilight and catches herself up in the act of throwing to the ground the chalice full of wine ready for the feast. The new mythology, or rather the ‘poetry of truth’, leans on a substitutive myth, the myth of Christ, a divinity that dies but to rise again and give new life: from the false fable, or from the truth only intuited, to ‘the truth without veils’, since ‘God Himself is the best Poet’. ‘The Wine of Cyprus’,67 a poem dedicated to Barrett’s blind Greek tutor during the years at Hope End, is a final farewell to scholarly poetry and signifies and certifies the exit of the erudite young poet, Elizabeth Barrett herself, who must admit the waning of the marvellous credibility of mythology and of gods that can no longer be crowned. The wine of Cyprus is a metaphor for that mythology, a mythology that in modern times can only be ‘sipped’. She corrects the initial symbol of the ‘fly’ – flicked from the edge of the glass, in remembrance of those epic drinking bouts of the mythological gods – into that of the ‘dove’ that only dips its beak into the cup. The classical world – following the development of the image – could help the poet

66 The poem anticipates Walter Pater’s fantasy – who in turn had taken it from Heine – of the mythological gods fleeing ever further north after their twilight. 67 A glass of Cyprus wine was usually sipped during the lessons with her tutor at Hope End, and it was drunk for the toast at Boyd’s house immediately after Barrett’s and Browning’s secret marriage, on 12 September 1846. The poem, inasmuch as it is retrospective of Barrett’s youthful studies and of the change in her attitude towards the classics, is close to ‘Development’ by Browning, and recalls, in its survey of great authors, both An Essay on Mind and ‘A Vision of Poets’, mentioned above.

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only in ‘drops’. In a state of inebriation due to the wine, in the second and longer part of the poem which loses the brilliance of the first, Barrett calls to mind her studies and brings back to life her early experiences in poetic, dramatic, and philosophical reading, and all the authors that in different ways had offered her a cup of liquor. ‘The Cry of the Children’ was the first poem of political protest written by Barrett, and the first success of the new aesthetics of the constructive word, at least to judge from the fact that the composition, based on an alarmed report on child labour written in 1843 by Richard Hengist Horne, was read publicly in Parliament and had an immediate effect by bringing about a new regulation. From now on, the domain of many of Barrett’s poems was to be that of the novel of protest, of denunciation and of satire, in the ‘social’ decade of nineteenthcentury English literature. She strongly felt that poetry could support and even surpass the novel in order to promote equality and justice, according to the ancient power of song and of melic poetry.68 2. ‘The Cry of the Children’ is a typically occasional poem, its images taken straight from the news items, and well known to her contemporaries; yet it does not end with the slogan, with the polemics and with the immediate invective, but is a far more finished poem, more pondered and structured than might be thought considering its genesis. One easily notices for instance the ingenious and extended play on the motif of ‘deafness’. The poet apostrophizes her ‘brothers’, that is her compatriots who are deaf to the laments and the cries of the little miners that only she can hear; she becomes their speaker and amplifies the sound of their crying and their tears, that not even the mothers of the young workers hear. A little girl died at work is paradoxically the symbol of rest and forced inactivity, because even had she wanted to there is no space to carry on working in the narrow ditch; and, should someone want to lend an ear to her earthly ‘shout’ he would realize only that it had stopped. The setting, initially in the mine, changes into that of the factory, whose emblem is the ‘wheels of iron’. Their double effect is to transmit their wheeling to all that surrounds them by creating a very modern nightmare of rotation, and to produce a 68 As Browning recalls in Aristophanes’ Apology, the walls of Athens were left standing by the enemy due to the Euripidean song that filled the air.

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noise that is directly functional to the paradigm of deafness, inasmuch as it deafens twice-over the laments and the cries. The little girl dead in the mine has reached in death a stasis that checks the unceasing and whirling movement of the wheels; in life, the silence of the wheels might allow the children to have and enjoy moments of brotherly union, even a simple exchange of ideas from which a political conscience may be born. Barrett did not hide from herself that a similar lack of political awareness was also due to religion or to its aberrations. These children end up imagining that even God has become deaf, and is unable to hear because of the squeaking of the wheels. This is a very interesting variation of the Deus absconditus motif, and introduced not in a strictly theological sense but in the form of a sharp syllogism formulated by the children: if the ‘brothers’ cannot hear their laments when passing near their doors, then it will be far more difficult for God to hear them. He is a God who, in his epicurean indifference, is comfortably at home in Paradise listening to the blissful chant of the angels, whose suave voices cover the screaming but ineffectual laments of the children. Such a deaf and insensible God is the effigy of the capitalist owner,69 which meant or implied that even religion, or at least a paralysed religion, friendly to the established power, was often an instrument in the hands of the powerful. And if religion was just this, then the children would soon have ended by not believing; the sky would have been simply a whirling of clouds, and the vision of God veiled by their tears.70 Long before others Barrett realized and foresaw what would become a deeply felt preoccupation, in particular in Matthew Arnold’s essay writing: the loss of faith by large sections of the working classes, to which religion offered only an abstract or delayed salvation, with a consequent shift of the workers towards ideologies – socialism, Marxism, and other offshoots – that promised instead a better life already in this world. The last stanza of ‘The Cry of the Children’ is explicit in describing the exploitation of the workers by means of the image of the world that makes a launching pad for progress 69 ‘of His image is the master / Who commands us to work on’. 70 ‘God’s possible is taught by His world’s loving’, which means that since love of the world and in the world is inexistent, God is also inexistent. Incidentally, Barrett’s daring in using the adjective ‘possible’ as a noun was highly stigmatized by the purists.

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out of the hearts of the children; but the path is smattered with the blood that spurts from their hearts.71 3. Such a decided and vibrant protest did not mean checkmating the Establishment and rejecting the British model of enlightened capitalism. The poem dedicated to the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1838 has already been mentioned, and it was followed by a second in 1840 and by a third, ‘Crowned and Wedded’, which welcomed her marriage to Prince Albert. It is like a long poetic procession that shows in a bird’s eye view the inside of the Abbey crowded with statesmen and dignitaries, where all classes offer an ideal greeting to the Queen. Barrett, a convinced supporter of Napoleon III, did not hide an admiration, shared by many compatriots, for Napoleon I, who is mythicized (in ‘Crowned and Buried’, written when the body of the Emperor returned to Paris by gracious concession of the English) as an Orestes entrusted in the urn to an Electra, and a magnificent champion of the freedom that he had trod under foot. It is perhaps a calculated bathos that the poem to Napoleon was originally followed, in the 1844 collection, by another on the spaniel Flush, after all jokingly but favourably compared to Julius Caesar (for the very reason that he was not bald under the crown!). Even this small poem of infinite tenderness, ‘Flush or Faunus’,72 together with a second and ampler one in 1850, ‘To Flush, My Dog’, which immortalizes the tireless companion of the wakeful hours of the recluse, are minimal signals of the cracking of the Titanic inspiration and – the received orientation in the 1840s and beyond in England – of the restrictions of the poetic perspective within the circumference of the little, the daily, the domestic, and of a poetry given over to more prosaic cadences, no longer solemnized and flowing.

71

A related poem, ‘A Child Asleep’, follows the blissful dreams and angelic visions of the sleeping child, which are so different from reality and unlinked to the inexorable passing of all things towards death. The most obvious pendant is ‘The Cry of the Human’, which turns to the adults who do not say like fools that there is no God, but implore him to be pitiful, though unable to praise God if life reserves only mysterious and inexplicable misfortune. 72 The poems on the life and death of Flush bring to mind Arnold and his laments for the cats and the dachshunds.

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§ 68. Barrett Browning IX: ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ I. Browning courted in verse The forty-four Sonnets from the Portuguese73 were written from 1846 in complete secrecy and unknown to Browning. Barrett shyly offered them in manuscript to her husband in June 1849 at Bagni di Lucca, where the couple sojourned on holiday.74 The reason why she kept them secret was the fear that Browning might look on them with disfavour. Browning instead was struck and wanted them published immediately in the 1850 collection, though he advised his wife to present them – as a screen to cover the intimate facts therein revealed – as the translation of an imaginary original. As ‘sonnets from the Portuguese’75 they were printed for the first time in 1850. To be sure these Sonnets are not, as Browning incautiously exclaimed taken by enthusiasm, ‘the most beautiful sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare’. A severe judge could immediately detect a carefree reprise of almost all the ingredients and of the thematic, technical and stylistic elements of the collections of love poems: the archaic veneer, the artifice of the ‘extended metaphor’, the at times strongly argumentative and syllogistic tone, the texture of incisive oppositions and antitheses, the repertory of traditional images, the classical topoi of the apotheosis and of unworthiness. Yet once the debts with the canon of the sonnet cycles of courting and love have been established – from Wyatt to Surrey, Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare – the contemporary poetic collections must be set at their side and placed on an even keel with them, whether the homosexual Sonnets from the Portuguese but also, according to a felicitous ambiguity (Taplin 1970, 234) Sonnets of a Portuguese, that is, of a second Caterina loved by the poet Camões, as Browning idealized his future bride. In ‘Caterina to Camoëns’, of 1844, Barrett had projected herself onto the Queen’s young lady-in-waiting loved by the Lusitanian poet in exile, and the whole monologue – an impassioned Elizabethan embroidery in which the dying woman recalls the distant poet and remembers their love – wheels around the elated memory of her ‘splendid eyes’ and the just as elated but frustrated desire to be re-united. 74 The version spread by Gosse that they were put in her husband’s pocket already at Pisa, immediately after the couple’s flight, has no foundation (Hayter 1962, 102–3). 75 The early reviewers fell into the error of exchanging them for a translation (Taplin 1970, 238). 73

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(In Memoriam by Tennyson is perfectly coeval) or the heterosexual ones by Meredith, Rossetti and Patmore. Naturally, the roles are inverted as are the poetic conventions of the male suitor, who is moreover, almost always, rejected. This means that Barrett’s sonnets take their distance in particular from the collections of love poems by Rossetti and Meredith, and that they transmute the separation of the lovers, or their always deferred union, into the achievement of the ecstatic moment of unison. With this optimistic outcome, though offered without any missionary and persuasive intent, they look towards the key work of the Victorian idealization of the married state, The Angel in the House by Patmore, though this is not formally composed of sonnets. Besides, Barrett confirms a very early propensity for the use of conceits and for the intellectualism of the Metaphysicals, and this closely allies her not only to Patmore but also to the far colder and more cerebral work of Rossetti.76 2. Sonnets from the Portuguese, taken as a whole, celebrates the galvanic and inflaming regenerative power of passion, such as the one that truly transformed the life of the sick and depressed Barrett, by then vowed to a symbolic death, feared and felt to be almost at hand, and that offered her salvation in the person of the beloved. Such faith in the metamorphic and transfiguring force of love was, however, also subject to a wavering curve, because there are moments in which love falls into the clutches of instability and precariousness, as in Clough and above all in Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. The first and seventh sonnets return to the biographical moment in the life of the poet now without hope, depressed and weary with renunciation, then vivified by pain, and they mask in mystic and prophetic terms the coming of Browning. The erudite memory, always ready for interaction with the present, leads to the contrast between the happy years of which Theocritus sings and the sad years of the present singer, years passing by in a funeral procession moving towards the abyss, until a figure, a ‘mystic form’ – not of death as might be expected, but of love – catches the poet 76 The first in the collection is already a distinctly Rossettian kind of sonnet, because Barrett makes use of plastic figurations and images of abstract processes; in particular the apparition of the ‘mystic form’ of the beloved is Rossettian. See, for other analogies, Hayter 1962, 232.

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by her hair as she is about to fall. The biographical thread is never followed chronologically in Sonnets from the Portuguese, both because it was itself not linear but full of highs and lows, and because, as in the twentiethcentury stream of consciousness, poetic reality unhinges chronology and works by means of association and unpredictability. Therefore, the whole of the central body of the collection, up to a few sonnets from the end, is an uninterrupted oscillation of palpitations of discomfort and throbs of hope. The divine prohibition comes with the second sonnet, where a God rises – a surrogate of her own father – to order her not to see her lover, a punishment even more severe than death. Amongst the most successful in describing the enthusiasm of passion, the fear that all might end, and the burning desire instead that the love that has fired her might be returned, is the fifth, in which the poet, a new Electra, pours the urn of ashes (all her past pain) in front of the lover, and among the ashes sees some half-burnt embers. Two possibilities open in this sonnet, the total damping of the fire, and with it the ceasing of all hope, or waiting for the wind that will bring those few embers back to life.77 The image is developed and continued right to the end, because should the half-burnt fire pick up strength it would then be vain to seek shelter from it.78 One of the last, the thirty-sixth, still recalls the doubts born at their first meeting, when love seemed but a passing fancy, or a parenthesis between one pain and another pain, and the poet admits that she has not completely got over this fear. Barrett feared to be loved out of pity, and that when the pain ended pity too might end and, with it, love, so much so that the

77 The ninth sonnet expresses the fear that tears and laments might even weary her beloved and induce him to leave her; in this case the woman will have to resign herself to love being only one-sided. 78 The image is carried over into the tenth sonnet: love, fire, is a flame that bursts forth in the same way from good quality wood or from weeds. ‘There’s nothing low / In love’. Here the transfiguring, glorifying force of love is celebrated, a fire that flames radiantly. The assertion that such a love is also love for God, who awards any kind of love, echoes Patmore’s philosophy of marriage (§ 172.4).

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dreamy, vibrant and wittily79 expressed memory of the first three kisses is postponed until the thirty-eighth. 3. The equality of the two lovers in the name of love had a precise contemporary resonance, as it contained a veiled allusion to that inter-class marriage that was severely forbidden by Victorian codes, as Clough and Patmore knew and as did the ‘poet’ of ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’. From an ontological point of view marriage is, in the tenth sonnet, unique in its absolute essence, and such that, in its immaculate purity, class barriers are overcome. All the unworthiness of one lover towards another, in the eleventh sonnet, is denied in virtue of the democratic force of love, and put to flight and defeated by love with its ‘vindicating grace’. The thirteenth sonnet takes up the theme of the unutterable nature of love, too great and buried too deep down in the heart, and expressed with silence rather than with words. The twenty-first sonnet re-affirms the necessity of repeating the promise of love, as much with words as with silence, in a ‘silvery iterance’. The fourteenth, Shakespearian sonnet analyses the absolute nature of love, a love not bound to parts or fractions of the body.80 The twenty-third seems a preview of Patmore in the image of the union of the lovers after death, but it closes on a daring note, an indifference for what lies beyond in order to enjoy to the full the earthly perspective and the fullness of earthly love. 4. A good half of the Sonnets from the Portuguese thus transposes and selects, in a much more stirring representation, the two years of courtship between the two lovers. As Clough did in Amours de Voyage with his Roman letters, it has a clear guideline in the love letters, just as immortal, written by the future couple between 1845 and 1846.81 The twenty-ninth is an epistolary sonnet, a kind of transposition in poetry of a written invitation, while in the dramatic twenty-eighth, almost ‘live’, Barrett reads through once again the stages of her courtship. She goes through the letters that she jealously 79 The divine lover mistakes its aim just like any inexperienced lover: the first kiss ends on her fingers, the second on her forehead, the third on her lips. 80 § 178.4. 81 The difference between the letters and the sonnets is that the sonnets are written without an interlocutor, which excludes and denies the communicative function (Colaiacomo 1981, 17).

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guards, and that then falling one by one from the piece of cord that binds them show a crescendo of promises. The Stilnovo and Provençal envoi in the last sonnet precedes by a few years the gift and the offer that the poet made to her then husband with the floral bunch of sonnets, which were like so many flowers picked in the garden, but not withered because kept in the ideal garden of her heart. Pathetic or dramatic events, secret and tender occasions are relived and transfigured in retrospect. In the very popular diptych of the eighteenth and nineteenth the gift to her wooer of a curl of hair is recalled, a curl black like the locks of the Muses sung by Pindar, and cut from a head of hair that no longer flowed down to her feet and framed a sad face – a gift exchanged with another curl, one of his, and placed near to her heart. Some sonnets, sobbing and broken, report dialogues, light skirmishes, while others are sighing summaries of visits that have taken place, or desperate sighs to her beloved, and longings to have him with her and not only in spirit or by means of a letter. For the whole two years of courtship Barrett had been ‘a bee shut in a crystalline’, imprisoned but safe and not tempted by the foolish daring of Icarus. The thirty-second sonnet, in which the promise of love is recalled, contains her instinctive reaction to turn back from the step taken, and reveals the hesitations and the uncertainties of the poet every single time that Browning suggested her fleeing with him. The thirty-fifth weighs up her future life since, in order to follow him, she would have to leave all she had; it foresees the change of environment, tests her own courage, and yet she devotes herself to a love that holds pain at bay. § 69. Barrett Browning X: ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ II. Sonnets on Eros disguised As far as critical appreciation is concerned, however, Sonnets from the Portuguese has suffered and still suffers from the acknowledgement, taken for granted, that they are a work in which the autobiography is objectified and necessarily disciplined by the formal boundaries of the sonnet, thus cutting the wings of Barrett’s innate exuberance. They have suffered, indeed, far too much from this biographical interpretation. They have been read only and too often in this way, and thus damaged and impoverished, admired in word but in substance too little enquired into and explored in

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their ‘golden folds’ – to use one of Barrett’s expressions.82 Consequently they are almost absent today from the sights of the scholars and even of the feminists themselves. The point is they need to be read apart from the context of biographical truth and of its transposition. This is the only way to appreciate their intrinsic literary qualities, the orchestrations of and the relations between the images, their allusive network and their ‘prismatic hues’, and not just that ‘white light’ that Browning envied her for.83 The very opening sonnet could wrongly invite the supposition of a post-Romantic inspiration, since the word springs forth from ‘musings’ and from visions the outlines of which are blurred and unclear. It is just the opposite, for the collection as a whole denies the impression of a disorderly and spontaneous ‘Romantic’ flow. 2. In representing the exceptional reality of love Barrett uses regularly, in a metaphorical and often twisted manner, a sacramental, theological, and biblical language, and even the language of contemporary religious diatribes. This well-known technique consists in the apotheosis of the beloved,84 and its first operation is to depict him as a divine being come down to earth, like the Messiah himself incarnate. The Annunciation enters the range of this procedure in the twenty-sixth sonnet, in which the coming of the suitor tangibly fills the evanescence of pure profane visions, and has as its correlative the fall of the consecrated water. Such a flow is translated into the total satisfaction of the soul, and the final line equates the lover with God, because like God he satisfies with his gifts and debases all dreams. The delirium of possession and the exultation of the harmonious fullness are in these sonnets like mystic ecstasies. She only looked for God, or rather a god, and she found him, so that a rhetorical antagonism arises, between the absent God of religion and the beloved, the true life-giving god. A sacred

82 The fortune of the Sonnets, not properly critical, and their romanticizing and mythicizing cult, are testified by the numerous translations, especially into Italian, appeared at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Rilke translated them into German. 83 § 105.1. 84 On apotheosis as the characteristic of the feminine love lyric, see Colaiacomo 1981, 22, and Stephenson 1989, 83.

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image is further turned upside down by saying that a life of love is like a benediction that life on earth looks back to.85 The nature of the ecstasy of love is more accurately defined in the twenty-fourth sonnet, announcing the abandonment of the world to its fate (with the surprising image of the click of the jack-knife) and the ascent of the lovers to a place suspended high up, the sacredness of which can be lessened only by God. 3. The thirty-seventh sonnet varies in the most ingenious way the stylistic elements of the apotheosis. The feared transience of love is evoked in the idol of a god ‘formed in the sand’, and this comes from ingrained habits that belong to the past, when the poet was not subjected to the sovereignty of love, so that she compares herself to a ‘shipwrecked pagan’ who has saved himself and reached harbour, and who sets a porpoise in the temple in gratitude to the ‘guardian god’ his saviour.86 The opening of this sonnet is tuned on an uncommon frequency of prayer and invocation, that of one who turns to God asking for ‘pardon’; but the pardon asked for is that of the beloved, for her having misunderstood and doubted his ‘strong divineness’. Behind the opposition introduced between the firmness of the ‘divine’ beloved and the frailness of the image on the sand, which dissolves and breaks at the first wave, one may recognize the irresistible reminiscence of the biblical episode of the golden calf, melted down while Moses climbed up to God to collect the Tables of the Law.87 Such a contrast underlies the clash between monotheism and idolatry, between the Christian faith and paganism, which is taken up again at the end. At the same time the soul models or more exactly distorts the abstract divine 85

The twenty-second sonnet celebrates the Rossettian unison with the daring image of a single flight, and with the wings that in the fullness of love change into fire. This union is like an exile, and projects the lovers far from the earth that can no longer cause them harm. It might be imagined that by rising in flight the two lovers are received and escorted by angels, but the desire also arises to remain on the earth, where they can also set themselves apart and be isolated. This permanence, in a Rossettian manner, is seen as an assault of darkness and death. 86 The marine god is Browning, but he also preannounces Romney Leigh, who in the final lines of Aurora Leigh emerges as a ‘sea-king’ from the night sea that is Florence (Leighton 1986, 109, and § 72.4). 87 This episode is also recalled in An Essay on Mind, II, 860–3.

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form of the beloved into an image, in the same way as the marine, protective god is ‘reduced’ and substituted by the porpoise. All of this re-echoes, metaphorically reordered, the silence of God after the Fall, and the doubt concerning the real presence of the divine, and his ‘lowered’ and enigmatic presence in the world, which formed the obsessive fulcrum of contemporary religious debate. The origin of such a deformation is an internal fragility of purpose well expressed by the adjective ‘swimming’, which looks towards the marine environment made of ‘sand’ and then widens and darkens into ‘shipwrecked’. Even the term ‘sovranty’ is mid-way between the courtly isotopy of earthly royalty, and the religious isotopy of divine royalty (hence the name ‘Lord’). The diagram of the deformations and of the ‘reductions’, and the chain of substitutions, can be thus summarized: from the ‘strong divineness’ of the beloved to the ‘image […] Formed of the sand’, only ‘fit to shift and break’; from the ‘purity of likeness’ to the ‘worthless counterfeit’, and finally from the ‘sea-god’ to the ‘porpoise’. The last of these operations confirms that, though the sonnet is kept within the context of the pagan world, it equally functions within the frame of the absence, and almost of the ironic reduction of the protecting God to one of his unworthy simulacra, a still leaping porpoise. 4. The unworthiness of the beloved woman compared to the ‘divine’ suitor is reflected and completed by the image of his ‘royalty’. All division is finally overcome by the acknowledged recognition of the equality of the lovers, of their common ‘sovranty’ in the name of love. The munificence of the king is celebrated in the eighth sonnet, a princely munificence that it is difficult to reciprocate for a woman who has nothing to give in her symbolic poverty, and also on account of the tears that have ‘left so dead / And pale a stuff ’. In the twelfth, to the contrary, love is an ennobling factor, and the poet sees herself now crowned with costly ‘rubies’; all of this, however, is due to the suitor being an archetype, a model she has to aspire to, and love is one of his own graces. The throne on which the soul now sits and to which he has drawn her is a royal throne. The gap between the poet and her suitor is continually allegorized in the sonnets with the musical elements of a player admired by all the ladies who haunt the lordly palace, and of a female, abandoned minstrel who sings toneless melodies (an image that also suggests the superiority of

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the young poet Robert Browning that Barrett recognized).88 The thirtysecond sonnet develops at length, for one of the last times, and resolves, the musical image, with the metaphor of the ‘worn viol’ that spoils the song, while the suitor is an exquisite singer. The third and fourth sonnets are amazing variations of these similes, interwoven in a network of connections of unheard of allusiveness. The suitor, in the third, is the soloist suitable for royal celebrations, a guest with a ‘princely heart’ and worthy of ‘queens’; the woman is ‘a poor, tired, wandering singer’; he is the object of ‘a hundred brighter eyes’, she is surrounded only by darkness and solitude. The tone is pessimistic, and only death will make them equal and overcome all diversity of extraction.89 The opposition, with its fable-like flavour, on which the sonnet pivots, is between the splendid internal space – where the admired violinist or piano player or orchestra conductor throws a glance at the poor, freezing minstrel that no one listens to – and the outside of the palace, with its funereal cypress tree that symbolically points to death, and against which the musician is leaning. Immediately after comes the fourth sonnet, even more dense, apparently easy but powerfully allusive, and almost malicious. It is still a sonnet that harps on the unworthiness of the woman, and it picks up once again the image of the singer who makes the dancers ‘break footing’ as he fascinates them with his song; he is suited for palaces, while she is lonely and abandoned in a simple house that he, from his upper regions, has deigned to visit. The domestic setting is symbolic, and the fallen and shabby character of the ‘house’ is emphasized, with its broken ‘casement’ and fallen-in roof. The ‘singer of high poems’ is naturally Browning, who in 1844 had already made his exordium and had established himself as a poet, and was now slowly surpassing Barrett herself. His lips were in all senses ‘pregnant’, both due to the richness of his poetic production and to the ease of his lines, even alluded to in the ‘folds of golden fulness’. Actually, Barrett had rivals in even too

88 In the scorched hair under the poetic laurel (fifth sonnet) is hidden the witty hope that love can undermine Browning’s position of poetic superiority; the suitor must fear even poetically. 89 Browning moved in high society while Barrett was really and truly a recluse.

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many other wooers who, she believed, hung from his lips. Two questions, as in a crescendo, express the surprise of a suitor who comes to look for her in that poor house. The musical metaphor is continued in the opposition between harmonious music, full and persuasive, and the cawing and harsh sounds of the poet, whose symbol is the cricket that ‘chirps against thy mandolin’; even the lifting of the latch as she welcomes her suitor is, as it is easy to imagine, a strident sound because of the rust. A very well hidden and parallel isotopy may be seen here, one that rises and branches out from the musical metaphor. The music of her suitor releases this isotopy from the fourth line, when the dancers break off their dancing and look at those strange, sensual, ‘pregnant lips’. Such an adjective, used in a figurative sense already at this stage, and to be explained as the poetic fecundity of Browning, is clearly attributable also to a love that makes spiritually and even physically pregnant whoever receives it. And then the request for an encore, with the glance full of desire for another song, mimes and alludes to the satisfied musical desire and to a further thirst. This iconography continues in the lifting of the latch, an iron bar, in the opposition between ‘lifting’ and ‘flopping’, and above all, just as unmistakable, in the singer’s action of fertilization, against the background of sterility and ‘desolation’. The verbal cluster, ‘folds of golden fulness’, which autonomously possesses a heightened phonological and even phonosymbolic roundness, reinforces the index of swollenness in ‘pregnant’, and mimics the music that slows down. The gold, like honey, is the male seed in the collective imagination, just as the word ‘door’ is an ancient symbol of the feminine genitalia. The sound of the cricket is ‘against’ – almost evoking a physical contact and an act of rubbing – the mandolin.90 Another crucial, retrospective, ‘pregnant’ sonnet is the twentieth, which foresees the moment when Browning, symbolized in Perseus, would free Andromeda by cutting

90 We must of course postulate, or recall, the paradigm active in the whole series of sonnets, the shift of gender: ‘my cricket’ becomes the phallus, or the conquered phallus of the partner who rubs; or, in an oneiric satisfaction of the woman’s desire, it is really the feminine sexual organ that rubs, as if the woman herself had taken the initiative. This cannot be completely excluded in the light of ‘The Romaunt of the Page’ (§ 66.2) and of ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’ (§ 66.3–4).

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the chains with a single blow. The miraculous thing is, in the recollection, that Barrett had not noticed in advance the signs of his presence or of his imminent arrival. The final image is very ingenious: the poet is compared to an atheist who does not feel God present because he is not materially visible; but, at the same time, she recognizes that her lover is like God, and, therefore, she makes him divine. This sonnet once again offers the symbols of sexual loneliness and sterility, as against the fecundity of companionship. The countryside covered with snow is not just the pure memory of a snowfall perhaps fallen a year before, but alludes to the symbolic snow of the unfertile womb (the snow is opposed to the fire, symbol of love in the other sonnets) which is not yet marked by the prints of footsteps.91 In the octave of the sonnet, new sacred and religious images and stylistic elements express once again erotic motifs, with an inversion of the technique of the contemporary sacramentalists and with the obvious resumption of that of the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals. This sonnet describes a new apotheosis of the beloved, who is a kind of Messiah whose coming is sensed and made perceptible by the trembling of nature, in lines that could easily have been found in contemporary religious lyrics (the ‘prescience’ of the beloved perceived in the buds reminds one of Donne). Still clearer is the erotic connotation to which terms of contemporary debates on the Deus absconditus are bent, for example in the ‘metaphysical’ comparison between the poet, who had not perceived the arrival of her lover (absent, but capable of transmitting vibrations to nature), and the atheists or sceptics who deny a formally absent God. § 70. Barrett Browning XI: ‘Casa Guidi Windows’. A homage to the Risorgimento The following decade of Barrett’s poetry was not however of an intimate and private nature, but vibrant with public and political militancy. This was due to her direct contact with unredeemed Italy after the couple had permanently settled in Florence in 1846, and to the 1848 fever that shook and infected all European literature, and led even the most unemotional

91

See in the seventh sonnet the ‘footsteps of [the­­] soul’ of the beloved.

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poet to write a few occasional supportive lines. Yet in her case, as we have seen, an engagé poetry had begun asserting itself in the 1844 collection. Sonnets from the Portuguese constitutes an extemporaneous parenthesis. The poetic word no longer springs in this decade from an intimate urgency and from an absolute and ideal project, but becomes occasional, ready to come forth when called for by historical circumstances. It dissipates all ornate and conventional halos to adhere spasmodically to reality: ‘void are all images / Men set between themselves and actual wrong’. Such a word, as in the case of ‘The Cry of the Children’, did not simply aim at denouncing injustice and slavery, but aspired directly to set in motion a renewal based not on power but on the evangelical law of peace and love. A statue made by the sculptor Hiram Powers, representing a Greek slave with a rosary and a cross in her hand, symbolizes, in a contemporary sonnet by Barrett, a poetry that, for a superior and immediate necessity, has ceased to be a song of ideal beauty and has become a weapon for battle. The dramatic monologue ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ is in turn one of the most ardent denunciations of American racism in the nineteenth century. It is a story of marginalization, of abuse, of bias and of carnal violence that bitterly contradicts the dream of a perfectly free society, which the Pilgrim Fathers had believed they had founded when disembarking in the new world. 2. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) was the most passionate English poetic tribute to the 1848 uprisings on the Continent and especially in Italy. It constitutes, in particular, the poetic inversion of the cold and controlled reports of Matthew Arnold en politicien, one of which focuses on the Italian situation;92 and it is the almost exact opposite of that parodic demythologization of the heroism of the Risorgimento that Clough, more or less at the same time, wrote in Rome with Amours de Voyage.93 The two poets were in different ways onlookers of two parallel and contemporary events that had in common the same unfortunate epilogue. Barrett followed those in Florence without needing to move, as an eye-witness to them from the windows of Casa Guidi overlooking the Grand Duke’s residence in the Pitti Palace. The two parts of the poem, adapting the 92 § 154.2. 93 § 141.

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Italian terza rima, were written a few years apart from one another, the first in 1847, shortly after the sudden and spontaneous concession of a municipal militia by the Grand Duke, which seemed to portend a greater freedom; the second in 1851 from the heart of the disappointment, after the shattering of all hope and the pompous return of the Austrians to Florence, when the Grand Duke settled once gain in his Palace having ‘come to his senses’. The wishful thinking of the rebels and the passivity of the Italian writers were such, in the 1840s in Italy, that the role of guide and inspirer could be conferred to, and taken on naturally, by an English woman poet passing through Italy. From now on Barrett would be the only Victorian writer, together with Arnold, to think of Italy not with the eye of the tourist reviewing the artistic beauties, and only interested in Roman antiquities and in the vestiges of Dante and the other artistic and literary glories. On the strength of its support of the patriotic cause Casa Guidi Windows was immediately translated into Italian in Florence in 1851, despite the severe Grand-ducal censorship, and established and consolidated Barrett’s fame as a passionate lover of Italy. Actually, this work marks the beginning of her poetical decline. The poetics of militancy, flaunted in the introduction as a new artistic manner dictated by the times, practically never rises above noble oratory. The style is florid, even rather improvised; the juxtapositions overabundant, at times artificial, and the digressions numerous and not always apt. In the diorama of the centos, of the anecdotes and of the reminiscences of artists and poets with which the poem is largely woven, at least a few glimpses of actual Florentine life stand out (the citizens feasting along the decked out streets, the appearance on the balconies of the Grand Duke, the parade of Austrian troops), with a documentary and realistic flavour remotely reminiscent of the opening of Browning’s The Ring and the Book. 3. As in Ugo Foscolo’s I Sepolcri, which Barrett did not know, the poem opens by outlining the contrast between the greatness of the past in Florence and Italy and the desolation of the present, and gives vent to an exhortation to the Italians to shake themselves and move into action in memory of their pristine magnanimity. She argues with all the resigned singers, sons of a mother country that would have been less wretched had it been less beautiful (a very ancient imaginary construction, already traceable in ‘Italia

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mia’ by Petrarch),94 and also with the poets responsible for the mythicization of an Italy as mother, nurse and inspirer of the arts, though now derelict. This was a dangerous and deforming stereotype that prevented any change from the stage of idealization to that of transformative action. Hence the progress of the poem as a gallery of great spirits that march past the reader like pure anecdotal curiosities, from Cimabue, whose Madonna now looked at by the Florentines so idly was once capable of impassioning the crowds,95 to his successor Giotto, to Angelico, and to Michelangelo, mocked by Piero de’ Medici for being unable to carve a statue of snow,96 whose bitter and unbending frown put to shame the almost prophetic superficiality of Piero, a little Grand Duke. Nor could Dante be overlooked, drawn into the flow of reminiscences because of the ‘stone of Dante’ where the Florentines had organized their political action. In that Florence of the fifteenth century, which had been brought back to fashion in England by the Pre-Raphaelites, stood out the magnetic figure of Savonarola, who had many supporters among those newly converted to Catholicism in England, and, for opposite reasons, among ardent Protestants like Barrett. In the long sequence devoted to him, Savonarola is depicted as the scourge of Popery and of the Signoria, and ipso facto identified, as erroneously many Protestants took him to be, a precursor of Luther.97 In Florence, and in the whole of Italy, there was no enlightened leader to be found, a leader who could have been, like Savonarola, a friar, or perhaps even a peasant or a pope. Actually, Barrett’s anti-Catholicism and with it her liberal and ‘Broad’98 theism, contradict 94 Barrett knew at least the founding sonnet of this archetype, ‘All’Italia’ by Filicaja, in Byron’s translation. 95 The scene is spoiled by too many details as if taken from Baedekers, and the parallel is greatly weakened by the fact that the altarpiece is not by Cimabue but is now attributed to Duccio. 96 Michelangelo, sculpting Brutus, wished to incite the Florentines to get rid of the tyrannical Piero de’ Medici. This statue by Michelangelo is also remembered in Part II, apropos of a hint concerning the killing of the Papal Minister, Rossi, in circumstances similar to those in which Julius Caesar was killed. 97 See Volume 5, § 199, on Savonarola in Romola by George Eliot. 98 Christ is the only divine mediator, and only Christ deserves being kneeled to, and, therefore, all the many earthly Churches are equally unworthy.

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this last hypothesis. An anti-papal pope like Browning’s Innocent XII99 would obviously have been a pope in danger, or one inadmissible as the author of the reawakening of the national consciousness and God’s authentic spokesman. In Part two, dated 1851, Barrett atones for having placed her hopes, stimulated by feminine weakness, both in the Grand Duke and in Pius IX and in the Florentines themselves. An irony that is only seemingly clement strikes – in one among the better handled passages – at the ingenuous dream of the Florentines, lovers of peaceful living, who had transformed the brief interlude of self-government into a small epicurean paradise of indolence. 4. Written in English, though very soon translated, Casa Guidi Windows was addressed to the European governments, and directly to the English crown, to make them aware of the Italian problem and of that of the oppressed nationalities. It thus presupposed an operative, along with an artistic aim. A reference to the Great Exhibition, recently held in Hyde Park, carries a severe and sarcastic blame. Miraculous technological discoveries were put on display and stood one facing the other, but they were supremely impotent to solve the real problems of humanity, which were still reducible to the division between the rich and the poor and between the free and the slaves. It has been rightly pointed out that Casa Guidi Windows subverts, though not completely, a patriarchal concept of history and of historiography, whose damages were under the eyes of all; and that the poem yearns for the advent of a ‘new Jerusalem’ ruled by love, nuptial and maternal, but paradoxically without a father. In an autobiographical sense, both the Grand Duke and the Pope are paternal and thus oppressive figures. But in Casa Guidi Windows the symbolic and ideal opposition, later to be developed in Aurora Leigh, between a maternal Italy and a paternal England is also inaugurated. Barrett’s personal history – her search for a mother and her refusal of the father, and, above all, her new role as bride and mother – interacts, and poetically overlaps, with the political proposal. The poem is however anything but a downright repudiation of past patriarchy. In the poem Barrett does not name any female writer or artist, or

99 § 132.3.

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prophetess of liberation, and her assumption is that Italian and Florentine art could be divided into two fields that are both male, that of the resigned singers to be repudiated and that of the rebel singers to be supported. It was in short erroneous to forget the past, and an active but selective nostalgia was necessary. In particular, the male archetype of Italy as mistress and seducer, but finally ravished and abandoned, needed to be replaced by an authentically feminine ideal of an Italy as bride and mother waiting for her liberator. Casa Guidi Windows begins with the song for freedom springing from the lips of a child, and this child becomes, at the end, the son of the poet, Pen, a two years old cherub prophesizing a rosy future. § 71. Barrett Browning XII: ‘Aurora Leigh’ I. The failed masterpiece Aurora Leigh is a ‘poem’ in the more exactly proportional sense of the term, with its nine books and over 10,000 lines. Conceived in 1844, as Barrett’s letters to her future husband reveal, it was first published in 1856 and revised in 1859. The most ambitious work by Barrett, but far from being her masterpiece, it was planned to be the crowning achievement of a career that would be cut off only four years later. It was intended to be and indeed immediately became the poem of the moment, even though, like many other poems and lyrics published before or straight after, with the same intentions and with the same vain ambitions, it did not last.100 It petered out as the pure and simple echoing of contemporary themes and diatribes and in the documentary and remonstrative mirroring of the degradation and the abject conditions of the working classes.101 Yet the expectations, and, after publication, the resonance of Aurora Leigh were immense. The two Rossettis idolized it, Ruskin regarded it as the greatest poem ever written, and among the admirers and enthusiasts were Browning, William Morris,

100 By 1928 Aurora Leigh was already ‘little read’ (Burdett 1928, 253). 101 Aurora’s trip to the poor dilapidated shack of Marian Erle opens a glimpse on the spectacle of the vulgar, brazen prostitute at the window; Aurora tips her handbag upside down and like animals the poor struggle to get hold of the coins. It has been said with a certain exaggeration that Barrett’s only direct experiences in the roughest London areas were those she made on the ‘missions’ (one of which is splendidly described by Virginia Woolf in Flush) to pay the ransom for her stolen spaniel.

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George Eliot, Poe and Emily Dickinson. The last of these, as has been proved, took various passages from it for her own compositions.102 The poem did not retain its fame for long, however, and later readers cut it down to size. Twentieth-century taste panned it in turn without any excuse whatsoever, finding it largely irredeemable and even irritating; or it rescued chosen passages in more indulgent readings like that of Virginia Woolf. Its greatest and most undeniable fault lies in the courageous, and in itself difficult mediation of genre between the Romantic poem of the artist’s formation and the militant novel belonging to that rather mediocre and also repetitive canon usually defined as that of the ‘condition of England’. Hence the intrusive authorial voice that was first noted by Virginia Woolf; hence a discontinuity between the lyrical or elegiac episodes, some of which are truly inspired, and many others that are raw haranguing; hence the accumulation of innumerable phases, whether didactic or of a purely debating nature; hence a great disorder and lack of control over the materials and the variety of multiple registers. Among these is even the diary of a journey and the virtuoso descriptions of local Italian colour, a genre that was fashionable. To this must be added a fatiguing and clumsy overlapping of parallel plots that have the same unpredictability, and the overabundance of turns, twists and turn-ups, as those of the feuilleton.103 Both the diegetic, descriptive and connective style, and the language of the dialogues are unnaturally charged. Except for the drawing-room skirmishes of the aristocracy – veritable impressionistic fragments – all the characters speak without distinction in contorted and twisted speeches padded with remote allusions.104 The exasperating dialectic duels between Aurora and Romney Leigh are not dry witticisms of a few lines but formal addresses full of obiter dicta lengthier

102 Moers 1976, 56–62. 103 The apex of the romantic acrobatics (with a flavour of a verse Moll Flanders), is touched on in the long stories of Marian Erle’s two flights: the first from home, when her exasperated mother wants to sell her to a lustful squire, and the second from the clutches of her violators, after her failure to marry Romney. 104 This was first clearly underlined by Merlette 1905, 270–1. According to Virginia Woolf, the poem proves that blank verse is ‘the most remorseless enemy of living speech’.

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than in a play. Such diatribes are redundant especially with artificial and superfluous digressions and with stridently erudite references, and at times indulge in an inappropriate, almost exhibitionist, use of metaphor. 2. In its primary aspect, that of a Künstlerroman, Aurora Leigh introduces the ingenuous, twenty-year-old poet Aurora, who crowns herself certainly not as a game. It then follows her London apprenticeship, for she is unsatisfied with her art that is strongly compromised. It closes with the poet tempering an art tending to the elated self-cultivation of the absolute spirit into a serviceable one, but miraculously unadulterated and dedicated to the regeneration of the actual world, and having its ideal continuation in life.105 Even Aurora Leigh is thus a chapter of the hard-won transition from the solipsism of early post-Romanticism to Victorian commitment after 1850. In the nineteenth-century querelle between modern and classic, ancient or even mythological subjects – a querelle that involved almost all the mid-Victorian poets, and in particular Clough and Arnold – Barrett in Aurora Leigh undoubtedly took the side of the former. The present era was sufficiently heroic, or at least sufficiently interesting, to be worthy

105 The formative itinerary of the poem closes in perfect synchrony with the time of its writing. It is, that is, a first-person retrospective by the poet Aurora Leigh after the closing of the plot. The retrospective value of the poem is evident from a Preface of just eight lines that – to be truthful not much to the point – compares the poem to a portrait that a lady artist gives to a one-time suitor, who much later gets it out of the drawer to realise what he had been and what he is. Such a Preface is also a veiled dedication to Robert Browning. The distance between author and alter ego decreases in some episodes, when the mature poet identifies palpitatingly with her youthful double, making past and present poetically coincide – above all, in the cases of repentance for often impulsive actions that were not always understood and controlled when they happened, and that perhaps could happen again. Memories of this kind provoke rhythmic admonishments like ‘Aurora Leigh, be humble’, or ‘Be calm’. In one signal case Barrett, the author, aesthetically takes her distances from her heroine – or perhaps she identifies even more closely with her – calling ‘poetic’ a similitude: that, for example, of the leaves of the trees in the Valdarno similar to the small fragments of a letter she has just torn up. In other phases the poem has the form of a diary, because it reviews the inner thoughts, the aims, and the self-analysis of the writer, as if she herself was reliving them at that moment.

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of taking its place in poetry.106 As a ‘political novel in verse’ the poem strongly lashes out at the British establishment, and from the opening a contrast is delineated between the miraculous authenticity of Aurora’s Italian mother and the negative portrait of her father – a man to say the least ‘incomplete’ – and a further one, bitterly cutting, of the English aunt who brings up the orphan Aurora. Symbolically, her mother is Italy, and Italy is the imagination: a portrait of the dead mother is for Aurora as a child a kind of Paterian Mona Lisa, a Medusa portrait, pallid and with a face similar to the swan that stands out on the stiff red silk, and a source of changing associations through time. The father is, vice versa, the portrait of British sturdiness – rigid, clumsy, without frills. His presentation seems to trace Clough’s figures of the emigrants and expatriates of Dipsychus and of Mari Magno, who find in the south a way out for their tortured hearts, and a test of their emotional fragility. A sudden ‘flood’ of ‘passion’ in a Florentine road drowns all his past compunction; he came to Florence to study the ‘secret of Da Vinci’s drains’, when he sees a pious woman in a procession and is stricken by her, for all the scornful British prejudices.107 No Englishman, not even her cousin and future groom Romney, until the coup de théâtre in the last book of the poem, is treated with respect or given a crumb of sympathy by Aurora. At the receptions she keeps herself isolated and does not take part in the light conversation, and all the lords are described in a negative light except for one.108 No male person surpasses the perfidy of Lady Waldemar, but all the other aristocratic feminine figures are, to say the least, frivolous. On the other hand, the representatives of the working class are healthy even though rough, as in much of the engaged and democratic literature of the time. Their 106 The possibility of a contemporary epic was denied by many on the basic premise that the present was a ‘pewter age’. Contemporaries, vice versa, were not for Barrett the best judges of present heroism, according to the similitude of Mount Athos, for some a colossus in the shape of a man, but for the peasants simply pasture land. 107 In Virginia Woolf ’s reconstruction in Flush, the pretence of democratic feeling that weakens or even obliterates class barriers, the loosening of morals, even the uncontrolled anarchy and the sexual promiscuity that characterized Italy for the English, are subtly filtered through the eyes and also often the sense of smell of a dog. 108 Hayter 1962, 125.

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reification is the result of the weakness of the governors and of privilege, rather than an answer to an impulse of their soul, which is naturally moral and instinctively religious, capable not only of resisting evil temptations but of bettering themselves by their own efforts. Marian Erle is a flower grown in the social mud, the over-perfect and in some way Puritan icon of spontaneous good will. The scene of the interrupted marriage between Romney Leigh and Marian – among the best and better constructed in the whole poem – depicts not only the symbolic contraposition between the two classes in the rigidly separate sides of the naves of the church, but also, through the social chatter of the nobles during their waiting for the bride, the cowardly immobility of the ruling classes. All its representatives were vocal in their belief that order had to be safeguarded, thus avoiding ‘falling head long’; apocalyptically, a ‘dismembering of society’ was feared.109 Barrett, in other words, captured the widespread preoccupation of the literary intelligentsia over an uncontrolled proletariat that trusted itself to – and that, even in England, would more and more put itself in the hands of – those who wanted to break up the state, or, meanwhile, had lost their religious faith and their belief in the human spokesman of God. Aurora Leigh is then an extreme vindication of poetry as also a spiritual weapon in the regeneration of society, and as such an antagonist to nineteenth-century materialism, positivism and economics.110 Barrett never denies the divine vocation of the artist, nor the capacity of art to express the voice of God on earth and the everlasting eternal truths, and of being thus a mediator between the ‘invisible’ and the ‘visible’. Poetry was for her, however, or had become, productive of a change, as long as the soul survived behind the action. Philanthropy, at least of the kind of 109 The bride’s guests form a kind of necropolis in the church, blind and maimed and looked on with apprehension and nodding heads by the well-thinking; the marriage is a meeting between extremes, and one that, according to Romney, may benefit and save society, but for the die-hards it is the forerunner of anarchy. The epilogue of the episode is an excited choral scene, a mimed farce and a crush in which the failed groom comes off worse. Romney, who had been so ardent to the cause of the poor is in the end suspected of trickery by those very people of whom he is the benefactor. 110 Frequent and shouted refutations are addressed by Aurora to the materialism of the age and the ‘algebraic god’ of positivists.

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the doctrines of Fourier, Comte and Owen, receives in the poem a double and united criticism, first by the protagonist who from the beginning is its enemy and then by Romney Leigh, although he has been, at the beginning, its most courageous and fanatical follower. The principal fault of all philanthropic movements was in the end that of not being ‘poetical’, even though its obverse could be a poetry far too individualistic and far too little philanthropic. Philanthropy without poetry fails but not vice versa; the poet scorns nothing that the philanthropist does, though always regarding it as being a ‘partial good’. The Parisian sojourn of Aurora Leigh in her voyage towards the Italy of her ancestors after the disgust with which the poet had left England, serves to contrast the English model with its alternative in the France of Napoleon III. The English had a superficial prejudice against the frivolity of the French, yet the French taught the English how to go straight into action starting from ideas, those ideas that Matthew Arnold, among others, acknowledged as their property. Such a panegyric, ideally set in 1852, immediately after the crowning of Napoleon, hails the advent of democracy in France and, in almost the same words as Arnold, the mythical renewal of the golden age, at least in France. 3. The Victorian philanthropist, allegedly a realist, was always, on closer inspection, more of a utopian and more distant from reality than the ‘absolute’ poet. Aurora Leigh introduces Romney Leigh as an immature male hero, he too moulded by the college system, and one that, though untouched by any parody, is similar to Hewson, the protagonist of The Bothie by Clough.111 He faces the same matrimonial alternative, uncertain whether to marry a working-class wife or a rich one. Both answer to the type of the hot and slightly exalted radical of the 1840s, critical of a diaphanous and empty-headed feminine beauty, and of the etiquette and ritual of the engagement. As is whispered with much truth in the drawing-rooms, Romney wants to marry not a woman but a class. Not having married, although not for his fault, a working-class woman, he ends up temporarily wanting ‘to pluck a flower / From the other side of the social hedge’. But unlike in Clough’s Bothie, the case study gets complicated, as Romney

111 §§ 138–9.

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courageously challenges the middle-class codes, or would like to do so, by marrying not only a former prostitute from the working class, Marian Erle, but one with an illegitimate son, though with the mitigating circumstances of having been raped. This is ultimately brought to nothing by Marian herself, not by Romney who would have been more than ready. Seven years later the solutions imagined by Clough, mixed marriage and emigration, were thought to be no longer practicable. The poem closes leaving things as they are. Romney and Aurora Leigh become betrothed, but the curtain falls before their marriage, and without any father appearing on the horizon, and with a symbolic but ambiguous community of just brothers, sisters and adoptive children. 4. Along with the immediate reception of Aurora Leigh as a verse novel of the artist’s formation and a political poem, a third, more defined, and gradually more systematic interpretation has come forward, that of a text among the most emblematic and problematic, and indeed exemplary, of feminine and feminist writing in nineteenth-century English literature. As in confirmation, it weaves a continuous dialogue, of which all the unsuspected implications are even now slowly coming to light, with the nineteenth-century canon of women’s literature and having feminine figures as their protagonists. It re-orders and synthetizes for the last time the personal history of Elizabeth Barrett.112 Aurora Leigh was in particular,

112 The most complete and enlightening feminist readings of the poem, to which I shall refer and which I synthetize though with some disagreements, are those of Kaplan 1978, of Leighton 1986 (114–57) and of Gilbert 1984. It is of course completely untrue, as Barrett maintained, that in Aurora Leigh there is ‘not even a single personal line’. Aurora is traced on at least two other living writers, the American Margaret Fuller, tragically drowned in 1851 with her young son on a ship that by a strange coincidence bore the name of Elizabeth; and Aurore Dudevant, known as George Sand. These mirrorings function in a double sense, as Margaret Fuller looms also behind Marian Erle in the figure of Angel, he too conceived outside marriage, Angel being the name of her son, and an ‘angel’ being Marian’s child. At the same time, Romney Leigh is, in autobiographical terms, Robert Browning, but also Barrett’s brother Edward who was also drowned, John Kenyon, the benefactor to whom the poem was dedicated, and the preceptor Hugh Boyd, the blind man par excellence in the personal story of Barrett. The literary allusions that have been found concerning the principal characters

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historically, the first poem to place a heroine, and an authoress, at its centre; the word of women, previously condemned to anonymity and to marginality, came out of the shade, with an ‘audacity’ and a ‘combination of male power and female tenderness’ that was admired by the early reviewers, like Swinburne and the old Leigh Hunt. But it was also accused of reproachful ‘impropriety’, and of a frankness that had been conceded and tolerated only in male writers, and even then not pacifically. From a feminist point of view, which has perhaps the fault of synchronizing overmuch the plot and to pose too many overingenious parallels so as to seem forced here and there, the poem is a metaphor for the edification of a society without a father, that is of a ‘matria’, an inexistent word that has been invented to substitute ‘patria’, always associated with a male bias. Having been brought up in ‘maternal’ Italy, Aurora Leigh loses her Italian mother and her English father, but is subjected to vicarious paternal figures in ‘paternal’ and repressive England,113 who conspire to imprison her in the role of the Victorian woman and soon to be wife.114 The development of the poem shows a double conquest, of humanity and of an integral femininity, and a double search for the mother – by Aurora Leigh and by Marian Erle who is her double and is expressly defined a spiritual ‘sister’. This search cannot but end, with a circular movement, in the mother country, such in a symbolic and geographical sense, that is Italy. In Italy, and in Florence, the

and some elements in the plot are many and disparate; yet the narrative texts with which Aurora Leigh weaves a complete and detailed parallelism are ultimately two, in order of importance the novel Corinne by Madame de Staël and, for Romney’s blindness, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. The female protagonist of the latter novel is a foreshadowing of both Aurora Leigh and Marian Erle. 113 English nature is tamed, the Italian one untamed; in Italy there are wild animals, in England the animals make one think of the eggs served the following morning for breakfast. 114 The freedom of the woman hinged above all on education; sewing symbolizes the subjection of woman to man, and only a disinterested reading, not an instrumental one, is useful. Aurora, when living with her aunt, re-discovers, loving them, all those books imposed on her earlier on by her father as an obligation. Yet, when she decides to join her mother again, she does not hesitate to sell them, for their symbolic link with her father, in order to find the money necessary for her journey to Italy.

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new Eden is created without an Adam. With a dizzying paradox Marian’s fatherless son – which makes her similar both to Mary Magdalene and to Mary the Virgin –115 will have two mothers.116 In such a plan, where does the male come in? Romney Leigh, in his own plot, is an ‘ex-patriarchal’ figure who rejects, at the end, the patriarchal law. He is accepted as a husband by Aurora Leigh in accordance with the feminist viewpoint that requires that the males must be ‘disfigured’ by the heroines, so that they can never again aspire to re-establish their dominion.117 But the epilogue of Aurora Leigh says basically that the man as father, even the man as husband, must be substituted by the man as brother.118 The ‘new’ Romney Leigh reads and appreciates Aurora’s poetry, though or rather only because he is symbolically blind, and he becomes like Robert Browning a ‘brother’ reader and listener. The resemblances between Romney, who has been introduced as a cousin of Aurora, and Barrett’s carnal brother Edward, are confirmed in the last scene of the poem by his ‘emerging’ like ‘a king’ from a visionary sea very similar to that in Torquay where her brother had drowned. But at the end of it all, ‘male cooperation’ was always necessary for the matriarchal apocalypse. Barrett does not dethrone and suppress the male and indicates in married love, though she doesn’t describe it in action, the germ cell of renewal and of a democracy without class differences. Aurora Leigh thus

115 Marian narrates her rape in terms of a parody of the Death and Crucifixion. An image of the Madonna is tied to Marian’s neck by her ravishers, but fleeing she throws it away, perhaps to distance her identification with the Madonna, at least in the sense of a passive sacrifice. AVP, 369, notes that it is the affirmation of a ‘feminine demystified form of the Christian myth’. 116 Barrett’s decision – taken only at a later stage – to divide the poem into nine books (that could perhaps correspond to the nine prophetic books of the Cumean Sibyl), has been linked, more sensibly, to the nine months of a mother’s pregnancy; this ‘foetal’ or maternal structure has its ‘heart’ in the fifth book. 117 Kaplan 1978, 24. 118 Here Barrett boldly echoes the incestuous relationship between Byron and his halfsister Augusta Leigh. Following an overly protracted play with paternal and maternal instances and hypostases, Lady Waldemar would be – according to Gilbert 1984, 203 – the false mother that the false father, Romney, has to refuse in order to become a true brother!

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joins, as a fourth voice, and almost singing in unison, the chorus of the three main ‘male’ marriage poems straddling the year 1850, The Princess by Tennyson, The Bothie of Tober-na-vuolich by Clough, and The Angel in the House by Patmore.119 § 72. Barrett Browning XIII: ‘Aurora Leigh’ II. The reconciliation of poetry and philanthropy The Künstlerroman follows in Aurora Leigh the paradigmatic development of the Romantic into the Victorian poet and Barrett’s recurrent motif of the ‘young poet’ face to face with the pressing calls of outside reality. The opening of the window in the ‘green chamber’ on the day of Aurora’s twentieth birthday is the inevitable Victorian symbolic scene, the exit from solipsism into nature to suck the ‘gradual gospels’ in it. Aurora enters this nature in the early morning and moves about with joy and delight, almost in secret, and in spontaneous subjection to a superior principle and amidst the swarming impulses that surround her. To the question: who truly is the poet – a liar, a ‘braggart’, a dreamer? – the answer is given romantically that the poet speaks the eternal, not the transient truth, is an intermediary of God that inflames mankind, and his word is thunder compared to the habitual actions of common mortals. Surprised by her cousin as she crowns herself poet, Aurora is however the first to turn this self-glorification into parody, and from this begins that lengthy confrontation and dialectic clash in various acts and scenes that forms one of the connective threads of the poem. The premise to Romney’s criticism is that in ‘this beleaguered earth’120 it was necessary for men and women to collaborate actively together, instead of writing poetry; thus he is no more 119 The last link went unnoticed by Kaplan 1978, who incidentally re-baptises Clough twice calling him Arthur Gordon Clough. It is no coincidence that the advice that Aurora Leigh in the seventh book gives by letter to Lady Waldemar, whom she considers an unworthy bride for Romney, sets out precisely the same matrimonial rules (made up of subtleness, devotion, and subjection on the part of the wife to her husband) listed by Patmore in The Angel in the House. 120 The apocalyptic tirade by Romney sounded in 1857 already imitative, and it echoes in particular Carlyle. If ‘all governments’ commit ‘a few wrongs’, nothing is left except the purely individual initiative. A similar situation throws everyone into a ‘curative’

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than a social critic or a slightly late Victorian sociologist: ‘Who has time / An hour’s time […] to sit upon a bank / And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands?’121 The ‘white hands’ were obviously those of the women who wrote poetry, a devotional poetry, nerveless and isolated. The voice of Romney, in the first of these bitter aesthetic clashes, echoes the disconsolate voice of the children in ‘The Cry of the Children’, by also saying that it was no longer a time to cling to faith, to the metamorphic and regenerative power of religion, an exploded myth. Aurora Leigh, twenty-seven-yearold freelance poet who lives independently in Grub Street in London, has a perfect awareness of the amphibious personality of the Victorian writer who, if he aspires to the ‘true and proper work’ of the soul does not sell, and in order to keep him-herself must thus write commercial things. Aurora in London is still a romantic woman poet who can only conceive of art as exile, as physical sufferance even, and as an illness;122 and an art that creates not a coldly pre-existent form but an organic one, dictated by the spirit that must set itself free, according to the Romantic image of the tree that does not have a fixed number of leaves. The provisional poetic manifesto of Aurora Leigh on the eve of her departure for Italy is one of the most lucid X-ray analyses of the state of Victorian literary art at the beginning of the 1840s, when writers who were not novelists were asked to write soothing ballads, lyrics that followed the rules, descriptive and idyllic poems that recalled the mythological gods that Barrett herself had

action. Aurora, on the contrary, asks: ‘Is the world so bad / While I hear nothing of it through the trees?’ 121 Romney blames in poetry an aspect that is typical to the dramatic monologue, the lack of generalization, or even the sympathizing with the psychology of each character. 122 One of the purest and most sober poetic gems from Barrett’s pen, the exquisite and frequently anthologized ‘A Musical Instrument’ (published in the posthumous collection of 1862), may be read as a late allegory of the poetic creation as an act of violence, defloration, or painful disembowelment (on the overturning of the Ovidian and later Romantic archetype of Pan and Syrinx, and on the change of viewpoint that makes the reed and not the demi-god the allegory of poetry, see the penetrating comments by Mermin 1989, 242–5). This poem, closing as it does on the reed that breathes its sweet song but is cut off from the bank, would seem, however, to precede the creative, energetic and optimistic poetics proclaimed at the end of Aurora Leigh.

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dismissed in ‘The Dead Pan’, as well as plays in imitation of Greek tragedy with an anachronistic apparatus of scenic tricks.123 According to the postRomantic poetry of the 1830s and 1840s the poets ought to be ‘bifocal’, capable of seeing comprehensively and panoramically,124 both near and far, of contemplating their own personal life and yet be the refraction of the collective consciousness into which they had been born. 2. Romney’s marriage proposal is refused because Aurora does not want to be that active companion that he is looking for, and in order to keep her soul rich she will endure all kinds of material poverty. The macabre, substitutive declaration that follows, made by Romney to Marian Erle in front of the dead body of a poor old woman that no one else has wanted to help, is based on the programme of a mutual complementarity of the married couple engaged in a social action aimed to found a more equal world and to abolish the gap between rich and poor. At this stage of the poem Romney looks first at Aurora and then at Marian simply to find a collaborator to create a movement to spread love to the many that were without it. While Aurora refuses a second marriage proposal (with an aristocrat, as a coldly calculated barter), and, like Arnold and Clough, senses that genuine love is nowhere to be found, Marian feels herself even overprized. Her sudden flight on the agreed date for the wedding is the result of her discovery (partly favoured by the perfidious Lady Waldemar, who is in love with Romney herself ) of being simply an object of aristocratic charity. Marian’s words to Aurora, who finds her in her Parisian shack, clearly deny the possibility of that mixed and interclass marriage that is successful in the utopian The Bothie by Clough; this denial is significant because it comes precisely from the person and the class that could have 123 This is a polemical barb at Matthew Arnold’s neoclassicism in particular (§ 158.5–6). 124 ‘I do distrust the poet who discerns / No character or glory in his times, / And trundles back his soul five hundred years, / Past moat and drawbridge, into a castlecourt’. The allusion is to Scott and to Tennyson (as is suggested by the Arthurian references) and to Barrett herself in her poems of 1844. In a confused and clumsy appendix frank judgements are also passed by Romney on contemporary poets by camouflaging their names (Browning, Tennyson, and perhaps Ruskin). Such writers, with their half-invented names, are not envied for their intrinsic merits, but for their immediate effect.

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had the greatest benefit. In Paris, on her journey towards Italy that is her definitive point of arrival and the very incarnation of her ‘risorgimento’, there starts a parallel artistic, moral and political maturation – which is equal to saying feminine and feminist – in both female characters. Aurora admits that poetic vocation and philanthropic action do not exclude one another but possess an equal dignity, and she comes to identify the aspiration of art to truth with that to recompose the divisions of the world – to identify in poetry the conjunction of spiritual and natural.125 Marian meanwhile has gone through a striking metamorphosis and has become another woman or rather truly a woman; she has matured intellectually, religiously and politically, and it is she who will teach and in some way even undeceive Aurora. When Marian, who has been seduced, raped and then abandoned, undergoes the meticulous, suspicious moralistic interrogation regarding the paternity of her young son, she replies, with reticent Victorian circumlocutions, that the child is a lamb similar to Christ, the Saviour of a sinful mankind, who finds no pity among men. God, by finally revealing to her his benevolent face, has rewarded for the wrong suffered a woman ill-treated like her, with a son that is a pledge for redemption. 3. As in any good novel, the parallel plots unite only at the end in Aurora Leigh, and with a notable amount of suspense fed by various equivocal situations, some of which are hardly probable, and anyway given in a steady but far too contrived trickle of revelations. Barrett needs a good two books of the poem, the eighth and the ninth, to orchestrate this finale, and the two books are almost wholly occupied by a lengthy dialogue that takes place between Aurora and Romney on a Florence terrace lit by the moon and the stars. It is a completely inconclusive dialogue, embarrassed and playing for time in view of the denouement, which brings Aurora to understand that Romney has become blind and that, above all, he is not married to Lady Waldemar. With a circular parallelism the poem opens and closes thus in Florence with an interval in between of more than twenty 125 Art is always the epiphany of the divine plan and of the cosmic harmony, according to the dynamics of types and antitypes, of sacramental prefiguration, of witnesses of ‘what is / Behind this show’. Such assertions are, as will be seen, shared by Romney in the last scene of the poem.

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years. With a remarkable scenic effect the epilogue takes place during the night and, therefore, in the dark. Aurora, who ignores that Romney has become blind in the meantime, makes continual and painful references during the dialogue to the organ of sight, which provides a tragic irony with their rhythmic refrains. The eyes are always considered with attention in the physical descriptions in the poem – the big eyes of Marian set in her tiny head, those bewitching, topaz-coloured, of the model that thrill the painter Carrington, and those of Romney himself that have become useless to him.126 In the phalanstery he erected a beam fell on his head during a fire, or was thrown on purpose – an improbable fact, and anyway it would seem involuntarily – by Marian’s father,127 while Romney was trying to save a painting of Aurora’s ancestor. On a symbolic plane this accident points to the fatal error that Romney has committed. But he presents himself at the end of the poem, in a subtle personal adaptation of the miracle of Christ who gives sight to the blind, as a blind man to whom the true light has been given in the form of his spontaneous repentance. The alleged seers of his time are instead the truly blind on whom the clay that Jesus poured forms an impenetrable and blinding encrustation. In this epilogue Romney, Dante-like, comes ‘to behold the stars’. Aurora, in the last of the adaptations and of the mythological and literary allusions, is his dawn, that is, his aurora, the bringer of light. 4. When Romney climbs up to Bellosguardo emerging like a Neptune from the night sea at the foot of the hill, Aurora is reading – a very clear and premonitory stage direction – the novella by Boccaccio that was the most popular among the Victorians, that of Federigo degli Alberighi. But before the easily predictable happy ending is reached the last act of the 126 Elizabeth had the eyes of a Creole; a play on eyes is found in the poem ‘Caterina to Camoëns’: eyes that death obscures and makes blind darkening their beauty. Autobiographically, blindness was a conscious self-characterization of Elizabeth Barrett before 1844: she defined herself a ‘blind poet’ and left confessions like this: ‘I have been like a blind woman in this temple that I am about to leave’, or like this, after meeting Browning: ‘I now see clearly […] I was absolutely blind when you arrived’. 127 In feminist readings, this picture, representing the ancestor of Aurora, would have transferred to her the power of the Leighs, subtracting it from the male branch.

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dialectic clash started so many years before in England must be completed. Romney admits the utter failure of his philanthropic programme, recognizes the inanity and the utopianism of his projects, and confesses he had denied divine providence. He regrets having considered only the strong material needs of the poor and disinherited, and reduced the whole of his mission to feeding them. In his conscience, time and again, the gnomic words of Aurora have echoed, that ‘it takes a high-souled man, / To move the masses’. Surprisingly, even Aurora confesses that she too has failed, that she too has been struck by some of his admonishments. There are thus two gradual and parallel repentances: ‘we both were wrong’, they say, neither had thought in their actions, and in their opposing utopias, of ‘God’s role’. Romney is so moved and repentant that he bursts out in a fanatical exaltation of that over-abstract and individualistic, and almost self-divinizing poetry that Aurora had already moved away from. The agreement that they reach fits in with the Victorian sacramentalist aesthetics of the 1830s, with Carlyle’s in particular, with the rejection of materialism and the ecstatic belief in the presence of God in creation. God is not absent and ‘hidden’, or is only so because of the faults of mankind; God is the guarantor for an art that works from the soul towards mankind and society. According to Carlyle’s gospel of work, each atom of creation carries on the plan of God, as long as man is not possessed by Titanic dissatisfactions but instead content with the assigned work, in which everyone has a share. The echoes of the repudiation of Marx’s, Fourier’s and the socialists’ egalitarianism are unmistakeable; and as for the political project, this is kept within the scope of a reform of society, brought about little by little, rather than in that of its complete overthrow. 5. Romney has also come to Italy believing that he had to take on his shoulders, like a shepherd, and in a spirit of reparation and expiation, the little lamb that is Marian, left on the ground injured by the wolves due to his unvigilant guardianship. According to another evangelic allusion that completes the symbolism of Marian as ‘Marian’, that is like the Madonna, he is a St Joseph, the putative father of a Child that is not his own. Actually Romney has never ceased to love Aurora, and so ardently that in his delirium after losing his sight he invoked her name, and had her poetry read to him for comfort. The very weak and melodramatic scene

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of the refusal of Romney by Marian, preceded by a warm hug from the woman prostrate at his feet, is explained, in its incoherence, only as the effect of a previous spiritual conflict: the heart would encourage Marian to accept, the head tells her it would be an absurdity. There are in fact two Marians, and the one Romney had known in England is now ‘dead’. The utopia of a mixed marriage is foiled only thanks to the superior wisdom of the proletarian woman herself who, with full self-awareness, admits that she had never loved Romney as an equal, but had adored him and so made him unreachable. She declares that her love had dried up, and what of it was left she would dedicate to her son. Thus it is the turn for Aurora to confess that she had mistaken ‘everything’, confess what she had always denied, that she had always loved her cousin; the blindness is now Aurora’s, the blindness of eyes wet with tears. Art, in the last aesthetic assertion in the poem, is surpassed and subsumed by love, and love for God incarnate. Art is still more strenuously defined a service and form of mediation between the visible and the invisible, the sensuous and the immaterial; but in so doing it must first of all pull down, as at Jericho, the walls that divide the classes. The reconstruction of Romney’s repentance resonates with ecstatic exclamations followed by the first moment of intense union, beatitude and isolation of the lovers from the world. But the words with which Romney accepts Aurora are wisely not reported in the text, not to fall into an even riskier pathos, and also because they, as in Sonnets from the Portuguese, touch on the unutterable. The programme of life and the mission of the couple coincide with the utopias of contemporary English emigrants, whether real or literary, to the fringes of the empire: it is the gospel of work, of industrious work for the good of mankind, with the aim of raising the level of the body and of the spirit, and with the seal of the promise for a total renewal of the world. § 73. Barrett Browning XIV: Final poems The career of Elizabeth Barrett Browning did not end in a new, drawn out high note, which was never seemingly contemplated after 1856, but mutedly. The most part of her last poems had a public, political and Italian and Florentine settings, and were inevitably marked, in their uncertain results and in their scarcity, by her physical decline and by the consumption of

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already massive doses of laudanum. Two collections were published in 1860 and, posthumously, in 1862. Poems before Congress, the first, was written like others from the ideal watchtower of Casa Guidi,128 and constitutes a short history of Italian and Florentine political events in 1859, a year dominated for better or for worse by the magnetic figure of Napoleon III. In the Preface appended to the collection, which resumes a youthful habit later given up (but one that is here a dangerous sign of the impotence of the poetic word), a violent invective is launched against national interests, and a warm appeal made for a policy that should be more European and have a wider range, not simply oriented to strengthening national prerogatives. Barrett was the second major English writer, with Arnold, to sympathize with Napoleon – against generalized British hostility, shared for instance by her husband –129 and for the same basic reason: he had the support of the people at his back. In Napoleon she had found substantially the leader for Europe, and especially for Italy, now finally ready to receive him, and whose absence was lamented in Casa Guidi Windows. The descent into Italy by Napoleon was prophetically felt by Barrett as heralding a European metamorphosis.130 Only a year before Italy had been a cemetery, as the English were the first to think, and the re-awakening of the French cockerel did not herald a new day; now it was necessary to reconsider the situation, for the whole of Italy had risen from its grave and from its lethargy, as if at the sound of the trumpets of resurrection. The movement towards reunification seemed unrelenting, as Parma, Bologna, Modena, and Florence gave one after the other their general consent to annexation. It might even have become a contagion, and helped the birth of a supranational confraternity based on the principles of the evangelic brotherhood and on the full

128 ‘An August Voice’ is addressed to the faint-hearted Florentines who ended up calling back the Grand Duke, already known for his betrayal and laziness in 1848. 129 Browning was to satirize the Emperor in his poem Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (Volume 6, § 14.5). 130 ‘Italy and the World’.

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application of the laws of Christ on earth, and by inducing the nations to set aside century-old defensive egoisms.131 2. ‘Napoleon III in Italy’ reveals a suspicious and equivocal link between the Emperor and the first Napoleon, who from the tomb turns his ‘victorious’ face upwards and lends a hand to his successor, thus confirming the benevolence shown in a previous poem where Barrett greeted the return of the body of the dead emperor to Paris.132 It was composed when the French troops were about to cross the Alps with the aim, as Barrett ardently believed, of driving out the Austrian oppressors. Napoleon reached Italy in 1859 as the ‘Sublime Deliverer’, alone against all, and as the new universal ‘portent’ come from the skies on the earth. Stylistically this poem makes full use of the tricks and rhetorical conventions of the genre: war choruses full of agitated hurrahs, stentorian anaphoras, personal apostrophes, the pathetic note as in the anecdote of the French general who, an emblem of hope, picks a young child up from the ground as he enters Milan. Napoleon’s about-face at Villafranca was then lamented in a sarcastic little story, almost a fairy-tale, told to a Florentine child by his mother – but this mother was Barrett herself, and Pen Browning the son with the blue eyes – in ‘A Tale of Villafranca’. Napoleon’s dream, like a flower sprouted from shoots that had taken root, was trodden under by the cliques of mean and ambitious statesmen loyal to the status quo, careful not to spoil the economic advantages and upset the flourishing commercial interests. According to her, Napoleon’s dreams had come to nothing due to a plot organized by obscurantist and ambitious politicians, and by the united interests of the strong nations. In fact, as ‘A Tale of Villafranca’ asserts, Napoleon had felt isolated, and had been forced to agree that the times were not yet ripe for the liberation of the oppressed peoples. Far more captivating are the various and colourful episodes of Florentine and Italian life and patriotism that open with ‘The Dance’, where the seal of fraternal union between two 131 ‘A Curse for a Nation’ involves America in the accusation of political immobility, and invites the American nation to join actively in the conflicts for European freedom. The introduction of an angel that exhorts the poet to speak is a strategy which Patmore will use in the political songs of The Unknown Eros (§ 178.2). 132 § 67.3.

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peoples is symbolized by a ball in the open air, in the verdant and flowery setting of the Cascine Park, among the Florentines ladies and the French soldiers and officers of the army of liberation. A Milanese lady133 wearing her best clothes and her most gaudy jewels visits the injured patriots in the hospital, all of them coming from different regions (to mark the national scope of the movement for independence in 1859), and has for all a word of comfort and encouragement.134 3. In Barrett’s last collection of 1862 there are still a few poetical leftovers from the 1859 campaign; here and there politics blend with romance, and mothers and fiancées are divided between passionate patriotism and the very human suffering at the loss of a dear one. Themes of the 1844 collection also reappear, such as love ended or not returned, repressed or hopeless, or tales of bigamy and of annulled marriages, and of unfaithfulness. Patriotic sensationalism reaches its apex in a poem on the young conscript forced to fight in the Austrian army, who asks and obtains with a smile on his lips to be killed by his brothers, with whom he would have preferred to fight. ‘Mother and Poet’ is on the pain of a Turin poet and mother, Laura Savio, whose two sons died in the siege of Gaeta. The imminence of the Italian national unity was greeted by more triumphal and longer songs. A warm, breath-taking homage was paid to Victor Emmanuel on his entrance into Florence in April 1860, so markedly different from that of the Grand Duke described in Casa Guidi Windows. ‘Summing up in Italy’ traces an obsessed and impulsive balance of the now favourable situation in Italy and lashes out against those outside Italy who denigrated and belittled the patriots fighting for independence. Only ‘A Song for the Ragged Schools of London’ is dedicated to the far off motherland, and its political diagnosis shows that the supremacy of a nation inevitably meant the ‘hunger’ of the poor. The solution was not that set out in Ricardo’s cynical theories, which

133 ‘A Court Lady’. 134 ‘Christmas Gifts’ is one of the facile lampoons of the Roman Papacy by English anti-Catholic Protestantism. The sumptuous show of the Vatican shows the gap between the poverty of Jesus’ stable and the exclusive care of temporal and secular interests. A triple gift, the colours of the Italian flag, shocks the Pope and makes him tremble.

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maintained that there were too many mouths to feed. Barrett was perfectly in line with the essay writers and novelists of the Arnoldian school, the supporters of an extension of literacy that would allow the less well-off classes to acquire a greater political awareness. Literacy, if well administered, would produce not rebels but integrated citizens. Such a protest poetry puts forward a relativistic vision of imperialism and recalls once again both ‘The Cry of the Children’ and Aurora Leigh. By raising the issues of the poor and ragged children it exposes the other side of the medal of imperial splendour. In this case religious faith is a possible buttress, but the only true salvation, which is also in part that of Marian Erle in Aurora Leigh, lies in literacy. 4. The very last of Barrett’s poems, some of which had already been printed in magazines, and were gathered and edited by Browning in 1862 after her death, cover a certain plurality of genres, and denote some late symptoms of renewal. They confirm a prevailing vein that is easy and shadowy, pathetic and effusive; Barrett was always ready to pick up touching and often sensational episodes from history and news items, following a track also common to the later Tennyson (as in his late monologue ‘Rizpah’). But there is also a return to a decontextualization which is typical in Barrett’s early poetry: to the song of love unrequited, to the elegy, the ballad, the nursery rhyme, humour,135 the metaphysical riddle. Some poems adopt the dramatic, almost surreal monologue, rich in startling surprises and referring to turbid passions and spiritual experiences that fleetingly resemble those of Browning’s masterpieces. The most notable of these is ‘Bianca among the Nightingales’, which conjures up a murky and immature passion whose recollection is punctuated by the trills of the nightingales hammering in the head of the woman abandoned by her lying and deceitful lover. ‘Lord Walter’s Wife’136 is also a rather strange poem, not a dramatic monologue

135 The last poem written by Barrett in May 1861 develops a ‘contrast’ between North and South, personified in their respective merits and characteristics, with which she greets the writer of fairy-tales, Andersen, on his visit to Rome. 136 The autobiographical background of this, as of other poems on unfaithfulness, has been found in the friendship between Browning and a Mrs Eckley, who had spread lies and gossip about Browning (see Hayter 1962, 223–4).

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but a ballad that recalls even more strongly in its psychological twistings, and in its obscurity, Browning’s monologues. In its subtle dialogue, or allusive and curious skirmish, a woman tries to hold on to a man who is in love with another woman, whether for purely disinterested reasons, or even for a double and polygamous love, or perhaps even in view of a simply platonic friendship. § 74. Tennyson* up to 1874 I: An exile from the palace of art137 The poetry of Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), the first of the Victorian poets in merit if not chronologically, spans so many years that *

Quotations will be taken from The Poems of Tennyson (= R), ed. C. Ricks, 3 vols, 2nd edn, London 1987 (on which see below, § 79), by progressive number of poem (without an indication of the volume number). This edition substitutes the Eversley Edition, 9 vols, London 1907–1908 (for many years the standard one, edited by Hallam, the son of Tennyson) and includes all the poems left out by Tennyson in the collected editions, as well as all the scattered and early poems, the latter first published by the poet’s grandson, Sir Charles Tennyson, in 1931, with the title of Unpublished Early Poems by Alfred Tennyson. The dramatic works are collected in Poems and Plays, London 1913. Letters are edited by C. Y. Lang and E. F. Shannon, 3 vols, Oxford 1982–1990, cited here as L I, L II and L III. Critical editions and anthologies are edited by W. C. Devane (New York 1940), W. H. Auden (London 1946), L. Stephen and H. Nicolson (Oxford 1947), E. Blunden (London 1960), M. Pagnini (Milano 1963). Life. H. Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols, London 1897 (compiled by his son, very useful but reticent; cites the letters copiously, including those written to Tennyson by friends; throughout the two volumes, the connecting pieces become ever rarer, and the work becomes a sort of Boswell); A. C. Benson, Tennyson, London 1912; C. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, London 1949 (by the poet’s grandson, the first objective biography); J. Richardson, The Pre-Eminent Victorian: A Study of Tennyson, London 1962; C. Ricks, Tennyson, London 1972, Berkeley, CA 1989 (as much a critical work as a biography); R. B. Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart, London 1980 (the best of the modern biographies); M. Thorn, Tennyson, London 1992; P. Levi, Tennyson, London 1993; A. Thwaite, Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife, London 1996; J. Batchelor, Tennyson: To Strive, To Seek, To Find, London 2012. Criticism. H. I. Fausset, Alfred Tennyson: A Modern Portrait, London 1923 (traces a biographical-psychological line of development alongside that of the growth of the poet; pivots on a Tennyson marked by psychological complexes, torn between the principles of beauty and pleasure and the ethical-moral stance of the ‘Apostles’;

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it almost reaches the end of the period. His work has historically been the victim of changes in taste, not merely those which to one degree or another affected all the Victorians in the twentieth century, but also those of his own contemporaries. Even more often, Tennyson was a victim of misunderstandings, the first of which may be traced to the Queen and her advisors. a harsh critique is levelled at the poetry from 1842, in particular Maud; the discussion of the poetry and works of Tennyson’s last three decades is very cursory. In the epilogue, Tennyson is defined as an exponent of the worst aspects of Victorianism); H. Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character, and Poetry, London 1923, repr. Garden City, NY 1963, with an important Afterword (a milestone of Tennyson criticism, combining biography and criticism, still useful and fascinating reading); G. N. Orsini, La poesia di A. Tennyson, Bari 1928 (emphasizes the dream-like, diaphanous, pictorial foreshadowings of aestheticism); D. Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry, Cambridge, MA 1937 (brief but accurate pages on the salient traits of Tennyson’s poetry); W. D. Paden, Tennyson in Egypt, Laurence, Kansas 1942 (a pioneering psychological, psychoanalytic and even psychiatric reading); P. F. Baum, Tennyson Sixty Years After, Chapel Hill, NC 1948 (a severe hatchet job); E. F. Shannon, Tennyson and the Reviewers, Cambridge, MA 1952 (valuable reconstruction of the reception given Tennyson by his contemporaries); B. Willey, More NineteenthCentury Studies, London 1956; J. H. Buckley, Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet, Cambridge, MA 1960 (a traditional, all-round general survey); Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. J. Killham, London 1960; F. L. Lucas, Tennyson, London 1961; V. Pitt, Tennyson Laureate, London 1962 (among the first rehabilitating studies); C. De L. Ryals, Theme and Symbol in Tennyson’s Poems to 1850, Philadelphia, PA 1964; CRHE, ed. T.  J. Jump, London 1967; The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations, ed. I. Armstrong, London 1969 (containing: M. Dodsworth, ‘Patterns of Morbidity: Repetition in Tennyson’s Poetry’, 7–34; B. Bergonzi, ‘Feminism and Femininity in The Princess’, 35–50; A. Sinfield, ‘Mattermoulded Forms of Speech: Tennyson’s Use of Language in In Memoriam’, 51–67; A. S. Byatt, ‘The Lyric Structure of Tennyson’s Maud’, 69–92); F. E. L. Priestley, Language and Structure in Tennyson’s Poetry, London 1973; J. R. Kincaid, Tennyson’s Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Pattern, New Haven, CT 1975 (with a somewhat mechanical application of the critical categories of Northrop Frye); H. Bloom, ‘Tennyson: In the Shadow of Keats’, in Poetry and Repression, New Haven, CT 1976, 143–74; W. D. Shaw, Tennyson’s Style, Ithaca, NY 1976; P. Turner, Tennyson, London 1976; A. D. Culler, The Poetry of Tennyson, London 1977 (sharp and dialectic, convincing above all regarding the early work up to 1842); Tennyson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. E. A. Francis, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1980; A. W. Thomson, The

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In 1850 they read a collection of poems on the death of a friend, entitled In Memoriam, believing it to be a document of value to the public, and, wishing to fill the vacuum left by the death of Wordsworth, offered him the honorary title of Poet Laureate. Tennyson sensed the misunderstanding and hesitated at length before finally accepting the post, and for forty years at least adopted a compromise which permitted him to follow the inalienable dictates of his own imagination while at the same time fulfilling the expectations placed on him by the nascent bourgeois state.1 The further misunderstanding was that of all those who failed even to suspect this compromise, and hailed Tennyson, both while alive and after his death, as the most representative poet of the entire age. The date of 1850 therefore held great importance for Tennyson, for that was when he ceased to be once and for all a certain type of poet, and one in many ways diametrically opposed to Tennyson the Poet Laureate, in part because he recycled himself as a public and celebratory poet. But the polarity of Tennyson before 1850 and Tennyson the Poet Laureate is not the only one in this poet, upon whom judgement has often been passed according to what might be termed an arbitrary attempt to interrupt the flow of time, too often forgetting some simple information regarding his poetry. The first elementary fact to be Poetry of Tennyson, London 1986; A. Sinfield, Alfred Tennyson, London 1986 (written according to a Marxist sociological perspective, and from a position of ‘materialistic deconstruction’); E. Jordan, Alfred Tennyson, Cambridge 1988; M. Shaw, Alfred Lord Tennyson, London 1988 (this and the previous book adopt a feminist approach); H. Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, Cambridge, MA 1988 (stops at 1855; elegant but often specious exegesis, indebted to Bloom of whom it adopts the mannerisms and the lexical idiosyncrasies); Tennyson: Seven Essays, ed. P. Collins, London 1992; D. S. Hair, Tennyson’s Language, Toronto 1992; G. Joseph, Tennyson and the Text, London 1992; A. Day, Tennyson’s Scepticism, Basingstoke 2005; S. Perry, Tennyson, Tavistock 2005; C. D. J. Pearsall, Tennyson’s Rapture: Transformation in the Victorian Dramatic Monologue, New York and Oxford 2008; Tennyson among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, ed. R. Douglas-Fairhurst and S. Perry, Oxford 2009; J. Morton, Tennyson among the Novelists, London 2010. 1

This is the opinion held, albeit from a more ideological perspective than mine, by Sinfield 1987, 21, who nonetheless gives no consideration to the audience – undoubtedly an elite one – of poets and contemporary critics.

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considered is that Tennyson wrote poetry for over six decades. He began publishing work ten years before Queen Victoria ascended to the throne, and when he stopped, there was already talk of the end of the Victorian age, and aestheticism was growing apace. Thus any opinion or judgement of Tennyson’s poetry must necessarily take into consideration the plurality of voices of his work, a plurality which both forms a chorus and a cacophony, and one that involves each single collection and all the several ones which he published. With a creative production spanning over sixty years, any critic must reckon with what amounts to being veritable geological layers in his poetry. 2. As noted, Tennyson began writing at time when there was a nearly palpable perception of the sunset of oversized and dominant figures, a moment in which everyone hesitated to say anything at all in verse for fear of not rising to the level of those great poets who, in the cases of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott, were still alive and writing. A poem written by him in 18272 speaks meaningfully of a harp which is left next to a fountain, and abandoned, never to play another note, and of a minstrel who runs away. It is the harp of the forefathers, of those ancestors who entertained the courts of noblemen at the time of Beowulf, but it is also the romantic harp, the Aeolian harp of Coleridge. Thus, the first option available to the Tennyson at the time of his adolescence was that of remaining dumb, of silencing the harp. This explains, and it is an observation which we must extend to Browning as well, the Victorians’ lucky discovery, or rediscovery, of a genre which they had not invented, the dramatic monologue. To write a dramatic monologue amounted to surviving the baptism of fire of speaking in the first person; secondly (thanks to the proliferation of filters, and to the thick layers of masks) it relieved the poet of the responsibility for his affirmations, indeed of all responsibility. This twilight, this sense of being second-rate successors to something great, was reflected in the poetic collection of the two brothers Charles and Alfred Tennyson in 1827, in which there are numerous and repeated images of both real and metaphorical sunsets, of the decline of nations or

2

R 6.

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the subjection of once glorious civilizations. In the young Tennyson, whose biography became over time completely unromantic, ever more grey and sedentary, and morally unblemished, most romantic experiences seem to fuse together almost without any principle of selection, as a result of both immaturity and an already far-sighted awareness of the benefits of imitation. More specifically, Tennyson’s reaction to the Romantics intensified, up until 1842, according to various routes, of which in my opinion the most important can be summed up as follows: the socialization of the self and its dethronement with respect to the Romantic Titans; the objectification and the disguising of the self in allegorical or mythological figures, in both cases in a mode which is to be designed as ‘dramatic’ rather than ‘lyrical’; the choice of exhausted and dispirited heroes, no longer crusading, indeed, often of heroines, who yearn for a Keatsian languor. Furthermore, his unhappy early life rendered Tennyson an insulated and introverted poet instinctively escaping from the world, abandoned on the peripheral womb of Lincolnshire: the author, at least as a novice, of a sort of poetry in its purest state, of exquisite craftsmanship. 3. ‘I have no life to give – for mine has been one of feelings not of actions’,3 wrote Tennyson to Leigh Hunt in 1837, providing a retrospective at only twenty-nine years old, though having already published three and a half poetry collections, and to justify the paucity of works and dates of his biography. He was an outsider who found it difficult to join tight-knit groups, tending instead to escape from city life; his ‘palace of art’ was that of his omnivorous readings, made together with his brothers in his father’s library. Life was fraught with troubles compared to his home in Somersby, and he grew up in its protection until he enrolled at university. If we think of the soul in the ‘palace of art’, and above all of the Lady of Shalott, in the two poems of those names, we must accept that Tennyson feared encounters with the world to be destructive, and even potentially deadly. Up until 1842 he continued writing poetry which was overwhelmingly lyrical and centred on the Romantic self, disarming it and distancing himself from it in a gallery of impassible states of mind. Even the allegorical poems of 1842, much

3

13.7.1837; L I, 155.

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indebted to Coleridge, and the countless others which centre upon human figures – either ancient or modern mythical figures or contemporary heroes or heroines, though stylized or mythicized – resolve themselves in pure objectifications of feeling, in the theatre of a nature serving as a backdrop. The Romantic, Titanic hero is eclipsed because no one existed in the present approaching that stature; his male heroes were patriots like Wellington, but only when, as Poet Laureate, he found himself obliged to celebrate national heroism. Initially, the heroes of his poems are suffering anti-heroes, weakened or made lazy and inactive, like Tithonus or the lotus-eaters;4 and this ‘weariness’ of Tennyson soon became a proverbial target of satire and parody. In truth, Tennyson venerated and celebrated heroines more than heroes. The entire poetic collection of 1832 is invaded and monopolized by studies of femininity, by portraits of women suspended between realism and imagination, or dreams, rhapsodies and dramatic monologues invariably offered by female voices. The unripe libertarianism and energy of Byron, as well as the utopianism and engagement of Shelley, are overthrown by pleased lingering on diseases, dream-thoughts and unhealthy fainting spells, on the intoxication of pagan visions and mythical paradises, all forms of a post-Romanticism which had historically been eradicated, literally wiped out by Victorianism, or rather repressed until its revival with Aestheticism. Tennyson’s earliest work revolves around his difficulties in interacting with the world:5 at times directly, but more often obliquely, as in his poems on

4

5

In ‘Kate’, not republished by Tennyson, he also confesses, in a dramatic disguise, that men were ‘golden flies’ and that heroism had faded away: ‘I would I were an armèd knight, / Farfamed for welwon enterprise, / And wearing on my swarthy brows / The garland of new-wreathed emprise; / For in a moment I would pierce / The blackest files of clanging fight, / And strongly strike to left and right, / In dreaming of my lady’s eyes. / Oh! Kate loves well the bold and fierce; / But none are bold enough for Kate, / She cannot find a fitting mate’. It was usual for Tennyson to be distracted and lost in thought. He actually lost and had to rewrite from memory the manuscript of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, and fortunately Patmore was able to retrieve that of In Memoriam which Tennyson had left in a hotel room. After 1850, by his own admission, he meditated almost exclusively on the ancient world, and wrote a great deal of archaeological poetry, on figures, themes and scenes from the past, trying to re-animate them with a modern spirit. In his letters he often

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the hermits, the progenitor of which is ‘St Simeon Stylites’. It is almost with distaste that Tennyson writes of current events and politics, or with a tone which is somewhat forced and false.6 He is always behind the times, finding it difficult to reflect upon them truthfully and consistently, tending to see the world through filters and prisms. Only a handful of poems reflect truly contemporary deeds and figures that have not been typified and removed from any reference of location. In an age of increasing realism, he was not a realist. He detested French realism;7 as a Victorian, but in disagreement with Browning, he adhered to one of the key principles of Victorian aesthetics, according to which ‘art is selection’. 4. Tennyson was the major nineteenth-century poet of decentralized origins, and his early poetry ideally springs from misty and shadowy sceneries where one could still sense strong and wild passions, from the mossy cemeteries skirted by streams and shaded by oaks and yews, over which there lingers a melancholic quiet. This scenery also had an undeniable ‘literary’ flavour and seemed to take inspiration from pre-Romantic and Gothic models.8 Tennyson’s primary senses are sight and hearing, for he lacks Keats’s synaesthesia and olfactory sense. Indeed, his sight and hearing seem so indissolubly fused that Poe justifiably asserted that Tennyson ‘seems to see with his ear’. After 1850, he usurped the position of Thomson in the poetic-descriptive genre. It was his habit, Tennyson confessed, to observe nature in order to capture a verbal sketch that he would later elaborate and expand;9 that later cool-headed reworking resulted in a poetry showing the highest verbal, metrical and musical craftsmanship. According to his son,

6 7 8 9

asked his correspondents for news of the world, which to him was mostly ‘an age of lies, and also an age of stinks’ (Memoir, II, 75). Hawthorne was among those who witnessed this behaviour personally (L II, 183–5), and it is to him that we owe one of the best descriptions of Tennyson’s detached, distracted, dreaming character. For Ruskin (CRHE, 11), Tennyson was always too immersed in the ‘things of the past’ and gave too little thought to the ‘present’. L III, 338ff. The affirmation made by Gladstone, that Tennyson was a realist in Idylls of the King (CRHE, 264), must be rejected. Poe underlined the foggy nature of Tennyson’s poetry with the adjective ‘ethereal’, and ascribed to him the additional quality of semantic indefiniteness. See L III, 239, for important statements regarding the imitation of nature.

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he composed around a euphonic cluster, or a simple sentence subsequently developed by his mental alchemy; the idea was indivisible from the sound, so at least programmatically his poems did not display that autonomy of sound from meaning which was often what was intended by the (often unflattering) label ‘musical poet’.10 This explains the immediate accessibility of a large number of the early poems by Tennyson, and the pre-eminence of mouthability, or orality, which invites the delight of elocution.11 The hypnotic power of Tennyson’s poetry, expressed in liturgical, almost biblical refrains as in ‘Oenone’ or in the obsessive nomination of the heroine in ‘The Ballad of Oriana’, was to impress Mallarmé.12 Coleridge’s affirmation that Tennyson had no understanding of metre seems foolish and inexplicable, despite being limited to his production before 1835; the sole instance of boldness, the sole act of rebellion in which Tennyson persisted until the end was that of metrics. His was a wonderful, luxuriant, inexhaustible metric variety and inventiveness. § 75. Tennyson up to 1874 II: The two voices The Romantic pedigree of Tennyson – and that of Milton, whose Satan was the ‘first Romantic poet’ – has been debated by deconstructionist and revisionist critics and by students of literature as ‘belatedness’. The critical space dedicated to the poems of Tennyson decreases, from this perspective, the further one distances himself from the source of the influence. There is no doubt about Tennyson’s ‘anxiety’ of Romantic influence and about his ability to overcome it; but Romanticism ‘ends’ in Tennyson to all effects in 1855 with Maud; it is with Maud that the ‘doom of Romanticism’ expires. Critics have always been interested in the pedantic question of how to divide Tennyson’s poetry into periods. The four usually delineated may be reduced to three;13 perhaps, if the chronology is actually to be useful,

10 11 12 13

Tennyson’s contemporaries from Horne to Bagehot saw in him the spirit of poetry itself and an almost asemantic gift. Strangely enough, however, Tennyson confessed he had ‘no ear’. Ricks 1972, 12–13. Œuvres complètes, Paris 1945, 529. Cf. Nicolson 1963, 229–30.

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to only two. The first more or less lasts up until 1855, and the other begins after that date. With few regrets, most biographers and critics have done away with the third and fourth periods, or the second if one prefers to call it that.14 After the four controversial collections of ‘epigonic’ poetry in 1827, 1830, 1832 and 1842, he made an abrupt but failed attempt to renew his art, which is witnessed by his first longer poem (The Princess). He then obtained definitive consecration with In Memoriam, which despite coming out in its complete form in 1850, had been begun in 1833, the year Arthur Hallam died at only twenty-one from a brain haemorrhage. This collection, a long dialogue with the departed in sober and concise quatrains, signals the highest achievement of that century’s introspective and reflective verse. It immediately attained public acclaim because it transmitted and in part addressed – and in part resolved in an attitude of firm resignation – a widely felt unease. Tennyson’s other masterpiece, which later grew to a coherent work of twelve books beginning with a poem composed in 1842, was Idylls of the King, his saga of the Arthurian Round Table. With its simple structure of a verse novel this poem constitutes the poet’s farewell to an entire age and to all of the Victorian utopias. In between these two masterpieces, with the exception of Maud, there is a nearly complete drought of inspiration; significantly, each time Tennyson raises his head, he finds his ideal measure in the lyrical fragment or at best in the lyricaldramatic monologue, and ultimately in short compositions. The evolution of genres and forms in Tennyson is already an indication of his surrender. The composition which best characterizes him is the idyll, adopted and practiced in its original Greek etymology of ‘single brief composition’ and without the bucolic connotations attributed to it by the post-Theocritean tradition.15 Even the long poem, which the public pressured him to produce, was ‘idyllic’ for Tennyson; this leads, among other things, to a contradictory and hybrid tension towards stasis within the frame of a poetry of action. It is to Tennyson that we owe the priority given to the organization and 14 15

Ryals 1964 and Tucker 1988 stop at 1850; in his treatment of Tennyson’s production after 1855, Ricks 1972 verges on a pure list of titles of individual poems. He spelled this word ‘idyl’. Its meaning is different from the word spelled ‘idyll’ as used in the title Idylls of the King. I come back to this difference in my discussion of Idylls in Volume 6.

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application of the dramatic monologue.16 In 1833, with ‘St Simeon Stylites’, he reinvented a genre, anticipating Browning. His numerous dramatic monologues, however, cannot compare with those of Browning, simply because for the most part they are far less dramatic and much more lyrical. 2. How many Tennysons exist, and how many and which are the geological strata listed above that we find in his poetry? And if a Tennyson exists, does an anti-Tennyson exist as well? Was it only a boutade that of Henry James, the great unmasker of Victorian duplicities, when he asserted that Tennyson ‘wasn’t Tennysonian’? Each poetic collection, including the last in 1892, displays a polyphony of chords, tones, metrical and prosodic forms. Moreover, the early and visible – continuous and perhaps even obsessive – absence of any unity or constant theme, and indeed the disparity of weight between single poems, also partly derives from the deliberate aim to please and to interact with the public – which is just what contemporary musicians did, passing nonchalantly from bagatelles to symphonies, from trios to orchestral works, from the popular Lied to the oratorio. Tennyson easily allowed himself to be guided by the varied tastes of the general public, which at his debut was still composed of élites and which gradually expanded together with literacy; thus the readability of his work was a factor Tennyson took into consideration, for he was aiming at a well defined target. The real Tennysonian ‘voice’ does not exist. Instead, there are many, and those are simply his plurality of tones and forms. The poet’s decentralization is also linguistic. It is seen, for example, in compositions which he wrote in the Lincolnshire dialect or in Irish dialect, for which he deserves a top position among dialectal poets of the 1800s, normally only represented by William Barnes.17 His poems in dialect answered a need, the contrast between the healthy world of peasants and that of the city, with that suffering pessimism and fatalism first introduced into English poetry by Gray and Wordsworth. But undoubtedly the dominant antithesis in Tennyson’s poetry, even before 1850, is that between his public and private voices. Perhaps there has never been a public role as inappropriately assigned 16 17

Before the close of the eighteenth century, the term ‘dramatic monologue’ was not in use, and that genre was referred to as ‘monodrama’ (a term revived in Maud), or of ‘prosopopeia’ (Culler 1977, 85). § 213.

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as that of Poet Laureate to a man who had until then been a recluse living only on ‘sensations’. He was then forced to repudiate or somehow reconcile a strictly ethical and very elevated concept of the function of poetry, absorbed by the Cambridge group of the ‘Apostles’ – as exemplified by several of the artes poeticae of the 1830s – and Romantic aesthetics, which saw the imagination and the cultivation and expansion of the self as the primary ingredient of poetry. But the post of Poet Laureate required even more of Tennyson. He was to celebrate the feats and the supposed successes of the Crown, such as anniversaries, military victories, and heroic acts, the Great Exhibitions and other events that showcased England – all of them duties which Tennyson performed coming close to, and sometimes heralding, Kipling’s high-flown apologies of imperialism.18 Few could claim, though it has occasionally been done,19 the inexistence of an aesthetic split, that is of a profound divide in poetic values between the two Tennysons, before and after 1850, even without making it a question of principle and, even in this case, admitting to the high academism of some of his occasional poetry. 3. According to a well-known definition, and to a different sort of schizophrenia that fuels his poetry and gives it substance, Tennyson was a ‘morbid and unhappy mystic’20 forced to become a great public poet. The numerous unresolved dualities of Tennyson have been summarized in many antinomic formulas: that between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’,21 the Freudian duality of the principle of pleasure and the principle of duty;22 the conflict between the female element (timid, defensive, hypersensitive)

18

Tennyson was utterly opposed to any intrusion of his public life into his private one; in his letters and even in a few poems, he laments that poetry, once a private activity, had become ‘public property’ (R 276A), asking himself why publish at all, pursuing fame and exposing himself to all the inherent drawbacks and misunderstandings of consumerism, including the risk of pirated editions which a poet of his notoriety inevitably ran. He confessed to Locker Lampson (Memoir, II, 69) that he had wanted to be a popular poet, but in his old age saw popularity as a ‘bastard fame’. 19 See Pitt 1962. 20 Nicolson 1963, 27. 21 Ryals 1964, 70. 22 Fausset 1923.

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and the male one (strong, dominant, aggressive);23 even that, while not purely geographical, between Lincolnshire and Farringford, or between the visionary and the prosperous administrator of his own literary fortunes. Until 1842, Tennyson systematically composed little portraits of women, spoke primarily in a female voice, evoked the thoughts of women, and had a feminine inspiration that was noticed and mocked in the first ferocious attacks on his poetry. His heroes are often indefinable hermaphrodite figures. Even the warrior King, Arthur, is expressly classified in Idylls as being of scarce virility. Fully virile men are later heroes like Ulysses and Tiresias, and only in Maud does Tennyson envisage an unmistakable, even belligerent ‘virility’.24 In the early 1900s, it was this prevailing or residual femininity in male characters, this defeatist spirit, which inspired writers to seek in more masculine poets a point of departure for the new English poetry after the close of the Victorian age.25 The other Tennyson of Henry James, suffocated by his public persona, and often disguised and camouflaged even by the poet, is generally the re-emerging, or buried and ‘morbid’ Tennyson. In the poetry collections published in his lifetime, he systematically suppressed poems or sketches in which his morbid side was more evident, in order to exhibit an unquestionable and aseptic portrait of himself. There is a clear conflict in his early poetry between the satisfaction and the repression of impulses, between satisfied and sublimated passion: the electrifying, dreamlike Homeric excursions into the world of desire were followed or compensated by tremendous self-flagellations. The time of amoral Romanticism had inexorably come to an end; almost simultaneously Browning – in a climate of total confession in Pauline, before using the oblique lens of his monologues to refract the rays of eroticism – expressed his need to anchor himself to the feminine as a balancing force, an outlet for, and a way to resolve, the tension. Women in Tennyson’s poetry are spiritually stripped of substance, but also tempting flesh, and sex is often a blind alley, as witnessed by ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and by the later belles 23

Lucas 1961, 15. Lucas observes that Tennyson would even recite the ‘feminine’ parts of his poetry in a ‘deep masculine and at times even terrifying voice’. 24 Sinfield 1986, 176. 25 F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry, London 1932.

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dames sans merci, and by the subsequent women-witches in the Idylls, such as Vivien and Attarre. His unlucky fling with Rosa Baring left an indelible mark on his poetry, camouflaged in a thousand ways, including the semantic and phonetic dissemination of her name.26 Many of mid-Tennyson’s short poems revolve around the motif of thwarted or betrayed love, from The Princess to Maud and ‘Enoch Arden’, and this disillusioned love leads to insanity. He was one of the first to explore insanity in poetry: he himself suffered from syndromes of madness or paranoia or mental imbalance, and his brothers Edward, Septimus and Frederick were all affected by mental illnesses in varying degrees. Maud and other poems represent metaphors of the mad poet, and both the protagonists of his early The Lover’s Tale and later of Maud are poets in their own way, almost professional ones, but poets who in extremis heal from their madness and take their place again in the ranks. Even when he disguises himself in psychopaths, like the madman of Maud, Tennyson remains a step away from extreme forms of madness. The Victorian gospel of restraint was often summarized and even preached by Tennyson in his poetry, but never as succinctly and memorably as in the words of Pallas to Oenone, exhorting her to ‘self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control’. § 76. Tennyson up to 1874 III: The ‘stupid’ Tennyson A very unfair commonplace view, first voiced by Taine and irreverently repeated in a definition by Auden, was that Tennyson was an obtuse poet, of an excellent linguistic genius but inferior speculative intelligence. According to this position, he offered a simple, unproblematic and relaxing art to an age in need of a breather after the Romantic excesses, one living in a sort of spiritual lethargy and in a moment of crisis regarding the schools of poetry. Among his many voices there is the conventional one of the ‘graveyard poet’, that of the poet for young women who was not ashamed to publish work in the Annuals – the popular periodicals of the time – and who was mocked as ‘School-miss Alfred’. And there was also the voice of the Biedermeier poet idealizing his home and singing odes to his office, a

26 I have already noted a similar psychological complex in Ruskin in § 44.

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comfortable space preferable to famous ones weighted with history.27 But there is much to doubt regarding any practical obtuseness of Tennyson. The ‘stupid’ Tennyson, as we have seen, was adept at intuiting the tastes of the public, and responded by serving up the calibrated and kaleidoscopic mix of his poetry collections. He frequently cultivated success with a system of ‘sequels’– the most typical case being ‘Locksley Hall’ and ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ – and attempted to apply to poetry the form of serial publication which was enormously successful in fiction. Yet even the derivative nature of almost all of his work is hardly an unequivocal sign of intellectual weakness. It is significant that Tennyson began his career as a translator, and that from his youth he had always sought inspiration in the work of others, rather than within himself, finding it almost a natural activity to compose poetry in the form of imitation, and drawing sustenance from what others had written. Even later he bore certain books firmly in mind, considering them ‘poetry-worthy cases’, conforming to his source material with the rigorous, at times pedantic precision of the historian. This, however, as we will see, is not necessarily a fault; on the contrary, at least when he turned to ancient myths, it serves as a quite modern example – even modernistic and rich with implications for the understanding of Tennyson’s art – of ‘literature based on literature’. The practitioners of the archetypical method of the twentieth century can claim Tennyson as one of their most luminous precursors, both in the way private values are attributed to myths and in the idea of a paradigmatic public value. T. S. Eliot spoke of myth as having the power to give order to human experience, and this is what we already find in Tennyson, who revisited and rewrote some classical myths (of Ulysses, of Tithonus and particularly of Tiresias, the latter taken up by Eliot himself ) with grace and Virgilian, ‘Alexandrian’ smoothness, as has often been said, but also knowingly placing them in a modern frame. 2. Tennyson wrote ‘stupid’ political poetry because he lacked a real political culture or conscience; because though incompetent he wished to intervene, despite his substantial lack of connection to the world or to the life lived among men. At the same time, his post as Poet Laureate and his

27 R 180.

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bourgeois public obligated him to speak out in this sphere so foreign to him. His political ideology was a probably insincere act of submission, if not of prostitution, especially if one thinks of the precocious libertarianism of Shelley or Byron. At twenty years old, albeit with some misgivings, he approved of the First Reform Bill, and also participated, quite apathetically, in an extremely risky action in support of the Spanish rebels. His real indifference to politics before 1850 distinguishes him from the Romantics, who even enrolled as combatants for liberty on European battlefields. This contrasts oddly with the fact that his grandfather and uncles were MPs. In any case, he never failed to include a few vibrant patriotic compositions in each collection, almost as a duty and to silence the highly politicized ‘Apostles’. His sincerely loyalist and monarchical spirit emerged in 1836 in his salute to Victoria, who ascended the throne as the ‘Queen of the Islands’, a democratic and beloved sovereign, sustained by a council of wise members, ready to attack despots. After 1850 he held a truly ‘narcotic’ sway over the age,28 and in him the Crown found a perfect instrument for consensus, an ideal intermediary to form and cement both the middle classes and the new classes in their stage of acculturation. Politically he was a democrat and anti-tyrant, but contradictorily he also upheld the status quo, when in his opinion the status quo worked. He considered, for example, the division and hierarchy between classes immutable, and the ascent of the working classes harmful, believing that it would eventually backfire, damaging the workers themselves. The Paris Commune of 1870 was apparently the inspiration for a poem in which he analysed the connection between revolution and evolution, which was in truth a regression towards ‘civic insanity’. He always supported the work of the English Crown throughout its involvement in the main armed conflicts of the time, such as the Crimean War and the Franco-Prussian War. He was far from being one of the rare pacifist writers of the nineteenth century; in Maud and other poems, war is an antidote to insurmountable interior torments and disappointments caused by love affairs that have led their victims to the brink of collapse. In his chauvinistic, deafening nationalism, in contrast to the two Brownings or,

28

Nicolson 1963, 11.

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later, to Swinburne, not a single word nor thought was spent on the cause of Italian unity, with the exception of a quick note, almost as part of his official duties, regarding Alessandro Poerio and the inhuman conditions of the Italian prisons. Tennyson’s conservatism and imperialism were of the same brand as those of Disraeli and of ‘Young England’, which at the time could even pass for progressive and enlightened. The poor had to remain poor, albeit a bit less so than before, provided the educated aristocratic class, desirous of delivering justice, bestowed upon them decent conditions of life, though always in a regime of submission. Tennyson, Disraeli, and Arnold all believed, following the ideal of a medieval utopia modelled on pre-Reformation England, that the salvation of England at the close of the Industrial Revolution lay in the controlled co-option of the bourgeois and the proletariat in public governance. For this reason, Tennyson abhorred every type of revolution, and fiercely opposed the concession of Home Rule to Ireland, though he lacked the finesse and the thoroughness of the political analysis of a Disraeli, or the theocratic frame of reference of another supposed conservative, Hopkins. 3. In In Memoriam and all of his later work Tennyson was forced to conform to an aesthetic canon which Pater would later dismantle definitively, that of useful art. For the lazy, it served as a surrogate for philosophy and for religion, as an attempt to reconcile the at times irreconcilable dichotomies between dogma and anti-dogmatic science. In any case, it was for everyone poetry for mass consumption, if not a pastime, meant to address practical and more current issues. For many of his contemporaries, Tennyson became an authority in many fields; he was the voice of truth, a sort of rapid handbook that could help to solve the most varied problems, from the speculative to the practical. I do not personally believe the often made claim that the ideas he manifested in his poetry are a patchwork of common beliefs. Stupid ideas do not necessarily or in principle make for stupid poetry, in the same way that a poem is not stupid in principle because it speaks of stupid ideas, but may certainly be so if it deals stupidly with any sort of ideas. It is inexplicable how the critics who declared Tennyson to be stupid were the same ones who, in the first decades of the twentieth century, lauded Donne as a modern poet because of his scientific and metaphysical questionings. Tennyson’s doubts were anything but stupid;

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they were systematic ones despite being eternally unresolved and therefore monotonous. There are no roads to Damascus in his work, which for over forty years continued to ‘ruminate’, as Eliot put it, on the same questions. Tennyson the explorer of metaphysical questions often composed poems whose title and content were reversed, due to his inherent incapacity to find a solution, which forced him to remain in a stalled situation. While studying at Cambridge, he was one of the few to escape the Tractarian tentacles and to avoid the temptation of flirting with Catholicism; still, he was religious just like many, if not all the Victorian poets, adhering to a broad, anti-formalist, and anti-dogmatic creed, which therefore was almost theistic and pantheistic. Like Browning, he often investigated faith tout court, prior to any formation of institutionalized confessions, as well as the principle of divinity inherent in nature. 4. The ‘stupid’ Tennyson was an extremely sharp and alarmed pioneer of many very advanced doctrines that others would subsequently perfect, beginning with Darwin. And in doing this, he would get very close to an attack on orthodoxy, when he didn’t patch up common faith and improbably graft heterodox doctrines onto the most usual beliefs of Christian practice. He was curious, morbidly so, to experiment with alternative sources of knowledge; he dabbled with myths and cosmogonies which, despite being parallel in substance to Christianity, were not the same thing, such as for example the Pythagorean and Platonic theories, Egyptian cosmogony, or gnosis. Christianity had always leaned on them, as the anthropologists and scholars of myth of the time were beginning to investigate and show, such as Pater, Frazer and Faber. Building on the work of Lyell and Chambers, geologists who preceded Darwin, he elaborated personal theories regarding the cyclic nature of the cosmos and the purpose of its evolution. From gnosis in the version of Blake, and from Platonism, he formed the theory of the incarnated spirit in chains, of the existence of degrees of being, of the infinite process of perfection of the species. He suffered greatly the passing of relatives and friends and expressed these emotions in poems that explore the mystery of death and thus the nature of the afterlife. These compositions (of which In Memoriam is the prototype) are rarely lachrymose, indeed often ‘morbidly’ based on a distorted or contorted perspective, with Tennyson envisioning life as it

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continues after death, from beneath and within the tomb, as if in possession of a miraculous clairvoyance. His very last poems are extremely terse metaphors which betray an attenuated and in any case open pessimism. An image which frequently appears is that of life as a drama which may have in store a happier ending than the ‘darkness’ of its first acts, or that of the gilt of the oak that fades with the passing of the seasons, but never completely disappears. § 77. Tennyson up to 1874 IV: Posthumous fame The characteristics, qualities, and genealogy of the poetry of Tennyson were pinpointed objectively and precisely by the most intelligent and sensitive critics of his time after the publication of his first collection in 1827. They were first of all the poets who were younger by a generation, like Hopkins and Swinburne, as well as critics of lesser stature such as Alfred Austin. Both the former and the latter distanced themselves clearly from the group of the pure glorifiers of Tennyson. As spokespeople for the average reader, they early on not only established Tennyson as the most representative poet of his time – a time still in its infancy, and one which was beginning to be termed ‘Victorian’ – but, in accordance with the nineteenth-century English obsession with hierarchies, labelled him not just a ‘great’ poet but ‘the greatest English poet’ of the nineteenth century, even above the Romantics. Predictably, Tennyson inspired a different response depending on the hands into which his poems fell,29 and he also made precautionary attempts, some not at all simple, at compromise, which won him a given public on the one hand, while on the other they distanced other readers.30 This is what happened, for example, when he soon guessed the need for ‘small things’ of the average Englishman and of post-Napoleonic English society, and in following the trend of the taming of Romanticism which was spreading throughout Europe, and finding the most congenial genre for himself in the idyll. But his commercial success, extraordinary in the 29 Sinfield 1986, 154ff. The audience reading the poem was bourgeois, but not homogeneous. 30 Tennyson was not wholly representative of his age, but he was the poet closest in spirit to the Zeitgeist (Pitt 1962, 148–53).

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case of Idylls of the King, and his popularity among an adoring public after 1850, were not always reflected in critical success. 2. Arthur Hallam, a classmate and the leader of a group of friends who had notable influence in shaping the intellectual world of the poet, was chiefly responsible for the precocious mythologizing of Tennyson, whose poetry almost instantly rose to the status of a classic in Cambridge academic circles. Already in 1831 Hallam, shortly before his death, cited the poems of Tennyson in his letters almost without mentioning their titles, a proof of the fact that certain passages were already part and parcel of a common cultural patrimony, and had entered into the collective memory. Hallam also endeavoured to quell the early explosion of dissent, and even mockery, with an essay that countered alleged accusations of a poetry that was too unphilosophical, arguing that Tennyson was a primitive and primordial poet ‘of sensations’. The ten years of poetic silence that Tennyson observed between 1832 and 1842, which were at least partly due to the harsh criticisms of Christopher North (the pen name of John Wilson) show that the general vogue and the alleged poetic dictatorship of Tennyson were a transitory fact limited to a very few years. This dictatorship began in 1850 with In Memoriam but already showed cracks in the early 1860s, when Hopkins coined the definition of ‘Parnassian’ to describe the absence of emotional peaks and the Tennysonian normality of inspiration. That was the moment when other poets, such as Clough or Meredith, had already made a name for themselves, and begun to operate in a way that was totally independent and infinitely distant from Tennyson’s practice. He was, therefore, a difficult testing ground for his immediate contemporaries, who in his work recognized one of the two poetic voices that were to take up the Romantic heritage after the ‘twilight of the gods’, of whom in 1830, the year of Tennyson’s debut, there were only two survivors, Coleridge (and not for long) and Wordsworth. He passed the exam brilliantly, because in those critiques of Tennyson’s poetry the real ability of the critics emerged: some revealed themselves to be pure dilettantes and flatterers, the criticism of others hit the nail on the head, and their analyses and opinions still ring true today. 3. The response of contemporary reviews is varied and uneven, as is typical of a subjective and impressionistic taste, and of the absence of real

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dictators; judgements are modelled on the cropping of privileged areas and on the emphasis on certain ‘voices’. Matthew Arnold, followed closely by Bagehot, singled out one of these voices when he attacked the ‘overelaboration of thought’ and ‘of expression’, and turned to the specious distinction between simplesse, or apparent simplicity, and simplicité. Meredith said that Tennyson filled his pages with vignettes, and Carroll dedicated to him the first innocuous parodies. But the review by ‘Christopher North’, is already a parody of sorts, as it ridicules Tennyson’s Titanic aspirations and dreams of immortality. This Philistine criticism of what were taken to be Romantic poses was to be repeated by others as well. The narcissism of North was exposed by John Stuart Mill, the author of the first unextravagant review and of the first balanced assessment, while a mixed review by Leigh Hunt appeared in 1842. The Poet Laureate that would later succeed Tennyson, Alfred Austin, believed he was expressing the thoughts of ‘the few independent spirits’, revealing in 1870 a few uncomfortable but precise truths, the main one being that Tennyson was a ‘third-rate poet’ who had never written a masterpiece. 4. Thus it is not entirely correct to affirm, as did his later detractors at the close of the century, that Tennyson had been capable of keeping English poetry stagnant for sixty years,31 though without a doubt he kept his own work in a stationary state for a very long time. The ratio changed slightly towards the end of his career. He ceased to set the fashion, and in a veiled manner accepted some elements, at least, of the new poetic experiences which were flowering and making themselves known in the 1880s. For example, though late, he incorporated certain mimetic shortcuts

31

Gosse, cited by Nicolson 1963, 207. If one can gauge the innovative gifts of a poet by his vocabulary, Tennyson wielded a predictable and controlled one which he dared not broaden. Once, in ‘Gareth and Lynette’, to have Gareth use an ‘invented verb’, he justified himself in a footnote, blaming the word on the ‘youthful ignorance’ of the knight. A typical example of his immobility is that Tennyson would often slip poems written in a different, earlier year, even many years previous or even possibly poems from his youth, into collections published many years later, without the reader noticing any stylistic discrepancy, a fact which, incidentally, complicates the task of correctly placing Tennyson’s undated poems.

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in the style of Browning into some of his dramatic monologues; he created a few rather risqué characters, described some scandalous passions, and even hinted at – unthinkably – the occasional ‘decadent’ attitude, the occasional propensity towards cursed beauty. He shared the anxiety of the long-lived Victorians, ‘condemned’, by the very long span of time in which they produced work, to adapt to the rapid changes in taste, unlike the few poets that died prematurely and who had written in a regime marked by intensity and concentration, free to compose without feeling the need to renew themselves. Tennyson lived over eighty years, and spent almost seventy of them drafting and composing poetry, and this allowed him to accumulate a vast poetic production. The anthologizing of Tennyson, meaning the need to distinguish amongst his works, to purify them, to dig through his corpus for a selection of the best pieces – to salvage the salvageable – was a process Tennyson subjected himself to on his own, long before his peers or posterity did so. Like Browning in his poem, ‘House’, he foresaw the ‘scandal and shouting’ following his death, the thirst for gossip, the desecration of his private life, the swooping down of hungry vultures awaiting the carcass. For this very reason, he attempted to present only his official voice to the public, often his most impeccable one, with acts of censorship which suffocated his other voices, aiming to silence them completely. Tennyson, who was to become the strong point in anthologies of Victorian poetry, was the first editor and anthologizer of his own work. Up until 1842, he would re-propose in each new collection poems from earlier ones, so that it may be said that each subsequent collection was a kind of partially definitive edition of his poetry. After 1842, following the example of Wordsworth, he was the selector and cataloguer of his own work, and an extremely arbitrary one, since he sometimes struck off, with some regret, anything that could imperil his image as Poet Laureate. These suppressed poems were not merely revelations of his private world but at times constituted noteworthy achievements. My job will also be to study these specimens which Tennyson self-censored or left submerged, which in more than one case meaningfully complete and in others contradict the official Tennyson. 5. That which during his life was an admiring compliment – that Tennyson was the representative poet of his age – over time became an

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unmitigated condemnation. He is a clear example of the posthumous curse of immediate popularity. The twentieth century had recourse to a diametrically opposed principle, according to which a Victorian, to save himself from condemnation, should be obscure, and have refused fame, more or less like Hopkins. The idea of the relationship between society and the poet had changed irreversibly at the beginning of the century; the poet was neither to seek nor to represent consensus. Yeats, Pound and Eliot ‘disinfected’ the Tennyson tradition in the name of the purity and the autonomy of poetry, which should not be confused with anecdote or far-fetched ideas about faith and science. For this very reason T. S. Eliot’s essay of 1936 almost seems like a false step. This piece is, however, less laudatory than its opening would lead one to believe, and clearly states that Tennyson must be selected and anthologized, not read in a continuum. The post-war period surprisingly and increasingly demonstrated that there was no reason only to ridicule Tennyson, and that the time had come to take him seriously. If all of English and even European literature was still being read in the light of the artistic revolution of the 1920s, it was more than natural, and once in a while not arbitrary, that Tennyson should be rediscovered as the precursor of Joyce, Eliot and Modernism itself.32 It was even suggestively proved,33 in part in the wake of the early aesthetics of Hallam, that fifty years before symbolism Tennyson had written symboliste poetry, that he had already used the technique of the objective correlative, and the imagistic one of juxtaposed images without commentary. After 1950 there began the overabundance of interpretative keys, each of which claims as dominant, at times arbitrarily, a poetic component: those of Frye, of Freud and Jung, and psychoanalytical, structuralist, semiotic, historico-materialistic and finally deconstructionist. The New Critics, supposing that Tennyson had been playing with language and confident that, as with Empson, the poetic text had to be without exception ambiguous, found ambiguity even where perhaps it isn’t there; they uncovered a rich trove of hues and positions,

32 33

Cf. A. J. Carr, ‘Tennyson as a Modern Poet’, in University of Toronto Quarterly, XXIII (1950), 361–382. Cf. the essays by McLuhan and Waterston, in Killham 1960.

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and almost modernist obscurity, making much of the brief lyric ‘Tears, idle tears’. Materialistic deconstructionism34 focused on the typically poststructuralist problem of signs and referents, with tangled arguments that render deferential and obligatory homage to Derrida, De Man and Rorty. The deconstructionists act on directives quite opposed to those of the New Critics: Tennyson, they say, bore with him the a-temporal ‘heritage’ of Romanticism, while the latter saw in Tennyson an avant-garde poet and the precursor of symbolism. One of the most exhaustive deconstructionist contribution to date35 performs a deft, acrobatic and in part arbitrary analytical reading of those poems of Tennyson which actually hearken back to a Romantic heritage or inspiration, but one that leaves unmentioned many characteristics which are not Romantic. Forty years of poetry are basically eliminated, which ultimately falsifies Tennyson’s canon. § 78. Tennyson up to 1874 V: Biography Tennyson’s paternal grandfather was a rude and pragmatic non-practising lawyer, who had an obsession with increasing the expanse of the real estate he had received in his wife’s dowry, and who boasted that his family was of Danish descent. Tennyson himself, in his later years, speaking of his play Harold, confessed that he was proud of being ‘half Danish and half Norman’.36 We do not know exactly when his grandfather decided to invest all of his hopes in his younger son Charles – who would take on the additional name of d’Eyncourt, renovate and furnish a medieval manor in a pompous style, and become an MP – thereby ‘disinheriting’ his eldest, the future father of Tennyson, whom he believed unqualified to promote the prestige of the family. Forced to join the clergy, in 1806 Tennyson’s father became a rector in the small town of Somersby, located in the heart of the heaths of Lincolnshire. The atmosphere at home went downhill over time as the signs of the rector’s mental instability became ever clearer. Neutral towards his brother but unable to forgive his father for the injustices he had suffered, he took to drinking and displayed suicidal tendencies; his wife, 34 Cf. Sinfield 1986. 35 Tucker 1988. 36 L III, 141 (14.1.1877).

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the niece of the bishop of Lincoln, and the daughter of a vicar, tried for as long as she could to keep the marriage together for the sake of the children. The prospect of an inevitable separation was later communicated to her father-in-law by letter with composed firmness. Tennyson was therefore able to observe and study first-hand37 the madness suffered by numerous protagonists of his poetry: an insidious, endemic madness which he blamed on the ‘black blood’ running through the veins of his ancestors, which affected, to a greater or lesser degree, either for genetic reasons or due to the dreadful atmosphere at home, three of his twelve siblings, the youngest of whom had to be committed to a mental hospital. In his early childhood, there was real fellowship between the three elder brothers, Frederick, Charles and Alfred, with only a year between them. The rector was a classicist who collected books and played the harp, and who, partly in revenge against his father, put great emphasis on the success of his children and educated them in the worship of the classics. During their long walks the three brothers would compete against each other reciting improvised lines in the woods and skirting the hedges, and Tennyson used to say that before he even knew how to read, on rainy days he would open his arms and ecstatically recite this line: ‘I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind’. The words ‘far, far away’ also carried a strange fascination for the boy. In 1824 he carved the name of Byron, fallen in Greece while he fought for liberty, on a rock. He was only twelve years old when he wrote an epic of 6,000 lines modelled on Scott. In 1827, upon the death of his maternal grandmother, his grandfather commissioned a funeral elegy. The episode reveals both Tennyson’s precocious talent and the temperament of his grandfather, who gave the boy ten shillings with the comment that those would be the first and the last earned through poetry. The earliest remaining example of Tennyson’s poetry are a hundred lines translated from the opening of Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae, which not only demonstrate the expertise and the naturalness with which he wielded the heroic couplets of Pope, whose translation of the Iliad he had read, but also hide the inferno which the parsonage of Somersby had become.38 A fight between 37 38

‘I studied the minds of my relatives’ (L I, 106; 1.1834). Culler 1977, 44, sees in this an early hint at apocalyptic and visionary leanings.

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his father and Frederick, the firstborn, caused the split of the two spouses when father threatened son with a knife and wielding a loaded pistol. The rector spent nearly a year afterwards travelling around Europe and died from typhus soon after his return in 1831. Tennyson explicitly stated that he grew up haunted by the desire to die, and that he would frequent cemeteries, rolling between the tombs in a morbid fascination with the macabre. When his father died, he crawled between the covers next to the still-warm corpse: he wanted to see his ghost, or, according to the less charitable, he finally had the chance to have a bed all to himself after years spent in the overcrowded parsonage. 2. The trio of brothers was reduced by one when in 1818 Frederick was sent to Eton, while Charles and Alfred, taken out of the local school, continued their studies under the guidance of the rector. In 1827 Tennyson joined his older brother at Trinity College Cambridge, but upon the death of their father their grandfather refused to provide the brothers with any more financial assistance towards the completion of their studies; in any case Tennyson had hardly applied himself with much passion. Within a month, from July to August 1831, he made the decision to renounce an ecclesiastical career and become a poet. At Cambridge it was also not long before he quit the group of the ‘Apostles’, a student debating society, after having presented (but due to shyness not having publicly read) a single paper, significantly on the theme of ghosts. All the same, a number of his peers began to appreciate the poems that this peevish and solitary country boy was composing, whilst remaining detached from the intense debates. Almost everyone in that circle was a somewhat accomplished poet, and together they formed a united band of friends who would exchange their poems and even collaborate as a team, as if the resulting pieces were the work of a common feeling. Tennyson revealed his poetic prowess winning a university prize on an assigned topic, surpassing a valiant and brilliant classmate, Arthur Hallam. Rather than a rivalry, a friendship was born of the event, the most profound and lasting of Tennyson’s life.39 The bond was 39

Like Hopkins for Dolben or perhaps Bridges, or the coterie of Pater, and others of the Oxford scene, Tennyson felt an intense affection for Hallam which may have been, though possibly only in an imaginary sense, homosexual (Tucker 1988, 451

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inspired by the immense respect, on the part of Hallam, for the poetic talent of his friend, which translated into a highly skilled review, still informative and enlightening today. While Tennyson suffered for his family situation and the violent explosions of his father, Hallam was attempting to recover from an ill-fated love affair, seeking consolation by falling in love with Tennyson’s sister, Emily, during occasional visits to Somersby. There he took advantage of the ever longer absences of the rector. In 1830 the poems of Tennyson were supposed to come out in a joint edition with those of Hallam, but the latter’s father objected. That same summer the two friends took a trip to France and Spain, financed by Hallam’s father, which was one of the last ‘romantic’ adventures of the century, in that the secret aim of the trip was to bring assistance to a handful of Spanish rebels that a few of the ‘Apostles’ had met in England, and whose cause they had taken up. Hallam and above all Tennyson were, in truth, pulled into this exploit by their more intrepid friends; the adventure however failed, with some even comic results. Tennyson, who limited himself to drawing on the trip for exotic inspiration for his poems, was already at twenty years old a rather moderate libertarian, who slipped into the crowd on the night in which the First Reform Bill was approved, and greeted in Somersby with church bells ringing in celebration. The sudden death of Hallam, in October 1833 in Vienna, where the friend had travelled with his father on a leisure trip, stunned Tennyson into a petrified and incredulous inertia. He did not attend the funeral when the body was returned to England, and even more surprisingly refused to contribute a testimony to the volume of posthumous writings of his friend. He waited twelve whole years before giving a collection of verse to the press; another eight years passed before he maintained the promise which he had made to the father of Hallam to memorialize him in the future. The death of Hallam did not, however, break Tennyson’s will to live; instead, with great fatigue, it confirmed it, Tennyson having never hidden his suicidal thoughts even in his poems. Nobly, Hallam’s father provided an allowance of 300 pounds to Emily Tennyson, expecting the young girl to spend her life a spinster, venerating n. 19). For Sinfield 1986, 131, who frames the question in the context of Victorian sexuality, the relationship ‘may not have been […] directly sexual’.

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the memory of her beloved, hopes that would later be dashed when she married at the beginning of 1842. On his deathbed, the grandfather left a will which was unfavourable to the Tennyson family, for the inheritance was divided into equal parts, opening an irreconcilable rift between the families of Charles, the uncle, and the far more numerous and needy one of the other brother, Tennyson’s father. 3. Rosa Baring was the first woman loved by Tennyson, with an unripe, unrequited passion. The family of the young woman was quite affluent, but Rosa was too frivolous and aristocratic for the relationship to last, and Tennyson’s official proposal of marriage in 1832 was refused. He suddenly understood how important wealth was in obtaining the hand of a woman, and Rosa reappears in Maud and in all the women vainly loved by Tennyson’s protagonists, often for reasons of money and rank. He met Emily Sellwood, his future wife, a girl from a good family in his neighbourhood, of an anonymous, rather colourless beauty, at the 1836 wedding of his brother Charles and Emily’s own sister. Officially Tennyson and Emily became engaged in the early months of 1837, but no date was set for the wedding: the engagement lasted fourteen years, both because Tennyson’s family was obliged to leave the parsonage of Somersby, and because in the eyes of many, not least of whom the judicious Emily, Tennyson had become a vagabond with neither a job nor prospects, and on top of that was suspected of being an unbeliever. He came to know madness even more closely residing for a time in 1840 in the mental institution to which his brother Septimus had been committed. He then threw himself recklessly into a disastrous economic investment, having such faith in the director of the institution that he entrusted him with almost his entire fortune in order to set up a mysterious business of wood decorations which went bankrupt in a very short time. He lost 3,000 pounds on the venture and fell into a prostrating depression from which he emerged thanks to this brother-in-law Lushington, who helped him to recoup part of the lost money by setting up an insurance policy on the life of the director, who died soon afterwards. His life became more financially stable when, through the intercession of friends, he was assigned an allowance of 200 pounds which was never revoked, even upon his being named Poet Laureate. After his wedding, he looked for a house which would take the place of the parsonage where

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he had grown up, and purchased the farm of Farringford, isolated in the middle of luxuriant vines on the Isle of Wight. The home that Tennyson had designed and built for himself in Aldworth in 1868, by which time he was wealthy and famous, was halfway between London and Portsmouth; in its decorations it was reminiscent of the glory of Bayons, the manor bought by his grandfather so long before. 4. The last four decades of Tennyson’s life were utterly uneventful, so much so that they are often unmentioned by biographers for lack of interesting material. In the increasingly less peaceful and productive silence of Farringford, he worked regularly on the composition of his works; he read, studied and recited poetry, drank port and smoked strong tobacco, and dedicated his free time to gardening or stargazing through his telescope from atop his villa’s tower. Occasionally he would take a ship to London, to accept an honour or attend a salon. He was offered the post of Poet Laureate in 1850 – the name of Browning was not even taken into consideration – upon the passing of Wordsworth, but after Samuel Rogers had refused on the grounds of his advanced age. Tennyson, who as it would seem had experienced a premonitory dream convincing him to accept the post, received the appointment from the queen in borrowed clothes, and pants which were tight in the seat. According to the unanimous impression of the numerous writers he knew and frequented, among whom Hawthorne and Henry James, he was a sloppy dresser, with a dishevelled appearance throughout his life. Carlyle described him as solitary and sad, surrounded by an aura of darkness and also – in a typical antithesis for Carlyle –40 one of ‘chaos’ that he was attempting to ‘shape into a cosmos’. After forty years, the photographs of Tennyson show a man very different from the one Lawrence had painted long before, a youth with shadowy good looks and downy pitch-black hair. Another honour which Tennyson had not sought was the title of Baron, proposed by Prime Minister Gladstone (who, as it turned out, Hallam had rebuffed in favour of Tennyson many years before). The queen, with whom Tennyson conducted a lively exchange of correspondence, had unlimited faith in Tennyson as both a politician and a poet, 40 § 10.

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and chose him as advisor to influence Gladstone on the Sudan question. Tennyson’s public apotheosis, which was hardly even scratched by the ever more frequent, ever less innocuous parodies, began with his deification at the hands of his own family. His wife Emily was his secretary and advisor, and his son Hallam became his Boswell, following closely behind, at times as manservant, at times nurse, and lastly as editor and unscrambler of his papers and his first biographer. Pilgrims, Garibaldi among them in 1864, descended in droves to visit the solemn guru, uncurved by age and who at eighty years old boasted a head with hardly a white hair. He lived so long that he survived many poets born long after him, as well as his siblings and second born son Lionel. In Aldworth, in the delirium preceding his death in 1892 from flu aggravated by gout, Tennyson frequently asked for the works of Shakespeare, and when he breathed his last he was holding a copy of Cymbeline. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, across from the tomb of Browning. § 79. Tennyson up to 1874 VI: Criteria for discussion Ricks’s three-volume edition has the unquestionable merit of having gathered everything that Tennyson wrote, that is to say both what he wrote and what he censored in the partially definitive editions, including poems which in some cases are of significant interest and should never have been excluded. The reservations prompted by this edition regard the fact that the strict criterion of chronology eclipses the demarcations between one collection and the next. Ricks silently gives preference, in his dating and thus in the organization of the canon, to first drafts, which for him set the time of composition, even in cases in which a poem was later heavily revised and published in much later collections, indeed ending up an entirely different, and of course a completed composition. At times there are hiatuses of over sixty years between the initial draft and the final form of a poem. It might perhaps have been preferable to publish these poems in an appendix, as did the editors of the Penguin edition of Browning. I will proceed with a mixed method, eclectic and dictated by common sense. Essentially I will try to preserve the integrity of the collections and thus reduce the disadvantages which derive from the adoption of an overly chronological criterion. The only truly insidious obstacle will be found in Idylls of

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the King, a work made up of parts which in themselves are autonomous and develop naturally, and which began to come out very early (‘Morte d’Arthur’ in 1842). I will, however, postpone their analysis until 1888 (and until Volume 6 of this series), the year of publication of all the separate pieces under a single title – when, in other words, they all come together and the poem achieves its fullest stage of unity. Tennyson, moreover, was a restless, frenetic revisionist who tended to make copious changes to his poems in numerous ways, to even tiny details, not only while he was composing them but even when he republished them. Obviously I will not be able to deal with these variants, if not in very rare cases. Ricks’s edition itself only includes a selection of the principal ones. § 80. Tennyson up to 1874 VII: Tennyson’s precocity Tennyson’s debut was not at all awkward or hesitant. His own father wrote notes in the margins of The Devil and the Lady,41 with understandable pride, given the age – only fourteen – at which his son composed this prodigious Elizabethan-Jacobean imitation, in which a wizard entrusts his wife to the protection of the devil during his temporary absence, and the latter carries out his task with dedication and astuteness. When the suitors arrive at court in front of her dwelling, the devil pitches them against one another, even presenting himself disguised in women’s clothes. The shadow of Goethe still hangs over the earliest works of Tennyson, as it does over those of Browning and of other poets debuting in the 1820s. This is not just the Goethe of Faust but also the Goethe of Wilhelm Meister, which had come out in 1824 in a translation by Carlyle – a Goethe who, like all the nineteenth-century Fausts, could not avoid being ‘contaminated’. No longer the corruptor and the tempter who, to satisfy the longings of Faust pushes a woman into sin, Mephistopheles is now charged with keeping watch over her faithfulness. The Faustian motif merges with the Donjuanesque theme of the temptation of female chastity, but in this case

41

Published only in 1930 by Sir Charles Tennyson. The third and most complete of the three manuscripts contains revisions and additions, all made by Tennyson before he turned sixteen.

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it is again a reversal, as the man is not the seducer: instead, the woman is an irresistible temptress. The drama is interrupted in the third act with the return of the magician from his ‘Faustian’ trip, sterile for the most part, to the known world. In the opinion of the poet’s son, the play should have ended with a macabre and wild dance of all of the characters as flames erupting out of the earth devour them to the jubilation of the devil. This epilogue, as well as a planned scene in which the young and embarrassed wife attempts to hide the presence of a final suitor from her husband, are Tennysonian tributes both to the European Donjuanesque tradition and to its English reinterpretation by Byron. The lady of this drama is not yet the lady of Shalott or Mariana, or any of the countless, abandoned Tennysonian heroines: she endures her confinement and compulsory imprisonment with tremors of rebellion and revenge, rather than waiting spasmodically and fatalistically for a beloved that never arrives. Yet her evil, bewitching beauty foreshadows Vivien of Idylls of the King, and the shrunken octogenarian wizard represents both repressed sexuality and, when defeated by Merlin, the exhausted immortality of Tithonus.42 The surprising and then immediately abandoned choice of a drama may be read as an act of youthful ambition and emulation, but also as a stepping stone towards the adoption of the dramatic monologue. The monologues of the woman, of the devil and particularly the first and final soliloquies of the magician are in strident contrast to the dialogic scenes, both because they are composed in solemn and resounding Miltonic cadences and because they are virtually closed compositions, removed from the action, and totally unmotivated, inserted as pure dramatic expedients. The obsession with betrayal, according to which all women are congenitally impure and sexually ravenous, is part of a long dramatic tradition: for the devil, women are more diabolical than Satan himself; they are sweet-smelling flowers which, wilting, become lethal ‘poisonous berries’; or richly embroidered, brilliantly coloured floral tapestries that, looked at closely, reveal a threatening pattern. The wizard also has a monologue on the unfathomable mysteries of the heart, and the 42 The epithet ‘shrunken […] Grasshopper’, which the woman slaps upon her husband, recalls the mystical metamorphosis of Tithonus, evoked by Tennyson in one of his finest monologues (§ 98.2–3).

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female heart in particular. The corporal punishment advocated by the devil43 hides a sense of impotence and a feeling of oppression by women, whose lubricious rejection is a denegation, filled with disgusting images, perhaps a reflection of a precociously dissatisfying sexual experience, or emotional involvements which turned out to be traumatic mistakes. 2. Tennyson’s three ‘apocalyptic’ poems, ‘Armageddon’, ‘Timbuctoo’, and ‘The Coach of Death’, despite still showing an influence from current events of the time and being the signs of incipient and tormenting inquiry prompted by the most recent scientific discoveries, may be included among the Romantic-visionary works and be placed in two literary orbits, that of Blake the prophet and that of Shelley the visionary. As such, they connect back to The Devil and the Lady more than one might think, in particular to the last soliloquy of the wizard. They also owe much to the frequent trance states induced by the repetition of incantations with which Tennyson confessed to have often experimented.44 In ‘Armageddon’45 the spasmodic prologue of the ‘final battle’ of Revelation, which with a jump of several decades brings to mind the Tennyson of the Idylls and its final cosmic conflict, is evoked by the not yet sixteen-year-old poet with an almost uncontrolled wealth of surreal visions: anthropomorphized beasts and birds that shudder and whimper, a tempest which hisses, wailing mixed with laughter, the sickly bloodshot moon, the swirling frenzied stream furrowing an arid land and splashing its shores with foam.46 The phantasmagoria is at times so dense and shocking that it seems a mental landscape, a therapeutic coughing up of disturbing images from the psyche: ‘dirty, black, shapeless things’ floating across the desolate stretch of land, and one shudders just at the sight. An eschatological and teleological pessimism seems to dominate the poem, and nothing indicates that the forces of good will have any chance of winning over those of evil in the imminent battle. Certainty of a positive outcome to the battle arrives only thanks to an unhoped-for, 43 44 45 46

‘Honour, love and fear / All meet in a bamboo’. Memoir, I, 320. Published for the first time in 1930–1931. Many of these images are repeated, without any possible influence, in Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ (§ 121–3).

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albeit sought, intervention from outside and specifically from above. The hymn with which the poem opens is an invocation to a ‘spirit of prophecy’ with powers similar to those of the Holy Spirit, in that it breathes life into creation, emanates light which is above all knowledge, and blows a wind that scatters the dark clouds of ignorance. The turbid and frightening apocalyptic vision thus dissipates and the sky clears completely in its arcane meaning with the arrival of a dazzling seraph, who almost renders the viewer of the vision a participant in a sort of divine omniscience. But the poem can also be read as a genesis rather than an apocalypse, the account of a primordial clash between God and Satan, the outcome of which is at first anything but certain: a battle between the forces of destruction and those of creation, from which the former will emerge victorious, opening an age of gradual but unstoppable evolution47 towards ever more perfect humans, to culminate in the ‘gigantic forms’ which will one day populate the earth. Tennyson’s speculation upon the ‘future’ of creation and the race finds its first, optimistic ‘act’ in this poem which, substantially changed, will become, in 1829, ‘Timbuctoo’. The poem won the Chancellor’s Gold medal at Cambridge and led to the first triumphant recognition given to Tennyson, who in its first reviews was even compared to Milton and Byron, despite the deep dissatisfaction of the writer, whose natural shyness was not the only reason why he declined even to recite it publicly on the day of the award ceremony. The changes between the two poems have been seen as a tangible sign of Tennyson’s definitive assimilation of Keats and the first symptom of post-Romantic Tennysonian escapism. The apocalypticism of ‘Armageddon’ is made conventional in a vision that is no longer from the heights of a mountain overlooking the biblical valley of Megiddo. Instead, it takes place on the equally evocative Pillars of Hercules. It unleashes a stream of associations that transport the reader to legendary cities which have engaged the collective imagination from the beginnings of time, from Atlantis to Eldorado to the African city of Timbuctoo, the wonder of modern times, which in 1828 had been reached by the first European,

47 Of the two theories proposed by contemporary science regarding the origin of the current shape of the earth, the Catastrophic and the Uniformitarian (§ 58.1), Tennyson would quickly come to favour the latter (Culler 1977, 14ff.).

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the Frenchman René Caillé, and which from that moment on had become a frequent theme in poetry. The same seraph who descends from the sky in ‘Armageddon’ is now a secular seraph, even with tones of paganism, a simple catalyst for beatific visions of a city bristling with countless spires and battlements, rotating suns and sparkling globes, a pyramid flanked by colonnades and a flaming throne, visions whose blinding glare is too much for the eye to stand, causing the poet to faint. In a different evolutionary framework, Timbuctoo is read by the poet as an allegory of the imagination and the imaginative consciousness, helping man ‘to attain / By shadowing forth the Unattainable’,48 and therefore in essence it allows him to aspire to vicarious forms of knowledge now nearing their extinction, due to the scientific spirit which leaves, or aims to leave, nothing unknowable. This is revealed by the seraph, raising the poet from the ground with a smile threaded through with an inexpressible melancholy, who carefully separates the opposing terms of ‘fable’ and ‘discovery’ in his speech49 before soaring off into the sky, leaving the poet alone beneath a darkening sky. ‘The Coach of Death’, written at the same time as The Devil and the Lady and ‘Armageddon’, although in rhyming quatrains rather than blank verse, merges the apocalypticism of the latter with the grotesque style of the former, without any dramatic disguise. We meet a desolate and icy land and a world beyond the grave where the damned await passage to Hell, and an infernal carriage which moves forward through frightening, fantastical, indefinable scenes that come to sinister life at his arrival. But a macabre realism, much more clear-cut and precise in its outline and details, characterizes the description of the innkeeper with wrinkled skin and waxen cheeks and of the ghostlike charioteer with creaking bones. There is even a vein of pathos and elegy when he pauses to consider the nostalgia of the damned for their lives and the loved ones they have left, the first symptom of Tennyson’s morbid, ‘inverted’ interest in the perspective on the afterlife as viewed by the defunct themselves. However, any idea that the poem expresses an obsession with an all-consuming dualism and Calvinistic

48 On the grammatical ambivalence of the verb ‘attain’ (which I interpret to be transitive, with ‘the Unattainable’ as its object) cf. the acute observations by Tucker 1988, 62–3. 49 These two words are italicized in the text.

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predestination infused with a dark, morbid sense of guilt is contradicted by the epilogue, which takes a more ambiguous position, accentuated by the abrupt end of the vision.50 The carriage of the elect heading towards paradise arrives to the sound of angelic choirs and passes the one destined to Hell; still, Hell appears, at least from afar, as a sort of superior pagan paradise, a new Timbuctoo, a dazzling array of obelisks, minarets and pavilions where mythological gods, not yet dethroned, reside. The ending is one of the first escapist flights in Tennyson’s poetry. Before long, the carriage will become the ship on which Tennyson will travel on the wings of his imagination, to revisit the places and the characters of the Arabian Nights, while the mythological realm is a prefiguration of the ‘palace of art’ into which Tennyson will intermittently yearn to retreat, subtracting himself at great expense from the scrutiny of religious conscience. 3. The collection Poems by Two Brothers51 was published in 1827 by a small publisher in the area of Somersby, who paid the authors ten pounds in cash and advanced ten more against sales. It revealed without question that at sixteen years old, the age at which the majority of these poems were written, Tennyson not only possessed a considerable erudition, but was able to imitate with ease all the styles of poetry from the previous half-century. He was more proficient, however, at managing Miltonian blank verse than rhyming stanzas. The connection between this collection and the other poems of his adolescence – apparently denied and hidden by the unorganized plethora of genres, metres and changes of poetic voice, as well as by the display of his sources, which becomes at times a 50 51

The poem is, as explained in the subtitle, ‘a fragment’. Only ‘Timbuctoo’ is formally complete. That is by Alfred and Charles Tennyson, but a few poems were also composed by Frederick Tennyson. The authorship of the single pieces, which in the manuscript are written in different hands, was not specified. The collection was then born as a collective project. I follow Ricks’s edition for the poems – forty-five in all – attributed to Tennyson, the only ones from this collection which I examine. This collection was later rejected and its poems were not even included as early works in the complete collections published by Tennyson (who, contemptuously, defined them as ‘precocious dregs’), and were reprinted only in 1893 after his death. He never republished the three ‘apocalyptic’ poems, considering them ‘too unusual for current tastes’.

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true encumbrance – lies in a prolonged sense of apocalypse. This is as much a private, existential chaos, which serves as prelude to a threatening judgement, as an objective apocalypse, public and of epic proportions, evoked in morbid states of mind, in scenes of setting suns, of ruin or spasmodic awaiting, or in the recurring depictions of civilizations which lie defeated, destroyed, or in inexorable decline. Many poems are written in the first person, but the narrative voice is varied and refracted, even in the cases in which there is a greater closeness to the purely lyrical genre. Tennyson in fact inhibits or casts doubt upon the possibility of immediately identifying himself with the poetic voice, resorting to a temporal artifice that in Tennysonian criticism is commonly called the ‘mask of age’,52 consisting in the introduction of a fictional interval of ‘long years’ between the events recounted and the telling of the story. Invariably, the rich hopes of youth are observed from the vantage point of bitterly disappointed old age, and the Blakean ‘innocence’ of youth is thus contrasted with the ‘experience’ of maturity: ‘where’s now the heart exulting / In pleasure’s buoyant sense, / And gaiety resulting / From conscious innocence?’ These poems are the exact counterpart and the symmetrical repercussion of the domestic chaos that was such a painful trial for Tennyson, although certainly they are also fully integrated into the Romantic tradition, particularly that of the Byronic hero, Titanic and cursed, as in Browning’s debut poem, Pauline. The suicide in front of whose tomb Tennyson composed a poem53 is in part the same Tennyson who seriously entertained thoughts of death, and who a few years later would give the poem ‘The Two Voices’ the provisional title of ‘thoughts of a suicide’. The expressions of open abhorrence for the waste of life, the endless bitterness, the sarcasm, the fatalistic tone, the images of corruption and ruin are also preludes to the two Locksley Hall poems which were to appear many years later. At times (as in R 7 and R 51) there are unjustifiable leaps between poems: on the one hand, strings of elementary rhetorical questions reassure the reader of the existence of eternal life (metrically anticipating the last, most cheerful sections of 52 53

An expression coined by Paden 1942. ‘The Grave of a Suicide’. Cf. also R 11, ‘Oh, when shall I rest in the tomb, / Wrapt about with the chill winding sheet?’

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In Memoriam); on the other, there is an almost deliberately contrasted, wild blaze of blasphemy and disparate confessions of abjection and unbelief, premonitions that an inevitable damnation hangs over the poet, together with excruciating corporal punishment. ‘Remorse’ is an unequivocal vision of personal damnation and a private apocalypse: ‘And yet I cannot here below / Take my full cup of guilt, as some, / And laugh away my doom to come’. Tennyson could not always manage to accept damnation as a challenge, to be dodged light-heartedly, leading to those mythological paradises where moral law is suspended, even if only in a dream, as in ‘The Coach of Death’. 4. The splitting of the voice appears above all in the elegiac and disconsolate dramatic monologues delivered by more objectified ‘masks’ of old age: the druid (R 18), the Persian exile who leaves Bassorah (R 14), the outcast (R 55), and the ‘old commander’.54 Cleopatra is the first abandoned woman in the Tennysonian canon, and therefore the first appearance of the archetype of separation and frustrated love; but Tennyson does not yet organize the poem from the point of view of the woman, as he will often do in the future. Instead the vantage point is that of the dying Antony as he leaves his lover. Berenice, like Cleopatra, escapes slavery through death in a dramatic monologue which is also delivered by a man, Mithridates. Tennyson sings the ‘omnipotence’ of love and idealizes the simple girl, the red-cheeked country damsel or the fair skinned Savoyard virgin (R 20); he dwells almost morbidly on the fleshy lips, the sweet-scented breath, the dazzling white teeth, the dainty feet, the immaculate bosom, the golden hair of a belle dame sans merci, and in the same way he voices a delicate lament on a Wordsworthian Lucy. The truth is that even then he feared the ambivalent, enigmatic charm of women: few of his poems express a sense of erotic gratification or satisfaction, or depict amorous encounters free from the throes of a guilty conscience (as in R 40), rather than adieus. In the first poems which are unmistakably Tennysonian in spirit and 54 R 33. The old man utters words that would not seem strange on the lips of King Arthur in Idylls of the King; in fact, they are like a meteoric trial run remembering a heroism and a knightly virtue which have disappeared. He hints at music, above all at the harp, a symbol of the construction of Camelot, the city built to the sound of music.

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atmosphere, the poetic ‘I’ becomes almost a completely mute spectator. Tennyson expressly indicates his preference for the Burkean sublime,55 for wild, rugged nature inspiring fear and trembling, and he focuses systematically on sunsets that are less than relaxing, on the evening and the night, never on full, clear days. Two poems linger on midnight (R 21 and 30), on a veiled landscape, tearful, dripping, illuminated by pale moonlight, which instils not only sadness but even shivers of terror. One often has the impression of a poet that pauses in front of a cosmic ruin and a pile of relics from a long-gone world of beauty and splendour, brooding on the melancholy, immature conviction that everything that is good is transitory and both can and must be fatally corrupted.56 The ‘apocalyptic’ spectacle of the destructive forces of nature is sinisterly sublime, like that of a maelstrom or an erupting volcano. The structural contrast on which the majority of these lyrics are based, which is no other than an ‘apocalyptic’ variation of the mask of age, is that between before and after, the promise of the past and the present reign of desolation and abandonment: time is personified in a medieval-style ‘allegory’ (R 27), and travels in a carriage that slices through the ages with an unstoppable pace, devouring everything, above all glory and terrestrial fame. The collection reveals the almost obsessive and impotent awareness of the irrevocable march of time, both in the simple images of the exile who mourns the harp which he must leave behind, draping it with a parting garland, or of the now rusty sword which had once been dazzling and appears frequently in poems which describe the transformation and ending of eras and historical cycles, from the Babylonians to the Jews, from the Persians to the Macedonians, from the Romans to the Barbarians, from the Incas to the Spanish. Several poems develop the clichés of time, desolation and dullness of what once shone in glory, the theme of the fall of cities or glorious

55 56

‘On Sublimity’. ‘In every rose of life, / Alas! there lurks a canker’. Cf. the images of the poisonous asp and scorpion (R 41). With no explanation, due to an obscure and even secret curse inherent in life, a happy wedding song turns into tragedy when the young bride stabs her oblivious, rejoicing groom (R 60, not included in Poems by Two Brothers, among others by the adolescent Tennyson published for the first time in 1930).

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states, like the kingdom of Pontus, the sunset of Indian civilization and the end of Babylonia and Jerusalem, and innumerable new Armageddons and Timbuctoos, cities deserted and mummified like the spectral Moscow of the Napoleonic wars or ancient Troy, dying on the notes of the same sad, ever fading music. Tennyson attested the irreparable end of the age of ancient heroes, those knights who scoffed at risk and death, and who, thirsty for blood, threw themselves into the fight with their arms wide open and with spear thrusting, now reduced to a ‘valley of bones’ (R 15). But he also felt that the sun had set over much more recent heroes, who had been followed by a present time filled with submissive dandies, which suggested to him occasional dramatic monologues full of invective against the historical forces of oppression. These he already tended to identify with the Romans and their historical heirs, the Catholics, in particular the Spanish. § 81. Tennyson up to 1874 VIII: ‘Poems, Chiefly Lyrical’ I. A poetry of musical lyricism If Poems by Two Brothers went almost unnoticed, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) was both reviewed (though not always favourably) in authoritative journals and noticed by prestigious and respected figures like Coleridge and Leigh Hunt, at a moment when new poetic voices were few and far between. Hallam, Tennyson’s dear friend, dedicated to him an acute and surprisingly well-balanced review despite its evident propagandistic purpose. Even at first sight, the collection, along with the exuberant, omnivorous but by now already more controlled capability of absorbing and echoing very disparate influences, revealed a poet who had found his own world and above all his own voice and style. It was this very fact, paradoxically – his originality, his inability to feel and to think like common people and to repeat platitudes – which led to his being resentfully reprimanded by John Wilson, who wrote under the pseudonym of Christopher North, in one of the two scathing reviews which so wounded him. The uneven nature of the collection had been perceived by the poet himself, who had undertaken a drastic act of revision, so that many poems were profoundly modified and relegated to the ‘Juvenilia’ section in the complete collections published and edited by Tennyson – or in large part excluded, never

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to be published again during his lifetime.57 And yet, as early as 1830 he had produced a great amount of work. The title is revealing because it tells us that the young poet had at least remotely faced the problem of the selection and unity of a collection: ‘chiefly’ and ‘lyrical’, the two words following the comma, are an indirect recognition of a lack of cohesion, but also warn us about a residual miscellaneous nature. The predominance of lyrical poems should not be understood, however, to be confessional or intimate: the area of the self is much more circumscribed than previously, although it reappears as an aspiration to escape from one’s own condition, or is reflected in other characters, or emerges in the depiction of the voluptuous sensuality of the depths of the sea, or even in dreams of a regression to childhood or to animal life. The lyrical emphasis should instead be understood in the sense of an evocative poetry of states of mind, to which references to time and space are often irrelevant, and in which there is no internal conceptual development. Tennyson was using a visual technique of the word which permitted him firstly to paint static scenes with brushstrokes of colour, impressions and detailed descriptions which encompass the interest of the composition. In addition, these ‘paintings’ are elaborated with an exceptional attention to sound, manifest in rich alliterative patterns, in lullabies, in sing-songs, internal rhymes or rhyming couplets, refrains, and above all onomatopoeias.58 2. The inaugural poem, ‘Claribel’, has the meaningful subtitle ‘a melody’. It is a small tapestry of ornithological and onomatopoeic elements in which Tennyson delights in citing the unusual names of birds (‘mavis’, ‘lintwhite’) and imitating their songs; we learn little or nothing of the woman who has died and whose name the poem has taken. It almost seems the work of a poet dedicated to a semantic exercise, who leafs through the dictionary extracting lists of words that have a strange sound and toys with them, 57 Ultra-modern, decontextualized sonnets of a strange, sinister suggestiveness and with an indecipherable air of mystery, were unjustly sacrificed by Tennyson (such as R 110). In another poem (R 118) neologisms and linguistic inventions anticipate Hopkins. Many of these excluded poems have an impressive archaic lexis and intricate rhythmic-strophic frameworks. 58 A veritable onomatopoeic paroxysm is found in the two stanzas of poem R 82.

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coupling them and at times even coining new expressions, usually words describing sounds. In the second stanza, the intent is that of associating objects with the appropriate verbal function, to couple sounds to their sources, with insistent onomatopoeia, sometimes making unfortunate choices which were immediately pounced upon by reviewers. Nearly every line, for example, ends with an archaic –th. Even ‘Leonine Elegiacs’59 is a list of onomatopoeic verbs paired with their respective emitters, and an accurate catalogue of impressions of the countryside and natural landscapes. ‘The Dying Swan’, the most famous piece in the collection, presents nothing more than a simple scene. In this and many other lyrics the occasion turns out to be mere pretext, and there is a veritable atrophy of action and a prolonged description of stasis. The human figures, mostly feminine, evoked by the titles, are expressions of emotional states or reflections of the same, manifested symbolically in the surrounding nature. The stanzaic divisions serve not to support the action but rather to deepen and enrich the psychological hues of the landscape. ‘Anacaona’, not included in the collection of 1830 but written the same year, has a new and daring lexis, used few other times before in a poem unless with ironic or macaronic intents, and this language lends a bewitching tropical flavour to the poem. Tennyson’s speciality, however, and one corresponding to his congenitally shadowy personality, was the creation of foreboding nocturnal scenes, dark and often set in cemeteries, which reflect human experiences of sharp and morbid suffering. The preferred spot is the tomb, surrounded by a nature which is sympathetic and humanized in a dignified and solemn suffering, palely illuminated by the moonlight; owls hoot, perched on church towers, and high or creeping breezes and a bubbling river are rarely absent. 3. This Tennysonian technique, of poems of sensations and emotional states reflected and resolved in evocative scenarios, has rightly been seen by some as an unmistakeable anticipation of fin-de-siècle symbolism. Significantly, it was to be adopted almost stealthily in the dramatic mono­logues of T. S. Eliot. The technique comes to full fruition in the

59

The formal characteristic of this metre is internal rhyme.

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ballad ‘Mariana’, for which Tennyson was inspired by the figure of the same name in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (to be more precise, by the ‘music’ of Shakespeare’s words: in Tennyson, female names, from Claribel to Mariana, are often loaded with literary references, used however as a simple point of departure for a free re-creation). The ballad, which is composed metrically in the same prosodic unit found in ‘The Lady of Shalott’, is a weave of complex but almost imperceptible sound effects. Already it expresses the pathos of the numerous, abandoned Tennysonian heroines who will follow, as well as the impasse of a collapse without escape routes, which translates into a fatalistic and exhausted invocation of death. Tennyson’s art lies in the objectification of that suggestive state of mind in the surrounding nature, subjected to hallucinations and synesthetic deformations especially of an auditory type: a nature which is abandoned and disused, of funeral colours and sinister noises, even suicidal. The phases of the day follow one another, periodically announced by the rooster’s cry, the bellowing of the oxen and the beating wings of bats, but they herald rites which are not shared, accentuating the contrast between the daily rhythm of life and the almost timeless inaction of the central figure, also reflected in the natural scale, with the sky paralysed in a ‘trance’ and the stagnant, motionless millstream. 4. Fortune does not smile on lovers in Tennyson at first, for they are nearly always frustrated or their stories end in tragedy. ‘Hero to Leander’ reverses the situation of ‘Mariana’: the heroine’s lover is close to her and she would very much like to close him in a passionate embrace. The valiant knight of ‘The Ballad of Oriana’ clumsily wounds the enamoured Oriana with an arrow, and the unpardonable error causes a paroxysm of nomination that amounts to an impossible resuscitation. Tennyson’s interest in the female psyche is the only element connecting these static poems, all of which recall the classics, to a series of very different compositions, those numerous portraits and mini-portraits60 which, as Tennyson claimed 60 But also of men, like those of the ‘Apostles’ and of his Cambridge friends, sketched in compositions which are at times serious, at others facetious and ironic. Hallam appears at the end of ‘Ode to Memory’, and is apostrophized anonymously in other poems.

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extravagantly, ‘were evolved, like the camel, from my own consciousness’, but at least in some cases corresponded to a real human being from Somersby. This group of poems laid the foundation of a genre that had no precedent, because they addressed a primarily female audience in the pages of the Annuals, though not dealing with ‘female’ themes and figures.61 Leigh Hunt dismissed them too quickly as postcard verses and beauty shop vignettes,62 and also in that case did not understand that they responded to a real need to widen the poetic gamut. He especially did not appreciate the cheeky, ultra-modern impressionism of some of these frames.63 For the first, and actually for the only time, Tennyson almost becomes a realist poet,64 who begins with the direct observation of reality, as he would do years later inaugurating another poetic genre all his own, that of the ‘English idyll’. The atmosphere of Somersby, at least before his fling with Rosa Baring, undoubtedly offered Tennyson examples of femininity less disturbing than those of the historical-mythological past or of literary tradition, and they instilled in him the hope that at least in some cases a romantic relationship could have a happy ending. ‘Lilian’ is the portrait of a playful, innocent, eternally smiling, and merely mischievous belle dame sans merci. After ‘Isabel’, an almost inhuman model of honesty and marital faithfulness, the woman would no longer be so unswervingly chaste. Under the sometimes playful surface of these sketches there hides an inability to portray the diverse and contradictory faces of women, an inability that, as we shall soon see, has secret implications of both a philosophical and personal nature.

61 Culler 1977, 38, quoted by Ricks in the introductory notes to R 68. 62 CRHE, 130. 63 Others are more elaborate, aimed at depicting the supremacy of a moral or spiritual quality, or a symbolic or paradigmatic figure. 64 That is, a poet describing a reality which is transfigured and stylized. It is unlikely that Tennyson could find young women named Lisette, Madeline, or even Isabel, in Somersby, names which evoke the age of chivalry, romance, and that disguising of actuality which will find its full expression in Idylls of the King.

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§ 82. Tennyson up to 1874 IX: ‘Poems, Chiefly Lyrical’ II. Metaphysical quests and imaginary escapes The heterogeneous nature of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical is also due to the fact that it included poems which dated back to adolescence and reflected the condition of great spiritual unease of Somersby – and, on a strictly poetic plane, the imitative experimentalism of the preceding collection – as well as others composed under the influence of his experiences at the University of Cambridge, which had begun for Tennyson in 1828 with profound homesickness and nostalgia for his family.65 His break with the solipsism of Somersby66 and his opening to the world, once appeased, was to plant the seeds for the themes par excellence of the next collection of 1833. Already we find in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical both the reflection of an immature doubt, an irredeemable private apocalypticism which bursts out in occasional, circumscribed dreamscapes, and a more masculine, stronger willed, energetic poetry, or at least one that claimed to be so. Early on, Tennyson absorbed the ideas of the Cambridge ‘Apostles’, who unlike Tennyson were almost all a group of ‘clear-headed friends’,67 very balanced and at times even light-hearted, who in some cases stimulated Tennyson’s untapped satirical vein, and above all, strongly influenced by Shelley, conceived of poetry not as an unproductive outpouring of emotions but rather as a prophetic utterance for the purposes of the transmission of moral teachings and of a political rebirth.68 The ‘Apostles’ were like a first, selective Victorian delegation which early on attempted to convert Tennyson to 65 Sonnet R 61 speaks of a devastating ‘love of home’. 66 Reflected in the chiselled, delicate song which begins with the line ‘A spirit haunts the year’s last hours’ and in its description of nature, overripe and wilted. 67 R 74, a portrait, partly imaginary, of his friend J. W. Blakesley. 68 ‘The Poet’, ‘The Poet’s Mind’ and the pretentious and confused ‘Ode on Memory’, describe the celestial birth and the divine genesis of the poet, who participates in a superior consciousness that he then disseminates on the earth in the form of flaming arrows. With similar metaphors (‘central’ stars whose rays ‘flash towards Earth but haven’t yet reached us’) sonnet R 62 describes the reawakening of repressed liberty: the nations where darkness and sleep reign will be shaken by the song of a poet, author of a ‘hymn that does not die’. R 63 imagines a real apocalypse, the renewal of humanity thanks to poetry, which defeats falsehood and creates ‘giants’ from men.

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that role of public poet which he would later be offered in the form of the nomination to Poet Laureate. But they did not realize that Tennyson was completely lacking in that intellectual firmness and verbal rhetoric necessary in a public poet, and that his own psychological temperament was so insecure that he tortured himself over irresolvable dilemmas. 2. Naturally no one could take the screen covering of ‘Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind’69 seriously. He attempted to attribute these dramatic confessions to a ‘sensitive’ but, as Hallam noted, hardly a ‘second-rate’ mind. It was again a Faustian or Luciferian mask, vanquished by contentious religious dilemmas and the inability to expiate sins against filial duty,70 to the point of cursing his ‘vacillating state’, and ‘weary’, like Mariana, invoking death. The mask of age, frequently applied in Poems by Two Brothers, is still at play in the nostalgic regression to innocent childhood, or even in the envy for the blissfully unaware condition of brutes, devoid of that most bitter privilege of humans, doubt. Formally, one finds here a rhapsodic vein perhaps dictated by mimetic necessity, in which the continual interjections, the tears, the insistent questions, the suspensions and the transitions constitute the real language of a speaker who is ‘void, / Dark, formless, utterly destroyed’. The advantages of assuming the rhapsodic form and the rhyming couplet were on the whole modest, because the poem, which can be considered a rewriting of ‘Armageddon’, is resolved in an argumentation which is often repetitive and cumbersome, and lacks the visionary push and the fantastic, daring enthusiasm of Tennyson’s first apocalyptic poems in blank verse. Nevertheless ‘Confessions’ has historical importance because it marks the first surfacing of Victorian religious and metaphysical doubt, anticipating as it does, by several years, the explorations of a Browning and the veritable religious diatribes of a Clough, while looking ahead to ‘Nondum’ by Hopkins, who was among those who managed to

69 This is the title of the poem in the 1884 edition, while in the 1830 edition the subtitle ‘not in Unity with Itself ’ is added. 70 There is almost a Joycean forewarning in the refusal of the soliloquist to kneel on the tomb of his mother who had prayed for him, and exhorted him to fear the divine rod that chastises pride, the ‘sin of devils’. The speaker confesses to having symbolically profaned her tomb.

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bend to that divine ‘rod’ so proudly rejected by Tennyson’s alter ego.71 The poem probes the mystery of the existence of life beyond death, in which Tennyson would from then on have difficulty in believing, and also of a salvation bestowed upon all men thanks to Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, which Tennyson Calvinistically limited only to the elect. ‘That even now […] I should require a sign’: these words constitute one of the first inklings of the Victorian anxiety over the indirect rather than ocular testimony of the ‘facts’ of the Gospels, a testimony that would no longer be enough for many generations of sceptics, rendered such by the new biblical studies and by the new scientific theories. Tennyson’s certainties from this point on will be increasingly provisional and fragile – beginning with those in the final sections of In Memoriam and continuing up to ‘Crossing the Bar’ – and insufficient for the final passing ‘with grief, not fear’.72 3. In a phase of  ‘Confessions’ the hypothesis is put forward of constructive doubt, which, by means of an analysis of the ‘laws / Of life and death’ may lead to an understanding of human nature. However, Tennyson’s doubt was not positive or philosophical, but sterile and destructive. The numerous pairs of poems based on conceptual reversals are nothing else than expressions of a dramatic cognitive impasse.73 Never republished, ‘The “How” and the “Why”’ is a poem formed by a breathless and above all answerless string of interrogatives regarding the mysteries of the universe and the meaning of life. The purpose of creation is discussed in the pair of poems ‘Nothing Will Die’ and ‘All Things Will Die’, the first of which is almost a preview of Hopkins’s ‘Heraclitean Fire’. In the former, Tennyson affirms that nothing begins and nothing ends and everything changes incessantly; in the latter, which denies its predecessor, a helpless Tennyson 71

As in Hopkins’s ‘Nondum’, doubt regards faith revealed and the search – ‘If one there be’ – for the true faith. 72 The image and the epithet ‘unpiloted’ (the mother sees her son on a ship ‘without a pilot’ in the dark and on a tempestuous sea) look ahead to ‘Crossing the Bar’. 73 At the same time Tennyson dedicated a poem to his Cambridge friend, Blakesley, capable, in a ‘happy challenge’, of untying ‘knots that tangle human creeds’. These words almost literally recur, but in a context of spiritual unrest which is still more painful, in ‘Confessions’: ‘the creaking chords that wound and eat / Into my human heart’.

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pits the dissolution of man against the eternal renewal of nature. He was among the very first Victorians to sense the chilling disruption of perspective caused by the new discoveries in science, geology, astronomy and evolution, and to probe the theme of creation ex nihilo of the universe and of its ‘unlimited transformation’.74 His paralysing indecision is underlain by a philosophical alternative that governs and informs Victorian thought, and that will generate two opposing and distinct schools. As early as 1830 Tennyson foresaw the future predominance of the doctrine of flux (‘all truth is change […] all things are as they seem to all, / All things flow in a stream’)75 and the moral implications connected to it, that is the end of eternal laws and of any distinction between good and bad. Like Hopkins, he was seeking an anchor strong enough to stop flux; he was seeking beliefs strong enough to counter this development. In Poems, Chiefly Lyrical we witness the birth of that quest for the ‘type’ that will reverberate until the very last stages of Tennyson’s poetry. Traces can be perceived in those same female portraits that we have already seen. Isabel is a ‘type’ in an almost Tractarian sense: she is reflected in ‘fairest forms’ of creation and in turn she herself reflects the Type par excellence, ‘God in [his] great charity’ and even her features are ‘fixed shadows of [his] fixed moods’. By contrast, Madeline is the spirit of flux and change.76 In Madeline, whose smiles alternate imperceptibly with frowns when the two are not imperceptibly fused, Tennyson also hints at the concept of chromatism analysed at length by Hopkins. 4. The Romantic, Keatsian narcosis, the only means capable of offering platonic compensations for his restlessness, lies for Tennyson in simple 74 R 93, 94, 101, 145. 75 Tennyson (R 145) contrasts the law of change (nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed) to that of the permanence of the ‘type’: the world is subject to a ‘fertile change’, ‘nothing is completely old or new, / Though all things are shaped in another form’. And yet, there were some ‘forms of the mind’ that could no longer be expressed again in the future, resembling fossils in the bowels of the earth. 76 Note the literal recurrence of ‘summer calm’, which is of Isabel but not Madeline, just as ‘fixed’ is opposed to ‘varying’; note also the flame which in the one is of chastity and in the other of passion: the first is ‘perfect’ in her chastity, the second in ‘the science of love’. ‘Lilian’ contains this aside: ‘Gaiety without eclipse / Wearieth me’. Lilian too stands opposite to the ‘fixed moods’ of Isabel.

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oblivion, in the escape through dreams to an unawareness of the mysteries of the universe and above all of moral responsibility, and ultimately of the sense of sin. ‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights’77 is a complete selfidentification of the poet, no longer a youth, with the youth he once was, who in his dreams retraces and repeats the night-time journey across lush gardens and perfumed shores towards a golden and enchanted Baghdad, analogous to the earlier Timbuctoo, a journey rewarded when finally his eyes fall upon a beautiful Persian woman and on the adoring Haroun Alrashid. Only in dreams, and sometimes not even then, was Tennyson able to hope for escape from the adult world of moral responsibility and into the enjoyment of no longer forbidden pleasures.78 His delight in inaction is reflected in the weary sailors of ‘The Sea-Fairies’, which anticipates ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, ‘Ulysses’ and the later, dream-like voyage of Maeldune, and also in the pre-apocalyptic and underwater dream of the Kraken, who experiences its own form of golden exile from the world; as well as in the analogous sea paradise of the mermen and naiads, where the pain of living is soothed and exorcised. The liquid, flowing essence of the sea, in these poems, is symbolic of freedom from the shackles of conscience and of the joyful satisfaction of desire. 5. ‘Amy’ (which will be the name of the woman loved and lost in the two ‘Locksley Hall’ poems), and other poems of this period republished after Tennyson’s death (cf. R 123–52) were not even included in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, because they were only partially finished, and also 77 The song of a Keatsian ‘bulbul’ – a préciosité which was blamed both by reviewers and by Hallam himself – summarizes in a song – and dilutes – the totality of experience. 78 A most refined poem in rhyming quatrains (R 132) echoes the ‘Arabian Nights’ in its dream-like escape through an exotic city, marked by steeples, pinnacles and spires. But after the dream follows the awakening, or better another dream, in which a joyful crowd invites the dreamer to awaken, and to face life. Significantly, the torpor of the dreamer pushes the crowd away and the sleeper plunges back into darkness and desperation. Another reflection of this conflict is in R 134. The East is on the same psychological axis as South America: Tennyson dreams of the fascinating, dark, naked beauty of Anacaona (§ 81.2), a South American queen who lives in a land of pleasure without remorse. A questionable anti-Spanish barb may underlie this poem.

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because they betrayed too openly a ‘vain’, tormented and unsatisfied ‘desire’ (R 126). There were only two completely irreconcilable solutions for ‘blind passion’: it either had to be expressed and satisfied, as in the case of Amy, or sublimated and spiritualized. In the sonnet ‘Love and Sorrow’ there is an unbridgeable divide: one half of the heart loves, the other is dominated by suffering; day and night, tears and love coexist. In the figure of a fierce huntress (R 133) Tennyson explores the seductive nature of an immoral act, and in that of the voluptuous and desirous Haitian queen Anacaona the itch of sex, either rejected or sublimated (Tennyson masked his own refusal to publish this poem, despite the pressure put on him by friends, by claiming that it contained errors regarding tropical flora and fauna). Tennyson, who had sketched the little female portraits, was also judging and evaluating possible, future life companions; in one of these sketches (R 150) we find a declaration of love which may or may not be merely literary, made amidst lakeside scenery, and accompanied by the song of nightingales. Amy, a lookalike of St Agatha, St Cecilia or St Agnes – and bearing a name which is very similar to that of Emily – also has, in her black hair, sharply parted over a marble-white forehead, features very similar to those of a woman Tennyson may have courted. Marion (R 147), neither beautiful, nor fascinating, nor gifted, is the ideal of Victorian femininity in that she is wise, humble, and delicate, the ‘soul of common sense’. Tennyson was enslaved by his feelings, and in a light, mischievous composition (R 151) he gives his own indications for the ideal qualities of a woman: dimples (also favoured by Hopkins), pink lips, black eyes. Love was only partly spiritual in origin, an emanation of God enveloping his celestial throne; or more exactly, this was a declaration of principle with no confirmation in the personal sphere. In opposition to Isabel, a symbol of chastity, and to the spiritual Amy, a saint descended to earth, or to the humble Marion, Madeline is an emblem of passion. The stressful waiting of the enamoured woman, a topos of Tennyson’s early lyrical poetry which we have already seen in ‘Leonine Elegiacs’ and in ‘Mariana’, was at the same time a situation which had personal and autobiographical resonance.

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§ 83. Tennyson up to 1874 X: The 1832 poems I. The socializing of the Romantic demiurge The 1832 collection – which bore the date 1833 and was published by Moxon, later the publisher of almost all of the major Victorian poets – marks the attainment of Tennyson’s full artistic maturity. This was mainly a result of the re-inclusion of its poems in the poetic collection of 1842, where they were substantially, and in some cases radically revised and modified, while a small number of them were actually cut. I shall use for these poems, in accordance with common practice, the text of 1842, but it will be impossible in a work like the present one to discuss the variants which make the same poems found in both editions, of 1832 and of 1842, autonomous and different texts. Neither shall I be able to show that these revisions led to results which were systematically better, always aimed at cutting back the exuberance of the young poet and pruning unnecessary decoration. The 1832 collection, or more exactly the poems which belong to it and which, revised, were included in the 1842 edition, constitute the best and in some cases the most successful attempts at every single theme and chord of Tennyson’s poetry before 1850, and a few even represent an unsurpassed and unrepeated peak of all of the poet’s work. The connection between this and the previous collection of 1830 is very strong, which amounts to making the four collections published over the time span from 1820 to 1842 a single, compact block with fundamental links and a variety of internal developments. In more than one case, the lyrical poems of 1832 lean on the complex and crucial ones of the preceding collection. The escapism and the aspiration to inaction of the ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ are preannounced by ‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights’ and ‘The Sea-Fairies’; the large number of Tennyson’s studies of the female mood of exhausted expectation, the most memorable exemplar of which is ‘The Lady of Shalott’, originate in ‘Mariana’, whose protagonist returns in a poem set in a different southern backdrop. The recourse to myth also intensifies, taking us from Hero and from Oriana to Oenone and to the women of the Bible and of Homer, and to the historical-legendary figures of ‘A Dream of Fair Women’. ‘Confessions’ continues in a series of intimate poems exploring a bitter inner crisis, and displaying an existential pessimism that is an intermediate phase on the path to ‘The Two Voices’. Finally, the series of female portraits is enlarged. The structural mechanism that links

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the two collections is irradiation or concentric extension; even, as in the case of the two ‘Mariana’ poems, rewriting and reduplication. However, this is not due to an opportunistic exploitation of a successful theme, or an early surrender to a manner; rather it is the result of a deep personal involvement, the unfolding of dilemmas which will continue ad infinitum, regarding which the poet could temporarily find clarity and peace only by exploring them through his writing. The 1832 collection drastically reduces the lyrical mode strictly speaking, by means of the intuition of classical myth as an appropriate vehicle for discussing and disguising personal feelings and doubts: a reinvented myth, never objectified nor objective, but instead inevitably wrapped in dreams or visions. The new generation of critics and readers was unprepared to receive the central core of this collection, composed of poems of the highest semantic and symbolic concentration, often encrypted and linked among themselves by multiple ties, parallelisms and microscopic rebounds which required – and still today require – a careful and precise exegesis. Indeed, at their publication they were scathingly received, in particular by an anonymous reviewer who turned out to be John Wilson Croker – the same who had savaged Keats – in the authoritative Quarterly Review. Tennyson, greatly wounded, reacted to this criticism using his own poetry as a weapon, in several strictly private sorties addressed to his detractors, defamatory and witty little poems rich in obsolete words and grotesque compounds. Croker’s polemical review was significant both for the resulting paralysis which struck Tennyson in his productive work, showing how hypersensitive he was to criticism, and because it was a tangible expression of the very obtuse average tastes of even the educated Victorian audience, or at least of a conspicuous section of it. 2. For Tennyson, in this phase of his poetry, a poem was supposed to speak of the thoughts, dreams, reveries, even the irrational fears and stirrings of the poet, and he found it hard to write exhortative or didactic poetry. A poem was to be a highly private act, so as to be ‘in communion with itself ’, and the reader should almost identify himself with the writer. In no way did he wish – in person, and certainly not with his poetry – to be among men in the world. Yet, occasionally we see him, almost reluctantly, halfheartedly, praising force and temperance in a masculine didactic poem, and

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even denouncing the hidden dangers of beauty; while at the same time, both through filters and a variety of distancing techniques, acknowledging his own temptation and confessing himself to be the slave of painful inertia. The imperative to be a sage resonated in him spontaneously, even before his peers were to propose that role officially for him. His poetry was to be like a healthy gulf stream for the spirits of the north,79 but in fact it spoke of an inner tension which was hardly edifying, and denied or modified invariably that which seemed to be a fixed point of reference. Little teaching could come from a poet who candidly admitted that his life was full of ‘weary days’, who dallied in dirges and macabre mortuary fantasies, and who did not hide his need for disengagement or escape from difficulties. The repetition of the adjective ‘weary’, in poems of unequivocal confessional content, confirms, if there were any need, that Tennyson personally shared that mood he so often described of exhausted waiting, that his was a wait for death and often a prefiguration of death, and a longing for death as a liberating agent from existential torment, in what can be described as true suicidal fantasies.80 The reflection on the functions and duties of art forms 79 R 154, the first sonnet of the collection. 80 The brief confession ‘My life is full of weary days’ turns the future perspective of In Memoriam upside down to imagine Tennyson, not Hallam, dead, and his own descent into the tomb, and for the first time creates a dialogue between a dying or dead person and a survivor. The contact between the tomb and the friend is certain, and death will not be an occasion for mourning but rather for joy, as suggested by the rhyme ‘crape’/ ‘grape’; in particular, it is possible to see the uninterrupted growth of nature over the tomb, on which the body of the dead person takes root, thus not dying completely, as his ‘clay’ almost becomes a fertilizing lime which irrigates the arid land. This poem is not among the most pessimistic of the collection, because imagining that he must bid Hallam adieu, Tennyson creates a balance between the lights and shadows of life, which has been a sequence of days which were ‘weary’, but also filled with ‘good things’. In the second stanza, the poetic ‘I’ prefigures a descent into the tomb which reverses the ascensional movement of the Kraken, with an analogous opposition that is confirmed and justified by the presence of the metaphor of sinking (‘I […] sink’). In another poem, written to console his friend Spedding upon the loss of his brother, no dramatic mask was permitted, and Tennyson uses the more conventional language of religious consolation, without flirting with death as in his many confessional disguises, with arpeggios on the fact that those for whom we feel the strongest affections

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a fundamental collateral theme for Tennyson. ‘The Palace of Art’ directly addresses the question of the genesis and the very essence of poetry itself. Tennyson in this and in preceding collections largely drew inspiration for his poetry from literature, and rewrote others’ texts, from the Bible to Theocritus to Ovid and even Chaucer, Shakespeare, Boccaccio and the Italian novellieri,81 without any of these revisitations being a simple translation or transcription – and this from a poet whose training had been in the translation of Greek and Latin classics. This not only bears witness to his superb recreative and allusive talent, but also to the fact that his poems capture literature itself, not life, or at least life filtered through art. The admonishment of the ‘Apostle’ Trench, which is thought to have led to Tennyson’s writing the poem – ‘Tennyson, we cannot live in art’ – may be read as and expanded to ‘Tennyson, we cannot live on art’ – or rather, art cannot merely reflect art itself, but must also feed on life, even should life be inartistic. The meaning of the allegory in ‘The Palace of Art’ is not the denial of the absolute Beauty of art, but rather the necessity of supporting it and reconciling it with the Truth of life, which also includes pain and ugliness. In the end, it is significant that the palace is not destroyed, and the soul may return there after having learned this lesson. Thus ‘The Palace of Art’ dramatically anticipates the cardinal themes of Decadence, as seen in Wilde or Huysmans, but only to dismiss them: dedication to a life of aesthetic pleasures must, in fact, fall back on virtue simply due to saturation – that is, a life which is romantically and decadently solitary and individualistic, dematerialized and purely contemplative, apocalyptic and amoral in a Faustian sense. Tennyson demonstrates, at least in this case, how distant he was from extremes and how favourable to compromise: his poem is neither for complete solipsism nor for a life conducted entirely in the social sphere, but rather for one grounded in tempered solipsism.

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are the first to be taken from us. The splendid final line adds that although we die, we remain ‘secure of change’. The poem eventually deviates into a somewhat unorthodox grievance against God, who too early steals earthly joys, lamenting that he, Tennyson, would like to ‘take the place of him that sleeps in peace’. Cf. ‘The Lover’s Tale’ (§ 85.3) and ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (§ 84.1–3).

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3. ‘The Palace of Art’ is preceded by an introductory poem, something of a key to it, addressed to an anonymous reader who, it is implied, belongs to the group of the Cambridge ‘Apostles’ with whom Tennyson shared a fertile and constructive disagreement: Beauty, Goodness and Knowledge are three inseparable sisters and he who adores only one of the three, in particular Beauty, but not the others, errs. This prologue warns the listener to heed the necessity and the superiority of Love, the same message that Browning was to declare in Paracelsus, his first work of a certain renown, a few years later. Without any evolutionary shudder Tennyson seals the poem with the image, much used in the poetry of the time, of God the potter who moulds clay with the tears of angels to form the ‘perfect shape of man’. In ‘The Palace of Art’, while failing to completely check a certain descriptive turgidity, Tennyson allegorically rewrites in rhyming quatrains a text which had been the object of countless variations since the time of Ecclesiastes: the dialogue of the soul with itself and the creation of a dream world of pleasures materialized in a castle, the last manifestation of which in English literature, here echoed and recognizable at first glance in the initial line – ‘I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house’ – was Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. The ‘I’ of this poem remains, until shortly before the end, the Romantic demiurge, creator of fantastic and utopian worlds, a Faustian demiurge more precisely and a creator made divine – only to then be dethroned – in a ‘God-like isolation’. The challenge of the ‘soul’ to God turns the former into a reincarnation of all of those Promethean, satanic and Faustian hypostases so dear to the Romantics. But Tennyson’s epigonic dilemma lies in the fact that this vision cannot be carried to its conclusion, that the challenge fails and the demiurge is self-dethroned: it is as if the poem had designed a clear parable for the waning of Romanticism. The pleasure paradise, or the place of isolation, was always a fairy-tale castle in a way for Tennyson, a crenelated medieval fortress, of square geometrical architecture, now erected atop a miraculous glade on a mountain peak, where the soul may, like a ‘quiet’ and motionless king, ‘reign […] apart’ while ‘the great world

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spins’, in accordance with another common contrast between stasis and motion.82 The palace, adorned with neoclassical fountains and statues, is a dream-like architectural wonder, inspired by those of the most sumptuous palaces of the English nobility.83 A slightly too large array of subjects is portrayed in the tapestries on the walls: marine and hunting scenes, shores and tempests, scenes of country life (including the harvesters who will appear in ‘The Lady of Shalott’) and of steep mountain sides, and an English house. This prolonged description of the content of the tapestries serves to indicate the essence of art as a filter of reality. ‘Art’ is a surrogate of direct and therefore total knowledge, an art thus fatally flawed and inevitably partial, partial also in the sense of a circumscribed horizon which leaves out evil and above all ugliness. It is false, in the final development of the allegory, that the subjects represented on the tapestries correspond to ‘every mood of mind’: on the contrary, this art is reductive, and there are other moods not contemplated by it. Indeed it is an illusion, just as it is an illusion that reality, history and legend are transcribed on those tapestries in something ‘not less than life’. Therefore in the poem there is also a hint at the totality of knowledge, and the admonishment that we must not limit ourselves to ‘knowledge for its beauty’, that is, knowledge of beautiful things. The paintings which together with the tapestries decorate the walls of the rooms depict the great poets, almost as if to hint at an art not modelled on life but modelled upon itself, art about art. After the paintings come the mosaics, the only ones which represent violent, wild, unsweetened topics, like that of a beast of burden prodded and frightened by a tiger. But, significantly, the soul is uninterested in these spectacles. The soul sits on the throne and sings alone, seeming to thoroughly enjoy this blissful and musical solitude. She is ‘communing with herself ’; what happens in the world does not affect her, or rather she delights in the purest light which surrounds her and looks from her

82 See below § 84 on ‘The Lady of Shalott’ for the many references contained in this section. 83 Culler 1977, 74.

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own height down upon the lowliness and filth of the world. The fiendish and Faustian rupture of the demiurgic illusion comes only with another move, which an authentic Romantic would never have made: the direct intervention of God, the Christian God, in a situation which is no longer that of a dream, but rather, at this point, a much more realistic one, and at a moment when the external narrator too clearly comes on the scene. The soul seems unwittingly about to ‘fall’ and ‘perish utterly’ when God enters to save her, paradoxically bestowing upon her the gift of desperation. The end of the ordeal of the soul, and of the allegory, is the same inner split as seen in ‘Confessions’ (‘the airy hand […] divided quite / The kingdom of her thought’), the same aspiring towards death in the impossibility to find ‘comfort anywhere’. The soul comes to hate her solitude and herself; in the final lines the castle is transformed into a geography of the psyche, because in its hidden corners ‘uncertain shapes’ wander; it is a sort of ship’s hold from which there emerges the Freudian repressed: pain and terror, decomposition, the cycle of life. Suddenly apocalyptic visions and hallucinations erupt, very similar to the horrifying ones of Tennyson’s early fantasies. The soul realizes she has been ‘exiled’ from God, and sees her own degeneration; an inexorable awareness of her transgressions against moral responsibility looms: the life of the soul has been a ‘crime’, and as if she were a visionary, the castle is metamorphosed sharply into a tomb. The fourth from last stanza contains an almost literary parallel to ‘The Lady of Shalott’, but with a significant variation of meaning: the soul is compared to a traveller who feels death coming upon him after a long journey while listening to noises that he cannot decipher; death, which here does not arrive, still transmits its sensations, and is revealed on first hearing ‘human footsteps’, just as the lady of Shalott dies when she reaches ‘the first house’. An identical undressing – ‘She threw her royal robes away’ – precedes the decision to begin an experience of atonement of the soul, and the castle is abandoned for a more lowly country house in the valley below. Yet the palace is abandoned but not destroyed. The final lines are very explicit: it will and indeed must be useful, but not in solitude, and the soul promises to return ‘with others’. A similar compromise, disappointing and patched

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up on the poetic plane as well, might conciliate the ‘Apostles’ and the other supporters of a ‘committed art’. 4. As has been noted, in ‘The Palace of Art’ the ‘poetry belongs to the palace’.84 Tennyson lingers on the total and complete artistic solipsism of the soul more than on her actual refusal of art, and posits a personality which is at least double, a self-awareness that speaks in the first person and a ‘soul’ which is independent – except when, at the end, faced by a higher principle, superior to both, God himself. Instinct, at least, required that Tennyson should inhabit the palace of art, even without company, because he wished to continue to live in a dimension of dreams, of visions, and of free expansion of his being. No doubt, the condition of the artist was for Tennyson that of solitude, far from the vortex of the world. ‘The LotosEaters’, the very first mythological and legendary recreation of a personal mood, is significantly devoid of dilemmas and presents figures that live in a dimension of dream, who choose exile travelling the opposite path with respect to the soul in the ‘The Palace of Art’. This path goes from social to solitary life, even though the speaking voice is a collective one, a community of those who share solitude. In this poem the only action that the lotus eaters carry out is aimed at the cessation of all action: Ulysses exhorts his companions to visit a land where time has stopped and where they will soon become prisoners of this stasis: ‘We have had enough of action, and of motion we’. The choruses, the highest expression of Tennyson’s melic poetry, sing an orgy of delicate and exhausting images which glorify rest and respite from motion and escape from the vortex of life. 5. ‘Courage!’, says Ulysses to his companions, who turn out to be the very embodiment of intense cowardice, and who once they have tasted the lotus lose all volition, seeing the world as invaded and possessed by tiredness (with inevitable recourse to the adjective ‘weary’), and solemnly renege on willpower.85 The descriptive prelude which precedes the chorus is one of the most effective depictions ever given of a landscape seen in a trancelike state, cloudy and opaque as if in a dream, on the border between the

84 F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry, London 1932, 16. 85 Cf. Ricks 1972, 91, on the use of the verb ‘will’.

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objective and the fantastic and the visionary. As in all of Tennyson’s escapist poetry, time stops all of a sudden, blocked in an everlasting afternoon, and movement slows down, even that of the streams which pause, hesitatingly, in their flow. For the most part, everything seems to be, rather than is. Identity and the clarity of borders seem to fade: ‘A land where all things seemed the same’. Tasting the magic fruit of the lotus results in a blurring of both sight and hearing. The eight choral inserts, formed of Spenserian stanzas, alternate between arpeggios and a delirium of images and metaphors of exhaustion and the phases of a precise argument which attacks the existential principle of action and protests against the shackles of fatigue and the pain of human life. It is the original rebellion against the laws of human society, conveyed by the refrain: ‘Let us alone’. The chorus voices a sorrowful tout passe, and a wan, disconsolate apocalypticism; private discomfort is indeed recognized, perceived and believed, at the same time, to be public; everything collapses, attempts to do good fail (‘What pleasure can we have / To war with evil?’), and ‘confusion’ reigns on their island, to the point that ‘’Tis hard to settle order once again’. Thus death looms again like an exorcism: ‘Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease’. Like Hamlet, the lotus eaters aspire to a life which is somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, ‘to seem / Falling asleep in a half-dream’. Tennyson’s religious uncertainty is revealed in the desire to be like ‘Gods together’, ‘careless of mankind’. This affirmation, which recalls ‘The Palace of Art’, tells us that in truth the lotus eaters have chosen an asocial life, and that moral imperatives are almost suppressed if not abolished entirely. As in ‘The Palace of Art’ the dream of ancient Epicureanism – to live the life of mere spectators – attracts and lulls them: indeed, the poem ends with a long description of the gods of Epicurus and Lucretius. It is also possible to read ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ as a response to the pressure of the ‘Apostles’, a response in verse to the attempt to push Tennyson and his poetry towards ‘dedication’ to humanity. § 84. Tennyson up to 1874 XI: The 1832 poems II. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and repressed eroticism The ‘lotos eaters’ are always, sometimes within a single poem, counterbalanced by the activists, and Tennyson often recovers that spirit of

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compromise seen and heard at the end of ‘The Palace of Art’, and weighs opposing alternatives without deciding, in a sort of dilemma. There is a series of lotus eaters and one of activists in this 1832 collection. Lotus eating are the soul in ‘The Palace of Art’ and the lady of Shalott, as is Paris of ‘Oenone’ – or at least he is a weak coward when he refuses Pallas’ exhortation to a ‘life of shocks, / Dangers, and deeds, until endurance grow / Sinewed with action’. On the other hand, Hanno, the sailor of ‘The Hesperides’ is, as we shall see, an activist, an indefatigable explorer, the potential infringer of a secret. The long ode ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ becomes more personal when, recollecting heroic gestures, the poet starts in surprise, and would act as if he had been transported back to ancient times, ‘resolved on noble things’. Subtle and precise similarities, but equally subtle, precise and decisive differences link ‘The Palace of Art’, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ and ‘The Lady of Shalott’, the ballad that first displays the emergence of the chivalric and Arthurian theme, upon which Tennyson would weave Idylls of the King. This is also the sole truly perfect poem of the collection, which his later revisions, made in 1842, pruned completely of useless decoration rendering it a miraculously economical verbal organism. The Lady of Shalott is still the soul that leaves the palace of art for an encounter with life, but meeting life it also meets death.86 The tapestries of the palace of art, in which the world is reflected, are transformed into the mirror and the web which the lady is weaving; both, in their variety, simultaneously represent for her – and protect her from – the surrounding world. The sole contact of the woman with the world takes place through the filter of art (which is for her, as it was for the soul in ‘The Palace of Art’, that of music and singing), almost as if looking at it with naked eyes would be unbearable. She is also physically separated from the world, represented by ‘tower’d 86 The evocativeness and magnetism of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ have always intrigued critics up until even the recent developments of poststructuralist criticism, which no longer sees the allegory of the artist who must remain distant from the world in order to create, but rather the impossibility of obtaining a pure and immediate access to reality (see for instance Joseph 1992). Regarding this poem, Sinfield 1986, 86ff., affirms that language no longer bridges the divide between sign and referent, but becomes self-referential.

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Camelot’, by the river in the middle of which the island where she lives is found. The real world breaking her isolation is Lancelot’s passing on his way to Camelot, but this too is reflected in the mirror. Though solipsism was morally condemnable for Tennyson, contact with the world was destructive. The woman leaves her loom and goes down to the river, but can only surrender passively to the inescapable power of a curse. 2. The ballad, which places a refrain at the end of each stanza of nine lines in iambic and trochaic metre, with another recurrence of the word ‘Camelot’ at every fifth line, derives by Tennyson’s admission from an Italian novella, but fuses disparate sources. Looked at carefully, the lady is a reversal of the lotus eaters: the latter escape from the world on the coasts of oblivion, while she, from oblivion, clambers down into the world; while the lotus eaters seek refuge from the world in a pleasant, though inartistic solitude, she attempts to break free from the solitude of art, losing her life in the process. The first of the four parts of the poem is a pure scenographic recreation of the vast fields of oats and barley with their tall stalks, and of the still higher towers of the distant Camelot. Passers-by in their weary, monotonous comings and goings along the shores of the river find their attention directed towards the island of Shalott. Its location on a river holds double meaning, representing a double distance or separation from the flow of life; although the island remains still, everything around it is in motion, from the road which runs towards the city to the people walking along it, to the waves on the river, which, nearly hidden by the willows, ‘runneth ever’, and is, in fact, in perpetual motion. Even when the motion slows, still it is motion, like that of the sluggish boats and of the ‘slow’ horses pulling them. The first sign of the disinterest of the lady in external life is that she does not greet the boats heading towards Camelot, which are also a sinister foreshadowing of her death. The palace walls and towers wrap her in silence, broken only by her song. No one sees her, she never appears at the window, and is unknown even though she arouses the curiosity of the people. To those outside, she has only the dimension of sound; she is a song, a joyful song heard by the reapers heading to the fields in the morning, and attending to purely manual work which prove fatiguing at dusk; they are thus the first to hear her song. The second activity of the lady is a different manual operation, an artistic one of creation, the weaving of a

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web. This is the point of the poem where the narrator as witness expires, because only an omniscient narrator can inform us of the bright colours in her web, given that the other witnesses cannot see them. The same who ‘whisper’ that she is not so much the lady of Shalott, as the ‘fairy’ lady of Shalott, have possibly whispered of her curse, which consists in a prohibition to look directly at the world. The curse is presented as pure gossip of which even the lady is dimly aware, even though she ignores that she is forbidden to look at Camelot. As she weaves what she sees in the mirror, which at times reflects the ‘shadows of the world’, the lady carries out a Platonic act of knowledge. The prohibition is avoided with this action, because if she does not see Camelot, she at least sees the road which leads to it, and even this is a compromised, vicarious vision. The silence, or the whispers of the place are broken by the sound, at first only potential, of Lancelot, whose bridles jingle and whose armour clashes, while from his belt there hangs a silver bugle at present inactive: this sound is also labial, and the emission of words in an inexistent language, ‘Tirra lirra’, which have been variously interpreted as a pure expression of energy and activity, devoid of any meaning. Lancelot enters as a dazzling brightness, a veritable symphony of colours, and he bursts out in a song that corresponds to that of the lady. Suddenly, the lady, who had always moved with an arcane composure which John Stuart Mill deemed ‘statuary’, is downright rash in her interpretation of the song as an invitation, as shown in a tight, paratactic series of verbs, firstly of movement inside her space, followed by an ever widening field of vision, culminating in her leaning out to see Camelot. A meaningful change of rhythm, from iambic to trochaic, marks with its urgency her descent to the shore and her seizure of a boat not her own, upon which she signs her name in black – an artist signing her work of art which, in this case, is the lady herself.87 At least one of the meanings attributed to the defiance of the prohibition is an access to direct knowledge, and one without barriers, of the living, pulsing world. The lady, unlike a patient Penelope, throws her web in the sea, and it spreads out as it floats (as will her white dress, sweeping across the boat), and 87 Tucker 1988, 115.

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the mirror magically breaks: the curse has been fulfilled. Still on the shore, the lady drinks in the lethal vision of Camelot, and an autumnal, rainy nature attends her wet funeral, humanly spreading leaves upon her in lieu of flowers, an exquisite scene rich in Pre-Raphaelite foreshadowings. From the perspective of a discussion about solipsism, the mere contact with life kills: the lady expires ‘ere she reached upon the tide / The first house by the water side’. 3. The poem which is symbolically closest to ‘The Lady of Shalott’, rich in an identical stylized and gestural symbolism, is a chorus of feminine voices entitled ‘The Hesperides’, which Tennyson self-censored in the later editions. Here we find another curse looming in the form of a possible theft. The poem, based on the myth of the Hesperides whose apples were stolen in one of the labours of Hercules, is another dense and encrypted text, open to multiple impressions and interpretations, among which surely there is that of the apple-tree as a metaphor of knowledge and of art, and of the divine mission of the poet. The Hesperides safeguard the ‘hallowed’ apple with their song, a song which also has the advantage of procuring ‘eternal pleasure’, the pleasure of an ‘eternal want of rest’. The ambiguity of ‘want’, which means both ‘desire’ and ‘need’, works with both meanings, because that act of guarding multiplies desire, increasing it as it becomes satisfied, and thus rendering it ever more of a need. Only once again postulating that supercilious, jealous, aristocratic isolation of the poet can the varied and even oracular definitions of the Hesperides be understood and explained. According to them ‘Hoarded wisdom brings delight’; on the other hand, the world, should the apple be stolen, would become ‘overwise’. Art as esoteric knowledge, a mystery to which only the elect have the key (‘All things are not told to all’) – this is the meaning of the proclaimed obscurantism of the sisters (‘Hesper hateth Phosphor’), who maliciously desire the ‘wound of the world’ to remain unhealed, and the ancient secret unrevealed. The navigator Hanno, with his eager, Ulyssean dynamism, is disapproved; he is the figure to whom in the prologue the Hesperides address their song. 4. Having closed this parenthesis, we may again focus on the meaning of the gaze of the lady of Shalott, which, perhaps with an involuntary charade, like that of the biblical wife of Lot kills anyone looking towards Camelot.

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And what is represented by that tree in the garden of the Hesperides, which, even before Tennyson, had been interpreted as a prefiguration of the original sin in the garden of Eden and of the Tree of Knowledge, above all due to the dragon that twists around its trunk? The death of the lady of Shalott also occurs as a consequence of her surrender to the desires of the flesh. The hortus conclusus of the sorceress, which the Romantics were able to see as the pleasure paradise of an Alcina, is instead a place of repression and of denied pleasures, first and foremost for those who live there imprisoned; the sterility of the woman lies in sharp contrast to the fields beyond where barley and oats proudly stand up.88 Tennyson’s erotic pessimism is clearly reflected, in this poetic collection, by female figures caught in the typical Ovidian dilemmas (from the Heroides), waiting in vain or certain of their abandonment by a lover, figures all doomed to die, already mythological in and of themselves, but whom the poet further mythicizes and projects into a sort of archetypal light. Such are Oenone who, abandoned by Paris, courts death and rhapsodizes on the motherhood denied her, Mariana of the 1830 collection and transferred to the Pyrenean scenes visited by Tennyson in 1831. The brewing frustration finds its voice in the frantic, furious tones of the woman’s outbursts of love, which assume the shape of daring metaphors and similes (Fatima), or translate, as in ‘The Sisters’, into the pure madness of murder. Inasmuch as they express an intensification of Tennyson’s erotic pessimism, the second Mariana, Fatima and Oenone precede the lady of Shalott: they have been abandoned, it is true, but at least they were once engaged. The protagonist of ‘Mariana in the South’, a poem that does not achieve the density of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and makes many concessions to local colour, also has a mirror, but one which reflects the ‘clear perfection of her face’. And contrastingly Mariana is a woman who is active in her own way, indomitable, far less resigned to her suffering, who prays faithfully to the Madonna to free her and fearlessly watches the sea from the balcony. Fatima desires to taste again the erotic pleasures which she had to renounce given the escape of her beloved; she doesn’t cry out to death as a welcome end, but rather as a lesser compensation

88 Ryals 1964, 72.

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to be avoided: ‘I will possess him or will die’, or if she must, she will die ‘claspt in his embrace’. The Ovidian narrative of Oenone, spoken in the third person, is almost like an operatic aria thanks to its use of anaphora and da capo. Like the lady of Shalott, Oenone sings more than speaks, recounting that she had a lover, a husband, who has abandoned her. She does not address any particular audience, unless perhaps ‘the stillness’, and she is heard only by the unpitying shadows of the mountains. Noon is hot and silent, and she is alone, alert, but ‘aweary’.89 Lovers and husbands never come off well in these poems: both Lancelot and Paris, as we shall see, are vain and superficial; Paris chooses the most flirtatious, flippant and frivolous of the three goddesses, without even noticing Pallas, who presents herself sincerely and offers a life of perfect Victorian austerity. A fundamental change with respect to ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is that in the end Oenone does make a decision, refuses fatal inaction and becomes a bit like Fatima: ‘I will rise and go / Down into Troy’, which demonstrates her will to end her alienating isolation and approach humankind once again. In ‘The Sisters’, following a vengeful wait, this activism is ultimately mad, unbalanced and murderous. As noted above, only the lady of Shalott is loved by no one, and her mirror reflects, almost covets, potential lovers that she has forbidden herself: curly haired shepherds, brightly dressed pages, and above all couples of knights; yet, she ‘hath no royal knight and true’. Daydreaming, she also sees in the mirror things that do not really appear: funerals, but also weddings, and ‘two young lovers lately wed’. One of the most ingenious moments of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is the nocturnal phantasmagoria of the lady, who unwittingly reads her destiny in the mirror: a funeral that is a wedding, a ‘white’ wedding, white like the wedding gown that she is wearing, in which she heads to the boat and sails towards Camelot. The reawakening of her senses is signalled by the rising of a fertile sun, which puts to flight the frigid moon at the appearance of Lancelot; but Lancelot has other things on his mind, for he is devoted to 89 Oenone too is burdened by the prohibition from seeing, which is violated: she sees the bickering of the gods without being seen or without hearing. She suffers Paris’ abandonment and relives it – tripled – in her tale: three frustrated women in fact court a single man, but only one will receive the apple.

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the ‘lady in his shield’. His comment when he sees the lady in her boat is quite indifferent, absent-minded, even casual. 5. The Tennysonian topos of the prison is in any case rather ambiguous. It symbolizes a form of repression and oppression, especially for the abandoned women, but is at the same time a pleasant space, a desirable refuge not devoid of attraction. With the passing of time, each heroine is overcome by a certain addiction, a sort of narcissistic complacency, an oxymoronic pairing of contrasting reactions. They long to escape but, in the constant impossibility of doing so, decadently relish the suffering itself; they savour the wait, usually but not always followed by death, a death at times prayed for, and thus tantalizing in its belateness (as in the case of the overly pessimistic ‘queen of May’, who believes she hears death at the door, when it is actually still months away).90 The wait has its upsides, if nothing else it prolongs life and favours self-conservation. The germ cell of this personal myth is in the underwater life of the Kraken, in the poem of the same name, whose aquatic prison is simultaneously a delightful epicurean refuge for parasites, where a gigantic octopus lives surrounded by powerless foragers. Not completely convinced that he should leave this little paradise, with an almost blasé and bored exhibitionism (‘once by men and angels to be seen’) – ‘in roaring’, as Tennyson splendidly adds – he waits for the attempt at liberation, prefiguring the vertical rather than horizontal escape of the prisoners, an effort which will end, as it almost inevitably does with every escape, in death ‘on the surface’. The lady of Shalott says herself she is not completely tired, rather merely bored by the ‘shadows’, and is – a microscopic detail that must not be ignored in a poem where each word is replete with meaning and function – only ‘half sick’. But the most explicit revelation of this ambiguity is found in Fatima, who says that hers is a ‘fierce delight’, a sharp, atrocious ecstasy that pierces her heart. Oenone also realizes that her music – already so seductive that it attracts the shadows of the mountains and inspires the

90 That of Jephthah’s daughter in ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ is a death religiously accepted and awaited with joy: ‘Lowered softly with a threefold cord of love / Down to a silent grave’.

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caves, streams, and hills themselves to listen – is such that ‘while I speak it, a little while / My heart may wander from its deeper woe’. The whole story manifests the compulsion to repeat her song, for the longer it lasts, the further away the death she has summoned will stay. The self-imposed imprisonment of the soul is also a dream-like place where tormented religious qualms and the atrocious metaphysical doubts of ‘Confessions’ may be tempered or exorcised: the soul of ‘The Palace of Art’ ‘prates’ with careless scorn about those questions which filled the protagonist of the poem of 1830 with anguish and morbid uncertainties, like that of ‘the resurrection of the dead’; and the problem of the real religion is likewise dismissed with cursory superiority (‘I care not what the sects may brawl’). Suffering for the death of a loved one, in the poem on the loss of Spedding’s brother, was itself also a painful blessing, a crucible in which Tennyson experienced an intense pain that was more enjoyable than ‘many pleasures’. ‘The Palace of Art’ follows a different allegorical path and one which is almost turned upside down with respect to all the other poems about imprisonment. If in many cases the imprisonment is compulsory, like that of the two Marianas, or one over which a curse hangs, like that of the lady of Shalott, the imprisonment of the soul is, in that allegory, voluntary, and even necessary, or at least thought to be so up to a certain point. Retreat from the world was necessary in order to tend to one’s art. The palace of art, in fact, stands tall for this reason, representing classical art without reference to the present, as evidenced by the monuments lining its rich rooms, where a soft light reigns, a ‘grateful gloom’, and where the production and the enjoyment of art is expressed through another oxymoron, a ‘delicious toil’. That the lady of Shalott is also an image and a symbol of the artist is revealed by the fact that the rooms of the palace form, one by one, a ‘perfect whole / From living Nature’; and tapestries, weavings, even if we do not know the artists, hang from the walls illustrating the totality of life, or what we believe and assume to be the totality of life. In any event, in ‘The Palace of Art’ the soul ‘treads over’ those mosaics that place before her not only ‘the human tale / Of this wide world’, but also its fatigue, its exhaustion, or the wretched end of kings and sovereigns, and of human power; and she sits on her throne ‘To sing her songs alone’, like a bridesmaid. Her song is compared to that

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of a nightingale, and is a circular song, sung to itself, exemplifying an art that has in itself both the giver and the receiver. 6. When Tennyson speaks in this collection in the first person, stepping away from his dramatic disguises, it is to confess his fear of female beauty, the incapacity or terror with which women filled him. The wait for death (R 158, which clarifies and explains the erotic frustration of Tennyson, who had no relationships with women) would have been joyful, and is neither terrible nor anguished, ‘claspt hand-in-hand with thee’91 (which repeats literally the frustration of Fatima). And this gratification might even have justified and enhanced that solitude. The baiting of the desirous, exotic Eleänore is an invitation; a pure dream, eyes wide open, a trance. She calls him by name and leaves him trembling and weak-kneed. In this case too we have a welcome death, or rather the poet says he would happily accept death (‘I drink the cup of costly death’),92 a death amounting to a delirium of life. The women who populate the phantasmagoria of ‘A Dream of Fair Women’, are generally romantically or already decadently ‘fatal’, like Helen and Cleopatra – when they are not, to the contrary, the umpteenth reincarnations of passivity and renunciation of the world, like Iphigenia and the daughter of Jephthah. In this ode, the sense of an already completed objectification is highlighted by the fact that for the first time Tennyson explains his procedure, familiarizing the reader with a framework that places the content of the dream in contrast to a very common daily circumstance which serves to identify the narrating self. The feelings inspired by the reading of Chaucer’s poem are those caused by the death that has captured the beauty of these ‘fair women’ of the past, so beautiful that wars broke out over their conquest and for the passion they aroused in men. The poem becomes still more personal when the remembering poet, startled, wishes to react, like one transported back to heroic times, a very clear symptom of the dialectic of action versus inaction. Afterwards, all these fantasies and visions triggered by his readings lead to a real dream, and the poet seems to find himself in a humid wood which he describes with relish. The Tennyson who rereads human history is no different from the soul of ‘The Palace of Art’ 91 ‘If I were loved’, the opening, confirms that Tennyson had not yet loved. 92 Rosalind, the ‘falcon’, also has eyes ‘that care not whom they kill’.

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who desires to know the ‘cycle of human life’ when she sees it represented in the mosaics: that is, knowledge of the world through literature, rather than through living itself. A Dantesque inspiration supplants the Chaucerian one, and there follows a very brief and impressive Divine Comedy with a row of figures from beyond the grave – women who died as much for love and tumultuous passions as for the spirit of sacrifice, like Iphigenia and the daughter of Jephthah. The comparison, or the inverted parallels between these women, also reveal Tennyson’s innate spirit of compromise. 7. The new and crowded gallery of feminine portraits and miniportraits captures a variety of characters and physical features. Tennyson sketches profiles of women which are not necessarily taken from life,93 all to varying degrees possible fiancées or wives, whom, however, he would never have dared approach. They were women at times vastly different from each other who all respond to the female type of the femme fatale or the melancholy and withdrawing woman: frustrating or frustrated women to whom a propitiatory invitation is always eventually made. An early decadent poem like ‘Eleänore’ might have been written by a Baudelaire, Gautier or Wilde; the exotic creature, eternally a child, surrounded by brightness and primordial light, an ‘imperial’ woman who blinds anyone who looks at her, imperturbable arouser of an infinite languor, the unreachable beloved of a prostrated adorer. In another of these portraits, ‘Rosalind’, the woman is a wild falcon that incarnates both the joyful irresponsible separation from the world and cruel ‘indifference’ towards new beaus. Margaret has that pallor and languor typical of the Romantic knight bewitched by the woman, found particularly in Keats, and the Da Vincian fascination of Mona Lisa’s smile; like the lady of Shalott she hears ‘the murmur of the strife’, but dares not ‘enter the toil of life’.

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Even these figures of non-mythological women are stylised in some way, and depicted in conventional poses. Tennyson could only see across the filter of courtly love: Margaret leans from the ‘bower-eaves’, almost as if she were in a castle. Women whom perhaps he actually knew were pushed into set moulds, or overlapped with others found in his capacious literary memory, like the Shakespearean shrew Kate.

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§ 85. Tennyson up to 1874 XII: The 1832 poems III. Idylls and political poems Tennyson’s first idylls, facile sketches of rustic life and stories of healthy, simple figures of the English countryside, are a dangerous and somewhat off-key surrender to pure narrative on a subject to which Tennyson was always partial, but in which he almost never managed to reach the supreme linguistic economy of his allegorical poems. The fact that these were the only pieces unconditionally admired by ‘Christopher North’ confirms my earlier comments on the tastes of Tennyson’s contemporaries. The stream, the farm, the mill, the ardent love affairs of the farmers, are Biedermeier elements that almost at the same time, or slightly earlier, were put expressly to music in Germany and above all by Schubert in Austria, and even in Tennyson they are enriched by delightful melodic intermezzi. ‘The Miller’s Daughter’, a companion piece to many exotic poems of unrequited or frustrated love, is a verbose dramatic monologue in rhymed stanzas idealizing, with an occasional thrill, the love of the speaker for the daughter of the miller. In addition to announcing a new genre, the poem foreshadows a hypothetical solution to the conflict between the poet and the world. At the beginning of the poem it is with fervent emotional involvement that Tennyson describes the wrinkled face and open smile of the miller, ‘full of dealings with the world’. The healthy world of concrete country life was at the antipodes of unhealthy Sehnsucht. The speaker is an utterly different being from the self-absorbed Tennyson, and without hesitation sings the praise of the best of all possible worlds, the blessed land which has given him all its gifts, so that rather than leave life he would happily live it all over again. As in The Angel in the House by Patmore, we witness a peaceful, bourgeois love affair, a courtship on the shores of a river, a sugary and somewhat banal portrait of perfect marital bliss. The poem clears up the shadows of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, because the beloved appears at the balcony like Mariana and unlike the lady of that poem, but she spins – rather than weaves – innocently; her song is also heard by those outside, but the shadow is her own as she leans out. This love was an antidote to Tennyson’s existential pessimism and ‘dispell’d the fear / That I should die an early death’. In the range of his moods, Tennyson was rarely able to contemplate joy unless it was ephemeral or internally flawed by the presentiment of dissolution; for

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this reason these country idylls become, after the very first promising lines, turbid and full of shadows. The anxious waiting of the young girl who longs to be crowned as the ‘May Queen’, and parades in her beauty that to her seems everlasting, proves to be, in the tripartite ballad of the same name, an empty, senseless anxiety; a quite telling fade-out takes the reader from nature in bloom to the bareness and mortuary atmosphere of December, whose general motif is the expectation of death, and death which is now not longed for but one caused by illness. This poem places in the rural present of England the archetype of the belle dame sans merci, of the vain and ‘difficult’ woman, punished by illness which ruins her flowering beauty.94 2. Tennyson’s poems with a political (more precisely libertarian) theme were undeniably rooted in reality. Prompted at the beginning of the 1830s by the short-lived insurrection of the Polish against the Tsar of Russia, they are also legible, at least in a distant reverberation, according to the dynamics of action and stasis. Whoever attacks the power of the Tsar speaks in the name of a group of ‘lotos eaters’, who ‘stand now, when we should aid the right’. Among the sonnets there is a late one on Napoleon, and one that depicts Alexander the Great as a hero of liberty anointed and sent by God to defeat the Persians. In internal politics, as various compositions (later discarded) show, Tennyson was on the side of the ‘pure’ and the ‘wise’, and against demagogues like O’Connell; he was thus an enemy of Irish independence despite being a cautious supporter of the First Reform Bill. His position, already at that time, was very close to that of Disraeli’s ‘Young England’, because from a conservative point of view it condemned all signs of disintegration, and looked to the past and to the social harmony of pre-Reformation England. Decades before the Idylls he denounced the ineluctable corruption of the present, the empty and populist rhetoric, the mirage of journalistic popularity, the advance of 94 The poem responds in its own way, and almost tempers in naïve candour, to the request for a divine ‘sign’ made by the anguished speaker of ‘Confessions’ as proof of the truth of the faith (§ 82.2). On her deathbed, having seen the error of her ways, the ‘May Queen’ tells the story of a ‘sign’ to her mother and sisters, the special confirmation of eternal life that God has given her in a vision of angels who, to a musical accompaniment, call to her and welcome her soul to Heaven.

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anarchy which was suffocating reverence. He did not advocate revolutionary measures as a remedy, but rather the ‘middle road of sober thought’, a gradual, Arnoldian illumination. 3. At nineteen years old Tennyson wrote the first three parts of ‘The Lover’s Tale’, in blank verse, but removed it at the last moment, dissatisfied, from the poetry collection of 1832, despite the loud protests of Hallam. Tennyson, however, allowed a few copies to circulate among his Cambridge friends in 1833, and after over thirty years he took it up again, adding a fourth and final part, and resolving to revise and publish the poem as a whole in 1879 to prevent piracy. He had then correctly affirmed in 1833 that the poem, though defective on an artistic plane, would certainly increase his popularity. Composed in 1827 and 1879, at the same time it foreshadowed and was a continuation of (in 1879, after Maud and ‘Enoch Arden’) a successful formula, that of the dramatic narrative monologue, or more precisely of the sentimental-dramatic or purely melodramatic monologue, rich in pauses, ecstatic exclamations and outpourings from the person in the first throes of a love which he or she believes is reciprocated, only to be later disillusioned and desperate. Julian, the protagonist, is a very ‘Tennysonian’ poet, a deft creator of atmospheres, of enchanting marine scenarios, calligraphic patterns and refined similes, which are drawn out and elaborate, often for their own sake.95 But he is also a narrator skilled at delayed development and at applying suspense and allusion. The poem presents the classic triangle of a bourgeois novel, but without even a suggestion of realism (the lack of any reference to time or place is purposeful), and indeed it has a strong resemblance to a tragic fable.96 The list of foreshadowings is completed by

95 The ‘metaphysical’ feel emerges in these lines reminiscent of Donne: ‘Ye ask me, friends, / When I began to love […] So know I not when I began to love’. Like the two lovers of Donne’s ‘The Extasy’, at the height of their idyll Julian and Camilla sit enraptured in a golden field, caught up in a ‘conversation’ that is almost entirely spiritual. 96 Julian and Camilla are cousins of exactly the same age who each lose a parent, he his father, she her mother. The orphans pass their infancy and childhood in a fairytale-like unison which is shattered by the revelation that Camilla loves another. Foreshadowing the looming tragedy are the flowers in whose vein poison runs, and, during a Wordsworthian excursion in a pine wood, a bridge suspended over a crevasse

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adding that ‘The Lover’s Tale’ is Tennyson’s first and earliest study of the madness of love that will reappear in ‘Locksley Hall’ and Maud, a passion for a nameless beloved, one that is subsequently betrayed or rejected. Here that temporary and ephemeral ecstasy of gratification is transformed into a wild, rash delirium tormented by nightmares and hallucinations, in a sensation of cosmic catastrophe which in the end, being utterly intolerable, leads to the ‘solution’ of fainting and unconsciousness, which had already been used in ‘Armageddon’ and ‘Confessions’. Yet, the poem contains at once both the disease97 and its cure, something seen even more clearly with the fourth part added in 1879. Julian, who writes the name of his beloved in the sand, eventually takes stock of the situation and finds a way to get past it, returning to life hopeful and healed. A truly Victorian sense of fair play, made of exquisite courtesies, regulates the behaviour of the two rivals, and the enamoured Julian, who never entertains thoughts of revenge, stoically sublimates his erotic desire in a platonic brotherly affection. His patience and abnegation are actually compensated later, with a ‘prize’ which is more like a slight punishment, as he has done nothing to deserve so great a treasure: Julian descends into the tomb to kiss his beloved, but hearing her heart still beating carries her out of the sepulchre; from the macabre we pass to the miraculous when the woman is resuscitated and gives birth to a baby. From Julian – regenerated, alive, transformed into a sort of deus ex machina – Lionel receives the bride that he too soon had believed dead, but she has become mute and will give the name of Julian to her child. In the fourth part, written in 1879, Tennyson oddly decided to make an anonymous witness, unconnected to the events, the narrator of the story, in an inappropriate adaptation of one of Boccaccio’s novellas.98 where a man and his wife threw themselves to their deaths, and where it is said their cries still echo in a cave. 97 A madness that does not require ‘a cell and keeper’, and which seems ‘no less than one divine apology’. 98 Decameron, the fourth novella of the tenth day. Tennyson glosses over the somewhat necrophilic sensuality of Boccaccio’s protagonist (meaningfully named Gentile), who not only kisses the deceased in the tomb but also fondles her breast. The anecdote of the Persian custom of offering guests a display of all that is most dear to their host is literally paraphrased, as is the apologue of the banished servant found dying

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§ 86. Tennyson up to 1874 XIII: The 1842 poems I. ‘The Two Voices’ The ten-year gap between the 1832 collection and the Poems in two volumes of 1842 – which is vaguely reminiscent of the seven-year poetic silence which thirty years later, almost at the same age, threatened to truncate the poetic career of Hopkins – was due to painful misfortunes, family mishaps, and a disappointment in love, as well as, as I have mentioned, to Tennyson’s hypersensitivity to negative reviews.99 Between 1831 and 1840 he lost both his father and his best friend, and was left not by one but by two possible wives; his family was evicted from the parsonage of Somersby, and, now head of the family, he was forced to look for a new house for his mother and his brothers, of whom at least two, Frederick and Edward, continued to show signs of mental unbalance. Unlike Hopkins, however, Tennyson, though he wasn’t publishing, continued to write. Indeed he wrote copiously, because both the breakups of his engagements with Rosa Baring and, at least temporarily, with Emily Sellwood, and above all, the death of Hallam, drove him to write rather than blocking him. In 1833 he had already begun accumulating material for that imposing and lengthy dirge which was to become In Memoriam.100 Rather than leading to any by the kind passer-by who precedes the entry onto the scene of the newly revived Camilla, to the astonishment of all. But in Tennyson the lover runs away at the end, while in Boccaccio he continues to live happily with the married couple whom he has reunited. 99 As with every other collection of Tennyson, that of 1842 had a series of codas in magazines, that is, short poems of a pungent satirical vein, among which a pair were aimed at the novelist Bulwer Lytton. 100 ‘Break, break, break’ signals a temporary impotence to speak, and reveals an intense suffering as well as an inability to vent that suffering, in a confrontation with the sea, which is free to throw itself upon the rocks, and with the fishermen who shout and sing, and remind the poet of the ‘voice now muted’. The triple repetition in the first line, which symbolises the tireless movement of the sea, contrasts with the definitive loss of Hallam. ‘The Ante-Chamber’, which dates back to the end of 1834 when Hallam was already dead, is a piece Tennyson meant as a prologue to ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’; it depicts, as if it were an oil portrait, the spiritual features of the deceased. It is not, then, a self-portrait in Tennysonian style, but rather a eulogy to the strength, the calm, the self-assuredness reflected in his facial traits. The difference in temperament is clearly delineated: Hallam knew best how to observe and to capture

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sort of poetic revolution, however, this decade in many ways marked an involution. In the first of the two volumes, Tennyson published duly and scrupulously edited versions of compositions which had already come out in 1832; it is the second volume which contains the most acclaimed masterpieces of Tennyson’s re-creative and monological art, though accompanied by disconcerting capitulations to a frivolous vein and to entertainment. All things considered, the collection lacks continuity and poetic density, such as that of symbolism and myth, and reduces (save in ‘The Day-Dream’ and ‘The Vision of Sin’) the visionary and dream-like mode. The span of composition stretching over ten years101 and the biographical events mentioned above, both explain and motivate this transition, at least in part: Hallam’s death intensified Tennyson’s general malaise and prostration, further aggravated by his unlucky love for Rosa Baring; these had an aesthetic impact even later. After 1836–1837 the move from Somersby and the rebirth of Tennyson’s hopes for marriage greatly helped him restore his faith in life. Consequently, the collection both displays and at times suffers from a stylistic, compositional and even temporal polarity: myth is set against daily life, the canto fermo in archaic style and with formulaic cadences against colloquial language, esoteric and metaphysical allegory, addressed to initiates, against bucolic idylls which Tennyson expressly called ‘English’ in the later reorganization of his poetry. Also found is the narration of contemporary anecdotes, usually regarding country folk. The idyll ‘Dora’ is the progenitor of the genre of the story told in verse, sentimental and often sugary, in a rural setting, with tragic and pessimistic elements, and showing examples of heroic human nature, and he delighted in understanding man not only or merely through books, but also in the ‘hubbub of the market’, where the ‘various world’ and its individuals shone through. The more complete study of the temptation of silence is contained in 276A, never republished, which speaks of the discomfort resulting when a personal poem is offered up to voracious readers, who inevitably desecrate it. One must also place ‘The Epic’ and ‘Morte d’Arthur’ in relation to the death of Hallam; both poems will be discussed as part of Idylls of the King. 101 Most of the poems in this collection were indeed written within 1835–1836, very few after 1840; at times the initial idea and the first draft date back to the early 1830s. Tennyson would later revise and complete these first drafts, even after his original inspiration had begun to fade.

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self-denial but also peasant toughness. Tennyson would become fixated on this genre without really having the gift of pure narration. It was the first symptom of his indulgence in that simplistic vein celebrating the domestic hearth which had been praised by reviewers of the earlier collections and which, Tennyson knew perfectly, they expected should be even more fruitful. If we are to believe his son Hallam, who was undoubtedly more Victorian than his father at the time these poems were written, Tennyson already was or at least felt himself a Poet Laureate in pectore, because he portrayed that ‘sacredness of home life’ on which ‘the stability and greatness of a nation largely depend’,102 a function similar in fact to that of the much more numerous political poems of the collection, veritable codes of conduct for a prudential spirit of appeasement among the classes.103 Even when writing his English idylls Tennyson did not really manage to capture life in a direct way, but rather always built his poems on anecdotes which were already found in literature, especially those of Theocritus. From his readings and from his world of books he shaped his most typical chivalric and romantic backdrop, beginning with an enamelled painting of the perfect unity of human figures and nature in bloom, with a fragment about Lancelot and Guinevere which is explicitly related to ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and particularly with his first Arthurian idyll, which will be, however, the last of a series in the great work in twelve books completed in 1888. 2. Tennyson’s state of mind after 1831 is reflected in numerous very personal lyrics, true outpourings without filters or masks, not even printed in the 1842 edition and only published in 1931. ‘The Vision of Sin’ allegorises, 102 Memoir, I, 189. 103 Pitt 1962, 126, suggests, doubtless plausibly, that Tennyson’s exclusion of earlier poems from the 1842 edition as well as his decision not to include some drafts or even completed poems such as ‘The Hesperides’ and ‘Tithonus’, were dictated by an aesthetic commensurate with a sense of social responsibility, aimed at creating poetry of a virile acceptance rather than languidly escapist. The aesthetic dilemmas of Tennyson are inherent in, or blended with, his poetry, as in the monologue of Will Waterproof (about which cf. § 88.4 n. 112). Very few poems (such as ‘Amphion’ and ‘The Poet’s Mind’ or others which remained unpublished, like ‘Youth’) explicitly focus on the function of poetry, and on the alternative between a solipsistic and a committed art.

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and ‘The Two Voices’ presents in a monologue, as we shall see, what is said in the form of first-person confessions in these compositions. In one of them, which were even greatly refined from a metrical point of view, Tennyson claimed to have a sole thought, and that thought was death (R 185); he also returned to the theme of the fading of youth and to his early knowledge of life: ‘When I was young and full of love / I took my fancies from above, / But as I wander from my birth / My fancies savour of the earth’.104 This earthly spirit lives ‘alone’, ‘Pent in a gleaming chrysalis, / Which an eternal prison is’, surrounded by things in eternal movement and metamorphosis, while he is denied any form of change. Another composition (R 186) confesses the burden of sin, which can only be atoned for through the suffering sent by God, and also, in a heartbreaking prayer, a ‘warring spirit’ and a ‘lack of faith’ that God himself must eradicate. He was oppressed by a strong sense of real suffocation and unbearable withdrawal into himself, which he continued to refract into a generalized personal apocalypticism, leading him to see the epoch of the pure and wise as having passed, and the present as a time of weakness. The fragmentary R 190 poem speaks of an insurmountable situation, a walk on burning coals, and breaks out into a nightmare of spasmodic foreboding of a cosmic catastrophe. As hinted in ‘Locksley Hall’, Tennyson even contemplated the idea of exile, perhaps in the southern warmth of the Italian Mediterranean where many Englishmen had settled permanently, or fantastically yearned for the hundred-year sleep described in ‘The Day-Dream’. 3. The personal hints disseminated in the many brief compositions of 1831 were reprised and distanced by Tennyson in his long allegory, ‘The Vision of Sin’, which contrasts (but not definitively) the vision of sin with the vision of God. This lyric presents a young man riding a winged horse which is held down by the weight of the flesh; when he reaches the gates of a palace, he is pulled to it by the force of a ‘child of sin’, and there he sees a group of sleepy beings and the evident signs of carousing. A violent crescendo, culminating in an onomatopoeic, strongly alliterative line, stirs them up in a macabre and Dionysian dance. The palace, no longer or not

104 R 184.

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merely a palace of art, becomes a dream-like surrogate of Hell identified with pleasure. An opposition is created between the night of this palace and God’s ‘awful rose of dawn’ outside, which stands out against the mountains beyond. But the inhabitants of the castle do not notice the dawn, and are indifferent even to the formless mist, a symbol of the Holy Spirit, which emanates from behind the mountains. The scene fades out, and the young hedonist appears, having become a painfully thin, toothless knight crossing a moor, who arrives at a run-down tavern, and like a skeletal Pan or Bacchus sings half-hearted praises to the carpe diem. The epilogue of the poem, which reveals the insurmountable indecisiveness of Tennyson, stops far short of any clear or sharp answers. To the question ‘Is there any hope?’, posed in the hope of obtaining a promise of redemption and eternal life, the answer is returned in an incomprehensible language, and the poem closes with the reappearance of the ‘awful rose of dawn’. The palace and the chain of mountains remain two utterly distinct spaces and in the meantime Man is subject to the temptation of sensual life. 4. Begun in 1835, the poem was only completed after 1839, in five parts of varying length and metre, but with structural disproportions and very evident internal imbalances. It belongs to the last flashes of Tennyson the romantic visionary, and appears tightly connected to ‘The Palace of Art’. Solipsistic art and dedication to the amoral cult of beauty were there symbolized by the ‘pleasure house’; these pleasures are not now specifically related to art, but are strictly those of the senses. The youth is an allegory of the Platonic soul, subjugated despite the powerful resistance of the great force of the senses, exemplified by the musical splashing of a fountain, an element that Tennyson borrowed from Euripides. In a sense the poem begins where ‘The Palace of Art’ left off, because in the ‘young sinner’ we can see a deterioration of the soul, who despite leaving the palace decides not to destroy it, and to return one day but ‘in company’, a company that is now depicted as one of purely hedonistic revellers. In and of itself, sin is not at first very different from mystical ecstasy, in that it is symbolized by a voluptuous music that goes from the almost imperceptible pianissimos to clashing, thunderous fortissimos which evoke sighs and languor, only then to shock the listeners as if with a jolt of electricity. From the end of the third part, the dream proper subsides, and gives way to a more

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hallucinatory vision which takes place, as the dreamer states, ‘within my head’. The youth ages suddenly, the winged horse becomes an old nag, and the palace is reduced to a dilapidated tavern. It is the presumptuous soul, disillusioned for the second time but not completely repentant, who continues, in quatrains of a vulgar, incoherent, trochaic rhythm, exactly the same parable as ‘The Palace of Art’, of the soul that believed she was a ‘demigod’, which is also the parable of satanic temptation fully developed by ‘The Two Voices’. Tennyson’s youthful and residual Calvinism has the old man say that ‘good works’ are not enough to ensure salvation, and that the burden of sin is beyond any atonement, and damnation is inescapable: one might as well, therefore, enjoy without restraint that aspiration to amoral abjection, that surrender to the sensory and instinctual life of brutes that Tennyson was not always inclined to reject, and which in fact he had obstinately contemplated since ‘Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind’. But in this part any visionary character fades away and too explicitly the poet turns to apocalyptic disillusion with open references to the present time. The fifth and last part is a vision in which, with obvious pre-evolutionistic echoes, men and beasts mate to give life to ‘lower forms’; no credit is given to the hope of perfecting the human race. 5. Four-fifths of the equally long dialogic rhapsody ‘The Two Voices’ had already been written by June 1833; Tennyson completed it in 1837 or 1838. The cloudy pessimism it exudes is thus only partly due to the loss of Hallam, a cause which could be attributed to it if read as a work of 1842, knowing moreover from the testimony of friends that the tragedy truly made Tennyson himself wish to die. The drafts of this poem were named ‘thoughts of a suicide’ in his letters, even before that tremendous loss, and this confirms that the poem dramatizes a condition of abstract metaphysical doubt, independent from the actual circumstances which radicalized and exacerbated it. It is one of the reasons why ‘The Two Voices’ holds simultaneously, especially in its contradictions, a paradigmatic value; it is a parable of the longed-for, dazzling and at the same time tantalizing inaccessibility of the divine epiphany, of a contact with the otherworld or at least with an always elusive metaphysical Truth. As an example of a poem with two voices, with the counterpoint between the one of the poet and

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the Mephistophelian one that is ‘still small’, this poem marks the appearance of a genre which will soon be reflected in Dickens and Clough’s fiction and poetry of the double: ‘He knows a baseness in his blood / At such strange war with something good. / He may not do the thing he would’. But it is also yet another example of Tennyson’s weakness, of his innate, irresistible propensity to aesthetic and ideological compromise. The poem ends, so to speak, by wiping the slate clean – and this is what even in his time inspired a chorus of criticism and parodies, among which a notable one by Lewis Carroll. The bitter, insistent, inner debate does not close with a decisive logical deduction; rather, it is abruptly blocked by a gratuitous idealization of a traditional, routine religiousness very similar to the ‘common faith’ longed for in ‘Supposed Confessions’. Another palace is abandoned, or rather in this case destroyed: not one of art, however, but of the asocial, doubting self. The conclusion announces the prologue of In Memoriam: divine love completes and orders everything, ‘although no tongue can prove’. 6. This conclusion rings hollow because it mechanically recites conventional maxims without a real or intimate acceptance of them, solemnizing the exterior observance of ritual: the ringing of the Sunday church bells provides an escape from nightmares, giving rise to a Biedermeier idyll, the scene of a humble couple going to church with their children in their Sunday best – the black humour is wiped out once and for all in a Wordsworthian embrace with nature. Throughout the poem, the protagonist is either a tired or old hero, a distinct forerunner of Browning’s Childe Roland or of his grammarian,105 or a new Ixion who takes shadows for reality. Metaphysical scepticism stems and ultimately disarms the illusory thirst for knowledge; thousands of years will not be enough to shed light on everything, because ‘the scale is infinite’, life is an enigma and only deceptive flashes of truth illuminate the search. For Tennyson, the quest involved the demonstration of the existence of God and the afterlife. He believed that only intermittently one could attain or come close to the perception of Eternity, an epiphany of the Absolute, or even of a Heavenly 105 § 122.1–3.

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Friend, and only by intellectual rather than analogical means, regardless of divine traces in nature. In this poem the teleology of creation, and the finalistic vision, do not in truth move beyond the range of aspiration. Right at the beginning, the image of the dragonfly, logically somewhat disconnected, and anyway difficult to interpret, exemplifies the non-linear and uneven progress of the poem: does this image have confirmatory or adversative value? Does the ‘still small voice’ claim that everything is constantly renewed, that perfection is not of man but of insects? That everything will be transformed and renewed? Or that, as in Egyptian mythology, the soul is immortal? The very orthodox ‘still small voice’, in that case, would take up once again the theory or inference of the ‘endless shade’ into which the speaker fears his death will dissolve him, to contest it, and in contrast to it places images of light and transparency as well as images of the ceaseless renewal of nature. But all of this occurs after a very unorthodox invitation to the speaker to end his days, to ‘not be’. Were we to define the nature of the two voices and thus the dynamics of the poem, we could say that there is on the one hand an undecided ‘I’, Faustus-like but already too hesitant, and on the other hand the ‘still small voice’ of a troublemaker, an authentic devil’s advocate who wishes to ‘defaustianize’ an already ‘defaustianized’ character. The disturbing aspect of this ‘still small voice’, which is intermittently a hypostasis of the conscience, is that, unrelenting, it continues to suggest the seductive attraction of suicide to the speaker, who has already confessed his proneness to the visiting of cemeteries. His is a consciousness which allows itself dangerous and at times terrifying, blasphemous, diabolical conjectures; in the end, the speaker recognizes its very dangerous nature, that of a voice that sought ‘to wreck my mortal ark, / By making all horizon dark’. It should also be noted that the ‘still small voice’ loses in the end. It resigns itself to defeat, departing with a sarcastic jab worthy of Satan himself: it reminds the speaker, ‘in quiet scorn’, that Sunday, the Sabbath of the Lord, is dawning. The diabolical ambiguity of this voice of his conscience is further underlined by the fact that a third voice is heard at the end, that of common sense, of survival and of the quiet life. 7. The vision of the ‘still small voice’ has a broad, universal spectrum; it sees Man as a particle, not insignificant but equal to the universe; the

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speaker has instead an anthropocentric and hierarchical vision, in accordance with the mechanistic doctrines of creation (the ‘creative eras’ over which nature rather than the Christian God presides), labelled by the other as unduly proud. Therefore the poem also represents the conflict between the unsettling cosmologies offered by contemporary science, or even by the ‘old mythologies’ – or those of an alternative and esoteric knowledge – and the traditional responses of the Bible, an authentic fable-like version of the Creation. But the questioning of the ‘Alpha’ is linked to that of the ‘Omega’: considering where we come from entails contemplating the end which awaits us. In the continuation of the poem, written later and not organically connected to it, the Wordsworthian thesis is added of childhood recollection but also the frightening hypothesis of the origin and evolution of man from ‘lower forms’ of life. Clearly distressed by the first speculations about evolution, in his mind Tennyson identified an archetype of perfection not found in nature; yet still, in his heart, he had faith in an incessant evolution towards the perfect type. The incitement to suicide made by the ‘small voice’ acquires significance in light of Tennyson’s religious principle, that redemptive value is concretized in the divine ‘gift’ of desperation. In a certain sense the ‘small voice’ takes the other voice at its word, that is, its materialistic and mechanical ideas can only lead to desperation. The first voice is thus that of an individualistic de-Christianized Faustianism. As a result of its ambiguity, however, the poem displays a continual oscillation, so that at the beginning the ‘small voice’ seems the orthodox one of the conscience and the speaker appears to be a Satan who is scolded for ‘pride’ and for a faith in the ceaseless progress of knowledge and the growth of ‘human power’. Indeed the ‘small voice’ dissuades him from the arrogant presumption that he can climb to the summit of knowledge, with an admonition of the sort used by Ruskin, another critic of the pretensions of science: that truth is an unfathomable mystery, extending beyond man’s capacity for understanding, and destined to remain unsolved. The voice says that it is a vain hope, even after millenniums, for humans to set foot ‘in midst of knowledge’: Man is ultimately a ‘dreamer, deaf and blind’. The ‘small voice’ also outlines a Victorian parable of unknowability, filled with malicious, haunting mirages, and the speaker claims to be afflicted by a truly exponential multiplication of ‘riddles’ in the universe. The dilemma

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of action versus sinful solipsism is resolved in this case by the ‘small voice’ with a paradoxical admonition: it is better to act, even seeking death, than to live the life of languid ‘lotus eaters’. In rapid succession, Tennyson’s alter ego reviews a vivid series of heroes and combatants, not only combatants in arms but also in spirit, never self-serving, always acting for the good of the community or humanity as a whole, instrumental to a material and spiritual growth. The desired mould is that of the strong, unfaltering solid man: the ‘calm’ man who does not succumb to the dazzling ‘dust of systems and of creeds’, and whose emblem is St Stephen. This quickly sketched digression paves the way for contemporary dramatic monologues on saints and ascetics, and proposes St Stephen as a model of resistant, suffering, unwavering, unyielding holiness. The poem ends suggesting a utopian ‘communion’ with others, set in motion by an opening, which in earlier poems was almost always lethal as it symbolized the encounter of the solitary soul with the world: here the window opens, breaking the shell of solipsism. § 87. Tennyson up to 1874 XIV: The 1842 poems II. Action and asceticism The two most important dramatic monologues of the 1842 collection, both in blank verse, are ‘Ulysses’ and ‘St Simeon Stylites’, to which may be added the rough sketches of dramatic monologues – taken from the double sphere of classical myth and the martyrological and hagiographic tradition – on the figures of Tithonus and Tiresias (completed and published in later collections), and other minor compositions dedicated to historic and legendary saints like St Agnes and Galahad. Not a monologue but a dramatic dialogue is the aforementioned ‘Morte d’Arthur’, which acts as a trait d’union between the two spheres, as it is based on a historical and mythological figure that is at the same time a paradigm of asceticism and of the spirit of renunciation of the world. The most revealing and newest characteristic of Tennyson’s dramatic monologues – appearing earlier than those of Browning, though the latter would personalize and almost monopolize the formula – is that they are no longer a total objectification and externalization of the feelings of the poet. Tennyson chooses various and even conflicting alter egos as monologists, or rather it is not always easy to see – and it will be still more difficult in Browning – to what extent the poet identifies with his speakers or whether instead he is simply a neutral

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spectator. These compositions are tests of options, of philosophies of life, of existential alternatives, and gathered together give contradictory and even disconcerting answers, and offer contrasting personalities even at times within the same poem. Each monologue is eventually discredited or relativized by another that follows, Tithonus and Telemachus offset Ulysses, Bedivere elides Arthur, as Simeon, Agnes and Galahad counter Lancelot, Guinevere and their carefree sensuality. In fact, Tennyson’s monologues focus on opposite extremes which all boil down to the dilemma of action or the refusal to act, both in the aesthetic and the existential spheres.106 2. ‘Ulysses’ too was written immediately after Tennyson received the news of the death of Hallam; the end in particular, Ulysses’ exhortation not to yield and to strive to seek, must be read, according to Tennyson himself, as a self-encouragement to ‘go forward’ and to ‘brave the struggle of life’. Tennyson even said that there was ‘more about himself ’ in the monologue than there was in the collective voice or even the ‘impersonality’ of In Memoriam. That affirmation (which says ‘about’ rather than ‘of myself ’) is not in and of itself the same as a self-identification, because the philosophy of Ulysses represents something that regarded him intimately, as a personal dilemma. Furthermore, paradoxically, the declared goal of the programmatic activism of Ulysses is actually inactivity. Action must sooner or later lead to inaction and the lifelessness of death, a death which will perhaps allow Ulysses to see Achilles again on the Fortunate Isles. In plain terms this meant for Tennyson the probability, which would spasmodically be entertained and at length be embraced in In Memoriam, of meeting Hallam again in the next life. ‘Ulysses’ was written on the basis of Homer and Dante, and is once again Tennysonian art on art, static and

106 The political poem ‘Love thou the land’ points to the ‘via media’ as a philosophic principle, as a historical, behavioural and obviously political archetype and as the quintessence of wisdom. It calls for a moderate and extremely cautious activism: ‘Meet is it changes should control / Our being, lest we rust in ease. / We all are changed by still degrees, / All but the basis of the soul’. Frantic action was as condemnable as tergiversation. R 236 reminds the reader of the ‘falseness of extremes’.

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already ‘Alexandrian’107 – and elegiac art, utterly unlike the vigorous, almost inexorable narrative synthesis of Dante.108 3. The gnomic opening seems to set activity as a law, a moral imperative, at least for kings if not for all men: Ulysses is caught in his first impulse to break away from the boredom and inaction of his sedentary life in Ithaca and go back out to sea. His is thus the life of a perfect lotus eater, but over time his dissatisfaction with inertia grows stronger. His surroundings are depressing as well as exhausted: the fire has gone out, the rocks are dry, his wife withered, his people made ugly by a life of merely accumulating, eating, drinking and sleeping. He uses this image to proclaim his hunger and thirst for adventure, at times pursued alone rather than in the company of others, but always forbidden to cowards; the same verb, ‘hoard’, is used to define a philosophy of the liberal consumption of energy to counter the parsimony of the islanders. Tennyson’s estrangement from the hero begins to appear with his indication of Ulysses’ pride at his own importance: ‘I am become a name’; even his frenzy to travel and to explore arises from a secondary need, for he wishes to shine rather than to rust: ‘How dull is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! / As though to breathe were life’.109 Ulysses also knows, like the first of the ‘The Two Voices’, that the goal of total knowledge is unattainable; here he echoes the Romantics in his Faustian experiential extremism, that thirst for knowledge which, after some decades, would become the battle cry of aestheticism. At the same time, death – not yet sought after – is deferred in the exorcism of frenetic activity and in his challenge of the limits known to Man and imposed by God himself. Ulysses seems to speak from a completely immanentist perspective, because he does not acknowledge anything after death and therefore understands his voyage as a defiant gesture towards the gods. Even as a politician, who purports to impart progressive and evolutionary laws to a ‘savage race’, he is rather questionable; his very 107 Culler 1977, 92ff. 108 Cf. T. S. Eliot, in his essay on Dante (1929). Arnold too had maintained that Dante had a superior level of ‘simplification’, while Tennyson, like the majority of the ‘great poets’, for Eliot had to turn to some degree of ‘forcing’. 109 Cf. above, n. 106.

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departure is, after all, an abdication, for he despairs at his ability to complete his civilizing mission. Because of this Ulysses was not even politically a useful model for the times. He embodies an extremism unknown to his son Telemachus, who possesses the ‘slow prudence’ to finish the job. Telemachus is moderate, perfectly socialized, responsible, while Ulysses is the first to call himself mad. The two have a very cold relationship and have established a precise division of labour. Ulysses is an unbeliever and a challenger, Telemachus pious and practising. 4. Thus, within the monologue itself, Telemachus and Ulysses offset one another; and outside the poem the quiet and languid Tithonus and above all King Arthur are further contrasting instances. In ‘Morte d’Arthur’ Arthur, as we shall see discussing Idylls of the King, also places the focus on the question of action and completes a voyage of a spiritual type, and guided by faith. He leaves a strange legacy, consisting almost of a contradictory invitation to an active renunciation of the world – a lifting of ‘hands in prayer’. The relationship with the world could even, thus, lead to denying it, and inaction consist not only in indulgence in pleasure but also in voluntary withdrawal, and the ivory tower of the artist be also that of the ascetic. The monologue ‘St Simeon Stylites’ – which unfolds in a crescendo of ever more disgusting, inhuman, paroxysmal details, and tells of the achievement of ever higher attainments of sanctity, in its confused, hyperbolic and delirious rambling – allows multiple and ambiguous interpretations. It extols renunciation but it can also be read as approving Victorian equilibrium e contrario, that is like the rejection of that religious frenzy which Browning was also investigating in that period. Tennyson’s contemporaries, Hunt among them, read the poem as satirical, and some sources tell us that Tennyson recited it with grimaces and grotesque snarls and even Homeric laughter, in order to highlight a certain ‘Brechtian’ detachment from the figure of the saint. The monologue remains unique in Tennyson’s production, at least until the later poetry of the 1880s, because after that almost systematically he was to give the genre a lyrical imprint. Tennyson’s impassioned interview with a God who is a mute interlocutor, deaf as well as absconditus, and the confrontation between the saint and those who are rewarded more than he, despite leading a less saintly (indeed a quite sinful) life, predate Hopkins without dissipating, in the voice of

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the saint, a pharisaic vein typical of Browning’s charlatans. St Simeon is a spiritual social climber, consumed by the thought of the crown of holiness; he gets lost in the sublime heights of faith and of purely verbal asceticism, but secretly his thoughts are turned to earth and to his goal. The close of the monologue is a delirium of coronation. The poem, inspired by the sceptical account of Gibbon, together with an earlier, brief poem about St Lawrence (which was left published) inaugurates Victorian martyrological poetry.110 With a leap forward of fifty years, this saint will merge with Wilde’s Jokanaan in Salome, where we find an analogous linguistic orgy, an analogous pleasure in martyrdom, and an analogous ‘Medusa’ beauty and a ‘Romantic’ fascination with the horrid. 5. Awareness of sin links the monologue of St Simeon to ‘The Vision of Sin’, while it also suggests the theme of longing for death found in many of Tennyson’s intimate poems. The initial question, although raised by a Catholic saint, reflects a point of Calvinistic theology: moral baseness, the slavery to sin for which St Simeon blames himself, almost make of him a damned soul, predestined to eternal damnation. But it is equally true that only God can take away sin and permit him to aspire to sainthood, which means nothing other than salvation. The first paragraph of the monologue is an example of that skilful and even perverse rhetoric that English Protestants frequently attributed to Catholics, Jesuits in particular: it is a mass of contradictions and deductions that do not stand up to scrutiny, ranging from the awareness of being ‘the basest of mankind’ to that of being ‘superhuman’, and an example of that unachievable state proper only to God’s elect. Hyperbole reigns supreme: the baseness claimed is exaggerated and almost denied, because his very self-punishment is in itself a great mark of sanctity. The self-styled boundless humility and the sense of abjection combine with the self-satisfaction of imminent sainthood and the future veneration to be obtained from his adorers, which anticipates the worldly vanity of Browning’s bishop at Saint Praxed’s.111 Life on the pillar is yet another disguise for the solipsistic life of the soul

110 R 152. Thirty years later Hopkins was to write a poem on the same saint. 111 § 116.2.

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in the palace, a palace now labelled as ‘the / Home of sin’. From above, the saint sings a solitary song to himself; his deafness augments his separation from and indifference to the world, because he rejects those who would reintegrate him into society, and also the comforts of life and the warmth of the hearth. The life of the saint, in his own words, has always been an ever bolder progression towards the solitary life and the distancing himself from the world: first in a convent, then alone on a mountain, in order to be in closer contact with God; finally at the top of ever higher pillars. Thus the monologue examines, and questions, a new and equally damnable form of solipsism. 6. Inaction could be conquered or sublimated in contemplation, which was, according to a certain point of view, a type of vicarious action of the metaphysical sort. Kindred figures to St Simeon, and further martyrological hypostases, are Sir Galahad and St Agnes, though treated (especially in the latter case) with skin-deep Pre-Raphaelite grace. Galahad’s heroism is greeted with cascades of flowers showered upon him by ladies and maidens. Tennyson was interested in the idea of mysticism, the renouncing of the flesh and of the world in the palace of faith, and followed (above all with curiosity) the mirage and the fascination of asceticism, as will be seen more clearly in Idylls of the King. Galahad is a pure-hearted knight who fights for a glory and a goal which are both otherworldly and unattainable. The God who reveals himself between the clouds and the mountains is almost a disappointing teaser who prolongs the knight’s quest ad infinitum, as occurs in Browning’s ‘Childe Roland’, while informing him that he must continue to ride although his destination is near. In both poems the negative collateral effect of an already unsuccessful asceticism is the extinction of eroticism. The superhuman force of Galahad, displayed in orgasmic imagery – his sword that penetrates the hardest steel of helmets – comes from his purity, the curbing of his instincts, the sacrifice of his sexual energy. Although not indifferent to the sweetness of feminine smiles, his heart is turned towards Heaven, and he has never held the hand of a girl; upon completing his knightly feats he escapes to the woods to pray, making his legacy an otherworldly, even anti-worldly, one. His is the same activism of prayer as that with which King Arthur takes his leave of the world.

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§ 88. Tennyson up to 1874 XV: The 1842 poems III. ‘Locksley Hall’ and other poems about crossed lovers Explicit poems later eliminated by Tennyson in his definitive editions, camouflaged anecdotes and morbid ‘metaphysical’ rhapsodies on ‘the name of the rose’, reflected his unrequited passion for Rosa Baring. They also portray his bitter disappointment, which like the later death of Hallam was destined to echo strongly throughout his poetry. Set aside for a few years, it was to be objectified, some years later, in Maud. This is one of the reasons why love, in this collection, usually ends in desperation, either frustrated or crushed, or else it is a love realized and enjoyed only in dreams; and it is also one of the reasons why we have a complete overturning of the situation on which many of Tennyson’s earlier poems had focused. It is now the man rather than the woman who has been abandoned by his beloved. At the same time, there increasingly looms up a new type of woman along the lines of Emily Sellwood, the pious and weak peasant, self-sacrificing and submissive, and a victim of parental or spousal pride and of the superficial blunders of men. The prototypes include Lady Clare, or Ellen Adair of ‘Edward Gray’ and above all Dora of the idyll of the same title. These poems remain situated between realistic verisimilitude and the use of the exotic or more exactly mythological filter or disguise. 2. A first draft of ‘Locksley Hall’ dated back to 1835, before the end of Tennyson’s relationship with Rosa Baring; it was then completed in monotonous rhyming distichs between 1837 and 1838, when Rosa made public her engagement to another man, definitively dashing any hopes Tennyson had had. The poet wisely attributed a paradigmatic value to the poem, as of ‘longings, weaknesses, virtues’ of youth, and hid the personal aspects of it behind a veil of filters and literary echoes, presenting himself as an Eastern immigrant, orphaned by a valorous father killed in battle. Tennyson’s inaction here is that of nostalgia and recollection: the protagonist turns in fact to his ‘comrades’ that they may leave him alone to sing of his pain of a betrayed and abandoned lover. His entreaty, ‘Leave me here’, is a direct echo of that of the lotus eaters landing on the island of oblivion in a previous poem. Like Ulysses, the protagonist, who once again takes up the ‘mask of age’, is an old commander, now alone, who turns to his companions, and at the height of his desperation would like to ‘burst

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all links of habit’ and ‘wander far away, / On from island unto island at the gateways of the day’. This repeats and reworks that internal archetype first presented in ‘The Lover’s Tale’: married to another at the command of her father, the beloved – Amy, yet another cousin – not only breaks his heart but also destroys his trust in history, the world, and even life itself. As always Tennyson is a master of the poetic outpourings of emotion, and the character’s regret flows forth in a reliving of the events, turning so to speak the knife in the wound, but also probing to the depths both what happened and what might have been. As if anticipating Proust, the speaker wonders if happiness consists in the capacity to compartmentalize one’s memory, that is, to hate the Amy wed to another yet love that woman who once loved him but no longer exists. The second part of the monologue is aimed, as in ‘The Lover’s Tale’, but with greater difficulty, to recover a lost balance and that optimism and positivistic pride found looking at the world of work, commerce and industry. Salvation could only come from the distracting force of action, best if war action, and action for a good cause and the defence of liberty and common values: ‘I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair’. For a moment the speaker is conquered by Victorian utopianism, caught in a regenerative dream of a world federation, immediately shattered, however, by the return of the thought of his heartbreak. The poem closes with a rapid sequence of imaginary solutions, simultaneous but also abysmally opposite, and of frenetic emotional reversals. His scandalous reverie of a free sexuality enjoyed with a beautiful ‘savage’ is immediately contradicted and repressed; he then dreams of reverting to the intimately amoral state of the beasts, but again proceeds to a belated, somewhat insincere renunciation and apparently embraces respectability. The last word is a strained, hypocritical self-encouragement, as he proclaims himself ready to remain within the ranks of society. 3. One would hardly think Tennyson was also the author of exemplary anecdotes of vibrant, mutual love, making for the most perfect of happy marriages; their surroundings and protagonists had the vivacious and plausible colours of rural Lincolnshire, even though the more personal and autobiographical details are always hidden or disguised, only to appear from time to time in brief flashes. ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’ is an optimistic disguising, in somewhat unsuccessful Romantic terms, of two ill-fated

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courtships, one (that of Hallam for Emily Tennyson) ending in tragedy, the other of Tennyson himself for Rosa Baring. It constitutes an obvious domestication of earlier motifs previously found in symbolic concentration, but here sweetened and made anecdotal. The house where the gardener’s daughter lives, and where two young painters arrive on a beautiful May day, is a new, virtually unrecognizable version of the deserted house of Mariana and of the lady of Shalott. ‘Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite / Beyond it’ lies the house, even if one sees the bell towers of the city faintly in the distance and if noises – like those of weddings and funerals on the isle of Shalott – are heard but only muffled. In a different and yet familiar English context, made up of linden trees and grazing cattle, the poem again suggests the motif of the barrier between an inner, solipsistic life and the world, the latter symbolized by a ‘league of grass’ crossed by a river, where languid rowboats leisurely pass by, and on whose shores wave ‘lazy lilies’. The shapes of the towers appear far away, but they are not those of Camelot but of the church. The gardener’s daughter, lovely and shapely, has a reserved, phlegmatic nature, vaguely ethereal compared to that of previous Tennysonian heroines: she remains distant from the looks of the men, ‘hoarded in herself ’, and like the lady of Shalott she seems almost to have become the subject of a local myth. The encounter between the two friends and Rose happens by surprise, while she, reminiscent of Mariana whose pears had fallen to the ground because of the rusty nails, is intent on putting back a rose bush blown away by the wind, from which however she cuts a rose which, with a slightly icy reserve, she gives to the first suitor before leaving. The poem happily ends with the gratification of a wedding, and this is the most obvious element of discontinuity with the tragic idyll so common among the Romantics, at the same time as it reverses ‘The Lover’s Tale’, even if the lover, before falling in love, is one of Tennyson’s pessimists and nihilists: an ‘empty heart’ turned towards the ‘shores of nothing’. A most concentrated happy ending is also found in ‘Lady Clare’, whose lovers are, or are believed to be, two cousins. 4. ‘English Idylls’ is how Tennyson classified several poems consisting of scenes and characters drawn from daily life, touching or sentimental anecdotes, parables like that of ‘Dora’, exemplifying peasant self-denial in the tradition of contemporary novelists like Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell or

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even Hardy. Some of these compositions have happy endings, and democratically advocate marriages between the classes. ‘Ladies’ only in name, like ‘Lady Clara Vera De Vere’, contradict and indeed dishonour their nobility by sadistically disillusioning their victims, who are almost always inexpert farmers. Instead, young and untamed country women demonstrate their truly noble natures and their rectitude, as in ‘Lady Clare’. The speaker in ‘Locksley Hall’ loses his beloved because she is given to another in an economically advantageous arranged marriage, and curses a system based on wealth: ‘Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys’. ‘Lady Clare’ is woven around a case of mistaken identity concerning the daughters of a count and of a governess; once the mistake is revealed this does not prevent the lord from marrying the ‘exchanged’ daughter and their love is in fact strengthened. In ‘The Lord of Burleigh’ a lord pretends to be a painter and in so doing wins the heart of a peasant girl, whom he marries and carries off to his castle where upon her death she is mourned by everyone. Several of these poems are dialogic, rather than dramatic monologues, the dialogue being better suited to give the illusion of immediacy, and of a vivid, unedited, direct rendering of the speech of common people, so disorganized that it often verges on idle chatter or is centred on the most recent news or on politics (often the First Reform Bill).112 The most characteristic exemplification of this dialogical vein is in ‘Walking to the Mail’, which recaptures the half-baked arguments, the inexhaustible verve, the blunders, the linguistic idiosyncrasies and the maxims of rural wisdom of two country folk on their way to meet the mail. The best of these English dialogic idylls is ‘The Talking Oak’, with its wealth of masterful and unsurpassed humorous and witty elements and effects of anthropomorphized nature that recall Wilde. The question that Walter – who reminds the reader of Shakespeare’s Orlando in As You Like It – asks of the talking oak, which is 112 Ambitious, but ultimately unsuccessful, ‘Will Waterproof ’s Lyrical Monologue’ is a ramshackle rhapsody in which a drunkard poet delivers in a tavern an impromptu ars poetica of his own but also a political credo which in its Toryism is decidedly Tennysonian. Tennyson comes here very close to Browning, yet he only manages a pale imitation of the optimistic, slightly superficial, self-satisfied blathering that filters through Pippa Passes.

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found in a heavenly scented wood just outside the borders of the smokeshrouded city, is whether another woman more beautiful than his Olivia has ever come to take shade from the sun beneath its boughs. The oak reassures him and with delight tells the lover about the last time Olivia passed by. In the humorous continuation of the dialogue the oak (male in gender) unknowingly arouses the jealousy of the lover, who suddenly grows dark. When asked whether his beloved had seen her name carved into the bark of the tree, the oak responds that her kiss and her tears had moved him to the point of feeling a shiver through his senses. Kissing the name carved by her beloved, the woman had in fact kissed the oak, who now in old age remembers and misses his youthful loves. An almost Popian, Rococo or Marinist episode is the sensual play of the mischievous sunrays filtering through the branches and the leaves of the oak and lighting on the face and the body of the sleeping girl. Even more mischievous, the oak awakens her by dropping an acorn between her breasts; she tosses it away without offending the oak. Desperate, the oak tree begs the youth to kiss the acorn again and again, so that his heat might hatch the ‘baby-oak within’. All that is left to the youth is to make the best of a bad situation, promising that the engagement will be formalized in the shade of the oak’s branches, and that acorns will adorn the bride on their wedding day. 5. Other such-like fairy tales in verse are at times less accessible due to sibylline, rather forced allusions to political or contemporary events. The warning contained in ‘The Goose’ is the need to maintain the status quo, recently threatened by the extension of franchise, by Chartism and by the Anti-Corn Law League: in essence, the moral was that the poor should remain poor. In that poem the elderly woman, receiving the miraculous goose, finds herself the possessor of riches she cannot manage, which leads her to cease working and even to damage the community. Her sudden and inexplicable pride hides the elevation of her social status; at the end, the exasperated woman is ready to wring the goose’s neck, and thus the foreigner who bestowed it upon her comes to take it back. The moral fable of the well-fed – indeed overfed – blackbird who refuses to sing also illustrates the maxim that ‘plenty corrupts the melody’, or that the song which the world expects for sheer pleasure will have to be sung out of mere need. ‘Lady Godiva’ is yet another reversal of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, with her damsel

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who is no longer exhausted and solipsistic but capable of healthy activism against oppression; she leaves the palace, yet now without any impending threat of death, indeed as a herald of a better and more lawful way of life. Tennyson completely expurgated the prurient elements of the story: no one dares to violate the prohibition against looking at her, the only peeping Tom being punished with blindness, while the only glances admitted are the completely innocent ones given by inanimate nature. Within the frame of the story Tennyson pauses democratically on the bench at Coventry station ‘with grooms and porters’. ‘The Day-Dream’, a variation on the theme of Sleeping Beauty in several sections, and one of his most delightful poems as far as its narrative is concerned, includes in its frame a series of worried allusions to the clouds darkening over the present time. 6. The more overtly political poems of the 1842 collection, including one which greets Victoria, on the occasion of her ascent to the throne as Queen of the Isles in 1836, are principally concerned with the same theme focused upon in ‘Lady Godiva’, the end of the age of heroism and true patriotism, and the need to treasure the glorious examples of English history. In ‘Love Thou Thy Land’ the ethic code of the politician and of the modern reformist, contradicting the positivistic belief of a continuous progress, specifically hinges on a patriotism that acts on the lessons of the past in the present, aiming to ‘instil’ them in future generations through the ‘power of thought’. The allegory of ‘The Goose’ is confirmed by a very cautious and even suspicious view of democracy: the masses must not be deceived, fed with ‘crude imaginings’, nor must they receive direct access to power. Tennyson’s political agenda was still the same as that expounded in the 1832 collection: his politician must possess moderation, spread knowledge and favour liberty,113 yet tempered by reverence; he must combat prejudice yet with gentle words. A veritable, persistent fear of revolution and violent change made Tennyson a fervent advocate of the law of ‘small steps’ and ‘gradation’. Peace was to be preserved as long as possible, in the awareness 113 The extension of freedom was to be bestowed, not conquered. However, Tennyson did not include the American war for independence among the rebellions (R 237) which had been fought in perfect accordance with the principles which the English themselves had always supported, as with John Hampden against Charles I.

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that principles are sometimes soaked in blood and that to defend them one must be prepared to bear arms. Tennyson was thus not surprised that he should be able to ‘survive’ in a nation like England (R 195): the country’s rich history gave him enough of a guarantee, filled as it was with luminous examples of defence of the truth, of respect for minorities and of a lack of sectarianism. This was, too, an indirect response to the many English exiles, some of them for political reasons. § 89. Tennyson up to 1874 XVI: ‘The Princess’ I. Reformist mediation and chauvinistic feminism Tennyson himself was the first to express disappointment over The Princess (1847–1853). This was the poem on current events which both the former ‘Apostles’, the reviewers and contemporary readers expected from him, and to it he attended without any real conviction, painfully aware that if he wanted to ‘make any mark at all’, it would have to be ‘by shortness’.114 His dissatisfaction grew with each edition of the five115 that were prepared to satisfy himself and above all his reviewers who had in a way ‘commissioned’ the piece. But with each revision, aimed at resolving the shortcomings of the poem, he essentially made them worse. The inspiration for The Princess can be traced in the debate raging at the time over the emancipation of women, but it was mainly drawn from its literary reverberations, from J. S. Mill’s pamphlets, or from slightly previous works of fiction. In the poem, a young princess refuses her betrothed husband in order to found a girls’ university college; but she will eventually follow her heart, returning to the more traditional role of wife and mother. The Princess came after four collections of short lyrics, but although it undoubtedly represents a turning point in Tennyson’s career, it does not abandon

114 Memoir, I, 166. 115 The first in 1847 was soon followed by a second at the beginning of 1848 which included only minor stylistic changes. In the third, 1850 edition, the poem was instead considerably revised, and interludes were added between the seven main sections. In the fourth edition (1851) Tennyson added the sections that refer to the prince’s cataleptic attacks. The text followed in all the late and more recent editions of the poem is the fifth, published in 1853.

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the former aesthetics and indeed remains indebted to at least two of the fundamental subgenres of the 1842 collection: the idyll and the fable. In Tennyson’s canon The Princess marks a consolidation and expansion of the process of conventionalization and domestication of many formerly irresolvable conflicts, now resolved, or perhaps one should say exorcised, in a miraculous, fairy-tale-like happy ending. Once again providing an example of both political and social unification, Tennyson uses the framework of the poem to voice his support for English isolationism, conservative and anti-French, and for an enlightened monarchy; furthermore, he envisions a ‘future man’, a family man who fits perfectly into society, and as in the English idylls he extols the familiar microcosm which was for him at the basis of national unity. With the marital union of the prince and the princess Tennyson welcomes the arrival of a new ‘type’, the progenitor or an intermediate link of that ‘crowning race of humankind’. This is a literal echo of the evolutionary debate in In Memoriam. ‘The peace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her’:116 the last two editions of the poem came out when Tennyson was already married, and we may conjecture that the passages relating to the cataleptic and trance-like states of the prince were only inserted to prove the action of the fulfilling and harmonising power of love, and to show the symbolic healing of intermittent, almost sleepwalking states of separation from reality. The Princess thus marks a further distancing of Tennyson from solipsistic and visionary Romanticism. 2. Both in the prologue and the epilogue he has his internal narrators discuss the genre of their narrative, whose hybrid character was reflected in, indeed confessed by, the subtitle ‘A medley’ which Tennyson added. He explained it later by the image of the ‘strange diagonal’, or rather of the blend of elements – at once sentimental and humorous, epic and mockheroic, as well as decidedly comic – which he considered unsatisfactory and that he feared would also disappoint his readers. But the word ‘medley’ also hints at least at two other things here: the insertion of purely lyrical counterpointed interludes and other songs placed between the separate

116 Memoir, I, 239.

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sections, and the passing of the torch between narrators, seven modern English university students gathered at the country residence of the father of one of the group, on a day on which the farmstead has been opened to the public until sunset. The heart of the poem is thus, according to this illusion, an oral retelling of a story by various speakers, which originates as a bet and unfolds like a game: the question is whether it is possible in modern times for there to exist true masculine and above all true feminine heroism, comparable to that of the great warriors of the past, whose deeds are immortalized in the heirlooms and statues which adorn the halls of the dwelling.117 The link between the two stories, the frame story and its core tale, is highlighted by the petulant Lilia, who in the prologue claims resolutely and proudly that there are great numbers of present-time heroines, and that only ‘convention beats them down’.118 The young girl is Tennyson’s first feminist, later reflected in Princess Ida of the internal story: she pushes away the paternalistic hand that touches her curls and denounces the inveterate tradition that insists on the subordinate status of women, claiming they are ‘twice as quick’; if she could, she adds, she would found a college just for women where they could learn everything taught at colleges for men. The fairy-tale-like tone of the story of the princess becomes almost immediately apparent in the weak if not inexistent psychological exploration, in its over-studied construction and its improbable symmetries. Two caricatured versions of kings, one ready to explode in completely innocuous rage, the other utterly placid and not at all regal, are the fathers of the two protagonists; the nameless blond prince also has two friends, the brazen Cyril and Florian, who help him to win back Princess Ida, who in turn also has two, very fragile, collaborators, Blanche and Psyche, the latter being the sister of Cyril. Psyche and Melissa, the daughter of the shrewish Blanche, fall easily and fatefully for the companions of the prince, opening

117 This is the question which Tennyson asks himself in ‘Lady Godiva’, in his political poems and even in the English idylls. Psyche’s lesson, which the prince hears at the university for women, contains an example of the Creation sub specie foeminae, the presiding spirits being Sappho, Joan of Arc and Queen Elizabeth. 118 This is, verbatim, a repetition of what is said by the anonymous speaker of ‘Locksley Hall’.

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the way for the final denouement. Naturally this occurs only after many difficulties and plot twists; indeed, at first destiny seems to be against the plans of the prince, who presents himself in disguise with his two friends at Ida’s university119 and is almost immediately recognized and arrested. It is only because her father has been taken hostage by the rival king that Princess Ida agrees to merely expel him from the university; only because he had saved her while she was sliding over a cliff does she first give the order not to kill him and then take him to her palace, by then semi-deserted, to tend to his injuries sustained in the battle against her brother, in which the prince was defeated. Ida surrenders to the prince when victory is at hand, only because she herself has backtracked. She sees that her desire to eradicate love from woman as well as her sentiments, considering these solely a female attribute, was sheer madness. Indeed, she had not reckoned on her own error, or rather her own carelessness: the presence at the university of Psyche’s little child, Aglaia, whom Ida confesses to having pampered and cuddled in bed, and whom, now far from her unfaithful mother, she clasps tightly to her neck. Thus it is not erotic but rather maternal love which inspires her repentance, which will be complete with the reuniting of Aglaia and her legitimate mother, and above all with the transformation of the university into a hospital. The happy ending is set in motion both thanks to evident structural improbabilities (who are the fathers of Aglaia and Melissa, and how were they conceived? Psyche must be a widow, in order that Cyril may legitimately wed her), and because of very human contradictions that fracture the overly rigid feminist agenda, which does not take natural female vulnerabilities into consideration. The tone is also mixed: the speeches of the single characters are often stilted and, as in the case of Ida, excessively pedantic; but there are also delightful variations of register and inflexion, as in the speeches of Ida’s brother Arac, the ‘genial giant’ who speaks in a rough military slang. 3. The fable-engendered familiarization and the disguised romance element were among the factors that led to scathing criticism of the poem from Barrett Browning, FitzGerald and Carlyle, and that, conversely, 119 From a tense atmosphere the poem moves abruptly to a comic one, with a typical theatrical quip: ‘are the ladies of your land so tall?’

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made it Tennyson’s first major success with the public and gained him a popularity which resisted even decades after publication. The Princess, however, was eventually included in the list of Tennyson’s faux pas after the 1842 collection, which literary critics compiled reflecting changed twentieth-century taste (the late parody by Gilbert and Sullivan, Princess Ida, of 1884, may be viewed, like all parodies, as an indirect appreciation). The lordly manor where the story takes place, described in detail in the prologue, was a place where the average reader could instantly find his bearings and feel at home, as it evoked to him the familiar air of those Victorian mansions filled to bursting with objects of the most varied taste, one could even say kitsch, decorated in accordance with the questionable standards of mishmash and bric-à-brac.120 To reach the women’s academy one passes through a neoclassical cloister of friezes and fountains which is at the same time a thinly disguised reincarnation of the Tennysonian palace of art, adorned with statues and portraits of ancient figures. It is also a distant but recognizable imitation of the neoclassical architecture of Trinity College Cambridge. Its organizational and teaching practices are modelled on those of the colleges for men. Ida exalts but at the same time vulgarizes the spirit of activism espoused by Tennyson’s Ulysses, exhorting her pupils to lofty and noble goals and even using the metaphor of ‘thirst’ for knowledge.121 Psyche’s first lesson – an extremely curious and atypical teacher, a confident brunette who brings her adorable daughter to the classroom – is a candid, whirlwind summary of evolution, from the primordial fluid up to the appearance of humanity still bearing apelike traits. She echoes Ulysses when she claims that the brain ‘gr[ows] with using’. Blanche, Ida’s other indispensable helper, is won to the cause of the three youths through a parodic satanic temptation, that is presenting to them the mirage of secular power: she will be restored to her role of university founder and will receive the needed material donations. If nothing else, 120 Pitt 1962, 140–1. 121 Ida tolerates the music which sweetens her repose at the beginning of the fourth part, but only as an innocent weakness, and one which she will immediately repress, evoking the metaphorical image of the Homeric sirens by saying that she ought to ‘cram’ her ears ‘with wool’ to resist its seduction.

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in the fourth part Blanche proclaims her equal status with Ida as the creator of the women’s university project; she thus reveals her repression and frustration, and, like Lucifer, is banished from ‘paradise’. Tennyson’s motif of the abandoned lover is tempered and pleasantly nuanced in light fairytale-like variations, in that the prince, who ultimately wins the hand of the repentant princess, refrains from lengthy and inconclusive emotional outpourings, and reacts intelligently and with an enterprising spirit. The passion of this prince differs radically from that of earlier Tennysonian heroes and alter egos, is much more self-controlled and far less morbid and morbidly paralysing.122 4. With The Princess Tennyson joined the cause of tame, early Victorian feminism, radicalizing its implications and then testing them, to ultimately demonstrate their impracticality. That women could manage without men was, for Tennyson, both a utopian and an insane idea, if for no other reason than the fact that society worked better when there was collaboration between the sexes, founded on reciprocal respect and on the division of labour since time immemorial. Doubtless this provided a convenient loophole for reformers to justify maintaining the status quo apart from a few insignificant changes. Tennyson stigmatizes the current petty, exploitative, even sadistic chauvinism in the figure of Ida’s father, a king who encourages the prince to ‘break her’ like a horse, or in the figure of the other king, the father of the prince, who proudly affirms that ‘the man is the hunter; woman is his game’. But Tennyson does then not contest the code of chivalry according to which the woman loves the man who returns triumphant, bearing trophies: ‘Man for the field and woman for the hearth […] The bearing and the training of a child / Is woman’s wisdom’. The poem teaches that women must be, or must go back to being, mothers and nurses, and that their femininity is reduced or destroyed in any competition with men, but instead fully realized in the institution of the family, and in their love for husband and child. When the absurd renunciation is removed, suddenly the femininity of the women-mothers-nurses is fully 122 Tennyson even has him criticize the sugary sweetness and pathos of the heroine at the beginning of part four, elements which at that date were already proverbially ‘Tennysonian’.

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valued, enhanced, and empowered; Ida becomes a real woman when she kisses her prince (‘And [he] left her woman’). The destiny of women, surely perfectible, was thus not that of a separation from but of a collaboration with man, in the only way in which Tennyson could see a possibility for equal dignity and equal rights: ‘the Woman’s cause is man’s […] they rise or sink together […] For woman is not undeveloped man, / But diverse […] not like to like, but like in difference’.123 To enact this it would have been enough for man to do his small part, to repent of the small sins of egotism and authoritarianism of which he was guilty. The need for healthy problem-solving action is confirmed by Tennyson in the seventh part of the poem where Ida, in a foreshadowing of George Eliot’s Romola, puts an end to her lucubrations, and, curing the wounded, rediscovers inner peace. More pessimistically, for Tennyson a solely female society could never resist because human nature of any sex was corruptible. The experiment of the female community is doomed to end up in crisis both because it is impossible to eradicate ‘womanly’ and thus ipso facto human feelings, and also because it must necessarily and paradoxically be modelled on, or in any case spoiled by the same chauvinism. The pernicious worm of sectarianism, in fact, infiltrates the community, along with typically male favouritism, jealousy, and envy. Only Ida remains Promethean until the very last, in her resistance to both attacks and flattery. With an icy glare and solemn poise, she presents herself and is often portrayed like a secular Madonna who rests her foot on two tame leopards. But her mistake, like that of Lady Macbeth, is that of acting against her nature, of seeing in herself, or creating for herself, the ‘male nature’. 5. Tennyson, in other words, offers as models a feminized, almost effeminate man and a virile woman, who can supplement and substitute the two earlier Tennysonian types or alternatives, the femme fatale and the abandoned woman. Ida announces the active woman, often a wife, who acts for the good of society, a possessor of that authoritarian force which was a traditionally male attribute. It is a chance coincidence that both this figure and Hopkins’s Sister Gertrude in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ 123 Lilia, the young girl, also wishes to assert women’s otherness, but only to prove that women are like, or more precisely better than men.

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should have a specifically ‘leonine’ courage which will not shrink from risk or sacrifice, besides an innate capacity to subjugate cowards, in each case hushing the babelish complaints and towering over the ‘tumult’ and causing it to cease, the former looking over the battleground as the battle rages, the latter in the thick of the storm.124 However, Hopkins venerated a spirit of activism which in actual terms could even become a pure spirit of renunciation, and which Tennyson, despite having reflected it in the words of the dying King Arthur, was ultimately to reject as a sterile form of visionary mysticism, as will the majority of Victorians. Yet another opening, and one symbolic of the poetry of Tennyson and so frequent – that of the bronze doors, so that the women may go out to nurse the wounded – heralds new life rather than being a harbinger of death. Ida returns the little Aglaia to Psyche revealing all the frustrations of her desire for motherhood, like Oenone. The prince, contradicting his father’s bellicose and chivalric machismo, represents the dreamy, even mawkish, conciliatory, pacifist man, or Walter Pater’s ‘diaphanous’ type before the term even existed. 6. The prologue unfolds on the farmstead of a gentleman who very democratically opens his lands to the less fortunate, enacting a Disraelian collaboration between social classes, of course under the guidance of the aristocracy.125 This reinforces perfectly the central nucleus of the poem, and constitutes an evident form of correlation. In this park, Tennyson symbolically reunites the two guarantors of Victorian conservatism: the enlightened aristocrat and the ‘intelligent artisan’, virtuous and mildtempered. Before the story of the princess is set in motion, Tennyson, with a vivid and inspired overview, describes at length the phases of the celebration, in which in addition to the sharing of pleasure there is a sharing of knowledge, albeit with a pinch of self-importance on the part of aristocrats. Various pastimes blend with learning opportunities: water games, cannon 124 Maid Marian in The Foresters, Tennyson’s last play, also has ‘somewhat of the lioness in her’. 125 The festival was actually held in the gardens which surrounded the manor of Maidstone, the residence of the Lushingtons, one of whose sons was to marry Tennyson’s sister Cecilia.

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shots and echoing effects, telescopes, miniature train sets, models, a ‘fireballoon’ from which a parachutist drops. The context is that of the process of mass acculturation ‘generously’ launched by the ruling class, though the ‘culture’ which is bestowed is only pragmatic and technical. The group of students is also symbolic, representing a class preparing itself to inherit power and also to preserve intact their parents’ old ideology; Tennyson has them praise English stability and condemn the disturbances in France in 1848. As in all of his earlier political poems, he sides against any violent or ‘unreasonable’ change, favouring a centralism quite alien to any extremes. The poet had no doubt that the generation of the then twenty-year-old Cambridge students, of which he himself had recently been a part, could be the governing class of the future. § 90. Tennyson up to 1874 XVII: ‘The Princess’ II. The lyrical interludes and the intercalary songs The songs Tennyson inserted between the seven main parts of the poem were added during the revisions and new editions of the poem with a twofold albeit symptomatic aim, which was both mimetic and programmatic: they were to be sung by the young girls in order that the male narrators could rest, and in addition they were to ensure and monitor the attention and the comprehension of the reader. They constituted, indeed, the ‘best interpreters’ of the poem. Psyche’s young child Aglaia was, according to Tennyson himself, the real heroine of the poem, and all the six inserted songs are in fact connected to the theme of childhood, the glue that holds them together. Other songs can be found as early as the first edition, incorporated into the text and recited by the characters of the second story as interludes which interpret and comment upon the action, and in particular anticipate and lyricize the feelings of the protagonists. When the poem declined in popularity after its considerable initial success, the only parts left in anthologies and compilations were these lyrical gems. It is clear that both the intercalary songs and those incorporated in the poem constitute an aesthetic compensation if not a contradiction. They respond to a need for brevity which is nostalgically missed, and above all stop the action to provide moments of pure Sehnsucht, of enchanted meditation and contemplation, even bringing the reader back to the type

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of poetry first crafted by the young Tennyson, which had been resolved in an atmosphere of pure emotions and is sometimes an embroidery of pure sound. That they were immediately anthologized is the best demonstration that they can be extrapolated from the poem without difficulty and without at all harming their already minimal function as comments or links. They were in fact, for the most part, independent and occasional compositions, inspired by readings or by visits to picturesque natural areas, subsequently exploited in the poem. ‘The splendour falls’,126 between the third and fourth parts, was inspired by a visit to the Irish lake of Killarney and by the sound of the boatman’s horns, similar to the melancholy melody of the shepherd in Tristan und Isolde that Wagner took from the Venetian gondolier. ‘Come down, o maid’, which Ida sings to herself before giving in to love, describes the wonders of the Alpine hills of Switzerland; by the direct admission of Tennyson, the incorporated song ‘Tears, idle tears’ expands upon Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’. 2. The attention of critics, starting with a few pioneering microstructural analyses done in the early 1940s, has been particularly focused on some of the inserted songs, and aimed at demonstrating the problematic modernity of Tennyson according to the concepts – at that time almost binding – of irony and paradox. These early investigations indirectly acknowledged for the first time the unexplored though unintentional richness of Tennyson’s poetry. In ‘Tears, idle tears’ the American New Critics found ambiguities and paradoxes which for them proved an awareness of the contrary impulses that make up human experience, and therefore inexplicable and diametrically opposed elements, and at times semantic and symbolic incongruities of the type and of the flavour later found in

126 This song enacts a phonetic feat, the ‘leonine’ elegiac metre with which Tennyson had experimented in his first collection, consisting of a middle rhyme in alternating lines. The echoing effect of the horns is created by means of alliteration and actual repetition, in a triple refrain. In the third stanza, as the musical echoes fade, those of the lovers come to life, and, as if they were the finest musical instruments, undergo a crescendo which gains force as it passes uninterrupted from one soul to the other.

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twentieth-century ‘obscurity’.127 This lyric, they said, expresses all this in lines so phonetically and rhythmically elaborate that they appear to rhyme without truly doing so: it is an interweaving of ambiguous symbols of sadness experienced during cheerful events, the more so because they are contemplated from a distance. Hence there is a contradictory and apparently incongruent range of adjectives which culminates in the oxymoron of a ‘Death in Life’. The response to this lyric is a simpler one from the prince, in eight unrhymed tercets about a swallow as a messenger of love. The pair of hymns read by the princess as she watches over the wounded prince is the only case in which the song actually performs a proleptic function of suggestion. With the oriental decorations and the stylization of the ghazal the poet describes nature as actively desiring to reawaken and become satiated, with delicate images which depict the beginnings of the fulfilment of that desire, and lend themselves to subtly erotic nuances.128 Immediately afterwards, Ida reads a second hymn, the refined, imaginative, musical song of a shepherd who invites his young lady, cold and pale, to come down from the mountain. The bashful, cold young girl is the epitome of the Tennysonian damsel closed off in her palace or arbour, that palace which was first a solipsistic palace of art, and which is now abandoned in order to go and live, in this case too, in a cottage ‘in the valley’. § 91. Tennyson up to 1874 XVIII: ‘In Memoriam’* I. Genesis and organization On 15 September 1833 Tennyson’s dearest friend and classmate, Arthur Henry Hallam, suddenly passed away at the tender age of twenty-two in *

An edition of the poem with all the variants contained in the manuscripts, and with copious commentary, is edited by S. Shatto and M. Shaw, Oxford 1982. All reference works on Tennyson cited in the general bibliography contain a chapter on In Memoriam. E. B. Mattes, ‘In Memoriam’: The Way of a Soul, New York 1951; K. W. Gransden, Tennyson: ‘In Memoriam’, London 1964; J. D. Hunt, Tennyson: ‘In

127 Cf., in Killham 1960, the essays by C. Brooks, ‘The Motivation of Tennyson’s Weeper’ (177–85), by G. Hough, ‘“Tears, idle tears”’ (186–91), and by L. Spitzer, ‘“Tears, idle tears” Again’ (192–203). 128 Sinfield 1986, 81; Tucker 1988, 370.

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Vienna, where he had gone on a holiday with his father. The cause was a cerebral haemorrhage. His body was transported by ship to England via Trieste and then interred in the cemetery of Clevedon at the source of the Severn. The son of a distinguished historian, educated at Eton, Hallam was not merely known as the charismatic leader of the group of the Cambridge ‘Apostles’, but was also a poet and a precocious intellectual, a true ‘star’ of Trinity (as Hopkins would be of Balliol at Oxford) to whom everyone predicted a glorious future. In addition, he was a great admirer of the poetry of Tennyson as well as a highly esteemed advisor. They were soon to have become brothers-in-law, as Hallam was engaged to marry Tennyson’s sister, Emily.129 The paralysing force of his profound pain overcame Tennyson, who was initially inconsolable. Tennyson the man only managed to recover when as a poet he began to distil and objectivize the pain in very short compositions that avoided any celebratory emphasis.130 He began In Memoriam, his greatest and most private poem, which eventually became a true spiritual breviary for an entire generation of his peers, in 1833, immediately after Hallam’s death, having no intention to expand it into a sequence or publish it. As he wrote them, Tennyson shared the lyrics with friends and his future wife Emily, to whom we owe the title; even in 1850, when he decided to put them in order for publication, he had only six copies printed, anonymously and with an indecipherable set of initials, A. H. H., in place of the name of his deceased friend.131 Hallam’s Memoriam’: A Casebook, London 1970; A. Sinfield, The Language of Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’, Oxford 1971; T. Peltason, Reading ‘In Memoriam’, Princeton, NJ 1985; A. Barton, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’, Edinburgh 2012. A. C. Bradley, A Commentary on Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’, London 1902 (revised edns 1907, 1930) remains useful. 129 As already mentioned, a joint volume of poetry was also supposed to be published in 1830, with the title Poems of Two University Students, but it was forbidden by Hallam’s father. It eventually came out as Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, only authored by Tennyson. 130 Tennyson needed to distance himself to gain perspective, as he wrote paradoxically on 14 February 1834 (L I, 108) to Hallam’s father: ‘I find the object is too near me to permit of any very accurate delineation’. 131 Anonymity led to involuntarily comical results: one reviewer took In Memoriam to be a poem composed by a military widow.

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death, which had already cast a shadow over the collection of 1842, soon became the irradiating centre for much, if not all of Tennyson’s poetry, up to and including Idylls of the King. Nonetheless, only the fact that the completed version of the poem dates to 1850 can lead one to believe that Tennyson had suddenly repudiated the type of poetry exemplified by The Princess: if instead we examine the time span over which the poem grew and was drafted, we see that the period is almost identical for both The Princess and In Memoriam. Thus it appears clear that Tennyson worked on them in parallel and consequently was weighing the two alternative – and conflicting – styles or ‘voices’ represented in the poems. In a way, the voices were irreconcilably different, although as we shall see the public voice is not completely abolished in In Memoriam, nor is the private one silent in The Princess. ‘Private sorrow’, a pain as sharp and profound as that felt by the poet, inevitably relegated even the most dramatic public emergencies to the back of his mind.132 Tennyson had acquired enough detachment to objectify himself in the fable of The Princess and to cultivate or begin to cultivate at the same time the poetry of inner, nagging thoughts, and in the first person used in his earlier collections.133 It was only the public use that was made of the poem, and its immediate and incredible success, which tilted the balance towards a particular type of public poetry, only partly based on personal experiences. 2. In fact, In Memoriam came out immediately afterwards, in the same year 1850, with a larger number of copies printed, and three other editions later followed, bearing witness to its rising popularity. Two exceptional readers and recipients of the poem instinctively proclaimed its educational and paradigmatic value for the public. These lyrics were the key to winning back Emily Sellwood’s heart, for they denied the untraditional 132 Cf. no. XXI, where Tennyson voices, to refute them, possible objections to his song filled with thoughts turned towards the deceased: ‘Is this an hour / For private sorrow’s barren song, / When more and more the people throng / The chairs and thrones of civil power?’ Tennyson almost certainly alludes to the Chartist unrest. 133 No. CII hints at a youthful Calvinistic vein of ontological pessimism, seeing life ‘dashed with flecks of sin’. In the following section Tennyson again vows to himself to keep calm and restrain his instincts, and also scolds himself for his reckless, dissipated youth.

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and somewhat suspect religious views which had led her father to deny Tennyson her hand. Queen Victoria, in turn, confessed that thanks to her assiduous reading of the poem in the wake of the death of her husband, Prince Albert, she had found a great source of consolation and edification.134 Its proven therapeutic effects contributed in part to earning Tennyson the post of Poet Laureate soon afterwards. Either by coincidence or design In Memoriam came out in the exact midpoint of the century. At least in England, and up until the 1870s, it was the most representative poem of the age. In this period, prior to the advent of Decadentism and the second generation of Victorian poets, it left a mark of firm stoicism and of a faith which, while not always or completely Christian, was in any case ‘natural’. Far from being the ‘barren song’135 that Tennyson feared, it helped readers to face the difficulties of the moment. He maintained that In Memoriam was not an autobiography but should be interpreted as an allegorical ‘way of the soul’ along the lines of the Divine Comedy, a definition which was later echoed and subverted by the title of an anti-spiritualistic novel at the close of the century, The Way of All Flesh by Butler. It updates the tradition of the epicedium which originated in classical poetry and continued with Petrarch’s canzoniere on the death of Laura, and with Milton’s Lycidas as well as with Shelley’s Adonais, imbuing it with apprehensions that were widely shared. It was exactly for this reason that there had to be a ‘collective’ intention in writing the text, where the shattered self is slowly restored in its unity, and the proverbial two or more Tennysonian voices unite to become a single one, no longer broken or discordant, but harmonious. In 134 This was later the subject of an incomparable cartoon by Max Beerbohm, in which, in an immense, empty, deserted hall, an overexcited Tennyson recites In Memoriam arm held high, sprawled sloppily across a chair, to a solemn and distant Queen Victoria, who is staring at the portrait of Prince Albert towering over the mantelpiece. This bears witness to the popularity of the poem with illustrators (Hunt 1970, 31–2), as well as to the rapidity with which it manifested its public and paradigmatic value, soon becoming the target of satirists who, born in the Victorian age, were the first to attack Victorianism. 135 No. LXXVII sarcastically imagines the final, material destiny of a book of poetry and its ‘mortal lullabies of pain’, which perhaps will be used as wrapping paper, to cover a box, or even as a hair roller.

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a similar way the readership itself was the same ‘race’ that was the sender of the message. But the public usefulness of the poem does not consist merely in the generalized and proven effectiveness as spiritual and religious therapy. It shored up, linking back to The Princess, the institutions upon which Victorian society rested, and sang an optimistic hymn to celebrate the continuation of life through marriage and the family. Private sorrow gives way in the epilogue to a public celebration, the epicedium to the epithalamium: to face, overcome and successfully sublimate the ordeal of pain could also lead the nation to suddenly contemplate the problems of civil society from above, and even help it to glimpse a true regeneration on the horizon. Tennyson claimed to be fully convinced, at the end of In Memoriam, that from heaven Hallam could lavish those almost miraculous political gifts which during his brief stint on earth he had been able to show only partially; he guaranteed a future regeneration of the world. The Victorians actually believed that Tennyson, thanks to the power of his suffering and his acute and inconsolable sense of loss, had experienced an almost mystical, psychic contact with his late friend, and that he was passing on to them his superior knowledge, and was sharing the fruits of that awareness. 3. In the chorus of general approval a negative review of In Memoriam was penned in The Times, a year after its publication,136 by Manley Hopkins, the father of the Jesuit poet. Manley Hopkins could have applied many of his criticisms to the poetry of his own son had he taken the time read it, for he attacked a supposed Tennysonian ‘mannerism’ both in his lines of praise and of pain, claiming that these made the poem ‘not a memorial but a myth’. The attacks Hopkins Sr made on the poem’s obscurity and witticisms were even more ‘anti-Hopkinsian’ in spirit. In his role as British Consul General of the Hawaiian Islands, Manley Hopkins later sent Tennyson a letter137 in which he invited the poet to pay a yearly subscription of one pound; only Tennyson’s letter of response remains, Tennyson being a personal acquaintance of the Hawaiian Queen Emma. The post-Victorian reading of the 136 As stated by Shannon 1952, 156–8, following H. House. The salient bits of the review are reprinted by Hunt 1970, 100–12. 137 L III, 21.

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poem almost immediately focused on the dangerous separation between its thought content, rejected as a pointless and damaging deadweight, and the genuineness, albeit intermittent, of pure feeling. For T. S. Eliot, writing in 1936, In Memoriam was an ambiguous masterpiece to be savoured word for word, unlike The Princess, which, he noticed, was not perhaps worth a second reading. Eliot inaugurated a change of taste, and above all revealed a misunderstanding in the reading and interpretation of the poem. The Victorians had taken In Memoriam for a message of strength, failing to understand that it was also a tragic text, and that Tennyson wished to believe in something, but knew not what. Twentieth-century existentialism, along with Eliot, could not avoid the conclusion that the ‘faith’ of this poem was a ‘poor thing’ and its real and ‘intense experience’ that of ‘doubt’. 4. The question of unity and organization in In Memoriam was in fact controversial and much discussed from the very beginning. Its 131 lyrics could seem, as they did seem to some of the first readers, simply a disorganized accumulation of memories and variations pivoting on the figure of the deceased, though without disregarding the prologue and epilogue which Tennyson added shortly before having the poem printed. There have been indeed critics who recommend a selective and anthological reading of the work, implicitly denying that it has any organizational plan. Substantially there are two possible ways to interpret the organization of In Memoriam. One follows the various phases of the spiritual progress; the other, more external, relates to the seasonal or liturgical calendar. The time frame of In Memoriam, which does not follow or reproduce the succession with which the single poems were actually composed, spans the period between 1833 and 1842, from the death of Hallam to the wedding of Tennyson’s sister Cecilia to his friend Edmund Lushington, an event sung about in the epilogue. Rhythmically, Christmas recurs three times, followed by New Year’s Eve. But these two times do not coincide, at least not completely, and certainly not at the start: they are the cyclical time associated with the calendar, and the stagnant, zigzagging, even backtracking time of consciousness; two kinds of time and motion which are out of step with one another and sometimes in contrast and reciprocally alienating. Christmas and New Year’s three times in a row fail to produce any noticeable variations in mood, and we hear Tennyson petrified, locked in

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the same pain and resistant to the poetry of these two events, unable to appreciate the sense of promise and renewal which they hold.138 The poems dedicated to the anniversaries of Hallam’s death are conspicuous cases of a calendar time that marches on while the time of consciousness is still and paralysed. Even in nature time is out of sync with the time of mourning, because nature capriciously evoked joys for some and pain for others, or it was exuberant while it should have been pensive. Psychic divergence with respect to the seasonal and spiritual calendars is due to the way psychological association works, as Tennyson knew from the Romantics and particularly from Wordsworth. Many compositions spring from visits to familiar places which generate a peaceful, easy, fluid outpouring of memories, and these visits are intentional but sometimes unintentional: such is the revisiting the ‘dark house’ where his friend had lived, or the path they walked together, or Cambridge, the scene of many discussions, and the little wood of elms and sycamores.139 5. The unpredictable nature of consciousness and of psychic and memorial associations is the main reason why the development of In Memoriam 138 This pain keeps him from experiencing joy and singing at Christmas, and cripples his fingers as they prepare the mistletoe. And the Christmas bells are not ‘the bells I know’ (no. CIV). Only in extremis, on the first Christmas (no. XXVIII), does joy arrive, dissipating the will to die, but only through the association with childhood memories. The same routine of Sunday worship also ends disturbing and unhealthy thoughts in ‘Supposed Confessions’ and ‘The Two Voices’. In no. XXIX Tennyson sarcastically notes compliance with ‘habits’. 139 The honeymoon of his brother Charles in Vienna, where Hallam had died, reawakens in Tennyson the vivid memory of his friend in no. XCVIII: happy, bustling, pompous, imperial Vienna may be, but for Tennyson the city is always shadowed by a veil of sadness. Among these places that which was most deeply imprinted with the memory of Hallam was Somersby parsonage where Tennyson’s family had lived until forced to leave in 1837. The five lyrics numbered C–CIV are notable examples of Tennyson’s highly effective poetry on abandoned places and at the same time they admirably describe the changeability of associations: new associations will inevitably grow in the mind of the ‘foreigner’ who will come to inhabit these places where everything spoke to him of the deceased. The failure of these associations occurs in no. CIV, on the third Christmas: the places no longer speak of Hallam and have become deconsecrated, or can no longer be consecrated (‘unhallowed’).

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can really only be extremely free and occasionally digressive or even repetitive. This explains in part the alternative and even conflicting organizations and demarcations which have been found in the poem, beginning with that, hardly adequate or illuminating, given by Tennyson himself. It also authorizes some of the assertions of contemporary critics who saw in the poem an irresolvable fluctuation of the self, and therefore an open work, necessarily and constantly in progress.140 Tennyson’s revisiting the same place, as in the two famous lyrics written in front of the ‘old yew’ (nos II and XXXIX, the second added later, 1868), aims to show, as noted above, that nature always appears to be the same while the mood of the onlooker has changed if only slightly. Nonetheless there is a fundamental divide in the poem which recurs about three quarters through its extension: the transition from a state of prostration and desperation to the triumphant conquest of new hope and faith in life. To this general plan a second is added, which I will attempt to examine later in all of its evolutionary implications: that of an impassioned and absorbing debate on the meaning of human life and more specifically of the afterlife, a debate which also leads the poet from an initial, desperate nihilism to a convinced finalism. The unity of the poem rests however, above all, on its metre, quatrains of iambic tetrameters, already used by Tennyson (and before him, by Sidney, Jonson and Herbert of Cherbury) and here invariably re-used after the tight-rope metrical acrobatics displayed previously. Far from imprisoning him, this metrical measure lends itself perfectly to the outpourings of a virile and solemn mourning, desperate but contained, and also to the allusive, concise formulas of abstract theological and philosophical poetry. In Memoriam thus represents Tennyson’s approximation to succinct brevity, which he rightly thought best suited him. The typical In Memoriam lyric is normally contained within three or four quatrains, and is thus an almost ‘Doric’, concise, essential composition in its severity, which evokes to the reader, not least due to its dry and aphorismatic pointes, the metaphysical, anti-Baroque vein of a George Herbert. Evocation and reflection involve each other and

140 Sinfield 1986, 124–7.

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become entwined; gnomic openings introduce subtle metaphysical arguments141 in a suggestive, even at times obscure, philosophical or dianoetic mode that requires an accurate and meticulous exegesis. Grammatical and syntactic regularity is sometimes violated for purposes of expressiveness, and anacoluthon and aposiopesis are frequent and effective as they are mimetic. At the same time, several lyrics fail to impose a general, esoteric or spiritual meaning on stylized and rather schematic pictures of rural life in which the anecdotal and idyllic vein prevails. The unequalled pinnacles of Tennyson’s descriptivism are the very frequent moments when he indulges in atmospheric poetry, in the catalogue of the aspects and variations of nature, now stormy, desolate or barren, now lush and awakening.142 6. The metrical pattern and the rhyme schemes of In Memoriam were immediately perceived by the sharper reviewers to be well designed and semantically allusive, even a true mise en abyme of the spiritual experience of the poem. Kingsley noted, perhaps a bit fancifully, that the abba rhyme scheme suggests in the external a rhymes a musical minor chord of melancholy and mourning, contrasting with the central b rhymes in major chords, which evoke the firmness of temperament necessary to bear the pain.143 The optimistic alleviation of the pain is mimetically expressed each time we reach the fourth line and the closure of the rhyme scheme in each stanza. These minor chords, claimed Kingsley, prepare the ear for something more, according to a circular dynamics that does not lead to emptiness or desperation.144 The quatrain was at the same time the metre which Tennyson considered most appropriate for public poetry, and as such it had been used in his previous political poems. In Memoriam 141 In no. VIII there is for example a complex rhetorical argument based on a double analogy, that of the enamoured who can no longer find his beloved whom he had set off anxiously to visit, and that of the flower beaten down by the rain, a flower dear to the poet like the flower of his poetry, and deposited on the grave of Hallam. 142 The objective correlative of the pain in no. VI is the mother who cries for her son lost at sea. Less appropriate and much more sugary (no. XCVII) is the metaphor of the wedding of a simple woman and a scientist, to commemorate and define reverent love for a superior being, such as Tennyson considered Hallam. 143 CRHE, 183. 144 Ricks 1972, 228.

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re-adopts it, not least because this too is in a way a public poem, expressing the Victorian philosophy of gradualism.145 § 92. Tennyson up to 1874 XIX: ‘In Memoriam’ II. The therapy of pain The first eighty sections of In Memoriam are heartbreaking poetry describing an inconsolable absence. With the solemn tones of a transfiguration, more than one lyric returns to the burial scene: Tennyson, who had not been physically present at his friend’s funeral, perhaps because of his overwhelming grief, was spiritually part of the funeral procession on the boat carrying Hallam’s remains home to England. Not only is the tomb the site of an idealized and repeated pilgrimage,146 but also the places frequented by Hallam during his life now mourn his absence with Tennyson. He recognized that if on the one hand his personal grief was inconsolable, it was also sterile and even stupid, despite his unsuccessful efforts to eradicate it. His desire to dislodge this pain was in conflict with the reasons of his heart, which humanly fantasized of having his friend back alive, but at the same time wallowed in misery, and even, in a masochistic way, enjoyed the ‘raven gloss’ of darkness as he submitted to the mockery of the ‘victor Hours’ (no. I). The night of the poem is that Nirvana of oblivion found in Novalis; its day is that of the will which decides to shake off its mourning but ends up collapsing back into grief (nos III–V). At the beginning of In Memoriam Tennyson is unable to conceive of mourning as anything but eternal; he can only pledge his devotion to the sterile hope that he will meet his friend again, and to a strenuous fight for restitution. The yew which is addressed, as mentioned above, in two famous poems (nos II, XXXIX) is a symbol of reunion as it enjoys a continuous uninterrupted nearness to the grave of his friend; but it is also the envied image of perpetual mourning.147 Tennyson confused private pain with the common heritage

145 Culler 1977, 159. 146 Tennyson in fact only visited the burial site of his friend long after his death, and the compositions which describe the grave are modelled on the tomb of his own father in the cemetery of Somersby. 147 The dominant opposition is in the first of the two lyrics between the unstoppable march of time and the apparent changelessness of the yew, which is an exception

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of a cosmic pain, but that was not enough to provide consolation. Thus, if Hallam had passed on to another sphere and could no longer return to this earth, the poet had nothing left to do but go on to join him as soon as possible, despite his awareness that that would only happen at the end of his ‘widow’d race’. His only reason to live, a journey which until now he had made carrying but a light burden, was now a desolate journey, that of undying love for the deceased: ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all’.148 2. His sincere therapeutic spirit and his intention to overcome the pain are in conflict, in the very first sections, with the simultaneous desire to prolong his suffering. Tennyson prayed that the pain should not be repressed too soon, because, ironically, that would have hindered his healing (no. I). His pain was morally and religiously reprehensible; it was as sinful to wallow in it with words – words that furthermore could be no more than an approximate and inadequate expression of the enormity of his grief – as it was to do so to excess. The venting of his grief needed to be dignified, controlled, obedient to a code of classical restraint: it was a ‘sin and shame to draw / The deepest measure from the chords’, and a ‘crime’ ‘to mourn for any overmuch’149 (no. LXXXV). This suffering was socially and politically condemnable as well, because it provoked the morbid inaction from which Tennyson was equally determined to escape. His private grief, caressed and

amidst the flowering of spring: a truly cemeterial tree, it has an eternal ‘gloom’. In the second poem, no. XXXIX, the yew is touched by the renewal of spring, but soon sinks back into despair. While Nature, unheeding, is reborn, even being fertilized by the mortal remains of humans (as with the violet in no. XVIII), the cycle of life does not return Hallam to Tennyson. Tennyson found it difficult to believe (no. I) that one inevitably passed on to a better state: that death, and in particular the death of Hallam, could be preferable to life, even should there be life beyond this world. 148 Poem no. LXXX posits an exact reversal: Tennyson dead and Hallam alive. The latter would have been equally sorrowful, but would have put his grief to productive use. Tennyson, alive, no longer extends his hands to his unreachable friend, and it is Hallam who reaches out from the grave to comfort him. 149 Verlaine hit the mark when he said, having decided to drop the project of translating In Memoriam, that Tennyson was too English, and that he had many memories when instead he should have had a broken heart.

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cherished, harboured an element of cowardice and political irresponsibility (no. XXI). In Memoriam therefore also points to an exit from a special form of that solipsism which previously Tennyson had often explored, and of which he had indicated necessary and healthy escape routes; it had been the solipsism of art and sexual frustration and repression, or indifference towards others. Here, the solipsism is that of sadness (‘in my sorrow shut’ [no. XXIII]), and of the marginalization resulting from his cultivation of a morbid emotional state.150 Sections nos XXVII and XXVIII analyse the state of one that ‘stagnates in the weeds of sloth’, wishing only to sleep, to forget, not to face the light of day. The indirect answer arrives in no. CVIII, with the announcement of a will to meet again with the ranks of human society: ‘I will not shut me from my kind’. 3. In the first phases of In Memoriam the transfer of Hallam’s body by sea to England, which Tennyson hoped would be accompanied by propitious, friendly winds, is involved in an ingenious game of reverberations. To himself Tennyson applies the image of a ‘helmless bark’ (no. IV), or a boat adrift on the sea ‘that strikes by night a craggy shelf / And staggers blindly ere she sinks’ (no. XVI). The image is taken up again and in a less sombre connotation as a journey in the opposite direction, by which the poet will set off to meet the deceased: ‘till I sail / To seek thee on the mystic deeps’ (no. CXXV). Yet another example of navigation will be the idealized voyage of the poet to meet his friend by means of his own death, until their final goodbye in ‘Crossing the Bar’. The quiet sea upon which the deceased is sailing contrasts with a tempestuous one, looking like a true deluge from which even Noah’s Ark offers no refuge: internalized, it is a ‘weight of nerves without a mind’, and the dove returning to it, rather than bearing the good news of the end of the tempest, comes to warn of an imminent cataclysm (no. XII). Cold and dark are always associated with Tennyson’s late friend and the places which sense his absence; the world of the poet is invariably ‘dim’; he sees everything in a pale, dull light, not least because the brilliant light of the departed has literally been put out. When at night the poet yearns vainly to sleep, an insidious insomnia 150 Sinfield 1986, 116–7.

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torments him; even the day becomes another night, darkened by the eclipse of Hallam’s star: ‘all is dark where thou art not’ (no. VIII). When life rises up again, it does so for others, not for the poet (no. VII). Tennyson often plays ‘metaphysically’ with these conceits and turns them upside down: poem no. LXVI identifies surviving as an ‘inner day’ because it is illuminated by his memories, while outside there is ‘eternal night’; no. XCI defines Hallam ‘finer light in light’, brilliance doubled, multiplied. The frequent economic metaphors turn on the words ‘loss’, ‘gain’, ‘profit’, ‘interest’ – an unmistakable legacy of the Metaphysical poetry of Herbert and Donne, taken from the sixteenth-century context of usury and market expansion, and re-contextualized by Tennyson, as also by Newman and Hopkins, in their religious and meditative poetry, against the background of the rise of capitalism and of the new economic vocabulary. One cannot entirely blame the critics who reprimanded Tennyson for his occasional obscurity, for his contortions and excessive metaphorical speciousness that border on the mannerist and Baroque. A case in point is the image in section no. LXXXI, of the frost of death which miraculously infuses full ripeness into the grain which dies, and intended to symbolize love for Hallam, frozen at his height and, because of his death, unable to grow. Love is a metaphysical spousal love and obviously a widower’s; as a widower, Tennyson had to arrive at the end of his ‘race’ (no. IX), but the semantic ambiguity of the word ‘race’ is very functional: given the collective nature and message of the poem, even the whole human race has been widowed by Hallam. One of the most poignant compositions, reinforced by anaphoras which turn it into a grief-stricken and fervent prayer, contains the longing to be reunited with and comforted by the dearly departed, with the poet tortured by Time and Life represented as a ‘maniac scattering dust’ and a ‘Fury slinging flame’ (no. L). Hallam was for Tennyson a tantalizing presence, pursued but always too distant to catch (nos XCI and XCII), the peak of a superhuman ascent of which one could never see the summit, both because Hallam himself was climbing too rapidly and because there was an immeasurable abyss between earthly life and the life beyond into which Hallam had been welcomed. Thus Tennyson was always, compared to Hallam, ‘a life behind’. Repeatedly, and in vain, he evokes the hand of Hallam, that it might slash through the clouds and pull Tennyson to him. This was another

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ontological difficulty Tennyson saw as an obstacle to his reunion, and it was the real possibility that he was unworthy of eternal life (no. CI).151 The ‘widow’d race’ closes happily with the wedding of Tennyson’s sister Cecilia described in the epilogue. The high tones of abstraction and meditation alternate in some cases with long similes and correlatives of an expressly idyllic type: young country folk of Lincolnshire who arrive trusting at the farmhouse where instead they find their beloved has fled; mothers and father anxious about their sailor sons, who have died at sea; young brides and later mothers, joyful and fulfilled with marital bliss, or hopelessly in love with unreachable aristocratic gentlemen. 4. The genesis of In Memoriam – the slowness with which the poem was planned and took shape, and its very raison d’être and justification – is contained in the words, or rather is literally the words making up the single poems, which, each a sum of words, form the collection as a whole. Grief was at once a propulsive and a paralysing force: ‘brief lays of sorrow born’, says Tennyson of these poems in a diptych (nos XLVIII–XLIX) which defines its nature and origin: neither demonstrations of truths or resolutions of doubts but etchings and ripples of pain, ‘short swallowflights of song’. But In Memoriam is also, ideally, a word born of silence, affirming itself and uttering itself. Tennyson considered grief to be mute by nature, and maintains in the prologue that the entire poem sprang as an instance of youthful confusion and waste, that it was a sort of passing delirium and of escaped preterition.152 And indeed initially the pain made 151 In no. LII Hallam reassures Tennyson from above regarding his well-being. The final image is wonderful, a vision of death as the separation of the pearl from the shell. Section no. LXIII goes so far as to establish a double and proportional contrast from which one finds that just as Tennyson feels pity for exploited and exhausted horses and dogs, Hallam pities Tennyson, moving towards ever dizzier heights. This inferiority is negated or attenuated from no. LXV onwards, when Hallam, at least as a wish, also receives something from Tennyson. 152 Similarly, in the first two lines of no. LXXV Tennyson says that he wishes to leave ‘thy praises unexpressed’. In the preceding no. XIX the suffering ‘drowns’ the song, and only when the pain subsides can he ‘speak a little’; at the same time only ‘the lighter moods’ (no. XX) draw comfort from words, while the more powerful grief is frozen, thus paralysing speech and producing silence.

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him silent, caused the cancellation and suppression of the word, to be followed by a fragmented and even hiccupping gush, the full song coming only in the end. Naturally the recollections of the silence, and also those of the fragmented and halting words, are not, from a distance, mimetic but instead highly formalized. As noted above, in a Calvinistic fashion Tennyson considered it ‘half a sin’ to translate his own grief into words’ (no. V), ‘for words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within’, although he acknowledged that there was usefulness in the ‘measured’ use of words – usefulness that was however, if studied closely, very modest, because they were only able to narcotize the pain. The word was a wholly inadequate and insufficient tool to express anything more than the ‘outline’ of a suffering so great. The growth of the collection is metaphorically justified as an intermittent word, as ‘fits’ of song that break out of the prison of sorrow (no. XXIII). Nature itself, which had been filled with rustling and chirping of birds before Hallam’s death, joins the poet in reverent silence (no. XIX), mixed with tears at the arrival of the body at the mouth of the Severn. The silence slowly fades away until a feeble voice returns. Very late the word is recognized as bringing relief, but nonetheless, once it has been found and has been uttered, it serves only to say that it is still inadequate to the task and unworthy of the person to be sung (no. LXXV). With a truly vicious circle Tennyson continues to say that words are insufficient and that sorrow is what renders the true measure of Hallam’s greatness, and that silence is the highest celebratory voice, a reverberating and echoing silence, translated in the heavens as a high ‘acclamation’. The second part of the collection, which smoothes away with a contained joy all oppositions and contrasts, gradually restores the function of the word, completely reinstating the mutual communication between the deceased and the survivor. Still, even in the poems of the second part, the utterance of the word remains of secondary importance compared to the ability of the deceased to listen.153 153 The metaphor of the word is perfected and transformed into that of the letters delivered to the surviving Tennyson from Hallam, and also in that of Hallam lord and king who has two courts, one heavenly and one earthly, presided over by his sentinels (no. CXXVI).

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5. The abyss separating the surviving poet and the departed is the tangible sign of a sincere and devoted homage to a dear friend, but this undoubtedly fits into the funerary tradition. Was it not, however, an exaggeration to dedicate such a colossal collection to a twenty-two-year-old friend who showed great promise but had done as yet nothing great? As in Milton’s Lycidas, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets which Tennyson admired far more than the dramas,154 the constantly and at times excessively hyperbolic style of In Memoriam finds its justification in its connections with the repertoire of funerary poetry. For the umpteenth time Tennyson draws upon literature to create literature. He is unable to apprehend the event in its raw totality and to recreate it directly in an artistic form, but leans on the filter of pre-existing works. To speak of In Memoriam means to relate it to the numerous texts which preceded it and to be aware of a sedated stylization which in many ways is the opposite of that diary-like procedure of which T. S. Eliot spoke, and which would presuppose an immediate confession.155 In addition to the texts previously mentioned, In Memoriam is modelled on confessional literature and spiritual autobiographies which, beginning with St Augustine and continuing through Bunyan, had given birth to and continued to generate spiritual diaries throughout the nineteenth century and up to the time of Tennyson.156 It is true that some pieces avoid speaking hyperbolically of Hallam and come close to a nearly realistic depiction of the deceased. Such are the memories of happy moments of academic life, of the debates of the ‘Apostles’ at Cambridge – debates in which Hallam, an acknowledged teacher and educator despite his great youth, always hit the nail on the head and managed to have the last word (no. CXXXVII). In others Tennyson remembers Hallam who though a

154 Cf. no. CXI: ‘I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can / The soul of Shakspeare love thee more’. 155 Cf. T. S. Eliot, in Killham 1960, 207–15, and, for a correction, Pitt 1962, 88ff. Bradley 1902, 4ff., despite speaking of an ‘overestimation’ of Hallam by Tennyson, also maintains that Tennyson depicted him exactly as he was. 156 Possible, more specific models – Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, Keble’s The Christian Year and the semi-unknown work by J. C. Hare, Guesses at Truth – are indicated by Culler 1977, 156ff.

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simple undergraduate would entertain his friends with speeches on politics, and walked with Tennyson in a nearby wood of sycamores and elms, both being adorers of rural beauty (no. LXXXIX).157 Tennyson also projects himself into a fantastical future that had not come true, as a grandfather surrounded by grandchildren with Hallam, at the end of his days, like a white-haired patriarch (no. LXXXIV). He seems destined to become the perfect symbol, the supreme incarnation of the gentleman, ‘the flower / And native growth of noble mind’,158 the embodiment of private rectitude and public dedication, a man who carries ‘without abuse / The grand old name of gentleman’, if only death had not cut him down. Already a perfect Victorian, Tennyson did not know how to contemplate Man’s ultimate mission outside the sphere of action and community life. More precisely he imagined for Hallam a first-rate political career, a reputation as forwardlooking honest statesman capable of turning the tides of history to ‘another course’ (no. CXIII), of returning order to chaos, of calming the waves and tides which were not only of a metaphysical and abstract type but also real political upheavals that loomed overseas (no. CXIII). Yet, while Hallam is seen to have the ability ‘to strive, to fashion, to fulfil’ (no. CXIII), he is no Romantic Ulysses, because like all Victorians he recognizes the limits of his knowledge and is aware (no. CXIV) that knowledge for its own sake, or pursued for ‘power’ and distinct from ‘reverence’ and ‘charity’, is condemnable. Almost parenthetically in section no. CIX, Tennyson adds that Hallam’s wisdom, the main gift of the gentleman, was ‘touched with no ascetic gloom’, a trait which he shared with his great mythological predecessor, King Arthur of Idylls of the King. While in life Hallam represented the highest natural perfection, ‘nature’s best’, and the world was an Eden not yet tainted by original sin, in death everything around

157 One should not miss an element of idealization, idyllic in an almost Titianesque or Giorgionesque sense, in these cultivated symposia in the midst of nature. Mythology is missing, but this is the model of many of Wilde’s poems which will tell of excursions into nature and of sensational transfigurations closed with the return to college. In no. XXIII Hallam and Tennyson are two Arnoldian shepherd friends in a mythological British Arcadia where Pan’s whisperings may be heard. 158 Arthur will in turn be flos regum.

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him becomes consecrated. Received among the blessed he is the purest of disembodied spirits, in constant ascent towards ever more luminous spheres, and ever more sublime ‘second states’ (no. LXI). His spirit converses with the blessed, welcomed among the angelic hosts from which he obtains knowledge conceded by God himself, to be shared with those left behind (no. XCII). Death is more lovely for having taken Hallam, and is adorned with his presence (no. CXXIV). In this crescendo of hyperbolic fervour, the final lyrics clearly deify him. Already ‘semi-divine’ in life (no. XIV), he has become a ‘divinely gifted man’ (no. LXIV) and in section no. CIII a chorus of virgins sing his praises, glorifying him as if he were a Christ among sages able to convince and impassion all. In the closing sections, Hallam is hailed as a purifying force for the world of the living, a demigod who shapes the world in an event parallel to Creation, and brings order to what was previously magma; his miraculous radiation, almost a rebirth, assures a radiant future.159 Stripped of their oracular framework, Tennyson’s hopes were those of the usual Victorian utopias, or of the most conservative nationalism: he foresaw the end of divisions and the advent of justice, a real historical renewal, a repressed millenarianism. A copy of this archetype stolen from humanity is Edmund Lushington, a font of knowledge and nobility only less deep than Hallam, whose last function is to serve as a propitious, albeit invisible God who blesses the marriage of Lushington and Cecilia Tennyson. § 93. Tennyson up to 1874 XX: ‘In Memoriam’ III. The ‘Deus absconditus’ and blind evolutionism The death of Hallam awoke, or intensified, unresolved questions in Tennyson, of which there had already been echoes in the earlier poetic collections, regarding faith, eternal life, and the meaning of life and destiny; but it also, though with great difficulty, solved them. Tennyson, along with Browning, was among the first Victorians to address the question of the veracity of the Gospels and the Holy Scriptures, which had bridged the gap between a First Principle, which had imposed itself on the historical 159 Tennyson, like most Victorians, feared that the French Revolution would cause a backlash in England, and the shadow of this fear stands out in several compositions.

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conscience – and which had been hypostatized since the time of the Greek philosophers and sprang from simple intuitive reasoning – and a Trinitarian God incarnated in Christ, who had lived – or, rather, it was said had lived – in Palestine slightly less than 2,000 years before. The doubts were fostered by the research and writings of German biblical critics and French positivists which, from positions which were not always or not completely agnostic, cast shadows on the value of the Bible as a historical document. Some of the most extraordinary Victorian poems, as I shall show discussing other poets who were ‘defectors’ from Oxford or Cambridge after Tennyson, revolve obsessively around the problem of the absence of direct eyewitness testimony necessary to exclude any doubts about the truth of the Scriptures, and on the fact that the modern believer could, at most, have at his disposal only a verbal and second-hand testimony of the events and miracles of Christ reported in the Gospels.160 Both Tennyson and Browning refer almost synchronically to the miracle of Lazarus, both because he had been a direct eyewitness to the power of Christ incarnate, and still more for having visited for a very brief time the hereafter as a simple man, whence he returned among the living. In no fewer than three poems, from which any link to Hallam is significantly absent, Tennyson noted that nothing is given us to know about what happened to Lazarus between his death and resurrection: ‘the rest remaineth unrevealed […] something sealed the lips of that evangelist’.161 The question that insistently torments Tennyson,

160 Also in this case Hallam was a paradigm, that of victory over doubt and of a decisive step in the direction of faith (no. XCVI). He had not yet conceived of doubt as being ‘Devil-born’, but was at first only able to play sour notes on a lyre from which he later coaxed harmonious ones. Like Pascal, Tennyson assigned a positive and constructive sense to doubt: ‘There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds’. 161 Of the three sections dedicated to the miracle of Lazarus (nos XXXI–XXXIII), which abruptly interrupt a brief Christmas cycle, the first seems a very concentrated ‘Karshish’, the poem by Browning (§ 122.6–7). In the second, Maria, the sister of Lazarus, is admired for having believed so readily. The third celebrates her pure and uncorrupted faith, and contains an exhortation from the poet to himself to follow her lesson of prayer. According to some, the ‘thou’ of this poem could be a generic recipient, a person of simple faith.

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and which Hallam’s death had made dramatically real and relevant, was whether life after death existed and what it was like: ‘How fares it with the happy dead?’ That question raised and implied other specific queries, which the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century had discussed with superb subtlety and morbidity 200 years earlier in twisted, impervious compositions which are here imitated or echoed. Is eternal life a more powerful, sublimated continuation of earthly life? What reflections do we have regarding the life we lived after we are dead? And how is the past seen by the dead? Tennyson’s objective is to reassure himself that there will be no loss of individuality in eternal life: just as a baby soon becomes aware of his individuality, and develops a distinct sense of self, so will it be for the dead, because death is a second birth (no. XLV). Thus the poet would be able to recognize Hallam in heaven, and would have all the time necessary to savour the bliss of that encounter before eventually losing himself in the ‘general soul’ (no. XLVII). Conversely, neither would the memory of the living and of earthly existence fade for the dead: in fact, while for the living the past is partly blurred by imperfect memories, for the dead everything is brilliantly clear and in sharp focus (no. XLVI). 2. Tennyson may have been painfully slow in absorbing the death of his friend into his poetry, but he was lightning fast in assimilating Principles of Geology (1830–1833) and Vestiges of Creation (1844) by Charles Lyell and Robert Chambers respectively. Hallam’s death opened up in Tennyson, or perhaps one should say caused to explode, a quest concerning the origin and destination of the cosmos, which he had already begun earlier, though in a somewhat confused way. In these volumes Tennyson found a few scientific hypotheses that he had already formulated on his own, but amplified and pursued with the necessary scientific rigour.162 The poems of In Memoriam that have an evolutionary backdrop or theme were penned almost immediately after his reading of the two volumes cited above, which he mentions or echoes even verbatim in many of the compositions. In essence, two world visions compete in In Memoriam until the second emerges 162 Tennyson read Vestiges in 1844 by requesting a copy of it to the publisher Moxon, believing it contained ‘speculations with which I have been familiar for years’ (15.10.1844; L I, 230).

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victorious. The first is a blind finalism and the fear of a world without purpose; the second is the good teleology of the cosmos and of creation. The inexplicable nature of the death of Hallam, cut down at the height of his youth, suggested to Tennyson that there was no captain at the helm of the cosmos. The third poem describes an aimless world dominated by a pessimistic, Schopenhaueresque Weltschmerz. The thirty-fourth echoes the question as to whether the world is a shadowy abyss or a marvel of beauty sung by a ‘wild poet’. Divine Providence is recognized explicitly by Tennyson, in section no. LIV, as a hypostasis of a God who provides everything and forgets nothing: as Teilhard de Chardin would later say, all of the world and its creation move towards good; God, as the Gospel says, watches everything.163 The unexpected end of this poem actually throws everything back into question: all the poet has said amounts to a pious and infantile desire dictated by fear: ‘So runs my dream: but what am I? / An infant crying in the night: / An infant crying for the light: / And with no language but a cry’. All instances of finalism are questioned in the poem which follows, because nature defies God as if it were not an emanation of the Divine, as if it were fleeing from divine control, or God himself were perverse. Finalism is completely denied in the darkest of sections, no. LVI, dominated by a sadistic, evil nature, a ‘stepmother’ in the manner of Leopardi, which shows no respect for anyone. These too, while not sonnets, are ‘terrible’ in the same way as those by Hopkins, which brim with references to Tennyson’s.164 3. Tennyson acknowledged an attention to perfection on the part of the Creator in the species, but, like Chambers, felt that great uncertainty reigned with regard to the specific characteristics of each individual human being. Nature sits in the dock, guilty of not having raised every element of creation to the same degree of maturity – and above all for not

163 § 58.3. 164 In no. LVI Nature that ‘shrieked against his creed’ becomes the Fury which in ‘No worst, there is none’ by Hopkins ‘had shrieked’ condemning Man. No. LVII begins and continues with the same dialectic process, of recovery following a shocking, quite terrifying conjecture, described with almost exactly the same words to be found later in Hopkins’s ‘Peace’.

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paying attention to single lives – which it destroys with indifference, ‘red in tooth and claw’ – but only to the preservation of the type (no. LV). The Darwinian question of whether man is similar to God or placed on the uppermost step of creation is truly ‘rhetorical’ in these dark, central phases of In Memoriam. As in Hopkins’s last sonnets Man, no more the Lord of creation, has fallen from his pedestal and, shrunken, is the source of a discord and cacophony far more strident than that made by the ‘dragons of the prime’. Section no. LVI is one of the most dramatic and tortured of the metaphysical-religious quests of the age, because it echoes the widespread fear of a gradual extinction of creation and with it of our own species. A clear response allowing an escape from fear could not be attained through mere human strength. That answer lay ‘behind the veil’, that is, in that precise point of temporal and spiritual evolution of the poem, beyond this life. § 94. Tennyson up to 1874 XXI: ‘In Memoriam’ IV. Cosmic finalism regained Tennyson did not solve the enigma of Creation, with all of its threatening evolutionary implications, by directly tearing through that veil or believing he had done so. Rather, his was a pure and simple renunciation of the quest – a choice to hide, though trembling, behind the awareness of man’s cognitive limitations. Following the seasonal calendar, this turning point in the poem can be placed in section no. CXVI, when the approach of spring instils in the poet for the first time a sense of reconciliation, his pain is suddenly relieved, his regrets less bitter, and the voice and vision of Hallam have become sweet memories. At the same time this sense of wellbeing emanating from spring grants the gift of renewed faith in the Being that ‘made the world so fair’. In Tennyson’s idealized hierarchy of human virtues, in which Hallam is naturally seen as a touchstone, the first place is assigned to wisdom, reverence, charity and faith; the sheer love of knowledge, strictly speaking, is not even included. Tennyson’s creed at the end of In Memoriam is an assertion which, springing from the heart, is unaffected by cold reason: a heart not like that of a man but of a child, who fears and doubts but knows that his father is close to him. It is a faith based for the most part on ephemeral foundations, because theological doubts are simply sponged off, and because Tennyson both understood and admitted that they could not be truly resolved.

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2. Newman, and before him Pascal, had called upon the heart to succour faith, and Kierkegaard himself felt the design of the world to be insufficient to demonstrate the existence of God.165 Tennyson’s position, later perfected in the late nineteenth century, is that of negative existentialism, or at least of the transitory epiphany of the divine, utterly private and hard to translate into words. Hallam himself was the model for this faith hinging on the heart, which he had discussed in ‘Theodicaea Novissima’,166 an essay of great interest for the evolution of Victorian religious thought, read to the ‘Apostles’ in October 1833. It was based on the assumption that the demonstration of the existence of God cannot be obtained through reason: God is Love, and Christ is the lowest form of nature touched by God.167 Patmore considered Tennyson orthodox, not that ‘pagan brother’ and pure pantheist that some believed him to be.168 Still, no label can really be applied to the religious views of In Memoriam, which are neither Tractarian, evangelical, or anti-Catholic.169 3. The turning point in the poem may seem too abrupt only because of the juxtaposition of the poems that announce it, written however over a much longer period of time. The opening of section no. CXVIII consists of a theological and finalistic vision of the cosmos: time, a laborious young giant, transforms everything through its work, but everything is later reassembled and re-finalized according to Divine will. Love and devotion are not the mud of dying nature, for the dead enter a more noble life, and a spiral of ever more noble actions. Tennyson’s short history of Creation is much indebted to geology: in the beginning there was a ball of molten liquid, then the formation of creatures with a defined shape, and finally, after a series of cataclysmic events, the apparition of man.170 Man himself then evolves in a constant progression towards an ever more perfect form, 165 Buckley 1960, 125ff., who also points to the three theological essays by Mill (§ 40.2) as anticipating the conflict between God and nature in Tennyson. 166 Cf. the extracts in Hunt 1970, 37–51. 167 The observations on Christ’s ‘self-abasement’ are an extraordinary point in common with the theology of Hopkins. 168 L I, 337 (19.8.1850). 169 Robertson, in Hunt 1970, 114ff. 170 Tennyson is referring to the cataclysmic theory of Cuvier (58.1), but denies any effect of ‘chance’.

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improving the ‘type’, and subdivides into races according to latitude. This path constantly leads him further from passions and sensuality and eliminates the marks of the beast, the monkey and the tiger. Section no. CXX proves in a most evident way both the absorption and the surmounting of Lyell’s geology, attacked with precise, accurate allusions to a science which reduces all things to mere matter.171 Tennyson could admit to a constant Heraclitean evolution of the whole of creation, but he unhesitatingly agreed with those who firmly postulated one or more ‘fixed points’. Section no. CXXII, depicting an apparently unstable universe undergoing rapid and eternal mutation yet found, as in Hopkins, revolving around a fixed point, is one of the many Victorian poetic fantasies aimed at overcoming blind and destructive motion, threatening, though never successfully, to suck even the perfected human type into its whirlpool. Another cardinal belief held by Tennyson was that the ultimate goal of evolution would be Good (no. CXXVIII). 4. Regarding blind evolution, Tennyson’s last word in both senses of the terms – his final peroration in favour of a guided cosmic finalism – is found in a very long passage at the end of the Epilogue, which comprises eleven stanzas and forty-four lines. It outlines a cosmogony which is not quite orthodox but rather veined with gnosis, with a touch of Platonism visible in the chains which restrain the soul. The birth of a soul is placed in the stellar vastness, from which the soul descends in chains, and lives, in ever lower stages, until the moment when it becomes incarnated as a man. That creature is the connecting link with those who have already been taken up into heaven. Tennyson thus believed in a personal, Spencerian form of evolution, both positivistic and spiritual, according to which the existent is structured and hierarchized in ‘phases’ and ‘steps’ in a continual ascent from lower to higher forms.172 In response to the question of whether there

171 Tennyson remarked that sarcasm about the ‘greater ape’ (man) and towards the magnetic theory of the brain was to be understood as aimed at materialism, not against evolution. 172 That process has a parallel in human fertility itself and in foetal development. Critics have pointed out the functionality of the ‘nuptial’ closure of the poem, so that the process of procreation redoubles, and is parallel to, the larger evolutionary process.

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was a clear-cut gap or leap between species, Tennyson answers with four lines that synthesize the evolutional history of man, who sheds his brutish nature and rises, continuously, towards ever dizzier heights, becoming the ‘crowning race’. Evolution was thus ongoing, in the form of a perfection of the human race to be attained over time, including its sensory and intellectual organs. That evolutionarily, superior race would see without filters, and would have direct knowledge of the arcane: for it nature would become an ‘open book’.173 Such spasmodic discussion loses all rigour in this Epilogue, however, and evades into or returns to the hyperbolic and celebratory vein. Hallam is a meteor appearing before his time, the type of this super-evolved race which is yet to come, and a guarantor of the evolutionary chain which leads towards God, as well as of a creation that rises spirally and spiritually growing, thus shedding every trace of matter. 5. The undeniably precipitous and unjustified reintroduction of God in the Epilogue as the last link in the evolutionary chain is confirmed in the general Prologue to In Memoriam. This is a composition added in 1849 which, as has been frequently noticed, should be ideally read at the end of the poem rather than at the beginning, as it predicts its epilogue. It functions like an a priori key to the work. The confirmation of this lies in the fact that the religious faith to which the prologue solemnly attests is simply an aspiration of the heart, a disarming faith which, though undoubtedly consoling, is without any proof: to believe ‘where we cannot prove’, to be content, keeping a reverent silence, with a ‘beam in darkness’, given that one cannot hope for a direct or dazzling vision, or indeed lives in a state of utter blindness. This is an intellectual ‘surrender’ similar to that found at the close of ‘The Two Voices’. The aspirations of Ulysses and Faust, tending to the extension of knowledge, had to reckon with a basic truth,

The purpose of marriage for Victorians was ‘to rear, to teach […] to knit / The generations each with each’. 173 There are literal echoes in the letter written by Tennyson to Emily on 24 October 1839 (L I, 174ff.), in which he claims that it is better to be humans than to have a merely biological existence. However, he had nothing more than a hope of a finalism directed towards the ‘universal good’. God could not be ‘cruel’; rather, he was ‘omnipotent’. In this letter Tennyson already hints at the ‘veil’ hiding the glory of Divine love.

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that God is invisible and therefore one cannot know him: ‘knowledge is of things we see’. This God was not only the Deus absconditus of whom other Victorians complained, but also the punitive, cruel, almost unjust god of the biblical and Protestant tradition. The opening of the Prologue sounds like a trial run of Hopkins’s ‘Deutschland’, because of the numerous, indeed deafening echoes and recurring lexical choices. Both poets address God with the liturgical ‘Thou’; both depict an anthropomorphic God using human limbs to create and above all to destroy. Man in both poems is ontologically amphibian, as he can be and is deified, but he is also a small and insignificant gnat in the hands of God. 6. The ‘revealed truth’ of faith, even when without proof, is at the basis of a rediscovered comfort which is simply and purely human, through which grief is overcome giving way to a serene resignation when facing the death of his friend. The inner process was painfully slow, and probed by Tennyson in many of the central sections of the collection. At the end Tennyson became convinced of two fundamental truths although they were only, yet again, truths of the heart. First, intact love for the deceased was a guarantee of eternal life. Second, the most effective, most real antidote to fight this sterile and macerating grief was another type of love, love for one’s neighbour.174 His pain, boundless before, becomes more measured and settles into a hard-won equilibrium: ‘I’ll rather take what fruit may be / Of sorrow under human skies’. As he acts, Nature responds in unison, gradually offering a parallel and mutual reinforcement. Life around the poet begins to pulsate once more, and the nights are no longer symbolically paralysing: ‘and in my breast spring wakens too’. Grief is reabsorbed into nature, becoming an April violet which ‘blooms’ like the other flowers. The separation from his friend, which had provoked a desperate and always doubtful yearning to be reunited, along with morbid fantasies and dream-like epiphanies,175 has now been serenely accepted, in the conviction 174 Section no. CVIII is a kind of Tennysonian ‘Carrion Comfort’: ‘I will not shut me from my kind, / And, lest I stiffen into stone, / I will not eat my heart alone’. 175 In section no. XCV the poet, alone, has heard the voice of Hallam, a voice that pulls him up, disembodied, to share, for a moment, the blinding vision of the unknown, ‘the empyreal heights of thought [… ] the deep pulsations of the world’. Another epiphany

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that the waiting will only augment the happiness experienced when they meet again. 7. Tennyson had often harboured the unrealizable but not so ‘strange’ dream that Hallam could return (no. XIV), and at the same time tried to imagine what could have been had Hallam never died, and in particular his wedding to his sister Emily, imagining the many family joys denied to both (no. LXXXIV). He later recognized that the first way to recover from this grief was the cultivation of love for others and even more specifically for a woman. In this sense In Memoriam is therapeutic. It is a detoxification, and a both private and public re-education. The long section no. LXXXV clearly has the role of articulating these concepts within the poem. It states that love for a woman does not deplete human love, but rather sustains and feeds it. It affirms Tennyson’s renewed and reinforced certainty of Hallam’s operative presence in his life and of a common unison or fusion between them, already here on this earth. From above, Hallam is like the secret instigator of acts of strength rather than of weakness; the poet overcomes his crippling grief in actions of solidarity towards others, and in the awareness of the ‘mighty hopes that make us men’. Hallam himself, sharing the pain of those on earth without harming his blessed serenity, encourages the poet to pursue human love. This section is then a survey and a new start, as it specifically begins to indicate how the sterile,

of the divine occurs in no. CXXII, which has at the same time an undeniably modern feel due to its daring flashes and linguistic shortcuts. Tennyson envisages an escape from the dimension of time and the cycle of life and death in an unrepeatable ‘flash of joy’: this is the spiritual ascent with Hallam in order to know the eternal heavens and to serenely experience the circular movement of the stars around the soul. The apex is in section no. CIII, where Tennyson ‘sees’ Hallam surrounded by maidens who sing his praises, and together with him leaves the heavens in a shallop, fording a river and feeling greater within. The voyage turns into an ascent and ends on a crimson cloud. It is an allegory and at the same time a reworking of ‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights’ and ‘The Lady of Shalott’: the maidens are the Muses, the river is the river of life, the veiled statue is that of the truth which then transforms into Hallam; the sea is eternity itself. The depiction of the heavens is almost naïve (as in no. LXXXV): the angels welcome the newcomers, gathered at the gates of paradise, and splashing fountains, like those found in ‘The Vision of Sin’, dispense wisdom.

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morbid love for a deceased person can find an outlet and a resolution in action, in a fertile love for a living being. Tennyson eventually discovers, at least in the final version of the poem,176 that his love for Hallam does not preclude all other earthly or heterosexual love. It follows that the epilogue to In Memoriam must needs be an epithalamium, the festive and slightly conventional song to celebrate the wedding of his sister, who ideally and vicariously completes that ritual that had not been brought to an end between Hallam and Emily Tennyson. Thus marital fertility is approved of and exalted, above all as a public virtue. But that marriage was also a positive omen and encouragement for the one about to be celebrated soon afterwards, thanks to this poem, between Tennyson and Emily Sellwood.177 This epilogue was the proof that life continued and that the grave now had its ‘sunny side’. § 95. Tennyson up to 1874 XXII: Poems after ‘In Memoriam’ from 1850 to 1855 Many hurried editions of Tennyson’s poetry came out in the wake of the success of In Memoriam, but there was little in the way of truly new material produced in the half decade between 1850 and 1855. In various journals Tennyson published a few fragments and brief poems composed many years

176 The poem was written in 1833 and revised in 1841 or after 1838, and its revisions are a source of considerable misunderstanding. In the first version it mentions Tennyson’s friend Lushington as a possible replacement in his affections for his deceased friend, though Tennyson could not attribute a similar love to him as that which he felt for Hallam; in the second, Emily takes the place of Lushington: male friendship gives way to heterosexual love. The twenty-eighth stanza clearly and unequivocally states that his love for Emily is overtaking that for Hallam. But even when he speaks of his love for Emily, the final comparison declares that this is inferior to that for Hallam: a late blooming primrose is a bit pale compared to one resplendent with the full bloom of spring. 177 ‘The Daisy’, inspired by his late honeymoon in Italy in 1851, is a panoramic catalogue of Italian views. This cold, orderly classicist exercise (the metre is an adaptation of the Horatian alcaics) cannot compare with Browning’s moving, exuberant ‘The Englishman in Italy’ (§ 116.3), though revived somewhat at the end with a tender reference to Tennyson’s newborn son.

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earlier, among which the six intensely sculpted lines of ‘The Eagle’ stand out. This is one of the Victorian, or more generally nineteenth-century contributions to the mysterious symbolism of the bird of prey, caught by Tennyson first in its stasis (which is at the same time a transfiguration of contemptuous and haughty solipsism), and later as it swiftly swoops down, like Hopkins’s ‘windhover’, symbolic of an imminent return from the solitary dizzy heights back to land and the world of humankind. The sudden, though at that moment not irreversible variation that characterizes this five-year period remains that of a public poetry inspired by an event which Tennyson, like many other Englishmen, considered catastrophic, and that threatened to disrupt the equilibrium in Europe and above all national security: the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon in December 1851. A sudden flame of warlike patriotism was lit in Tennyson when with openly imperialistic aims the Russian Tsar Nicholas I instigated the Crimean War, an event that mobilized public opinion across England, which, even if in alliance with the long-despised French, joined the fray to defend the liberty of the Turks attacked so gratuitously. The war had an evident implication of internal politics. It was, in other words, a temporary vent for widespread frustration, provoked by the growing inequality between a new plutocracy consequent on industrial development – as witnessed by the 1851 Great Exhibition – and the still excluded lower classes. 2. Tennyson’s first poem as Poet Laureate, which used the same metre as In Memoriam, and voiced his greetings, praise and gratitude for Queen Victoria, conventionally became from then on the opening poem in all the complete editions of Tennyson. It underlines, in the conceptual framework of universal progress, that the Crown now rests on peace rather than war, and presages in future eras a role of the Queen as guarantor of justice even beyond the national borders. The idealization of the Victorian court, where purity and serenity reign unchallenged, foreshadows King Arthur’s court in Idylls, particularly because, like that of Arthur, it is a royal court which is really anything but ideal. The fear that a second French Revolution could break out in England awoke in Tennyson a vein of patriotism characterized by simplified language and, metrically, by frenzied iambic pentameters. This caused him to hastily reverse his earlier pacifism: ‘Is this a time to cry for peace, / When we should shriek for rifles?’ (R 302). One of the weak

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spots of the English army, which occasionally suffered defeats despite being second to none in military valour, was the fact that their rifles needed to be replaced with more modern ones, a measure that had not passed due to the supposed avarice of Parliament!178 Such was the content of poems written in the form of open letters addressed by Tennyson to the Lords. He was however careful not to sign this or other, sometimes violent invectives against the French as Poet Laureate, as he might damage the Queen and her good relations with Napoleon, much better ones, indeed, than Tennyson would have wished her to have. Beyond this tactical and opportunistic motivation, an incipient fracture between the two Tennysonian voices begins to emerge in the choice of the various pseudonyms to which he had recourse. 3. The great care and seriousness with which Tennyson set about honouring his office are demonstrated by the fact that in 1852 he spontaneously wrote and published on its own ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’, a sumptuous and opulent epicedium in honour of the victor against Napoleon at Waterloo,179 the first version of which was torn to pieces by critics. Tennyson, still insecure, revised it in a second edition taking their comments into account. The familiar theme of bidding farewell to the deceased was still more legitimate because addressed to an authentic, universally recognized hero, a moderate and sensible gentleman, democratic and benevolent, capable, for all his greatness, of fraternizing with the

178 R 305. There were even attempts to organize an anti-French militia, blocked by the government, which Tennyson stigmatized. ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, a ballad depicting separate scenes in strong relief, came straight from newspaper accounts and relates the celebrated episode of the 600 of Balaclava, who resisted incalculably superior forces in the Crimean War before being defeated, in part due to a military error which Tennyson did not fail to mention. Both in the ‘Ode’ to Wellington (in which a refrain exalts the law according to which ‘the path of duty was the way to glory’) and in this poem, he subscribes to a dangerous militaristic code of blind obedience: the light cavalry are not ‘to reply’ nor ‘to reason why’, but only ‘to do and die’. That code must have been endorsed by the troops on the front in Crimea, and the poem was so popular that Tennyson sent 1,000 copies to be distributed to the soldiers. 179 See Wellington’s epithet as ‘World victor’s victor’.

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average man.180 Switching from In Memoriam to the ode Tennyson repeats the argumentative development of the first with a surprising analogy: first a funeral cortege in which the poet metaphorically takes part, then the burial, the ‘universal’ grief, and the positive influence passed on by the deceased (‘If aught of things that here befall / Touch a spirit among things divine’), with a continuous alternation between the excited vision and the inflamed, passionate retelling of the acts of the commander. Wellington’s mission continues, higher and nobler, in the celestial sphere, in accordance with that optimistic finalism and unceasingly positive evolution to which Tennyson, with great difficulty, had given his seal of approval in In Memoriam. The nine stanzas are characterized by an unequal but ever increasing number of lines, as if wishing to expand them proportionally to the increase of public and private grief, which turns into a hymn of gratitude, a trusting and solemn glorification of the deceased. Celebrating Wellington as the ‘last great Englishman’ Tennyson intended to explicitly pay homage to all of his predecessors: Nelson, the undefeated hero of the seas, as Wellington had been on land, is there to welcome the Duke to Heaven. But Wellington is just the last example of an archetype of the integrity, and of the struggle for justice and the public good, which can be traced back to the ancient King Alfred. The only form of isolationism recognized by Tennyson, one for which he even gives thanks to the Almighty, is political: British isolationism, utopian and imperialist, bringing civilization and liberty to still savage lands.

180 Buried in ‘central’ and ‘streaming’ London, the news of Wellington’s death was felt far beyond the city in each ‘hamlet’ and country home. The mourning and ‘long long procession’ are metaphorically universal because all the classes participate in them. Ten thousand copies of the ode were printed and sold at the price of two shillings to the crowds on the occasion of his funeral (Sinfield 1986, 161).

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§ 96. Tennyson up to 1874 XXIII: ‘Maud’ I. The ‘monodramatic’ rewriting of the trauma of first love Maud (1855),181 developed in concentric circles around a fragment from 1833 inspired by his unhappy love affair with Rosa Baring,182 was its supreme objectivization in Tennyson’s oeuvre. The distant but still unhealed wound was revisited and in part exorcised through a refined framework of transpositions and with a new poetic technique. Rosa has the name Maud,183 and is the charming daughter of a calculating father who opts to destroy a tender idyll in favour of a financially advantageous match. Thinking of himself as a disturbed paranoid psychopath, Tennyson attempted in the poem the mimesis of this pathology of passion. The work is divided into sections (reminiscent of the organization of In Memoriam) each of which corresponds to a ‘session’ of writing, separated by short intervals of time and sometimes placed in detailed settings (a little wood, an armchair, the perfumed shadows of the Lebanese cypress, the Brittany beach), in which imperceptible events ignite unrestrained emotion in that ultrasensitive psyche. This led to that atomistic vision which many critics, T. S. Eliot first among them, had of Maud, which seemed to them merely a collection of beautiful yet separate poems in exquisitely varied metres. The first reviews, including those of Gladstone and Bagehot, filled magazine pages with worried discussions about the possible and deliberate self-identification of Tennyson with his hero. As late as 1936 Eliot resorted

181 Critical edition with commentary by S. Shatto, London 1986. For the autobiographical background cf. W. R. Rader, Tennyson’s ‘Maud’: The Biographical Genesis, Berkeley, CA 1963. 182 ‘Oh! that ’twere possible’, published separately in 1837 and later incorporated into the poem; other parts had also been written much earlier. According to some, the expansion of the brief lines into a poem was suggested to Tennyson by his friend John Simeon. Further autobiographical details, easily identifiable, are the rough venal father of Maud, a clear reflection of Tennyson’s paternal grandfather; her brother, a politician like Tennyson’s uncle; her widowed mother. Tennyson was personally acquainted with madness, having three siblings affected by it. 183 According to Jordan 1988, 147, Maud may suggest ‘maw’, a cavernous open jaw originating from the French ‘mordre’; or, by means of the sound, the German ‘Mord’, that is, ‘murder’.

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to clumsy arguments to explain that Tennyson had a gentle and emotionally repressed character. The term ‘monodrama’ of the subtitle is actually little more than an embellishment to what is in essence a particular form and modality of the dramatic monologue: it is more melodic, and singable, rather than merely dramatic, exactly as its few predecessors had been. He was aware of the ‘entirely new form’184 which he had given the poem and had hoped for the poem to be read aloud, like those of Hopkins, by a speaker with a deep voice and ‘good lungs’. He himself gave many acclaimed public readings of this poem, which over years became his pièce de résistance. Auden once described Maud as an opera libretto manqué. 2. Both the mark of the madness and its cause are revealed at the outset with one of those brilliant flashes which suddenly flare up only to quickly burn out in the psyche: the ‘hollow’ behind the wood where the madman’s father was crushed by a stone, and a hollow whose ‘lips’ are still dripping blood in a vampire-like hallucination.185 The madness seeps through in this and the following scenes in a sort of colour-crazed Daltonism. Injections of unreal and dream-like colour burst on to the scene, their spectrum dictated by the changing moods of the speaker and by the fluctuations of his madness, which in turn follow in a morbid and pulsating way the evolution of the courtship and the love story. The curtains of Maud’s bedroom fade to the pallor of death in the fear of rejection, only to flush pink soon afterwards, as in a colourful fantasy, when the desired consent is given. Ruskin used this poem to illustrate what he termed ‘pathetic fallacy’, the contagious tendency of a pessimistic mood to see anyone’s own subjective emotional state reflected in nature – like the fierce roaring of the waves which foretells shipwrecks and the ‘maddened’ beach which screams, ‘dragg’d down’ by the storm. These are images inspired by the ‘cold and clear cut’ face of Maud who appears, also in a fantasy, to the protagonist. The hallucination is not just visual, but aural as well: musical and cheerful sounds, which then 184 L II, 135; 21.3.1855 (Tennyson’s italics). 185 The cause of death is murder or suicide: the investigation is inconclusive. The mental illness was, in part, hereditary: his father was already profoundly disturbed, with a waxen face, and muttering to himself. But he was honest, and had been cheated by an old man, perhaps even the father of Maud.

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alternate depending on the scene with gloomy and sinister ones, cries and wailing or simply indistinct buzzing. Although Tennyson is very skilful in rendering this working of an unstable psyche, he is less adept in crafting the prolonged hallucination. His study of the evolution of mental illness reaches its apex after Maud’s death, in the long ‘mad scene’ which undeniably sounds, despite its phantasmagorical character, like a bravura piece modelled on the operatic ones in nineteenth-century melodramas. Tennyson’s obsession with death leads in this scene to a hallucinatory exchange between the mental hospital and the tomb; the sounds of a funeral hammer into the brain of the madman, coming from above, while the other patients become dead people moving in an infernal merry-go-round. Little infiltrations of reality are the serious observations on the inefficiency of undertakers in burying the dead! From the tomb, from this imperfectly sealed grave, and from a state of semi-life and semi-death we hear the last words of this scene, in which a more hermetic burial is invoked. 3. The whole poem seems to be written ‘in progress’, rather than composed by a narrator having completed an experience, and gradually, as soon as the single events occur or, more often, the emotional states follow one another. Tennyson’s edits to the supposed original document, or diary of a madman, are many and evident. The poem consists of three parts of decreasing length,186 each of which is subdivided into numbered sections, themselves divided into subsections. The poem’s metre, a fruit of Tennyson’s expertise, is no less complex, and with its astonishing variety also serves to delineate the psychological and emotional curve of the protagonist’s mind, as if this curve shaped the metre itself. Narrative and discursive sections with ampler metrical forms alternate with brief and extremely succinct ones in quatrains, more lyrical and more ‘cantabile’. The register varies from the dream-like to the brief and rapid-fire communications, as with the bare, sharp notice of the arrival of Maud’s brother, brutally severing the passionate and optimistic fantasizing of the enamoured man. Numerous events occur throughout the poem, but their interweaving is purposefully elliptical and imperfect, and essential facts like the protagonist’s escape from England

186 This tri-part division was completed in the eleventh edition in 1865.

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after his rejection or the duel, or Maud’s death, are wrapped in a sort of psychological fog. Indeed Tennyson is almost pathetic when narrating the factual. His reconstruction of the story’s background is clumsy and awkward, with high-flown dubious quotes from Aeschylus.187 He instead succeeds in imitating the mental language of madness with its obsessive restriction of times and places, which become symbolic and cyclical. The starry sunset drenched in perfume alternates with the pink and radiant dawn in accordance with the rhythmic swinging pendulum of fulfilment and procrastination; the ideally central places in the poem are the rose garden, an Eden which becomes Hell when the madman’s Eve is chased out for falling in love, or the ‘rivulet’ which listens sympathetically to his effusions. 4. Madness works not only by fading the contours of reality but also destructuring and deforming it, to then reshape it according to a new fantastic and pathological geometry, with that loss of clear definition which is typical of psychological disturbances. Aside from Maud there are other roles, but no proper names, either of people or even of places. Everything literally pales next to the central splendour, the blinding radiance of Maud. Every other character – including the protagonist, who is never named, and Maud’s fiancé, the ‘babe-faced lord’ – is not actually a character but merely a role – the ‘fathers’, the ‘mothers’, her ‘brother’; the two fathers are opposites of one another, but the mothers share infinite sweetness.188 Maud fills the poem, and, so to speak, renders all the other characters anonymous 187 This can be contrasted with the description of the banquet and the departure of the guests at the first lights of dawn, which is elliptical and blurred, composed of detached images, with the last carriage’s creaking wheels. 188 A motif which is clearly taken from The Princess (along with many others, about which see Byatt 1969) in which the fathers of the two lovers agreed at their birth that the two were to wed. The only case in which Tennyson slightly gives in to realism (and that still with a deformed and dream-like character) is in the depiction of Maud’s brother. Over six feet tall, whistling, triumphant, bedecked with rings, emanating a nauseating scent, with a ‘contumelious lip’, this brother stares at his shiny boots, beats the ground with his cane, and is often referred to with the derogatory deictic ‘this’. He partially redeems himself when, dying, he takes on himself the blame for the duel and exhorts the protagonist, who has wounded him, to flee.

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by means of the psychic prominence and delirium of her naming. As a character, she too is reduced to a psychological and linguistic dimension, translating into a long chain of elaborate zoological and floral metaphors and chromatic embroideries, but also of subtle mythical motifs which turn her into yet another private archetype, an exemplar of all of those ‘beautiful women’ of history who for Tennyson were also belles dames sans merci:189 Eve, certainly, but also Cleopatra, whose lion rolls, utterly dominated, at her feet; or the nymph Oread, who comes down and displays herself in front of an unworthy admirer. For the entire first section Maud offers herself in the form of greetings from a distance, smiles, blushes, touches of the hand, ambiguous signs in need of interpretation, most often read as a haughty refusal. The madman’s speech overflows in ecstasy until the moment of his violent disillusionment, which occurs in a fade-out between the first and second parts, in the wedding song acclaiming with bold biblical echoes the Pan-like fusion of nature with Maud, and in the apostrophe to the rivulet and in the truly delirious dream sequences of the last sections of the first part. 5. Maud was yet another compromise, because, as always, it is indebted to Tennyson’s copious literary memories, and exploits several promptings that had settled in that porous repertory,190 fusing them with a realism which captures even crude details taken from the news and from proletarian claims (such as the doctoring of food) and above all with the most authentic, Romantic and Tennysonian poetry concerning the limitless and almost Titanic expansion of the self. Maud is a rewriting of ‘The Lover’s Tale’, but the protagonist descends directly from the (also anonymous) speaker in ‘Locksley Hall’. Still, even in this case, Tennyson is unable to resist his impulse to temper that Romantic aspiration with a solution which is even worse than the usual idyllic way out – enlistment in the army. The protagonist is a lover-poet whose metrical deftness and wild imagination 189 Maud has an impeccable neoclassical beauty, almost larval and mortuary in its coldness, accentuated by her aquiline nose. 190 The primary archetype, but certainly not the only one, was established by Tennyson himself when he said that Maud was ‘a little Hamlet’ (cf., for a discussion of these analogies, Byatt 1969).

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surpass those of his counterpart in ‘The Lover’s Tale’.191 The descriptive abundance verges on the neo-Baroque, expressing itself in overflowing, hammering alliterations, in the repetition of adjectives, the use of climax and gradation, in meticulously crafted and rare oxymora, and in prolonged biblical and liturgical echoes. This is the most showy but also questionable and risky aspect of the poem. The smallest step at times separates Tennyson’s metaphorical paroxysms from ridiculous and sugary sweetness. He believed Maud to be one of his two masterpieces. Eight thousand copies, a considerable number, were sold of the poem, but it was unfavourably received by critics (a fact taken into account by Tennyson in his revisions), looked upon with suspicion by the general public – which had expected a sequel to In Memoriam rather than the representation of a mad, intemperate passion – and then ferociously parodied. § 97. Tennyson up to 1874 XXIV: ‘Maud’ II. ‘Amour fou’ healed by war The actions outlined in Maud are similar or parallel to those of In Memoriam, apart from the final solution. The protagonist finds himself in the same condition as Tennyson mourning Hallam in In Memoriam, because the initial moments of the poem are set in the aftermath of personal loss, in an unspecified time following the death of the madman’s father, who has perhaps thrown himself over a cliff. Like Tennyson, Maud’s lover gives in to the guilty pleasure of morbid solipsism, claiming that he wishes to seal himself off from the world, to ‘bury myself in myself ’. But, as in In Memoriam, we are told that he has sworn to himself ‘nevermore to brood / On a horror of shattered limbs’; he reveals his will, though difficult to achieve, to heal from this grief. At least from his point of view, he has done well not to get involved in a world which he rejects as completely misleading, and as a den of thieves. The reason for an unhoped-for re-evaluation of pure feeling and of the consequent, isolating solipsism – of a longing for the aloofness of the Epicurean or the Stoic, or of the ataraxy of the philosopher – is to be sought in the gaping cracks in the civil society of the early 1850s in England, grossly unfair in the eyes of the socially

191 § 85.3.

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oppressed.192 That suggestion also depended on the sudden, pessimistic recrudescence resulting from the new implications of evolution. Only love, as with the lady of Shalott, pulls the protagonist from his isolation, pushing him to go out into the streets and among men. The meeting takes place, in fact, ‘at the head of the village street’, where Maud has appeared, she too interrupting her golden isolation. Love, considered for a moment, and deceptively, the only true thing, the only thing worthy of faith in a world marred by lies, is also the only redemptive and the only really socializing force. In section XVIII of the first part, the youth discovers that he is no longer ‘all forlorn’, and that love has filled him with a finalistic faith, has overturned every morbid impulse towards death, and renewed his will to live, to live even to ‘fight with mortal wrongs’. Once lost, that same love inevitably distances the lover from the human family. In the second part of the poem he falls back to hating again the places where people crowd together, the squares and the streets, and the morbid, unhealthy desire to plunge into some ‘pit’ to indulge in the pleasure of a good cry. Reuniting with his peers in the collective frenzy of war is the last, most false, most disappointing escape from solipsism. 2. It is in the third, very brief part of the poem, recited on the deck of the ship carrying the protagonist and other soldiers to war in Crimea, that Tennyson joins the private motif with the public sphere, and once more, as in In Memoriam, points out to his age and his countrymen yet another supplementary paradigmatic value in that union. Here ends any semblance of autobiography (which for the first two parts, if present, had been quite camouflaged), giving way to what could be termed a collective expectation. There are many analogies between the protagonist fleeing to Brittany, after the duel in which Maud’s brother is killed, and the wounded Tristram in chivalric romances; like Tristram, he looks out at the empty sea as an ‘old song’ buzzes in his ear. But like an anti-Tristram, or an anglicised Tristram, the hero rebels against death, finding again ‘a spark of will not to be trampled out’, breaking the spell of a passion which destroys every other passion, and recapturing his sense of equilibrium and reawakening to the 192 The madman is ‘nameless and poor’, and his anonymity is also a metaphor for his social insignificance and rejection.

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modern world as if from a long dream.193 His passion becomes numbed in a bath of collective fanaticism and in the sudden adherence to a reactionary ideology that Tennyson perhaps even hoped to present in a problematic way. This ‘poor man’ sings praises to the ‘mattock-harden’d hand’, to the autocratic leader so long as he is honest, and harbours in his insanity what for Tennyson was instead a very sane desire for stability. He claimed not to have wished to take sides, standing neither for peace nor for war, and to have aimed to maintain a rigorous impartiality behind the dramatic mask of a madman. What he has the protagonist say is, however, strongly in line with his earlier patriotic and anti-Napoleonic poetry and with his railing against cowardly pacifism. Behind this dramatic mask he delivers an unequivocal apology for war. Not only does Tennyson, without apprehension, probe the dangerous consequences of warmongering fanaticism, and weigh with nonchalance a war desired and even blessed by God, but he also writes the poem, or at least ends it, exclusively to justify a newly re-awakened European belligerence at a historical moment when the whole of Europe had too long prospered in peace, until its weapons were rusting and its thirst for war overpowering. 3. The usefulness of war was thus twofold: it was the antidote, though at a very high price, to an ill-fated love story, and, in addition, it responded to a noble purpose because it came to the rescue of trampled populations in Europe. In the first phases of the poem, as in the fifth section of the first part, Maud’s song praising heroism fails to shake the youth, who flops down faint-hearted, the thought of love weakening any other wishful thinking. Yet his love hides a repressed but firm supporter of war, who lashes out, sarcastically, against the pacifist preaching of the Quakers. In the third part, when the protagonist has recovered from his madness after his hospitalization in a mental institution, it is Maud herself, by now a pure spirit, who like ‘a silent lightning’ abandons the ‘band of the blest’ (to whom she is now united, like Hallam, in the hereafter), and in a vision or a dream speaks to him of a hope for the future world that lies in the wars about to break out (‘And in that hope, dear soul, let trouble have rest’). The scene changes

193 This is almost an identical sequence to that found in ‘The Lover’s Tale’.

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with lightning speed from the mental hospital to the deck of the warship where the vision of the now purely spiritual Maud dissolves and disappears once and for all. For the first time the protagonist finds a relationship, neither deteriorated nor sullied by resentment or rivalry, with his peers or with life, and exorcises a private disappointment through enthusiasm for a public cause; he joins ‘a loyal people shouting a battle cry’. On that ship, he says, ‘I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind’. However, the step from wallowing in the misery of an unlucky love affair to its cure through action and war is undeniably quite hurried and abrupt: ‘it was but a dream, yet it lightned my despair / When I thought that a war would arise in defence of the right’. Equally unjustified is that the protagonist should abandon the lyrical and dreamy register to spout rough, pompous, warmongering anti-Russian propaganda. Tennyson’s target, once Napoleon III, has now become Tsar Nicholas I, the ‘giant liar’. 4. Hallam stood in the same relationship to Tennyson as Maud to the madman. Just as Tennyson, orphaned by Hallam, felt that the world moved according to a blind force, advancing towards nothingness, such is the desperation of the madman having lost Maud, or unable to reach her. Once again worrying shadows rise in him to insinuate the dubious teleological nature of creation, whose wonders do not celebrate their creator but instead instil in man the awareness of his nothingness. The cosmic vision of a nature ‘one with rapine’, and of a ‘world of plunder and prey’, seems to anticipate Darwin’s natural selection. A sort of proportional deduction brings to an extended application of that law: man is predatory in the same way as in nature the stronger will crush and subjugate the weaker. As in Darwin, survival is of the fittest, and the hawk tears apart the sparrow. In precisely the same terms as In Memoriam, an investigation is made into the evolution of man and of the human species towards ‘Nature’s crowning race’,194 and its conclusion is that the perfecting of the species is an illusion. The related question as to whether God rules the world remains unanswered, or the answer is the same as in In Memoriam, that, literally, of the ‘unseen hand’ of a God ‘hid by the veil’. The second section of the second part is a morbid, 194 For this key term – ‘crowning race’ – which occurs verbatim in In Memoriam, cf. § 89.1.

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pensive, Lyellian rhapsody on a shell, the principal instrument of study of the naturalists of that period. The hero on the Brittany coast, where he has found shelter after the duel, finds one on the shore and grasps it in his hand, reflecting on the mystery and paradox of its apparent fragility, despite its ability to resist sea storms that break ships apart. Yet it too participates in the incessant and inevitable drifting of creation, and, without will, has been left alone without support. 5. Maud was the largest stone in a diadem composed of small, briefer poems for the most part centred on motifs of forbidden love, all built around protagonists who are dreamers out of step with the times, in many ways paler repeats of the same protagonist. The unhappy love triangle of Maud is announced in ‘Edwin Morris’, a dramatic dialogue of 1851 first drafted in 1839, which behind a pointlessly complicated structure, and in the precocious manner of a defused idyll, adumbrates the story of an unlucky young love followed by a forced marriage. Among the echoes of the polemics in Maud are the painter’s denunciations of unscrupulous urbanization destroying the bucolic countryside as well as of the new migratory movements resulting from industrialization. Settling in glorious, virginal districts were ‘new-comers’ with no history, who would become in no time those same, cynical ‘millionaires’ against whom the protagonist of Maud rails.195 The main link between Maud and ‘Edwin Morris’ is unlucky love hindered by parents. The painter falls in love at first sight with a young girl whom he sees fleetingly and who loves him in return, but this love is thwarted and ended suddenly by their relatives, nouveaux riches cotton

195 Tennyson drafted a Horatian invitation to the Reverend F. D. Maurice, a former ‘Apostle’ and founder of the Christian socialists, to come visit him at Farringford (‘To the Reverend F. D. Maurice’). In it, he expressed hopes to speak with him freely of those theological questions for which his friend had been expelled from Cambridge (having asserted positions over the punishment of the damned which were judged to be heretical), but also of current internal and foreign politics, and of the Crimean War which is now termed ‘the Northern sin / Which made a selfish war begin’. Tennyson gives new approval to the decision of the protagonist of Maud, blaming the Tsar for a war that anyhow he regards as a healthy outlet.

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spinners and people who have just turned industrialists.196 The painter is rejected, for they prefer a marriage of convenience to a marriage for love; additionally, he is punished with economic ruin: persecuted by creditors, slandered, hunted down by the sheriff, he is forced to flee without having the option (in that peaceful year of 1838) of choosing the ‘solution’ of war. Both the painter, who isolates himself in a small ‘palace of art’, and the poet, who inappropriately gives the title to the poem of which he is not the protagonist (a gifted loafer who dabbles in botany and geology) are remnants of the past, out of place in the England of the Great Exhibition and of the feverish activity of markets and industry – more exactly, they are undesirable as potential husbands. The admonition that Tennyson doesn’t fail to apply against absolute, socially isolating passion is conveyed in the words of the fat curate who continues to repeat the refrain ‘God made the woman for the use of man, / And for the good and increase of the world’, a summary of the Victorian gospel of love. Far-fetched and fantastic vicissitudes and savoury rural mimicry are the fundamental ingredients of ‘The Brook’, an exasperatingly slow and awkward English idyll, though interspersed with the brook’s delightful lyrics commenting the action. This is the humanized brook of Maud gifted with speech, like the talking oak of an earlier idyll. The protagonist of Maud reappears here in Edmund, a secondary, quite unrealistic character, a lover of poetry and uninterested in money, despised by the ‘strong sons of the world’, and once again someone who makes a somewhat polemical departure for Italy and Florence where, like Clough, he meets his death, consumed by fever. ‘The Letters’ is in turn an almost unrecognizable Gothic reworking of Maud in which slander and lies, rather than economic and social inferiority, give rise to the prohibition of the love affair. The unexpected happy ending, and the festive bell ringing celebrating a wedding, replacing the expected death knell that would accompany a separation, are due to a miraculous and equally Gothic reversal of fortunes.

196 A grotesque version of the motif of the prohibition is that the two lovers are surprised by a pack of dogs!

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§ 98. Tennyson up to 1874 XXV: Poems from 1855 to 1864. The poet of the people The decade between Maud and ‘Enoch Arden’ was also poor and declining. For the most part Tennyson wrote eulogies and poems purely of circumstance, also virulent, openly interventionist conservative invectives, or attended to almost exclusively metrical experimentalism. His feisty antiFrench tirade calling for rearming against Napoleon III was so persuasive that at the end of 1859 there were over 150, 000 new recruits to the voluntary anti-French militias. Another circumstance that required the intervention of the Poet Laureate was the inauguration of the International Exhibition of 1862, to which Tennyson dedicated a brief ode which was later set to music and required a limitless ‘Mahlerian’ chorus (1,000 or 4,000 voices). Tennyson’s scarce productivity was owing to the fact that he was finishing and preparing his first four Idylls of the King for print; these were published with a dedication to the Queen in 1858.197 All that Tennyson wrote before 1858, with the exception of Idylls, was included in the Enoch Arden volume of 1864; a year later, Tennyson indulged in a most colossal self-promotion, compiling a vast anthology of all of his poetic production. Enoch Arden is among the least logically compiled and most improvised collections ever published by Tennyson: around three ambitious and certainly important poems of medium to long length, there are gathered reworked poems of mediocre or even scarce quality, as well as other extemporary pieces of quite secondary importance. Perhaps the idea was to pad a volume which otherwise would have been scanty. The poet even included a series of his Homeric translations intended to rebut Matthew Arnold’s criticism that his blank verse was inappropriate for Homer.198 Tennyson’s more authoritarian voice now eliminates any residual doubt regarding his greatness and stature as a poet, and the Poet Laureate is unafraid to compare himself to Milton, to whom he dedicates a high-sounding sonnet. Tennyson’s metrical experiments in this collection undoubtedly hold their own with contemporary experiments made by Clough in quantitative and accentual 197 Ricks wisely arranges Idylls in a single sequence and places it chronologically as a work of 1888. 198 § 161.7 n. 209.

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verse, as well as with the more systematic practice of sprung rhythm of Hopkins. They lack, however, that intimate necessity, that very rigorous motivation which, at least in Hopkins, justifies every deviation from the norm. ‘Boädicea’ uses a prose-like excess of ‘weak’ syllables to transcribe the impassioned speech of a Queen of the Britons against the harassment of the Roman legions; but thematically this seems like a throwback to the exotic and erudite early Tennyson. A more mannerist than authentically realistic operation is the adoption of dialect (from his native Lincolnshire) in ‘Northern Farmer-Old Style’,199 which in addition to this linguistic aspect presents situations and characters which retrace the formulas of the rural anecdote. ‘Sea Dreams’200 doubtless introduces new elements, which consist of a potential but ultimately unsuccessful updating and amplification of the idyll in a purely narrative, storytelling direction. It recounts the ordeal of a dim-witted office worker in an atmosphere somewhere between the sentimental and the proto-naturalistic which is better suited to a novel, of the sort that many like Gissing were starting to pen at the time.201 But one has the impression that the story itself resists being told within the constraints of awkward Tennysonian blank verse. 2. ‘Tithonus’ was conceived – but not finished – in 1833 as a pendant to ‘Ulysses’ with the title of ‘Tithon’, and completed and edited in 1860 to be included, finally, in the 1864 volume. It is the latest fruit of that long, practically inexhaustible legacy left by Hallam’s death, ever ready to spring

199 Similarly, ‘Requiescat’, a short, exquisite poem in two stanzas, explores the state of exhaustion and waiting for death found in ‘Mariana’ and the funeral scene in ‘Claribel’. 200 Cf. § 78.3 for the details of the disastrous financial investment to which the poem refers. 201 The smouldering insecurity of the city dweller and the citizen contrasts with the serene, rough acceptance of life both in the figure of the ‘northern farmer’ and of the grandmother in ‘The Grandmother’. The latter, despite having lost all her children and even her husband, accepts her fate uncomplainingly. ‘The Voyage’ and ‘The Captain’ are nothing more than facile and sensationalist anecdotes, the latter being a tragic parable on the harmful consequences of the strongman methods used by a kind of Ahab of the English fleet.

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forth in Tennyson’s poetry by way of association.202 It is also an example of the Tennysonian technique of defusing an emotion, of that necessity to ‘distance’ an event, which he invoked and required in order to be capable of honouring his friend both before and during the writing of In Memoriam, and which always translates into an objectification and almost universalization of the purely private and personal grief.203 ‘Tithonus’ may naturally be read like an indirect invocation to reuniting with his late friend, and as the most transfigured of the poems expressing a desire for his own death, as even the life lived until its natural end could have delayed the encounter with Hallam. At the same time, almost like a clairvoyant, Tennyson predicts and laments his own long life, a sort of relative immortality which was to deny him that blessed vision for many years to come. But in ‘Tithonus’, as in ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Tiresias’ and the other dramatic monologues based on mythical figures, the autobiography is subsumed in Tennyson’s purest recreative art, an almost autonomous verbal art, rhythmic, musical and imagistic. 3. ‘Tithonus’ may give the mistaken impression of a formless rhapsody; it is in fact subtly organized by the rhetorical device of antithesis, inherent in the mythological tradition but sharpened in Tennyson’s version. The death scenes of the first four lines – ‘natural’ deaths, part of the cycle of life itself – share a descending motion in the images of the ‘woods that fall’, of the vapours wafting towards the earth, of the swan that dies, and of the mere mortals ploughing the fields which will become their resting places. In this way they emblemize a destiny which is both envied and regretted, of exclusion and subtraction, as is underlined by the violent inversion of pronoun which opens the fifth line, ‘Me only cruel immortality / Consumes’, where both the adjective ‘cruel’ and the verb ‘consumes’ overturn shared universal expectations with an oxymoron. They capture the drama of Tithonus who, dematerialized like a shadow, hovers above at the edges of the world, enveloped in the mist and in the eternal airy embrace of Eos. The second section of the monologue outlines the condition of 202 ‘In the Valley of Cauteretz’, written after Tennyson’s second visit to the Pyrenees with Hallam in 1830. 203 The calm, gnomic ‘On a Mourner’ (its generic title was added at the moment of publication), has also no recognizably personal elements.

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Tithonus in light of a second contrast: now a spirit, he regrets that having been a man he has become a demigod; but against this deified man stands a humanized goddess, Eos. She, in turn, cries like a human for her error and her lack of foresight.204 The nature of the poem as a pendant to ‘Ulysses’ lies above all in Tithonus’ desire to revert to his perfectly human form, without attempting to escape forth into the unknown. The final part of the monologue – introduced by a dazzling description of the slow sunrise and the golden lights spreading over the face of the goddess, whose eyes will soon ‘blind the stars’ – alternates implorations with regrets. Tithonus still lives under the illusion that the gift of immortality can be reversed, and, inebriated, remembers moments of voluptuous, gratified, youthful eroticism. Structurally perfect, the monologue closes with the images of un-deification with which it opened: the farmers at sunrise head out to their labour on the land, and, ‘happy’ – another contradiction – have the ‘power to die’ and long to share the descending motion of nature: ‘Release me, and restore me to the ground’. 4. In addition to ‘Tithonus’, the two main poems of the Enoch Arden volume are the title one and ‘Aylmer’s Field’, a second poem in many aspects related to and even mirroring the first. According to a practice which will become ever more frequent, they were both drawn from prose sketches of a minor novelist, one of the many obscure prompters in Tennyson’s last forty years of poetic production. Not only is this the umpteenth tangible proof of the exquisite and nearly systematically ‘literary’ nature of Tennyson’s poetry, which often beautifully integrates with and breathes new life into his erudite memory; it also proves that Tennyson was well on the way to being a versifier of random subjects. The gap between ‘Tithonus’ and the other two poems could hardly be wider, nor could there be anything more damaging to the organization of the volume, for Tennyson moves from a static poetry centred on the evocation of pure emotional states to one even too dynamic and spurious, based on plots occurring over wide lapses of time and characters rather superficially individualized. This will occur with increasing frequency in Tennyson as time goes on. The two narrative 204 Eos is also silent, not even speaking in reported speech.

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poems tackle head on social issues like the impossibility of integrating the Disraelian ‘two nations’, with tragic consequences directly caused by a stubborn yet empty spirit of conservation. ‘Enoch Arden’ has the feel of Crabbe’s seafaring tales in verse, but does at times indulge in intolerably lachrymose sentimentalism, and its blank verse flows almost too fluidly with a simplicity bordering on sloppiness. It gives the impression of paving the way for the simplified diction of Idylls. The opening scenes, with the idealization of the domestic hearth and the victorious fight for life, make up a type of marine idyll in the vein of second-rate Biedermeier, though in part compensated by the central phases which soberly describe the decadeslong stay of the protagonist on a deserted island following a shipwreck. But the poem decidedly worsens in the epilogue, when the fisherman Arden returns to his village to find his wife remarried and with children not his own, and dies without revealing his true identity to anyone, yet not before shedding tears over the lock of hair belonging to his sickly son, which he had cut and taken with him on his voyage. The popularity of ‘Enoch Arden’ was soon immense, earning Tennyson the sobriquet of ‘poet of the people’. It was translated into numerous languages and even set to music by Richard Strauss in a rather indifferent melologue. The critical verdict was rather controversial. Hopkins and Bagehot coined two definitions which were not completely negative, ‘Parnassian’ and ‘ornate’,205 to define this new Tennysonian manner. Of a very different nature were the reactions to the poem’s thorny questions, which worried the theologians of the time, and even the Queen: was Enoch Arden’s wife guilty? Though the little port ‘had seldom seen a costlier funeral’ – a line judged the most cynical and unpardonable that Tennyson had ever written – she had in 205 Bagehot’s impressionistic argument (CRHE, 282ff.) rests on the questionable aesthetic premise that there must be an absolute and perfect adaptation of a description to the perceiving subject, and he thus refuses the idea that a fisherman can even begin to perceive the luxury of the details of Tennyson’s description of the tropical island. Applying this principle, most literary descriptions would be judged ‘ornate’. Also, one does not understand why a fisherman cannot be handsome: quite to the contrary, Victorian literature praises the healthy, unadorned beauty of the peasants, particularly peasant women.

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the meantime remarried having given her husband up for dead after more than ten years. And, was she in reality a concubine, or rather, if she was not, whose legitimate wife was she? 5. Below, on the coast, lies the fishing village; as in Maud, above there is the residence of the richest man; a ‘cave’ recalls the ‘terrible pit’ at the beginning of Maud.206 Also in a ‘cave’ Philip, the miller’s son, who does not have the natural goodness of those of Dickens or George Eliot, sees Enoch and Annie kissing; in the same cave Enoch in turn will later spy upon the happiness of Annie and Philip. The triangle is the same as in Maud and, further back, of ‘The Lover’s Tale’: three friends, two of them boys, have vied for the third child, Annie Lee, from their earliest marriage games, a rivalry which has given birth to a smouldering, unvoiced conflict and even hatred for one another. While Philip is a rich man’s son, Enoch is an orphan, which in Tennyson always translates into a more or less mythical prohibition of love, or at least a serious obstacle to marriage. Even one like Annie, who as a young girl wished to escape the temptations of riches and marry for love, could not escape the social determinism in which Tennyson so pessimistically believed: tragedy is a narrative expedient to express the ineluctable condemnation of the poor. The ruling principle is ‘all things human change’; but, for the poor, the change is always for the worse. The madman of Maud has two reincarnations: first he is Philip, consumed with envy for the happiness of the two lovers and then newlyweds, and later he is Enoch impotently suffering Philip’s inexorable comeback. Tennyson depicts a world undermined by degradation, even in the childhood games of the two boys, and symbolized by the sandcastles they build on the beach, only to see them carried away daily by the waves. Enoch may be poor, but he is rich in initiative, rebelling against his condition and nearly succeeding in winning respectability and economic wellbeing. He is a good Protestant and, like his biblical namesake, a ‘Godfearing man’, and knows that God rewards hard work, the only thing that can bring success; his tenacity earns him respect as a sailor, allowing him to give his children the education he never had. His misfortune, in the form of a broken limb through which

206 § 96.2.

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he loses his job, stimulates rather than defeats him, serving to reinforce his fighting spirit. Once healed, he leaves his beloved boat for a post as boatswain at sea, but not before establishing a boating supply store managed by his wife. Unfortunately, lacking expertise, she fails at the venture. If Enoch is an indomitable Ulysses, his wife Annie is a Penelope incapable of patiently waiting. From a Protestant and Puritan standpoint, the sin of which she is guilty is resignation; she neither applies herself in commerce nor makes use of her talents. It must be said, however, that her failure is not entirely her fault: she does not adjust to the unfair laws of the market, remaining steadfastly honest when other merchants prosper because they are usurers and profiteers. Even her son dies as a consequence of social injustice, through lack of food and healthcare. From this point on, the poem splits into two scenarios, each followed in turn, albeit with some awkwardness. Enoch, à la Robinson Crusoe,207 finds himself shipwrecked on an island that offers him easy, abundant nutrition functioning like a final, almost unrecognizable, positive metamorphosis of Tennysonian solipsism. It is an ironic, effective contrast to see that he lives better on the island doing nothing than in his own country where the poor must struggle in vain; perhaps the island is rich because it is ‘the loneliest in the lonely sea’, and man has not yet arrived bringing his unfair social organization. The island is an Eden of abundance, a regenerated England which, despite the briefness of its description, anticipates imminent utopian narratives. Enoch sees a sign in his surroundings, but it is dramatically different from the one that his wife believes she is given: when opening the Bible at random she feels certain that her husband is dead,208 and authorized by God to remarry. 207 Robinson Crusoe is also guided by providence in his adventures, which ultimately give him material wealth. 208 The almost American-style optimism of Enoch, who nearly becomes a self-made man and a rich amateur sailor after having barely scraped together enough money to buy a small boat, is in steep contrast to the indecisive, apprehensive fatalism of his wife. Here appears the last variation of the theme of the mirror taken from ‘The Lady of Shalott’: she is unable to focus the binoculars with which she would have been able to sight and bid adieu to the ship on which her husband is sailing away. In the first, rather improbable stages of the poem, the towers of Camelot become the mill. A vulgarization and a transformation into pure superstition of the motif of the ‘sign’

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The long wait of the shipwrecked sailor, consumed with homesickness and tormented by sinister auditory hallucinations (like the distant ringing of church bells in celebration of his wife’s second wedding) is repaid by the appearance of a ship which will carry him back home. Here the inexorable descent into tragedy begins, now suggesting Swift’s Gulliver rather than Robinson Crusoe. The re-socialization of Enoch, though after an isolation which he had not sought, leads to the same lethal effects of the call to reality and to love in the form of Lancelot in ‘The Lady of Shalott’. The sailors that rescue him see a barely human being, bearded like a savage and happily lacking the trappings of civilization, as some of his abilities, notably speech, have become atrophied with disuse. The ship, in circumstances which differ greatly from those experienced by the protagonist of Maud, is a microcosm of genuine human relationships, a last taste of Eden before the return to the predatory world of civilization. The sailors, all foreigners, generously share their supplies with him, offering him a passage home to his native land. In ‘The Lover’s Tale’ Tennyson had brought an almost identical love triangle to a sort of peaceful reconciliation; now he chooses the path of sublimation, of an acceptance of defeat which is outwardly noble, and masked with a generalized pardon, even of the second husband. The pain, however, is atrocious, and in the end kills Enoch, his sole consolation the fact that his wife will know he loved her to the very end. 6. The poor fishermen who are the protagonists of ‘Enoch Arden’ remain in the background, transformed into men who work the land, in the very weak and somewhat confused poem ‘Aylmer’s Field’, whose foreground belongs to haughty aristocrats. The poem rests almost exclusively on a sequence of satirical sketches; independently of these it is pure, unadulterated political propaganda not adequately adapted to a love story which seems unfinished, lacking in cohesion, and weakened still further by the inclusion of a few quite unrealistic episodes.209 The contemporary found in In Memoriam (§ 93.1–2) is the episode of Annie’s opening of the Bible ‘to find a sign’. 209 Undoubtedly jarring is the exotic episode of the arrival of the Indian cousin who gives the girl a kriss he has conquered in incredibly dangerous circumstances, and which the girl imprudently passes on to her lover. The latter will kill himself with

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social implications are fully revealed when the two lovers, strolling, visit the hutches of the poor, whom young Edith pities just as she is kindly disposed towards the farmers that bless what they believe to be an imminent marriage. The young woman’s sensitivity is revealed in the flowers that adorn the homes of the poor, in a form of aristocratic condescendence, philanthropic but conservative, which, as in Disraeli’s Sybil, idealized the nobility of poverty but did nothing to encourage a more equal distribution of wealth. At the time in which the poem is set, the late eighteenth century, the aristocracy scornfully rejected the new egalitarian ideology of the Revolution, which had however been adopted by the Chartists in England, as well as by the first socialists, and is also traceable in the sermons of Dissenters. The tragic tale of love and marriage between the young humanitarian daughter of a country landholder and the student who is not sufficiently well off210 links ‘Aylmer’s Field’ to the long series of Tennyson’s poems on marriage, as well as to the autobiographical theme of the unlucky affair with Rosa Baring, now in the distant past but still reverberating in his poetry. § 99. Tennyson up to 1874 XXVI: Poems from 1869 to 1874. ‘Lucretius’ The dilemma of whether to marry for money or for love was dealt with by Tennyson in the rough framework and in the Lincolnshire dialect of the rural idyll ‘Northern Farmer – New Style’; the cynical set of rules that the sly farmer imparts to his own son, summarized in a hammering onomatopoeia to the beat of the hooves of his horse, without a doubt resolves the dilemma in favour of marriage for money. The poem is one of the few secondary ones in The Holy Grail, a volume published by Tennyson towards the end of 1869, but by convention dated 1870, which mainly consisted

the kriss after receiving, by a mysterious, telepathic communication, the news that the girl is dead. 210 Even when he is rejected by her father, the young man does not give up or give in, but reacts like a true Tennysonian hero, trying to obtain a position as lawyer. The girl’s parents try to ‘sell’ her, but she, a new Portia, rejects all her suitors. The two lovers write to one another leaving their letters in the heart of an old oak. When her father finds them he becomes livid with anger.

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of four new sections of Idylls of the King. It would be wrong to consider these poems random or included merely to pad the collection; they are indeed conceptually dense and at least in one case possess great poetic merit. The underlying theme is Tennyson’s metaphysical questioning, which was far from resolved, and hinged on the presence of God in the world. This presence is so ambiguous and at times so tolerant of evil that it leads one to question the very existence of God. Tennyson’s poetic talent lies in his ability to express himself in a wide range of registers, and to disguise and dissimulate this questioning behind even casual or erudite sources of inspiration. ‘The Victim’, for example, rewrites the story of Abraham and Isaac transposing it in terms of Scandinavian mythology, and with a different conclusion. The reader would be justified in considering this just a mediocre literary curiosity, were it not for questions and dilemmas posed therein with the greatest urgency. The plague is the sign of an irate God who must be placated with human sacrifice, indeed that of the King’s own son, at least according to the priest interpreting the signs from above. Nature itself,211 studied meticulously and successfully at the time by the Victorian sacramentalists in search of indelible traces of the divine presence, instead of giving off sparks of the divine, conceals tantalizing mysteries. Like Blake contemplating the lamb or the rose, Tennyson pulls a flower out of the wall but can no longer find the answer to questions about the essence of God and Man. These metaphysical doubts were in part triggered in Tennyson by his membership of a group similar in a way to the ‘Apostles’, the Metaphysical Society founded by the theologian R. H. Hutton, which counted among its members a considerable number of eminent writers and men of culture, including Browning. ‘The Higher Pantheism’ was recited at the first meeting of the society in 1869. It explores, in a tightly woven series of questions, a single, unresolved query: is nature ultimately a reflection of the Creator, or his negation? Could it be that nature testifies to a ‘separation’ from God, corroborated by the Parmenidean self-reflection of the biblical ‘I am who I am’? Tennyson had hardly made any progress past the conclusion of In Memoriam; indeed, the poem closes on the sibylline tautology of a

211 ‘Flower in the crannied wall’.

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nature that would be a vision of God, if only we had the mental faculties to understand and to see.212 2. In ‘Lucretius’ Tennyson turns to a recurrent Victorian mechanism, that of attributing a contemporary issue to a figure from the past, real or imaginary, and examining the way in which that issue would have been perceived according to the level of knowledge reached at the time. Lucretius allows Tennyson to focus on two issues in particular: first, the metaphysical-theological question of the very existence of God, the operations of divine providence, and the finalism of Creation; second, the more personal question of man’s behaviour, the control of his instincts and the life of the senses, a theme around which Idylls of the King is constructed. ‘Lucretius’, actually prompted as an echo by an English edition of the Latin poet published in 1864, revisits the poet’s death with a power unprecedented in Tennyson. According to a legend spread by St Jerome, Lucretius died by his own hand, stabbing himself with a dagger. It is one of the rare occasions on which Tennyson managed to compose an entire monologue in the style of the many which had been crafted by Browning. The verbal flow attains a rare level of mimetic realism, unimpeded as it is in other cases by stanzaic divisions or by the rhyme scheme; on the contrary it is enhanced by a flexible blank verse which follows and shapes the unpredictable, rhapsodic contortions of a psyche buffeted by a delirium of dreams and nightmarish visions. Lucretius’ sleep is continually disturbed, and awakened, by this stormy atmosphere. In Victorian poetic literature this is one of the innumerable foreshadowings of twentieth-century stream of consciousness; the more so as Tennyson, normally a prude, finally 212 Tennyson’s ‘two voices’ continue to overlap during these years with messages whose tones and content are disconcertingly opposed. A short poem of simplistic biblical tones which was never republished (R 352) displays a candid faith in God’s immanent presence in nature, and a God immediately available to man, not absconditus, not silent but answering those who pray him. In contrast, the strongly sibylline voice of the mountain top in the quatrains of ‘The Voice and the Peak’ of 1874 echoes the uncertainties of ‘The Higher Pantheism’. The peak, when questioned, speaks in riddles whose solutions are denied to men, a veiled metaphor of the spiritual conscience and divine revelation, both eternally incomplete because beneath them will always lie a layer of the unknowable.

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found the courage to lift the veil on those murky areas about which the Victorians had until then remained silent. Pace Rossetti and Swinburne, it was Tennyson who had first turned to that Eastern or late imperial world of mythology, of exhausted sensations and voluptuous fainting spells. But never before ‘Lucretius’ had he lingered upon them with such disinhibition; after much prevarication, he resolved not to censor passages that even in 1870 were felt by readers as a dangerous attack on public decorum. 3. ‘Lucretius’, in several phases an ingenious paraphrasing and collage of pieces from De Rerum Natura, revolves around the destructive collateral effects of an aphrodisiacal potion given him by the poet’s wife, Lucilia.213 According to primitive medical science this potion ‘tickles the brute brain’ and sows ruin in the cells. The poem is thus the fruit of a mind which is yet again disturbed, unbalanced, ‘checked […] to shape’. Lucretius, immersed in the consultation of the 300 scrolls of the ‘divine’ Epicurus, is a heretical, distressed Epicurean, as he lends his voice to the dramatic, urgent questions of his time. Those cosmic, stellar visions which in Lucretius’ poem are transcribed with a cold scientific spirit arouse in Tennyson’s character a timorous, unbearable anxiety. In his dreams, he sees the destruction of the cosmos, a downpour of atoms that have broken their connections and are perilously adrift. The last section, contorted and ponderous, divided up by long and insidious asides, says, with clear allusions to the present, that an ending of a cycle is imminent, and a general earthquake will upset the ‘cosmic order’, uncovering tombs and making everything vanish. As he kills himself, Lucretius knows that his biological salvation will end up being the very same, pale consolation of many twentieth-century poets: 213 Naturally the monologue is also open, in its richness, to an autobiographical reading. Is Lucretius a self-portrait to some degree? Lucilia could be a counterpart of Emily, who perhaps complained that Tennyson left too soon her bed, giving her only a cold morning kiss, to spend too much time with his poems. Could Emily have felt jealous of the countless female friendships of her husband and feel them as rivals? Lucretius’ sacer furor is alien to Lucilia, who occupies the beginning and the end of the poem creating its framework, and her actions are planned with cold, calculating reason. Inviting comparison with Browning, she has some traits in common with the wife of Andrea Del Sarto (§ 121.3).

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that of becoming one with nature, a nature at once ‘womb’ and ‘tomb’, which both destroys and recreates in successive cycles.214 From an evolutionary perspective, nature could at the same time, though not necessarily, cancel every vestige of humanity and every principle of individuality, recreating man as ‘beast or bird or fish, or opulent flower’. Thus Tennyson inexorably conducts his character to face the most terrible hypothesis of nineteenthcentury science, that of an entirely material, thus totally perishable, universe. Not only the body but also the soul is perishable, the soul which, according to Epicurus, Lucretius is convinced will be dispersed into the air at his death, and thus die. And if all nature is corruptible, and all is made of atoms, were the gods not, according to the ‘great law’, also ‘dissoluble’? Tennyson abruptly interrupts this phase of the monologue with an affirmation that the gods exist and are immortal, but only on the basis of the apodictic assertion of Epicurus. What his Lucretius, and indirectly Tennyson, think of it is left unsaid thanks to an ingenious shortcut: Lucretius is in a confused state of mind. 4. Indirectly, like Browning in ‘Caliban upon Setebos’,215 ‘Lucretius’ explores the relationship between Creator and creation and thus the Christian concept of providence. With an argumentative transition which is a bit laborious and forced, Lucretius is led to denounce how little the gods care about what happens on earth. His eyes still see the living, pulsating image of Venus, like Eos in ‘Tithonus’ crying ‘human-amorous tears’ for her human or semi-divine lovers, but also the very different one of Apollo, insensitive to human pain, blind and impassible towards what he himself illuminates with his potent light. Lucretius, his dagger vibrating in his flesh, trusts that he will escape into the ‘divine Tranquillity’, tranquillity without passions, without pleasure, without pain, which neither attracts nor courts sages but is often vainly courted by them. The decision to commit suicide – a form of liberty and a paradoxical proof of man’s superiority to beasts, as 214 The words ‘womb’ and ‘tomb’ also appear in the sonnet ‘Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves’ by Hopkins, not entirely removed thematically from Tennyson’s composition. Only art, artistic creation, can survive a cosmic, apocalyptic crisis according to Lucretius, this being a second, ephemeral and vicarious salvation. 215 § 124.6.

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well as a demonstration of Roman virtue – matures in the conviction that one might well be indifferent towards those who are indifferent and end a life which is, as in ‘Tithonus’, an old age afflicted by the deterioration of the body. The Lucretian-Tennysonian god is not only indifferent – or, according to the insoluble Victorian ambivalence, biblically inflexible and cruel – but also, at least in the intervals of the monologue, a deceitful, a cruel, sadistic tempter, stimulating in man carnal desire and lascivious visions that he cannot control, and which trap him with a mixture of attraction and repulsion. The frenzied dance of courtesans, the Roman orgies of Sulla, the breasts of Helen, the sword ready to pierce and wound, but flagging when faced with such beauty – are not these, Lucretius asks himself, the ‘revenge’ of Venus, thirsty for greater attention? Tennyson deftly toys with the fact that similar visions can be provoked by potions and that Lucretius, unknowingly, attributes them to the goddess. In an authentically Ovidian metamorphosis he has the vision of a lascivious Oread surrounded by satyrs, which silences any aspiration towards the nobility of the senses. He does not know whether to pray for his vision to be obscured or further widened by the laurels. That pressure cracks the ‘sweet Epicurean life’, causing him to realize that he is an imperfect Epicurean, a slave to his passions and impulse: ‘But now it seems some unseen monster lays / His vast and filthy hands upon my will, / Wrenching it backward into his’. The insanity of sex explodes into something more – the incitement to suicide. 5. Tennyson dedicated a tribute to his art in 1874, a luxurious edition in several volumes, to that date complete. Very few of the few new but mainly occasional poems included in this collection216 deserve to be examined. His role as Poet Laureate required Tennyson to support current British policies, which were often such an utterly capricious interweaving of different interests that they forced the poet to change positions precipitously. Against his will, in 1871 he had to retract what he had emphatically and baldly proclaimed in previous years. The funny side of a poem welcoming Princess Marie Alexandrovna, coming to marry the Duke of Edinburgh – or 216 ‘In the Garden at Swainston’ is a pale, and at times even superficial reprise of the epicedium in the tone of a martial tune, in which Tennyson recreates a hierarchy of his lost loved ones, the highest position held being, not surprisingly, that of Hallam.

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rather, the son of England’s arch-enemy during the Crimean War, the Tsar of Russia – was that the latter now sent his daughter to marry an Englishman, an act representing for Tennyson the classic olive branch inaugurating a new period of universal peace. He himself considered as Horatian nugae poems like ‘The Window’, a Liederkreis along the line of the German song cycles (it was in fact set to music by Arthur Sullivan, and was supposed to be, but was not, illustrated by Millais). The plot, with lighter and more singsong tones than for example in Maud, is that of a bashful woman in love who rejects, scorns, or doesn’t hear the advances of her suitor, who in the end receives the long yearned-for consent. Tennyson, composing for music, was less than happy with these little poems, which were almost wrenched from him, but acknowledged the ‘melic’ nature of much of his poetry, which remains, whether or not set to music, a series of texts and words for music, like the opera libretti of the eighteenth century or Metastasio’s choruses. § 100. FitzGerald* I: From the would-be creator to the orientalist forger Edward FitzGerald (1809–1883) was the classic author unius libri, and that book is nothing other than the translation-recreation of an anthology 217

*

FitzGerald’s most complete edition is Letters and Literary Remains, ed. W. A. Wright, 7 vols, London 1902–1903, to be placed alongside The Variorum and Definitive Edition of the Poetical and Prose Writings, ed. G. Bentham, New York 1903 (which excludes the correspondence). The Letters of Edward FitzGerald, ed. A. M. and A. B. Terhune, 4 vols, Princeton, NJ 1980, substitutes all the preceding partial collections. Anthologies, all containing one or more versions of the Rubáiyát, are edited by C. Ganz, London 1933; by G. F. Maine, with an introduction by L. Houseman, London 1953 (with very useful commentary and annotation); by C. J. Weber, Waterville 1959; by J. Richardson, London 1962; by M. Konick, New York 1967. See also Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition, ed. C. Decker, Charlottesville, VA 1997, and Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, ed. D. Karlin, Oxford 2009. Anthologies of the letters are edited by J. M. Cohen, London 1960; by A. Hayter, London 1979. Life and Criticism. E. Heron-Allen, Edward FitzGerald’s ‘Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’ With Their Original Persian Sources, London 1899, and The Second Edition of Edward FitzGerald’s ‘Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’, London 1908; J. Glyde, The Life of Edward FitzGerald, London 1900; T. Wright, The Life of Edward FitzGerald, 2 vols, London 1904; A. C. Benson, Edward FitzGerald, London 1905 (the work which

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of quatrains by the Persian poet Omar Khayyám, which was memorized by whole generations of disaffected youths both in and out of England practically until after the Great War. FitzGerald can be defined as yet another product, albeit eccentric, but quite unmistakable, of the Arnoldian public schools and of the English universities. A member of a wealthy family of remote Anglo-Norman ancestry, he studied at Cambridge in the same space of time when the three Tennyson brothers were there, and within a few years they became fast friends. At Cambridge, though he remained on the fringes of the student association of ‘The Apostles’,1 FitzGerald received the stigmata of religious doubt, and like everyone he was caught up in the grip of Romanism, Tractarianism and theological reductionism. He was also affected by the echoes of the nascent, fiery controversies of the 1830s regarding the relations between religion and science, which especially shook Oxford but touched Cambridge as well.2 He remained brought FitzGerald to the attention of the modernists); J. Blith, Edward FitzGerald and ‘Posh’, London 1908 (on the friendship between FitzGerald and Fletcher, the Suffolk fisherman); M. Adams, In the Footsteps of Borrow and FitzGerald, London 1914, and Omar’s Interpreter: A New Life of Edward FitzGerald, London 1911; A. Y. Campbell, ‘Edward FitzGerald’, in The Great Victorians, ed. A. J. and H. Massingham, London 1932, 196–207; A. M. Terhune, The Life of Edward FitzGerald, London 1947 (the standard biography); J. L. Borges, ‘The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald’ (1949), Eng. trans. in Selected Non-Fictions, Harmondsworth 1999 (a brief, insightful comparison between Khayyám and FitzGerald); P. De Polnay, Into an Old Room: the Paradox of Edward FitzGerald, London 1950; A. J. Arberry, Omar Khayyám and FitzGerald, London 1959; J. Richardson, FitzGerald, London 1960; A. M. Piemontese, ‘Omar Khayyám in Italia’, in Oriente Moderno, LIV (1974), 275–97 (on the relationship between the original quatrains of the Persian poet and FitzGerald’s translation, as well as on the Italian fame of the poem and the poet); R. B. Martin, With Friends Possessed: A Life of Edward FitzGerald, London 1985 (a more analytical study, brings to light the homosexual implications of the poet’s male friendships, among whom were young riders and fishermen); Edward FitzGerald’s ‘Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’: A Famous Poem and its Influence, ed. W. H. Martin and S. Mason, London and New York 2011. 1 2

§ 78.2. This religious distress is documented in the letters to his friends written in the university years (cf. the detailed reconstruction in Terhune 1947, 55–66).

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in contact with the circle of young intellectuals, his peers at Cambridge, throughout his life, as is witnessed by a very large collection of letters. Having graduated without distinction, aware of his lack of poetic genius, after insignificant attempts at poetry in 1830 he returned home from a stint in Paris with Thackeray determined to become a ‘great bear’3 and to dedicate himself to a plan, which he often recalled with a hint of pride, of ‘simple life and deep thought’. Not needing to work, and even if his family fortune were reduced over time as a result of imprudent investments, he felt free to embody the figure of the solipsist in isolation from the world, devoted to curious and erratic literary appetites and to the pleasures of music, gardening and friendship. More often than not his proud, aristocratic independence, his over the top gestures and eccentric free-thinking scandalized the right-minded people. Far from ostentatiously displaying his wealth, he had that sloppiness that is frequently a distinctive trait of nobles and intellectuals. He often moved from place to place, conducting the life of a roving wanderer, and even lived for a brief period on his yacht – the provocatively named Scandal – in the company of a nearly illiterate fisherman. This man was one of the many with whom he was friendly and of a number of humble country folk he habitually frequented in his native Suffolk. His independence resulted in an unhappy marriage to a perfectly conformist woman which lasted only a matter of months.4 2. All of FitzGerald’s works bear the marks of the Cambridge environment and of the intellectual atmosphere of the 1830s. In number they are few, and all of minor importance save one. All are also translations or transcriptions. Except for his lack of creativity FitzGerald perfectly fits the profile of the Oxford and Cambridge defectors that we have detected in 3 Terhune 1947, 41. 4 FitzGerald’s two engagements evoke a not-very-funny comedy of errors. The first time, he was on the verge of proposing to the future wife of the orientalist Cowell, when she was stolen right from under his nose by this younger student. He thus married the daughter of the Quaker minister and poet Bernard Barton, but only as the result of a disastrous misunderstanding that he lacked the courage to clear up, and which he was to regret bitterly. On his deathbed, Barton united the hands of his daughter and of his friend FitzGerald, who was led to believe that the gesture represented the dying wish of his friend (Terhune 1947, 192–3).

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Tennyson and will see again in Matthew Arnold, Clough and even, later, and with a series of surprising analogies, in Pater and Hopkins. FitzGerald’s single original work not built on the foundation of a pre-existing text written by someone else – the interesting but prolix dialogue Euphranor – is a faithful reflection of the mental horizons of young Cambridge students in the 1830s, occupied by metaphysical and religious doubts, discussions on the repression of desire and on the dualism of body and spirit, and particularly by the utopian dream of a revival of chivalry and by a common, fervent idealization of a new type of hero for the moment. This was thus an early sketch of the perfect Victorian gentleman. His shy nature, the awareness of his inferiority as an imitator and remaker, together with his curiosity and chameleon-like exploration of exotic literature, led him to launch and explore these same issues mostly behind the veil of translations, more often than not modestly anonymous ones. For FitzGerald, translation was that shield which many other poets found in the dramatic monologue – and Rubáiyát could certainly be called a dramatic monologue sui generis – because it permitted the author to play hide-and-seek with his reader, making use of a studied combination of personal affirmations mixed with others which were clearly, in varying degrees, ‘dramatic’. In short, translation proved to be a means to disguise and camouflage the self. Considered in their entirety, FitzGerald’s works display a poet entering and leaving different personas in various ways attuned to his thinking, almost to the point of deliberately losing or erasing his own.5 3. FitzGerald unhesitatingly presented all of his translations, which aside from his masterpiece in quatrains included versions of other Persian poems as well as various dramas by Calderón and Aeschylus, as ‘free’, tending, that is, to preserve the spirit of the originals rather than the letter. In the preface to Agamemnon he shrewdly described his work as not a ‘version’ but a ‘perversion’. Both in Aeschylus and in Calderón, and certainly in Khayyám, he believed there was a need to clarify the obscurities of the original; in particular in the works of Calderón alterations and pruning 5

FitzGerald’s qualms about his own identity can be traced to a decision of his father, taken after the death of FitzGerald’s maternal grandfather when the boy was only nine, to change his own surname, Purcell, to that of FitzGerald.

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were necessary in order to adapt the work to present-time tastes, utterly unaccustomed to the Baroque elements and the exasperating conceits of the siglo de oro. From a strictly philological point of view, FitzGerald’s work is unforgivable. He allows himself to take a text and tear it apart, although he always takes care to furnish erudite explanatory footnotes or appendices. An even more blatant impropriety is his combination of the two Oedipus plays of Sophocles into one. Naturally, FitzGerald would never have entered literary history simply as a literary translator; he belongs in the ranks of poet-translators or translator-poets, alongside illustrious names like Marlowe, Chapman, Pope, Cowper; or perhaps in those of the great English literary forgers like Macpherson and Chatterton. In the nineteenth century philological rigour was certainly mild, if we consider that FitzGerald was even reprimanded for having put ‘so little of himself ’6 into his versions of the Persian translations. Modern and postmodern sensibilities have instead gradually appreciated this sort of operation, which comes very close to the now popular trend for adaptations and remakes. FitzGerald’s repertoire, to say the least, cannot be really compared to the tradition of translations made by major writers to which it belongs. That usually only involved Greek epics or dramas or monumental masterpieces of western literature. He enlarged the range of the translatable, and opened the doors to the knowledge of a civilization which was barely known in his time. In this sense, his work can only be compared to that of Rossetti and his slightly later translations of the early Italian poets. Preceded by Byron, and in his own time by Tennyson and Arnold, FitzGerald was a pioneer of Victorian exoticism and Persianism; he was the first to take up in a competent and systematic way, and offering a truly valuable cultural mediation, the corpus of that literature and culture, of which he appointed himself an ambassador. Without him, without the orientalist vogue to which he gave birth, many of Tennyson’s late monologues with Oriental themes might never have been written, and we probably would not have had that much more original variation and recreation of Persian motifs found in Browning’s Ferishtas’s Fancies.

6 Benson 1905, 89.

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4. Fitzgerald is nearly as notable as a writer of letters as he is a remaker of exotic texts. His copious correspondence has traditionally been praised for its pleasantness, grace, and humour. The interest of his dense volumes lies mainly in the light they shed not so much on the writer as on the intended recipients of the letters, and in the golden mine of documentary material which can be found in them. He was a friend and correspondent of almost all the great intellectuals of his age. Carlyle, Tennyson and Thackeray, among others, enjoyed his esteem and affection. In these letters, for the first and only time, we find evidence of that inventiveness which FitzGerald lacked as a writer. They are written without a rush, and above all in many cases with no discernible practical purpose; and they have the refinement, the descriptive clarity and the planning of true art. They were often sent without any request for response, contradicting and surpassing their informative purpose to satisfy the higher need for expression on the part of the writer. FitzGerald lays himself bare and mythologizes his self-imprisonment. From his exile, he still, in reality, longed to join the fray. He hesitated, lazed away, but proclaimed that ‘men ought to have an ambition to stir’; despite his systematically idle life, which he described in delicious portraits (study, fishing, sailing in his boat), he felt the call inciting him ‘to more active and serious duties of life’. A portrait emerges of one nostalgic for the old chivalrous England in inexorable decline, who wipes away a tear at the tender memories of a time long past, and celebrates the tenth anniversaries of happy events with a touch of regret. The intimate dimension of the letters almost never leaves room for references to current events or political discussions;7 what looms large instead is the gentleman and bookworm, second only to Hopkins in the late nineteenth century for his critical nose and the brilliance of his spontaneous, idiosyncratic, judgements, both scathing and extolling, and for the eclectic breadth of his horizons and interests, stretching from painting to music. He combs through all of the English literary tradition in his letters, as well as the Greek and Latin classics. His order of preference, however, and the

7

FitzGerald was a stubbornly half-Irish conservative who opposed any concession of political independence to Ireland. But amidst the choruses of raging nationalists he never failed to express his hope for the political and territorial downsizing of England.

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greater quantity of positive judgements – on Tennyson,8 Thackeray and Carlyle, as well as their predecessors, Richardson and Crabbe in particular – confirm his anti-Romantic, classical bent. He could not bear ‘Daddy Wordsworth’ and he completely ignores, save for the odd poisoned barb, both the Brownings and also Rossetti, Patmore and Matthew Arnold. The linguist, or better the dialectologist, the collector of marine jargon, the lexicographer, and the etymologist, with eccentricities and fantasies worth even in this case of Hopkins as a university student and budding philologist, crop up in the letters and do so even more systematically in Suffolk Sea Phrases, an enjoyable collection of dialectal curiosities and creative solecisms. Behind the innocuous taxonomy one spies an equally conservative and backward-looking spirit, because the Suffolk farmers and fishermen are the custodians of the archaic purity of language before its corruption. § 101. FitzGerald II: The dialogue ‘Euphranor’ The allegorical poem, or ‘masnavi’,9 ‘Salámán and Absál’, penned by Jami, the most famous and esteemed fifteenth-century Persian poet, was the first poem from that literature that FitzGerald had ever read. It was translated and published by FitzGerald in 1850. According to his canons for translation, he confessed that he had reduced it by three quarters in the first version, and to have further shortened it before its republication in 1875. It is not difficult to see the reasons why FitzGerald was so attracted to this poem and this poet, despite Jami’s use of an allegory which FitzGerald did not hesitate to define as oppressive and intrusive. On the one hand, we have the king and the philosopher who try platonically to purify and almost separate themselves from the flesh; on the other, the irresistible

8

9

Tennyson’s decline after In Memoriam was objectively perceived by FitzGerald despite their close friendship. The greatest, inimitable Tennyson would remain that made legendary by FitzGerald himself (for having almost shared his creative excitement), Tennyson the author of the poetic volumes completed and published by 1833. The ‘masnavi’ is a poetic genre in which the hemistichs of each line rhyme, though each line has a different rhyme from that which follows. FitzGerald did not adopt this admittedly very difficult metre, substituting it with a blank verse which he himself considered too Miltonian, with occasional rhyming couplets.

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temptations of the flesh itself, which are ultimately defeated: in other words, and in essence, this is also the focus of the agon to be found in the quatrains of Omar Khayyám, but resolved in a diametrically opposed way. To St Paul’s distinction between flesh and spirit, FitzGerald found added in the masnavi allusions to the temptations in the Garden of Eden, the motif of the waning of youthful heroism, and the resurgence of the active spirit of chivalry. The fable, of Hellenistic origins, is preceded by a prologue praising God, whose vicar and ‘shadow’ on Earth is the king. This nameless sovereign has by his side not so much a philosopher in the flesh as a pure voice of divine wisdom. As the story develops, the philosopher clarifies to the king, who is without a spouse or children, that to generate children there must be carnal desire. The philosopher rails against women in a tirade dictated by ‘the emasculating neo-Platonic mysticism’10 prevailing at the time in Persia. The prince miraculously born to the king is in fact named according to the denial of the flesh: Salámán is a compound of ‘sanity’ and ‘heaven’. Both the king and the philosopher exhort the young prince to dedicate himself to the contemplation of the divine and to renounce the flesh, but he soon falls hopelessly in love with the beautiful wet nurse Absál. Using metapsychic powers, the king finds a way to make his son’s trysts fail, and to expose him to the gospel of temperance to which all sovereigns must scrupulously adhere. Only pure gold, Salámán, survives the fire which consumes the two lovers, rendered desperate by the prohibition of their relationship; Absál, an alloy of base metals, perishes.11 Salámán is healed from his madness by the philosopher, who counterbalances the image of the lifeless Absál, in the psyche of Salámán, with that of a wholly spiritual Venus. Venus is an exceptional representation of exquisite perfection. In the coda the father is the acting intellect, the philosopher the emanation of grace. Salámán represents the human spirit born of the acting intellect, without recourse to the physical.

10 11

A. Pagliaro and A. Bausani, La letteratura persiana, Firenze 1968, 473. A psychoanalytical reading of the poem as a ritual of liberation from the ‘wet nursemother-lover’ is found in Martin 1985, 179.

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2. In the prologue, ‘Mortal Beauty’ is nothing other than ‘the Veil / The Heavenly hides behind, and from itself / Feeds’.12 That divinity, as for the sacramentalists, is ‘Under the forms of all Created Things’, and governs the universe, holding it tightly in its grasp. At the same time, FitzGerald the translator enhances the frustration of yearning for this beauty which peeps out from behind the veil, thus rendering itself impossible to reach, and the desire for a final, unhesitating and complete submission to the pleasures of the senses: ‘in the Revelation of Thyself / Self-Lost, and Conscience-quit of Good and Evil’. Another very modern symptom foreshadowed by the Persian poet is the split felt by Man, his ‘separate and Derivéd Self ’ and inclination towards self-affirmation, versus the joining with God. We sense here a pale emergence of the Victorian motif of the double, exemplified by the lovely anecdote of the Kurd who ties a pumpkin to his ankles while sleeping in order to recognize himself when he awakens: which means that if man is only himself and nothing more, there is no explanation for his dignity and wisdom; and that if he is only God this ‘abject impotence’ is mysterious. His heartfelt, final words can be read in a personal sense, as they inconsolably and heartbreakingly call for a ray of light and for a regeneration in Khayyám’s metaphor of the wine, to be offered, and of the lees, to be discarded. In turn the non-physical birth of Salámán may well be, already in Jami, a syncretic myth, alternative but parallel to the Christian incarnation of God, with the figure of the wise philosopher in the role of the Holy Spirit. The philosopher’s expressions of terror and disgust about sex surely would have had a precise resonance for Victorian Puritans and Calvinists.13 The joyful pastimes of the youth, the ball game so similar to cricket or polo, the unerring hunts with bow and arrow and above all the banquets enlivened by the music of sensual houris, suggest the vein of Tennyson’s ‘Arabian Nights’ and of Victorian exoticism. At the same time the irresistible seductive magic of Absál is reminiscent of that of Eve, or of the satanic temptations of Eden. In this occult Eden-like scenario, Salámán, reproached for his love, flees desperately with Absál into 12 13

The use of capital letters in FitzGerald is always erratic. The words of the philosopher in the sixteenth section are particularly clear as to the pollution of the spirit being the fault of the flesh and of women.

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the desert – or, one could say, towards exile. When Salámán unexpectedly and courageously rises back up after his sensual loitering, and ultimately vows to renounce action and sensuality, we can sense another Victorian paradigm particularly dear to Tennyson, the parable of reason, of intellect, of self-control dominating the senses. 3. Euphranor (1851), the only strictly inventive work by FitzGerald, neither derived nor translated from another’s work, confirms indirectly his almost vital and congenital need for a text to lean upon. The narrative material struggles to merge with the conceptual content, which reveals the former to be a mere pretext.14 In the framework of a boat excursion to a Cambridge suburb, the two principal speakers in the dialogue – an unnamed doctor who is also the writer of the story, and his younger friend Euphranor, a Tractarian sympathizer – while rowing and later over two mugs of ale, carry on a discussion upon the rebirth of chivalry recently advocated by the ideologue Kenelm Digby (1797–1880) in his books. This rebirth of chivalry was not to be, as many detractors complained, an empty and unproductive aesthetic nostalgia; rather was it a spiritual chivalry, a militia of soldiers fighting for the just and the beautiful, throngs of ideally young warriors moved by their strong sense of morals. This discussion is only the prologue to two wider and much more detailed ones that lead towards a few other intellectual issues that are among the most widely debated by intellectuals of the time. FitzGerald’s main question concerns again the relationships between flesh and spirit. The doctor – quoting Montaigne – favours a symbiosis and a mutual shaping of the two elements, one on the other; Euphranor instead refuses the idea of any reciprocal influence. The discussion stalls and another of a politicalpedagogical nature begins, which is the most vigorous part of the dialogue, though even this section has its slow parts. Gradually we realize that the doctor is FitzGerald’s spokesman in his stigmatization of the idleness of the scions of aristocratic families and the decline of good manners and genuineness. He gives an utterly negative appraisal of the newly rich bourgeois posing as aristocrats, while unconditional praise is lavished on 14 Entire passages from Kenelm Digby’s books are suggested and even read aloud in the text.

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the peasants living happily in poverty far from the world (like those with whom FitzGerald surrounded himself in his own life.) At this point the narrator, with the support of Euphranor, launches a tirade against the current educational system which represses ‘animal activities’ in the students, with the objective of instilling in them a sense of respectability. The influence of Montaigne can be seen in a few utopian and fantastical proposals which at the same time sound like a parody of the future scholastic reports of the inspector Matthew Arnold.15 Almost imperceptibly the dialogue slides in its final sections into one of the first Victorian utopian texts, for it traces an identikit of the new Englishman as the product of a radically reformed educational system. The new method of teaching was to be modelled on the real needs and natural learning rhythms of the pupils, and hinging on a ‘Wordsworthian’ apprenticeship in and about nature.16 The model of the Arnoldian public school is confronted by one of its most precocious and implacable critics in this dialogue. The main reason for this critique – left for others to explore in more detail – is that Arnold’s public school imposed a dangerous elephantiasis of the spirit and a resulting atrophy of the flesh. The doctor of this FitzGeraldian dialogue expressly speaks of pedagogical ‘errors’ anticipating to the letter the uncle of the protagonist in Clough’s Dipsychus, who concludes at the end of the poem that ‘It’s all Arnold’s doing’.17 The rebel against this educational systems which renders its pupils obtuse is another prototype of much literature to come: the rebel, that is, who ‘defects’ from that experience and returns encouraged, reassured, and joyful to settle and create a large and happy family, while those who remain behind languish and suffer. The final result of the argument is the principle of active volunteerism, to work hands-on rather than just planning, which was the mire of inaction in which so many English youth were caught. The doctor, opening up towards a precociously blind vitality, espouses a vigour so pure that it can lead to extreme evil as well 15 16 17

Yet the doctor allows for the whipping of repeat offenders, even though he approves only a rare use, exemplary and as a last resort. Significantly, the doctor ‘knows little Latin and less Greek’, and must ask the student Euphranor to translate a passage from Aristophanes. § 143.3.

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as to extreme good. In the (not especially explicit) words of this doctor, which forcefully advocate a determined spirit eager to face challenges and natural dangers, and which was to forge a youth hardened and ready to face war, we can also see resurfacing that bellicose nostalgia often found in this age of peace in which the Victorians, often somewhat reluctantly, were living. A new figure of an active writer was imperative to bring this utopian reform of English society to life: a man of action, not closed up in his ivory tower. This was of course the opposite of FitzGerald’s life style, though to be an active reforming writer was his secret, unrealizable aspiration. 4. As to genre, Euphranor is a modern adaptation of the Platonic dialogue, but it also draws inspiration from the module of the stories of university life mainly illustrated by Newman in Loss and Gain. At the same time, for its self-parodying and playful elements – first among them that of disguising and renaming the protagonists with Greek nicknames – it can be seen as a prose pendant to Clough’s The Bothie. This similarity is also due to the amused reproduction of the speeches, ideas and real fixations of the students. The youths are from Cambridge but have the same longing for freshness and novelty as Clough’s Oxford students.18 Arrogant, they expand at length on notions that they studied just the day before; they show off their erudition, endlessly citing literary examples. In a framework identical to Clough’s The Bothie, that of an excursion which proceeds with no limits set to free speech, there are in FitzGerald’s dialogue two protagonists and some secondary characters who also have Greek-sounding names, and who play a very specific role, that of verifying or contradicting the points made during the discussion. They can be easily grouped along the lines of physical exercise – a complement to mental exercise – and inaction. Lycion, whose interventions in the first phases of the discussion at the tavern almost exclusively aim to scorn the ideas of chivalry, is in fact the most mentally atrophied of the youths; with no force of will, he passes his days smoking cigars and playing billiards, vices much stigmatized by the two reformers. Lexilogus is at the other extreme, an awkward youth dedicated only to his 18

Except for Skythrops, a strong advocate of the teaching of science in school programmes.

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studies: a perfect product of the Arnoldian school, he could be the older brother, so to speak, of Dipsychus in Clough’s poem.19 Tellingly, Lexilogus remains immobile at the helm while the doctor and Euphranor row and converse as they ride down the river. The expected knight appears epiphanically under the guise of a Phidippus20 – he indeed arrives on horseback, and though not excelling in his studies he is bursting with happiness and humanity – as well as of the anonymous figures of the rowers of the team of St John’s college, who win the university regatta which takes place early that evening. Before the regatta, the youths rightly partake of an abundant meal in which they are served, as true knights might be, those juicy steaks which, according to the earlier words of the doctor, the body needs if it is to become worthy of the spirit.21 5. Short parables, curious anecdotes and both original and (often) borrowed aphorisms, stolen in bulk from Plato, Bacon, Johnson, Goethe, Coleridge and others, but also copiously lifted from the Victorian trio of maîtres-à-penser – Arnold, Newman and Carlyle – constitute and enrich the bizarre and disorganized Polonius, which, composed and published in 1852, seems to be, rather than a book of aphorisms, a grab-bag of them thrown together at random. It is another symptom of FitzGerald’s chameleon-like, controlled parasitism and talent for self-reinvention. There is even a method 19 He is modelled, according to Martin 1985, 165, on the orientalist Cowell (§ 102.1). 20 Modelled in turn upon the figure of R. K. Browne, a young sportsman not without literary interests who was widely known in the early 1830s (Benson 1905, 43, 132). Upon his death, ironically caused by a fall from horseback, the figure of the knight was reincarnated in ‘Posh’, namely the twenty-five-year-old fisherman Joseph Fletcher, with whom FitzGerald even went into the seafood business, setting up a company which later dissolved, not without friction over some alleged unpaid bills. 21 An anticipation or imitation of Euphranor is ‘The Boat-race’, a delightful poem by the minor poet W. C. Bennett (1820–1895), whose protagonist is a young Oxfordian poet and tragedian with an immature heart, slightly soft and effeminate, to whom the rough, future father-in-law makes an offer: win the rowing contest and obtain the hand of his beloved. The girl gives her consent, but the youth loses the race, or rather he wins it, but only thanks to the generosity of the chivalric winner who, having been implored, concedes him the victory in the final seconds. The poem is also a scathing indictment against ‘bookworms’. The scene from the university regatta reappears even as late as Meredith and Hardy.

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to this mishmash of a good 139 declared topics. The common denominator is their attack on commonplace ideas, on philistinism and human stupidity, narrow views and pusillanimity, objectives in the name of which the ecumenical FitzGerald, despite being almost a materialist and certainly a sceptic, gathers together numerous pages by Newman. Among these one exhorts the reader to action, to shaking off his torpor which follows the purely aesthetic reading of novels, even should they be ones exalting the good and the importance of action. This is the precondition of the eulogy of action on the part of the doctor in Euphranor. This collection of aphorisms, not in the least separate from the earlier works by FitzGerald nor from his later ones, continues the discussion hinging on the figure of the ‘knight’ through that same mix of personal recreation and the reproduction of the authoritative voices of others in translation. No single item of this compendium but contains a panegyric praising the nobility of spirit, stoicism, self-control, the control of the passions, conversely condemning snobbery, showiness, and everything inauthentic. § 102. FitzGerald III: ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’ I. Omar reborn in the sceptical nineteenth century The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, or rather the quatrains of Omar Khayyám which brought such fame to the Persian poet, inextricably linked to the name of his translator,22 held FitzGerald captive for over twenty years. Still longer and more complicated was the publishing history, from the first edition in 1859 to the last of the five prepared by FitzGerald and posthumously published in 1889.23 The first, unconscious inspiration for FitzGerald came from an eccentric off-duty Anglo-Indian serviceman whom he met as a child. But it was the enfant prodige Edward Byles Cowell, orientalist and from 1867 professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge, who introduced him

22 23

The authorship remained anonymous until 1872 and the third edition, and the poem was suspected to be by FitzGerald for the first time by the circle of American authors led by Charles Eliot Norton, who had also been Clough’s mentor. According to his wishes, a rose picked at Nishapur, Omar’s birthplace, was planted on his tomb, like that growing on the tomb of the Persian poet.

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to Khayyám and his quatrains24 in a handwritten draft of 158 compositions discovered in 1856 at the Bodleian library at Oxford, supplemented by a second draft sent in a transcription from Calcutta. A selection from the first version was rejected by magazines; the complete translation of the quatrains taken from the two manuscripts, seventy-five in all, came out in 1859 at FitzGerald’s own expense, printed by a minor publisher in London at the price of one shilling. Not having any market, this first edition was sold off for just a penny a copy. The next four editions followed on the wave of the enthusiasm that rose almost overnight for this poem, and after Rossetti in 1861, with his incomparable nose for talent, had bought a copy from a bookstand as a result of Tennyson’s affectionate dedication of ‘Tiresias’ to FitzGerald, and in the context of a fervour of studies and of important investigations regarding Khayyám completed during the middle years of the century. At the time the canon of Khayyám’s works, a question still open even today, had only begun to be organized, and attention was concentrated upon separating the authentic quatrains from the spurious ones. There were scholars interested in significantly expanding that canon and others who even suggested that the name of Khayyám should be struck off from the history of Persian literature. Equally open was the question of how to interpret the quatrains, which could hide an unsuspected allegorical meaning and examples of the mystical communion with God behind proclamations of evident and even crass materialism, a point of view held by the French Orientalist Nicolas and strongly contested by FitzGerald in the notes to his third edition. Closer to our times it has been ascertained that 24 An ancient type of popular poem, the robai arose in the form of even scorching epigrams hurled by people at their commanders, and became an established literary genre with Rudaghi. It obeyed a formal structure of three types, the ‘square’ quatrain (the fourth line explains the fact described in the first), the ‘triangular’ (the first two lines are repetitions of the same assertion, while the third introduces a different concept and the fourth is again related to the first) and the ‘parallel’ (Pagliaro and Bausani, op. cit., 319–23), but always within a self-enclosed development and in a loose succession between each composition. Metrically, the robai consists of two lines divided into four hemistichs, transformed by FitzGerald into a quatrain with an aaba rhyme scheme, a model that immediately became popular and was also used by Swinburne in ‘Laus Veneris’, among others.

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it is not in fact possible to resolve the aporias presented by the quatrains, which, if truly written by the same poet, reflect varying moods and are written at times by a denying atheist, by a disconsolate but not irreligious thinker who – although not an allegorist – was related to the framework of Persian theological thought, and possibly even by a mystic.25 The figure of Omar Khayyám is itself lost in legend. We know for certain that he was a native of Nishapur in Khorasan, and that he was active during the eleventh century as a mathematician and as an astronomer charged, along with two other wise men, with reforming the calendar. Romantic anecdotes relate that it was his desire to be buried in the midst of flower petals blowing in the wind. The ancient sources already underlined his fame as a scientist rather than as a poet, and successive generations of his countrymen remembered him as an atheist who saw the world in a state of chaos. Interest was also generated over time in the question as to whether or not Khayyám was a sufi, that is whether he believed that salvation lay in a re-absorption of the soul into the spirit of God and in the renunciation of earthly pleasures; some even suggested that he was instead a repentant sufi poking fun at the doctrines of that faith. 2. FitzGerald, to simplify, regarded Khayyám as an ‘epicurean materialist’. He also claimed (and critics took him at his word) that from the very outset he had immediately felt a deep sympathy for the Persian sage: they were as if blood relations, and he felt ‘like him’.26 The relationship between FitzGerald and Khayyám is in reality so elusive that it has become part and parcel of the historical reception, deformed and full of misunderstandings, of the Rubáiyát themselves. One should also make a passing reference to a greater misunderstanding, one regarding the figure of Khayyám, whose fanatic cult arose towards the end of the nineteenth century, leading to the foundation of actual clubs of followers. This cult was due to the fact that very few could read the Persian original. The poet was almost exclusively known through the mediation of FitzGerald, which was not particularly trustworthy; hence scholars of Iranian literature spoke (and Pagliaro and Bausani, op. cit., 343–6. The orientalists usually point to a humorous, playful and parodic element, with the aim of poking fun at earlier writers of quatrains. 26 Letters, I, 342. 25

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continue to speak) in a highly derogatory way of this corrupted translation by FitzGerald, to which they refer as of ‘FitzOmar’. In 1859 FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát were suddenly faced with an unexpected rival in the form of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the other great Victorian oracular text on life after death. FitzGerald, by birth one of the earliest Victorians, had in fact entered the literary scene quite late, having thus as his ideal audience second generation Victorians to whom the Rubáiyát offered a more exotic version, embellished and made absolute, of their languid, fatalistic, pacifist scepticism. The Persian poet from the twelfth century ad was mistaken for a contemporary since he had embraced the path of religious and metaphysical doubt. Thus FitzGerald’s version, read in such a distorting way, became one of the texts which most inspired the Pre-Raphaelites,27 and was then classified as an early product of Victorian Decadentism and of its longing to flee from reality and responsibility into the arms of the ‘sweetscented Orient’. Indeed it ended up being regarded as a ‘bible of unbelief ’28 whose editions, just like Bibles and mass-books, frequently came out in Morocco leather, golden edged pages and coloured bookmarkers. The late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century sensibilities that received ‘FitzOmar’ were already establishing fragmentation and improvisation as part of the poetic agenda, and valorised intellectual snobbery, the masochistic instinct for disorientation and self-destruction, and antihistorical idealism. Even in Italy – where by 1974 there were twenty translations of the quatrains, of which eight were actually retranslations from the English – FitzGerald found favour with the Decadents, and Giovanni Pascoli dedicated to him a poem entitled ‘L’immortalità’, which voices the condemnation of faith in immortality, the ephemeral nature of all things human and the almost Promethean attitude of defiance of the poet ‘che contempla e crea’ [‘who contemplates and creates’]. Thus everywhere it became the current opinion that ‘FitzOmar’ was a profligate genius of atheism and a hero of free thought, belonging to a circle which included 27 Obviously this must be intended as the second Pre-Raphaelitism of Morris, Burne-Jones, Swinburne and of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s later phase (§ 188), which superseded ‘Christian Art’. 28 VAL, 192–5.

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Lucretius, Horace, Rabelais, Voltaire, Leopardi and Heine. One cannot understand, however, the true and authentic significance of FitzGerald and the Rubáiyát without placing both within the ideological and religious context of Victorian England. Persian theology at the end of the first millennium was not, of course, an atheist theology, but it was consonant with that of mid-eighteenth century England, and easily adaptable to the Victorian concept of the Divine. God is far away, terrifyingly so for the Muslims, and elusive, even teasing, but in any case existing. The Rubáiyát fit into their own times in that they play down and almost make fun of the anxiety about the afterlife: ‘why fret about [Unborn To-Morrow, and dead Yesterday] if To-day be sweet!’29 Far from the roar of the fray, the wise man ‘make(s) game of that which makes as much of Thee’,30 that is he mocks God, who in turn makes fun of man. FitzGerald ends his quest with few certainties, finding a joyful strength in his own transgressions and in the acceptance that there is no tomorrow, or that anyway one cannot be sure that there is, and embracing this renunciation with conviction. When the Angel of Death arrives, he will be welcomed, as indeed he must be, with stoic firmness. The poem thus appears to be a far from Promethean challenge. However, the elegiac vein is translated into masculine acceptance, into the vindication of man’s dignity and intellectual independence, one which will not faint-heartedly yield to unverified truths, and will always insist on investigating personally, no matter how difficult the consequences may be to accept, and consequences which knock man from his pedestal and from his false beliefs. The poet claims to be incorrigible, and does not know if at the end his words of repentance were spoken while sober or drunk, and ultimately, although realizing his sins, begs his pardon, but takes up the cup of wine. This explains the misunderstandings that in point of fact some of the quatrains, separately taken, would seem to authorize, that is that the poem is a reckless invitation to drink, indeed to drown these ultimate questions in wine, and to get inebriated, drugged and narcotized; it also explains the exploitation of the poem in recent, parodic parables written as therapies to detoxify alcoholics. 29 The thirty-seventh quatrain, first edition. 30 The forty-fifth quatrain of the first edition, never re-used.

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3. From FitzGerald’s letters and from Euphranor there emerges an intellectual doubter but not an indifferent one. FitzGerald is neither an atheist nor an absolute immanentist. From the same letters one learns that at least at one point in his life FitzGerald was a good Christian, a practising Protestant who attended church on Sundays, actually renouncing the pleasures in which Omar was drowning. He was a teetotaller and a vegetarian, and he rarely smoked. A few of the quatrains of Khayyám were intentionally excluded from all the five versions because of their ‘unmistakable coarseness’, enough to scandalize even a pure philologist, but actually not so pure, like Cowell, even if the reason for that exclusion was perhaps his desire not to scandalize his audience. Defining him an agnostic, as most critics have done, seems therefore an unjust and excessive terminological shortcut, unless by that term one simply refers to a way of saying:31 he was if anything a restless, indecisive spirit asking questions that he did not know how to solve, who despite being affected by Matthew Arnold’s reductionism and by other early developments in theology, and being doubtless intolerant of all forms of superstition, sanctimony and bigotry, did not doubt the existence of God. He gave the best definition of himself in a letter of 1830 speaking of a spiritual split which we can easily apply to his later life: ‘I still vacillate like a fool between belief and disbelief […] for I have no strength of mind’.32 This definition applies perfectly to his ‘spiritual twin’, Clough, who felt excruciatingly and permanently that same spiritual condition, of being ‘stuck in the middle’. The respect FitzGerald had for church rituals and vestments, and for the solemn church music, even reminds one of the soul naturaliter christiana of a Walter Pater. The absolute import assumed by the supposedly immanentist gospel of the quatrains is denied

31

32

Terhune is disconcerting in this regard, implying that implicitly FitzGerald is still more agnostic than Omar, defined as neither an atheist nor an agnostic (Terhune 1947, 219). Yet the same critic contradicts himself (223), having defined FitzGerald as an agnostic, when he claims that the poet never doubted the existence of a Supreme Being, and that he revered and admired Christ and always defended the official Anglican Church. Letters, I, 88. Benson 1905, 188, is far from fanciful when he compares him to a nineteenth-century Hamlet.

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or counterbalanced by the remaining part of FitzGerald’s translations. Parliament of Birds, the allegory of an uphill path in search of the divine, overturns the Rubáiyát, and also in his Calderón FitzGerald intensified the religious elements, rather than reducing them, with regard to the original. If FitzGerald truly experiences the drama of the fin-de-siècle ‘degeneration’, he describes it from the point of view of one waiting for an awakening, but conscious of his impotence. Chesterton rightly said that ‘it is because there is something which is after all indescribably manly, intellectual, firm about FitzGerald’s way of phrasing the pessimism that he towers above the slope that was tumbling down to the decadents’.33 There is then in his isolation no morbid, flabby, or complacent despondency, and his self-declared, showy epicureanism was a mask and an attitude in which he indulged, but one hiding a fundamental sanity. His own chosen self-imprisonment was often a choice he blamed others for making, and he often cited the cases of poets who had been, or according to FitzGerald would eventually become, men of action, like Shakespeare and Byron. From the fusion between Omar and FitzGerald a third poet was born, as Borges said with a boutade, a poet who brought to maturity what had been repressed by the mathematicians in Persia. Omar and FitzGerald ‘were very different’ according to Borges, and in reality would not even have been friends had they lived at the same time. 4. A comparison of the five editions allows one to see not only aspects regarding the process of composition and others useful for identifying the standard text, but also small and sometimes imperceptible changes in accent. The first version (of seventy-five quatrains) is the most succinct of the five, while the second (1868) is the longest, followed by the last three, which all contain more than 100 quatrains, in compliance with an evident principle of conceptual expansion. Some quatrains from the first edition reappear in the following divided into two, where entire new sections or sequences also appear. Much detailed work was also spent by FitzGerald on vocabulary: some colloquialisms were suppressed, adjectives and nouns exchanged for synonyms or more or less figurative language; new short syntagmas were also added, at times even entire couplets. Often the transformation

33

VAL, 194.

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consists in a simple repositioning of quatrains, which confirms the rhapsodic nature of the poem. The Rubáiyát thus presents the irresolvable textual problem that we face with some of the most long-lived Victorians: is the edition closest to the intentions of the author the one most recent, or one of the intermediate ones? No version of the Rubáiyát can be identified as definitive, and none of the five editions stands out from others for the aptness of its textual choices. Even modern editors can do nothing better than publish the first and the fifth in the same edition, as if they were two autonomous and separate works. All were approved by the author and all are formally complete and marvellously finished.34 The fifth edition itself, normally the preferred one, is not always, in its additional material and in its re-elaborations, superior to the first. It remains true, however, that at the conceptual level FitzGerald increases his pessimism version after version, rendering certain quatrains ever more bitter, even adding his own scathing remarks and making the tone even harsher and more provocative, intensifying the urgency of the questions and turning the quest itself into, as it were, a dramatic dialogue between two opposing internal voices.35 § 103. FitzGerald IV: ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’ II. The conceptual arabesque One objective that drove FitzGerald, version after version, was that of improving the structural organization of the poem. I use the term ‘poem’ because FitzGerald had the intuition and the ability to turn what was a jumble of quatrains, a fluid and amoebic corpus, into a closed and structured 34

35

Being one of the rare instances of Victorian poetic craftsmanship, FitzGerald escaped the modernist purges ordered by Eliot and Pound. Eliot’s Gerontion is a fusion of Conrad’s invented Kurtz with the historical FitzGerald, who, old and almost blind, had children read him books. Pound thought him a master, and another poettranslator like him. A fragmentary memory of FitzGerald appears in the eightieth of Pound’s Cantos. In particular FitzGerald, in amplifying the first edition, accepted both authentic and spurious quatrains from Omar, which repeated others with slight variations, according to a customary practice in Persian literature but not always in line with western tastes. In my analysis I will refer for the most part to the fifth edition, without neglecting, where relevant, readings provided by earlier ones.

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whole. The original had not in fact been written as a whole but as a pure accumulation and addition of single monads lacking any reciprocal relationship. One may briefly examine, just as an example and without weighing down our discussion with long and detailed digressions on variants, the transformation of the first and the last stanzas of the poem. The goal that FitzGerald pursued and ultimately achieved was the realization of a perfect circular connection. In the fifth edition, he does so through a series of precise conceptual and above all lexical reversals. In the opening quatrain of this fifth version there is a resounding invitation to the poetic ‘I’ to rise up, and the description of the rising sun which rends the night and chases the stars from the sky – ‘who scatter’d into flight / The Stars’, perfectly literal stars therefore. In the last quatrain, the night returns, closing the daily cycle, and the moon makes its appearance in the sky replacing the sun, its rays lingering upon ‘the Guests star-scatter’d on the Grass’:36 not only does the sun cede its place to the moon, but thanks to a remarkable transformation, the image of the stars returns with a new metaphorical value. Now they are the departed in a cemetery, stars ‘scatter’d’ across the grass. If we look at this very tight circular connection in the fifth edition and compare it to the others, we discover that none of this is found in the first. The closure is present but the tight lexical links are not, even if the first quatrain can be considered even poetically more successful, lacking the weighty expression ‘scatter’d into flight’ or the repetition of the word ‘night’: ‘scatter’ appears neither in the second edition nor the third and only occurred to FitzGerald in the fourth, which apart from a very few changes is identical to the fifth. One may indeed speak both metaphorically and literally of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát in terms of the weaving of a Persian carpet: each of the main, recurring images – in and of themselves elementary and much used even in western tradition: wine, the cup ever ready to be filled and be emptied, whose brims are compared to human lips which drink from it, a clay cup which must one day dry out and crumble into dust, 36

The verb ‘scatter’ appears, confirming the continuity of images, in the sixtieth quatrain of the fifth edition and in the corresponding quatrains from earlier ones, but to describe the ‘sword’ of the wine emblemized in the ‘mighty Mahmúd’, ready to ‘Scatter before him’ ‘Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul’.

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symbolizing the deterioration of Creation, another symbol for which is the rose – comes and goes in an embroidery and a texture rich in ever new associations, variations and at times surprising and unexpected semantic reversals.37 Stylistically, FitzGerald preserves the elaborate, Baroque-like Persian rhetoric made of circumlocutions, antonomasias, slightly altered repetitions of single trains of thought. He made no attempt in this case to slim down the exotic onomastics that, fused with citations from the Christian Bible found in the Koran, creates and maintains an arcane aura. The rhythm and music of the lines are, instead, utterly English. Pauses and enjambements, with the admirable reinforcement given by the absence of rhyme in the third line, avoid any prosodic monotony. The linguistic register varies as well, from the grave, solemn, and majestic, Latinate, to a rigid structure at times shaken by exhortations and awoken by climaxes which are alternately brusque, harsh, or colloquial. 2. In addition to the continuity of images, the structural cohesion imposed by FitzGerald upon his Rubáiyát hinges on the valorization (with respect to the original) of an outline following, by and large, a narrative thread. It is dawn and the poet shakes himself awake. Carrying his books and food, and above all wine, he heads towards the river-bank, accompanied by his cup-bearer. As in Euphranor he makes impromptu speeches on the meaning of life, on the here and now and the afterlife. Awakening from his nocturnal oblivion, he is attracted in this first light of dawn to action and communion with others, but withdraws from the crowd to seek solitude. Rhapsodies flow more smoothly from the ‘river’s lip on which we lean’,38 where the use of the plural implies both the poet and his young female companion39 who sings and pours the wine. The Persian quatrains 37

A few other examples: the ‘temple’, to which the worshippers must draw close for the rituals, is none other than the ‘tavern’ of the pleasures of the flesh (second quatrain of the fifth edition); the cup is the cup of wine, but also, in the seventy-second quatrain, the ‘inverted Bowl’ of the sky to which hands are raised, which is, notably, empty. That cup, in a third variation, becomes one containing a dark liquid, and is the cup of the angel who has come to announce death. 38 With a further development of the image of the human lip and of that of the cup. 39 Martin 1985, 208, remarks however, irrefutably, that there is a deliberate ambiguity, possible in English, regarding the gender of the ‘companion’.

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placed by FitzGerald at the opening of his version thus already implicitly contained a parable of Fitzgerald’s life, a life associated with solitude and meditative isolation, but enveloped in an attitude which is anything but helpless or fatalistic, because the wintry garments of penitence are stowed away and his lips draw close to the proffered cup of joy. Both FitzGerald the Victorian escapist and the Persian poet Omar Khayyám lived in a limbo between civilization and the desert, between villages housing the community and solitude. Such a place in the middle is also the embodiment of a utopian abolition of class distinctions: there is no more sovereign and lout, instead everyone is equal. This longed-for voluntary exile – this idealization of the country life made of comforts and of physical and intellectual pleasures without concern for luxuries, food in particular – and this wilful abandonment of civilization are two of the clearest points of contact between FitzGerald and Omar. 3. Among the many foreshadowings found by FitzGerald in the quatrains of Khayyám is the reappraisal of the body and of the pleasures of the flesh and the palate – which do not contradict the spirit, and may even fortify it, precisely because they have been themselves created by God and placed at the disposal of man – and the repudiation of the contemporary ethics of renunciation. The whole poem, rather than inviting to asceticism, exhorts one to spend, indeed to squander, goods which are transient, rather than spare them. The image of the rose appears again and again, the flower proclaiming in its own words that it wishes to be opened, its seeds poured on the ground or lavished upon gardens. In another language and another cultural epoch, Khayyám had grasped the bitter difference – perceived and regretted by many Victorian poets – reigning between the natural and biological cycle, subject to a perpetual seasonal renewal, and the human cycle, in which each individual, and earthly life itself come to an end with no return from death. Having grasped it, he had rebelled against it. As a result of his meditation on the Persian quatrains, FitzGerald was able to compose one of the many Victorian inquiries about the beginning and the end. One of the short internal storylines is the re-evocation of the curious and morbid interest of the young poet in knowing what awaits him beyond the ‘door of Darkness’ no one has ever crossed; given the lack of any precise information, the speculations of prophets and pious people

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about life after death can only be considered legends.40 The quest itself is very delicate. A mere trifle separates what is true from what is false: it is a veritable treasure hunt whose map is in the hands of a God who hides behind the wings to watch the show He himself has arranged as a pastime.41 The God of the Persians was not so different from that of the Victorians, and was already blamed in Khayyám’s time for demanding a payment from Man for a debt never contracted. FitzGerald makes of Omar an ante litteram protester against Calvinistic predestination and a supporter of the law of forgiveness: if man was predestined, his will would have no value and he would be stripped of all dignity, while instead man should be held responsible for sins committed of his own free will, but not even in this case punished with eternal damnation. The metaphysical quest remains in fact unanswered: what follows death is neither certain, inevitable or ascertainable, unless in sudden flashes, but neither can it be assumed that there is no afterlife. It is a vicious cycle, redoubled and reinforced by the formal and structural closure I have described above. The emblematic function of the image of the tulip is extraordinary (in the fortieth quatrain of the fifth edition), outstretched as it is with its open chalice – again, a ‘cup’ – to receive the celestial liquid, and which man must ‘devoutly’ imitate, an adverb which is not necessarily ironic, indicating instead an attitude of patient waiting, even if not rewarded, or not immediately rewarded. 4. The Rubáiyát, as its critics have all pointed out, was published with perfect timing in the same year as Darwin’s The Origin of Species. The two works reflect the most dramatic religious question of Victorian times,

40 See the recurring figure of Lazarus in the poetry of Tennyson and Browning (§§ 93.1 and 122.6–7), as an example of a man who explored the otherworld and managed to return from there. FitzGerald was also the writer who gave, naturally having first found it in Khayyám, the most circumstantial development of the oriental image of the veil, a Victorian archetype also extensively reworked by Tennyson (§§ 94.1 and 5.3). 41 God is, depending on the circumstances, the puppeteer who holds the lantern, using it to project shadows on the wall and make them dance, or the chess player who capriciously puts the pieces back one by one, or the player of bowls who possesses neither his own will nor the capacity to move.

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triggered by scientific discoveries, and inherent in particular in the finalism of Creation with relation to evolution. Ahead of their time, Khayyám had laid to rest Victorian alarm about the possible albeit not probable extinction of the human race at an unspecified future date. Death wipes out every single man, but the human ‘type’ would never be extinct.42 A second, selfcontained internal parable addresses the evolutionary theme of the finalism of creation. Its first draft was separate from the rest, and entitled ‘Book of Pots’, that is talking vases in the workshop of the potter according to the recurrent biblical image, here ingeniously and delightfully retold. One of the vases trustingly affirms the finalism of creation, because having been created the vase cannot, by being broken, return to nothingness and to the state of unshaped clay from which it had been formed: neither, responds another talking vase, can it be childishly destroyed at the caprice of its creator. But a third vase, twisted and ‘of a more ungainly Make’, insinuates that the creator himself committed an error, and raises the question of whether the tendency to evil was the desire of the creator or was due to human free will; who knows, implies the next quatrain, if it is due to the desire of Satan, with his face forever marked by the smoke of Hell? That voice is promptly silenced by the others, who assert that punishment for misdeeds on earth will not be eternal, even for the blackest of sinners. With joyful malice, a ‘Sufi pipkin’, that is a ‘mystical pot’, passionately insists that they stop speaking in metaphors, that they say who the vase is and who the potter, and a loquacious companion responds that God sends poorly crafted vases to Hell. Finally, a last vase implicitly takes us back to the value that similar discussions hold for Khayyám: parched, he longs for a drop of that ‘old familiar Juice’, to rejuvenate him. Hidden in the plurality of these voices is the variety of contemporary responses, at times quite veiled, to these questions of faith, hounded by evolutionary science.

42 In the fifth edition FitzGerald removed the too explicit word ‘type’: ‘know the type no more’ became ‘know the like no more’.

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§ 104. Browning up to 1869* I: A defector on the loose, Spasmodic and politicized There are three distinct derivations and thus initial directions in the poetry of  Robert Browning (1812–1889) which deserve to be put into focus. Browning was by 1840 a defector sui generis from British university culture, and a Spasmodic and Chartist – qua political – poet, in both cases without *

*

Poetical Works, 17 vols, London 1888–1894, revised by Browning and completed and edited by E. Berdoe, is the basis of the three principal historical editions, the ‘Florentine’, ed. C. Porter and H. A. Clarke, 12 vols, New York 1898 (with remarkable annotation); the ‘Centenary’, ed. F. G. Kenyon, 10 vols, London 1912 (repr. New York 1966), and that edited by A. Birrell, 2 vols, London 1896, later reprinted in a single volume with important additions, and with the collaboration of F. G. Kenyon, New York 1915. The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, ed. I. Jack et al., Oxford, 1981- (8 vols published to date), is valuable for the accuracy of the textual references and the reproduction of the text of the first editions where different from that of 1888–1894. Another now complete edition is The Complete Works of Robert Browning, general and founding ed. R. A. King jr, published in Athens, OH, from 1969, and from vol. VI jointly by Baylor University Press, 17 vols. Regarding the controversies over the textual criteria adopted by this last edition, cf. Victorian Studies, XIII (1969), 441–4, and VP  IX (1971), 351–6. A third comprehensive edition, Robert Browning: The Poems, of which vols I and II have been published to date, is edited by J. Woolford and D. Karlin, London 1991. The complete Penguin edition (excluding the dramatic works), ed. J. Pettigrew and completed by T. J. Collins, 2 vols, Harmondsworth 1981, remains excellent and includes synthetic but extremely accurate explanatory notes. Partial editions of Browning’s poetry include Poetical Works 1833–1864, ed. I. Jack, Oxford 1970; Selected Poems, ed. M. Allott, Oxford 1967; A Choice of Browning’s Verse, ed. E. Lucie-Smith, London 1967; Men and Women, ed. P. Turner, Oxford 1972; Liriche e monologhi drammatici, ed. A. Righetti, Milano 1982 and 1990; Andrea del Sarto, Pictor Ignotus, Fra Lippo Lippi, ed. F. Rognoni, Venezia 1998; Robert Browning: An Edition of the Major Works, ed. A. Roberts, Oxford 1999; Robert Browning, ed. D. Dunn, London 2004; Robert Browning: Selected Poems, ed. D. Karlin, London 2004. Browning’s essay on Shelley is included in vol. I of the Penguin edition, 1001–13; for that on Chatterton see the edn ed. D. Smalley, Cambridge, MA 1948. For a comprehensive collection of Browning’s letters see the bibliography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (§ 60.1). Separate editions: The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1845–1846, 2 vols, London 1899, and, ed. E. Kintner, Cambridge, MA 1969; Robert Browning and Alfred Domett, ed. F. G. Kenyon, London 1906; Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: A Broken Friendship

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an official investiture. Only from 1841 on1 does Browning become the most ventriloquial and unspasmodic Victorian practitioner of the dramatic monologue, that patented literary instrument for recreating verbal portraits as Revealed by their Letters, ed. R. Curle, London 1937; Letters of Robert Browning, Collected by Thomas J. Wise, ed. T. L. Hood, London 1933 (here referenced as L); New Letters of Robert Browning, ed. W. C. De Vane and K. L. Knickerbocker, New Haven, CT 1950 (here referenced as NL); Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden, ed. E. C. McAleer, Austin, TX 1951 (here referenced as DI); Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett, ed. P. Landis and R. E. Freeman, Urbana, IL 1958; Browning to His American Friends, ed. G. Reese Hudson, London 1965; Learned Lady: Letters from Robert Browning to Mrs Thomas Fitzgerald 1876–1889, ed. E. C. McAleer, Cambridge, MA 1966; Browning’s Trumpeter: The Correspondence of Robert Browning and F. J. Furnivall, 1872–1889, Washington 1979. Bibliographies include L. N. Broughton, C. S. Northup, R. Pearsall, Robert Browning: A Bibliography 1830– 1950, Ithaca, NY 1953, integrated by W. S. Peterson, Robert and Elizabeth Browning: An Annotated Bibliography, 1951–1970, New York 1974; P. Honan, ‘Robert Browning’, in The Victorian Poets: A Guide to Research, ed. F. E. Faverty, Cambridge, MA 1968. L. N. Broughton and B. Stelter, A Concordance to the Works of Robert Browning, 2 vols, New York, 1924–1925. Life. E. Gosse, Robert Browning: Personalia, Boston, MA 1890; S. Orr, Life and Letters of Robert Browning, London 1891 (2nd, revised edn 1908; useful for the personal knowledge of the poet by the author, but reticent and full of inaccuracies); E. Dowden, The Life of Robert Browning, London 1904; W. H. Griffin and H. C. Minchin, The Life of Robert Browning, London 1910 and 1938 (the first important biography, balanced and well documented); B. Miller, Robert Browning: A Portrait, London 1952 (engaging and convincing, written with a psychological and psychoanalytical emphasis); M. Ward, Robert Browning and His World, 2 vols, London 1968–1969 (a response to the morbid search for secret conflicts, but simplistic and superficial); W. Irvine and P. Honan, The Book, the Ring and the Poet: A Biography of Robert Browning, London 1975 (the most comprehensive biography, occasionally a bit flat and neutral); J. Maynard, Browning’s Youth, Cambridge, MA 1977 (an extensively documented reconstruction of the formative years; on more than one occasion it disagrees with B. Miller); D. Karlin, The Courtship of Robert Browning, Oxford 1985; C. De Ryals, The Life of Robert Browning: A Critical Biography, Oxford 1

Browning was starting to use the dramatic monologue form from the mid-1830s, though using it more and developing it in the 1840s. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, at first called just ‘Porphyria’, and ‘Johannes Agricola’, were first published in The Monthly Repository in January 1836. ‘Porphyria’ may have been written as early as 1834.

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of people and above all their psychologies, as memorable as they are irreconcilably diverse, at the same time purely imaginary and historical or quasi-historical. He is thus the acknowledged precursor of a psychic, cognitive 1993; S. Wood, Robert Browning: A Literary Life, Basingstoke 2001; P. N. NevilleSington, Robert Browning: A Life after Death, London 2004; R. S. Kennedy and D. S. Hair, The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning: A Literary Life, London 2007. Criticism. S. Orr, Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning, London 1886 (useful for the above mentioned reasons; on the whole, nothing more than pure synopsis); H. Jones, Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher, Glasgow 1891 (harsh criticism of the intuitionism and anti-rationalism of Browning); S. A. Brooke, The Poetry of Robert Browning, London 1902; G. K. Chesterton, Robert Browning, London 1903, 1951 (something between biography and criticism, with unpredictable verdicts); F. A. Pottle, Shelley and Browning: A Myth and Some Facts, Chicago, IL 1923; F. L. Lucas, ‘Browning’, in Ten Victorian Poets, Cambridge 1930, 21–38; F. R. G. Duckworth, Browning: Background and Conflict, London 1931; A. A. Brockington, Browning and the Twentieth Century, Oxford 1932 (repr. New York 1963); W. C. De Vane, A Browning Handbook, New York 1935 and, rev., 1955 (indispensible guide, despite its many inaccuracies); H. E. Kenmare, Browning and Modern Thought, London 1939; S. Policardi, Introduzione allo studio della poesia di Robert Browning, Milano-Venezia 1946; W. O. Raymond, The Infinite Moment and Other Essays in Robert Browning, Toronto 1950, 2nd edn 1965; J. M. Cohen, Robert Browning, London 1952 (a balanced analysis); E. D. H. Johnson, ‘Browning’, in The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry, Princeton, NJ 1952, 69–143 (convincing study of the repercussions of the poetic and social trends of the time on Browning’s poetry); M. Praz, ‘Ciò che gli stranieri vedono nell’Italia’, in La casa della fama, MilanoNapoli 1952, 149–72, and ‘Rome and the Victorians’, in PHE, 444–66; H. C. Duffin, Amphibian: A Reconsideration of Browning, London 1956; R. Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience, New York 1957, 75–159 and 182–209 (a pioneering study of the dramatic monologue); R. A. King jr, The Bow and the Lyre: The Art of Robert Browning, Ann Arbor, MI 1957 (excellent discussions of the style in selected dramatic monologues) and The Focusing Artifice: The Poetry of Robert Browning, Athens, OH 1968; P. Honan, Browning’s Characters: A Study in Poetic Technique, New Haven, CT 1961; H. S. Davies, Browning and the Modern Novel, Hull 1962; N. B. Crowell, The Triple Soul: Browning’s Theory of Knowledge, Albuquerque, NM 1963, and The Convex Glass: The Mind of Robert Browning, Albuquerque, NM 1968; J. H. Miller, `Robert Browning’, in The Disappearance of God, London 1963 and Cambridge, MA 1979, 81–156 (a rhapsodic essay, refined and specialized); W. Whitla, The Central Truth: The Incarnation in Browning’s Poetry, Toronto 1963; The Browning Critics, ed. B. Litzinger and K. L. Knickerbocker, Lexington, KT 1965; C. W. Smith, Browning’s Star Imagery: A Study of Detail in Poetic Design, Octagon 1965; Robert Browning: A

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and metaphysical relativism that borders on the irresolvable. Browning as a defector, to start with? Considering his biography and education, certainly not. He did not attend a public school or the University of Oxford, although he was later granted an honorary degree from there. But he was a defector with regard to other freely acquired identifying characteristics, Collection of Critical Essays, ed. P. Drew, London 1966; V. S. Curry, Robert Browning and Dramatic Monologue, New York 1966; T. Collins, Robert Browning’s MoralAesthetic Theory 1833–1855, Lincoln, NE 1967; I. M. Williams, Browning, London 1967 (a quick, deft survey); B. Melchiori, Browning’s Poetry of Reticence, London 1968 (symbolic criticism in a Freudian key); M. D. Shaw, The Dialectical Temper: The Rhetorical Art of Robert Browning, Ithaca, NY 1968; Browning’s Mind and Art, ed. C. Tracy, Edinburgh 1968; L. Burrows, Browning: An Introductory Essay, Folcroft 1970; P. Drew, The Poetry of Browning: A Critical Introduction, London 1970; CRHE, ed. B. Litzinger and D. Smalley, London 1970; F. T. Russell, One Word More on Browning, Folcroft 1971; D. S. Hair, Browning’s Experiments with Genre, Toronto 1972; I. Jack, Browning’s Major Poetry, London 1973; M. G. Machen, The Bible in Browning, Folcroft 1973; Robert Browning, ed. I. Armstrong, London 1974 (essays of uneven value, on Browning’s relationship to various schools of thought or areas of interest); E. Cook, Browning’s Lyrics: An Exploration, Toronto 1974 (on recurring images); B. S. Flowers, Browning and the Modern Tradition, London 1976; C. L. Rivers, Browning’s Theory of the Poet, Salzburg 1976; Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. H. Bloom and A. Munich, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1979; B. Brugière, L’univers imaginaire de Robert Browning, Paris 1979 (psychocritical and structural-semiotic); H. F. Tucker, Browning’s Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure, Minneapolis, MA 1980; A. Righetti, Il ritratto, l’epitaffio, il clavicordo, Verona 1981; P. Kelley and B. Loley, The Browning Collections, Winfield, KS 1981; R. E. Gridley, Browning, London 1982; D. Thomas, Robert Browning, London 1982; E. Linguanti, Rileggere Browning, Pisa 1984; Robert Browning, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1985 and 2009; L. Erikson, Robert Browning: His Poetry and His Audiences, Ithaca, NY 1986; G. Bornstein, Poetic Remaking: The Art of Browning, Yeats, Pound, Philadelphia, PA 1988; J. Woolford, Browning the Revisionary, London 1988, and Robert Browning, Tavistock 2007, and, as editor, Robert Browning in Contexts, Winfield, KS 1998; J. Bristow, Robert Browning, Hemel Hempstead 1991; Browning e Venezia, ed. S. Perosa, Firenze 1991; D. Karlin, Browning’s Hatreds, Oxford 1993; F. Marucci, ‘Nel labirinto delle isotopie: ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ di Browning’, in Semeia. Itinerari per Marcello Pagnini, ed. L. Innocenti, F. Marucci and P. Pugliatti, Bologna 1994, 331–43; S. Bailey, Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning’s Poetry, London 2010; B. Martens, Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice, Farnham 2011; Victorian Writers and the Stage: The Plays of Dickens, Browning, Collins and Tennyson, Houndmills 2015. A separate bibliography will be provided relating to The Ring and the Book, and that concerning Browning’s production after 1869 will be given in Volume 6.

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such as his passionate discussions of biblical criticism, his philosophical and speculative interests, which were never abandoned, and his classical erudition, which even surpassed that of poets who had been to Oxford or Cambridge, like Tennyson, Clough and Arnold, and was even more curious and eccentric. The other two genetic paths, particularly the second, came to nothing in a shorter time span. Until 1841 Browning, hoping to make a name for himself, pursued two distinct authorial policies: the dramatic poem on the one hand, with which he aimed to revive the appeal of the Romantics, presenting himself as their follower (I am referring to the minor and more ephemeral works of Keats, Shelley and Byron), and on the other hand, the drama tout court, intended to be performed on stage, another genre unsuccessfully attempted by the Romantics. The dream of becoming the restorer of British theatre and the greatest playwright of the century failed to become reality due both to an objective decline in demand for the genre in his lifetime and to the subjects he chose for his works, questionable and unperformable at the very least. The first three of Browning’s poems are investigations into the meaning of art and the identity of the artist. From the beginning Browning was determined to compose studies on the ‘incidents in the development of a soul’ of a fictional or semi-autobiographical character. Pauline is without a doubt the most faithful and intensely Romantic of Browning’s first works in its presentation of a male protagonist seeking refuge in the embrace of a female saviour. In contrast, both Paracelsus and Sordello show the solitary journey of a protagonist intent on self-divinization. Browning chose as their antagonists, who in part serve as balancing influences and terms of comparison, male characters who lack an authentic poetic life, embodiments of abstract and ideal positions which are imperceptibly almost identical to the protagonists. In fact, up until but excluding Pippa Passes, he always wrote virtually the same work in the form of an exquisitely literary mediation, placing at its centre a character who is an autobiographical projection of himself but also a figure borrowed from various sources, and the fruit of his earlier raids on literature. Paracelsus and Sordello are the latest reincarnations of an archetype which loomed in Elizabethan literature and found its greatest manifestations in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Faustus and in Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois. But at the same time he had more recent models to follow, such

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as Byron’s frustrated heroes with their unquenchable Sehnsucht, Shelley’s Prometheus and his paler shadows and doubles spread throughout other works, as well as Goethe’s Faust. I will reconstruct this background step by step when introducing the school of the true Spasmodic poets.12 Up until 1840, with the three poems mentioned above, Browning indeed precedes the Titanic Spasmodism of Bailey, Dobell and Smith. It is incidentally quite strange that there should have been no personal acquaintance or contact, that no documented connections are extant between him and the three poets, and that no exchange of letters survives, perhaps simply because of the decentralized origins and the largely anonymous and isolated activity of at least two of the three Spasmodics.3 During the Chartist decade from 1840 to 1850, Browning wrote poetry which was apparently detached and apathetic, and worked on excursions into the exotic where, however, oblivion represents the other side of the coin to a democratic anxiety and at the same time to disgusted nihilism. Democratic feeling and nihilism also emerge in a bitterly politicized theatre. His despasmodization, but not depoliticization, begins with the famous ‘step scene’ in Sordello, with the economical publication of Bells and Pomegranates in double columns, and with the declaration of solidarity for the paupers in Pippa Passes. 2. Browning’s liberalism derived from the evangelical religious Nonconformity of his youth, reinforced – as we shall see from his biography – by his father’s aversion to slavery.4 Under the spell of Shelley, and up until his first trip to Italy, he passed through a phase of political pessimism to then experience the influence of the radicalized and more constructive progressivism of the environment which gravitated around the magnetic

2 3

4

§§ 224–8. Festus, Paracelsus’ defaustianized alter ego, and the embodiment of the most timorous and bigoted common sense, becomes the typically Faustian protagonist of Bailey’s poem of the same name, Festus being an obvious corruption of Faust. ‘Spasmodic’ is the term used for Browning by G. H. Lewes (CRHE, 121), though without precise and deliberate references to the Spasmodics. Hair 1972 connects Browning to the Spasmodics, Bailey, Dobell and Smith, but only as an instance of affinity of poetic genres, and he fails to consider the keystone, the figure of Faust. T. Lloyd, ‘Browning and Politics’, in Armstrong 1974, 142ff.

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figure of the Unitarian minister William Johnson Fox, editor of the Monthly Repository and Browning’s first mentor. The political message to be inferred from Pippa Passes is very daring. As we will see, it marks the real start or the re-founding of Browning’s art. Inspired by the debate on the legislation and regulation of factory work, he not only denounced in that poem Austrian tyranny in the episode of the patriot Luigi, but also staunchly criticized abuses of power and the privileges of the rich. The most strictly political moment for Browning is to be found in any case in his vilified theatre, full of veiled and sometimes imperceptibly masked reflections on current politics, despite its exotic settings and its distant scenarios. Virtually all of his dramas are set in a court where absolute despots hatch intrigues with the help of perfidious and diabolical ministers; the few honest beings are sheer and ineffectual dreamers, and the crowds are quite voluble; in one case an insurrection – in the Papal states – fails miserably and evaporates like a soap bubble. Politicians in Browning’s poems and theatre are invariably petty schemers, demagogues, and Machiavellians whose techniques and skills, applied to win consensus, Browning investigates, from Chiappino in A Soul’s Tragedy to Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, to Dodington in Parleyings,5 if we extend our observation beyond 1870. Browning’s liberalism, up to a certain point, conflicted with his philosophical anti-Benthamism; over time he silently abandoned it, as is demonstrated by his opposition to the granting of self-government to Ireland and his imperialism, however critical. Compared to him, Elizabeth Barrett, who advocated the abolition of the House of Lords and female suffrage, was always much more ‘leftist’.

5

As a confirmation, see a passage from Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1875): ‘Politics! Spend your life to spare the world’s: / Improve each unit by some particle / Of joy the more, deteriorate the orb / Entire, your own: poor profit, dismal loss’. In the mediocre poem ‘Pietro of Abano’ a young Greek, disillusioned, pronounces the following words: ‘Ruling men is vulgar, easy and ignoble: / Rid yourself of conscience, quick you have at beck and call the fond herd’.

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§ 105. Browning up to 1869 II: The ‘white light’ and the ‘prismatic hues’ Infatuated with Shelley, and having started out with the most direct of confessions and exposures of himself – in Pauline –Browning soon became the most systematic and determined debunker and shatterer of the lyrical ‘I’. The prefaces, notes and appendices attached to his first three works insisted on purely dramatic inspiration and at the same time on the absence of any revelation of the self by the author. After 1868 many others were to contain explicit or parenthetical anti-Romantic barbs, and emphasize the firm distinction between autobiography and art, and between author and mask. That does not mean that in Browning all autobiography is rigorously absent or deleted, but only that, from the mid-1830s, he did everything possible to cover up, disguise and camouflage it. He became a poet who made historical and fictional characters speak, rather than speaking himself in the first person, with the result that it is always difficult to determine to what degree the voice pertains to the real author and what to the mask. This chameleon-like behaviour was in fact one of the many aspects of Browning’s work disliked by his contemporaries, who were eager to see through his ‘façade’, but whom he almost always left disappointed.6 A few drops of Browning himself were always distilled into many of his characters, but these contrast with one another even to the point of being diametrically opposed, even within the same poem; and in any case they appear in combination with other non-autobiographical components. Thus he gave life to an infinite number of partial, deformed alter egos, autobiographical with regard to one or more aspects but otherwise completely different from himself. In a way, this is a return to square one, because the result is tantamount to a search for and exploration of the self, albeit in an agonizing and disguised form. ‘You speak out, you, – I only make men and women speak – give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the white pure light’:7 these words, contained in the second letter written by Browning to his future wife Elizabeth Barrett, are often quoted not only as a more or less voluntary and predictive statement of his poetics, but also as a dramatic confession of his inability to express and to 6 This is asserted very clearly in ‘House’, a poem in the form of an exemplum. 7 13.1.1845.

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put forth all of himself in a poem, unless through the colourful metaphor of the prism, which alludes to nothing other than the dramatic mask. This statement is found among the few of his letters containing personal and private thoughts; for the most part they are instead aseptic (with the partial exception of the letters to his wife Elizabeth and those to Julia Wedgwood), and occupied with banal information with only smatterings of references to the public sphere. In another such statement, found in a letter from one month later, Browning expressed regret that he had never written ‘R. B. a poem’, that is, a poem which completely revealed all of himself. These confessions have allowed some critics to brand Browning with the incapacity or even fright of the utterance, whose symptoms are not silence but rather his uninterrupted, even deafening flow of words, thus interpreted as being meant to hide, disguise or disturb meaning. Even simply the titles of many studies and essays on Browning imply this, referring to an ‘amphibious’ or ‘reticent’ Browning, or to his ‘triple soul’, and even go so far as to diagnose a ‘stuttering’ or aphasic poet.8 The titles of many of his poems, which are often in pairs in conceptual contrast, and of many collections, point to his indecision, hesitation and ambivalence; many others contain hidden conflicts in their development or points of view. The Ring and the Book entirely revolves around this idea of the mobile, oscillating point of view, and some critics have found it suggests a quite modern historical, philosophical and judicial relativism. The poem is very paradoxical in this respect: while it does indeed set different interpretations of events against each other, it also, in Book I and in Book X, lays out very clearly the truthful account of things. Browning uncovered the threat of relativism before Walter Pater; nevertheless, other writers were concomitantly echoing him, like the sensationalists in the novel. One of them, Wilkie Collins, was in some ways the closest to him. Yet from the vortex of the conflicting and

8

Cf. Duffin 1956, Melchiori 1968, Crowell 1963, the biography of Ward 1968–1969 (the second volume of which is entitled Two Brownings?), and the essay by W. S. Holmes, ‘Browning: Semantic Stutterer’, PMLA, LX (1945), 231–55. R. D. Altick insisted on the Jamesian intuition of Browning’s double life and his communicative impotence in ‘The Private Life of Robert Browning’, Yale Review, XLI (1951), 247–62, which should be read together with the psychoanalytical biography by Miller 1952.

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camouflaged voices, and therefore from the unrecognizable masks of the real author, there emerges in Browning from time to time a more personal one, that of an alter ego closer to Browning or even coincident with him, as happens in Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day. The ‘white light’ appeared and blazed intermittently, even if it always corresponded to a doubtful and broken voice that expressed no absolute certainties; or, if it really was a personal voice, it was immediately questioned and thus relativized. 2. Henry James, who knew Browning personally and was one of his most brilliant and enraptured contemporary interpreters, was also among the first to perceive and emphasize the difference, if not the split, between the private and the public man, and in a certain sense the founder of the legend of Browning the ‘amphibian’. In the short story ‘The Private Life’ he ascribed to Browning a sort of Jekyll-Hyde duality, camouflaging him in the ‘celebrated’ Londoner Clare Vawdrey, a writer famous for the ‘subjectivity’ of his books but in public a mundane and even coarse prattler. The climax of the story occurs when Vawdrey, commissioned by a great actress to write a dramatic part, is unable to say a word when the time comes to recite the part in public. He claims to have left the manuscript in his hotel room (the story is set in a Swiss mountain resort); afterwards, the narrator goes up there while Vawdrey, as he believes, is occupied elsewhere, and finds his double, or rather his private persona, busy writing in the dark. The degree to which James was perplexed by the mystery of Browning’s double life seeps through in the repeated professions of disappointment and frustration of the narrator, who is in turn an alter ego of the real James: ‘It looked infinitely more like [Vawdrey] than our friend does himself […] [He] disappoints every one who looks in him for the genius that created the pages they adore’. Ultimately the narrator, a secret admirer of the novelist, feels ‘the irritating certitude that for personal relations this admirable genius thought his second-best good enough’. The attempt to explain that the real responsibility for this schizophrenia lies with the ‘vulgar and stupid world’ is cold comfort. Indeed, integration with the public is in him a sort of possessive defence of his private self: ‘the real man would have been a fool to come out for it when he could gossip and dine by deputy’. 3. As a confirmation, there are in Browning some but not many paradigmatic traces and conceptual isotopies. We may in fact categorise him

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as an atomistic poet, whose poetry is a texture of dramatic monologues even reciprocally incoherent and having only slight connections, attributed to speakers that have in common neither the time, the place nor the sphere of action: a constellation of autonomous and disconnected psychic centres that reflect, as in a mise en abyme, the disharmonic unrelatedness of the cosmos. The variety, the mixture, the unclassifiable nature and the tonal oscillation of Browning’s poems are an application of the aesthetic principle implied in the programme of Bells and Pomegranates.9 The dramatic monologue fulfils in Browning the youthful dream of being someone else: the thrill, that is, felt in being at the same time oneself and a different self. Browning, while writing Pauline, confessed he was aspiring not only to have, but to be and think the All. The demiurgic Titanism of the first three poems survives in the dramatic monologues in the form of a complete identification of the poet with the Other, and above all with those very exceptional and privileged personalities in whom God is incarnated and who are God (Pippa, the Pope), or in whom the man-God unison is attained. He operates both outside and inside his dramatic monologues, because his own judgement is ungraspable and indefinable, and a poem credibly beginning on the tones of the unmistakable condemnation of the monologuer, proves to be more possibilistic, more unstable and even contradictory in its development; or Browning may make interpretative statements outside the poems that do not agree with the proof of reading and with what the text seems to say. His wicked and perverse Catholic prelates, to take just one example, are more pitiable and may even be absolved on the basis of their own ‘apologies’. Browning’s irresolution is fully revealed to us in the field of religious faith.10 He is a constructive theologian who believes in the teleology and intelligibility of the world, a world which is a gift of God, a world good although varied, and which, marked by an evolutionary design, moves towards God. And yet this goal is intuited but not reached, save in exceptional moments of dazzling vision. Even more 9 § 114.1. 10 An irresolution that could be reminiscent of the dilemmas of Kierkegaard, a contemporary philosopher (P. Drew, ‘Browning and Philosophy’, in Armstrong 1974, 105).

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frequent are the moments when this design ceases to appear evident and transparent, as sometimes the doubt that the world is dominated by evil takes over. Hence, paradoxically, faith is revived by means of systematic doubt. The irreducible polarities of Browning, alternately a supporter of a philosophy of candid and even philistine optimism and an implacable and subtilizing doubter, amazed and antagonized his contemporaries such as Hardy. But to point to the ups and downs of Browning is, as we realize, tantamount to giving another definition, or a non-metaphorical explanation, of the term ‘spasmodic’. Browning’s monologuer is often strenuously engaged in a quest, which is actual and metaphysical at the same time, and therefore allegorical; he takes on the frequent semblance of a traveller, pilgrim or knight striving to accomplish a mission, but failing in this enterprise because the goal cannot, in principle, be reached. He is rewarded, however, by the very fact that he has been questing, were it not that satiety and surrender loom large as a recurring and never to be defeated temptation. The symbolic mark of many of Browning’s actants is a search without success and without result, or with the sole result consisting of the search itself, which ends with the dramatic and ironic discovery that it is worthwhile simply to search. The range of Browning’s characters may include, from bottom to top, the non-entity that has given up searching, the dreamer, the frustrated individual willing to fight but ultimately withdrawing, and the great Faustian challenger, the semi-divine or superhuman searcher that comes close but for a few steps to the goal. (Paracelsus, in the early work of that name, is the paradigmatic instance of this last type.) Several monologuers are ruined and psychologically deranged by this inexhaustible will to overcome themselves. To some of his painters and artists – such as Andrea del Sarto – Browning applies a Puritan frame of mind resembling Ruskin’s condemnation of the post-Raphaelite and late Renaissance painters – a Salvator Rosa for instance – as lacking vigour and morally lax. And yet this very deep philosophy boils down to a very simple message, frequently heard from the Victorians, that human love is proof of Divine love and of its providential design. As the most perfect and admirable realization of human love, and at the same time as a living link to the Divine, Browning celebrated his wife Elizabeth, in life and in death. This idealization became more pronounced after her death, when Browning saw in her a Beatrice

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reaching down from Heaven to pull him upwards, suspended on a cloud in the sky, watching him, judging him, waiting for him. He felt her implicit heritage of integrity and sublime morality, and depicted himself as being ever on the point of departure for the hereafter, carried on the wings of the spirit, and as continuing to have a direct, invisible, telepathic line of communication with her. He ‘heard’ her and spoke to her, felt her operating presence in his life, and evoked her with the same medium-like powers that he parodied – or so it was believed – in ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’. All of the poetry regarding matrimony and human love of the later Browning centres on the indestructible memory of Elizabeth and at the same time on this burdensome inheritance. Browning no doubt sings the unison of his own love for Elizabeth, but this is the same unison, absorbed into precariousness, of love in general and of earthly love in particular. So that precariousness throws its shadow on his love, too. § 106. Browning up to 1869 III: Mechanisms and horizons of Browning’s dramatic monologue The dramatic monologue, a hybrid in that it is a genre partaking of drama and introspective poetry, was therefore the ideal vehicle for Browning and the one to which his name remained most strongly linked in nineteenth-century English poetry, even though he is not, strictly speaking, its inventor.11 The primary structural characteristic of the dramatic monologue12 – inductively reinvented and adapted by Browning – is the 11 Turner 1972, xviii, sees its origin in Theocritus and Ovid, and estimates more than 200 users before Browning. 12 I follow on the whole the reconstruction made in Langbaum 1957, 75–108. Before Langbaum a rudimentary but essential theoretical foundation had been provided by I. B. Sessions, ‘The Dramatic Monologue’, in PMLA, LXII (1947), 503–16. Langbaum’s synthetic, unsophisticated description of the dramatic monologue naturally called for amendments and suggested adjustments to many scholars, and was first expanded in an interesting and balanced essay by A. D. Culler, ‘Monodrama and Dramatic Monologue’, PMLA, XC (1975), 366–85, which is, however, more historically oriented than focused on the technicalities of the genre. Culler in fact describes how the European and German (literary and musical) ‘monodrama’ was adopted in England and culminated in Tennyson’s Maud. Some additions and objections to

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concept of sympathy. Sympathy may be defined as the author’s adhesion to and self-identification with a character who is distinct from him. The second characteristic is the suspension of moral judgement, which becomes implicit and is determined by the degree of identification created between the reader and the speaker. Thirdly, before the speaker one must always presuppose an audience or more often a single interlocutor, who in obedience to an unwritten law does not speak, and, being frequently addressed, has listening reactions that are always subtly intercepted in various ways, and registered for example in the interjections, the interruptions and in every other purely phatic interventions of the speaker himself during his own monologue.13 The novelty represented by Browning’s version of the dramatic monologue lies in the virtually limitless expansion of sympathy. He gives an indiscriminate hearing to, and takes sides with, characters with vastly different morals, but he is nonetheless able to arouse in the reader, or at least to suggest, an identification, and even some forms of imaginary connivance with characters who are far from innocent and at times even immoral. To the three functions listed above, a fourth must be added: the mimetic nature of the monologue, which in its most illusionistic exemplars opens abruptly, in medias res, capturing or indeed surprising the speaker in a self-revelatory flash and a chaotic epiphany. Not even Shakespeare comes as close, as Browning does, to the mimesis of spoken English and to a sort

13

Langbaum are found in A. Sinfield, Dramatic Monologue, London 1977, in J. Woolford 1988, 68–75, and in C. D. J. Pearsall, ‘The Dramatic Monologue’, in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. J. Bristow, Cambridge 2000, 67–88. The communicative model – as I have said – is much more varied and diversified. The monologue may in fact be a self-communication and therefore only spoken, or even non-spoken speech, or the interlocutor may even be a deceased person. As we shall see, the monologue may even be anti-mimetic, as in the sub-genre of the lyrical monologue. Several monologues may be defined as confessions and apologies; and real confessions at the confessional are ‘The Confessional’ and the later, most remarkable ‘A Forgiveness’. The reader is instead emotionally and intellectually called upon in poems which, though not formally dramatic monologues, present ‘cases’ and dilemmas of arduous resolution, like ‘The Statue and the Bust’ (§ 120.5) or ‘Ivàn Ivànovic’.

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of ‘high fidelity’ even of sound, that is to the inflections, the variety of tones and all the supra-segmental characteristics and possibilities of speech. Each monologue by Browning is a single dramatic unit having a taut discursive development and an extraordinary diegetic and allusive density; it must provide background, situation and consequences with the utmost naturalness, and this information must be conveyed both to its internal imaginary interlocutor(s) and to its historical reader, forced to get his bearings while facing, with increasing difficulty, the usual dramatic conventions at the rising of the curtain, and without any off-stage voice similar to that of the novelist. Obviously, if there exists in the range of literary genres a technique that is antithetical to that of the dramatic monologue, this is the novel of the omniscient novelist. 2. The classic speaker of Browning’s monologues attempts to convince his listener with a brilliant stream of words, and with the speciousness of his elocution, more than with the pure force of his reasoning. To say that he is a casuist is limiting. Rather, he is a verbose, smooth talker who instead of straightforwardly stating his point of view and expressing his thoughts with a few telling words, assails his listener with torrential oratory, burying him in images and figures, and in waves of exempla, and when he seems to have finished, begins again, and rather than clarifying, muddles and confuses points that had seemed clear. Similar types and characters are effective so long as they manage to inspire the reader’s sympathy and, with it, his or her neutrality. The rhetorical subgenre of the ‘apology’ suits Browning admirably: Blougram, Lippo Lippi, the ‘medium’ Sludge, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Don Juan in Fifine at the Fair, up to and including Aristophanes of Aristophanes’ Apology and the ‘people of importance’ of Parleyings become, from monologists, apologists, or rather strenuous defenders of a less-than-clean life full of flagrant transgressions of respectability. At the same time, Browning is the historical poet intent on condensing entire phases of civilization and cultural trends, and even the crucial watersheds of human history, into dramatic and vertiginous close-ups. Like the historical novelist, he reconstructs them by means of the synecdoche of a single representative exponent and a monologue which has the effect of an epiphany. It is as if we were faced with the ancient world surprised out of its Apollonian calm by the disturbing Good News, with corrupt Rome,

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or the continental, obscurantist Middle Ages, repressed Catholicism, the Renaissance and the Baroque. Except for the first link, this development had seen Italy as its main stage. The settings for Browning’s monologues are primarily Italian, not least because the poet made his home in Italy for over fifteen years. The four poetry collections preceding The Ring and the Book, as well as obviously this poem itself, mark the height of this ‘Italian’ Browning. In these, he displayed his accuracy and talent for historical reconstruction, drawing from his abundant well of poetic imagination. Florence, Rome and Venice, with little Asolo, were Browning’s three or four poles par excellence. The first represented the great painterly tradition of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the second was the seat of the Roman Catholic Church and the Papacy, the city of sumptuous churches filled with marble friezes and painted frescoes, in which he saw displayed all of the worldliness and spirituality, the horror and the fascination, the sanctity and the profligacy of an institution which was at once elusive and tempting. One can easily agree with Henry James when, referring principally to The Ring and the Book, he lavished praise, among the many varieties of scenarios in Browning’s poetry, to his Italy, a land capable of unleashing clouds of ‘golden dust’, and of inspiring him better than many others who, from George Eliot to Swinburne,14 were to evoke it or simply choose it as a setting for their works. He in fact treated contemporary Italy much more timidly in Dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, with a few sketches of country life, a rather conventional composition on attained Italian unity,15 and an undoubtedly fresh and successful poem which evokes the folklore of the south, filtered, however, through the experience of a cultured, even a little ironic, Englishman. His contact with nineteenth-century Italian culture was almost non-existent, and in his letters he unfortunately showed that he regarded contemporary Italy as an underdeveloped and barely civilized country. The ‘land of souls’, that is how Browning saw Italy: ‘My liking for Italy was always a selfish one, – I felt alone with my own soul there […] I never read a line in a modern Italian 14 15

‘The Novel in The Ring and the Book’, in Notes on Novelists, London 1914, 318. Browning’s interest in the cause of Italian independence was certainly tepid and if he supported Italian unification it was purely due to his wife’s influence.

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book that was of use to me, – never saw a flash of poetry come out of an Italian word: in art, in action, yes, – not in the region of ideas: I always said, they are poetry, don’t and can’t make poetry’.16 § 107. Browning up to 1869 IV: Foreshadowings and influences of Browning’s art The unity of measurement that Browning usually applies to the dramatic monologue is almost inadmissible. A monologue that goes on for more than 1,000 lines, as is far from rare in Browning, ceases to be mimetic. There are implicit norms for single poems which, if they are not epics, must observe a certain standard of size. Wilde was right when he paired Browning and Meredith by using the label of ‘prose poets’.17 These interminable dramatic monologues by Browning are the counterpart of the ‘baggy monsters’ in the field of fiction, and all later sensibilities have relegated them to the repertory of texts which are the sole object of academic study. The dramatic monologue is not in fact an oration, a lecture or a public speech, but rather must bear the mark of the informal, the confidential, the private. Mimesis, on the other hand, is more plausible and acceptable where the dramatic monologue is either a self-communication, more or less spoken, and therefore at least partially spoken thought or the private preparation of a public oration. These two preconditions are both to be found in some of the ‘books’ of The Ring and the Book, where they possess an intrinsic motivation. The defect of a dimension no longer contained 16

17

19.5.1866 (L. 93) and 7.8.1866 (L 101). Because of this egoistic exploitation and his attitude of narcissistic exile, such a distorted representation of Italy is not that distant from the picturesque, bizarre, kaleidoscopic portrayals found in Dickens, Thackeray, Melville and Hawthorne, as has been amply shown by Praz in his contributions on British travellers in Italy quoted in the bibliography. It is for this reason that I find misleading and perplexing the lines ‘Open my heart and you will see / Graved inside of it, “Italy”’, taken from the end of ‘De Gustibus’ and reproduced in the marble plaque placed above the entrance to the Brownings’ home in Rome in via Bocca di Leone. B. Melchiori, ‘Browning in Italy’, in Armstrong 1974, 183, cites a relevant statement made by Elizabeth to a friend, that Browning would never have left England for Italy if he had not been forced to do so because of Elizabeth’s poor health. CRHE, 524ff.

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within acceptable standards is aggravated in the second half of Browning’s career, in extremely analytical and laborious poems revolving around hairsplitting disputes (like those concerning the worth of Euripides’ tragedies in the Balaustion poems), and in others where he sets up morbid case histories or inconclusive lucubrations. Of all of this second Browning – prolix, tortuous, if not downright ‘concentric’ – critics have been dismissive or even silent. T. S. Eliot, as I mentioned, thought that Browning ‘ruminated’, that is to say, wrote in a form and style which were particularly unpopular and old-fashioned in the cultural and aesthetic climate of Imagism. For Eliot, Browning had no sense of concinnitas; his nature was rather to repeat, to reiterate, to annotate and to reformulate. He was the poet of the obiter dictum, and not always with strictly mimetic or representative ends. A much exploited and recurrent rhetorical habit, which worsens into a vice, is in Browning the accretion of examples – the presentation of a parable, an allegory or a story to illustrate an abstract concept, and one meticulously detailed, reworked and further developed, therefore a kind of interminable extended metaphor. No doubt, some are admirable and altogether relevant, others truly weak, stale and cold. One also perceives an almost mechanical, exhibitionist display of ingenuity in the not infrequent cases in which Browning resorts to mythological comparisons, more often than not re-worked in an allegorical sense, or forced to serve precise and exact correspondences, and at times interpreted according to opposing versions. In Book IX of The Ring and the Book Pompilia while in Arezzo is compared to the mythical Hesione who painted herself with pitch to save herself from the monster and attract Hercules. Through Pompilia’s defence lawyer, Browning furnishes two possible ‘applications’ of the black colour of the pitch, suggesting that it does not point to the compliance demonstrated to Caponsacchi to seduce him, but rather to the dark bruises caused by the beatings and abuse suffered at the hands of her husband. This is only one of the countless examples of the breathtaking degree of sophistication with which similar mythological combinations are made. The felicity and at the same time the limit of the books of the two lawyers in The Ring and the Book reside in their weakness and extravagance from a purely judicial point of view – even making every possible concession to a mimetic intention – and on their purely rhetorical consistency. Browning,

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of course, revelled in figures like the two lawyers, naturally predisposed to verbal fireworks. However, he also applied the same technique, far less appropriately, to characters of a different type, less inclined to verbal virtuosity and therefore quite unconvincing. 2. I have tried to explain one of the many reasons why Browning never managed to satisfy the expectations of his potential readers, to the point of his suspecting there existed an actual incompatibility between him and them. At its publication, his poetry was paradoxically too new to be fully accepted or appreciated.18 He himself was guilty of too much abstraction and presumption, and started off on the wrong foot twice due to errors of assessment. Or perhaps he misunderstood the demands of his readers, and trying to shape their tastes offered them a type of poetry too distant from the canons of his day and their own horizons, preferring to follow a difficult and not immediately gratifying kind of poetry without changing direction.19 His audience was at first unable to appreciate the daring and eccentricity of his creations, the novelty of his geographical and temporal settings, and the choice of themes and problems which were often anachronistic and strange, or esoteric and remote. On the other hand, his poetry overflows with erudite references and suggestions, and gathers together cultural and speculative interests which are numerous and varied. From his earliest years, he read everything, though not profoundly, that he could find in the well-stocked shelves of his home library. He then dabbled in painting and music, until he became a quite capable performer,20 and delved into the history of every epoch besides that of England. However, and this is a sure sign of his diversity, all of this curiosity initially spills out into a strange, abstract, extravagant encyclopaedism. At the beginning

18

‘They cry out for new things and when you furnish them with what they cried for, “it’s so new”, they grunt’ (NL 92). 19 In a famous retrospective statement on his poetic work, Browning defined it on the whole too difficult for many people with whom he would have wished to communicate. He added: ‘I never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar, or a game of dominoes, to an idle man’ (L 128–9). 20 Along with D’Annunzio and Thomas Mann, Browning must be considered among the deftest and most talented paraphrasers of musical works.

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he was demonstrating his full immersion in that marginal, humanistic and sixteenth-century culture or erudition which had already proven a rich hunting ground for Robert Burton. Although he would draw from it even later on occasion, until the publication of Pippa Passes his source by definition, his unus liber, his inexhaustible reserve of raw material to reshape and refine in poetry was the Biographie Universelle, published in Paris between 1811 and 1828 in no fewer than fifty-two volumes. He consulted this work together with another renowned encyclopaedia of the time, Wonders of the Little World by Nathaniel Wanley. This determined a choice of figures, themes and anecdotes which were largely unknown and of little appeal to his contemporaries. It was quite rare for Browning to approach facts or figures of confirmed notoriety, and this holds true for the full extent of his production. His is, in a way, the attitude of a speleologist or of the Carthusian monk. Wishing to make the voice of a musician heard, rather than choosing for example Bach or Mozart, he would opt for Galuppi or Abbot Vogler; if he needed a writer, he would bypass Shakespeare or Milton for Sordello and Christopher Smart. Two magnificent dramatic monologues have as their speakers Filippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto, without counting others that are centred on minor figures. One must also remember the emblematic and revealing poem entitled ‘Pictor Ignotus’.21 As early as 1864 Bagehot noted that the tradition to which Browning belongs is that of the grotesque, meaning by that a kind of spoken style neither linear nor consequential, and with a visual perspective passing from spectacle to contrasting spectacle. A distant precursor of his knotty, mimetic, sprung style is obviously John Donne (a poet whom he greatly admired), and a more recent poetic father, as for all first generation Victorian poets, is Byron, on whom his immature youthful Incondita, later lost, was modelled. The Byron of Don Juan, together with others of his satires, was indeed never repudiated, unlike his visceral idol, Shelley. The most difficult obstacle for the Victorian reader of Browning to overcome was, however, the unprecedented degree of morbid introspection attained in the five fundamental dramatic 21

At the same time this hides a personal reference, that of the anonymity and obscurity which, Browning was certain, would be torn apart and revealed as greatness to posterity.

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monologues of his middle phase and in his creative peak, The Ring and the Book. His contemporaries, who expected to find in fiction and poetry an equilibrium between thought and action, faced a poetics based on the self-declared priority of thought and on indifference to action: ‘along with every act – and speech is act – / There go, a multitude impalpable / To ordinary human faculty, / The thoughts which give the act significance. / Who is a poet needs must apprehend / Alike both speech and thoughts which prompt to speech. / Part these, and thought withdraws to poetry: / Speech is reported in the newspaper’.22 With The Ring and the Book Browning inaugurated a type of poetic realism coexisting with psychological inquiry which – a fate common to all the naturalists – provoked the disapproval of the self-righteous, since Browning refused to manipulate or camouflage the historical facts and to soften the tragic acmes, or gloss over immoral and horrific epilogues. 3. When Wordsworth died it was, however, beneficial for Browning that he was not appointed Poet Laureate, an honour to which he perhaps aspired and of which, however, only a small minority thought him worthy.23 Indeed, among the first generation Victorian poets Browning remained one of the few not to pen occasional poems in the worst sense of the word, popular or purely encomiastic, or facilely successful. Some have imputed his aloofness from the life of the times, and his stubborn and haughty coherence, to two factors: the lack of a regular education – and the anxious and excessive love of his parents, who tolerated and even fostered his youthful eccentricities – and the expatriate’s self-complacency and political, geographical and psychological exile and uprootedness. The name of Browning was soon tied to that of Tennyson by his contemporaries in a hendiadys that indicated the two greatest poets of their time, and such a pairing became a proverbial classification in literary histories. The two poets could be presented as having the same symmetry as that of Dickens and

22 This is a parenthetical observation made by Browning in Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, before the protagonist climbs up the tower to commit suicide. 23 Browning declared that Tennyson’s appointment was amply deserved.

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Thackeray in that of the novel,24 were it not that the two novelists suggest as many analogies as the poets differences. The first of these, a very general one, regards the far greater popularity enjoyed by Tennyson and the long and bitter battle Browning was forced to fight before being publicly recognized as a major poet. Tennyson was, or became in spite of himself, the national Bard; Browning remained, for a good half of his career, an outsider. Until the death of his wife Elizabeth Barrett in 1861, he was almost entirely hidden in her shadow; he was, as was said in Paris, le mari de madame. In the wake of her death, he relocated to England, and eventually plunged into the writing of his most ambitious work, The Ring and the Book, and this brought him an ephemeral burst of fame at its publication in 1869. In the last decade of his life, however, he became the object of a fanatic cult of admirers which, however, rested on an almost complete misunderstanding of his poetry, assumed to be a treasure trove of moral teachings which, definitely more replete with doubts than certainties, it is not. Practically as soon as Balaustion’s Adventure, his first poem after The Ring and the Book, was published in 1871, and all the way until his death in 1889, a harsh battle with critics, guilty of cursory and prejudicial condemnation, was waged through the Browning Society as well as from the pulpit of his poetry. The Browning Society increased the sales of the works of the poet but, as mentioned above, propagated that false image of Browning as a contemporary prophet.25 It is precisely for the presumed mishmash of religious

24 Like Dickens and Thackeray, Browning and Tennyson were veiled rivals in life, but hid this behind a cold and formal deference. They lavished praise upon one another but in private each criticized the other to friends. The judgements passed by each upon the poetic works of the other are full of both needling and serious, solemn criticism (cf. § 111.2 for Tennyson’s opinion on Sordello). 25 A veritable sect of Browningites was born when Browning was still living. The most prominent among them were Mrs Sutherland Orr, his first biographer and author of the first reader’s guide to Browning’s works, and J. T. Nettleship. Browning met with success in Europe and across the Atlantic, where Mark Twain gave lectures crowded with attentive admirers, as we can see from a curious and humorous eyewitness account in CRHE, 25–6. For his part, Hopkins notes in a letter of 1884 that Browning had won an unspecified ‘popularity poll’. A mere two years after his death, he was already being contested by Jones 1891 on philosophical grounds for

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and philosophical thought at the expense of the necessary formal rigour that Browning was rejected in the early twentieth century. But in the case of Browning, this rejection was prejudiced and undeserved, given that his art contains many anticipations of twentieth-century experimentalism and of that revolution of poetic language, whose supporters were paradoxically his greatest adversaries. Henry James saluted Browning – albeit with some reserve deriving from his fractured musicality – as a ‘tremendous and incomparable modern’.26 It is precisely this which the major poets of the last century confirmed, not so much in their explicit affirmations, which were always cautious and sometimes even untrue, but in their poetic practice. T. S. Eliot, who dismissed both Browning and Tennyson27 by pointing to French symbolism and the Metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century as the major inspiration for nineteenth-century poetry, is indebted to Browning in his dramatic monologues and in the meditative phases of the Four Quartets, just as his stripped-down and skeletal diction descends from the fragmented style and almost dissonant, halting musicality of Browning’s poetry. Still less imaginable without Browning is Ezra Pound,

his daring intuitionism and for his discrediting of rationality. Later, through the 1920s and beyond, Santayana and Chesterton led two schools, one emphasizing a shapeless and unstructured Browning and the other – in the minority for the most part – envisioning Browning as a profoundly self-conscious artist. In the violent tirade contained in his essay of 1900, ‘The Poetry of Barbarism’, Santayana presented a great writer but at the same time a volcanic and barbaric genius, referring to both his structural extravagance and sloppiness, and the concept of an omnipotent and semi-divine ‘soul’ analogous to the ‘Me’ of Whitman. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the major demolisher of Browning was F. R. Leavis in New Bearings in English Poetry, who postulated, echoing Santayana, a primitive poet lacking adult sensitivity and possessing a rough and ‘muscular’ philosophy. A landmark date for Browning criticism is 1927, when the study of Parleyings by William C. De Vane, the greatest Browning scholar before 1950, was published. 26 ‘Browning in Westminster Abbey’, an obituary published on 4 January 1891, in The Speaker, reprinted in CRHE, 530–4. 27 Mainly due to cultural snobbery and to avoid being accused of provincialism, as rightly noted by B. and G. Melchiori, Il gusto di Henry James, Torino 1974, 79–117 (‘La lezione al maestro’).

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who recognized Browning as his true ‘father’28 and in his first dramatic monologues echoed Browning’s ambivalence towards his alter egos as well as sharing his predilection for unusual and forgotten figures and his exotic themes and settings. At the same time, Browning’s dramatic monologue, especially in the not infrequent cases when it flows almost at the boundary between thought and word and is caught in the variety of its improvisations and capricious evolutions, foreshadows the transitions, the false starts and the inorganic nature of spoken thought which characterizes twentieth-century stream of consciousness, particularly in the burlesque and detached version of Joyce. Largely by virtue of The Ring and the Book, Browning should be considered, with full legitimacy, an author who ‘taught’ the novelists and not just the other poets. Once again it was Henry James who started off this paradoxical interpretation by underlining, in one of his essays, the potential nature, instinctively understood by Browning but not fully exploited, of a great Gothic romance embedded in the historical and judicial material of the poem. At the same time James recognized how profound and decisive the reading of the poem had been for his own narrative works.29 The relativism of The Ring and the Book is not only a foreshadowing of the technique of the shifting points of view used by James and Conrad, but also constitutes in many aspects a preview of Pirandello and of the theatre of the absurd. Borges spoke of Browning, pointing to the

28 Pound harks back to Browning in ‘Mesmerism’, the title of a Browning poem, and echoes him in many other very transparent titles such as ‘Fifine’, ‘Paracelsus in Excelsis’ and ‘Scriptor Ignotus’; even his Cantos may be read as a mammoth dramatic monologue. The list of those influenced could easily be stretched to include the names of Hardy, Kipling, Owen, Graves, de la Mare, Masefield and Frost. Even Eugenio Montale saw in Browning (Sulla poesia, Milano 1976) a ‘metaphysical father’, or better, in him and in Baudelaire, the representatives of a poetry which was ‘not realistic, not romantic and not even strictly decadent, which roughly speaking may be called metaphysical’, a grouping to which he belongs. Cf. Linguanti 1984, 2, and D. S. Avalle, Gli Orecchini di Montale, Torino 1970, 28ff., for more specific analogies between single poems of both poets. 29 Cf., for a careful analysis of influences, B. and G. Melchiori, Il gusto di Henry James, quoted in n. 27. W. Empson describes Browning as a ‘novel-writer of merit with no lyrical inspiration at all’ (Seven Types of Ambiguity, London 1984, 20 [1st edn 1930]).

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enigma enfolding the real in that poem and to the indecipherable forces at whose mercy man finds himself, as a precursor of Kafka. § 108. Browning up to 1869 V: Biography It seems to me that a biographical, formative and conceptual parallel between Browning and Ruskin has never been fully explored.30 Both Londoners, of well-to-do bourgeois families, there were only seven years between them. Both had Scottish blood in their veins, Browning on the side of his mother, a pious and philanthropic woman, and a fervent congregational Christian, who from his early childhood, just like Ruskin’s mother, accustomed him to diligently read the Bible daily. Although not an only child, Browning was a precocious learner who received the full attention of his parents, who educated him at home, without sending him to a public school. Browning’s father, kind and good-natured like the father of Ruskin, was however more cultured and gifted, and had collected an extensive library. He not only taught his son a disorderly love of reading, but introduced him to the world of pictorial art, often taking him to the Dulwich gallery where Browning developed a curiosity about and a lasting passion for art. Both Ruskin and Browning lived with their parents until a relatively adult age in a dubious climate of psychological subjection and hidden rebellion. This ‘hothouse atmosphere’ was fertile ground for neuroses. While Browning’s relationship with his father was peaceful, open and without problems, that with his mother Sarah Anna Wiedemann had morbid undertones. Browning felt a mix of love and reverential fear for her. He inherited her waxy pallor, which stands out in his youthful portraits, as well has her predisposition for migraines, from which he suffered until his marriage. Like her, he suffered from chronic bronchitis and bilious disorders as well as from nervous attacks masked by his impeccable and even easy-going behaviour in public. As time passed, Browning and Ruskin both found in Italy the catalyst for their art, one in poetry and the other in prose. Ruskin visited Italy off and on for long periods over six decades, while Browning made his home in Italy for fifteen years starting in 1846.

30 Concerning what follows, cf. Ruskin’s biography, and my discussion, at §§ 44–57.

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The Rome-Florence-Venice axis was not only a series of places where they happened to live; that line also formed a historical and cultural paradigm with its symbolic and emblematic stations, also chronologically ordered, on a fundamental path of transition from the ancient to the modern, of which the work of both is also a tireless study. At this point, the visible analogies between the two writers undoubtedly cease and the parallel turns into a contrast. Browning overcame his neuroses, even though, as I have already mentioned, his schizophrenic behaviour and the mysteries about his life continued to fascinate and intrigue an eyewitness such as Henry James. His own personal myth – unlike Ruskin, to whom it remained unknown or was never recognized as a myth – was exorcised, broken down and objectified by Browning, both that Puritan one which could have derived from his mother and his strict home education, and – the other side of the coin – that of the Shelleyan, divinized denier. Ruskin was obsessed by the myth of the flower bud, that is to say, by the still pure young girl who almost always, on maturing, became corrupt. Browning was instead more obsessed by that of the wilted flower, and unlike Ruskin he harboured a supreme and anti-Puritan faith in the interdependence, blessed by God, of the flesh and the spirit, which it would be an aberration and even a sin not to enjoy.31 The two men followed very different paths in their careers: the poet, Browning, never attempted to take detours, while Ruskin, the art critic, reinvented himself as an impassioned tribune of the people after 1860. 2. Mystery surrounds Browning’s forbears, although this is not in itself exceptional since we noticed the same fact in the biography of Macaulay and Elizabeth Barrett.32 Some credit is owed, in my opinion, to the rumour that Browning had mixed blood and Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side; it is an ascertained fact that his paternal grandfather tyrannically sent his twenty-year-old son from his first marriage, who would become Browning’s father, to manage a sugar plantation owned by his late wife on an island 31 32

A Pauline and therefore New Testament motif: ‘Now the body is nor for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body’ (1 Cor. 6, 13, with what follows until 20). §§ 35 and 62.1.

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in the Antilles. Having returned home as a convinced and humanitarian abolitionist, he married against his father’s will, who bore him rancour until a few years before his death. He had a much softer character and to calm his father’s fury he accepted a post with the Bank of England, a job which he always hated. He ought to have been an artist, well-versed in languages and gifted with an encyclopaedic culture as he was, besides having a passion for history and literature.33 Browning was born on May 7, 1812 in Camberwell, then a village just south of London, and was raised in a matriarchal regime, characterized, however, by pronounced diversities of temperament and educational ideas alternating between laxity and severity. The influence of his parents shaped him in two distinct ways. To his mother he owed his early love for music (which he would later cultivate to the point of becoming an accomplished pianist and extemporary composer) as well as a love of flowers and animals. His father, in contrast, was at least partially responsible for instilling in Browning a love for facts, names and events which were remote and out of the ordinary. De Lairesse’s treatise on pictorial techniques, famous at the time, and one of the 6,000 volumes in his father’s library, was read by Browning with far more than sporadic interest. He devoured them in an unorganized fashion, as testified to by one of his final works, Parleyings, which allows us to reconstruct a list of the authors perused in his youth, albeit not an exhaustive one. Browning was essentially self-taught, or at least most of his knowledge was gleaned from the well-stocked shelves of the family library or through private and paternal teaching.34 His school career was short. As an adult he confessed to have learned little or nothing from the schools he attended. He was taken out of the one close to home because his precociousness cast his classmates in a bad light. At seven he attended a new school where he committed Pope’s Homer to memory. Finally, there was the school headed by the Reverend Thomas Ready at Peckham, a mile from home, until the age of fourteen. These were all experiences which put the brake in more than one way on his already restless spirit and unfettered creativity. Having left 33 An ability passed on to his grandson Pen, who became a painter. 34 The figure of his father, with his curious didactic methods, is recalled in the later poem ‘Development’.

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the school of Reverend Ready, rather than enrolling in a public school, he took private lessons for a year in music, Italian and French, and in October 1828 matriculated at the newly opened University of London, where he studied Greek, Latin and German. In spring 1829 he had already ended his university career, perhaps due to homesickness or perhaps because he was dissatisfied with the mostly philological course of studies there. Earlier, in 1826, he had made the discovery of and become completely enraptured by Shelley, an experience which was destined to become a focal point of his entire life. Today the story that Browning bought Queen Mab from a market stall is the stuff of legend; and inexplicable is the reason why (one feels it must have been the fruit of a misunderstanding) a cousin, not suspected of wishing to corrupt the young Browning, gave him a copy of Shelley’s poems.35 The extremely rare edition of the complete works of Shelley was then given to him as a gift, and in good faith, by his mother, together with those of Keats, and directly from the source, the publishers Hunt and Clark. Browning, who until then had been, as he would confess as an adult, ‘passionately religious’ – naturally due to his mother’s influence, for his father was at best tepid about religion, even indifferent – was struck as by lightning. The reading of Shelley, to whose creed he adhered without hesitation, set off a conflict of allegiance which left an indelible mark. For two years, the last part of which may have coincided with his unhappy experience at university, he not only subscribed to Shelley’s atheism and political subversion, but also became a vegetarian, following to the letter the instructions prescribed in a note to Queen Mab, based on bread and potatoes. He was forced to interrupt this diet due to consequent sight problems. His passion for Shelley shook the foundations of his relationship with his pious mother who, once aware of the ideas of the Romantic poet, could but abhor them. Faced with the inevitable necessity of a choice, Browning in the end repudiated Shelley. He took the step also thanks to the help and the mediation of his mother’s friends, Sarah and Eliza Flower, to whom Browning had turned after his spiritual crisis, and who during

35

According to De Vane 1955, 9, this was a small pirated edition published by Benbow in 1826.

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those critical years exercised a notable balancing influence upon him. Being enlightened Unitarians, unlike his mother who had abruptly closed the door upon Browning, they discussed his atheism with him and induced him to overcome it. The daughters of a typesetter and journalist, who had even served a few years of prison for his liberal and progressive ideas, the two sisters, one a poet (Sarah) and the other (Eliza) a musician, played a crucial role in helping Browning in his first steps as a poet and guiding him in his intellectual and emotional life. His relationship with the two Flowers sisters revealed for the first time how Browning was not nor ever would be sensitive to the charm of girls in their first bloom of womanhood but was instead attracted by mature, maternal women. The three women who up until his marriage left sentimental traces in Browning were all – a not too curious coincidence – older than he, at least two of them well on their way to becoming spinsters. In Eliza, nine years older than he, Browning found a second, sympathetic maternal figure to whom he could reveal the tormented dilemmas resulting from his veneration of Shelley. Of the two sisters it was almost certainly she the one for whom Browning conceived the platonic or transfigured infatuation which he described in his first approved work, Pauline. When his university experience ended, Browning expressed to his parents his desire to embrace the career of poet; they accepted this decision doubtfully at first, but later, like the parents of Ruskin, they came to support it with enthusiasm, to the point not only of covering the expenses of publishing his first works but even paying for his two expensive trips to Italy without batting an eye. 3. Proud to show off the talents of her fourteen-year-old son, Browning’s mother showed Incondita, later lost, to Sarah Flower. She submitted the manuscript to the Unitarian minister, Fox, who had acquired a certain notoriety as a journalist and literary critic, and who, in 1829, upon the death of their father, had become tutor to the two sisters. Before long, Browning embraced Fox as his guide. Fox would later write the only favourable review for Pauline, help Browning to publish Paracelsus, recommend him to his future publisher Moxon, and introduce him to the critic John Forster, through whom Browning met other important people. Within a time span of only eighteen months Fox included five poems by Browning in the Monthly Repository of which he was editor. In the years following, Sarah

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Flower formed her own family, and Eliza ceased to be Fox’s pupil, becoming his lover. Browning, having returned to a rather conventional faith, may have been convinced of the purely platonic nature of that cohabitation, unlike others who cut ties with Fox. In the early 1830s, the Reverend’s house, located in Bayswater, became a lesser literary salon where youths aspiring to artistic and literary glory gathered. It was here that Browning made all of his social and professional contacts up to 1846. Through Fox he sought a publisher willing to print his second work, Paracelsus, composed after returning from his trip to Russia in 1834, where he had accompanied the Consul General in London. When the poem came out, the reviews were flattering, but Browning, who apparently until then had received only praise, was wounded by the few dissenting voices, leading to a sense of resentment towards critics that would always remain ingrained. Nevertheless Paracelsus launched Browning into the literary firmament: for eleven years, he found glory as the celebrated author of Paracelsus. During a reception held by the poet and playwright ‘Serjeant’ Talfourd in May 1836, where both Landor and Wordsworth were present, Browning was hailed as the most promising of the young poets. He made numerous other contacts at Fox’s house (Carlyle, Harriet Martineau and the mediocre poet Fanny Haworth, eleven years his senior and among his first admirers)36 including that of the famous actor William Charles Macready, an acquaintance who for a period of time seemed on the verge of giving a new and different impetus to the budding career of Browning, and of transforming it from that of a poet with dramatic tendencies to that of a playwright tout court. It is certain that Browning felt the irresistible pull of the theatre; indeed it was the theatre which he credited with the emergence of his vocation as a poet or at least with its first, tangible manifestation: one evening in October 1832 he had been, in fact, the enraptured and overwhelmed spectator of one of the last, and by then somewhat tired performances, of the great Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean. Reading Paracelsus, Macready believed he had discovered in Browning the author capable of breathing new life into English theatre, which he felt 36 Haworth wrote a few poems overflowing with acknowledgement and praise for Browning. The two briefly exchanged letters, and if rumours of Browning having sentimental ties before 1845 were true, it was probably with her.

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was in inexorable decline (and also of saving his own career, which was on the edge of economic collapse). As I will mention, the objective truth is that Browning produced plays which simply could not be staged, and no matter how he may have desired the career of playwright, and in his later years regretted not having become one, drama was never his true vocation. Yet it was Macready who suggested to Browning and fostered in him the aspiration to become the greatest English playwright of the century. In 1836 Macready, after a first reading of Strafford, had pompously written in his diary that he had received ‘one of the very highest, may I not say the highest honour, I have through life received’; but he was forced over time to change his mind. In 1843, on the occasion of the opening of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon – a fiasco which Browning blamed on Macready for refusing to play the title role and repeatedly ridiculing the play to the troupe –37 he left Browning in the lurch. 4. In the autumn of 1844, upon his return from a second trip to Italy, an ideally Shelleyan pilgrimage along the Tyrrhenian coast from Naples to Livorno, Browning found on his table a freshly printed volume of poems by Elizabeth Barrett. Upon the urging of John Kenyon, a distant relative of Barrett’s who would later become the couple’s benefactor, on 10 January 1845 Browning penned a letter of sincere congratulations to her, the first in an intense epistolary courtship which, despite lasting less than two years, occupies two thick volumes and testifies to the progress of a relationship destined to end in marriage. Browning, who had vowed not to marry temporarily for economic reasons (his father could never have supported the young poet and family as well), fell in love with Elizabeth Barrett (six years his senior, even though Browning, it was said, did not learn her real age until her death) and in an impulsive gesture decided to marry her even before meeting her in person, which occurred four months after having written his first letter.38 Until then, Browning had lived a life which was 37 38

In addition to the critic Forster, Dickens also defended Browning, exhorting Macready to produce the play with a letter of generous approval, of which Browning remained mysteriously uninformed. There is general agreement that the only missing letter, burned by Browning himself, contained a premature declaration of love. Barrett was not completely unknown to

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physically and emotionally just a little less sheltered than that of Barrett; one could even maintain that it was he rather than she who was chronically ill.39 Impractical Browning proposed to Barrett without taking into consideration the economic consequences of his action. Having always been dependent upon his parents, he had no money of his own. Fortunately, Elizabeth was the beneficiary of a sizeable annual income in the form of national bonds, and in that way, at least at the beginning, the couple was assured of some funds. But Browning, who would never lack fantastical projects to raise their quality of life, had to get used to the idea of being supported by his wife. They married in secret on 12 September 1846 in the London church of St Marylebone, and departed for Southampton and afterwards for Italy,40 with the intention of staying there only over the winter until Elizabeth’s father overcame his anger and an inevitable reconciliation was reached. The Italian climate proved immediately beneficial to Elizabeth’s health, but a longer stay became necessary due to the unbending attitude of her father and siblings. They passed the winter of 1846–1847 in Pisa, a famous therapeutic location among English consumptives, to then settle at Casa Guidi in Florence (hence the name of the patriotic poem penned by Elizabeth). They were a fundamentally solid couple, although their matrimonial life was marked by occasional divergences in opinion, arguments and even stormy periods. Their political ideas were very different, for while Elizabeth sympathized with firm and even, when necessary, tyrannical temperaments (her idol was Napoleon III), Browning was a liberal and a democratic in favour of mass movements over individuals. The stark disapproval which Browning had always felt towards Spiritualism, in which his wife in contrast believed, bubbled to the surface in 1855 when, on one of their occasional visits to England, Elizabeth stubbornly wanted at all costs to meet a medium that Browning would later ridicule in a poem (but, as we will see, only ambiguously); during one session, in a skilfully designed Browning, as they had collaborated in 1843 on a critical book by R. H. Horne concerning the principal literary figures of the time. 39 Browning’s migraines are discussed more often in their love letters than the ailments of Barrett. 40 The elopement was condemned by Wordsworth, forgetting his own Parisian escapades.

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show, invisible hands laid a wreath of clematis on Elizabeth’s head. It was not long before Browning felt the sting of dissatisfaction and frustration with the form of submission which he had chosen freely. This included artistic frustration. In the first months and years of his marriage he had produced little or nothing, but with Men and Women he had gone out of his way to write something to appeal to a wider public, noting however with displeasure that luck refused to smile upon him; and all this while his wife approached the peak of her popularity with Aurora Leigh. The enthusiastic reviews and re-printings of her poem only increased his own feeling of failure and lack of creativity: ‘I am the church-organ bellows’ blower that talked of our playing, but you know what I do is looking after the commas and dots to i’s’.41 Browning also gave his wife free rein in the education of their son Wiedemann (known by the nicknames Penini, Peni and finally Pen) born in 1849 after two miscarriages. She was the one who wanted at all costs to raise him as an Italian. The child grew up in an atmosphere of extravagance and adulation, a true enfant gâté with long blonde curls and lacy clothes; he would later develop, not completely surprisingly, a veritable aversion towards England. 5. The Brownings also disagreed upon the two cities in which they resided. Elizabeth adored Florence and was always disappointed by Rome, whereas Browning was indifferent, even hostile, to Florence (where, in 1846, he did not even wish to stay due to the ‘hordes’ of vulgar compatriots), but found himself perfectly at ease in the Eternal City. There his friend and sculptor William Wetmore Story introduced him to clay sculpture, a welcome diversion from poetry. In Rome, often leaving his wife and son at home, he began rather late in his career to attend salons and parties. By 1861, he had made four visits to England with Elizabeth. During the first, soon after the death of his mother, he learned that his father was seeing a widow and was about to remarry. He changed his mind, but was sued by the widow and lost. Almost at the same time, from a parcel of letters that Browning had been invited to edit for publication – attributed to Shelley and come to light only then to be proved to be apocryphal – he reached

41 2.12.1856 (NL, 97).

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the bitter conclusion that his old idol had left his wife not in a mutual agreement but with a cruel unilateral decision. The pain caused by this realization coalesced with that he felt in learning of his father’s infidelity in widowhood. The visits to England, which were all sources of bitterness for Elizabeth given her father’s refusal to be reconciled with her, brought, however, some gratification too. On meeting George Sand in Paris in 1851 Browning felt he had not been given adequate consideration, but during his second visit to England he had the satisfaction of seeing that people had begun to notice him. A meeting of the two major living poets took place in September 1855, in the temporary residence of the Brownings in London, when Tennyson read his recently completed Maud and Browning ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, while Rossetti, unseen, painted a portrait of the Poet Laureate. 6. When Elizabeth died, Browning immediately left Italy and returned to London with the intention of embracing a life in retirement. In truth only nine months later he had already settled into an imposing home in the area of Paddington, where he was to live for the next twenty-five years. After the death of his father (1866), he was joined by his faithful sister Sarianna. From that moment they became inseparable companions. At first Browning took great care to appear as the jealous custodian of the memory of his late wife (he edited her works in 1887), but he did not torture himself over her loss. As early as 1863 he had begun to frequent high society, as well as to attend events of academic, cultural and musical interest, which for him were irresistibly attractive and which he had been forced to renounce for too long during his marriage. His life became as methodical and as regular as a Swiss watch; those who knew him described him in that period as a faultless gentleman and a sharp, brilliant conversationalist. Henry James – as we have seen – revealed a dichotomy between the poet and the man of the world, clever in protecting his privacy behind his worldliness. Tennyson said he imagined Browning would die wearing a white tie, and at a reception a lady mistook him for an exuberant banker. Browning’s only worry, apart from that of spending his time in the most pleasant and relaxing way, was to ensure his son’s success. This is the explanation for many of the steps and initiatives that he took, and of many opportunistic friendships that he made. He committed many blunders in childrearing, not even made in good faith, such as attempting to Anglicize his son overnight, subjecting

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him to a strict educational protocol which ended up dampening his spirits rather than increasing his scant willpower. When Pen, having left Oxford without taking a degree, showed he had talent for painting, Browning supported him, sending him to study in Antwerp and becoming his first admirer, patron, and backer. Browning was not ashamed to admit that the main reason why he considered remarrying in the first ten years after the death of Elizabeth was not that of finding a second wife but rather that of giving a mother, preferably wealthy, to his son. It is almost impossible to count the number of relationships and engagements that were attributed to him, rumours justified by the friendly manner and audaciously confidential expressions he exchanged with mature acquaintances. Among them were Julia Wedgwood, an intellectual with a rather cold temperament and one of the few quite a bit younger than he, whose correspondence was brusquely cut short to silence gossip; Mrs Egerton-Smith, whose sudden death in 1876 inspired the short poem La Saisiaz; the American poet Clara Bloomfield Moore (who it was rumoured he was on the verge of marrying) and above all the American expatriate Katherine Bronson, at whose home in Asolo Browning was an almost permanent summer guest from 1878 on. But it is unlikely that Browning made more than one serious proposal of marriage, that to Louisa McKenzie, Lady Ashburton, a very wealthy Scottish widow and a fascinating, albeit fickle woman. This proposal, made in September 1869, would surely have been accepted if it had not been for the prosaic, inopportune terms in which it was made.42 Browning was frank enough not to hide two facts: his continuing devotion to Elizabeth Barrett and the presence of their son; in other words, he candidly admitted his interest in a marriage of convenience. He was long resentful, not on account of her refusal but rather of the consequences. He also lived in remorse, longing to recapture the lost sense of closeness he had felt with Elizabeth. In 1878, after seventeen years of absence, and having passed his previous summers in some of the most enchanting and

42 According to a different reconstruction (cf. W. Whitla, ‘Browning and the Ashburton Affair’, Browning Society Notes, II [1972], 12–41), it was Browning rather than Ashburton who turned down the proposal.

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picturesque seaside and mountain locations in Brittany, Switzerland and Haute-Savoie, he decided to cross the Alps and to see Italy again, but in all of his Italian summer holidays he never went south of Venice (which he failed to visit only three times until 1889), carefully avoiding all of the places associated with his married life. His stays were divided equally between Venice and Asolo, that ‘delicious Asolo’, as he wrote in a letter in 1838, and which, mere days before his death, he called ‘the most beautiful spot I ever was privileged to see’,43 and where he hoped until the end to obtain permission to buy a piece of land. He often had presentiments of death, but always without gravity or dismay; indeed, he welcomed them with a defiant spirit. Until only a short while before his final illness he was composing new poems for Asolando. He died in Venice on 12 December 1889, three years before what he viewed as ‘the proper term, / The appointed Fourscore’,44 in a palace bought and restored by his son, after a worsening of his bronchial complaint combined with heart failure. Florence and Venice fought over the honour of being his final resting place, an honour which ultimately fell to Westminster Abbey, where his tomb was placed next to that of Chaucer, the poet to whom, for his variety, he had often been compared. § 109. Browning up to 1869 VI: ‘Pauline’ and the essays on Chatterton and Shelley ‘Genius almost invariably begins to develop itself by imitation’; the artist when he first begins can only be a ‘thief ’, and only after having mastered the current models around him can he gradually become aware of his own means and begin to test his own voice. Browning, who on the motif of the ‘development of a soul’, and the soul of the artist, was to focus his first three published works, applied this evolutionary law to the childpoet, the ‘marvellous boy’ beloved by the Romantics, Thomas Chatterton, sketching out a biography in a valuable essay published anonymously in 1842 and coming to light almost a century later.45 The importance of this 43 24.7.1838 and 15.10.1889 (NL, 383). 44 From the poem ‘Jochanan Hakkadosh’. 45 Browning’s essay, which appeared in the Foreign Quarterly Review, begins as a review of a book written by an American scholar on the madness and imprisonment of

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essay lies in the fact that, like another essay on Shelley, it reveals much more about Browning than about Chatterton, and above all supplies an a posteriori reconstruction and justification (although perhaps too simplistic and rationalized) for his early imitative works, from those burned or repudiated to the first three poems. Absolving Chatterton from the sin of ‘forgery’, because he had published his works in passing them off as those of an obscure medieval monk, Browning commits the same sin, deforming and falsifying biographical information or interpreting it in a different way. This is one of the earliest examples of the adaptation of historical figures which we will later find in abundance in his poetic works. The question with which Browning begins is whether Chatterton, towards the end of his life, intended to persevere in this fraud or instead to end it. Browning defends the poet – while condemning Macpherson, a ‘mature impostor’ – for his young age; as with Shelley, he attributes to Chatterton a clear, nascent, redemptive volition, fatally truncated by his death: Chatterton had left Bristol for London, determined to end his hoax at the precise moment when the demand for his ‘fakes’ was at its height, as show the fragments of his manuscripts strewn across the floor of his apartment which were found after his suicide.46 2. Browning discovered the Romantics while still practically a child, by reading Macpherson’s Ossian, the most famous and well received, albeit acknowledged example of literary counterfeiting of English literature. From Wordsworth, as admired in his youth as he was rejected later for his conservative shift of thought, Browning absorbed a sharp interest in nature seen as an irreplaceable aid in the quest for self-knowledge. That interest declined, however, over time. Coleridge inspired one of his only Tasso, but both the topic and the figure of the Italian poet are dropped after just a few lines. The transition is justified, weakly, on the basis of the precocious talent of both poets, Tasso and Chesterton. 46 The essay is anticipatory because it can also be seen as one of the first apologies for a real or presumed impostor. Smalley 1948 sees in it the origin and the testing ground for future dramatic monologues, and in Chatterton the prototype of Browning’s monologists, in particular of Djabal of The Return of the Druses (§ 113.3), Sludge and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau – an ingenious, but forced argument despite the rich documentation.

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surviving poems from Incondita, not at all awkward despite being written at no more than fourteen years of age. The others had been burnt on the advice of Reverend Fox.47 It was Byron who mainly served as inspiration for these early poems and who was Browning’s idol before being eclipsed by Shelley. Like Wordsworth, but for completely different reasons, Byron too would become the target of fierce and pointed attacks (the cult of the melancholy and pessimistic hero conflicted with his philosophy of action). Browning was to solemnly abjure Shelley more than once, but signs of that youthful infatuation remained with him until his old age. At first he was enraptured by his short poems, the lyrical and symbolic fantasies; later he was entranced by Shelley the radical thinker and philosopher, the Promethean conqueror of the Infinite and the audacious individualist who dethrones God and puts a divinized man on his pedestal. Browning’s atheism did not last long because it was ultimately one of the points of Shelley’s agenda which were most extraneous to his own vision of life. Yet it still took him nearly fifteen years and three poems, or rather until the middle of Pippa Passes (1841), to ‘heal’ at least officially and to emerge from the blind alley in which he had been led by Shelley’s idea of the poet and the artist. Browning’s problem, triggered by Shelley and later tackled with care in the 1852 essay dedicated to him, was that of finding the right balance between subjectivity and objectivity, or between two opposing vectors, one oriented to the objective world (to be accepted wholly in the full variety of its manifestations), and the other to the inner life and the almost monadic and alienating closure within the self. Browning, who conceived Pauline after hearing Kean recite Richard III, distanced himself from Shelley by adopting Shakespeare – that is, he ceased to be a poet 47 ‘The Dance of Death’, in which personifications of sickness and death speak, illustrating their destructive actions, and echoing Coleridge’s ‘Fire, Famine and Slaughter’. Later, Browning was to model the interludes in rhyming verse of the fourth part of Paracelsus (beginning with the line ‘Over the sea our galleys went’) on ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. ‘The First Born of Egypt’ is a free poetic interpretation of a biblical episode, the death of the son of Pharaoh decreed by the God of Israel. Both poems survived thanks to Sarah Flower, who transcribed them from her album which contained all of Incondita, and submitted them to Fox, presumably as the two most significant ones.

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exclusively dedicated to and absorbed by the abstract world of the ego, and became a poet immersed in the thick of daily life. 3. Pauline, his first, still immature poetic production, was published anonymously in 1833 with funds from his maternal aunt. There Browning traced his portrait of an artist, romantically transfigured but at the same time precise and detailed, foreshadowing themes, figures and elements which were to shape his creative development. Rather than pointing to his surpassing or dismissal of Shelley, the poem shows a Browning who is no longer willing to accept Shelley in toto but is rather on the verge of rejecting some of his teachings, albeit reluctantly, yet still holding tightly to others. The apostate who had been roused by Shelley’s libertarian agenda and by his proclamation of rebirth and atheism claims to have rejected him, despite admitting that he feels a ‘strange delight’ and dedicates a fervid homage to Shelley, the ‘Sun-Treader’,48 in the form of two moving apostrophes. Shelley is the point of departure for a journey that begins with the discovery of a powerful self-centredness, a sense of supremacy over everyone and everything, and the sharp perception of the separation of one’s own self from the rest of Creation, a ‘vague sense of power’ at war with a ‘restraint’ imposed from outside. Browning gave the most precise description of the climate and nature of Incondita by having the reading of Shelley inspire a poem which narcissistically affirms the unbridgeable divide between himself and the world. Pauline intervenes at the end of the long anamnesis as the catalyst of the prayed-for metamorphosis:49 the sinning penitent sinks disillusioned and submissive into her arms, ready to be purified, and bids her adieu ‘free from doubt / Or touch of fear’, conscious of being able to slip back into temptation, but firm in his 48 This periphrasis means the ‘dethroner of God’. The Oxford English Dictionary includes examples such as treading grapes or treading defenceless populations; the same verb is used in the Authorized Version to describe the Virgin Mary trampling the serpent under her heel. Cf. the annotation in Karlin and Woolford’s edn, vol. I, 36, which seems to contradict the Pettigrew and Collins, Penguin edn (see vol. I, 1024), for whom the image suggests ‘the ethereal quality of Shelley’s idealism and imagery’. 49 This is the theme announced by the first of the two epigraphs, taken from Clément Marot, the court poet.

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intent: ‘I cannot be immortal, taste all joy’.50 Browning recognized the stimulating and balancing nature of the friendship of the Flower sisters and probably took Eliza, the elder, as his model for Pauline51 – a strongly spiritualized creature, the romantic and Goethe-like phantom of the feminine, symbol of pure love and of the divine intermediary to whom the twenty-one-year-old poet (Shelley’s age when he composed Alastor, the model for Pauline) clung fervently in his desire to mend his ways.52 4. Pauline was the first and only part of a much vaster project which was supposed to bring the young and romantically megalomaniac Browning to write, one after the other, an opera, a play, a novel and a poem, all under various pseudonyms, to amaze the world. Soon afterwards he smiled at his own attempt, defining the poem as ‘the only crab apple that remains of the shapely tree of life in my fool’s paradise’. Reviews varied in tenor but were not discouraging. In one of them, spurred on by Browning’s own solicitations, Fox scented that a genius was about to emerge, although he also predicted with great foresight its sparse future popularity. Another review left its mark on Browning, although paradoxically it was never even published. That was the one John Stuart Mill just began, for he merely returned a copy of the poem to the publisher with notes in the margins and a conclusion containing the verdict that the author was not, in his opinion, sound of mind. Browning responded to Mill on the same copy, in part accepting, in part counter-attacking. Browning’s art, also due to this galling experience, took a much less autobiographical and self-confessional turn. Pauline 50 Browning uses a beautiful description of the figure of Andromeda as an example of unyielding firmness, a myth which would later prove to be a fertile source of ideas and symbolic adaptations. 51 But we cannot rule out the possibility that Browning intended to fuse both sisters in the figure of Pauline, idealized in that role which both of them essentially played, of surrogate mother. What is asked of Pauline is a ‘screen / To shut me in with thee, and from all fear’. Pauline must guide the poet as a mother takes her child by the hand. 52 The delirious, uncontainable pull of superhuman goals, the ‘hunger for / All pleasure’, the inextinguishable, insatiable ‘craving after knowledge’, and that ‘principle of restlessness / Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all’ are a Faustian prefiguration which points directly to Paracelsus and beyond, but here attributed to the protagonist, without any apparent self-criticism.

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remained unsold and Browning withdrew it from circulation. Reading it at the British Museum in 1847, D. G. Rossetti discovered the voice of its author. Browning acknowledged his authorship in 1868, including it in the complete edition of his works, although ‘with extreme repugnance, indeed purely of necessity’ (that is to say, to prevent pirated editions), defining it a ‘rough preliminary sketch’. On the contrary, Pauline may actually be said to belong to a much later stage than Paracelsus and Sordello in Browning’s compositional technique, as it is already a dramatic monologue albeit in an embryonic form, and quite imperfect and incomplete, particularly because of the insufficient distance between the author and the monologist. As a ‘fragment of a confession’, as stated in the subtitle, it is another foreshadowing of a situation and a scenario which will become canonical in Browning’s maturity. 5. Browning returned to Shelley in a piece of writing which others baptized the ‘essay on Shelley’, though it is nothing more than an introduction to a group of unpublished letters which were later discovered to be fake, from the poet to his first wife Harriet, which Browning’s publisher Moxon had purchased at an auction and then published together with Browning’s essay, in 1852. The ‘essay’ is a memoir, veined by nostalgia but devoid of any blind fanaticism; and it is complementary to the self-irony found in the poem ‘Memorabilia’.53 Browning distinguishes between objective and subjective poets, the former being those who reproduce reality, better and in greater detail than in the perceptions of the average man. In that way they operate as intermediaries, interpreters, ‘creators’ who address the multitudes of men who are their intellectual inferiors. The subjective poets, on the other hand, aim at describing what man cannot see, the vision of God, the Platonic ideas which like ‘seeds of creation’ burn in the hands of God, that is to say ‘primal elements of humanity’, which can be traced within oneself and one’s soul, but which are reflections of an absolute consciousness. Thus the objective poet feels he is a part of a community of his peers, while the subjective poet is a visionary, a mystic and a solipsist. These were the questions and the aporias which confronted almost all the first-generation

53

§ 121.7.

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Victorian poets. Browning does not postulate a hierarchy between the two types of poet, but the fact that he describes them as complementary is meaningful; to that, he adds that one day they could meld into a single person. Warning his reader to be wary of the paroxysms of the Romantic sublime, he states that ‘the world is not to be known and thrown aside’, but we must return to it and rediscover it a second time. Shelley is naturally classified among the more profoundly subjective poets: he was a poet whose inspiration was a quintessential one of tension towards ever higher forms of self-knowledge and self-revelation, intent on pulling all humanity up with him to these heights. From a moral point of view, the many negative experiences of Shelley’s life are indulgently attributed to the ‘poor limits’ of our humanity; in the final passage the rehabilitation of the poet, particularly his religious rehabilitation, becomes even more subtle and tortuous: ‘had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the Christians’. According to Browning, Shelley believed in many Christian dogmas even though he negated their historical foundations, and a single profession of faith is worth more than many of unbelief.54 Soon after the publication, as I have noted in the biographical section, these ‘letters of Shelley’ were exposed as the result of a skilful forgery, and the book was immediately withdrawn from circulation. § 110. Browning up to 1869 VII: ‘Paracelsus’. The failed search for absolute knowledge Paracelsus (1835), Browning’s first work published in his name, met with great public approval at least on the part of professional poets. It was the fruit of the criticism that Pauline had received, or at least of a personal self-criticism, since Browning objectified himself in a character very different from himself, although he transplanted into that character, immeasurably magnified, most of the unassuaged restlessness and aspirations of the protagonist of Pauline. Hunting for disguises to mask his own youthful Romantic Titanism, he refrained from choosing, perhaps to avoid 54

‘The fact that there is a gold-region is established by the finding of one lump, though you miss the vein never so often’. This is along the same lines as the paradoxical arguments developed by Bishop Blougram or by Sludge the medium.

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an embarrassing comparison with Goethe, the figure which would have been natural or possible to expect, namely Faust.55 He chose in any case one of his most similar historical alter egos, who in addition was almost contemporary with Faust, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus of Hohenheim (1493–1541), who it is said fashioned for himself the nickname of Paracelsus to indicate his supposed superiority over Celsus, and whose fourth name, ‘probably acquired’ – as is maintained by the source on which Browning documented himself and from which he drew copiously while composing a very erudite and exhibitionist appendix – was perhaps due to the ‘characteristic phraseology of his lectures’.56 The subject seems to have been suggested to Browning by a family friend, a French count, but could have occurred to him independently, given the popularity during those years of the sixteenth-century doctor, who had inspired Shelley and intrigued Beddoes.57 Browning, who some years earlier had casually followed medical courses, discovered other points in common with Paracelsus, realizing how he had been, in addition, a proud, self-taught Protestant with little university experience and doubtless a self-made man such as Browning was becoming. In Paracelsus, nonetheless, he did not much see the physician and the alchemist as the symbol of an absolutely and complete devotion to a mission. He made of him a historical or rather legendary and almost mythical analogue of the aspiring poet in search of self-assertion in the midst of a hostile society.58 More ambitious than Pauline, Paracelsus

On the possible influence of Faust cf. Woolford 1988, 3–4 and 6–7. The English translation of the first part of Faust had been published two years before by Moxon, Browning’s future publisher. The most famous Goethian character, Faust, was to be introduced indirectly, many years later, in the humorous epilogue to Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day. 56 Browning followed three works, all owned by his father: the Biographie Universelle, the edition in three volumes of the works of Paracelsus edited by F. Botiskius, and the Vitae Germanorum Medicorum by Melchior Adam. 57 Jack 1973, 25 n. 13. 58 When Paracelsus leaves his companions Festus and Michal to face his destiny, Browning depicts his own debut and encounter with the world and the necessary yet painful break from the comfort of his family ties and their protective shell. Festus’ and Michal’s names begin with the initial letters of ‘father’ and ‘mother’, 55

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fits the common denominator of the infatuation with Shelley and with Alastor in particular, and shares with both works the sense of an extreme, nostalgic repentance. The figure of the intellectual greedy for knowledge will become one of the most frequently seen in Browning’s art, but in this first apparition the element of irony is missing, while later it will become a fundamental component. Here instead the climate remains one of almost intact, Romantic high pathos. Browning follows the parable of Paracelsus step by step with bated breath and at the end refrains from passing judgement. He is painted, at the most, with the mark of a repudiation which is however not devoid of admiration. The dream of Paracelsus is the dream of human power, of the suppression of one’s own limits to attain a power equal to that of God himself, that same desire spurring Dante’s Ulysses59 to cross the boundaries created by God or incarnated in Milton’s Satan. But the seeds of its failure are buried within the dream itself. Paracelsus wants to be the one who carries this new light to humanity, to become ‘a star to men’, yet he wishes to share nothing with them, nor welcome them to take part in his endeavours, and he refuses any future reward, knowing that the quest itself will suffice: ‘If I can serve mankind / ’Tis well; but here our intercourse must end: / I never will be served by those I serve’. The ordeal of Paracelsus thus becomes the tragedy of absolute knowledge set apart from love, or the tragedy of one who comes to know the need for love but is unable to put this knowledge into practice. This parable foreshadows a frequent Victorian motif, that of isolating solipsism yielding to socialization and to communion with other men, as found for instance in Tennyson’s and Arnold’s poetry.60 Paracelsus’ meeting with the poet Aprile opens up a new horizon for him, but not to the point of provoking and are therefore, Festus in particular, parental figures and influences. The garden in Wurzburg, which is the setting for the first part of the poem, is almost certainly a poetic recreation of the garden behind Browning’s childhood home in Camberwell (Miller 1952, 3ff.). 59 Dante’s Ulysses was almost certainly known to Browning, who not much later would compose Sordello on the basis of the Purgatorio. 60 Arnold’s Empedocles (§ 155.3) is after all a doctor with thaumaturgic powers, and a self-divinized challenger who disdains having any communion with his fellow creatures.

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a complete change of heart or a disillusion. To the end, Paracelsus remains a divided character, always ready to rise from the ashes of his failure to face the same challenge again. 2. In setting the life of Paracelsus to verse, Browning lacked earlier models to follow. Although his blank verse already seems confident and fluent, this five-act dramatic poem has a certain weakness in its structure. Nor is the choice of the five paradigmatic moments, corresponding to the five parts of the poem, altogether felicitous. These are inconveniences partly due to the fact that it was composed in only six months (if one is to believe the preface, which, however, appears only in the first edition) and partly caused by the hybrid structure which he chose. The poem is dramatic but only in appearance. Browning had no intention of creating a historically accurate account of the life of Paracelsus, and for this reason, of the many historical figures who could have appeared in the poem, he included four among the dramatis personae, and not even all of them were assigned a truly dramatic role. Michal, Paracelsus’ classmate, has very few lines and then disappears from the scene; of the remaining characters only Festus plays more than the mere role of dramatic fiction and has the function of feeding and checking, with his comments, the unceasing stream of words flowing from Paracelsus. Festus is the voice of wisdom and equilibrium, correcting Paracelsus when he aims too high – confronting him, adulating him and prodding him when his enthusiasm wavers.61 As for Aprile, he only makes a brief although decisive appearance; this is also the treatment given to external events which occurred during the life of Paracelsus. Some external events of outstanding historical importance are likewise merely mentioned in passing, as if relegated to a faded, distant backdrop.62 In other words, the defect which will plague Browning’s plays is already visible: the lack of any real external action. He ultimately aimed at the sharp emergence

61

In similar circumstances, Festus takes on the appearance and the role which was assigned to Pauline in the previous poem by Browning. 62 An exception is the end of Part IV, when Paracelsus lingers to talk admiringly of Luther, who is credited with having taken care of and unchained his people. Similarly, Browning hardly mentions the professional and scientific activities of Paracelsus, nor does he ever present him while at work, only before or after.

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of the individuality of his protagonist and at keeping him at the forefront, his light obscuring all that surrounded him. Thus his life experiences leave no trace upon him, immersed as he is in his mission, and determined to communicate it in increasingly expansive remarks which are also, inevitably, ever more repetitive. Paracelsus has the effect of an uninterrupted monologue, conducted in majestic, winged, magniloquent language, as if it were all spoken in one breath. 3. In Part I, Paracelsus, hungry for ‘knowledge’, announces his intention to leave Wurzburg and the university, vainly beseeched to stay by his companions. Part II part takes place in Constantinople, nine years later, when he is already beginning to experience his first vacillations. Leaving the hovel of a Greek fortune-teller, he hears the voices of a ‘wan troop’ of poets suspended in the air, banished by God for not having fulfilled their mission. They invite him to join them. It is at this moment that the Italian poet Aprile appears. Aprile is a disguise for the utopian Shelley of his first youthful short poems, the self-proclaimed transformer of the world. In the contrast between Paracelsus and Aprile lies the whole personal dilemma of Browning, at that time only partially solved, and biographically embodied in the conflict between Shelley and his own mother: that between absolute knowledge and love, and between reason and feeling. Browning acknowledges for the moment the fact that Love and Knowledge, the heart and the mind, cannot be reconciled, and sees them meeting in God: ‘God is the perfect poet, / Who in his person acts his own creations’.63 Aprile represents the correction of the most inhuman impulses in Paracelsus. He is a more mature Paracelsus who has learned from his own defeat. Paracelsus yearns for knowledge, while Aprile ‘would love infinitely, and be loved’; each of his actions, in contrast to those of Paracelsus, is intended to bring some sort of benefit to men. Between the two, there is, or there could be, a mutual completion: ‘I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE – / Excluding love as thou refusedst knowledge […] Are we not halves of one dissevered world?’64 Aprile dies praising life and love, and Paracelsus 63 Revealingly, the first version was ‘Who in His grand love acts his own conceptions’. 64 The reasons for which Aprile dies, or rather for which he, too, fails, are not very clear. Browning seems to indicate that Aprile too looks to the past, and has not been

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prepares to take that message and make it his own; his resolution to learn to love will however be in vain, because he will fail to make that graft, or will be able to do so only imperfectly. The death of Aprile is meaningful precisely because it occurs at the very moment when a sense of brotherhood is growing between them. In the most difficult and desperate moments of his future life, Paracelsus will remember this ‘strange competitor in enterprise, / Bound for the same end by another path’, and his warnings will never cease to echo in his mind. In Aprile, Browning, with an indirect prophecy, was reminding himself of the ultimate aim of his own art, in almost the same terms as in ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’: ‘Every passion sprung from man, conceived by man, / Would I express and cloth it in its right form, / Or blend with others struggling in one form, / Or show repressed by an ungainly form’. 4. Part III, in which Paracelsus is found in Basel at the height of his academic fame but already on the verge of his fall (just before being unmasked as a quack), is written in a ‘confessional vein’, required by the presence of Festus, and in the spirit and the letter of Pauline. Stripped of his Promethean frills and returned to the dimension of a suffering man, Paracelsus becomes almost like the penitent in Pauline who abandons Shelley in search of a guide who can provide comfort. He recognizes the failure of his vow to carry out the agenda of Aprile, whose teachings have proved too difficult to enact. In Part IV, in 1528, he reappears in an Alsatian tavern hurling abuse at Basel and at his detractors, and we now see him in a less than heroic or superhuman light, that of a ‘low’, baser man, who allows himself the satisfaction of ‘a parting kick’ at Basel. He has now discovered, besides those of love and knowledge, a third impulse in Man: hate. Degraded and distrustful, he chases after pleasure and plays a role in life which he will not give up, despite having renounced his plan. His life is split between sudden bursts of new energy and crushing disappointments. Finally, in Part V, he is dying in a room of the hospital of St Sebastian in Salzburg. unflinchingly faithful to his mission, seduced by ‘memories, regrets, and passionate love’: ‘I was tempted sorely’. According to an ingenious, but perhaps too subtle interpretation, Aprile fails because his love is still too abstract and romantic, an aspiration which is absolute and not objective, and not the love of God incarnated as man (De Vane 1955, 51–2).

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His delirium, broken by random ideas and memories, by abrupt digressions and continuously changing thoughts (Browning here demonstrates daring techniques very close to those which he will apply in his future poetry), is followed by a dense monologue of adieu which indeed becomes the climax of the entire poem. Looking back at his past, Paracelsus sees in his insatiability the spring that has always pushed him forward. It was an inborn natural hunger, an endless leap from one unreachable goal to another. He repeats that his nature is like that of Ulysses, not born to ‘idly gaze, but cast / Light on a darkling race’, and calls out his challenge to God once again, putting himself on the same plane with Him. In a fascinating revisiting of the Creation, or paraphrase of Genesis, which is at the same time a preview of the later evolutionary poem ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’,65 Paracelsus recalls the apparition of man during Creation as the final result of a never-ending process of metamorphosis which has taken place on earth since the creation of matter itself. These are lines of inspired philosophical and proto-evolutionary poetry of a decidedly Miltonian flavour, which also call to mind Lucretius, or foreshadow Hopkins’s ‘Heraclitean Fire’ and the Christian evolutionism of a Teilhard de Chardin.66 Man is the crowning achievement of this teeming, swarming work of the earth, a combination of separate powers, spread throughout the inferior layers of nature. ‘Man, once descried, imprints forever / His presence on all lifeless things […] things tend still upward, progress is the law of life, man is not Man as yet’. The ascent will stop only when ‘all the race is perfected alike / As man’, namely in the ‘completed man’, in the final state of man’s physical and intellectual evolution. The symbolic epilogue is also prophetic, as the free and anarchic quest of the semi-divine challenger is truncated by a principle descending from on high – a veritable deus ex machina – as in The Ring and the Book. God in person instils in Paracelsus, as a divine emanation, the concept of the teleology of the cosmos. When Browning has Paracelsus imagine a time when men will overtake the ‘limits of their

65 § 124.6. 66 See G. M. Ridenour, ‘Four Modes in the Poetry of Robert Browning’, in Bloom and Munich 1979, 15, and § 58.4.

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nature’ and will become ‘too great / For narrow creeds of right and wrong’, Paracelsus becomes like an ante litteram Nietzsche, the precursor of the idea of the superman which is Browning’s target in his last works. Here Browning pauses for the moment and even too suddenly ends the poem on a repentant note. Paracelsus confesses what the reader already knows, that ultimately he has failed due to a lack of love and because he has not been content to be simply a man. The invoked ‘third man’ is a synthesis and a compromise between the two extremes, Paracelsus and Aprile. § 111. Browning up to 1869 VIII: ‘Sordello’ I. The travails of a Romantic soul in the Italian Middle Ages With its six books and nearly 6,000 lines, Sordello (1840) is, after The Ring and the Book, the longest of Browning’s works, and the most ambitious poem of his youth. It is, also, at least partly a failure, although hardly that clamorous fiasco which contemporary critics thought that it was, and whose judgement would weigh heavily on Browning’s name for nearly three decades in the form of a covert, preconceived diffidence. The poem had a laborious and tormented gestation, since Browning, who was working at the same time on his first play, left no stone unturned to make this poem different from the two which had preceded it, its ultimate meaning and essence being not all that dissimilar. Its hero is as Romantic, and Promethean, and congenitally melancholy and thirsting for the ineffable, although less abstract and on a more human scale, as Paracelsus had been. Browning found the solution to his problem in adopting a different formal structure and substituting the dramatic mode with that of the narrative poem. He thus increased the number of characters provided with psychological consistency, and gave ample space and emphasis to that historical background that had instead been nearly non-existent in Paracelsus. As he stated in the 1863 preface to his works, the historical decoration ‘was purposely of no more importance than a background requires’, but that statement is not entirely true if we think of the weight that this historical decoration acquires in the poem, which is a continuous interweaving of the historical theme and the psychological drama, and in large sections takes on the rhythm and the pace of an epic poem. In the story of the thirteenthcentury Mantuan troubadour, Sordello (ca 1200–1269) of whom he had

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learned in his private courses of Italian and in his readings from Dante (though Italian subjects were undoubtedly in fashion, appearing in works of Shelley, Byron, Bulwer Lytton and Landor among others), Browning for the third time disguised a personal itinerary and a series of largely autobiographical dilemmas. Sordello, compared to Paracelsus, had, as a man of letters, an even more pronounced autobiographical plausibility. Through him and his often confused inner agitation, Browning depicted the incomprehension and hostility which early on he himself had experienced at the hands of his contemporaries; through him, he investigated the responsibility of the artist, anticipating the dilemma which would occupy the Decadents and that had already been addressed by the first Romantics, the conflict between subjection to the conventions of society and the yearning to live in a different, separate world. All of this makes Sordello Browning’s most relevant youthful contribution to the problems facing the Victorian writer, uncertain whether to cultivate his own otherness or become an instrumental or entertaining poet. Without endorsing any loss of identity on the part of the poet, in Sordello who casts down his crown to embrace or rather to try to embrace the cause of the people, Browning recognized the inadequacy of the poet closed within himself and the need for a healthy outlet, the outlet towards which his art will turn after this poem. Sordello thus moves towards the same end point as Paracelsus, representing again the contrast between thought and action, introversion and encounter with the world, and between individualism (the cult of one’s own otherness to the point of disdaining the masses) and self-divinization on the one hand, and submission, service and adaptation to reality on the other. But at the moment when thoughts and words should have yielded to action, Browning yet again got bogged down, having Sordello die right at the beginning of his public mission, defeated by the concrete and real world, a world too big for him and to which he cannot manage to adapt. Sordello is a second character who fails, or does not reach the goal, however close to it he may have come. Browning identified with him just as much as he gradually distanced himself from him, finally giving him the dimension of a split personality who dies in conflict, different from ‘what he should have been, / Could be, and was not’, as well as from that which he ‘was anxious to appear, but scarce / Solicitous to be’.

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2. The anecdotal portions and historical excursus of the poem are clear, quite readable and lively, but Browning is repetitive and utterly confused when following the thoughts of Sordello, which are like a skein which should be unwound over time (given the number of times that the character takes it into his own hands) but gets increasingly more tangled. In other words Sordello requires patient, albeit not always remunerative, exegetical work. Its obscurity, at first inflated and strongly condemned by his contemporaries, was later explained and justified, if not actually denied or, to the contrary, exalted. Tennyson maintained – and this was only one of the critical boutades showered upon the work – that he had only understood the first and final lines. Chesterton instead absolved Browning, adducing that he was romantically naïve and confident in the immediate comprehensibility of his ideas. Pound went so far as to credit Sordello with a limpid narrative, a lucidity of voice and a clarity of design rarely found in English literature, and comparable to nothing less than the Divine Comedy. Browning himself indirectly furnished a camouflaged justification for the artificiality and the abstract inconclusiveness of Sordello’s meditations when, in the closing monologue attributed to him, he humorously added that he had merely attempted to ‘to extract the pith / Of this his problem’. Here we realize the functionality of obscurity with respect to a soul that does not develop, according to the main goal of the work which, as Browning stated, was to depict the ‘development of a soul’. The most problematic issue with Sordello is precisely that of his not evolving at all, of being the same character wrestling with the same problems throughout.67 But, as I mentioned, the absence of any development in Sordello reflects at least in part that of the author and the obscurity may thus be traceable to an autobiographical matrix: in Sordello’s stuttering Browning was expressing his own psychological blocks, depicting his own unpreparedness for life, and hiding his fear of being forced to stand face to face with his own dividedness and existential impasse.68

67 Miller 1979, 90. 68 See S. W. Holmes, ‘Browning: Semantic Stutterer’, PMLA, LX (1945), 231–55.

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3. Sordello is not only compromised by the obscurity of the introspective parts, but also by its more than evident organizational weaknesses and lack of structural harmony, closely dependent on the way in which Browning composed the poem, which he began in 1833 immediately after the publication of Pauline and before Paracelsus, and finished six years later. Aware of these weaknesses, or rather intending to make the poem less obscure, he made further revisions between 1845 and 1847, soon after having moved to Florence, and in 1855–1856 while living in Rome, but to no avail.69 It is thus painfully clear that the poet’s own ideas on the poem and its protagonist changed over the period in which Sordello was composed, leaving visible signs of rewriting, and of modifications that demonstrate the difficulty found in finishing the work. His poetic intention was far from clear and he was also worried by the obvious parallels, if not actual possible duplications of material, between the new poem and his previous ones, Pauline and Paracelsus. It is common to speak in fact of three Sordellos, or rather three successive layers to the poem which are quite easy to distinguish. Browning did his research for the first version, perhaps coinciding with the first two and a half books,70 reading Dante, Daniello Bartoli and the Biographie Universelle. He trimmed down the plot and the cast of characters, and invented the poet Eglamor and the critic Naddo as Sordello’s antagonists. But in this way the poem was too similar to Paracelsus. More specifically, the contrast between Eglamor and Sordello too closely followed the lines of that between Aprile and Paracelsus. Browning thus rewrote Sordello over the fourteen months between the publication of Paracelsus and his first drafting of Strafford (1837). For this second Sordello, he added the more detailed Mantuan chronicles of Platina and Aliprandi to his other sources and transformed Sordello into a warrior poet who abandons his meditative solitude to defend the city of his birth against Ezzelino da Romano. But trouble ensued for this revision when, in an amazing coincidence, a poem by one Mrs Busk was published in 1837 which had the exact title of the one Browning was composing. In part to 69 This was another reason for which Browning did not include Sordello in the partially complete editions of his poetry, published before 1863. 70 De Vane 1955, 72–85.

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make his work more different from hers – without necessarily suggesting that this decision was responsible for upsetting his whole compositional plan, as some have suggested – Browning began a third rewriting of the poem, in which he decided to insert the life of Sordello into a wider and more detailed historical frame. To do this, he principally studied the Storia degli Ecelini of the eighteenth-century historian Giambattista Verci, as well as a number of disparate sources, among which Muratori, Ughi and Sismondi. Their reciprocal contradictions did not concern him because, when he did not mix the sources deftly in a pastiche, he contaminated and completely revolutionized them in his own way.71 Far from being a work of erudition, Sordello is freely reinvented, and retains only the thinnest thread of connection to historical truth. The plot unfolds against the historical background of the rivalry between the two families of the Estes and of the Romanos, one Guelph and the other Ghibelline, in the Veneto and in the city of Ferrara. Browning, however, condensed the events in a single year, 1224, when in truth they took place over a span from 1220 to 1224. This is not the first or only time Browning falsifies history: there are numerous changes of name, people whose roles are switched, chronological inaccuracies, as well as misrepresentations or pure inventions. The most relevant of these include the fact that Cunizza, the woman kidnapped by Sordello in league with the brothers Ezzelino and Alberico da Romano, is renamed Palma. Alongside her and Sordello, Browning places a third protagonist in order of importance, Taurello Salinguerra, a Ghibelline warrior born in Ferrara, both ally and rival of the Romanos. In a final turn of events Taurello discovers that he is Sordello’s father (again, this is not historically true). Browning took the Mantuan troubadour – of whom little is certain and upon whom the many sources disagree about nearly everything, but who lived a long and eventful life, enjoying an excellent reputation as minstrel, lover and in his later years influential political advisor – and created a character infinitely more thoughtful and problematic 71

This incredible quantity of historical works and English poems on the figure of Sordello has a curious counterpart in Giuseppe Verdi’s youthful opera entitled Oberto (1839), in which Sordello does not appear, but ample coverage is dedicated to Salinguerra.

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than the real man could have been. He is very different, with his doubts, from the ‘anima lombarda […] altera e disdegnosa’ [‘Lombard spirit […] in high abstracted mood’] whom Dante and Virgil meet in Purgatory. His career as a poet is almost nothing, and it is dealt with briefly in a single book; Browning’s focus is shifted to the doubts and dilemmas which lead to his involvement in politics. His Sordello becomes a Guelph of a thousand prevarications who – in the most evident of historical inaccuracies – dies, essentially from a broken heart, in that same year of 1224, at little more than twenty-one, and still completely unfulfilled both as a poet and, above all, as a man of politics. 4. Despite its imperfections and discontinuities, Sordello does occupy an important position among the works of Browning, because both formally and technically it is his first conscious attempt to renew the conventions of poetic literature of his time. One may claim that the form of the poem is still dramatic, given that the narration in the third person alternates with long intervals in first-person dialogues. Yet Browning, who also abandons blank verse for the heroic couplet, presents himself in a new role, that of storyteller and entertainer who often apostrophizes his readers, thus establishing a contact and involving them in the story. While the opening contains this declaration of intent, the epilogue consists of Browning’s personal comments as he visits places related to Sordello, and of his reviews of the various versions of the poet’s life furnished by his biographers. Such a frame, occupied entirely by the author, foreshadows that contained in the first and twelfth books of The Ring and the Book.72 In the purely narrative sections, the poetic language is very different from the rigid, lofty style of Paracelsus, tinged as it is with the tones of popular and oral storytelling. The 72 The apostrophe, addressed to his own audience of the living and above all to the dead, together with a veiled captatio benevolentiae, prefigures the mature Browning who in the opening to The Ring and the Book attempts to soothe the British public as ‘ye who like me not’ (§ 126.3). An echo of the relativism of truth around which the poem revolves can be found in these lines from one of Sordello’s reflections: ‘One object, viewed diversely, may evince / Beauty and Ugliness – this way attract, / That way repel […] Why must a single of the sides be right? / What bids choose this and leave the opposite?’

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considerable space dedicated to the purely descriptive element comes from the same need. Browning frequently puts into practice a cameraman-like technique with which he seems to take the reader by the hand and take him on a sort of guided tour. One remarkable section of the poem is found in Book I, when Browning leads us quickly along the corridors of the palace in Verona, with the flames of torches flickering and the bells of the carroccio, until we discover Palma and Sordello tucked inside a recess. A similar process by which we slowly penetrate from the outside to within is used in the description of the castle of Goito and its rooms, and in that of the palace and garden of Salinguerra. On the one hand, Browning, wounded by the criticisms of verbosity levelled at Paracelsus, reacted by aiming even too strongly at linguistic succinctness, which led to the contorted and elliptic style of the poem. On the other hand, perhaps with Don Juan and other mock-heroic poems by Byron in mind, he devised a work whose pace is digressive, rhapsodic, zigzagging, and a pattern of abrupt, sudden and disconnected flashes. Paradoxically, it is in the historical anecdotes and in the depiction of the minor figures and events – such as, in Book IV, the introduction of the nobleman Crescentius Nomentanus, whose dream had been to revive the ancient Roman Republic, or in Book VI the description of the action-filled capture of Salinguerra – where we find the most heartfelt part of the work, although Browning minimized the importance of these elements. In the ‘historical decoration’ we sense the first flashes of that Italy, somewhere between historical reality and invention, where before long Browning was to find his comfort zone. 5. Sordello contains a manifesto of Browning’s aesthetics but also notifies the reader of its imminent superseding. He discussed his compositional problems – this is another important indication of the modernity of this work – in the introduction to Book I, hinting ironically at his small audience and hypothesizing an audience of the dead; he then continued the discussion in a very evocative digression which alone occupies half of Book III, consisting of a rhapsodic interweaving of disconnected thoughts, where Sordello is momentarily put to one aside by Browning himself, who wishes to speak sincerely and even a bit maliciously of that nebulousness in planning the poem which weakens and undermines it. His ponderings, which he imagines flowing ‘on a ruined palace-step / At Venice’, seem to start from

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the admission that poetry is for Sordello, unlike that of his rival Eglamor, a receptacle that cannot contain his whole being, and that therefore life, always in movement, transcends poetry and art and is impotent and unable to translate all of itself, all of its variety and complexity, into mere words. Hence Browning asks himself whether or not to continue the poem, or seek a different protagonist among the scenes and figures surrounding him in the hic et nunc, that is in contemporary Venice where he imagines himself to be. These lucubrations continue until suddenly his glance falls upon a ‘sad dishevelled ghost’, a begging woman who is in all likelihood a Venetian prostitute apostrophized as ‘queen’ and ‘lady’. Here Browning announces the aesthetic revolution that will begin in earnest with Pippa Passes, which means the choice of an art capable of making the variegated experience of life resonate in poetry, in its chiaroscuro of good and evil, and of portraying a beauty which is no longer ethereal and idealized but ‘care-bit’ and ‘brokenup’, the emblems of which are the poor people of Venice. Along the lines of Aprile’s admonishment in Paracelsus, and applying the interrupted journey of Sordello to himself, Browning confirms or foreshadows the abandonment of Promethean poetry, constructed of idealized, Promethean, Shelleyan protagonists, in favour of a poetry at once realistic, democratic and antilyrical, whose main field of vision is ‘common nature’. § 112. Browning up to 1869 IX: ‘Sordello’ II. The double defeat of the poet and politician Sordello opens with a description of the solitary childhood of the hero and his visits to the castle of Goito and to a fountain, supported by caryatids who seem to pulsate with human feelings, into which he will ultimately hurl his poet’s crown. It is an effective passage, undoubtedly well written, among the most inspired of the entire work, which testifies to Browning’s morbid interest in life initiations. The spiritual biography of Sordello presents similarities in these first phases to that of the boy in Wordsworth’s Prelude – still more surprising if one thinks that at the time Wordsworth had still not published it. Sordello lies down in nature and experiences a panic fusion with it, discovers himself and prepares for his encounter with the world. These similarities are, however, soon dispelled: in a digression Browning introduces his classic theory of the objective – or

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better, extroverted, almost unaware of his own individuality – and subjective and introverted poet, self-aware and as such re-absorbed into this awareness, removed from the world of objects surrounding him. And he diagnoses in Sordello a sensitivity which is, predictably, of the latter type, prone to the temptations of solitude and sterile thoughts, not translated into action, and oblivious of human limitations.73 Strengthened by a demiurgic, formative tension which recalls the pantheism of Paracelsus, he stamps the mark of his soul upon inanimate nature, dreaming in his fantasies of being Ezzelino, the Emperor Frederick or even Apollo. His undefined and insatiable dreams are oriented towards the search for poetic fame, the means by which he will be able to make his superiority known to other men. He wins in the conflict with his rival minstrel Eglamor (a character with this name figures in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona) and Palma bestows the crown upon him. A reincarnation of Paracelsus’ Aprile, a Shelleyan double for his ecstatic idea of poetry as a vehicle of superior knowledge, Eglamor is the objective poet, but with limits. He loves beauty but fails to take care of his own human fragility; significantly, he dies from the pain inflicted by his defeat in a poetic challenge. Sordello, soaring on the wings of his sudden fame, is indistinguishable from Paracelsus. He does not want to remain ‘one of the many, one with hopes and cares / And interests nowise distinct from theirs’, nor does he intend to model his career on any earlier example; he seeks the world’s admiration but at the same time proclaims that ‘the world’s concernment […] will hardly interfere’ with him or his works. When he proclaims that he wishes to choose words and not action, Browning’s verse takes on a solemn note: ‘he would look / For not another channel to dispense / His own volition by, receive men’s sense / Of its supremacy – would live content / Obstructed else, with merely verse for vent’. However, when he puts his vows to the test, he convinces himself almost immediately that they are impracticable, and feels that the poet must inevitably conform, lowering himself to rouse the enthusiasm of the crowds and the admiring stares of women. This causes him to call into question the desire for a life completely detached from the world and stimulates him 73

Williams 1967, 36–7.

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to give in to small joys and satisfactions. Ultimately Browning assigns to Sordello the difficulties which are innate to poetry. He must express the inexpressible and the ineffable through his language, drawing from the perceptive life and the imagination, but he also needs to satisfy the tastes of the public while at the same time safeguarding his own identity. The public petitions him for romances and conventional stories without noticing, behind the greatness of the gestures described, the greatness of the author, and when he sings of abstractions, the public does not understand. In the midst of all of these dilemmas, Sordello is introduced to the critic Naddo, who suggests to him his own aesthetics based on common sense, and invites him to dedicate himself to a repetitive and reproductive art, without soul, made for the masses. Naddo, Festus’ double from Paracelsus, is a man of compromise and an advocate for a poetry that feeds on human nature, in the most all-inclusive sense of the term, as its raw material. He is the enemy of subtlety and abstruseness, and he chooses a path between superficiality and ‘o’er-refining’. Through Naddo’s advice and objections74 Browning gives, before the digression in Book III, a foreshadowing of his future aesthetics, which would naturally reject all of that advice. Unable to summon the will to mediate, which alone would have been sufficient to match the ideal formulation with the linguistic expression, and uncertain whether to pursue his own road and force the age to consecrate him, or ‘else forswearing bard-craft, wake / From out his lethargy and nobly shake / Off timid habits of denial, mix / With men, enjoy like men’,75 Sordello returns to the castle of Goito and throws his crown into the fountain. 2. Having renounced poetry, for Sordello ‘the suspended life begins anew’, thus confirming that the evolution of the character is nothing more than a pendulum swinging between hopes and successes that lead to new beginnings, and that the poem is static rather than really dynamic. At the beginning of Book III, Sordello, discouraged and disheartened, discards the ‘ladder’ which he had tried to climb, and begins to debate the same

74 Here Browning reflects his own resentment towards his critics, and a satirical sketch of the critic John Forster can be glimpsed. 75 With obvious echoes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and his most famous soliloquy.

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unresolved dilemmas, albeit in other forms and following more tortured paths, reduced to that between absolute self-realization or service to man. Shaken by Palma, with a supreme effort he plunges into life, but this metamorphosis, from poet to politician, has no development because even in this capacity Sordello remains an unexpressed person without any outlet for his thoughts, and nothing breaks his fundamental motionlessness. As stated earlier, Browning’s new aesthetics, announced in the epilogue of Book III, comes into force after Sordello, but a reflection of it can undoubtedly be seen already in Browning’s decision to bring Taurello Salinguerra to the fore, after keeping him in the shadows up to that point. Salinguerra is an ‘all action’ warrior whose thoughts are pure caprices or in whom a sufficient harmony of thought and action reigns; he has as youthful an appearance as Sordello despite being much older, for the latter is prematurely aged and his thoughts sterile. As soon as he decides to dedicate his life to the people, and having thus the opportunity to fully live a spiritual life and to prolong and fulfil his spirit in a body, Sordello finds himself once again consumed by his natural indecisiveness and by his inconceivable wavering at the very moment when he should act: do the Mantuans represent that humanity of which he has dreamed? How much and in what ways should he fuse with them? Are they all worthy of his self-sacrifice? When his political conscience finally awakens, it shows a democratic and egalitarian leaning, and he decides to champion the cause of the people, and having found an agreement with the powerful to fight to obtain all the privileges which until then were the prerogative of the few. Getting ready to take a position in the political parties of the time, he chooses the Guelphs and the papacy, recognizing in them the forces most prepared to do good for men; and when he moves to meet Salinguerra, safely perched up in the town of Ferrara, he admonishes him that nothing has been done to free the people from injustice and misery. His flash of inspiration at the close of Book IV is indicative of the strongly utopian character of his programme: just as dissatisfied with the Guelphs as with the Ghibellines, he decides to walk in the footsteps, and continue the work of Crescenzio Nomentano, who in the tenth century had aspired to give life to a new Roman Republic: he will fight, following Nomentano’s footsteps, to resuscitate Ancient Rome, the authentic Rome, neither Guelph nor Ghibelline,

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but an archetypical city, the ‘scheme to put mankind / Once more in full possession of their rights’. In that way he will be able to build ‘new structures […] brought back to harmony’. But the dream shatters immediately, colliding with reality: ‘serves my folly right / By adding yet another to the dull / List of abortions’. His conscience therefore materializes in a ‘whisper’ which in a long and crucial intervention admonishes Sordello over the inevitable incompleteness of human enterprise, and encourages him to descend, from the state of a god, to that of a man, inviting him to embrace more modest expectations, and ultimately urges him to eradicate his individualism. The voice launches into a vast historical excursus – with an attitude and a tone which are vaguely Dantesque in their solemnity, and because of the number of interwoven allusions and symbolic elements – which begins with Clodoveus to describe the rise of the three-centurylong conflict between the Papacy and the Empire. The voice prophesies that he will be the one to write the next chapter of history, leaving him his strongest admonishment when it incites him to heal his own rift between being a poet and a warrior, uniting his two halves. Sordello races to perorate before Salinguerra the cause of humanity, imploring him to heed this divine call. As a response, the old warrior affixes the Roman badge upon Sordello’s chest, naming him his successor. Sordello, having just learned from Palma that he is the son of Salinguerra, now discovers to his amazement that by marrying Palma he could become the lord of all Italy, and it is to this prospect that his final inner debate is dedicated: but it closes with yet another renunciation. Sordello once again becomes a hero who aspires to greatness without achieving it, observing the success of others in frustration, as they find satisfaction in illusory conquests. He is still a god rather than a man, and feels the inadequacy of the rewards which await his efforts. He dies, overcome by his own febrile though sterile cogitative activity, after having thrown that badge to the ground and trampled upon it. He remains a model of coherence but also – like Paracelsus, Aprile and Eglamor – of immaturity and lack of preparation for life. Like many other figures in Browning’s poetry from this moment on, he has a vision of truth, but when it is too late and he is on the brink of death; and his truth is that only by expressing and acting out himself in the external world could he have benefited himself and mankind.

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§ 113. Browning up to 1869 X: The theatre Browning’s theatre, an activity which he embraced from 1837 to 1846 thanks, as mentioned above, to the actor Macready and his first, enthusiastic words of encouragement and esteem, includes seven plays, only two of which not expressly written for the stage. He attended to them both as an alternative and as a complementary activity to his poetry. It was a decidedly unfortunate interlude, fuelled by a double misunderstanding. Macready was as quick and impulsive in his consecration of Browning’s genius as a playwright as Browning was in believing his words unconditionally. Far from admitting that he was not cut out for the theatre, he continued to produce drama after drama without giving up, even when it seemed crystal clear to him that what should have been a triumphant and brilliant rise to fame was becoming a ruinous debacle. Neither those plays which were actually staged nor those which, never performed, remained confined to the pages of Bells and Pomegranates, were crowned with any success with the public or with the critics. Of the four plays which he submitted to Macready, only two were staged by the actor, and not without considerable doubt and unimaginable procrastination, and they had in any case brief lives; the other two were returned to the sender, rejected with accompanying letters and no mitigating circumstances. The fable convenue is that Browning’s dramas are of a static nature, that he knows how to depict the characters in a freeze-frame, so to speak, but not in motion, and that there is not any real dramatic interaction; in a word, there is too much thought and too little action. These objections, not completely true of all of his works, and in any case inappropriate with regard to the first ones, are absolutely relevant to the latter ones, where the action becomes almost non-existent and the dramatic development consists of a series of juxtaposed but unconnected monologues having no mutual relationship. Browning, the recent author of Paracelsus and Sordello, did not modify his contorted and abstract psychologizing, nor did he consider that an excess of indirectly implied thoughts and winking at audience, and an overuse of asides, often render a plot obscure or at least make its development not immediately evident to the audience. As to the topics, from the historical drama he turned to the intimist, from that to the bloody, violent tragedy, and then to the action-filled canvas full of plot twists and to romance, showing off in each of these genres the results of careful fact finding and

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of a detailed historical erudition. All these violent shiftings of genres and changes of style were dictated in Browning by the desire to comply with the canons of early Victorian drama and to suit the tastes and the expectations of Macready, and they give the impression of an oddly assorted and heterogeneous production. Yet we are dealing with works which are fully Browning’s in every way. Indeed, they establish a sufficient and at times even notable continuity with the poetical works already written or forthcoming. Almost all of the protagonists are exemplars in reduced form of the aspiring ‘candidate’ of the first poems; almost all of the dramas focus on a form of absolute devotion – to someone, to a cause or an idea – which in some cases even leads to the sacrifice of his or her life: it is Browning’s pervasive theme par excellence, that of ‘service’, which is suggested drama after drama. In all of them there is a reflection on the world of politics – one of shady intrigues, immoderate passions or unbridled ambition, that Browning encounters at every level in every single historical epoch that he examines; and it is a world which he unmasks and from which he seems to recoil, nauseated. 2. He debuted with Strafford (1837), making him, with full historical accuracy, the most fervent supporter of the royal prerogative against Parliament in the two decades which were to lead to Cromwell’s Protectorate. In a purely dramatic form, this is a transposition of the chief theme of his first poems, the rise and fall of a hero. Thomas Wentworth, first Earl Strafford (1593–1641), is caught, like Paracelsus, at the end of his life’s path, sick and tired, but not broken, Promethean at times in the incandescence of his delirium: ‘’Tis worth while […] having foes like mine, / Just for the bliss of crushing them’. Not even when, his destiny already sealed, he is offered the chance of escape does he deny his ideals: ‘I’ll not draw back from the last service’. The play, which had a run of five performances at Covent Garden, displays a detailed knowledge of its historical subject. Browning had in fact helped the critic John Forster in his writing of a two-volume biography of Strafford from which he largely drew. This is one of the reasons why the play is little more than dramatized history,76 with no outstanding 76 Among the more successful moments one finds the Shakespearean scene of the trial (IV.2) in which the speeches of Pym and Strafford are not reported directly but only

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features, no psychological insights or unity of design. Browning’s second play, King Victor and King Charles (1842), is far more uniform, but was nevertheless ditched without hesitation by Macready. Inspired perhaps by Alfieri, Browning abandoned English history, attracted by the stormy relationship between Victor Amadeus II and his son Charles Emanuel III of Savoy, which culminated in the incarceration of the former in 1730. The gist of the drama lies in the contrasts between the three main characters who, not unlike those in Strafford, are embodiments of political positions. Charles is a new and successful character: rather than aspiring to greatness and ever higher aims, he confesses without reticence his ineptness and his desire to remain in obscurity, and his hatred for pomp; and, strangely and atypically, he admits to being one who ‘cannot strive’, using a word which had been the battle cry and the expression par excellence of Paracelsus. On a purely political level, Browning ascribes to him a regenerative capacity which is still in nuce, seeing in him the potential to inaugurate a new epoch, and a new, as yet unexpressed, ‘noble nature’. Victor is in contrast a cunning sovereign, ambitious and without scruples, who abdicates in favour of his son only because he is in deep trouble politically and knows that both foreign powers and local nobles will not be able to bring action against his young, still inexpert son. He contemplates a return to power when the dust has settled. Despite his impersonation of a Machiavellian king, he is not really a hard or one-dimensional man; rather he is conflicted, torn, ambiguous in his nostalgic moments and in his mixture of thirst for power and human weakness. Minister D’Ormea literally comes in between the two protagonists, being a figure which from this point on will appear in almost all Browning’s plays: the courtier with his constantly negative or mysterious marks, deftly remaining afloat in all circumstances. 3. After a similar chamber play, geometrical, plain, without crowds or open air scenes, Browning went on the offensive with Macready, suggesting to him a completely different kind of work, polyphonic and varied, rich with action, surprises and plot twists, which he ingenuously thought in the form of the comments and exclamations of those present; in the final scene, a rare moment of intimacy, the protagonist, imprisoned in the Tower, lapses into memories before his execution.

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could be the be- all and the end- all of what the actor was looking for. On a historical basis that he found as usual in the Biographie Universelle, he wove with The Return of the Druses (1843) the most forced and unrealistic of his dramatic plots, that of the revolt of a colony of Druses, trapped on one of the Sporades islands, subject to the oppression and the exploitation of their ‘protectors’, the Knights of Rhodes. This revolt culminates in the murder of their Prefect and their departure for the longed-for Lebanon thanks to the help of a Venetian fleet. It was, naturally, too remote and unlikely a plot for Macready, although an advocate of a spectacular theatre, to consider producing. Except for this exoticism, Browning did not altogether change the lineaments of the characters, focusing on the motifs of conflict and sacrifice. Djabal the Druse, the leader of the revolt, who pretends to be the reincarnated ancient prophet Hakeem and who promises them his imminent transfiguration to inflame his companions, is tortured by the dilemma of whether or not to reveal his deception. Browning has him unmasked at the end, but, in the spirit of ‘service’, apparently legitimizes his imposture, devised after all to guide the Druses to their freedom. A different type of conflict is that faced by Anael, one of the freshest creatures of Browning’s dramaturgy in terms of her candour and virginal enthusiasm. She does not want to admit that pure and simple humanity which she discovered in Djabal, and, believing all is lost, sacrifices her life for the people. The positive hero is the young knight-novice Loys de Dreux, who cherishes the dream of becoming Prefect of the Knights, as well as that unrealizable one of being able both to remain a knight and to love Anael. He is undeceived by the only easy-going character in the play, who reveals to him the illicit trafficking on the island and the flourishing commerce of the Church. The theme of the liberation from tyranny is thus joined to that of the denunciation of the shady intrigues of politics. A hint is also given, as in Strafford, to the changeable nature of the crowd. Browning returned to the scenes with A Blot in the ’Scutcheon (1843), a drama which is not about political intrigue but rather about romantic and sinful passion followed by atonement. The play explores the following question: in the case of the female protagonist Mildred, a fourteen-year-old who has committed a sexual sin, will or will not God pardon her? In a tortured refrain, she repeats: ‘I was so young, I loved him so, I had / No mother, God forgot me, and I fell’. For Browning

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not only has God not forgotten Mildred, but he has already forgiven her, and she herself affirms that she has even had a vision of an indulgent and merciful Father. But for the conventions of the time, forgiveness is only possible through a purifying death. One of the key contrasts is that between the rigid formalism of Mildred’s brother and guardian, and the necessary spirit of flexibility: Mildred, dying, declares that the sky ‘needs no code to keep its grace from stain’.77 Perhaps precisely because of its questioning of formalism, this play was lauded by Dickens, but that was not enough to keep it running at the Drury Lane past its third performance. No better fate awaited Colombe’s Birthday78 (1844), a free dramatic adaptation of the historical seventh-century episode of the fight for succession to the Rhenish Dukedom of Juliers, with which Browning returned to the theme of political intrigue with the most incisively pessimistic and disgusted description of the baseness of the courts. 4. Having ended his collaboration with Macready, and released from any external conditioning, Browning in 1846 composed his last two theatrical works. Both addressing Italian issues, and inspired by vague and remote historical events, they are, if not his best plays, surely his most original and groundbreaking. Luria, set during the Italian period of the signorie, is the story of a Moorish mercenary captain79 who in order to prove his integrity and loyalty to Florence, who doubts him and puts him to the test, dies a suicide. The play forms a portrait of a Florence torn by suspicions, opportunism, rivalries and unfettered ambitions. In contrast Luria stands out as a model of coherence and moral rectitude. But Browning makes even more of him. With the richness of his symbolic traits, Luria becomes the most

77 The denunciation of formalism rests on Mildred and on Guendolin, her sister-inlaw. 78 Left by Macready, or rather having left Macready, Browning offered the play to the actor Charles Kean, son of the great Edmund, who postponed its staging for so long that Browning, become impatient, published it in volume form. The play was first performed as late as in 1853 at the Haymarket, where it lasted for seven shows before sinking into oblivion. 79 The decadence of fifteenth-century Italy in this drama is such that due to their attachment to the post, it is impossible to appoint a Florentine as head of the army.

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profound figure of his dramatic works. We find in him the motifs of the wild and the alien, and that of the passionate Moor who like Shakespeare’s Othello dramatically incarnates the dilemma between cultural assimilation and loyalty to one’s race.80 Also veiled, but unmistakable, are his hints at that motif of the ‘disappearance of God’ which is so obsessively debated in the early Browning: in his final words before dying, Luria tells about how in his youth, back in his distant homeland, he had enjoyed a full, direct personal contact with a tangible presence, who ‘glows above with scarce an intervention, presses close / And palpitating’; it is a God who knows how to ‘Recast the world, erase old things and make them new’. Echoes of Pippa Passes are also quite obvious, especially in the epilogue, when Luria realizes with surprise that he possesses a similar regenerating effect: ‘All men become good creatures’, he observes, seeing suspicions, hate or human indifference turn into love among his accusers or mere overseers. Browning even makes him the incarnation of an idea from Carlyle, the model that positively shapes the masses thanks to the sacrifice of his own life, which is the God-sent man regenerating a dying society. The last of the seven dramas, A Soul’s Tragedy, is also one of the three, with King Victor and King Charles and A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, lacking the traditional division in five acts. Of its only two acts, the first is in verse and the second in prose, an alternation which reflects a precise contrast in content, in that Act I represents, in the author’s words, the ‘poetry’, and the second the ‘prose’ in the life of the protagonist. Measured according to their literary value, the two acts stand in an inverted position. The plain, lacklustre Act I is the polar opposite of the lively, vigorous and entertaining Act II. The tone is also new, because despite the title, which seems to foreshadow abysses of dramatic solemnity, there is a good dose of humour, caricature and sketches. The characters abandon themselves to the pleasure of conversation and to the anecdote, and this new approach produces, in Ogniben, the Pope’s Legate, at least one memorable character. The climate is that of historical fantasy and of an unrealistic and unreal moral fable. A new depiction of the ascent 80 Cf. De Vane 1955, 188, for a parallel with Othello. Luria’s integration into Florence has an imaginary correlative in the ‘Moorish front’ he has drawn on the walls of his tent, meant as the completion of the unfinished Duomo.

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and of the miserable fall of an emblematic character, the play is the story of Chiappino, initially the classic victim of human ingratitude, and then a revolutionary leader for whom sheer chance paves the way to success and to the appointment of Pope’s Provost, which he had always abhorred (but an apparently insignificant event turns out to be fatal). Ogniben pushes the drama in the direction of the story of a revolt which is deftly tamed, until finally the status quo is completely restored. Browning plays the chord of the fickleness and easy malleability of the crowds, those citizens of Faenza whom the Papal Legate Ogniben plays with as he pleases. Chiappino is a caricature of opportunism as well as of the wishful thinking and superficiality of revolutions. Having managed to quell the revolt, Ogniben slowly lures him into a trap and Chiappino, who had hoped to establish a ‘pure republic’ and equality among citizens, ends up agreeing with the Legate that it is easier to adapt the old systems of government. He renounces the dreams of a perfect state and embraces the Legate’s ideas of absolute power, and slowly and half unwittingly places himself in the shoes of the hated Provost. The formulaic behaviour, the dirty tricks, the compromises, the sly tactics and loopholes that Ogniben suggests to him are well planned strategies, on Ogniben’s part, to keep, unthreatened, his power. The implicit judgement on petty politics, and politics tout court, is once again unmistakable. Having said all this, Ogniben is a cynic who cannot manage to be completely negative, and ultimately we find him likeable. He is also the mouthpiece for a philosophy of life that probably was not, for Browning, totally despicable.81 Although he may seem of a diabolical cleverness and base pragmatism, and even to be an indifferentist, he is also someone who, like God, can find beauty even in corruption, and a magnified beauty there where others simply do not see ugliness. Ogniben is Browning’s most successful dramatic caricature. Of particular charm is the scene in which he arrives riding a mule, from which he dismounts muttering Latin phrases to appease the rebels. His relentless chatter, embellished with piquant and colourful images, topped off with maxims, proverbs, sayings and clever observations is also unforgettable. This specious, although hypnotic, fluency

81

His name naturally says it all: it means ‘all good’.

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is an unmistakable foretaste of the ‘apology’ of the most famous Catholic bishop of Browning’s poetic canon, Bishop Blougram. § 114. Browning up to 1869 XI: ‘Pippa Passes’. Asolo’s naïve spinner In the digression of Book III of Sordello – in that ‘sad dishevelled ghost’ whom Browning sees, and in the admiration which he proclaims for the poor Venetians; therefore in the admission of having momentarily taken into consideration a radical change of protagonist and of narrative material –82 lie the buds of Pippa Passes (1841). Browning mostly composed it immediately after finishing Sordello in the second half of 1839, melding together pieces which had already been written and drafts which dated back to his first trip to Italy in 1838. Even patched together in that way, and separated by small lapses of time, the gap between the two works is immense. Browning composed a quite original, for him almost revolutionary, work in which the preceding earlier compositional canons are, one by one, dismantled. He showed that he had suddenly managed to achieve that adaptation to reality which both Paracelsus and Sordello had sought strenuously but vainly. Pippa Passes is a more humble work, less ambitious, if only because it is briefer and more approachable than his previous ones. That he had in the meantime given up all Promethean aspirations, and that he was ready to eat humble pie in the work that he was about to complete, is witnessed by the form of publication he chose. In fact he launched with Pippa Passes a series at a modest price, of which eight issues were planned until 1846 for a total of nine poetic and dramatic works, printed on two columns and in small, hardly legible characters. He called it with the curious, biblical name of Bells and Pomegranates, to indicate the variety of themes and tones that would be the dominant notes, as well as the alternation between the humble and the sublime, the serious and the facetious.83 Following this idea, Browning wrote a work which is halfway between different genres, poetry for entertainment and at the same time that melodrama which he had long dreamed of inventing and which he intended to entrust to Eliza 82 83

§ 111.5. In the eighth issue of the series Browning spoke of ‘a ‘mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought’.

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Flower for setting to music. The climate and feel of the piece resemble those of a detective story or mystery novel in its secret manoeuvres and tailing of suspects, the final discovery of Pippa’s real identity (she turns out to be the niece of the bishop)84 and the foiled attempt to kidnap her followed by the Intendant’s arrest. Its four parts cannot in fact be judged with the yardstick of realism, have no reciprocal continuity and do not seem to share the same scenic space. They reproduce the magical realism of an Ariosto, or the enchanted, surreal atmosphere of Shakespeare’s more misty and dream-like plays, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to The Tempest. Pippa Passes also marked the definitive end of Browning’s works based on a single protagonist who overpowers and eclipses every other character around him. Renouncing the narrative poem, he gave up at the same time any attempt at historical synthesis and ceased subdividing the work into large spans of time, preferring to compress the action into a single day, from sunrise to night, just as he also no longer had recourse to remote subjects and resolutely tackled the contemporary world, although in his own way. The action of Pippa Passes is set once again in a partly imaginary, reinvented Italy in 1834, and treated with no traditional Victorian reticence.85 2. A poor orphan silk spinner in Asolo, forced to work hard all year with only a single day off for New Year’s Day, Pippa is antipodal to those Promethean and megalomaniac characters like Paracelsus and Sordello,

84 A similar denouement occurs in Sordello, where the protagonist discovers that he is the son of Salinguerra (112.2). Both Sordello and Pippa believe themselves to be of low origins, when instead they are children of rich parents. 85 The situation in the first episode is quite thorny: two lovers have just assassinated the woman’s elderly husband and there is a brief lingering of the lens on her half-naked body and on the recollections of the couple’s trembling lovemaking. Anticipating the concept informing ‘The Statue and the Bust’ (§ 120.5), Browning has his two lovers feel remorse for the killing but not for their adultery, admissible if true love commands it. Students, guards and prostitutes crowd the interludes, giving Browning a chance to exhibit his talent for character-sketching. One of the freshest and most authentically realistic flashes is the third interlude, in which some elderly prostitutes lose themselves in nostalgia and childhood memories. Bluphocks, an English vagabond who has abjured all religions and mocks them blasphemously, and who is a friend to the students, is somewhat out of place.

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rewarded by Fate with a stream of gifts. Almost by the stroke of a magic wand are we finally faced with someone who does not linger obsessively on herself and who, precisely where her predecessors faltered, finds within herself the force to forge ahead; someone who opens herself to life and does something to help others. With this creation, for the moment too openly unreal and too manifestly antithetical to Paracelsus and Sordello, Browning found an answer to the main question posited in his first works: whether and how to help humanity. Pippa is a milestone in Browning’s poetry, and will serve as a prototype for large numbers of his later feminine characters, who will be unmistakable reincarnations of her. As in Paracelsus, and even to a greater extent in Pippa Passes, Browning investigates the will of God and the answer that man must give Him while on earth, and the way in which his actual actions must be performed in accordance with His will. Pippa is worried by the possible waste of her God-given talents and committed to giving a meaning to her spare time and her holidays. From beginning to end hers is the voice through which God speaks. The magic power, the divine, miraculous effect of her singing first leads a young man to repent, who together with his lover has just assassinated her husband; later it drives a sculptor to commit a selfless act of love and generosity; then it removes any doubts lingering in a patriot who is about to commit a violent and even rash act; finally, it gives a bishop the decisive impetus to act as true justice or at least his religious role, require. She thus becomes the unknowing instrument of God on earth, channelling the situations in which she finds herself along the path towards His intentions; and this she does through her elementary song made up of primordial concepts, articulated in clear and simple language, and hovering like a celestial melody above human passions and their tumult, and thus imparting an unexpected direction to events. Browning glimpses then – in Pippa, as humble, unwitting and joyous a character as Pope Innocent XII in The Ring and the Book will be a suffering and superhuman figure – the exceptional, purely intuitive unison between man and God, the latter speaking, acting and judging through those who are inspired by him. But along with the purely theological theme, we notice in Pippa Passes the first explicit formulation of Browning’s democratic leanings. We can hear emerging through the work an echo of the contemporary debate on the exploitation of the worker and

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his legitimate hopes for a more equal social order. ‘All service ranks the same with God / With God, whose puppets, best and worst, / Are we: there is no last nor first’. 3. In her opening soliloquy, Pippa contemplates the presumed happiness of ‘Asolo’s Four Happiest Ones’, a happiness that no atmospheric changes, neither rain, nor storm, can touch. Free on her day of vacation to do whatever she most wants, she imagines herself to be them, parading around with their prestige and tasting the pleasures of their lifestyle. The approaching dawn to which she addresses her thoughts is a personification of God, and it is on God that she boldly blames the division of society into rich and poor; but her envy soon vanishes, because before long she convinces herself – sounding as a very compliant worker – that the idealized happiness that she desired does not actually exist, or, if obtained, is fragile and superficial. She herself, in her poverty, is happier than they are. A mature and expert philosopher, she reflects disconsolately on the transience of human things: the yearning for love of the two lovers is one already affected and worn thin by convention: ‘lovers grow cold, men learn to hate their wives, / And only parents’ love can last our lives’. For herself she longs for a primal and genuine love: ‘Mine should have lapped me round from the beginning’.86 But parental love too is longed for by Pippa, an orphan, so that in her innocent faith the only love she is able to imagine is the divine one, which she sees incarnate in the bishop, bathed in the brilliant marvelling that he is able to awaken in her. At the end of her soliloquy, she can thus proclaim that there is no difference between small and big, that God, who fills the world with his multiform presence, governs it wisely and pulls the strings: ‘I will pass each, and see their happiness, / And envy none – being just as great, no doubt, / Useful to men, and dear to God, as they!’ Here is a faith that will not be changed by the experience of the day. Indeed, in the evening Pippa returns home tired but satisfied, fulfilled in her role of unknowing Divine agent: ‘one thing I should like to really know: / 86 In Browning, love is placed on a scale: physical-erotic, sublimated, familial, patriotic, finally divine. That of Pippa for creation undergoes an unconscious erotic sublimation, visible in the images of explosion and tumescence found in her soliloquies, particularly the opening one (cf. Hair 1972, 53).

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How near I ever might approach all these / I only fancied being, this long day: / – Approach, I mean, so as to touch them, so / As to … in some way … move them if you please, / Do good or evil to them some slight way’. 4. With her opening and closing speeches, as she goes past and sings, Pippa acts both as a frame and catalyst for the four episodes. The first of these is, as mentioned, a story of marital infidelity which begins just after the husband has been assassinated, and the two lovers, Sebald and Ottima, are gripped by their first feelings of remorse. On the whole it can be considered a melodramatic scene, the passion of the two lovers not being quite so exceptional and fatal as to make us expect them to be caught up in the vortex of love-death.87 In this case, Pippa, passing by the greenhouse where the two lovers have spent the night, with her song restores to them the moral conscience they had believed silenced. Sebald, thanks to the words of Pippa, knows, or rather rediscovers, God and His justice, and decides to seek atonement, pulling Ottima along behind him. Thus, rather than casting a spell, Pippa actually breaks one. The second episode, still weaker, sheds irony on the figure of an amateurish, fanciful artist who aspires to greatness; or at least that is the light in which the students see him, organizing at his expense pranks reminiscent of those frequently found in Boccaccio. They have him, in fact, marry a prostitute who ends up finding she truly cares about the man and the part she herself had agreed to play, and thus desiring to make it reality. Jules is a Paracelsus or Sordello in miniature, as he nurtures a contemptuous isolation and, as an artist, believes himself to be the ‘pre-destinated novel thinker in marble’. Browning’s judgement does not seem instead to be so drastic, and the character – who expounds his theories on art retracing the confused and inconclusive chatter of Sordello – finally gains a veneer of dignity. In this case Pippa’s song evokes to him the heartbreaking but impossible love of a page for the elderly chatelaine of Asolo, the exiled queen Caterina Cornaro, and teaches that art breathes life into material things and conjures a soul out of nothing. Jules discovers that he has the power to imbue Phene with a new soul and decides to flee with her to a Greek island. If it is admissible to seek an autobiographical 87 ‘Let death come now! ’Tis right to die! / Right to be punished! Nought completes such bliss / But woe!’

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character in Pippa Passes then this is Jules, an artist intent on relaunching his art. 5. The third episode, unfolding again in the climate and spirit of reinvention, focuses on the Italian pre-Risorgimento, which provides a historical backdrop to the whole poem.88 Should one interpret this scene in a rigorously realistic sense, Browning’s judgement on Italian patriotism would be extremely pessimistic. Luigi is a foolish but impassioned patriot, inspired by a puerile, thoughtless delusion. He claims that the best part of his plan – the assassination of the Austrian emperor Franz Josef I – is the death itself. Pippas’s song89 – a ballad in the style of Coleridge or Wordsworth, an already existent piece written in 1835, which Browning recycled for the occasion with few changes – contains, once again, a thinly disguised depiction of the real situation: the emperor is metamorphosed into a hoary, sleepy, benevolent king at the dawn of creation whom a dragon (a personification of Luigi) dares not kill. However, this time Pippa seems to fail in the communication of her divine message. Indeed Luigi overturns the meaning of the ballad and adapts it in a way that suits him. This song will always remain, for Luigi, the ‘voice of God’ exhorting him to conquer any weaknesses. He is not dissuaded from his plan but rather comforted and fortified, a solution with which Browning perhaps suggested the religious legitimization and the divine sanctioning of patriotism, and its recourse to violence by force majeure. Browning finally entrusts the most difficult demonstration that all of us, ‘best and worst’, are ‘puppets’ in the hands of God, to a nameless Sicilian bishop, happily characterized by a dry cough, who, fortified by Pippa, despite recognizing himself to be a hardened sinner, finds in extremis a sliver of moral conscience, a spark of dignity and the courage to unmask the much more guilty, evil and unrepentant Intendant. All this in a scene which, though in prose instead of verse, is highly refined

88 Silvio Pellico is the only one of the non-fictional carbonari to be mentioned by Browning in Pippa Passes. Browning also briefly refers to the imprisonment of Italian patriots at Spielberg castle and calls one of the prostitutes by the name of Zanze, one appearing in Pellico’s Le mie prigioni. 89 The words of Luigi’s mother are like an early echo of this song; she sees in patriotism an egotism which cloaks itself in love.

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and already exhibits Browning’s typical staccato, made up of fits and starts, sudden halts and unexpected discursive leaps: ‘So far as my brother’s illgotten treasure reverts to me, I can stop the consequences of his crime […] it is because I avow myself a very worm, sinful beyond measure, that I reject a line of conduct you would applaud perhaps’.90 In this final speech he proclaims himself, even while admitting a shared enslavement to sin, an instrument of God and of His justice. Pippa’s song, praising the miraculous unity and harmony of nature both living and inanimate, thus strengthens in him the decision that he already had in his heart to take, the delivery of the Intendant into the hands of justice. Precisely because of his redemption, however belated, one cannot accuse Browning of having given in this bishop a completely negative portrait of a Catholic prelate. This ultimately upright Monsignor looks forward to the Pope in The Ring and the Book being, like the Pope, an exception to the rule: aware of the corruption and abomination of the Church through the centuries, and rather than tolerating or abetting it, he halts their course, by intuiting what Gods asks him to do. § 115. Browning up to 1869 XII: ‘Dramatic Lyrics’. Psychic unbalance Having concluded a whole season of foggy, mostly inconclusive poems with an autobiographical basis, centred on the figure of the Promethean hero inspired by Shelley and Byron – and while the complete failure of his plays for the stage loomed large – with Dramatic Lyrics, published as the third issue of Bells and Pomegranates, Browning found his ideal compositional measure. His dramatic monologues – either of a medium length or even of a few dozen lines – were eventually to gain him the favour of critics and the public. Though one might be tempted to speak of a complete break, it is actually necessary to underline the very clear connection existing between Dramatic Lyrics and earlier experiments. Browning exploited a secondary characteristic of the poems from his youth and of his dramas, which is his unsuitability for action and dramatic development and his tendency to create detached and separate scenes, by transforming this 90 The behind-the-scene, sensational, but not wholly improbable story which emerges from this speech, and the plan that is foiled at the last moment, is that Pippa, unbeknownst to her, was going to be sold as a prostitute the following day.

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vice into a virtue. Hence the episodic vein, the dramatic fragment, the self-contained scene. Considered as a whole, however, Dramatic Lyrics gathered together only a few poems expressly composed for the occasion, and was filled instead with pre-existing lyrics already published in magazines (fourteen in all, of which the last, the macabre, slightly repulsive but nonetheless very popular fairy-tale in verse, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’,91 was included at the last moment to fill out the collection).92 In even greater measure Browning enriched it with the rejected parts from Paracelsus, Sordello, Pippa Passes and his dramatic works, while other poems were the fruit of countless readings made in the planning of the above-mentioned poems. He formally indicated the unity of the collection – despite such different origins – by underlining the common denominator of the dramatic nature of the poems. They were indeed ‘lyrical as expression’ but ‘dramatic’ by principle, meaning a series of enunciations not to be credited to the author but to other, fictional characters. Browning was on his way to becoming the least autobiographical of the great Victorian poets by silencing his own voice – or, more precisely, by refracting it into the voices of many others and thus intensifying it, and by using a complex technique to disguise this, and a gallery of imaginary characters in which his own reflections freely blend with purely fantastical projections. 2. There are in Dramatic Lyrics only two dramatic monologues strictly speaking, or rather fragments that can be imagined as extracted from plays, albeit non-existent ones. To these one could add a third, which is a dramatic

91

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Composed for the eldest son of the actor Macready. The story tells of how the German city of Hamelin was liberated from an invasion of mice thanks to the intervention of the pied piper. The poem is doubtless notable for its grotesque vein and its inventive language. Browning intended to publish only plays in Bells and Pomegranates, but was convinced by the publisher Moxon to include two issues of brief poetic compositions as well, in order to better match the tastes of the public. Bornstein 1988, 15–29, points to the internal logic of the collection and discovers the order in which the single poems are arranged, which he finds based on parallelism or thematic contrast, in couples or triads of linked poems. Woolford 1988, 99–103, discusses in turn the different order of the poems in the first and second editions of Men and Women.

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dialogue with captions, but with a deeply lyrical orientation.93 The dramatic imprint becomes vague and unspecific, even artificial, while the poems included range from the monologue in classical style to the military song, from the medieval-style ballad to the impressionistic, descriptive vignette, to monologues which are narrative, lyrical, meditative or argumentative, even philosophical and, as we have seen, to the fairy-tale in verse.94 The interpenetration of ‘lyrical expression’ and ‘dramatic principle’, which is far from complete or totally successful, is only one of the structural shortcomings which make it difficult to group and subdivide the compositions of Dramatic Lyrics. This was a problem Browning himself encountered if we are to judge by his own rearranging of the poems in this collection and the two following when editing his complete works from 1863 onwards. There he subdivided them into three groups, ‘Lyrics’, ‘Romances’ and ‘Men and Women’, thus wishing to indicate, respectively, the predominant lyrical, imaginary or purely narrative element.95 Of the three major fields or areas to which humans dedicate their energy – love, art, and religion – and of the resulting groups of lovers, artists and men of faith from which Browning invariably chose or invented his protagonists, the second group is nearly absent, the third little represented, and the first predominant. Already focused on the themes of devotion and service, he expanded this sphere, rapidly becoming an investigator of the most intense and morbid forms of

93

‘In a Gondola’, a nocturnal dialogue of two secret lovers on the canals of Venice, who voice their voluptuousness and sensuality in the language of Decadent ecstasy, with ‘metaphysical’ and euphuistic undertones. 94 ‘Count Gismond’, a fable on falsehood punished and moral rectitude rewarded has, apart from the opening and the ending, the flavour and the form of a medieval ballad rather than that of a dramatic monologue. ‘Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli’ is drafted in a diaphanous, impalpable, dream- and Provençal-like style, and is interspersed with sweet images and elemental symbols. ‘Artemis Prologizes’ is a prologue to a sequel of Euripides’ Hippolytus which Browning began at the end of 1840 and immediately left off. 95 The editors of the modern editions nonetheless retain – I believe wisely – the original distribution, publishing the poems in the order of inclusion and sequence followed in the three collections as first published. All of them have, however, inexplicably omitted the titles which linked some poems in diptychs.

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human passion, both pure and corrupt, both altruistic and selfish. He did not take into account geographical or temporal boundaries, nor did he allow for half-heartedness in these passions. Instead, he always saw a polarization of extremes, those of the integrity and crystal-clear transparency of intent, contrasted with hypocritical deceitfulness.96 His prime field of observation is thus either the individual, harmonious personality or the irremediably split and divided one. Any moral judgement is implicit, suspended, and in any case secondary; when one senses it, this judgement is present in the form of light touches, rather than violent blows, for Browning’s primary purpose is always that of a successful, aesthetically precise and believable portrayal of character. As such, Dramatic Lyrics can be defined as a gallery of portraits to be judged according to their degree of vividness. The showpiece of this collection is a dramatic monologue which established itself as one of the most famous and powerful ever written by Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’. With it, he heralded the depiction of an immoral, cynical, and murderous figure that he believed, with a degree of arbitrariness, typical of the Italian Renaissance. Upon close examination, the monk in the equally powerful ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ is a figure not much different from the duke, because both are brimming with a fierce hatred which is either unjustified or motivated solely by jealousy and envy, towards a person who remains in the background and of whom we catch only glimpses. The two are complementary figures of the same historical climate. The omnipresent Catholic religion was, in fact, for Browning, incapable of curbing, much less disciplining or sublimating, the natural passions, and was experienced as a sort of cage. The Spanish monk is the personification of duplicity: he feels the limitations and the fetters of monastic life and in secret growls his bitter hatred of his brother, even if in public he is skilled at concealing it behind silence or a smile. The text reproduces with high fidelity the very sound of his moans and grumblings. The counterpart of 96 Both the already cited ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ and ‘Waring’ lie outside of this scheme; the latter remains equally important because it carries out, under cover of the memory of his childhood friend Alfred Domett, who in 1842 abandoned family and friends to escape to New Zealand, a camouflaged but unmistakable autobiographical metaphor.

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this monk, one of the first targets of Browning’s anti-Catholicism, and the related poem, may well be ‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’,97 originally forming a diptych with ‘Porphyria’s Lover’98 under the title of ‘Madhouse cells’. The poem is normally considered a condemnation of fanatic religion and pharisaic condescension; this is in fact, in this collection, the poem tasked with setting out, on a plane of ambiguous sincerity, Browning’s ideas on faith as a direct and mystical contact with the true God: ‘For I intend to get to God, / For ’tis to God I get so fast. / For in God’s breast, my own abode, I lay my spirit down at last’. It was in him that Browning placed all his faith-based optimism, all of his firm certainty in the witness of God to be found in the spectacle that is Earth, all of the conviction that it is in Man that God externalizes himself and satisfies his love. 3. I examine more at length and in greater depth ‘My Last Duchess’ both because it is probably the best known and most popular of Browning’s dramatic monologues for its lightning-quick, unsurpassed brevity – others, though equally famous, are much longer and cannot be read and performed all in one breath – and to demonstrate the level of poetic density reached by dozens and dozens of his monologues, and the network of suggestions and implications on which they rest in many cases. Given the amazing magnitude of Browning’s oeuvre, I shall be unable to provide further allround analyses of other poems. The original title of ‘My Last Duchess’ was ‘Italy’, which shows Browning’s intention to capture the psychology and character of a nation. The poem connects back to and at the same time opposes another from the same collection, ‘Count Gismond’, whose title was ‘France’. It can also be added that ‘Ferrara’, the sub-heading, is a synecdoche of the speaker, the Duke of Ferrara, as we find frequently in

97 Agricola, the pseudonym of Johannes Schitter or Schneider (1494–1566), was the founder of Antinomianism, a doctrine which rejected the Law, and maintained that that salvation comes from faith alone and is in no way dependent on deeds (be they good or bad), and that the son of God could not sin and that God does not punish. The poem derived from the preliminary readings made by Browning for Paracelsus. 98 It tells of an episode of madness caused by love, culminating in murder: a man strangles his lover, motivated purely by her ‘pride’, or by her presumed, incomplete devotion to him. This case is practically identical to that of the Duke of Ferrara.

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Shakespeare: it identifies the character by means of the place, or rather the ruler by means of the kingdom, along the lines of Shakespeare’s ‘Cornwall’ or ‘Clarence’. The monologue is supposedly spoken by Alfonso d’Este, the second Duke of Ferrara, who, after having poisoned – as historians attest – his seventeen-year-old wife Lucrezia de’ Medici in 1561, in 1565 married the daughter of the Emperor Ferdinand I and sister of the Count of Tyrol. Alfonso entertains the emissary of the count who has come to agree on the dowry.99 The monologue is doubtless the most memorable example of that ‘abrupt epiphany’ of which Browning is a master. Nothing tells us that it is a Duke speaking except inference, the title and the first line, because one supposes that the person speaking of ‘my duchess’ must be a duke. The composition is thus strongly mimetic, and seems to be extracted from a drama which we do not possess. We sense that we are spectators of a single scene, or of a play condensed into a single fragment, with the acts of this inexistent play only hinted at, although very powerfully and evocatively. In particular, from l. 25 we are given as if line by line scenes of preceding acts which have been cancelled or cut: the gift of a ‘favour’; the duke and duchess at the window gazing at the sunset, the fool who presents the queen with cherries; the Duchess riding horseback in the garden. The Duke’s interjections of ‘I repeat’ also refer us back to a ‘cut’ scene, something which has just occurred but out of sight. The previous agreements about the dowry are a detail which is naturally never mentioned and therefore cannot be ‘repeated’. The immediacy and the dramatic climax are intensified by the use of present tenses and by that of the deictics ‘that’ and ‘there’. Structurally, the meticulously drawn and carefully organized monologue is divided into three clean-cut sections. A frame consisting of two distinct times, though actually separated by just a few moments, encapsulates the duke’s anamnesis. The latter greets the emissary and has him climb up to the gallery; he invites him to seat himself in front of the duchess’s portrait; after the anamnesis the emissary is politely – or at least so it would seem – invited to rise and descend the stairs to join the other guests. The 99 In the light of its background, the poem was written in the wake of Sordello and, as Alfonso had been the protector of Tasso, of Browning’s essay on Chatterton (§ 109.1).

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sequence is as follows: ‘there she stands / Will’t please you sit’ – ‘there she stands […] Will’t please you rise?’ (ll. 46–7). The duke’s anamnesis takes place in isolation, in a quiet huddle or summit between him and the emissary; the two withdraw from the group of guests to have a private talk. Presumably the duke points his finger at the portrait, to uncover not a living duchess but a painted one.100 The painted duchess has usurped, and as if she had ‘sucked away’ the living one, according to an over-used metaphor found in the works of Gothic Romantics, and often applied to women who, alive, die while being painted. The tradition into which ‘My Last Duchess’ fits is that of the lethal, carnivorous portrait of Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ and, with a more complex and almost inverted relationship, of Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Pater’s Imaginary Portraits. We are also reminded of Rossetti’s ‘St Agnes of Intercession’, in which the imaginary Tuscan painter Angiolieri paints his beloved and in giving her life on the canvas condemns her slowly to death; or of Rossetti’s poem ‘The Portrait’, which echoes Browning almost to the letter.101 Thus, according to the typically Decadent or proto-Decadent tradition to which the poem belongs, the artist’s life presides over the real and physical one, to the point of oppressing or suffocating it. This, however, contrasts with the conscience of the painter Frà Pandolf, for whom ‘Paint / Must never hope to reproduce’ the hues of colour and the blush in the neck of the woman; but the duke would not agree, because he has just said that art resuscitates life and is a substitute for it, though one adapted to his will – and, as the duke would say, echoing the Baroque poets, that art purifies and refines life. The power of the

100 ‘Looking as if she were alive’ is obviously ambiguous: it can mean both ‘who seems’ and ‘who watches’, the latter implication supported by the duchess’s stare so obsessively commented on by the duke. She, in fact, practises a kind of spontaneous, uncontrolled ecumenism with her sight, contrary to the Victorian ethics of the chastisement of the eyes, and to the principle that not all was to be looked at, because conducive to undesirable sensations and temptations, a fact attested for instance by Hopkins, who assigned himself periods of optic abstinence. In this contrast between stares, the duchess’s one is panoramic, covering 360 degrees, while the duke’s has a far more restricted optical range, and he demands the same of others. 101 §§ 189.4 and 186.2.

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portrait in ‘My Last Duchess’ is not only the sinister and charming one of the painting; it is above all that of the portrait of the duke himself, painted by his own words. His compliment ‘I call / That piece a wonder’ notifies to us that the duke is a connoisseur and a collector. A second collector’s item that he points out to the listener is a Neptune taming a sea-horse at the end of the monologue. These collectors’ items, these masterpieces, are treasured for their absolute worth; we discover that, like the Decadents of the end of the century, the duke has not managed to suppress his feelings of guilt: the constant contemplation of the object is the source of memories which, never dulled, carry him back to the experience of the duchess’s smile that drove him mad, a madness he was unable to control. The duke’s morbid imagination is caught in the powerful and unusual hint at the hands of the friar who ‘worked busily a day’ while painting: a gesture that seems to fit in with that of strangling rather than of painting, and is an instantaneous repetition, as it were, of the act – a strangling – so analytically described in ‘Porphiria’s Lover’, the monologue immediately preceding in the order of the collection. The private showing of the ‘portrait’ has been prepared in advance by the duke, used to leaving nothing to chance. Thus we see again in him the Machiavellian of Elizabethan drama; but he is also the resentful and dishonest ‘villain’ who broods and mutters in secret. While the duke is calculating, the duchess is the quintessence of naturalness and spontaneity; ‘and I chose never to stoop’ reveals, on the other hand, a satanic side. The difference between the duke and duchess lies in the contrast between ‘by design’ and ‘too easily impressed’. The duke is a cold simulator hiding and controlling his reactions, or so he believes; of the duchess’s spontaneity we have proof in the ‘blush’ of her cheeks with joy. During the duke’s anamnesis there are allusions to possible bickering and to his frustrations, the duke having indeed attempted to bring the duchess back under his control; and also to verbal battles following witticisms and digs aimed at the duke, in a quite adversarial relationship, as we guess. In other words, the portrait of the duchess is highly unsettling. The duke knows that it exerts a mysterious fascination which leads strangers, surprised and terrified – non-Italians and non-Ferrarese, like the emissary – to ask questions. We know from the text that the climb up to view the portrait is a repeated practice, not one which happens for the first time with this

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emissary. The duchess is his ‘last duchess’, recently deceased but also the last of a series of other duchesses lost in circumstances – we are led to believe – which are less than clear. Indeed we are witnessing a sort of ritual of vision. The pseudo-religious, transversal meaning is highlighted by the fact that the portrait is kept under a cloth, and that only the duke can take it off to show the painting. Admitting the magic power of the portrait is like admitting, with a shocking epiphany, its associative and deeply relativistic power. It is a sort of Gorgon turning to stone whoever looks at it, or an object the observation of which must be punished. That mysterious and imperious charm propagates itself to the observers. As for the duke, he knows that he must keep it covered, and that he must manage and limit his own visits to the portrait because from it a phantasmagorical, associative potential may be released which is still out of his control. Yet he knows that from time to time, like Coleridge’s mariner who ‘hath his will’, he must go up to see it, and he does not resist, thus wiping out all his plans of controlled contemplation. The act of killing or eliminating the duchess was thus one of weakness, rather than of power, and the proof of an unbalanced psyche. Like Wilde’s prisoner, the duke has killed an object which he adored, blinded by an excess of love, one which he did not want to share with anyone or risk seeing, to his mind, diminished or reduced. To return to the moment of interaction between the duke and the emissary, ll. 6–13 contain an incomparable concentration of implicit and psychological shades of meaning. The polite formula by which the duke invites the emissary to contemplate the painting is thus false. It contrasts sharply with the attitude of fear and subjection, almost of terror, with which the duke suggests that all the ‘strangers’ look at this painting (‘if they durst’): rather than being comfortably seated they are perhaps bent or hunched over, as if awaiting the duke’s wrath. This fits in with other, more imperious and frank commands, concealed beneath polite formulas; the paratactic, quasimilitary inflection in ll. 45–6 is very effective, strongly allusive, indirect and inferential. With it the duke easily implies the bloody epilogue without recounting it explicitly. The duke is, therefore, a strategist obsessed by language; he often makes use of hesitations, pauses, parentheses, incidental propositions, fillers of a weak phatic character, which far from marking embarrassment or wavering, signal its opposite; his confessions and

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admissions – that he lacks ‘skill in speech’ – show, on the contrary, his constant search for the mot juste, or rather the most cruel, most brutal of words for clarifying his hints. Examples of this frequent reliance on targeted pauses are the parenthesis of ll. 9–10, the subtle ‘she thought’, the pause ‘how shall I say’, which pair up with the incidental proposition ‘I know not how’, and the further, parenthetical ‘(which I have not)’. The duke’s vigorous discursive flow halts in concise and broken paratactic enunciations, and his eloquent use of ellipses and suspensions – ‘Then all smiles stopped altogether’ – recalls Dante’s ‘e da quel dì più non vi leggemmo innante’ [‘In its leaves that day / We read no more’]. The monologue is a masterpiece of allusive discourse, a speech meant to be understood by those who wish to understand, an understanding resisted by the duchess, whom the duke even now reproaches for not having understood his explanations before, since psychologically, to explain would have been an act of humility, and it is not the duke’s way to ‘make his will / Quite clear’ just to anyone; he speaks on the contrary to those who catch his meaning right off the bat. Unlike the duchess, the court emissary, from what we can gather an experienced diplomat, certainly possesses that kind of intuition. The duke’s announcement given from l. 47 to l. 53 is a second example of Dantesque ‘parlar coperto’ [‘secret purport of speech’] intended to be read between the lines, even enunciated and packaged in legal terms and metaphors: grammatically it disguises an imperative function and intention in a simple assertion. What he intends to swiftly convey to the emissary is that the economic terms of the marriage must be respected to the letter; the ironic ‘no just pretence’ reveals that the duke’s pretences are more exorbitant than just, as well as just how inflexible and picky he is; his implied threat, should the agreement not be respected, is clear.102 Another threatening detail is ‘known munificence’, whose irony almost certainly betrays an act of blackmail on the part of the duke. This threat is reinforced by the words ‘I repeat’ with which the statement opens, and, almost at the end, by the new incidental proposition ‘as I avowed / At starting’; and, graphically, by what we could call a new analogical vision or contemplation: the Neptune taming

102 Powerfully ironic because the fact is instead very important and deserving of death.

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a seahorse, another hypostasis of the duke, representing the duchess or anyone else who tries to stand up to him. His admirable play on pronouns underlines the self-centred character of the duke, who begins on a possessive note, ‘my last duchess’, and continues to l. 10 with repetitions of the pronoun ‘I’ that cannot be missed: ‘I have drawn’ and ‘but I’; this extends to l. 25 with ‘my favour’.103 Equally important is the fact that the monologue is constructed by means of possessive adjectives and personal pronouns in the first-person singular (‘that’s my last duchess’ – ‘cast in bronze for me’), thus encapsulating the motif of possessiveness. § 116. Browning up to 1869 XIII: ‘Dramatic Romances and Lyrics’ I. Scenes from Renaissance and contemporary Italy Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, published towards the end of 1845 as the seventh and penultimate issue of Bells and Pomegranates, reproduces the imbalances and the fluctuations of form, style and content, of historical periods and spheres of action found in Dramatic Lyrics; or, more precisely, it aggravates them. A preliminary confirmation of the almost indiscriminate inclusivity, and of its hybrid character, can be perceived from the title, which points out, if nothing else, the plurality and the contamination of its forms, ordering hierarchically the three genre categories to which the compositions can be assigned. The dramatic monologues, strictly mimetic of the disorderly fluctuations of conscience, are the aesthetic high notes of the collection, its most ambitious section even if not the most conspicuous or richest from a numerical standpoint. The abysses of the human soul and the inextricable tangle of the most unconfessed affections and passions are explored, with results which are still more powerful, and with an introspection which is more spasmodic. What Browning systematically depicts is a private and tumultuous epiphany, a liberating release after a long period of inhibition and self-control, in which the speaker of the monologue vents without restraint, like a river overflowing its banks, all that he had held back inside, and bursts through the retaining walls of censure. Supreme

103 ‘my’ insofar as it ‘represents me’, and ‘belongs to me’; ‘favour’ is a jewel but also a gift made by the duke.

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among these occasions is the spiritual, death-bed testament. Immediately beneath come the narrative monologues, in which the dramatic element, or rather the presence of a character speaking in the first person, is reduced to a purely structural fiction. There we can find examples of poems which are subtly or even explicitly autobiographical – but in a new vein with respect to the earliest poems, no longer Promethean or grandiloquent, but rather self-ironic and for this very reason more credible and likeable – or travel memories and lyrics whose voice is at the same time not that of Browning, and written, that is, in the style of a diaphanous and a somewhat evanescent love story. Other poems are evocative, intimate, nostalgic, or impressionistic depictions of scenes, surrounded at the end by even light pieces and exemples of epigrammatic and humorous poetry. In this variety, and thus in the implicit and arduous problem of the internal organization of Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, lies the reason for the ultimately weak echo that, yet again, Browning aroused in his readers. Like Tennyson, he offered his readers a poetry of a very high level of aesthetic indeterminacy, each single example differing from the following one, and thus bound to disorient and distance them. Browning himself appeared at times still uncertain about what was to be done, intent on testing what genre would be most likely to gain him success. 2. There are very few poems in this collection that lack autobiographical roots, however remote, and among these many have as their background the second trip which Browning took to Italy, travelling up the Tyrrhenian coast from Naples to Tuscany in the autumn of 1844. He experienced many, very diverse stimuli and the places he visited in Italy inspired him in myriad ways, leading to different expressions of feeling and degrees of imaginative transfer or, at times, faithful description. In some cases he presents an exact, detailed image of a place, while in others he gives in to a game of association and evocation, rendering his point of departure practically unrecognizable. Florence and Rome, which Browning visited in inverse order, inspired him to compose two corresponding dramatic monologues set during the Italian Renaissance. The poetic truth of the portrait is as powerful as its historical truth is inaccurate and distorted. The Italy of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Italy of the mature and thus already dying and dissipating Renaissance, already

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central to his theatre, and glimpsed in Dramatic Lyrics, is compared to an age of men vanquished by their passions (envy, resentment and hate), and therefore in the grip of an ambition for fame and greatness, grasping merely at worldly interests rather than faith and that religiousness upon which, at least superficially, its art had been built. His diagnosis, as I have shown, was the same as that which soon afterwards would be pronounced by Ruskin. Browning, who would later dedicate monologues to two painters who, while not on everybody’s lips, were sufficiently known in the Florentine Renaissance, surprisingly entitled ‘Pictor Ignotus’ his only monologue on a strictly artistic theme. Its real prototype was most likely Fra Bartolomeo, of whom he had read in Vasari and whom he made a conservative artist, eaten up by envy for Raphael (his former disciple, who surpassed his teacher), and overwhelmed by regrets, as he had wanted once to be the best but was condemned to obscurity due to his fear of the world and his love of the quiet life. This poem hides behind its erudition a subtly autobiographical transposition, in that the painter does not stoop to compromises, is not willing to contaminate his art, nor to adapt himself to fashions despite his suffering.104 ‘Pictor Ignotus’ cannot be considered representative of 104 I do not pause here to discuss the still open question of the identification of the painter with Fra Bartolomeo. If he is the one, Browning could have read in Vasari about his excellence, recognized by his contemporaries, and about his good, selfeffacing nature, and the obsessiveness of his pictorial subjects, such as Madonnas and nativities. Regarding Fra Bartolomeo’s dazzling meeting with Savonarola, Vasari reconstructs the scene so often revisited by the Victorian novelists and poets, such as Hopkins and George Eliot above all, that is to say, the ‘bonfire of vanities’, meaning ‘songbooks’ but also ‘many paintings and sculpures of naked figures made by the Masters’, among them not only ‘the whole studio’ of Bartolomeo but also works by Lorenzo di Credi. Savonarola, as in George Eliot, is first and foremost ‘a voice’ (Volume 5, § 199.4). Already in Vasari there is the outline of a painter-friar of a particular type: a cowardly, self-defeating painter rejecting dangerous art and beauty, but not yet an Andrea del Sarto. Unlike Fra Lippo Lippi, the internal, painful, unhealed friction was in him that between sacrifice and reward; it is above all the untameable drive towards confrontation with other painters, and consequently envy, as in the Spanish monk, in Andrea, and even in the Bishop at St Praxed’s, all of them hopelessly wounded by pride. His conflict was also, funnily, that of his incapacity to resist the sting of gluttony, as he died of a surfeit of figs, which he avidly ate.

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Florentine painters of the fifteenth century, but emblematic of an entire age is ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’.105 Ruskin defined it as the most powerful poetic depiction of the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, far more efficacious than the one he himself had crafted in his pages of art theory, as showing its ‘worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin’.106 The obsession of the sensual and worldly bishop is to ensure himself a form of immortality held and preserved in time by the incorruptible and precious marble of his funeral monument and by the aureate, immortal phrases in Ciceronian Latin of his epitaph, thus exorcising the prospect of corruptibility of the flesh and the end of everything. The dramatic mimesis is highly effective: not only does Browning deftly, albeit indirectly, reconstruct the scene at the bedside of the prelate, whose desperate pleas and appeals fail to defeat the insensitivity and ingratitude of his descendants which he already foresees, but also, and above all, he brilliantly follows the tortuous stream of consciousness of memories, resolutions, pathetic contradictions and sudden fits and starts.107 This phenomenal portrait embodies the true nature of the nepotistic and corrupt clergy of Renaissance Rome. The 105 Browning modified, almost reinventing, the architectural design of the Roman church, and for the tomb frieze he made use of his youthful readings from De Lairesse’s manual. It is ironic that the bishop should pray to St Praxed, who had donated her worldly riches to the poor. 106 This judgement is found in the fourth volume of Modern Painters where, speaking of this monologue, Ruskin praises its gift of concision, from his own thirty pages – against the Renaissance – to a hundred lines, Browning’s, and their uncommon, greater efficacy. Ruskin had been deeply interested in this monologue because, as mentioned above (§ 54.2), the marble tomb of a prelate or of a Venetian Doge was for him a litmus test to verify the extent of the personage’s self-effacement or, on the contrary, the blasphemous challenge to death of Renaissance Catholicism. 107 The bishop begins the monologue by citing a verse from Ecclesiastes on the ephemeral nature of life, but does all he can to deny it. At the same time he cites or recalls many other biblical passages but only to turn their meanings upside down. He threatens his children with revenge after his death if they do not carry out his wishes, and then raises his eyes to the heavens to the ‘aery dome where live / The Angels’. Like a child showing off his treasures he reveals that he has buried a globe of lapislazuli; and he is convinced that he has direct communication with St Praxed and that his feelings

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monologue does in fact ultimately show compassion and human kindness or indulgence towards his subject, and an interpretation on the lines indicated by Ruskin, dispelling any ambiguity of the manifest text, was authorized by Browning only from behind the scenes, as Thackeray often did.108 An enemy of Tractarianism, Browning approved Ruskin’s interpretation in a cover letter when he sent the poem to Hood’s Magazine, a letter in which he pleaded for its publication, as if to counter the momentum gained by the Tractarian Movement.109 3. In contrast to the image of Renaissance Italy, which was grasped by means of the imagination, and freely reconstructed in the two monologues seen above, we find the real Italy of the Risorgimento and of the nineteenth-century backwardness of which Browning had had first-hand experience, beginning with his first Italian trip in 1838. To it he dedicated two mirror-like monologues presented one after the other, taking as his inspiration features and human types who were for once quite well known to the British audience. In both cases the dramatic reins are loosened and Browning indulges in a relaxed conversational and anecdotal vein. In the first the speaker is an Italian patriot, now a refugee in England where many had fled after the first, failed insurrections of the Carbonari (among whom the Rossettis’ father); in the second, Browning himself is the Englishman

and passions will endure in the afterlife, as if the dead were still living creatures in their tombs. 108 Volume 5, § 74.1. 109 1845 was the year of Newman’s defection to Catholicism. The anti-Catholic controversy is slightly less virulent in ‘The Confessional’, set in Spain, the other great theatre of superstitious and agonizing religion which Browning never visited but considered only second to Italy in this respect. The speaker in this poem is a young Spanish girl who is in love with a subversive and who confesses the sin of her love affair to a priest. The cleric then uses her candour to have him arrested and ultimately hanged. The healthy sensual love that she defends and evokes is contrasted to the oppressive and diabolical duplicity of the Church, personified by her confessor, who pressures her to denounce the subversive, using promises concerning the salvation of her soul. Browning further attacked the Catholic religion in his delicate apologue ‘The Boy and the Angel’, which casts an unflattering light even on the highest ranking Catholic clergy (including the Pope) and extols the authentic religion of simple folk.

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venturing to discover the picturesque southern Italy. Carlyle had championed Mazzini, and it was Mazzini who served as the distant inspiration for the figure of Browning’s patriot in ‘The Italian in England’ (Mazzini himself would read this poem to Italian refugees as testimony to the solidarity of their English brethren). More likely Browning found inspiration in the expedition of the Bandiera brothers, which had ended tragically not long before his arrival in Naples in October 1844. ‘The Englishman in Italy’, the second of the two Risorgimento monologues, is a kaleidoscope full of scenes from southern Italian life, specifically from Piano di Sorrento where Browning resided for a period; extremely varied in tone, at times lyrical, it is at others good-naturedly satirical. There, a place already dear to the Romantic poets from Goethe to Sainte-Beuve and Lamartine, Browning voiced the curious amazement of the Englishman faced with unknown ways of life, illustrating them for his compatriots in a vein of enticing freshness as well as with delicate yet witty sketches, at times reminiscent of Keats. The grand finale is dedicated to the festivities in honour of the Virgin of the Rosary, with a procession through the streets of the village accompanied by band music, with fireworks and a concluding service at the beautifully decorated and brightly illuminated church. The resulting portrait of southern Italian Catholicism is a charming fusion of religion and superstition. However the ending is an abrupt, direct apostrophe to the reader: ‘Fortù,110 in my England at home, / Men meet gravely to-day / And debate, if abolishing Corn-laws / Be righteous and wide / – If  ’t were proper, Scirocco should vanish / In black from the skies’.111 In that way, Browning defended his exoticism and underlined its healthy narcotic and calming effects, contrasting the clear Italian scenes with the dark and stormy atmosphere left behind in his country, without at the same time losing the opportunity to wittily declare his own liberal faith. 4. Some poems may be gathered together in a sort of fragmentary travel diary. They are in fact drafted in a minor tone, in the form of impressions, 110 Most probably an abbreviation of the (rare) Italian first name Fortunio, a boy to whom the monologue is addressed. 111 As we know the tax was abolished in 1846 thanks to the pressure of the Anti-Corn Law League.

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digressions and sketches of just a few lines which punctuate the collection and visibly offset those of a wider scope. Just as Browning opened Dramatic Lyrics with ‘Cavalier Tunes’, this new collection begins with a vigorous monologue on a war theme, composed on the ship which was carrying the poet to Naples, ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’. The composition, born of a nostalgic longing for his own horse left in England, stands out for its vivid language and succinct tone, as well as for its breathless iambic rhythm. The passage from Gibraltar inspired more than a few travel sketches and brief, nostalgic compositions. The somewhat conventional pathos found in ‘Home-Thoughts from Abroad I’ alternates with historical reminiscence; ‘Home-Thoughts from Abroad II’ celebrates the English hero associated par excellence with Gibraltar, Admiral Nelson. Equally patriotic, and also set against the background of historical memories in Gibraltar, but in a more intimate, pensive tone, is ‘Home-Thoughts from the Sea’, an early example of imagistic descriptivism. The height of Browning’s impressionism is found in the diptych formed by ‘Meeting at Night’ and ‘Parting at Morning’: the action – a secret nocturnal meeting of lovers – is secondary to its re-creation of the atmosphere which is the true objective of the poem – or rather the evocation of the colours, the sounds, the noises, the nearly imperceptible heartbeats. The first of the two poems, in particular, is, syntactically, an extraordinarily modern lyric where single, unconnected images follow one another without verbs. The first, brief section of ‘Earth’s Immortalities’ is a meditation upon the tomb of Shelley, once an object of burning veneration and one never completely extinguished; the tomb is now neglected and covered with weeds. Having dedicated a veiled elegy to Shelley, in ‘The Lost Leader’ Browning condemns Wordsworth. Even without naming him explicitly, the implication is clear; he confesses having once considered him, and his life philosophy of striving, an inspiration and motivation for his own poetry, but regards him now as a faded model, an emblem of quietism and immobility amounting to an insult to God, no more and no less than ‘Pictor Ignotus’. No monologue, the poem is instead an invective filled with sarcastic, indignant notes, breaking out at times into apocalyptic prophesizing. Browning not only condemns Wordsworth for literary reasons, but also for his political volte-face. He refuses to forgive the abandonment of his youthful revolutionary ardour

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and his renunciation of all forms of political resistance, made evident by his acceptance of a government pension and the nomination as Poet Laureate. Despite all this, the poem ends on a brusque and unjustified visionary twist: we see Wordsworth who, ‘pardoned in heaven, and the first by the throne’, awaits the throngs of poets. § 117. Browning up to 1869 XIV: ‘Dramatic Romances and Lyrics’ II. Other lyrics with love-related themes A mere three years separate Dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, but they were crucial ones for Browning from a biographical standpoint, mainly because in the last of them he met his future wife Elizabeth Barrett. The poems composed in 1845, more than half of those which comprise Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, were conceived and germinated during the period in which he met and fell in love with her, an invalid a few years his senior. Almost immediately struck by a blind veneration for her, and soon well aware of her superior stature and critical abilities, Browning presented her with the poems which he intended to publish in this collection, and she was generous in her advice and suggestions, providing copious notes and observations in the margins of his manuscript, which he almost invariably accepted. But the presence of Elizabeth Barrett may be seen also and above all in the fabric of the poems themselves, woven with veiled, sometimes almost imperceptible, allusions to her. He depicted himself as the determined suitor, and even attempted to force her hand with cryptic and coded transpositions of their love story, using a sort of language ad usum delphini coined specifically to avoid raising any sort of suspicion among readers hunting for secrets; yet the content of the poems, and their urgings, were ones which she could easily grasp. Similar implications and suggestive hints appear throughout their voluminous correspondence. Browning’s most resolute verse courtship of Barrett, indeed his most explicit invitation to elope with him, thus breaking free of her supine submission to the will of her father and her domestic imprisonment, is contained in ‘The Flight of the Duchess’, which is at the same time the only example of pure romance in the collection. Browning almost certainly composed the first nine sections in 1842, and had published that version, much shorter than the definitive one, in a magazine in 1845. It was over the course of

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their relationship that Browning, who may have already thought of, or even sketched out, the crucial speech of the old gypsy – centred upon his own vision of life as a succession of trials – very likely realized that the plot could easily be adapted to his own situation. The scene is exotic and fantastical. The setting is a dukedom in Moldavia described with abundant detail, in an evident attempt to portray local colour, with ample concessions to the atmospheres of the historical novel.112 Elizabeth Barrett can be recognized in the character of the fragile, minute duchess who languishes in the castle, a prisoner of the pompous, haughty duke and the stern motherduchess, a couple whom Browning uses to depict Barrett’s inflexible father. If Browning ever identifies with one of his characters, it is with the narrator of this story, the devoted hunter who helps the duchess to break the yoke of the duke, and like the real Browning watches her ‘from below’.113 But he also identifies with the Gypsy, the true author of the escape. In her prophecy, metamorphosed in the queen with the duchess lying dazzled at her feet, Browning presents himself in disguise as the one who would give Elizabeth ‘Life’s pure fire’, predicting the difficulties and obstacles which would lay in the path of their life together, but strengthened by his indefatigable optimism, and promising his support to her as well: ‘So trial after trial past, / Wilt thou fall at the very last / Breathless, half in trance / With the thrill of the great deliverance, / Into our arms for evermore; / And thou shalt know, those arms once curled / About thee, what we knew before, / How love is the only good in the world’.114 2. Browning’s first, impulsive declaration of love in May 1845 almost led to a permanent end to the relationship. He reflected quite transparently on that event, as well as on his desire to make peace, in ‘The Lost Mistress’, pretending to complain in bitter-sweet, Catullian lines about her final abandonment and his own quiet resignation. But more often his love story is disguised, made impersonal, devoid of any recognizable references, and 112 Like the lock of hair that the duchess gives to the hunter as she leaves and that Browning, after much insistence, obtained from Barrett (cf. § 68.4). 113 Irvine-Honan 1975, 131. 114 In the next lines Browning evocatively describes their developing relationship through the image of a tree and climbing vine.

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refracted in elegant and at times almost restrained variations. He even took account of and weighed the phenomenology of lovesickness with the objectivity of a psychologist reviewing case studies, or as if wanting to prevent any possible exaggerations or pathological complications. ‘Song’, an elegant pair of perfectly balanced stanzas, investigates foolish, exalted, blinding love, the object of the more transparently autobiographical ‘Time’s Revenges’, whose colloquial tone is quite unlike the proverbial subtleness of other poems. Browning projects himself into the intoxicated, possessed poet-lover indifferent to his poetic glory, and whose lady, reminiscent of Keats’s belle dame sans merci, far from accepting his love, tortures him, insensitive and ungrateful as well as fatuous. ‘The Flower’s Name’115 is a somewhat light, agreeable poem, written rather in the style of the Italian Stilnovo, or in that of an Elizabethan romantic poem as it flows over into the hyperbolic language of the enamoured who seeks traces, signs or scents of his beloved everywhere. Browning is the suitor who wanders in a Spanish garden of flowers and herbs lovingly cultivated by the woman he loves. Pre-revolutionary France is the setting for ‘The Laboratory’, one of the best demonstrations of Browning’s fertile imagination and of his ability to capture unusual events. The protagonist of this monologue is a court dancer (perhaps modelled on a woman famous for her predilection for poisoning,

115 This is the first part of the diptych ‘Garden Fancies’. The second, ‘Sibrandus Schnafnaburgensis’, is a delicious example of the type of the humorous monologue, linguistically bubbly along the lines of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ (§ 115.1 and n. 91). Botany and a second person who remains in the background act as ties to the latter poem; but the theme of revenge links it back to ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ (§ 115.2). The protagonist, in fact, jokingly throws into the crevices of a plum-tree trunk, to later collect it, torn, a copy of a treatise of an unknown author. With the new title of ‘Garden Fancies III’ this poem was re-united by Browning with the other two in the complete edition of his works in 1863. The pedant Sibrandus who rails against pedantry in order to enjoy Rabelais to the fullest is probably an actual German of the late sixteenth century whom Browning found named in those encyclopaedias at his home from which he often drew inspiration. With his good-natured peevishness and his ultimately innocuous iconoclastic nature, as well as his momentary enthusiasm and sudden repentances, and not least his foreign-sounding name, Sibrandus is vaguely reminiscent of Professor Teufelsdröckh in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.

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the Marchioness of Brinvilliers), and the monologue is imagined to be spoken while she watches the preparation of the poison with which she intends to eliminate her rivals. ‘The Glove’, the final poem in the collection, leaves the reader disoriented by the truly paradoxical variation on the theme of devotion to the beloved set in the fifteenth-century court of Francis I of France. In a re-interpretation of an anecdote already used by Schiller and Leigh Hunt in England, Browning justifies the absurd demand of the lady who orders her lover to descend into the lion’s den to collect her glove: once he has performed this task, he slaps her in the face with the same glove, only to end up marrying her, burdened with the unflattering reputation for being an expert glove-hunter. § 118. Browning up to 1869 XV: ‘Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day’ I. The Christian confessions under scrutiny Browning’s first work composed after his marriage, and the first of those written in Italy (it was drafted in Florence in the months immediately preceding its publication), Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850) marks a temporary shelving of the variety of themes, settings and places found in the previous collections, and curtails the proliferation of masks and forms of disguise. Was this that ‘R. B. a poem’ that Browning aimed to write, rather than being forced to constantly refract himself in the ‘prismatic hues’ of his imaginary characters?116 Formally this is still a monologue, although not dramatic and rather a narrative one in the first two parts, almost an interior one, and an evocative example of this genre or even of the stream-of-consciousness technique, at least at the outset of the second. But what matters most is the voice speaking, almost indistinguishable from Browning’s own, a voice that puts into focus, as exhaustively as possible, that religious quest of which we have traces and hints, anything but ephemeral or indifferent, both in his early poems and in the protagonists of his plays, as well as in the speakers of his dramatic monologues composed until that moment. Thus, rather than a diversion, this is more like a step backwards, and the resumption of an earlier, interrupted discussion. There are enough 116 § 105.1.

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elements for us to trace in the poem an ideal extension from Paracelsus and especially Pauline, beginning with the confession, both lucid and passionate that takes shape here, and with the basic dilemma, not so secret in the end, between self-divinization and submission to God. In Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day Browning, in other words, seriously intended to summarize his ideas about religion in the year 1850: the conclusions he reached, by the very fact of their openness, contain the raison d’être of numerous poems in the following collections, and sometimes of single short or long poems in which he was to explore the same issues until a late age. 2. The two parts which comprise this work owe their origin to both painful and joyful events. The death of Browning’s pious mother was followed by the birth of his own son in the spring of 1849. These events acted like catalysts to the restlessness which had already been stirring in him for some time, and which was further fuelled by discussions which may have taken place with Elizabeth. In the first piece, Christmas-Eve, Browning, like Swift in his A Tale of a Tub, is a sardonic and disgusted observer of the diversity of faiths notwithstanding their basis in a single indivisible root. Its form is that of a dream in several scenes, a nocturnal phantasmagoria in the course of which different places of worship are described where Christmas Eve is being celebrated, each of which represents a given creed or approach to faith. First we have the evangelicals, next the Roman Catholics, and lastly the rationalistic debunkers, a group enjoying a strong growth due to the so-called German new biblical criticism. Thus Browning provides quite a precise image of the three ‘churches’ or ‘currents’, or in any case doctrinal stances which were most often involved, at times violently, in the religious debates of his time. Just as he would later subject Spiritualism to scathing satire, he was strongly critical of one of its analogues, religious fanaticism, and the techniques of false mysticism used by the Dissenters. It is not the content of the sermon pronounced by the minister in the chapel which is unacceptable, but rather the form his presentation takes: his teachings are true if communicated succinctly in a sober and controlled style, but become false and disgusting if rhetorically couched, or emphasized by means of his mental delirium: ‘truth remains true, the fault’s in the prover’. Rome and St Peter, and thus Catholicism itself, display the same spectacle of outward appearance, but to an even greater degree. The Roman basilica

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overflows with anxious people who ravenously await ‘the main altar’s consummation’, equally eager to partake of the artificial ecstasy provided by the accompanying liturgy. Here too the traces of a mechanical religiousness, of a knowingly orchestrated rite, picturesque but empty, and a purely folkloric spectacle are unmistakable. The efforts made to save the truth are obscured by ‘errors and perversities’ and lead to a clear distancing of the speaker from that form of worship. Browning is even less tolerant of biblical criticism, which he attacks with a violent, impatient closing speech, which serves at the same time as an impassioned defence of the misunderstood divinity of Christ. However, his resentful polemic against pure erudition devoid of love ends suddenly – somewhat disconcertingly for the reader – in sincere admiration and in a fully benevolent, almost indulgent absolution. The imaginary itinerary ends in a circular fashion, with a formal act of assent, submission and obedience to the faith and the worship of that same chapel of Dissenters where it had begun. But it is undeniable that, among the three alternatives, this represents the lesser evil.117 Apart from the case of biblical criticism, Browning does not have strong objections of a strictly theological nature towards Dissent, but only emotional and aesthetic reactions, and one realizes that his real intention is not to settle the issue of which faith is the most orthodox, rather to reject all of them in favour of a personal faith, interior and individual, rejecting any regimentation in a particular Church. Browning, in other words, confesses his own lack of faith in the communal aspect of faith and his inability to be deeply involved in it. Only a fine line separates this from a profession of indifference or even agnosticism towards the various Christian creeds: ‘Let me enjoy my own conviction, / Not watch my neighbour’s faith with fretfulness, / Still spying there some dereliction / Of truth, perversity, forgetfulness! / Better a mild indifferentism, / Teaching that both our faiths (though duller / His shine through dull spirit’s prism) / Originally had one colour!’ This discussion develops, and ends, more on the terrain of religious syncretism than 117 This echoes a similar statement found in a letter Elizabeth sent to Browning (15 August 1846), which may be taken as a direct and decisive inspiration for the poem: ‘there is enough to dissent from among the dissenters […] But better this even, than what is elsewhere’.

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on that of diversity: the ultimate meaning of faith is an understanding of God as love, and that is the unifying focus of all confessions; that is what the ‘pilgrim’ at the end of his journey concludes, calling upon himself to consider how ‘saint, savage, sage, / Fuse their respective creeds in one / Before the general Father’s throne’. 3. The fundamentals of positive faith are discussed and presented in a visionary way by Browning – in the most sincere, direct, and evocative examination we have at this stage of his poetic art – immediately after his unmistakable mouthpiece, overcome by disgust and almost feeling a sense of liberation, rushes out of the Dissenting chapel. Browning finds his own church in nature and in the whole creation, in the vastness of the heavens and lastly in man, in whom God reflects himself, his power and especially his love: ‘the loving worm within its clod, / Were diviner than a loveless god / Amid his world’. God’s power is supreme, but ‘love is the ever-springing fountain’; or, more precisely, his love shines through power, and therefore God is amazing power beyond the imagination but also infinite goodness. It is at this point of these nocturnal lucubrations that the sky is transfigured: the wind and rain cease and a wondrous lunar rainbow appears in the sky. The text adopts a very distinct biblical and Gospel cadence and paraphrases a typically biblical event or situation, God calling and addressing a prophet, a martyr or an apostle. ‘One out of a world of men, / Singled forth’, Browning’s mystic and visionary alter ego becomes the last representative of a family which includes Adam, Moses and Elijah, all the way up to Christ’s apostles. All that happens in his eyes is the repetition of the transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor in front of the adoring apostles. Like them, he is overcome by an indescribable ecstasy at the height of which he has a direct vision of Christ. The terrifying, blinding contemplation of the face of God is a classic theme of Victorian religious poetry: initially he sees him from the back, carefully studying the ‘sweepy garment, vast and white, / With a hem that I could recognize’.118 Then Christ turns and offers 118 It is a fragment of the hem of Christ’s gown, which he tries so desperately to hold on to. It will remain clutched in his hands at the end of the vision, like a talisman and a pledge, transforming the new convert into the reincarnation of another biblical character, this time one in the Gospels, healed by touching the cloth of Christ’s robes.

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him the dazzling sight of his face. When the burst of light has subsided, the pilgrim interprets the departure of Christ as a punishment inflicted upon him for having left the chapel and criticized the faithful. He recognizes that Christ cannot disdain their love, however poor, but this does not mean that he denies in any way his personal, pantheistic faith; indeed, he reaffirms that he too can follow Christ in his own way, ‘dispensed from seeking to be influenced / By all the less immediate ways / That Earth, in worships manifold, / Adopts to reach, by prayer and praise, / The garment’s hem’. 4. In truth, Browning fails to overcome the shortcomings of his early works, especially in the meditative and argumentative parts, compromised by a discursive exuberance and overabundance, and by digressions and superfluous complications. His vigorous, sometimes bitter and even fierce impressionistic sketches are preferable by far, accompanied as they are by frequently funny, epigrammatic and Byronic rhymes in stark contrast to the serious nature of the themes discussed. The description of the entrance of the faithful into the chapel of ‘Mount Zion’119 is indebted to the caricatural technique of repetition of which Dickens is a master: in order of appearance we find first an overweight woman with an umbrella looking like ‘a wreck of whalebones’, then a young woman with a child at her breast, followed by another withered woman who seems almost to be a mere shell of a person, and a ‘tall yellow man’, his face covered by a handkerchief to hide a horrible cyst. Lastly enters the coughing apprentice of a shoemaker. The audience’s ‘avidity’ contrasts with the ‘immense stupidity’ of the preacher: ‘The flock sat on, / Divinely flustered, / Sniffing, methought, its dew of Hermon / With such content in every snuffle / As the devil inside us loves to ruffle’; the fat woman in turn delightedly feasts her eyes ‘maternally’ on the preacher. Very effective panoramic glimpses of St Peter’s Square introduce, in the Roman episode, an overview of the scenes inside the basilica. Masterful But in this episode we can also see a hint of, or better still an allusion to A Tale of a Tub, in which Christ’s coat is given to Peter, Martin and Jack. 119 Browning almost certainly took as his model the York Street Congregationalist chapel which he had attended as a youth. The preacher may be have been inspired by Reverend George Clayton, who had once publicly criticized Browning for his apathy during his atheist phase.

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touches underline the role played even by inanimate objects – incense, the organ, the bell at the consecration – to create and maintain the right atmosphere. An example of the most successful satirical sketching is the Carlyle-like ‘hawk-nosed high-cheek boned Professor’ of Göttingen, who with his ‘kind of cough-preludious’ and ‘well-nigh celestial’ look, in addition to his mass of greasy hair, is reminiscent of Strauss, the author of Das Leben Jesu, a fine parody of which can be found in the Christmas lecture given by Browning in all its long tortuous passages, it too interrupted by periodic fits of coughing. § 119. Browning up to 1869 XVI: ‘Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day’ II. The temptations of ascetic life Having weighed the diversity of faiths during the practice of their worship in Christmas-Eve, in Easter-Day Browning investigates the problem lying at the heart of the question, one which strictly speaking he ought to have studied first. Foregoing the descriptive mode and the use of caricatures and sketches, he now conducts the discourse almost exclusively on the plane of a dense argumentative debate. The poem tackles the same ‘grammar’ of faith illustrated by Newman in his Apologia or by Arnold in God and the Bible, and has above all analogies with Tennyson’s ‘The Two Voices’ and In Memoriam. In a way, by discussing the question of religious doubt, Browning made his own – even as pure hypotheses – those same reserves and objections which he had attacked and carefully discarded in Christmas-Eve. How else could we describe Browning, if not as a potential sympathizer and follower of that school of thought, when he invokes the finding of scrolls proving the existence of Moses, or a cave or island which can be ‘translatable’ into Jonah’s whale? The dramatic culmination to which this unresolved question of the guarantees of faith and of the real existence of the afterlife leads, is a shocking and overwhelming vision of the Last Judgement. Here the dialogue is no more that between the voices of scepticism and faith, which speak in turns in the theatre of conscience, rather one – sometimes vigorous, others imploring or passionate – between the speaker and an imaginary listener whom we find to be God Himself, a God who fits the type of the God-oracle, the sphinx-like, hieroglyphic God of the Victorians. Easter-Day can reasonably be included among other examples

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of visionary poetry about the Apocalypse, such as Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius, Hopkins’s ‘Deutschland’ or Thomson’s ‘The City of Dreadful Night’. The conclusions reached when vision fades are contradictory or at the very least disconcerting: the voice of God sanctions asceticism as a perfect correspondence on the part of man to the plan of Creation and denounces excessive attachment to the things of the world, which, despite having been created by Him, must indeed inspire the devoted attention of the believer, but not to the point of making him forget that life in the world is merely a preliminary phase in preparation for life in Heaven. In this way Browning actually denies what he had unconditionally approved of in Christmas-Eve, but perhaps in a purely hypothetical way rather than with an authentic and profound conviction: he himself confessed that asceticism, which was to be repeatedly considered only to be discarded in favour of a legitimate, desirable enjoyment of earthly life and of the world, was only ‘one aspect of the problem’.120 2. The abstract prelude, suspended in time, without any ties to the experience with which Easter-Day opens, finds its cue in the saying ‘How very hard it is to be / A Christian’, which are the opening lines and become a refrain rhythmically repeated throughout the poem. The same alter ego who had already served as a filter for Browning in Christmas-Eve now starts to investigate the reasons for the dissatisfaction and unhappiness which do not abandon believers each time they question the foundations of their faith. The difficulty in fact lies in believing, ‘once and for all’ and ‘wholly’: human life is, rather, a succession of questions which re-surface again and again, always unanswered. The intimate essence of faith is found, reluctantly, in this uncertainty, in this risk, and it is a chord which will be played repeatedly and even more systematically by Bishop Blougram in a future monologue: ‘You must mix some uncertainty / With faith, if you would have faith be’. Having postulated that a scientific faith, endowed with exact and absolutely perspicuous laws, would be absurd because it would frustrate the ‘very end which it was destined to serve’, Man cannot suppress in himself the desire for a faith that is at least ‘probable’ and sufficiently 120 4 May 1850.

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constant, or even intermittent, but with few faults and gaps. If it is selfevident that belief means the desire to believe and believe with the heart those responses offered to one’s hopes and fears, the problem inherent in the scientific status of faith and as such to the historical truthfulness of the biblical and evangelical tradition remains far from solved: what evidence exists that the Eternal really died on the Cross for us eighteen centuries ago? Only if Christ truly died for all men is he fully justified in requiring of them a life of renunciation and repentance following the examples of the martyrs. And what if instead ‘we should mistake, / And so renounce life for the sake / Of death and nothing else?’ It is this, the grafting of ‘flexile, finite life […] / Into the fixed and infinite’ which becomes, in lines which make one think of T. S. Eliot, the ‘point / Whereon all turns’; but it is at the same time the punctum dolens of the whole meditation. 3. Easter-Day has its real beginning at the close of the long metaphysical prelude, when Browning, with a link back to Christmas-Eve, tells of an Easter night three years before, and of how, following a firm, age-old tradition, he had awaited sunrise looking from the heights over the landscape of chimneys and rooftops of the city. On the same street where he was walking in Christmas-Eve, on the same lawn in front of the chapel, he falls prey to a question: ‘How were my case now, did I fall / Dead here, this minute – should I lie / Faithful or faithless?’ With a shiver of mystery and the unknown that he felt as a child when, lying in his bed, he would jump up, trying to catch an imaginary monster behind the door, the speaker devours the space that separates him from God in order to know directly from Him ‘his bidding, as my duty, clear, from doubt’. From this point on, the monologue consists of a vision of the Day of Judgement and of an awed, face-to-face interview with God, which has all of the clarity and detail of an actually experienced mystical vision, while being also a personal transcription of John’s Apocalypse. Suddenly, a fiery and vengeful tongue of fire flashes across the night sky; the clouds which had stretched across the firmament like a net are devoured by the flames spreading out from their centre. The fire spreads from the skies to earth, joined by the flames breathed by a dragon, and the clouds, transformed into pillars, hold up the sky. The inflexible Divine indictment which begins at this point is focused on those justifications which the accused speaker had attempted

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to use as proof of his faith, and which instead are unmasked as forms of self-divinization and emulation. The sinner recognizes that he has enjoyed the beauties of Creation as if they had been created for their own sake. God, with contemptuous and cruel sarcasm, invites him to continue on the same path, all the while repeating his condemnation of the speaker, guilty of not having received the ‘partial beauty’ of Earth as a ‘pledge’.121 Neither is art a pledge of salvation: God sanctions it but only if it becomes a ‘fable’ through which divine truth shines; any art attempting to embody the infinite within its finite shell is vain. Faced with the pressure of these reproaches, even the last of his alibis falls through: that the Promethean thirst for new knowledge and scientific discoveries, or the desire to break the chains of the sad condition of human existence, is what God requires of men. 4. Seeing his world of ambitions in tatters, having rejected art and intellect as useless as evidence of and inducements to faith, Browning’s alter ego surrenders and entrusts himself to love. It is here that Easter-Day distinctly refers back to Pauline: a new womanly figure, almost certainly Elizabeth Barrett herself, convinces him of the power of love, and her eyes lead him to forget the past and above all embrace humility. In this light the poem is a second and more updated summary and spiritual autobiography as far as the end of the 1840s. However, not even this makes God smile benevolently; instead, he glowers, frowning severely. Not only is the speaker’s announced penance late, when he ought to have embraced it from the beginning, but the love in question is understood according to two distinct, opposing, irreconcilable meanings. While for the speaker love is altogether human, ‘horizontal’ and immanent, for God love is solely divine love, being the love for One who gave his life for men, having himself become human. The monologue terminates in a vicious circle, because the very doubt regarding the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ is the spark setting off the meditation and the corresponding vision. The punishment 121 In a beautiful passage which Browning attributes to the voice of God, Man is compared to a lizard who believes its own crack in a rock to constitute the entire world, until someone destroys that crack and the lizard is blinded by light. Likewise, the earth is sufficient to satisfy the needs of man until God destroys it in a single blow.

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to which the visionary is condemned at the end of the dream is that of remaining in a state of unsolvable, perpetual duality:122 he will wander the world exploring and trying over and over, refusing and accepting, happy not to be left aside by God and in need of being constantly called by Him; yet neither will the earth leave him in peace, instead constantly tempting him. It is owing to this twofold attraction, of earth and heaven, that the poem confirms at the end what it had set out to demonstrate: how difficult it is to be Christians and how life is nothing other than a path of seeking and of trials.123 § 120. Browning up to 1869 XVII: ‘Men and Women’ I. Monologues and poems on conjugal love Of Browning’s four collection of lyrics and dramatic monologues which appeared between 1841 and the publication of The Ring and the Book, Men and Women124 (1855) is the thickest and most voluminous. Two of the fifty-one compositions included in the collection are around 1,000 lines long and as such could have easily stood alone; no more than a dozen of the others are short or examples of light poetry; the bulk consists of mediumlength or long poems. They provide more than enough evidence to dispel any possible suspicion or supposition that upon his marriage Browning was somehow going to change from being a poet who was prolific to the extreme of a suddenly parsimonious one. The collection grew over a span of time from 1848 to 1855, finding its compositional peak in the last three years. Since 1847 the Brownings had been residing permanently in Florence at Casa Guidi overlooking Pitti Square, except during their numerous trips across Italy and stays in Paris, which occupied nearly a whole year between

122 Cohen 1952, 68. 123 4 May 1850. 124 The title was almost certainly taken from a line in Sonnets from the Portuguese, and as such is a veiled tribute to and an exchange of gifts with his wife. ‘I lived with visions for my company / Instead of men and women, years ago’: if we miss this contrast and therefore the connotations of concreteness and tangibility, the title may seem insipid, especially with respect to many other, extremely imaginative, Browning titles.

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1851 and 1852, and a winter holiday in the more cosmopolitan, worldly Rome in 1854 to take advantage of the milder climate. Browning had made no secret of his ambitions to reach a wider public with these poems, richer with ‘music’ and ‘painting’; but he found himself attacked with still harsher accusations of being an obscure and extravagant poet. Nevertheless Men and Women, along with The Ring and the Book, must be regarded as a test of Browning’s true greatness. Although even here there are some mediocre, or even some truly bad poems, these are compensated by the best he ever wrote in each poetic genre and subgenre and on each single theme of his repertory. It remains, however, a collection still solidly rooted, in a line of full continuity, in the poetics of Bells and Pomegranates, representing a return to the variety, the multiplicity of forms,125 the multi-dimensionality of the two preceding collections, infused with something of the thoughtfulness, the restlessness and the doubtful mood pervading Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day. Men and Women certainly follows the path of this work, and if there is any fundamental difference between the poetry of Dramatic Romances and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics on the one hand, and Men and Women on the other, it lies in fact in Browning’s more thoughtful attitude throughout the work. Human affairs, and above all personal ones, are often projected onto a wider background, and outside of time, and thoughts of death, like a constant low base tone, recur and weave themselves into the fabric of the poems, as well as the distinct leitmotiv of the fruitless, unsatisfied quest, at times literal and at others metaphorical. 2. Two programmatic poems, the first with a certain vagueness, the other explicitly, form an ideal introduction to the collection and point to the emotional context in which it germinated and, more importantly, define its objectives and aesthetic intentions. In ‘“Transcendentalism”: A Poem in Twelve Books’,126 inserted among the last in 1855 but in later editions rightfully and symptomatically chosen as the opening poem of Men 125 The dramatic monologue does not have an absolute hegemony of genre, as usual, and often appears in less marked and even conventional forms, and few of them are perfectly mimetic. Browning tried to find alternatives such as, for example, the ‘epistle’ (§ 122.6). 126 An obviously misleading title, in view of its contents.

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and Women, Browning ultimately justifies that blend of ‘thought’ and ‘song’ which had been his poetic aim from the very first issues of Bells and Pomegranates. It consists of a debate in which two poets expound two different aesthetics of poetry; one of them identifies it with conceptuality and prose, the other with imagination, images and music. Not all of the exaltation of magic and of the evocative power of the word, and of its supremacy over concentration on content, should be taken literally (if it were, one might observe how often Browning himself is guilty of having committed the same error stigmatized here). Accustomed to putting on masks, even as early as 1855, Browning certainly could not nor would have wanted to subscribe to a complete removal of the element of thought in poetry. He may probably have wanted to represent, in the two debaters, the spirit of his youth and adulthood, or he may have targeted Carlyle’s ‘transcendentalism’ and his well-known preference for prose and dislike of poetry; or even Wordsworth in the figure of the poet-harpist with his interminable and inconclusive preludes. In any case that of poetry as ‘naked thoughts’ draped in ‘sights and sounds’ remains one of the best-fitting, most appropriate aesthetic definitions of the collection. In contrast, in ‘One Word More’,127 the dedication inaugurating a series of triumphal tributes to Elizabeth Barrett, Browning discusses and exemplifies the relationship between personality and impersonality in art and takes note, at least in his own case, of how impossible it is to make it a direct, immediate vehicle for expressing his personal feelings. In a certain sense, the poem is a declaration of impotence, a new admission of his inability to project the ‘white light’ rather than refracting himself into the ‘prismatic hues’ of his creations. In a more general sense the problem analysed is the ability of the author to translate himself into this work, of how much that is authentically his own can shine through and how much instead remains concealed, disguised in his manner (hence the insistence upon the distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘art’). Each artist aspires ‘to be the man and leave the artist […] to find his love a language fit and fair and simple and sufficient’.

127 The poem actually contains over 200 lines.

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3. The purely descriptive vein, represented in the earlier collections in the form of impressionistic scenes, usually light and superficial, and also sketches made up of many scenes, fades here, and its surviving examples are generally re-absorbed into the overall tendency towards the intimate and meditative mode. In Rome, Browning is enthralled by the charm of ruins laden with history, and in ‘Love Among the Ruins’ he pauses, amazed, to remember in solemn rhythmic lines an ancient world which is fascinating but incomprehensible, of chiaroscuro shades, extremisms and sharp divisions. The thoughtful contemplation enacted in this poem contrasts with the sharp irony and nonchalance of ‘Protus’, a pure reverie triggered by the imaginary review of busts of Roman emperors, including one which stands out, that of a child emperor: Rome is here that of the late empire, of the first barbarian threats, of the captains who made sudden fortunes, of poisonings and conspiracies, and the moral to be drawn is that of the precariousness and uncertainty of human fortunes. ‘Up at a Villa – Down in the City’, a series of kaleidoscopic snapshots of daily life in nineteenthcentury Tuscany, recalls ‘The Englishman in Italy’, but for its constant shuttling between the countryside and the city, which results in a much tighter organization. Having previously impersonated the English tourist visiting the south, in this poem Browning camouflages himself as a country gentleman a little short on funds who hates the solitude, monotony and hard life of the countryside and longs for the movement, variety and lively gossip of the city, where he cannot afford to live. This provides an excuse to shower a good-natured irony on the customs of nineteenth-century Italy, depicted according to the usual cliché of superstitious religiousness (here too we find an incisive description of a procession), patriotism, bandits and shootings. The picturesque Italian south, evoked through traditional pictorial and literary stereotypes (a castle surrounded by cliffs, a sunny beach facing a crumbling home in the shade of a cypress) reappears in ‘De Gustibus’, another rewriting of ‘The Englishman in Italy’ and at the same time of ‘The Italian in England’ with the action-filled, vivid, patriotic tableau with which it ends (the injuring of the hated Bourbon king). This elicits from Browning an almost too explicit and overweening

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declaration of love: ‘open my heart and you will see / Graved inside of it, ‘Italy’’.128 4. If we exclude the programmatic poems, the oneiric rhapsodies and the few occasional poems, Men and Women re-presents the three privileged spheres and thematic areas which are quintessentially Browning’s own: love, art and faith. The compositions dedicated to love undoubtedly comprise the largest but unquestionably the weakest portion of the collection, both when Browning speaks of it in abstract, cold, conceptual terms and, more often, when he is involved in the first person and in an undisguised autobiographical key. In both cases it is important to understand that love is not intended as romantic feeling, as passion and desire, but rather as the more prosaic conjugal love, and as the settling and cooling of love when the lovers live together. Men and Women is indeed the work which reflects and sums up with the greatest faithfulness and immediacy the conjugal life of the Brownings. It permeates the work from top to bottom; Elizabeth Barrett is its tutelary deity, its inspirer, and to her the work is dedicated.129 Even so, Browning could not hide from himself the difficulties he faced in conserving such a union intact and lasting, and was almost obsessed with its fragility and with the instability of marital love. This is suggested by his spasmodic search for an impossibile preservation in time of what he calls the ‘infinite moment’ or ‘good minute’, in other words an intoxicating moment of magical fusion, a suspension of time and abstraction from the world. A further proof is the excessive insistence, the slightly empty solemnity, the unjustified magniloquence with which he sought to exorcise that obsession. The glorification of his own marriage, the celebration of that epiphanic moment of pure fusion, ephemeral though it may be, is enacted in the final stanzas of ‘By the Fireside’, where Browning raises to his wife, ‘my perfect 128 The poem assumes the form of a phantasmagoria, or a sequence of vague and surreal visions of a ‘spirit’ who has come back from beyond the grave. More precisely, there are two spirits, because Browning juxtaposes his own spirit, revisiting Italy, with another who (as the title alludes) loves the coldest, reassuring and almost enervating English landscapes. 129 Another poem-dedication, in addition to ‘One Word More’, is the short, very delicate ‘My Star’.

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wife, my Leonor’, the most hyperbolic of panegyrics. It is a poem that until that point is anything but tainted by encomiastic excess, rather a sober and suffered recollection, and at the same time a sinister premonition of death. Browning imagines the ‘November of life’ in the form of an old man seated in front of the fire, overcome with memories of a visit made in the company of his wife to a ruined chapel at the end of a narrow curvy road. The climb through the woods to the little alpine church becomes, in the supposed memory of the old man, a melancholy and suspended observation of natural scenes; yet this landscape becomes almost all of a sudden the source of funereal echoes, becoming slippery, steep, marred with cliffs, and evocative of death. ‘A Lovers’ Quarrel’ is perhaps the happiest idealization of day-to-day married life, with its good-natured lingering on the wintry lethargy of the two lovers,130 on their pastimes and their adoring caresses; but even in this case Browning eventually abandons his best impressionistic style and slips into the direct peroration, first with a triumphal tribute which holds up the woman as the receptacle of every virtue, and later in a complaining, conceptual, wordy request for forgiveness. Tied to this and forming a pair with it is ‘A Woman’s Last Word’, a pleasant, Catullian invitation to make amends and not to break the charmed moment. The insidious feeling of division, in contrast to the repeated hymns to the perfect union, leaps to the foreground in ‘Two in the Campagna’, one of the most explicit and worrying admissions of that marital frustration which already tormented Browning in 1854 while still in Italy. A painful example of conjugal Sehnsucht, it is in a way almost antithetical to ‘By the Fireside’, as it does not seem to allow the possibility of recapturing that ‘infinite moment’, and the instant of the ecstatic and intoxicating fusion and of plenitude in love, and the poem expires in admitting the pain of ‘finite hearts that yearn’.131

130 The reference to Napoleon III and the barbs aimed at Spiritualism leave no doubt as to the autobiographical element in the poem. ‘Mesmerism’ is focused on a topic which was also a source of discord between the Brownings. 131 The image which dominates the first six stanzas is that of a thought (the miraculous unison of the Roman landscape and at the same time of the two lovers) in the shape of a filament from a spider’s web which is chased in vain: one of the lovers grasps one

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5. An only slight autobiographical basis survives in ‘In a Balcony’, one of the two compositions of an exorbitant length mentioned above. Going back in time, Browning recalls and foreshadows his own thwarted courtship, but shuffles the cards by placing himself in the role of the male protagonist, but perhaps cloning his wife in both of the female characters. The poem is unique not only for its length: on the one hand it is a dramatic fragment fully in line with Browning’s plays, of which it reproduces not only the form but also the atmosphere, the most common characters, and the leading and often abstract conflicts, and the theme of absolute devotion in love. In particular, it is a closet drama which has many similarities to Colombe’s Birthday.132 Browning repeats and reaffirms his fervent belief in the ‘fusion of souls’. Burning with love, Norbert – even the name is an obvious echo – is raring to immediately run to the queen to ask for Constance’s hand in marriage, while his beloved would prefer to wait, fearing a negative reply. The poem is thus a new hymn to the purifying and regenerating power of love, and at the same time an intoxicating testimony to the goodness of the world. Norbert displays all of his moral strength by rejecting any flattery and passes the test and, without renouncing his devotion to the queen, insists upon and in the end obtains the hand of his beloved. The queen, with whom Constance sympathizes and whom she makes an effort to understand, is also secretly in love with Norbert. The queen stands in turn for the father of Elizabeth or represents the voice of prudence and an instance of denial; however, she eventually becomes a second and more complete reflection of Elizabeth herself and of the late, almost senile and palpitating reawakening of her love. ‘The Statue and the Bust’133 is yet end tightly while the other lets it go. Many of Eugenio Montale’s poems are indebted to these lyrics and in particular to this image, ‘La casa dei doganieri’ [‘The House of the Custom Officers’] being among these an unmistakable example. 132 There we see reflected in particular, through the pessimistic analysis of Constance, the avidity, self-serving hypocrisy and venality of the courts, later confirmed by the sharp irony and disgust of the queen. 133 A different inspiration has been suggested in the relationship of the philosopher J. S. Mill and Harriet Taylor, which led to their marriage (§ 41.1 n. 8). The title refers to a statue and a bust that the two lovers secretly commission, as a symbol of their undying love, from Giambologna or the last of the Della Robbias.

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another variation, another anecdotal disguising of Browning’s courtship, and at the same time an imaginative transposition of an alternative conclusion. The poem is very readable, captivating and light, without running around in proverbial intellectualizing complications, at least until the moral, drawn in the conclusive tercets. It describes and approves of the love at first sight between a noblewoman and Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici in sixteenth-century Florence, but condemns them for not consuming it. What Browning really wanted to paradoxically demonstrate is that the path of love is not smooth but rather runs up against conventions and external impositions that one has the moral obligation to fight. Additionally he maintained, in an audacious, unconventional, if not heretical theological appendix, that the two lovers would neither see God nor be included in the lists of the elect, but not because what they desired was sinful, but rather because they disobeyed the divine commandment which posits in the use of one’s own talents the true sense of life: ‘Let man contend to its uttermost / For his life’s set prize, be it what it will’. 6. At first glance, ‘Any Wife to Any Husband’ appears to be purely a figment of the imagination. It is a fantasy coming from the afterlife, attributed to a deceased wife, centred on the future devotion of the husband who has survived her. In reality the poem can also be read in an autobiographical if not prophetic sense, because almost ten years before the event, Browning unknowingly foreshadowed, albeit taking them to extremes, his own dilemmas as a widower. On the one hand, through the woman’s words he brings love back into the orbit of that attitude of spasmodic tension which has God’s approval, and points to the immaterial nature of love, indifferent to the beauty of the body which is destined to fade but related rather to the constancy, the unchanging and eternal youth of the soul;134 on the other hand, in the words of the husband, Browning pleads to be pardoned for the innocent, momentary distractions and infatuations, so venial that they 134 In a similar way, the question of the meaning of the body and of female grace is explored in ‘A Pretty Woman’, an issue resolved with a compromise which echoes the best poems that Hopkins will later dedicate to the topic: the rose of beauty and youth should be smelled, kissed, carried in one’s buttonhole and then thrown away. It is of no avail to try to sublimate it.

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do not enfeeble the eternity of his first love.135 In other poems Browning proved capable of disguising this autobiographical nature or of erasing all apparent traces, by applying himself to the description of love fully at ease with his imagination. In these he appears as an investigator or even just a cataloguer of the kinds of love (strange forms more often than not, abnormal, sometimes even pathological) or as a subtle psychologist, skilful in packaging convoluted and singular arguments of an exquisitely metaphysical nature, together with monologues entirely played out in dialectic skirmishes. The fluctuation in tone of these poems is profound. Browning is at times a participant, at others moralistic and in yet others moved, compassionate, ironic, cynical, and even occasionally misogynistic;136 and like a veritable chameleon he has the most disparate of points of view face off against one another without taking sides. Often a case or a situation is split into two contrasting developments, in a pairing of poems with two titles that mirror one another, thus rendering palpable the neutrality of the writer. ‘Life in a Love’ and ‘Love in a Life’ turn to humour, deflating romantic pathos and spreading an ironic depreciation of the excesses of passion and on the way that the beloved seems ubiquitous to his lover. ‘In Three Days’ and ‘In a Year’ concern the volubility of love and its possible changes over time; with an identical separation of perspectives the pair formed by ‘One Way of Love’ and ‘Another Way of Love’ describe the rejection of love by the beloved contrasted to the insensitivity for her graces. Some are short, delicious, rarefied lyrics that look ahead to Browning’s last collection, Asolando, like the exquisite ‘Misconception’, which displays the happiest and most elementary symbols in just a couple of stanzas that lament the 135 As a matter of fact, the poem alludes to the affair between Browning’s father and a widow, which went on for some time after the death of Browning’s mother in 1849 and his intention to remarry, which profoundly embittered Browning (§ 108.5); but in the poem he is inclined to pardon the act, having the woman utter words of admiration and appreciation for her husband. 136 As in ‘A Light Woman’, where the woman is a hunter about to catch yet another prey, a prey that the speaker of the monologue intends to save by courting the woman herself. Browning sets forth a case in which the essential question hinges on the moral responsibility of the three characters, and on the identification of the one of the three whose responsibility is the greatest.

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ephemerality of love from the point of view of a lover who enjoyed the favours of a woman who later abandoned him so as to aim for a man from a higher class; or like the enigmatic and imaginative fantasy, or dream and arabesque, ‘Women and Roses’, woven around the timeless simile between a woman and a rose. § 121. Browning up to 1869 XVIII: ‘Men and Women’ II. Monologues and poems on pictorial, musical and literary art Browning’s curious and competent interest in painting, specifically Italian painting, a life-long passion, is represented in Men and Women by two major dramatic monologues dedicated to two Florentine painters of the Renaissance. ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, the first, is an extraordinary masterpiece of linguistic mimesis. Browning manages to obtain maximum adherence to his subject: Lippo’s language, masculine, unconventional and intemperate, is the counterpart to his art. But at the same time he ingeniously continues the monologue in the most natural way, without the reader sensing any need for a second voice. The salient facts about the eventful and restless life of the reckless, sensual friar painter emerge little by little,137 from his impoverished childhood to his entering the convent as an orphan, more out of pure necessity than vocation, and to the revelation of his talent and fortunate friendship with Cosimo de’ Medici. Equally clever is Browning in communicating to us in a truly unobtrusive way the necessary details of his painting career and of his principal works. As an art historian he sketches very clearly through the words of Lippo the fundamental transition from a medieval aesthetic, founded on the denial of the world, on the repression of the flesh and on spiritual sublimation, to the liberating, unconventional, en plein air art of the Renaissance. On the other hand, he also prefigures, with Lippo, the modern artist, the ante litteram naïve, an outsider and rebel whom we meet when he is just about to be arrested for breaking the law. It would be an error, however, to identify Browning’s own aesthetic tout court with that of the painter. Lippo is only one of the countless artistic alter egos, not all of whom were similar to one another, to whom Browning 137 Browning followed Vasari so blindly that he makes Masaccio a student of Lippo instead of the other way round.

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gave life, even only in Men and Women. What he underlines in the three major monologues on painters written so far (including ‘Pictor Ignotus’) seems to be the asphyxiating pictorial convention that obliged painters to paint sublimated and sublimating subjects like Madonnas and saints, while no one had the audacity to paint reality, which is also the body. This contradicted their ways of life: Lippo as a man, but not as a painter, satisfies the flesh. There is then dormant in the three painters an urge to transgress and to recover the ‘integral man’. Lippo’s message is that one cannot expect to just represent the soul of man, because the soul is indissoluble from corporal beauty. He cannot but be a conniving painter, of course, but one that fools everyone, having a broader aesthetic than the one he actually puts into practice.  Andrea del Sarto’s art, on the contrary, is cold, icy, and calligraphic; it is not persuasive, does not reach the recipient and, selfreferential, operates in a closed circle. He is at bottom an agnostic, working in perfect indifference and in absolute exhaustion. 2. Lippo’s monologue sounds initially as the profession of a naïve and natural realism, and its candour and its absence of over-intellectual and subtilizing formulations is reminiscent of Pippa’s simple openness to the world.138 Closed up in his ‘mew’ for three weeks ‘a-painting […] saints and saints / And saints again’, Lippo escaped like a prisoner would, climbing down a rope made of bed sheets, irresistibly attracted by the outside air scented with spring and by flocks of young people heard singing choruses to love and pleasure. His psychology and rudimentary poetics are all here, in this contrast between the ‘mew’ and the ‘fresh air’, between the saints and ‘flesh and blood’, of which he knows he is made from head to foot. He does not hide the fact that deep down he is a ‘beast’, an animal, and a force of nature: that part remains with him as an artist, even if he has necessarily educated himself and has reached an awareness of his means and objectives. Life, not the spirit, is his testing ground: his artistic eye was trained on the streets, searching for anyone who could offer him a crust of bread. Having grown up despising the mouldy, musty curriculum of the conventual apprenticeship, instead of concentrating on his Latin he started

138 § 114.

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doodling on any small surface he could find, to the point that the friars gave up on educating him. Yet when they put a brush in his hand, he began to translate into painting, with a complete, raw realism, all of the sights that he had witnessed throughout his life, ‘Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the true / As much as pea and pea’. As with Pippa, Browning reiterates in Lippo the concept of art as a source of surprise and as glorification of the beauty of creation. The monologue follows the same route, then, as Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, especially as along the way it modifies, or at least softens, the amorality of Lippo, complete with even blasphemous and irreverent comments. He eventually pronounces one of the most effective moral, religious and didactic vindications of beauty in Victorian times, beauty which, being the gift of God Himself, must be neither ignored nor despised: ‘This world’s no blotch for us, / Nor blank: it means intensely, and means good: / To find its meaning is my meat and drink’. Lippo thus both supports an even extreme realism, but also firmly asserts the religious meaning of the truthful representation of beauty, given that such a representation, sic et simpliciter, is more persuasive than most sermons. 3. Just as Lippo compares himself to the horse which turns the millwheel, Andrea del Sarto, in the homonymous monologue, is the bat that ‘no sun should tempt / Out of the grange whose four walls make his world’;139 Lippo is carefree, extroverted and defiant, while Andrea is self-centred, cowardly and riddled with doubts. Spoken in a languorous, subtle tone contrasting starkly with the rough, effervescent words of Lippo, Browning’s second major monologue featuring a Florentine painter is less of an aesthetic manifesto and more of a psychological portrait crafted by digging into the hidden recesses of its subject. The beauty of what has often been judged as the most perfect of Browning’s creations lies in the evocativeness of its images and metaphors, which together perfectly mirror the drama of the artist and are its most befitting symbolic correlatives. The dominant atmosphere is indeed that of ‘common grayness’ which ‘silvers everything’, one pervaded by the dull, subtle colours of twilight, of 139 Browning sent the monologue to John Kenyon to replace a copy or photograph of a painting of Andrea del Sarto and his wife, which was later discovered to be inauthentic.

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‘autumn in everything’ – those vague, undefined outlines that one finds in his paintings as well. The tragedy of the artist is that of a man whose spirit for action is lacking or weak, and of willpower facing a crisis, which grows into a pessimistic, evil, Schopenhauerian noluntas.140 Andrea is the fallen artist, tired and sluggish, who has let his great talent go to waste, without allowing it to bear fruit, an omission of which he is guilty before both God and men: the ‘least’ of the many less gifted painters than him in sixteenthcentury Florence, still reveals the flame of a ‘truer light of God’, whereas in him fire has gone out. His regrets, his dwelling on his memories, his resignation to content himself with that little he has achieved makes him like ‘Pictor Ignotus’. Only his envy of and unvoiced rivalry with Raphael and Michelangelo send ripples through an otherwise stagnant monologue. If then Lippo tends to embody or disguise Browning, Andrea in many ways represents what Browning neither was nor wanted to be; but it is impossible to say how autobiographically allusive the secondary theme may be, that of the marital unhappiness of the artist.141 Lucrezia, Andrea’s insensitive partner, indifferent to his art and only greedy for his earnings (and she cheats on him as well),142 receives a scathing condemnation. 4. A coda of these two great pictorial monologues is ‘Old Pictures in Florence’, whose logical protagonist is Giotto – although this is not a dramatic monologue, and Browning himself speaks in his own person, parading his erudition. Giotto headed the myriad of misunderstood painters of the thirteenth, fourteenth and even fifteenth centuries who, minor but hardly obscure, paved the way for the arrival of the great Renaissance masters. Browning provokingly confesses his preference for Niccolò Pisano among sculptors and Cimabue among painters, and in

140 ‘somebody remarks / Morello’s outline there is wrongly traced, / His hue mistaken; what of that? or else, / Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that? / Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?’ 141 Browning may also have been thinking of the unhappy marriage of his friend, the sculptor William Page. A drama bearing the same title was composed by De Musset (Melchiori 1968, 199–204). 142 Her ‘serpentining beauty’ makes her look like the temptress Eve.

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general all of the pre-Renaissance art over the great masters. Building on a reflection already sketched out in ‘Pictor Ignotus’, he stigmatizes the lack of care and the neglect suffered by the works of those artists working at the very beginnings of Renaissance painting, while all of the attention is focused on Michelangelo, Raphael, and da Vinci. More specifically, he does not hide his own sympathy for those artists who sought perfection, as Browning did, and who, although never reaching it, never ceased striving, and were pioneers who eventually passed the baton to others. The focus of the poem lies not in the polemical aspect, which is in truth a bit forced and gratuitous,143 but rather in the reflection on the laws which regulate the evolution of art, all of which can be traced back to a single law, the Vasarian principle of continuity and of progress without gaps or fractures. The incomplete and obscure work of the early masters is taken by Browning (in much the same way as Ruskin) as a metaphor and example of his own ‘striving’. Over the course of centuries art repudiated the concept of the perfection of Man divinized by the Greeks, moving towards one no longer made of achievements and conquests but rather of seeking and of breathless, and not always fruitful, questing: ‘’tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven – / The better! What’s come to perfection perishes’. This is confirmed by the example of Giotto, famous not so much for his most perfect and most rapidly executed work, that O in the form of a circle, but rather for his unfinished bell-tower for the Duomo in Florence. The poem ends on a new profession of realism: ideally looking forward to Fra Lippo Lippi, the early painters reject Greek art, which aims at the sublimation of Man, and ‘paint man, whatever the issue’, and thus, as founders of this ‘revolution’, they deserve to be honoured.144 5. Of the two compositions Browning dedicated in Men and Women to musicians, which differ considerably in artistic value, the first, ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ is among the most evocative and modern poems Browning 143 Browning hopes for the ‘completion’ of Florence, by which he means both the city’s winning its liberty and independence and an increased care for the early painters in terms of restoration of their works, among them the completion of Giotto’s bell-tower. 144 On the Ruskinian frame of though of this conclusion cf. § 49.2.

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ever wrote, as well as being his densest and most sophisticated. What up to a certain point seems to be a sympathetic and autobiographically allusive portrait of a musician who offers his pearls to an insensitive, distracted audience, turns into a series of blinding freeze-frames almost detached from their historical context – eighteenth-century Venice – only then to take on another shape when it becomes an anguished presentiment of death, vainly exorcized by the prospect of immortality. In the first of his facets, Galuppi, like any artist, both reflects and does not reflect his times and society. Venice is identified and summarized in the most virtuosic and exterior aspects of his harpsichord music; but Galuppi, who can be ‘grave and gay’, is at the same time its critical conscience. His toccata brings to life mercantile Venice, the Venice of the Doges, which to the cultured Englishman automatically suggests, in addition to other literary allusions, Shakespeare’s Shylock; but it also points to death, nothingness, the ‘dust’ and ‘ashes’ which are all that remain of a city without a soul, of a world of frivolous party-goers, insanely and frantically spinning in a whirlwind of pleasures. The general archetype is in the poem as much that of Baudelaire’s ‘sadness of the flesh’ as that of the ‘death in Venice’. It is not unlikely that this rhapsody was inspired by The Stones of Venice, in the same way as ‘The Bishop Orders’ had concisely anticipated Ruskin’s critique of Renaissance sensualism. 6. Galuppi’s dramatic monologue, structurally very complicated, has several voices and no listener, being a reverie, a rhapsody or more precisely a soliloquy. The voices are those of the monologist and – as in a monologue inside a monologue – that of the two eighteenth-century Venetian lovers whom he evokes; when they have disappeared from the scene – one exclusively mental – a spectral and hallucinatory dialogue begins, between the monologist-player of the music and Galuppi himself, who ‘speaks’ through his music, played or heard. As with dreams, the monologue presents many scenes displaying varying levels of clarity. Both works of painting and of music are for Browning media for the release of private sensations and associations, and the ‘Toccata’ analyses music. In ‘My Last Duchess’ a painted work is looked at and read according to an enigmatic charm which elicits responses of a private nature; in ‘A Toccata’ a message which is almost visual, rather than auditory, is specifically contemplated, one capable of releasing

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a vision and a reverie.145 The seventh stanza delivers, or at least implies, a statement on the ‘meaning in music’. The speaker interprets the toccata as the expression of a metaphysical melancholy, from which a cosmic pessimism emanates. To ‘grave and gay’ Galuppi the Venetians responded with their applause, but they only understood his gaiety, without grasping his gravity. Walter Pater was to say that all art tends towards music, but only because of the asemantic, only formal sound essence of the word; Browning in contrast, and with him his monologist, believes in a sort of musical pathetic fallacy, given that the musical piece releases melancholy sounds, or even groans. Additionally, once again, a metaphor of the hermeneutic act is adumbrated: the predicament of an art so refined that its fruition is only partial. The Venetian lovers, with their sensual relationship, only grasped the surface of the music, while its treasures remained wasted and untouched. Indeed, they fail to understand the metaphysical message, almost the admonishment of the music, and leap straight into the inexorable rhythm of pleasure. These eighteenth-century listeners of the toccata are expressly young, vainly focused on eternalizing their youth and enjoying the moment, but death is approaching and has wiped out every trace of them. Nothing remains of their sensual fullness. We see the signs of disease, of restlessness, of slight frustration as the woman nibbles her mask and the man caresses the hilt of his sword. The adjective ‘burning’ is the same used unforgettably by Pater in the conclusion of The Renaissance, and taken as a key word by the Decadents; if so, these Venetians are early, Paterian experientialists. Their greed for pleasure emerges from the dialogue which takes place before and after the imagined performance, on life which is happy only in kisses, the ‘million’ kisses, as in Catullus, with which happiness is identified. The ‘Toccata’, like ‘My Last Duchess’, is thus offered to us like a reductio of a civilization, as are Ferrara or Rome in the monologues of the duke and of the bishop at St Praxed’s. What is this Venice like? What does it represent for the British man of music? Three issues are worth noting: economic power, in the ‘merchants’ who were kings; religious power, and specifically superstition; the political power of the doge, a word that, it should

145 The performer symptomatically exclaims: ‘it’s as if I saw it all’.

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be remembered, is a corruption of ‘duke’.146 It should also be remembered that the Rialto bridge does not bear that name in the poem, but is called ‘Shylock’s bridge’, reinforcing the isotopy of the predominance of money, and supporting the relativistic stance of the Englishman, who has never been there and relies on literary filters. From the eleventh stanza onward a close contest begins between the monologist and Galuppi. Browning subtly self-identifies with the latter and at the same time distances himself from the speaker, a geologist and positivist scientist who wrenches from Nature its secrets. The message of the music and of the Venetian scene which it evokes seems to be this: ‘What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?’ The thirteenth stanza addresses evolution, harking back to the debate on the extinction of the species as evinced by excavations where fossils of extinct species were found. In the light of the final stanza the scientist and performer admits his own unease concerning the nihilistic conclusions of science and relies on faith, which establishes the finalism of the cosmos and the survival of the soul.147 7. In his monologues spoken by artists, and in his other poems on the same theme, Browning could not resist alighting on his own personal sphere, the art of the word and poetry, even if he did not discuss it in the 146 The famous Venetian wedding on the sea was perhaps an extravagant, wasteful gesture, but it was also a fetishistic gesture along the lines of the eccentricities of the Duke of Ferrara, even if consolidated by tradition. 147 The quite superficial, still musical ‘Master Hughes of Saxe-Gotha’ instead takes aim at the degeneration of the musical arts, and especially of Baroque organ music. The nauseated reaction of the organist to whom the monologue is entrusted is very similar to that felt by Sibrandus Schnafnaburgensis (§ 117.2 n. 115) in an earlier poem. But as in ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, the escape of the imaginary master raises a serious existential question: the organist suddenly and without warning interrupts his tirade to ask himself whether with that disorganized and wild cacophony of noises the musician actually intended to imitate the intricate, senseless nature of life, to show us ‘Death ending all with a knife’. Here too, yet with the goal of an ironic demolition and burlesque deformation, there is a delicious attempt to translate into linguistic meanings the constituent parts of a fugue. Given the earful he receives in return, the fictional German composer of the seventeenth to eighteenth century with whom the dialogue is conducted is certainly not Johann Sebastian Bach, an idea also denied by Browning in a letter.

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same depth as in his monologues on painters. In ‘Memorabilia’, which D’Annunzio translated, Browning, with delicate images once again evoking – and mostly intact, at that – his devotion to Shelley, the idol of his youth whom he had never completely rejected, and the subject of the homonymous essay which must have been written slightly before or after this composition.148 But this poem is somewhat beyond the norm: its lack of restraint, its suspended and amazed admiration place it on a plane of immediacy and frank candour which on the one hand confirm Browning’s unpredictability and on the other contrast strongly with two other much more controlled and indirect poems on literary themes. The short narrative poem ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’ clarifies the personal and autobiographical resonance of the discussion made with such insistence and bitterness in ‘Old Pictures in Florence’ – and which, as I mentioned, seemed somewhat gratuitous – in favour of the obscure, misunderstood forerunners of the Florentine pictorial Renaissance. The poem is both a detailed and cryptic analysis of the difficult responsibilities of the poet and a vindication of the secluded greatness of artists assuming their own responsibilities rather than eluding them, and thereby excluded from public honours. It thus returns to what Browning outspokenly affirmed and condemned in ‘The Lost Leader’.149 Once ‘a man of mark’, now the poet is a fallen nobleman with faded prestige, which is not difficult to surmise from his worn cloak and the mangy, half-blind dog who follows him in his walks at odd hours. Only towards the end of the poem does the curtain rise: the corregidor, the chief magistrate of Valladolid with whom the poet is identified, has as his first office – a fact already stated in ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ – the careful observation of the many forms of public life and of its more common daily spectacles. His is not a mere passive observation, however; it has a moral purpose: even though he is no longer salaried by the court, that does not mean that the poet ceases to be the repository of social conscience, the invisible eye, and at the same time the scourger of customs; unseen, he watches both ‘men and things’, to the point that he annoys his fellow citizens, who complain that in their midst there is ‘not 148 § 109.5. 149 § 116.4.

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so much a spy, / As a recording chief-inquisitor, / The town’s true master’. A spy on the part of whom, indeed? The corregidor, forever at the service of the king who asks for his services, sends daily reports to the sovereign who, rewarding other favourites with his generosity, reads them uninterestedly, reacting neither with approval or disapproval. This Kafkaesque or pre-Beckettian king still exhorts him warmly to send these reports, with the reminder that he wishes these reports should be much more about himself. With this metaphor of the king and his subject, Browning admirably blends the religious, social and political missions of the poet. For him the poet acts as an intermediary, a trait d’union between humanity and God,150 a God that does not even remunerate him as he would expect; all the same, the poet is in conflict with power, which claims that unfailing celebrative service which the poet cannot manage to give, with his impartial eye. The result is that things do not go so well for him: it is a fable that he is rolling in money and pleasures. 8. Both the thesis and the premise of ‘Popularity’ are that the ‘authentic poet’ is an emanation of God, who is his guide and the guarantor of his posthumous fame. The poem denounces, with the energy of a fresh and ingenious fable, the sad, deplorable forgetfulness to which the early poets were doomed, and the unjust fame, and advantages and privileges of every type, including riches, which are enjoyed by the often mechanical imitators of a famous work. The opening scene is that of the painting of a portrait of a poet who has the makings of a genius, but whom no one seems to notice except the painter of the portrait himself, who knows that his star, currently invisible, will one day shine brightly. If it is really necessary to give a name to the ‘authentic poet’ that Browning had in mind, it is naturally a very evocative hypothesis that he wished to camouflage himself, claiming the certainty of a posthumous fame as payback for the contemporary negligence by which he felt victimized. The most likely identification is that with Keats, who is in fact named specifically in the final line and contrasted, with a sudden logical leap, with the ranks of imitators. In that case the poem would be a fitting pendant to ‘Memorabilia’, elicited by 150 As Browning wrote to Ruskin (10 December 1855): ‘A poet’s affair is with God, to whom he is accountable, and of whom is his reward’.

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the publication of the biography of Keats by Richard Monckton Milnes (1848) and inspired by the Roman sojourns of Browning, who had taken a pilgrimage to the tomb of the poet and met Joseph Severn, in whose arms Keats had breathed his last. A metaphor within the metaphor is the parable of the humble shellfish from which a precious blue liquid was extracted in ancient times. This liquid was to do wonders and cause revolutions in fashion,151 from which exploiters made fortunes, while no one remembers the man who first set hand on that shell at the bottom of the sea – which shell represents Keats. Browning, as so often happens, is carried away by the parable and works at it in his most successful storytelling vein, although it is exorbitant and out of sync with his opening thesis. § 122. Browning up to 1869 XIX: ‘Men and Women’ III. Monologues and poems on religion and theology Far from being resolved in arid and didactic poetry, philosophical and religious inquiries in Men and Women are often encapsulated in highly original metaphorical frameworks. Browning in some cases speaks in the first person, but more often through a series of masks which reflect him although only in part, and which must be rounded up or down according to the contexts. In each and every alter ego he chooses there is an autobiographical veneer in the midst of fantastical formulations and unrealistic and improbable elements. If his best poems on that theme are also the most contorted and sibylline, if therein we find a constant re-stating of the same questions, albeit in different imaginary frameworks, this is owing to the fact that Browning addressed a series of unsolvable dilemmas; that he was, and would continue to be, in a condition in which questions are asked but answers are not expected. The very sense of the quest is tested in the poem that is perhaps the most suggestive, the most imaginative, the most visionary and the most oblique of the whole Browning canon, ‘“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”’. In its superb metaphor, that of a ‘childe’ who overcomes impossible obstacles and completes his mission, reaching the Dark Tower – where, it would seem, his predecessors have all 151 The metaphor of poetry as a distillation of a liquid from an impure substance was quite common among the Victorians.

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failed – Browning declares again his philosophy of life as ‘striving’, struggle, tension, seeking and risky adventure into unexplored terrain, as opposed to a quiet self-absorbed satisfaction with what is already known. However, he bitterly notices the disappointing result of this quest. The poem fits perfectly, though cryptically, into the climate and context of other works in this same collection which tentatively draw up an existential balance, and the whole framework foreshadows, more specifically, the journey of life itself, which must end and is about to reach its final stage, the meeting with death, a prospect which is fatally interwoven with the morbid uncertainty regarding the real existence of life after death. It is also true that the knight Roland is, to a certain degree, rewarded for his tenacity, constancy and courage: the tower is much closer, the dangers are far fewer, and far less difficult to overcome, than he had believed; despite this, he has fought mightily in order to hold tightly in his hand death and nothing else: indeed, the ‘dark tower’, the destination of the exhausting journey, seems to be death itself. The poem ends in the greatest indeterminacy, with the reader unable to establish whether Roland survives in some form (an indication of which could be the fact that the poem is narrated in the first person) or whether he is reunited with the troop of his peers who have fallen or shamefully given up the journey before reaching their destination. 2. As in many other cases, but here to a far greater degree, the figurative and anecdotal material itself is the fruit of a shrewd contamination of events and opportunely adapted autobiographical fragments as well as of a myriad of literary reminiscences. The ‘dark tower’ has a distant, real correspondence in a strange tower that greatly impressed Browning during an excursion to Massa Carrara in his first years in Italy. The surreal surroundings, however, are due to readings which range from King Lear – hence the title – to the medieval Arthurian tales, to Poe, to children’s fairy-tales, to the Bible, Dante, Bunyan, Wordsworth, and the Keats of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’.152 The fascinating phantasmagoria begins with the apparition of a ‘hoary cripple’ who indicates the way for the knight and barely represses the diabolical cackle of one who is savouring the fall 152 For a discussion of sources and of the several interpretations of this monologue see my essay, Marucci 1994.

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of yet another victim into his trap. From the start the reader is thus able to realize how extraordinarily successful the poem is in evoking the sinister, the macabre, the horrifying, the nightmarish.153 In fact, even as a mere collage of disconnected and evocative images, as a typical by-product of the horrifying romantic landscape, was ‘Childe Roland’ read by generations of critics who, encouraged by an affirmation perhaps artfully made on purpose by Browning himself, felt authorised to elude any interpretative attempt. Browning said that the poem was nothing other than a dream, a figment of the imagination with no allegorical meaning, and that he had felt as if forced to write it against his will. On the contrary, the poem develops into a sort of funeral march, or a symbolic via crucis, as I have already mentioned. The ‘childe’ marches on almost by inertia, aware that he has sworn himself to a mission destined to fail, and desires to die. The description of the path he follows is the most hallucinatory symbolic translation of spiritual desolation: an endless plain where nothing grows apart from weeds, from which mother nature emerges, dark, stony, drained, to command our attention, as in Hopkins’s ‘terrible’ sonnets. She announces blind destructiveness and at the same time her desire for regeneration: ‘“See / Or shut your eyes,” said Nature peevishly, / “It nothing skills: I cannot help my case: / ’Tis the Last Judgement’s Fire must cure this place, / Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free”’. 3. The usefulness of this quest and of striving is the issue at the heart of two poems which together with ‘Childe Roland’ form a sort of triptych of metaphysical questioning; however, they substantially prolong and complicate the ambiguity rather than clarifying it. Striving itself is resolutely rejected, and the seductions of a philosophy of resignation are 153 During his journey, a horse that is no more than skin and bones – inspired by one on a tapestry which Browning never forgot and at the same time by one found in Poe’s ‘Metzengerstein’ – suddenly appears in front of the childe. The poem touches the height of the macabre when he nears a churning, foaming torrent on which alders and willows ‘flung them headlong in a fit / Of mute despair, a suicidal throng’, and when skulls spring from his bed and shrieks like those of children are heard coming from beneath. Once he has crossed the torrent he is terrified by a croaking noise similar to that of toads excited by a potion, or closed in a cage, or of wild cats, and further on his eyes fall upon a blood-curdling instrument of torture.

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weighed and ultimately embraced in ‘The Last Ride Together’,154 a poem whose ostensible subject is love. Of Browning’s love poems this is among the most inspired and most couched in pure song, but here that theme reveals itself to be secondary to a stronger, more general and existential reflection. The enamoured man reverses Childe Roland, of whom he is an exact counterpart: he accepts his fate of rejected lover and contents himself with what little his beloved offers him with her refusal: one last horseback ride together. Thinking back on his decision, he says that perhaps by insisting in his tenacious courtship he might have achieved something more or even something less, losing that last horseback ride which she conceded. He extends and generalizes the laws of failure and of transience variously inherent in the human condition (even applying them to the world of the arts); he goes so far as to insinuate that paradise may not even exist, or if it does, it may be only an illusion, an indefinite prolonging of this intoxicating ride. ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’, too, with the equally symbolic figure of the erudite humanist insensitive to the flattery of the world and solely focused on the accumulation of knowledge, immediately challenges ‘Childe Roland’. Death, which the knight unknowingly plans for himself, has arrived for the grammarian, and in both cases we see a balance sheet of life drawn up, in the first person in ‘Childe Roland’, and in ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’ by the disciples carrying the bier of their leader. As in ‘Childe Roland’, the landscape is symbolic, although less sinisterly so: the funeral procession which leaves the plain and its humble villages to climb ever steeper paths towards the city represents the difficult scientific career of the grammarian from his humble origins: he is the high mountain ‘crowded with culture’, which shines brightly with the flame of hard-earned knowledge while the plain sleeps peacefully, steeped in ignorance; however, that knowledge – unbeknownst to the scholar – increases on a parallel with a decline in his health. Whose side Browning is on is difficult to ascertain: does the poem exalt perseverance – thus contradicting ‘The Last Ride Together’ – or is it instead its ironic repudiation? It marks perhaps the reappearance of the youthful Promethean aspiration, yet again handled ambiguously without 154 The musical texture, the frequent use of anaphora and the theme of love’s end are all found in the best examples of the Stilnovo ballads.

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a stand being taken. It is at once an exorcism of Promethean hubris and an ardent apology for it.155 4. The first poem of Men and Women that Browning composed (although later, as has been mentioned several times, he scarcely followed the chronology in the internal arrangements of compositions in this collection) was ‘The Guardian-Angel’, inspired by a visit to the church of St Augustine in Fano, made with his wife during the summer of 1848 for the purpose of personally seeing Guercino’s painting of the same subject. For some time he considered the latter an insuperable masterpiece and wanted to defend it from the criticism of Ruskin. If we exclude the end of the poem, lingering on even insipid factual data, the first five stanzas are a pure, extended, spontaneous song which reaches lyrical heights that are truly unusual in Browning. We surprise the poet before the ‘magnificent […] pathos’ of the painting of the angel leaning over the boy, linking his hands in prayer and pointing at the sky. Browning openly confesses his need for protection and for guidance, peace and serenity, and formulates his wish that the angel should leave the canvas and, rather than returning to his celestial abode in the evening, take Browning under his wings, covering him with the folds of his white robe. Similarly, in Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day Browning had longed to be carried away in flight, wrapped in Christ’s robes: equally distinct is the call of the voice of contrition and of desire to be carried away from the extenuating contortions of thought to a simple, childish world. Almost miraculously he glimpses a world transfigured in beauty and regenerated by love. The poem, so explicit in revealing the insecurity with which he battled at the time, is a kind of introduction to the four or five of Men and Women which are of a more markedly religious type, although not spoken as here from the heart, but wrapped in allusions, protective layers and parabolic plots not always easy to penetrate. In and of itself, the fantastical element is still circumscribed and scant in ‘Saul’ – or should we say in the long and crucial addition that 155 A religious implication is present and undeniable as well: the life of the grammarian also symbolizes his tortured search for God and for the hidden face of the Divine. In him Browning weighs up the arduous, difficult path that leads out of the present and towards eternity. An echo of this poem, in the shape of a brief Horatian fantasy on moral rectitude and the dignity of resistance to temptation, is ‘Instans Tyrannus’.

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Browning added to the nine sections of the poem with the same title which he had already included in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics – simply because it is a biblical paraphrase. In its first version the poem ended after David, standing before Saul, had raised his trusting, almost naïve hymn to the beauty and harmony of creation; in vain, however, because he had not managed to shake the king from his slumber and inertia. In the contrast between Saul e David an intimately personal religious challenge is represented: one could say that the Browning of the first version reflects himself more in Saul than David, and that the Browning of the second identifies with, or would like to identify more with David than with Saul. The latter did not recover the light of reason, could not overcome his symbolic aboulia simply because David’s hymn to the beauty of creation was not enough to persuade Saul of the need for faith and the presence of God; or rather Browning was unable to continue the task begun by David and had left the poem incomplete because he himself was paralysed by the same doubts as Saul. In between the two versions lies, and not by chance, the debate staged in ChristmasEve and Easter-Day. Little by little, as the speech of David picks itself back up in its sweeping spirals, it comes to touch upon and reprise themes and motifs of that poem. As the second version opens, Saul shakes himself, melting like the snow on a high mountain at the first inklings of spring, and the task of David becomes that of rendering his recovery stable and long lasting, by using an overabundance of evidence. To that end, the ‘wine of this life’ is not enough, rather is necessary a ‘vintage more potent and perfect’. Browning brings up all of the main questions addressed in Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day and adds new ones he had been exploring in the meantime, such as those of life as an arduous and often disappointing period of searching and trial, of rejection of the world and the flesh to embrace the spirit and asceticism, of the value of the beauty of creation and the prospect of life after death. David understands Saul but urges him to overcome his merely human perspective: ‘But the license of age has its limits; thou diest at last: / As the lion when age dims his eyeball; the rose at her height, / So with man – so his power and his beauty for ever take flight’. 5. ‘Saul’ was a favourite of the Pre-Raphaelites and of Browning himself, who would often recite it in public. David’s song, only here and there weighed down by wordiness, flows in the form of a refreshing reproduction

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and reinvention of biblical style, replete with expressions of childlike amazement and with a host of solemn, elaborate comparisons taken from the observation of nature. Only at the end does the poem become excessively didactic, and David’s argument, here Browning’s mouthpiece, becomes too subtle and insistent, indeed a confused hodgepodge of axioms, admonishments, pleas and urgings that have little to do with the tragedy of Saul. In the final lines we witness the reappearance of the Victorian Deus absconditus, a God who, like the ‘dark tower’ that is believed to be who knows where, is right beside us: ‘Each faculty tasked / To perceive him, has gained an abyss, where a dew-drop was asked’. David’s peroration reaches its point of departure, with God who shines through creation, the latter an imperfection which claims and implies a perfection. In a series of oxymora, David reinforces his conviction that to submit to God is to be raised rather than humiliated, that God is infinite love as much as infinite power.156 He confirms the smallness of man before God, but then turns it upside down, bridging the gap by humanizing that divine face that will welcome him to Heaven. 6. In Men and Women, Browning’s insoluble, tormented dilemmas with regard to faith, which rise unendingly like dragons with seven heads, are debated above all through the fictional intermediaries of a wandering

156 ‘The Lord […] knows not to vary […] / Give both the infinities their due –/ Infinite mercy, but, I wis, / As infinite a justice too’. These lines are found in ‘The Heretic’s Tragedy’, based on the burning at the stake of the Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques du Bourg-Molay, in 1314. Its detailed and unusual framework, and the medieval-style stage directions that aim to give the feeling of the times and the impression of an imitation, are rather tedious, but the poem also contains a solemn, thoughtful meditation on the divine in nature and on the fallibility and smallness of humanity. As to his idea of God as a synthesis of two opposing infinities, this directly follows ‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’ (§ 115.2) and Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, while at the same time looking ahead to Hopkins’s ‘Deutschland’ and its notion of God as a synthesis of mercy and power. Hopkins also comes to mind with the motif of martyrdom and, on the linguistic plane, the wealth of original and creative inventions. The expression ‘Larch-heart that chars to a chalk-white glow’ is a perfectly parallelistic line which could easily have been penned by the Jesuit poet.

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Arab doctor in Palestine from the first century bc who comes to hear of the miracle of Lazarus’ resurrection, and a Greek sage barely affected by Jesus’ preaching. They appear in the two twin ‘epistles’ – a device through which Browning varied imperceptibly the model of the dramatic monologue – entitled ‘An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician’ and ‘Cleon’. Karshish, who we must imagine having met and visited Lazarus a few decades after his resurrection, is torn between doubt and amazement. Never ending questions and perplexities arise as he tells his colleague and teacher about the ‘strange experience’ he has had and the legend, as he believes, which he has heard. His bewilderment is that of one who finds himself facing a human being who has, even momentarily possessed, ‘knowledge beyond the fleshly faculty’, and has completed a sort of excursion into the unknown, to then return to earth. After having taken his time to puzzle out the psychology of Lazarus, Karshish asks himself how much is to be believed of the fabled story of Christ. With this stratagem Browning re-examines the reliability of Christian faith, the historic status and the veracity of the Gospels and of the miracles therein contained, upon which they rest. The Gospels are, after all, stories about events to which few were direct eyewitnesses. Luckier than later inquirers, Karshish was able to meet Lazarus, but apart from that his position is in no way different from that of all investigators in future ages, to whom the examination of direct witnesses and the checking of factual evidence would forever be precluded. In spirit, then, Karshish is a follower of the sceptical German professor of Christmas-Eve who reduces Christ to a mere man, albeit one gifted with exceptional abilities. Karshish is certainly sceptical, but he does not have preconceptions; and it is uncertain whether or not he will ultimately accept the hypothesis of Christ’s divinity. He pretends to dismiss the topic as ‘trivial matter’, yet he confesses that the mystery of the possible descent of God to earth in the form of a human being continues to disturb him. Yet again, that mystery is definitely that of the simultaneous presence and interplay of power and love, the simultaneous distance and the nearness of Man and God. The epistle ends with his astonished pondering of the possibility that God could have a human face and speak from the thunder in a human voice: that in a word he is at once both ‘the All-Great’ and ‘the All-Loving’. ‘Cleon’ approaches the same dramatic and

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crucial questions, taking different and less direct paths. At the beginning it seems to be a hymn of open praise and tribute to the laws of progress, laws placed by God in Man and in creation, issued and sanctioned by Him. The reflection of the Greek sage, at first pleased and satisfied, gradually becomes, however, more thoughtful, more sceptical, indeed veritably anguished. His optimism crumbles the moment he begins to consider death, so that he begins indirectly to loathe and attack the concept of progress he had praised: ‘In man there’s failure, only since he left / The lower and unconscious forms of life […] Most progress is most failure’. The same progress which carried man to ever higher levels of self-awareness has infused in him the awareness of death. Thus the epistle changes into a desperate, nostalgic and regressive elegy, and a hymn to the blissful ignorance and innocence of nature and animal life; at the same time into a heartbreaking invocation of an afterlife to defeat death: ‘It is so horrible, / I dare at times imagine to my need / Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, / Unlimited in capability / For joy, as this in desire for joy’. Cleon is even firmer and more contemptuous than Karshish in disposing of the ‘barbarian Jew’, Paul, and of Christ whose doctrine Paul insists on preaching, which – although it teaches how to defeat death – can be believed by ‘no sane man’. 7. Both poems contain indirect, very disguised stances on some of the most controversial and hotly debated ideological and philosophical topics of the time. Suffice it to recall the importance that the idea of progress takes on in Cleon’s arguments, and that of the role of happiness as an objective of life, which is what Bentham and the utilitarians preached. ‘Karshish’ is in turn a metaphor for the scientific approach to faith, and in particular for the way in which medical science accounts for an abnormal event like the resurrection of Lazarus without resorting to miraculous explanations. The Arab doctor explains the sensational news which he has heard – but which he is careful not to classify as a miracle – as a case of ‘mania’, brought on by epilepsy and culminating in a three-day long trance. Christ is presented as a ‘Nazarene physician’ who, unbeknownst to anyone, administers medicines to the patient, causing him to awaken from his trance and leaving him in an abnormal state of paranoia or monomania; by virtue of that extraordinary, unrepeatable experience, Lazarus now looks at the world as a child would, living in a limbo, sleepy, apathetic, submissive to Divine Will, without trying

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to attract followers or to preach the Good News of Christ. With respect to Karshish, the timid, cowardly and ultimately doubtful Arab, Cleon the Greek is far more categorical in his refusal, to the point of denying, or at least loading with irony, the sub-heading of the poem, which echoes a verse from Acts (17, 28) in which Paul points to the continuity between the Greek school of thought and the new Word, nearly placing the Christian prophets and the Greek poets in the same family. The inheritance of Karshish is, if anything, collected by Protus, the king to whom Cleon addresses the epistle, and whose dialectic importance is inversely proportional to his scenic presence: restless and curious, he follows in Paul’s footsteps, the disciple of a master who had spun stories of an afterlife. Cleon, proficient in all of the arts, sage of sages, a poet, philosopher, physiologist, musician and goldsmith, opens by listing proudly, and a bit pompously, his talents; and he continues winding his way through convoluted comparisons and subtle syllogisms; from high upon his pedestal he uses Socratic reasoning to teach the king. The essence of the first part of his monologue is that his epoch surpasses those of the past because it has achieved a synthesis, and that synthesis – this general principle is unmistakably evolutionary and positivistic in nature – is superior to the single parts, however perfect they may be.157 When, in answering a question of the king, Cleon asks himself whether he may have reached the ‘purpose in our life’, we can clearly see what ties this fictional creation to Paracelsus and the ‘grammarian’. With almost the same words as the medieval doctor on his deathbed, Cleon sarcastically denies the temptation of omniscience, the mad race towards the surpassing of human limits to the point of becoming a direct rival of God. The advantages of unconsciousness, of humility, or modesty, are illustrated by him with the beautiful comparison of the brazen statue of the fountain naiad, fed by the thin stream of water that has been assigned to it: ‘what boots / To know she might spout oceans if she could?’ In a very human outburst of nostalgic regret Cleon turns even the grammarian’s cold heroic insensitivity 157 In the field of art, Cleon’s theory is that, despite not recognizing himself as great as Homer, Terpander or even Phidias, he has entered into communion with them and made a synthesis while, taken separately, the three artists were incapable of using one another’s expressive means.

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towards pleasure, beauty, joy and the throbbing of life: ‘Say rather that my fate is deadlier still / In this, that every day my sense of joy / Grows more acute, my soul […] / […] more enlarged, more keen; / While every day my hairs fall more and more, / My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase –/ The horror quickening still from year to year, / The consummation coming past escape / When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy’. § 123. Browning up to 1869 XX: ‘Men and Women’ IV. ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ On faith and its enigmas, however, Browning wrote his most disconcerting and his most supremely ambiguous document – perhaps not only in Men and Women – with ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’. Here he indulged his restless questioning, debating the usual themes but this time arranging them in an unusual way, and in a contemporary setting. The faith being considered is faith tout court but at the same time the Catholic faith, seen through the deforming mirror of the nocturnal confidences of a no longer imaginary English Catholic bishop. In quite a detailed manner, with a series of explicit and unmistakable references, Browning takes a stance in the ongoing religious debate, in a historical moment in which, while Protestantism was becoming pulverized into a fine dust of sects, ever stronger Catholic sympathies, channelled by the Oxford Movement, were taking root. Conversions to Catholicism were also increasing and the Catholic Church was rapidly gaining ground and returning to the offensive on the island.158 Browning, as mentioned above, took a stance in that debate, even though from this poem it is not completely clear which. What can be mistaken for a resolute attack, after the powerful shots already aimed at Catholicism in ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’ and Christmas-Eve, reveals itself to be a much more complex and elusive judgement. Blougram is a many-faceted character, both yet another mouthpiece for Browning’s doubt-filled, precarious faith, and for his well-known difficulty with belief itself, and a vulgar and brazen 158 Resuming his discussion in Christmas-Eve, Browning recognizes Catholicism as an alternative to Protestantism and vice versa, but excludes biblical criticism: ‘He [Strauss] looks upon no future: Luther did’.

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pleasure-seeker, a hypocritical, devious, morally despicable figure, and as such the very emblem and the inflated prototype of Roman Catholicism. The Catholicism portrayed in this monologue comes close to the image of a showy faith or a specious fraud, one that, however, is poised to release all its seductive powers intact, offering the mirage of an almost too easy and speedy resolution to a host of difficult questions. Catholicism, or at least that sui generis one attributed to the bishop, offers the most convenient (albeit unscrupulous) arguments necessary to answer two of the aporias which had been noted by Browning from the outset. Through Blougram, he questions the very concept of faith, and likewise of life, as an uninterrupted and by its nature unsatisfied quest; and he glimpses its happy conclusion. Likewise, retracing his footsteps, he suggests a way to justify the world, which he had always perceived as a double-edged sword, and thus to calm down his own ascetic aspirations. Catholicism à la Blougram is the faith that most nonchalantly legitimizes and even exalts the enjoyment of this world: a worldly, materialistic and almost hedonistic faith which wallows in comforts and pleasures, and does not reject spiritual power while assigning a value to the temporal one. It is a compromising faith, prepared to turn a blind eye, if not both, on human weakness. It is ultimately a realistic, cynical faith which banishes idealism and measures life according to the criteria of ‘is’ rather than ‘ought’. As such, Blougram’s satisfied religiosity is the extreme enlargement – and the transformation into a system of thought – of the pure and innocent creed of Pippa in Pippa Passes, and in particular of one of the recurrent assertions contained in that youthful poem, that this world is fundamentally good, and that men are duty-bound to appreciate it. Blougram, quite similar to if not a twin of the bishop appearing in the final part of Pippa Passes,159 distinctly calls to mind the legate Ogniben of A Soul’s Tragedy with his torrential, unstoppable oratory and his remarkable conciliatory attitude.160 But Browning, while he may perhaps be reflected in some way in the bishop, disguises himself even more subtly in Gigadibs, the budding journalist, and an atheist, who accepts the dinner invitation of the bishop merely as an opportunity to 159 § 114.5. 160 § 113.4.

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vent his contempt and to display his own superiority, yet ends up getting the worst of the confrontation in a very open finale. 2. The metaphor or simile framing the monologue, and reappearing throughout, is that of life as a sea-crossing, a crossing which is necessarily faced, according to the bishop, in a mid-level cabin and carrying as much baggage as will fit in the cabin, and that which is necessary and can effectively, realistically, be useful during the journey, rather than what one might abstractly consider to be so. The passenger spitefully bringing nothing aboard, because forbidden by the ship’s captain to bring everything he wanted, demonstrates his poor judgement, is ultimately the loser and must complete the journey naked. Metaphors aside, this amounts to indicating as the most important element of the Catholic philosophy an ideal which ironically is the very opposite of an ideal; indeed, it coincides with the straightforward acceptance of the status quo, and with a disenchanted, prosaic admission of human limitations, or a medietas which is anything but heroic. The first third of the monologue concentrates on general topics: as in Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, faith is re-examined tout court, even before considering it as present-day, Catholic faith. The discussion hinges on the guarantees of faith, a faith that cannot be ‘fixed, / Absolute and exclusive’, and is rooted by nature in indemonstrable dogma. Browning identifies as never before with a prelate who is intent on glossing with the utmost care the element of risk inherent in faith. He candidly admits that he is ‘sceptical at times’, that he himself finds it difficult to believe ‘each detail the most minute’ of faith; indeed, with a paradox, in order to show that he sees eye to eye with his listener, he tosses out dogma. The truth is that, just as the pangs and goading doubts of scepticism assault faith, faith does the same to incredulity: ‘All we have gained then by our unbelief / Is a life of doubt diversified by faith, / For one of faith diversified by doubt’. The imaginative emblem of the experience of faith are the lines in which Blougram defines it as ‘perpetual unbelief / Kept quiet like the snake ’neath Michael’s foot / Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe’,161 an image which is, however, overturned, with a sudden bathos, providing 161 Another extravagant image is that of faith as an eternal tug of war between God and Satan.

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a showcase for Blougram’s brilliant, unpredictable oratory, of the sneeze which explodes only after some sort of stimulus. The development of the bishop’s arguments shows Browning’s longing for an easy, quiet faith and at the same time his yearning to end a constant and without exception fruitless, search.162 With an argument that is the very model of speciousness and approximation, he affirms that faith exists and must exist because one lives better by having it, because it is made for the world and because the world, due to its nature, demands it. Conversely, doubt robs one of the will to live. An index of the intransigent maximalism of the listener is that he responds by saying that a faith which contemplates doubt is useless: ‘whole faith or none!’ is the objection; but Blougram answers that ‘If you desire faith – then you’ve faith enough’.163 Blougram discards ‘pure’ faith both because by definition it is impossible, and because the naked vision of God would be blinding: evil is the reason for which creation, rather than revealing God, hides Him; Creation protects us, shielding us from the dazzling brilliance of God. 3. It is a widely held opinion that the living model for the bishop was Cardinal Wiseman, Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the English Catholic Church from 1850. Wiseman, who was also a novelist, was in turn believed for a long time to be the author of a defence of the bishop which appeared anonymously in 1856 in the Catholic magazine The Rambler. The correspondence is far from certain and the portrait must be understood as a free reinvention, blending characteristics taken from other contemporary Catholic ecclesiastics with some of those of the archbishop.164 The 162 The repudiation of the unending religious quest is represented – varying the general metaphor of the ocean crossing – by the similitude of the traveller who, descending from the North Pole to the Equator, frantic to reach it and looking forward to the future, strips off his clothes one after the other before reaching the climate where they will be superfluous. 163 On the nearly literal echo, or the anticipations of the assumptions set out by Newman in The Grammar of Assent, although much later than this monologue, cf. § 32. 164 In Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey defines cardinal Wiseman as the antithesis of Browning’s Blougram, apart from his love of good food and wine. Another possible model could be the aforementioned Newman, whom Blougram expressly calls ‘brother’ – but in 1855 Newman was not yet a bishop – or Father Prout, whose real

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monologue is organized like a card or chess game: dinner over, and with the young journalist having shot his last bolt, the game is in the hands of the bishop, who, pouring himself a final glass of claret, launches into his apology. Without mincing words or resorting to false mysteries, Blougram lists the pleasures which he enjoys, the culinary delights in which he indulges, the exquisite art with which he surrounds himself, which he says assists and corroborates his spirit. With sinister diabolicalness he repeats the story of Christ’s temptation in the desert and praises to the journalist, although achieving no results, the material and spiritual power of an ecclesiastic career, suggesting that he should consider it. In the more specifically Catholic part of the apology, Blougram begins by saying that life exists and the Catholic faith is ‘the best and readiest means of living by; / The most pronounced moreover, fixed, precise / And absolute form of faith in the whole world’, the creed which, in fact, best meets the needs and addresses the weaknesses of Man who, by not hiding them, justifies and satisfies his own thirst for power and prestige. The whole, weakest central part of the monologue – which is over 800 lines long – is aimed at demonstrating that the bishop’s concept of life is far preferable to any other.165 But from a defensive position the bishop moves to the offensive, and to a full-forced apology for the Catholic faith, its unproven dogmas (such as the Immaculate Conception in which the Protestants do not believe) and its miracles even in the present time, among which he mentions the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius. With arguments very close to those in a novella of the Decameron in which Abraham the Jew unexpectedly converts after having seen the debauchery of the Roman Pope, Blougram defends the orthodoxy and superiority of the Catholic faith by pointing out name was F. S. Mahony, an ex-Jesuit who turned to journalism whom Browning had met in Florence in the autumn of 1847. The name of the bishop suggests Lord Brougham, a figure as eclectic as he was much talked about in Browning’s time, a prolific orator and the inventor of the heavy four-wheeled carriage appropriately named ‘brum’. This last reference is worthy of consideration especially since Gigadibs, the name of the young interlocutor, contains, among other playful echoes, the word ‘gig’, in other words the light two-wheeled carriage. 165 ‘My business is not to remake myself, / But make the absolute best of what God made’.

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the fact that this system, despite all its absurdities, naivety, coarseness and self-contradictions, is still alive and kicking rather than having deteriorated over time. It is useless thus to attempt to purify the Catholic faith, which represents systematic and deliberate impurity: one takes all or nothing, given that if one even begins to attempt purification one would soon come close, like young Fichte, to slashing the face of God. With a final effort to arouse the envy of his interlocutor, the bishop returns to the theme of the grandeur, prestige and power which he enjoys; at the same time, however, he showers his listener with disdain. Having begun as a monologue in the first person, by its end ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ dissolves its fiction by switching to the third person and by escaping into a grotesque fantasy. Blougram, we are informed, believes in only half of the things he has said. The other half was used only for the sake of argument. This is like saying he is more of a disbeliever than he had given to understand, or more of a believer, in which case all of the confessions of doubt and uncertainty were nothing more than a smokescreen purposely raised to attract the naïve Gigadibs.166 The latter marches off bag and baggage and departs for Australia, but it is difficult to say whether he does so in disgust, or enlightened by this conversation, or whether he goes off to dedicate himself to farming or to the Bible. The final hint, that he has started reading the last chapter of St John’s Gospel, may perhaps induce one to see in his departure the embracing of a new life and the first glimmer of a conversion. § 124. Browning up to 1869 XXI: ‘Dramatis Personae’ I. Faith threatened by evolutionism Fantasies and transpositions centred on religious doubt also constitute the backbone and supporting foundation of Dramatis Personae (1864). This collection can therefore be said to be a natural continuation of the debate begun in Men and Women, whose horizons and conceptual framework are largely established in ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, as are its characteristic argumentative virtuosities. Among the collections of Browning’s poetry, 166 ‘Apology’ is a word whose etymology can also suggest ‘acknowledging one’s error’. Newman’s Apologia, too, was unpublished in 1855, and therefore Browning is doubly his predecessor.

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this is the one which most distinctively deals with contemporary topics and most closely reflects the hotly controversial cultural issues of his time. Browning appears now shaken and frightened not only by the new biblical exegesis but also, and more dramatically, by the advancement of positivism, materialism and above all evolutionism. The publication date of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, in 1859, precedes that of the composition of the majority of poems in the collection, in which the determination of the role and of the correct hierarchical position of Man with respect to God and the beasts is a recurring if not obsessive theme. In most cases, Browning avoids once again taking a stance, and nonchalantly claims and then denies a series of statements like a veritable chameleon, disguising and wrapping himself in contradictory and antithetical alter egos.167 This almost irritating practice tempts the reader to take his investigations for cold and purely imaginative exercises, or merely intellectual and non-committal skirmishes where, contrary to appearances, nothing is truly decided and instead everything is reopened – which is, incidentally, a faithful mirror of the Victorian mindset with regard to religion. Though in every single speaker we can find something authentically and genuinely Browning’s, we can never deduce a clear and definitive evolution of his own thought from these poems, whose exact chronology is, once again, of no assistance. 2. Towards the end of the 1850s Browning read Renan, Strauss and Das Wesen des Christentums by Feuerbach (the latter in George Eliot’s translation). These further studies of the positivist school of thought are the backdrop of ‘A Death in the Desert’,168 a reconstruction of the death of John the Evangelist, and of the circumstances in which he left his spiritual will. Browning composed it by readapting an old apocryphal tradition which claimed that the apostle died in his nineties in a cave carved into the rocks near Ephesus around 100 ad, while being hunted down by the Romans. Browning proceeds to a substantial but not complete disavowal of modern objections – as implied above, of a positivistic, materialistic and Darwinist nature – to the traditional image of faith. Against the atheists,

167 I disagree with De Vane 1955, 280, who affirms that ‘the dramatic disguise has worn thin’. 168 The scene of John’s death had already been described in the third book of Sordello.

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he points to a faith which, as witnessed by the Gospels, caught on easily and naturally among the first Christians; to the materialists, he denies that religion is a pure ‘projection’ of human imagination; lastly, against Strauss and the biblical exegetes, he vindicates the authentic and literal divinity of Christ, ‘the illimitable God’, no longer a ‘mere man’. Browning, in fact, depicts an evangelist who speaks as if transplanted into the middle of the nineteenth century and has him express the longing for a strong, infallible faith which sweeps away, or aspires to sweep away, all doubts: ‘To me that story – ay, that Life and Death / Of which I wrote “it was” – to me, it is’. In his long excursus – which contains both the objections, drawn from the main heresies that arose during that period, as well as the expected refutations – John describes the zigzagging path of faith even during his own lifetime, and predicts his own reawakening in future epochs, when man will grope around ‘feeling for foot-hold through a blank profound’. His words, therefore, gradually lose any contextual adherence or verisimilitude, and gradually echo, sometimes in a very explicit way, the main speculations of contemporary theology: the biblical critics, like Renan, Strauss, Feuerbach, are all mimetized in the various historical heretics like Ebion, Cerinthus and others. The point upon which John insists is that faith has been proved once and for all: ‘nothing shall prove twice what once was proved […] Wouldst thou unprove this to re-prove the proved?’ And yet the message of the evangelist with which we are left is anything but triumphant, and he is at the same time an unmistakable mouthpiece for the restlessness of the Victorians and of the nineteenth century. His concept of faith is not ultimately very different from that defined by bishop Blougram, a doubt-filled faith, strengthened by its uncertainties. To those who ask him for incontrovertible evidence, John responds that ‘such progress could no more attend his soul / Were all it struggles after found at first / And guesses changed to knowledge absolute’. Thus the poem manages to enclose within itself an explicit refutation of evolutionism: man is indeed unique and represents the last step of the ladder, which he has reached according to the law of human progress; but there is a difference in quality that separates him both from the beasts and from God. He tends towards God but is not God. In place of Darwin’s evolution Browning posits once again a kind of Christian evolution.

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3. The imposing composition, ingeniously constructed as to seem the tale of a certain Pamphylax the Antiochene found in a parchment scroll, appears to gather together a series of themes and motifs which are typically Johannine, and among those dearest to Browning (such as the preeminence of love), combined with others which are completely fictional.169 The opening is highly imaginative. John compares himself to the embers of a fire now spent and reduced to ashes but, if one breathes upon them, incandescent once more; such is his residual capacity to remember the history to which he was witness. It is no more than ashes, but when the ashes are scattered by the wind the last man who ‘saw with his eyes and handled with his hands / That which was from the first, the Word of Life’ will die. Such hinting at the nature of faith as something relying on eye-witnessing make of Browning’s John an ideal brother to Karshish. Initially the evangelist surveys the first steps of Christian faith, which point at the same time to a modern paradigm: faith spouted forth, then disbelief insidiously crept in, and a generation of men was born who demanded certainties, required impossible explanations, even doubted that he, John, existed: ‘Was John at all, and did he say he saw?’ His words contain the prediction of the plight of modern man, who can only base his faith on indirect evidence, and of an age in which faith is threatened by the appearance of the Antichrist, and truth is blocked, and ‘deadened of its absolute blaze’ it ‘might need love’s eye to pierce the o’erstretched doubt’.170 Towards the end Browning has

169 The fictional first narrator briefly recalls in brackets the theory, more Platonic or Augustinian than Johannine, of the three souls (working, knowing, and being) which determine Man’s reaching out to God. 170 The nostalgic tone of the opening fades away with the advent of a heavy and invasive didacticism interspersed with over-elaborate and often unsuitable comparisons. To demonstrate the vital importance of Christ to Man, John resorts to an enthymeme: as Prometheus taught Man the superiority of fire over all other gifts, so we must see the role of Christ. In commenting on human blindness, he returns to paradox: ‘How shall ye help this man who knows himself, / That he must love and would be loved again, / Yet, owning his own love that proveth Christ, / Rejecteth Christ through very need of him?’ To illustrate the necessity of faith, John relies on Voltaire’s comparison, that of the child who, raised in a cave, and having at his disposal only the reflection of sunlight, still believes in the existence of a strong source of light even if he cannot see it himself.

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John discuss the absence of miracles and signs intended to give guarantees and definitive support to faith in present times, and silently argues that Victorian literature was not to be considered very different from that immediately following John. If Christ’s miracles were necessary because ‘save for [them], no faith was possible’, in the contemporary age a miracle ‘would compel, not help’, and violence would thereby be done to the freedom of choice in Man, who must, after all, play a part. 4. ‘Mr Sludge, the “Medium”’ is planned and develops as the digressive ramblings of a medium caught out by one of his victims, and who begs him not to publicly expose him, recounts his life and reveals the tricks of his trade, but also defends his ‘art’. It is Browning’s contribution to one of the most widely debated and controversial pseudo-cultural phenomena of his time, and which also had a quite unpleasant, personal side-effect. This is in fact that ‘long poem’ (indeed the longest composition ever included in a collection) of which he never allowed his wife to read even a line in the two years in which it was sketched out and drafted (1859–1860), both because the two spouses had agreed not to show each other their work until in its final stages and above all because the topic was one upon which they most strongly disagreed. On Browning’s official position regarding Spiritualism there can be no doubt: he was resolutely sceptical, expressed many times the conviction that it was a colossal fraud and his indignation exploded on more than a few memorable occasions. The recognized model of the imaginary Sludge is Daniel Dunglas Home, an American medium of English origin who between 1850 and 1860 had an extraordinary following across Europe and whom the Brownings met for the first time at Ealing, during a trip to England in 1855. Elizabeth later participated with him in several séances.171 Anyone expecting a confirmation or an exacerbation of this judgement in this poem would be, however, disappointed. Browning’s condemnation of Spiritualism is carried out in an extremely anomalous way, because his primary target is not so much Sludge, whom Browning justifies, humanizes and even empathizes with, seeing him as a poor devil who, at the end, solemnly promises to change his ways. On the contrary, blame is placed squarely on society, which encourages him, adulates him and traps

171 § 108.4.

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him in a role, a situation which the medium has legitimately exploited to his own advantage. Browning lashes out at the credulousness of people, particularly the educated and their infatuation. Ultimately he ridicules that frivolous society (American, but also English, for that matter) which he himself would frequent assiduously after 1861. His negative judgement of this class stands out if for no other reason than the low moral standing of Sludge’s interlocutor.172 Nevertheless, as soon as the monologue gets going, the satirical objective proves to be specious and ultimately secondary: not only does the condemnation of Spiritualism end up being far less cut and dried, but we discover a doubtful, possibilistic Browning, to say the least. What counts most is that the monologue once again broaches an investigation of religious faith and considers those doubts which at the same time undermine and fortify it: ‘Sludge’ is in short a pendant to Bishop Blougram’s apology – the apology, not completely untrustworthy and partly worthy of hearing, of a medium, which is to say of the representative of an ersatz or perhaps of the most hidden and orthodox essence of religious faith, in the same way as the Catholic faith appeared as such in the bishop’s monologue. Partly like Blougram, Sludge is a talented charlatan and a social climber and, as the far less unctuous words with which he departs show once he is no longer in the presence of his client, a consummate hypocrite. And yet his words lead us to think, they incite doubt, they spark off traces of truth from his deception. With him Browning was perhaps already probing that relativism, that ambivalence and mixture of true and false upon which The Ring and the Book hinges; he manages 172 Whoever, even in jest, spreads the rumour that he has the powers of a medium has his fate sealed, forced to become a medium almost by popular acclaim; he who ‘ferrets out’ a medium becomes just as famous as one who finds a painting that had been given up as lost, or an ancient medal, or hits on the first edition of a beloved work. For society Spiritualism was an exciting source of entertainment and of animated conversations, a show for thrill seekers, people with nothing to do, in which the medium was a well-paid actor. The exploits of Spiritualism, as Sludge admits, reduce themselves to a question of practice: one is either born a poet or athlete or medium. The trick is there, but invisible; it is self-delusion, or even a disease: ‘Once the imposture plunged its proper depth / I’ the rotten of your natures […] / It’s impossible to cheat – that’s, be found out’.

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in fact to overturn, hypothetically, his condemnation and imperceptibly asks himself: what if instead of being a coarse, macroscopic scam, it were all true? What initially is an apology and a defence, or a frank admission of a trick being played, and what is indirectly a scathing social satire, turns into an investigation into the relationship between Spiritualism and religious faith and of their possible collaboration and interpenetration. 5. The turning point of which I am speaking occurs towards the almost exact midpoint of the monologue: Sludge admits that he has cheated every time he was able, and yet in all honesty he affirms that there is ‘something in it, tricks and all’. The examination of the possibly religious modicum of Spiritualism begins with a casual comment: ‘With my phenomena / I laid the atheist sprawling on his back, / Propped up Saint Paul, or, at least, Swedenborg’. According to Sludge, Spiritualism backs up religion, helps and comforts man in his thirst for knowledge about the afterlife, and in that sense, he insists, there is a perfect agreement between the Bible and Spiritualism, which favours the interaction between the living and – according to what it teaches – that ‘world beside the world / With spirits, not mankind, for tenantry’. Spiritualism, in short, does nothing other than restore that contact with life after death of which the Bible itself speaks and whose traces were lost in post-biblical times. This claim by Sludge thus provides a guarantee which is undoubtedly paradoxical and ironic, but in the light of the context in which this poem is placed, it conveys to Browning a seduction which is far from implausible. Sludge’s monologue, in fact, gradually loses any mediumistic specificity, and comes to echo the voice of those doubting investigators of faith found in the poems of Men and Women, as well as to channel and exorcise obsessions typical of Browning and largely shared by his contemporaries. It soon shifts towards a semi-serious study of the Victorian cult of signs and omens, a smoke-screen to make some more general comments on the action of the supernatural and the presence of the divine in daily life.173 Sludge firmly claims that Spiritualism deserves 173 ‘I live by signs and omens’ says Sludge, who adds that he receives enlightenment on which decisions to make from the way in which a fire goes out, a pot boils or from the flight of birds. A typical Victorian image, also used by Ruskin, is that of divining the secret force which moves ball and cue in billiards. As evidence of the intervention

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to be the religion of the moment, and that it is the most orthodox and authentic of faiths (‘I think myself the more religious man’), as it traces and points to the operation of providence in the present time. His argument flows once again into the re-assertion of the precarious nature of faith, or at least alludes to the disconcerting equivalence, as far as guarantees are concerned, between Spiritualism and religious faith, in accordance with that category of doubt mentioned by Blougram. No one, claims Sludge, approaches Spiritualism with ‘pure and full belief ’: everyone embraces it with apprehension. Nor are those lacking who ‘never did, at bottom of their hearts’, believe ‘for a moment’; ironically the sceptic is compared to the doubting St Thomas and to the ‘guest without the wedding-garb’ in the Gospel. ‘I’ve my taste of truth, / Likewise my touch of falsehood’, he confesses. Then with even more spine-chilling words he tells his listener: ‘Don’t let truth’s lump rot stagnant for the lack / Of a timely helpful lie to leaven it’. On this analogy his most disturbing words are these: ‘I tell you, sir, in one sense, I believe / Nothing at all, – that everybody can, / Will, and does cheat: but in another sense / I’m ready to believe my very self – / That every cheat’s inspired, and every lie / Quick with a germ of truth’. 6. ‘Caliban Upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island’ (written probably between the end of 1859 and the beginning of 1860) was directly influenced, indeed almost provoked, by the reading of Darwin’s The Origin of Species and by a myriad of pamphlets and comments of a Darwinist nature which came out in its wake. The monologue figures as a most original appendix or continuation to The Tempest, as it imagines that Caliban has gone seeking ‘for grace’ as augured in the final act of Shakespeare’s play. Its meaning is completely clear if one sticks to its value as a representation of the psychology of a savage; indeed it is one of the most accomplished and imaginative of Browning’s dramatic monologues for its ingenious mimesis and for its invention of a monkeyish English whose lexicon, grammar and syntax have nevertheless an archaic and primordial flavour. In fact,

of the supernatural in daily life, Sludge recounts to his listener that he miraculously escaped from a railway accident thanks to having forgotten his handkerchief, in contrast to ‘the thirty-three that Providence forgot’.

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Caliban speaks mostly in the third person rather than the first, and the natural world with the flora and the fauna comprises the horizon of his verbal world and originate the tropes that he uses. Far less clear, indeed cryptic, is the composition if one attempts to decipher Browning’s stance and intentions. Among his numerous alter egos, all of them endowed with some points of contact with their creator, Caliban is doubtless one of the most distant and unlikely. Yet not even in this case can we say that he dissociates himself completely from the subject matter put forward by this character; or that he has stayed rigorously neutral. As the title suggests, the monologue contains a detailed formulation of natural theology, reporting, that is, the thoughts which a savage on a deserted island might have about God, thoughts of a rough creature who in an evolutionary sense has more of the brute in him than the man, but also represents the hypothetical human category which has nothing other than its own embryonic intellect and its personal experiential context, from which to form ideas, and no previous information to aid him. It is an elementary observation that of Browning’s major monologues about religion, this is one of the few where for obvious reasons no study is made of the truthfulness and the historical nature of the Gospels. And in a perfectly consequential way, in the absence of any Revelation, the God as love normally postulated by Browning is here removed and substituted by a God having very different, indeed diametrically opposed attributes. Caliban’s theology confusedly contemplates two antithetical divine hypostases, in conflict with each other and hierarchically ordered: Setebos, a weak god close to him, and Quiet, a strong but distant god showing indifference, indolence and apathy. Setebos, according to Caliban, created ‘in spite’ or ‘in envy’, rather than for love, beings subject to him to be used like ‘playthings’, with whom he amuses himself by torturing and directing them while finding satisfaction in their actions. Ravaged by envy for not being able to climb up to Quiet, Setebos quenches his thirst for dominion and power by fantasizing about unreal worlds and dressing up as Prospero: like a child, he ‘takes his mirth with make-believes’. And Caliban and the other creatures on the island? The best way to escape Setebos’ anger is not to appear happy. He simulates, dances on moonlit nights but wails during the day, laughs in his hideaways and offers sacrifices to Setebos, hoping that Quiet will break out of his

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idleness and that Setebos will age and finally die; but in the meantime the crow, an informer, tells Setebos everything, and, furious, the latter lashes out at Caliban with thunder. If the subtitle, ‘Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself ’ (from Psalm 50) has a meaning, the primary theme of the poem, or at least one of its themes, is the discussion and possible rebuttal of a rigorously anthropomorphic notion of divinity. However, Setebos is also an exaggerated portrait of the Victorian God, and especially of the God of the Nonconformists, the tradition in which Browning was raised. He tended to see God as friendly and loving: and Setebos is vindictive, terrible and violent, a mere step above being a sadistic torturer, an insatiable God who – an assertion which speaks volumes of his fickleness and indecipherability – ‘doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord’.174 7. A nearly perfect counterpart to ‘Caliban upon Setebos’ (but written in solemn rhymed sextains), ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ is a far more orthodox and direct meditation on the nature and the figure of God. It too was influenced by contemporary immanentist philosophies, but only to condemn them in toto. More precisely, it is a rejoinder to FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát and its approval of a faithless, hedonistic carpe diem, and to Arnold’s ‘Empedocles on Etna’. Arnold was so impressed by the poem that he asked it be read to him while on his deathbed. Browning chose as his mouthpiece the much more unequivocal, multi-faceted sage and scholarly Jew of the first century of the new millennium,175 prefiguring autobiographically his own adieu to youth and preparing himself for a trusting embrace of old age and a fearless meeting with death. The theology of the rabbi, no longer ‘natural’ but distinctly transcendentalist, puts God back where He belongs, recognizes His power and His love, and reaffirms that time and history are preordained and solidly guided by the hand of their maker, and Man is oriented towards a world beyond, not left at the mercy of chance. Dismissing the religious

174 At the same time Caliban is a Victorian observer of nature shaken by a constant internal war, and by the enmity of his elements and his inhabitants fighting to survive, at the mercy of chance. 175 Browning knew his ‘Song of death’ well, and reinvented it in ‘Holy-Cross Day’ in Men and Women, an apology for the Jewish faith and an indirect denunciation of the repressive measures of Catholicism, especially during the Renaissance.

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implications of materialism and evolutionary theory, not only does ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ shed light on the intentions of ‘Caliban upon Setebos’, but also points to a re-discussion, certainly from a much more humble perspective, of the Promethean issues of Paracelsus, as well as those of the ‘grammarian’ and of Childe Roland. The rabbi insistently vindicates the divine nature of Man, ‘a god though in the germ’, denies any common ground with the ‘developed brute’ untouched by any divine spark, and above all refuses any easy hedonism or pessimistic immobility: ‘Poor vaunt indeed of life, / Were man but formed to feed / On joy, to solely seek and find the feast’.176 As a representative of his ideas or religious aspirations Browning also chose the musician Georg Joseph Vogler, the German composer, organist and music theoretician who lived during the second half of the eighteenth century, and who was famous in his lifetime only to fall into oblivion after his death. He was chosen perhaps less for his musical merits or the profound nature of his faith, of which there is no particular evidence (though Vogler was ordained a Catholic priest), than for the fact that John Relfe, Browning’s music teacher as a youth, had been his pupil. ‘Abt Vogler’ is the only monologue spoken by an artist in Dramatis Personae, but its protagonist does not appear principally in this role, and offers us first and foremost his spiritualized poetics. Browning makes him into a mystic, and one who shares many of the ideas of the rabbi Ben Ezra. The abbot is a late blooming Baroque musician who composed ad maiorem Dei gloria; like Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’177 the poem conveys the reactions of amazement felt by an 176 Both the recognition of the insignificance of Man (and his miraculous and tendential divinity) and the biblical simile depicting God as a potter, of time as his potter’s wheel, and man as the vase, are recurrent tropes in Victorian poetry (cf. § 103.4). 177 See the recurrence of the word ‘minion’ and the whole third stanza with its images of elevation and the description of the whirlwind dance of the notes. The first octave is extraordinarily elaborate, with its accurate sound texture filled with alliterations, and its musical, turgid, Baroque syntax. The opening ‘Would’ finds its grammatical resolution after seven lines of unusual length, fourteen syllables for the most part, and this period predates certain Hopkinsian syntactic acrobatics and in particular the long-drawn-out opening of  ‘Henry Purcell’ and, to an even greater extent (for its rhythm, its echoes, and the conceptual agreement: the fusion of parts and members in a harmonious whole), the sonnet ‘Harry Ploughman’.

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artist standing before the mastery of his creation and seeing in that mastery the revelation of the ‘finger of God’.178 In short, thanks to his improvisation, the abbot enjoys a moment of privileged vision, an epiphany and flash of inspiration: ‘God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear; / The rest may reason and welcome: ’tis we musicians know’. Vogler echoes the rabbi in the optimistic certainty that life will be completed beyond the grave and in God, that time will be redeemed and become eternity and that this world is fundamentally good: ‘The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; / What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more’. Browning reserved for Vogler, therefore, a more respectful treatment, and showered greater praise on him than that given to his imaginary and near contemporary compatriot Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, whom he had dismissed, in part for satirical purposes, as the very essence of chaos and superficiality in a poem of Men and Women. ‘Abt Vogler’, although different structurally, may be compared to ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’, whose speaker is a much more sceptical and pessimistic observer of life. Browning chose ‘Abt Vogler’ when once he was asked to indicate the four most representative specimens of his art: the second half is somewhat forced, wordy and excessively didactic, but the first six octaves form a splendidly inspired prelude. 8. One may doubt that ‘Epilogue’ has the clarifying and conclusive value that critics have attributed to it. This short poem, which repeats much more concisely the conceptual path of Christmas-Eve, gives voice to only three religious attitudes and distinct ways of conceiving and experiencing faith: Browning is arguably neutral, recording as he does these voices following one another in a juxtaposition rather than as contrasting viewpoints; nor is there any reason to imagine them in a hierarchical order or even to identify the third with that of Browning himself. The first voice is that of the ancient, biblical faith of David, who remembers the day of the consecration of the Temple and the descent of God in the form of a glorious cloud, seen by a myriad of onlookers fused together in a single community.

178 Vogler was, curiously, not only the inventor of a new instrument, the portable organ, but also of a new system of fingering. Thirty years earlier, at his debut, Browning had defined music, in Pauline, as an ‘earnest of heaven’.

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This voice is confidently and profoundly aware of God’s presence and immanence in the world.  Browning assigned the second voice to Renan only in the editions following the first, but he had him already in mind as he composed the poem almost at the same time as he was reading Vie de Jésus, towards the end of 1863. This is the voice complaining of the absence of God and as such one of the most heartfelt, melancholy confessions of the Deus absconditus, lamenting the distance of his ‘star’, which leaves behind a thick, disorienting universal shadow. What the third voice says, discarding both David’s faith and Renan’s lack thereof, is that in its very variety and its incessant change the earth is the most unquestionable testimony of the presence of God: ‘where’s the need of Temple, when the walls / Of the world are that? […] / That one face, far from vanish, rather grows / Or decomposes but to recompose, / Become my universe that feels and knows’. After all the masks and the tantalizing seductions and temptations of doubt in Dramatis Personae, such final and apodictic transparency is somewhat suspect: the debate was to reopen, even intensified and more morbid, in The Ring and the Book, and in the poems and collections of Browning’s last decade. § 125. Browning up to 1869 XXII: ‘Dramatis Personae’ II. Autobiographical and occasional poems The other side of Dramatis Personae consists of poems of a completely different type, more accessible and approachable, lyrical and in part autobiographical, combined with others which are decidedly occasional and anecdotal. They form a necessary, desirable counterweight to so much uninterrupted abstract and incandescent thought. While in essence this jump does still correspond to the youthful poetics of variation that marked his earlier collections, it is also true that these minor poems assured Browning a moderate success in terms of audience, or more exactly they represented, compared to the silence and harsh comments which his earlier works had received, his first true, unmitigated triumph. Suffice it to recall that this was the first of his works to require a second edition. In short, considering the fame that it earned him, Dramatis Personae is a key work, because with it Browning, even without ever attaining the heights of popularity enjoyed by Tennyson, began to establish himself in the position and in the esteem

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which he deserved. And this was possible, we must remember, only when in the eyes of the critics and readers he was no longer eclipsed by Elizabeth, who had passed away in 1861. Her death was undoubtedly a terrible blow for Browning, although one must be careful not to over-idealize or exaggerate her balancing qualities nor conceal the misunderstandings and the disagreements in their marriage, as I discussed in the biographical section; these things Browning was after all hesitant to admit fully even to himself. It is, however, undeniable that from the point of view of his productivity alone, the loss of Elizabeth coincided with a fresh flow of force and energy. From a compositional perspective, Dramatis Personae covers the last years of Elizabeth’s life and the first ones of Browning’s widowhood; but the poems that Browning wrote before 1861 are very few, or far fewer than those written after. If, however, he was inactive or not particularly active (in nine years he wrote twenty-one poems, although the first sketches for The Ring and the Book date back to the beginning of the decade 1860–1870), this was because he was absorbed by the care of his ever-sicker wife as well as worn out by envy over her own growing popularity, which reached its height with Aurora Leigh. 2. The only poem written (in July 1861 or slightly later) on the death of Elizabeth is ‘Prospice’, a Dantesque179 acknowledgement of her guiding function, fulfilled both during life and from the hereafter. It also reverberates with one of the most determined challenges and exorcisms of death that Browning bequeathed, perfectly matching the confidence, the audacity and the heroic and combative philosophy of his own temperament, which he had always yearned to claim for himself, so that the poem may be said to be a lyrical and autobiographical counterpart to ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’: ‘I was ever a fighter, so – one fight more, / The best and the last’. The leap into the dark of the ‘heroes of old’, with whom Browning feels akin, is depicted as an ascent to mountainous regions where Death reigns, and fog, mist, snow, lightning and a sense of suffocating are a prelude to the battle. Doubts about the reward for and the ultimate utility of this fight give way to certainty; the battle reveals itself to be proverbially briefer and easier 179 Browning added to his wife’s will a meaningful passage from the Vita Nuova celebrating the immortality of the soul.

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than he had imagined, and an amazing metamorphosis and transfiguration also intervene: in a short time the tempest dies down, the sun is split in two by the apparition of Elizabeth, ‘soul of my soul’, who joins the dying man, going with him towards God. 3. The approach of death and the fatal encounter with it recur in the group of poems treating theological themes – in John the Evangelist and Rabbi Ben Ezra – and constitute one of the most unmistakable guiding themes in Dramatis Personae. In a style which is no longer solemn and visionary but rather markedly colloquial, Browning writes of it in ‘Apparent Failure’,180 rewording, very affably, his own incurable theological optimism. Death is faced with lightness if not almost with audacity and mockery, and we even find a play on words with ‘morgue’, which renders famous the Seine just as Petrarch immortalized the Sorgue. The whole reconstruction of the unhealthy gesture of the three suicides laid out in the morgue is informed by a broad-minded perspective and a spirit of compassion and comprehension, rather than sternness or moralistic condemnation: ‘I thought, and think, their sins atoned’. The dying man in ‘Confessions’ speaks with rude impatience to the confessor, come to urge him towards resignation, and the memories of his last hours are, almost improperly, happy: he reminisces about his life without feeling it at all to be a ‘valley of tears’, on the contrary seeing it transfigured into a landscape frequented in his youth, cheered by the presence of his beloved. Ultimately even ‘May and Death’ is a relativization of death; among the first poems in Dramatis Personae, it was written in 1852 after the death of Browning’s cousin James Silverthorn, son of the maternal aunt who had financed Pauline and best man at his wedding in 1846. 4. From 1854 and until 1861 (with the exception of one year almost entirely spent in Paris between 1855 and 1856) the Brownings generally lived in Florence during the summer and wintered in Rome; but the landscapes of the poems in Dramatis Personae are no longer mostly Italian, as they had been in Men and Women and still more in Dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. The presence of Italy is practically erased and the 180 ‘Apparent’ according to the perspective indicated in the text, or otherwise ‘evident’ from a purely worldly one.

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settings become mostly Parisian and French. Browning drew some hints and inspiration, and a few settings, from the legends of Brittany, where he went on vacation in 1862 and 1864, composing there a substantial part of the collection. Brittany is the setting of its first five poems, which have in common the treatment of cases of love, yet caught in a very specific aspect or phase, namely the absence of love, the condition when love has faded and is regretted, or love which blooms but is left to wilt, renounced and finally extinguished. In most cases, the titles immediately betray and foreshadow bitterness and regret. ‘James Lee’s Wife’ – in part a tardy rewriting and continuation of a sketch dating all the way back to 1836, completed during a summer vacation in Pornic in 1862, and pervaded by its rough and windy landscapes – is the opening composition in Dramatis Personae. A lyrical, dream-like poem, it stands out for the beautiful depiction of the dim marine scenes and the weaving of the natural symbols (autumn, Browning’s season of absence par excellence; the wind, a symbol of mutability as in Shelley), and above all for the sober, essential style and the spare musicality, so unusual compared with Browning’s expressive opulence. It is the prolonged reverie of a new bride who ardently wishes for the continuation of a love which is already finished, therefore an elegy over the smouldering unhappiness of marriage and the impossibility, often lamented by Browning, of keeping the flame of first love alive and not reducing it to the prosaicness of everyday life. Much more pessimistically than anywhere else, Browning alludes to the effect of the erosion of time on human things, transporting into the sphere of love that dilemma between eternity and change which he so thoroughly debates in the religious sphere. It is now the woman who, reversing the roles of a poem which hinges on the same theme – ‘The Last Ride Together’ – becomes the mouthpiece of the glorification of the eternity of love. The theme lyrically explored in this poem becomes an object of scorn in ‘The Worst of It’. The case being examined is that of a poor devil, a mediocre and imperfect man being betrayed by his wife, generally regarded as a model of perfection and purity, a veritable immaculate ‘swan’ while he is unquestionably blemished, and married her in sincerely desiring to be purified and bettered. When he discovers her betrayal he resolves not to resign himself but to obtain revenge: he wonders how the Creator will judge her – will she gain or lose Paradise? In any case he invokes a punishment:

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‘I am called at last / When the devil stabs you, to lend the knife’. ‘Dis aliter Visum; or Le Byron des Nos Jours’ (the setting is the same Breton coast of Pornic) is spoken in contrast by a woman who meets a man with whom, ten years earlier, a lasting love could have bloomed, perhaps even leading to marriage, and imagines his thoughts, if and how he would have wished to make advances and why it had all come to nothing. A poet and cultured man, he is soon to be a candidate for a post with the Académie Française, and acts quite differently than Byron would have in his day (hence the alternative title). The essence of the poem, along the lines of ‘The Statue and the Bust’, is the condemnation of waiting and prudence in love. The same is true of ‘Too Late’, in which the autobiographical speaker cries for a woman whom he ardently loved but married another man. He accuses himself for not having fought enough and having given up too early. On the theme of undeclared love, never stated and ultimately lost, Browning also wrote a playful, refined variation with the feel of an Aesopian fable, entitled ‘Youth and Art’. The protagonists are a couple of sparrows with artistic ambitions. One wishes to reinvigorate the fame of a sculptor of merit, the other to emulate the gift of song of a Grisi. Neither of the two had the courage or the timing to declare the love they felt for the other, with the result that both end up marrying the wrong partner. 5. ‘The Guardian Angel’ from Men and Women is the model of a series of pictorial fantasies inspired by works of art, for the most part insignificant although generally witty and well-constructed. A commentary in verse was written by Browning on a portrait of Patmore’s first wife made by Millais, and he dedicated a composition of only eight lines to a group of sculptures by Thomas Woolner which showed two deaf and dumb twins; a third, almost an exact companion piece, was also written on a painting by Frederick Leighton exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1864, depicting Orpheus and Eurydice. Browning apparently saw his own wife in the mythological female figure wishing to be rescued from the underworld. Much more significant, although far from a masterpiece, and notable for its connections with poems with a prevailing religious theme, is ‘Gold Hair’, the reworking of a Breton legend whose protagonist is a girl from Pornic (where the poem was written around 1862) of a waxen, almost immaterial beauty crowned and intensified by a flowing mane of golden hair. The girl,

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believed to be a model of perfection and purity (in a way similar to the swan-woman of ‘The Worst of It’) takes a fortune of Louis-d’or to her grave hidden in her hair; secretly and passionately greedy, she thus demonstrates an unsuspected attachment to the world, while everyone had believed her ‘a soul that is meant / […] To just see earth, and hardly be seen, / And blossom in heaven instead’, and who in popular belief had been ‘turned an angel before the time’. The deception is revealed, and the fortune surfaces, during works of repair to the church where the girl has been buried close to the altar. Even granted its adherence to the legend, the poem is arguably an unmitigated condemnation of asceticism (which for Browning, more often than not, seems to be devious and insincere), and of its degeneration into hypocrisy. The tone is one of open mockery towards religion, at least of the Catholic type, and especially for its practices and its ministers, its poses and superstitions. The moral of the story, emerging in the final stanzas, frames this anecdote within the ongoing religious debate triggered by biblical criticism. Browning resorts to his usual moral laxity deeply veined with common sense and cynicism: ‘saints tumble to earth with so slight a tilt’, according to the priest, an expert in human matters, faced with the discovery of the gold. Browning also dismisses the supposed objections of the representatives of biblical criticism, affirming his own orthodoxy even and above all in a case which should bring grist to their mill: but he does this with verbal virtuosity worthy of Bishop Blougram’s: ‘’Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart / At the head of a lie – taught Original Sin, / The Corruption of Man’s Heart’. § 126. Browning up to 1869 XXIII: ‘The Ring and the Book’* I. Materials, sources, structural organization and conceptual framework In Rome, on 2 January 1698, Guido Franceschini, a forty-year-old count from Arezzo, barbarically killed with a hail of knife wounds, with the complicity of four assassins, his in-laws Violante and Pietro Comparini and his barely eighteen-year-old wife, and their adopted daughter, Pompilia. It was the savage end of a marriage purely based on convenience, in which *

Browning made many revisions in the second edition, published in 1872, and in the third, which he included in his 1889 Poetical Works. This last edition is the one adopted by all three of the principal complete editions of Browning’s poetry (§ 104.1) and by

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the young girl had been no more than a bargaining chip. Franceschini, an impoverished nobleman, had in fact married Pompilia, whose parents had presented her as their legitimate daughter, solely to come into the possession of her considerable fortune. The Comparinis on the other hand, rich but not noble, had given him their daughter’s hand in marriage to raise their social standing. Having followed her after the marriage to Arezzo and to the two modern critical editions. In accordance with my rigorously chronological approach I will however follow the text of the first edition of 1868–1869, reproduced and edited by R. D. Altick, Harmondsworth 1971. A. K. Cook, A Commentary upon Browning’s ‘The Ring and the Book’, London 1920, is still useful today for its explanations of historical, literary, mythological references. Its Appendixes discuss the main cruces of the poem. This commentary must be integrated with F. Treves, The Country of ‘The Ring and the Book’, London 1913. J. Cassidy, A Study of Browning’s ‘The Ring and the Book’, Oxford 1924; J. E. Shaw, ‘The “Donna Angelicata” in The Ring and the Book’, PMLA, XLI (1926), 55–81; L. Snitslaar, Sidelights on R. Browning’s ‘The Ring and the Book’, Amsterdam 1934; B. R. McElderry, ‘Victorian Evaluation of The Ring and the Book’, in Research Studies of the State College of New York, VII (1939), 75–89, and ‘The Narrative Structure of Browning’s The Ring and the Book’, ibid., XI (1943), 199–233; R. Langbaum, ‘The Ring and the Book: A Relativist Poem’, in The Poetry of Experience, quoted in the general bibliography (§ 104), 109–36; E. D. H. Johnson, ‘Browning’s Pluralistic Universe: A Reading of The Ring and the Book’, in University of Toronto Quarterly, XXXI (1961), 20–41; G. R. Wassermain, ‘The Meaning of Browning’s Ring-Figure’, in Modern Language Notes, LXXVI (1961), 420–6; R. D. Altick and J. F. Loucks, Browning’s Roman Murder Story: A Reading of ‘The Ring and the Book’, Chicago, IL 1968 (an extensive critical survey, with valuable analyses of themes and motifs); M. R. Sullivan, Browning’s Voices in ‘The Ring and the Book’: A Study of Method and Meaning, Toronto 1969 (a rather scholastic commentary); P. A. Cundiff, Browning’s Ring Metaphor and Truth, Metichen 1972; B. Litzinger, ‘The Structural Logic of The Ring and the Book’, in Twentieth Century Literary Per­spectives, ed. C. De L. Ryals, Durham, NC 1974, 105–14; J. Killham, ‘Browning’s “Modernity”: The Ring and the Book and Relativism’, in H. Bloom and A. Munich 1979 (quoted in the general bibliography, § 104), 79–99; W. E. Buckler, Poetry and Truth in Robert Browning’s ‘The Ring and the Book’, New York 1985; M. Bellorini, Ritratti in scena. Una lettura di ‘The Ring and the Book’ di Robert Browning, Bari 1992; P. H. Padma, Robert Browning: Character and Motive in ‘The Ring and the Book’, New Delhi 1996; A. P. Brady, Pompilia: A Feminist Reading of Browning’s ‘The Ring and the Book’, Athens, OH 1998; P. D. Rigg, Robert Browning Romantic Irony in ‘The Ring and the Book’, Madison, NJ 1999. For the translations and reproductions of The Old Yellow Book, the source of the poem, see below, n. 184.

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the estate of the count, and realizing what a mistake they had made, they had returned to Rome after only a few months where, to the surprise of everyone, they revealed the illegitimacy of Pompilia, thus scuppering the plans of Franceschini. After four years of mistreatment by her husband, Pompilia fled from Arezzo on an April day in 1697 with the help of a priest, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, with whom Guido caught her in a tavern at the gates of Rome, handing her over to the law with the accusation of adultery. Count Franceschini began to design his bloody plans when he realized that the law, as he thought, had failed to punish the two adulterers with the necessary severity, handing out only light sentences. The birth of a child to Pompilia was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The young wife, who suffered for three days before succumbing, even on her deathbed held to a version of the story completely different from that of Guido. Abandoned by her adoptive parents, abused by her husband and the victim of general indifference, she had had no other choice but to escape. But her honour was intact, the child was Guido’s, and Caponsacchi had not been her lover but her heroic champion. In the trial that followed, Franceschini was found guilty of murder and condemned to death with his accomplices. An appeal for clemency was made to Pope Innocent XII, but in vain. On 22 February, 1698, the five assassins were executed in Rome, in a packed Piazza del Popolo. These are, in a nutshell, the bloody events and the late seventeenth-century Italian court case that raised a great furore at the time of their occurrence, only to be rapidly forgotten. From the contemporary accounts and proceedings of the trial which he discovered by chance, Browning wove the twelve books of The Ring and the Book (1868–1869). This poem, the second peak of his art, is at least in some aspects a work of profound and even revolutionary modernity. It also represents the crowning achievement of Browning’s technical and formal experimentation, and sums up and synthesizes a great number of his emotional and autobiographical experiences, as well as the speculative and thematic subjects found in his poetry from the very beginning. First and foremost, it signals a return to the long narrative and dramatic poem, a dream cherished by Browning at the inception of his career, but which had fallen short with Paracelsus and especially with Sordello. The dramatic monologue, as in its best examples in Men and Women, reaches the apex of its mastery and artistic completion,

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offering itself as an ingenious rhetorical and argumentative construction on the one hand and a vigorous, chiselled-out revelation of a personality on the other. At the same time, it is a vast drama for voices which confirms once more Browning’s dramatic ambitions, but, in its sequence of selfenclosed monologues and in the lack of action, also exhibits the reasons for the failure of the youthful playwright.181 In the historical annals he found an event full of ambiguities and relativistic contortions which, as he immediately intuited, already had the Browning imprint before his time. He was also quick to realize the adaptability of the protagonists to his consolidated human types and the suitability of the actual events to the scenes, situations and cases typical of his repertoire. In the final analysis, the Roman murder had had its origin in a poor marriage and in conjugal unhappiness, which is a subtly autobiographical theme frequently explored in earlier poetry collections. No less autobiographical and no less represented in Browning’s work is the related theme of the

181 A confirmation of the dramatic potential of the poem comes from the theatrical production of a shorter version entitled Caponsacchi, inspired by and derived from The Ring and the Book, which encountered a modicum of success in New York in 1926–1927 (De Vane 1955, 347). The speakers themselves in the poem (for instance the unnamed one in Book II and Guido Franceschini in the fifth) refer to the plot as a pièce divided into scenes and performed by actors: more than once it is called a ‘farce’, indeed a ‘broad farce’ in several acts, in which the discovery of the love letters exchanged between Pompilia and Caponsacchi constitutes the fifth act, and a farce of which the two supposed lovers are the authors, who months earlier had composed the prologue and later added the development right under Guido’s nose. In Book III the trial for divorce is specifically defined as a prelude to the ‘first act of the farce’, whose crisis coincides with the moment in which Guido plans the murder, like an actor studying his part ‘fearless of a failure’. In the view of the sceptical speaker of Book IV the ‘play’ turns into a mechanical, senseless drama, or into a theatre of the absurd: the truth, for the waiting populace, will descend from the sky like the deus ex machina in the fifth act (but this is an ironic explanation in which he does not believe). From the farce that it was, the story becomes a tragedy due to the verdict of the court in the trial for divorce, which recalls the puppet shows in Piazza Navona, when at the end the puppets appear dressed in different costumes ready for the following show. For other uses of the theatrical metaphor in Books X and XII see § 132.4 n. 247, and 132.7 n. 253.

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liberation of an oppressed and unhappy woman, at the centre of ‘The Flight of the Duchess’.182 Pompilia, in her flower-like openness to the beauty of the world, in her unconditional yet chaste offer of herself ad extra, reincarnates Pippa of Pippa Passes;183 and her treatment at the hands of the evil Guido is reminiscent – although he is a count rather than a duke – of the duchess in ‘My Last Duchess’. Guido Franceschini is then none other than a scenic and psychological expansion of that perverse duke, and The Ring and the Book is a mammoth re-working of ‘My Last Duchess’. Yet Guido Franceschini, split between the recognition of his own limits and his boundless ambition, also marks the final re-appearance of the insidious and omnipresent theme of striving, while the two Roman lawyers of Books VIII and IX are perhaps Browning’s most admirable creations of the figure of the charlatan. However, until the very end, they are allowed a veneer of credibility. As to the Pope, he is on the one hand the target of an anti-Catholic polemic frequently found in earlier works as well as, on the other hand, yet another investigator of the guarantees of faith, and the disguised mouthpiece for Browning’s Hamlet-like doubts. 2. A square-shaped book, called from the very beginning the ‘Old Yellow Book’,184 was the main source for the poem. Browning himself tells 182 The autobiographical theme that Browning saw mirrored in the Roman murder story is naturally his own flight with Elizabeth Barrett in September 1846. Significantly, Browning moved the date of the flight of Pompilia from 28 April 1697, when it really occurred, to 23 April, the feast of St George. 183 Pippa is also unjustly slandered and saved in extremis, as well as suspected of being an illegitimate child. 184 The book is yellow as having a yellow cover (which the book, kept today in the library of Balliol College in Oxford, does have) as well as ‘yellowed’, to underline its age. It has been reproduced and translated in C. W. Hodell, The Old Yellow Book: Source of Browning’s ‘The Ring and the Book’, Washington 1908, 2nd edn 1915, and, in a more accurate and extensively commented version, in J. M. Gest, The Old Yellow Book: Source of Browning’s ‘The Ring and the Book’, Boston, MA 1925. The Florentine lawyer Francesco Cencini edited in this book twenty-two official and semi-official documents written in the legal Latin of the seventeenth century (of which three are hand-written) concerning the Franceschini trial. It is perhaps worth remembering that that trial took place in Rome according to the customary procedure of the Papal state, and, unlike today’s practice, was carried out exclusively by means of written discussion and

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in the opening lines of Book I of the poem how, walking through the streets of Florence with a heightened sensitivity for historical events, he found the book by pure chance on the morning of a day in June 1860, rummaging at a stall selling second-hand items around the Basilica of San Lorenzo; and how, buying it for a lira, he began to rifle through it, indeed to read it avidly, even on the walk home; and of the sleepless night that he spent and his imaginary dream of a horseback ride in which he was transfigured into Pompilia and Caponsacchi making their escape from Arezzo towards Rome. From that day in June Browning had the intimate, indelible certainty that he had found a splendid literary plot. His hesitations were justified. The reason why he waited so long before putting pen to paper is that Browning believed the story to be better suited to a novel than to a poem, as is testified by his curious offer of the idea to a few minor novelists who were his acquaintances, and even to Trollope (all of whom declined). More likely, he was unable to begin work on it until after Elizabeth’s illness and death, and his subsequent move to a stable residence in London after 1861. Deep down this story from seventeenth-century Italy offered unknowingly to English novelists a plot of a marked contemporary interest because, as we shall see, many of the classic Victorian novels hinge on the theme of the exchange of rank for wealth, on arranged marriages between fallen aristocrats and the offspring of rich bourgeois, as well as on

orations. Besides the ‘yellow book’ Browning, who personally conducted ultimately fruitless research at the Vatican archives, relied, for documentation regarding the murder and the capital execution, on a different summary which was sent to him from Rome by a friend – a Mrs Baker, in circumstances shrouded in mystery – which is commonly referred to as the ‘secondary source’ of the poem. In 1900 a summary of the main events of the trial and of the background, independent of the ‘Old Yellow Book’, was discovered at the Reale Biblioteca Casanatese in Rome, and was reproduced in translation in Griffin and Minchin’s 1910 biography, Appendix B, 309–27. The most important later discovery is, however, that made at the Biblioteca Comunale of Cortona in a collection of documents similar to the ‘Old Yellow Book’, which includes a series of depositions of secondary witnesses, and published in B. Corrigan, Curious Annals: New Documents Relating to Browning’s Roman Murder Story, Toronto 1956 (the original Italian was reproduced and introduced by Corrigan herself in English Miscellany, XI [1960], 333–400).

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the sudden discovery of the illegitimacy of a child, which often becomes the pivot of the novel’s plot because it was statistically confirmed by reality.185 I shall therefore point out in the course of my analysis the often very close analogies between Browning’s poem and certain Victorian novels revolving around the theme of the search for truth and for the very boundaries of the physical, the metaphysical and the phenomenological. The novelist most suited to manage a plot like that of The Ring and the Book in prose would have certainly been Wilkie Collins. Browning’s first step in the writing of the poem is usually said to be a visit he made in the summer of 1864 to the Pas de Roland during a holiday in the Pyrenees; there, after having long paused with his eyes fixed on a symbolic falcon ready to take off in flight, he devised the outline and the structure of the poem, the twelve books of the classical and epic masterpieces of the ancients. In a letter of October 1864, he confessed to Julia Wedgwood, a London friend and correspondent, that he already had the whole poem in his head and that he hoped to finish it over a period of six months, an estimate he later extended considerably. The time he spent writing the poem was four and a half years, as confirmed by the comment made by Browning taking leave, at the end of the twelfth and final book, from his ‘four-years’ intimate’.186 3. Of the two framing metaphors or symbols which appear in the title and which, with a mirror-like reflection are presented in those of the first and last books (‘The Ring and the Book’ and ‘The Book and the Ring’, respectively), the second, that of the ‘book’, does not point to the poem but instead to the aforementioned ‘Old Yellow Book’; this constitutes the unshaped, unworked gold or rather the raw material used to create, vivify,

185 Trollope had more work than he could deal with in 1868–1869, and was busy drafting his own tour de force, the novel He Knew He Was Right which, on closer inspection, has marked similarities with Browning’s poem, being based on the morbid, paranoid jealousy of a spouse, albeit not a homicidal one (Volume 5, §§ 100–1). Other novelists were also working in that decade on Italian historical events and combining reality and invention, and with wholly personal emphases, like George Eliot in Romola. We can add the further recurrences in fiction – and less frequently in poetry – of the motif of the fallen or seduced woman, such as Pompilia is or is accused of being. 186 This refers to the trial proceedings, the ‘Old Yellow Book’.

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and organize the story which gave rise to the poem. The inspiring element is the metamorphic action of the imagination and the shaping power of art, from which the ‘ring’, or in other words the poem, was created. How then did Browning shape that raw material? The very pertinence of this question was even denied by some illustrious readers of the work, among whom Carlyle and Santayana, who denounced its complete absence of structure and organization. There were also those who suggested that the poem, whose length among the poetic English classics is exceeded only by Spenser’s Faerie Queene, be pruned and abridged; and malicious reviewers added that it was published by Browning in four instalments – and the second two almost four months after the first two – to favour its absorption by the public in appropriately small doses. But does The Ring and the Book really have the formless, abstruse, labyrinthine, ‘Gothic’ structure as described by Henry James?187 It is in fact the first long work in which Browning manages to perfectly control his material, the first and the only poem where the structural organization, and the balance and arrangement of the parts – aspects which are vague or almost completely approximate or missing in earlier poems – are not just carefully thought out, but on the whole highly satisfying. Browning gave shape and a logical and poetic order to a mass of dry legal documents, creating, or in some cases simply bringing to light and accentuating, a framework of symmetries both in the events and in the characters who are involved in them and in the books entitled after them. The structural plan is ternary and binary at the same time: that is, the poem moves forward in triads of books that vaguely recall Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis mechanism, as in Books II, III and IV, or outline an ascending and descending spiral, as in Books V, VI and VII, which ideally move from earth to dematerialization. The triads alternate

187 In the essay by Henry James entitled ‘The Novel in The Ring and the Book’, Browning is defined ‘our great master’, but the poem is for him a flawed masterpiece, a work of art stifled in the course of its realization. The starting point of James’s critique is this supposed formlessness, which he would have subjected to a novel-like rewriting if only he had had in hand the ‘Old Yellow Book’. His main objection is that Caponsacchi should have been more central to the poem and its true focus. James would also have eliminated from the poem the Pope, being too transcendental a figure.

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with or are intersected by dyads, as in the books of the two lawyers, of the two ‘Half Romes’, of Guido and Pompilia.188 The sequence of the voices and their monologues is encapsulated in a frame made up of the first and twelfth books, books that integrate one another and refer to one another thanks to the action of a rich series of links of a conceptual, autobiographical or symbolic type. Book I contains a preview of the following books and a presentation of the characters; Book XII informs us about the events which followed the conclusion of the trial and those which occurred after the death of Guido.189 The difference between the frame and the painting is thus the difference between the author and the characters; there is a clear-cut division between the two. In the frame Browning or his hypostasis stands out while in the painting he remains carefully on the sidelines, giving the floor to his creations. The ten middle books are all dramatic monologues in blank verse, all of them pronounced in the time span going from the murder to the execution, even if through the monologues which follow one another the entire story is retraced time and again in great detail (and in ingeniously contrasting, and often diametrically opposed and completely irreconcilable versions), from the history of the birth of 188 Altick and Loucks 1968, 39ff., and Sullivan 1969, 178–81. 189 The narration of the execution, unlike the sober and quick announcement that Browning gives of it in Book I, occupies almost a fourth of Book XII, where it is entrusted to a letter of which there is no trace in the ‘Old Yellow Book’ and which is thus completely invented. This letter, from a Venetian tourist to a correspondent, is an excellent example of an epistolary style in verse; it has a frivolous and salon style, and is interspersed with French citations and punctuated by naughty and even unseemly comments, to the point that Browning pretends to silence him impatiently before it is finished. In the letter Guido’s execution is conceived and narrated in terms of a popular festival, along the lines of the folkloric small-town Italy depicted by Browning in previous poems. We see balconies rented for six soldi, the numbers played in the lottery, women miraculously healed. To common life and to Guido’s personal drama the Venetian tourist turns a deaf ear. He only cares to watch the spectacle in a hedonistic spirit. As an aesthete he notices the pale and unattractive face of Guido and his wearing clothes that do not suit him. This does not keep him from having an idea or rather an opinion on events. ‘The Pope has done his worst’: a man of high rank, probably a nobleman, the tourist is one of many who instinctively defend Guido.

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Pompilia to Guido’s bloody assault to the house of the Comparinis only a few days before the beginning of the trial. Browning varied and successfully remedied the monotony of the poem (whose central section consists of repetitions, albeit from diverse and opposing visual angles, of the same storyline) skilfully using a kind of cross-fade technique, in other words putting into relief and making prominent in some monologues details and segments of the story which are left more or less in the background in others. Neither, on the other hand, is it a purely, rigorously synchronic narration, since the reader is asked to imagine the single monologues spoken at different moments from one another (the distance being variable and in some cases imperceptible), in such as way as to have, even incidentally, an informative function. This makes any effort to connect them superfluous. Attention is not confined to the three main protagonists but rather, proving Browning’s ambition to paint a composite, realistic fresco of seventeenthcentury Italy, the speakers of almost half of the monologues are secondary figures or even persons extraneous to the events, and one is assigned to Pope Innocent XII, called to face a difficult dilemma, between rigour and forgiveness, by the appeal for pardon presented by Guido’s lawyers. After Book I there follow three monologues featuring three representatives of Roman public opinion; each of the three main protagonists has a monologue, but Guido, the richest and most complex character, and undisputed central character of the work, is given two, one before the beginning of the trial and another when it has ended with his sentencing and after the Pope has rejected his appeal. This monologue is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of his executioners. Space is given to comments from the public, and the most specifically judicial component is entrusted to two very engaging and contrasting monologues, one of Guido’s defence lawyer and the other of the public prosecutor and defence attorney for Pompilia. In both of them Browning has ample opportunity to display his satirical and comic verve. 4. The frequency with which Browning has his monologists linger on descriptions of external surroundings, and through them gives disproportionate space to chatting and gossiping, and describes minutiae in microscopic detail, using hundreds of lines to reconstruct and debate secondary issues and even negligible details – in the apt definition of Chesterton, the poem’s ‘apotheosis of the insignificant’ – is the first indication of the

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extent to which Browning contaminates and hybridises a literary genre consecrated by a centuries-old tradition. Upon close examination, The Ring and the Book has all the marks and canonical requisites of a heroic epic poem, were it not that at the same time it also overturns those same canons. Its genre is in fact the mock-heroic (especially, as we will see, in the character of Guido) or even the macaronic (in the books of the two lawyers).190 Returning to an earlier point, one of the reasons for the success which Browning suddenly achieved was his employment of ingredients which had bolstered the fortunes of the contemporary novel, specifically the judiciary intrigue which was one of the mainstays of the increasingly popular ‘sensational genre’. What remains a mystery is how the Victorians could find a ‘moral treasure’ – as maintained by The Athenaeum – in a work which pivots on the precariousness of truth and the evanescence and ambiguity of reality. With respect to the past, Browning undoubtedly wrote a work which contains, all things considered, far less abstract thought and far more storytelling, or at least a substantial balance is struck (with the possible exception of the second book of Guido and that of the Pope) between the introspective probing, or the arduous and convoluted argument, and a more directly narrative content. The pace of the poem is, for long stretches, surprisingly linear. Its most modern aspect is certainly the establishment of cognitive relativism as a dominant conceptual category. In Book I, Browning of course makes his own personal version of the facts and his own verdict on the thorny judicial case, very clear, but he disappears from the scene of events and interweaves a polyphony of highly discordant voices whose effect on the reader is that of undermining and even overturning any initial confidence in that profession of insoluble uncertainty about what is true and what is false, what is real and what merely apparent. This results in the gradual affirmation of agnostic relativism, not only towards this particular Roman case, but also universalized: ‘here’s the plague / That all this trouble comes of telling truth, / Which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false, / Seems to be just the thing it would supplant, / Nor recognizable by who it left – / While falsehood

190 Altick and Loucks 1968, 7 and 181ff.

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would have done the work of truth’. For ten books this cognitive oscillation is enhanced by the interchangeability of true and false which we witness through the contrasting versions of the facts in the same story. Every single character, for the duration of his or her monologue, plays the role of the indisputable guardian of the truth, only to be completely contradicted by the next speaker. Two or more versions exist for each small segment of the ‘story’, and within each single version there are contrasting developments. Each version is given the same weight, an entire book, only to be rebutted and undermined by the next, but always provisionally. The evocativeness emerging from The Ring and the Book, by virtue of this particular device, is extraordinary, although it is possible to find similarities in what Richardson and Smollett had done before him, or in Wilkie Collins among Browning’s contemporaries. Browning points towards The Brothers Karamazov, which contains an episode of bloodshed and a similar uncertainty as to how events really unfolded, as much as towards the universes of Kafka, Beckett and Pirandello, or of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The ‘ring’ has an ambivalent or multi-purpose value. In one of its meanings, although neither the first nor last in the chronological order of appearance, or in an ideal sense, it symbolizes the sterility of the vicious circle, the return to the point of departure at the end of a vain, irresolvable search: ‘here were the end, had anything an end’. By placing the epilogue in the hand of a new chorus of voices, which on a reduced scale repeat the general module of the poem, not only does Browning accentuate the temporal separation which excludes any direct or eye-witnesses ipso facto, but he also magnifies the intrigue and further entangles the labyrinth.191 Uncertainty, insecurity and instability seem to be the closing note of the poem: ‘what was once seen, grows what is now

191 With the most rigorous action of filtering, Browning, to conclude the poem, resorts to four documents which are presented as authentic, and which in reality are not, or are only partially so: one a letter of a Venetian tourist (as mentioned above) and two of two lawyers, the second of which in turn contains an extract from the raving sermon of Pompilia’s Augustinian confessor on her deathbed. This sermon, however, as I will show, contains a posthumous and highly unpopular interpretation of the whole story.

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described, / Then talked of, told about, a tinge the less / In every fresh transmission; till it melts […] dies and leaves all dark’.192 5. The almost absolute relativism of the poem is in fact tempered and counterbalanced193 by means of two compensatory instruments, which, however, it is impossible not to recognize as a structural weakness of the poem or as an unsolved aesthetic aporia. Browning, after leaving the reader at the mercy of a disorienting series of points of view, in extremis pulls the strings by bringing forth a higher authority appointed to ascertain the truth. In other words, he does not affirm that the truth is unknowable but, as is proclaimed by the Augustinian friar who is Pompilia’s confessor in articulo mortis, he maintains that the truth is an exclusive prerogative of God, and can only be revealed to humans in privileged moments of intuition, vision and almost mystical contact with that superior knowledge. The final implications of the relativism in the poem is thus that the truth is not within the reach of everyone, but its knowledge is proportionate to the moral stature of the individuals who seek it, and of those the Pope is the most noble and highest. This also means stressing the difficulty found in bringing the truth to light and the inadequacy and congenital fallacy of the human instruments traditionally entrusted with its discovery. The denunciation of the workings of justice is among the dominating themes of all of the monologues, regardless of whom they intend to defend. The fact remains that two unreconciled perspectives intersect indefinitely through the poem: on the one hand a metaphysical, transcendent, univocal one, which refers back to a medieval ‘symbolic’ order of vertical correspondences which are, despite everything, recognizable, clashes with an immanentist one, that of virtually anarchic relativism. But Browning also points to a second possibility on the basis of which it is possible to transcend

192 On the possible influence of Carlyle regarding this insistence on the elusive nature of historical truth, cf. Altick and Loucks 1968, 26–8. 193 But I would certainly not say abolished, as does the provocative essay by Killham 1979, which maintains that Browning in The Ring and the Book destroys that irony that elsewhere characterizes his art, and that the poem is even an ‘antidote’ to the increasing relativism of the age, and ‘a Victorian monument to faith in absolute truth’.

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this relative nature of the truth: art. Art, in the conclusive and oracular words of the poem, is ‘the one possible way of speaking truth’. Here the other fundamental value of the ring emerges, and on this image Book XII ends, as the first began. The ring of the first line of the poem is first and foremost a work of art, the gift that an English friend gave Elizabeth;194 but it gradually comes to be identified with the perfect form of art, and its creation by the goldsmith to mean the artist’s labour of creation. Just as the goldsmith must deal with slag and rubble during the stages of his work, as well as the gold itself; just as in order to shape the ring and make it assume the form of a circle, he must have an alloy which in the end is vaporized with acid; in the same way the work of art is ‘prime nature with an added artistry’. Gold, then, is to the ring what the ‘Old Yellow Book’ is to The Ring and the Book: the miraculous transformation, in which what was dying regains life, is explained by Browning as the action of art and creative imagination, which mixed with inert matter renders it ‘malleable’ to the hammer and chisel: ‘fancy has informed, transpierced, / Thridded and so thrown fast the facts else free, / As right through ring and ring runs the djered / And binds the loose, one bar without the break’.195 The idea that art holds formative power does not give rise to objections; but it is worth 194 Isa Blagden, the ‘dearest Isa’ of a correspondence which lasted for many decades. In the epilogue of Book I Browning invokes – in lines which are slightly forced and with a clichéd tone despite the favour which they enjoyed – his deceased wife Elizabeth as his ‘Lyric Love’, so that she may preside as a Muse over the composition of the new poem. Browning returns in his thoughts to his wife, extending the meaning of the image of the ring, in the epilogue of Book XII, where he reaffirms the salvific and redeeming power of art, a gold nugget which is then melted and shaped into a ring, and a gold ring which thus acquires a dual function: it is a true and revivifying work of art and is at the same time an amulet, a pledge of protection and immortality: ring and guard-ring. The poem ends with yet another variation, the wish that the ring which is The Ring and the Book be paired to another golden ring, that which binds Italy and England and with which Niccolò Tommaseo identified Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the epigraph placed over the entry to Casa Guidi in Florence. 195 The slight impropriety of the metaphor is quite evident and has been often noted by commentators: the imagination, unlike an alloy in the process of working with gold, does not disappear after the work of art is completed. Sullivan 1969, 19–20, makes a weak attempt to defend the metaphor, maintaining that the dissolution of

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asking ourselves what it means to say that art is ‘the one way possible / Of speaking true’. This oracular formula, once investigated, turns out to be of minor importance with respect to the solemnity with which it is shrouded. The artistic truth of the poem does not differ in any way from the historical truth: Browning does not have mysteries to reveal or buried sensational facts to bring to light. Presumably he merely intended to justify his own artistic license, and to affirm, if there ever were a need, that his work was not that of a historian but rather of an artist, in order to protect himself in advance from objections regarding falsification or manipulation of his sources. Artistic truth, then, is contrasted to historical truth in that it takes history and interprets it, delves deeper into it, and inevitably colours it. Indeed artistic truth, if only one keeps in mind all the misrepresentations found between the poem and its sources, coincides in some measure with historical untruth. In that sense all of the more or less acceptable or gratuitous interpretations of that formula are true, although only partially so. It may indeed mean a projection of the tragedy of Pompilia and Guido onto a greater stage, in which the forces of good fight and triumph over those of evil; or that God’s judgement becomes intelligible and expresses itself sometimes providentially through human words. Indeed Browning justifies the distance he takes from history to fill in the gaps and supplement the truth, intrinsically flawed, through his imaginative and reanimating art (‘action now shrouds, now shows the informing thought’). One thing is then the determination of events, another the underlying motivations and the psychological meanderings of the characters; above all he feels that the faithfulness of his poem should not be measured in accordance with history, but with respect to its poetic and structural logic. § 127. Browning up to 1869 XXIV: ‘The Ring and the Book’ II. The fresco of seventeenth-century Italy Having portrayed the medieval Italy of the troubadours and penetrated the sensibility of the Italian Renaissance with his monologues featuring churchmen, artists and painters, Browning, with a move forward in time, the alloy signifies the transition from narrative to dramatic form, and thus also the disappearance or the concealment of the reanimating artist.

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elects now as his theatre Counter-Reformation Italy, more specifically late seventeenth-century Rome. Intent on delving into the depths of human psyche, absorbed in the meanderings and the recesses of consciousness, he did not at all neglect external surroundings, even if he does not dedicate to them more than hints and fleeting panoramic vistas. He is a precise and meticulous realist in the prominence given, in almost all of the monologues, to the period of the trial, carried out and concluded during carnival. The popular echo of the murder and trial is taken into account to such a degree that three of the books in the poem are monologues of the vox populi or sample expressions of public opinion; how much the current atmosphere conditioned the trial is underscored by the worries of the Pope, who despite his courageous decision not to heed it, eventually humours the populace by moving the site of the execution. With vigorous impressionism Browning reconstructs late Baroque Rome, the theatre and backdrop to the events. This was a city in which a plethora of new artists were working, enjoying a fame often unequal to their true worth, as a consequence of the ascent of a wealthy bourgeoisie eager to decorate and embellish their palaces. The festive atmosphere of carnival, the greedy sensationalism of the crowds and the wealth that facilitates the burgeoning of the arts all violently clash with the hidden insecurity that undermines the Church. In the unsolvable, piercing anguish of the Pope we see represented a city which is not triumphant, but one that vacillates, and a victim to anxiety. Browning sensed this smouldering and elusive unease, and accorded a disproportionate pre-eminence (one which historically it did not have)196 to a heretical movement founded by the Spaniard Miguel de Molinos, called Molinism, which preached mystic quietism, a perfect openness of the soul to the divine calling, and diminished the importance of dogma, religious rites, and sacraments; its founder was condemned for heresy in 1687. Molinism, in the superstitious and religiously superficial Rome depicted by Browning, is an alarming word, used without any real knowledge of its theology. But at the same time Browning presents it with a particular undertone: while he does not 196 Browning, who had studied Italian as a youth by reading the prose works of the Jesuit Daniello Bartoli (after whom one of the Parleyings of 1887 is entitled), was perhaps struck by an anti-Molinist pamphlet by Bartoli, in 1679, attacking Segneri.

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exactly have it coincide with Protestantism, he makes it the mouthpiece for some of the claims and the accusations historically made against the Church of Rome. Because of the hearing given by the Pope to Molinists, thus making them heralds of a new era, Molinism serves to introduce the theme of relativism even in the religious sphere.197 I will gradually discuss the emergences of the anguished climate, of the widespread apocalyptic premonitions and of the terrorized sense of alarm which intangibly pervade Rome in the poem. Here I will only note that all this has a staggering effect on the Pope and on the Augustinian friar who enters to leave a final seal upon the poem. As to the morals of seventeenth-century Italy, Browning tended to let his severity pass for rigorous objectivity. The innocent epicureanism of the crowds, and in particular of Guido’s two lawyers, acts as a shield to the distortions of a corrupt and stagnant system dominated by backwardness, anachronisms and compromises. At every turn he evokes figures of unworthy, cowardly priests and of shamelessly greedy and nepotistic prelates, such as had never been seen in his art before.198 His inveterate hostility towards Catholicism is entrusted to an outsider, Guido, a self-confessed disbeliever, and, from within the Church and from the point of view of a fully orthodox faith, to the Pope himself. Guido lashes that same Catholicism of whose negativity the Pope, paradoxically and in

197 Langbaum 1957, 128–31. 198 Regarding a Church which tolerates, indeed inflicts the death penalty, Browning stays neutral, but is critical with regard to torture. In Book I he accuses the Catholic Church of being immobile and an enemy of progress, insinuating that a great deal of water would have to pass under the bridge if one were to wait for the abolition of torture of its own accord. Of the two lawyers, who both inquire into the effectiveness of torture but do not bother about its admissibility, one states his disapproval as if ex officio, while the other, significantly, skirts around the topic because torture has made his job easier. As a historian, Browning has the defence lawyer of Guido observe in Book VIII that the use of torture was allowed in Rome only in exceptional cases for a nobleman, and has him cite lengthy statistics taken from the work of a jurist of the time regarding its tested effectiveness (96 per cent of cases!). A grotesque parenthesis, in that Book, is the reference to noblemen’s daily training to endure torture: ‘Men are no longer men!’, is the resigned comment of the lawyer, who criticizes, irritated, the cowardice and weakness of Guido, who, tortured, has immediately confessed.

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his very irreproachability, is a living proof. Nor is Browning’s judgement of Italians, which could be taxed with being conformist and superficial, much more flattering. He attributes them indiscriminately with the pseudoMachiavellian theory and practice that the end justifies the means. To those moralists who blamed him for having gratuitously lumped together too many horrors and too much evil in the poem, and to have only shown human weakness rather than disguising it,199 he responded – in compliance with a realism which in the formulations which he provided echoes with amazing precision the manifestos of naturalist novelists –200 that he had not the slightest intention to soften history and render it edifying, and that his intent was to adhere scrupulously to the facts. The connotative repertoire and the systems of images and metaphors employed function as mirrors and infallible signs of Browning’s discrediting, condemning, nauseating attitude while looking at a human panorama where only Pompilia, the Pope and the Augustinian friar are an exception. We are faced with a true menagerie: all of the characters live on a animal-like parallel plane which is continually referenced and continually reappears and changes according to the varying and violent contrasts between successive points of view, and which provokes fluctuating characterizations as a result, all within a vast field of possibilities. Because of the hegemonic figure of metamorphosis, the characters tend, still within the animalesque field, towards the hybrid,

199 Like Julia Wedgwood, whose response to the poem, which Browning had submitted to her in instalments as he was composing it, was extremely sceptical, as is witnessed by their discussion in the correspondence. Significantly, Browning stated that his wife Elizabeth had never shown interest in the story which would become The Ring and the Book. She probably would have made the same criticisms as Wedgwood. 200 Henry James recognized but at the same time criticized the strict naturalism adopted by Browning, maintaining that even at the risk of an aesthetic failure of a work, the material should be selected according to a particular orientation towards a certain objective.

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the cross-breed, even the monstrous.201 The prevailing tinge is in fact that of a subhuman rather than that of a human drama.202 201 A passage in Book XI is emblematic, as the Comparinis are seen by Guido as ‘two ambiguous insects, changing name / And nature with the season’s warmth or chill’. Significantly, he asks himself whether he would have to tolerate their settling in some other form of life, and is aware that, by killing them, he has avoided other ‘transformations of disgust’. 202 The most typical and frequent association attributed to Guido by the group of his detractors, and which he applies to himself in order to deny it, is that of the ‘wolfface whence the sheepskin fell’; but the image is interchangeable and Browning has Guido take note of this when he exclaims in his second monologue: ‘How that staunch image serves at every turn!’ Rarely is Guido the picture of a lion’s pure force and power; his savagery is conveyed by metaphors of felines like the tabby cat, or the falcon, the bull, or the bear, and his slyness by that of the fox, and his diabolical wickedness by those of the spider, the scorpion or the basilisk. His repellent nature is emphasized by his association with the worms of the earth and the snails. The description of his relatives is not very different, and their prevailing features are duplicity, sliminess and sinister wickedness (the fox, the mouse): Guido’s younger brother is specifically defined a ‘hybrid’ by the Pope. The attributes of the Comparinis are also animalesque for the most part: Pietro is for his inertia and quietism a donkey, an owl and a goat. Violante Comparini is of a much more satanic standing; only Pompilia in her immense fairness manages to call her a dove, while the attributes of all the other characters are those of the serpent, the viper and the scorpion. Anyone who is misogynistically or instinctively against Pompilia marks her in the poem by offensive comparisons such as those with the serpent, the bitch, the fox, the spider, the viper, even the toad: she is referred to as a lamb or sheep only as a shameless disguise. Guido bases his defence on her unmasking and calls her a goat, a lion and a serpent, mixed together in a single monster. Her sympathizers, however, speak of Pompilia in opposite terms, as a caged bird yearning for freedom. She describes herself various times as a little lamb who is unknowingly heading towards the slaughterhouse. The lawyers’ verbal skirmishes abound with colourful animal insults, to which they add detailed and antithetical touches. For Arcangeli, Pompilia is an eel who slithers out of the hands of the fisherman. The zoological fantasy is further illustrated by the depiction of the Pope, given by the same lawyer Arcangeli, as a dog who precedes the ‘tardy pack’ of the judges with his own ‘authoritative bay’, and incites them to a ‘sudden yelp / Unisonous’. To this may be added morbid images and others of corruption and sickness, such as infected swellings, blisters, boils that burst, pusfilled wounds and sores, fetid humours, gangrene, ulcers, abscesses, pimples, growths, parasites and taenia. Equally frequent is the appearance of images of rotten, repulsive,

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§ 128. Browning up to 1869 XXV: ‘The Ring and the Book’ III: The two ‘Half-Romes’ and the Tertium Quid The vast poem starts with three monologues, corresponding to the same number of books, spoken by three spectators and commentators completely uninvolved in the events. In the vaguely Hegelian plan that presides over this first triad, the first two monologues are thesis and antithesis to each other. The speaker of the first supports Guido, that of the second Pompilia; the third speaker has the task of synthesizing the two positions.203 The spokesman of the first ‘Half-Rome’ (this being the title of Book II), the one of the lower classes, is a curious onlooker who pretends to be very knowledgeable and who informs an acquaintance about the events and for whom he acts as guide with an attitude which is at times condescending,204 on the evening of the day following the murder. The scene is imagined to take place in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina where both, like an avid and exuberant crowd, have come to see the bodies of Pietro and Violante

nauseating food; the gastronomic interest is, on the other hand, central, but in a sense notably different in Book VIII, as we will see, where they form the obsessive idea of lawyer Arcangeli. To all this repertoire of base images other iconic systems act as counterweights. Often Browning turns to a Homeric scheme, seeing under or behind the story of the poem that of Helen kidnapped by Paris and chased by Menelaus, a reading which has both an ennobling and an ironic function, besides the cases in which it is used in a merely decorative way. The biblical citation has an analogous epic function, but still more frequently lends itself to an ironic resonance rather than a profound one (such is the comparison between the false maternity of Violante and that of Mary). At the opening of Book IX one of the two lawyers launches into a long simile between the two Comparinis and the Holy Family, with Guido in the place of Herod. Guido is also effectively compared with Samson and Judas, and Violante’s deception is presented along the lines of the temptation of Eden. On the images of animals, food, colours and others see Honan 1961, 188–206, with minute statistical tabulation of the occurrences. 203 It is precisely due to this internal logic that it is in my opinion unjustified to criticize the excessive length of the poem; some critics target specifically these three books, which they would see cut completely or in part. 204 His exposition is certainly colourful. It has the feel of an oral story in part due to the numerous proverbs, sayings, mythological and Homeric citations that he uses to give weight to his words, though he often stumbles or commits blunders.

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Comparini exposed for their last farewells. It is worth noting that there is no dialogue here. Not only does the interlocutor remain silent, but he receives far fewer prompts and cues (which when they occur serve a necessary phatic and fictional function) in the first part of the monologue; if anything, they become more frequent towards the end, because of a cousin of the speaker who is courting his wife, causing him to remotely relate the whole story of Pompilia and Guido to his own personal case, and authorize the reader to suspect that all of his sympathy for Guido is due only to this hidden reason. Conversely, Browning sets the second of the three introductory monologues at the outdoor market, around twenty-four or forty-eight at the latest after the first. The source of the citizen’s version in Book II is a scheming priest, and this too is a reworking of the words of Fra Celestino, Pompilia’s confessor. 2. The speaker of ‘Half-Rome’, like many others in Browning’s monologues – particularly those set in Italy – is worldly and experienced, vitriolic and impatient. His biting sarcasm leaves no one unscathed, and he is a priest-hater to boot. He rains or rather pours out contempt on everything and everyone (even in death Pietro is ‘the old murdered fool’) and reviews the whole story, pausing on cruel and horrifying details, without flinching. He is also an obscure fatalist for whom ultimately it was the devil that triggered the chain of tragic events. But he is also a staunch moralist, fanatic and critical; his extreme condemnation of and contempt for prostitution (‘deepest of our social dregs’) indicates possible sexual inhibition. His final diagnosis is revealing because while he vents his bitterness on Pompilia and Caponsacchi, he also exposes the hidden bloodthirsty nature of an Old Testament Christian; in fact he highlights the supposed inefficiency and insufficiency of the law and the need in some cases to take justice into one’s own hands. Regarding the actions of Guido, whom he sees as a Hamlet-like prisoner of his own indecision, he paradoxically criticizes him for what he considers his pointless scruples and respectfulness: he should have killed Pompilia immediately in the tavern at Castelnuovo, thus redeeming his tainted honour, following the old road instead of taking a new one, only then to hurriedly retrace his steps. In that way, he would have taken one life instead of three and he would not have spared that of Caponsacchi, much more guilty than the Comparinis. The only moment in which he

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softens and extenuates his rigour is when he allows Guido a momentary hesitation before inflicting the mortal blow on Pompilia: Guido imagines the guardian angel suggesting to him to give her another chance; but it is equally indicative of the speaker’s fatalism that he should add that the suggestion had no effect. We have no precise indications about the identity of the second speaker in Book III, except for the fact that he is unmarried, which can partly explain his point of view. His version is much more idealized than that of his predecessor, whose immanentism and agnosticism he does not share, as can be deduced by his faith in miracles and in the intervention of angels and supernatural forces. Nor does he share the polemical acrimony or fervid partisanship; much more balanced, he looks at events from above and with greater detachment, perhaps because of the time interval which separates the two monologues, of which the first was an on-the-spot reaction immediately after the homicide. In contrast to the rough commoner of Book II, this is a legalist who adheres scrupulously to the law and believes, despite everything, in its effectiveness. In the address which he imagines directing at Guido, before the end, he urges him to do something completely opposite from what his predecessor had done: he exhorts him, by wishful thinking, to resist the temptation of taking justice into his own hands and to be patient, trusting in the law. 3. The narrative style of the first of the two ‘Half Rome’ monologues is wholly simplistic and its aim is a reduction and explanation of the events in terms of an elementary and primitive drama of jealousy. Guido is the cuckolded husband, fearful of what people will say, who reacts by killing his wife when she gives birth to a child who is not his own. He is a noble fallen from his status, naïve but honest, and a victim of Violante’s schemes.205 205 Violante is the fisherman, Guido the fish and Pompilia the bait, metaphors used in all the monologues and subject in various later applications to many ingenious developments, and even applicable to other phases of the plot. Indeed they will be re-used apropos of the letters written by Guido and passed off as having been written by Pompilia, letters with which Guido attempts to catch her, the fish, through Caponsacchi, the bait. In the narration of the assassination, and of the failed escape of the murderers, the metaphor used is that of a net whose holes make it possible for the fish to escape.

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Pompilia herself is unmasked as a goody-two-shoes no less diabolical than Violante: she is the one who organizes and orchestrates the escape, while her relationship with Caponsacchi is hardly pure and simple friendship. That the speaker is shamelessly on the side of Guido, despite not wanting to ‘prejudge the case’ and proclaiming himself to be absolutely objective, can be inferred when he mentions the supposed ‘compassion’ with which Guido absolved Pompilia after following and catching her, and by the completely invented indulgence that he supposedly reserved for her on having discovered her illegitimacy. A defender to the hilt of Pompilia, and in the second instance of Caponsacchi, the speaker of Book III underlines the intact purity and also the untamed character of Pompilia, absolving her as morally justified in fleeing her husband, having vainly tried all other remedies. Pompilia, in violent contrast to the images and metaphors used in the preceding monologue (dark, sinister and referring to animals, beings and states which are repulsive and disgusting) is now shrouded in sublimity and immateriality. A recurrent association is that of the wilted or trampled rose. Disagreeing over Guido and Pompilia, the two narrators have common ground in their irrevocable condemnation of the Comparinis. The visit of Abbot Paolo Franceschini, Guido’s brother in Rome,206 to the two wealthy Roman bourgeois, the Comparinis, to arrange the marriage – an excellent fictional insertion in which we find the finest of caricature touches – makes their perfect complementary nature clear: the abbot is the principle of stillness and Violante of motion, she is stasis and he activity. Pietro gives the impression of being a bit dazed and good-natured, and conveniently falls asleep just as his wife and the abbot are plotting the events which will ultimately lead his family to their graves.

206 In reality Paolo, eight years older, was the first-born of the family, not Guido. Once he had become an abbot, Paolo entered service in Rome under the powerful Cardinal Lauria, and enjoyed his favours to the extent that in 1693 he was nominated secretary of the order of the Knights of St John of Malta. He it was who set eyes on Pompilia for Guido, in that it was unthinkable the Comparinis would have other children and the inheritance have to be split up. After the wedding and the revelation of her illegitimacy, Paolo understandably fell into disfavour, resigned from his post and fled abroad, abandoning his brother without notice.

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4. The first two monologues place the reader immediately and violently before the relativism of truth in the poem; they also stand out for their impressionistic and vivid atmospheric depictions. Both catch the reverse side of the tragedy, and the popular sensationalism surrounding the murder and the trial, dwelling on the fanatical curiosity of the crowd, greedy and never satisfied. From the sight of the bodies of the Comparinis and the voyeurism of the people with which Book II opens, we switch in the third to the description of a dying Pompilia at the hospital, made bearing the mark of the miraculous. A truly surprising and prophetic detail is the presence of a painter – photography not having been yet invented – to immortalize the dying woman with his brush. The emphasis on the horror and premonition is common to both monologues: a nameless visitor, briefly heard saying, at the beginning of Book III, that he has discovered the ‘secret cause’ of the crime – the Antichrist who spreads the doctrine of the ‘philosophic sin’ and ultimately of Molinism – is a stronger and more delirious counterpart of the rambling and foolish Luca Cini of the preceding one, who also sees in the events the hand of the devil and the impending Judgement Day. Both, in turn, herald the ravings of the Pope and to a far greater extent the closing sermon of Fra Celestino. With cuts recalling those of Manzoni in The Betrothed, Browning lashes out, through the narrator of Book III, at the prudence and servility of the governor and of the archbishop of Arezzo who both, when approached by Pompilia, are completely unmoved by her pleas. The two of them are joined by the cowardly friar who feared, responding to Pompilia’s request for help, stepping on the toes of some powerful person, and thus, like the others, denied her his help. 5. Slightly later in chronological order than the two monologues examined above is the third and last summary of the events given by uninvolved narrators. It is spoken by a sort of mediator between the two earlier positions. It is night-time on the third day after the triple murder, and the scene is set in a sitting room where nobles and clergy (including some cardinals) are playing cards and listening, raising their eyes occasionally from the game. The coterie of churchmen, the possibly too outspoken monologist, and the theological issues which he touches upon ex professo with a certain exaggeration or speciousness of speech, are all reminiscent of Bishop Blougram’s monologue. In this Book sarcasm and tortuosity of

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speech are on the rise, and the retrospective moves away from the level of simple facts to become decidedly more oriented towards the underlying psychological motivations. This third speaker identifies with the various characters, temporarily taking each of their sides, so that for hundreds and hundreds of lines the text is an imaginary court located in the mind, in which accusers, accused, defenders and objectors follow one after the other: an interweaving of contrasting voices already undermines or compresses the retelling of the phases and the details of the story, often handled in just a few lines. In an ideal hierarchy of the three speakers, the Tertium Quid, as Browning had anticipated in Book I, is the ‘finer sense o’ the city […] the curd o’ the cream, the flower o’ the wheat’, a cultural superiority, mixed with scorn for the common people, which he wields with notable frequency (also expressed in his Latin citations, in his exempla and elaborate, prolonged similes; the title of the monologue says it all). Under the gaze of this vaunted superiority, he scatters his sarcastic comments on the sensational and showy aspects which constitute the primary if not the sole raison d’être of the trial, which is held, he tells us, ‘to please the mob’, neither for the love of truth nor in the hope of finding a definitive sentence, for the case is too complicated and the law will be unable to decide. He is thus the voice of cultured scepticism. Whatever the truth is, he proclaims, there is no need to avoid illuminating, or rather deceiving, the common man: in view of this it is out of the question to argue or split hairs about the admissibility of measures like torture, a necessary instrument for control and maintenance of power. The entire chain of events is at the same time one of lies, and is compared to the performance of a disorienting and estranged tragedy, and at the same time a pessimistic one, to which he affixes the inscription: ‘Each cheated each’. 6. The self-proclaimed equidistance of the Tertium Quid, however, turns quite early to a fiction, because if there is a character with whom he sides, even considering his emphasis on neutrality and his basic scepticism, it is Guido, towards whom he is most indulgent. He lists the wrongs that Guido has suffered and sympathizes with him; his sympathy also comes unequivocally to the fore at the end of the monologue when, imagining him in the presence of Pompilia and Caponsacchi in Castelnuovo, he ends

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up assuming a position which is not very different from that of the commoner of Book II. He criticizes Guido for his irresoluteness and cowardice, and in particular for not having killed her and above all Caponsacchi immediately; in that way he would have exposed the woman to general shame. He is thus anything but tender with Pompilia, whose version – that Guido pushed her into the arms of Caponsacchi in order to have a pretext for rejecting her and keeping her dowry to himself – collapses sentence by sentence like a house of cards, with a veritable cascade of objections and insinuations. He discards the inference regarding the corruption of the archbishop and the governor and defends their work. Nor in his opinion could Guido have manipulated Caponsacchi to the extent suggested, and Caponsacchi has readily accepted to leap into the ‘abysmal black’ with a married woman. Equally incredible for him is the version of Caponsacchi, claiming that after feeling disgust at Pompilia’s professions of love, he had second thoughts, met her and ultimately acted merely out of piety. The speaker is finally sceptical regarding the last words of the dying Pompilia, which could be both the proof of her innocence and of her guilt, just as her confession, which is ‘public’ and may not coincide with, may indeed contradict, the ‘private one’. A frequenter of high ranking clergy, he does not even take Fra Celestino at his word, and counters any simplistic credulity of the populace by citing and evoking the voices of the friends of Guido, who see in the prayer and confession of Pompilia the supreme stratagem of a consummate and diabolical actress.207 207 Book IV is the only one in the poem that describes in detail, and naturalistically, the meeting and the negotiations between Violante and the Roman prostitute who is the real mother of Pompilia. The ‘sale’ of Pompilia by the prostitute is a much less abject act the one committed by the same prostitute in selling her own virginity at twelve years old for ‘a melon and three pauls’. And, the voice comments, one can only be cheered that by a similar sin – a felix culpa – Pompilia was torn from the ‘hell in life’ and from ‘life in hell’. Even with regard to marriage the Tertium Quid adds unknown details, among which that of the hairdresser and matchmaker, whose interview with Violante is narrated with richness of colour and first-person dialogues; this scene enlarges the picture of a Rome filled with wheeling and dealing, tricks, fraud and connections.

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7. If there is a constant, unvarying common thread or theme between the three introductory monologues, beyond differences in culture and point of view, investigative instruments, and parties to fight for or defend, it is the underscoring of the innate incapacity of justice – Roman justice in particular at the time, and human justice tout court – to shed full light on the responsibilities of single individuals, and of its inadequacies and insufficiencies; connected with this is the uncertainty or even indeterminability of the truth itself. In the three monologues, every time that justice enters the scene, Browning has his narrators denounce its snail’s pace, falsifications, Hamlet-like uncertainties or rather Solomon-like middle positions and, without euphemisms, the over-cautiousness that leads it to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds. The first of the three speakers ironizes on the ‘triumph of truth’, on the masterpiece of a verdict which even at the time of the first trial (held after the attempted escape) is seen as the primary cause of the later disasters. His own version of the facts, filled with patent, macroscopic distortions, speaks volumes for the uncertainty and the precariousness of truth: this is how, already in the first steps of the process of transmission, truth is muddied. Pompilia did not make any sort of deathbed confession of her adultery, as he would have wished; as to her illegitimacy, he, siding with Guido, can only withdraw, keep silent, and non-committal. The most painful admission of the need to suspend judgement and of the unascertainable nature of the facts is made by the ‘Other Half Rome’. Having to distinguish right from wrong, true from false, he confesses his impotence: weighing the contrasting versions, he uses great caution in taking sides; indeed he does not know which way to turn. He forces himself to keep his eyes dry and to plug his ears against any supernatural voices, pushing away the temptation of any non-objective explanation of the events (which is instead furnished by Fra Celestino, whose certainty of the purity and innocence of Pompilia is completely intuitive, not empirical). Yet his faith, the faith of one who is instinctively on the side of Pompilia and disbelieves Caponsacchi’s assertion that she was the one to have started writing love letters, begins to crack, finding it hard to believe her claim that the escape was ‘extemporized / As in romance-books’. Eventually, the Tertium Quid frames the problem of the search for truth in a way that is on the one hand in line

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with the religiously themed monologues in Men and Women and above all of Dramatis Personae – focusing on the lack of absolute evidence of faith – and on the other anticipates the agnostic stance that Browning takes in the concluding book of the poem. The Tertium Quid, who initially proclaims its brash certainty that the trial will shed full light on the responsibility of the accused to the total satisfaction of everyone, slowly ends up by doubting this certainty, and indeed ‘despairing’ of history and declaring it incomprehensible. We see a symbol of the great uncertainty that reigns, in the pantomimed movements with which the monologue ends and the general stampede of all the guests who thus avoid taking sides, deaf to the pleas of the orator who urges them to do so. § 129. Browning up to 1869 XXVI: ‘The Ring and the Book’ IV. The two monologues of Guido Franceschini Two monologues and books, the fifth and the eleventh, are dedicated to Guido Franceschini, the main party accused of the murders which bloodied Rome in those first days of 1698. They gather together and correspond to the multiplicity of his facets and do justice to the complexity of the character. Like those of the two ‘Half-Romes’ and the Tertium Quid they have their own stringent structural and dramatic necessity, separated as they are by a decisive turn of events. This temporal hiatus makes them the expressions of two profoundly different emotional states: in the first, given immediately after the reconstruction of the Tertium Quid, and probably occurring on the third day after the crime, Guido, having just returned to his cell after the confession of his guilt, does not yet fear for his life; in the second he, ‘the same man, another voice’,208 speaks a very few hours before his decapitation, his death sentence having been announced by the law-court and the Pope (whose monologue comes immediately before, in Book X) having rejected his appeal for clemency and signed the order of execution. Guido is the characteristic, tireless and inexhaustible monologist in Browning, who endows him with such ingenious and often surprising verbal resources as

208 As is well emphasized by the slight variation in the titles of the two monologues, ‘Count Guido Franceschini’ for the first, and ‘Guido’ for the second.

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to render any comparison with the real and historical Guido Franceschini unthinkable. He is the primary and ultimately the only authentic defender of his actions, in whose presence his court-appointed lawyer Arcangeli seems to be merely an affected academic attorney. Guido’s first speech, delivered in the isolation and solitude of his prison cell but with him imagining the entire law-court standing in front of him is, rather more than a monologue, an impassioned and fervid peroration and a masterpiece of judicial rhetoric exploiting with consummate skill the whole repertoire of persuasive tools. Having confessed under torture, his line of defence hinges on the desperate attempt to present his crime as the final, inevitable station of a Calvary209 of disgrace, humiliation and lack of respect, such as his life has been; he goes so far as to affirm that Pompilia is the devil incarnate and that God armed his hand. Far from attempting to appear humble and submissive – although he purports to be so – the ambiguous light that he chooses for himself is that of a narcissistic and therefore false self-commiseration, that of a failure who in his heart of hearts believes he is anything but that, and pretends to sympathize with and defend his own mediocrity and for that reason exaggerates it. Guido magnifies, makes epic and renders elegiac his decline and his plight as a victim of the times and of a corrupt world, and celebrates himself as the great rejected one and the arch melancholic. 2. In his autobiographical anamnesis Guido first masochistically looks back on his dreams of grandeur so quickly dashed and on his boundless pride despite the extreme poverty of his family.210 Dissuaded from a military career, he remembers having judiciously kept a foot in the Church by taking 209 I use this expression with a meaning which is anything but figurative. Guido begins Book V comparing himself to Christ crucified, with the sole difference that while Jesus was given vinegar to drink on the Cross, Guido, upon his return to the cell, is offered a sip of Velletri wine. Indeed, in Book XI he expressly compares himself to Christ climbing Mount Calvary. 210 Guido sees himself again as a youth watching, livid with rage, the towers of the palaces recently built by the nouveaux riches, while his own can hardly boast a ‘turret sound’; or the ‘widow who ne’er was wed’ who, unlike his mother, strolls the streets of Arezzo in her six-horse-carriage; or the priest, a son of peasants, who makes his fortune with a book against Molinism that a cardinal publishes in his own name, paying the priest handsomely and even allowing him to keep a mistress.

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minor orders, but just for the mere love of advancement. Having arrived in Rome at the age of fifteen, Guido says he vainly waited thirty years for a reward for his sacrifices,211 while he saw ‘many a denizen o’ the dung’ on a certain day grow wings and fly past him straight to heaven. Memories and anecdotes of his exclusion still stand burning in his memory: page boys in the vestibule of a doctor who is nothing more than his father’s lackey, where he is refused entry because of his dirty shoes; the chamberlain, the grandson of his father’s chaplain, who kept him waiting in the anteroom among the marble busts and sent him as a gift a stub of a lacquered candle as a sign of recognition of the ability with which he made the mule march in the procession; the condescendence of the prison functionary who only a few days before had recognized him and had signed the authorization to transfer him to the new prisons. ‘These were the fellows, such their fortunes now’. What follows in this anamnesis unfolds with a carefully studied variation of tone and register: facing humiliation Guido holds himself up as a victim, but whenever possible he magnifies his heroism. Preparing to narrate the flight of his wife with the priest he sees himself (again) ‘chin deep in a marsh of misery’ and what’s more with a ‘gad-fly’ (Caponsacchi) who teases him to his face: a grotesque situation, something between Dante and Beckett; the hyperbole intensifies at the end of the story when he claims to have seen the devils dance frantically ‘around my broken gods / Over my desecrated heart’. With a fine manoeuvre, recalling his behaviour at Castelnuovo, Guido however overturns the hyperbole to metamorphose himself into the victim. He admits to cowardice but defends and justifies it: not taking vengeance at that moment was, if nothing else, an act coherent with his personality, having always affirmed his trust in the law, whose verdict he moreover dismantles with consummate, Shakespearean irony, blaming it for the severity and rigour used in punishing far more minor criminals. His return to Arezzo, having handed the fugitives over to the law, is retold in a newly elegiac vein, from his revisitation of the places along 211 In 1693, at the service of the intractable Cardinal Nerli, Guido, profoundly disillusioned, had left the Church and had gone to live in Rome without a position; it was then that his brother the abbot suggested to him the idea of an arranged marriage.

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the route of the escape to his being and feeling constantly indicated as the ‘much-commiserated husband’; equally incisive is the description of the sniggers he was sure he heard coming even from inanimate objects upon his return. Guido reaches the depths of his bitterness when, having told everyone that he was satisfied with the verdict of the Court and the punishment meted out to Pompilia and Caponsacchi at the trial, he in no time receives a bitter surprise in the shape of a letter informing him that Pompilia and the Comparinis have requested a separation and that Pompilia has been moved from the convent of the Convertites to the home of the Comparinis (where it is easier for Caponsacchi to visit her), and that Paolo, his own brother the abbot, has fled. That informative letter – the sender of which is never identified, and which most likely is an invention of Guido – is, in the chain of expressions of scorn and mockery, a masterpiece of sincere, or more likely false, masochism – that is to say, one dictated by purely rhetorical purposes. Upon reading the letter, he collapses, desperate, which convinces him that his defeat and dishonour is of cosmic, universal proportions.212 The bloody epilogue is relived in Guido’s anamnesis with a still more magniloquent and hyperbolic tone: he moves towards Rome as if wrapped in a ‘cloud / Of horror’, and when this cloud opens, he hears the primordial scream of the archangels fighting to follow and crush Satan; shocked and stunned by the Christmas-like atmosphere, Guido, in a raving and phantasmagorical series of flashes inside his head, sees a baby Jesus covered in wrinkles and the crucifixion overlaying the manger scene. Retelling the moment of his return home Guido, sincere or an insidious hypocrite, claims to have softened for a moment: had Pompilia, or even Pietro Comparini (whom he pardons) opened the door, he would have hesitated or perhaps even given up the idea of murder; but it is Violante who comes to the door. This first monologue closes by fading into the dream-like: delirious, Guido dreams of a universal regeneration, and hopes, thanks to the infant Gaetano, for a purifying force (although believed by him to be the fruit of Pompilia’s 212 In this letter, which thus shatters his expectations of compensation, the capture is turned upside down into a farce that inspires riotous laughter: Caponsacchi is a little priest who knows Ovid better than Aquinas, and Pompilia is a Corinna able to recite her part without a script.

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adultery) and for the arrival of a radiant tomorrow, for the redemption of a Rome no longer corrupt, and for a righteous world. 3. In his role of self-appointed lawyer, Guido defends his marriage as a form of barter, an ‘exchange of quality for wealth’; the ‘incorporation with nobility’ was, after all, what the Comparinis had sought. On the relationships which must exist between husband and wife in their conjugal life, Guido invokes and applies to the letter St Paul’s rule of the wife’s submission to her husband. Taking a stance of intransigent chauvinism, he relegates wives to the role of their husbands’ subjects, citing as an example the rigour which the Church applies to its members. As to the supposed mistreatment suffered by Pompilia, and the alleged, iniquitous move of having her courted by his priest brother, Girolamo, this is all gossip designed to damage him, nothing more than a tissue of lies. Regarding the hurried flight of the Comparinis from Arezzo, Guido again applies the principle of the absolute submission of a wife to her husband, maintaining that, whether or not she was the daughter of the Comparini, it was Pompilia’s duty to stand by her husband. He himself recites the repudiation that she should have announced, rejecting her parents and seeking help and support from him, and has her denounce the role of bait which the Comparinis had forced her to play. As to the letter of blame regarding the behaviour of her parents which Pompilia had penned to the Abbot Paolo, Guido furnishes a clarifying version: it was he who forced Pompilia to write it under dictation but for her own good, only to teach her her duties.213 For the third time, after the hints contained in the second and third books, he takes up the assumption according to which he would have been far more justified in his actions 213 Putting forward this dubious explanation, Guido corroborates his own affirmation, comparing himself to a priest who makes the sign of the cross over a dying man, or says ‘I do’ at the baptism in place of the child: as the dying man could refuse or the child become a Molinist, in the same way Pompilia might deviate from the right path. The need for a lesson and punishment on the lines of the Bible is likewise supported by the analogy – ingenious, lengthy and amplified in all its correspondences – between his act and St Peter’s amputation of Malchus’ ear in the Garden of Gethsemane, save for the fact that Guido limits himself to ‘box Malchus’ ear / Instead of severing the cartilage’.

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if he had avenged his wrongs immediately. That killing would have been unintentional, while that which he actually committed was instead premeditated; the former, among other things, would have met with greater clemency from the judges. If he did not act on the spot, Guido argues, this was due to the blind faith he had in the law, which eventually bitterly disappointed him. In conclusion, he claims to have fulfilled the way of God by killing them. God, the ‘great Physician’, ordered him ‘to lance the core / Of the bad ulcer’. In the last peroration, Guido rejects the accusation of having bribed the archbishop and the governor, turning this accusation back against the members of the Court, who, he suspects, were suborned by the vox populi to side with the class of clerics (to which Caponsacchi belongs) and tending to punish the layman. Paradoxically, he adds, the law should thank him for having done what it failed to do, like a servant making up for the negligence of his master. 4. After the exhaustive retrospective in Book V, Guido’s second monologue in the eleventh is not, nor could it be, a second reconstruction merely filling the remaining gaps of the first. For at least the first half – a sort of enormous prologue – it is the most rhapsodic, the most rambling, the most magmatic monologue of those assigned by Browning to the protagonists of his poem. Conceived as the disorderly and formless outburst of a condemned man facing execution, and spoken by Guido in front of two mute prelates who, having come to convince him to die a Christian, he supplicates, beseeching them to intercede with the Pope, in it Browning gives in to the vice which he most easily incurs, the accretion of anecdotes, exempla and arguments. Although it is possible to salvage it for purely mimetic reasons, and though it includes moments of great intensity, it is among the most freewheeling, verbose and cumbersome in the poem. From tactical celebrator of his own mediocrity, as he poses in the earlier monologue, Guido intensifies the impudent and satanic light which had sometimes flickered in its last phase. Intermittently, taking up a motif from the earlier monologue, he foreshadows the groans of Hopkins’s eunuch: ‘nowise does it skill, / Everything goes against me’. He is God’s ‘huge and sheer mistake’, the cosmic loser at the hands of the ‘tenacious hate of fortune’ and of all things ‘in, under, and above earth’. Similar to the thief crucified

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to the left of Jesus, he dies an unrepentant murderer.214 But on balance we cannot say that Browning condemns him in toto, both because all things considered he is a contradictory and even pathetic boaster and because, above all, in the light of this second monologue, he plays too many of Browning’s chords to be disapproved with no extenuating circumstances. To him Browning entrusted, first and foremost, a reinterpretation of that theme of striving so dear to him, which has become in Guido only shadowy and larval. In the second place he gave him a morbid theological interest that was at least in part wholly consonant with Browning’s own; he made Guido, that is, the mouthpiece of his own anti-Catholicism and even of certain unconfessable concerns about faith and certain recurring heretical or at least heterodox temptations. 5. One of the fully developed themes in the second monologue of Guido, after the vague hints contained in the first, is in fact the polemical, relentless, hammering indictment of the Pope and the Church. He sharply attacks the lack of transparency and consistency of the Pope, denouncing both the cruelty of the judge and the unworthiness of the pastor. To his mind, the Pope is first and foremost guilty of having abandoned him and even ordered his decapitation, thus overturning a centuries-old custom of preferential treatment of the noble class. It is easy for Guido to hold himself up as the example of a scapegoat belonging to a nobility for whom the rules of the game have suddenly been changed. Rather than hand him back to his loved ones, knowing that when the moment of his death arrived he would inevitably face judgement and punishment, the Pope has prematurely cut his life short. A lamb was calling for help to be pulled out of the marsh in which it had become entrapped and he, the shepherd of the flock, has allowed it instead to fall into the abyss. But beyond a critique of an exquisitely legal nature, also intrigues and shady, mysterious interests, and obscure and turbid machinations are mentioned and naturally stigmatized

214 The last, famous pleading – ‘Abbot, – Cardinal, – Christ, – Maria, – God, Pompilia, will you let them murder me?’ – has often been invoked to demonstrate the contrary, but I read it as a final stratagem to earn clemency.

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as a normal practice by now rooted in the mindset and the practice of the Roman Church. Guido goads the Pope, putting him in a corner, not hesitating to proclaim himself an apostate, to reject at least that faith in which both the Pontiff and the two prelates guarding him believe so strongly, tearing in this way the delicate veil which still covered, in the previous monologue, his orthodoxy and devotion to the Church. Guido labels the two prelates as hypocrites, slimy ‘casuists’, supporters of the reason of state, purposefully sent to coerce a confession and repentance from him in order to avoid any possible protests among the populace. A speech attributed by Guido to one of them is symptomatic of both Roman corruption and of the specious theological subtlety of the two ecclesiastics, according to which he would have saved his life if he had presented the murder in an anti-Molinist light, as a fanatical attempt, even based on foundations unable to be proved, to eliminate three Molinists and prevent his son Gaetano from becoming a fourth. It does not seem to me a fantastical hypothesis to suggest that in Guido one can see take shape, at least as a remotely surfacing theme, the celebration of a trial against Rome, the Papacy and Catholicism from a Protestant point of view. If this is the case, Browning (who, never tender with Catholicism, harboured strong Nonconformist tendencies inherited from his mother) reprised and brought to its final conclusion, through Guido, the anti-Catholic arguments of earlier poems such as ‘A Bishop Orders’ and above all the Roman, parodic and farcical section in Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day. Imperceptibly, pushed by that betrayal suffered at the hands of the Pope and the Church, Guido goes over to the other side, embracing, along with motives dictated by his own situation, some of the main accusations levied upon the Catholic Church by the Protestant tradition. He hints more than once at the secularization of the Church and at its transformation into an earthly power engaged in matters of state, so much so that it flagrantly negates the fundamentals of the faith. He himself, as a strategy, solicits the two prelates to dangle in front of the Pope (thus, a Machiavellian Pope, a temporal and political sovereign) the inopportune nature and the risk of a capital sentence against him, which would elicit the disapproval of the King of France. Neither do the Pope’s frequent, inadmissible alliances, stipulated with unbelievers and infidels against other sovereigns who were instead Catholic, go unobserved, just as

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Guido unmasks (like Luther much before him) the pretexts used in the past to combat the crusades. Another Protestant charge at which Guido subtly hints is the identification of the Pope with the Antichrist, and quite soon we hear him harshly criticizing the Catholic cult of relics.215 Guido echoes Luther each time he rails against Catholicism, or at least that Catholicism which is before him, accusing it of being a deformation of the Gospels, and, ahead of his time, his voice inaugurates the incandescent debate going on in England, in the very same years in which Browning’s poem was composed, regarding the apostolic succession.216 The Pope is repeatedly referred to, and with all the heavy irony of this periphrasis, as the ‘disinterested Vicar of Our Lord’, and Guido poses as a Protestant, or at least a British Anglican of the nineteenth century, each time he declares that the Catholic Church is in decline, having strayed from the purity of its origins, and maintains that Peter (who would have certainly acquitted him unpunished) would hardly have been able to recognize his successor and representative in the present Pontiff. 6. But the merely destruens phase of this trial is offset by the proposition of an alternative philosophy, theology and faith. To the punishing and vengeful, cruel and insensitive God depicted by the two prelates, and at least in this case coinciding with the notion of God held by the Victorians, Guido contrasts if not the certainty at least the possibility that God is mercy and forgiveness; denying what the prelates affirm, he hints at the Victorian ambivalent God, avenging but simultaneously compassionate. Furthermore, as a Machiavellian and follower of Hobbes, he tears apart the aura of immaterial and false spirituality, and ultimately of hypocrisy,

215 An emblem of the superstitious Catholic faith is the gouty sacristan who shows the case of the relic and waits hungrily for a tip; the relic healed Cophetua but is now powerless to heal his gout. Idle, inactive, like this relic, faith has lost its effectiveness upon the world. 216 This too is a veiled, astute contemporary allusion, and it refers to the aggressive Catholic revival which in one case I will call the ‘siege of Rome’ (Volume 5, § 17 and § 167), that of a number of novels of the late 1860s which focused expressly on attempts by Catholic prelates, often Jesuits, to win vacillating English Protestants back into the fold.

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which the Church and religion claim as their own, clearly rejecting the philosophy of temperance and repression of the instincts, and makes instead a profession of secular faith, formulating an updated and expanded version of carpe diem.217 A blasphemous and irreverent hymn rings out to demonstrate human hypocrisy and the base motivations which govern man and to extol ‘faith in the present life’, a hedonistic faith closed to the transcendent dimension. Guido imagines, or hopes to see, all of creation bow down to it: ‘down all they drop to my low level, ease / Heart upon dungy earth that’s warm and soft, / And let who will attempt the altitudes’. 7. One of the most successful and poetic contradictions of this character occurs when the tone of the monologue switches from challenge to lament, to supplication, almost to whimpering, upon the arrival of the executioners. In the increasing tiredness and resignation which begin to overcome him, quite unlike the conclusion of the first monologue, Guido confesses that his release from prison would only reserve for him a future so bleak and humiliating that death is almost preferable. And despite this, the penultimate section before the end shows again a shameless, contemptuous Guido, whose attitude is more defiant than ever: ‘I begin to taste my strength, / Careless, gay even: what’s the worth of life?’ He even plays the 217 Saying that he wants nothing more than ‘entire faith’ or else ‘complete unbelief ’, Guido seems to deny that doubt-filled philosophy, fortified by its very doubt, that Browning entrusts to Blougram (§ 123.2), and instead to come close to his interlocutor Gigadibs, citing him to the letter. As a matter of fact in this way Guido denounces precisely that false faith, with its compromises, ready to be denied, which the two prelates want to pass off as solid. As far as he is concerned, he confesses to have never pretended to have ‘entire faith’: ‘I capped to and kept off from faith’ (with a verbal play between ‘capped’ and ‘kept’ which also occurs in Hopkins). Indeed, Guido confesses with total candour: ‘I never was at any time / A Christian’, and on the contrary of having always been a primitive believer, sprung from the fauns and the nymphs, trunks and the hearts of oak, and venerating as his divinity a Jove with ‘rough vest and goatskin wrappage’. His false, ironic, even sarcastic reconstruction of a syncretistic faith with strong pagan undertones is strikingly reminiscent of the words of Caliban in ‘Caliban upon Setebos’ (§ 124.6). Guido postulates in Jove an imperturbable and unattainable god singularly akin to the ‘Quiet’ of Caliban, along with inferior divinities who are more humanized and act as intermediaries: the fauns, the nymphs and the Greek gods (Caliban’s Setebos).

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jinx, the bird of ill omen, foretelling few remaining days of life for the Pope and for Abbot Acciaioli little more than a year. A rebel on this earth, he will continue to be so in the hereafter: his regeneration will only be partial, something will remain that is unchangeable, ‘some nucleus that’s myself ’. But as noted above, at the exact moment of the entrance of the executioners, he eats his own words on the spot: ‘Life is all!’, better to be in chains but alive. He who a few minutes before had claimed never to have considered the Pope a God, proclaims himself his subject and bows down to him. One thinks that the premonitions about the approaching hour of his execution had earlier been as incessant as their reception was stoic, dismissed almost with nonchalance. A description of extraordinary vigour, in the initial phases of the monologue, is the recollection of the circumstances in which Guido saw the hangman’s axe (which he always refers to with the Italian word ‘mannaja’), for the first time, one May evening a few years earlier. He lucidly and coldly reviews the inactive instrument, looking innocuous and with such an air of cleanliness, which arouses the stupor and curiosity of idlers; he also adds an anatomical disquisition, on the basis of the knowledge and the terminology of the time, on death due to the cutting of the jugular (Browning had had, in his youth, a smattering of medical study). This way of dying is the fruit of an art other than that of nature, natural death being painless, perhaps in one’s sleep, at seventy years of age. Guido experiences in advance, but without a tremor, the moment of his decapitation, identifying with the earlier victims of that deadly instrument. En passant the controversy comes back to the fore against the barbaric nature of this form of punishment as well as against the scandalous and unjust favouritism which regulates its use: to Guido, as a proud aristocrat, the use of the ‘mannaja’ as a deterrent and bogeyman of the common people – and at the same time a lesson and a healthy form of entertainment, just as the Tertium Quid had claimed – is acceptable. What he disagrees with is the treatment reserved for him by the Pope, quite different from that used when that instrument of death had been last employed: the noblemen had been left unpunished, although found guilty, the cowherd had been beheaded, guilty of nothing more than having reacted to his humiliation. Guido argues in this case, too, against the lack of respect towards the aristocracy, against traditions which have become ever more barbaric, against

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times that have changed, against Rome which has become ‘un-Romed’. He returns frequently to his own nobility and to the history of his bloodline, in the attempt to soften, bamboozle and win the cardinal and the abbot over to his side, underlining the pastimes and pleasures they all share. In a sense Guido is a nostalgic, melancholy observer of the waning of a chivalric and feudal code of honour, a nobleman who looks scornfully at his inferiors and regrets the demise of the courtly conventions, of the equestrian sports and the camaraderie of aristocratic life and above all of the supreme, unfailing loyalty that reigned among its members: a society that, law unto itself, is above the law, an island of happiness that enjoys natural immunity.218 § 130. Browning up to 1869 XXVII: ‘The Ring and the Book’ V. Giuseppe Caponsacchi and Pompilia Giuseppe Caponsacchi, whose voice we hear in Book V in order to defend himself and Pompilia, is placed like a shield between the latter and Guido in the pages of the poem just as happened in the historical circumstances. It is at first a voice of sarcastic criticism towards Roman justice which, during the trial following the capture of the two fugitives, listened to his deposition with haughty incredulity and now, with the murders committed, has called him back with urgency from Civitavecchia where

218 In the purely narrative part (which, as I mentioned, is very brief, having been almost entirely covered in the first monologue), Guido describes the murder in terms of a failed work of art, marred by the fatal demon of imperfection, he being the ‘poor obstructed artist’, the painter who at the last stroke of the brush ruins his masterpiece, or the poet whose inspiration dries up in the last stanza. He even regrets that Pompilia did not die after his first blows, for in that case he would have been able to contrive an infallible alibi: having come to Rome to collect his wife and son, he had found them with Caponsacchi; attacked, he defended himself and Caponsacchi escaped. To his misfortune, Guido encounters an irreproachable functionary in the renter of horses, who denies him a fresh mount because he is lacking ‘permission’ – he is a man who does not give in to the temptation of gold, indeed ‘the one scrupulous fellow in all Rome’, which leads him to speak, after having demonstrated the corruption and corruptibility of the city, of ‘irrational Rome’ as opposed to his ‘blessed Tuscany’. Guido’s anti-Roman stance is again highlighted when, invoking suicide, he compares himself to the ancient Tuscan heroes rather than to Roman ones.

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he had been sent in punitive exile, humbly begging him to illuminate them on the innermost motives of the misdeed. He accuses justice of having applied, already at the time of that first trial – the first spark of a later conflagration – excessive mildness, punishing everyone too lightly, and thus indiscriminately punishing both the innocent and the guilty instead of the single truly guilty party, who is Guido, with the punishment he deserved. Again asserting his full integrity as a priest,219 he consequently tends to present himself as the champion of truth who, guided by the hand of God, fights and unmasks lies, to the point that the events tend in his retelling to be projected onto a cosmic scenario, and to become an agon between the forces of good and evil, in which he plays Saviour and Redeemer, while Guido is the ‘Lord of Show, / And Prince of the Power of the Air’. Just as Guido is far from gentle with him, Caponsacchi does not hide his regret for not having killed him the only time that he had the opportunity; but not so much out of hatred, as because his hesitation involuntarily led to the death of Pompilia. In any case, he does not ask that Guido die now: he wishes him a more atrocious punishment, to wander the world repelled by everyone, like Judas, indeed to form with the latter a fellowship founded on hatred, on traitorous kisses, on continuous scuffles and false reconciliations. By contrast, even from the first lines the diabolical and calculating figure which Guido sees in Pompilia looms like a luminous and immaterial presence, a martyr and a flaming and armed archangel, and a pure emanation of the divine.220 2. Even if Caponsacchi is not the focus of the poem to the extent Henry James would have liked him to be (he wished he could even be its fulcrum), Browning transfigured the historical Caponsacchi – whose deposition is 219 Caponsacchi effectively shows the court that, had there really been an affair between himself and Pompilia, there would have been no need to flee; in an impromptu Machiavellian comment, he adds that the law, given that it ended up placing Pompilia with her adoptive parents to whom he had taken her back, could ‘justif[y] the means / Having allowed the end’, and clear him completely. 220 Pompilia’s arrest in Castelnuovo, with her attempt to wound Guido with his own sword, is retold by Caponsacchi in terms especially alluding to the capture of Jesus in Gethsemane, an image also used earlier by Guido (see § 129.3 n. 213), but with a twisted or even completely reversed connotation.

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nowhere to be found in the ‘Old Yellow Book’ – making him the true and positive hero of The Ring and the Book. As I pointed out, he was extremely sensitive to the archetype of the liberator of an oppressed woman, which was not only a purely literary archetype but, in fact, contained an indelible autobiographical association. History involuntarily furnished him a Browning-style hero hardly needing any authorial manipulation: this is to say, a problematic hero, in the making and yet divided, rather than triumphant and unhesitatingly triumphing. In fact, Caponsacchi attains his heroic stature after an exhausting and far from linear struggle. He did not become a priest to earn his daily bread: he himself remembers his ancestor, a bishop, and how he helped the poor and saved Arezzo from the threat of sacking by Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici. He joined the priesthood out of a pure spirit of emulation because, ‘bishop in the bud’, he was won over by dreams of making himself a career within the Church. Once a priest, the inner dilemma of Caponsacchi lies in the scruples of an ecclesiastic who wants to adhere strictly to his vows but yet is aware of, and terrified by, the weakness of the flesh and the attractions of the world.221 The emblem of the Catholic clergy in Italy in the seventeenth century is once again personified by Browning in a bishop, in the present case the direct superior of Caponsacchi, who – so different from his ancestor – candidly shows off to him his laxity, his philosophy of compromise and adjustment and shamelessly exhorts him to give himself to the world.222 Up until the meeting with Pompilia the newly consecrated priest Caponsacchi, by his own admission, had faithfully enacted the compromise to which he has been authorized, indeed urged. He reads the breviary and is equally assiduous in his attentions there ‘where beauty and fashion rule’, according to the

221 This is said from a Protestant viewpoint, given that on the impossibility of priests’ keeping their vows of celibacy clashes between the Tractarians – and later the Catholic converts – and the Protestants were the order of the day; for instance, Kingsley elicited Newman’s Apologia with a barb of this type (§ 27.2). 222 It is no longer the time, says this bishop, to add bricks to the building, but rather to decorate it with ivy and roses: ‘Renounce the world? Nay, keep and give it us’. Today, he adds with an image that is reminiscent of his distant ‘predecessor’ of St Praxed, rough stone is not wanted for the façade of the church, but porphyry.

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new image of a priest in step with the times, a mature Renaissance man, a humanist immersed in the world and right at he heart of society, whom the Pope will fear and abhor in his monologue.223 But it did not take long for Caponsacchi to turn back and dismiss his illusions. To the same bishop who, seeing him closed up in church, asked him in surprise if he was perhaps thinking of becoming a Molinist, and attempted to push him back into the world, Caponsacchi responded that he was first and foremost simply a Christian. Once he has relived this Pauline conversion, Caponsacchi’s monologue, save for the account of the escape with Pompilia from Arezzo, focuses almost invariably on a polemical theme, arguably debatable and forced, which is the denunciation of the scandalous habits of the Church, its worldliness, its hypocrisy – although coming from the opposing front to Guido and inspired by the purpose of regenerating, not dismantling it. It is no coincidence that in his final lines he wishes that Fra Celestino, Pompilia’s confessor, be made the next Pope, and he proclaims his faith in the word of God and solely in it, refusing the guidance of God’s selfprofessed earthly representatives, abbots ‘with the well-turned leg’, canons with the ‘silk mask’ and bishops with the ‘world’s musk still unbrushed / From the rochet’. 3. According to Caponsacchi’s own version of the story, the epiphany leading to his rejection of the world coincided with his encounter with Pompilia; and this is the first aspect which makes us pause to think; in addition, once he met Pompilia and witnessed her ‘potency of truth’ and ‘crystalline soul’, he claims to have undergone a metamorphosis which, in its suddenness, sounds less than fully credible: ‘Into another state, under new rule / I knew myself was passing swift and sure’. Browning knew that Caponsacchi, whom he makes exit the scene as he vows to fight for the triumph of good and express his wish for an openness to even the most imperceptible signs of the divine, left the Church in 1702, giving up the 223 Browning portrays Caponsacchi’s risky position, on the ridge which divides faith from the world, both for the sake of historical truth and to give credibility to the innocence he professes, having in any case got mixed up in a situation thorny enough for a priest. He had been steered towards a practice which was customary for the contemporary clergy while, personally, he had had scruples and hesitations.

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cowl. But he made no mention of this for the sake of his archetypical role. The real nature of his feelings for Pompilia after first having been struck, ecstatically, by the sight of her at the theatre – like a Madonna of Raphael placed on the main altar – is intentionally left vague in Caponsacchi’s own retelling. Was it sensual love or simply amazed admiration before such a splendid sign of God? What one seems to understand is that Caponsacchi, in all honesty, admits to having felt a sensual quiver, but without feeling guilty or sinful. When a canon, an accomplice and companion in his worldly adventures (later branded by Caponsacchi himself as the emblem of the fashionable priest, devoid of scruples of conscience), volunteers to find him a way to meet Pompilia, Caponsacchi does not bat an eye, indeed confesses that for the duration of the day before, and all night long, he has been burning for Pompilia. When the canon, communicating the failure of his attempts, remarks to him in a totally offhand manner that Pompilia is the victim of abuse at the hands of her husband, compassion and a legitimate desire to rescue her instantly become one of the motives, if not the main and sole one, for his action. The ambiguous nature of his feelings is fully understood by Caponsacchi himself when later he remembers having felt in that moment as if he were on a razor’s edge, with his thoughts divided between the Summa of St Thomas and Pompilia, and to have felt both a frustrated lover and a liberator and a paladin of an undefended woman. In his defence, Caponsacchi makes it clear that he is not a saint, but like everyone he is subject to the tremors of the flesh, has ‘romanced a little’, even as a priest, in a way which is not different in the Bible for Joseph with Potiphar’s wife. 4. Caponsacchi’s victory over the world, one not without shadows, and won with difficulty, is instead a goal which is fully attained by Pompilia. In her monologue she speaks outside that world in which all the other characters in The Ring and the Book, with the exception of the Pope, are immersed with great impetuousness; a world that in her eyes is vain and ephemeral and at which she looks with almost complete, absolute, but not at all pessimistic ataraxy.224 With her candid and silvery voice, with 224 The death of the ascetic character, usually in the flower of his youth, is a topos frequently exploited by contemporary fiction, as exemplified by little Nell in Dickens, or – though the character is much older – Thackeray’s Colonel Newcome.

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her ascetic tension, with her softening of every conflict and her spiritual elevation, she is most evidently an echo of Pippa in the poem with the same name. She looks at human things with the same equanimity but also the same naïve lack of inhibitions, recognizing that she is part of a human family that is indiscriminately, and in every single member of it, God’s creation, and which in turn is in a state of harmonious communion with nature. That contact, that direct line with God, which there is practically no character in the poem who does not claim to have, is, in her case, real.225 Unsullied pureness, Pompilia is the only natural being, intact from machinations in the midst of a myriad of Machiavellian characters. She is unique in the surrounding panorama of mediocrity and Roman abjection due to her integral application of the law of reconciliation and forgiveness. It is her confessor who prompts her to search her mind and recount her story, though she avows she remembers nothing or nearly nothing about the four years of marriage. She has agreed to do so with a single aim: she wishes to recollect Guido’s utter cruelty to better forgive him.226 And she fulfils this task to perfection, even finding extenuating circumstances for the behaviour of her husband, who was tricked by the Comparini; she even regrets not having stood as a mediator between them and him. And she calls on Caponsacchi – sparkling with ‘truth’ from his every pore, a true and last surviving ‘servant of God’, saviour of the weak and enemy of cowards – to share her purity. She extols precisely that union of which the world is suspicious, which for her exists only in a natural and purely spiritual sense. Indeed, she makes of Caponsacchi the focus of a reversal of perspectives: no longer ‘sinner’ and ‘devil’ but ‘saint’; images of light and shadow follow one another even too insistently in the parts of her monologue that evoke her rescue by him. The real apotheosis she attributes to Caponsacchi culminates in her recognition of his role as a divine mediator, as through

225 Pompilia’s God, ‘God the strong, God the beneficent […] ever mindful in all strife and strait’, who ‘makes the need extreme, / Till at the last He puts forth might and saves’, heralds Hopkins’s God as he appears in the opening of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. 226 Having said that, her forgiveness in the end, in a way which is more than understandable, becomes insidious and slightly sarcastic, when she, paradoxically, thanks Guido for having ended their marriage by killing her.

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him God has bestowed enough light for men, immersed in the shadows, to rise up to reach Him. 5. Pompilia’s revisitation of her past life may initially give the impression, which will prove to be false, of a character who is resigned and prone to obscure fatalism. Her monologue, which she utters while already dying, on the fourth day after the bloody events227 (and on the same day in which Caponsacchi appears before the court in the preceding book), begins by listing her presentiments of death which she now detects in her childhood, such as the lion devouring the ‘figure of a prostrate man’ outside the entrance to the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina where she was baptized and married. Even more markedly, at the corner of the street a statue of the Virgin in the tabernacle looks like her, with the further foreshadowing of the Baby Jesus being torn or having fallen from her breast. Pompilia describes herself at the time of her marriage as an impotent victim at the mercy of events, surrounded by a reality which was intangible and elusive: ‘it proved wrong but seemed right’ are the words she says of her adoption referring to the thoughts of Violante, who ‘instead of piercing straight / Through the pretence to the ignoble truth’ trusted in the works of Abbot Paolo. She herself believed the Comparinis were her real parents until she discovered that they only ‘seemed such and were none’, just as she discovered, having fooled herself into believing that her husband would be a real husband, that Guido just for once would be exactly what he seemed to be. She confesses having suffered in silence and without understanding the plan that was being plotted behind her back, a docile lamb allowing herself to be shorn and butchered, a holocaust the value of whose blood was discussed in her presence. Mechanically and unconsciously she lives through the stages of her marriage, remembering the sinister background of the weather (a deluge), and the suspicious feeling of being surrounded by hostile objects and furniture. Her interpretation of the deeds of the Comparinis, despite being and feeling the most unfairly damaged party, confirms her docility to the secret plans of God, which is the real and 227 Honan 1961, 240ff., demonstrates, on the basis of an in-depth examination of lexical occurrences in her monologue, that very few words belong to a register which is too high for an adolescent such as Pompilia.

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profound value underlying her apparent resignation. She absolves Pietro, and towards Violante she recognizes her guilt, however not to the extent of authorizing Guido to carry out a revenge of similar proportions. Browning attributes to Pompilia a thought which is perhaps overly ingenious when he has her defend Violante by putting herself in the shoes of her own little son Gaetano: faced with the possibility of leaving him in the hands of her natural father she would not refuse to give him up, allowing him to become the son of another. If it is an irony of fate that Guido, not knowing she was an illegitimate child, reprimanded her for being her mother’s daughter, the irreverence of Pompilia amounts to a quite truthful interpretation of history when the hate that she assumes her real mother felt when she sold the baby is called authentic love, for the woman was trying to save Pompilia from misery and eternal damnation. Any suspicion that Pompilia is a resigned spectator of events and a still more resigned teller of the story, disappears when, in her monologue, she reaches the years of her marriage and the episode of the escape. She states categorically that there was never love between her and Caponsacchi: the only purpose of the escape was to reach her own parents in Rome. Caponsacchi, far from having been her lover, had been approached by her only to escort her, and he had nobly accepted. The explanation furnished by Pompilia, even without having to postulate any insincerity on her part, can be interpreted as a form of girlish illusion; sensual love may have existed but was sublimated and transfigured into a sort of religious and mystical exaltation.228 What is certain is that, given the way it is presented in her account, Pompilia literally put into practice, both in the preparations for and the execution of the escape, the evangelical precept of prudence and astuteness. Pompilia, however, eventually became anything but a submissive wife, of which there is further evidence in her accepting sexual intercourse with Guido only after the injunction of the archbishop. On the basis of an intuition, which in The Ring and the Book is always an instrument superior to pure reason, she felt that the archbishop 228 Pompilia even confesses to having believed that when there were knocks on the door on the day of the assassination, it was Caponsacchi that was knocking, and to having rushed to open it: in other words she may be sublimating and spiritualizing her own desire.

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was making a mistake. The prelate is instinctively revealed as yet one more casuist and a talented wordsmith who even accuses her, preposterously, of being a Molinist; his negative portrait is completed when he does not flinch at the revelation of the abhorrent offers of Guido’s brother, Girolamo (himself a priest), but grabs the carrot, tossing aside the stick, by telling her a devious, equivocal propitiatory parable. 6. As to the question of the love letters exchanged between Caponsacchi and Pompilia, hotly debated in almost all of the monologues with the most varied and contrasting positions taken, this is an issue which remains unanswered and which amplifies the relativism of the poem to the limit of the insoluble. Pompilia and Caponsacchi give, apart from the details, versions which tally and according to which the letters are a diabolical sham devised by Guido. The whole question, in Caponsacchi’s narration, takes the form, from the very beginning, of a war of wits: Guido arranges for him to receive false love letters from Pompilia to which Caponsacchi responds simply in order to stir up her husband’s jealousy, in a veritable tug-of-war. When Pompilia enters the scene in Caponsacchi’s monologue the plot thickens, however: on the one hand he admits having received letters from her (Guido is thus extraneous to the events), but on the other hand they were actually written by the female messenger who delivered them to him, who not only amended them and considerably altered their content from that originally dictated by Pompilia (who could neither read nor write), making a simple request for help look like love, but she also doctored Caponsacchi’s replies in the same way. In other words, Browning orchestrates a Catherine wheel of pretences and forgeries, further muddling a question which not even the ‘Old Yellow Book’ fully clarifies.229 229 Cook 1920, 285–9, considers it unlikely but not impossible that the historical Pompilia knew how to write and that therefore the letters were written by her; he reveals, however, that the said love letters, if authentic, presuppose a familiarity with classical literature which Pompilia could not have had. In the depositions contained in the ‘Old Yellow Book’ we also find that Pompilia claimed to have learned to write in her last few days in Arezzo, but there is a letter from her, which no one proved at the time to be false, even if it was produced after her death, and dated 3 May 1697, which contrasts with the affirmation given on her deathbed that she did not know how to

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Later Caponsacchi puts an end to the intricate question, stating that the letters were all falsified by Guido or by the messenger, and that consequently Guido had pretended to uncover in the tavern of Castelnuovo something that he himself had hidden. Pompilia, for her part, agrees with Caponsacchi in saying that their first encounter was at the theatre in Arezzo, where Guido usually took her almost as if to show her off to suitors to prostitute her. But she also remembers having seen Caponsacchi while, on the wings of the music, she was daydreaming about Rome and wishing to return there.230 She also mentions the involuntary role played by the maid in helping her and Caponsacchi to meet: the woman, after ‘a papertwist of comfits’ has been thrown in Pompilia’s lap at the theatre by Caponsacchi (upon the urging of Canon Conti), first vainly attempted to convince Pompilia to meet him to tell him of Guido’s threats upon her life; later, after her refusal, she told Pompilia, falsely, of a Caponsacchi intoxicated and mad with love for her (Pompilia needed only to see Caponsacchi once to know it was true). When the maid had given up hope, Pompilia was struck one morning, upon waking up, by a sentence casually uttered on purpose the evening before by the same maid: the whole ecclesiastic world was about to leave Arezzo for Rome. Her decision to escape was taken in an instant and is presented by Pompilia not as a surrender to temptation but an act of which God himself is guarantor, even though in appearance it would appear the contrary. She felt as if God himself was giving her the necessary strength. An aura of miracle surrounds the encounter on the balcony between Pompilia and Caponsacchi, when Pompilia acquires the confidence, yet again intuitive and almost mystical, that Caponsacchi in helping her will be serving God.

write. In Book IX Browning does have this letter examined, though in a playful way, by lawyer Bottini, when he conjectures that Pompilia could have learned to read and write like the parrots and the magpies, to placate her ‘hunger after fellowship’. 230 Henry James pointed out that this scene could have been ‘done’ so as to result in a pendant to the evening at the Rouen playhouse in Madame Bovary by Flaubert.

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§ 131. Browning up to 1869 XXVIII: ‘The Ring and the Book’ VI. The lawyers It was a stroke of genius on the part of Browning to give the floor, in the midst of the polyphony of The Ring and the Book, to the two lawyers in the Franceschini trial, Giacinto Arcangeli and Giovan Battista Bottini. The monologues entrusted to them – never loved by the critics and indeed usually chosen as the first to be sacrificed, together with the second, third and fourth Books in a hypothetical abridged version of the poem – have much more than a historical and judicial alibi for their presence. Placed as they are between those of the three leading actors and the acme of the tragedy, not only do they lessen the tension creating a sort of facetious and playful interlude, but they are also, on their own, and apart from their function within the poem, among Browning’s most original and enjoyable inventions. This is mainly due to the vividness with which the two characters are sketched out and to the superb, bubbly linguistic creativity which he bestows upon them. It would therefore be preposterous and pointless to look for the historical matrixes of the two figures in the ‘Old Yellow Book’: even if Browning adhered to his source for the specifically judicial parts, Arcangeli and Bottini are and must be understood as creations resulting from the exercise of that free application of ‘poetic truth’ that Browning contrasts to ‘historical truth’ at the end of the poem, specifically legitimizing his own work as that of an artistic re-creator of events, and thus also ipso facto re-inventor, as opposed to the scrupulous historian.231 2. Arcangeli exists first and foremost, if not only, in a linguistic dimension. What matters most to him is to prepare and produce a well-crafted speech, and his attention is turned to, even obsessively focused on, the language, the sounds and the details of expression.232 Latin is his soul: he makes constant reference to Latin authors and cases, and with Latin phrases and citations (of which Browning always inserts the English translation) his oration is filled; his is the oration of a failed Latinist, who on the model 231 Suffice it to say that Desiderio Spreti, and not Arcangeli, was Guido’s main defence lawyer, and the ‘pauperorum procurator’, Arcangeli being only the second lawyer. 232 Both his monologue and that of Bottini are teeming with puns and plays on words, and the sound fabric itself is noticeably more elaborate than in the others.

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of Cicero’s Pro Milone aims to compose a Pro Guidone et sociis. Bottini is substantially the same figure, complementary to or rather a mirror image of Arcangeli: both resort for the most part to the same techniques, the same criteria and argumentative expedients and even use, in many cases, the same examples and images, naturally to diametrically opposing ends.233 One of the essential differences between the two is, if anything, the fact that while Arcangeli yearns to be a Latinist, and is a Latinist lawyer, Bottini instead is a painter lawyer;234 or we could say the difference is between the rigorous and rational argumentative abilities of the former, and the eloquence and the emotional, sugary rhetoric of the latter.235 On a strictly professional plane, the two are bitter enemies, nor could it be otherwise. Yet the insults which they exchange are ultimately innocuous and friendly. Arcangeli, in the ‘portrait’ and in the numerous hints that he dedicates to his adversary, repeatedly calls him a bigot, a hypocrite and a dandy, and when he imagines him practising the speech in his studio, a crowing rooster. Bottini also takes aim at the boundless appetite of Arcangeli and, as a consequence, at his clouded brain. Browning declared his hatred for them and to have

233 Both compare Guido to Samson and Pompilia to Lucrece dishonoured by Sextus Tarquinius; both lament their time limits, citing the metaphysical image of sand falling through an hourglass; both wax nostalgic for ancient times when orations were pronounced out loud and not, as at present, only written, and regret having priests for judges. 234 Bottini-as-painter is discussed at length below. In truth Bottini is no less a competent or an erudite Latinist than Arcangeli, even if he is not as stifling in emphasizing it or in claiming his superiority. At any rate, while Arcangeli looks to the prose writers, Bottini chiefly turns to the poets and above all to the bucolic, pastoral and idyllic ones, and to Catullus and Horace. 235 Bottini, for whom all young girls are more or less the same, begins his reconstruction of the events with the first ‘frolics’ of the little lamb Pompilia; his retelling of her virginal fatuity is a pastiche of platitudes from bucolic poetry, while that of the difficult married life is a piece which virtually overflows with tropes. The transition from youth to married life, and Pompilia’s adaptation to its rhythms, is instead recounted along the lines of a parody of the fourth Virgilian eclogue. There is a constant recurrence in Bottini’s monologue of classical reminiscences and mythological similes, adapted or re-worked with often morbid ingenuity. Here it is obviously Browning the classicist rising to the surface.

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intended to expose them as disreputable emblems of the entire class of lawyers;236 but, at least as far as these two books are concerned, they fail to reach the heights of perversity of lawyers in Dickens. They are merely mediocre scoundrels, carefree goliards, painted, all things considered, with a caricature brush that leaves them unscathed.237 3. Arcangeli is yet another example in Browning of a character who is eternally awaiting revenge, ready to show the world his own misunderstood value and that, as such, he believes, or would like to believe, that he is always ahead of the game. He is not particularly resentful of Pompilia or the Comparinis, and his main adversary and rival is Bottini; nor is he as interested in having the truth triumph, or even saving Guido, so much as defeating Bottini and obtaining a personal victory. With respect to his rival he is an outsider, a social climber who exudes self-confidence but for the moment has nothing in hand: it is symptomatic of this that he is given the most thankless of tasks and one in which he will be the loser. At the same time, his faith is just superficial and tepid and indeed beneath the surface he is an unbeliever, a sceptic and a hypocrite. His envy puts him in the company of such Browning’s characters as the monk of ‘A Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ and the mediocre, pretentious musician Hugues of Saxe-Gotha. The vaunted, superior purity of his Latin, his gluttony, the references to food, wine and spices, and also his diabolical slyness and boundless greed (Arcangeli has just extorted, or so he believes, an advantageous will from the maternal grandfather of his son) link him most evidently to the Bishop at St Praxed. Bottini, in turn, becomes a fully caricatural character when, at the end of his monologue, he yields to a naïve optimism and suddenly acting like a dreamer launches into a panegyric of justice and of a world in which everyone trusts the law, to

236 In his letters to Julia Wedgwood; in another, Browning had claimed that the two lawyers were foolish rather than evil men. This judgement will become much harsher in Book XII, as we shall see. 237 And yet in chapter LXIII of The Old Curiosity Shop, when one of his many couples of trickster lawyers appears, Dickens tosses out a very Browninguesque comment: ‘Nobody knows the truth, everybody believes a falsehood’.

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the mutual advantage of those who are innocent, guilty, and those who are naturally lawyers. 4. The theme of the relativity of truth makes The Ring and the Book, as I have repeatedly observed, an extraordinarily modern work; the two monologues of Book VIII and IX are also modern, and to even a greater extent, in their foreshadowings of twentieth-century stream of consciousness in its playful version. Dominating and distracting thoughts alternate and succeed each other, and periodically become polarised, in Arcangeli: throughout the poem, he is the character most open to and affected by mental associations, and the one whose thoughts most tend to wander off track; he is also the one most easily trapped by the demon of analogy, by erudition and exemplification, which are occasionally only a means to their own end: the extreme case occurs when he proposes to stop digressing by using another digression. Bottini’s monologue is far more controlled but not less anticipatory. Right from the beginning, dissatisfied with the judicial practices of his time requiring written harangues, he dreams of being able to pronounce his oration out loud on a stage, and of transforming his own cramped little studio into an ‘immense hall’ where his words can reach not only the fifty Papal judges, not only the Pope in person, but all Rome. The formal structure of his monologue stems from this longing. The first sixteen lines, in which Bottini makes it explicit, contain the real, authentic thoughts of Bottini and are a private set of stage directions; after that, the monologue seems to take on the aspect of a realization of that dream. It is in fact the declamation of his harangue were he to find himself in the desired but impossible conditions described above. He himself, at the end of a long pictorial opening simile which will be dealt with below, expressly defines it an exordium. However, while this is practically a finished piece, comparable to that ‘painting’ which is the final result of the sketches and preparations of a painter, the rest of the speech is only outlined, at the same time a declaimed and rehearsed oration and the dramatic monologue of a lawyer who drafts his oration out loud, intermittently inserting pieces that are already finished, the boundary between the finished and unfinished parts being not always clear, sometimes imperceptible. In other words, Bottini scribbles down notes and fragments of his opening arguments and as he writes, he speaks, perhaps recites out loud, adding

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notes, memoranda, comments, and instructions.238 Thus Browning, in both monologues, renounces the idea of reproducing the final, polished judicial product and adopts the much more evocative solution of giving us ‘the making out a case’, or rather the incubation of a speech. The elaborate comparison which Bottini makes between himself and a painter is thus slightly contradictory: Bottini extols the perfection of the painting and Browning instead gives us his unfinished work. This nature of work in progress is again restated in the final considerations of the lawyer, which contain proposals for immediate action and his own reminder to go and have the speech printed, once it has been edited and polished. Similarly, Arcangeli, having reached the end of his speech, refers to what he has written in terms of a rough draft, vowing to undertake a tough labor limae the following day, to delete every ‘undue floridity’, to assume a more respectful tone towards the Church, and to use a more Ciceronian Latin. 5. The digressions in the monologue of Arcangeli give a clear idea both of his ultimate lack of involvement in Guido’s tragedy, about which it is difficult to imagine anyone being less concerned, of his psychology and his own private world which, unlike the case of Bottini, influences and even often engulfs his specifically professional side. His true nature is that of a hedonist, an epicurean, an eternal youth or petit bourgeois. He is constantly or periodically distracted and set off track by linguistic and expressive niceties: starting with the married life of Guido and Pompilia, his attention soon turns not only to determining their respective roles and responsibilities but also to the best way in which to express in Latin the terms ‘marriage’, ‘forged letter’ and ‘pistol’. It is significant that he declares that it is better for him to lose the case then cede the prize of best Latinist to Bottini, and that – a fact which is even more disconcerting and indicative, if true, of the standards of objectivity of Roman courts – it would seem that even the judges are not insensitive to the elegance of his style, and may even be influenced by it when they come to deciding upon the 238 A confirmation that we are in the presence of a rehearsal comes from a parenthetical comment in which Bottini explains why he has used a sea metaphor (to please the Pope, a Neapolitan), a comment which in fact is inappropriate and inopportune for a finished speech.

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verdict. In his prologue, Arcangeli first turns his thoughts to his son who bears his name (this is his eighth birthday) and dreams of seeing him one day a prince among lawyers and following in the footsteps of his father, a master in Latin; he also has a foretaste of the birthday party that will take place that evening, celebrates the warmth of the family hearth and finally talks about his intent to win. Private thoughts filter irresistibility and covertly into his defence arguments until the end, nullifying his objective, announced over and over, of inflexible concentration. His morbid adoration for his son is shown in the nearly orgiastic quantity of diminutives and pet names that he coins: Cinone, Cinoncino, Cinerugiolo, Cinazzo, Cintino, etc.239 He works and perorates, in truth, only to the degree necessary to allow himself to enjoy – indeed to drown in – the pleasures of the table and of his family’s affections: his motto is hardly the Benedictine ‘ora et labora’, but rather: first work and then play. Alongside his son and Latin, good food is his chief passion. As his speech develops, we notice that he becomes ever hungrier and any pretext suffices to think about the birthday feast, the preparations for which are well underway: he can almost savour the smells from the kitchen. These involuntary thoughts interrupt him with ever greater frequency, gradually making of the monologue a curious mixture of gastronomic and legal terminology and thus anticipating Joyce’s chapter on Bloom’s lunch in Ulysses. 6. The angle taken by Bottini’s speech is already evident in the opulent simile, so rich with variants and so ramified as to almost seem an allegory, which he presents at the opening of his monologue in comparing the lawyer who immerses himself in a case and a painter who reads up on the subject and begins sketches for a painting of the Holy Family,240 a comparison 239 Browning’s relationship with his son Pen may have been reflected, albeit with a good dose of self-irony, in the morbid one that Arcangeli has with his son. 240 Here Browning funnelled all of his competence and passion for painting, basing his description of the genesis of pictorial work and its preparation on what he remembered from his youthful readings of De Lairesse’s manual; in its documentary value it also offers us an indirect peek at the artistic movements in Rome at that time. The painter whom Bottini has in mind, and whom the reader thinks of, rather than Ciro Ferri whom he mentions, is an exponent of High Baroque or of the mature Renaissance, perfectly versed in anatomy, physiology, and human musculature (even dissection),

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that contains among other things a small ars poetica or theory of artistic production. It in fact stems from the notion of an opposition between the external and physical materiality of the artistic product and the ‘inner spectrum’, the ‘brain-deposit’, infinitely purer and intangible, or rather the ‘main central truth / And soul o’ the picture’ which is distinct from the ‘outward frame’, or rather the work of art as a ‘spirit-birth’, an unicum which cannot be divided. There are here very evident literary echoes and specific repetitions of the theory of the genesis of artistic production – and of that of The Ring and the Book in particular – expounded by Browning in person in Books I and XII, which lead one to consider Bottini, at least in this respect, yet another (although by the nature of the situation, slightly self-parodying)241 mouthpiece for Browning. It is Bottini himself who compares the Holy Family of the imaginary painter to the Comparini family, without noticing the inappropriateness of the comparison, for the simple fact that only with a great deal of forcing could St Joseph be compared to Caponsacchi, although it is more than natural to compare Guido to the Herod of the situation, who meditates upon the Slaughter of Innocents. The pictorial metaphor disappears from the monologue when Bottini wishes to focus on a single portrait, that of Pompilia, a portrait that he tends to produce ‘natural size’, finally opting to abandon it and settle only for his model, Pompilia, in the flesh. Consequently, his comparisons, and Pompilia’s counterparts, turn into historical or literary figures from the past. 7. A defence of Guido had already been given, without competence and solely by instinct, by the common citizen representative of the first ‘Half Rome’ in Book II, and by Guido himself in Book V. Arcangeli summarizes and organizes the reasons of his sympathizers and partisans as an expert; and yet his defence remains, if judged by modern standards, laughable and imaginative and in essence weak, indeed specious and simplistic. Its knowledge and skills that would induce one to identify him with a Michelangelo or alternatively a Mantegna, while the wrinkled and rough St Joseph, and especially the Madonna with the ‘florid lip’ and the ‘bosom uberous’ and the Baby Jesus with the ‘budding face’ and ‘imbued with dewy sleep’ make one think of Caravaggio and Rubens. 241 Altick and Loucks 1968, 22–3 n. 5.

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general organization is centred on honour killing. Guido is a self-confessed murderer, so all that remains to do is to explain and justify what happened, not deny it. Having established that line of defence, his objective is to show that if honour is a gift from God, the honour of one’s wife is even more so, and also that even the supposition or the mere suspicion of a spot on that honour is enough to trigger the rage of a husband, there being no limits to the revenge carried out with such a motive. As a result his speech has a didactic, treatise-like, analogical development, and the peroration becomes erudite and encyclopaedic (naturally, and with subtle irony, Browning is both deft at masquerading as his character and in distancing himself from the speaker). The cases of honour killings are reviewed thoroughly, beginning with those of the animal kingdom and arriving at the human; Man being first examined as primitive and pagan, and eventually a Christian. An early proof of Arcangeli’s verbal virtuosity lies in his claim that man is Man, in a positive sense, precisely when he acts like the beasts. Yet he does not demonstrate, as he presumes, that Scripture is in favour of revenge, but rather that honour is sacred and, when wounded, it leads one to lose his mind. However, we do see a confirmation of his ironic standing when he bathetically confesses that, after all the erudition which he has shown, he has forgotten to include the important opinion and comments of St Ambrose. His opportunism has ample scope for display when, confident that this revenge for adultery will soon be sanctioned as ‘the absolute flower’ by the Pope, he attacks the Molinists who deny it, passing cleverly as an adversary of revisionism and a faithful and true follower of the word of Jesus. In his case, the echoes of the reformist controversy against the Church are superficial and self-interested, like his assertion about the admissibility of divorce, which Jesus authorized and the Church abolished, or the barbs he fires at his ‘infallible Pope’. Even from the words of Arcangeli, Innocent XII – whose majesty, he claims, Guido has not injured but on the contrary reinforced – is painted in a negative light, like a quietist who does not want to be disturbed by troubles and whose intellectual faculties are in irreversible decline: a venerable, dazed and sleepy old man whose pathetic pride he imagines awoken suddenly by the stream of his own – Arcangeli’s – words. Infinite, but also infinitely specious, is the ingenuousness of the lawyer when he defends this vengeance and discusses

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the very particular circumstances which render it more or less justifiable (the latter a case which naturally has nothing to do with that of Guido). Having exhausted his list of extenuating circumstances, in his pars destruens he deflects and defuses the six aggravating circumstances put forward by Bottini, by re-applying on a vast scale the scattered Machiavellianism of nearly all the characters in the poem. Only later does he remember that he is supposed to be the ‘Pauperum Procurator’, and out of mere duty owing to his position – the poor are the treasure of Christ – he also argues the case of the four accomplices of Guido. One of his last paradoxical arguments is that the historically documented idea of the assassins – to kill Guido after committing the crime and on the way back to Arezzo – testifies to both their own rectitude and Guido’s integrity: the former felt no hatred for the victims and only wished to be paid in accordance with an ‘instinct of equity’: while the latter did not wish to mar the purity of his gesture with monetary remuneration and therefore did well to mislead them and refuse to keep his word. 8. Unlike Arcangeli, Bottini has an attitude towards the court which is more wheedling than aggressive; opening his speech, he turns to the court, addressing its members as ‘lights of law’ and, at the end, lavishes unctuous praise upon them. If he only could, he would fill the place with his emotional and grandiose, narcotic and bewitching rhetoric. Offering them the equivalent of the ‘artist’s ultimate appeal’, he works hard at providing everything except evidence: instead of proving that Pompilia is all virtue, he would like to be able to say, like the painter, ‘Behold Pompilia!’ It is almost against his will that he must prepare to make his demonstration and when he does, we realize that he is still more systematic, and if possible even a blinder follower of Machiavellian precepts than even Arcangeli was, naturally with completely different results: the aim of Pompilia – a wholly admissible result –, that is to say the escape from Guido, authorized means which are not unobjectionable. She used her own graces – for this is the thesis – to ensnare Caponsacchi, whom in fact she did not know at first was a priest. Not only that, but we realize that Bottini is the most casual and insidious defender of casuistry, in which area he completes audacious and virtuoso leaps worthy of the best Catholic tradition. Pompilia, far from naïve, is according to Bottini calculating and talented at it, although

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it must be said that for him this is in no way a negative quality: tricks and deceptions have been indeed carried out, but as noted, with good intentions. They are her daily bread, he suggests, beginning with the letter written from Arezzo to Abbot Paolo which it is understandable that Pompilia had written on impulse, and that only later she denied having written, passing it off as having been extorted by Guido, after repenting for having discredited those who she had believed to be her parents (‘O splendidly mendacious!’, is the oxymoronic comment by Bottini). In its development, the monologue reconstructs the events if only in a selective way, aimed in fact at briefly outlining what happened after the marriage and the first signs of impatience in Pompilia. Bottini clears her of wrongdoing at every single stage of the story. He proceeds specifically through the use and abuse of admitting but not conceding. In a pure spirit of defiance, and in a hypothetical way, he therefore pretends to accept almost every accusation, in order to subsequently prove it unfounded.242 For, as Machiavellian and insidious as he makes Pompilia out to be, Bottini has no doubt that she never yielded, and kept her chastity intact; regarding Caponsacchi, however, he finds 242 Bottini admits that Pompilia has been excessively generous in lavishing her graces but, assuming that she actually did, she did it without malice; the love letters to Caponsacchi, if truly written by Pompilia, are justifiable due to her need to find allies and because only by pretending to write love letters would she be able to capture the attention of Caponsacchi; and furthermore because by making the first move she would be able to avoid putting Caponsacchi in an embarrassing situation. Taking a stance regarding the supposed cuddling between Pompilia and Caponsacchi during the escape, mentioned only by the coachman, Bottini does not raise objections, judging such ‘osculation’ a ‘potent means’ to dismiss the scruples of the priest, if indeed the coachman’s version is true, which it is not. To the strategy of admit-butdo-not-concede Bottini adds another version of the supposed visits of Caponsacchi to Pompilia after her relocation to the home of the Comparinis, as she awaits the birth of her son, believed by Guido to be a further proof of her adultery. In that regard, Bottini truly clutches at straws to defend the full admissibility of those hypothetical visits, maintaining that Caponsacchi too may have been lonely and may have given in to human weakness: just as an alcoholic – goes the reasoning – damages his health if he attempts total abstinence and therefore wisely reduces his consumption slowly, so, in order to give up the habit of frequenting Pompilia, Caponsacchi may have occasionally visited her.

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such a yielding more likely, insinuating that he may have had weaknesses, may have softened and given in to the temptations of the flesh (and this is what one can infer, as seen above, from his own monologue).243 9. The two lawyers do not leave the scene at the end of the two Books containing their monologues; instead they reappear in a fleeting but very effective appendix in the twelfth and last Book. Of the four documents 243 The justification of the actions of Caponsacchi, who helped Pompilia in the simplest and handiest way, very unlike the archbishop and the governor of Arezzo and their devious procrastination, is entrusted to an apology which is among the most ingenious but also the most cryptic of those generated by Browning’s imagination in The Ring and the Book.  It is a parable ideally inspired by Boccaccio and by his tales discussing and exalting human opportunism, and it tells in fact of the dreams of Peter, John, and Judas, which Bottini presen­ts, without assigning it any credibility whatsoever, as the invention of a despicable Jew aimed at discrediting Christianity.  According to the tale, the three apostles arrive, exhausted, at a tavern where the only thing that they can find to eat is a single hen, a hen which they agree will be given to the one of the three who, after a restorative nap, will be able to report the most beautiful dream. While the dreams of Peter and John sublimate or obliterate altogether material considerations  (the former dreams of Paradise, the latter of the Church and its keys), that of Judas is pragmatic and astute as it places the flesh before the spirit, despite pretending hypocritically to do the opposite: he says in fact that he has had a dream in which he was eating the hen, but rather than a dream it is reality, because he actually did eat the hen, cheating the others out of it. The meaning of the parable, as stated by Bottini, is that ‘to keep wide awake is our best dream’. Complete uncertainty remains, however, as to who is the Judas of the situation. The most logical interpretation is that he may stand both for the archbishop and the governor for their fraudulent ‘dreams’ and duplicitous behaviour, while Peter and John are the models for Caponsacchi, given their nobility and transparency. But the possibility cannot be excluded that Bottini wishes to criticize the insensitivity and duplicity of the two authorities from Arezzo through Peter and John instead, and in Judas show the opportunism and audacity of Caponsacchi, of whom in that case Judas is the alter ego. This parable would be in this case much bolder and heterodox, because it would place the superiority of action, even if not completely honest or legitimate, above any good intentions not followed by any action at all. This is something that it would not be impossibile to admit given the very numerous times in which, as noted above, Bottini applies his own Machiavellianism, its final and supreme application being his suggesting the presumed simulation of Pompilia’s death, a permissible means towards the end, which was to tell the world the real state of affairs, and, with a confession, to save her soul.

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invented by Browning to pull the strings of the poem together, two are in fact a letter from Arcangeli to Cencini, editor of the ‘Old Yellow Book’, and another, its natural counterpart, from Bottini to an unspecified recipient.244 Here Browning’s judgement on the two lawyers becomes suddenly harsher, bitter and more sarcastic. In his letter Arcangeli, despite his defeat, does not lay down his sharpened weapons and his aggressiveness towards Bottini; his inner soul as a Latinist reappears and he does not refrain from mentioning movingly, his heart swollen with pride, his son’s witty response given to a woman who has commented upon his father’s defeat. If towards Arcangeli, who has lost the case, Browning is indulgent, Bottini fares worse, for his moral stature is sharply cut down to size with respect to his own monologue in Book IX. His pride and triumph are unjustified, as he has been defending the truth, which by his own admission is an easy job. When later he moves on to inform his correspondent of his future projects, we see clearly the very mediocre nature of a cynical and opportunistic man devoid of any scruples. He will squeeze the last possible drop from the Franceschini trial, as availing himself of a cavil (the court declared Guido guilty, not Pompilia innocent) and of the sentence of a court in Arezzo and of the Catholic Rota of Florence, both unfavourable to Pompilia, he will now take on the cause of the Convertite nuns to confiscate her worldly belongings, as property of a sinner. This volte-face is so great and scandalous that Browning himself comes out from behind the curtain to denounce it by reporting the papal decree which establishes the full innocence of Pompilia. But Bottini’s triumph is ruined, not to say completely nullified, by a crucial extract of the sermon given by the Augustinian friar, Pompilia’s confessor, included 244 These missives are moreover linked by various analogies: both lawyers, as I mentioned, fire barbs at one another, both are under pressure to finish their letters in order to post them in time; both – and here the analogy extends to the Venetian tourist, author of the first of the four documents (§ 126.3 n. 189) – close the letter with flattering anecdotes. To underline the atmosphere after the execution, Bottini, in his letter, blames Arcangeli’s ‘lack of heart’ as the latter, once the ‘procession’ reached the church of Santa Maria del Popolo (which contains the relic of Christ’s navel), found it an occasion ‘to cut a joke’ and, according to Bottini, paraphrasing Martial, announced: ‘Ad umbilicum [which also means a knob at the end of the roller to which a manuscript is attached] sic perventum est’.

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by Bottini in his own letter to demonstrate to everyone, as he believes, the friar’s raving madness. The friar spreads the shadow of doubt and of pessimism over that triumph, starting with the very assumption that the truth is not as clear as one might believe and that, in the end, it only rests with God. It is more than natural that this sermon, directly attacking Bottini and on the strength of his worldly perspective, should long continue to echo in his mind; and that he should retort by calling the friar a ‘blatant brother […] virulent and rabid’, and even, without mincing his words, a Molinist. § 132. Browning up to 1869 XXIX: ‘The Ring and the Book’ VII. A resolution or a re-opening of relativism? The final and supreme earthly judge upon whose word depends the life or death of Guido Franceschini and his four accomplices is Pope Innocent XII, born Antonio Pignatelli of Naples, ascending to the Papacy at sixty-six years of age in 1691 and spiritual guide of the Catholic Church until 1700. After having long examined and weighed the fervid, passionate, insistent and sinuous voices of doubt and of hesitation, in Book X he rejects the appeal for clemency presented by the guilty parties and signs the order of execution. The Pope embraces his responsibility, perfectly aware that he could have erred, that only God fully possesses the truth and that man is ignorant and his word congenitally untruthful, but also sure that according to the elements at his disposal Guido is guilty. He too, then, is a perfectly Browninguesque creation, considering that he hardly appears in the ‘Old Yellow Book’. Innocent endures his excruciating torment as both vicar of Christ and a man, represented with a poetic truth and a depth of psychological insight equalled only by the Books of Guido. He is at once a Pope who is historically believable and a manifest mouthpiece for Browning in all his subtle and professional theological digressions. But he is also made to come on stage as a deus ex machina and an interpretative key, definitive and official, and the authentic voice of truth. The relativism which until now has reigned in the poem is resolved from the heights of his nobility, by his wisdom and by the power of the contact that he possesses with divine omniscience. Yet, upon closer examination, the relativism is only temporarily resolved and, we might say, contradicted in the same moment in which it is resolved, and

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for two fundamental reasons: the Pope’s agony, the fatigue with which he achieves his certainty, a certainty which at any rate is weak, as of one who underscores his limits and inadequacies; and the recouping of relativism itself, entrusted to the last pessimistic word of the poem, that of the Augustinian friar, Fra Celestino. 2. The sentencing of Guido is for the Pope a decision already taken and firmly established – despite his hoping that Guido may in extremis repent and mend his ways – practically from his first words: if he goes over the now familiar events once again it is because he wants to understand to the full the ‘seed of act’, the intentions of the protagonists which were then translated into actions; because he wants, by summarizing the facts, to further support his deeply rooted conviction. He is not at all without compassion or comprehension for Guido, and indeed the first time that he turns to him he seems to melt into commiseration and solidarity: himself not far from death, he sees in Guido ‘another poor weak trembling human wretch […] / Pushed up to the gulf ’. His own diagnosis of Guido, which he attempts to make as objective and impartial as possible, confirms in essence the portrait which had taken form in Guido’s two monologues: that of the character who, having received some talents at birth, puts them to waste, and does not use his abilities to make them bear fruit. The idea of life set forth by the Pope is that of an apprenticeship faced with obstacles which turn out to be only apparent. Guido was, even before his marriage, a frustrated, entrapped prisoner desiring to flee, an exception to the rule according to which nature creates Man to be courageous and do what is right; his noble birth and his place in society ought to have helped him to follow steadily the path of righteousness. Guido’s very taking of the minor orders was an act done only out of pure self-interest, as a safety net and possible refuge (incidentally, it is one of the first confirmations of the unpredictability of the Pope that he takes no account of that ecclesiastic state, indeed condemns it, when even out of esprit de corps it ought to have been enough to save Guido’s life). However brief and concise, his retrospective gradually turns towards an impressive climax filled with symbols, metaphors and negative or discrediting characterizations. Guido is a mere mollusc that separates from its shell (clearly the Church), a snail which keeps the company of worms and flies, an abject insect which feeds on carrion; in the whole

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section regarding his marriage Guido is described as a toad and then a wolf; snared by the Comparinis, in whom he meets his match, he changes into a rapacious eagle. Consecrated and addicted to ‘brutish appetites’, Guido is painted in a Calibanesque subhuman light that extends to all of his relatives. The Franceschini family is contemplated by the Pope statically, in a sort of imaginary tableau vivant in marble or on canvas. It is a piece of extraordinary intensity and creativity, with strong chiaroscuro tones and an ambiguous, equivocal atmosphere; the metaphorical frame is that of a zoo of sinister animals where the unnatural, the hybrid, the crossbreed dominate. The Pope’s judgement of Guido’s brothers, Paolo and Girolamo Franceschini, and of their mother, is almost more negative than that of Guido: Paolo is ‘all craft but no violence’, an elusive eel; Girolamo instead is ‘part violence part craft’, destined one day to amalgamate and already joined to his ‘avidity’; but all three are at the service of Satan. Their mother, who has nothing maternal or feminine about her, is in turn ‘the hag that gave these three abortions birth’, a ‘panther’ inciting her cubs to cruelty. Abbot Paolo has grave moral responsibilities: he is the mover and the primary cause of the entire chain of misdeeds, the person most responsible for the murders. Although he treats the Comparinis as deserving of neither praise nor blame, being creatures of ‘mixed nature’ who ‘keep the middle course’, the Pope is again extremely harsh towards the governor and the Bishop of Arezzo, to whom he addresses two harangues of a Dantesque flavour dripping with livid sarcasm. In the landscape of abjection and baseness linked to the entire entourage of Guido, the four assassins are figures greeted almost with sympathy, as they are devoid of premeditation or duplicity. Innocent, previously defined as sensitive to marine imagery as a Neapolitan, instead idealizes the country life and demonstrates this by praising and treating with familiarity the activity of the four assassins. Their fury towards Guido, when he refuses to pay them (another case of religion becoming heresy), is absolutely justified in his opinion. The dull and livid colours that darken the portraits of the Franceschinis are overshadowed by the dazzlingly whites of Pompilia. Overturning an image already used by Bottini, the Pope defines himself a frustrated gardener for whom nothing grows, until suddenly a flower appears from a seed thrown by chance to the ground: Pompilia is the only or one of the few satisfactions of his papacy, a being

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in whom, both remissive and obedient but also rebellious and courageous, the correspondence to the divine commandments is perfect. For her a place is assured in Paradise, and Caponsacchi will have his not far away; in his case, however, the Pope’s judgement is slightly different, although ultimately in line with that which emerges from his own monologue: he is a character undergoing transformation on a journey to regeneration. Unlike Pompilia, he is not all pureness, and has committed many errors which cannot be ignored. Yet he redeems himself at the last moment, even beating all the just with his sublime gesture. In an aside, the Pope takes the opportunity to criticize the inaction of those who should have been the first to rescue Pompilia, the men of the Church, and almost disavows or at least questions the usual apprenticeship of the priests, which tires and numbs them. This is one of many of this Pope’s moments of daring and unorthodox self-criticism. 3. For his courage and the heroic firmness with which he not only resists inertia but also makes a judgement which is most consistent and objective, although limited by the evidence at his disposal, the Pope’s moral standing rises by several notches above that of all of the other characters in The Ring and the Book. The contrast with the other representatives or members of the Church is abysmal, be they prelates obsessed with gambling as in Book IV, the Archbishop of Arezzo or Canon Conti and the cowardly monk who promises to help Pompilia and then fails her, or Abbot Paolo and the other religious figures appearing in the poem. Innocent XII is one of the few characters, if not the only one, and perhaps the single Catholic clergyman of Browning’s canon, who is not two-faced, who is all of a piece and consistent with his own views, earnest and unaggressive, neither a braggart nor a social climber, thoughtful and self-critical. He is also the only one who does not apply – indeed seems to reject – the largely dominant Machiavellianism, speaking as he does only of ends, not of means or at least of means which are ‘manly’, dignified, and perfectly admissible. Or perhaps his is a healthy Machiavellianism, even when it is apparently still more daring: that of Caponsacchi who runs to the defence of Pompilia, a violation of the ecclesiastical rules, but justified by the end, with a supreme disregard for form and attention to substance. It has all the flavour of the truth of paradoxes the fact that Browning personifies this

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admirable moral steadfastness in an old man nearing death, who cannot help but remind himself constantly of the clouds gathering and surrounding him; who is and knows that he is mentally weakened, and often repeats himself or gets confused, and whose speech gradually becomes more and more incomprehensible. The truth is that Browning’s Pope Innocent XII is a Pope who deep down feels so little a Pope and so much more a man, a Pope whom Browning takes down from his pedestal and from his pulpit, to show him to us naked and doubting, rather than triumphant in his selfsatisfied smugness: ‘Mankind is ignorant, a man I am’. This is a supremely unorthodox Pope, and self-punishing to the point of going against his own interests and the interests (though notably secular ones, of power and worldly prestige, not spiritual) of the institution he represents. Who could ever have imagined, given the record, a Pope who flays corruption, laxity and the compromising philosophy of priests, clerics and prelates; one who opposes the rich and the powerful in favour of the poor and defenceless, and who punishes and pardons, aggravates and attenuates, in an unpredictable way, according to his conscience and generosity? But a Browning Pope who is beyond reproach and impartial is too good to be true; and in fact Browning keeps the man and his role distinct from one another. He is as positive in his judgement of the former as he is negative in that of the latter. Innocent XII saves himself almost despite the fact that he is Pope. In contrast to what he had done with his gallery of Catholic clergy of whom the present is the latest portrait (beginning with the bishop in Pippa Passes and Ogniben in A Soul’s Tragedy, or the bishop at St Praxed’s and Blougram), Browning now avoids lumping everyone together. Atypically he uses a model Pope to find a new way to condemn the past and present corruption of an institution, and to vaguely weaken and undermine, once again from a point of view which is exquisitely reformist and Protestant, the historical foundations and biblical credentials of the institute itself. The accent that the Pope places on the words ‘vicar of Christ’ and the insistence with which he reminds himself that he is the representative of God on earth, are a sort of excusatio non petita, or display scepticism at the very least; to the already revealed difficulty of a purely human judgement, the Pope adds a strictly professional query: how does one recognize the judgement of God in the judgements of humans? Paradoxically, it is precisely

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through a Pope that Browning dismantles or at least ruptures the dogma of papal infallibility.245 It is strange and unbelievable only in appearance that in his opening remarks Innocent should deal with an obscure and macabre episode of the history of the church, the posthumous trial brought against his predecessor Formosus.246 Here the Pope’s function of guarantor of the single voice of truth begins largely and miserably to crumble. And it is a sign at the same time of his caution and circumspection, of his fear of sullying and of his hope, instead, of colouring the last page of his life, that he should search for light in the actions of his predecessors, even if the comfort he can derive therefrom is powerfully ironic: the sanctity of Formosus is a matter of ‘opinion’, and there is nothing certain about it. On the other hand, the Catholic Church is presented ex abrupto, in this episode, for what it is, revealing in the Pope the opening of a historical perspective, but also showing the sudden deflagration of morbid intrigues. The rapid succession of purges found in the annals of the history of Papacy imparts to this evocation an involuntarily false, grotesque and absurd character. No less different is the panorama of Roman Catholicism in the year 1698, so that Innocent is the miraculous exception that confirms the rule, and it is only thanks to this utopian and unimaginable character that we have the paradoxical confirmation of the irredeemability of the Catholic Church. 4. As stated above, Browning paints Innocent XII as credibly as possible as a Pope and as a man of the late seventeenth century immersed in the problems of his times. As a Pope he feels very strongly the problems of the unity of Christianity and the weakness of the Papacy as a secular power. His inner divisions and torments are mimetically expressed in the refracting of his conscience in many distinct voices which alternate and debate inside him. He resists heroically to the insidious voice which suggests that he save Guido in the name of the stability of the Papacy, which also indicates to him the innocuousness of the act by instead aggravating the traumatic effect which Guido’s condemnation would have: in short, he 245 Another contemporary issue, which especially concerns Newman (cf. § 26.5 n. 10). 246 Formosus (801–896) was deposed by Pope Stephen (896–7), and his body thrown into the Tiber, before being rehabilitated by Pope Theodore II (897). But Formosus was rehabilitated by a later Pope, Sergius III (904–11).

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stands up to those who tempt him in the name of the reason of state. He will not listen to those who predict the nightmare of the expansion of Protestantism as a consequence of his death sentence: in addition to Molinos, Calvin and Luther are finally named, and this is one of the most timely historical references. With remarkable contextual adherence, Browning also represents a Pope who sees with dismay his world of the seventeenth century threatened by the new scientific discoveries that open new horizons to the faith (he expressly names Galileo’s telescope), and feels the demise of the old and harmonious medieval world picture.247 The negative judgement expressed en passant on St Ignatius, and therefore the discrediting of Jesuitism (another highly unlikely trait in a Pope), add a touch to his religious nostalgia and his enmity towards innovation. Innocent is decidedly out of step with his times when he is transformed into a Victorian Englishman afflicted by multiple scruples, pressured and anguished by evolutionism, materialism and the spread of anti-Christian thought. His meditations on God, on the inscrutability of his designs and on the dimensions of infinite love, and in contrast to those on the insignificance of Man, make him an ideal brother to Saul, Rabbi Ben Ezra and the pilgrim of Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day. At the same time all this makes this monologue a continuation of the fermenting theological queries of a Blougram, a Karshish, a Cleon and a St John of ‘A Death in the Desert’. 5. So many thought-provoking ideas, indeed too many, are found in the second thousand to the 2,000 lines of the Book, in which the protagonists are relegated to the background and only emerge after vast, swollen digressions, which are often rhapsodic and only loosely related to one another, and which together constitute the real, authentic soul and the centre of gravity of the Book. As yet another investigator of the nature of religious

247 To express the sense of an end, of a world that is sinking, the Pope elaborates and applies to himself that theatrical metaphor which is one of the guiding motifs of the poem as a whole (see § 126.1 n. 181). It is in fact re-used in various ways and for differing purposes by almost all of the characters. The Pope presents himself as the masque goaded by the antimasque which aims to trick him; the mime pushes him, the last survivor, to the side, and he sees coming closer ‘pantaloon, sock, plume, and castanet’, the clothes in his wardrobe.

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faith and of its guarantees, the Pope reaffirms the limits of human intellect, accepts them, and is satisfied, even without fully understanding, dazzled and overcome by their mystery. Even if not perhaps completely followed by Browning, he begins again and eliminates any doubts on the ‘transmitting of the tale’ put forward by earlier doubters in his poetry, blaming this dissatisfaction, this residual doubt, on the human condition of ‘training’ and of ‘passage’, which makes men seek a destination that they will never reach. The problem with faith in those who came after Christ is recognized in the fact that faith is no longer faith in the ‘thing’ but instead faith in the ‘report’ of the ‘thing’, and that therefore faith has become weaker over time: a return to primitive faith would be very welcome, a faith actually placed in something, discrediting the mere ‘report’. From this stems the Pope’s creed, which on the whole and in detail is not significantly different (although not as cynical) to that of Blougram’s: ‘what but the weakness in a faith supplies / The incentive to humanity, not strength / Absolute, irresistible comports!’ This ‘weakness within strength’ is in truth a force that is even stronger and faith is a labyrinth in which he has not lost his way. In a memorable monologue within the monologue, Euripides is called from beyond the grave in order to chastise the post-Revelation Christians and above all the contemporary ones, all the more so considering that before the Revelation, with nothing more than natural wisdom, it was not impossible to live according to divine law if one made the necessary adjustments and one could come, in a foggy way, to perceive that law and to conform one’s life to it.248 But Euripides’ intervention also serves to introduce, or 248 Perhaps an unfinished dramatic monologue, Euripides’ speech foreshadows future works in which Browning will lay much greater focus on themes and cues from Greek tragedy. With a slight forcing of the tradition according to which Euripides was irreligious and even almost an atheist, here he is an unknowing prophet of Christ. Like Karshish and Cleon, he has sensed the coming of Christ and advocates the cause of all those who like him have seen in accordance with their own ability to see, which is to say, without the Revelation, and who have nonetheless developed a theology parallel to the Christian one. The framework of evolutionary thought is made explicit when Browning has Euripides affirm that he has not wasted the talents he was given, adapting himself to live like a beast, but has instead embraced the laws of virtue and selfless love, walking in the footsteps of St Paul five centuries earlier.

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rather develop, the nostalgic and painful evocation of ancient faith, the fire burning inside the first Christians, by now extinguished in the cold and faint-hearted faith of modernity.249 Depressed, the Pope yearns for the return of that ‘thrill of dawn’, indeed invokes that ‘conflagration of the world’ promised by Christ, that of his ‘second coming’ to ‘make all things new’ and to convert sadness into joy. His words mark one of the peaks of Browning’s apocalypticism and at the same time of that thirst for regeneration and purgation that resonated in few other Victorian spirits. Studying ‘this torpor of assurance [in] our creed’, in a series of rhetorical interrogations and a crescendo of dramatic questions, Innocent reaches a formulation of his hopes in a future regeneration equivalent to the return of doubt and in the end to a ‘torpid reassurance’ (at least in this emphasis he agrees with Blougram), and even to the return of danger, that danger in which the first Christians lived and worshipped – he even calls for a healing earthquake, capable of causing the return of a man who is ‘prepared to die – that is alive at last’. The most poetically intense phase of this meditation, where apocalypticism becomes most pronounced and even raving, coincides with the final, dramatic clash between the voice of clemency and that of intransigence. Once more the Pope gives vent to his own crusade against Modernism, precisely because he interprets as a sign the nagging voice which urges him not to punish: could there be today, he asks himself, a new ‘tribunal’, one higher than that of God, the tribunal of culture? Responding to this question he answers lawyer Arcangeli, who expressly appealed to the laws of progress. The highly insinuating voice demanding Whoever has done like him, even if according to the doctrines of faith he cannot be saved, still does not deserve to be punished; indeed, he is more worthy than those who, even having been given illumination, stumble as if in the dark while in the light of day, losing their way. A single word from Euripides would have caused them to wade out of the marsh in which they were stuck. 249 Examples include the archbishop and the governor of Arezzo, both deaf to the pleas of Pompilia. With respect to the Convertite nuns and their petition, aimed at taking possession of Pompilia’s worldly goods, the Pope spouts fiery words of condemnation: he compares their greed to that of the soldiers who cast lots to gain the tunic of the crucified Christ. The imagined self-defence of each is rejected, by pointing to a life devoid of calculation rather than a small-scale one.

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clemency appeals not only to questions of culture and civilization, but also to the minor orders which Guido has taken; not only that, for it prophesizes the imminent advent of an age in which everyone, even popes, will allow culture to guide them and will adapt themselves to its dictates: no longer will the world follow Christianity and the Pope as before, but ‘Civilisation and the Emperor’.250 That voice admonishes Innocent and invites him to reflect on his future meeting with God in heaven after having sent one of his peers, and one of God’s children, to his death. It implicitly exhorts him to do like Pilate with Barabbas; but the Pope is unwavering. 6. It is only to a certain point surprising, after all that has been said, that many, if not all the characters of The Ring and the Book discredit the Pope, or even shower him with insults. This, contrasted with his noble and passionate profession and the demonstration he has given of integrity and steadfastness, is an immediate denial of any possible resolution to the relativism of the poem, and an equally clear confirmation of the insurmountable indeterminacy in which judgement is suspended. In this sense the letter of the Venetian tourist to whom Browning entrusts the account of Guido’s execution251 in Book XII is the final slanderous distortion and deformation of the Pontiff ’s character. The tourist begins by hinting at his poor health and describes him as a larva, with one foot already in the grave. For him he is, with the exception of occasional moments of lucidity, a foolish old man who spends his time reciting the rosary and is by now incapable of taking charge of the situation. But, more seriously, the Venetian turns him into a vain and worldly man, who at all costs wants to hang on at least until the following December, in order to declare a new jubilee year. At the mercy of ‘insuperable prejudices’, and pressed by Austria and France and by his hatred towards the former and infatuation with the latter, the Pope, condemning Guido, has silenced the voices of justice, prudence and esprit de corps when instead he should have listened to them. A candle in the wind, 250 Innocent sees his successor in a priest who no longer follows the rules of the Church but his own instincts, and compares him to a dancer moving out of time with the music. In this case examples are again ready: Caponsacchi danced by keeping time, Abbot Paolo out of time. 251 § 126.3 n. 189.

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an ‘earthen vessel’,252 he moved the execution from Castel Sant’Angelo to the Piazza del Popolo for no other reason than to placate the populace. It is superfluous to repeat that the Pope has not in the least lost his judgement, that he is anything but vain or worldly, and that while he takes political factors into consideration he does so to ignore them; that he is not blinded by the need to protect the stability of the papacy, and that he acts with complete autonomy. If he is not intimidated nor subjugated by the King of France, he certainly cannot be bent by popular will. In his case Browning makes an exception to the rule, unwilling to abandon him to the mocking tyranny of relativism. After bestowing upon him in Book I a halo of decency and wisdom, Browning in fact comes out from behind the scenes in Book XII to salute his approaching death and protect him from any defamation. And yet, because of the irony of history, his papacy would be remembered as that during which a different ‘pope’ was born, indeed a ‘terrible’ one, Voltaire. 7. In Book XII – which, it is worth recalling, is not a monologue, but is an enunciation by the internal author – Browning introduces another character, the Augustinian friar Fra Celestino, who watches over Pompilia in her final hours and listens to her deathbed confession. This meteoric apparition intensifies and aggravates the relativism of the poem. Mentioned previously by all the monologists, and, according to the various versions of facts, taken from rags to riches, this friar haunts the poem like a shadow or a ghost, without ever having room to make his voice heard, if not in the indirect, distorting and partial form of hearsay or reported speech. Browning, who would certainly have given him a monologue were it not that in doing so he would have radically modified the design of the poem and altered the perfect number of twelve books, in the end found a way to give him a voice by turning to the ingenious expedient of that ‘letter within the letter’, that is to say an extract from the friar’s own sermon which Bottini, for reasons I have already discussed, resolves to transcribe. In so doing the words of this friar finally acquire an immediate and even violent expressivity which in a monologue entirely

252 As such is Don Abbondio defined in Manzoni’s The Betrothed.

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spoken by him would have been drowned in overflowing prolixity. A counterpart to the anonymous Arezzo monk, who is placed next to the governor and the Archbishop of Arezzo as the third emblem of the stasis and the faint-heartedness of the powerful men of the Church in refusing to come to Pompilia’s aid, Fra Celestino in that sermon reads the events through a lens which is still more firmly otherworldly than that used by the Pope.253 The final retrospective of the notorious facts, retold in an anagogical and solemnly biblical language, one saturated with symbols, oracular and marked by a rhythm that increases in pace until it becomes a frenzied round dance, reduces the protagonists to types and abstract entities facing off against one another. The centrepiece of the sermon, despite its pretentious introduction,254 is a raving phantasmagoria of the origins of Christianity, of the Rome of the martyrs and of the faith in the catacombs, in which an ever more threatening, obsessed and prophetic apocalypticism is unleashed. The difference between the Pope and the friar lies in the fact that the Pope stoops to compromises, even if noble and acceptable ones, while the friar strikes out at the world unremittingly and humiliates Man. ‘God is true / And every man is liar’ is the bold title of his sermon, an axiom similar if not identical to that awareness of human ignorance and the inscrutability of the designs of God, possessed by the Pope. In the Pope,

253 Like the Pope, the friar also turns to the comparison of Noah’s ark to defend the same scepticism: a dove that returns with an olive branch does not authorize one to deduce with absolute certainty that the deluge has ceased; and for the one Pompilia saved from slander there are many others who still lie in the mud. Moreover, both the Pope and the friar wax nostalgic for the faith of the first Christians, and both make use of ingenious and lengthy descriptions that exploit theatrical metaphors. The friar mentions a ‘strange human play / Privily acted on a theatre’ until an ‘earthquake’ (which the Pope also invokes) ‘lays wall low’ and holds the actors petrified in their poses. 254 The aim is that of using examples to explain an evident case of historical error, that of the ancient Romans who believed that the first Christians worshipped idols, to the point that – he says – it took centuries to discover their true faith. The friar wants to note that establishing the absolute truth is just casual and it always occurs late, when indeed it occurs at all. Human justice cannot favour this kind of revelation, for rather than shedding light on events it tends to make of the twilight a total eclipse.

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however, this awareness is slowly, although with difficulty, overcome with a dispassionate acceptance of human limitations, while instead in the friar’s sermon it comes close to irredeemable agnosticism, and to a pessimistic philosophy of inaction. § 133. Clough* I: A ‘submerged’ poet, fathoming psychic division Only a few decades ago, Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) was only a name for the English, or, at most, the author of a single poem, ‘Say not 255

*

The complete critical edition of Clough’s poems here used (= M), not always unexceptionable as far as its textual choices or the chronological order of poems are concerned, is The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. F. L. Mulhauser, 2nd edn, Oxford 1974. Regarding the objective and on the whole insoluble difficulties in preparing Clough’s text, which is in an irreparably fluid state, see my comments below in § 133.6. Clough’s prose is very partially collected in Poems and Prose Remains, edited by his wife Blanche, 2 vols, London 1869, and in Selected Prose Works, ed. B. B. Trawick, Tuscaloosa, AL 1964; his correspondence (the collection is not complete, and many passages are excised) is edited by F. L. Mulhauser, The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, 2 vols, Oxford 1957. The letters from Arnold to Clough are separately published (those from Clough are lost; cf. § 148.1, bibl.), as well as those to and from Emerson, Emerson-Clough Letters, ed. H. F. Lowry and R. L. Rusk, Cleveland, OH 1934. The Oxford Diaries of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. A. Kenny, Oxford 1990. Selections, anthologies and separate poetic editions include: Amours de Voyage and The Bothie (1848 text), ed. P. Scott, St Lucia, Queensland 1974 and 1976 respectively, with useful critical and textual commentary; A Selection from Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. J. Purkis, London 1967; A Choice of Clough’s Verse, ed. M. Thorpe, London 1969 (with a good introduction); Selected Poems, ed. S. Chew, Manchester 1987; Selected Poems, ed. J. McCue, Harmondsworth 1991 (an excellent choice, with commentary, and textual decisions which polemically differ from those adopted by Mulhauser); Selected Poems, ed. J. P. Phelan, London 1995, 2016; Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. J. Beer, London 1998; Amours de Voyage, ed. J. Barnes, London 2009; ‘Mari Magno’, ‘Dipsychus’, and Other Poems, ed. A. Kenny, Manchester 2014.    Life and Criticism. S. A. Brooke, Four Victorian Poets, New York 1908; E. Guyot, Essai sur la formation philosophique du poète A. H. Clough, Paris 1913 (cumbersome analysis of Clough’s philosophical ideas); L. Strachey, Eminent Victorians, London 1918 (harshly critical in his essay on Dr Arnold); J. I. Osborne, Arthur Hugh Clough, London 1920; F. L. Lucas, Eight Victorian Poets, Cambridge 1930, 55–74; G. Levy, Arthur Hugh Clough, London 1938 (a succinct, balanced presentation); F. J. Woodward, The Doctor’s Disciples, London 1954; I. Armstrong, Arthur Hugh Clough, London 1962; C. Chorley, Arthur Hugh Clough: The Uncommitted Mind, Oxford 1962 (an accurate, well-documented biography with a slightly psychoanalytical approach;

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the struggle nought availeth’. That poem, uprooted from its ideal cultural subsoil, and removed from the dialectic growth of Clough’s work as a whole, soon found its meaning falsified and was read as one of the many Victorian decalogues of the Puritan work ethic, or even as a viaticum at the time of the advent of British imperialistic warmongering and, later, of resistance to dictatorships. In that sense, Winston Churchill was still citing it to his compatriots during the Second World War. If anything, the poetry of Clough, in its general terms, represents instead a minor, ‘scandalous’ Victorian chapter of anti-heroism, often describing the fear of acting, even panic, ignobility and cowardice. That poem’s very stentorian incipit, ‘Say not the struggle nought availeth’, was addressed to those who had always had little courage or desire to fight, and thus, in the first place, to the makes use of unpublished material found at the Bodleian Library at Oxford; modest as criticism); W. E. Houghton, The Poetry of Clough: An Essay in Revaluation, New Haven, CT and London 1963 (first, combative revaluation; the specific examination of the poetic texts is however mostly paraphrastic); P. Veyriras, Arthur Hugh Clough, Paris 1964 (a lucid study including a statistical approach to Clough’s poetic language; a curious middle chapter provides a psychiatric classification of the poet); G. Tillotson, ‘Clough’s The Bothie’ and ‘Clough: Thought and Action’, in G. and K. Tillotson, MidVictorian Studies, London 1965, 118–44 and 145–51; M. Timko, Innocent Victorian: The Satiric Poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough, Athens, OH 1966 (principally a study of Clough’s religious ideas; the poetry is read as an illustration of his thought, with an emphasis on the satirical dimension; the extended parallel between T. S. Eliot and Clough is misleading); B. Hardy, ‘Clough’s Self-consciousness’ (repr. in The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry, London 1977, 33–53), and J. Goode, ‘Amours de Voyage: the Aqueous Poem’, both in The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations, ed. I. Armstrong, London 1969, 253–74 and 275–97; D. Williams, Too Quick Despairer: A Life of Arthur Hugh Clough, London 1969; E. B. Greenberger, Arthur Hugh Clough: The Growth of a Poet’s Mind, Cambridge, MA 1970 (informative on the evolution of Clough’s thought and on the shaping influences of his time, with a study of his critical prose); W. V. Harris, Arthur Hugh Clough, New York 1970; R. K. Biswas, Arthur Hugh Clough: Towards a Reconsideration, Oxford 1972 (a well-written biography, with particular attention paid to the influences on Clough and the contemporary ideological debate, with good interpretative sections); CRHE, ed. M. Thorpe, London 1972; A. Kenny, God and Two Poets: Arthur Hugh Clough and Gerard Manley Hopkins, London 1988, and Arthur Hugh Clough: A Poet’s Life, London 2005; J. Maynard, ‘Clough and the Victorian “Question of Sex”’, in Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion, Cambridge 1993, 39–84; R. Christiansen, The Voice of Victorian Sex: Arthur H. Clough 1819–1861, London 2001; J. Schad, Arthur Hugh Clough, Tavistock 2006.

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author himself. The ‘heroic’ reading of Clough’s poetry was meant in turn to combat that of a ‘failed’ Clough, first called as such by his former best friend Matthew Arnold, who immortalized him in ‘Thyrsis’ as a ‘too quick despairer’, a seeker easily confused with the archetype of the ‘scholar-gipsy’, who never reaches a classic, Sophoclean state of calm.1 The no less than sixteen reprints of the poetry of Clough until 1910 can only be accounted for as caused by his alleged eulogy of heroism. They were faithfully modelled on the first editions posthumously edited by his wife, who, with her manipulations and censorship, was the first conscious author – humanly deserving of absolution, but philologically guilty – of an operation tending to the perfect adaptation of Clough’s poetic corpus, of which she was the depositary, to the tastes and sensibilities of contemporary readers. She made it, in fact, a text written by a restless and sardonic Victorian, but a Victorian nonetheless. Thus, even in his lifetime, and immediately after his death, Clough became the victim of a huge interpretative misunderstanding, because his poems as a whole constitute an unprecedented j’accuse of the Victorian cultural model. He brought back to the surface that repressed, submerged ‘continent’ that many, including himself, at that time referred to as man’s ‘second self ’, and which more or less corresponds to the Freudian id. It is to Clough that we owe the first shameless rediscovery in Victorian times of man’s impulses and instincts, carried out with the greatest possible extension of the hiatus between spiritual sublimation and carnal reality. All four most important long poems by Clough question or repudiate the – in many ways tyrannical – Victorian paradigm and myth of growth, which resulted in a violent repression of the instincts and to the imperative of a breathless rush of adolescence into adulthood. As a consequence, Clough attacks – before Matthew Arnold, but without Arnold’s weapons of a lucid

1

§ 159.5. In 1853 Clough wrote a review of Arnold’s poems, having easily identified the author who had hidden his real name behind the initial ‘A’ (§ 152.2). In it he fired light barbs at his friend and fellow poet and redirected the accusation to the accuser. Arnold is, in fact, depicted as a scholar gentleman, a refined man belonging to a world far removed from daily problems. ‘Empedocles on Etna’ is dismissed in just a few lines, ‘Tristram and Iseult’ paraphrased with derision; and ‘The Strayed Reveller’ is accused of dwelling too long on states of dream and inactivity.

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and articulated essay writing, and relying instead on biting satire – the rites and conventions of high society and the new bourgeoisie. His alter egos are harsh critics of etiquette, of the economic system, of the labour market and of class exploitation. In his own way and in certain moments he was a committed poet-politician close to the poor and to rural and factory workers. Like Arnold, he was a proud enemy of all kinds of jingoistic nationalistic rhetoric. Finally, but this is not surprising, he demolishes the foundations of traditional religious faith. If there is anything new about him it is perhaps his sacrilegious spirit, the irreverent sneering and blasphemous mockery with which he strikes out at hypocritical acquiescence to a habitual and self-interested religion. Next to ‘Say not the struggle nought availeth’ we must immediately mention the much more sardonic ‘The Latest Decalogue’, a scathing attack on contemporary ethics. 2. This chain of rebellions, which indicted all of the commonly held Victorian values, had been sparked off by the pedagogy of Rugby. Clough is chronologically and ideally the first of many negative products – poets and writers, almost all of them unbalanced, psychologically tortured and torn – forged by Dr Arnold.2 With his relentless struggle against ‘bad’ thoughts and actions, with his strenuous daily crusade for mental cleansing, with the utopianism of his idea of the gentleman, Dr Arnold could only send out into the world either ascetics and medieval heroes, or fragile youths riddled with complexes: when he left Rugby for Oxford, Clough was both. At Rugby, he had distinguished himself as the most brilliant and promising student, as well as the favourite disciple of his teacher. Oxford revealed the cracks in an armour which he had believed impenetrable, and the intimate frailties of an ardour which should have been even contagious and missionary. Clough, the product of both schools, was thus caught between Arnold and Newman. He established a paradigm which, from then on, became classic and repetitive, leading to different outcomes, which range from an embrace of Catholicism to a return to the Anglican fold, from atheism to restless syncretism and doubt, even to scientistic reductionism, as witnessed, in their disguises, by the poetry and narrative of the

2

§ 9.5.

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time, by Arnold and by Pater, by Hopkins3 and by Wilde, by Froude and Mrs Ward. With the action of an inexorable retaliation Clough, who while at Oxford ended up becoming a sceptic, made the primary theme of his poetry the fight with Evil and the ever more resurgent temptations of the senses. On this conflict he centred his tormented and unfinished masterpiece, Dipsychus. Both culturally and formatively, Clough later became both son and disciple of the tolerant, even anarchic liberalism of Emerson and of the spiritualism of Carlyle. Both of these influences were however more destructive than constructive, as Clough himself admitted with a witty boutade, noting that Carlyle, the first to denounce the lack of values in the modern world, ‘had led [his followers] out into the desert, and had left [them] there’. These formative experiences suggest to us why his lyrical and intimist poetry has very few fixed points and is lacerated by aporias which never quite heal; they explain the perpetually provisional nature of his work and the tormented drafting of almost all of his major poems. Clough was incapable of ‘concluding’ anything, and even merely of coming up with and planning fully developed works, because in the thick darkness of his mind not even a glimmer of clarifying light would appear. This is why his protagonists find themselves blocked in a perennial situation of paralysis, both of mind and body. Herein originates the Cloughian figure par excellence, the fugitive, escaping from an inauthentic and terrifyingly conventional society, but also escaping from himself and towards a longed-for truce with his unbearable thoughts, by which he is constantly pursued. He is thirsty for oblivion, that illusory oblivion given by a simple vortical movement which simultaneously tears him apart. His four major works centre on the Bildung of a young protagonist, specifically an Oxford student, who struggles – successfully only in a single case – with problems related to questions of faith, and who is on the verge of losing it. In addition, he battles with sexual desire and the erotic initiation, endowed with a sexual appetite which could either be joyfully satisfied or bitterly stifled in a bourgeois marriage. Only The Bothie has a happy ending, but 3

On the bifurcation of the two lives and two poetical careers – Clough’s and Hopkins’s – which for a while followed a common path, indeed moved on hand in hand, cf. Kenny 1988, and, below, n. 6.

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it gradually unfolds as a utopian, unrealizable idyll, or meaningfully realizable with a hasty escape from England, and at any rate realized outside the borders of England, in the pure, virginal Scottish Highlands. In two other poems, Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus, the hero is de-heroized. He is a poor devil crushed by his mood swings, drowning in the sea of his own insoluble indecisions, and thrashing about in the clutches of his doubts. Clough himself hides behind this figure, as does the entire generation of students and graduates from public schools and universities who for many years more were to be chronically unprepared for life, and who will populate narratives of the end of the century all the way up to E. M. Forster’s novels. Only the protagonist of The Bothie has a guide nearby to advise him – in the person of his tutor, who still struggles to understand him and who providentially restrains his mood swings. Immediately afterwards, Claude of Amours sends intimate letters to a friend who does not answer him. By the time we get to Dipsychus, the protagonist’s guide is his own other and evil self, Mephistopheles incarnate. Utterly alone, solitary above all due to an education which has rendered them incomplete, unbalanced individuals with minds that circle steadily upon themselves and hearts whose wings have been clipped, and oppressed by a Calvinistic guilt complex – that is the state of the young and not so young protagonists of Mari Magno, his final poem, some of whom are no longer even students. 3. The turning point in Clough’s poetic career, which can be placed after Amours, when he slipped into a compositional aphasia or even into silence, was due primarily to the difficulty that he experienced in objectifying his autobiography and in sublimating and distancing his own inner conflicts. While his first collection of poems, Ambarvalia, in 1849, is full of poems of an intimate and personal nature, The Bothie of Tober-na-vuolich and Amours de Voyage, which followed on each other’s heels, revealed, surprisingly even for those who read the latter in its serial publication a decade later, a rare Victorian poet leaning towards the parodic and the playful – right next to a turbid and moody Clough, wrapped up entirely in himself, another Clough, humourist and caricaturist. With these two poems, drafted in just a few days in a fit of inspiration, he produced two little, playful masterpieces, in which autobiographical events are filtered,

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put at a distance and therefore perfectly controlled. In the first case – The Bothie – he did this by setting the plot in a dimension of modern epics, therefore purposefully falsified and desublimated; in the other, through the estranging and parodic use of the style of the epistolary novel of the eighteenth century. Both are experiments – experiments in genre and metrics, as both are in hexameters – which are unique in the poetry prevalent in England in the 1840s. A mise en abyme of the sheer linguistic creativity of Clough, of his delight in the pun, of his proto-Joycean plurilingualism, is in the fact that the titles of those four major works – not to mention those of numerous other poems – include, the first a mixture of English and Gaelic, the second a phrase in French, the third a Latinized Greek word, and the fourth a Latin ablative. Not one is in simple English. With a bit of acrobatics one could claim that Dipsychus has a playful nature and is a deliberate rewriting, naturally of Faustian poems, one which is however developed and attended to with much less detachment and indeed with a turbid and torrid involvement, if only witnessed by its open, and thus far less controlled structure. Mari Magno, Clough’s last and unfinished work, undertaken after almost a decade of silence, revisits the genre of the verse tale à la Crabbe, and practised before him by Tennyson in ‘Enoch Arden’. 4. Clough, needless to say, is a poet who from his very beginnings evaded any affiliation with a tradition or a poetic school. He was among the few poets born in the first thirty years of the century to be immune to the ‘doom of Romanticism’; he doesn’t have to pay his debts to anyone, and seeks his own authentic voice, one never heard before. What is missing more than anything in Clough, with respect to his peer Matthew Arnold, with whom he had shared all of his formative experiences, is a diagnostic, prophetic, or pontificating vein. He does not speak at all like a representative of a generation of disappointed youths, nor does he address an afflicted humanity in need of a comfort that only literature can provide, in a moment in which religion is falling to pieces. Rather, he speaks only for himself. He does not curry favour with his readers nor makes concessions to his audience or the tastes of the public.4 Reading his first pieces, one is almost tempted to think that Shelley and Keats had never 4

‘The public’s favour […] / It were pollution did we please’ (M, 319).

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existed, so total is the absence of any influence, and of that constant, nagging, and even contorted imaginary and intertextual dialogue with their figures that we find in the works of the debuting Tennyson, Browning and Matthew Arnold. It would be vain to auscultate the cadences of the poetic diction of his time in Clough: we do not find any Tennysonian vocal poetry, nor do we hear the lulling ‘musicality’ which was so appreciated by his contemporaries. Instead an unadorned, deliberate, at times even dull conversational style predominates. The most notable absence among the traditional contemporary genres is in Clough that of the dramatic monologue, due to the eminently dialogic and dialectic nature of his poetry. It is with Browning rather than to Tennyson5 that we should associate him, and along the lines of that rejection of conventional poetical ‘beauty’ so harshly denounced by Matthew Arnold. His style is also often intentionally rough and clumsy; his rhymes macaronic rather than euphonic, or improper and thus Byronic. From Byron, or even from Swift, Clough takes up the goliardic, joking vein, and rediscovers licentiousness and indecency. He welcomes back jargon, the verbum humile, mockery and parody. We may have to go even further back to find his blood relatives, to Augustan poetry and that of the eighteenth century with its wit tinged with an illuminist hue. Clough’s distance from the poetic practice of his times, and his novelties, can be fully gauged, however, by his systematic choice of modern and contemporary subjects, caught with a realism which gradually becomes more and more visionary, hallucinatory and estranged. Taking a side in the querelle initiated by Arnold, he had no doubt that literature should dedicate itself to the present rather than reanimating the past and the deities of mythology; for this reason he praised novels with a contemporary setting to which Arnold would always remain deaf. Among the Victorians, he was the first to widen the visual angle and the 5

Few knew how to use metre more flexibly than Clough. His metrical tours de force include The Bothie and Amours de Voyage, and what Clough was capable of creating with hexameters is testified to in the astonishing Homeric specimens he left us (cf. below, § 147.1 and n. 107). For the sake of the experiment, and for fun, he composed brief poems in Greek metre (in alcaics as well). A good defence of the expertise and metrical variety of Clough, in contrast to an established tradition that considered him a ‘rough versifier’, is in Timko 1966, 106 nn. 5 and 113.

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horizon of poetry, to include scenes from street life, the seedy parts of town, even the brothel. 5. I have thus mentioned and summarized Clough’s main works. Immediately after one must cite a few of his exquisite short poems, his elegies and the melancholy songs about time passing, homesickness, the delights of spiritual and sublimated love. These are gentle and sometimes ethereal, impalpable Elizabethan and Caroline variations, in the style of a disciple of Carew, Marvell and Jonson. In several, even briefer poems Clough attempts a type of gnomic poetry addressed to a wider public, while numerous others debate religion in settings that are frequently grotesque and surreal. From all this material, which in the end is not so expansive, the figure emerges of a poet, indeed of an artist who is among the most consummate and educated of his time, and belongs to an evolutionary lineage that while unpopular during his own time would yet bring him closer and make him more congenial to the sensitivities of later epochs. Like Hopkins, to whom he is spontaneously compared for precise aspects of his work and career, appreciation for Clough was destined to mature after a delay of a few generations.6 Had he been better known, this accuser 6

Comparisons between Clough and Hopkins are frequent and rest on psychic division and torment, on the reaction of both to the contemporary poetic diction, to their revitalization of poetic language with injections of jargon and everyday speech, on their prosodic experimentalism and poetic fragmentism. The largest portion of the production of Clough could only be, as a result of his sudden death, a kind of writing which – like that of Hopkins – is private, self-addressed and a dialogue with himself. Both, as a consequence, left at their deaths a fluid, disorganized body of work. Bridges, the posthumous editor of Hopkins’s poems, finds a counterpart in the censoring Blanche Clough. Like Hopkins, Clough lived and poetically expressed the dilemma between silence and utterance. His youthful poetry occasionally revolves, though playfully, around the impotence of words, and on the difficulty of saying something poetically in a utilitarian age: ‘I cannot write a single word’, is a refrain that is extremely eloquent to explain a crisis of themes and content and the necessity to find a new stylistic mode (M, 482ff.). This poem also shows an awareness of the crisis of the poetic word in an age of followers, an age in which only some literary genres, and especially fiction, enjoyed a large market. In a youthful poem (M, 318) Clough examines the destination of poetry and its inevitably private nature, and its impossibility to trigger any aspiration to satisfy ‘public favour’ or to solicit compliments

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of bourgeois falseness would have been welcomed as a brother in spirit by the Decadents, and this daring analyst of psychic division would have revealed himself as a precursor to the creators of the psychological novel of the close of the century. Lytton Strachey made no distinctions and lumped all the Victorian poets together in his portrait of Dr Arnold in Eminent Victorians, and the modernists were as indifferent to Clough as to all the other Victorians, and failed to appreciate his parodic vein and his playful attitude embedded in his flexible hexameters. To rehabilitate Clough there was no need to overturn the judgement of the 1880s and to make him a hero and a combatant, because from the first years of the twentieth century it was clear that perfectly successful poetry could be written on the subject of human failure. Only much later was it noticed that Clough’s hesitant and divided characters – spitting prototypes of Prufrock – are a prefiguration of twentieth century indecision and of the individual’s divorce from great ideals. The old-fashioned verdict on Clough’s poetry, that it never goes beyond an inchoate state and is ‘technically atrocious’7 – and consists of personal jottings and annotations preceding any proper poetic elaboration, and may be read at best as a series of biographical symptoms and documents – does not therefore really have any sensible foundation and can be explained by the provisional state in which a good half of his poetry was unfortunately destined to remain. A balanced judgement on Clough the poet must take into consideration the fact that not only did he promise himself to perfect and rework what he had not finished, but also that works were later printed which he had not wanted to be printed, or would not really have wished published. The comprehensive 1974 edition of his poetry is in fact even too ample and it definitely does not separate drafts from finished compositions. It also includes, yielding to a sort of established literary voyeurism, creations which were completely extemporaneous, private

from friends. These, just as Hopkins recognized, were stimuli that could not be done without. Under no circumstances, however, did poetry have to satisfy poor tastes. Other poems from 1851 contain sporadic meditations on Hopkins’s typical theme of the loss of visual inspiration and on the falsification of the act of writing when compared to perception. 7 Lucas 1930, 67.

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and diary notes just happening to have the external form of verse. Ideally, then, Clough’s poetic production should be clearly subdivided into poems surely intended for publication on the one hand, and on the other, poems in a rough or manuscript state or fragmentary ones, on which aesthetic judgement must remain suspended. 6. Upon Clough’s death his wife found herself in possession of a huge collection of manuscripts, something like thirty notebooks in addition to a mass of loose pages, often covered by indecipherable markings. The fact that Clough’s most powerful poem, and his most modern, despite being his most uneven – Dipsychus – was lying among those papers, drafted in more than one version and without a clear indication of the order of the scenes, speaks volumes. The brevity of his life, and his own death, which after all was quite sudden, prevented Clough, unlike many Victorians, from personally editing provisionally complete editions of his poetry. His tormented and demanding nature would perhaps have reduced to the minimum, as far as he was concerned, the amount of his approved production. He too, almost like Pater, wanted to release only finished products and would certainly not have tolerated that his poetic edition be swollen and almost half made up of compositions left in a fragmentary state.8 A wonderful poem,9 whose metaphor of the slow gestation of the son in the womb of the mother brings to mind Hopkins’s ‘To R. B.’, reveals how strenuous and unsatisfactory his research for the mot juste could be. As a result, the organization of Clough’s canon is an operation which is far from concluded. The dating is in many cases very uncertain, and for a good number of poems there is more than one drafting, and definitive indications are missing that would help to determine the author’s real intentions or the version to be preferred. If we set aside the adolescent’s works included in the Rugby school newspaper, Clough gave his imprimatur only to three works: the Ambarvalia collection, The Bothie and Amours de Voyage. Clough’s American friend Charles Eliot Norton, a 8

9

Patmore, in a review dated 1888, was convinced that most of the remaining poetry of Clough would have been carefully reviewed before being published, or otherwise burnt tout court (CRHE, 336); moreover, he rightly pointed out the need to reduce rather than expand Clough’s canon. M, 319–20.

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fine classicist and translator of Dante, and among his few real and ardent admirers while alive, published – in concert with Clough, who had intentionally reviewed and corrected a certain number of his unpublished texts, but not yet in a clear and definitive manner – an American edition that came out only posthumously in 1862, at the same time as an almost identical British one, edited by his wife. Clough was aware of the chaotic state of his poetry, and he willingly delayed and in the end abandoned the project of a collected edition. That edition in 1862, quantitatively very reduced, and limited to the poems collected therein, still remains the one we have closest to the actual will of the author. After her husband’s death Blanche Clough dealt with his literary bequest, with additions eked out arbitrarily to the corpus, and a targeted censorship, which culminated in 1869 in an edition in two volumes of prose, letters and poems which established Clough as one of the leading figures in the major Victorian poetic canon. As said, that canonization was obtained precisely thanks to an adaptation of his texts to the tastes and the sensitivities of the times.10 7. With the exception of a few articles in magazines, Clough criticism has not reached the degree of subtlety and of hazardous exploration which characterizes the study of other poets. Both recent and less recent studies11 have focused their attention on the spiritual evolution of the poet, on the ideas and speculations which transpire from his poetic works, and have thus also focused their studies on Clough the prose writer.12 His critical bibliography received a new stimulus when, at the end of the 1950s, a huge amount of personal material was made available, particularly in 10

11 12

Clough was only in part his own first critic when, as some have claimed, he wrote in the first draft with all of the expressive frankness he could muster, only to make his compositions presentable, in accordance with the canons of decorum, in successive revisions. These revisions mostly concerned his stylistic exuberance. Cf. Greenberger 1970, especially. Among the critical essays that have come down to us, some of which were given as lectures in America, one on Wordsworth asserts the obvious platitude that Wordsworth’s poetry contains the seed of Romanticism and that his poetic jewels are to be found hidden under a copious amount of dead weight. One on Dryden adopts the same stance as Arnold’s, seeing him as the father of English prose, which had been until then bookish and academic, and which he delatinized.

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prose, which had remained with his last descendent and at the Bodleian library in Oxford. There is nothing of astonishing novelty in this material, nothing which was not yet known or that could not be surmised through the most synthetic formulations of his poems. Clough’s friends from Oxford and his American admirers, as well as the critics that made of him an original thinker, may be accused of exaggeration. Clough was indeed already seen in his own time, for the courage with which he had tackled certain thorny theological questions, as the leader of an advanced liberalism and of an Oxfordian progressivism capable of penetrating the conservative bed-rock. This is what was believed for a short time even by the Boston ‘Brahmins’, of whom Emerson was the leader. Emerson glimpsed, in Clough, the intellectual that at the end of the 1840s could tow England towards a symbolic ‘promised land’. When in 1848 he bid adieu to Emerson who was leaving Liverpool on the way back to America, Emerson playfully crowned Clough as the new ‘Bishop of England’ in the place of Carlyle. Clough, however, did not trust in this prophetic vocation, indeed sought to shake it off. § 134. Clough II: Biography Clough was born in Liverpool in 1819 into a family with plenty of money but not much culture. His father imported raw cotton from America and his job necessitated frequent travel between England and America, which led inevitably to long periods of physical separation from the family while Clough was growing up. The family moved permanently to America when he was four; soon after their arrival in Charleston, however, and another move to New York, his father had to leave again, remaining in England for eleven months. As a small child Clough was thus his mother’s favourite; she would read him fairy tales and the Homeric epics, the novels of Scott and works of history, but also frightening tales of the suffering of martyrs and of the battles of the Protestants against the Catholics. Clough did not suffer the traditional dichotomy of Victorian families: his mother was very religious and had iron-clad principles, and inculcated to her son the sense of God and of duty; and his father was not the classic tyrant but was instead exuberant and affectionate. If anything Clough suffered from

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the early destruction of this golden nest, from loneliness and uprootedness.13 Both his happy period in America and the yearned-for reunion of the family are recollected in his earliest poems, written when still a child: the inconsolable pain, the open wound of not having a home, or of having even two. He began early on to search for roots, torn from him as soon as they were found. The whole family returned to Liverpool in June 1828, and the following fall Clough entered school in Chester. But soon afterwards, once again, his parents left for America, leaving their son with his uncle and aunt. 2. Whether stories of distant blood ties between his family and John Calvin are true or not, Clough was shaped by one of his most ardent putative sons, Dr Arnold of Rugby; but his mother had already been an Arnold in miniature. Her maiden name was the very appropriate one of Perfect. Clough entered Rugby on his tenth birthday in 1829 with his brother Charles, and Dr Arnold loved him almost like his own son.14 Since Clough was homeless, he was often invited to Arnold’s, where he was lovingly received by Arnold’s spouse as well. He excelled at sports and was admired by all his peers; he personally edited the school magazine, making several contributions of his own. The word ‘prig’ defines what Clough was like, more or less, with his devoted and unctuous religiousness, upon his arrival at Oxford in October 1837, the winner of a scholarship to the immense satisfaction of the Doctor. He had left Rugby with the halo of the martyr and hermit. He inflicted corporal punishments upon himself, lived in an unheated room and bathed in the icy waters of the Cherwell, though a few of these sacrifices were due to the paltry funds which he was sent from home. It says a lot that writing from Rugby Clough had urged his lazy brother to wake up, reminding him of his duty, and strongly recommending that he remain true to the faith;15 he himself had bid adieu to Rugby, leaving for Oxford, with some disproportionate and rambling poetic stanzas, filled with an adolescent spirit of pathos and also with an unspecified, almost 13 5 November 1835. 14 A letter from Arnold dated 19 October 1837 to Clough’s father, in Arnold’s correspondence. 15 See passim the letters to George Clough in 1834.

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sinister fear of the leap he was about to make.16 It turns out that he had good reason: already in the first months he found himself ‘like a straw drawn up the draught of a chimney’. The group of fervent Arnoldians whose leaders were his peers Stanley and Lake, and who intended to serve as leavening for ‘the whole lump’17 at the university, found bitter rivals in the group of Tractarian sympathizers. Clough had personal encounters with Newman, with whom he was very impressed; he became convinced of the value of ritual and the role of clergy as intermediary between God and Man, in direct opposition to the teachings of Dr Arnold.18 In 1838 in a letter he declared himself fully won over; but there is no trace that this infatuation lasted very long, and we can conjecture that, unlike Matthew Arnold who listened to Newman’s sermons with rapt attention, Clough never set foot in the church of St Mary where Newman gave them. In particular, he came under the influence of his tutor in mathematics, the future biographer of Newman, Ward, whose conversion to Catholicism left Clough appalled and paralysed (in 1844 Ward published a controversial book of theology that was discussed by the authorities of the college and whose effect was his academic degradation). It is believed now that rather than furnishing a new faith to Clough, the Tractarians left him in midstream, having however irreparably undermined the baggage of convictions he had brought from Rugby. It was perhaps, then, the Tractarians, according to Matthew Arnold who knew him so well, those ‘men unblessed’ and the evil company which led him astray.19 His excessive sincerity and his solemnly sworn, Arnoldian diffidence against Catholicism and Tractarianism caused Clough in 1840 to rapidly fall into prostration, even though he never confided his troubles to anyone, not even his beloved sister. Physically worn, increasingly lethargic and stressed, he finished his studies – tormented by doubts, caught up in the emotional pendulum between his attachment to Newman and the reductionist perspective of a pure moral law imprinted upon the conscience without the incentive of future rewards – and graduated without earning 16 17 18 19

M, 504ff. 13 February 1836. 16 February 1839. So in ‘Thyrsis’ (§ 159.5).

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top marks. The following day it is believed – but it is probably untrue – that he walked all the way from Oxford to Rugby to break the news of his ‘failure’ to Dr Arnold. On Easter day 1842, examined by Newman in person, he was elected a fellow of Oriel; with fatal timing Dr Arnold died the same year, and his own father filed for bankruptcy. His path towards atheism dates back to that year, a path which began when Clough started to doubt his allegiance to the Thirty Nine Articles.20 3. After graduating, Clough supported himself by teaching small groups of Oxford University students with whom, as was the custom, he spent summer study vacations in Wales and Scotland. On these occasions not only could he indulge his love for walks and excursions to the mountains, and swims whenever possible in the ice-cold rivers or crystalline lakes, but he could also collect and store away in his memory anecdotes and human types. Under his very eyes there was a more genuine and balanced humanity, though living in the midst of poverty, and so different from the student world and the people he would have met in the city and in the salons. His letters from that period speak little of literature (only a note in passing is given to Werther and the authoress who was all the rage at Oxford, George Sand with her Indiana) and very much about religion; they also show his nascent political commitment. Clough, the son of a merchant who was in part an exploiter, became a socialist radical who railed against free trade and began systematically to support laws in favour of workers. In 1847, his commitment to social and political causes resulted in a pamphlet written in support of the Irish masses martyred by the potato famine, a pamphlet which already attests to his communist and egalitarian sympathies. Clough exhorted the Oxford students to make donations for the poor and hungry, but also, with a precociously satirical vein, railed against the empty, profligate aristocracy and its insensitivity towards the needy. Private property was untouchable, and yet it had to fall before special circumstances and emergencies, and at any rate Clough called for greater equality in the distribution of wealth. In that pamphlet we can see 20 Cf. in particular the letter dated 13 July 1844, in which Clough confirms that he is in a sea of doubts, indeed that he has lost his faith and finds himself facing the abyss of atheism, or merely formal faith.

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both the foreshadowing of the political analyses of Matthew Arnold and in particular his definition of aristocracy as a class that ‘does as it likes’.21 Like his peers, Clough harboured vaguely millennarist and republican aspirations, and even contemplated going into exile and leaving that boat taking on water that was England. Having been bitten by the bug of the continental irredentists, he was later disappointed by the hasty conservative results of the two revolutions of which he was an eye witness, revolutions that in his hopes would have been enough to restore meaning to life and heal him from his ‘hopeless lethargy’. In Paris in 1848 he grabbed the chance to attend a recital of Rachel, the Arnoldian actress par excellence;22 that of the Roman Republic in 1849 was for him not even a proper revolution. After the debacle of Mazzini and the Roman republicans, Clough moved to Naples, then up along the Italian peninsula staying briefly in Switzerland before returning home. When in 1853 Wellington died, Clough too, whom Arnold hailed as ‘citoyen Clough’, joined Tennyson and the enlightened conservatives in saluting the duke with an ode which both links him to and distinguishes him from Napoleon. In 1849 Clough had already completely lost his faith in both the outcomes of the French revolution and any possibility of speeding up ‘change’ in England. 4. Dr Arnold, his mother, the Tractarians and evangelicalism all inculcated sexual repression; Clough wanted to liberate sexuality. In Dipsychus there is an ambivalent passage to the effect that sex is a path to maturation or, more precisely, that sin is ‘a painful opening out / Of paths for ampler virtue’. In a poem of the same time Clough clearly manifests an Origen complex, that of castration for the fear of sexual sin, and calls a kiss an action irreparability marked by sin. In light of his Oxford diaries23 it can be ascertained that the sin for which Clough obsessively admonished himself was above all and almost exclusively masturbation, alluded to with the image ‘under the moon’. He was so hermetic and enigmatic in his letters that one cannot say with certainty whether many romantic relationships followed the path of an inconclusive or delayed courtship, a 21 § 167.2–3. 22 § 151.3. 23 Kenny 1988, 16.

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motif on which many of the basic situations in his four main poems hinge. Equally hermetically he transferred to verse the theme of the rejection of one’s beloved and of distance between lovers. To decide whether Clough fell in love or even became secretly engaged or not, is important not just to satisfy a simple biographical curiosity but because if he got married he could not have remained a fellow at Oriel, regardless of his strictly theological doubts. Thackeray too, who met him in 1848, believed he saw in Clough someone who had been ‘frustrated in love’. In any case in 1848 he began to show an intention to renounce his fellowship. Oxford reminded him of biblical ‘slavery’, and leaving it was like reaching towards both economical and above all intellectual liberty. He ended up being appointed, towards the end of 1849, as head at University Hall, a ‘non sectarian’ dormitory of the newborn University College of London. It was a sinecure – no more than eleven pupils were under his guidance – for which he had been recommended by friends, which however relieved him of the obligation to teach religion or to make a public profession of faith. His ‘jump over the ditch’ was sadly emblematic of the waste and depletion of his poetic talent, and it is extraordinarily similar in its effects to that made by two other poets, Matthew Arnold who ended up a school inspector, and Hopkins who became a professor of Greek in Dublin. That jump was bitterly regretted because Clough, the ideal son of a citadel of knowledge, found not liberty but solitude and frustration in the city. All his life, having lost Matthew Arnold and the other Oxford Rugbeians, and never really having become a Tractarian, Clough had for friends only old Carlyle, and for at time Emerson, to whom he had turned at Oxford, first and foremost spiritually, as a healthy antidote to intellectual narrowness. 5. Clough then vainly applied for a post as educational director in Australia. In 1850 he became an English literature professor at the University of London for a fistful of pounds in annual salary. He left his post at the Hall in late 1851. Encouraged by Emerson, he left again for America in 1852 with the intention of becoming a private teacher or even founding a school. In the end, he only did poorly paid odd jobs, wrote newspaper articles, held the occasional lecture, and started revising Dryden’s Plutarch. Waiting for him in England was Blanche, the cousin of Florence Nightingale, eight years his junior, with whom he had become engaged. Slippery, lewd confessions,

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over which the torrid and shadowy atmosphere of Dipsychus hovers, alternate in his American letters with outpourings of infantile tenderness. Moody and inconclusive, he scared Blanche, who refused to follow him to America. In their thick and almost daily correspondence, there was a long tug-of-war between him, who wanted to stay on in America but without any financial pressure, and Blanche’s parents who wanted him to return to England, but not before having found a good job there. In America Clough hung about, and had to defend himself against his fiancée’s accusations, not entirely unfounded, of ‘indolence’. America was certainly not that New Zealand of his alter ego Hewson in The Bothie, where one could start life over from a state of virginity. Nevertheless it was still a country that with its differences from England intensified the ‘disgust’ that Clough felt when, in the summer of 1853, he set foot back in his homeland. During his American year, he had satisfied his need for independence, temporarily avoided the scrutiny of the self-righteous and for once only had lived out his aspirations as an Oxford defector never accepted into its ranks. Once returned to England he recognized with resignation that ‘il faut s’y soumettre’, using in French the same injunction used by the conformist Spirit in Dipsychus.24 Back in England he was immediately ready and willing to leave again; that project ended up being, after the wedding, ‘visionary’, according to Clough himself, but when he was given six months’ leave for illness at the beginning of 1860 he felt once again the temptation growing within to ‘cross the Atlantic’. Once married, Clough fell victim to that routine of the office worker, that disabling rat race that he had always feared and abhorred. Florence Nightingale sapped his poetic energy definitively when she returned from the war in Crimea, as Clough, feeling a sudden resurgence of his past democratic and humanitarian ideals, became her devoted assistant. Already at age of forty his health was failing, and after 1859 travelling was necessary, though not to calm his restlessness but for curative purposes. He died in Florence during one of those trips, from malaria and rheumatic fever caused by a cold, and is buried there in the Protestant cemetery.

24 19 January 1854.

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§ 135. Clough III: University poems Circumstantial, occasional and elegiac poetry was an apprenticeship that Clough attended to with an even greater rapidity than that of his predecessors, as was the patriotic one on the much-used theme of the sunset of heroic ages.25 The poems for which he won awards at Rugby, and others published in the school magazine, written before he was eighteen and not later than 1838, are self-declaredly expressions of a humble muse, and they are mainly centred upon the formula of the Gothic-style tale in verse and of the ballad with simple lexicon and easy rhythm recalling, for the simple and sometimes bizarre protagonists taken from daily life, Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. Nor is it surprising to find an imitation of Coleridge’s Christabel in a ballad which retells a parable of the awakening of carnal impulses with the consequent evocation of the gigantic bogeyman of sin. The only exception is a vast, impassioned, apocalyptic historical sketch in several stanzas26 which is influenced by Dr Arnold’s cyclical theory, and even by the image to him most dear – massively used later by his son – of the tides. This poem, a de rigueur apocalyptic piece for every post-Romantic poet, embraces a finalistic vision of history yearning for an imminent time in which the present chaos will be returned to harmony. Various other poems hinge on the theme of the generational exchange and on discipleship; but already Clough keeps the apocalyptic and ‘spasmodic’ element to a minimum, and sometimes dissolves it into even humorous variations. And he also naturally applies the Tennysonian ‘mask of age’, so that the sixteen-year-old boy from Rugby can turn to look with nostalgia upon childhood, when his psychic morbidity had not yet exploded, nor had the churning vortex of the self begun spinning. His early alienation produces its first fruit in ‘An Incident’, which contrasts the squalid spectacle of urban life with the simple happiness of two poor brothers.

25

One composition written upon the death of George IV, ‘Snowdon’ (M, 453ff.) develops the theme of the end of  Welsh mythologies, symbolized by the mountain of the same name, now barren, the highest in Wales. 26 ‘The Close of the Eighteenth Century’ (M, 455ff.). On the aesthetic implications deriving from the period at Rugby, cf. the insightful remarks of Biswas 1972, 45–51.

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2. Clough’s early poetry is somewhat arbitrarily closed, in the current poetic editions, in 1837 and with his departure from Rugby, and his mature work is made to begin with his arrival at Oxford. Completely foreign to Clough’s real centre of inspiration are the two exuberant historical and mythological odes with which he twice (deservedly) lost the Newdigate prize. ‘Salsette and Elephanta’, entered into the Newdigate in 1839, is one of the many variations, written at the time, on the theme of the buried or underwater city, and one of few concessions he made to Victorian exoticism. It is reminiscent of Arnold’s ‘Mycerinus’, but in the end becomes a coherent and merely veiled transposition of the meditation, which would later flow into Adam and Eve, on the nostalgia for pre-lapsarian Eden. Lingering on the escape to the Orient, it longs for a world immune to sin and law. However, the vision, like those in the youthful poems of Tennyson and Hopkins, is ultimately rejected, because suspicious and unhealthy, and its disappearance coincides with the return in spirit to the familiar, though much duller, English landscapes. The other composition that competed at the Newdigate, ‘The Judgment of Brutus’, concludes significantly with an exemplum of Roman fortitude, of the toughness of the will that contrasts with the weakness, idleness and fluctuation of resolutions in modern times. Clough confided in a letter to his friend Burbidge that he was displaced, his weak and impulsive heart lacking a direction in which to channel his love, and that therefore he ended up in the hands of chance. That composition, which marks the dawning of Clough’s republicanism, is one of the many pedantic poetizations of minor episodes from history which constituted a didactic practice of the time. Many of his other university poems had an extemporaneous origin. They were contained in letters addressed to friends, or in diaries. Attitudes and moods of desperation prevail in monologues or soliloquies, though occasionally the tone is more fluid and humorous. The examination of conscience always leads him to the mea culpa, the denunciation of sins perhaps sexual, alluded to with the evangelical symbol of the wasted talents, and with an ardent imagination which foreshadows (in the sonnet written on his twenty-first birthday), Hopkins’s self-fashioning as a eunuch. ‘Sin’ includes both personal and original sin, with an inevitable pre-lapsarian nostalgia. There is a veritable emotional and humoral oscillation, of healing and relapsing, which,

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however, Clough had the strength to set to rhyme. That was at any rate an absolutely common problem with university students, a disease and a discomfort, and perhaps even a complacent sign of distinction, confessed for instance in a composition of the same period by Matthew Arnold, too. The intellectual strife hinges on the elusiveness of truth, about which, Clough believed, one could only have fleeting appearances separated by frightening periods of darkness.27 ‘Epi-Strauss-ium’28 inaugurates the poetry of theological discussion only a few months from the appearance of David Friedrich Strauss’s Leben Jesu translated by George Eliot. The effusion of the divine ‘glory’ – the epiphany of the Incarnation, the later and historical spread of the Word – is described with an ingenious pun that takes us back to two meanings which are mutually exclusive and even overturn one another: ‘spent’ can indicate both enlargement and extinguishment of the ‘radiance’ up to a hypothetical, threatening darkness. In this poem, exclamatory and interrogative at the same time, Clough doubts the form but not the substance of the Revelation; as he acknowledged to his sister in his letters, the divine commandments existed undamaged, and even burned brightly with light, in the conscience.29 § 136. Clough IV: ‘Ambarvalia’. Early signs of bivocal poetry In Ambarvalia30 (1849) Clough followed in the footsteps of the Tennyson brothers, as it was a joint production and was co-written by Clough and his Oxford companion Thomas Burbidge. It still has little of real art and of Clough’s art, and should be read a posteriori, concentrating on the few germs destined to be further developed. Matthew Arnold rightly noticed that Clough had only rarely managed to be crystal-clear 27

M, 137. On Clough’s intellectual development towards the unknowability of truth, on the basis of his university essays of 1838, cf. Greenberger 1970, 41ff. 28 That is, ‘Small Poem on Strauss’. 29 4–23.5.1847. Arpeggios in prose on the absence of foundations in the Scriptures are also found in ‘Notes on the Religious Tradition’. 30 The title (intentionally self-deprecating [Armstrong 1962, 17] but also ironical, because it created the expectation of bucolic countryside scenes which were not present [CRHE, 88]) refers to the festival of purification of the fields in Ancient Rome, also recalled in the opening of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean.

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(and even to lack any Hellenistic sense of ‘beauty’). Apart from a few light, almost neo-Elizabethan variations on love in supple and musical metres, the bulk of this collection – there are forty poems by Clough in all – has too much of the intellectual diary and the raw soul-probing. If it lacks any attempt at objectivization, and its poems are unlike each other and yet considered together so similar to those of his first years at Oxford and even to earlier ones from Rugby (yet again, so different from The Bothie, published one year earlier), the reason is that the arc of their composition began far earlier, and the collection contains ‘old things, the casualties of at least ten years’.31 Ambarvalia reveals and confirms a soul in turmoil,32 morbidly concentrated upon itself33 and fearful of the inauthentic world, which can only be saved and redeemed by love, that miraculous fortifying fusion between two souls against the surrounding squalor. Clough looks within himself but also looks out, and in his lack of preparation desires an encounter with the world from which he immediately pulls back, and which he immediately flees. This spirit of observation triggers a few early, bitterly satirical sketches of life in society, and a few incisive portraits of hypocrisy and conformism. 2. Having a central position in the collection, a group of brief compositions, ten in all and for the most part sonnets, entitled à la Tennyson and Wordsworth ‘Blank Misgivings of a Creature moving in Worlds not Realised’, describe the spiritual journey from terror and discomfort to timid optimism thanks to the therapy of ‘reconciliation’ with himself and of patience. God the rescuer is far away; he exists but is ‘unidentified’; the poet, however, becomes aware, through tiresome work, and at the end of the meditative experience, that God is an inscrutable dispenser, 31 32

33

Letter to Emerson dated 10 February 1849. Poetry, not least because of Clough’s sense of guilt, was an activity upon which one could waste energies (M, 42), and anyway, in the metapoetic poem which follows immediately after, an activity which is neither divine nor sublime, but completely human: an accident of the brain and – with an early bathos – of the stomach. Objective correlatives and natural descriptions are very rare, but offer ‘cyclical’, immutable, or peaceful and soothing spectacles (M, 12); they reveal an afflicted heart (M, 24). In his feelings, too, Clough longed for immutability (M, 12), and wished that love would remain ‘Not only for to-day’.

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for the good of men, even of the knowledge of sin. So yet again Clough repeats and denounces the frustration that his excessively strict if not fanatic moral education had caused, one that that did not take human weakness into account.34 The inner religious debate is foreshadowed in the elaborate marine (torn sails, broken rudder, the ship on the brink of going under) and economic (waste and debt) metaphors, and in the long and recurring comparisons of the unknowing child abandoned by his mother with no other guide. The need not to feel alone and to be guided along the journey of life and the passage into adulthood, and the opposite need, to spread one’s wings and fly alone, will be the central questions of Clough’s poetry after The Bothie. In the third sonnet of ‘Blank Misgivings’ the ‘circle’ that the poet is about to leave or believes he can leave is that of the university, and his destination is the silent wood, the uninhabited and ‘maternal’ hills, with which he will irrationally or deliriously be able to meld and from which he will then return to the world to carry out tasks for which he is now too weak. In all other respects, Ambarvalia exudes erotic frustration and a real hunger for sex capable of breaking into his mental solipsism and attain an authentic unison. Some lyrics look directly forward to one of the dilemmas in Dipsychus, making a distinction between eminently sexual free love and its fulfilment in marriage, which inevitably condensed what was airy and imposed irreversible laws on the heart. Marriage was a step which came ever closer, for him as for any other thirty-year-old who had finished his studies, a step required by social mores as well as by his family, which desired a normal life for him.35 Diverse poems can be reduced to the rhetorical exercise or poetic genre of Provençal or Stilnovo poetry, the ‘definition of love’: a flame

34 The ballad ‘Come back my olden heart’ sings praises to the ‘faithful’ or rather stable heart, the only bulwark in the paralysis of the soul, torn by too many doubts, including scientific ones. 35 ‘Duty’ is the title of a bitter poem which looks one by one at all forms of Victorian etiquette and sarcastically invites the reader to observe them. In this poem, dating back to 1840, Clough wholly refuses the destiny intended for him by his family, the socially integrated married life. At the same time he claims the right to selfdetermination, including intellectual self-determination.

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that bursts out towards the sky, a star reflected in the impure river, or in the darkened earth. When eyes are lowered, when one’s stare is cleansed of mystic fog and ready to face reality, Clough confesses to himself, with boundless irony bordering on sarcasm, how ineffective the marriage formula really was. ‘When panting sighs the bosom fill’ is a long, dense and confused lucubration on the theme of marriage, but also his umpteenth attempt to define love: angelic and sublime, or carnal and bestial. The exterior and physical signs of love are the same that excite the brutes, if it were not for the fact that the brutes have no soul and cannot feel the ‘zest’. A ‘voice’ arrives to cast doubt on the chances of a rational love, and therefore of a passion subjugated to reason; at the same time, the voice is that of prudence which urges him to be patient, and furthermore adds to the picture of human love the threatening image of instability. Extremely vague, almost as if purposefully hidden, are the biographical traces that lie behind these lyrics, which are often untitled or have extravagant and impertinent titles. In three rather academic, forced and cryptic sonnets, Clough’s flame has the nom de plume of Leonina; another poem with a Greek title evokes a young Scot who was perhaps the sister of his friend Walrond, and recollects their adieu but also the euphoria of the experience. A similar, ardent trochaic song is the poem ‘Epì Látmoi’, an early idealization of the life of the Highlands and a direct precursor of The Bothie. The girl with whom the poet throws himself into the whirling dance is unchangeable like the images reflected in the lake, which are constantly destroyed and reformed; indeed she is a Homeric archetype, so much so that, foreshadowing Rossetti, she is imparadised and becomes a star in the firmament. The only moment in which Clough tested his ability to liberally and unconventionally prefigure sensual and bodily desire, escaping for once from the oppressive weight of sin and punishment, is enclosed in the poem ‘Natura naturans’, which his wife abhorred and was almost ready to exclude from the first posthumous edition of Clough’s poems. The poem, initially anecdotal – a casual encounter with a girl on a train – turns into a soliloquy on the possibility of maintaining innocence and yet enjoying the satisfaction of the senses without later guilty consequences. The title, reminiscent of Spinoza, is justified by the fact that the poet and the girl, seated next to one another, in a sudden and unrepeatable sensation feel a

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single fluid racing through their veins and intellects. Such was the feeling of our ancestors, who experienced it without shame and without the fear of nudity. At that time Clough had already written several scenes of the dialogic poem Adam and Eve.36 3. The image, or artifice, of the two or more voices speaking and often animatedly debating within the mind has its beginnings in Ambarvalia. Tennyson had launched this device in 1842 with ‘The Two Voices’,37 but it rapidly became a fully Cloughian stylistic trait thanks, above all, to the very prolonged use he would make of it in Dipsychus. Ambarvalia opens emblematically under the sign of this redoubling of voices with ‘The Questioning Spirit’,38 in which for the first time in Clough the fracture of the psyche is made concrete, and the voices of acquiescence and conformity battle with another, evil and almost Mephistophelian prompter. From now on, much of Clough’s poetry will hinge on a series of dialogues and more precisely of inquiries into the issues of knowing and deliberately ignoring, of renunciation and pleasure, of duty and liberation, of meeting the world and retreating from it into the self. And much of his poetry will be realistically, and then more and more surreally, set on the road or at a crossroads, where the interrogating Mephistophelian spirit will point out the concrete, tangible, and above pleasurable forms of life to a character timidly desiring to refuse them. The ‘circle’ appearing in ‘The Questioning Spirit’ can symbolize a generation of Rugby or Oxford alumni, deprived of guides or support who, followers of Keats, wish to narcotize reality and continue to dream, abstracting themselves from it; they are dissuaded, however, by a disembodied voice which reminds them that such a position is unsustainable. This creed of renunciation, and this denial to the invitation of the ‘questioning spirit’, echo the many yearnings of post-Romantic 36

37 38

There is a reference to Spinoza also in a brief later poem (M, 198–9) about the circumnavigation of Magellan, emblematic of a return to the point of departure: Spinoza had already discovered the connection between finite and infinite and between man and God. § 86.5–7. In ‘When panting sighs the bosom fill’, cited above, the free rejoicing of the heart is held back by a ‘small expostulating voice’.

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escapism, as expressed for instance in Tennyson’s lotus-eaters and in the Rubáiyát of FitzGerald. However, the poem becomes a caustic criticism of Victorian upbringing when the questioning spirit, passing from complaining to sarcasm, and revealing his hidden Mephistophelian attributes, points to the limits of ‘duty’ and above all to the female flesh that beckons invitingly from the pavement. 4. In this already surreal vision, all of Clough’s companions withdraw, firm in their beliefs, resisting the temptations of the flesh; but Clough seems to be the only one to detach himself in order to listen to the surprising confession of the questioning spirit. In a change of scene that is sudden and slightly inexplicable, not only does the Mephistophelian spirit remain silenced in a corner, but he is almost humiliated, becoming like a diminished and self-deposed Satan who kneels in front of this ‘one spirit’, Clough himself. Thanks to this confession, the leitmotif of the composition becomes theological and religious, or at any rate, gnosiological, because it repeats in a reversed form the satanic temptations in the desert. For this Satan the sadistic enjoyment of instilling doubt without adding any truly constructive knowledge is already enough: ‘Only with questionings pass I to and fro, / Perplexing these that sleep, and in their folly / Imbreeding doubt and sceptic melancholy’.39 The image of a repentant Satan is con-

39 The Gospel variation ‘Bethesda’ (1849) ties back explicitly, but on the whole in a rather forced way, to ‘The Questioning Spirit’, identifying first the ‘circle’ of the questioned spirits with the cripples of the fifth chapter of John’s Gospel, healed in the water of the pool while the ‘troubling of the water’ caused by an angel continued. Among the crowd of spectators or the other recipients of miracles we can pick out the tempting  spirit of the preceding poem, who swallowing his pride admits to defeat and says that he has decided to live like everyone else. Pride is the only missing trait in this character to make him a direct and precise antecedent to the ‘Spirit’ who will appear in Dipsychus: the essence of the words is, indeed, the same. Influenced by German biblical criticism, Clough eventually revisits the Gospel miracle from the point of view of doubt: the water could very well have been that of Lethe, and the man of little faith was perhaps healed by the passing by of a Browning-like ‘more diviner stranger’, in other words Christ (§ 122.6–7). The voice of the narrator remains noncommittal: the event may or may not ever have happened. The area is thus that of the paradoxical, plain-spoken or even shouted negation of the miracles of  Christ —

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nected to that of the lyric ‘Qui laborat, orat’, in which the soul, precisely like a penitent Lucifer prostrates itself before God having subjugated any ‘rebel self-centred thought’. The third stanza affirms that knowledge of God can only be by now intuitive, not intellectual, and that it is vain to expect total knowledge of God using human instruments. With extremely contorted reasoning the last stanzas argue that if it is not possible to pray to one we do not know, God rewards men who work and who in working pray, just as in the motto of Rugby school, quoted in the title of the poem. The divine is acrobatically found in a ‘not unowned’ God, existent even if not named. The penultimate stanza hopefully mentions those rare epiphanies occurring when – with the appearance of the metaphor of the veil,40 so frequent in Victorian poetry – the ‘blinding film’ is torn during work, and the eyes are shocked, recognizing and having received the gift of a ‘beatific supersensual sight’. 5. In ‘The New Sinai’ Clough outlines the journey that led from polytheism to pagan pantheism and from pagan pantheism to Christian monotheism, but for the moment he exhorts himself to deny that the age of atheism has arrived. The first parallelism is that between the pagan ages and a Christian age still ready to fall into temptation, caused by the ‘disappearance’ of God himself and by his denial to be a presence that can be sensed, and by man’s willingness to see the divine in the greatest variety of false appearances. This continued until the moment when the young soul received the revelation from Sinai that there is only one God. Very rapid, even instantaneous, is the passage in the poem from this revelation to the negation of God by contemporary science: after the thousand gods of paganism came the single God of Christianity and the no God of nineteenth-century science. Clough wonders whether there is today a new Moses capable of rending the cloud that obscures God from our sight and of hearing the divine voice. The cloud is only apparently empty, for within it there is God, so that there is no choice but to wait for his plan of revelation to be carried out. ‘The New Sinai’ is therefore a poem among which, supreme, that of his resurrection — which will continue to echo in the poems set in Italy written in the same year 1849 (§ 142.1). 40 On the recurrence and meaning of the image see above, § 5.3.

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of moderate religious optimism and resistance to the waves of scepticism and atheism triggered by science, which will make themselves increasingly heard in Clough’s poetry.41 § 137. Clough V: ‘Adam and Eve’ Adam and Eve, which has come down to us as a fragmentary manuscript not precisely datable, but begun on the author’s own admission in 1848, was the thirty-year-old Clough’s first tangible attempt to objectivize his psychological and religious conflicts. Through the evident disguise of Eve and Adam two inner ‘voices’ clash with each other: on the one hand a paralysing and terrifying Calvinistic rigour, and on the other a liberal ethic or more precisely a cautious and even defiant humanism. Clough’s Adam, in particular, summarizes in himself and echoes all the satanic, Promethean and Faustian icons of earlier and contemporary times.42 Cain recalls Byron’s poem of the same name, an author who, as I mentioned in my introduction, was a gold mine of stylistic solutions and mythological suggestions for Clough. In the case in point, Clough, in the person of Adam, and self-mythologizing his departure from Oxford, dramatized his theological divergences with the provost of Oriel, Hawkins. Adam and Eve, together with Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus, is a dialogical, even dialectic and judicial, and therefore eminently bivocal poem, which

41

Clough uses the same word for Moses which he had used in ‘Epi-Straussi-um’, ‘vanish’, to mean the disappearance of philological and historical evidence, and of the guarantees of truth, and precisely theorizes the present condition of the Deus absconditus, though still confiding in a future epiphany. At the time in which he was drafting and finalizing the compositions in Ambarvalia he had not yet lost his faith, but he had come to the tolerant conviction that the foundation of religion was one and the same, regardless of the variety of confessions and creeds. ‘Sic itur’ and ‘Qua cursum ventus’ both refer, with their serene and plain metaphors of walking on opposing pavements and of the routes of ships, to the already irreparable split from his tutor, Ward, a follower of Newman. Despite the religious disagreement, Clough really believed that both were moving on parallel paths towards the same destination; at the end of the journey they would one day exchange looks of forgiveness and reconciliation. 42 Rossetti’s contemporary, obsessive interest in the apocryphal story of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, should also be remembered (§ 187.1).

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constitutes a fundamental terminus a quo or an alternative model to the leading poetic genre, the dramatic monologue. Clough already thought of a drama for voices with stylized or totally absent stage directions, in accordance with the plan later given to Dipsychus. There are in all fifteen dialogic scenes in blank verse in which Adam and Eve and then Cain and Abel alternate, in a trajectory that, reworking Genesis, begins with the Fall and closes with the fratricide. 2. The remarkably successful opening scenes stand out for the deliberate absence of any instance of solemnity or of Miltonian magniloquence – on the contrary they suggest a systematic spirit of desublimation and are wrapped in a dark, surreal atmosphere43 – as well as for the depth with which the characters’ psychologies are carved out and reciprocally contrasted. Adam is the sinner who recovers, resolved to start over and rebuild; Eve is instead paralysed, petrified, as we see in in her triple, obsessive cry, ‘Guilt, guilt, guilt’. Adam fears and despairs only for a moment before a harsh, angry God; only for a moment does he give in to panic, obeying an inner voice urging him to surrender and suicide. Quickly gaining self-control, he manages, in a feat none of the future alter egos of Clough will accomplish, to embrace and understand sin (even the pleasure of sleep and copulation) as an event which is as indispensable to historical development as it is in individual growth: ‘We were to grow’. Even when he remembers the serpent’s assault, the threatening approach of the archangel, and the previously unnoticed embarrassment of his nakedness, he only feels a strange and pleasurable taste of rebellion and boasts that knowledge of good which to obtain causes his punishment; he feels almost, ‘within the scales of mere exterior me’s’, a different and almost divinized sense of his identity. Eve, upon whom weigh both the punishments and the doubts of the humankind of the past and above all of the future, thus represents Clough more than Adam does, even though he would have liked to be Adam.

43 Adam trivializes and empties the meaning of the biblical act of picking a single apple; in a disparaging tone he claims that woman is to be credited with the ‘mighty mythus of the Fall’. Adam indeed thinks that the serpent, the apple, and the curse were in essence a dream, or a chimera.

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3. In the central and final scenes, the debate touches upon questions of the greatest urgency for Clough and his contemporaries; but this results in irremediably weighty arguments. Eve can only blame her transgression against the divine commandment in Eden on the Victorian God who hides Himself. Adam believes that God would not be God if he spoke with absolute clarity, and claims that the divine voice is within man. Cain and Abel from their first steps imitate their parents but exasperating their positions. Abel takes the side of his mother. He knows of the Fall and trusts in the redemption which is already underway; Cain expresses a demonic individuality, ungovernable and aggressive, almost truly super-human, inherited from Adam but in a more potent form. The murder of his brother, which happens off stage, is nothing other, in his words, than the physical elimination of an obstacle to his own divine emulation and to the conquest of total liberty. Cain, who proudly accepts only the punishment not to forget, rejects the idea of kneeling because in essence he has not heard the message of God, a silent and invisible God.44 The biblical story prevented Clough, however, from creating a second Satan and allowed him to reflect his own nature of eternally unsuccessful challenger. Cain embraces the exile advised by his father Adam, aware of a monstrous, terrible, and lasting rift within himself.45 § 138. Clough VI: ‘The Bothie of Tober-na-vuolich’ I. The joyful parody of academia Conceived and quickly composed in September 1848 at his home in Liverpool, cheered by the company of his mother and sister, the poem in

44 Even Abel’s murder is, according to Adam’s plan, part of those ‘seething processes’ expressly required by ‘necessity’, which causing man to grow are ultimately acts aimed at the greater good; so is the acceptance of Satan’s temptation. 45 The complete rehabilitation of Cain is recounted in the third person in the remake of the biblical story which is ‘The Song of Lamech’. The old patriarch, who is Cain’s descendant, tells how he, following the implorations of Eve, set out on the path of atonement, and how after many years he met Adam again, who told him that he had seen Abel in a dream, and that he forgave him. Cain dies blessed by his father, and completely redeemed.

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hexameters The Bothie of Tober-na-vuolich46 was immediately published by an Oxford publisher and by one in London, and a year later in America as well. It represents one of the few, perhaps the only real oasis of the joy of writing found in all of Clough, a joy that is sensed in every page and every line, and also in the linguistic and stylistic gusto with which some recent biographical events are transfigured. It is a joy reflected in the happy end which tops off the story, itself not completely invented.47 Behind The Bothie lie in particular Clough’s repeated experiences as tutor of groups of Oxford students, whom he accompanied for periods of study in the heart of the Highlands to prepare for their exams. During these periods the strict daily program of study would alternate with long walks and excursions, occasionally with a swim in the clear and cold waters of the lochs, and above all with contact with the locals, and even the welcome participation in games and dances. In the course of these experiences, Clough perhaps developed a passion for a young Scottish woman which was reflected in the experience 46 This is the title of the second version of the poem in the edition personally edited by the poet. The name of the Scottish village was, in the first version, Toper-nafuosich, and was changed because of a supposed, obscene double meaning, after some reviewers and friends warned Clough that the name recurred in a Gaelic toast to the female genitals. That Clough – such an attentive linguist and dialectologist, and above all such a frequent visitor to the Highlands – knew nothing of this seems rather incredible; it is more likely that he had attempted to get away with it, smuggling in one of his many cases of nicknaming in the poem, albeit this one is doubtless the rudest. The text I follow is that provided by Mulhauser, who follows the 1862 edition which reduces, not always successfully, the stylistic exuberance and intemperance of the 1848 text, reproduced by Scott 1976. 47 The plan of The Bothie is described in a letter dated 6 November 1848, written by Clough to Matthew Arnold’s brother, Thomas, who had emigrated to New Zealand. At that moment Clough was ‘loose on the world’, and pondering his friend’s advice of becoming a professor in New Zealand for three years; he also noticed that, like Hewson, he was in such a state that he could fall in love ‘every day’. By his own admission his prospects were, like those of Hewson, ‘uncertain’ and ‘quite hazy’. In addition to Thomas Arnold, another correspondent and friend of Clough, J. Gell, had emigrated to New Zealand. Emigration to New Zealand, for utopian reasons as well as owing to the crowded labour market in England, was common and generalized, and a social phenomenon also reflected in a famous painting by Ford Madox Brown (Veyriras 1964, 271).

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of his alter ego Philip Hewson.48 Thus The Bothie is also at the same time a poem of student life, of a kind that was earning a notable success at the close of the 1840s and was taking on the proportions of a small subgenre; it constitutes, in particular, an echo, one year later, of Tennyson’s The Princess.49 This was the moment of the explosion of socialism and of the revolutions of 1848 whose fermenting preparations had reached, albeit in an attenuated form, the golden isolation of an already ‘democratic’ England, which for some students and radical intellectuals was far from democratic and needed instead to regenerate itself. Those were the years in which everyone was talking, either in favour or with terror, of the Irish disorders and of Chartism, or of the emancipation of women. Not only that: both The Princess and The Bothie convey to us the tone of voice and the idiolect – exuberant, hyperbolic and somewhat raving – typical of the university youth of the time. But in Clough’s poem there is an operation which is missing in that of Tennyson, or which is only found in very small part: a stylistic tour de force and a deliberate, refined parodic operation, made possible by a suddenly reacquired faith in his own means and in his future. This was to be for Clough an ephemeral blaze, and this enthusiasm barely survived until the completion of his next work, Amours de Voyage. 2. The Bothie had passable commercial success; it was praised by Kingsley but torn apart by the Spectator which judged it ‘indecent and profane, immoral and communistic’. Thanks to an unauthorized edition it found favour in America, and when Clough arrived there a few years later he was surprised to find himself greeted as the ‘celebrated author’ of this poem, the edition of which had sold like hot cakes. The surprise of the first readers who expected a full-fledged vindication explaining the reasons behind his radical step – abandoning Oxford – and the sense of disorientation that even today one feels reading this poem for the first time, are an indirect proof of its originality and extravagance. Already at the time its metrics made of it, if not anything else, an esoteric poem with 48 Distinct verbal and situational echoes with the poem – the Scottish word ‘bothie’, and in particular the Greek greeting of Hewson to his first beloved, Katie – are found in the poem from Ambarvalia entitled ‘O theós metà sou’. 49 A line by Tennyson, even if not from The Princess, is cited by Hewson.

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a narrow range and an exercise aimed at the classical academia or to readers who had at least a smattering of Greek and Latin. With the conventions and the stylistic features of epic poetry – that is to say with the maximum friction between the material and its treatment – Clough sang an everyday subject matter, not even history but just news. With The Bothie, with Clough and with Clough only, the chapter of Victorian parody and of Victorian burlesque worthy of Pope and Dryden, opens and almost immediately closes. His use of the hexameter, which he admitted choosing immediately after reading the not particularly successful, and as such provocative experiments of Longfellow in Evangeline, is parodic and playful rather than purely classical in form or style – as Matthew Arnold thought it was according to a perplexed sociological study of the present.50 It is a hexameter that is naturally and intentionally strident in tone when used to depict and narrate a subject matter to which it is inadequate, and that therefore creates a frustrated expectation in the reader; Clough called it, with an added ear for the pun anticipating Joyce, ‘anglo-wild’. Beginning from its metrical organization the poem radiates out – in its plot, in the conventions of the genre, in the methods of presentation of the characters and description of the events – towards an amazing range of citations, of literary allusions, of deliberate and playful imitations. In a sense in this poem nothing is serious and everything farcical and comic. The sudden epic deflagrations – the solemnizing simile, the repeated epithet, the reduplication with reversal (such as: ‘Adam kept the secret, / Adam the secret kept’), the anaphora, and outside of the Homeric technique the Anglo-Saxon kenning and the alliterative modules and the Scottish lexical veneer – all these empty themselves of their individual function when applied to a subject matter that clashes with them and makes them incongruous. The conventions of the epic poem – such as the introductory invocation to the Muses and the tropes of inexpressibility – are themselves parodied on several occasions, as Byron had done in Don Juan, all the way up to the ending, when the poet playfully confesses that he is no longer sure where the sacred mountain to the muse is, and whether it is Pindus or Etna or Ben-Nevis. The tutor

50 § 161.5.

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and his students are truly caricatures, shrunken Homeric heroes drawn from day-to-day life. The protagonist is a contemporary Odysseus who in his wanderings through the Highlands finds in turn, as if blended and overlaid in the same figure, his own Circe, Nausicaa and Penelope; but in certain moments of suspension in the text he is a ‘wandering hero’, thus already impressively similar to Joyce’s Bloom, especially in the hospital episode of Ulysses. And the allusive game continues, even becoming freer and more anarchic. Each of the nine books of the poem – indeed, there are nine, to twelve or twenty-four of classical epics – is introduced by a Latin, Virgilian subtitle, and all of these subtitles ideally point back to the general subtitle, a ‘Long-Vacation Pastoral’. The students are the Homeric heroes of today as much as the shepherds of Virgil’s eclogues who sing about their heart-ache and their often palingenetic dreams. For his part the tutor, fancifully baptized Adam, triggers references in the range of the serious and the playful, whose traces are at first very vague though they resurface and are reinforced after a patient wait. An Eve is missing, but this Adam is symbolically the spiritual father of his boys and of one in particular, Hewson, who is about to commit at a given moment a few impulsive actions, and thus a possible Cain, whom Adam rescues, soothes, and dissuades. At the same time, a new relationship of equality between men and women could re-establish, in the utopia of the protagonist, the pre-lapsarian state,51 and lead back the world to the Edenic state. Into this innocuous variation Clough then softens the dark tragedy of the unfinished Adam and Eve; his parodic intention is fully revealed at the end, when the young student Hewson is compared to Jacob intent on choosing between Leah and Rachel, who in this case are two Scottish peasants girls with whom he falls in love, and also to Boz who found and married Ruth.52

51 52

In Book II, ll. 82ff., Hewson expressly sings the praises of a new Eve and a new Adam. Such a profane use of the Bible in The Bothie was noticed and stigmatized by the provost of Oriel (Chorley 1962, 166–7). Clough never stopped adapting to himself and his biography the figure of Jacob. In the dramatic monologue ‘Jacob’, probably dating back to 1851, he is not reflected in Abram and Isaac who ‘communicated’ with God, but with the patriarch who has lost that sense of communion, and, simply as a man who has to make his living by the sweat of his brow, now fights with God.

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3. Just as Joyce was to reflect himself in Ulysses through Bloom and through Stephen, Clough mirrored himself in Adam and in Philip Hewson. According to the biography, he should be Adam, the nickname so appropriately given to the tutor by his students. In 1848, Clough could have, should have and would have wanted to be a father in more than one way; a father in the flesh, and thus a married man53 and in any case a man who was no longer a virgin, having had a sexual encounter with a woman; a spiritual father and a guide for younger men. He was not and did not feel like he was either of the two. Therefore he is at the same time, perhaps first and foremost, the student Hewson, a name that also means, or sounds, ‘you, son’. With this pun he was alluding to his state of still being a son, not yet grown, which he believed he was or which he was considered to be by the members of his own family. Clough, in this poem so overwhelmingly different from the still immature and unsophisticated introspective lyrics of Ambarvalia, was therefore suddenly capable to hide and at the same time reveal, in this ingenious texture of allusive ciphers, his own delicate biographical moment. Hewson’s ideas in fact correspond exactly to the utopian, still undeveloped political and social visions of Clough at that time. Clough entrusts to his autobiographical protagonist a Bildung the final results of which lose themselves in the fanciful: the newlyweds escape to New Zealand,54 but this responds to his longed for, envisioned, redemptive proletarian and peasant love. § 139. Clough VII: ‘The Bothie of Tober-na-vuolich’ II. The bothie, an exportable microcosmos The opening of The Bothie,55 one of the most sparkling moments of creativity in all of Clough’s poetry, offers itself immediately as a deliberate parody of the end of the Iliad. The sports games have just finished which displayed the athletic prowess of the students, physically and mentally strong 53

Cf. the following couplet in ‘Duty’ (§ 136.2 n. 35): ‘and marry – papa and mamma desire you, / And your sister and schoolfellows do’. 54 The catalogue of the gifts made by his friends to Hewson and Elspie humorously looks back to that which his Oxford friends made to Thomas Arnold (Biswas 1972, 263 n. 3). 55 Very loosely based on a banquet given in honour of Queen Victoria during her visit to Scotland in 1847.

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as both Homeric warriors and students of Rugby and Oxford had to be. Both the catalogue and the list of the characters are also in a Homeric style, as are the minute description of the clothing worn, the Greek-sounding nicknames and epithets parodically repeated in the course and at the end of each single presentation. As in medieval painting the tables at the banquet are placed according to a symbolic, emblematic and hierarchical plan; and the balance that reigned in Scotland, and perhaps in the very faith practiced by Clough at that time, between Catholicism and Protestantism, translates into the fact that both the Catholic priest and the Protestant minister give a speech before and after the banquet. Many other important representatives of the local community are present, as well as even politicians from London. The banquet – a reduced repetition of Homeric banquets, and, like those, one abounding with roasted meats and washed down by wines and liquors, both precisely listed once again – represents at the same time a microcosmos of the English social spectrum. The metrical form – combined with the parodic use of the epic stereotypes of protasis, preterition and simile – lends a strange flavour to the many references to contemporary events and trivia being chatted about by the guests, and touched upon during the toasts given by several of the diners. But outside the domain of parody, at times even having accents clashing with the circumstance, is the speech given by Hewson, who for no apparent reason attacks the establishment, the class divisions, the Anglican Church, and specifically the game laws. In the midst of the general embarrassment, there is one person who understands and approves of the youth: a thin, older character dressed like a ‘Saxon’ who nears him and limits himself to inviting Hewson to his ‘bothie’. The scenic and narrative effectiveness of this meteoric apparition lies in the expectation which is suddenly created – both in the reader and in Hewson’s companions, being Hewson the only one who is unaware – of a future meeting, one that will actually occur at the end after many sentimental vicissitudes of the protagonist. 2. ‘Radical and poet’, a romantic believer in and supporter of the reform of society and in particular of women’s emancipation, Hewson will later be given a flesh and blood version of that ghost of femininity that had been revealed to him earlier on, along with a taste of an interpersonal relationship between a man and a woman. This had not happened at the

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dance school but rather – in a perfect fusion between the political and the sentimental – in a field, where a poor, homely peasant girl was digging up potatoes with a ‘three-pronged fork’, those potatoes which had a sad contemporary resonance and clearly alluded to the Irish famine. Before the epilogue, the Homeric and classical divertissement must however make room for Clough’s far more serious drama for voices, and to the reasoned and detailed debate between Adam and Hewson, although this too is in hexameters and is punctuated by the pranks and jokes of Hewson’s other companions. Clough’s following poems will but transpose to this theatre of consciousness, and often of the unconscious, a debate between two voices, which are in the meantime, in The Bothie, those of two distinct, fully identified personalities. The fiery, palingenetic tirades of Hewson56 are quenched by his tutor Adam, who responds to his pupil with the most unctuous Arnoldian sermon on Victorian moral duty, centred upon the search for the ‘relative’ good – not to be confused with what is ‘attractive’ and ipso facto transient – and on the law of growth. Politically, Adam is a conservative who does not what to stir up trouble where there is calm, and who defends equality only to deny it, adding that all things considered every man has its own tasks to carry out and is not called to perform others; therefore total equality would be utopian. The discussion closes with a temporary lack of solution, because Hewson really wants to plunge into the world and experience it in person with all of his ardour of knowledge, and without a guide. Still, the teachings of his tutor, for the moment ignored, are destined to have resonance and to bear fruit in the future. 3. The dispersion of the students, who for three weeks bid farewell with colourful epithets to their textbooks, and set off for various destinations in Scotland, allows for inspired interludes describing rivers, Scottish woods, and finally a secluded lake where it is a delight to swim and dive. From the moment in which the plot splits into two scenes – the cottage where the tutor lives, the moor, and the other places where Hewson lives by himself and ‘in exile’ – and before the general reunion in the final book, 56

A florid satirical speech of one of his peers translates Hewson’s ideal of the working girl’s beauty into architectural terms, renaming him as the ‘Pugin of women’, with one of the numerous contemporary allusions (cf. § 51.2).

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the form of the poem changes once again, and becomes necessarily epistolary. Clough manoeuvres this with a taste and an ease which foreshadow Amours de Voyage: at times epistles are well structured, humorous and stylized, but we also find notes, fragments, scraps of paper, all following upon one another at an increasingly frenetic pace. In the Highlands, alone, Hewson forges ahead along a path of sentimental initiation studded with flashes of insight and constant and sudden changes of direction. Clough distances himself from the protagonist in various parodic ways, but for this very reason he elects him as his stand-in. Hewson immediately puts his ideas into practice. He spends his time alone and quiet in cottages, helps the peasant girls to carry the peat, hang out the laundry and make porridge, and he learns enough Gaelic to act the lady’s man; he eventually falls under the spell of a maid named Katie, whom however he does not kiss because he is too ‘timid’. Being a wandering Odysseus, or like Byron’s Childe Harold, alone on the mountains, and repentant for having left the young woman, as he fears, in a state of desperation, he longs for death in a lament which has a mimetized, parodic frame and is divided into stanzas with a chorus. Hewson’s abandonment of Katie is due to his terrifying and paralysing excess of feelings for which the immature youth is not prepared, not to a sudden falling out of love. Hewson is already becoming Dipsychus when in a dream he suddenly sees, spontaneously and inexplicably, visions emerging from his turbulent consciousness, flashes of streets of ill repute and spectres of heavily made-up, impudent prostitutes winking at him; these visions are followed by another of the ‘Great Judge’ and other disjointed ones of purity corrupted, and sex made dirty. Hewson is an even more unmistakable preparatory study for Dipsychus in his mood swings, arising from his fragile willpower and the extreme fickleness and instability of his intentions. He is ‘confused’ to the point that with a serious ideological contradiction he ends up by falling in love immediately afterwards with a noblewoman. In the castle of a countess he dallies in dancing and hunting, tossing his radical ideas and doctrines to the wind, and from afar he impudently apostrophizes the miner who brings up jewels from the bowels of the earth to the light (‘Dig, and starve, and be thankful’). But his reconsiderations do not end here: he retraces his steps, leaves the castle, and now writes from the ‘bothie’ in Tober-na-vuolich, where, in a

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kind of Hegelian synthesis, he has fallen in love with a second Scottish peasant.57 4. The ‘bothie’ of Tober-na-vuolich, where Hewson’s ‘sentimental journey’ ends, belongs to a son of the soil and of hardship making a virtue out of necessity: ex-soldier, independent farmer, farrier, but also jack of all trades, he is also the teacher and instructor of his daughters. By pure chance, a horse needs shoeing during a trip by carriage, so he and Hewson meet again a long time after the banquet which opened the poem. Hewson writes more and more cryptically to the tutor Adam that inactive beauty is not enough, one must see it in action and at work. Nor must there be one who serves and one who is served, but instead a mutual collaboration in service. Student and tutor reunite in the bothie to agree that Elspie McKay, the eldest daughter of the farrier, is the ‘good’ and not the simple and passing attraction. From this point on the text sets out a marriage prospect which for Clough was impossible or extremely difficult to realize, and that could only receive support from a progressive instructor such as Adam, whose counterparts in reality did not exist. Clough’s greater involvement in the subject matter provokes a new and decisive change of register in the work, and, notably, the abandonment of parody. Elspie and Hewson confess and declare their love under the alders like two heroes of a novel, with commonplace and rhetorical similes; the scene preceding the kiss and every other which follows, all the way until the end, where they exchange promises and projects for the future, are likewise long-winded and spent.58 Clough was not a master of the idyll, and the text falls short every time that he runs out of parody and the epic model switches into realistic narrative. The love affair, however, does not lead to an immediate marriage

57 That is thanks to a penetrating, benevolently hypnotizing and mysteriously regenerating stare, while the youth was still in love with Katie, and which had remained firmly set in his memory from that moment. 58 A truly cyclopic comparison, but not exactly Homeric – the rays of the morning sun that awaken the city and life in the multitude of its manifestations – closes the work; it in fact identifies that beneficial light with the love of Elspie, which symbolically restores the artificial city to natural beauty. This tableau, too, has a pictorial correlative in the painting Work by Madox Brown (Veyriras 1964, 280).

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like those in fairy-tales. Realistically, Clough does not forget the difficulties arising from the different social backgrounds of the two lovers,59 and makes a pretence of verisimilitude. A trial year is necessary, during which Hewson wisely completes his studies at Oxford to eventually marry the young woman after obtaining his degree. He receives it with full honours because, unlike Clough, he possesses an inner strength that only a satisfying love could provide, even though Clough strangely silences in his alter ego the other great, perhaps even greater quest in which he was engaged, the religious one. The meaning of the departure of the newlyweds for New Zealand dovetails, in its motives and in its results, with Matthew Arnold’s diagnoses of the university community deprived of spiritual guides:60 academic culture was sterile and inconclusive, and even on a national scale it was doubtful that it would ensure a future to England; the same was true of the sterile as well as unjust class divisions which created obstacles to mixed marriages. The new intelligentsia could only be redeemed by absorbing in itself the more authentic life blood of the population and of the working and rural classes.61 The fact remains that the germ cell of the new life and the new interclass society – a self-sufficient community living within its means, where all of the essential functions of communal life are ensured – would have to grow at the outside margins of the nation, and in a land like Scotland which was periodically shaken by independence movements and which, like a metonymy of Ireland, was claiming national autonomy. Even worse, the ‘bothie’, the polar opposite of a college or of the aristocratic castle, will have to be transplanted into the new world, as if implying that the old one was irreparably and irredeemably compromised.62 59 Hewson is, at any rate, an orphan, ‘a thousand pounds his portion’. 60 Cf. the poems ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ and ‘Rugby Chapel’ (§ 157.6 and 159.3–4). 61 If it is the task of the educated classes to put abstract knowledge into practice, a union with the working classes will be for the latter ipso facto an incentive to greater literacy. Elspie on the other hand is not illiterate, for she has been privately taught by her father; and Hewson pronounces an indirect condemnation of his own academic culture when, making plans for the future, he declares that he will prohibit his wife from reading books. 62 In the letters he addresses to Hewson, Adam expresses the belief that one must give the best of oneself in the role and place that providence has placed him in. Hewson

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§ 140. Clough VIII: ‘Amours de Voyage’ I. The withdrawal from action and the epistolary game The general rehearsal, the outline in prose of Amours de Voyage, a poem in letters and again in hexameters, but more contrived and more discontinuous than The Bothie, are found in the collection of real letters, numerous and never more detailed, that Clough wrote to relatives and friends from Rome, where he arrived in the summer of 1849 and where he followed daily – as that democrat and republican sui generis that he was, increasingly more and more disillusioned – the brief life of the Roman Republic. Founded by Mazzini, defended by Garibaldi, besieged by Oudinot, the Republic eventually fell on 30 June 1849, at the hands of the same Frenchmen who had fought for liberty in 1789 and under Napoleon. Clough remained there until Oudinot entered the city and until the disbandment of the assembly and the escape of Garibaldi in August 1849. Amours was drafted in Rome almost ‘in real time’ in the same year, but was published, in instalments, only in 1858, in the Atlantic Monthly in America. Its moderate success was sufficient to ensure Clough, who would publish very little after this piece, his first and last remunerations. The autobiographical nature of the poem is explicit but coded. Claude is a second alter ego to Clough, largely projective and completed by his imagination, and also hidden by a name which, with almost the same allusive procedure used in The Bothie, alliterates with – and is written and pronounced almost in the same way as – that of Clough himself, except for the end consonant.63 The poem unfolds

responds that it is difficult to mark the confines between an unchangeable order given by providence and the freedom of the will. It is significant that Hewson cites as evidence the Thucydidean image of the ‘ignorant armies’ in the night, later made famous by Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (§ 154.3–4). Still along the lines of the war metaphor, in response to the question: where is the battle? Hewson responds, as a speaker for his whole generation, that around him he does not see armies, he does not see kings, he does not see great causes or ranks of supporters, only an ‘infinite jumble and mess and dislocation’. AVP, 196, points out that in the escape to New Zealand we can see the tangible sign of political disillusionment and, possibly, of betrayal, on the part of the bourgeois intellectual, of Chartism, which at the end of the 1840s had exhausted its action. 63 Another pertinent etymology is that of claudus, ‘limping’. In the light of the letters of the period corresponding to Clough’s actual stay in Rome in 1849, one can

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and ends, however, in a quite different way from The Bothie: the couple of lovers, who conduct a merely inconclusive skirmish, are far worse matched, made up of an intellectual who gets embroiled in sterile lucubrations and a daughter of bourgeois parents.64 Such a couple at the end splits up, even if the two former lovers start pursuing each other in a kind of wild-goose chase. Thus there is not even at the end a physical reunion after the separation, as there is significantly no utopia, no missionary project with plans to leave for faraway and still virgin lands that Clough entrusts to his hero. Hewson’s democratic and revolutionary passions are quenched in the uninvolved and even sometimes cynical outlook of Claude, who is therefore largely the exact opposite of the protagonist of The Bothie. He recognizes himself in the heroes of the past – Adam, Saul, Faust – and identifies with them precisely in order to underline the unbridgeable gap that separates him from them. The Roman historical events of the present are like a modern, de-heroized version of the great, truly epic actions of Homeric times and of those of the other Rome, Ancient Rome, in which heroism was something more than just a word. Thus Claude is much more sincere when he recollects the great myths of indecision and disengagement or of simply boasted heroism: the lotus-eaters, Hamlet, Don Quixote. As Bagehot wrote, Amours contravened Matthew Arnold’s dictates and the recipe for the ‘grand action’, since it was instead based on a ‘long inaction’, which is not only of a political and ideal nature but must be also understood as the absence of spirit of initiative and resourcefulness with women. Claude of Amours is, historically, the first of a still submerged generation of antiheroes of indifference, indolence and renunciation; he is the forerunner, a surmise that Clough reflected and reshaped in Amours de Voyage a secret passion for the American Margaret Fuller, impassioned and active Red Cross volunteer in the hospitals at the time. In 1849 she was already married and a mother (cf. § 71.4 n. 112). 64 Satirical barbs like those of Smollett and Dickens hit the head of the family who keeps his feet on the ground and his wife who puts on the airs of a bluestocking, quoting Byron and Wordsworth but with unforgivable blunders. Politically conservatives, the Trevellyns soon flee Rome and its ‘Republican terror’. Despite his ‘aristocratic’ fussiness, Claude ends up spending time with the family, although he continues to be sharp with these parvenus who are also a bit too stingy, and who were mere shopkeepers not long before.

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couple of decades earlier, of the Decadents addicted to spleen and political disengagement in a moment in which the ardour of the Romantics65 and of their impulse to leave the sphere of the intellect and art in favour of action, even in defence of the oppressed peoples, was becoming almost completely extinct. At the same time, Clough had the lucid and crucial intuition to extend to the entire poem the epistolary structure which had been, in The Bothie, only episodic. The change from the third person narration to the letter served Clough, as far as his alter ego Claude is concerned, as a highly useful expedient towards the representation of the fluctuation and the fragmentation of the psyche, and towards that bivocal and even polyphonic nature of consciousness upon which Dipsychus turns. In a few isolated attempts to ‘read’ his surroundings, Claude already perceives at his side a ‘shadow’, and in other very dark hints that shadow already shows Mephistophelian marks.66 2. Amours stems, though already with some discontinuity, from that condition of ease and creative gusto, and from that playful attitude capable of tempering and shielding the autobiography in parody that we have seen at work in The Bothie. The parodic disguise starts with the title, which is in the language, by definition, of gallantry; the protagonist himself has a French name despite being an Englishman, and the maudlin notes which decorate the letters are also ‘French’, especially those sentimental ones of the feminine characters. There are in fact two separate and non-communicating channels to this epistolary flow, separated by a strident counterpoint: a ‘high’ one of Claude – which corresponds to an epistolary novel of ideas

65 The desublimation of Romantic Titanism is highlighted by the Trevellyn family and completed by Vernon, the suitor and later happy groom of Georgina Trevellyn; throughout the plot the former finds the greatest of pleasures in the sphere of domestic tenderness. 66 See in particular the ending of the fourth letter of Canto I – ‘What our shadows seem, forsooth, we will ourselves be. / Do I look like that? you think me that: then I am that’ – and the fragments (or postscripts) of the sixth letter of Canto V, which no longer and not even remotely resemble the nature and form of a letter, being instead an altogether private, turbid and tortured confession. In the penultimate of these, Claude chases away a ‘subtle, fanatical tempter’.

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or to an intimate intellectual diary addressed to Eustace,67 who is only an unanswering recipient – and a ‘low’ one, of the bourgeois family’s daughters, and of Mary Trevellyn in particular, writing to her best friend in England, and whose verse letters are fraught with gossip and trivia, whispers and naïve exclamations. Claude’s letters, of varying length, are studded with interruptions and sudden changes of subject, and swing between the poles of pure and detailed information and of the fit of metaphysical speculation. The two voices, male and female, set up a Smollettian relativism made up of close, macroscopic clashes of opinions, like that which concerns Rome, a wonder of the world who leaves the young woman astonished while it appears mere piles of rubble to the disappointed young Englishman.68 The short prologues and epilogues framing each of the five books, which create a disorienting counterpoint in that they seem late effusions of the amateur poet imitating the modules of Romantic melancholy and elegy, constitute further instances of the instability of the poetic register. The most easily sensed friction is once again that between the subject matter and the setting, both strictly contemporary, and the backdating of the style. The modules of Amours closest in time are those of the epistolary novel of the eighteenth century; I have just hinted at Smollett, but Clough also mimics Sterne. On the other hand, the near-tragedy of unresolved love looks back to Werther, and the satire of manners aimed at the bourgeois and the love affairs of the young women’s hearts have a distant flavour of the novels of Jane Austen. The crisscross pattern of the two epistolary flows, and the game of simulation and wile, are a far more innocuous reworking of Les Liaisons dangereuses.69 67 With an imperfect anagram – we will never know how conscious – and of the same nature as those which can be found in The Bothie, ‘Eustace’ might contain the principles of otherness (‘Eu’ = ‘You’) while also being a correspondent who ‘tacet’, that is, is silent. In the first letter of the entire collection, Claude specifies: ‘I write that you may write me an answer’. 68 Similarly, from the very first exchanges of letters, Clough creates in those of the two Trevellyn sisters a decentralized and falsified view of the protagonist, which is added to that in the first person of Claude on himself, and contrasts with it, thus founding the opposition between being and appearing. 69 In French is one of the four epigraphs which, all of them allusive, seem to be due to improvisation if not to the flair for the pure hodgepodge. That epigraph – ‘Il doutait

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3. An ingenious and much camouflaged parody, whose ‘victim’ is Matthew Arnold, has been discovered in Amours. It sheds light in particular on his cycle of poems ‘Switzerland’ and on the identity of the mysterious Marguerite,70 and thus on the fact that in his poetry Clough felt indeed as if he were being continuously scrutinized by the frowning figure of his friend, though ultimately theirs was a veiled, dialectical and polemical relationship. If we accept the supposition of the most accredited biography of Arnold,71 Arnold’s Marguerite was named Mary Claude, even if almost certainly – and contrary to what Clough may have thought – she was English rather than French. The Claude of Amours, who up to a certain point resists the charm of an English Mary, and when he discovers that he loves her, follows her vainly, ultimately losing her forever, not only disguises Clough but is a brilliant imaginary development of the romantic passion for ‘Marguerite’ his friend Arnold wanted to keep hidden, which was eventually to give a hard time to his biographers and commentators. While Clough was writing Amours, Arnold in England was comfortably dreaming of imaginary and intoxicating visits to the palace of Circe;72 in Genoa, the first city where Clough stopped in his Italian trip in 1849, Clough composed a poem – ‘Resignation – To Faustus’ – which was intended as an explicit ‘response’ to another poem by Arnold.73

de tout, même de l’amour’ – comes, according to Clough, from a ‘French novel’, but the reference is almost certainly meant to be joking and ironic, and the source is ‘not identified’ according to all commentators, precisely because it is inexistent, a pure invention by Clough. 70 Cf. the explanatory note in McCue, Selected Poems, 243–4. 71 § 156.2. 72 § 152.4. 73 Cf. § 152.7. This verse epistle, already along the lines of those of Amours, describes the palaces in Genoa whose art treasures had been disfigured by the passage of the Piedmontese troops. Clough’s wonder at the conjunction of the horror and filth with the angelic, immaterial purity of the canvases is softened by the reflection that flowers sprout in dung and if nothing else in mud. Italy exemplifies the cycle of nature which lives, dies and is reborn. Clough’s ‘resignation’, far different from that of Arnold, is the acceptance of debris as a moment of transition, in the natural chain of events, to the spiritual and the clean.

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§ 141. Clough IX: ‘Amours de Voyage’ II. The personal debacle reflected in the fall of the Roman Republic Claude’s arrival in Rome, and his earliest letters from there, are characterized by the complete reversal of the usual reactions of the tourist. They are at the same time influenced by the stereotype of the Arnoldian-Rugbeian revulsion against the Eternal City qua the beacon of Catholicism, and even by that of the disinterest in artistic beauty, overcome by that of natural landscapes, which was often the case with nineteenth-century travellers to Italy, up to Ruskin who only loved a certain kind of art in Italy. The formative and therapeutic purpose of the grand tour, which was for many young Englishmen a mandatory rite, in Amours is emptied of meaning by its prescient protagonist, who knows that his mind will not change by travelling, and that one moves just to feel the tugging on the rope which ties us, proving our own ‘metaphysical’ limitations. Claude, a pilgrim in Rome, like Clough in biographical reality, is torn by those religious doubts from which Hewson was miraculously immune in The Bothie. In particular he cannot find a stimulus – if anything a disincentive – to embrace Roman Catholicism. Catholicism is for Claude the conventional creed of his compatriots and of some recent converts, that Catholicism which in Browning’s Bishop Blougram, as later in the young Hopkins, meant humiliation and at the same time exaltation, and made of shocking leaps from the banal to the supreme, from the sordid to the perfect. In it Claude discovers, architecturally translated into the Baroque glory of the Chiesa del Gesù, a faith which is still earthly; but it is significant that not even Luther receives his approval because he had had a second and baleful influence by reviving theology and thus causing a second ‘Noah’s Flood’.74 The protagonist’s position dovetails that of Clough, who had left Oriel College and had just accepted the direction of University Hall, though it makes quite clear his

74 The counterpart to every form of revealed religion is a clear, spontaneous outpouring of paganism. Claude reverses ‘The New Sinai’ (§ 136.5) when he dethrones the Christian God and puts back on the pedestal of the Pantheon the pagan gods, or when he would like to remove the cross that stands on the statue of the Dioscuri, or the bricks that encrust the primitive marble of the pagan monuments.

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own tolerant and even agnostic ideas regarding religion. The denial of the myth of growth, so dear to the Victorians, thus ends up acquiring a double interrelated echo, pedagogical and metaphysical-ontological, the second of which sweeps away any remaining traces of Victorian theology or teleology. On the one hand Claude rebels against that doctrine of the uninterrupted and anticipated growth which forced one to leave the age of childhood as soon as possible, accelerating the passage into adulthood, in a race whose final goal – as the tutor Adam admonishes in The Bothie – is the Absolute Good. On the other, Claude, much like Hewson, claims the right to err, to follow distractions, to deviate from the straight path; he even claims the right to remain a child for a while, and to enjoy a sojourn in an Eden outside of which one is continually pushed by ‘cruel archangels’; he even longs for a regression to childhood and for an embrace of the undifferentiated.75 2. In Canto II, almost entirely occupied by quickly drawn sketches, marginal caricatures and the reports of the secondary effects of the siege, we witness the unmasking of patriotism, which even for the Victorians was defined in the Horatian motto that dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The phases of the Roman resistance, under Claude’s purely observing eye, are biblically parodied and thus wrapped in solemn cadences of prophecy; halfway between a dream and a sketch is the efficiently slowed down episode of the killing of a deserting priest, which Claude witnesses until, coward that he is, he becomes overwhelmed by fear, being himself also dressed in black. The scenes of urban warfare offer a further example of a relativizing description. Georgina and Mary Trevellyn only pause in their letters to describe the picturesque, the sensational, the fabulous, without grasping the political significance of the events which they have witnessed. They linger in particular on the figure of Garibaldi. Mazzini – who is obviously ‘despicable’ from the conservative and bourgeois point of view – confiscates horses in Rome at the exact moment when the family is preparing 75

This is also the theme of the inconclusive, undated and intermittently powerful dramatic monologue ‘Sa Majesté Très Chrétienne’, attributed to Louis XV of France. It is directly the oppressed Calvinist Clough who speaks when Louis XV yearns for the innocence of childhood (‘And why does childhood ever change to man?’), perhaps obtained with an act similar to the castration of Origen.

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to move to Florence. Overturning the perspective of Mary, Claude praises the ‘noble Mazzini’. In love, too, ‘action / Is a most dangerous thing’, and it is for this very reason that Claude is loath to leave his false Eden of inaction and works hard to convince himself that Mary would never love him no matter what. Behind his derisory smile and his fussy procrastination hides a vital and shared need for the support of a woman,76 which can only translate into a very subtle courtship, disguised to the point that it is taken for indifference. Mary’s postscript to the thirteenth letter of Canto I describes Claude as a heartbreaker who puts on airs (!) and ‘terribly selfish’. In the first letter of the following canto Mary corrects herself, judging Claude to be ‘simply a cold intellectual being’ who wishes to be courted, never makes the first move, and when he is pursued, is disgusted. In the sigh-filled close of Canto II Claude confesses his desire to forget life more than participating in it, and his wish to drown himself in the past and in art, but admits too to having been bitten by love. Clough’s typical dilemma, that between the satisfaction of sexual freedom, albeit plagued by a tremendous sense of guilt, and the sublimation of desire in marriage, returns, aggravated, in Amours. It is a dilemma that results, unresolved, in complete paralysis. Claude refrains from declaring his love; frustrated, eternally wary, he is careful not to expose or commit himself, and looks satisfyingly at himself as he temporizes. It is significant that he feels the veritable frenzy of love exactly when Mary is no more to be reached. The exhilarating, fruitless chain of quid pro quos in which the reciprocal pursuit of the two presumed but never declared lovers ends, is the tangible sign of the confusion which reigns in the life of Claude. Canto IV is very short because it is made up of cryptic announcements that follow the phases of the pursuit of Mary by a repentant Claude, who, in this case too, mimics Arnold’s pursuit of Marguerite in that same year in the Swiss mountains. But this episode reproduces the same humorous manhunt organized in The Bothie for Hewson in exile in the Highlands.

76 In the parodic envoi at the very end of the poem, where the real author is finally made to come out from the disguise, Clough explicitly indicates an uneasiness common to English youth.

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3. In the fifth and final canto of Amours de Voyage public and private become indissolubly interwoven and the amorous failure of the single individual is reflected in and melded into the complete general failure of the revolutionary will of the people, specifically the Italian, Roman, Florentine and Venetian libertarians. The last letters follow upon one another chaotically, until they draw, in the chain of places from which they are addressed, a circular path and a series of returns to the points of departure. It truly seems a comedy of errors or of the absurd, with Claude spasmodically reaching out to capture Mary and at the same time finding himself victim of a conspiracy of events that are not, nor could be preordained. Other retrospective analyses appear in a long letter made up of random annotations, fragments that he knowingly neglects to mail and that pure chance will possibly destroy. On a human, religious and philosophical plane, Clough’s protagonist leaves his Roman experience broken within. His maturation consists only in the awareness of his defeat. Sentimentally frustrated, having intentionally relegated love to the sphere of illusions, Claude has not found the comfort of religious faith, and proclaims that he intends to call all things by their right name without euphemisms, and using perfect objectivity; but actually truth is not shown to be something fixed, but rather illegible, strange, multiform; bewildered, he witnesses the usual routine, ungoverned by providence. Taking stock before leaving, he introduces the revealing image of a tunnel, that tunnel into which by now the real Clough had already entered. § 142. Clough X: The poems of ‘juxtaposition’ Having gone down to Naples from Rome before returning to England, Clough conceived in 1849, or at any rate dated from that year two more poems, ‘Easter Day, Naples 1849’ and ‘Easter Day II’ which are among his most famous and most bitingly negative ‘liturgies of unbelief ’. They mark at the same time his abandonment of the detached, playful vein of parody and the debut of a new style characterized by rude, frank sarcasm, and the absence of any projective or dramatic filters. In Naples, in the streets where sin raged freely, the poet reached the conviction that ‘Christ is not risen’, and shouted it out right on the day in which the miracle of the Resurrection was celebrated. In the first poem Clough does not deny the

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existence of Christ, only his resurrection and with it his divinity; and if Christ is human and not divine, then like all men he is subject to decay and corruption. The central phases of the first poem are a dismantling of the supposed evidence of the miracle of the resurrection: the holy sepulchre was empty, and the body of Jesus could have been somewhere else; the vision of the pious women, a vision of angels or of Jesus himself, was pure hallucination. Also not worthy of credence were the apparitions of Jesus after his death; at that time, anyhow, gossip was surely reigning uncontrolled. The turning point of the poem occurs when Clough, with an abrupt rhetorical question, denies a fortiori the possibility of the resurrection – and with it of eternal life – for the whole humanity that came after Jesus and for every single man, including himself. Not only is this earth the only paradise available, but it is also already Hell, because joys and suffering are distributed blindly and in equal measure to the just and to sinners. All this is asserted by Clough with the same anti-dogmatic outlook that numerous prose works by Matthew Arnold would soon begin to adopt. Clough himself speaks of fables and later inventions and thus paraphrases the Arnoldian term Aberglaube – ‘after gospel and late creed’. The two Neapolitan Easter compositions form a diptych and spill into one another like Hopkins’s ‘Echoes’ or Dylan Thomas’s ‘Vision and Prayer’. In ‘Easter Day II’ what has been denied is reaffirmed with a dialectical compromise and according to a traditional religious vision which seems, however, somehow patched up. The emotional sphere is already and distinctly that of Dipsychus, and this is confirmed by the fact that the first poem of the diptych, when seen in the light of the second, seems to be dictated by a voice of the conscience to which another voice replies; this second voice comforts the poet at the eleventh hour, and responds that Christ is dead but not truly dead, indeed He has risen.77 What was first said is contradicted, with a varied and reversed repetition of the same words and the same formulations. Hope wins, and as in a litany, but an agonizing litany, the voice proclaims that ‘God lives’.

77 The quite vulgar beginning also confirms this, for there a pimp offers his female wares to the poet.

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2. The fragments of the surreal and intermittently playful ‘I dreamed a dream’ – neither datable nor organizable, because left in rather disconnected sections – also initially evoke the scene from the Resurrection in the same unbelieving spirit of the first ‘Easter Day’. Clough makes of Christ a ‘shadow’ on his sepulchre and points to the extreme fragility of the ‘development of Christianity and of the Christian doctrine’, after which one of the fundamental theological works of Newman was entitled. It is not so much the existence of Jesus which is again cast in doubt; rather Clough observes the fatal dispersion and deformation of his message, enriched with rules and arbitrary habitual prescriptions not originally contained in it, and that Christ would not recognize as his own. The apostles are ashamed for what they believed; Peter in particular wonders if he has heard one thing for another. Faith was then transmitted as a simple moral escape route, aimed at quieting doubts and obtaining a good death. Even the Pope and the cardinals are not worried about the authentic ties of their faith to its source, no longer questioning the origins of their beliefs, and instead keeping conventions alive out of mere opportunism. However, ‘That there are powers …’, also undatable, retells in a favourable and more orthodox perspective the same evangelical miracle of Christ walking on the waters of the Sea of Galilee recalled by Hopkins in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, even if it seems to acknowledge faith in an attentive Providence only as a natural, spontaneous request for rescue in moments of danger. ‘The Latest Decalogue’ is probably the most scornful parody of the Ten Commandments ever to be written, as well as the most ferocious denunciation of a misunderstood and perverted religion, which has become the cornerstone of a bourgeois ethic based on personal gain and self-interest. 3. The Neapolitan poems of 1849 and the other religious meditations written before or immediately after Dipsychus obey a technique that Clough consciously and repeatedly called ‘juxtaposition’, and illustrate the ‘spasmodic’, even spastic nature of his poetry, which often proceeds by intellectual and humoral leaps reflected in the metre and in the rhythm, and with heretical outbursts followed by sudden repentances and rappels to orthodoxy, thus placing on the same plane, without a definite stance being taken, both the ‘thesis’ and the ‘antithesis’. It is not contradictory that Clough wrote his most celebrated poem, ‘Say not the struggle nought

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availeth’,78 apparently praising the indomitable spirit of fighting, shortly before representing in Dipsychus the sheer panic of action; and that he surrounded this poem with numerous short songs and heroic choruses of an even military tone. The first words of that lyric, the exhortation to ‘say not’, presuppose in fact a soliloquy or more precisely an interior dialogue, and therefore the bivocal situation of the majority of Clough’s poems. Looking back, ‘Say not’ echoes to the letter, reproducing even the images with singular precision and faithfulness, the recommendations given by the ‘providentialist’ Adam to the pessimist Hewson at the close of The Bothie. The discouraged, individualistic withdrawal from action is in fact ‘juxtaposed’ to the descent into the fray to truly participate in the collective fight for which reinforcements will be the secret to success.79 As I mentioned opening this discussion, ‘Say not the struggle nought availeth’, beautiful in and of itself, soberly inspiring a feeling of quiet melancholy, was misunderstood in its dialectical procedure and frequently cited as the very manifesto of that heroism which Clough never possessed. As such it

78 Composed, according to some, in the last days of resistance of the Roman Republic. According to AVP, 194, the poem was instead modelled on Chartist rhetoric. 79 In the third quatrain there is a parallelism between the discouraged and inert self and the ‘tired waves’ which ‘vainly’ break on the shore. These waves participate indeed in a generalized movement, adding decisive and retroactive force to another force already in movement; they seem not to produce any effect, having the same vainly oscillating movement as in Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (§ 154.4), while the sea has already penetrated into the interior. Likewise, the sunrise, in the fourth quatrain, does not stand out only in the windows turned towards the East, but also invades with its golden reflections the land behind. Hewson in The Bothie responds to the tutor placing himself in the same contrast found in ‘Dover Beach’ between Arnold himself and Sophocles: Hewson in fact uses the same Thucydidean image of the ‘ignorant armies’ in the night while the tutor and the second ‘Sophoclean’ voice of ‘Say not’ reply that there is a sure guide in battle. In the final line of the poem, which describes the spreading of the dawn light, some specific lexical recurrences and slight ripples in the voice (‘look’) make one think of the end of Hopkins’s ‘God’s Grandeur’. Clough’s providentialism is in any case secular, immanentist, drawn, like that of Arnold, from a cyclical vision of history; it differs from that of Hopkins, which is instead transcendent or based on faith, and specifically tied to the intervention of the Holy Spirit.

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was often significantly placed at the close of his first editions, as the ideal epitome of his philosophy and a noble word of encouragement for future ages. § 143. Clough XI: ‘Dipsychus’ I. The staging of the conflict between conscience and the world The dramatic poem Dipsychus, the most ambitious of Clough’s works and the strongest and frankest Victorian exploration of desublimated eros and of the fear of action, was written in a rapt frenzy, immediately after his trip to Venice made by Clough in the summer of 1850, and with the lucid awareness of one who is covering ground no one has dared touch before. It is a free, dream-like transposition of that trip. Dipsychus is not really unfinished. Between a prologue and an epilogue, both in prose, the poet intended to encapsulate, and he actually composed in an undefinitive way and in several drafts, a series of scenes, some of which are monologues and some dialogues. But later he never returned to the work to form from that magma a single and unified organism. This would have entailed the definition of the title,80 some additional ties between the scenes and the sacrifice of several minor and collateral episodes; above all a clearer and tighter sequential plan, and a more logical and chronological order of the scenes. The reasons for which Clough did not retouch Dipsychus are simple: he was afraid to publish a poem that because of its risqué contents would have created an unprecedented stir in the literary world, and worsened the ostracism and diffidence of which he was already a victim. It could also have jeopardized not only his already very uncertain career as instructor and teacher but also his hopes for marriage: indeed, from America he implored and begged his fiancée Blanche not to read it, knowing that she

80 The title oscillates in the manuscripts between Dipsychus – adopted by M and normally used – and Dipsychus and the Spirit. There are four versions of the poem, all of them left in a quite disconnected state and none of them complete (cf. M, 681–4). They are contained in four manuscript notebooks. M, to which reference will be made here in the numeration of the scenes, follows the third revision of the poem, integrating it however, where necessary, with the second, and placing in the footnotes almost all the variants and other materials left in a rough state.

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had found the manuscript. Clough had had, for some time, the prudential idea to take Dipsychus apart and publish the more innocuous sections separately, and a few did actually appear in magazines before his death. The philological and editorial cruces posed by Dipsychus are as a consequence insoluble. One version of the poem, with a cautionary note added by his wife, was published for the first time in 1865, and that version, even then, amounted, with its abridgement of the work, to an interpretative hypothesis or proposal, understandably dictated by the desire to reintegrate her husband at the eleventh hour into the standards, even the broadest ones, of Victorian decorum. The later editors of the text found themselves faced with a multitude of alternative drafts and variations whose arrangement is inevitably arbitrary and subjective, and which has given rise to endless discussion. I myself shall find it necessary to refer on some occasions to the scenes which have been discarded from the critical edition of the poems. 2. The model underlying Dipsychus is no longer that of the verse tale, which will be re-used in Mari Magno, but rather that of the dramatic scene, more precisely that of the medieval Everyman, and of the Elizabethan and Goethian psychodrama. Its most direct antecedent in Clough, for its dialogic analogy, can be found in the unfinished and undatable Adam and Eve. That Clough knowingly intended to recall and imitate the plan of Faust – which was overused and repeatedly followed in the first postRomantic poems of Tennyson and Browning – is undisputed, if for no other reason for the fact that, in one of the manuscript versions, the two protagonists have the names Faustulus and Mephistopheles.81 Dipsychus is thus a Faust reborn; but he recapitulates and synthetizes the most atemporal myths of hesitation, and he recalls Faust but also Hamlet in monologues which have the unmistakable, Hamlet-like signs of a psychological activity

81

Nevertheless, Clough had never read Faust ‘as one ought’, that is, systematically, from beginning to end. The pastiche is also relevant to his own work: Clough incorporates into the first scene of Dipsychus the opening lines from his poem ‘Easter Day Naples 1849’, which continue to reverberate in the mind of Dipsychus, who says he himself conceived them ‘last year in Naples’. In that way Clough ingeniously confirms, if ever there had been any doubt, the autobiographical nature of the male protagonists in his three major poems, and of Dipsychus in particular.

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which, rather than preparing the character for action, ends up thwarting it.82 With metronomic precision Dipsychus is furthermore the Victorian mid-century poem exhibiting the crisis of the intellectual and his entry into the world, at times a task so arduous as to cause his self-destruction. In particular, the careers of Clough and Matthew Arnold were so parallel that Dipsychus can be seen as a far less Titanic and much more doubting alter ego of Empedocles committing suicide by throwing himself inside the crater of Etna, an episode at the centre of an almost contemporary poem which is likewise written in a dramatic and dialogical form.83 However, while the classicist option obliged Arnold to use a rigid spatial and temporal mimesis, Clough, a fervent modernist, composed a work which was yet again extremely ‘topical’, littered with precise references to the concrete and contemporary world of the positivistic revanche, and characterized by the lowering of standards of values and by the advent of mass culture. Ultimately all the maligning of the Mephistophelian Spirit against the irrational metaphysical fears of Dipsychus, all his insistence on ‘facts’ and ‘common sense’, and his prolonged and lethal anti-metaphysical sarcasm, are a ventriloquous version of the pragmatism praised by utilitarians, positivists, scientists and even pedagogues. Venice itself, central to a great deal of nineteenth-century English and especially Victorian literature, is here a city less sublime and less idealized, indeed an obligatory destination of the educational grand tour, but caught in its more usually censored and marginalized sides, and in its more turbid aspects, as a theatre for and inspirer of dark and unhealthy lucubrations. Dipsychus knows that he is following a path already taken by Byron, but he changes it completely; the scenes of the poem are set one after the other in classic and established sites like Piazza San Marco, the Accademia, the Lido, and Torcello, but also in less classically chosen ones like the quays, the brothel, or the park, visited and revisited in a never ending circular movement which itself is the perfect emblem of a psychological and mental piétiner sur place. Dipsychus, the

82 83

A grand monologue, more precisely a full-fledged Hamlet-like soliloquy on action and inaction, is in the tenth scene. § 155.

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nineteenth-century and English ‘Death in Venice’84 par excellence, gives us en passant, through the observations of the two antagonists, realistic flashes of rare vividness and effectiveness, beginning with the first scene, of the Sunday evening in the square with its movement, its colourful humanity and the crowds having a good time, while an improvised baritone sings Rossini’s Figaro aria. Naples, Venice and the whole of Italy were for Clough all symbols of the swarming life and the maelstrom of the flesh, and as such of the eclipse of the divine. In the Catholic, sensual Mediterranean it was no longer possible to believe in God, and unlike the sacramentalists Clough was incapable of seeing reality, and particularly man, as a direct emanation of God and as a ‘book of God’; both were rather a negation of Him. Reality is for Clough a proof of the inexistence of God, not one of his redeeming goodness; humanity was for him unredeemed, that is to say that the stain of original sin was indelible and the sin itself could not be obliterated. 3. Autobiographically, Dipsychus is the young Clough put into focus by the slightly older Clough of 1850, who in the last scene reveals the age of his protagonist, a twenty-one-year-old who by now has spent, indeed wasted without truly realizing anything, almost a third of his life. He therefore impersonates the just graduated Clough of 1842, who however did in no way diverge from his creator, still doubtful as to whether he should launch into the bourgeois world of work and like everyone else create a family – whether to repress his impulses, transferring them into the marital routine, whether to become enmeshed in the living death of the social fabric. As the third representation of the crucial passage to adult life and of the Victorian Bildung, Dipsychus presents now the pejorative metamorphosis of the usual figure of the guide accompanying the young student. In The Bothie this is a benevolent and attentive tutor, in Amours de Voyage a mute and therefore absent friend, a pure listener incapable of giving advice; now, the guide has become deceitful and diabolical, a voice of the evil self, or a tempter and a corrupting influence. A work by Clough when he was little more than thirty years old, Dipsychus is explicit about a childhood which continued and extended well past the 84 I have noticed the prodigious preparatory value of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice in § 52.3.

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threshold of the age of maturity: youths who had had the same formative experience were expressly infants, just as Dipsychus is often contemptuously defined by his shadow, and, accordingly, they became adults but were still adolescents. That retarded growth was not only intellectual but regarded the person as a whole, as well as the timing and the forms of his entry into life: a vast cultural preparation, often theoretical and concentrated on factual knowledge, acquired at the public schools – which even geographically were isolated and constructed a macrocosmos which was completely unreal – were unable to prepare students for actual life; youngster who were illiterate and who had immediately gone to work were much more mature. In a diagnostic sense, without however succumbing to the heavy moralistic tirade, but in the lighter style of the surreal scene always sustained by an overriding taste for facetiousness, Dipsychus is a colossal anti-Arnoldian pedagogical manifesto. And yet, only the famous Arnoldian method of the examination of conscience could have allowed Clough to launch such a merciless, even masochistic and destructive attack against the unity of the psyche. The dynamics, the translation into dramatic terms and the hypostatization of that practice can be located in an affirmation by Dipsychus in the third scene: ‘O God how quietly / Out of our better into our worst selves […] We slide and never notice’. The key to the meaning of Dipsychus – a ‘conflict between the tender conscience and the world’ – is revealed by Clough himself to his uncle in the prose epilogue. That uncle, a man of the old school,85 expressly attributes the blame for the distress of his nephew to the ‘tenderness’, indeed ‘overtenderness’, of the public schools and to Dr Arnold, adding that the schools before the Arnoldian reform were almost better, as they accustomed the pupils to seeing harmony rather than a split between themselves and the world. Following Arnold, students had been taught to consider the world as ‘evil’ and that it was necessary to overcome it in a leap and stay far away from it. A school like Rugby prepared them if anything for the scruples of conscience, and restored to the family an eighteen-year-old 85

And which was in reality Clough’s Uncle Alfred, at whose home he, a student first at Rugby and then at Oxford, was hosted during the long periods in which his parents, in America, were absent.

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‘goose’, such as Clough had been and his alter ego in Dipsychus is. Young students fresh out of university had absorbed an ‘apocalyptic’ spirit there and come out marked by a sense of sin that extended even to disciplinary misdemeanours, and required inevitable punishment. The uncle in this epilogue, the first interpreter of the poem, has reserves about the diabolical Spirit accompanying Dipsychus, but finds that what he has said is ‘sensible’; the greatest of ironies is that the nephew finds himself forced to make a timid defence of Dr Arnold, assigning blame to the religious movements, the evangelicals of Wesley and the Tractarians of Pusey, guilty of having transmitted the contagion of an irrational and almost delirious religious feeling. 4. Not so much the meaning as the emphasis of Dipsychus varies notably according to the order in which the scenes would have been set in a hypothetical version for publication, and also according to the manuscript version which may be considered the closest to the author’s final intentions. The text reconstructed by Clough’s wife placed hierarchically in the first position in Dipsychus’ thought the problem of the existence of God and of action; the order established in the 1974 critical edition shifts the accent to his sexual disturbances. It is impossible to establish a real hierarchy because the inconclusiveness and elusiveness of the problems that assail him, and the grip of the never resolved thoughts, are the very soul of the protagonist and reverberate even in the formal structure and organization of the poem. It would then have been very difficult for Clough himself, given the quantity of the material he had drafted, to extract from it a work in essence as neat and clear-cut as Amours de Voyage. Owing to the mindset of the protagonist the poem was meant to be a skewer-like collection, blocked and paralysed in its development, even concentric, and resolved in a series of scenes each of which were dead ends. Therefore the stage directions, which even from the beginning are extremely low-key, gradually disappear, as the real theatre in question is that of the mind, and it is there where words originate. As late as the twelfth scene, shortly before the end of the poem, Clough has the Spirit imagine for Dipsychus a future that was already the present for Clough, one of eternal and inconclusive oscillation. This comment is followed by a monologue that echoes almost to the letter the dramatic

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words of Marlowe’s Faustus hearing the ‘horses of the night’ and of the Last Judgement. Putting on stage the paralysis, the unhealthy impasse, the getting bogged down of a ‘concentric’ character, Clough knowingly confronted the problems of all realistic art, which must represent also the inartistic and the unaesthetic. With his old-fashioned aesthetic, still modelled on the Augustan concinnitas, the witty uncle of the epilogue lists, after the end of the performance or the reading of Dipsychus, all the shortcomings of the poem and in particular its slowness and its convolution. The interactions and the mirrorings between form and content were not and are not fully understood even today, and most critics have pointed to Dipsychus as the beginning of a decline in Clough. The disjointed structure, made up of detached flashes, and the juxtaposition of scenes and episodes, are in reality a very modern anticipation of a purely psychical scenography, of a reality that arranges itself in a fragmentary and discontinuous way like the very activities of the psyche, and which is no longer the reality of nineteenth-century poetic and above all narrative realism. The modernity of Dipsychus consists in the decentralization of the subject, in which reality flows deformed, without any common or shared objectivity, absorbed only through the filter of the thinking psyche, as in the stream of consciousness. § 144. Clough XII: ‘Dipsychus’ II. The ‘double-minded man’ and the tempting Spirit Dipsychus is the poetic culmination of the bi- and plurivocal literature of mid-nineteenth-century English poetry and of the theatralization of the fractured conscience in its hiatuses, juxtapositions and contradictions; as such it is the poetic pendant to the novel or some of the novels of Dickens. The title, admirably appropriate and integrated, is an English adaptation of a Greek word recurring in the Old Testament and in the Epistle of St James (‘a double-minded man’), in passages that were copied by Clough in his notebooks to be memorized, and that establish in the Bible yet another model for the poem.86 Escorting the young, ‘double86 Psychological duplicity had already been revealed in a poem from Ambarvalia, with the Latin title ‘Homo sum, nihil humani …’ which was later excluded. In it

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minded’ intellectual, is a contradicting Spirit who has on the page a very happy hybrid and changeable nature, as it is one moment only a voice and a series of words but in others is also, and often above all, a character in the flesh, a very earthy Mephistophelian double, degraded and indifferent, whose role is like that of Sancho Panza for Don Quixote or Leporello for Don Giovanni.87 The dialogical form, here employed, has however nothing of the biblical solemnity nor of the sacred flavour of medieval morality plays: it is an antiphonal form systematically aiming at grotesque effects, by virtue of the cacophony created between the sublime heights at which Dipsychus wishes to hover and the derisory reductionism of the Spirit.88 Some of the scenes, and conspicuous sections of dialogue and recitative, contain only series of bickerings, in couplets or rapid-fire exchanges in lines that, with the addition of rhyme, often come close to opera buffa modules. In this third major poem, Clough abandoned the hexameter for the dramatic metre par excellence, blank verse; but the Spirit always intervenes with shorter metres, simple and even forced and dull rhymes, and with refrains, rigmaroles and doggerel.89 The metrical and prosodic fluctuation

Clough referred to an encounter with a beggar or perhaps a prostitute on the corner of a street, whom he kissed with an act that he must defend from the rebuke of a ‘questioner’, a spirit that in this case, rather than being the voice of temptation, is that of his moral conscience. The relationship is in this poem almost completely overturned: in defiance, the speaker lays claim to the freedom to be above the laws of good and evil. 87 In a coda of the third scene, cut out in M and restored in McCue’s anthology, the Spirit is so alive and kicking, and has an existence so autonomous, that he describes in great detail, and with a precision incredible for contemporary canons, a fleeting sexual encounter with a prostitute glimpsed in San Marco square. In this case the Spirit is not simply a mental hypostasis but a surreal, dream-like spectre which is also the incarnation of sexual pleasure without scruples or any sense of decency. 88 At the Lido (the sixth scene), where Dipsychus, following in the footsteps of Byron, wishes to take a swim in the sea, the Spirit, bringing the situation back to a practical tone, reminds the youth that he has no towels. The frequent effusions and apostrophes in the style of Shelley closely resemble the short prologues of Amours de Voyage. 89 In a single case, in the fourth scene, the protagonist speaks in hexameters, impatiently scoffed at by the Spirit. Clough is also self-critical with regard to his use of metre, as he camouflages himself once more in the voice of the traditionalist uncle who, in the

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in Dipsychus may in truth be traced back to the two matrixes of dramatic blank verse, emphatic, often melodramatic or apostrophizing – with which the protagonist often addresses supernatural beings (the stars, the sky, the moon) – and of the more agile and bustling measures of the Spirit, whose lexicon is also plurilinguistic, often embellished by French terms and mottos taken from the traditional language of gallantry and libertine flippancy. While the words of Dipsychus are monological, murmured and almost spoken within his conscience, those of the spirit are phatic, meant to capture one’s attention. 2. Dipsychus is the first to question himself about the nature of the Spirit, which could be a hypostasis of his own ‘bad thoughts’ or ‘some external agency at work’. Gradually he convinces himself that it is Belial, who must know sin before calling it thus. There is never any doubt in Dipsychus, in truth, that the Spirit is a diabolical emanation and hypostasis, but the greatest of his torments is that even the diabolical may obscurely reveal itself to be a sort of divine epiphany.90 The final scenes dissolve all doubt: it is Mephistopheles, or Belial, or Cosmocrator. As a mirror image of Dipsychus and of his diabolical side, the Spirit is actually a prismatic composite of reductive and debunking attitudes, finally culminating in an emblem for that bourgeois self-satisfaction and self-sufficiency which, throughout the range of its pseudo-values, tempts Dipsychus to descend from his idealistic pedestal. As a code for materialism the Spirit, calling itself as such, is of course an oxymoron. With its ‘aria di entrata’ the Spirit comes across as a further development of that petulant ‘pimp’ who appears in the two ‘Neapolitan’ poems,91 with no other task but to tempt the youth with sinful sexual encounters with the provocative Venetian girls; he elbows and harasses him, as Satan tempts Christ in the desert. It has an innate predilection for all that is hybrid and compromised, while Dipsychus fights to remain in the impossible reign of aseptic purity. The symbols constantly surfacing in its imagination are those with which the Victorians usually prologue, says he expected pedestrian, simple lines, easy to declaim, not abstruseness, metrical liberties and ‘hurry-scurry’ anapaests. 90 This is confirmed by the uncle in the epilogue: ‘perhaps he wasn’t a devil after all’. 91 § 142.1.

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conveyed their longing for collective regeneration. They are water and the sea, especially while crossing the Venetian canals by gondola in a sweeping, easy movement;92 or the pure air into which Dipsychus leaps eager to breathe it in, or the cathedral spires and bell towers with which he vibrates in unison, or the snowy peaks of distant mountains; or the state of infancy which holds within it the last glimmers of angelic life; or the harvest newly cleared of weeds, in all its new lushness, the golden fields of wheat that dispel the memories of the dull, brown autumn. Finally, they are the precious stones, the jewels, the pearls and crystals into which impurity is metamorphosed and eliminated. The Spirit, instead, always represents the small-scale, bourgeois mindset shrouded by aspirations to the Absolute; keeping its distance, it does not mix with anyone of a lower social class, respecting and demanding respect for etiquette and social hierarchies, and endowed with a profound sense of honour (once he urges Dipsychus to challenge a soldier who has insulted him). In short, he is the pre-incarnation of the Arnoldian philistine. Politically the Spirit is also nostalgic for the ancien régime, and he cynically supports injustice, exploitation, and even slavery; its aberrant capitalistic and consumerist ideology is voiced in a coarse ballad on money entitled ‘As I sat at the café’.93 Philosophically, one could call him a second-hand illuminist who believes that this is the best of all worlds and that one must extract as much pleasure as possible from it, forgetting and abolishing pain; or a sensationist, an empiricist, a realist, for whom only what one can actually touch exists. His opinions on poetry in general proclaim him to be aesthetically an obtuse reactionary: in the eighth scene, ‘In a Gondola’, in a sing-song voice he quotes Béranger, and pooh-poohs Wordsworth, mawkishness and romantic attitudinizing; and yet, with striking self-assurance, he defines himself a ‘judge of verses’.

92 In The Bothie (§ 138.1 and 139.3) too there are frequent symbolic scenes of dives into Scottish lakes, symbolizing the desired and attained contact with primal purity. 93 Four rough and harsh rigmaroles in rhyming tercets, grouped by Clough with the title ‘In stratis viarum’ (§ 146.2), are relegated to the rejected variants in M. All of them are attributable to the Mephistophelian Spirit which sees selfishness and selfinterest as the dominating force in life, both here and in the hereafter.

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3. Dipsychus is an unmistakeable contemporary prototype because he also exemplifies procrastination of the sexual experience and of the loss of male virginity before marriage, implicitly believing in the commandment of pre-matrimonial chastity as a moral imperative primarily, and secondly a hygienic one. He is even more prototypical in the frustration with which he experiences this and the reluctance and timidity94 which prevent him from putting into practice the transgressions to which he is tempted. As a consequence of an Arnoldian education, he is even disgusted by sex and virtually believes that perfection is obtained through ‘abstinence’. Sex was permitted and indeed sanctified in marital life, which was regulated by a rite and by a law (which, incidentally, is exactly what D. G. Rossetti would have contended in response to the accusations of obscenity made against him by Buchanan).95 According to the Spirit, instead, the demon of sex could be exorcised simply by plucking it from the tree like a ripe fruit, and at any rate like a perfectly tangible reality, rather than an abstract or mental entity, as instead the Berkeleyan Dipsychus wishes to do. Only in the sensual and theological dream of the sixth scene is sex seen as accessible and enjoyable without any sense of guilt; in that dream the Victorian chord of the Deus absconditus vibrates at length, but the chorus that sings that Christ has not risen, is accompanied, in the dream logic and in the complementarity of sexual repression and religious doubt, by the image of a girl who comes to lie with him. Until it ends, in this dream Dipsychus speaks the vulgar language of the Spirit, and temporarily shares with him the same political reactionary ideals and the same desire for power; upon awakening, the Spirit compliments him and urges him to become a faithful follower of the Church of England, and therefore an authentic Pharisee. Any ideal aspiration falls in San Marco in front of the underhanded calls of the girls who are there expressly to show off their beauty. The infamous third scene, meaningfully set at the ‘Quays’, and censored by Clough’s wife in the first edition of the poem, is actually among the most vigorous and breath-taking 94 With one of his many colourful constructs the Spirit accuses him of being a ‘connubial puritan’; but he suspects that Dipsychus would not even have the courage to propose marriage. 95 § 191.6.

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of the poem; it focuses on the philosophizing of Dipsychus, sorry to have for a moment taken into consideration the idea of meeting a prostitute,96 and on the vulgar, titillating countermelody of the Spirit. Dipsychus yearns for an immediate purification while the Spirit, with rhythmically flowing iambics, rebuts that he is not a tempter but a healer, drawing on a form of pseudo-experientialism reminiscent of Pater: ‘try all things’. 4. Completely intent on the psychomachia which makes the hero a potential, ghostly Everyman, Dipsychus does not allow for third voices or other dramatis personae apart from the two hypostases of the conscience. The seventh scene, which takes place in the square, is the only one, with the exception of the dream-like ones with the prostitutes, in which Dipsychus acts, or better declares that he has acted or interacted with the world around him. With regard to the problem of action, this scene ironically shows after all a renunciation of action: Dipsychus has argued with a Croatian imperial soldier, but has immediately attempted to curb the fight, in part but not only because he has never picked up a sword. The inevitable scolding of the Spirit – which demands that Dipsychus, if he does not want to duel, at least write a resentful letter – underline, as I mentioned, its markedly bourgeois sense of honour and of class rank. In the following scene he puts symptomatically into relief the fact that it is one thing to fight for an important cause, and another over a small slight such as the one he has suffered; but ultimately he is no longer even capable of reconstructing a hierarchy of actions. Like Claude in Amours, Dipsychus undermines the foundations of Victorian activism, particularly of the warmongering type, emptying firstly the myth of military virtue;97 in his awareness of the end of past heroism there are distinct foreshadowings of twentieth-century apathy, of its deafness to the great ideals and of its sense of waiting on the sidelines. In the scene taking place at the Accademia, Dipsychus lingers before a painting that depicts Byron drawing his sword for the Greeks, but the painting itself seems to him ultimately to be meaningless, only a pure combination of colours. Action 96 The description of the flaccid, elderly prostitute, makes an excellent backdrop to his bitter meditation on the corruption of the divine creature. 97 The renunciation of legal action against the soldier has an added political motivation: Dipsychus is a pacifist, against all oppressors.

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had a natural link to ‘vocation’, and vocation essentially meant the choice of a status and possibly a career: in a practical sense it was the prospect for every twenty-one-year-old graduate like Dipsychus (or like Clough, who was still unemployed or underemployed in 1850). The Spirit continues to promote the easy route of bourgeois conformism; his religion is still the conventional practice of the decent man, a social duty which is pure façade, nothing profound or morbid, indeed a mere question of habit, like kneeling at the pew on Sunday, in full view of everyone, with one’s wife and children: in essence this is that inverted decalogue that echoes in the aptly named poem ‘The Latest Decalogue’ and, with carefully placed irony, in the epilogue to Tennyson’s ‘Two Voices’.98 For opportunistic reasons Dipsychus could theoretically take holy orders, which for Clough was like rubbing salt in the wound. The tenth scene of the poem dramatizes the common Victorian query, ‘what is to be done?’, in that Dipsychus weighs the various career plans put forward for him by the Spirit, only to cast them all aside. In the end, Clough, the merciless and debunking Clough, gives in to idealism; as an antidote to this depressing picture he has in fact his hero admit that the only salvation is in authentic and regenerated love. Yet Clough knew that this love was the rarest of things, and anticipates almost to the letter, and with the same syntax, the conclusion of Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’: ‘love […] exists […] but so, so rare, / So doubtful, so exceptional, hard to guess; / When guessed, so often counterfeit’.99 § 145. Clough XIII: ‘Dipsychus’ III. The final scenes. ‘Dipsychus continued’ The three final scenes of Dipsychus seem to foreshadow or directly enact a way-out of paralysis and a resolution of psychic doubleness; all of them, perhaps deliberately, unfold under the sign of misunderstanding. In the twelfth scene, which takes place ‘on a bridge’, presumably the Rialto, Dipsychus, despite being aware that he is venturing into an inferno, seems to agree to enter into the false, conventional life that he has always rejected; this scene seems therefore to signal the defeat of Dipsychus and

98 § 86.6. 99 On ‘Dover Beach’ cf. § 154.4.

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his acceptance of the philosophy of life proposed by the Spirit, or in other words the descent into ‘the large world / And the throng’d life’. In the next scene, at Torcello, Dipsychus, dreaming or waking, believes that he hears a voice from above, a voice which offers him help regarding his ‘enemy’, and he convinces himself that in order to know the world it is necessary to be in the world. Having suddenly become a hypocrite, he submits but only to get stronger and be ready for the great moment; his life plan is the same that allowed the Clough of the present to survive: submitting, but in order to rebel. In the final scene the Spirit is proclaimed winner and Dipsychus offers himself to it; Faustian echoes emerge more clearly than ever: he wishes to cede to the spirit only a ‘half ’, but the Spirit demands everything. When the pact is stipulated, the Spirit cannot hide, and indeed reveals, with pride, its diabolical progeny. 2. The paralysis of action and vocation has another final release in the acceptance of the world in the shape of an imaginary projection in time, of a hypothesis that turns out to be miserable and of a very wretched outlook. This happens in a sort of grotesque ‘second Faust’, entitled Dipsychus continued.100 The new part – much criticized, yet considered unjudgeable because incomplete, though in reality such is not the case – is a flashforward of rare scenic effectiveness. The Spirit has been silenced or has disappeared completely, and the scene is moved from Venice to a squalid surreal London of the future. In rapid snapshots, and using several voices, Clough describes the utter failure of the protagonist, who has obeyed the voice that wanted him submissive; thirty years after the Venetian experience, his memories emerge in spurts. Dipsychus ended up choosing a profession, law, towards which he had had a particular aversion; though appreciated in his field, his life consists of moving forward blindly and obediently following orders from above. An intuition worthy of Ibsen induced Clough to introduce onstage the woman with whom Dipsychus, finally putting into practice the deafening injunctions of the Spirit, lost his virginity thirty years before, only to later abandon her. He suffers a symbolic collapse during a hearing: beneath his apparent, hard exterior he is a fragile man, and his colleagues 100 Of uncertain date, it is assigned to 1852–1853, when Clough was in Boston, by Chorley 1962, 263–6.

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murmur amongst themselves that lawyers of the past were firmer. These colleagues of the bar, in a scene which displays a rapid-fire dialogue that looks forward to twentieth-century drama, recall his childhood, and take stock of it in a way that is not very different from that of his uncle in the prose epilogue: a studious youth, lacklustre performance at university, and finally the traumatic encounter with the woman. The added part closes, even more symbolically, with the news of his resignation and the unsurprising prediction of his imminent death. Dying, Dipsychus, remains convinced of the crime he has committed; and he also fears that the woman whom he ruined has thrown herself into the Thames. § 146. Clough XIV: Completed and unfinished poems from 1850–1853 Clough had no sooner depicted in Dipsychus his own tormenting inaction than we hear him hail from Peschiera, in the poem written in 1850, having left Venice, the defeated, but not pointlessly defeated Italian heroes and patriots, whose example will hopefully teach their children at least to better put up with their oppressors.101 The quiet and easy poem, in slightly alliterating quatrains, flows from a motto from Tennyson, that ‘’Tis better to have fought and lost, / Than never to have fought at all’; on the other hand, a keyword of ‘Peschiera’, used at every turn by the Spirit in Dipsychus, is ‘submit’: it is not a question of submitting to the world and of compromising with bourgeois habits, but of submitting to a God who permits the oppressed to remain so. The finally triumphant force will not be that of the Austrians but that which will be reborn of the children of the fallen patriots. The contemporary ‘Alteram Partem’ forms with ‘Peschiera’ yet another case of ‘juxtaposition’, because it proposes a rapid dialectical reconsideration which is immediately resolved: no poem restores life to the dead, but life, like a river that flows to the sea and there perishes, but returns to the spring and flows once more to the sea, will be reborn in those to whom it has left an example of heroism. 2. The effects of Dipsychus can be perceived in the versified entries of a painfully intimate diary that was expressly called by Clough ‘Venetian’, 101 In Peschiera Clough, in particular, saw in front of him that same ‘Croatian soldier’ that Dipsychus came close to challenging to a duel.

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written in 1850 and certainly not meant to be published, if for no other reason because of its clearly unfinished state. Once again probings of his emotional moods, and of boundless abysses of depression closely follow more measured and more confident assurances of recovery, almost exactly on the same lines as the poems of Ambarvalia. Those effects are also retraced in the re-proposition, without even the most minimal progress, of the same theological questions. The fragments of ‘In stratis viarum’, which perhaps were to directly flow into Dipsychus, confront the problem of the lost testimony of Christ’s passage in Galilee, thus of believing without having seen. Clough was in search of a direct ‘vision’ which could ignore the events of reality; he expressly yearned for a faith passed on from father to son without the necessity of refounding it through a new search that would have sterile results; he would feel satisfied not with any absolute certainty but with an ‘unlimited possibility’. In ‘A Hymn not a Hymn’102 God is proclaimed indescribable and unembraceable, but is removed from his celestial seat and placed in the treasure chest of the heart, being thus reduced to an interior rather than iconic dimension. The seven incomplete and gap-filled metaphysical sonnets on death, written in 1851, revolve, a bit aridly, around the theme of the deterioration of nature and of the beauty and of the persistence of what is imperishable, if any there is. More than the two, antithetical Cloughian voices, the heart and cold reason confront each other, and suggest and deny in turn that something remains after death: ‘when all is thought and said, / The heart still overrules the head; / Still what we hope we must believe, / And what is given us receive’.103 The fifth sonnet expresses a belief in quite a clear way, but the sixth and especially the seventh seem to reduce his entire query and its outcome to a throw of the dice: the conclusion is as always an impasse, with equal measures of hope and despair. The two Neapolitan Easter 1849 hymns, and their inquiry into the divinity of Jesus, were reprised and their contents repeated in another deeply inquisitive poem, ‘Across the sea’. Its series of rhetorical questions only confirms that the poor who ran to Jesus, about whom the

102 The title is in Greek. 103 ‘What we, when face to face we see’.

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Gospels speak, were only going to see and hear a simple man – ‘a young man preaching in a boat’ – albeit one magnetic and captivating. 3. Returning to London in 1851 Clough filled his poetic diary with other entries that remained in a fluid and unedited state, and that perhaps he would have excluded from any complete edition of his poems. One of these communicates, allusively, his adieu to poetry destined for publication. His separation from the Oxford atmosphere, still sufficiently close to nature, sharpened his sense of disorientation in the metropolis, from which he attacked the conventions and rites of the bourgeois and the official culture as sterile and pedantic. Rarely London offered reassuring glimpses of a suffering humanity, yet one almost more unyielding than Clough himself. In ‘A London Idyll’ an apprentice and a poor girl in Kensington Garden embrace in unison with nature in their ‘purest innocence’; and it is meaningful that the only images and the only emblems of joy and of life which is not pulsating vainly, are the tender spectacle of workers whose youthful love is sincere, and the country dances of youth. The recurrent image in these reflections is that of the fugitive, almost as Clough had depicted it in Hewson in The Bothie, but a far less melodramatic ‘despairer’ than Arnold later represented him.104 Arnold had however at least understood his friend’s need to rest in a natural, romantic, and dream-like refuge. Dreamy pageturning apostrophes full of contained pathos follow one upon another, each almost surpassing the previous one in the terse simplicity of their diction, in the candid and naïve appeal to nature in constant renewal and to the trees upon which leaves are bursting forth at the beginning of spring, which however does not always arrive for the heart. Clough admitted, however, that he was unable to maintain his contempt for too long, and reminded himself to ‘be patient’; it was always so difficult ‘to acknowledge brotherhood, yet not surrender / Integrity’. 4. Songs in Absence was the name given in the first posthumous edition to several poems, almost none of which had titles but which were much more complete in form and more various in metre, which Clough composed during his long trip by steamship taken to America in 1852,

104 § 159.5.

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and later during the eight months that he spent there, far from his fiancée Blanche who had remained in England. Her absence, and his desire to reunite with her, together with the terse, simplified and tenderly elegiac style, make one think once again, but in the form of a veiled echo rather than with a polemic or parodic aim, of Matthew Arnold’s Marguerite poems, which at the time had been recently published. The whole, brief songbook unfolds, unusually for Clough, in studied Marvellian arias reminiscent of ‘To His Coy Mistress’, and foreshadows, almost thirty years earlier, that simplification of diction, that stylistic deflation and even that dispersion of the metaphysical fog that almost all the Victorian poets, Tennyson and Browning among them, attained as sixty-year-olds. In some cases Clough even came close to light verse and children’s poetry, or halfway between doggerel and nonsense. In this later Clough, homesick for England, and reaching out to his fiancée far away, it almost seems that the weight that hung over the poetry of 1852, and in particular that written during the crucial period around Dipsychus, has vanished. Ideally addressed to his fiancée, they no longer speak of turbid fantasies, of lust, of sensual and sexual appetites; they exude on the contrary a sense of freedom beneath clear skies dotted only with the occasional cloud, a sky of pure and liberating love with the happy prospect of marriage ahead.105 Launching a bridge back towards his previously composed poetry, in a short love letter which explicitly refers to a new Eden Clough projects himself into an Adam no longer expelled from Paradise. 5. The cycle is structured like a travel log, punctuated by notes regarding the weather and by references, in Clough always anxious and exhilarating,106 to the landing, as well as by looks back over his shoulder. In several brief and light sections he writes of his yearning to have his distant fiancée with

105 The allusive ‘Nay draw not yet the cork’ probably contains an indication regarding the necessity of self-control before marriage and an invitation to wait rather than squandering the ‘the priceless essence’, reserving it for a moment that has not yet arrived but is imminent. A manuscript, festive, praise-filled, ‘Spenserian’ ‘Epithalamium’, in stanzas of an uneven number of lines, with final refrains, is datable to around 1854. 106 ‘Where lies the land’ almost contrasts Clough’s inaction and cowardice with the battleship defying the elements.

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him, and, only just having embarked, immediately begins to dream of the moment in which he will once again embrace her. Of the charming ‘Where you with me’, a Marvellian gem which sings praises to the power of love, giving strength to the weak and permitting the victory of each man’s ‘better self ’ over all ignoble or cowardly impulses, three versions are extant, of which the second, the longest, voices the certainty that Clough, made firm by the support of his beloved, will succeed in that practical world which he had always abhorred. Also with a touch of Marvell, ‘That out of sight is out of mind’ approves the proverb for his friends but not for true love, and centres on the witty concept that love cannot cease because of separation, when we cannot see the person whom we love, simply because love is blind: a conceit of this type, though not self-satisfied and unextended, occasionally informs other lyrics as well. A feathery lightness, reminding one of the atmospheres of the Italian poet Guido Gozzano, can be perceived even in the title of ‘When at the glass you tie your hair’. Among the poems which were surely composed on American soil there is the amazing song ‘Come, pleasant thoughts’, conceived and perhaps directly composed during a Sunday sermon, made up of flashing recollections and shaken by a heartbreaking desire to be reunited. Owing to the usual and invincible mood swings Clough presents himself, with something of the ironic distancing seen in Claude of Amours, as the beaten exile who feels the pangs of homesickness for his own country and city far away. The delicate ‘Ye flags of Piccadilly’ is a perfectly crepuscular poem fearlessly revealing human contradictions, which were for Clough his own contradictions, those of a man who abhorred the sight of the metropolis and now, in the middle of the sea, fickle as man is, wishes he were back in a city. The distance, and the trip by sea, brought back to his mind the religious differences which wrought havoc on his sincere friendships many years before, past rifts which now, buoyed by this wave of elegy and renewed tenderness, he wishes healed. § 147. Clough XV: ‘Mari Magno’ In 1861 or shortly before, seven years later than the last poems which are datable with certainty, and after his last poetical outburst, Clough threw himself into experiments in classical metre consigned to a ‘Homeric’

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notebook in which his expertise and confidence as a translator shine supreme, but from which we may also indirectly sense the drying up of the lyrical and personal vein, and almost the inability to find poetic subjects.107 But not much later, in 1861, his poetic flame rekindled, and with renewed vigour he concentrated on his fourth long poem. As often was the case, the title is in a foreign language, and was to have been Mari Magno, though with the sub-heading or Tales on Board; with a much newer formula, and very daring as well, Clough intended to place four ‘tales’ – literally calling them such – within a framework. The number was later increased to six and – all this within the few months of life which remained to Clough before November 1861 – to eight. His death prevented him to reread or revise all of these tales with the same completeness, or even perhaps to write more of them so as to reach the ‘exact’, canonical number usual in other collections of tales.108 Clough’s ambition was to remake the classical poetic and narrative work of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: a new Canterbury Tales, or better yet a new Decameron for modern times,109 as is also confirmed by the sequence not of days but of ‘nights’ and

107 One of these evokes the tropical forest with detailed sensual images; a second one describes a river that flows regally to the valley and overcomes all obstacles eventually to plunge into the sea. ‘Actaeon’ is an astounding imitation of Ovid, in which the Arcadian hunter satisfies a voyeuristic desire by looking at and enjoying the nudity of Artemis, an act for which he is punished. 108 The 1862 edition contained only the prologue and three tales; the expanded 1863 edition added another three. The two remaining stories were omitted, one for its licentious content (see the note below) and the other because too incomplete. 109 The spicy tale ‘of the American’ is the most obviously modelled on Chaucer and Boccaccio, but with a note of humour and farce in the style of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. Two American sisters stay overnight at a hotel, and one of the two, having risen to fetch the watch she has left downstairs, mistakenly returns to the wrong room and ends up sleeping all night next to a man. The next morning, the man, without saying a word gives the woman back the watch which she has left behind in his room. Love lives on and feeds on casual circumstances, comments the narrator; in fact, the two later get to know one another, begin to court, and eventually marry. The American’s democratic attitude towards marriage is questioned by the curate in the following discussion: in essence, the American claims that marriages are made in heaven, or granted us by a ‘superior power’ that we cannot understand; the curate objects that there are rules and degrees to which love must submit.

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by the chain of narrators. Here the pretext for the storytelling is neither the plague in Florence nor a pilgrimage to Canterbury, but an imaginary ocean crossing from England to America and the meetings of a few passengers on the deck of the ship in the warm nights – yet imaginary only to a degree, because the occasion, autobiographical as usual in Clough, was that real ocean crossing he had made years before to America, during which he had met the types of the real narrators, among whom there was Thackeray. The critical judgement on these tales has to take into account the fact that they were composed on his deathbed, at times in pencil, and in an increasingly uncertain and illegible handwriting. The framework is in need of guesswork; there are few and only vague ties between the single tales;110 nor is the connection very firm between each tale and its teller, and in fact in the various manuscript versions some tales are attributed to different narrators. However, no matter how unfinished its tales may be, the main perplexity arising with Mari Magno, which upon its appearance was strangely greeted by some as Clough’s masterpiece, regards the sudden and surprising shift towards a kind of simplified literature, so simplified as to appear conventional, slipshod, and even like a literary by-product. In some tales one senses the bittersweet taste of Patmore, whose The Angel in the House was attributed to Clough when it came out in America. 2. In their plots and in the figures of their protagonists, the tales of Mari Magno overlap with those of Clough’s three preceding poems; there is even the brief appearance of an ‘artillery captain’ who tosses out cynical comments, dictated by a very pragmatic and conciliatory mentality, and 110 A dark night falls after each of the stories is ended, and it is time to go to bed. There is one exception: the link between the fifth and the sixth tale includes an episode which breaks up the monotony of the trip, the sudden stop of the ship which spouts white smoke, spotted by a boy who has awakened while dreaming of England. The next morning a passenger is disembarked in a ghost town wrapped in fog. An arcane sense of rocks, pine-covered coasts and limpid waters – the northern coast of America – emanates from this interlude. Perhaps Clough superimposed his memories of his recent ocean crossing to America as an adult in 1852 upon the more faded, but precisely for this reason more ecstatic memories of his first crossing as a child (§ 134.1). His stupor at the majestic advancing of the steamer that cuts through the sea is indeed markedly childlike in flavour.

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who is the unrecognizable development, almost the domesticated and goodnatured version, in the gallery of Clough’s characters, of the Spirit from Dipsychus.111 In other words, in this work the psychological study of procrastination ends and Clough veers towards the scenarios of the contemporary novel. He mimics the simplistic versifiers of pathetic anecdotes like Crabbe and the late Tennyson and reworks the sentimental sketch à la Dickens. The sampler of situations includes love stories between university students and Scottish waitresses, the debacle of employees tempted to betray their wives by charming Mediterranean women, sudden illnesses and miraculous healings almost at the point of death, minor dramas of jealousy, ill-timed new loves of students for judicious girls who choose to entrust their fates to far more serious suitors. The fast-paced prose of contemporary fiction finds a natural equivalent in the iambic decasyllable in rhyming couplets; and also taken from it are the plot twists, the denouements, and the serendipitous coincidence. Looked at on their own, the seven tales can even be considered, with one or two exceptions at most, dull or without substance. The value that Clough attributed to them was perhaps yet again private; they were almost like a pastime with a sedative or delaying function as he lay close to death. It is not surprising that, as always, Clough, immune from any Titanic hubris, was the first to recognize their shortcomings, and was self-critical at least in one knowingly allusive case, that of an observation quite pertinently made by one of his listeners, who is also a narrator in turn, regarding the inconclusiveness and the stagnation of certain phases in one of the tales, and the necessity of making it flow faster. The unity of Mari Magno lies in the fact that at its core there appear young men and women who are experiencing the transition to adulthood – according to the crucial motif of the sentimental Bildung – and the encounter with life itself and, ultimately, the bifurcation between eroticism and marital life. Both in the first and in the second tales, among the most finished and amplest, youths of both sexes discover almost overnight that they are actually men and women who recognize that the end has come to the age of innocent

111 In Clough’s plans this officer was to tell a tale – the eighth, in fact – set during the Crimean War. Only two insignificant fragments are extant, disconnected and full of gaps.

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games, and feel the drives of puberty. In both cases the male protagonists arrive fatally late and immature, like Claude in Amours, to propose. In the first one finds his old playmate fully grown, but she, grown weary of waiting, has promised herself to another man.112 After these two tales Clough, almost with great effort, abandons his favourite figure of the young student and intellectual; in the clergyman’s second tale, the sixth of the series, the protagonist is an office worker. Compared to the temporal unity of Amours de Voyage and above all of Dipsychus, the tales of Mari Magno may cover a time span which is much longer, a decade or more in some cases; and it is in dealing with the connections between the various phases of the plot, manageable in novels, that verse leaves something to be desired. 3. In the prologue the new pilgrimage, suitable to modern times, is a secular one in which the passengers voyaging by sea include, both hopeful and ardent, a youth, who is the general narrator, and an old man.113 The progress of the ship, its sailing of the seas and tearing down the waves, is a motion animated by a purpose, a motion with an objective involving all the elements, supported and rocked by the iambic rhythm of the verse. In its second canonical step – the Boccaccian or Chaucerian catalogue of the narrators and of the passengers – the prologue does not describe facial features but psychological attitudes, traits and modes of reasoning of characters who are all exiles from Europe. It is also true that, at least in the state in which Clough left the text, those detailed presentations remain detached pieces apparently having neither a poetic nor a structural necessity. The series of stories seems to emerge as if in play, that is, from a disagreement between the lawyer and the clergyman regarding the institution of marriage. Of the seven extant tales only three deserve to be studied more in depth, and they are those classified as ‘The Lawyer’s First Tale’, the ‘The Clergyman’s Second Tale’ and ‘The Lawyer’s Second Tale’. The unnamed protagonist of the first is the umpteenth alter ego of the young Clough, a Rugby and later Oxford student who, completely absorbed by his 112 In the clergyman’s first tale, instead, the end is optimistic: the two young lovers do not leave each other, but after a trial period they reunite in a spirit of mutual assistance, as stated in the motto of the title. 113 These characters may also be seen as the last incarnations of the archetypal figures of the guide and the pupil in Clough’s poetry.

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studies, one day faces the awakening of his senses but much more unhappily than Hewson in The Bothie.114 The lawyer’s second tale also unfolds like a remake of The Bothie, having as its protagonists, not by coincidence, a character by the name of Philip and a girl named Christie. The Oxford fellow, who having dismissed his students now seeks solitude and time for reflection, but who like them is ‘perhaps a little pensive in his mood’, meets a girl at a dance (another recurring element, a Scottish waitress of ‘rustic grace’). Thus here again we have the emergence of the perfect recipe for marriage according to Clough: an ex college student and a girl from the Highlands marry according to the only conjugal formula that he is able to imagine would truly be fruitful. In its easy concessions to the sentimental, the clergyman’s second tale is the most unequivocally similar to Tennyson’s popular epics, such as ‘Enoch Arden’ and ‘Sea Dreams’. The new pair of protagonists, Edward and Jane, is here a married couple, and the husband is not even Clough’s traditional Oxford intellectual, but an insurance salesman. While not rolling in money, the little family have a happy life and also manage to put aside some savings. Yet after nine years, a grave illness requires Edward to travel far from home for a period of treatment lasting three months. He does not seek distraction but is faced with temptation in the shape of a woman who possesses a ‘strange’ beauty in the style of Walter Pater, and dark skin and Junoesque features. The extramarital affair takes place in the south, which is always sinful for Clough as we know, while his wife is busy nursing his infirm mother.115

114 Like Hewson in The Bothie the protagonist hates dancing, and in particular the quadrille, even if the dance is a less cold and ritual ceremony in which he discovers his passion and finds himself captured by it. ‘Currente Calamo’, the main section of the tale of the young general narrator, and fragmented into several small slivers of a forced sketch-style writing, links back to The Bothie in the epiphany of the feminine – similar to Hewson’s recollection of the maiden ‘in a garden uprooting potatoes’ (§ 139.2) – in the form of a dark-skinned gypsy who is climbing the side of a mountain in the Pyrenees on the back of a mule. 115 The narrator, a clergyman, comments that there is not only a benign providence but also an evil Dipsychian one, in other words the Devil, always ready to tempt and divert man from the right path. The narrator speaks, alluding to Adam, of a ‘fall’, skipping over the details of this betrayal.

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Back in England Edward cannot muster the courage to return to being the dutiful husband as if nothing had happened, and instead confesses his misdeed to his wife, and in a Terence-like act of self-punishment forbids himself from seeing his family and lives far from them in atonement; for her part his wife, like all women in Clough, is far more mature than her partner, and is willing to close an eye. Clough was speaking of experiences with which he was very familiar while writing the episode dedicated to the miserable, grey existence of the solitary husband in London, that same life he himself had led as a bachelor before his marriage. One evening, as in Dipsychus continued, Edward has a fleeting meeting with his former temptress, now a prostitute, but she his torn from him by a client who leads her away along the ‘flaming streets of hell’. The telegram which arrives soon afterwards, warning him that his young daughter, delirious and gravely ill, is calling for him and needs a doctor, is a truly Dickensian expedient. Seeing her husband, Jane eventually shows him the other face of the Victorian God, which he had not seen, his eyes only intent upon God the punisher: that of the God of forgiveness. § 148. Matthew Arnold up to 1870* I: Subdued Romanticism and classical aspirations The beginnings of Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) were those of a poet still romantically crepuscular, intoxicated by Hellenic nectars and immersed 116

*

There are two modern editions of Arnold’s poetry, Poetical Works, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry, London 1950, which follows the non-chronological sequence, preferred by Arnold, of his 1888 Library Edition, and includes a choice of variants, and – the edition here followed – The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. K. Allott, London 1965 (whose annotations will be cited with the initial P), integrated by M. Allott, London 1979. This edition includes the fragments and the whole of his youthful poetry in a sequence which is as chronological as possible. The concordance of Arnold’s poems is edited by S. M. Parrish, A Concordance to the Poems of Matthew Arnold, Ithaca, NY 1960. The prose is collected in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols, Ann Arbor, MI 1960–1977, which I will cite, particularly in the cases of Arnold’s uncollected essays and writings, with the Roman number for the volume followed by page numbers. This edition filled a real gap and gave new impetus to Arnold studies, which until then had been based on an incomplete corpus of writing. For all its many qualities, however, it also has a drawback, that of following

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in dream-like languors, albeit incessantly shaken by imperious admonitions to awaken to collective responsibility. The eldest son of Dr Arnold of Rugby, he debuted in 1849 satiating a voracious poetic appetite, and following immediately his first poetic collection with a second, more substantial one the chronological criterion too rigidly, with the result that Arnold’s books are dismembered and rendered almost unrecognizable, on the basis of the fact that they were collections of previously published and then reordered essays (and the editor always includes the later revisions). The best anthology of Arnold’s prose and poetry is edited by M. Allott and R. H. Super, Oxford 1986. Arnold’s letters are edited by G. W. E. Russell, Letters of Matthew Arnold 1848–1888, 2 vols, London 1895 (which I cite as L I and L II). This collection is incomplete, and was harshly criticized by the relatives of Arnold; it must be integrated with Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Whitridge, New Haven, CT 1923 (which I cite as UL). His correspondence with Clough was separately published in The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. H. F. Lowry, London 1932 (which I cite as LC). The whole correspondence is now available in The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. C. Y. Lang, 6 vols, Charlottesville, VA 1996–2002. The Note-Books of Matthew Arnold, ed. H. F. Lowry, K. Young and W. H. Dunn, London 1952. See also Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. D. Wilson, Cambridge 1932, and Essays in Criticism, ed. T. M. Hoctor, London 1968. Life. P. Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life, London 1981; N. Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold, London 1995. Criticism. G. Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, Edinburgh and London 1899 (readable essay of historical value, with judgements which are still definitive); R. E. C. Houghton, The Influence of the Classics on the Poetry of Matthew Arnold, Oxford 1923; H. Kingsmill, Matthew Arnold, London 1928; C. H. Harvey, Matthew Arnold, London 1931, 1969; E. K. Brown, Studies in the Text of Matthew Arnold’s Prose Works, Paris 1935, 1969, and Matthew Arnold: A Study in Conflict, Chicago, IL 1948; I. E. Sells, Matthew Arnold and France: The Poet, Cambridge 1935; C. Stanley, Matthew Arnold, Toronto 1938; L. Trilling, Matthew Arnold, London 1939, 1949 (the first important evaluation); C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary, London 1940 (cited as Commentary; extremely useful for the reconstruction of the compositional history); H. F. Lowry, Matthew Arnold and the Modern Spirit, Princeton, NJ 1941; L. Bonnerot, Matthew Arnold, poète: Essai de biographie psychologique, Paris 1947 (uniquely documented and scholarly, at times even too detailed); E. K. Chambers, Matthew Arnold: A Study, Oxford 1947, 1964; I. McDonald, The Buried Self: A Background to the Poems of Matthew Arnold, 1848–1851, London 1949; W. F. Connell, The Educational Thought and Influence of Matthew Arnold, London 1950; F. E. Faverty, Matthew Arnold the Ethnologist,

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in 1852, and with a third, already partly anthological, in 1853. After this date the poet was overshadowed by the many-faceted essayist, eclectic enough to address practically every sphere of speculative and applied knowledge (literary criticism, aesthetics, theology, anthropology, pedagogy, politics), an activity which ultimately took precedence for the long remainder of his career. Over the total span of his poetic and prose production Arnold, by unanimous agreement, represents therefore another instance of the transition from pure to Victorianized Romanticism, and eventually to a wholly unromanticized Victorianism. But it has not been easy for critics to pinpoint the exact moment of this transition. While there is no doubt that Arnold’s essays fully enact it, his poetry has seemed to be either a preparatory phase to his conversion to classicism or yet another chapter of Victorian self-repression, a chapter of a thwarted, disturbed Romanticism, subject to a stabilizing impulse which, for all his efforts, was not always achieved or successful. This dichotomy has influenced general opinions on the hierarchy of the poet and the essayist, as well as the judgements made on his adoption of prose, by some seen as a ‘betrayal’ and by others greeted as a necessary step forward. Two readings thus followed one another over time and still find themselves in conflict, one pessimistic and tragic, the other optimistic. According to the former, Arnold was the morbid and inevitable prisoner of a ‘disease’ which he could only overcome by means of a most violent, painful effort; as such, he was and is frequently seen as the trait d’union between Romanticism proper and the Decadent poets of the 1890s, between Romantic isolation and – after the post-Romantic and Victorian

Evanston, IL 1951; J. Holloway, The Victorian Sage, London 1953, 202–43 (on the rhetorical techniques); K. Allott, Matthew Arnold, London 1955; J. Ells, The Touchstones of Matthew Arnold, New York, 1955; J. D. Jump, Matthew Arnold, London 1955; K. Tillotson, Arnold and Carlyle, Oxford 1956; F. Kermode, Romantic Image, London 1957, 1971 (see especially Chapter 1 on the artist’s isolation); P. F. Baum, Ten Studies in the Poetry of Matthew Arnold, Durham, NC 1958; W. E. Buckler, Matthew Arnold’s Books: Toward a Publishing Diary, Genève 1958, and On the Poetry of Matthew Arnold: Essays in Critical Reconstruction, New York 1982 (on the whole convoluted and confusing); W. A. Jamison, Arnold and the Romantics, Copenhagen 1958; V. Buckley, Poetry and Morality: Studies on the Criticism of Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis, London 1959, 25–86; W. Robbins,

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normalization – the new seclusion of the aesthetes, who found in Arnold, and especially in the dramatic dialogue ‘Empedocles on Etna’, their own manifesto and in Empedocles an emblem of the dazzling poetic vision, only possible through voluntary exile from life and action – or even through

The Ethical Idealism of Matthew Arnold, Toronto 1959; D. J. James, Matthew Arnold and the Decline of English Romanticism, Oxford 1961; G. De Logu, La poetica e la poesia di Matthew Arnold, Genova 1961; V. Gabrieli, Il mirto e l’alloro, Bari 1961 (the best Italian study of the poetry); W. S. Johnson, The Voices of Matthew Arnold, New Haven, CT 1961; H. C. Duffin, Arnold the Poet, London 1962; L. Gottfried, Matthew Arnold and the Romantics, Lincoln, NE 1963; J. H. Miller, The Disappearance of God, London 1963 and Cambridge, MA 1979, 212–69, and The Linguistic Moment, Princeton, NJ 1985 (see above all Chapter I); P. W. Day, Matthew Arnold and the Philosophy of Vico, Auckland 1964; P. J. MacCarthy, Matthew Arnold and the Three Classes, New York 1964; W. D. Anderson, Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition, Ann Arbor, MI 1965 (an illuminating study of Arnold’s modern adaptation of classical tradition); G. Tillotson, Mid-Victorian Studies, London 1965; A. Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold, New Haven, CT and London 1967 (the best reconstruction of the symbolic universe of Arnold’s poetry; cf. below, § 148.4); W. A. Madden, Matthew Arnold: A Study of the Aesthetic Temperament in Victorian England, Bloomington, IN 1967 (focuses on Arnold the aesthete and his aesthetic attitudinizing, minimizes the moralist); G. R. Stange, Matthew Arnold: The Poet as Humanist, Princeton, NJ 1967 (mainly dedicated to the influences of and analogies with the classicism of Goethe; cf. § 148.4); P. Drew, ‘Matthew Arnold and the Passage of Time: A Study of “The Scholar-Gipsy” and “Thyrsis”’, in The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations, ed. I. Armstrong, London 1969, 199–224; G. Pearson, ‘The Importance of Arnold’s Merope’, ibid., 225–52; D. J. De Laura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, Pater, Austin, TX 1969 (a laborious study of the transformations of the dogmatic Christianity of Newman into that of Arnold and Pater); A. H. Roper, Arnold’s Poetic Landscapes, Baltimore, MD 1969; M. Thorpe, Matthew Arnold, London 1969; R. H. Super, The Time-Spirit of Matthew Arnold, Ann Arbor, MI 1970; F. G. Walcott, The Origins of ‘Culture and Anarchy’, London 1970; J. N. D. Bush, Matthew Arnold, a Survey of his Poetry and Prose, London 1971; H. W. Fulweiler, Letters from the Darkling Plain: Language and the Grounds of Knowledge in the Poetry of Arnold and Hopkins, Columbia, MO 1972, 25–86; Critics on Matthew Arnold, ed. J. Latham, London 1973; Matthew Arnold: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J. De Laura, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1973; CRHE (The Poetry), ed. C. Dawson, London 1973; S. Coulling, Matthew Arnold and His Critics: A Study of Arnold’s Controversies, Athens, OH 1974; Matthew Arnold, ed. K. Allott, London 1975; CRHE (The Prose), ed. C. Dawson and

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suicide.1 According to the second reading, the actual poetry written by Arnold before becoming an essayist is a conscious and unrelenting criticism of Romanticism, and the work of an artist in command of his subject matter, who wields his classical sources in a detached, objective way, and in whom both personal effusions and a collective paradigm are simultaneously present. It is a therapeutic action concluding with the adoption of a Goethian neoclassicism, and significantly followed by the elimination from his own poetic canon of ‘Empedocles on Etna’ itself, a refusal which can be interpreted as a healthy plunge into life and action. Both for the former and for the latter school of thought, there is however no doubt that Arnold the classicist fully asserted himself after 1853 and ‘Empedocles on Etna’, with a series of long poems informed by an objectively and openly declared classical style, which in any case constitute the shortest-lived portion of his production. 2. Of the two readings, it is the first, of Arnold the Romantic poet caught up in and torn by his own inner conflicts, the one which has been historically the most influential. This is due above all to the fact that to the first hostile historians of Victorianism Arnold appeared to be perfectly adaptable to the model of the repressed Victorian riddled with complexes, and that he fitted in with a psychological and Freudian criticism which J. Pfordresher, London 1979; J. Carroll, The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold, Berkeley, CA 1982; R. ApRoberts, Arnold and God, Berkeley, CA 1983; Matthew Arnold: Between Two Worlds, ed. R. Giddings, London 1986; Matthew Arnold, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1986; Matthew Arnold 1988: A Centennial Review, ed. M. Allott, London 1988; S. Collini, Arnold, Oxford 1988; VP, XXVI (1988), 1–2, special issue on Arnold’s centenary, ed. J. P. Farrell and J. J. Savory; Matthew Arnold and His Time and Ours: Centenary Essays, ed. C. MacHann and F. D. Burt, Charlottesville, VA 1988; D. G. Riede, Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language, Charlottesville, VA 1988; M. Hardman, Six Victorian Thinkers, Manchester 1991, 141–73: F. Marucci, ‘Patterns of Intermittence in Arnold’s “Dover Beach”’, in Strumenti critici, XIV (1999), 261–80; R. L. Pratt, Matthew Arnold Revisited, New York 2000; A. Grob, A Longing like Despair: Arnold’s Poetry of Pessimism, Newark, DE 2002; R. D’Agnillo, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold, Roma 2005; A. H. Harrison, The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold, Athens, OH 2009. 1 Kermode 1971, 19.

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offhandedly read literary texts as pure symptomatologies of profound and hidden conflicts. Arnold, it was said, was the umpteenth victim of a tyrannical father, which undoubtedly Dr Arnold of Rugby was. His imperious acts were supposedly compensated by Matthew’s very sweet mother, according to an Oedipal model which is also traceable with precision in Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett and in part Browning. Dr Arnold’s portrait in Eminent Victorians (1918) by Lytton Strachey, and W. H. Auden’s poem dedicated to Matthew Arnold in 1939, mark the birth of this reading, and to them (and in particular to Auden) can be traced all subsequent criticism of Arnold until deconstruction, which has its founding elements in Freud and specifically in the inner division of the subject, in the irresponsibility of the poetic word and in Freudian denegation.2 Thus conflicts unduly proliferated in such a vision of the poet. However, some of these alleged conflicts prove, put to the test, inexistent, while some were truly faced by him during his life, and still others are purely intellectual aporias that critics wanted to see as unresolved and bleeding psychological dilemmas in his poetry:3 the Romantic worshipper of his absolute self versus the socialized and responsible Victorian; the modern man, victim of the turbulence of the world, and the classic aspirant and the adorer of composure; the procrastinator and the activist; the dreaming and anarchic Celt – condemned by diurnal conscience – versus the Teuton and Saxon absorbed by actuality; the poet obsessed with images and the critic working with concepts; the Hellenist and the Hebraist. My own idea is that Arnold knew early on how to read within himself. He was aware of his own real inner conflicts, and controlled his ‘fluctuations’, both intellectual and emotional. In short, he was not a schizophrenic poet with a Freudian split between a critical, superior consciousness, rigidly and lucidly doling out rules, and another, rebellious self, almost an id, abandoning itself to impulsive writing which produced poetry that he would, immediately thereafter, condemn and 2 3

Arnold, at least officially, still acknowledged the profound influence of his father, having for him words of admiration and pointing to him in his poetry as a ‘guide’. There may be some truth in the hypothesis of even a genetic and racial conflict, which is traced back to the undoubtedly Celtic blood of his mother which got mixed with the Jewish blood of German ancestors transplanted to Lowestoft.

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remove, due to flagrant transgressions against pre-established critical dictates. On the contrary, he knew how to present himself as a problematic and disenchanted Romantic poet, and right afterwards, or almost at the same moment, as an astute critic of his own work. In ‘The New Sirens’ and ‘Empedocles on Etna’ the poet and the critic, or rather the Romantic and the critic of Romanticism, already proceed hand in hand and frankly contradict and relativize one another. And in each composition, after his languorous, sensuous abandonment to the dream-like fantasy, and the satisfaction of desire, there follows the firm call for self-control and a sharp diagnosis takes place with ‘calm’ detachment, albeit a detachment which is only illusory and purely temporary. 3. Since his debut Arnold abstained from interjections and blatant and lacerating cries; he did not exude any poetic pathos and spoke in a soft voice. His earliest poetry exhibits veneers of apocalyptic impotence but no nostalgia for Titanism. The very parable of Empedocles in the poem of the same name acquires a completely different meaning when it is considered in its specifically dramatic nature – like a dialectic and dialogic agon – and the relationship between the protagonist and the writer, too often taken for granted, is questioned. A similar compensatory function is carried out by the second and ‘classic’ Iseult in front of the ‘romantic’ Tristram in ‘Tristram and Iseult’. Either to the credit or fault of his father, who dismissed poetry for reasons opposite to those of the utilitarians, but close to those adhered to by the evangelicals – in other words, he thought of it as a frivolous occupation and a waste of time – Arnold appeared on the scene in 1849 as an already adult poet, who may have intentionally kept his precocious talents hidden. Above all he was a poet gifted with an innate and unusual sense of proportion.4 Supplemental evidence of a reduced Romanticism is in the fact that Arnold did not produce lengthy poems and did not leave to posterity exorbitant apprentice work. His first published collection, precisely because it was the work of a poet who was 4

Victorian restraint, together with the desire to present himself as an adult man and poet, is the cause for which at Arnold’s request his youthful letters were cut and are only extant from 1849, until the gap was filled by the recent complete edition of his correspondence.

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already twenty-seven years old, was not even judged by him so useless or bulky to need a copious pruning, as was the case with Tennyson. The classical severity of which he was a supporter as a critic, and which signified the necessity to always extract the best from each poet and writer, was applied first of all to his own work. The scarce thematic and metrical variety for which he was criticized was an objective shortcoming as well as a deliberate choice. He would always follow a poetic practice of great and therefore unpopular severity. He authored very few poems voicing vulgar patriotism,5 which instead we find in great number in the early Tennyson; he left very few sycophantic lines or compositions aimed at a female or only barely literate audience, and using suave or passionate rhythms. There are also very few idylls, and concessions to the exoticism of the moment are likewise rare. Love poetry is limited to brief throbs that seem to allude, more than anything, to unfulfilled passions, a sensual rapture which flows immediately into the sedateness of conjugal love. The distinction between Arnold’s supposedly and provisionally Romantic poetry and the attainment of a classical or tentatively classical one hinges on the implications of the first-person pronoun, and on the transition from an exclusively private to a public or collective ‘I’ and to a ‘we’ which is much more than a conventional pluralis maiestatis. Arnold very quickly recovered from the sacred terror of lyrical poetry in the first person and from directly effusive poetry, and first and foremost because, while the first post-Romantics were afraid of the substantial difference and the irreducible diversity of their own selves, he established the representative character of his own self in the modern age, first of all as the mouthpiece of the Oxford and university community of the well-educated, then as poet-essayist and eventually only as essayist, in the form of a conscious sense of belonging to a utopian, illuminated and reformed bourgeoisie. The recovery of the poetic first person – which has

5

It could not have been otherwise in a poet who was among those rare Englishmen who were truly self-critical and believed England satisfied with its aristocracy and bourgeoisie, and that having much travelled denounced the boredom (L I, 130) as well as many other limits of his compatriots. Believing, along with Dr Johnson, that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’ (X, 143), he could not coherently write patriotic poetry.

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as its automatic counterpart the almost complete disappearance of the dramatic monologue, the expressive mode which was hegemonic at the time – is the formal symptom both of the recomposition of the divided self and of the awareness of a restored faith in an at least embryonic public function of poetry. Having by then overcome the concept of a solipsistic, selforiented poetry, or one addressed to an almost private circle of recipients, he proudly felt the emblematic, representative, communitarian and almost universalistic role of poetry and of his own poetry in particular; he felt he was, and that it was his duty to be, a mouthpiece, not just a personal and eccentric voice, or one characterized by an absolute diversity: ‘My poems represent […] the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century’. 4. The representativeness of Arnold’s poetry, an affirmation which contradicts others in which he reduces his own poems to a series of disconnected fragments refractory to any synthesis, was brought to light and valorised by critics as an articulated conceptual discourse, perfected by his essays but first developed in his poetry in recurrent, studied, and organized allegorical and symbolic patterns. The two models that have been found are one triadic6 and the other dyadic; both, despite some crucial differences, and from different points of departure, converge upon an identical result. Arnold’s poetry centres then on the analysis of the modern condition from the point of view of the intellectual who knows how to perceive it, and, far from sharing any superficial euphoria, lives in a state of doubt and smouldering restlessness, or at most of conscious delusion which results from the personal and collective collapse of creeds and ideologies.7 Critics have discovered that Arnold frequently and recurrently depicts his age as adulthood reaching towards a better future that coincides with a personal and historical lost infancy: a river, the river of life, leaves the dewy

6

Cf. Culler 1967, in part. 1–17. Culler’s most ingenious symbolic outline must be strained and subjected to adaptations to give uniformly coherent results; the negative pole even ambiguously becomes the positive one, with disconcerting changes. 7 Saintsbury 1899, 28, with the support of Sainte-Beuve, was the first to state that Arnold had given a voice to the ‘discouraged generation of 1850’.

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forest, flows down a dark plain and joins the iridescent sea.8 This image is reshaped and transformed into another equally frequent one, namely that of the pilgrimage,9 or the walk, or the ocean crossing, or the climb, alone or with others, and a climb which is often at the same time an ambiguous ascent in reverse, that is a descent to the age of innocent childhood. This is an experience which however reveals itself in its forms and in its final outcomes to be an illusion, or a deception.10 A second and parallel symbolism, to my mind even more clarifying, is that of the sea tides and of the patterns of oscillation and intermittency, which often involves and reverberates on the metrical and rhythmic structure of individual poems.11 If Arnold’s poetry is conceptually based on the opposition between the chaotic and blind instability of modernity and the fixity of the classical world, this is often conveyed by images of a natural succession of symbolic high and low tides. Instability is the real characterizing element of the modern condition, and of Arnold’s poetry qua a prolonged, relentless reflection upon it. The modern sense of unease, according to a cyclical perspective that Arnold was to explain in detail in his essays, was in fact a discomfort inherent in all ‘modern’ ages of the past, ages marked by the twilight of communal harmony and by the crumbling of ideological models. The frequent and disconcerting conceptual and emotional contradictions between one poem and the next are indeed attributable to this modern ‘fluctuation’, along with those semantic discrepancies, and notable changes of direction marked – as in ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ – by apparently innocent substitutions of words at a distance in time. Arnold’s instability is linguistic and epistemological at the same time, inherent, as in many other Victorians, in the very same heuristic and referential functions of language

8 9

This series of images is significantly drawn from ‘Mahomets Gesang’ by Goethe. Behind this journey there is once more Goethe, and in particular his idylls in free verse hinging on the figure of the wanderer, such as ‘Wandrers Sturmlied’. 10 Between the forest and the dark plain Arnold almost always places an abyss or a ravine, signifying the loss of freshness and of maternal or primordial joy. 11 Bonnerot 1947, 422–3, hints at a psychological cause for the lack of structure in Arnold, the ‘undulation’ and ‘oscillation’ of his moods and thoughts.

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and communication.12 Arnold the poet is already the pioneering clairvoyant of cosmic instability, of that which Pater will define, without praising it himself, the modern relative. In Arnold’s poetry fixity is undoubtedly a longed for objective, but one that is known to be unreachable and which is never reached. An incessant aspiration is what is expressed by the word ‘calm’ – both adjective and noun – with its adjectival variation ‘tranquil’; it is a calm which arises from the affective experience of life, which itself is almost always a senseless ‘eddy’, or even a vortex. The greatest of the fluctuations consists in the fact that at times not even this calm satisfied Arnold, who, having reached it, dreamed of diving back into the vortex. In that sense Arnold’s poetry only touches upon the goal of the classical line of vision; his essays are the natural and logical continuation of his poetry – or rather, the impasse is overcome, symptomatically, only in the last of Arnold’s poems of 1867, ‘Obermann Once More’, which precedes, and foreshadows, his transition to essay-writing. Arnold the poet reflects and submits to this precariousness, this instability; Arnold the essayist discovers the Sophoclean capability to see ‘steadily’, which lies in panoramic fixity. 5. It remains to be asked whether Arnold is truly, along with Tennyson and Browning, and as literary historians of the past have told us, the third great poet of the first Victorian generation of those born between 1800 and 1825; or if he was at least the greatest English elegiac poet. He himself was the first to doubt it. He was a fine critic of his own writing judging by the severity with which he captured the discrepancies between his poetics and his practice, and in assessing dispassionately the value of his poetry. In 1853, when the best and most conspicuous part of his poetic work had already come out, he did not hesitate to confess, with exaggerated modesty, that his poems ‘viewed absolutely, are certainly little or nothing’.13 Extending his criticism to Tennyson and Browning, he knew just as well that he could not compete with them, and that he had ‘less poetic sentiment than Tennyson, less intellectual abundance and vigour than Browning’,14 12 13 14

Cf. especially, for this perspective, Riede 1988. LC, 46 (italics in the text). L II, 9. In a letter to Clough of 1848–1849 (LC, 96ff.), which also contains Arnold’s first formulation of the ‘damage’ caused by Keats to English literature, he attributes

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even if he credited himself with a greater fusion of each of these gifts. With respect to his two predecessors, he had the obvious disadvantage of being an unexpressed or ‘amputated’ poet, who practically closed his career when he was only thirty, and thus still young even according to the standards of Victorian precocity. In any case his stature as a poet would not have risen if he had continued to write poetry. Even his contemporaries complained of the lack in him of the raw material of poetry, noting lines that were unmusical, clumsy metrics and the lack of thematic variety. The most serious defect of Arnold’s poetry lies in a misunderstanding of its means: in large part it consists of moral admonishments, and of philosophemes compressed into the space of verse. It lies in its assertiveness and didacticism, and thus inevitably in a language which is precise, clear, definitive, more suited to prose, rather than that, more misty and haloed, associated with poetry.15 To cite Mallarmé, Arnold always says too much and suggests too little. The poems which incline towards diagnosis sound already like essays; they are decidedly essay-like when they foreshadow his critical production, such as the vast odes studying the figures of the great wise men and poets who were dear to Arnold, like Wordsworth, Sénancour16 and Heine. The Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, to whom he has a vague resemblance, created poetry of ‘thought’, too. Arnold’s ‘thought’ is at times equally subtle, and examined with the instruments of stylistics and semiotics, and in a micro-textual approach, it may indeed conceal surprises for the reader. But it is never ‘sensuous’ thought, to apply an Arnoldian aesthetic category, as much as it is poeticized thought, prolix and devoid of any ‘classical’ density, albeit carefully nestled in frameworks of images, sensations and recollections. Arnold was determined to avoid the worst and most detrimental characteristic of English poetry, its Elizabethan and

15 16

to Browning a poetic ‘gift’ found in his ‘fulness’ and ‘movement’, but also a ‘confused multitudinousness’. That accusation refers to his inability to synthesize a separate and fragmented reality, an operation which was always successful for the classics, particularly the Greeks. Among the first to notice this prosastic character was Saintsbury 1899, 11ff. Arnold always cites the name of this very important influence on him without accenting the ‘e’.

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decorative matrix which he often criticized, but the chief stylistic feature of his neo-epic spirit – the Homeric simile, often stretched out and elaborated – comes close to those unmotivated embellishments that he, as a theorist, condemned. The same accusation of gratuitousness can be made regarding the poetic cliché of the so-called à tableau codas, pictures where the whirling atmospheric and psychological movement suddenly settles as if by magic beneath the eyes of an unperturbed nature. 6. Arnold’s true masterpieces can be counted on the fingers of one hand, unless one includes those small masterpieces of a minor vein, the poems of the Marguerite cycle and the rapidly sketched aphorisms of the 1852 collection. Even his most famous and often anthologized poems, ‘Dover Beach’, ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’, after truly inspired beginnings, peter out in wordy diagnostic codas. Arnold, the extoller of the integrated form, sins against his own rule when he himself ‘thinks out loud’ as in ‘Empedocles on Etna’. His poems remain in one’s memory often thanks to single fragments or isolated lines, rather than in that ‘totality’ which he recommended. As an eminently poetical operation, Arnold’s classicism informing the poems of 1853 and of the tragedy Merope must be considered a failure. His contemporaries noticed this and judged his classicism severely, indeed thought of it as cold or false. In the meantime, however, and precisely because of that classicism which is at times a liability, Arnold also earned a tight circle of admirers. He gave birth to the concept and the practice of humanistic poetry, and to an elegiac vein of scepticism which was neither discouraged nor renunciatory and which found favour with the educated classes without causing impatience in those contemporaries who could not tolerate the pyrotechnics of Browning and, after 1850, the didactic emphasis of Tennyson. This circle of Victorian readers appreciated a poetry which brimmed over with cultured references and which is a continuous dialogue with the greatest. The classical veneer of many of Arnold’s odes and elegies, the rich variety of his erudite sources of inspiration, were the ambiguous instruments with which his poetry charmed certain groups of readers, while naturally repulsing others. Not having been lauded as a genius, neither was Arnold later crushed by critics. He was loved by the Georgians at the beginning of the twentieth century for his soft rather than shouting tones; and after the First World War he

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was considered the precursor of Hardy and Housman. But he did not hold up to the new vogue of Hopkins and Donne, or the New Criticism which sought only ambiguity and hidden nuances of meaning in a poem. After the Second World War it was discovered that Arnold had unknowingly anticipated the international political atmosphere and the smouldering conflict between superpowers.17 At the time, it escaped the attention of most that Arnold had probed – in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the Marguerite cycle and in his first successful examples of meditative poetry, and without visible and conscious points of contact with Kierkegaard – twentieth-century existentialism or the precariousness of existence, and the literature of ‘incommunicability’, by indicating in love, even if not yet or not explicitly in eroticism, the only stronghold and the only possibility remaining to defend us from the anxiety of living. § 149. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 II: From the poet to the essayist and to the theorist of integrated literature The preface to the 1853 poetry collection, which was chiefly oriented to ‘Empedocles on Etna’, and marks the beginning of Arnold’s activity as an essayist and the ending of that of the poet, displays a lucid awareness of the gap between the aspiration towards classical objectivity and the subjection to the modern ‘oscillations’ in his own poetry. It openly embraced the notion of a public literature and, in principle, of one endowed with a euphoric effect. He confessed to Clough in that same year 1853 that the objective, indeed the duty of poetry and literature for the present, was the Homeric and Shakespearean one, that of animating and reanimating its readers,18 not simply that of representing ‘morbid’ and melancholy states, which were both personally and above all socially sterile. Soon afterwards, he coined one of his most celebrated formulas, that literature is essentially – in the meaning and with the Greek etymology of the term – a ‘criticism of life’. After 1853, he ended up becoming more absorbed by the elaboration of this theory than by the desire to put it into practice. Instead of returning 17 18

PGU, vol. 6, 83. LC, 146.

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to poetry strengthened by his own new dictates, he increasingly enlarged the range of his essay-writing in the domain of the incidental and of the public. I have already noticed that the residual poetic efforts of Arnold the classicist and ‘reanimator’ were actually scarce and unconvincing. 2. The purported formalism, indeed the anticipations of the poetics of aestheticism which could be traced in his youthful letters to Clough – the occasional, misguided affirmations that point to ‘beauty’ rather than ‘truth’ as the most important element in poetry, and form as the ‘sole necessary of Poetry as such; whereas the greatest wealth and depth of matter is merely a superfluity in the Poet as such’ –19 must be read in perspective, as attempts at an aesthetics in progress, depending on mood swings, and as fragmentary as the nature of his own poetry, that of a twenty-five-year-old and still developing youth. It must also be read in the extemporaneous context of a strict criticism of his friend’s poetry, excessive in its concentration on content and lacking the necessary attention to poetic form. In these same letters, on the other hand, we see the emerging need for the harmonious connection and interpenetration of form and content in the context of a genuine inspiration and of a respect for the laws of metrics.20 This is a balanced compromise on which his essays, collected in the first series of Essays in Criticism (1865), are based and from which they stem, 19 LC, 98–9. 20 In 1847 Arnold analysed in a letter to Clough the mechanism of literary decadence, which he notices in his surroundings, and which he traces in the slavish acceptance of a tradition arrived at full maturity, and even become overripe. Different and more favourable is the case of a writer who has no models from which to learn style and structure, which is ‘half the work’; this is the case of someone who is forced to dedicate himself to and concentrate on content to compensate for the shortcomings of form. In his letters to Clough Arnold precociously postulates an eternal renewal of tradition and a continuous revision of the works of the masters, on the strength of the principle of the superiority of styles which are simple, without mannerisms, frills or decorations, like that of Goethe, which is never spiralled and convoluted as the one of the writers of the Latin Middle Ages. The type of poetry suggested as a model to Clough already contains a world view: it is a poetry dressing up ideas which are ‘found’, common and fluid rather than original; a poetry conveying what Arnold would later call the Zeitgeist: ‘The poet’s matter being the hitherto experience of the world, and his own’ (LC, 64–5; italics in the text).

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and which will be echoed in all of his subsequent essay writing. This collection of essays, which at least in part was a skilful editorial operation, marked the entrance of Arnold into the arena of Victorian essay-writing, and imposed his authority in a period which had no literary dictators, precisely because a strong and well-defined idea of literature and of the English tradition clearly emerged from it. It was an idea whose limits – the theoretical weakness, which translated into postulates that were quite vague and noncommittal – were to paradoxically favour contradictory developments in the immediate and distant future. Applied without reverential fears and with an almost mathematical spirit, these assumptions of Arnold’s aesthetics – the primacy of content over form, the public and universal nature of poetry, the control of ‘morbid’ excesses and ‘mental states’ – all came to life in this book in a new, unpredictable map of the literary evolution, from which the likes of Shakespeare and of Goethe, as the author of Faust, found themselves excluded. By its very nature Arnold’s criticism was both absolute and incidental, aiming at the formation of a new writer for the present times, obliged to filter tradition and clarify forces which to him were truly useful, at the same time discarding the unhelpful models. The new ‘classical’ poet, one not morbidly reclining on his own mental states and capable of a unifying recomposition and reinterpretation of multi-faceted reality, was even less a poet dependent on empty formal experimentation. Shakespeare was a negative, or at least a dangerous influence for a contemporary would-be poet because it was too tempting to imitate his profusion of details and of decorations rather than the profundity of his thought.21 Arnold placed above Shakespeare, and above all other modern poets, the Greek tragedians, masters of the clarity of design, of rigour in development and simplicity of style, as well as dispensers of useful moral advice. In Essays in Criticism, Arnold struck down Romanticism or at least a certain kind of ‘morbid’ and emotionally incontinent Romanticism, labelling it ‘Elizabethan’, and, in a relativistic and 21

A later critique of Hamlet discusses echoes from Montaigne in the drama, and precedes T. S. Eliot’s famous essay in defining it ‘so tantalising and ineffective a play’ (X, 191). A ‘classical’ Shakespeare, in contrast, is presented in a youthful sonnet dedicated to him.

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indirect way, seeing it as having been foreshadowed by the semi-unknown or remote figures of French poets and diarists, or Stoic philosophers from the past.22 Not even Tennyson and Browning, the poets of the moment, and apart from himself, met the requisites of a classical poetry able to dominate the kaleidoscopic nature of reality without yielding to solipsism or formal mannerism. The position of the novelists was equally ‘fragmentary’ and even more involved in the incidental, which explains why Arnold never dedicated a single essay to contemporary narrative, despite the fact that he read it with gusto23 as a pastime and for necessary information. Only at the end of his career, due to its popularity, he was impelled to occupy himself with the European naturalist novel. 3. The aesthetics of Essays in Criticism eventually became a reference point which was not shared peacefully among his contemporaries, who were first and foremost the anonymous reviewers against whom Arnold fought epic battles in the most forgettable parts of his essays and prefaces. The poets, Arnold’s exact or slightly younger contemporaries, continued to write ‘morbid’ poetry about ‘mental states’, hardly universalistic or objective, even in some cases neo-Elizabethan.24 Their moral and moralizing 22

Arnold returned to the Romantic poets far more analytically in his essays comprised in the second series of Essays in Criticism (1888). His almost in extremis rehabilitations of them, after harsh invectives against their mores, were contemporary with the full affirmation of the naturalist novel – which Arnold abhorred – and are almost extorted from him as a counterweight and for a sort of relativistic comparison. 23 In novels, too, Arnold set great store by the constructive ability and expertise, as one can indirectly surmise from a negative opinion on Villette (L I, 29) and a positive one on the novels of Bulwer Lytton. Only in 1880 did Arnold read David Copperfield for the first time. 24 Arnold’s classicism was received by other ‘outsiders’ who were much more integrated than he was, like Palgrave, William Johnson Cory (1823–1892) and William Caldwell Roscoe (1823–1859). Cory was a famed Greek and Latin scholar who had studied at Eton and Cambridge, and had returned to Eton as a professor, having among his pupils the future Prime Minister Gladstone. In his chief poetic work, Ionica, published semi-anonymously in 1858, cameos of a soft classical grace, judged to be worthy of Landor, follow one upon another. The work closely approaches the atmospheres of Woolner or of the Tennyson of the ‘lotus-eaters’ (§§ 209 and 83.4–5). The encounter of the two cultures, Hellenic and Hebrew, is prefigured in the Greek dawn which

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intent was never in doubt, but that was a widely shared principle, not one held solely by Arnold. We cannot however fail to recognize that Arnold, looking directly forward to Wilde, rehabilitates the nobility of the critic and places his function and his role on a par with that of the creator. That word, critic, synonymous with caprice and volubility, spelt torture for the writers of the period, as Tennyson and Browning well knew. Indeed criticism, when truly great, despite being in principle parasitic with respect to creation, was for Arnold always superior to any mediocre literary creation.25 Arnold, still young, reminded Clough, foreshadowing Pater, how difficult it was to write prose, and how much more difficult it was than writing poetry, because prose required those ‘articulations of the discourse’ of which poetry, given its ‘oppositional’ nature, had no need. However, only in one case, Friendship’s Garland, which has all the appearance of a Carlylean pastiche, Arnold truly managed to be a creative essayist and a Wildean ‘critic-artist’. Undeniably to the credit of Arnold’s criticism is also the accent which he constantly placed on the scarce reputation of English literature in Europe, due to the ‘insularity’ and ‘eccentricity’ of the English. He complained that Chinese and other Asian languages and literatures were not taught in schools, and for the first time cracked the surface of literary anglocentrism26 and questioned the centrality of European languages and cultures, fighting for a panoptic enlargement of culture. First

fuses with the Hebrew noon, and more specifically in the consequent acquisition of a ‘greater strength of soul’. A pronounced frugality and chastity of style is the salient element of the poetry of Roscoe, the grandson of an illustrious historian, and a graduate of University College London, who, a failed lawyer due to his delicate health, was the author of classical sonnets at which his contemporaries marvelled, and of other lyrics in which meditative themes are wrapped in a sovereign sense of detachment. 25 In the obituary of Sainte-Beuve (V, 304ff.) Arnold applies this principle to the criticism of the deceased, far superior to the poetry of a Lamartine. 26 In a late review of General Grant’s memoirs (XI, 177), Arnold, however, still protested, with a prophecy which was to be completely disproved by events, against the imminent separation of literatures and cultures: for him there could not exist a Canadian or Australian literature because ‘all of us contribute to a single, great literature, English literature’. He did not even believe that American literature had acquired full autonomy, although he did add the caveat ‘for the moment’.

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and foremost he wished Jewish and Catholic culture reinserted in the canon. Methodologically, he reacted to the critical impressionism of the Victorians, to the careless anarchy of purely extemporaneous and casual judgement with no basis in a series of theoretical foundations. He also went, however, to the opposite extreme, fixing a very few and rigid axioms that over time underwent only the most minimal variations – and even those, almost exclusively regarding terminology – applied according to a deductive method. Those categories, on closer view, are in many cases such only in name, rather than objective and universal principles. They are indeed of the same nature as that ‘claptrap’, those prejudices and even those ‘foibles’ or ‘shibboleths’ which Arnold himself stigmatized in the common mentality. His very synthetic and expeditious formulas can be often reduced to mere catchphrases and slogans, passed off as general and universal laws; and they are used too mechanically and rigidly,27 thus acquiring the feel of a trick which has been invented on purpose in order to shower praise or to destroy. The critical activity for Arnold was in principle none other than judicial,28 and this was perfectly normal for the canons of the time, as was a generic and descriptive interpretative reading which today appears wholly unacceptable. Only in his works of Homeric and biblical criticism does Arnold come close to the philological, stylistic, semantic and historical criticism of today. 4. The apparently unbridgeable gap, the great enigmatic leap from the ineffectiveness of the poet to the dazzling optimism of the essayist,29 can also be explained by a series of pragmatic considerations more related to the ‘health’ of the man than to his ideology. Not being a member of 27 28

29

In the context of ‘fluctuation’ those repetitions are attributed by Miller 1979, 263–5, to the loss of self-referentiality of language. The normative function of the literary critic is defined, in ‘The Function of Criticism’, as that of ‘establishing an author’s place in literature, and his relation to a central standard’; above all in the cases of well-known writers, criticism ‘must be all judgment; an enunciation and application of principles’. Arnold attributed to the Americans a still greater obsession with rankings (XI, 176); the latter were different from the English only in the systematic placement of Americans before all the rest of the world, an opinion shared by Dickens (Volume 5, § 36.4). Hence the frequent accusation of ‘dawnism’, an easy prediction of a radiant tomorrow.

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the wealthy bourgeoisie, and being one of many children, Arnold could not immediately enjoy the large economic assistance which permitted Tennyson and Browning, after obscure and tormenting procrastination, to become professional poets. In 1851 he was instead forced to accept, albeit quite reluctantly, a post as School Inspector for the Crown, a job which he held until two years before his death. His letters overflow with complaints, though never accompanied by self-pity, about the heavy workload and the routine work which, nevertheless, he carried out with commendable scruples. His was a job which ‘thousands of persons could have performed better’, he lamented, adding that he lacked time to dedicate to that for which he had a ‘special predisposition’.30 As a school inspector, he came into direct contact with daily life, much more so than any other contemporary writer, perhaps with the exception of some novelists. That was a reality that could be treated and healed both with political and social measures and still more with resolute action, that is, with a literature capable of offering a renewed cultural mediation. ‘Culture’ is almost the synonym par excellence for, and the byword of Arnold’s whole essay writing, of which we will need to bring to light all the implications. It is an inclusive term which subsumes in a subordinate position all of the spheres of human practical and speculative activity, and therefore also literature, and which explains why purely literary criticism was for Arnold no more than a branch, even quite limited, of his essayistic production. He thus wrote less and less poetry and increasingly more prose because he understood that every cultural mediation could be exercised more effectively by holding the pen as a militant essayist than as a practising poet.31 He personally experienced the positivist prediction, expressed by second-rate Victorian or late Romantic aestheticians like Fox and Macaulay, according to which in the current scientific era of rapid change poetry had exhausted its function, and at best art needed to resign itself to the condition of the ‘survivor’. Few readers of poetry remained, and they were incalculably fewer than those of the reborn novel: in 1853 he already admitted that he wrote esoteric poems ‘calculated to interest none 30 L II, 43 (XI, 1870). 31 See the confession to this effect made a few months before his death, on 31 August 1887 (L II, 367–9).

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but the writer and a few esprits maladifs’.32 But while such prophets took notice, with cold and sometimes cynical objectivity, of this alleged decline of poetry, Arnold witnessed it with melancholy apprehension. A famous passage from a letter to Clough of 185233 affirms that poetry is a ‘magister vitae’ and subsumes the offices of a foundered religion. Arnold thus believed unswervingly in the highest of roles for poetry, and found in his prose writings a fortunate surrogate and an honourable compromise which at the same time permitted him to resolve problems of a financial nature. While he had self-financed the publication of his poetry collections, he earned very well as an essayist, albeit not as much as novelists.34 In the Victorian jungle of literary compromises, he managed to be one of the few writers capable of preserving his own cultural autonomy and to be easily crowned with fame. This does not mean that he went uncontested, but rather that his lucidity and his obstinacy allowed him to continue undaunted along his path, or, more often, to pick up the glove and grab his foil in icy, precise, elegant retorts which usually silenced his challengers. No harsh reviews ever had the paralysing power on Arnold the essayist that those of Christopher North had on Tennyson the poet, or those which made Browning leave England. At a time when numerous poets had no audience, or wrote for the wrong recipients, or were paralysed, he carved out for himself and cultivated a rich and various audience which over time even hungered to read every single word he wrote. His formative action was in fact aimed not only at the bourgeoisie, his primary and foremost recipients, but also at the newly cultured classes, for whose benefit he wrote presentations and prefaces to collections and anthologies of poets and the classics. He attributed to his essays, or hoped that they would have, the same persuasive and formative 32 33 34

UL, 21. LC, 122ff. Each of his successive essays was better paid, and sometimes he had so many requests that he had to refuse them. In 1883 he considered whether or not to accept a pension of £200 as a public recognition for his promotion of poetry. Some journals criticized him as ‘a very Bonaparte for “rapacity”’ (L II, 253). His American letters contain meticulous calculations of his earnings, even if Arnold’s decision to go to America was not only motivated by profit, as he was accused by some American newspapers (L II, 225), but also inspired by a sincere missionary spirit.

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powers that Hopkins would claim – alas, only virtually – for his poetry, and he used Hopkins’s very same metaphorical language, a bit fanatic and having almost the mystic ring of a missionary, even though his target was not a community of believers but civil society.35 And like the novelists who wrote in instalments he had the gratifying reward of knowing that he was reaching his audience and getting it involved, that he had that invaluable feedback with which the unfortunate Hopkins would never be favoured. In 1880 he had become a living classic,36 and complacently noticed that even porters and police officers were among his readers.37 He was however fully aware – as an essayist and critic he used to read against the light the irresistible fashions that with time proved to be ephemeral – that his fame was only skin-deep. He was merely the coiner of phrases and slogans which the public took to heart, and repeated like children’s rhymes, almost as if they were a well-known concentrate of his thoughts. A well received manual and handbook of formulas and slogans was in fact concocted by Arnold himself, with the same sort of looting that others more arbitrarily committed later with Wilde. This widespread fame had also its innocuous flip side in parodies, like the one in The New Republic by Mallock, which Arnold read composedly and even with pleasure. 5. The premise of Arnold’s varied, but ultimately unified essay writing lies in the awareness – widespread at the time, and often triumphantly hailed – of the definitive, not postponable nor resistible advent of modernity. The difference between Arnold the poet and Arnold the essayist is that while the poet resignedly suffered the Zeitgeist, the essayist accepted all that was good or at any rate irreversible in it, making the best of a bad situation. Even before Pater, Arnold made the first in-depth study of that clean break which occurred in western history at the close of the Middle Ages and the beginning of humanism, and that second and still more powerful one caused by the French Revolution. Arnold 35 36 37

‘More and more I am delighted to see that what I’m doing produces its effects, and it encourages me to continue […] in the various activity that is in my opinion necessary to produce a fruitful effect in a country like this’ (quoted in V, 408). L II, 189. L II, 220.

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acknow­ledged the ‘charm’ and the poetic ‘aroma’ of the Middle Ages, but, unlike Hopkins, Ruskin or Pater, he was far from nostalgic, and made a point of distinguishing himself from the great numbers of supporters of a medieval revival – from the ‘utter folly of those who take it seriously, and play at restoring it’.38 To second the objectively inexorable Zeitgeist meant accepting the scientific, demystifying, rationalistic mentality, by then victorious in Europe – with its utilitarian and above all positivistic philosophy, and slightly before the advent of Marxism – over the last remnants of idealism. Nevertheless Arnold was convinced of two things: that not all the effects of the Zeitgeist were positive, and that Europe’s collective cultural heritage was not something to be tossed aside. As a neo-illuminist he worked towards the integration and the suturing of the two cultural models, not for the substitution of the one with the other; in practice he worked towards the conservation, slightly updated and adjusted, of the heritage of high culture of a classical and humanistic matrix. From this perspective, the whole human history was a forge or better a progressive ‘sowing’ of ideas39 with respect to an earlier aridity; ideas that were in natural competition and subject to the principle of natural selection. Thus, culture for Arnold – aware of the accumulation of knowledge which already in his time was disorderly, chaotic and overwhelming – always means making exceptions and choosing ‘the best’ of what has been thought and written.40 Likewise, in the field of literature his interest turned to the problem of transmitting English literature to the students of modern times, to the delineation of an essential profile of literary history – literature, as I mentioned, being only one element of a larger organism called civilization. No one was ever more steadfast than Arnold in denouncing the dangerous confusion which had been generated and had consolidated during his time between the

L I, 127. However, in Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868) Arnold affirms that in the Middle Ages there was a substantially unified European community, a ‘feudal and universal unity’ which gave way ‘to the various and divided life of modern Europe’. 39 LC, 142–3. 40 He often recalled Themistocles’ witty motto addressed to those who suggested to him a mnemotechnichs: ‘Teach me rather to forget’ (VIII, 306). 38

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heritage of practical and pseudo-scientific knowledge – and also, perhaps above all, of prejudices and false values – and that of the authentic and unadulterated ‘ideas’ and of authentic culture, which ought not even to be identified with material progress, but instead with the ‘humanization of man in society’.41 This explains why Arnold greeted with such fervour the ‘dissolvents’, that is, those modern and modernizing folk who, like primitive Christians, or even Heine or Napoleon III, fought with all their might to free themselves from the remnants of the past. In the nineteenth century, he was the most indomitable champion of culture understood in this way, and not only among the English. His mission, for which he left poetry for essay-writing, was exactly that of strenuously combatting – in the second half of the nineteenth century, at a time when the ‘English spirit’ was undergoing a ‘great transformation’ – against prejudice and anti-cultural forces, incarnated above all in a single class, the bourgeoisie.42 The bourgeois ‘philistinism’ fought by Heine was Arnold’s longstanding enemy, too, and by his own admission one which was very difficult to kill. Only a modicum of ‘heart’, indeed the ‘cœur au métier’, distinguished him from Voltaire, whom Arnold admired, oddly including him among the greatest poets of all time, but with the caveat that he was a ‘heartless’ poet.43 6. To fight the bourgeoisie44 meant fighting the most populous class of the nation, the one which formed its very backbone, and to which Arnold himself belonged. This is one of the reasons why his body of essays 41

In a standardized milieu like that of mid-Victorian age, the individual was always the one to carry the torch of culture. In the highly interesting beginning of the essay on De Maistre in Russia (IX, 86ff.), Arnold claims, foreshadowing cultural typology, that culture advances thanks to the clashes and collisions of single individuals with the cultural atmosphere which surrounds them, and that from this friction the culture of the following age is born; it is a question thus of individuals who are superior to the age in which they live, but who will then be inferior to the age which they have helped to create. 42 L I, 207. 43 X, 243, in an address given at an American reception in 1882. 44 AVP, 205–31, aims to demonstrate, at times forcedly, that Arnold is already a liberal in crisis in his poetry. For A. D. Culler (‘Matthew Arnold and the Zeitgeist’, in Bloom

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is first and foremost a self-critique, both in a personal and a national sense. Arnold, as a political writer, or better yet an ante litteram sociologist, is a major progressive and reformist intellectual who lashes out at demagogy, makes a clear analysis of the classical structure of British society, denounces economic and caste privileges, and daringly challenges the very concept of imperialism, indicating solutions – with regard, for example, to the question of Ireland – which will actually be adopted decades later.45 Even so he may dissatisfy the consciousness of the third millennium; his reformism may seem insufficient and his anti-imperialism merely a disguised form of imperialism.46 But it remains indisputable that Arnold debunked and demolished political and cultural Anglocentrism in nineteenth-century Europe. He firmly believed that the culture which counted was European culture, which was to be the training ground for criticism: a criticism, in fact, ‘which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result’.47 Among the first pro-Europeans, he was furthermore a pro-European in an age still characterized by stubborn and arrogant British isolationism. It is not easy to find in English literature a writer who like Arnold – an attitude which today may seem almost automatic and quite normal – thought in European terms, long before the frontiers and cultural barriers were knocked down, and in an age in which the culture of

1986, 109–37), the symbolic triad of the forest, the plain and the sea (§ 148.4) can also be interpreted as aristocracy-bourgeoisie-democracy. 45 Arnold was one of the few thinkers who went against the mainstream, and one of the few Englishmen of his time to cast doubts upon the infallibility of British politics in Ireland since the time of Cromwell. The majority of the British, including the Catholic Hopkins, considered the Irish to be the dredge of society, while Arnold maintained that they had every reason to ‘hate’ the English. A strong government, which is what Arnold desired, was in duty bound to repress disorder of every sort, both that provoked by the Fenians and by the English. 46 A great federalist prophet (L I, 10), Arnold believed in 1848 that a hundred years later the European continent would be a ‘great united Federal Republic’; in the same letter he prophesized, in an equally far-sighted way, that England, ‘all her colonies gone’, would have been ‘in a dull steady decay’. 47 ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’.

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nationalism and chauvinism reigned. Indeed, as for Humboldt, for him it was ‘a joy […] to feel himself modified by the operation of a foreign influence’. He is pro-European in every way, because as an Englishman he is always willing, at times too willing, to learn from phenomena happening outside England, occasionally going to the other extreme in seeing what is abroad as systematically better, even at the cost of some crass deformation.48 He is the last utopian of a unified culture with a European foundation. The third world and the alternative cultures could not find a place in his horizons, because the work of discovery and appreciation of those countries was yet to come. Only much later, however, did Arnold, who wanted to meaningfully deepen the study in loco and who admitted his own lack of documentation, objectively reconsider and modify his very critical, and truly condescending idea of the American model.49 7. Given the essential intersection between religion and politics the main Arnoldian enemy is religious Dissent. The Puritans had distorted the Scriptures with partial and relativistic readings, sometimes based on exegetical errors; above all they were guilty of having implanted a ‘philistine’ spirit which was later transmitted to the bourgeoisie and which had made of religion something mechanical and businesslike. Arnold applied the same metaphor of sclerosis, even gangrene, to religious discussions, but without considering any of the creeds incapable of transformation: he in fact recognized enormous resources within Dissent itself, though wrongly oriented, and sympathized with Catholicism, despite seeing it as gangrenous, or, to use a frequently chosen adjective, ‘petrified’; indeed, a ‘transformed Catholic Church’ was for him the Church of the future.50 The surviving Hebraism, which was the foundation of Dissent, temporarily led Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, to claim that too much Hebraism was harmful and that humanity, not just English society, was in need of new Hellenic lifeblood. He would later turn this affirmation upside down, to 48 European fame was much more important than any praise given to him in England. 49 For the retractation of his anti-Americanism in his final decade see Volume 6, § 31. 50 VIII, 110. Emerson’s essay ‘The American Scholar’ hinges on the idea of the sclerosis of the official Churches, in which the fluid and primary message of Christ has vanished. Emerson uses a term that Arnold inherits, ‘petrified’.

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the point of establishing, in mathematical terms, that Hellenism represents a quarter of human life and that the other three quarters are Hebraism, or religion. But the Hellenic fire gradually extinguished itself, and the entire decade of the 1870s was dominated by an almost monopolizing interest in theological and religious questions. This evident turn testifies perhaps to a slow transition from a Hellenized romanticism, derived from Goethe and Winckelmann – and to which Keats and German Romanticism were not extraneous – to a moralized Victorianism. Arnold was increasingly more inclined in his essays to denounce, as a condition of present times – gradually more serious and more dangerous, in the politics of nations and individuals – a lack rather than an excess of Hebraism as opposed to one of Hellenism. The unenviable first place belonged to the French, congenitally devoid of any moral sense, in part due to the fact that their Latin roots had taken the upper hand over their German ones. 8. One of the most unpardonable human sins is for Arnold one’s preconceived opposition to change, or rather being untransformable. In an epoch which was undergoing a rapid transition, like the nineteenth century, all individuals as well as public institutions needed to be ductile at the very least. And politics itself was essentially a pragmatic art without fixed rules, and modelled on contingencies. Politicians were therefore for him to weigh their choices on the basis of the historical context, or even geographical and national circumstances, and conform to the moment in which laws were to be passed, rather than operating in the abstract. Each nation needed to assess its own internal situation and make the most appropriate decisions as a consequence. Equally pragmatically Arnold stated that perfection is not of this world, and that at times politics necessarily means choosing the ‘second best’. He knew he was a pragmatist, and boasted of the fact, remarking ironically on his ‘speculative weakness’, or ironically promising that over time he would acquire some semblance of a ‘philosophical mind’.51As to Arnold’s practical spirit, however, it is reasonable to raise strong doubts. A master when he summarizes and analyses the historical causes of an event or a political situation, he is fanciful at the very least

51

X, 194.

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when it comes to proposing or only suggesting operative measures. The relationship between politics and geographical contexts, often a point of departure of his essays, rested on a dubious and overly rigid theory of racial types and national formae mentis. According to it the English character is typified by honesty and energy, but with little willingness to accept new ideas, while the Germans are renowned for the painstaking and unfailing patience with which they collect ideas and information and for the tact and order with which they organize it. The French are in turn Latinized Irish, entirely sense-addicted. The essentially new element of Arnold’s ‘reconnaissance’ of English society is its subdivision not into Disraeli’s two ‘nations’ – the rich and the poor, the aristocrats and the working class – but rather into three classes which were more intertwined and connected than was apparent. With the exception of a few hurried and excited judgements influenced by the Paris February 1848 revolution, Arnold clearly did not envisage the abolition of the aristocracy, but rather intended to reform it. He recognized its undeniable historical merits, although it was momentarily in crisis because of its resistance to new ideas. He assigned it the future task of becoming an illuminated guide for the nation. It was necessary, indeed vital, that the aristocracy should come to see the ‘light’, first and foremost because every social class looked at the one which was above it as a model: the aristocracy weighed upon the English bourgeois, for example, ‘like a nightmare’.52 The middle classes needed more than anything to reduce the strong ideological and behavioural hold which the most obtuse Puritanism exerted upon them. As to the masses, the same principle of interdependence applied as that between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy: ‘nothing can be done effectively to raise [the lower class] except through the agency of a transformed middle class; for, till the middle class is transformed, the aristocratic class, which will do nothing effectively, will rule’.53 The present and future governability of England was Arnold’s real problem and real objective, and it depended on the resolution of class 52 53

L II, 229. L I, 224. In alternative to the essay, to reach the bourgeoisie Arnold the essayist hoped, after 1880, that his reforms could be carried out through a literary form until then unused by the Victorians: the theatre. He believed H. A. Jones and the other

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conflicts and the reconstitution of a strong authoritarian state. He often confessed in his essays to his devotion and admiration for Burke, which contradicts or at least weakens his equally frequent conviction that the ideas of the French Revolution had had a healthy aftermath, as they had spread the gospel of democracy and brought nearer the end of aristocratic power.54 Arnold agreed with Burke that the revolutionary age had been a disconnected, confused and, all things considered, ineffective one. There are no essays on political themes by Arnold that neglect to refer to Burke, who had the gift of infusing imagination into his political speeches, and of whose writings on Ireland Arnold edited a selection. Another reactionary who stands as an example of Arnold’s brand of conservatism, in many ways similar to Burke, is de Maistre. 9. Pedagogy is far from secondary in Arnold’s essays, in that on an effective and widespread schooling – also for the masses, both primary and secondary – depended in large part that transmission of ideas which alone represented the salvation of the nation, and which, above all, could co-opt as partner in the management of public affairs an educated bourgeoisie endowed with its own school institutions, thus keeping it away from revolutionary adventures. Behind Arnold’s inspection reports a mind can be seen which is remarkably capable of making connections, and in particular of linking education to culture and thus to literature and the arts. His usual comparative procedure gradually and ever more decisively convinced him that England was, from the point of view of the organization of its educational system, a far from progressive, but strongly backward, and still feudal and medieval country. More gravely, England was a country which was completely immobile, whereas the continental nations, especially France, were at the forefront, or they had rapidly passed measures that abolished anachronistic structures in step with the times. Education was only the visible sign of a larger problem, the negligence and the indifference of the playwrights of the dramatic revival able, if nothing else, to scrape the ‘middle-class fetish’ (23 December 1884; L II, 317). 54 In some youthful judgements, he even saw Napoleon as a pro-European in possession of a great ‘number of ideas’, and a great man who went off the right path (L I, 11).

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state. This was permitted by the passivity of a bourgeoisie – to say nothing of the masses, which were still largely excluded – which was satisfied with a poor education, one which did not include in its syllabuses any scientific disciplines, in contrast to what was done in France and in the much admired and efficient Prussia. Assuming that the state were to control education, education needed to become also or only public, regularly inspected, and decentralized. As a university pedagogist Arnold follows on the heels of Newman, as he puts forward an alternative ‘idea of university’ based on a number of innovations (decentralization, the careful geographical distribution of campuses, also according to local needs and the principle ‘not the students to education but the education to the students’)55 which were later welcomed by modern pedagogy. With his systematic self-critical spirit Arnold brushes off the generalized envy which was already widespread for Oxford and Cambridge, which were for him institutions by now obsolete, as was the college system. § 150. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 III: Range and argumentative strategies of Arnold’s essays An often-expressed regret of Arnold was that he had had too little time to dedicate to poetry, which implied that perhaps he had given too much of it to prose. The eleven thick volumes of Arnold’s prose must of course be pruned of all the innumerable journalistic, occasional or merely polemical pieces of writing; but even with this drastic reduction Arnold’s books are far too many. None of them, however, came out initially as a book: all were collections of essays, which then became chapters of books centred around more or less unified topics. All originated from casual inspirations, though aiming to propound, if not a proper theory, at least an opinion. Within certain limits, Arnold had the tendency to discuss a topic to the point of saturation, at least for him; some of his books, according to an explicit notice, bring a certain speculation to a definitive conclusion and are Arnold’s last word. We can thus speak of a ‘political’ decade, from 1860 to 1870, which pivots on the most universally well-known book by Arnold,

55

IV, 322.

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Culture and Anarchy. Interwoven with political essays are those of literary criticism as well as on an ambitious range of topics and speculative fields. With respect to Ruskin, and above all to Pater, only music and art remain outside Arnold’s sphere of interest, apart from sporadic references from the standpoint of the mere amateur. In this variety of specializations, Arnold the theologian and biblical critic, exegete and religious reformer, active in the early 1870s, is undoubtedly the most short-lived, even considering the unavoidable organic character of ‘culture’ and its integration into the new religion for the times, a principle of which Arnold was a strenuous supporter. His obsessive interest in the biblical questions raised by the Tübingen school was rarely contained within acceptable limits, and Arnold’s three biblical books are in large part copies of one another. The classical sobriety which he preached as a theorist always tripped up Arnold as a writer, due to his uncontainable need to expand on a subject, and to rejoin and to specify. Characteristically, he himself noted with surprise that not just brief retorts, but entire essays and even books sprang and proliferated as a result of this sheer need for correction and clarification. He continued writing political essays, a genre at once theoretical and militant, practically up until his death, often with tired repetitions and re-elaborations of the same thoughts. Over time, he lost almost all the poetic gift he had as a poet, to the point of resembling not a former poet, but rather a tireless polemicist capable of churning out stern, repetitive, heavily reasoned works devoid of lightness or imagination, which go straight to the heart of an argument and ignore questions of form. 2. The typical procedure of Arnold’s essays is laborious, pachidermal, lead-footed. Before dropping one topic to move on to the next he dissects it until its last implication, with multiple references to previous passages. His argument, particularly in the theological works, is illustrated and supported by an uncontainable, Baroque abundance of examples and citations. He was conscious of his own inability to organize his material, for in two cases, Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible – though that was not the only reason – he drew from them two ‘popular editions’ that abridged considerably the contents and thus also reduced the length of the books themselves. His supreme detachment from all subject matters, which he boasted he possessed, and which in truth in some cases he did possess,

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imparts an impression of order, of polished and elegant naturalness, and of an urban, ‘illuminist’ composure to many of his writings, which often begin with a citation chosen to pique the curiosity of the reader. Against the background of fanaticism and bias of many contemporary critics, his voice is never that of an agitated aggression of an adversary, but it aims at the soft, gentle charm of persuasion, which, far from preventing or weakening an implacable and undaunted frankness, heightens it. As inevitably happened with Carlyle, Arnold’s diatribes, burnt out and drained of its contingent bitterness towards yesterday’s adversaries, have lost nowadays their urgency. We read Arnold the essayist without worrying about the acrimony towards his targets, and instead as purely an exercise in rhetorical and linguistic strategy.56 In strictly argumentative terms the persuasive strategy of Arnold’s essays acts in the exclusive territory of probare and docere, rather than movere. They are all somewhat Spinozian, being systematically organized and developed more geometrico or mathematico, almost as if they were theorems that unravel in a series of tightly linked steps. Some over-used argumentative techniques play an integral part in this procedure, sometimes becoming like habits and, worse, cunning verbal tricks, and thus a false and specious rhetoric. The frequent turning to etymology and semantics is not always ingenious, rather even occasionally misleading. A line of reasoning may be validated by reliance on the correct and at first misunderstood etymological root of a word that may have, as in the case of ‘conscience’ and ‘curiosity’, a distant French derivation. A 1879 lecture delivered to Eton students57 begins by analysing the etymological history of a Greek word in its range of meanings very dear to Arnold, those of intellectual ‘flexibility’. For rhetorical and argumentative purposes he often uses the apparatuses of philology, and at least his theological writing demonstrates that his demanding nature and presumption in attacking current translations of Scripture do not merely involve formal, but rather substantial questions: Puritanism, with all of its enormous historical, cultural and political consequences, is 56 See an analysis of Arnold’s rhetorical techniques in Holloway 1953, in The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. H. Levine and W. A. Madden, New York 1968, and in G. P. Landow, Elegant Jeremiahs, Ithaca, NY 1986. 57 IX, 20ff.

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almost descended for Arnold from a mistaken translation of a verse in St Paul. A brilliant illusionist’s game consists in the use of definitions,58 that is in dismissing an objection by demonstrating a previous misunderstanding of the meaning of its terms, and that the range of possible meanings is larger, or different from the definition of one’s adversary. Implacable and lethal, and not at all softly persuasive, is Arnold each time that he turns to the citation of passages excerpted from the writings of others, which he mockingly takes apart. Even more effective is the technique of the rhythmic, ironic, and allusive repetition of a phrase that actually implies a worried, bitter truth. This is a distant re-use of a very well-known artifice, that with which Mark Antony presents himself to the conspirators and weaves together the funeral elegy over Caesar’s body in Shakespeare. Often effervescent and shifting on the written page, Arnold’s essays were, if read – and most of them were, before appearing in print – something different and much tamer. We do not have flattering descriptions of Arnold as an orator, at least not in the 1880s. One of these registers a monotonous reading without any departure from the written text, or any attempts at gestural or vocal effects. His elocution seemed that of a ‘worn and tired curate’.59 Witnesses assured that as to personal contact Arnold communicated an impression of great weariness, which made it difficult to believe that his lectures could carry any persuasive force. In his first American tour, he held in repertory only three lectures, which however attracted audiences that were for those times enormous; but the absence of modern loudspeakers obliged him to undergo diction tests aimed at improving his gestures and his delivery, which a newspaper judged similar to that of a ‘plucked bird pecking grapes on a perch’, because of the way he constantly bent over his manuscript.

58

59

Holloway 1953, 207, inexplicably asserts that in Arnold there is a lack of ‘definitions of words’, and that Arnold proposes, in any case (220), ‘trite’ definitions. This affirmation, which could be true in a relative sense and in the context of a comparison between the techniques of Newman and Carlyle, should in reality be overturned: Arnold wanted to defamiliarize the reader by persuading him to accept extravagant definitions. This source is cited by the editor in X, 473.

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3. In addition to being a poet and essayist, Arnold was a sporadic translator from Greek, French and from the Bible, and a much more prolific writer of letters, which were not merely practical documents but were often creative and read like essays in miniature. Those to Clough, which cease after 1861, are always friendly, allusive, exuberant and even manneristic in style. Arnold’s real epistolary masterpieces are his letters to his family, which contrast remarkably with the telegraphic and listless missives of the late Browning and with those of Tennyson at any time. Inspired letters written during his travels describe with simple words and without any stereotypes natural scenes and vegetation, the look of the sky, the rain and the sun, the foggy and misty winter and the luminous summer, the rivers and torrents, where Arnold would often pause to relax, looking forward to one of his favourite pastimes, fishing. In a terrifying letter he recollects with scientific and unflinching objectivity, until the last breath, the death throes of his son Basil. Other protagonists include pets; a letter portrays his Persian cat Atossa and her attentive watch over the undisturbed sleep of her owner; another from Switzerland tells with touching words of the death of an energetic kitten with a bell around its neck, and the pitiful look of its tiny body hit by a carriage. Arnold’s first inspection tour in 1865 – which he made as a sort of late grand tour – produced a separate, self-enclosed section of letters from Italy punctuated by original observations which can invite comparison with other Romantic and Victorian classics of this popular memoirist genre. Arnold was among the few Victorians, like Meredith and prior to E. M. Forster, to appreciate contemporary Italians without condescension, although for the occasion he put on a pair of undoubtedly naïve glasses, overcome by an excessive enthusiasm for all things foreign. In Turin and Florence he was struck by the presumptive scientific mentality of the Italians; in Milan he admired their elegance, in Naples he heard talk of a ‘Neapolitan miracle’. The Italian situation was however at midcentury much less rosy than what Arnold believed or fooled himself that he was seeing. Moving on to Berlin and then travelling along the Rhine, downcast after encountering the Germans, he confessed that Italy alone was worth a trip, and that all the rest was wasted time, apart from Greece. He preferred the natural scenery such as that of Vesuvius, or the sights of life lived, to monumental art.

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4. Arnold consciously and acrimoniously competed against Ruskin, the old Carlyle and any other living Englishman for the position of the leading Victorian and perhaps even European essayist. He thought that Carlyle plainly did not resist the test of the changes of taste and of the vicissitudes of history; he had dispensed seriousness to a population that had even too much of it, and he did not have much else to give. Likewise, Arnold’s letters and at times even his essays are scattered with negative allusions to Ruskin, and credit him with an aberrant ‘dogmatism’60 and an absence of ‘calm’, Arnold’s chief property, which in Ruskin was overwhelmed by irritability.61 Moreover, on the plane of pure argumentative logic, Ruskin lacked the ‘ordo concatenatioque veri which is the one thing needful’.62 He eventually dared to patronize and condescend to his master Renan,63 and to tone down the signs of esteem and sympathy towards the other of his great French teachers, Sainte-Beuve.64 Over the years, the paleotext, the matrix and the origo of Arnold as essayist have been traced, applying perspectives which are wholly relativistic, in Epictetus, in Marcus Aurelius, in Montaigne, in Spinoza, in Sénancour, in Goethe, in Wordsworth and in Heine; but as a ‘cultural critic’ in the wider sense of the term, he has few precedents in England, perhaps only Coleridge. For his part, he expressly indicated as his own spiritual fathers Goethe, his own father, Keble and Newman,65 figures who had disappeared or were external to the fray by the time he reached maturity, and all of them venerated first and foremost as masters of wisdom. Goethe in particular was more admired by Arnold as a critic, aphorist and writer of maxims than as a poet, and as the poet of ‘morbid’ Faust. Arnold had known Newman personally and had frequented him during his studies at Oxford in the early 1840s: one of his three 1882 60 61 62 63 64 65

L I, 200. L I, 51. UL, 33. Cf. L II, 144 and 159. See the essay ‘Sainte-Beuve’ (XI, 106ff.). In UL, 66 (28.5.1872), Keble is removed and Sainte-Beuve added. As to connections with Newman, and in particular on the origin in Newman of the adhesion to the Zeitgeist, and of his notions of integrated culture, provincialism and philistinism, cf. DeLaura 1969, Introduction.

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‘discourses in America’ recalls with vibrant and moving words the spasmodic attention with which he followed the majestic march of the solemn figure towards the pulpit of St Mary, and with which he used to listen to his sermons, entranced by their almost magical soothing powers. There is almost nothing malicious or ironic in the letter in which, forty years later,66 Arnold recollects a personal meeting with the cardinal, who for the occasion was wearing robes bordered in gold and a red zucchetto, and seated on a small throne was the object of reverence and hand-kissing by those present. That encounter took place several years after a brief exchange of letters between the two, which became necessary to avoid an unpleasant misunderstanding, that Arnold had intended to satirize the cardinal in one of his writings.67 That friendly correspondence, full of reciprocal compliments and rich in shared theological points of interest despite the substantial differences in each man’s positions, took place, however, before the publication of Arnold’s two chief theological books, which Newman certainly would not have treated with the same tolerance. 5. Manifold were the developments that originated from Arnold’s idea of organic culture, which also included, and indeed centred on, literature, or simply from the successive stages of his own aesthetics. His youthful formalism, which, in poetry, translated into ephemeral and ecstatic visions of sensual beauty, influenced Rossetti and Swinburne; and the writers and poets working in the 1870s and 1880s separated the poet from the essayist and read only the latter, often with convinced approval. The very demanding Hopkins noticed the lack of inscape, of that effect and sense of the wholeness which is exactly what Arnold claimed made poetry truly great; and yet Hopkins disagreed with those who called the essayist ‘Mr Kidglove Cocksure’, indeed affirming, in one of his paradoxical statements, that Arnold, though he nearly always disagreed with him, was a great critic. Wilde, before Pater and followed by T. S. Eliot, even considered him the putative father of aestheticism, at least as far as the idea of the ‘disinterested’ nature of criticism was concerned. For them Arnold had elevated criticism to the rank of an autonomous art, rather than a subsidiary and supporting discipline. Pater 66 L II, 169. 67 UL, 55ff.

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never held apertis verbis the theory of art for art’s sake or the separation of art from life, but, like Arnold, he believed in the continuation of art in action; nor, again reminiscent of Arnold, would he have rejected the nexus between great art and ‘great ends’ – indeed he would have agreed whole-heartedly with it. The finalistic use of literature made by Arnold is what Pater, with a Copernican revolution, clearly hoped for: the discovery of the word as an undivided hendiadys of use and beauty. All of the aesthetes including Hopkins rejected Arnold, however, establishing the firm principle that art does not follow the vision of a thing ‘as it really is’, but rather as it appears to the artist, and in accordance with what it suggests. 6. The faults of Arnold the critic were sighted for the first time at the dawn of the twentieth century by Saintsbury, and these were for him, more specifically, too servile a devotion to Sainte-Beuve, an excessive debt to classical principles and a slavery to rigid formulas that led him to huge blunders in judgement. Another survivor, Chesterton, applied in 1913 the law of retaliation, wittily accusing Arnold of being a Philistine, and thus paving the way for the brutal criticisms of a Strachey. The Arnoldian poetic canon, which banned Elizabethan and Metaphysical poetry and even dared doubt Shakespeare, was then literally overturned by Eliot and his followers, Leavis leading the pack. But Eliot’s judgement is enigmatic, and it would be no exaggeration to define him the true successor of Arnold, not least for his unified vision of knowledge and the interweaving of poetry, criticism, culture, and more generally literature. Indeed Arnold’s 1853 preface is the very source of the objective correlative and the unification of sensibility that Eliot preached were necessary to twentieth-century literature. Starting from the post-war period, Arnold’s tantalizing inheritance was investigated by a specialized bibliography that dedicated equal attention to the two main sections of Arnold’s textual corpus. Culler and Stange, authors of two books which are in many ways antithetical, and which were published in the same year, not only scowl at one another but even pretend reciprocal ignorance. Stange is the author of the more unconventional of the two books, as it is based on the assumption that the poet and his poetry are perfectly controlled, and thus radically contrary to the genetic and aetiologic theory of the Freudians and the deconstructionists, who find in Arnold the victim of unconscious and uncontrollable forces. Arnold’s classicist

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and neo-humanist criticism, which led to views of Arnold the essayist as being superior to Arnold the poet,68 seemed to the deconstructionists as ‘empty dogmatism’.69 The predictable and repetitive reading of the deconstructionists leads back Arnold’s ‘disease’, lamented in his poetry, to the usual ‘anxiety of influence’, a disease visible as much in his biographical irresolutions and in his stylistic discontinuities. This process continues and concludes in Arnold’s ‘diminishing’ of himself, in the suppression of the poet and in the fragmentation and mutilation of his works.70 Riede 1988 boldly put forward the theory of a deconstructable Arnold, who has understood but yet hides the béance, the abyss of a language emptied of its referential functions, vainly spinning around a meaning that it no longer conveys. § 151. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 IV: Biography Arnold requested that no biography of his be written, a prohibition dictated in his case by the wish to keep hidden as long as possible unpleasant, even sordid situations regarding his own personality and personal life, and in short all of that second and more common, but also less noble and more evil self postulated by his rudimental psychology, which is very much in sync with the Victorian theories of the double. One conjectures that those shameful facts were his youthful sexual appetites, of which we know only the echoes found in the Marguerite poetic cycle, and which cooled down in purely romantic skirmishes after his marriage. Or maybe they referred to the dissipation of his children, whose debts it fell upon him to pay, and therefore the real, even base economic reasons that lay behind his two American tours; and finally, his alcoholism: in short, the gossip and dark secrets of the daily life of a man who was publicly unimpeachable and always compos sui. 2. When Arnold was born in 1822, Thomas Arnold was a modest teacher of a preparatory school, and Laleham, his birthplace, was a suburb 68 In the book by Collini 1988. 69 Buckler 1982, 147. 70 Cf. J. Woolford’s essay ‘“The Sick King in Bokhara”: Arnold and the Sublime of Suffering’, in Giddings 1986, 100–20.

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on the Thames not far from Windsor, in what today is the ‘greater London’. Matthew was only six years old when his father earned his degree in theology; he was eight when he was appointed Headmaster of Rugby School. The economic affluence thus achieved was always relative; of his many sons, all gifted and eclectic, two emigrated not only in response to an adventurous spirit. Of these Thomas left for Australia and New Zealand in pursuit of the ideals of the French Revolution, and converted to Catholicism at least twice before fathering a daughter who became a notable novelist, known by the pen name of Mrs Ward. William, another brother, became an ensign in the Guards of Bengal. No one in the family at Rugby could keep up with the almost inhuman rhythm of the headmaster, and little Matthew even less than his siblings. Due to a small defect in his lower limbs, for a period he had to wear leg braces, and found compassion from his mother – a woman of great intellectual power, capable of appreciating and discussing in her letters the writings of her son when he became a famous writer – and from his favourite sister Jane, or ‘K’ as she was called, for the family was fond of nicknames. The oppressive atmosphere of Rugby lightened during the summer holidays, when the family moved to Fox How, in the romantic Lake District near the refuge of Wordsworth, who became a friend of the Arnolds. This ‘House of Paradise’ the older Arnold regretted visiting so rarely. The inflexible paternal severity resulted in the indolence and laziness with which Arnold, until his twenties, and before his father died, applied himself to his studies. At Rugby School, which he entered at fifteen years old, he was already, significantly, the protector of the weak. He composed Latin and even English poems earning his first praises, but he neglected Greek and did not receive brilliant marks. Beerbohm, the author of a later malicious satirical cartoon, wrote of a young Arnold who was never ‘wholly serious’ and who in the classroom made faces behind his father’s back. Only by a stroke of luck did Arnold win a scholarship to Oxford at nineteen, where he made friends with the unambitious, racked up debts through gambling, and imitated the precocious post-Romantic dandies wearing a monocle. He also read ancient Indian poetry and the novels of forbidden authors like George Sand. His companions were amazed to see young Arnold going trout fishing instead of revising for exams. More than once it has been noted that he was one

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of the few Victorians of his generation to let his religious practices lapse painlessly – with, as one of his poems reads, ‘sad lucidity of soul’. His father’s open and combative anti-Tractarianism had not kept Arnold from going to listen to the sermons of Newman in St Mary; indeed, perhaps it was the stimulus for doing so out of a pure spirit of transgression. His loss of faith, either that inherited by the Anglican Church or that of the more daring and seductive proposals of Tractarianism, or even that of the conciliatory and reductive secularized versions, was probably recognized and admitted to by Arnold in the metrically broken lines of ‘The Voice’, 71 a ‘voice’ which, in one of its figurative and symbolic meanings, that of the peaceful and relaxing moon-rays dying in the rough seas, is the correlative of the voice of Newman, who in 1845 was to leave Oxford and the Anglican Church – a voice therefore about to be silenced, but for Arnold never silent. At Oxford a friendship with Clough grew out of reciprocal devotion and esteem, but also in a climate of absolute frankness, which was also the cause of friction and strong divergences of opinion occasionally breaking out into ‘cowardly actions’.72 However, Arnold never ceased, until Clough’s early death in 1861, to comfort and advise his friend – occasionally even dedicating poems to him – both in the religious difficulties and the practical ones which tormented him. Clough was on the edge of a breakdown. Just like Tennyson upon the death of Hallam, Arnold confessed to Clough’s wife that he was ‘in some way too close’ to write a memoir of the deceased, and had to decline. 3. Frivolity and unexpected seriousness alternated in Arnold while a student at Oxford and immediately following his degree. At university he played the part of a poetic reformer who was a bit obsessed and presumptuous, combatting the conventions, which he traced back to Wordsworth, of poetry as a ‘thinking out loud’ and espousing a concept of art as verbal

71

Emerson’s voice had also gone silent, one that echoed with equal authority in Oxford for both Arnold and his friends. The prose version of the lines dedicated to Newman and Emerson is in the three American essays by Arnold, and above all in the third, ‘Emerson’. 72 LC, 63.

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artifice.73 He nourished the same neurotic solipsism of Tennyson and Browning; he longed to withdraw into himself and was uninterested in the life surrounding him, populated by utterly mediocre sights and by stupidity. Months would pass without his reading a newspaper, and he saw contemporary events as parallels of distant historical ones. Before his marriage or even immediately afterwards, he toyed with the idea of leaving England for Europe – Italy or his beloved Switzerland – like many English exiles of the recent past, inclined to prefer an uncertain life as an authentic artist to economic security at home. He did not graduate with the highest marks; once he graduated, he did not have a job, and in 1845 he was hired as tutor by his father’s successor at Rugby. He then obtained a fellowship at Oriel College in Oxford, like Clough. During this period he kept a diary where he transcribed Goethian maxims, spent time rereading George Sand, and discovered Sénancour. He continued to explore the works of Goethe and Spinoza. In 1846 he took a trip to France, the France of Louis Philippe, in order to meet the famous George Sand in person; he returned a second time in the same year, bewitched by the French actress Rachel. In 1848 in Switzerland, at the Hotel Bellevue in Thun, Arnold’s parenthetical experience of romantic, undisciplined and passionate eroticism opened, only to close exactly one year later. This episode was and remained wrapped in deep mystery until recently.74 Arnold decided to put an end to any romantic dreaming, resigning himself to taking up the job of inspector to earn a living, thus permitting him to marry the daughter of a judge, Fanny Lucy Wightman.75 Six rather sickly children were born 73 UL, 17. 74 The end of the idyll has been explained in various ways. Trilling 1949, 123, on the basis of the poetic image of the ‘kerchief ’ which covered her hair, suggested that Marguerite was a maid or governess; other critics believed that she was French and that the separation was due to religious differences – she a Catholic and Arnold an agnostic. It has been recently fantasized, following the obsession with finding dark secrets and censured scandals everywhere, that Marguerite was a prostitute (TLS, 21 June 1996, 17). On this, cf. below, § 156.2. 75 This was expressly confirmed by Arnold in a brief speech he gave during a welcoming ceremony on the occasion of his retirement as school inspector (12 November 1886; XI, 374ff.).

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to them, some of whom were struck down by strange conspiracies of fate. Through an acquaintance, when the Whigs returned to power, Arnold had obtained a permanent post as secretary to a Lord, which forced him to cut any remaining ties to Oriel. His appointment as inspector followed in 1851, and began with a mission, made relatively easy by the new trains, to Manchester and the schools of the manufacturing district. A couple of years were sufficient for Arnold, overwhelmed by his workload, to begin meditating on an escape to a tropical island and to confess, only partially facetiously, that he wanted to apply for the post of governor of the Mauritius islands. The only thing he obtained from Disraeli was an assistant. He often sought other positions, but without success; finally in 1870 he was promoted to Senior Inspector and to Head Inspector in 1884. The chair of poetry at Oxford, held by Arnold until 1867, required no more than four lectures a year, but was unremunerated, and he was not given leave from his duties as inspector. Only after the publication of Culture and Anarchy Arnold – who wrote in his spare time with considerable sacrifices, and as a lecturer even improvised without anyone realizing it – became a public figure, followed assiduously by the press in his movements and minor exploits. In time, he fulfilled his mission of educator and popularizer without neglecting the economic aspects, and did not refuse paid work such as contributing introductions to classics in cheap editions and anthologies. One of the reasons for which he contemplated his first American tour was the remuneration that was offered. The first lecture he gave was interrupted by shouts inviting him to raise his voice, and was received with a certain amount of disappointment at his shabby appearance. He spoke to the impressive total of 40,000 people, and returned to England in March 1884 having earned a net total of 1,000 pounds. During his stay, a New York lawyer had fallen in love with his daughter Lucy and came to England to ask for her hand in marriage. Before his second American tour, Arnold made his last trip across the Continent as school inspector, this time to Germany, where he attended a session of Parliament and listened to a speech by Bismarck, hulking, good-natured, and dressed in the uniform of a general; and he had in Dresden a brief and very formal encounter with King Frederick William. Like his father, Arnold died of a heart attack in April 1888 in Liverpool, collapsing to the ground as he was attempting to catch a bus.

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He had been drinking too much for too long, and had become obese, while as a young man he had looked like Edwin Drood. He wanted to end his days in Florence, the most beautiful city he had ever seen;76 instead, he was buried near the tomb of his children in Laleham cemetery, in the presence of Browning and Henry James. § 152. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 V: ‘The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems’. The triad of poems on controlled empathy and the ‘wide’ vision In ‘Alaric at Rome’, a prize-winning poem written at Rugby in 1840, though not reprinted by Arnold, who only in 1888 admitted its authorship, one recognizes, from its stylistic models and skilful rhetoric, a precocious fantasy on a Stoic leitmotif, the transience of greatness. However, the theme came to him, even without his admission, from Byron and even from the early apocalypticism of Tennyson. The poem, which in several places openly paraphrases Childe Harold, thus reveals the unsurprising survival of Byron almost twenty years after his death,77 and at the same time presents a second epigonic theme par excellence, which also emerges in the early works of Tennyson, that of the sunset of the heroic age. This was a very common key to the interpretation of the poetry of English post-Romanticism on the part of the poets of that period.78 The fame of the Eternal City was not all one of true glory, rather, already in its decadence it rested on turpitude and sloth. This decadence inevitably reminded the son of the proudest anti-Catholic Englishman of the later one of Catholic Rome. The Victorian stereotype of the ‘waste of youth’ and the Tennysonian ‘mask of age’, with the admonishment that one must treasure the time allotted and put one’s life to good use,79 were taken to the 76 L II, 364. 77 In the essay on Byron included in the second series of Essays in Criticism, Arnold confessed that he still remembered the ‘latter years of Byron’s vogue’, and that as a youth he felt ‘the expiring wave of that mighty influence’ (IX, 221). 78 With the complicity of recent Roman historiography (Gibbon and Mommsen, who had struck dumb Arnold’s father), which had imposed the rhythm and the same paradigm of the rise and fall of the great civilizations. 79 § 80.3. As a hypothetical spectator Arnold looks back at the ‘Energies wasted, unimproved hours, / The saddening visions of departing days’.

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letter by Rossetti’s brother, who in one of the first reviews identified the young author as an old man.80 The prevailing tone is not however one of moral castigation of the Roman world, but elegiac, and emerging from the sight of defeated Rome that overcomes the conqueror, who contemplates it without any tremor of empty jubilation. The rude barbarian is made to obey the paradigm of the sensitive and restless soul; he has a ‘troubled breast’ and longs for quiet, which he finds only in the tomb, in that legendary river tomb which was dug in the Burentinus. The ode ‘Cromwell’, with which Arnold – who was the first to be dissatisfied with it – won the Newdigate prize in 1843, also makes of the resolute Puritan general an iron-fisted man not devoid of sentimental tenderness, rather endowed with an ‘inward ear’ with which he listened to the voice of freedom, as well as with an eye that peered into the ‘common sights’ and ‘secret sympathies’ in nature. The bulk of the poem follows Cromwell’s vision, full of sweet memories as he faces the waves of the sea,81 when he was tempted to flee from his destiny and leave for America. Likewise he rejects this desire for ‘calm’ envisioned on the shores of the Thames, and, though late, and after an ‘unfruitful youth’, he leaps into action, behaving in the opposite way to the elegiac fatalism of Alaric. The poem had an assigned topic,82 and could only have a historical-descriptive development, where Alaric’s psychology could be freely and imaginatively reinvented; in its activist implications it is even unrelated to Arnold’s dawning philosophy of waiting. As a mature, historical and political essayist, Arnold would overturn this positive judgement on Cromwell and Puritanism, the nursery of nineteenth-century bourgeois philistinism. 2. The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, published in 1849 by his father’s publisher, and signed by Arnold only with his initials, included poems carefully selected among those which he had written since he was

80 CRHE 1973, 57. 81 Already ‘gleaming’, according to the typical Arnoldian motif of intermittence. 82 Cromwell was at the same time the hero-king of Carlyle (§ 20) and an anti-Tractarian bulwark at Oxford, where the ‘Newmanites’ reaped adepts and venerated the memory of the ‘martyr’ King Charles. The awards ceremony at the Sheldonian was disturbed and eventually interrupted by students.

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twenty-one or twenty-two years old.83 Like all the debuting Victorian ­writers, he had to adapt his semi-public poetic writing to a wider audience. The poems were in many ways the expression of a chorus of voices, that of a harmonious group of university students whose highest emanation was to be Clough rather than Arnold himself. Arnold’s poems circulated in manuscript among his friends at Oxford – just like those of Tennyson among the Cambridge ‘Apostles’ in 1830 – and many were composed for, and addressed expressly to them. One insistently evokes as listener and recipient his sister Jane; others are coded, effervescent dialogues, extemporaneous effusions, philosophical epistles in verse addressed to unspecified friends; still others, prevalently dense sonnets, were actually versified impressions of readings included in the university syllabus, or written out of pure personal curiosity. In a moment in which no publisher trusted debutants and first collections were often self-published, he could not deviate from the well-established ‘mixed’ formula, deliberately intended to cover a large spectrum of texts and expectations for a reading public which was both stratified and not overly fond of innovation. Wordsworth is a constant dialectic reference, and there are frequent concessions to colour and elegiac and pathetic elements. The shadow of Tennyson is apparent in the easy fairy-tale and even submarine nature and context of some poems, while some others are closely modelled on Homeric and Sophoclean motifs, or, going to the other extreme, take up current events from the standpoint of a solid, enlightened centralism. Yet Arnold’s collection was already less mixed than those of Tennyson and Browning after their respective debuts. Some of the first reviewers erred when they spoke of a ‘perverse imitator’ of Tennyson, because Arnold had immediately taken his distance from a poetry resolved in metrical exercise as an end to itself, and from the search for euphony and the exhibition of an archaic and scholarly lexis. As if sensing the accusation rightly made much later against Tennyson – that he was a poet without ideas or even ‘stupid’ – Arnold personally inaugurated that poetry of ideas which, within 83

Seized by fear and wounded by the critics, Arnold almost immediately withdrew the collection. In the subsequent reorganization of his poetry by genre – which, neglecting chronology, Arnold adopted beginning with his first complete poetry editions, in the wake of Wordsworth – some were expressly labelled as ‘early poems’.

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a decade, became the emblem and touchstone of great poetry in his critical essays. This was a poetry – and in a wider sense, a literature – that enacted and conveyed a ‘criticism of life’, making the poet a poet-philosopher, a poet-sociologist and a poet-diagnostician, and a student of mankind and of the conditions of living. This was a poet still romantically ‘different’, kissed ab ovo by the Muses with gifts denied to common mortals, whose main organ is a non-naturalistic, but rather ‘clairvoyant’ eye, yet also much less romantically so, that is less prepared to emphasize this difference, and never tempted to escape from responsibility. Arnold’s sister, Jane, was the first to be surprised by the swiftness with which a dandy and prig as her brother had been at Oxford – even a prankster who had never had much desire to study – could turn out poetry that was so carefully thoughtful, so filled with seriousness and sententiousness. 3. The problematization of Romantic Titanism and activism, as well as the redefinition of the role of the poet, are at the heart of a discourse whose conclusions are for the moment confused, open, provisional, even contradictory. Arnold never gives clear-cut answers, instead proposes blurred solutions, compromises and situations of uncertainty and conflict, hybrid figures and the atmosphere of the elegy. A triad of complex poems, meticulously studied by critics with far from univocal interpretations, discusses the poet’s status. They alternate between the Homeric recreation, the fable, and disguised autobiography, and with a dialectical path, not always following a straight line, they eventually bring the poetic ‘I’ to some detachment from Romanticism. The eponymous, still immature dialogic scene in unrhymed Greek metres, ‘The Strayed Reveller’, influenced by Arnold’s reading of Guérin’s ‘Centaure’, and very close to the theoretical positions of Goethe,84 is a confrontation between classical imperturbability and the call to social commitment. ‘The New Sirens’,85 undoubtedly Arnold’s most refined ‘artistic’ product and his most hermetic and cryptic poem ever, is an extremely veiled rite of passage from the daring, unharnessed youth to a more controlled maturity: a painful, not completely convinced refusal of the experiential life and of Romantic self-divinization and detachment. Finally, 84 Stange 1967, 16–29. 85 The poem is also reminiscent of an episode in the novel Lélia by George Sand.

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‘Resignation’86 is a laborious and often chaotic poem due to its unsuccessful sutures between recollection and didactic intention, but temporarily establishing the poet as a public epic singer and chronicler of human history, variegated with joy and pain. Such is the logical order of these poems in the light of the development of Arnold’s poetics, despite the fact that chronology is of little help or suggests a slightly different ordering of the three works. Significantly, Arnold placed ‘Resignation’ at the very end of his collection; he himself admitted that his poems contradicted one another as expressions of a reflection that was still fragmentary and in progress, and which it would have been a wasted effort to try to recompose.87 4. The problem faced in this triad – the opening of the poet to the world, but safeguarding the ‘quintessence’ of poetry – is therefore, with very few variations, the same Tennyson dealt with in ‘The Palace of Art’ and in other poems from the 1830s.88 The unity of this triad is increased by the fact that the three poems describe pilgrimages of apprentice or in pectore poets, and at least in two cases solitaries or foreigners who experience epiphanies when they ‘stray’ from straight paths. In the morning they leave the suburbs, or green heights or countryside cabins, and descend to the valley, to the populated city or to the sea, though repeatedly tempted to retrace their steps towards those solitary heights and panoramic positions. Formally, ‘The Strayed Reveller’ is a dialogic idyll in the style of Theocritus or Virgil, which allowed Arnold to stage a dialectical agon and thus deftly to camouflage his own point of view. Conceptually, from the mouth of the shepherd-poet lured to the palace of Circe where Ulysses, tired from his travels, is idling about, a development in three phases is outlined which follows the inexorable future of history and civilization: from the Greek gods to the Romantic poets to the ‘wise bards’ of the present or future. The gods are the historical, Epicurean gods of many incredulous Victorians, gods that taunt men and almost take pleasure in their fatigue; but they are also gods as poets and divinized poets, whose ease transfigures the humble and dignified efforts of men directed at material survival, an 86 On the meaning of the term cf. § 153.4. 87 UL, 18. 88 § 83.2–4.

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activity displayed before their eyes as if in a kaleidoscope of sculptured poses, polished neoclassical statues of demigods, centaurs and heroes, in twilit scenes veiled with melancholy. The unmoved vision of the gods is described by this innocent and natural poet, having been told of it by Silenus, his unheeded master. The shepherd boy exemplifies in fact the narcotic Romanticism of Keats, his abandonment to the orgiastic succession of ‘wild’ pictures and, intoxicated by wine, to the loss of any rational control. That form of inebriation and of obfuscation was feared and rationally rejected by Arnold, though also secretly desired; it cut off any ties to life by causing the subject to stray towards a world of purely voluptuous and isolating sensations. Circe’s kingdom represents the cessation of daily activity, and the youth reaches her palace where he no longer pushes away the cup of nectar from his lips, while he was originally directed towards a community meeting and a rite at the temple. The youth really stands for Arnold himself when, between sips of the intoxicating cup, he diagnoses, but is unable to embrace, a third path, the path of the poet who, obeying an unfathomable law, must now become one with the humanity of whom he sings, and in doing this grasps the corruption of the spectacle admired by the gods in its radiant and luminous immobility. He sees the poses beginning to move, with all the resulting negative consequences, like Keats missing the impossible fixity of the figures depicted on the Greek urn. The painful empathy, the concept that informs ‘Resignation’, is in ‘The Strayed Reveller’ so acute that the poet is continuously pushed back either towards the divine vision, which is ‘without pain, without labour’, or towards the Keatsian narcosis of Circe. The three visions face off without any interaction and without a synthesis, and the poem closes with the youth who, as he does at the beginning, tremblingly asks for the luscious cup. 5. Rossetti and Swinburne admired the magic and impalpable nature of the images and symbols of ‘The New Sirens’, its allusive and arcane plot, and ultimately the accomplished product of ‘pure’ art. Taken in isolation, some of its lines are among the most euphonic and the most enchanting of all Arnold’s poetry. Arnold, on request, had to write for his friends an explanatory synopsis which at least in part neutralizes and deflates the poem, and almost seems to be a commentary on a different text, thus constituting a case of self-interpretation and, inevitably, ex post facto deformation. The

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poem was later excluded by Arnold from his canon in the first anthological editions, and then put back due to the insistence of Swinburne; the author always looked at it with a certain detachment if not contempt, as a ‘youthful thing’. In the poem Arnold is a ‘strayed’ wanderer attracted once again to a palace, that of the sirens; he speaks now directly in the first person on behalf of a ‘group’ of poets; the poem is compressed in the timespan between dawn and the late afternoon and twilight, which represents the parable of a private and personal disillusionment as well as a historical perspective and the succession, regulated by a dialectic of intermittence, of the three almost Vicoian ages of man. The morning illusion regarding the sirens cracks because of the distant ‘sounds of warning’ at the approach of noon, and is dispelled in the evening disillusionment; the sober vision contrasts with the intoxicated one. In fact, the sirens represent another narcotic temptation, an appeasement of irrational fears and aporias and a path towards escape, and towards a guiltless yielding to the senses. The invitation to enjoy the moment and to settle in the enchanted garden is conveyed with words which look back to Keats, once again, and ahead to D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne and above all Pater (‘Only, what we feel, we know’). To the seduction of sensuality is added the fear of the sterility of the quest for knowledge, frustrated by a relativism which once again foreshadows Pater: ‘Opinion trembles / Judgments shift, convictions go’. By suddenly introducing the fearful metamorphosis of the sirens – from dazzling and seductive creatures into old hags, wilted like their own garden – Arnold painfully rejects that invitation, aware that those seductions will be answered ‘at God’s tribunal’, and convinces himself that they are but ‘fits of joy’ in their rhythm and in the blind and incomprehensible ‘flux’ of life. At the close of the poem, which added in the 1849 edition the subtitle ‘A Palinode’, Arnold sheds a harsh light on the sterility of mood changes that provoked in him a continuous coming and going of sensuality and repression, a seesaw between the ennui of the spiritual life and overexcitement, and the necessity for a mental and psychological balance. Indeed he predicts that this alternation – depicted with an astronomical image which Arnold was to re-use in his political prose, the zenith and the nadir, and an alternation that is after all a dialogue of the mind with itself – will turn out over time to be energy-sapping and even destructive.

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6. Woven together with equally cryptic uncertainty and addressing the same dilemma between Romantic escape and Victorian responsibility – including that of women and mothers – and between solipsism and communal life, is the fairy-tale poem, taken from Andersen but clearly reminiscent of Tennyson, ‘The Forsaken Merman’, which proved to be the most popular in Arnold’s first collection because of its anecdotal ease and its elegiac pathos. The sheltered life under the sea initially provides a refuge from the world to the young woman kidnapped by the merman until she, repentant, returns to face the responsibilities of life. As in Tennyson’s In Memoriam it is a sound – the church bells – that bring her back to reality; and her ‘mirror’, which reminds us of that of the Lady of Shalott,89 is the green, transparent surface of the sea. Is the act of the woman approved of or condemned? Andersen’s text underlined the opposition much more markedly, and Tennyson, too, insisted, in his pair of poems on mermen and nymphs, on the opposition between the civilized and repressive world of religion and the underwater pagan world, emblematic of free sensuality. There is in Arnold a complete separation between the two spaces: the merman waits outside the church where his wife participates in the service, without understanding the rites, which seem to him to be no more than lugubrious buzzing; reintegrated into community life the woman sings with joy only to sob as she looks out at the sea. This ambiguity is also camouflaged and exemplified by the mobility of the point of view. In ‘The Forsaken Merman’ the point of view is that, wholly critical, of the merman, who stigmatizes his wife’s perfectly conventional yielding to the call of community, and her refusal to continue her adventure in their fantastical and amoral world.90 Two choral fragments again featuring two

89 § 84.2. Of a pre-Wildean spirit is the supposition of the woman, who believes that she will lose her soul if she remains at the bottom of the sea, and is called back to fulfil her religious duties. 90 The little narrative parable from 1853, ‘The Neckan’ – which is indebted like many others to the same famous and fertile source of Pater’s Imaginary Portraits, Heine’s Les Dieux en exil – is a vision of the northern world. The conflict between past and present is switched to a spatial plane: the underground world is ‘kind’ while the Church, which should be the refuge of sinners, is represented by the priest who

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women, Antigone and Dejanira (written in the 1840s but published in 1867) also discuss two hypotheses which are by and large those of Romantic self-divinization and Victorian de-divinization. Antigone exalts sacrifice, obedience to the ‘primal law’ and to blood ties, values in line with Arnold’s frequent invitations to man not to exalt himself and tame his pride. Dejanira is a Tennysonian Fatima who waits and is consumed by mad Dionysian solitude, not heeding the oracles. 7. With his favourite sister Jane, his father and other mountain and nature lovers, young Arnold had once made a memorable excursion in the Lake District, which he repeated in the company of his sister ten years later (1843–1844). In ‘Resignation’, a rhapsodic and impervious Wordsworthian ode91 and at the same time an epistle in verse, the framework is no longer that of ancient myth but if anything that of modern myth, interwoven with an actual autobiographical event that makes it an ironic desublimation of the metaphysical quest of the Victorians.92 Jane, whom the whole family, without any apparent reason, called ‘K’, is poetically rebaptised as Fausta, with a nod to Goethe and a subtle criticism of her Romantic utopias (perhaps even slightly ventriloquial as we shall see) and which takes shape over the course of the poem after a long delay on the aspects, the forms and the glimpses of a virgin, rough, invigorating nature. ‘Faustian’ may be defined this sister’s ardent and irrepressible faith in the divine and demiurgic mission of the poet, who is the same Homeric and ‘Orphic’ poet, exalted and intoxicated, outlined by the words of the youth in ‘The Strayed Reveller’, whose ‘divinity’, by miraculously eternalizing him, subtracts him from human misery.93

91 92

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passes by the needy Samaritan. God must turn to the miracle – similar to that which happens in Tannhäuser – to convince his representative on earth to repent. This double parallelism with Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ is unmistakable. This theme is announced at the outset, in the long recollection of the valiant heroes and ancient knights, from the Huns to the crusaders, but it takes a comic turn with the ‘jovial host’ who loudly greets those who are departing for the excursion. This character is realistic and trustworthy, and the evident opposite of the ‘hoary cripple’ in Browning (§ 122.2). ‘Resignation’ is in turn a rehearsal for ‘Rugby Chapel’, which is also based on a symbolic excursion to the mountains (§ 159.4). For the classic-romantic dialectic of ‘feeling’ and ‘seeing’, cf. the excellent analyses in Bonnerot 1947, 292–4, and Stange 1967, 63–5.

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In the most explicitly didactic and catechetic section of the poem Arnold seems to be inclined to recommend an elusive and very difficult form of controlled empathy, by all means not a narcotic one. As in all the early Victorian poetic manifestos he dethrones the poet and tosses him into the fray of the contingent, from which, however, he will have to retreat to aim at a contemplation of ‘life in general’; this will appear to him no longer like a series of disorderly fragments but as a ‘placid and continuous whole’. Arnold does not deny that the poet is a Goethian ‘favourite of the gods’ and that he has a beating heart; but he grasps the sacred fire from the sky and returns among men and speaks to them in even-minded contemplation about the totality of life, which is by its very nature not only composed of joy but also, and unfortunately in a larger portion, of pain. The mountain walk symbolizes the circular path of poetic inspiration, because it moves from the plain to climb the mountain peak, the seat of inspiration and the home of the Muses from time immemorial, and then descends to the valley and the ‘noisy town’ of men, whence it climbs back up or simply from which it distances itself, earning a sheltered and panoramic position of newly ‘divine’ and classical impassibility.94 Arnold accentuates the social and socializing dimension of the poet’s role, who stays close above all to the people – who suffer more severely the laws of life’s misery – and can resist temptations of solipsism or secular power. These acrobatic formulations reveal Arnold’s secret intent to leave open and reconcile both solutions, even if the profession of a humanitarian, philanthropic, consoling, and above all politically active poetry, sounds a sentimental, rhetorical, and on the whole false note in the development of Arnold’s poetry. § 153. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 VI: The stateless cosmos and the philosophy of active stoicism Looking upon the degenerated world, fallen from its pristine harmony, chaotic and even devoid of meaning, and from the stance of a ‘resigned’, 94 In the sonnet ‘Shakespeare’ the playwright is a high and inaccessible mountain whose base is in the ground and whose peak is the only thing offered to the gaze of mortals. Shakespeare too represents ‘active’, indeed victorious ‘Stoicism’, one, in particular, victorious over pain.

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classical impassibility, was in truth the only possible solution, albeit not always attainable, for a sceptical and unbelieving Arnold just upon finishing his university studies. One of the intellectual sources of Arnold’s first poetic collection, if not the most influential, is that religious turmoil experienced during his university studies at Oxford and which very few of his peers were able to escape, sometimes with dramatic results as in the case of Arnold’s most intimate friend and classmate, the poet Clough. Oxford students in the 1840s witnessed the Tractarian wars only a few years after their first explosion; Arnold had already personally got to know these in his family, in the shape of the fierce disapproval of his father for Newman and the ‘Newmanites’; and he had seen them incarnated in the figure of his own godfather, John Keble. In the standoff between Anglicanism and Tractarianism and then Catholicism, Arnold ended up landing at a provisional profession of agnosticism. In the impossibility of cultivating a Romantic self-worship, he did not choose the soothing charm of revealed faith but sought an anchor in rules of life which could permit him to continue living, or surviving, in a state of waiting. These rules were found in the Stoic philosophy of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, in Indian esoterics, and in the eclectic neo-Stoicism of Goethe and Sénancour. His gospel of waiting proved frightfully ironic only two years after the Great Exhibition of 1851, which marked the apogee in the bourgeois attainment of a high standard of living. This was a proof of poetry’s extremely restricted range of resonance, in Arnold’s case almost exclusively the university intelligentsia. 2. The anonymity of the author of The Strayed Reveller, and the fear that readers might confuse the speaker with the poet, which so deeply tormented the post-Romantics and suggested to Arnold to hide his identity under his initials, is reflected and formally reinforced by some strategies which aimed to throw readers off the scent. For example, the religious inquiry is delegated to alter egos picked from often unlikely historical and mythological scenarios and from the most varied geographical climates, given the tight parallelism between the past and the present which was usual with the Victorians. In at least one case, the manuscripts reveal that Arnold only at a later time attributed his personal thoughts to fictitious characters. That is what occurs in the spasmodic hymn attributed to the monk Stagirius, in whom, as he explained to Clough, he had sensed the

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same discomfort that was torturing him. Just as the much more crucial ‘Victorian’ figure of Simeon the Stylites,95 Stagirius lives ‘alone’, far from the ‘world’s temptations’ of which the poet is a victim, only feeling ‘anguish’ and ‘torpor’; indeed he senses that God is distant and his soul proud and idolatrous, even if he would sincerely climb higher. In the third stanza the diction becomes litanic and heart-rending. In 1844, the date of the composition, Arnold, like the monk, lay in ‘athumia’, that is in a condition of passive, exhausted inaction. One of the reasons, if not the main one for which he lost his faith, was the quite common Victorian suspicion that God did not govern the world with enough love, but imposed upon it cruel, undecipherable laws, which Arnold could painfully verify in the premature loss of his father and in his first unhappy love affairs. That inequality of the law – which obscurely involved poets as well, and was the cause of their painful empathy – was also studied by Arnold – to prove it was universal – in its applications in successive cultures and historical periods: Egyptian law, Greek law, or rather that of ‘austere’ Fate, Christian and Muslim law. In each case man was faced with the alternatives of challenge or acceptance, which reflected the same dilemma between the divinized man of Romanticism and the new ethics and poetics of a humble and succumbing man and poet. ‘Mycerinus’ is directly assigned to the voice of the ancient Pharaoh, and in its first drafting it perhaps dates back to the time of the death of Arnold’s father (1843–1844). It is in Arnold a rare specimen of a dramatic monologue with a narrative coda, and it ultimately centres on the idea of a God who is not only the unfathomable God of the Old Testament – who systematically rewards the just with misfortune and bestows success on sinners – but is also the Lucretian god of Tennyson’s monologue of the same title and the minor, impotent god, subject to the jurisdiction of superior gods, of Browning’s ‘Caliban upon Setebos’.96 Mycerinus’ escape into the woods is an act of carefully studied revenge, but Arnold corrects the Epicurean hedonism to which he plans to surrender97 with the resist95 The figure of this saint is of obsessive interest to Tennyson (§ 87.4) and Hopkins. 96 §§ 99.2–4 and 124.6. 97 The poem obscurely alludes to a sexual prohibition (‘one short joy, one lust’), which is imposed directly by God, and that seems to be a prelude to God’s prohibition against his love for Marguerite.

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ance of a Stoic who is aware of his strength, and, thanks to it, is as unperturbed as an Olympian. In the slightly later Muslim anecdote ‘The Sick King in Bokhara’, taken from those travellers’ and explorers’ memories which obsessively inflamed Victorian exoticism, the problem of the law brings with it a paradox similar to those often found in Browning, that of the thoughtful, perplexed king who wants to disobey the law but ends up exposing its inflexibility by performing an unjust act, though he does so reluctantly (he orders the execution of an innocent or at least a confessed criminal of a crime which is certainly not one punishable by death). The compassionate king leaves a window open to transgression, but without being able to save the guilty party. 3. ‘In Utrumque Paratus’, the poem closest to the metaphysical meditations of In Memoriam which Tennyson was composing and completing at that time,98 contrasts, and finally extinguishes in its perfect formal balancing and in its argumentative articulation, the wonder of a direct and intuitive, Plotinian and Wordsworthian experience of the emanation of the cosmos from the paternal figure of ‘One all-pure’.99 He dismisses this hypothesis by weighing a different lineage, that of mother nature procreating in pain. Arnold repeated, in chorus with the naturalists and evolutionists, that all theories of a divine origin of man and of his heavenly destination were at least uncertain; but the least uncertain of the two genetic hypotheses was the first. As a pure phenomenologist, and no longer a Romantic, he posits in nature laws that do not correspond to human ones, and discovers the illusion of a morality in nature that originates instead with the observer.100 Nature is separated from God, like man, but does not suffer from it, being a collection of unconnected fragments to which and in which Arnold does not apply or discover that unifying plan, or that verticalizing thrust – from the fragment to the whole, and to the Omnipotent – which Hopkins and

98 The Strayed Reveller and In Memoriam were published only a year apart, and were due to similar autobiographical and affective events, the death of a loved one and disappointment in love. 99 A figure in which it is possible to see, with a quite functional ambiguity, his own father, who died in 1842. 100 Jamison 1958, 26ff.

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the other Victorian medievalists were able to see and experience.101 The absence of finalism in the cosmos, in created man and in history itself – a shocking perspective, tortuously discussed and ultimately defeated in In Memoriam – was accepted by Arnold without dismay, and lucidly analysed. His ‘calm’ in the face of the meaningless and undetermined becoming is the impassibility of the neo-Stoic and of all the Stoicisms of pre-Christian knowledge, or even of the subsequent philosophies inspired by Stoicism, which presupposed the utter pointlessness of action and longed for the estrangement from life. Arnold was however not so much a denier as, as I said, one who preferred to wait and see, who meditated at length before acting, and at times so deeply that he would procrastinate indefinitely a given action. The programmatic sonnet, ‘Quiet Work’, which Arnold placed later as the inaugural composition of the group of his early poems, and whose title is in itself an almost perfect oxymoron, hails the reconciliation of two ‘duties’ which should be fused but which the world and actual life split apart: hard work done in peace and quiet, and sheer abstraction preparatory for fruitful action, two principles also drawn from Krishna’s cryptic admonitions in the Bhagavad Gîtâ, one of those sapiential works read by Arnold in his university years. The first and deepest disagreements between Arnold and his close friend, Clough, arose on this terrain and on this dilemma. Clough was so willing to be caught up by the ‘flux of life’ that he set off in 1848 for France in order to follow the evolution of the Parisian insurrection from up close. Arnold’s political apathy102 – but not his belief in all forms of utopian and ‘active’ Stoicism – were quickly to dissolve like snow in the sun when the poet turned essayist and political commentator.

101 Miller 1979, 234, who rightly points out the purely enumerative and patternless character of natural descriptions in Arnold. 102 Also addressed to Clough are the two sonnets entitled ‘To a Republican Friend’, disputing the idea that revolutions were ‘stimulating’. In the first Arnold claims to agree with Clough on his admiration of human virtues, in his criticism of political myopia, in feeling compassion for the anxiety of the lower classes and worries for the future of Europe. In the second sonnet, however, he throws water on the fire, maintaining that nothing can be resolved by copying France, but instead with patience, an awareness of human limits, and negotiation.

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4. It was in the collection The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems that the most noteworthy and central symbol in Arnold’s poetry first appeared, that of the gypsy in which he synthesized the traits of this ‘active’, undiscouraged Stoicism, the only form of resistance to the aimlessness of life, and thus of survival. This character presented itself for the first time to Arnold when he was around twenty-one in the unforgettable, sad face of a little gypsy child in his mother’s arms. That was during a vacation on the Isle of Man, and Arnold was struck by his dark and mysterious face set in a mask of pain which by itself epitomized, in a sort of ‘foreknowledge’, both universal pain and the pointlessness of life.103 The amazement of the observer, translated into a long sequence of interrogations without answers, lies in the paradox of a childhood which is so prematurely senile, of a brow creased by ‘fantastic’ wrinkles and of childish eyes over which so many clouds have already gathered. Arnold explicitly assigns to that gypsy boy the disdainful ‘calm’ of ‘stoic souls’, with which, despite having lost all hope, he ‘proceeds to live’, not on the mountain tops but in the middle of the battlefield. The notion of ‘resignation’, later established in a confusing way by Arnold in the poem of the same title, actually excludes here its precise denotative value: in the argumentative opening of ‘Resignation’ Arnold explains in fact that it does not mean passive and disheartened impotence but rather a detachment from the chain of time. It implies acceptance of the transience of man as opposed to the natural cycle which is in a state of perpetual renewal, a truth that is stubbornly denied by all forms of Titanism and Romantic divinization, as well by Faustian hubris like that of Arnold’s own sister. The gypsies, who also appear in ‘Resignation’, and upon whose camps the two brothers spy during their walk – wanderers so very strange in those places that they seem purely instrumental – exemplify fixity as distinct from flux, and the unawareness, even the unconsciousness, of any sense of time, while Arnold’s sister is ‘Time’s chafing prisoner’.104 The consequence of this state of imprisonment, to which the gypsies are luckily not subject, is the 103 This fixity is then at the same time classical and romantic, because it is the perception of the totality, but of a totality of pain. 104 Cf. an acute analysis of the poem in Bonnerot 1947, 284–97. The gypsies, representing in the hierarchy of the forms of ‘resignation’ only an ‘interest turned to simple

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feeling of the weight of a world which is infected, perishable, unsettled, and excluded from any redemption; it is at the same time the extinction of everything existent, including man, into nothingness, or into an incessantly metamorphic, ‘Heraclitean’ fire, at the end of which there was not, contrary to what Hopkins was to announce, any resurrection. § 154. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 VII: Poems of the ‘ebb tide’ Arnold’s youthful exuberance disappeared almost totally with the collection Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems105 (1852), made up of compositions dating back to the three-year period from 1849 to 1852 alone, all of which – save two exceptions – are brief, even very brief poems drafted in the prevailing metric measure of the quatrain. They also witness the discontinuance of the extemporaneous digression into the exotic and the suppression of the dramatic screen. In fact they fearlessly choose the first-person mode, a painfully and thoroughly diagnostic voice, or are constructed in the form of a subtle, veiled dialogue, as allusive as it is tightly woven, with the great aphorists and essayists of history. These figures, at that time an almost daily reading, were later to be the subjects of intense study on the part of Arnold as critic. As a whole Empedocles is one of the greatest expressions of the Victorian poets’ psychological and social alienation, and more generally of the crisis of modern conscience. This conscience was that of the academic elite to whom Arnold belonged, but not that of the average man euphorically satisfied by the triumphs of technology, and if anything suffering from an opposite unbalance. In these poems Arnold touches the highest point, on the one hand of his reflection on the sterile elephantiasis of self-devouring thought, and on the other of the clipped impetus of the heart. This produces the paralysis of motion, a swinging motion like a pendulum, never really advancing, and represented by the very frequent, almost obsessive poetic image of the undertow. The final consequences of the instability of mood and cosmic drifting were foreshadowed, and survival’, differ at this stage from the ‘scholar-gipsy’; however, they are not his opposite, as Stange 1967, 61, would have it. 105 Like the preceding collection, this too came out anonymously and was immediately withdrawn from circulation due to bad reviews and poor sales.

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immediately overcome, in an objectification which was dramatic and no longer lyric and aphorismatic, that of the legendary suicidal gesture of the ancient philosopher Empedocles. He envisions – but at the end cannot manage to embrace – the very last of the illusions offered to the loss of faith. This illusion is represented by the collapse of every self-divinizing Titanism and by the re-inclusion of man in the natural cycle – a form of secular ‘salvation’ which will present itself with ever greater urgency in twentieth-century poetry. Empedocles was temporally delimited by crucial events both in the private and the public sphere. In 1849 the somewhat attenuated echoes of the revolutionary uprisings exploding across Europe reached Arnold; in 1850 Wordsworth died. On the emotional side the two trips Arnold made to Switzerland are of great importance. In September 1848 he met ‘Marguerite’ at the lake of Thun, and all we know is that the relationship ended exactly one year afterwards and in the same place, in September 1849; by June 1851 Arnold had already married Fanny Lucy Wightman. The Swiss idyll, sterile on the biographical plane, was instead a dynamic and propulsive force on the poetic one, since it resulted in a formally self-enclosed cycle of brief lyrical poems and a series of other poems more loosely connected to this experience, where pessimism becomes harsher and personal experience rises to a cosmic law. With a peculiar coincidence, the Switzerland of Marguerite was also that of Sénancour, the great melancholy and solitary nihilist of the pre-Romantic age. Arnold’s second and only other objectivization of these emotional turmoils is his pioneering reworking of the greatest and most fascinating of modern myth, the poem Tristram and Iseult. 2. Arnold’s stoicism could not stand up to the Roman insurrection of 1848 and to the assault of the French troops under General Oudinot, from which another and much more fervent spectator on site, Clough, took his inspiration for the epistolary verse tale Amours de Voyage. For a short time, Arnold continued to believe in the illusion of being able to live in an epoch of ‘concentration’ and temporal stagnation, in which he could freely indulge in the cultivation of his spiritual dimension, follow his own daimon and realize his own entelechy according to the teachings of Marcus Aurelius. That implied the failure of both active and resigned Stoicism which he had preached in the preceding collection. The year 1849

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was the year of his discovery of the fluctuating and unstable nature of the human psyche, particularly in modern times. Arnold the psychologist, who as an essayist would coin the theory of the two selves, speaks in ‘The Buried Life’ of a ‘buried stream’ of which man lives unaware, but that from time to time pushes him to plumb the depths of his consciousness. But those are ephemeral and rare self-epiphanies, which cannot compensate for the ignorance of one’s inner life nor for the almost Pirandellian alienation within another identity. In light of his failed relationship with Marguerite, Arnold also presupposed the incapability of penetrating and reading the profound mystery of the heart, his own and that of others. This unknowability is always imputed to God or in any case to a superior power. Short parables and apologies of a neo-metaphysical type, reminiscent of the false candour of Herbert, bring the perspective of the human being before God back to that of a new Tantalus, Arnold’s God always positing a desire but then prohibiting humans from reaching the desired object. These poems constitute the basis of Arnold’s theological thought, which was to be formalized more than twenty years later, and of an idea of God that already comes close to a mere historically anthropomorphized hypostasis, or to a pure synonym for the moral law. In ‘Progress’ Arnold, like all Victorians, emphasizes the temporal distance, ‘eighteen hundred years ago’, separating his time from that of Christ’s message, without however presuming its fatal outdatedness; to the contrary, the past is always ready to give answers to the present, and religion, every historical religion, was a therapy to heal the modern state of unease. A Lucretian god was at work, if anything (‘the Powers that sport with man’),106 a god not simply absconditus as for the majority of Victorians, but also unknowable, unpredictable, moody, and even sadistically capricious. 3. Apart from the two long dramatic poems that have at their core Empedocles and Tristram, two lyrics from the 1853 collection stand out from the numerous brief, gnomic and aphoristic compositions, the former for the wealth and pregnancy of its imagery and symbols, and the latter for its ample, personal discussion of a treasured and crucial formative experience.

106 ‘Destiny’.

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The first is ‘Dover Beach’, published in 1867 but written by Arnold in 1851 on the occasion of a brief trip to Dover with his wife, and the second the long ode in rhyming quatrains entitled ‘Stanzas in Memory of the Author of Obermann’. While differing in structure and style – the former synthetic and dazzling in its nocturnal and marine flashes, the other broad and comfortable in the flow of its memories and its argumentation – both involve one another reciprocally, as both explore, with the reinforcement of some precise lexical repetitions, the epistemological and psychological instability of modernity. ‘Dover Beach’, the most famous poem by Arnold, is in his poetry the most admirable and most successful combination of introspection and imagery – bare, essential, almost anticipating twentiethcentury Imagism – with lyrical evocation and erudite memory. ‘Obermann’ inaugurates in turn the most typical situation of Arnold’s later poetry, the dream-like apparition of a loved one while revisiting the places where he or she used to live. In this poem Arnold turns to Étienne Pivert de Sénancour, ‘the author of Obermann’, his most famous, indeed practically his only major work. Even if formally dedicated to this obscure writer – of whose rediscovery and re-evaluation Arnold became a supporter, and to whom he later dedicated a second homage and repeatedly referred in his essays – the Sénancour ode indeed furnishes an invaluable map of the influences and sources impinging on Arnold at the end of the 1840s, since it also includes a consequential and joint evaluation of Wordsworth and Goethe. 4. Only the occasional redundancy and some repetition of a purely prose-like type reveal that ‘Dover Beach’ had an extremely laborious textual genesis. In 1851, Arnold had already sketched out the final section, to which he later added, after his honeymoon in Dover, the twenty-eight opening lines. The poem, born of the fusion of these two fragments in the edition of 1867, with a delay probably believed to be necessary because of Victorian marital prudery, included important and fundamental textual variants. The aesthetic unity and structural cohesion, however, were almost miraculously left undamaged, indeed they were made much more powerful. The theme of instability is first and foremost concealed in metre and rhythm, the former irregular like the line of the coast and the other fluctuating like the tides. The soothing auditory atmosphere of a quiet and rocking barcarole of the opening, all played on a chain of elongated vowels, is gradually overlaid

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and superseded by strident onomatopoeias; the syntax picks up motion after firm and spaced out statements, and begins to follow a sinuous path, broken by parenthetical clauses and other interruptions. Descriptively, ‘Dover Beach’ initially presents a superficial immobility which is the fruit of an erroneous impression – or, as is immediately clarified, a lunar illusion: it is an immobility that hides within itself an incessant swinging pendulum movement, that of the tides, of the pebbles dragged out and drawn back into the bank. In the first five lines themselves, prevalent images of stability clash with, and are weakened by others of intermittence, above all that of light, those lights which also flash on the distant French coast.107 The marks of stability are deceptive and bring on momentary euphoria and well-being (‘calm’, then ‘tranquil’, and above all ‘sweet’), because both the powerful voice and the mute listener to whom the poet turns show us that the silence is illusory, broken as it is by the dull crashing of the tide that one can only hear by going to the window and sharpening ear and eye. The movement of the two persons in the poem, towards the window from the inside of the room, is an element of the poem’s reduced plot, but it must also be interpreted on a symbolic plane,108 as the exit from one’s absorption in a solipsistic dream and as a tentative contact with reality: the sound of the tide, earlier unheard, suffocated or softened, now suggests and irresistibly brings the ‘eternal note of sadness in’. In an overturned parallelism between past and present, such by virtue of the unrepeatability of the supreme, stable dominion of the world and of psychic life on the part of the 107 The motif of intermittence works both on the visual and the auditory plane: ‘glimmering’, an optical phenomenon, has an auditory counterpart in ‘tremulous’, while all of the verbs referring to permanence are in parallel with the ‘eternity’ of the sad note. 108 Before Arnold, Tennyson had based many of his poems on this act, going to the window and focusing both one’s gaze and hearing on a distant event outside. The character ‘staying inside’ always represents in Tennyson the solipsism of art and his/ her impenetrable, isolated absorption in the self; the character leaning out sees a spectacle that is unexpected, that surprises and often deludes him/her. Both in ‘The Palace of Art’ and in ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (§§ 83.3 and 84.2) reality is softened and made more beautiful thanks to its reflection in tapestries which are not necessarily truthful, or when filtered through a mirror.

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authentic classical spirit, the English poet on the Channel is incapable of reading and synthesizing that same ‘roar’ of the waves, that same symbolic ebb and flow of human unhappiness which Sophocles perceived looking at the Aegean sea.109 The northern sea is ‘distant’, both in a spatial and a temporal sense, from the Aegean of Sophocles; in his superior wisdom the Greek tragedian was capable, like other Arnoldian sages of primitive times, of discovering the cyclical mechanism of life and in particular the alternation between faith and doubt over the course of time, and consequently the certainty that phases of doubt inevitably would be followed by a resurgence of faith.110 As far as the poet of ‘Dover Beach’, and with still greater clarity Arnold the essayist are concerned, they note the ‘ondoyante et diverse’ nature of modern man already discovered by Montaigne and shared, after Arnold, by Pater.111 At the beginning of the third of the four sections, the sea, which was only deceptively calm, and tinged with a note of sadness, becomes expressly the ebbing sea of faith; the tide remains at the centre of the poem but only as a dysphoric image of retreat, a metaphor in particular of the Deus absconditus. The descriptive terms of the beginning recur, though now varied and modified in a far more pessimistic way, in a scenario which has become hallucinatory and apocalyptic: the sweet breeze has become a threatening wind, the massive cliffs are ‘vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world’. This overwhelming visionary descent

109 It is an innocent, justifiable case of poetic licence, often noticed by critics, that Sophocles should be able to perceive the rhythm of the tides in a sea like the Aegean which is not tidal. Sophocles could certainly have seen the flowing rhythm of the waves. 110 The famous definition of Sophocles in the sonnet ‘To a Friend’, that of a man who ‘saw life steadily, and saw it whole’, also has a more remote meaning, that of seeing life in the wholeness of its incessant rhythm of ‘highs’ and ‘lows’. 111 This oscillating nature was also an exquisitely ‘Celtic’ motif for Arnold, while the Teuton had no genetic predisposition towards these perceptions or mood swings (§ 165.3). In Arnold’s literary and critical essays, on the other hand, ‘fluctuation’ becomes a positive and strictly necessary element: the overused formula ‘a current of fresh and true ideas’ implies constant renewal, when instead the term ‘vortex’, a synonym for stasis, negates any dynamism of ideas (§ 165.3). Guérin will be seen as ‘a temperament which opposes itself to the fixedness of a religious vocation’ (§ 163.3).

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towards nothingness, which ends in a pair of ‘negative’ lines dominated by the formidable, pounding succession of no less than six occurrences of the conjunction ‘neither/nor’, suggests in nuce a secular gospel of discouraged Victorian immanentism. The world is neither varied, nor beautiful nor even new, is instead old, doubtful, restless, turbid, and subjected to pain, the opposite of that ‘charged’ world, and charged with the ‘grandeur of God’, and a world which is ‘fresh’, clean, and constantly renewed, as in a sonnet by Hopkins which seems a direct response to Arnold’s poem. Arnold can only posit the ‘truth’112 or constancy of human love in an irremediably unstable cosmos, as the only and the final antidote to nothingness. The celebrated Thucydidian simile that ends the poem – of the two armies fighting in the night – on closer inspection links back to the semantic field of the preceding ebb and tide images, because their movements, ‘ignorant’ and ‘confused’, imply alternating and chaotic phases of attacking and retreating; their ‘clashing’ denies any stasis and encloses within itself the idea of a vain and unfinalized movement.113 Thus a peaceful, tranquil coastal scenario bathed by the moon is gradually transformed, in ‘Dover Beach’, into a cosmic nightmare; but ultimately Arnold calls the former a dream and the latter reality. The defeat of the illusions confirms, however, their value and their importance; religious faith, too, was one of these necessary illusions, one of those forms of Aberglaube that the adult conscience historically rejected, but that had to be treated with the greatest indulgence, according to the future statements of Arnold the theologian. 5. In 1849 Arnold had visited the Swiss Alps, which meant for him the figure of the writer Sénancour and the pages of Obermann; and he had directly tested the effects and inhaled the scents which emanated from

112 The ambiguous term ‘truth’ has been exploited by deconstructionist critics (cf. Riede 1988, 196ff.) to bring the poem back to the motif of the language’s loss of referentiality and ‘truth’. ‘The Buried Life’ also indicates a ‘misunderstanding’ which is not just the incommunicability between lovers, but rather a linguistic misunderstanding, which may be ultimately overcome by love. 113 After the Second World War, ‘Dover Beach’ came back to the limelight thanks also to this ending, which seemed almost to foreshadow the Cold War between the two great superpowers (PGU, vol. 6, 83).

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both. His interest in the figure of the Swiss writer was focused above all on the latter’s analogous inability, in the age of advanced modernity, to find peace and face the world: only if read superficially could Sénancour’s pages give the impression of being the anodyne or sedative for anyone, like Arnold, on the quest for the unfindable ‘calm’; deep down there were heavy-hearted despondency and passive impotence when faced with the pain of living, and an incurable fever burned. As in ‘Dover Beach’, the surface, in the ode to Sénancour, does not correspond to the depths: the slope of the mountain is like the sea of ‘Dover Beach’, a blank page that inspires a soothing calmness with its stretches of snow, from which one seems to hear the pleasant rustling of the pines or the tinkling of the cowbells, but which in reality conveys from the depths a note of moral agony, complaints and sobs. The only comparable ‘seers’, even superior to Sénancour, were Goethe and Wordsworth. Goethe is the true counterpart of Sénancour, and in certain respects the belated protagonist of the ode. He had been a strong, free, far-sighted man, who had possessed the gift of the impassible, Olympic observation despite the tumult of his times, crossed by the French Revolution. Sénancour had come significantly later, in an age that was not much different from that of Arnold, an age of transition in which firm footholds were missing, as was the time to reflect and to grow. The dialectical argumentation of the poem revolves around the fact that Arnold recognizes himself too much in Sénancour, when instead he would like to be, but cannot manage to be, partly like Wordsworth and totally like Goethe.114 To give in to Sénancour was paramount to accepting a perilous philosophy of death, which in 1849 and in this poem Arnold could only temporarily counter with the soothing, illusory, but not actually 114 Arnold imputes to Wordsworth a convenient omission: he spontaneously cut himself out of modern life, living only in a ‘medieval’ interior dimension. Goethe is contrasted to Sénancour in the terms of a symbolic antithesis between the light and the fog which blanket the Swiss landscape. The comparison between Goethe and Wordsworth, with the addition of Byron and the exclusion of Sénancour, recurs in the elegiac lines upon the death of Wordsworth written in 1850. In them, Goethe, reason, stands opposite to Wordsworth, pathos; Goethe is the cold surgeon while Wordsworth eases the destiny of man, restoring to him the candour with which a child looks at the world around him.

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salvific power of nature. At the end of the ode, he understands the limit of this figure and of the Swiss landscape. His achieved distancing is demonstrated by his walking towards that world from which Sénancour taught that it was necessary to isolate oneself; Arnold decides, despite suffering, that it is still worthwhile to spend his life among men, and throws himself back into the fray. He also knew, intentionally using the first person, that his entire generation was as yet still immature and unprepared for this task. 6. Sénancour shared with Wordsworth, and like him had just experienced, some kind of faith in the soothing capacities of nature, the only consolation available to man, even if in the sole form of illusion and of ‘dreams that but deceive’. Inspired by the recent publication of The Prelude, Arnold’s ‘The Youth of Nature’ probes the hidden sources of the inextinguishable power of nature, and concludes that it bursts out, and reaches humanity, even without a Wordsworthian poet as intermediary: ‘the singer was less than his themes’.115 Like all contemporary sceptics, however, Arnold runs aground when faced with a nature that is itself subject to an unceasing but unfinalized becoming. The most complete Victorian valorization of nature was to be carried out once again in poetry by Hopkins in the sonnet ‘God’s Grandeur’, in which the eternal and never faded ‘freshness’ of nature, its ‘grandeur’ – even if subterranean (‘sunk at the core of the world’) – is guaranteed by the vigilance of the Holy Spirit. Equally reminiscent of this poem is Hopkins’s ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’, in which the wonders of nature are available to everyone, and only the ‘beholder’ is ‘wanting’. In his poem, Arnold repeats that the stars radiate all of their wonder only in the presence of their ‘observer’; and the poet is a surrogate of the Holy Spirit because he lends ‘a new life’ to nature itself. Arnold composed one of his many diptychs by uniting it with ‘The Youth of Man’, for the most part an inferior poem, in which immutable nature watches the evolution of man,

115 The resulting assertion is that it is not possible to reproduce the ‘shock’ of the initial inspiration, as Hopkins also would have it, and that during composition the inspiration cools, so art is fatally behind with respect to life, above all perceptive life. The aesthetic conclusion is that of a fatal inferiority of art to sensation.

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his errors and his repentances, among which those of the believers in their young age that nature was a fiction, a projection of interior wishes. § 155. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 VIII: ‘Empedocles on Etna’ and the tragedy of self-devouring thought Conceived as early as 1849 on the basis of Simon Karsten’s work on the fragments of the ancient Greek philosophers (1838) and of the life of Diogenes Laertius, the dramatic poem ‘Empedocles on Etna’, a real turning point in Arnold’s art and also his most powerfully ‘spasmodic’ work, was completed after the shorter poems of 1852. The poem, which soldered together fragments of an unfinished drama about Lucretius, was subsequently omitted in Arnold’s 1853 collection, and only excerpts were published in the 1855 edition; in its full version it was reinserted in the 1867 edition upon the insistence of Browning. In the 1853 Preface Arnold explained the reasons of his decision to exclude the poem, substantially and self-critically synthesized in the absence of an Aristotelian catharsis, or in other words caused by his own inability to extract from the events, and propose, truly decisive advice to action and a way out from the sterile and unhealthy vortexes of thought as an end for itself. But that reflection was made possible only after an evident Copernican revolution which was to lead to the abandonment of the poetic vehicle, and which was an actual, symbolic leap into the fiery crater of Etna, in order to come out of it regenerated. In Arnold’s poetic career this was his first work of vast proportions entirely set in antiquity. But in fact it was a modernized ancient world which acted as an allegorical framework for the situation of the modern conscience and for his own plight. Empedocles stands in part for Arnold himself who desperately wanted to resist the encounter with the world despite being isolated in his solitude, and who camouflaged in the philosopher’s suicide his masochistic, Romantic drowning in the self. Empedocles was indeed, as Arnold poetically imagined himself, a survivor in an age of transition and of extraordinarily rapid ‘expansion’, in which the parameters of life were changing and values were retreating very quickly from any form of stability. Arnold did not have qualms to admit in his letters that Empedocles’ dilemmas were his own and that the first of them was the ‘congestion of the brain’. Significantly the philosopher seeks an

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equilibrium between heart and mind that he cannot attain though recognizing it as necessary.116 A few years after Tennyson’s ‘The Two Voices’ and Maud, Arnold wrote his own poem about the Victorian suicidal aspiration; its difference to those poems by Tennyson and Browning is that it does not have a happy ending, and places the overcoming of that temptation and its healing outside and after the events narrated, in the preface which disowned the poem. 2. ‘Empedocles’ is divided into two acts in three scenes, which consist of dialogues and monologues introduced by brief, stylized captions and cadenced by the succession of the hours from sunrise until night. It follows, until the completion of the mad gesture, and until the real definitive disappearance of Empedocles’ body in the crater, the evolution and the consolidation of the suicidal design in the ancient Sicilian philosopher. The young harpist Callicles – a pure Arnoldian invention with respect to historical sources –117 is constantly hidden, and he never openly addresses the philosopher but sings to him while invisible, thus embodying the pure sound of the harp and a pure voice which flows to Empedocles from behind the scenes, coming from the shelter of the forest and later from the depths of the valley when Empedocles is on the crater. The function of this device, which is very effective from a dramatic point of view above all in Act II, is that of underlining the unbridgeable divergence of the two expressive systems and therapies – between analytical philosophy and song, between the dialectical interaction taking place between Empedocles and his pupil Pausanias on the one side and the solitary, oblique, dream-like and mythological voice of the harpist on the other. In this way, we have an unresolved 116 Thomas Arnold expressly recommended to his students (as we know from Stanley’s biography [quoted in § 8.1], vol. I, 360) the equilibrium of human faculties, condemning Empedocles’ disease (‘the undue predominance of mere intellect’, unaccompanied by moral sense). 117 In the sources, and particularly in Diogenes Laertius, Empedocles’ suicidal act is considered a trial and a challenge, aimed to demonstrate his own divinity, whereas in Arnold it is a sign of defeat. The historians placed much more emphasis on the supposedly divine origins of the philosopher, which was underlined by his style of dress: on his head he wore a golden diadem, on his feet bronze sandals and on his arms Delphian lappets.

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oscillation between a schematic drama exclusively for voices, three in total, and the attempt to attain a more precise, more detailed and more fully characterized dramatization. Still, ‘Empedocles on Etna’, alongside Merope, remains the most advanced attempt made by Arnold towards the rebirth of the theatrical art in which he was such a fervent believer. Arnold himself acknowledged in the preface these formal shortcomings, speaking of a play which was ‘general, indeterminate, and faint’, without the gift of particularization. Callicles is also the only one of the three characters endowed with traits of genuine humanity: this emerges in the few lines that he exchanges, immediately at the beginning, with cowardly Pausanias, when his impertinent but very intuitive naturalness provokes an explosion of ire in the latter, in lines which are casual and quick, even interspersed with the occasional burst of humour. But the solos of Empedocles become increasingly more intrusive, perhaps because they represent the most ancient layer of this text, when Arnold’s meditations had not yet been transferred to his alter ego. This work of inlay and adaptation damages the poem, often rendering it disjointed, at times powerful, at others forced. The second of the three scenes, above all, in which Arnold openly elects Empedocles as his mouthpiece, is marred by repetitions and recurrent prolixity (Arnold, in fact, accused himself in the 1853 preface not only of ‘something morbid’ but also of ‘something monotonous’). The singing parentheses of the harpist Callicles have a true musical function, and are an almost symphonic counterpoint creating contrasts in tone and relaxing the tension; but taken on their own they are, as noted, separate frames, polished and dream-like tableaux transcribed from Pindar and Ovid, which were later successfully extrapolated from the poem. 3. Empedocles was in the air in the early nineteenth century, and Hölderlin had written a tormented and ultimately unfinished poem on this figure, which Arnold, so interested in German literature as he was, may have read, abstaining from imitating it.118 The Romantics saw in him yet another embodiment of the Titanic challenger of the gods, and a multi-faceted character who at the same time was philosopher, mystic, thaumaturgist, 118 See Miller 1979, 218–19, and Miller 1985, 18–19, for an analysis of the two works and for a synthetic comparison.

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the inventor of medicine and a democratic politician who refused to be crowned king and voluntarily went into exile from his native Agrigento, dying a suicide or, according to another source, in the course of a sacrifice. As a counterpart to Empedocles and Pausanias – who represent reason, or in the case of the latter false or presumed reason – Arnold needed a figure that could be pure emotional stupor, feeling, sense perception and nothing else: an expansive figure moved by the wonders of nature which is transmuted for him into an Eden in which it is pleasurable to linger early in the morning.119 The poem opens in medias res with a summary of the background events, in which Empedocles does not appear. A full, soothing unison with nature is created and reinforced through the words of Callicles himself, a cure which, according to him, could heal Empedocles, if only he could watch nature with his own eyes and the same openness of spirit, whereas medical science presumes that healing depends on an intensification of solitude, not on jovial company. The harpist’s ingenious intuition allows him to conclude that Empedocles’ discomfort is endogenous, ‘in himself ’, in his self-devouring mind, which can only be healed by detaching its obsessive attention from itself. The symptoms proclaim Empedocles, who lived in an age only a little later (but already irreparably so) than Attic classicism, already a victim of the modern oscillation of moods unknown to Sophocles and the great tragedians and sages of antiquity. Empedocles’ ‘fixedness’ is by now only that of pessimism and misanthropy, which, according to the physician Pausanias, Callicles can at best ‘soothe’, and that Empedocles and only Empedocles can eradicate. While for Callicles the philosopher is a fallen and exiled god, an ‘orphan’ with no father, and thus perfectly a man, for Pausanias he still is a thaumaturge, a divinized man

119 The synchronic opposition in ‘Empedocles’, between asphyxiating rationality and complete self-abandonment to the senses, is reminiscent of the final overcoming of sterile cerebralism in Browning’s Sordello (§ 114.1) by means of the acquisition of the wise, joyful candour of Pippa (with whom, it has been noted, Callicles shares many traits). On the other hand, as I shall notice, Empedocles comes close to the contemporary ‘spasmodic’ character, central in several minor poems of the period (cf. §§ 224–228), and to Browning’s Paracelsus as well. Obviously, the harpist has a distant similarity to a character appearing in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.

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who has performed the miracle of resuscitating a woman from Agrigento who lived for thirty days in a ‘cold trance of death’ – a story Pausanias, like a morbid Karshish from Browning,120 would have retold to discover its secret and know how human power can withstand the gods, bearers of evil and misfortune in the world, and how to placate them. In the second scene Arnold, switching from blank verse to stanzas of six seven-syllabled rhyming lines, has Empedocles play himself the harp and intone a lengthy maieutic and didactic episode which is perhaps Arnold’s only falling off into the worst sort of Browninguesque philosophical ‘rumination’. From being sick, Empedocles passes to the provisional role of the physician of a patient who is even more ill, to whom he dispenses wisdom, moderation and dispassionate resignation. Betraying his frustration and preparing the tragic acme, he is soon after the first to disobey his recipe, precisely because he confronts himself with the lucid analysis of the fluctuating nature of his psyche and of the unattainable stableness of mood and intellect, or of the abyss between thought and action. Empedocles admits that Callicles is right to recognize the hypertrophy of reason and the need to discipline it, combatting divinization and Faustian aspirations, and concludes that reason is a gift of Lucretian gods, which can turn upon its recipient becoming a curse. Callicles’ first melic intervention, which at the outset of the poem greets Empedocles and prepares from afar his entry onto the scene, is a transposed invitation to calm in the placid splendour of nature and in the form of arcane mythological stories representing yearnings for rest; they are subtly curative for Empedocles who would wish to listen to them. The closing song of the second scene – telling of an Ovidian, cryptic metamorphosis of Cadmus and Harmony into ‘breathless quiet, after all their ills’ – has again the function of a tragic and vain counterpoint. 4. The final scene of ‘Empedocles on Etna’ is one of the last nineteenthcentury ‘grand style’121 revisitations of the myth of the dethroned Prometheus, as a man and a poet. It is vaguely similar in its plan and assumptions to the final scene in Browning’s Paracelsus and in Dobell’s Balder, whose common model was Goethe’s first Faust. The three scenes represent 120 § 122.6–7. 121 A term soon theorized by Arnold (§ 161.5).

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in succession, and complementarily, the three chief faces of the polyhedral character. In the first, we have Empedocles the physician, in the second Empedocles the philosopher and natural scientist who studies the cosmos; in the third Empedocles the poet, who expresses historically his philosophy in two fragmentary short poems. For his part, Callicles, a close relative of the ‘strayed reveller’, moves in truth a step ahead, because he is a much more controlled, Apollonian poet. He is, like the ‘reveller’, a verbal decorator, a storyteller, skilful in presenting colourful myths in polyptychs where pain and joy appear to be miraculously calmed, as if by a cathartic effect, in the veil and with the filter of musical art. Callicles is an Apollonian poet not only because he sings of scenes and episodes related to the haughty and imperturbable figure of the god of music, but because he always manages to channel images of conflict and disorder towards a supreme recomposure of a classical, elegiac or graceful nature. Instead, Empedocles is also like the tuneless, defeated Marsyas, a satyr and follower of Dionysus; he is a Dionysian poet, irrepressible and untamed, seeing perpetual conflict in the world. Nonetheless, Arnold does not fail to reveal that the Apollonian serenity of Callicles, who constantly sings of dream-like evasions into myth, is only possible in the form of a youthful exile from the world, and that for him, always a symbolic, hidden inhabitant of the valleys and the lowlands, the arduous heights of thought are out of reach.122 5. What Empedocles has drawn up, as the first reviewers noted, is hardly the last will and testament of an imminent suicide; and yet, in the third scene, we see him surprisingly alone next to the crater at night, and we hear him vow, in a monologue that rises to the heights of the authentic tragic solemnity, never to see another human being, and to annihilate himself. That resolution is the sheer consequence of his oscillating nature. His suicide is then in its intentions much more cathartic and less sterile than Arnold believed it to be in his own self-criticism, because it is at the same time a sacrifice to benefit humanity, with a distant similarity to that of Christ. Empedocles on the edge of the crater is surrounded by vulgarity, seeking solitude but unhappy nonetheless, and having reached the

122 Kermode 1971, 24ff.

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conclusion that he can neither live alone, nor with others, any longer. In the scenic setting of the act, he experiences and almost gives in to the seduction of music; the voice of Callicles echoes in the night as he sings about Typhon, a Promethean and Titanic image of eternal, irrepressible rebellion, the symbol of Empedocles himself in his aversion to ‘calm’ and ‘repose’. Loathing the world that abhors greatness, Empedocles removes the signs of his own self-divinization, while in an intense contrasting song Callicles tirelessly plays his harp, by now inaudible, and sings about another exemplum, the compassion of Olympus for the defeated Marsyas. Empedocles also removes, finally, the Apollonian laurel wreath of the harpist, tired of solitude, and of a poetry celebrating the exclusive cult of the divinized self that keeps ‘aloof the profane’. The dilemma is unsolvable: among men he would at least be able to take his gaze off himself, until ‘the absence from himself, / That other torment’ would ‘grow unbearable’. The psychological mechanism of volubility, created by ‘oscillations’ which, he realizes, only death can take away, is the same one (‘miserably bandied to and fro / Like a sea-wave’) expressed in ‘Dover Beach’ with the image of the tides. In an amazing prefiguration of ‘homeless’ thought, which links back to a similar image from ‘Dover Beach’, Empedocles only glimpses the nightmare of a wandering mind and of a man who is prisoner of his psyche; and he knows that life will begin again with a new, fatal descent of the mind into life, leading to a new and vain attempt at equilibrium and unity with oneself and the world. Echoing ‘Resignation’, Empedocles foresees an even further deterioration of this situation of conflict. His suicidal act receives a final and at this point tardy comment in Callicles’ song, constantly shaped by the ebb and flow paradigm and by that of chaos and the following clearing up: from fiery and boiling Etna the song reaches Mount Helicon, the flocks of sheep watched by shepherds, and Apollo’s train. § 156. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 IX: Arnold as Tristram, and the two Iseults Between and after the two trips to Switzerland in 1848 and 1849, and before and after his marriage, Arnold kept a thick diary of love poems, or little songbook whose recurrent and general theme is frustration, a frustration which, when he analysed it, eluded any specific explanations owing to

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the mood swings which were typical of him. Now a dark power, confusedly identified with a divine prohibition, blocks the free release of his sensuality; now Arnold reprimands himself for his weakness, his scarce virility, and above all his repugnant actions; now he blames everything on women, all of them contemptuous, haughty, indifferent, and fickle. In this inflamed condition this fickleness becomes a cosmic law; the heart is always rebellious and uncontrollable and it is impossible to eternalize Romantic love, by its nature always transient and fleeting, inevitably leaving man alone and alienated from himself. Such erotic pessimism feeds and embitters the existentialist sense of precariousness and debility of the human condition. Nothing substantially changes in this picture as one passes from the first to the second of his loves, from his first affair as a repressed Romantic and his second as a satisfied bourgeois. These love poems are in fact subdivided into two cycles with very hazy, unclear borders, and they effectively combine, in a very modern way, a gnomic vein with a lyrical effusion and a sober anecdotal line.123 2. ‘Switzerland’, the cycle of love poems specifically dedicated to ‘Marguerite’, was nervously reorganized by Arnold in the later poetic editions; some poems belonging to it were inexplicably removed and then readmitted. Marguerite was only the Goethian nom de plume of a woman who – one may suspect, in the absence of any definite clues in Arnold’s diaries and letters – triggered an overwhelming passion in him, although when he spoke of her to Clough he adopted a somewhat distant attitude. It is by now a matter of relative certainty that Marguerite was an Englishwoman of French origin whose pseudonym was inspired by her sympathies for pre-Romantic and sentimental literature from Rousseau to Foscolo.124 Altogether, the 123 Arnold’s love poetry begins with the 1849 collection, following the graceful taste of the Biedermeier and of the idyll with the poems ‘A Memory Picture’ and ‘A Modern Sappho’, the latter his only example of a dramatic monologue in the collection, and a poem describing a spasmodic and resigned waiting which reflects the manner of Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’. Further back, ‘Switzerland’ recalls Wordsworth’s Lucy poems and the German Lieder cycles (Stange 1967, 221ff.). 124 ‘fain / Would these arms reach to clasp thee! / But see! ’tis in vain’, from ‘Parting’, is a likely citation from Foscolo’s sonnet ‘In morte del fratello Giovanni’: ‘ma io deluse a voi le palme tendo’.

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eight brief and sometimes very brief lyrics constitute the assessment, and ultimately the dismissal of isolating love in favour of the superior and imperious needs of a less exclusive one; or the definitive rejection of the Romantic paradigm of irregular and passionate love which, in his life, could burst out only during the exceptional circumstances of a holiday. ‘Meeting’ sings in limpid and fresh lines the delicate, languid, pale, blue-eyed figure whose beauty is ‘unalterable’ in time; enamoured, he feels attracted to her but senses this attraction to be sinful. The Victorian theme of forbidden love is tied to the Lucretian theology of a sadistic and frustrating God who invites the poet to reflect and ‘retire’, provoking a timid challenge. What is hidden behind the divine prohibition? Perhaps the same fear of pre-marital sex that was felt by Micerinus, or will be by the sisters of ‘Goblin Market’ and more generally by Christina Rossetti’s peasant girls. The eternalizing of love and within love will be revealed, immediately after this poem, to be illusory and impossible, but even here it is threatened; this lyric alone sings a temporary satisfaction – all the others acknowledge the breaking of the spell. In the stanzaic and metrical alternations of ‘Parting’, the surrounding Swiss landscape becomes suddenly stormy and darkly autumnal, a sign of the march of a time that Arnold had believed to be still. The shadow of the woman is projected like an epiphany onto the hotel room, and her lips seem untouchable. The dilemma is now between enjoying pleasure and obeying the inner imperative and the divine prohibition, a dilemma resolved in the ‘calming’ embrace of Nature, the only immutable and constant entity, and thus the only one that cannot disappoint him. Arnold has in effect on the one hand ‘retired’; on the other, he denies the inalterability which was intoxicatingly exalted in the preceding poem. An ambiguous allusion may cause us to suspect that Marguerite was either believed to be, or truly was, a loose, promiscuous woman, kissed and embraced by others, a woman with a ‘past’; these perfectly bourgeois qualms invite the poet to reflect. Female, and also male, fickleness shares the responsibility with the ultimate unknowability of the heart. ‘A Farewell’, in its metre and prolixity a clumsy and lachrymose transcription of a farewell letter, marks the end of the Swiss vacation and Arnold’s leave-taking from Marguerite, describing first, with minutely detailed realism, his preparations for departure, with the horses being tied to the carriage and the convoy’s march towards

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the wooden bridge. The poet blames the separation on Marguerite and, diagnosing it, derives from it the general law of the transitory nature of feelings: the heart is at its core rebellious and turbulent, and women fragile and lacking in self-control. In this relatively succinct poem, Arnold lays out the same analysis found in ‘Empedocles’, the parting of reason from the ungovernable heart, whose feverish unpredictability impels one at times to pluck it out of himself. But indirectly it diagnoses also the weakness of contemporary virility, which raises the hope of a strong man, and a stranger to doubt. In this analysis one can read on the one hand the Victorian fear of the feminine and on the other the clear admission of the inexperience and immaturity of Arnold and his generation, incapable of controlling ‘too strong emotion’. More prosaically, he reprimanded himself perhaps for not having been strong enough to stand up to his family; so this cycle too is, in its admissions, a little rite of passage and an approach to adulthood. The text remains purposefully evasive about the determination of the responsibility of the separation, which might have been a refusal on the part of Marguerite, the opposition of his parents, a new divine prohibition or even the ‘raving world’, that is the bourgeois conventions. The Goethian ‘affinities’ between the two lovers who now bid each other adieu, undiscovered now, will be understood in the afterlife, but too late; like Dante and Tennyson, and as in the almost contemporary ‘The Blessed Damozel’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (which uses the same astronomical and musical metaphors), Arnold lingers on this otherworldly, harmonious and musical reunion among the stars, which also represents the conquest of the ‘calm’ of which the Earth has become so thirsty. Only in the post-mortem reuniting will the ‘smile’ appear on the lips of his no longer sullen and strict Father, and love will be sublimated in a harmony of sweet dematerialized thoughts. 3. The poem ‘Isolation. To Marguerite’, though not included in the ‘Switzerland’ cycle, forms ideally part of it; for understandable reasons it was excluded from the 1852 edition (Arnold had married in the meantime) and only inserted in the later ones. The poem, initially a poignant expression of regret and of the smouldering insecurity that threatens human love, suddenly falls, however, into cold and cerebral mythological and metaphysical flourishes.125 The dream of an isolating love, increas125 The prop of the similar love of Selene for Endymion seems completely artificial; Selene leaves her starry heights, but ignored how vain the love of mortals was.

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ingly stronger and more constant in time, in exile from the world and nourished only by itself, even if frustrated and without hope, is subject to the misunderstanding described in ‘Parting’. The heart neither knows the heart of others nor itself; moreover, according to the metaphor of the tides, nothing in feelings is stable, so the heart remains solitary, returning to its solipsistic sphere, after having left it to escape ‘where passions reign’. The alienated heart, which cannot meld with other elements which repel it, can only find relief in the unawareness of this isolation or in the illusion that it does not exist. This poem, in fact, adds to the rebellion of the heart its foolish desire for solitude and isolation, never abandoned without shame. In the much briefer and more finished ‘To Marguerite–Continued’, which in 1852 had a more circumstantial title that alluded to Marguerite’s restitution to Arnold of the copy of Foscolo’s Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, the poet by now seeks the antidote to solitude, which looms in the sensation of cosmic unity already postulated in ‘In Utrumque Paratus’, namely the sensation of being ‘parts of a single continent’, which is however in reality an ephemeral illusion caused by favourable weather conditions. Arnold was to bid his final adieu to Marguerite more than ten years later, in a serene, dreamy, exquisite elegy, interwoven with sober images, ‘The Terrace at Berne’. Nothing had changed in those places that witnessed the birth of their passion, only Marguerite – who in his recollection seems to have something different in her smile and in her hair – was absent; perhaps she is even dead, and in any case ‘Passed through the crucible of time’. The poet manages to overcome the experience of pain and to bid farewell to his Swiss love, aware of the changeability of human things. Ten years earlier he had romantically sought an eternalization of love; now, more mature, he knows that Marguerite too is subject to the laws of time and that if he saw her again he would notice the ravages of time on her flesh, even the make-up to hide wrinkles, or even probably a more vulgar laugh. 4. In the sixth poem of the Marguerite cycle, ‘Absence’, one woman forces out the other: Fanny substitutes Marguerite, and we see this change from the colour of the eyes, blue eyes and grey ones which are superimposed the ones on the others. This almost cinematic fade-out has an extremely important function, and appears in other intentionally vague poems where it can have a double meaning, pointing to the first or the second woman, whose love continued to bear signs of frustration and instability. In these poems, which have for titles the names of contemptuous and coldly chaste women, and which range from reality to fantasy and to transfiguration,

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there is perhaps the distant influence of Tennyson’s much more substantial but still imaginary series of little ‘portraits’ which described common women but much more often haughty and unreachable ones.126 The five idylls of a later cycle, entitled ‘The River’, and which one could rebaptise as the cycle of Fanny, clearly reflect a crisis in Arnold’s second relationship. The poems describe an unhappy, frustrated Arnold, perhaps due to the refusal of Fanny’s father; having lost that ‘calm’ and that abstraction from things which he often invoked, he felt a man on the edge of a collapse, and darkly harbouring suicidal thoughts: ‘some find death ere they find love’. The first of these poems tells of a happy boat ride on the Thames in a sunny August, with the poet waiting devotedly and faithfully that his beloved turn her face and gaze towards him; in the meantime he stares at her, memorizing each minute detail of her countenance. The little, still picture suddenly becomes unstable and the vague sensation or even the well-founded suspicion arises that the woman is a belle dame sans merci, because she does not turn. Finally the man despairs of obtaining her love before his soul is reincarnated and his heart ceases to beat. As a result, the other idylls insist on the stoic but vain necessity of eradicating even the memories of a happier time.127 5. ‘Calais Sands’, written in 1850 but published in 1867, because it too betrayed a moment of trembling nostalgia for the past and a passion not yet spent, seems to be a kind of companion to ‘Dover Beach’. It is an invocation that the beloved be present to help the poet fully taste the past which still pulses through the streets of the French city. In this poem the spirit of Tristram is already in the air. The woman is the first Iseult, and Arnold, like Tristram, waits on the shore for her, heart-wrenchingly longing for her 126 § 81.4. 127 ‘The Church of Brou’, a tripartite poem based on Swiss stories and scenes and included in the 1853 collection, harks back to the theme of conjugal love but also to the recollection of Marguerite, though objectifying both. It is a subtly masked autobiographical wish that the duchess of this poem, who bears the name Marguerite, should venerate a lost spouse by erecting a monument which can survive the test of time, thus eternalizing an earthly love. Moreover, the heavenly reunion confirms the hoped for desire expressed in the last poems in the Marguerite cycle, that is that she and Arnold would continue loving each other and more fully realize their love in the afterlife.

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arrival and staring at the horizon and dreaming, almost hallucinating that a spot on the horizon is the ship which is bringing his beloved back to him. The poem could in fact represent, yet again, a case of functional ambiguity and highly suggestive overlapping, repeating as it does the fading in and out of the grey and the blue eyes in ‘Absence’. To decide which of the two women is hidden in the person that the poet on the coast desperately longs for is not, and maybe it was not meant to be, easy. The pair of final lines, in which there is a foretaste of the reunion of the two lovers under the same roof, is however much more suggestive of a yearning for an intoxicated, clandestine rendez-vous with Marguerite.128 From Calais, and after this dream-like encounter, Arnold proceeded towards the Rhine, where he composed ‘On the Rhein’, which symptomatically underlines the need for self-mastery and for the ability to withdraw from the vortex of obsessive and sterile thoughts. One of the two Iseults arrives yet again like a healer and a balm – ‘A messenger from radiant climes’, even only in a dream – in ‘Longing’. The dramatic poem Tristram and Iseult was thus in the first place, like ‘Empedocles on Etna’, an objectivization of Arnold’s relationship with Marguerite and of the engagement and marriage to Fanny. Arnold reflected himself, according to the same asymptotic procedure of ‘Empedocles’, in the symbolic, fatal weakness of Tristram, in his delirium and in his regrets for an unrepeatable union. The self-curative value of the poem – focused on the figure of the second Iseult, wife and mother – consists in the exit from an emotional turbulence and in the reconquering of stability – or rather from a fiery and irregular passion to a starchy marital union. Due to an almost studied turn of fate, Arnold got to know for the first time of the story of Tristram and Iseult from a 1841 issue of French magazine, during his second stay in Thun in September 1849, when his separation from Marguerite was imminent and in a moment in which the prospect of conjugal love as a counterpoint to romantic adventure was beginning to gain ground in him, even if it was not yet filled with the right person. 128 Until only a few decades ago, critics usually resolved this ambiguity by pointing to the chasteness of the desire and by identifying Fanny in the woman arriving. The objection that Marguerite could not come to Calais from England fell apart, among other things, when the biographers verified that she was an Englishwoman.

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Arnold seized upon the Tristram plot and only later, upon his return to England, opened Malory’s work, which he had never read. Reading Arnold’s Tristram and Iseult after listening to Wagner’s opera creates the impression of something dull and tame. Unlike in ‘Empedocles on Etna’, Arnold opted for a desublimated, soft and demure diction interspersed with colloquial inflections and occasional echoes from naturalist melodrama; and he mixed the dramatic with the narrative with the interventions of an invasive offscreen voice. The importance of the poem, apart from its autobiographical reverberations, is above all historical, because much earlier than Tennyson’s ‘The Last Tournament’, or even than Morris’s and Swinburne’s reworkings,129 this is the first treatment of the Arthurian myth in Victorian poetry. 6. Tristram and Iseult begins where Wagner leaves off, but it also harks back to the final scene of ‘Empedocles on Etna’: Tristram, who like Empedocles is close to suicide, has put aside the signs of his past splendour – his hunting clothes and also his harp; he is on his deathbed and tremblingly awaits the Irish Iseult, the first Iseult, and he is cared for by the patient, second Iseult with the White Hands. Clumsy questions from the voice offstage, which stands for that of a Greek Chorus, guide us to the recognition of the knight and his devoted companion, who is the wilted flower (‘gloom’) as compared to the newly blossomed (and perfectly rhyming) ‘bloom’ of the other Iseult; the symbolic season is a winter whipped by hail, following the summer heat of the first love, which Tristram deliriously recollects.130 In the back history provided by the chorus, the episode of the love potion, which Iseult’s mother had given her daughter to render the love between her and her husband King Mark eternal, is nothing more than the latest reference to the deplorably temporary and unstable nature of 129 In the scenario of the Tristram vogue in Europe Arnold even preceded Wagner. He was proud of having been the ground-breaker. In a letter dated March 1886 from Munich, where he went to see Wagner’s Tristan, he observed that ‘less is made of the story than might be made’. He added that Act II seemed to him to be interminable and without action. Without waiting for the end he had left the theatre. Not a single word is said on the music. Arnold recognized with perfect sincerity that music, generally speaking, meant little to him. 130 The wind does not blow ‘frisch’ but ‘loud’; only during his second delirium it becomes ‘chill’.

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love. According to the narrator, Tristram on his deathbed relives his escape from Iseult, in which he seems to be the solitary Empedocles burning up with fever. But it is an escape which is already in itself the renunciation of any heroic stature or spirit of defiance. By sheer chance Tristram reaches the castle of the second Iseult as a ‘pining exile’, and on the waves of the Atlantic ultimately finds a modicum of the yearned for Arnoldian ‘calm’. Such was also, almost literally, the path that Arnold, in his escape from Thun and in his ‘retreat’ from his passion for Marguerite, prefigured for himself, until the attainment of a calm which, however, would be still visited and disturbed by unsuppressible desire, a desire that, as for Tristram bound south to war against the Romans, could have been soothed only by action. Tristram dreams of crossing the dark forest and arriving at a chapel and a fountain in which to bathe his burning brow, only to see reflected in the water the face of Iseult scolding him for having forgotten her. But in yet another fade-out, and in a phantasmagoria of faces, that of the second Iseult, calling him back to the hearth, is superimposed on the face of the other Iseult. If not even the forest is able to placate Tristram’s pain, if not even the battle cleanses his blood, then, as with Empedocles, nothing remains but to die. This death is the symbolic exorcism which could ensure survival to Arnold, as a healed and reformed Tristram. In the last frame of this first scene, mawkish but much admired by its first readers, the narrating voice lingers on the angelic repose of their two small children, and celebrates the human gifts of the second Iseult, the luminous figure of a devotion which is anything but ‘proud’. 7. The dialogue of the two lovers, Tristram and the freshly arrived first Iseult, unfolds in the second scene in clumsy rhyming trochaic decasyllables that make the ex-lovers resemble two stiff opera singers exchanging solemn and hyperbolic remarks. The scene was the one which Arnold desired and at the same time feared would occur after leaving Marguerite. It betrays the hope that Marguerite would reappear and that he would hear her voice ring out, in an impossible eternalization of romantic passion (‘No, thou shalt not speak! I should be finding / Something altered in thy courtly tone’). At the same time, as in ‘The Terrace at Berne’, Arnold feared, like Tristram, the reappearance of a bourgeois, unromantic Marguerite, and thus to be the only one of the two left to grip the memory of a blessed ecstasy in ‘the

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green wood’. Iseult, as Tristram feared, has by now acquired a pragmatic and solid concreteness, and invites Tristram vainly to mature, having herself understood the law of mutability; she proposes a compromise suggesting that both loves can live together in him. Naturally Arnold could not save Tristram, if not at the price of daring changes that would have drastically altered the traditional plot; but the deaths of the two lovers are the only moment of the drama in which, with an authentically Wagnerian spirit, and at least on Tristram’s part, the shudder of absolute, Romantic love is relived, and is as such indissolubly tied to death. Iseult dies with Tristram out of a pure spirit of sacrifice, and willing to satisfy her old lover’s capricious and sensual pleasure of self-annihilation, but far from sharing it. She dies, but not of the burning fever of the sexual act, rather in the cathartic ‘quiet’. 8. Far from the sublime myth, in the domain of  ‘prose’, and in an atmosphere of elegy and tender regret, Iseult spends her days as a judicious mother watching after her little children. The drama, however, hardly closes on the idealization of the subdued Victorian domestic life of widowhood. Tristram lives again, if nothing else, in his hunting dog, which Iseult herself caresses at midnight. In a rather forced intervention in the first person (removed and then significantly reinserted between 1853 and 1857), the poet himself comes forward to clarify that only an irresistible passion such as Tristram’s can transform a whole being and make the past seem like a shadow and a dream. But, he adds, superhuman passion ‘gulls men potently’, being but a ‘diseased unrest’; in its absence, men are prey to ‘languor and distress’. In 1852, Arnold still lived on the whole in a condition of extreme uncertainty. The drama concludes with a story long kept hanging, and which Iseult tells with doubtful plausibility to her children on the sea-shore, that of the seduction of Merlin by the enchantress Vivian (sic in Arnold), upon which one of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King was to hinge. Arnold claimed to have introduced it for exclusively aesthetic reasons, that is to alleviate the excessive sadness with which the drama would have ended. In truth the story, coming as it does precisely from the mouth of a woman who ought to have overcome and sublimated Tristanian passion, is a second example of surrender to the blind and fatal fascination of beauty and the senses. Merlin, like Arnold a convalescent in this poem, is a ‘prisoner […]

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in that daisied circle’,131 that is, by way of a malicious etymological allusion enclosed in ‘daisy’, a prisoner of Marguerite. § 157. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 X: Post-Tractarian disorientation and the temptations of communitarian salvation The 1853 poetic edition, the first to appear in Arnold’s name, was in its own way an anthological edition intended to present, beside a very few new compositions, the best of his earlier production, according to criteria partly suggested in a brief but crucial Preface which has often been mentioned.132 Just a year after the symbolic death of Empedocles, Arnold’s publishing history indicates a timid recovery, however soon questioned by several signs of relapse. Nothing was retained in that collection of the dialogic scene representing the suicide of the ancient Sicilian philosopher, except the elegiac and soothing songs of the musician Callicles describing sedated, Apollonian, mythological scenarios. Tristram and Iseult, which counterbalanced self-destructive Romantic love with marital stability incarnated in the second Iseult, was included in its entirety. In two of the three principal new compositions following the 1853 edition, ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’ and ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’,133 Arnold, given the insurmountable and morbid block of human psyche left to its autonomy, explores the salvation offered by institutions. Both poems in reality decree the impracticability or the lack of foundation of a communitarian salvation, and push the human subject back into the vortex of psychological solipsism. Earlier, in Sohrab and Rustum, not yet concluded in 1852 and left out of that edition, Arnold had depicted the tragic and exemplary failure of impulsive heroism. Formally the three works – two of which are among his most renowned

131 Cf. Culler 1967, 151. Vivian has the same blue eyes as Marguerite (Bonnerot 1947, 92). 132 Discussed more at length below, § 161.2. 133 Published separately in 1855 but begun in 1851. The seeds of this composition were sown in the fragment entitled ‘Meta’ dating back to 1849, one of the poems which, Arnold noted, was to illustrate the constraints imposed upon the spirit by cloistral life. In this poem a female figure comes forward, from a group of monks, to tell the poet that the peace of the spirit can be found in that place.

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and studied, and one even believed to be among his masterpieces – also mark Arnold’s farewell to aphorismatic poetry of a lyrical and introspective type, and a return to longer poems such as the ode and to full-scale exotic poetry. In both cases, he gathered anecdotes and literary trouvailles and adapted them not always successfully, in a manneristic and academic style. 2. Arnold regarded Sohrab and Rustum as his most successful example of that type of poem, theorized by him in the Preface to the 1853 collection, almost completely resolved in a ‘reanimating’ subject of a Schiller-like naïveté. The pleasure that he felt in its composition was a good omen, in that he could imagine that it would be reflected in a similar pleasure for its readers. Arnold, on the contrary, had masked a confession of tragic personal impotence134 in the objectivized form of a neo-Homeric epic.135 On the surface, Sohrab and Rustum is a very prescient creation, as it invented a form of poetic entertainment that aimed at counteracting the rampant popularity of novels, following the lines and direction upon which Tennyson was also meditating as he worked on the project, still nebulous at that time, of

134 In its underground autobiographical allusions, the poem describes a generational change, though through the paradoxical elimination of the son, knocked down by the simple name of the father. This also means, as in ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ (§ 157.6), that the ‘rigorous teachers’ were truly invincible. At the same time Arnold-Sohrab, dying, asks his father-Rustum for his approval and obtains it. This insinuates that his father had suffocated him to the point of symbolically killing him. Sohrab dies, but gives the world peace, serving as sacrificial lamb and bearer of civilization. The will of Sohrab, who though young is almost wiser than Rustum, inverts and upturns the father-son relationship. Sohrab says that his father will live on, and do what he, Sohrab, had been unable to do. 135 The Nestor of the Tartars is Peran-Wisa, whom the bold Sohrab visits at dawn after a sleepless night to ask him to end the too-long war between the Tartars and the Persians with a single combat. The following gathering is equally Homeric, with the warriors marching one by one according to the curious customs of their own lands. The whole action occurs between dawn and sunset and the point of view alternates from one side of the battlefield to the other, as in Homer. In one of these scenic movements we see Rustum lazing around and carousing, and at first refusing the duel like Achilles in Homer. Details of a heroic type are those of the carefully detailed and hieratic dressing, of the description of Rustum’s helmet and above all of his humanized horse.

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Idylls of the King. I am of course referring to the first fluid, flowing revisitation of myth and even of exotic legends, capable of capturing the imagination of the public. Arnold intended to remake and orientalize, as he confessed, a well-known, familiar plot, by adding for instance the right amount of humour in the outbursts of Sohrab. The latter calls for peace, and he babies and tickles his father Rustum infuriating him, and with the same Tennysonian taste for ample and laborious similes and for slightly ironic and Ariostesque hyperboles, and the same, elegiac recollections of the hearth, the native land and the lost loved ones.136 The poem, whose development requires that neither of the duellists know the identity of his adversary,137 must programmatically and inexorably move towards a belated and thus tragic denouement, whose effect is at least partly cathartic. This was Arnold’s objective and hope as expressed in his Preface, and it is attempted here in two ways: by virtue of a Homeric, dignified and solemn submission to destiny on the part of the murderous father, and by the reunion of this ‘episode’, as it is defined, to ‘the All’, symbolized in the final, famous tableau of the majestic, humanized river Oxus’ flowing towards its delta.138 If one considers that Sohrab and Rustum was written at almost the same time as ‘Empedocles on Etna’, and that it was supposed to be included in the same collection, the poem then seems to be an equally unsuccessful counterpart: from a hero who is utterly cerebral we move on to one who is all heart, impulsive and generous; but the point of arrival is the same, a delirious encounter with death. The impulsive generosity of the ‘unquiet heart’, which is an expression lifted verbatim from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, is subtly relativized and ultimately criticized, not only with respect to the unheeded and wise equilibrium of old Peran-Wisa, but also with respect to the capricious and for the moment innocuous inactivity of Rustum. Indeed

136 The agnition between father and son, with sighs and faintings, and the pathetic final kiss, is worthy of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. 137 Rustum only convinces himself that the man he has knocked down is his own son, a fact of which he had been kept in the dark by his own wife, only when he sees on his body the mark of a ‘griffin’ carved by his mother at shoulder height. 138 Homerically the stars and the sun ‘took part / In that unnatural conflict’, and a cloud in the sky darkens the sun.

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Sohrab, for better or for worse, is all and only heart, a heart that allows him intuitively to feel that in front of him is his father, who however denies that he is; and a heart that, however, pushes him stubbornly to seek death. 3. ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’ undertakes a perplexed, indirect re-examination of that Anglican, institutionalized culture of the public schools and of the university system, in which Arnold could no longer find authentic answers. The student-gypsy, legendary-historical defector from Oxford in the seventeenth century, detaches himself from all principles of social life and enters and exits it according to his inner needs and to the typical Arnoldian motif of intermittence. He is the symbol of a successful hybridism and of the sharing of two natures, which can in fact permit him to appreciate and enjoy the best of life. Insofar as he is a timeless archetype, he is another unreachable emblem of the fight against modern doubt, crowned in him by success. ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, inspired by a visit to a Carthusian monastery in the French Alps made by Arnold during his late honeymoon in 1851, ends more explicitly with the rejection of both the romantic votaries of spiritual disease and the new generation of contemporary sages selling an empty, unjustified optimism. It is a both personal and objective poem because it seeks to provide an answer to the malaise, an answer that could be embraced by Arnold as poet as well as by his generation of sceptics. It does not so much represent a tantalizing challenge to the embrace of faith and Catholicism – in particular according to the vogue and the recent examples on the coattails of Newman’s ‘defection’–139 as directly the prospect of that cloistered and monastic life which permitted a comfortable refuge away from the chaotic modern world, by now incomprehensible to the Victorian intellectual. The Carthusian community proposes the refusal of the world in the name of a superior fruitfulness of life, or death to life in order to have life in death; in their perfect integration into the faith they don’t suffer the world because they have already fully repudiated it.140 Arnold is here the spokesman for dozens and dozens of doubting Victorians standing on 139 Arnold perhaps alludes to Newman with the image of Achilles taking refuge in his tent. At any rate he was sifting through Catholic propaganda which he received from various French sources alluded to here, like Chateaubriand and Lamartine. 140 The convent is as ‘world-famed’ as its monks are insensitive to this fame.

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the ‘convent threshold’,141 tormentingly asking himself whether he should cross that line. He was among those who in the end left, disheartened and without answers. The ideological and religious instability of the early 1850s was provoking a desperate need for authentic guides capable to administer ‘words of eternal life’, words which ultimately, for Arnold, did not come from the Carthusian community, isolated at the top of a mountain like the popular figure of St Simeon Stylites. The monks are therefore a metaphor of that renunciatory and eremitical Catholicism, and of the medieval revival ambiguously discussed for the first time in Tennyson’s ‘St Simeon Stylites’ in 1842. Ten years later than Arnold, Hopkins was to take this figure as his starting point to complete a leap, which Arnold never took, in the direction of Catholicism. In its first half, Arnold’s poem is a pale rehearsal – which of course it is not in the second – of ‘The Habit of Perfection’, a poem in which Hopkins, a Catholic by then, was to bid adieu to the world and euphorically embrace monastic life. 4. ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’ is not an absolute nor even a relative masterpiece, and this was admitted to by its own author. Arnold drew it from a literary anecdote which he stripped of any sensational references,142 but overly embellished with too contrived archaic and rare terms, complicated it metrically by turning to a stanza which is an infelicitous patchwork of Shakespearean and Keatsian measures, and enriched it with echoes from the pastoral and cemeterial poetry of Gray. The mannered introductory apostrophe serves to contrast the daily ‘quest’ for the scholar-gypsy on the part of the shepherd – who in his humility is not only among those with whom the gypsy is happy to socialize, but also imaginatively spy on him – with that of the poet who is culturally more evolved but also more

141 Cf. § 200.1 on the poem ‘The Convent Threshold’ by Christina Rossetti. The Grande Chartreuse had also been visited in 1830 by Arnold’s father, who had confessed that it was ‘certainly enough to make a man romantic’ (see Stanley’s biography [quoted in § 8.1], vol. I, 268). 142 Arnold’s poem (which had been inspired by Joseph Glanvil’s book, a copy of which Arnold had bought in 1844), was to be entitled, in homage to a contemporary vogue, ‘The First Mesmerist’. Glanvil’s scholar-gypsy had acquired superior sensory and even hypnotic powers that Arnold mentions only fleetingly.

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disappointed. The poet knows that the gypsy, like Shakespeare’s fair youth, is ‘exempt from age’, immortal only thanks to his verbal art. In his own way the shepherd is one of Arnold’s ‘strayed revellers’.143 Instead of attending to his daily tasks, he follows false prophets and must be re-awoken by the rough and impatient shouts of his companions; he returns to the community of the shepherds but only to take up again his ‘quest’ as soon as possible, and in solitude; as such he is also a foreshadowing of the scholar-gypsy’s desertion of the community and of his temporary re-entries. At the same time, the first three stanzas form a very rich preparatory framework of images of oscillation and fixity. The shepherd’s quest is intermittent like that of the mower who comes and goes in the grazing lands of the mountains; the sheep ‘cross and recross’ the strips of green at night in the moonlight; only the poet symbolically and mentally ‘sits’ and ‘waits’ without worrying about the changing hour. In rapid and vivid narrative sketches Arnold thus retraces the salient phases of the story of the poor but intelligent and keen student, who left the university144 tired of knocking at the doors of ‘privilege’, and set to wandering the world with the gypsies. But here the poet allows himself to be seduced temporarily by the illusion of the shepherd, when the scholar-gypsy of history, who indeed committed this unique gesture, becomes a phantasmatic, unreachable and thus fleeting and intermittent archetype that the poet is seeking here and now,145 and who is the same scholar-gypsy handed down by history but also his purely imaginary revival. Arnold brilliantly mixes the plane of history with that of fiction, and outlines with the freshness of an eye witness the character’s fleeting apparitions. He knowingly controls both reality and fiction, especially in a later phase of the poem which is a fantastic revenge of illusion, the illusion of the immortality of this wandering gypsy. The serene clarity

143 Arnold returns to the youthful theme of ‘deviation’ using various times, as a synonym of the escape, the verb ‘to stray’. 144 In the course of his wanderings, the gypsy sees students meeting in Christ Church, and immediately pulls back to a ‘sequester’d grange’. 145 See the negative emphases found in the line ‘And I myself seem half to know thy looks’, constructed by the restrictive reflective ‘myself ’, the verb ‘seem’ and another limitation, ‘half to know’.

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of the gypsy only comes from his intermittent contact with the world, and actually not with the entire world but rather with what most pure, simple and innocent the world has to offer. He escapes from his schoolmates who pursue him, but openly seeks contact with nature, making fleeting visits to the humble and to children, and spying, unseen, upon the operations of sowing and harvesting. He also makes exquisite floral gifts,146 and like St Francis is a friend of the swallows and listens, like an enchanted naïf, to the warbling of the blackbirds. From this point on, Arnold the diagnostician definitely takes the upper hand over Arnold recollecting illusions. The gypsy contrasts a sole desire and a sole destination to the ‘thousand’ ineffective projects of men and to the ‘fluctuation’ and the crisis of the will which translates into inaction, and he is consequently joyful and exempt from doubt. This contrast is historical as well: the eternal youth incarnated by the gypsy emphasizes Arnold’s denunciation of the grip of time in which humanity is caught. Enfeebled by the misadventures, humanity advances towards a progressive drying up of its ‘elastic powers’147; the scholar-gypsy’s intellectual clarity clashes with the incertitude of the present and its ‘halfbelievers’. The ultimate value of this archetype, and that which best sums it up, is simply and solely the harmony of the past compared to the ‘strange disease of modern life’; a harmony which, with a literal reference to the problematics of Arnold’s poetry and of ‘Empedocles on Etna’, is the equilibrium between, and the perfect reconciliation of, heart and mind.148 5. In the transition from the solipsistic poet to the combative essayist involved in the world, ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’ undoubtedly represents a stalemate; the possible salvation which lies in his figure is a ‘negative’ one, 146 Small, idyllic, almost Leopardian portraits follow one another in this elegy, among which there is one of a housewife darning ‘at her open door’. 147 ‘The generations of thy peers are fled, / And we ourselves shall go […] with powers fresh […] not spent on other things’. In ‘God’s Grandeur’ Hopkins may have recalled these lines and the entire final part of Arnold’s elegy. Arnold confers upon the gypsy those powers of eternal youth, as opposed to the consumption of energy, which Hopkins will attribute to nature revitalized by God. 148 With magic, the gypsies with whom the student took refuge manage to meld will and intelligence, obtaining happiness. Arnold’s scholar-gypsy promises not to keep this secret for himself but to spread it for the good of the world.

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obtained through renunciation or with a controlled presence in the world. He is always the emblem of hesitancy or at least of a wait for a ‘heaven-sent moment’ and an over-sensitive incitement which never comes. He endlessly procrastinates the complete revelation of himself to the world and even his stable return. He is not the strong man Arnold was seeking, but rather a weak one who must fear the contagion of the world into which he should breathe new life. Arnold, always according to the intersection between reality and imagination, advises him to stay far from modern life, which would instil in him a pernicious fluctuation and a loss of fixity, would undermine his ‘powers’ and make his resolutions ‘cross and shifting’, while also threatening his ‘glad perennial youth’. And the perspective of defeat – so severely disapproved of by Arnold’s twentieth-century detractors, and even reduced to the aimless contemplation of an evasion relieving him of any responsibility –149 is the real cause of his waiting and of his retreat from modern life, which he constantly flees.150 And yet at least in one respect, that of hope, the scholar-gypsy is the object of a passionate and nostalgic regret: he still carries hope alive within while his contemporaries have lost it – hope in the divine spark that must sooner or later arrive, enabling him to re-enter society with a ‘project’ for salvation, and an answer to doubt and division. In this way, the scholar-gypsy comes to fit the Arnoldian paradigm of waiting incarnated by Sophocles in ‘Dover Beach’, a waiting that is not just the supreme capacity to see life in a unified and panoramic way, but, more precisely, a trustful awareness of the positive alternations of history. 6. In the prelude to ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ the ascent takes off from flowery meadows where the human works – signifying the gradual supremacy of pure spirit – have fallen into disuse, and the vegetation is giving way to the hard rock. The atmosphere is suspenseful, at times even sinister, almost that of a Gothic novel or of Browning’s Childe Roland’s quest151 in its pathetic fallacies: the sound of the stream is ‘strangled’, the 149 Above all by Leavis in The Common Pursuit and Revaluation. 150 The final comparison of the scholar-gypsy with the Tyrian merchants, who one day saw the Greek invaders and their ships bearing gifts arrive, and fled to exile, is, however, questionable and forced. 151 § 122.5.

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winds gurgle, the landscape flickers according to Arnold’s typical marks of intermittence. The ‘ghostlike’ monks are a reflection, inside the convent, of the ‘spectral’ vapours, and in the alternation of the white of the cowls, of that of the landscape; in the poetic reconstruction152 they are indeed another image, but a much less positive one, of the hybrid, of life in death, and of the oxymoron ‘living tomb’.153 Arnold, in fact, shortly after closes this memorialist motif, since the object of the poem becomes a confrontation between sources that present themselves as givers of authentic life but leave one’s thirst intact and burning.154 Climbing to the Chartreuse Arnold felt he was arriving almost surreptitiously in front of the ‘rigorous’ secular teachers of his youth – Carlyle, Goethe, Sénancour, Spinoza – and that he owed them a justification for his curiosity. The clash does not reveal itself to be solely the very current one between the Catholic and the Protestant faiths – both ‘gone’, or according to his dry dismissal, ‘one dead, / The other powerless to be born’;155 so much as between faith and a modern secular ethic which does not give any answers, those answers that that very faith, which Arnold could not bring himself to embrace, could have provided. The rigour of those teachers lay above all in the firmness with which they had ‘reduced’ religious faith to pure ethics, with the result, however, that contemporary man was now ‘lost’ and in need of reassurance. The poem is yet another resigned analysis of modern ‘disease’, of the modern absence of hopes and of ways out, and of authentic teachers of life.156 This diagnosis, made in the first years of the 1850s, is doubly resigned, faced as it is with the irruption on the scene of false prophets and of the positivist ideologies – Leopardi’s ‘magnifiche sorti e progressive’ [‘magnificent and progressive 152 It is rather doubtful that Arnold could really have attended a celebration of the Eucharist at the abbey. The passing of the consecrated host (in reality the wafer of Peace) from hand to hand, which he supposedly witnessed, is a gross liturgical error; the observation that the wooden beds were the coffins of the monks is also inexact. 153 Fertility is recreated inside the sterility of the stone, in the fragrant herb garden. 154 Still more useless was the model of Romantic Titanism and activism, that of the exhibitionistic Byron and of the unrealistic Shelley. 155 Or rather, Protestantism was dead, and Catholicism needed regeneration. 156 Undeniably Arnold’s own father figured among these teachers whose ‘overcoming’ is even more evident in Sohrab and Rustum (cf. § 157.2 n. 134).

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fate’].157 In the final comparison, which like all of Arnold’s final comparisons has something false and academic about it, he represents an entire generation of sterile renouncers and scholar-gypsies afraid of becoming infected, who are actually the usual university intelligentsia to whom he habitually turned, and that could be seduced by mirages of ‘action and pleasure’. The fanfare of war, which the children described in the comparison hear coming from the forest, may be the call of the Crimean War in which many, including the unfortunate lover of Tennyson’s Maud drowned their lovesickness and their economic grievances. The poem’s revision, completed in 1867, brought however with it an almost imperceptible but decisive variation of perspective and meaning, signalled, nonetheless, by a single word change. The ‘children’, in a position of wise waiting, unaffected by the colourful world, and custodians of the flame of tradition, in 1855 are in a ‘forest’, an image which is at least neutral if not positive, trees and shadows being favourable to constructive thoughts of peace. In the 1867 version, the ‘forest’ is changed to ‘desert’: in the twelve-year interval Arnold had at least in part become one of those ‘sciolists’ who proudly criticized isolation, and criticized himself the disdainful, solipsistic sterility of those who in those days did not accept the manifestos of progress.158 § 158. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 XI: ‘Balder Dead’ and ‘Merope’. Reworkings and updates of myth After turning thirty, Arnold began to feel the true stabilizing benefits of marital and family life, with the birth of his first children and the work of school inspection, which, although energy-sapping and unstimulating on the intellectual plane, imposed on him the necessity of action and interaction in the world. His contemporary election as professor of poetry at Oxford, a post second in prestige only to that of Poet Laureate, inspired him to attempt an arduous poetic mediation between the private sphere

157 The condition is that of an existentialist and almost surreal waiting – also posited by Arnold in ‘Dover Beach’ (§ 154.4) – for the revival of the sun’s cycle, and for the apparition of the dawn following the night. 158 Allott, in P, 294.

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and the public and civil voice,159 such as was sensible and anyway expected from the person bearing that title, whose audience, the cultured public in general, was larger than the circle of his Oxford friends. Balder Dead and the one-act tragedy Merope can be traced to these objectives, and they kept Arnold occupied for the majority of 1854 and 1857 respectively. The former was published in 1855 and the latter in 1858. After the less bountiful and already anthological 1853 collection, both inaugurated a poetic phase characterized by a blander productive rhythm and by a concentration on solitary and massive works. At the same time, his lyrical and introspective vein is tempered, following the direction of Sohrab and Rustum, in a poetry which objectifies, and neutralizes in the classic and stable metric form of blank verse, the inner dilemmas and reduces the role of the poet to that of the intermediary, almost merely the translator, aiming to help the reader to rediscover the modernity or better the timelessness of ancient myths. Such is the aesthetic underpinning both Balder Dead – which apart from very few liberties and the odd change of name literally follows the corresponding episode of Edda – and also Merope, which in several phases is a paraphrase of Sophocles’ Electra. Neither the former nor, especially, the latter stand out for any exceptional artistic accomplishment, but at least in some aspects both have an experimental, indeed pioneering value, which Arnold was the first to note with pride. Balder Dead vies with or may even be compared to Wagner and his tetralogy;160 Merope opens the path to the dramatic adaptations of myth and classical drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 2. In its veiled theological implication, Balder Dead is an illusory act of faith in a mythology, already foreshadowed in Edda, of good, diaphanous, 159 At the beginning of Merope young Aepytus hides ‘behind the shelter of [his] father’s tomb’, and, by now grown, is determined to complete and fulfil the mission he had left interrupted. ‘Shelter’ is significantly the word re-used in ‘Rugby Chapel’ (§ 159.4). Arnold also admonishes himself with the words of Polyphontes, according to which one must ‘sacrifice […] personal feeling to the public weal’. Merope was suggested to Arnold by the poetry lectures he gave at Oxford, and he hoped it would be a classicist calling card for his new assignment. 160 The revisitation, both refined and naïve, of Scandinavian fables recalls Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the world of Tolkien.

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Virgilian gods, rather than ‘irate’ as was more usual in Victorian theology; gods, above all, not so irretrievably distant as to seem ‘hidden’.161 Resolving or rather shelving the obsessive lucubrations reflected in the 1849 and 1853 collections, Arnold imaginatively encounters present-day gods who govern the world and look benignly upon ‘the earth and men’ and, unlike the distracted and insensitive gods of the Epicureans, care for men and follow them in their valorous adventures, giving those most deserving the reward of living with them in Valhalla, where both gods and justly compensated earthly heroes participate in an eternal celebration. Man becomes a god according to a modified Romantic perspective, and the god becomes humanized. The repudiated Christian God is substituted with a legendary genealogy of pagan gods or demigods – such because truly humanized or even truly human, and therefore also minor and even mortal, and at times even diminished gods, physically disabled like Hoder the blind god, or vulnerable like Balder himself. A grave threat of extinction hovers over these provisional gods, of which they are aware – the threat, that is, of Ragnarok, which is also the twilight of paganism, the same motif underlying Arnold’s two most celebrated ‘submarine’ poems.162 Balder is the icon of the mythological and Apollonian God of light, a radiant and haloed God also acting as a prefiguration of the defeated, derided and crucified, rather than triumphant, Christ: he is the only God who is subject to the shame of dying before the time prescribed by fate and of descending to the underworld, where the basest of mortals are condemned to live. In his very different katabasis, Balder is a Titanic Empedocles regenerated and reconciled to his destiny, a wise, civilizing God gifted with superior knowledge. He knows the medical herbs and the magic that bring one back to life, but like Empedocles, and partially like Jesus, he raises the dead but does not know how to cure or resurrect himself. In him, Arnold sees realized the perfect equilibrium between head and heart, waiting and action; in funeral laments the other gods sing of him as strong of body and mind. At the end of each action, nonetheless, Balder longs for ‘calm’ like all Arnold’s 161 From this poetic nucleus, with fundamental enrichments, Arnold’s biblical and theological essays and books of the 1870s will start. 162 § 152.6 and n. 90.

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heroes, and in the otherworld he becomes an Arnoldian temporizer, but such a one only because of all the gods he is the one who most intimately believes in the advent of happier days and in a return of the light. Odin himself incarnates a perfect equilibrium between waiting and acting, above all between the static time of pain – a pain which for the Victorians ought never to have been obsessive, but rather contained within limits of classical sobriety – and a time for decisions and for putting intentions into practice. 3. An overturned trinity challenges the primacy of Odin, father of the gods, and it is that of Fenris and Hela, queen of the reign of the dead, and of the ‘serpent’ that twists itself around the world as if it were the biblical Tree of Knowledge. The latter is child of Lok, a disguise of Satan, whom Odin, creator of the world and of the heavens, and father of the gods,163 was not able to demolish completely, precisely because in the end Odin is a semi-omnipotent god, subject to the wishes of a still greater power. The law of fate materializes in Lok’s comeback, who in the meantime is the evil instigator of the death of Balder. He uses Balder’s own brother, Hoder,164 to strike Balder with the only weapon fatal to him, an ironically innocuouslooking twig of mistletoe. Disguised as the skeletal witch Thok, Lok precludes the return of Balder to the land of the living, being the only one not to mourn his passing. The cremation of Balder’s cadaver on the ship carrying him to the land of the dead is a transfiguration and prefiguration of the Crucifixion: Balder is at the top of the pyre, and his wife Nanna165 and the innocent Hoder are at the sides. Precisely because the twilight of the gods is willed by fate, Odin and all the other good gods know that ultimately even the presence of Balder, whom everyone wish to call back from the afterworld, would be helpless to thwart fate. For Arnold, however,

163 Frea is at once the wife and the daughter of Odin. In the first case, she represents Eve. 164 Hoder is blind and thus an unaware Judas, and in fact he then runs to commit suicide; but rather than being dictated by desperation this gesture is the sublimation of his inconsolable pain. In his anglicized name, which in Scandinavian means ‘poetry’, Hoder is separated by a single alphabetic letter from blind Homer. 165 Arnold’s motif of eternalized love and of the post mortem reunion of lovers and spouses reappears in the sublime devotion of Balder’s wife.

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after the desolating closure of every human and otherworldly perspective in the 1853 poems, Eddic Ragnarok figured like an authentic and complete Christian apocalypse. A civilization based on wars and on the spilling of blood would have been succeeded, according to a cyclical law, by a new Asgard, an unexplored land of the blessed, an ‘earth […] more fresh […] more verdant’, where the souls would be returned to their bodies. 4. The dialogues between the gods are even comically desublimated and colloquial, but a few purely descriptive phases of Balder Dead illustrate Arnold’s talents at ingenious storytelling supported by an effective narrative rhythm. In the two journeys to the underworld of the god Hermod, which are the acme of the sheer marvellous with their wealth of terrifying elements which magically and spontaneously become almost instantly innocuous, the intrepid god ventures into a fantastical landscape, foggy and steep, proceeding like many ghostly knights in Victorian poems towards the unknown, in a journey which is more than anything dream-like. In this case it is not a ‘dark tower’ but a ‘grate’ which he must cross dismounting from his horse, much more intelligent and alive than Childe Roland’s in Browning.166 At the gates of hell, situated at the extreme northern boundaries and near the shores of the ocean, ‘whose watery ring enfolds the world’, a ‘damsel’, as an improbable Charon, separates the dead, pointing them in the direction they must take. That ‘damsel’, who is the damsel of Coleridge, Tennyson and Rossetti, is however perfidious only on the surface, and belongs to the same family of the frightening warriors who appear to Tennyson’s knights in Idylls, who are chubby children under their armours. 5. Arnold nurtured hopes to stage Merope,167 his amplest and most carefully designed dramatic work, convinced that the tragedy could have an immediate appeal for the contemporary public and that classical poetry, properly adapted, was more modern than contemporary poetry. In and of itself this intuition – the exemplary and archetypal value of myth, and its ordering function – was brilliant and launched a bridge to the slightly 166 § 122.2. 167 The role of the protagonist was offered to the actress Helen Faucit, who politely dissuaded Arnold from the attempt to stage the play; Rachel, Arnold’s old flame, had already died by then.

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later narrative works of Walter Pater; it even looks ahead to the ‘mythical method’ of the twentieth century.168 But the work remains far removed from a real remake, resulting more than anything in a cold imitation which is both multiple and eclectic, as it brings together situations and solutions from Shakespearean plays169 and from the classical French tragedies of Voltaire and Racine. The obedience to the Greek models lies structurally in the tautness of the action – not divided into acts and scenes, and entirely contained in the span of a single day and acted out on the proscenium and in the open space – and pre-eminently in the choruses, for which Arnold believed he had invented rhythms and metres aimed at reproducing the same effect as choral Greek poetry. Merope is indeed structured round its choruses, such as Arnold had often composed in the past, in the form of separate scenes belonging to an inexistent or only imaginary scenic action. In Merope they still retain their autonomy and exhibit their 168 In its first edition the drama came out with a long preface not included in later editions, which is an interesting and modern essay on the methods with which a myth is transformed and is received. Arnold believed, like Manzoni, that tradition should be followed but ‘with discretion’; and that at any rate it should be modified. Myths should be recreated only in the cases in which treatments of them by the classical playwrights were not extant; the classics were by definition insuperable. This is why Arnold chose a subject like that of Merope, on which classic dramas either did not exist or had been lost. In the historical overview, Arnold reviews the works of his predecessors, mainly of little note in the France of Richelieu, until Scipione Maffei’s version, praised by Voltaire, exported with immense success across Europe, and adapted, with the addition of a love intrigue, in an English translation. Voltaire had written his Merope play in the spirit of the reservations he had expressed about Maffei’s treatment, and adapting the plot to the tastes of the Parisians, tastes that no longer contemplated the simplicity of the Greeks. The esteem with which Arnold looked at Voltaire does not exempt him from criticizing the rhymed alexandrine – which Arnold believed inappropriate to the tragedy – and the lack of a real poetic feeling. 169 Aepytus acts like the Shakespearean fake stranger when, coming out of his hiding place, he finds himself facing the king. In his self-confidence he is also like a regenerated Hamlet who embraces the planned action (Culler 1967, 228), which gains the upper hand over the Shakespearean fickleness of the populace. In her waverings between action and feminine faint-heartedness, Merope is like Lady Macbeth; and Polyphontes is a much more astute Claudius.

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nature of merely refined and superfluous embellishments. Rhythmically, they provide intervals between interminable dialogues in which the characters repetitively analyse opposing alternatives and lines of action, and which at times unpredictably lead to quick retorts or responses consisting of single lines, or barbs savouring of the very French taste for the pointe. The rapid-fire discussion gives way in at least one case to the amazing and fable-like tale: the presumed death during the hunt of Aepytus, Merope’s son, artfully reported to the tyrant Polyphontes, is a virtuoso performance of the type of Théramène’s récit in Racine’s Phèdre. However, there is no real scenic need for it, since it is concisely recounted to Merope immediately afterwards by an another character. The denouement has an effective and ingenious tragicomic effect in the scream of Merope stopped in her tracks by the providential revelation that she is about to kill her sleeping son, who at the sound of that scream wakes up in a stupor. But that scene later leads to the slowest episode of the play, the confrontation between mother and son on the times and methods of obtaining revenge. Merope is a psychological but also a dilemmatic drama with a political background, where characters endlessly argue about various strategies conducive to justice and peace in a civil society and strategies that reduce themselves to those of a passive, renunciatory wait-and-see attitude and of energetic and at times necessarily bloody action: for Merope revenge is horrid and evil, for Aepytus it is prescribed by nature.170 The young hero Aepytus is an Arnoldian ‘unquiet heart’, but a heart by now tamed and reasoning. As soon as he arrives at the place where the revenge is planned he refrains from running to his mother because he knows that only by waiting judiciously can his plan be successful,171 and he brings it to completion by disciplining his heart through reason, combining action with waiting.

170 Aepytus’ ardent expectation – not shared by his vacillating mother Merope – that an impulsive act of courage could fire up a cowardly and resigned crowd, had had a confirmation in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and in the revolutionary movements of 1848. 171 As in Sohrab and Rustum, the guardian of his heart is an old man, uncle Laias. At the beginning of the play, the intervention of the chorus which escorts Merope to the sacrifice is almost a separate poem, perhaps one already composed, about the

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6. The political theme hinges on Polyphontes, an ambiguously kind and perhaps subtly Machiavellian tyrant172 whom Merope even in the epilogue hails and addresses, in front of his cadaver, by defining him an impenetrable mask.173 The initial phases of the play, which introduce Merope as she joins the chorus at the annual funeral sacrifice in memory of her deceased husband, focus on previous cases of assassinations of tyrants and on the punishments meted out to their authors, sometimes mild and some others even condoned, as in cases in which the common good is at stake (Polyphontes repeats the argument of Brutus, Caesar’s assassin). Polyphontes may well be a hypocrite even to himself, and his monologues, with no witnesses to listen to them, be equally false, even when he professes sincere devotion to the public peace. Merope struggles with the law according to which political motivations must take precedence over the feelings, because she wants only peace and not revenge or bloodshed. A supporter of a more evolved civilization, which considers revenge barbaric and impulsive, she embraces revenge giving in to a barbaric impulse herself, when she is informed of the tremendous nature of what has occurred: not simply the presumed death of her son due to error and an excess of boldness, but the more diabolical version which is communicated to her by the unwitting faithful servant,174 unpredictability of the heart, and the impossibility of knowing one’s heart or that of others, a theme addressed at length in the Marguerite cycle and in ‘The Buried Life’ (§§ 156.2 and 154.2). The chorus lingers on the motif of the precariousness of life and the extreme randomness of the moral or immoral results of an action, such that man is not master of himself but at the mercy of chance. 172 Napoleon III, in the essay ‘England and the Italian Question’ (§ 166.2), is justified according to the following law: ‘no usurper ever came to power without breaking some oath of allegiance, and history does not defame all usurpers’. 173 The description of Polyphontes’ murder by Aepytus, made at a distance by the chorus, loses all cruelty and is stylized; the chorus closes the scene with the staccato pace of a litany. A messenger occupies the entire space of the final scene confirming that, as Aepytus had predicted, the people were urged by his gesture to rise up against the Doric oligarchy. 174 This version is designed by the servant himself, and is the fruit either of ingenuousness, whose tragic consequences are stopped at the eleventh hour, or, more likely, of an incomprehensible structural flaw. Polyphontes, in fact, would not have had any use to spread that version; the servant himself, in turn, and equally inexplicably, stops

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that Polyphontes himself ordered the killing. For a moment she is again in the grip of her ‘unquiet heart’, to the point that she is about to commit the same mad action as that committed by Sohrab with much more tragic results. In the following, pressing dialogue with her son, Merope incarnates the contradiction of a woman and a mother, in addition to a queen, when she admits that she wants to keep her son so as not to lose him now that she has had him back, even going so far as to sing the praises of Polyphontes. § 159. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 XII: The epicedia of the 1860s After Merope, Arnold’s poems, initially in the form of sketches that were reworked and completed much later, began to trickle forth in magazines, rather than being collected in organic and abundant collections, precisely because there were too few of them. No new collections came out from 1858 to 1867, and when one was published in this year it took reviewers by surprise, for they had assumed his career as a poet had come to an end. Whoever takes a look at the production of these years, or at the even rarer poetry of his last two decades, easily notices the primacy of the epicedium. Familiar epicedia were written by Arnold in an elegiac, evocative, lyrical and impressionistic vein, upon the death of his brother William and of his sister-in-law, the latter perished and buried in far away Punjab;175 another was dedicated to the figure of his father, who was not only a kinsman but also a public figure who had been the subject of much recent discussion; in still others, on poets and writers almost his contemporaries, the essayistic mode takes the upper hand over the personal tone. Indeed, those last epicedia point almost implicitly to the surrender of the poet to the essayist, and it is symptomatic that coinciding and almost coextensive essayistic arguments were developed, as in the case of Heine and Clough, both in essays and in poems. In ‘Heine’s Grave’ and ‘Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoön’, Arnold’s assumptions openly claim another expressive instrument and seem

the hand of Merope, and reveals to her that she is about to kill her son, the same one that he had judged and accused of being one of Polyphontes’ assassins. 175 Respectively ‘Stanzas from Carnac’ and ‘A Southern Night’.

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to be squeezed into the form and the metre of the poem.176 In particular the second of the two compositions, which explores the relationship between the arts and assigns tasks so far overlooked to modern poetry, sacrifices or even trivializes its starting point in favour of pure argumentation. 2. The epicedium, practically relaunched in English poetry by Tennyson even prior to In Memoriam, is a typical form of Victorian mediation between private and public poetry. The epicedium of a loved one – friend, brother, relative – not only expressed the atavistic feeling of sorrow, though respectful of the will of a superior being, but also reawakened in those who remained a metaphysical quest into the final destiny of creation. On the other hand, in the most essay-like epicedia which Arnold composed at the same time as his debut as an essayist, a figure appears on the horizon, that of a less isolated and more publicly involved writer177 who takes on the task, as did Tennyson after 1850, of bidding a final farewell to the spirits of the great departed. What makes Tennyson different from Arnold is that not even death could inspire to him a panegyric or a passionate and uncritical encomium, nor could make him deflect from a firm and objective intellectual analysis.178 His voice continued to deliver unpleasant and even depressing statements, instead of (as he himself wished to do) reviving messages. The division he now foresaw was no longer the inner and vertical conflict between intellect and heart, but a horizontal one between soul and body: the men who surrounded him were only body and no soul, only matter and animality, or ‘absence of soul’; very few had ‘lofty souls’. Arnold’s criticism of life at the beginning of the latter half of the century no longer focuses on themes of an ontological-religious nature, but extends to the social sphere. Unlike Tennyson, sometimes he does not neglect to 176 See T. S. Eliot’s questionable opinion that ‘Heine’s Grave’ is a lovely poem because it says things that Arnold could not say in an essay (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, London 1933, 111–12). 177 A passage eventually expunged from the 1855 epicedium in memory of Charlotte Brontë states that ‘private affections’ have by now run their course and the time has come for ‘thoughts of the general weal’ and ‘public cares’, which rarely stimulate or touch the passionate souls of the young, who, ‘plung’d in themselves’, ‘demand / Only to live by the heart, / Only to love and be lov’d’. 178 Culler 1967, 236.

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lash out at petty English politics and a degraded and guideless society, no longer listening to the great voices of the past and becoming dehumanized in a stolid, depleting mechanization. 3. It is nonetheless true that after 1860 Arnold’s criticism of life becomes more constructive and less desperate, and points to forms of individual and collective salvation which, though merely illusory, signal a way out from the profound pessimism of the poetry of 1853 and from the complete absence of perspectives of the ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’. What Arnold proposed was nothing other than a stoic, almost sceptical resistance, a stubborn tolerance of nothingness, or simply a tension – at first feeble and discouraged, then indefatigable – towards the goal. What this ‘goal’ of which Arnold often speaks really consists of is difficult to determine with precision. In these epicedia, life is represented by the metaphor of the uphill elimination race, during which sooner or later a storm breaks out and only one person, who in some cases may ambiguously be Arnold himself, remains standing to continue the ascent; salvation is a pure act of seeking, a confident striving towards a light which one can only glimpse in intermittent flashes.179 The climb to the top of the mountain in ‘Rugby Chapel’ presents the recurrence of a basic Victorian archetype, that of a metaphysical quest which is fulfilling in and of itself, without any real and tangible result. The most dramatic image, hidden behind a deceitful show of energy, is that of Arnold’s own father who comforts the other climbers, but is himself perhaps not sure of what he is seeking, and is himself by now tired of climbing. Like Leopardi, Arnold believed it possible that it is easer to tolerate nothingness in the company of others; and it may seem almost cynical that he finds his way out of the tunnel, in ‘Heine’s Grave’ and in ‘Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoön’, by maintaining that poetry and the poet must lead common men to joy through oblivion. The tomb is therefore the symbolic location and at the same time the image that connects Arnold’s poems until the end of his career. These epicedia were all or nearly all conceived during real pilgrimages that Arnold made to the sepulchres of the deceased, and all of them

179 A situation similar to that of the ‘scholar-gipsy’ (§ 157.3–5).

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begin with long descriptive preludes which linger on the respectful silence which hovers on cemeteries where nature, almost jeering at the fleetingness of human life, exhibits its evergreens and its ‘everlasting-flowers’. But the eternalization of nature is enacted also thanks to the temporal cycle from which human life is excluded, so that the tomb is a living testimony to a definitive, non-cyclical event. The mythological poem Balder Dead paves the way for these epicedia at least for its veiled perspective of a voyage to the underworld, vainly undertaken to bring back and make immortal at least some deceased who, for their stature as extraordinary men and almost demi-gods, deserved resurrection. Arnold can but discard any form of survival save for that natural metamorphosis taking place in the crucible of nature, which reshuffles and biologically recycles bodies. Only the great, in any case, survived in the enduring, posthumous force of their spiritual word. The Arnoldian afterworld is not the Christian paradise, but shares the nature it has in mythological tales such as those of Proserpina, Daphne and Orpheus. The ‘city of God’, prophesized by Arnold’s father, is, in what may be a deliberate polemic, the same, purely human community regenerated by the secular morals passed down by the great masters of history. And in ‘Thyrsis’, dead Clough is taken up by ‘great Mother’ nature, but is also himself mythologically transfigured into one of the ancient Sicilian shepherds, and he joins their ‘train divine’. 4. The Rugby School chapel, where the headmaster was buried in accordance with his wishes, was inseparably a part of him and like a tangible and imperishable prolongation of his own life; it also suggests, in the poem’s insistent descriptive contrast of lights and shadows in the foggy autumn evening, the ambivalent nature of his legacy. The chapel is dark but the ‘gloom’ brings back to mind the brilliance surrounding the deceased in life, which made him like a ‘radiant’ and at the same time protective sun, almost like the ‘shade’ of a ‘mighty oak’ which no longer offers shelter. ‘Rugby Chapel’ explores the possible survival of the departed more than ten years after his death, a survival as a pure spirit in the afterlife and a survival as a formative influence exercised on the life before death. Arnold recognized that a moral force like that of his father could not be defeated even by death, and that in some form it had to survive; his father visibly continued to make the ‘word / Of the Spirit’ echo as he did when he was living, and was still spending

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words that resonated like a ‘trumpet’. If both in life and after death Thomas Arnold strenuously continued to carry out his mission to educate and to be a teacher of morality, this sufficed to confirm that he was truly welcomed into the sphere of immortality,180 shared with the group of the great guides of humanity. However, with a sudden argumentative twist Arnold soon subdues and silences the personal recollection, turning the poem into an objective diagnosis. His eye plunges from the immortals transformed into pure spirits, but already ‘spiritual’ on this earth, down to the ‘mortal’ and ‘soulless’ men helplessly captured in an ‘eddy’, scratching about and roaming like animals, satisfying their primordial needs, and uncontrolled like the movements of waves, according to Arnold’s overused image of a blind, casual oscillation and fluctuation. And yet there always remained for Arnold a proud, intermediate group of elect, the community of intellectuals and cultured men educated at the public schools and in the universities. These were a separate body, distant from the populace, and they sought higher goals under the guide of teachers of whom Thomas Arnold was the most luminous representative in an epoch which had just ended, while withdrawing himself and them from that ‘eddy’ in which other men drowned to disappear into nothingness. The military metaphor of the ‘trumpet’ predominates in the development of the poem, shifting to that of the scattered army, because such was now the group of the master’s pupils, who no longer rested in the light nor even in the protective shadow of their teacher. Arnold takes the usual step forward towards a generational and collective diagnosis, and as in numerous other poems, among which principally ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, he declares the failure of the generation of Rugby and Oxford students, decimated during the symbolic walk of life. This was due not so much, this time, to the insufficiency of the teaching received, which could unambiguously be ascribed to his own father, but because of the intrinsic moral weakness of the pupils themselves.181 The climb among

180 Defined with a circumlocution ‘the sounding labour-house vast / Of being’. 181 God reluctantly sees those whom he had sent on that journey fall and lose themselves. But this is a metaphorical God, just as the angels gushing forth divine ardour are pure images.

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surreal, snowy and glimmering cliffs,182 and the encounter with the old ‘host’ at the top, allude not so much to the supreme moment of death and of the Judgement – although the most traditional Victorian symbols of the metaphysical quest are cited almost literally – as to the conquest of an inflexible, secular, immanent stoicism, as Arnold was to argue more in depth in his theological books. This is a stoicism which rested, however, on the evasion and the complete oblivion of the last questions of life. The ‘salvation’ which Thomas Arnold during his life reached for himself and continued to deal out is a form of pure ‘Hebraism’, that is the mere moral capacity, the mere strength to carry on and not collapse along the way. Of that group of elect and disciples, Matthew Arnold proclaims himself to be the last survivor, thus starting his own reception into that sphere of ‘helpers and friends of humanity’ to which his father had belonged. Only in that sense can Arnold admit his father into that group of ‘guides’ dismissed by him in ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’. 5. In the epicedium ‘Thyrsis’, planned in 1862–1863 and completed in 1867, Arnold belatedly remembered – although not altogether tenderly, and in an academic, Theocritean and Virgilian transfiguration – the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, his friend at Oxford who had died in 1861. It is a composition which too openly aims to rank among the great epicedia of English literature: metrically elaborate, unusually embellished and ornate, decorated with separate scenes informed by a slightly forced, staged neoclassicism. The free flowing recollection is dammed by erudite, calculated digressions, and subjected to a rhapsodic and insidious argument which corrects, adjusts and even repeats itself along the way. In its purely lyrical moments ‘Thyrsis’ remains however a peculiar, Arnoldian ‘search for lost time’: time lost, time found again, and time above all acknowledged, recognized, that is, in its Proust-like, affective, only dormant ties with the landscape, and ready to reawaken. At the heart of the poem is the same opposition between illusion and reality – the illusion, in particular, that time may be stopped and relived – that energizes for example ‘Dover 182 Dr Arnold was indeed a mountain enthusiast, and he organized excursions for which he himself was the guide (cf. Stanley’s biography [§ 8.1, bibl.] vol. I, 239, and the poem ‘Resignation’ [§ 152.7] for a similar symbolic use of Arnold’s passion).

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Beach’. This is the reason of a long, initial phase of reciprocal recognition between the landscape and the visitor. An almost religious, ecstatic flash of inspiration, a Mosaic epiphany, is the rediscovery of the elm, which as in Proust has a power to set the recollection in motion, only equal to the fortuitousness of the circumstances that made that recollection available to the subject who is recollecting.183 It is this elm, the ‘signal-elm’ at the top of the hill – behind which the sun was setting, but from which it was also possible to see the valley and Oxford in particular, Oxford which like its hills is part of the otherwise violated unchangeability – the primary source and the Proustian pledge of memory. Everything has then changed around, but in reality the only thing which has changed is that which ‘man makes’: the question the hills are asked, whether they have changed, receives an implicit, negative response. Nature is in constant change, but the fundamental difference, in which the conceptual core of Arnold’s great poetry lies, is that nature is cyclical, and that its spectacles accordingly return with the alternation of the seasons, unlike the things and the lives of men. The cuckoo flies at the arrival of a summer storm, but ‘next year he will return’; Thyrsis-Clough, in a sudden closure of an argument carried out in a set of three stanzas, ‘never more we swains shall see’.184 The core of the poem combines a Theocritean elegy on the Sicilian 183 Arnold finds it by distancing himself from a few hunters who are returning from a hunt. In his last moments before his death Dr Arnold too remembered ‘an old elm on the rise of a hill on the outskirts of Rugby, or a fine oak, which called forth many old recollections of its associates in the adjoining hedges’ (Stanley’s biography [§ 8.1, bibl.], vol. II, 327). 184 But there is also a different and more concrete geographical scenario which is made up of three parts in reciprocal opposition. It is the magical hilly area surrounding Oxford, the same ‘sweet city’ of Oxford which can be seen in the distance from the hills and which is contrasted to another city, London, the ‘great town’ with its ‘harsh, heart-wearing roar’. Reviewing an anonymous article in the London Review dated 6 December 1862, Arnold the excursionist, spurred by the new techniques devised by a cartographer who was curiously named Henry James (‘Ordnance Maps’, II, 252ff.), protested that maps had not been updated, that they were worse than the old ones, and that the shading was approximate. This was a less extempore writing than it might seem: Arnold regrets that the Cumnor Hills are no longer on the map, and this connects back to his elegies and to ‘Thyrsis’ in particular. A Francophile, Arnold

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shepherd Thyrsis with Virgil’s song contest in the seventh eclogue.185 But the Theocritean and Virgilian symbol of the shepherd gradually merges with or even is substituted by that of the scholar-gypsy, a figure who closes its circular path in this poem. Arnold placed ‘Thyrsis’ immediately after ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’ in all editions of his poems, but this epicedium also and above all connects back to ‘Rugby Chapel’ for the evident analogy of the image of the surviving poet’s ascent to the summit of the hills. In this case, too, Arnold sketches out a reflection which has both a personal and collective aim, he and Clough having, like the scholar-gypsy, ‘escaped’ from Oxford, Arnold symbolically and Clough literally. Even more than Arnold himself, Clough was a lover of the ‘simple joy the country yields’, though he ignored that nature renews itself both for the worse and for the better, if one only had the patience to wait. Like the scholar-gypsy of the other poem, the two friends had early on discovered that, to survive, one must frequent the world only fitfully and in contact with its residual purity. But the gypsy’s lifestyle and the resulting peace of the heart, expressed in the symbolic disguise of the sweet and happy songs of the pastoral pipe, lasted too little for both of them; Clough in particular proved to be a quickly tired and weakened scholar-gypsy. He is indeed one of those climbers surprised by the storm in ‘Rugby Chapel’ – ‘thy rustic flute […] too soon […] learnt a stormy note’ – and fallen during the voyage of life before reaching the summit of the hill; the two friends have then both gained ‘visions of […] light’ even more intermittent than those enjoyed by the scholar-gypsy, and visions darkened early in the evening. As in ‘Rugby Chapel’, life finds somehow a meaning in the indomitable and uninterrupted search for a diffused and ‘fugitive’ light, a light which is an eminently spiritual and inward criticizes English maps in comparison to French ones: even the task of map-making is part of what a good government is responsible for doing. 185 In that blessed golden age of civilization it was still possible to snatch a departed loved one from death. In Virgil, Thyrsis is the loser, defeated by Corydon-Arnold, referred to in the epigraph of Canto 2 of The Bothie: ‘et certamen erat, Corydon cum Thyrside, magnum’. Arnold attempts to temper the arrogance of this by writing ‘Time, not Corydon, hath conquered thee …’, but in the very next line he makes a claim for his own supremacy: ‘Alack for Corydon no rival now!’ I owe this suggestion to Philip Stewart.

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element. Arnold confirms once more that he is the only one of that group of indomitable men, led by his father, to have arrived standing at the goal. The veiled but strong criticism addressed to the impatience of Clough, who despaired too early, has its precise and symmetrical counterpart in the proud affirmation that he, Arnold himself, was neither desperate nor wishing to despair, and was thus definitively the scholar-gypsy’s true heir, indeed that same scholar-gypsy who, in the poem, was, although chased, unreachable. The image of the elm and of the gypsy close the poem with an acrobatic implication. Arnold hopes that the mute Clough, who like all the deceased is also deaf to any calls from across the divide, and whose pastoral pipe has fallen silent, may, though defeated by life, once gain breathe an encouraging whisper. He points out to him, at the same time, the only two tokens of survival in the surrounding landscape, tied in their freedom from the laws of time and interdependent as a guarantee of reciprocal survival. The temporary and feared disappearance of the elm is at the same time symbolic of the disappearance of the scholar-gypsy and of Clough himself: ‘while the tree lived, he in these fields lived on’. 6. The far less inspired epicedium ‘Haworth Churchyard’, which Arnold wrote after the death of Charlotte Brontë in April 1855 committing various errors on the location of a tomb that he had never visited, signals at that stage only a biological salvation, that occurring in the metamorphosis of a perpetually changing nature (‘never idle workshop of nature’), which annually presents the festive spectacle of spring. In Charlotte’s case the final passing had been at least comforted by the fact that she had ‘entered’ the grave, but had been preceded by her relatives and her sisters, so that theirs would be a ‘united repose’ (even if only ideally, because the four siblings were neither buried in the same tomb nor in the same place). The lines entitled ‘Early Death and Fame’, which in 1855 were part of the epicedium but were later expunged, pinpoint, with Paterian sensitivity, the need, as consequence of the nullifying effect of death, to live life intensely, in its pure and intoxicating sensory aspect, a life of ‘moments’ and ‘pulses’. Only a name, carved into the marble of his bare Parisian tomb at Montmartre, visited by Arnold on a sunny day in September 1858, remained of Heinrich Heine, that Promethean challenger who, though prostrated by atrocious physical suffering, had always been ready to raise rebelliously his head up

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again. In ‘Heine’s Grave’, completed in 1863 and published in 1867, the personal and evocative vein gives way, however, to the assessment of the man of letters and poet who, in a camouflaged reflection, is also in part Arnold himself. Heine’s family was, it is true, that of Aristophanes and Voltaire, rather than that of the poets endowed with the Arnoldian ‘calm’; he was a poet whose peace was ‘poisoned’, a restless, bleeding poet, who almost morbidly relished his own suffering. The Arnoldian critical formula is that Heine ultimately had ‘wit’ and ‘scorn’, and so corrosive as to have practically destroyed the world,186 but he had neither ‘love’ nor ‘heart’. Arnold specifies the necessity of love as the other side of a constructive rather than a depressing criticism of life, and ultimately criticizes, through Heine, himself and his own poetry, which up to that moment had not been very encouraging. The poem’s final response dovetails with the conclusions of other epicedia, endorsing a corroborating poetry which, in the absence of positive messages, at least helps man to forget his miserable condition. Yet Arnold was not even very sure that Heine had remained ‘heartless’ until the end: the powerful initial depiction of a paralysed Heine, little more than a human larva, is amplified and denied in the flight of fancy – similar to the one closing Manzoni’s ode on the death of Napoleon – in which Arnold imagines Heine nostalgically returning to the simplicity and peace of the native valleys, and climbing up to the pure air of the Brocken, where the iron cross on the summit, which the poet clutches, becomes, with the change of the initial letter, the Cross.187 7. ‘Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoön’188 is an Aristotelian and peripatetic dialogue, which unfolds in an intentionally simple metric and prose-like flatness, and comes to the conclusion that painting and music enjoy a

186 Arnold, on his way to becoming the most lucid and brutal critic of his own nationality, remembers in the poem how he could not avoid feeling that Heine was like a blood relative, since, before Arnold himself, he had stigmatized and mocked the English. 187 Similar and opposite to Heine is Goethe, who came to the Brocken but to work and live, not to mock and die. 188 See my own ‘Alcune considerazioni sul ritrattismo letterario’, in Comparatistica, VIII (1997), 17–26.

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conditioned, rather than absolute supremacy over poetry, merely because they carry out the task that poetry, despite being designed to fulfil it, does not in fact carry out, the task of calming and soothing man in his existential condition. If art is to ‘soothe our pains’, poets fail to do this like the celestial musicians of the present, Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn. The path of the discussion becomes interwoven with the actual walk: the flowery meadow is the ‘painter’s sphere’, whence comes the definition of painting, which gathers multiple stimuli and synthesizes them to express ‘A moment’s life of things that live’ – therefore being an art of the moment, without a kinetic development. Standing on Westminster bridge, the two speakers are surprised both by the natural echoes of the wind playing on the surface of the water in ripples, and those of the low notes of the organ coming from within the Abbey, sounds which are provoked rather than being spontaneous, though already spontaneously counterpointed as in nature: ‘sound / In laws of human artists bound’ (the organ mimics the ‘breeze that rustles by’). Compared to the painter, the musician has a superior range of expression and a superior power to involve the listener, since his principal ingredient is ‘feeling’, which must be channelled, like the real flow of a river, towards results of pure beauty in the absence of any referential context. Modern poetry is for Arnold a synthesis of music and painting, of what is fixed and what is transient; his voice is already that of a the literary critic announcing that poetry tends towards an expression which is ‘clear’ and ‘deep’, and should reflect not the parts but the entirety of life.189 § 160. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 XIII: Further poems of the 1860s. The conquest of the euphoric word and the vision of a new world order The vast, majestic, architectural forms of the ode and the elegy had as a complementary repercussion, in the poetic edition of 1867, a return to the lyrical voice and to the lost, private aphorismatic diction, a return that can be explained by the fact that Arnold’s public voice had by then been transferred to the essay, thus leaving free space for such minimal, whispered utterances. These found additional material in Arnold’s revisionist readings

189 This is not very different from the youthful ars poetica of ‘Resignation’ (§ 152.7).

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and rereadings of loved authors, including Marcus Aurelius and Sénancour. Shortly after 1860, at around forty years old, Arnold often confessed that he had left his past behind, that he considered finished the time of inconclusive youthful sports, and that he had ‘something to do’ and the ‘will’ to do it.190 Not only this, but with surprising and exaggerated haste he applied the form of the epicedium even to himself, and as a result of so much writing on the deaths of others he couldn’t help beginning to think about his own, in a voice which was ever more bitter, sarcastic, dry, even annoyed. He awaited old age expecting it to be boring, not the wise, restful old age of tradition and proverbs. In ‘Growing Old’ – constructed on a dense series of rhetorical questions and composed in a low-key, bare style which for Arnold is absolutely new – one seems to listen to Tennyson’s own last lyrics. Old age was not a sweet golden sunset, but an addition of pain to pain, slightly weakened by the sheer flatness of the emotions – a lethargy without flashes of inspiration, a desert of the senses.191 In ‘A Wish’, Arnold imitates the voice of the misanthropic Heine, and strips down and displays his most unthinkable rough side and his most sarcastic stoicism, denouncing, as Tennyson and Christina Rossetti do in their graveside poetry, the other face of Victorian grief, which hid hypocrisy and only rarely expressed sincere pain.192 The crowd was thus so irksome for Arnold that he desired death only to be distanced from it; on the other hand, death was always a leap in the dark, the afterlife an ‘undiscovered mystery’, and resurrection was not that contemplated by faith, but a secular reassumption into the natural 190 L I, 344 (27 January 1866). 191 Many epigrams describe this condition of lucid pessimism. The brief apologue ‘The Progress of Poesy’ divides life into hopeful youth, fatigued maturity, and vacillating old age, by means of the metaphor of the flowing water (and water that cannot be channelled, and as such wasted). Life is utter nothingness, a vain, sorrowful quest while the body is mostly in pain. ‘The Last Word’ foreshadows Hopkins’s eunuch metaphors: addressed to himself, it is a very brief and paratactic series of discouraging invitations to shut down. 192 The evocation of the two ‘doctors’ is particularly cutting, and he prays that they stay far away: one is a physician, who diagnoses an illness that he cannot cure, and is useless; the other is a doctor of the soul, the priest, who unctuously comes to hear his confession and administer the last rites.

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cycle of life and a re-entry into the universe. The legacy Arnold hoped for was that already ascribed to his own father in ‘Rugby Chapel’: to be able, after death, to release his unused excess energy. The moment before death was nothing other than proof of the ephemeral trace left by human existence against the background of a world which already existed and would continue to exist after human extinction. Nature, in other words, is the divine and creative surrogate, and shares with God the task of meting out justice, impartial and harsh as it may be; and death is a reconnecting with the ‘eternal course of life’, a form of eternity and eternalization in nature. 2. ‘Obermann Once More’, Arnold’s last or penultimate full-scale ode, is also his last diagnostic, essay-like poem. At first glance, it seems for the most part to be a flat, repetitive poem, frankly even somewhat superfluous because it confirms the crisis and the absence of prospects affecting an entire generation. On the contrary, it turns out to be a crucial work, the very significant novelty of which being that it manages at the end to summon hope and point a way out of the paralysis of introspective poetry and passive acquiescence – indeed almost triumphantly it overturns them. With solemn clarity the poem ends establishing the investiture of Arnold – announced by the imaginary ghost of Sénancour – as a prophet of a new gospel of joy and consolation for suffering humanity, and a saviour of a broken-hearted age. At the end the ghost of Sénancour fades away, and with it also that of Arnold the poet,193 since this mission will be, indeed already was at that time, taken on and carried out by Arnold the essayist. The keystone of Arnold’s metamorphosis, hidden in the poem, lies in the historical excursus heard from the master. In essence this consists in the rediscovery of the cyclical mechanism of history and, more in particular, in that alternation of ‘high’ and ‘low tides’ that was painfully perceived as paralysed in the early poetry, notably in ‘Dover Beach’.194 In the ‘desert’ and in the darkness of the present, nothing authorized anyone to believe in an imminent ‘dawn’ of a new world – if not the almost probabilistic comfort of an undulatory progress of history, which, compared to the present, made one envisage the transition 193 Tinker and Lowry, Commentary, 273. 194 § 154.4. Arnold significantly re-uses the same marine imagery: ‘But slow that tide […] which bathed our life, retired’.

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to a phase of recovery and also, finally, to the conquest of joy. As the ancient Roman world in its decline, and intellectually exhausted – a model very familiar to the Victorians and later Victorians, through the mediation of the historical novels set in the age of early Christianity – was shaken and inflamed by the Good News of Jesus, so the prostrated early nineteenthcentury world was about to be revived by a new hope. The acceptance of the prophetic, salvific mission for humanity no longer allowed Arnold to hesitate or reconsider his own role. The world for him became a single whole, including all humanity in addition to his compatriots. Even and preeminently in his poetry of the 1860s, Arnold rips apart the rigid boundaries of intellectualistic intimacy and esotericism to rest his gaze abroad without filters. Some sonnets depict scenes of everyday London life with frankness and vigour, and they are scenes set in the slums inhabited by workers and the poor, or by vagabonds who reach out their hands to the rich but receive offerings only from others, poor like themselves. These snapshots of the London of the poor directly refer back to Arnold’s earliest poem, the only previous one having a realistic urban scenario, ‘To a Gipsy Child by the Seashore’. Arnold’s gaze, turning ‘East’ and ‘West’ of London in a diptych of sonnets, is one moving from the centre of the city to its suburbs; this centre was at the same time his own self. 3. Organized in quatrains with a syncopated rhythm reminiscent of the metre of Tennyson’s ‘The Palace of Art’, ‘Obermann Once More’ opens with a slow and very neat atmospheric and descriptive prelude, which becomes a ‘vision’, and gradually a hallucination, at first visual and then auditory, when Sénancour appears to Arnold in the clothes of a shepherd, with a flower and a book in his hand. His long and composite apostrophe, which occupies the whole central section of the poem, becomes the lament of the ‘brooding East’ in tears, overwhelmed and dethroned by the new Christian gospel. Within it, from the lips of Sénancour, room is found for a paradoxical epicedium on the very figure of Christ: the Swiss writer pauses imaginatively before the sepulchre of the crucified Jesus, which, like that of every deceased figure in Arnold, but much more dramatically, is ‘dumb’, enclosing a man deceased forever, rather than a survivor or even a saved man or a saviour. The concluding words of Sénancour are those of an oracular diagnosis but also of a prophecy, a prophecy which

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elects Arnold to be the Moses of the new age, the one who must lead his people across the Red Sea to the promised land.195 The relationship of this poem to that of which it is the continuation is therefore one of complete conceptual reversal, without however affecting their emotional relationship, which remained unchanged. As in ‘Thyrsis’, the Alpine surroundings of Switzerland are familiar to the visitor, and recognized as being eternal and unchanged in contrast to the ongoing metamorphosis of human works. In addition, there is now, as there will be in Proust, an apparent temporal hiatus which reveals itself as an imaginary overlapping: Arnold discovers that he is unchanged, and ‘twenty years’ seem to have passed when he suddenly realizes that it is as if he left those places ‘yesterday’. And the places, the mountain pass and the ‘cone of Jaman’, retain the same potential energy to bring back memories as were unleashed in ‘Thyrsis’ by the elm and the Oxford hills. Through Sénancour Arnold blames himself for having abandoned those places; twenty years earlier he should have remained. The beloved ghost, however, urges him to return among men immediately, as a prophet and dispenser of hope and joy. The real reason of Arnold’s sudden optimism resists an exhaustive explanation, and is of the same nature as the sudden strokes of inspiration; but it also has something to do with a closer approach to religious faith. At that time Arnold already placed great hope – as testified to by his theological writings – in religious reform, a symptom of which was in the recent opening of the Church of England to a greater tolerance and broader views. A ‘reduced’ religion modelled on the essential needs of the times was the mirage he believed capable of establishing a new order.196 Historical progress as outlined by Sénancour is both diachronic and historical and private and microcosmic; it in fact

195 This image is echoed at the end of the essay ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (§ 162.3). 196 The first of the two parts of ‘Bacchanalia; or, The New Age’, which form a rather forced antithesis, describes the descent of the sweet-scented and tranquil evening, a real landscape which is abruptly followed by the dream-like depiction of the wild dance of the Bacchae. The second section opens with a series of paratactic, telegraphic announcements of a changing age, of peace and hard work. The poet’s task is to support this general movement.

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adumbrates, in the symbolic image of the storm beating down on the late Roman world, heartless and wholly addicted to mere sensorial satisfaction and ennui, both the personal drama of Empedocles and Heine and the crisis of Arnold’s generation, as reflected in the climb up to the hilltop in ‘Rugby Chapel’ and ‘Thyrsis’. Sénancour was, in short, as he himself confesses, a coward: he declares that hope will dawn, but in the meantime he withdraws to his retreat in the mountains, using the excuse that the time is not yet ripe and he has no followers; indeed he passively believed that his life was pointless. Also for this reason, as he desperately enjoins Arnold not to ‘despair’, Sénancour becomes indistinguishable from Clough in ‘Thyrsis’, and for the second time invests Arnold with the symbolic role of the scholargypsy, who is about to find the force to become a stable part of that world from which, for the fear of contagion, he had sought to withdraw in ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’. 4. The reconstruction of Christ’s advent in the Roman world and in the equally ‘thirsty’ Eastern wisdom translates in the words of Sénancour into the usual heart-rending Victorian longing for the lost, direct eye witnessing: ‘Oh, had I lived in that great day’.197 That testimony, though with gradually reduced strength, had resisted over the centuries, ‘while we believed’, and Christ’s tomb remained symbolically open. But that legacy had violently come to nothing: God ‘is dead’, Sénancour declares foreshadowing Nietzsche. The next shock to the apathy into which humanity had plunged was administered by the French Revolution, which tore the world to fragments but failed to reassemble them leaving it dismembered. Thus, in addition to the task of formulating a new creed for modern times, there was a political and social one – a need practically felt by all the Victorians, and fully carried out in Arnold’s essays – to rebuild the civil community and a feeling itself of a community. In his poetry, and above all in ‘Obermann Once More’, Arnold is much more concessive, and much more open to the fascination of a humble, candid, naïve faith than he is in his contemporary 197 The correlation between early Christianity and the pure, humble, childish joy of a spontaneous relationship with things coincides impressively with Pater’s analysis in Marius the Epicurean, where Pater regrets that such a closeness to realia was overtaken by asceticism and renunciation in the Middle Ages.

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and later theological essays. In numerous other, shorter and impromptu poems, nonchalant only in disguise, Arnold does speak of legendary saints and miracles and reports extravagant anecdotes of martyrs, dilemmas of faith and philosophy, diatribes of heretics; and in a prayer attributed to Monica, St Augustine’s mother, entertains and lightly touches upon the idea of a primordial faith that he neither possesses nor reaches, but by which he is tempted. The secret and threatening backdrop of these poems, poetically contradicted, is that summed up by the slogan which governs the two great theological books of the 1870s, that ‘miracles do not happen’. § 161. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 XIV: The essays on the Homeric translations The systematic, sequential examination of Arnold’s poetry up to and through the 1860s which I have undertaken has allowed me to take into account only a minimal portion of his essay-writing, which in 1867 was in full swing, and already active in various cultural areas, and was by then even nearing its peak. His proper debut, as has been mentioned, had been in the field of literary and more specifically poetic criticism, with the Preface which opened the 1853 edition, and five years later with the one accompanying the play Merope. At that time these prefaces had been self-critical in the narrowest, most literal sense of the term. In his 1853 Preface Arnold proved to be completely aware of his chief aporia – one, so to speak, of a deRomanticized Victorianism also shared by Tennyson – an aporia between a ‘future’ poet that Arnold wanted to be – a Schiller-like one, aspiring to instil joy in others by descending into the world of human misery – and another, ‘actual’ poet, who wished to cultivate his own immature, solipsistic and often desperate self, without caring about the rest of the world. In 1853, the ‘actual’ poet lagged behind with respect to the poet-essayist in pectore who would be officially invested with that role in ‘Obermann Once More’. In this poem, as we have just seen, Arnold assigned himself a mission which he definitively understood that he could best carry out in the domain of prose essays rather than in that of poetry, and a mission to which he was in fact simultaneously attending. 2. In the 1853 Preface the openly classicist profession stems from, and is even made necessary by the incomprehensible chaos of the times and

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by the lack of guides – or even ‘one guide’ – to help find one’s way, a lack which Arnold repeatedly denounced in his poetry. In the classical world it was possible instead to find those ‘fixed points’ and that ‘steadying and composing effect’ which in a changeable and already relativistic future, lacking reliable axes, Arnold, for one, could not find in religious faith or in the Romantic and post-Romantic guides. The classics were the ‘only sure guidance, the only solid footing’ of an age which proclaimed itself the age of progress and gloried in its ‘great ideas of industrial development and social amelioration’. This and other affirmations presuppose the semantic emptying out of the word ‘progress’, and, in one of the first applications of the brilliant Arnoldian technique of the etymological test, play on the deliberate ambiguity of the word pair ‘modern’ and ‘antique’. This antinomy, one to which Arnold was increasingly to reduce his vision of culture and literature, is still fluid and imprecise in this preface. Empedocles, both the poet as protagonist of Arnold’s poem and the Sicilian philosopher passed down by history, is secretly contrasted to Homer in the terms of a clash between the modern and the ancient, as he embodies the psychological and intellectual corruption of the calm, objectivity and joy of the ‘early Greek genius’. In a later phase of the preface the literary subjects taken from contemporary life are ‘modern’; furthermore, Arnold refers constantly to ‘us moderns’. In reality, in the course of the preface Arnold carries out an evident conceptual reversal, because he considers any kind of literature ‘ancient’ or, worse, ‘antiquated’ if and when it reflects current times, and ‘modern’ every kind of literature, such as the classical, that depicts what is eternal and not transient (and he says this with no reference to the langue, archaic in one case, current in the other). In addition to his own poetry, and apart from ‘Empedocles on Etna’ and the so-called ‘modern’ Faust and Hamlet literature (centring on the morbid and inconclusive ‘dialogue of the mind with itself ’), Arnold’s target is the entire English poetic tradition ‘of expression’ and a contemporary literature, above all narrative, whose theme is everyday life, to which the classics could serve as a further antidote, proving a model both for content and for form. In this preface Arnold also opens his war against English literary ‘Euphuism’ and on that protracted Elizabethanism which lay behind all fragmentary literature made up of single, brilliant cameos, but leaning towards pure decoration

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and linguistic play as ends in themselves. These tendencies, in the present represented by the utterly ephemeral vogue of the ‘Spasmodics’, were poles apart from the firm succinctness and inexorability of Greek tragedy. But there is also an allusion to the gap, already widening at the time in which Arnold was writing, between ‘high’ and popular literature, the latter the prerogative of novelists. On the other hand, against the widespread theory and practice which held that the only subject of art had to be modern life, Arnold insistently reminds his reader of the sense of atemporality with which the Greek spectator watched a play, and how the casual, fleeting, and everyday belonged to the dominion of comedy. According to these canons he could surely have been one of the many detractors of the most widely misunderstood poem of the age, that veritable ‘apotheosis’ of the quotidian which is Browning’s The Ring and the Book.198 3. Arnold returned to the querelle des anciens et des modernes in the lecture ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’199 (1857, but published in 1868), chilly received even by its young listeners. It was in fact the first, and it is the only surviving lecture of those given by Arnold at Oxford as professor of poetry. The framework remains that of the relationship between literature and the world, and its theme how literature responds to its changing promptings, synthesizing them within itself. But the essay almost creates the expectation of a final judgement on the ‘adequacy’ of contemporary literature, which is lacking because perhaps developed in later lectures which have not come down to us. In fact, Arnold abandons quite soon his initial starting point, which coincides with that of the 1853 Preface in indicating the need for a ‘guide’ in the Daedalean contemporary world, a world which confuses progress with the greater availability of ‘knowledge’ and with the ‘power of production’. The argument unfolds from a risky supposition, actually one anchored in the Victorian historical conscience: that all historical ages are ideally co-present, which authorizes Arnold’s paradox according to which the Greeks could serve as contemporary models because, for their own times, they had resolved the same 198 As regards the first aspect, a probable contemporary target was Tennyson’s The Princess (1847), which contained lyrical intermezzos separated by the action. 199 I, 18–37.

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problems that nineteenth-century England was facing. In the absence of a comparison between the literature and culture of the two very distant periods, Arnold’s polemical assumption is that the Athenian society of the fifth century was more ‘modern’, and had a more ‘adequate’ literature than Elizabethan England. The sobriety of the age of Pericles is contrasted to the cult of the ornamental whim, of extravagance and caprice, which steals vigour from all manifestations of life, and renders even the prose and poetic arts of that period immature. The essay is already a perfect example of Arnold’s typical prose style, based as it is on the elegance and lucidity of exposition but also on a standard procedure of verbal acrobatics and daring generalizations which are not sufficiently justified, being completely personal, very often specious and nonetheless passed off as objective and universal truths. The word ‘modern’, for instance, is used here with a slightly more favourable meaning and in a more restrictive but also more dangerously fluctuating way than in the 1853 Preface, where it stands only as the mark of an obsessive sensitivity and for the disorders of the psyche. As a consequence a ‘modern’ civilization, indeed the most modern that the world had ever known – the golden age of Rome – had had for Arnold – in Lucretius,200 Virgil and Horace – an ‘inadequate’ literature, characterized by the signs of the ‘modern’ age, ennui and ‘depression’. The Arnoldian ‘co-presence’, that is the synchronizing of writers from different epochs, leads to the amazing diagnosis that Thucydides is just as modern as Burke, and much more so than Ralegh, who in comparison is ‘obsolete and unfamiliar’.201 Equally questionable is the deduction of an automatic law that regulates the fortunes of an author, who survives proportionally to the degree to which his work has a tendency to transmit life-giving energy, and sustains and promotes Bergson’s élan vital; a literature that shows this ‘vital impetus’ as defective or blocked will be forgotten, tacitly suppressed by future generations. This law was to become the basis of Arnold’s 200 It is not a coincidence that the fragments of an unfinished poem on Lucretius flowed into ‘Empedocles on Etna’. 201 This on the basis of the later, over-used technique of the comparison, consisting in an artful extrapolation of the best sample of the writer Arnold wishes to praise, and of the worst of the writer he wishes to criticize.

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literary historiography, and the very raison d’etre of his transition from poet to essayist. 4. The three Oxford lectures gathered in 1861 in a volume entitled On Translating Homer mark the true beginning of ‘objective’ and applied essaywriting by Arnold, despite being at first addressed, given their topic, to a somewhat restricted audience of the initiated. They appeared in a moment of fervent Homeric studies and betray a nature which is even too vibrantly militant. No fewer than four translations of Homer’s epics followed one another over a span of twelve consecutive months, and at least in academic circles the echo of a revolutionary, pioneering essay (1795) of Friedrich August Wolf  had not faded – to the contrary it still hovered threateningly in the air. Wolf – oppugned by Browning as well –202 had claimed that the Iliad and the Odyssey were nothing more than a series of lays passed down orally. A second edition of Arnold’s book, published in the same year 1861, incorporated a fourth lecture in an appendix. This appendix had originated in the desire to placate the translator F. W. Newman, brother of the future cardinal and Arnold’s main target; but in truth it contains new and still firmer confirmations of previous positions. Taken as a whole On Translating Homer appears to be a vademecum, dense with admonishments, caveats, advice and recommendations, for the Homeric translator. In order not to merely preach emptily or pontificate condescendingly, in the third lecture Arnold also provided his own specimens of translation, four fragments – humbly presented as attempts and proofs of his adherence to certain principles – in free hexameters with frequent poetic licenses, some of which are questionable, and requiring acrobatic justifications. There is a twofold and asymmetrical interest in the four lectures. They shed light on Arnold’s theory of translation and deserve a place, even if marginal, in the evolution of this theory; but at the same time they should be seen as a pretext to indirectly sketch out a theory of literature, using Homer and his 202 Arnold takes no interest in the ‘Homeric question’ and suggests the translator ignore it as well, but not because the translator is no philologist or historian, but rather for an objective and inescapable scarcity of information. Arnold however maintains that there surely was a Homer, because the poems that we have are homogeneous, and this is due to their marks of nobility, also termed the ‘grand style’ (about which more later on). The same is true for Dante: such great works cannot have been written by more than one author.

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recent, and above all past translators, who were poets in their own right, of the calibre of Chapman, Pope and Cowper. In its first aspect, as a theoretical work on translation, Arnold’s essays have a rather limited value. Except for the cases in which he points out objective errors, his critiques of the translations are debatable, and many of them fall in the realm of personal taste. Indeed, today we would tend to say that Newman has the stronger position, or rather we would praise his work of creative and even eccentric mimesis, rather than prefer the adoption of a rigidly uniform style and of a stiff register as Arnold recommended. In its second aspect, the book is a precocious and indirect analysis of the state of English literature of the nineteenth century, and contains the prescription of a therapy. Arnold lays his cards on the table with a decisive and vibrant call for a neo-Homeric aesthetic of linguistic economy and for the containment of extravagance and ‘Elizabethan’ poetic license. He himself being by now on the verge of leaving his practice of poetry, with perfect coherence he could call poets back to the objective and universalizing nature of poetry, a poetry purified of any extreme mark of individuality. 5. What was then in principle the linguistic and metrical means that Arnold considered appropriate for Homeric translations, to which almost none of those extant in English even came close? A simple, direct language, like the world of Homer and of the primitive Greeks. His ideal translator was not to coin a special, archaic and merely Saxon vocabulary; he needed in fact to avoid anachronisms that smacked of that Romantic ‘modern sentimentality’, of that ‘tender pantheism’ which – preposterously, in Arnold’s opinion – Ruskin found in Homer. And only three metres were appropriate: the heroic couplet, blank verse and the hexameter. The second could truly, if not ‘affected’, rise to the heights of Homer’s ‘grand style’, though it needed to be rapid, flowing, fluid, something no poet had thus far managed to produce, including Milton, whose blank verse is ‘self-retarding’, and with respect to Homer too compressed, too pregnant with meaning. Arnold was in truth a great promoter of the hexameter, and not only in Homeric translations: the pioneering attempts of Clough203 and the less 203 Arnold praises Clough’s The Bothie as Homeric, both because it is in hexameters and because it is simple and flows rapidly. And yet Clough, unlike Homer, states often ‘curious’ thoughts in simple form, as found in certain passages in Shakespeare. In

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successful ones of Longfellow204 are all warmly praised. Allied with the hexameter is a ‘loose and idiomatic’ grammar like that of Shakespeare; thus the translator could and should look back to Shakespeare at least in the cases in which he was effectively idiomatic. But the ‘grand mine’ of the Homeric translator had to be the Bible. The term ‘grand style’, ascribed to Homer and destined to enter current use in Arnold’s essays, though it seems to contradict the concept of Homeric ‘simplicity’, does not in fact contemplate or comprehend any element of the ‘grandiose’, and has to do, more than with the language, with the moral quality, the ‘nobility’ and the dignity of Homer, which for Arnold never fall short. In an important clarification, Arnold specifies that the Homeric grand manner is an intuition and cannot be proved mathematically; this is the reason why he may appear apodictic, if not wholly haphazard, when he cites four exemplary passages of supposed ‘grand style’ in Homer. 6. The fourfold diagnosis of the Homeric style is as follows: Homer is rapid, direct and simple in thought, in expression (Arnold here riskily compares Homer to an illuminist and even to Voltaire!), in words and in ideas; and he is noble. For Arnold, almost all the translators of the past, from Chapman to Newman, had failed to appropriate and valorise one or more of these qualities. Cowper is too Miltonic and thus not rapid; Pope too artificial; Chapman too imaginative; Newman has an ‘ignoble manner’; all or almost all had interposed a ‘veil’ between text and translation. Arnold’s preference, deducible from the smallest quantity of criticisms and by that of his approvals, goes to Pope and the poetic canons of the Augustan age.205 the fourth lecture Arnold, in a sort of brief epicedium in prose, salutes the deceased poet, again underlining the excellence of his art, his ‘true Homeric ring’. 204 This sufficed to exclude the use of rhyme in Homeric translations. It pairs things which are divided, and thus does not render the Homeric ‘movement’; it also induces the reader to look back, creating backward-looking associations, whereas in the original the movement is inexorably projected forwards. 205 Pope was, for Arnold, more Homeric than Cowper because more rapid, but he too used rhyme and had an epigrammatic spirit and a taste for antithesis that were the exact opposite of Homer; Pope is very weak, in Arnold’s opinion, in narrative or descriptive passages. While Homer composes with an eye to the subject, Pope does so with an eye to style, and consequently he lacks immediacy. He adorns, solemnizes and

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At the same time Arnold sets or applies aesthetic dispositions in his discussion: he exalts the ‘noble’ and tears down the ‘quaint’ and the ‘garrulous’ found in the old English ballads. The inseparability of style from content, breached by Cowper, is traced back to the unity of art, the effect of which lies in the whole rather than in words ‘taken separately’. The modern Homer of Newman was harshly contested by Arnold in the second lecture because his translation was the result of erroneous premises regarding the nature of Homeric poetry and its author. Arnold disapproves of four categories, those of a quaint, garrulous, prosaic and low Homer, on the basis of which Newman had coined, in Arnold’s opinion, a correspondent style which was at times colloquial, vulgar and ‘excessively familiar’, and disagreed with the Arnoldian image of a Homer always noble and always stylistically uniform, namely a poet who, unlike a Defoe, never ‘rises or sinks’, never ‘is prosaic when [he] is tame, low when [he] is mean’.206 Arnold’s principles are clarified, better than in his inflexible critique of Newman’s translation – which at times lapses into the hair-splitting discussion of the propriety of single epithets – in the position he takes with regard to Chapman’s Iliad. Through Chapman Arnold excoriates Elizabethan literature which disobeyed the precept of sobriety by reproducing intact, in its translations, all of the abstruseness and grotesqueness of the Middle Ages, doctoring and ‘tormenting’ the originals. Chapman belonged in fact to a ‘fantastic’ literature inappropriate to Homer’s simplicity of thought; a literature which was extravagant rather than ‘temperate’, and prone to linguistic excess, one enriches tropically what is simple. In her preface to her own translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (§ 63.3), Elizabeth Barrett was already on the path of Arnold the Homeric critic in On Translating Homer: she in fact saw the limits of Pope and Cowper in their role of translators-misrepresenters. But what for Arnold was a defect – a style marked by personal and contemporary idiosyncrasies– is for the post-Romantic Barrett an inalienable mark of the poetic. 206 In the fourth lecture, returning to this point, Arnold adds to Defoe, without naming names, the ‘Dutch painter’ as an exemplification of the absence of a grand style and of an adaptation of style to context. It is undoubtedly questionable, precisely because it pays lip service to a Victorian aesthetic principle, to indicate as admirable and imitable the supposedly Homeric technique of ‘making everything noble’, including the sordid.

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which produced the King James’ Bible only as an exception and because it had kept these characteristics in check. Arnold identifies a permanently ‘Elizabethan’ element in English literature, against which the Augustans reacted unsuccessfully, attempting to drain it. The third lecture closes with the hope that English literature, for the moment inferior in Europe to French and German literature, will be able to reappropriate the precept of seeing ‘the object as in itself it really is’, thus enacting the suppression of the individual element. The erudite academic argument ends then in a series of instructions which were directly relevant to the current situation, as they recognized the urgent need to purify and purge English literature of the remaining, still strong Elizabethan eccentricities: the English poets needed to pass ‘seven times in the fire’ before hoping to translate Homer. And the immediate need was for them to familiarize with ‘the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky’.207 7. In the fourth lecture Arnold is only initially meek and ready to apologize and make acknowledgements to the abused Newman, who had reacted with a rejoinder to what could only be termed true verbal insolence on the part of Arnold. Neither of the two was indeed willing to budge an inch, and Arnold, rock-like, launched into a still more detailed discussion which sounds nowadays like argy-bargy over pettifogging matters. Arnold’s cavilling is in fact always presented as utterly personal opinion. The greatest of his concessions is that the interpretation and the appreciation of a poem is a question of perception, of refinement, of an ‘undulation’ reminiscent of Montaigne, where ‘the shade, the fine distinction, is everything’.208 207 Arnold goes so far as to say that even Homer is a ‘modern’ in the sense defined in ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’. Homer’s modernity lies in his vision of life as ‘a conflict and a hell’, and yet he knew how to rise above it, remaining imperturbable and ‘noble’. 208 With fatigue and at times with specious and hair-splitting analyses, Arnold upholds the absolute and relative modernity of Homer’s language, which was perfectly known and mastered by all the scholars in the Athens of Pericles, whereas there was not the same relationship between the English ones and the language of Chaucer or Burns. Arnold sharply touches upon the real problem of the history of the reception of stylistic registers, one in fact anything but straightforward or progressive. The reduction of the appreciation of a poem to a question of sensitivity and taste, subtracting

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Called upon to give an undelayable definition, Arnold asserts that the grand style arises when ‘a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or severity a serious subject’. It is a tautological definition, which explains little despite the fact that Arnold believed the opposite, and does not say specifically what happens when the subject is ‘low’. From the intricate and excessively protracted discussion of some recent essays on the Homeric and English hexameter, a position emerges which is in essence moderate, that there was no need to create a new and fantastical hexameter as some had claimed, and that metre, however free, should not be accentual. Among the Victorian reformers of metre, Arnold is, along with Clough, one of the ‘metrists’, against the accentualists like Hopkins.209 This fourth lecture was also implicitly a militant intervention behind the screen of Homeric criticism, as it deplored the lack of an academy in England and also that of an authority appointed to regulate and discipline literary taste, and to bring order back where chaos reigned. § 162. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 XV: The first series of ‘Essays in Criticism’ I. Implications and applications of Arnold’s ‘criticism’ The old, worldly sage who set to teaching his countrymen the ‘critical’ spirit in Essays in Criticism210 (which appeared in 1865 in a volume it from any functional examination, remains one of Arnold’s most dangerous ideas because it is not only a systematic characteristic of Victorian literary criticism but it was later passed on to English criticism until its twentieth-century developments and to the present day, as was testified to in the past by an extreme case, the impressionistic approach to the poetry of Hopkins. 209 One of the essays to which Arnold responded had been written by a friend of Tennyson’s, Spedding, who, for lack of any other suitable metre, had praised Tennyson’s blank verse as being perfectly Homeric. Arnold, begging to disagree, inexplicably defines Tennyson as extremely subtle and elaborate in his thought, thus not Homerically simple, and belonging to the same family of the Elizabethans and of Shakespeare. Quibbling, he distinguishes simplicité (possessed by Wordsworth) and simplesse (§ 161.5). The criticisms levelled at Tennyson, whose devout followers had lifted him even above Wordsworth, seem then motivated by personal distaste and a spirit of rivalry. 210 By convention cited as ‘first series’, to distinguish them from the second one, published posthumously in 1888.

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that collected essays published in magazines since the early 1860s, and was re-presented with minimal revisions in 1869 and 1875), was in truth a camouflaged forty-three-year-old who by then was almost an ex-poet. Arnold threw himself into the essay-writing arena with a Garibaldian boldness and with ideas and projects greatly in excess of what could possibly be realized. This shows through in the letters he wrote to his relatives and friends revealing his new vocation, but not in the calculated composure of the essays themselves. The success that Arnold spasmodically pursued was above all one of a large listening audience, and one not devoid of possible financial benefits;211 but it was not separate from his aspiration to reform the English as if instantly. This he proposed to do not by means of a direct attack, not with invective and diatribe, but with soft, persuasive force. The new Arnoldian essay no longer has the asphyxiating, fussy air that characterizes On Translating Homer. We know that Arnold made targeted adaptations of the oral version of these essays, which were originally addressed to the Oxford students, so that they could be understood and unequivocally received by a non academic public, and therefore he adopted a plain and commonsense attitude. That audience became in essence that of the educated bourgeois who read the magazines where Arnold initially had these essays published, selling them to the highest bidder; but it also consisted of those cultured strata of population who, as he noted, were used to reading only novels and devotional books. Precisely for this reason today we may judge as concessions to popularization strategies for mediation which were at that time self-aware and even sophisticated – such as the rhapsodic tone which ranges from theoretical heights to the common events of the daily newspaper, or the extensive biographical information on the discussed writers; above all the abundant, almost jumbled up excerpts of translated texts. These translations aimed at facilitating the approach to the foreign authors, and the chosen passages, seemingly eccentric, served the objective of broadening the horizons of the audience. Their scarce notoriety was anyway compensated by the method of comparison with similar and corresponding figures of English literature and culture. The plan of the book 211 Arnold made no mystery of the fact that the payment he received was to furnish him with the necessary funding for a trip to Rome.

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is thus much more unified than one might presume given the time span that it covers (from Marcus Aurelius to Heine) and the mosaic of nationalities and genres represented. This is because it precisely stemmed from the new and quite peculiar meaning that the term ‘criticism’ had acquired for Arnold, in the first crucial application of the semantic test. 2. Essays in Criticism received favourable reviews almost immediately, not only in England, but in America by Henry James and Melville, and in France by Sainte-Beuve. The encouraging reception was due first and foremost to the fact that for some time in England there had been a vacuum in aesthetics and criticism, disciplines which, after Wordsworth and Coleridge, poets had deserted to dedicate themselves exclusively to the practice of poetry. Arnold’s aesthetics may seem today to be a series of apodictic and thumbnail affirmations, and an overly geometrical and simplified construction made up of clean-cut, uncompromising, even impressionistic verdicts, in the best of cases indebted to an updated Romantic lexicon. Indeed these essays appeared during that feverish but inconclusive and improvised theoretical turmoil that we have noticed earlier on as typical of the age. Ultimately, however, the authority of Arnold’s book was not due to the value of the single essays taken on their own, but rather to its overall ambition and aspiration to connect literature to the entire sphere of human activity in an organic whole – to a neo-humanistic project, opposed and impugned by the first Decadents – in which literature as such occupies a related if not a subaltern position to other activities, both intellectual and practical. In Arnold’s view, ‘criticism’, in fact, means literary criticism tout court but, at the same time, and primarily, something much broader. In Essays in Criticism he has joined literature, religion and politics in a single, indivisible and symbiotic entity for which, not much later, he was to coin the term ‘culture’. This amalgamation is announced and explained in the two framing theoretical essays, and applied to the cultural and literary figures who are the subjects of the other seven, who are emblematic examples of that amalgamation and even autobiographically representatives of it, as they successively or even simultaneously embody both the Romantic and post-Romantic and at least partly ‘critical’ author ( Joubert), the ‘citoyen’ at the service of his community (Heine), the ‘constructive ‘religious reformer (Marcus Aurelius and especially Spinoza). Arnold’s criticism is therefore

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a ‘mental attitude’ which is necessary in every sphere of knowledge, a ‘disinterested’ spirit of objectivity which, in the late nineteenth century, was the antidote to the self-assured, obtuse, and chauvinistic pragmatism of the English, dubbed by Arnold from this book onward as ‘philistinism’. Thus, first and foremost, Arnold’s criticism is self-critical, a task which must be carried out by the English regarding their own mindsets. These essays were to have a ‘subtle indirect action’ by means of a ‘slow and obscure work’. With respect to the declared and frequently denounced absence of bearings as voiced in his poetry, Arnold had found a type and a formula for a ‘guide’, but for a broader social spectrum, one that could be now identified with the whole national community.212 3. The essay ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, given by Arnold as a lecture at Oxford in October 1864 and placed as the inaugural one in all the following editions of the book, is, at least in one of its aspects, a sociological pamphlet against English ‘impermeability’ to ideas, especially foreign ones, and their absence of ‘curiosity’ – in the most noble sense of the term – about ‘the best that is known and thought in the world’. In this essay, and in the one dedicated to Heine, Arnold’s battle rages against English ‘philistinism’, historically congenital but at present worsened by self-satisfaction, and not challenged and certainly not eradicated by a literature uniformly ‘high’ which in England did not exist. Without openly polemicizing either with the idea of literature as entertainment or with poetry as an elite phenomenon, Arnold supports a thorough and fruitful familiarity with literature – as noted, prevalently foreign literature – not merely for purposes of sheer pleasure but also as an intellectual training. This ‘literature’ was indeed philosophy itself filtered through the great writer-thinkers. On the contrary, the single informative and formative channel of great swaths of the population at the time was the newspaper. With masterful effectiveness, Arnold repeatedly selects some of the journalistic formulas through which bourgeois self-sufficiency was reinforced and fed, and with a technique of which he quickly became a master, by dint of 212 The concept of a spiritual guide is taken from Sainte-Beuve, to whom Arnold expressly recognized the role of a ‘guide […] de ceux qui aiment surtout la vérité’ (letter to Sainte-Beuve, quoted in Bonnerot 1947, 518–9).

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repeating them, he empties them of meaning and turns them inside out to make them mean the exact opposite of what they were originally intended to signify.213 The illuminist, construens attitude is manifested anyway in the fact that Arnold, despite his awareness of the enormous ‘expansion’ characterizing the historical moment after an age of ‘concentration’, like that which ended with the Congress of Vienna – and which was principally and only an expansion of an economic and industrial nature – accepts it as the effect of an inevitable, cyclical historical mechanism. He foresaw that despite industrialization society would soon achieve a greater intellectual level, but not by seconding the delirious positivistic triumphalism which was the fashion, but through the transmission of ideas worthy of the name. There were very few signs of this in the present, which was however only apparently a ‘moment of stasis’, while really it was a ‘pause in which the turn to a new mode of spiritual progress is being accomplished’. A new and ‘reduced’ religion, reconstructed so as to be tailored to the humanity of the day – the constructive one of Renan, not the destructive ones of Colenso and the ‘Reviewers’ –214 was also a source of strength and hope. 4. The essay on Heine bears the unmistakeable marks of Arnold’s optimism at the beginning of the 1860s, as, together with Heine, he hails all the ‘dissolvents’ of the old creeds fighting in favour of the spirit of modernity, though he would wish less ‘acrid’ and less biting dissolvents, endowed with greater moral strength and with a stronger respect for themselves and for others, and with an authentic dignity – all of them issues which are better developed in the poem ‘Heine’s Grave’.215 With Heine, Arnold shared a rational, firm opposition to the Middle Ages, whose glamour 213 The well-known refrain ‘Wragg is in custody’, extracted from a newspaper article, refers to a poor mother’s murder of her own small child, a patently obvious contradiction of English self-sufficiency. One already perceives an inkling of Hellenic aestheticism, fused with a Dickensian satire, in the statement of the worrying (!), recent spread of cacophonic surnames, and in the criticism made of the pretentious yet vulgar building of the College of Health and the Headquarters of the English Divorce Court. 214 § 164.3. 215 In purely poetic terms Arnold recognizes in Heine the choice of flexible metres, and appreciates his witty poems in ballad form.

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created even in England groups of followers and revivalists, who in turn were utterly devoid of any Arnoldian enthusiasm for modernity. Almost at the same time in which these essays were being published in journals (1863), at Oxford Hopkins was drafting papers on the necessity of refuting the equation between ‘flux’ and progress, and Pater was reflecting, with bitter objectivity veined with anxiety, on relativity as a sign of modernity.216 Heine had preceded Arnold with the first complete analysis – and with the coinage of the term itself – of the ‘philistine’ spirit of the English, congenitally inaccessible to ideas; at the same time, he objectivizes his criticism of English philistinism having Heine himself pronounce it. The aggravating factor of nineteenth-century and contemporary philistinism pointed out by Arnold is religious Dissent, that ‘prison of Puritanism’ in which the nineteenth-century English bourgeoisie suffered, just as it had suffocated the entire Elizabethan age. Once developed, this theory will be at the core of Culture and Anarchy, connected to that of the rebirth of the Jewish and Greek elements already adumbrated by the German poet, who nonetheless had had bitter words of satirical mockery against his own race. If Heine had not managed to reawaken Germany, it was mainly because that nation, despite having ideas, failed, unlike France, to translate them into practice, or to do so quickly; and moreover Heine, as a poet and man of letters, had no other task apart from that of sowing ideas and preparing the ground. In Heine, the professional ethics of the politics of literature is therefore recognized, whose function is not one of ‘direct action’. Through Heine Arnold indirectly rejects the English Romantic tradition, not only because it was a ‘school of feeling’ but also because it encouraged a retreat from society. He excuses Byron and Shelley, who could not apply the modern spirit for a lack of solidarity and the strong resistance of their environment. Byron is defined as a great ‘elementary power’ crushed by philistinism, a natural ‘genius’ though deprived of ‘the

216 The Arnoldian parable of the early Goethian Enlightenment, which succeeded medieval obscurantism, will be later reflected, perhaps even consciously imitated, in Pater’s ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’.

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intellectual equipment of a supreme modern poet’; and Wordsworth had been a recluse cut off from modernity.217 § 163. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 XVI: The first series of ‘Essays in Criticism’ II. The historical and literary perspective That same Europe, above all that same France from which Arnold intended to draw the vital lymph of ideas that were to auspiciously regenerate the English philistine, proclaimed the equation between great literature and ideas to be obsolete and surpassed, an opinion which is advanced in Arnold’s essay ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’. In the mid1860s, the French symbolists already believed literature to be made up not of ideas but of words; and Arnold came forward as one of the last voices calling for a concept of literature as profound philosophical wisdom, and one of the last supporters of the poet-philosopher mixing and spreading ideas even without creating them ex novo. These principles condemned all poetic experiences, including Romanticism, which were only ‘a great movement of feeling’ rather than ‘a great movement of mind’. The essay ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ is in fact the dismantling of Romanticism, decreed on the basis of a lack of ideas which rendered Romanticism ‘immature’ and ‘premature’. Arnold expressly speaks not of bookish culture but of ‘atmosphere’, and indeed the Romantics lacked both the cultural life of the Greeks and the highly organized culture of eighteenth-century Germany. They did not have a ‘thorough interpretation of the world’, which is a formula that translates almost to the letter the German expression Weltanschauung. He picks up from Carlyle the conviction, 217 A supremely humorous appendix, written later than all the essays in the book — like almost every later preface written by Arnold — is the General Preface of Essays in Criticism, in which Arnold re-delivered light barbs which, he pretended to notice only now (1865), had been truly blows at the heart for certain ‘Philistines’. Against the followers of Bentham Arnold cleverly turns to the surreal anecdote – which is a foreshadowing of Friendship’s Garland – of a train journey made with companions who are trembling not so much for the possible repetition at their expense of the bloody acts of a railway murderer, but for their own, scandalous professions of ‘transcendentalism’. Among the travellers appears a cowardly jeweller who, Arnold suspects, is on a pilgrimage to receive the donation of ‘a sacred bone of his great, dissected master’.

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which will however reveal itself to be only temporary, of the absolute historical and historical-literary significance of the French Revolution with the exception of its grisly degenerations; but he changes this conviction when he sees in the Revolution an ‘enthusiasm for pure reason’. Among other things, Arnold believed that the French Revolution had indeed translated ideas into the political sphere, but that it had not really produced an intellectual revolution but rather an ‘epoch of concentration’, whose mainstay had been England and whose voice had been that of Burke: for this fact alone that epoch of concentration had been, politically, an epoch of reaction. Essays in Criticism is then in one of its aspects an operation of readjustment of perspective, a refocusing of the entire history of literature, which meant automatically for Arnold rehabilitating and rediscovering as much as ditching authors, or rather separating the real writers of genius – among whom there were also some great ones who had been forgotten (as such Arnold regarded Joubert and Spinoza) –218 from those who were simply able writers, the prototype for whom was Macaulay. The purge of Romanticism, and of all other forms of literature relying on feelings rather than ideas, leads to the definition of a canon which is almost the opposite of that of today, when we would consider it unthinkable to set limits on the immensity of Shakespeare, or ostracize other authors or cultural periods unacceptable to Arnold. On the other hand, it was to be expected that the first Arnoldian book of literary criticism would be ‘European’:219 the

218 An essay on his beloved Sénancour, which perfectly fitted into this typology, was unexpectedly not included in the Essays. Arnold wrote, along the lines of the two poems on Sénancour, an essay entitled ‘Obermann’, but he published it in the newborn magazine The Academy in 1869 (V, 295ff.). 219 From a wider and forward-looking perspective, this Eurocentrism reveals all its limits. The brief 1867 review ‘Theodore Parker’ (V, 78ff.) demonstrates Arnold’s incapacity to assume culture except as merely Eurocentric, or in other words not to admit the existence, or to see any premonitory signs of the birth of decentralized or local cultures capable of subtracting themselves from European hegemony. So he claims that the Americans have no autonomous culture but are indebted to the English, and that they receive the essence of European culture through that of England. They are – in a clearly myopic view – Englishmen born in the United States by chance, who will have to wait a long time before learning to ‘assimilate independently’ the

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authors to whom essays are dedicated are all foreigners, thus witnessing a broadened, no longer insular perspective, for which Arnold would fight vigorously from this moment on. 2. This emphasis on ideas, however, must not deceive the reader, and it proves undoubtedly rash and unbalanced when faced with the evidence provided by the other essays. It could even lead one to suppose a parallel devaluation of words and form, which Arnold later placed very clearly in balance with contents without postulating relationships of subordination between the two components. In ‘The Function of Criticism’ the objective is mainly that of pointing out the cultural degradation of the masses and of the English bourgeoisie, the lowering of standards and the urgency resulting from the situation. As to the intrinsic nature of poetry, Arnold does not disagree with the early Victorian aesthetic foundations of Keble, Hunt, Newman and Mill, because he always and repeatedly maintains – with a definition that seems retraced on Mill’s own famous one in his two essays on the nature of poetry – that poetry is ‘the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things’.220 In the essay on Maurice de Guérin, a double typology is set: poetry means the power to treat natural things conveying a new and fully intimate meaning of them, and conveying the feeling that we have of them as well; the other typology is that of lyrical poetry, which interprets our inner life to ourselves.221 In both cases poetry, significantly, distinguishes itself from the experimental methods of science: it is an illusory intuition, potent but inexact, a ‘magic power’. Arnold postulates a passive poetry, a complete openness to impressions which thus corresponds to the ‘wise passiveness’ of Wordsworth, or rather to the Romantic Eolian harp capturing every rustling of nature. In the young French poet this is an empathic

European models as well as the classical ones. Only in Whitman does Arnold, like Hopkins, recognize with surprise an authentic voice, not modelled on English poets. 220 § 41.4. 221 In Guérin there is for Arnold a predominance of the ‘faculty of naturalistic interpretation’, and the ‘natural magic’ is perfect. The word ‘naturalistic’ creates a critical ambiguity that in 1865 went unnoticed; it is one of the frequent cases of involuntary ambiguity and verbal imprecision in Arnold.

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identification with the natural world, of which he is like the voice, the voice of the winds and the currents. Guérin found words that incomparably echo even the most imperceptible impressions that nature evokes in us, ‘symbols equivalent with the thing symbolized’.222 3. Maurice and Eugenie de Guérin are Arnoldian look-alikes, and anyhow Arnoldian figures of restless seekers, worn out by their constantly frustrated desire. Arnold’s interest in them stemmed from the same fervid and troubled climate found in the poems ‘Rugby Chapel’ and ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’. Guérin, though tempted, had also ended up refusing, like Arnold at the Chartreuse, the strict rules of monastic life – had ended up facing the dilemma between solipsistic writing and the call of active life, or of that same lucrative writing to which Guérin sacrifices himself in a painful self-annulment. Guérin represents the same paradigm of inconstancy which is at the heart of many of Arnold’s poems; an inconstancy which is above all religious, and which, being a tormented and restless Romantic Catholic, led him, through various inner revolutions, to conversions and abjurations within very short intervals. Aesthetically the two Guérin essays seem to approve norms opposite to those fixed in ‘The Function of Criticism’, both because they were written earlier (1862 and 1863) – Arnold was at that time much more intent on adhering to the intuitions of the Romantics regarding the self and the world, even though he was anxious to universalize them – and perhaps because they wanted to demonstrate paradoxically a form of Romanticism which was however more disciplined and more nourished with ideas. Maurice de Guérin was at the same time the classic and Romantic poet that Arnold himself had been on the eve of his debut as essay-writer, as he knew the best that had 222 A similar equilibrium needed to be installed in poetry between ‘natural magic’ and ‘moral profundity’, an equilibrium so difficult to reach that even Shakespeare, not to mention Shelley and Keats, tended to become insufficiently simple and sensuous and too intellectualized. Furthermore Arnold, in his approach to poetry, continued to believe with very little flexibility that a certain content could a priori require a specific metrical treatment, and saw the French alexandrine as prejudicial for Racine, and the decasyllabic couplet as penalizing Pope, and in the eighteenth century only the sparse production of Gray was spared. Only prose, for Arnold, could pragmatically shape its expressive vehicle.

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been produced by the literary arts and because he was also a stern critic of ephemeral and second-rate literature, above all novels, and of sensational literature devoid of ideas: like Arnold, a restorer of the classic spirit, and a professed Romantic who criticized the Romantics. The first words of the essay on his sister Eugénie present Maurice as a French Keats who is less of a southerner, less of an ‘Elizabethan’, and gifted with ‘more of distinction and power’ as well with more of ‘delicacy of expression’. The essay on Eugénie also clarifies the entirely Arnoldian meaning of the term ‘distinction’, which is a synonym for taste and judgemental capacity, in short of a critical sense aiming to ‘correct the world’s blunders’, and to fix ‘the world’s ideals’. 4. The other theoretical essay in Essays in Criticism, ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’223 makes a very disadvantageous comparison between the tradition of English prose and a model which for Arnold is unreachable, that of eighteenth-century French illuminist prose. It stemmed from Arnold’s congenital aversion to disorderly, eccentric, extravagant, capricious products, and ultimately to ‘Elizabethan’ literature. Here he maintains that England has good poetry but lacks decent prose, excelling in ‘energetic’ genius but not in intelligence; in France the opposite is true, being a land of renowned prose writers. Arnold extensively and subjectively resorts to the technique of the exemplary excerpt and of the one-way comparison between English and French examples, with the systematic intention of establishing the superiority of the latter over the former. Many English prose writers, on the basis of this confrontation, are ‘poetic’; they have genius and imagination but not intelligence. Indeed, after Shakespeare, for Arnold there is only mediocre prose while French prose undergoes a phenomenal development. The alleged deficiencies are always inherent in form, precision, proportion, structure, and this is reflected not only in the creative works but also in the translations and in scientific writings, which rather than being truly scientific are often merely extravagant. Arnold himself, in short, was the saviour and the revitalizer of literature through these same essays, saving it from the bloodless and by now moribund tradition of English prose. Among contemporary prose writers he leaves few unscathed, and Ruskin is the 223 This essay, originating from a visit to the Académie Française and a review of a book by Renan, was likewise first given as a lecture at Oxford in 1864.

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first of the transgressors with his extravagant and poeticized prose. Only the courteous Newman, who by then was already outside the fray, receives praise, which as always for Arnold hearkens back to his university days and thus to his direct listening to Newman’s sermons at Oxford. 5. In Arnold’s opinion, the pernicious, unregulated literary individualism, the ‘Elizabethan’ lack of discipline, and the extravagance that reigned in current English literature, needed to be checked by the institution of a literary Academy along the lines of the Académie Française. As they are described, both the French Academy and the new English one are in their utopianism two Swiftian academies of Lagado: they immobilize literary language, clip the wings of creativity, thus attacking the very life of literature, and coming close to the censorship of the Holy Office or of totalitarian regimes.224 Arnold does not hesitate to note these inconveniences, but claims that the advantages are greater, above all for a country like England lacking the traditional gifts of the French, such as discernment as to whether the plaisir du texte is legitimate or not – lacking, that is, in the critical and evaluative faculty. One cannot say that Arnold’s re-organizing efforts had no immediate effects, since in this essay the bases are laid for that literary decorum, that sense of proportion, that consensus on taste – and those supposedly objective and publicly shared standards are fixed – which were to lead to the almost cautionary and a priori exclusion of the irregulars. Such, an irregular, was Hopkins for Bridges when, only a decade later, he began reading the poetry his friend was already composing. The category applied by Arnold is yet again of an illuminist mould: there is a friction between the free, innate, non-transmittable genius (that of the Romantics and of Coleridge in particular) and tamed intelligence, and between the recklessness and anarchy of genius and cold and hard rules. The energy of which Arnold speaks is in fact ‘freedom, entire independence of all authority […] fullest room to expand as it will’.225 224 That superior organism had been, in Arnold’s first formulation in On Translating Homer (§ 161.4–7), an assembly of scholars which alone was capable of assessing translations and deciding upon their merits or flaws. 225 While poetry can also take the form of intuitive energy, ‘genial’ in the Romantic lexicon, prose requires a flexible intelligence; according to this criterion there had

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6. Alongside poetry and prose, Arnold saw criticism as a third force, and in the essay ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ he rehabilitates the nobility and equality of the role of the critic with respect to that of the creator. Although the function of the creator was pre-eminent, it was far from pointless for Arnold that he should dedicate himself to criticism, and for various reasons – the first of which being that in certain, unpoetical ages, criticism helps to prepare the creative function and is therefore ideally co-creative. The mechanism of literary production hinges first and foremost on the transmission of ideas, not necessarily new. Whereas the philosopher discovers new ideas, the poet synthesizes and spreads them. Inspired by a ‘certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas’, he treats these ideas ‘divinely’ and presents them in the most attractive and effective combinations. Not ideas in their pure state, then, but not sensations and emotions either: if the right atmosphere of ideas is lacking, the great poet works in vain, and that right atmosphere is shaped by the philosopher and the critic. The idea of the critic as artist, memorably developed by Wilde in one of his essays a few decades later, is thus originally Arnold’s own, although not yet in the form of the hendiadys. A second inalienable task of Arnold’s criticism lies in the classifying and ranking of literary authors according to a yardstick which must be as objective as possible; this critical rigour, in the form of the term ‘disinterestedness’, is since then associated with Arnold. He launched his campaign against literary prejudice as well, and his criticism of capricious, personally extravagant ‘Elizabethan’ literature finds its nexus in the denunciation of an unregulated, wildly subjective, impressionistic criticism which – Arnold was perfectly right here – reigned supreme at that time in England.226 His dictum that the ‘business’ of criticism is ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’, indeed

been too much ‘genial’ and thus poetic prose in England in the past. The opposition between ‘unregulated’ poetry and ‘regulated’ prose is mirrored by that between the academy and the outskirts, between the moderate, dry spirit of the centre opposed to the eccentric, anarchical, unregulated spirit of the suburbs. 226 Arnold is very harsh with the biased magazines subservient to political and caste interests, directly formative of ideas, but more often of opinions and, as noted, prejudices.

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caught on as a catchphrase until the 1870s, when it was dismantled word for word by Pater in the preface to The Renaissance. 7. The long-winded essay on Joubert, which in its first magazine version had the meaningful title ‘A French Coleridge’, has the declared objective of illustrating, with even overly brilliant images and arguments, the paradigmatic distinction between ‘men of genius’ and ‘men of ability’, the latter merely indulging the whims and tastes of the public. In truth the real objective of the essay, revealed more than half-way through, is that of assessing two English prose writers who are ‘Elizabethan’ to varying degrees: Coleridge, who is the only great Romantic to whom Arnold in his whole criticism did not dedicate a specific essay, and Macaulay. The latter is first exalted as an honest rhetorician, to be later downgraded to an ephemeral writer who will not resist the test of time and the generational change. Between the lines Arnold alludes to many analogies between Coleridge and Joubert. Both were fragmentary and occasional writers, both eclectic and conservative; but Arnold’s Francophile zeal, which leads him to declare Coleridge’s inferiority to Joubert, is unforgivable. Arnold concedes to Coleridge the important merit of being – in philistine, pragmatic England – a constant stimulus and a ‘disturbing element’ in the search for truth. But while Coleridge was hazy and often incomprehensible, Joubert had the gift of absolute, unfailing objectivity, the typical gift of the Arnoldian ‘critic’: ‘To see and show things as they really are’.227 § 164. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 XVII: The first series of ‘Essays in Criticism’ III. The essays on religion The essays on religious and philosophical topics in Essays in Criticism, and the few others of the decade 1860–1870, are in themselves nothing more

227 The usual recourse to etymology concerns the French adjective saugrenu: such, ‘impudently absurd’, are for the French Coleridge’s judgements regarding their own literature. Likewise questionable is Arnold’s opinion that the ignorance of a language precludes the correct judgement of a work. The long digression on transversal misunderstandings (Chateaubriand and Racine were not appreciated in England, Joubert preferred an unknown French poet to Milton) are a prelude to the assertion that both Coleridge and Joubert had expressed indefensible verdicts.

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than prolegomena, at times confused, to the two great books of biblical criticism of the 1870s, Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible. They in fact delineate a tendency towards the ‘reduction’ of religion according to the needs and the widespread scientistic and positivistic tendencies that Arnold believed to be shared by the English High Church and, less questionably, by the Broad Church; on the other hand they prelude to the end of Arnold’s youthful hesitations and herald his embrace of Anglicanism. The essay on Eugénie de Guérin re-proposes the comparison between the two faiths – Catholic and Protestant, the former dying and the other as yet unborn – in the same terms as ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, but concludes that the Catholic doctrine of renunciation was ‘incurably sterile’, and could only be healed by Protestantism. The three essays with more specifically religious themes in Essays in Criticism complete the perspective adopted in the whole book, by indicating the vital connection between religion, literature and politics and by looking at the example of figures of writer-philosophers or theologians who accept and indeed make more powerful the positive dimension of religion, a reductive dimension but at the same time a source of joy. Its emblems are Marcus Aurelius, forerunner of all the ‘consoling and hope-inspiring’ writers, St Francis, who adapted religion ‘for popular use’, and the diaphanous, ‘edifying’ Spinoza. Naturally such writers, themselves ‘critics’ of religion, are examined by Arnold with an equally ‘critical’228 spirit, visible both in the discussion of their speculative positions and in the meticulous textual criticism conducted on the translations of their works into English, which for many of Arnold’s readers was the only accessible text. 2. The essay on Marcus Aurelius, together with Long’s translation of his Meditations – the occasion which inspired the essay – was to play a major role in the spread of the contemporary fame of this figure. It is the only one that Arnold wrote on all the Stoics and the pre-Christian or proto-Christian sages in whom he had been profoundly interested since his youth, as is proved by the many literal references in his poems. Arnold only singles out, and explicitly joins to Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus as a moral 228 This leads him to notice with frankness all the cases in which ‘the great critic’, Spinoza, ‘becomes voluntarily […] uncritical’.

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writer on a par with Christian teachers. Arnold’s thesis is that in its essence Greek and Roman Stoicism already contained Christian morality, save for that ‘tide of joyful and bounding emotion’ which Christianity had infused into it. This is why we sense in Marcus Aurelius ‘something melancholy, circumscribed, and ineffectual’,229 a soft and resigned sweetness, a passive acceptance, more than a real joy. All these attitudes, examined and accentuated by Arnold, together with the elegiac final image of the emperor who reaches out his hand towards something that is ‘beyond’, would exercise a little later a singular, lasting fascination on Walter Pater, and influence his novel Marius the Epicurean. While Marcus Aurelius was a forerunner of Christianity (although for Arnold he would never have become a martyr), he was also a critic of it, ‘modern’ at least in his impassible examination of the plurality of faiths or simply of the competing philosophies. Christ’s doctrine was subject already at that time to that precocious ‘misrepresentation’ caused by the temporal gap between event and source, also painfully lamented in Browning’s monologues. ‘Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment’ is complementary to the essay on Marcus Aurelius at least because it examines the actual results of that primitive Christianity which escaped persecution, when, that is, it became institutionalized but thereby lost what was volatile and secret it had on its first appearance; and, in the second place, because it asks what answers Christianity offers to the primitive religious needs of man (these too are questions which would have been taken up again by Pater, almost in the same form, in his studies of Greek mythology). Theocritus and St Francis are compared as the representatives of two worlds, the pagan and the medieval Christian ones. Theocritus is permeated by a sense of the pleasure of life which however ends up being a bit nauseating; St Francis is the one who discovered the heart and the imagination and was able to appreciate the ‘whole world’ as pervaded and transfigured by a completely spiritual emotion. These were for Arnold two extremes which required a synthesis: too much sensualism in Pompeii, too much spiritualism in St Francis. With the exception of the Renaissance 229 Arnold justifies Marcus Aurelius’ incontestable, inexplicable persecutions of the Christians by the fact that early Christianity was for the emperor something ‘philosophically contemptible, politically subversive, and morally abominable’ – like Mormonism for his contemporaries, Arnold adds, in another of his aforementioned frequent and abrupt jumps in tone and perspective.

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– which had returned to the pagan spirit and at the same time to the senses and to reason – for Arnold no secular or religious cultural movement had enacted a similar conciliation. The Reformation – the Lutheran one, not the watered-down English version – had reacted to the paganization of the Roman Church without however reintroducing anything Greek; reason and feeling had then irreparably diverged in the eighteenth century and beyond. The introduction of the synthetic concept of ‘imaginative reason’, traced in the golden age of Greek lyric and tragic poetry – in Simonides, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Pindar, in whom this conciliation was realized for the first and only time – constitutes a prefiguration of that Hellenic element which in Arnold will become the inescapable leavening of culture, of all culture. The Greek and Renaissance civilizations are for Arnold, as they will be for Pater, the golden ages of humanity, the models to readopt in a supposed, and awaited, cyclical dynamism of the world. 3. The revolutionary, ‘scandalous’ books of biblical exegesis written by the Bishop of Natal, John William Colenso, and the articles and essays of various heterodox authors contained in the miscellaneous book Essays and Reviews (1860), were discussed by Arnold in a series of interrelated writings forming a controversy in which, together with the bishop, the figure of the philosopher Spinoza was also implicated. Spinoza, whom Arnold had read assiduously as a young student, had in fact presented in his own time, but more politely, the same ‘heresy’ as Colenso and the ‘Reviewers’. In ‘The Bishop and the Philosopher’ – published in a magazine in 1863 and later incorporated almost in its entirety into Essays in Criticism, but with the suppression of all references to Colenso, and with the new title ‘Spinoza and the Bible’ – the specious premise from which Arnold begins is that whoever writes of biblical exegesis must necessarily do so with the purpose of edification, and therefore advance ‘culture’ and humanize the masses, whereas the ‘opinions’ of Bishop Colenso, challenging the divine inspiration of the Bible, were destructive and tore apart the creed of the ‘stupid Englishmen’, a creed firmly entrenched in the thorough literalness of the Bible. Arnold, who would later endorse Colenso’s positions without ever openly confessing to sharing them,230 sounds in this essay like one timidly suggesting that the truth cannot be questioned in order to avoid

230 As was also noticed by Trilling 1949, 212ff.

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cataclysms, or that it must be wisely oriented following the objective of preserving at least the cornerstones of the faith. In comparing Spinoza to Colenso, Arnold found a kind of preview, dialectically accepted,231 of his nascent religious thought, later fully articulated in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible, and whose roots are found in Spinoza’s assertion that religious precepts can be reduced to the faith in God and to the living of an honest life, although nothing certain, unambiguous and scientific can be said about the figure or the nature of God. From here, indeed, it will be only a small step to the assertion of a God who is a pure, hypostatized synonym for the ‘moral righteousness’ theorized in the two theological books. Arnold does not speak in the first person, but has no objections to the Bible being stripped, as Spinoza wishes, of all of its almost pointless and at times imaginative historical parts, and to religion being reduced to pure moral law, one which all the secular and even agnostic cultures might agree upon, a law of the heart, ‘inly-written’, prior to the advent of Christ, as had been admitted even by St John. The last bulwark to be torn down is that of the miracles, either inexistent or the result of pure stylistic circumlocutions, or Hebrew tropes. All things considered, however, Arnold agrees with Spinoza who, unlike Colenso, is constructive, and did point out the supposed errors of the Bible, but not to demolish, rather to fortify the faith, though one purified. 4. The true response to Colenso, and at the same time to all those who had criticized ‘The Bishop and the Philosopher’, is found in the essay ‘Dr Stanley’s Lectures on the Jewish Church’,232 the first pages of which are Arnold’s clearest pronouncement on the double truth, that of the Bible and that of science, and on the necessity of their reciprocal non-interference. On the proven basis of the unsustainability of the Bible as science it was necessary to proceed to a reform of religion, and the task facing religious

231 ‘Spinoza and the Bible’, which seems to throw much water on the fire of Arnold’s enthusiasm for Spinoza, in fact confines itself to reviewing some harmless shortcomings, mostly philological, of Spinoza’s Tractatus, which was the work of a Jew and not of a Christian, more precisely of a Jew who had become in the end no Jew and no Christian, though not an atheist or, a fortiori, a post-Hegelian. 232 This essay (1863; III, 65–82) appeared in a magazine and was not reprinted in volume.

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reformers in modern times was therefore not that of rejecting but instead of very slowly reconciling the ‘new intellectual ideas with the spirit of the times’. Bishop Stanley, Arnold’s classmate at Oxford and the biographer of Arnold’s father, had moved in this direction, having himself confronted the Bible with the right spirit and the necessary respect for its divine inspiration, whereas Colenso had erred in his decision to face it from the point of view of a scientist. In any case it was clear that, in 1863, a ‘religious reformer’ had not yet appeared on the horizon, and that it was the State’s responsibility to support and carry out the reform itself, as for Arnold the State was indissolubly identified with the national Church, as also was his father’s firm conviction.233 The quite acrobatic secret of authentic biblical criticism lay for Arnold in the objective analysis of the scientific errors of the Bible, and in ensuring at the same time, despite these errors, ‘the future which undoubtedly exists for the religious life’. § 165. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 XVIII: ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’. Political separatism cured by philology Arnold’s Oxford lectures on Celtic literature, gathered together in 1867 in a volume entitled On the Study of Celtic Literature, had an extemporaneous autobiographical origin which was welded to an ethnographic and literary theory – or more precisely a fantasy. Visiting Brittany in 1859, Arnold had felt his maternal Cornish – and thus Celtic – roots resurfacing within himself; it was during a later stay in Wales in 1863 that he had felt with amazement and trepidation the impalpable and suggestive aura of the veiled and dewy landscapes and had discovered those traditions, those fables, those ancient myths which had later been whitewashed by the Saxon invasion. In particular he had attended the annual festival of ancient Welsh traditions, the Eisteddfod, an edition which not only had been pitifully disorganized, but had also been ruined by inclement weather; even the locals had been far from numerous. Ethnographically, it was his reading of some essays by Renan that convinced Arnold that the English race owed more than he had thought to the Celts; that stimulation fused in turn with

233 § 9.1.

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his desire to rectify the words of a scholar of ancient Welsh poetry, editor of an anthology published in 1858 from positions which were profoundly hostile. From all these distinct experiences a provocative and fascinating book was born, one which breathes life into the aridity of philology and into the erudite and professional sphere of the academic lecture by means of a ‘hypothetical’ and exploratory style of writing,234 not at all his usual one, and one that would remain unique in his output. The secret agenda of the book, which could seem as the pure extravagance of an amateur, lies in fact in its pioneering exploration of the roots of English society and of the English race. While already preparing to identify, in Culture and Anarchy, the capital turning point of English history in the Reformation and in the marginalization of Puritan Dissent – the distant progenitor of the bourgeois philistine – Arnold examines in these lectures a different genealogy, the submerged and still older Celtic heritage. This was a confused heritage, or perhaps one rendered more so by Arnold’s tentative analysis; confused, however, to such a degree that, according to the results of his critique, it may be seen as both the germ cell of English philistinism and its antidote.235 The Celtic element also reveals itself to be, from an autobiographical perspective, a synonym for that introspective, solipsistic poetry which can even be morbid and wholly resolved into style, which Arnold had rejected shortly before, and which in any case he hailed almost nostalgically in the nearly contemporary essay on Maurice de Guérin. 2. Arnold’s irrepressible polemical instinct, although passed off as the absolute ‘neutrality’ and ‘impartiality’ of ‘criticism’, makes of the obscure anthologizer, Nash, a ready-made guinea pig, the Newman of the situation primed for a cruel attack.236 Arnold reminds himself insistently of the objectivity of ‘scientific investigation’, but he is the first to violate and abandon its rules on the wings of his enthusiasm, turning to pure conjecture.

234 Significantly, Arnold accepted and included in the volume edition the friendly objections of an expert linguist, Lord Strangford. 235 In the book one even comes upon the puzzling declaration that there is also a good philistinism, one leading towards science, which could no longer be opposed or disavowed. 236 § 161.4.

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His amazement before the most recent findings of philology is almost childlike – the amazement, that is, for an eminently associative science revealing unsuspected linguistic relations, and a ‘science’ that invited the student to play the game and to let ‘rhymes’ between words and words, and words and things, come to the surface. Here we sense the same complacent fascination, accompanied by the inherent risk of making blunders, as is found in Hopkins’s Journal (the latter was an attentive listener of these Oxford lectures and drew many valuable hints from them). The search for philological ‘rhymes’ constitutes a support for that of racial relationships: Arnold identified in science an unspecified and presumed tendency to unite rather than to divide. The English race had in fact crystallized throughout history as a mixture of autochthonous elements which were Celtic, Germanic and Norman; the Celtic element consisted for Arnold in visible somatic features but also in indelible ‘spiritual marks’. The reader almost senses he is watching a newly practising chemist when Arnold, with perfect seriousness, begins to separate the Celtic, Germanic and Norman ‘elements’ and to blend them together again. What was then the mental framework, the temperament, or as the title says the Celtic ‘element’ or ‘genius’, which today would be called the genetic code, and which had been fused in a new synthesis with the Germanic and Norman ones?237 Not all the consequences of the impurity of the race were positive: in essence, the English retained a Celtic mood of sentimentality which instinctively induced them to take refuge within when faced with the ‘despotism of fact’; but that mood also translated, in art, into a lack of organizational ability,238 237 The German element is a combination of soundness and honesty, and crosses into Gemeinheit; the Norman is a Teuton, originally, but Latinized and paradoxically an exporter to England of a Latinized culture, the opposite of Celtic culture in its adherence to facts, in its quickness, clarity, military valour and business acumen. 238 This explains why for Arnold the Celts do not express themselves in the plastic arts, and if they do they are unsuccessful. In music and poetry, on the contrary, the Celts excelled, but in the brief vein and without creating great masterpieces like those of Bach or Dante, and they retreated into technique. Arnold adds that the Celts, concentrating entirely on the eye and on the eternally unsatisfied gaze directed at the imperceptible and the ideal (whose symbol is the forest), and having little realistic attachment to facts, are unsuited to painting – hence the congenital weakness of

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and, in politics, into the failure of every attempt at aggregation, witnessed by the recognition that the Celts did not produce a lasting civilization. An identical mixture is found in English religion, a mid-point between German rationalism and pious Celtic sentimentalism. 3. The ‘Arnoldian’ literary critic who comes out of hiding at the end of the ethnographic foray reconstructs a linguistic and literary Celtic genealogy, it too a residue or ‘element’ which is variously blended with the Germanic and Norman ones. The threefold predisposition for style, melancholy and natural magic is expressly Celtic. Arnold admired German literature immensely, but above all for its content of ideas and its ‘modern’ atmosphere; it was stylistically awkward and prose-like,239 though in its great writers it also displayed a Homeric simplicity.240 If so, English style was not German. Indeed even the Celts did not have interpretations of the world to boast about, but merely and simply style to offer, and were literally intoxicated with it. Melancholy had in turn produced a literary Titanism of the Byronic type and, earlier on, pre-Romantic and Ossianic poetry;241 but even Shakespeare is ‘Celtic’ in his magic natural descriptions. The Celtic infatuation, then, ultimately harks back to an alternative literary evolution in history, that of the dream-like and melancholy languor which oversteps any neat periodization, by the same standards as the alternation between

English painting. Turner is defined as eminently a Celt, and maybe Ruskin would have questioned the extravagant assertion that the Celtic element always stealthily intrudes into English painting to repress the Germanic vein, which would anchor it to facts. 239 In a review of a manual of Greek history (V, 257ff.), Arnold praised a rare example of readable and well-written German prose. 240 Preceding Hopkins and his theory of poetic language as current language ‘heightened’, Arnold argues that stylistic simplicity has its roots in Shakespeare: ‘a manner changed and heightened […] a peculiar re-casting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say’. 241 Arnold finds nothing Titanic in German literature, for even when it aims to be Titanic it is instead full of Sehnsucht, which is only a mawkish yearning. He provides ‘proofs’ of the Celtic ‘magic’, but its sphere is that, very subtle one, of literary taste and sensitivity. He believes that he is demonstrating his point with overwhelming evidence, but his proofs could be easily overturned; too few and far between are the examples he gives of Celtic style, and those mostly in translation.

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classical and Romantic sensibilities removed from the progress of time, which Pater was soon to theorize. It also ends up rehabilitating figures and atmospheres, like those of the Romantics, which Arnold had ditched not long before while constructing his literary system. He was nonetheless aware that the marks of Celtic culture were completely marginal and even unserviceable in the present time. The disturbing, abrupt conclusion is that the only valid contemporary literature is that of Goethe, the only one interpreting the world autonomously despite having nothing of the Celt in him. A few pages from the end, Arnold even adds that the Celtic temper is pernicious, and the reader is left to discover that the Celtic spirit is one of the roots of philistinism. Celticism in fact boils down to ‘self-will and want of patience with ideas’; with its delicateness and its spirituality, it can be useful in tempering philistinism, but the Celt who does not know how to handle the world is, strictly speaking, an example of the lack of Arnoldian ‘criticism’, and in this he absolutely cannot be redeemed. 4. Arnold’s lectures and the book gathering them were conceived and grew in the wake of that indiscriminate euphoria which governs his essays of literary criticism, politics and religion, and which always translated into critiques that were constructive rather than destructive, and forward-looking. After a philological introduction which may almost be termed a false start, and a circumscribed episode of literary ethnography, the ultimate goal of On the Study of Celtic Literature reveals itself to be a new proposal, aimed at the reconstitution of English society in a historical moment when the separatist claims were capitalizing on that linguistic autonomy which the English were attempting to suffocate. Arnold, who was on his way to becoming predominantly an essayist and a political commentator, rejects the Welsh and Irish separatist movements, and suggests that they could be defused through humanity and tolerance; he defines attempts at ‘political and social Celtisation’ as fantastical, and backs up his position with scientific findings that establish the English and the Celts as distant relatives. Science gives a hand to politics, and the book is therefore, in the last analysis, the first example of Arnold’s coming to the rescue of minorities. More specifically, he believed that the Welsh should not delay the process of linguistic unification in England, but at the same time that did not automatically mean that they should cease to honour their ancient

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Welsh language and literature. English needed to become the national language across the whole nation, and saying this Arnold sounded a linguistic imperialist of the type that today would be fiercely criticized, even if this is made out to be a necessity of modern civilization. Nevertheless, for Arnold, the Welsh, despite being obliged to stop speaking Welsh in the practical sphere – and even, Arnold sceptically adds, to cultivate it now as a literary language – still needed to venerate their antique and forgotten traditions. ‘Philistine’, and inimical to culture, was actually only bourgeois public opinion, whose ideas were most effectively spread through The Times, which had recently advocated the abolition of the Eisteddfod. So it was not the Irish and Welsh who were to be united with the English, it was rather the English, and particularly the moribund aristocracy and the vulgar bourgeoisie, who needed to overcome their proud awareness of being in union only with themselves. From the final phases of this book Arnold’s massive crusade against the bourgeoisie, which was to occupy him in his later political papers, takes its start: a crusade always methodologically hinging on disautomatization, on the exhortation to reflect on real and false interests, or rather on prejudices, and fought against an entire class. That study of Celtic literature could definitively reveal – with precise, embarrassing political consequences – the absolute falseness of the claims of certain experts – shared very broadly by the opinion of the stuffy philistines and later also by some intellectuals like Hopkins – for whom the Irish, which was the same as saying the Welsh, were ‘aliens in speech, in religion, in blood’ with respect to the English.242 In addition to the political writer we catch a glimpse of the future pedagogue, who disagrees with those who wished for scholastic university institutions to apply themselves a bit less to the classics and a bit more to modern questions. That was anathema for Arnold, who retorts that universities must still occupy themselves with remote matters, which are not so remote after all, for the gap in 242 At the time that ethnic theory was just beginning to take shape which sees a very broad linguistic and racial Indo-European zone, and unlike today there was no certainty that the Celts belonged to this family. With caution, Arnold cites a recent theory according to which there were three linguistic families: Indo-European, Semitic and Mongolian.

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knowledge which needed to be bridged concerned in fact the Celtic component of the English culture and race. Arnold’s ultimate hope, later heeded by politicians, was that a chair for Celtic studies be established at Oxford. § 166. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 XIX: ‘Friendship’s Garland’. The first, satirical and parodic work of the political writer The political mediation offered at the eleventh hour by philology and literary criticism, while permitting Arnold to keep his original identity of literary writer intact for a short time, was too sophisticated and refined, and followed a path which was too alternative to influence and inspire the reform of English society or the battle against philistinism. After 1865, he understood the need to hit his target in a more direct manner, and did so through two types of writing. The first adopted a transposed and satirical key, attempted in Friendship’s Garland and immediately abandoned with the exception of sporadic returns (because it too was overly erudite and academic, and therefore remained unheard). The other, which was to become his standard after Culture and Anarchy, chose a wholly practical key, the objective and circumstantial analysis, at once retrospective and synchronic, of the current political situation. Despite its brevity, even Arnold’s very first political piece of writing in 1859, dedicated to the Italian situation, may be considered an indirect criticism of English society, because in essence it is an attempt to rectify political ignorance and commonplaces and it intended first and foremost to combat stock judgements on the part of the English aristocracy and public opinion. As we will see, Culture and Anarchy too is of a hybrid and mixed nature, and ultimately Arnold leads the political discussion into the realm of religion; soon after this, he became convinced that social reform must necessarily and primarily follow a religious reform. It is not a coincidence that his two theological books of the 1870s were his most meditated, most thought about, most demanding, and from his own perspective the most significant ones he ever wrote. 2. Arnold was in Europe during the second Italian war of independence, from April to July 1859, when the battle of Solferino took place and the notorious treaty of Villafranca was stipulated which sanctioned the handing over of Lombardy to Piedmont and of Venice to the Austrians. Those events inspired him to write a pamphlet which he drafted upon his

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return and was separately published in a magazine for a very low fee, entitled ‘England and the Italian Question’.243 Arnold’s ardent desire to denounce the myopic nature of the conservatives led him to an opposite and paradoxical Francophile and Italophile fanaticism. In the essay he combats three specific prejudices, that of the impossibility of independence for Italians, that of the ‘chimeric’ principle of nationality, and the suspicion that in Italy the French had simply substituted the Austrians in the role of oppressors. In an equally biased manner, this historical excursus ends up finding signs of Italian patriotism and ferments of independence even where they were inexistent. Each successive emperor had been remote from the general population, and the flame of Italian nationalism had been kept burning within the sterile and rotting feudal system. After that, there had been the independent republics and the ‘Comuni’ which, with alternating successes and failures, had eventually managed to defeat the expansionist aims of the emperors. For Arnold, the ‘Signorie’ had represented governments which were Italian in every way, and completely de-Germanized, and which, even before other European states, had sowed the seeds of unity throughout the nation. At the end of this excursus, Arnold believes he has demonstrated that the idea that Italy had never been independent was a fallacy. The principle of separate nationality, to which the Italians had full rights, is thus confirmed on the basis of the determining factor of the will of the people and of their national sentiment. For Arnold, the national sentiment of the Italians surpassed that of all others with the exception of the French and the English. He denies that the French aspired to other annexations, on the strength of a fanciful extension of the ethnic and racial theory which he would later perfect, which depicts the typical Frenchman as the lazy, pleasure-seeking, easy-going farmer244 or the prosperous merchant, both opposed to a new war which would have meant new taxes. 3. Arnold was one of the few intellectuals in his time – perhaps the only other was Barrett Browning – who were indulgent towards, and indeed nurtured a boundless faith in Napoleon III, who was like smoke in the 243 I, 65–96. 244 This is a widely known stereotype, acknowledged and elaborated upon by Browning (and by others as well) in his poem Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.

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eyes of the English – fearful of his supposedly expansionist aims – and also and in particular to many contemporary writers. Tennyson had just attacked him in various fiery political poems and in Maud; Browning was to satirize him in the ambiguous protagonist of Prince HohenstielSchwangau. The English aversion to Napoleon was not due, for Arnold, to an objective examination of facts, but rather to the circles of the French, Orléanist and legitimist aristocracy who were his enemies. A Francophile, Arnold felt it important that an alliance should be re-established between England and France and the wing of Austrian sympathizers be silenced. The emperor had, in his opinion, the full support of the masses and the merchant classes,245 and far from having harboured dreams of conquest he had been moved to fight a noble, unselfish, ‘fine war’, and he was the true heir to the profoundly democratic ideals of the French Revolution. In 1859 Arnold, who would later have fluid, not always coherent ideas on the French Revolution, was still convinced of the fundamental importance of the event, which had been full of repercussions on a European, even global scale; an event that the cowardly English aristocracy still believed to be a historical error, and a calamity which could repeat itself, even in England. From this moment on Arnold would always coldly grant the aristocracy great historical and formative merits, but he would also severely reprimand its intellectual immobility and its utter enmity to ‘ideas’, which it derided as illusory, or as veritable will-o-the-wisps. The aristocracy seemed in fact to believe that almost alone it had defeated both the French Revolution and with it its ‘ideas’, having been the inspirer of the Congress of Vienna, whose main error had however been precisely this lack of consideration for ‘popular ideas’. Napoleon III was, in Arnold’s eyes, the real champion of the commoners and of violated nationalisms, and the man who would heal

245 Arnold’s anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism lead him however to criticize Napoleon for the support he accepted of, and indeed bought from, the Ultramontane clergy, which for evident reasons was also pro-Austrian. Napoleon’s ‘betrayal’ after Villafranca is justified as an act of fear following Veuillot’s hostile articles in the Universe and the complications arisen in the Papal states. Napoleon thus committed the error of fearing the reaction of the Catholics who, in Arnold’s opinion, were ‘insignificant’ even in Italy, as far as moral force and following were concerned.

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the wounds inflicted by the Congress of Vienna. The closing note of the pamphlet is however one of profound and disconsolate sarcasm: Napoleon had wasted a great occasion, popular discontent was at its height, and the confederation presided over by the Pope was inconclusive. And the result of the Italian war was widely and favourably accepted by the English, who saw their prestige as coming out of it unscathed, and who had been successful in dissuading the Italians from war. 4. Arnold’s political essays which appeared in magazines in the late 1860s were collected by the author, with a wise decision dictated by a profound divergence of approach, in two books. The ‘letters’ published in two groups in the Pall Mall Gazette, between July 1866 and April 1867, and then from June 1869 to February 1871, were collected in Friendship’s Garland (1871); the remaining portion of the essays flowed into Culture and Anarchy. Arnold presented Friendship’s Garland as a joke, and it is indeed an absolutely unique work among those he wrote, and the only spark of humour ever produced by his genius both in poetry and in prose. It was unique also for its failure, or anyhow for the cold reception it received, caused by that same philistinism that he was fighting and that also implied, as Arnold well knew, a congenital insensitivity to enjoy a similar, sophisticated pastiche. For the single and only time in the writings of Arnold the essayist, abstract ideas are not called into play, but rather caricatures that impersonate them, and the political diatribe is lightened by brief epistles full of refined eighteenth-century humour, and indebted to Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, to Swift’s pamphlets, and to the ‘jocoserious’ illuminist tradition, in particular Voltaire246 but also to Carlyle and his Sartor Resartus. In the tripartite letter exchange, a correspondent appears who is actually called Matthew Arnold (a clearly ironic self-deformation of the real Arnold, being a poor, down-at-heel writer living in a modest Grub Street garret, in the traditional eighteenth-century district of the pen pushers), a German savant named Arminius, and a young, ambitious journalist trying to make a name for himself, Leo Adulescens. With respect to the magazine publication, the 246 Lowe, the Benthamite and Comtian optimist, is satirized as a direct descendant of Pangloss from Voltaire’s Candide, from which Arminius’ genealogy is also entirely lifted.

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book was reorganized by Arnold backwards, and opens with a dedicatory letter dated 1871 in which he announces the death of Arminius247 and the finally obtained promotion of the ‘collaborationist’ Leo Adulescens. Every letter of the correspondence deals, starting from episodic situations and chance meetings, with a given internal or international political problem, but with a camouflaged and deformed echo, where reality and imagination intersect, and with a mixture of historical and invented characters. The discussion concerns facts of the late 1860s and the early 1870s, such as the Austrian-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, or burning questions of internal politics such as the suppression of the Church of Ireland or the approval of the Second Reform Bill. The everyday political and parliamentary news is thoroughly screened, with a proliferation of extremely precise hints which today are no longer decipherable at a first glance. Naturally this procedure, which was extremely disorienting even for contemporary readers, is dialectic and maieutic at the same time, and the truth stems from three different and opposing ways of ‘seeing an object’, that is from the epistolary exchanges of the three writers. Arnold disguises himself as a vulgar bourgeois, and his stand-in is literally slashed by Arminius, who attributes to him ‘an infatuation about everything English’, and some ideas which were the exact reverse of those held by the real Arnold. Arminius is the Arnoldian whip castigating the English through a third party, thus demonstrating that the most objective observers of the English were foreigners. Not everything said by the German is embraceable, in the same way that the sayings of the Professor in Sartor Resartus were objectionable. In the style of Carlyle, an innocuous bickering is formed between the two, which is however mostly fake and completely strategic, even if it provokes occasional breaks in the friendship of the two correspondents. Arminius embodies the republican spirit, which is also that of Heine, of the Germanic soul enlightened by ideas, and of the principle of obedience which is the cornerstone of Prussian greatness. The ‘real’ Arnold demonstrates between the lines that he is not giving too much credit to the big, 247 This first letter is a perfect imitation of Sterne’s sentimental epistolary style; always ready to give way to the unlikely and the comical, it turns into an extremely forced attack on G. A. H. Sala, one of Arnold’s enemies.

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abstract words describing the battle of the Spirit against the non-spiritual, but the distinction between the French way to the spirit, passing through the adulation of the people, and the German one, passing through philosophy and the extension of education to the masses, serves Arnold’s purpose to assert that among the English there is at the moment not even a trace of the German ‘Geist’. 5. The objective essayist showed en passant that, had he only wished to, he could have become a successful, cutting satirical narrator. Paradoxically, the most felicitous and least outdated parts of the book are the narrative flashes and the far too few and isolated sketches in which politics remains in the background and a surreal and venomous verve is unleashed. In Arminius Arnold gives an imaginary identity to abstract Prussian idealism, that of a poor youth with a pipe eternally in his mouth and puffing great clouds of smoke, a headful of dirty hair waving in the wind, a clean-shaven face except for his moustache, a blue military jacket, his hands stuffed perennially in its pockets. He not only speaks but also acts in accordance with the typical traits of the German caricature and according to the continuous repetition of verbal and gestural tics, the soul of caricature. In him idealism is not sterile, nor is it separate from patriotism, because, despite reviling the two puppeteers who have started the Franco-Prussian War, he rushes to enlist, meeting a tragic end when a stray bullet strikes him as he serves as guard at the gates of Paris – however he has first prudently addressed all his creditors to ‘Arnold’.248 The well-to-do, yet stupid bourgeoisie is in turn camouflaged in the beer-brewer bearing the carnivalesque name of ‘Mr Bottles’, a Baptist (and thus for Arnold, a Puritan, like all bourgeois), who after having made money has become a radical, and fights memorable dialectical duels with Arminius and is the target of his fiery invectives. Mr Bottles is a veritable Dickensian caricature, especially in the grotesque sketch of the trial brought by an improvised popular tribunal against a petty thief who has stolen a hare (to illustrate the presumptive English gifts for self-government). In this sketch the three judges, devoid of any legal 248 Who imagines for a moment that the newspaper reporting the news of Arminius’ death is a missive of the Literary Fund giving him an award for his battle against philistinism.

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competence, represent the bourgeoisie, the clergy, and the aristocracy,249 and they too have carnivalesque names. The brewer speaks on this occasion with a clipped language oddly reminiscent of that of Dickens’s Jingle.250 A surreal apologue, Swiftian and at the same time Joycean ante litteram, or worthy of an absurdist play, shows the three contending parties at a store selling tripe, dislodging one another in turn because of a lack of space, a ploy to comment and irreverently transfigure the Crimean War. § 167. Matthew Arnold XX: ‘Culture and Anarchy’ I. The synthesis of Arnold’s neo-humanism All six essays comprising Culture and Anarchy came out over the span of thirteen months, between 1867 and 1868, in the Cornhill, and were collected in volume, in a slightly revised form, in 1869, between the publication of the first and second series of letters of Friendship’s Garland. Culture and Anarchy had a militant genesis, too; indeed, it bears the same signs of an ‘open’ work, since each essay takes up point by point stimulations and challenges tossed out as the essays were published, in the form of an uninterrupted updating. Those challenges included those less extemporaneous ones launched by recently published essays and other writings focusing on the concepts of culture, liberty and anarchy, the main one of which, and the best known, was Mill’s On Liberty. The merits and limits of Arnold as an essayist are faithfully mirrored in Culture and Anarchy, to the extent of making this work, which formally and argumentatively is in itself anything but a masterpiece, the very model of his essay writing. The general tone is not obviously dry, crisp, caustic as in Friendship’s Garland. Arnold returns 249 At another moment, responding indirectly to Disraeli, Arnold states that England is in truth neither two nor three nations, but instead ‘no nation’. 250 Volume 5, § 27.1. Replying to the bitter Arminius, in this scene Arnold attributes to his own alias the hope of bridging the gap between the children of the poor petty thief and those of the supposedly ‘educated’ classes. As inspector and pedagogue, Arnold opens the controversy against an elitist system of education left entirely to private initiatives and inadequate in its programmes. The controversy continues in the comical episode of the brawl between the son of Bottles and a royal scion, which takes place at a model private school where the only subjects taught are cricket and the behaviour of a gentleman.

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to his typical technique of urban persuasion: that, inimical of any concinnitas, found in Essays in Criticism. The procedure used, equally typical, is that of the thematic reprise and amplification. A great deal of the chief assumptions is enclosed in the first chapter, and the others probe, develop and enrich these assumptions, or simply refer back to them through pithy formulas, almost with a mnemonic purpose, imperceptibly varied in lexis and in phraseology, and more than ever leveraging the consummate rhetorical method consisting in the semantic and synonymical test.251 This method is alternately inductive and deductive, since each statement of a general nature is reached from, and seems as if generated by an actual event; or it is applied to an event. Hence the unequal and discontinuous nature of the discourse, the alternation between sections which are now truly off-putting, because they are purely journalistic or topical controversy, and others which are much more lively and stimulating, which are however not necessarily the most rigorously argued or most logically valid. These show Arnold’s brilliance at its best, his candid inclination towards deformation and inaccuracy, his disarming simplicity, as well as his utter absence of caution. It is here that Arnold’s real or merely vaunted multiple competences come into play, those of a political thinker or simply commentator who gradually claims the role of philosopher, sociologist, historian of religions and institutions, literary critic, exegete and ethnographer, and, last but not least, psychologist. The fact remains that Culture and Anarchy, as witness its many reprints even during the author’s lifetime, is Arnold’s most representative book, not so much because of any novelty pertaining to content, which indeed it does not contain, but rather because it is a synthesis and a reordering of his political thought and of his pan-humanism over the span of the fifteen years from 1855 to 1870. It in fact recalls and redefines, and often repeats and paraphrases, all the supporting concepts and tenets of his thought, from that of ‘criticism’ to that of the pre-eminence of ideas – and ideas that must be accepted, weighed and continuously renewed, warding off every ossification before translating them into action. The reference to 251 However, Arnold is not a jealous nominalist: he says he is perfectly willing to renounce his claim to the invention of the term ‘culture’ in favour of a better, more appropriate synonym, so long as the substance of the term is preserved.

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‘culture’ leads to the denunciation of mechanized civilization, and a historical and genetic analysis of English society invokes the creation of controlling bodies – the Arnoldian ‘academies’ – meant to curb any symptoms of ‘anarchy’. But at the same time Culture and Anarchy builds a bridge to the great issues of Arnold’s essay writing after 1870, both to the subsequent ‘theological’ decade, which will witness the unmistakeable overturning of the supremacy of Hellenism over Hebraism, and to the final one of his career, when he engaged in a strenuous campaign for equal rights for the minority Irish Catholics, and in a gradual but not always linear adjustment of his ideas on the American political model. 2. Apart from its incidental elements, Culture and Anarchy constitutes one of the fundamental texts of nineteenth-century and Victorian political thought in England, mainly due to two reflections which are developed therein: the in-depth examination of the threefold social stratification with the consequent analysis of the prerogatives of each class; and that concerning Hebraism and Hellenism as essential components of the modern spirit, though only if correctly coordinated. The starting point of Culture and Anarchy is the absence of culture sic et simpliciter – but indeed identified with a background of excellent ideas, and ideas of perfection – as much as expressly political culture, an absence evenly shared by a dying and beclouded aristocracy, a bourgeoisie holding tight its pseudo-values, and a proletariat still without a political conscience, at the mercy of reckless demagogues. No sworn or prejudiced enemy of industrialism, which by then could no longer be averted, Arnold cannot fail to notice its negative effects, including the thirst for riches and material wealth which it generated in the middle class. This resulted in an anarchic individualism and in an ‘exterior’ and ‘mechanical’ scale of values and the formation of an ever-greater number of exploited, often dehumanized workers, insofar as they were necessary to generate that affluence. Arnold goes to the heart of one of the problems most strongly felt by the Victorians, and one echoed by contemporary literature: the advent of a newly literate section of the population, competed for by the higher classes, who wished to attract new followers to their fold, and of indoctrinating agencies, among which a demagogic press. That newly literate class thus found itself held in a vicelike grip, as it was coveted by the liberals who wanted to make them into

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philistines, and by the grassroots politicians who wanted to Jacobinize them. This state of affairs Arnold intended to combat by means of a neutral, authentically formative and non-partisan force. A comprehensive definition of Culture and Anarchy, though not the only one, could be that it is one of the last Victorian ‘white utopias’ – the very last is perhaps Pater’s Plato and Platonism –, and such because still hinging on the possibility of reordering the chaos of nineteenth-century politics, and remedying the increasingly more serious rift in civil society, by means of abstract rules, general principles or formulas and slogans inspired by Greek, Latin and biblical and Christian culture. Arnold did not give excessive credit to practical measures aimed at reducing poverty and eliminating the sad sights of rag-clad, malnourished and skeletal children in the London slums; he was instead convinced that a greater dose of Hellenism would amply suffice. The scandalous staunchness with which he approves of the repression of the Hyde Park 1867 riots at the hand of the military forces – which was the main incidental event that gave rise to the book – may seem to be the quintessence of reaction. In reality, Arnold sincerely hoped for reform measures which would take into account the proletarian complaints, and saw the solution of the problem as the result of an acquisition of more culture by every class, and by the nation as a whole. That solution should come, rather than from a violent insurgency from below, as a concession from above. Only after Arnold and this book will ‘culture’ cease to pontificate, until the moment when, with Marxism, it will become subordinate to praxis, indeed subservient to the actual needs of the working classes, in forms which will be more or less ‘organic’. Arnold is mainly concerned with disenchanting his fellow countrymen and with making them mend their ways; he insists on the diagnosis frequently using medical metaphors that we also find in his poetry – ‘the diseased spirit of our time’; but he provides a sort of therapy as well. The revolution he calls for will be a peaceful one,252 a new spiritual attitude, a stronger vigilance over one’s ideals: it will be therefore, in its true nature, a ‘transformation’. The title of the book effectively summarizes its main idea: Arnoldian culture, defined in its facets and in its genesis, as well as in its

252 An objective also shared by Wellington, to whom both Arnold and Tennyson (§ 95.3) dedicated odes.

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effects, is the medicine that can heal anarchy, a word which recapitulates the present moment while it identifies a sort of British genetic and racial code. Leaning on Humboldt and Renan, Arnold insinuates that the political ideal is a weak, reduced state machinery, and that only the circumstances render an authoritarian state necessary; by suppressing the state the ideal of freedom falls further out of reach, it does not come closer. 253 3. The fulcrum of the book’s second chapter is in fact the analysis of the misunderstood concept of the State as an expression of only a single section of the population, and in particular as the emanation of a single class, rather than as the civil community as a whole, thus an independent state which is not subservient to class interests. The demands of each of the three classes, or specifically of the aristocracy and of the bourgeoisie, to raise themselves as a principle of authority, and as a balanced force of government and guidance, are dismantled owing to an obvious lack of culture in each of them. Here the demonstrative procedure to which Arnold turns, deductive but not always limpid, is synecdochic, that is he elects a part for the whole or rather a representative for each class. He appears completely insensitive to the charm of aristocracy and betrays none of the shy quasireverence shown by many writers as they looked at it, the aristocrat often being the tangible incarnation of the Victorian archetype of the ‘gentleman’. Instead he attributes to that class a barbaric heritage still emerging in its superficial love for the blaze of power, for sports and the chivalric spirit. Only Richardson, in the second part of Pamela, had pilloried the incurable stupidity and mental thickness of the aristocracy to a similar degree. 4. ‘Culture’, lamentably absent, needed in fact to be defined and disambiguated, and defining the meaning of culture amounted to disproving – this is the main objective of the book – the semantic deformations performed by the enemies of ‘culture’ regarding its most authentic significance.254 Arnold’s strenuous persuasive efforts are again aimed at dem253 This laissez faire is rebutted, claiming that it fuels not only happiness and well-being but also poverty. Similarly, following Ricardo, Arnold states that the biblical injunction, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’, is pernicious, if interpreted to the letter. 254 The points of departure were actually a few sharp accusations or barbs that had been aimed at him by people such as Bright, a liberal with a foot in both camps (§ 7.3), or Harrison, who judged culture to be politically useless.

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onstrating that such a meaning is not the narrow, mechanical one of a purely bookish knowledge of the philosophic and literary texts or of the humanities, in other words mere erudition, but instead corresponds to a broader knowledge, to an illumination which is in essence a form of observation, or at most a preparation for action. The resulting action, immune from any dreams of power and only directed at the common good, would then be carried out only after mature reflection. Here the historical figure with whom Arnold most openly identifies is Socrates, who had trained disciples to whom he took care to transmit his most celebrated lesson: ‘γνῶθι σεαυτόν’ [‘know thyself ’]. This Socratic self-knowledge could, in modern times, constitute almost a fourth class, because anyone could become ‘cultured’ quite apart from the class of one’s birth. In each of the three traditional classes there were, or there could be born, elect members moved by the sole desire to see things as they truly were and to fight to defend reason and the will of God. Arnold expressly refers to ‘aliens’, who transmit and support the best of what is taught and known everywhere in the world, and especially that which benefits the masses; and he cites his own personal case as a member of the middle classes, one who is exempt from the ‘defect’ of ‘self-satisfaction’, and who defends ‘spiritual growth’. § 168. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 XXI: ‘Culture and Anarchy’ II. Waiting for a re-Hellenization In its second and enlarged definition, Arnoldian ‘culture’ is set up as the chief antidote to philistinism, that tyrannical force of which Arnold saw two deeply intertwined aetiologies, one historical and the other endogenous. Arnold finds in every Englishman, notwithstanding the class to which he belongs, certain unifying elements harking back to primordial anarchic instincts. And in every Englishman he traces the persistence of barbaric ancestral impulses, ferocious, perverse and even homicidal, as is witnessed every time that, for example, he expresses an opinion, carried away by ignorance and passion, or worships power and success, or when he ‘tramples savagely on the fallen’. The theory of the three classes is upset and ultimately overturned by this psychological theory, fundamental at least in view of the mechanics of one’s exit from his own class and entry in a fourth, that of the ‘enlightened’. In an epoch so attentive to investigate

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and stage the division of the self in both poetry and the novel – from Arnold’s friend, Clough, to Dickens – Arnold asks himself whether man is a ‘gentle and simple being, showing the traces of a noble and divine nature; or an unhappy chained captive, labouring with groanings that cannot be uttered to free himself from the body of his death’. With a foreshadowing of Freud, the psyche is a battlefield where the two selves clash, a more ‘serious’ and a ‘more relaxed’ one, a self dedicated to higher, disinterested things and another who indulges in the vulgar and has a special preference for bathos. Arnold also refers to this dichotomy as oscillations of mood, like those described in his poetry, or ‘alterations’ of human, moral and intellectual impulses. Historically, however, these two facets of the psyche had separated and had succeeded one another, according to a regulating dynamics which is indeed too reductive and too acrobatic, that of Hebraism and Hellenism. The correspondence between history and psychology allowed Arnold to suggest that while in the present Hellenism was wanting in the English model, Hebraism predominated, but above all in its corrupted form, that philistinism of which it was a distant predecessor. 2. In a very personal and often questionable reconstruction, the Hellenic spirit, which had practically removed the sense of sin and of punishment and with them the moral principle, was premature, and it had been historically overcome by the Hebraic one. This was in turn supplanted by a ‘more attractive development’, Christianity, which put into practice the program of Hebraism ‘by conforming to the image of a self-sacrificing example’, Jesus Christ. Christianity corrected Hebraism, which had became sclerotized and mechanical, with an importation of Hellenism, and with a ‘free play’, such as St Paul would make, around the rule of ironclad moral control. The fourth chapter of Culture and Anarchy, a historical and objective analysis of Hellenism and Hebraism, retraces the chronic nostalgia felt by the Reformed English for an irenic and conciliatory religiosity; the pages dedicated to the sweet, enervated, languid mysticism of primitive Christianity are distinct foreshadowings, once again, of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean. Pater and Wilde learned from Arnold that according to this view, after primitive Christianity the only truly Hellenized historical and cultural moment had been the continental Renaissance, a period to be regarded as quite distinct from the English one, which was dominated

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by the Reform.255 The second half of the sixteenth century was crucial for Arnold, because all the dissenting sects could have easily been reabsorbed into the Church of England, thus eliminating for ever the pernicious effects – in the present and above all in the future – of the strongest and the most strenuous of them, the Puritans. In Culture and Anarchy is the apex of Arnold’s personal crusade against Puritanism, which was itself a synonym for the middle classes and for philistinism by virtue of the degree to which, to his mind, it had infiltrated the current bourgeois mindset. All the ‘religious organizations’ of the present were inadequate to set man on the path towards complete perfection, nor were they sufficient to spread the ideal of ‘sweetness’ and of ‘light’,256 as was the case with the Greeks, because religion reinforces the moral fibre, but does not instil the Greek ideal of harmony – and, for Arnold, moral perfection is inferior to spiritual perfection. Despite this lack of faith, Arnold, a convinced supporter of statism, believed the Church of England to be much more Hellenistic or Hellenizable. He declared himself a faithful member of it on the eve of the two massive theological books which, after 1870, were to require his orthodoxy to become much more acrobatic. Arnold the historian, Arnold the lexicographer, and, as noted, Arnold the psychological and biblical commentator, join forces against Puritanism.257 One cannot completely 255 Arnold ably overcomes the difficulties posed by the English Reformation, within which, among other things, small doses of Renaissance elements were preserved; unwittingly, he is however led to declare the superiority of Renaissance Catholicism, which was ipso facto Hellenized. On the other hand Arnold, discussing the historical transformations of Hebraism and Hellenism, defines as unacceptable the parallelism between primitive Christianity and Puritanism as forces opposing respectively a sclerotized Hellenism and a sclerotized Catholicism. On the evident disagreement with Ruskin on this point cf. in particular § 54. 256 This is the title of the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy, taken from Swift’s The Battle of the Books, and it is what the bee carries back from its flight. 257 Psychologically Puritanism, unlike primitive Christianity, ‘mutilated’ man; exegetically, it made absolute a norm which instead should be integrated, that of the conscience, having misunderstood or failed to contextualize many terms from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and having made ‘talismans’ of them, whereas the Anglican theologians were much more flexible. Arnold cites on several occasions, as an authoritative source, the aphorisms and apothegms of Bishop Wilson, who

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fault contemporary critics who ‘upbraided’ Arnold for being an ‘elegant Jeremiah’ or ‘for trifling with aesthetics and poetical fancies’: his prophecies are as cutting as his objectives consist, as stated by his detractors, in an ideal of spiritual serenity and of exile from the world which is a recurring theme of his poetry: the unaesthetic vulgarity which contravenes the ‘sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming’. The autobiographical, purely poetical genesis of Culture and Anarchy is the nostalgia for a lost place and an unrecoverable time: the light, the harmony and the beauty of Oxford in the 1840s and of Arnold’s student days, as against the squalor and degradation of the slums. 3. Both the fourth and the fifth chapters insist, at least in words, upon the need to integrate the two ‘moments of being’, both metaphysical and ontological as well as historically realized. In truth, though Hellenism and Hebraism have the same goals – the perfection of man – they approach these goals with different means, because Hellenism favours objectivity and the ease of thought, and Hebraism considers works and obedience as preeminent. Or rather, Hellenism sees things in their beauty, while Hebraism is blinded and even obsessed by the shadow of sin, impossible to expiate. Arnold inclines towards a relativization of the two ‘moments,’ which are aids to human growth, and must be bolstered according to the historical contexts. The English situation was in the present such that space had to be taken from, rather than given, to Hebraism, which had historically been dominant. In one of the numerous applications of the inductive method, to demonstrate that there was no sense in invoking even more Puritanism in the present, Arnold refers to a recent death – real or manufactured – of a suicide, caused by the spectre of poverty as well as by that of eternal damnation. And yet there is no doubt that a certain religion, which we can take as an enlightened and Hellenized Hebraism, is already at times pointed to, in Culture and Anarchy, as historically the most important of the efforts in which the impulse towards perfection manifested itself, and as the voice of the most profound human experience. There is a passage in which Arnold defines religion as equivalent to culture; in another he is so strange and unknown as to seem an invented character, and to serve as a little joke played on the reader.

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claims the supremacy of culture over religion, by which he means, however, the limiting and divisive Puritanical religion. Religion was surely superior to literature because it had a ‘larger range’. And it is no coincidence that Arnold underlines that for the Greeks poetry and religion were one and the same thing. Arnold by religion always means exclusively an inner and spiritual force, echoing Arnold father’s sometimes angry rejection of ritualistic superstructures and clerical hierarchies. The final part of the sixth chapter and the Preface – which, written afterwards, is in fact almost a seventh chapter – both deal with the burning contemporary issue of the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Ireland in 1869, a measure which Arnold believed to be cowardly and opportunistic, and which had been passed by the government to please the Dissenters rather than as a liberal gesture. Arnold’s position, contrary to denationalizations, is that even the Catholic and the Presbyterian Churches had to become ‘established’ in Ireland.258 With his final words he not only regrets that at the time of Queen Elizabeth Presbyterianism had been unfortunately expelled, but offers an olive branch to the maligned Dissenters hoping that their forms of worship may be adopted by the national Church of England. This too is a pale reflection of Victorian anxiety about the dismemberment of faith and the multiplication of religious sects. 4. Similar oscillations and conceptual uncertainties characterize the definition of Hellenism. Arnold introduces it as the equivalent of purely objective knowledge; then states arbitrarily that to know things as they are means to know them in their beauty: ‘many things are not seen in their true nature and as they really are, unless they are seen as beautiful’. Arnold, who in this book is more of a Hellenist than Hebraist, cannot hide, therefore, an instinctive tendency towards aesthetization. Immediately afterwards, he in fact admits that this definition is a deliberate restriction of the visual

258 The possible objection was that in America there was no national Church, and yet everything was going swimmingly and education was being provided to all classes. But after all what was America? It was England minus its ‘barbarian’ aristocrats and almost without its ‘populace’, and with a livelier group of philistines, but also with a more pronounced and integralist Hebraizing push towards practical, superficial and material knowledge.

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field. This is an ambiguous foreshadowing of the Decadent abolition of everything ugly: ‘difficulties are kept out of view, and the beauty and rationality of the ideal have all our thoughts’. The description of the transition to Hebraism and then to Christianity is described with almost exact literary echoes from the excursus in ‘Obermann Once More’: the Good News, news of the complete liberation of man from all slavery and not of a new imprisonment, came to an exhausted Hellenistic world, a demonstration that – at least at the time, adds Arnold – ‘the world could not live by it’ alone. To the two forces, not hegemonic but necessarily collaborative, the same cyclical mechanism, and in particular the same images of the rise and fall of the tides repeatedly found in his poetry, are applied: ‘each of these two forces has its appointed hours of culminations and seasons of rule’. By the same token Arnold foresaw and advocated in 1870, feeling that he was near the end of a new ‘high tide’ of Hebraism, the return of a neoRenaissance and neo-Hellenistic phase. Thus he was unknowingly the real prophet of the advent of the Hellenistic aestheticism of Pater and Wilde, from which he was in many other respects so distant. 5. In the sixth and final chapter measures are discussed which at that time provoked incandescent parliamentary debates, though today they seem to border on the farcical and the surreal: is it right that upon the death of an individual who has left no will his material wealth should pass on to his eldest son? Is it fair that the brother of a deceased man should have the right to marry his widow? Arnold systematically brings to light, but with contorted and convoluted arguments, the present lack of authentic ‘light’ and ‘sweetness’, and therefore of Hellenism, and the prevalence of a narrow and opportunistic vision of life. The tone of the discussion rises again as soon as Arnold faces his minor target of liberalism head on, as liberalism, increasing production and population, was ipso facto also increasing the number of the poor with nothing to eat. While the increase in industrialization obscures the problem of poverty, it also raises the upper limit for the basic necessities and broadens the availability and the demand for consumption goods. Arnold’s analysis is enriched with the latest Marxist terminological borrowings, like that of the ‘fetishes’ hoisted by the liberals.

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§ 169. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 XXII: Educational writings Two books and a number of assorted essays and other writings were born of the more than two decades of Arnold’s activities as a school inspector. For the most part they were modelled on his official reports, which were reworked for a wider audience, both because this provided him with a considerable source of income, and because they could corroborate and support, from a different point of view, some of his ideas or chimeras, as the fruit of that panoptic vision of things human which was synonymous with ‘culture’. This explains the impossibility, with Arnold, to clearly separate the pedagogue from the political writer, from the historian and ultimately from the theoretician of ‘culture’. As a school inspector Arnold was convinced, and at least in this case not because of his professional bias, that in every country, and therefore also in England, the future in large part depended on the educational system, and that the educational system of a state was a mirror and a diagram of its political orientation. It has been frequently noted here that Arnold’s culture is not coextensive with simple erudition; but the culture of a ruling class was largely shaped by schools, by their organization and by their directives. From the various missions carried out on the Continent, which offered him the possibility to make valuable comparisons, two books took shape in particular, The Popular Education in France (1861) and Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868). They were informative, educational and often purely documentary books, though interspersed by notes and reflections of great interest for the student of Arnold as a thinker. 2. In March 1859 Arnold was appointed by the Royal Commission on Education to carry out a mission on the Continent, in France and in the bordering countries, in the imminence of an extension of primary public education in England. The report that followed became a book crafted with the care and the hand of an artist, The Popular Education in France. It is a book that Arnold was determined to publish even if he had to pay 80 pounds of his own money in order to meet the printing costs. It is anything but a quickly written, routine piece. Indeed it is the fruit of a heartfelt and authentic involvement, agile and revived by witty and surprising judgements. Arnold completely changes the genre of the inspector’s report, which normally should suppress any personal aspect or

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any descriptive vein, or translate them into cold impartiality. In essence, his bias is not belied, for instance every time that he brings to light, in the history of French education, the victorious conflict of the secular state in subtracting the monopoly of education from the Church (which, Arnold states, must first and foremost be solidly in the hands, not hyperactive but neither immobile, of the state). He could not resist lingering admiringly on the French system, created – first by Napoleon and then by Guizot – with the specific awareness that it was the school system’s duty to shape the political conscience of the illiterate. His firm conviction regarding the State monopoly on education, on the other hand, did not preclude but instead respected religious pluralism. The French were at the avant garde, having introduced separate religious instruction for the believers of various creeds, and an exemption for non-believers. Naturally, France had the advantage of recognizing only three sects or religious confessions, where in England they were literally a multitude. 3. The strengths and the merits of the French system, which had almost eliminated truancy and illiteracy – compared to the situation in England, with 2.5 million illiterates – are extolled by Arnold259 to highlight the exclusiveness of English schools, which, though the best in the world, were reserved to the few and inaccessible to the poor, a fact denounced by dozens of novels published at the time. In the vast majority of cases, schooling was also not an option for the bourgeois, which Arnold believed to be the worst-educated middle class in Europe. The presumptive, superior intelligence of the French was not inborn, but simply due to a better and more far-sighted educational system; everything, therefore, hinged, as ever, on the lack of a strong, decision-making state, and that of enlightened school legislators. The state’s stagnancy and absenteeism could even spark undesirable political developments, even revolutions (which was what

259 ‘Teutonic? we are French!’, shouts Arnold, a little intoxicated, affirming the perfect agreement and spiritual communion between the two races, which was to be supported by new proofs in On the Study of Celtic Literature (§ 165). With time the tie had been cut with the sixteenth-century-old Germanic offshoot, just as France had severed its Celtic and Latin ties. Paris is the centre of the world, and the ideas which count are French.

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conservative and right-minded Englishmen continued to fear most, even before 1870 and the French Commune), and could anyhow contribute to the ‘Prussianizing’ or ‘Americanizing’ of the population. According to these forecasts, the population could become docile, law-abiding, and pedantic as in Prussia, or a community of individuals of limited intelligence and interrupted intellectual development, without ideals as in America. Arnold’s thought in 1859 was still so fluid that he could point to a compensation for the lack of culture in the ‘superabundance of innate barbaric vigour’ of the English and French aristocracy, and in the standards which the ‘splendid’ albeit declining aristocracy, that, at least in France, could not fail to offer.260 4. The preface to The Popular Education in France – which Arnold, as was his habit, wrote subsequent to the book, and was also reprinted, by itself, with the title ‘Democracy’ in 1879 – is a true cornerstone of Arnold’s educational and political thinking. It has only very tenuous ties, ultimately, to the book; it has instead many and crucial ones to Culture and Anarchy, which it anticipates and, in its second version, amplifies and re-elaborates, and even surpasses with its surprising and courageous profession of democratic sympathies. The classification of the three English classes and of their serious cultural deficiencies and omissions in responsibility is purely repetitive,261 but what is brand new is the historical reconstruction of the aristocratic character of the political parties after the 1688 Revolution. This reconstruction is centred upon the concept of caste and of a closed body which had always aimed at a permanent weakening of the executive branch. 260 More succinct and less interesting sections concern the Swiss and Dutch systems. On a visit in Freiburg Arnold acknowledges that any interventionist fanaticism of the state, even with the aim of democratization, must be condemned just as much as its immobilism: this is the case, as happens in America, when democracy has a ‘pulverizing’ effect. In Holland Arnold praises the non-sectarian schools because the optimum is a Christian, neither Catholic nor Protestant, and therefore non-dogmatic school. 261 The gist of Culture and Anarchy is expressed with great clarity, and even some enlargements, with these words: ‘If [the middle classes] cannot win their sympathy or give them their direction, society is in danger of falling into anarchy’. Like Orwell a century later, Arnold believed that the future was in the hands of the ‘proles’, the working classes.

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It being understood that dating back to Roman times great civilizations were built thanks to the efforts of aristocracies, Arnold here proclaims resoundingly that the time of aristocracy has come to an end, and that democracy has risen upon the horizon, attempting to realize its entelechy, or rather its Spinozian essence, whose objective is equality. Even though the audacity of these affirmations is attenuated by some reservations, Arnold hails such full and natural aspiration to equality, and fearlessly faces the prospect of a happy and satisfied working class, Hellenized in the Arnoldian style, ‘fairer’ than an agitated and vociferous mass desirous of mimicking the aristocracy. In 1859, and all the more so in 1879, Arnold foresaw a decisive half-century for Europe, and decisive due to, indeed perhaps thanks to, the masses. These could rise to power without making an alliance with the state, but in that case Americanized masses, lacking culture or high ideals, would come to power; for this reason, only a reinforcing of the state could prevent the unstoppable development of democracy becoming an Americanization. Only a strong state, which remains a freely elected delegation,262 did not risk the suffocation of democracy, and could become its ally. This is why at the end, when Arnold hurriedly remembers the institutional task of a preface, he underlines that one of the chief objectives of the state is that of educating the middle classes according to higher standards; and from this even the working classes would automatically draw a benefit. 5. That Arnold should meet with resistance and divergent opinions with regard to his concept of culture in his own Department of Education is an undeniable sign of his own isolation and at the same time a proof that philistinism, against which he was fighting, was no mere figment of his imagination. Some of the more extemporaneous pamphlets from the early 1860s263 denounce the utilitarian philosophy which lay behind law proposals aimed at increasing the teaching of ‘practical’ subjects and at reducing the funds allotted to public education in proportion to the number of successful students in the schools. These proposals had been put forward on the assumption that the state had already contributed too much and too generously, indeed extravagantly – Arnold disagreed, claiming that not 262 Arnold cites Burke’s definition: ‘the nation in its collective and corporate character’. 263 II, 212ff.

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less culture, but more culture was needed. For him, utilitarianism was the umpteenth camouflage of the liberalism of those who desired a weakened and non-interventionist state in matters educational. For every ‘flash of civilization’ that was extinguished and for every scholar left ‘unhumanized’ the state was to be held responsible. In some cases Arnold’s weapon is that of fierce irony and even of counterfeiting, along the lines of the letters of Friendship’s Garland. A letter published in the Daily News was signed by ‘A Lover of Light’; Arnold intervened later anonymously in the London Review in May 1862, on a heavily patched-up law proposal for reducing the funds allotted to education, with a blistering article filled with effective comparisons and mockery targeting the bill’s main proponent. Three further letters to the Pall Mall Gazette, urbane on the surface but in truth venomous, are riddled with dissimulated barbs; the last of them disagrees with a public petition which aimed to set up a secondary, non-sectorial educational experiment for the disadvantaged classes, which Arnold criticized for its principle, that of its voluntary nature, which relieved the state of any type of intervention or true educational policy. 6. A French Eton, comprised of three autonomous pieces published in magazines which came out in a single edition in 1864, also oscillates between the pamphlet and the memoir inspired by the same trip Arnold took to France to complete his report on primary school instruction in that country. In particular it was suggested by his meeting with Lacordaire in the Sorèze mountains, where the abbot had founded one of the most famous private high schools in France. The mountain surroundings, the abbey, the hieratic figure of the friar were bound to trigger in Arnold the same feeling inspired by the Carthusians in the poem ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’. Lacordaire is a nostalgic anti-modern, a ‘great Christian orator of the fourth century, born in the nineteenth’, thus an emblem of eremitism and of a retreat from the world that Arnold could appreciate for at least two reasons, secret or barely hinted at. These were that the Sorèze community was an admirable example of moral and organizational order which ‘proclaimed the intrinsic weakness and danger of a state of anarchy’; and that it reawakened in him the regret for the lost student community first of Rugby and then of Oxford, and of safe fatherly guidance.264 Sorèze was 264 A pathetic but not mawkish detail, remembered by Arnold, is that of a pupil who, while running, takes and kisses the hand of Father Lacordaire.

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none other than one among many prestigious French high schools, whereas the English equivalents were the mere nine public schools, of immense prestige but expensive to the point that they were practically inaccessible if one did not belong to the aristocracy or the affluent bourgeoisie; hence the necessity to create ‘a secondary instruction at once reasonably cheap and reasonably good’. A ‘small’ reduction of the fees was insufficient, as this would have meant the exclusion of the children of the less affluent middle class from Eton or Rugby; instead it was necessary to apply the much more reasonable policies of the French. Politically, each measure needed to be supported by the state, which had to discourage and, if need be, forbid purely individual initiatives. A French Eton thus ends up being a new, reasoned, ingenious intervention aimed to benefit the bourgeoisie and teach it to look at the problem of public state education with ‘impartial regard’. According to Arnold, the aristocracy was responsible for the generalized distrust in all government actions, as it was unwilling to see its own autonomy, or even its own anarchy, in any way limited. The bourgeoisie objected as well, because Dissent, which was its backbone, was an enemy of a state which persecuted it. Arnold’s clarion call is that the bourgeoisie come out into the open, and become active in promoting the intervention of the state. It could and should be co-opted in the governance of public affairs, and could ‘divide power with the aristocratic class’. At the close of A French Eton, Arnold, in one of his frequent fits of reforming optimism, prophetically foresees in the ‘ferment’265 taking place in the English middle class the dawn of a great era, reminiscent of the Greece of Pericles, or the ages of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. § 170. Matthew Arnold up to 1870 XXIII: Secondary and university education in Europe and in England The endless book Schools and Universities on the Continent, which grew from an inspection report of 1865–1867 after a mission completed in France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany, does not repeat the miracle of the preceding one on primary school education in France. Too much of it consists of description, of purely informative data and of accompanying statistics, 265 A ferment represented by the voracious reading of second-rate novels, destined to be forgotten but being, nevertheless, a ‘sign of a widespread mental development of that class’!

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and the personal mark is negligible. Moreover Arnold, who undertook his mission in the summer, found some schools closed or inaccessible, another reason why he could not always have the benefit of direct observation. The most interesting parts are those of historical reconstruction carried out in the form of rapid excursus, where his ideas regarding the future of culture are best evidenced, above all through the examination of the meaning and the compass of the Renaissance in the field of education in Europe, and of the constantly resurgent war between the obscurantist medieval and Catholic forces and the progressive and illuminist ones. Along the way, some unresolved cruxes of modern pedagogy are highlighted and discussed, such as that of the religious and mixed teaching, or the textbook market, though at the time still unexploited by a greedy publishing industry. Its method, already applied in Culture and Anarchy, is synecdochic, that of choosing a part for the whole, or a single state or internal political division to stand for an entire nation; thus Prussia is a microcosm of Germany, and the Zürich canton of the whole of Switzerland. 2. Arnold returned to England convinced that it was urgent to overcome the century-old stagnancy of school syllabuses, and to second the spirit of the times which was moving in the direction of the empowering of scientific disciplines. This did not however entail abolishing humanistic subjects, irreplaceable in the formation of the gentleman, the individual who knows himself and the world. It was thus necessary to work on both fronts, with the aim of imparting knowledge which was global and coordinated. The spectrum of knowledge was however, in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, already so broad that a forced choice was unavoidable between one alternative and the other, as the French had done with the ‘bifurcation’. This meant the choice of a specialization at a certain stage in a pupil’s career, entailing a slight sacrifice either of the humanities or the sciences, but a choice made in full liberty and in accordance with the aptitudes and the gifts of the scholars. Some other educational suggestions make Arnold a far-sighted precursor. He and Newman were among the very first who strongly advocated a ‘vital’ approach to literature, one without barriers and aimed at nurturing ‘the love for the things of the mind, the flexibility, the spiritual moderation’; and who recommended that less space should be dedicated in high schools to compositions in Greek or

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Latin, and much more invested in reading and living literature, not only classical but also modern and foreign literatures. Foreign languages needed to be taught not only to communicate but also as literary languages. On the basis of the comparison between the two systems Arnolds indicates a few other obstacles placed in the way to improve English education: it was not possible to make secondary education obligatory because there was a lack of public schools, and this happened because of the lack of a decentralized school system; and these disadvantages inevitably penalized the bourgeoisie. 3. The French chapter in Schools and Universities on the Continent covers a topic which had already been dealt with in the previous book on primary school education in France. Arnold dwells now far less on personal impressions, avoids detailed descriptions and adopts a more staid and documentary tone. On the whole, he sums up the evolution of education in France, the salient moments of which are the creation of the University of Paris (whose prerogatives, curricula and medieval resistance to modern influences and to renewal he describes),266 and, after the Jesuit monopoly of the sixteenth century, the Revolution and the Napoleonic age. In organizational and operational terms there is not a single aspect of the French system, illustrated by Arnold without omissions, that the English could not or should not envy.267 In the chapter dealing with syllabuses Arnold does not miss the chance to wound national pride by reminding his compatriots that English is in French schools less chosen than German (and in Germany students chose English as the language of commerce, rather than of culture!). Besides, France, ready to tune in with the Zeitgeist, had already reduced the hegemony of Latin and Greek and enhanced scientific subjects. 266 Like Pater in the imaginary portrait ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ and in The Renaissance, Arnold upholds the theory that the Renaissance originated in France and in the fourteenthcentury cathedrals. A definition is used by both, I believe in a completely involuntary way, that of ‘the Renaissance within the limits of the Middle Ages’, which refers to the cultural reawakening of the fourteenth century. 267 The only fault that Arnold was inclined to find in the French system is that in high schools students spent too many hours indoors, and did not do enough physical exercise. On the other hand, he harshly criticizes the quite typical English practices, hardly known on the Continent, of fagging and of corporal punishment.

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4. The historical introduction which opens the chapter on the Italian secondary school system is hurried, brief and in large part derivative. Arnold maintains that Italy was the European guiding nation in the Renaissance, just as France had been that in the twelfth century. But he advances the odd theory, interspersed by light-hearted, predictable antiAristotelian witticisms, that in Italy there was a rift between the universities – dominated by the teaching of scholasticism, which was still ‘medieval and barbaric’ – and the great humanists, who remained distant from it and were launching Italy and Europe ‘on the line of modern ideas and modern civilization’. He judges Averroism negatively because it is medieval, and prevailing until the seventeenth century. The opposing force to Aristotelianism is found by Arnold in the growth of natural and experimental sciences; but still more questionable and contorted is the next passage, according to which Averroism fell due to the fault or the merits of the Counter-Reformation. Even education suffered from this instrumental objective and was subject to its repercussions. The saviour, for France and for Italy, was Napoleon, and his descendants were also deserving of praise in southern Italy. In secular, unified Italy after 1861, which Arnold knew much less about than France or Germany, a series of measures were taken that tended to rationalize and even diminish the privileges of religious instruction, but there was also a crisis of the job market which was negatively influencing secondary and university education. Along with the proverbial sights of laziness and dysfunction, Arnold notes a decrease in enrolment especially at Faculties of Letters, whose well-being is the secret index to the conditions of a country’s culture and civilization. Medicine and Jurisprudence lorded it, because graduates were assured employment. 5. The chief difference in the history of Germany is that for Arnold the Renaissance, precisely because it was allied with the life-blood of the Reform, participated actively and intimately in the renewal of education, in contrast to France and Italy, where it remained separated, subjected to and rejected by the ‘medieval routine’ firstly, and secondly by the forces of the Counter-Reformation. Indeed, all the humanists were also reformers and Protestants and vice versa, with the exception of Luther, and the Romanists were ignorant. Arnold regretted that the same thing had only

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partially occurred in England due to the separation of the Reform from the Renaissance, as well as to the fact that the Protestant reformers were not the greatest intellects of the country. These, with the exception of Milton – inexplicably ignored by Arnold – were Shakespeare, Bacon and Spenser. Arnold, however, is not silent about another fatal historical process, that of the ‘petrification’ of Protestantism, which sclerotized and weakened education along with it, the rebirth of which only began with Friedrich August Wolf.268

268 Without particular signs of disapproval Arnold notices that in the present time the Prussian educational policy was focused on making scientific teaching and ‘useful knowledge’ stronger; this, among other things, forged the merchant classes who were graduating from schools with basic notions of modern culture which were broader and more modern than in England. The Swiss were akin to the Scotch, as well as to the Germans, in that their system of studies was not oriented towards the humanities but towards an ‘intelligent industrialism’, although not totally free of vulgarity.

Part Iii 

The Pre-Raphaelites

§ 171. Patmore* I: The singer of hearth and home Almost a contemporary of Arnold and slightly younger than Clough, Coventry Patmore (1823–1896) stands mid-way between the three major poets born before or shortly after 1810 – Tennyson and the two Brownings – and those born towards the end of the 1820s, of whom the most prominent 1

*

In the absence of a complete and annotated critical edition I follow Collected Poems, ed. F. Page, London 1949, which reproduces (with some liberties) the final 1886 edition edited by Patmore, but excludes many of the compositions of the two poetry collections which preceded The Angel in the House. A selection is edited by D. Patmore, London 1949. There is also no complete, organic edition of the prose. Patmore, with some baffling overlapping, reintroduced what he held to be the best of his large body of essays on various topics, published in periodicals from 1846 until his death, in the volumes English Metrical Law, London 1857 (= ML), Principle in Art, London 1889 (= PA), Religio poetae, London 1893 (= RP). Other essays were then chosen and reprinted in Courage in Politics and Other Essays, ed. F. Page, Oxford 1921 (= CP). His religious ideas were condensed and elaborated in the form of aphorisms – typical, he said, of saints and lovers – in the four-part, slightly repetitive volume The Rod, the Root and the Flower, London 1895, repr. New York 1950 and 1968 (= RRF). Other aphorisms are found in the appendices of the poetical works edited by Page. For more on Patmore the aphorist see F. Marucci, ‘La filotea aforistica di Coventry Patmore’, in L’Europa degli Aforisti II, ed. M. T. Biason, special issue of Annali di Ca’ Foscari, XXXVII (1998), 1–2, 97–108. A useful anthology of letters is in Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, ed. B. Champneys, 2 vols, London 1901; the letters to and from Hopkins are included in Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. C. Abbott, Oxford 1970, 295–393 (= FL). Odes from The Unknown Eros are translated, with a colourful introduction and a brilliant commentary, in PIO, 481–505. Life. Biographical profile in the two volumes of correspondence edited by Champneys, cited above. D. Patmore, Portrait of My Family, London 1935, and The Life and Times of Coventry Patmore, London 1950 (an updated version of the 1935 book, more frank and unrestrained). Criticism. A. Meynell, Introduction to The Angel in the House, London 1903; E. W. Gosse, Coventry Patmore, London 1905; O. Burdett, The Idea of Coventry Patmore, Oxford 1921; F. Page, Patmore: A Study in Poetry, Oxford 1933 (sees Patmore as a universal poet independently of his religion and his philosophy; includes a lengthy and academic discussion of the prosody); T. Connolly, Mystical Poems of Nuptial Love, Boston, MA 1938; A. Guidi, Coventry Patmore, Brescia 1946 (Patmore as the principal exponent of Catholic symbolism); F. L. Lucas, Ten Victorian Poets,

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are Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. First coming to notice in 1854 with the narrative poem The Angel in the House, which immediately enjoyed an enormous success, Patmore demonstrated, more precisely, that he had picked up and brought to an extreme degree of neatness the bourgeois idyll of Tennyson, while at the same time showing that he was in harmony with the themes and sympathies of the Pre-Raphaelites in the way he idealized the marital union, a theme illustrated with a figurative language that is vaguely Stilnovistic, concettist and even esoteric. Two decades later, with The Unknown Eros, his second and only other narrative poem of real importance, and written after his conversion to Catholicism, he proved to have veered towards the style of the real and even slightly aestheticizing Catholic poets, who were however twenty years younger than him, such as

Cambridge 1948, 75–97 (slashes Patmore’s poetry and reactionary ideas); J. M. Cohen, ‘Prophet Without Responsibility: A Study of Patmore’s Poetry’, in Essays in Criticism, I (1951), 283–97; V. Larbaud, ‘Coventry Patmore’, in Ce vice impuni. La Lecture. Domaine anglais, in Œuvres complètes, Paris 1951, vol. III, 58–106 (written in 1911, judges Patmore’s father with strange indulgence and closes by declaring Patmore to be a greater poet than Tennyson); H. Read, ‘Coventry Patmore’, in Collected Essays in Literary Criticism, London 1951, 315–30 (originally from 1929, focuses on Patmore’s poetry and poetics); PHE, ‘The Epic of the Everyday: The Angel in the House by Coventry Patmore’, 413–43 (a seminal reading of The Angel in the House as a Biedermeier idyll); J. Oliver, Coventry Patmore, New York 1956; J. C. Reid, The Mind and Art of Coventry Patmore, London 1957 (on Patmore’s manifold influences and the intellectual ‘sources’, thus placing Patmore the prose writer before the poet; several pages are paraphrases or quotations; written in the wake of Praz, but much more cumbersome); J. Holloway, ‘Patmore, Donne, and the Wit of Love’, in The Charted Mirror, London 1960, 53–62; P. M. Ball, The Heart’s Events, London 1976; M. A. Weinig, Coventry Patmore, Boston, MA 1981; I. Anstruther, Coventry Patmore’s Angel: A Study of Coventry Patmore, His Wife Emily and ‘The Angel in the House’, London 1992; J. Maynard, ‘Known and Unknown Desire: Coventry Patmore’s Search for Eros’, in Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion, Cambridge 1993, 141–270 (the whole of the first part is a psychological and psychoanalytical biographical reconstruction delving into the first drafts of poems later revised and even repudiated, aiming to discover unconfessed and often unsublimated early loves; contains an exceptionally close reading of The Unknown Eros).

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Hopkins, Francis Thompson and Alice Meynell.1 Patmore did never really align himself with literary movements, brotherhoods or other groupings, nor even with only one writer. He cultivated somewhat formal friendships, often of brief duration, never fanatical or combative attachments. A friendship which he formed with Tennyson broke down owing to a deep need for independence, and possibly also for a matter of wounded pride. He empathized with the Pre-Raphaelites because, like many of them, he cherished the dream of becoming an artist-poet, or even just an artist; but he suddenly disengaged himself from them at the first symptoms of their falling into moral laxity. Neither was he sparing in his attacks on this or that exponent of that movement.2 After his marriage he shut himself up in what could be called an inner exile, both physically and spiritually. The Angel in the House permits us to say that Patmore stands outside his period, and ought in a sense to be backdated to an earlier literary age.3 In several aspects of style and content, The Angel in the House is anachronistic by about forty years; in other aspects, by a full two centuries. Marital bliss, according to a structural dichotomy which I shall illustrate, is represented in The Angel in the House in terms of the realism of the novelists of the end of the eighteenth century, as well as symbolized – in the daring connections which Patmore points out between the physical and the spiritual – by means of the conceits and the ingenuity of Donne and the Caroline Metaphysical poets. The unprecedented success of the poem was due more than anything else to the first of the two anachronisms, which answered to a deeply felt need for stability. The Angel in the House revives the stable and ordered world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, immortalized in the decentralized scenarios and sentimental plots of the novels 1

2 3

I will discuss Patmore entirely in this volume given the paucity of his poetic output after 1870 and the retrospective nature of his impressive non-fiction, which had its beginnings, after all, in the early 1840s. The Unknown Eros was itself written in part before 1870. An essay on D. G. Rossetti (PA, 98–105), among Patmore’s least objective writings, unjustly attributes to him a chronic lack of technique and falls prey to frequent misconceptions, such as that of presumed Italianisms in the poet. This is explicitly recognized above all by Meynell 1903, 18, and Read 1951, 316. The other poet whom we shall have to backdate in Volume 6 is Hopkins.

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of Smollett, Goldsmith and Jane Austen, the narrative poems of Crabbe4 and a little later the non-fiction of the eccentrics.5 Patmore had a genuine vein of poet-narrator and landscape painter, and the descriptive parts of The Angel in the House invite comparison with the sketches of the eighteenth-century novelists and those of the actual painters of urban and rural life. 2. Patmore’s familiarity with the eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury novel is demonstrated by dozens of reviews that he wrote before the writing and the publication of The Angel in the House, often dedicated to works of minor authors. Some critics believed that he had slavishly copied there his plots and his character-types.6 In that period, Patmore had already begun to reduce – and in some cases to actually eliminate – the vestiges of the turbid, unhealthy Romanticism of his two preceding collections.7 His reviews of Blake, Shelley and Keats, on the whole negative if not fiercely vitriolic, were based on the criterion of a ‘sane’ art which excepted Wordsworth and Coleridge only. The phase of inflamed, uncontrolled passion in The Angel in the House lasts over the space of one night, to subside thereafter into the glow of a steadier and more lasting fire. Patmore has no equals in the unflinching resoluteness with which he shifts the centre of gravity of erotic Romantic poetry. Again and again poets had sung and were still singing the ephemeral flame of love, and lamented the rather unpoetical routine of the aftermath in which love hardened into matrimony and passion was almost extinguished.8 But to say that the flame ‘subsides’ gives an imperfect idea of Patmore’s vision of love in The Angel in the House: he does not make a stand against ‘passion’ but rather against its disordered and uncontrolled forms. Calm and controlled sexual passion is for him the

4 5 6 7 8

PSL, 408–9. Patmore dedicated an essay to Crabbe (examined with Shelley in PA, 122–8), which also throws light on his own humble and photographic art in The Angel in the House. The essay ‘Old Coach Roads’ (CP, 40–5), though written as late as 1886, still has the levity, impalpability and naïveté of those of Lamb and De Quincey. Page 1933, 63–4. See the extensive analysis by Maynard 1993, 160–79. PSL, 553.

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‘purest, sweetest and [ …] most difficult theme in poetry’. At the centre of Patmore’s The Angel of the House is the notion of an art which radiates ‘peace’, the principal characteristic of classical art; turbulence and the vortex were for him the main defining principles of ‘modern’ art.9 He may be defined as the poet of the prolonged epiphany, since he does speak of the ‘spark’ of love, but this spark is recognized and seen to emanate from conjugal love. Love has evolved in what may be described as a succession of sparks, each of which is superior in intensity to the preceding one. In conjugal relations Patmore saw something which was both timeless and atemporal, unchangeable even through old age or sickness; love was, therefore, evergreen. The Angel in the House captured10 not the lived reality but the Victorian ideal of family and conjugal life, an ideal pursued and occasionally reached in the life and art of every de-romanticized poet who aspired to matrimonial regularity and resisted Romantic sexual permissiveness. Monogamous marriage was the pillar and raison d’être of society, a pillar which the Romantic poets led by Shelley had tried to demolish through their work and their example. Where he adopts the theme of marital and family love and places it at the centre of his work, Patmore joins Tennyson, Browning, Barrett Browning, Arnold and, above all, Clough. Clough, like Patmore, makes youthful love and the first outbreak of the erotic drive his principal theme, but injecting into it more tragic energy. Patmore’s The Angel in the House is in many respects the obverse of Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus. He finds in the idyll his chosen form, with sprinklings of wit and humour unknown to Clough, if not in the form of quips or remarks through clenched teeth. The neoclassical rule of ‘selfcontrol’ is mirrored in his style. The ‘distinction’ which Patmore the critic accorded to the greatest literary figures was based substantially on their style, in some cases excluding the content: ‘that which is of the greatest value in every true artist is his style’. The principle of formal equilibrium corroborates itself in the axiom that metric laws should be ‘stretched’, but 9 10

See the telling title of the essay ‘The Point of Rest in Art’ (PA, 12–17). Photography is the word Patmore uses in a review of Jane Austen (CP, 67). Novelists, Patmore thought, would provide a photography of the Victorian age for future generations (CP, 133).

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never broken, as was seen in the work of modern poets; also, metre ought to be dictated by passion, a ‘metre-making passion’.11 3. A perceptible change of voice – together with a thematic complementarity – characterizes Patmore’s second poetic phase. Apart from a small number of other loose poems, it identifies with the odes of The Unknown Eros, which were published from 1868 and whose final textual organization was made a decade before the poet’s death. It is impossible to attenuate the gap between these two phases, one of cold Apollonian clarity and the other of unrestrained Dionysian turgidity. Patmore moved away from a Protestant ‘Metaphysical’ poetry to one of a flamboyant, Catholic Baroque type – from Donne and Herbert to the mystical furor of Crashaw. The powerful affirmation of the self only arrives at the fall of the curtain. In these odes the neatness of the design shatters in the vagueness of the vision, and in the confused and tortured examination of the soul. This uneven work can really be considered, at the same time, as anticipating some of the most intense and most ardent Catholic religious poetry of the century, of which a major example is Hopkins’s ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. Patmore’s Unknown Eros is a poetry of turmoil which shakes up the metre but even strains and distorts the poetic lexicon.12 Only recently re-evaluated on the 11

12

Patmore’s few, brilliantly argued essays on William Barnes – the fruit of an extravagant infatuation which he shared with Hopkins – establish the Dorset dialectal poet as a minor classic in the vein of Suckling, Herbert and Burns, by virtue of his ‘sustained’ stylistic ‘finish’, of his expressive felicity, of the absence of embellishments, of his simplicity and his candour emanating from poems of great perfection. Patmore was inexplicably incapable of understanding or appreciating Hopkins the poet, so much as to sound critically obtuse. And yet he had friendly and respectful relations with him for six years, and kept up a constant correspondence which provides an irreplaceable source of information on the poetry of both. Patmore submitted his two major poems to Hopkins – who already appreciated them and re-examined them with great objectivity – with a view to making a revision of them after 1883, the year in which they met in person and began to correspond. He did however accept far less than ‘two thirds’ of the corrections suggested by Hopkins, as he claimed he had done: he could only make few changes because otherwise he would have had to completely rewrite the poems or recover the original inspiration. Hopkins made suggestions of a stylistic and typographical nature; but in some cases he argued some more substantial matters. In particular he contested two theological

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strength of its exceptional and immaterial lyricism,13 it marks Patmore with the stigmata of the ‘religious’ poet, though not in the sense of the doubters like Clough, nor even in that of the pantheistic poets, as much as of the mystics. The achievement of Patmore’s two main poems – though conditioned by the tight focus on the struggle between human and divine love, and presumptively ‘vitiated’ by excesses of devotion and of Marian cult – was recognized during Patmore’s lifetime and praised by contemporaries as distinguished as Tennyson, Ruskin and the hard-to-please Hopkins himself. It remains mysterious why Patmore was soon shelved after his death, as if his mortal remains were an inconvenience or the evidence of a crime. We must above all ask ourselves why the neglect was not corrected later – as happened with many Victorians – with an appreciable retrospective interest; why Patmore remained out of print for decades, either excluded from anthologies, and ignored by critics and even completely absent from the school or university syllabus. The Angel in the House sweetened everything, shrouded everything in a purifying dawn light which appeared false and unreal to posterity. Its remarkable popularity was partly the fruit of a misunderstanding.14 The metaphysical and theological framework was tolerated and in many cases ignored by readers who were avidly attentive to the plot only. Just as in a mathematical equation, The Angel in the House ceased to exist when the world it had depicted had passed, like a faded photograph. That ‘photograph’ was not simply put aside but actually torn up. The Angel

13 14

hypotheses highly personal to Patmore, and even quasi-heretical: that women ought to be ‘vain’, that even the Virgin had been vain (FL, 307–11), and that the blessed could be a little sad in Paradise for the lack of salvation of someone who was dear to them in their earthly life. Hopkins, strangely, never dwelt on Patmore’s one true protracted theological error, that is, he could not believe that the conjugal knot could be undone in Paradise, and no family ties would have existed in the afterlife (see also § 178). Regarding the daring rhythmic and prosodic innovations of The Unknown Eros, Read 1951, 323, conjectured that Hopkins had been influenced by it. Unquestionably Patmore’s odes were published in no particular order before the ‘Deutschland’, written at the end of 1875; however, it must be ascertained whether Hopkins had really read them and to what degree he had assimilated them. Mainly the work of Maynard 1993. PHE, 431 and 438–9.

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in the House was really the work ‘of its time’ that Patmore had aspired to write, and once its time had expired, it was rapidly forgotten. The avowedly Catholic The Unknown Eros fared little better and raised objections and perplexity from the Catholics themselves. Newman was suspicious of Patmore’s mixing of pampering and religion, and of his rash mythological embroideries that smacked of impure pagan passion. Hopkins, as noted, sought to temper the theological ardour of the older poet.15 So it was that in 1892, on the death of Tennyson, Gladstone could answer, with a quip, to anyone who suggested Patmore for Poet Laureate (and that fact itself witnesses that he was held in esteem, however residually) that Patmore ‘was already dead for some time’. Slightly later Italian critics of English literature hailed Patmore as the leading exponent of an exuberant and undisciplined mid-nineteenth-century British Catholicism, and championed him for the simplicity and ‘domesticity’ of lines they thought similar to those of Giovanni Pascoli. Taking a similar view of his work, Patmore won the favour of and was translated by eminent French Catholics such as Larbaud and Claudel. Even in England his fortunes enjoyed a transitory revival on the occasion of the rediscovery of the Metaphysical poets and the publication of Grierson’s edition of Donne’s poetry.16 4. The epithet ‘angel in the house’ soon came into vogue and was consolidated in nineteenth-century feminism as a synonym for the tyranny of the husband towards the passive wife, reduced and declassed to the level of his humble servant, even so far as to make her comply with his commands and abuse of power. This was however an evident misconception and a real and complete falsification of the idiosyncratic and highly individual thought of Patmore. Patmore’s ‘angel’ did not even refer to the married woman but rather to conjugal love, the perceptible reflection of divine love for the created being. There is no doubt that in Patmore’s ‘decalogue’ it was heresy to establish equality between husband and wife. He was always strenuously hostile to the emancipation of women, which 15 16

Hopkins notoriously gave Patmore a piece of advice which he followed and which was for long stigmatized by critics, that of burning a short prose treatise entitled Sponsa Dei. PHE, 413.

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he could not accept because it questioned his own theory of the marital couple, based on the diversity of tasks and charisma.17 Equality within the married couple was for him anathema, but that did not imply that the inequality was always and in every case in favour of the husband: the married woman had superior intuition and presence of spirit, subtle dissembling skills to keep her husband’s veiled despotism in check, in the final analysis; the helm of the union was in her hands. In short, one may talk of an authentic, even if acrobatic feminism in Patmore.18 § 172. Patmore II: The second, mid-Victorian outsider It is not daring or off the mark to place Patmore alongside Oscar Wilde, though in a completely oppositional way. Both shared a flair for the sharp aphorism and the provocative paradox, and a life out of the ordinary; furthermore, after 1885 both followed similar paths in the literary limelight.19 Numerous critics of the past, his poetry having become unreadable, and anticipating the same kind of interest that was to be shown in Wilde, were far more appealed by Patmore the man – his excessive boutades, his strangeness, his attitudinizing – than by Patmore the poet.20 Until 1870, Patmore undoubtedly seems to be the miles gloriosus of nineteenth-century English poetry. He claimed, obstinately and openly, that he had lived and was still living in the best of all possible worlds: a world which could even stabilize into a condition of complete permanence, such was its irreversible bliss. The Paradise of religion could already be attained in this life, and it was actually granted to everyone ‘to reach levels of happiness in this life superior to the happiness of some blessed soul who is already in Paradise’. Patmore the essayist wrote in 1846 without irony that he was ‘an optimist’,

Clough too thought in The Bothie (§ 139.4 n. 61) that the ideal wife should not necessarily be instructed. 18 Reid 1957, 42. Maynard 1993, 180 and passim, notes the schematic blunder of taking Patmore for an antifeminist. 19 Chesterton (VAL, 201–2) connects Patmore to the other Victorian ‘outsider’ before Hopkins: Browning. He suggests the label of ‘a Catholic Browning’ to classify Patmore. 20 Lucas 1948, 96. 17

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and his subsequent essays confirm that life for him was all joy, ‘pure and simple joy’. One essay, appropriately entitled ‘Cheerfulness in Life and Art’21 describes an unashamedly Edenic universe and a God who is absolutely not absconditus, a God who, as he repeated ad nauseam citing the Bible and the Latin Breviary, ‘delights in living in the world of men’. It is indeed true. Patmore’s God is an unusually friendly one, personal and familiar as he was before the Fall, a God revealed incessantly and spontaneously by a Universe which had never been so transparent, and in which man is the image of God and a creature whose status is only ‘slightly below the angels’. The picture of Patmore as homo felix only holds true, however, until the second half of the 1860s. After 1867, the date of the Second Reform Bill, he became a slightly paranoid and fanatical prophet, alarmed by the eruption in England of foreign naturalism and Decadence. He frequently railed against a philosophy which no longer endorsed ‘universal love’ and ‘permanent truth’. Nevertheless his last book of aphorisms suggests that he weathered the storm. By the 1890s, having seen two wives and two of his seven children lowered into the grave, he repeated that he had had every blessing in life, that he was enjoying excellent health and physical as much as spiritual wellbeing. All this proclaims him the only ‘positive’ apocalyptic of his time, the reverse of the ‘negative’ apocalyptics and of Thomson B. V. in particular. This was because he really did believe that the lost Eden was re-established on earth, and that only the pessimists saw earth as a hell, and ‘a dreadful night’. 2. Patmore was blessed as few were with a naturally conciliatory temperament. He was in some respects fortunate in his personal circumstances, but he was equally resilient in the face of misfortunes or bereavements. He typifies my theory of the evolution of English Victorian poetry. Educated privately by his father and for a brief period in France, he was not a defector from the public school system or from the two great universities; his intellectual and cultural training was different from those of Tennyson, Arnold and Clough. He had avoided the regime of a school like Rugby 21

PA, 6–11. Without the theological baggage, Patmore finds himself in harmony with Arnold, in that he always sustains a corroborating, reinvigorating, galvanizing art, rather than an art as a source of discouragement.

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and also any entanglement in post-Tractarianism at Oxford. As a poet he brought less anxiety and cultural ‘baggage’ to his vocation than did many of his contemporaries. Nothing in his work resembles the formless confessions typical of the very early Clough, for example (whose immature verse needs to be passed over in order to arrive at the poet’s true work).22 Obviously his early emotional experiences compare with those of similarly ambitious and well-educated young men, but in his case it was a relatively tranquil process. He had had an unusually rosy and straightforward youth; he was sufficiently well-off, had experienced no developmental troubles or suffered distressing or enduring amorous disappointments; and watched over by the not overly unremitting attention of his parents he had early contracted an exemplary marriage. He was equally fortunate to find sedentary work which he accepted uncomplainingly for two decades, after having been practically abandoned and left alone at the age of twenty-five; on leaving it he became a quiet country gentleman on the margins of the literary fray.23 The secret of Patmore’s bonhomie is found in an appraisal he gave of Hopkins after his death, which could be applied indirectly to himself: speaking about the Jesuit poet he said that he had seemed to him to be one of those few saints he had met ‘in whom religion had absolutely no narrowing effect’. A skewed judgement insofar as it applies to Hopkins, but accurate of Patmore himself. It would be fair to say that for all the significant poets of his time, including Tennyson, Clough and Arnold, religion had had a ‘narrowing effect’, while for Patmore it was a joyous possession and had an entirely widening effect. He did not emerge completely unscathed from the doctrinal storms in which his Oxford and Cambridge contemporaries in the 1830s and 1840s found themselves

22 They were indeed expunged by the author from the poetic edition of 1844. Some confessional sonnets are reproduced in Page’s edition, 36–40. 23 Patmore’s first alter ego could not but be called, programmatically, Felix, and Felicia was the first title of the poem ‘Beata’ from The Unknown Eros. He clearly refers to himself when in The Victories of Love he has Felix recognize his exceptional good luck and the divine gifts fallen to his lot almost as if he were predestined. In particular, Felix attributes to himself a character which ‘So naturally […] moved above / All sordid contraries of love, / Strengthen’d in youth with discipline / Of light.’

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embroiled, but evidence for this comes chiefly from his letters (he did not keep a diary), and they are gentle and restrained. He was not deflected by Blanco White, Strauss and German biblical criticism. There is no mark of these thinkers in his poetry. In his old age he challenged Arnold headon. Scripture was not just a catalogue of apparent nonsensical events but a beacon of light: hyperboles, figures of thought and of speech had to be taken in all their literal significance. The unusual feature of Patmore’s thinking is its unwavering ‘positive’ quality, its confidence. There is no dejection or pessimism, and the depressed figure of the poet possessed by ‘honest doubt’ does not appear in his work. His view of life was well thought out, a confident Weltanschauung. He was unusual among poets in having a comprehensive and systematic explanation of the world. He admired Hegel, he bowed to St Thomas Aquinas, and he set himself as a kind of legislator (or dictator) for mankind. There was a system in the universe: not as much as a millimetre lay undiscovered or remained out of place, everything was organized according to a hierarchical plan set in stone. What did not fit into that symmetry was disposed of. This system – enriched by its natural and consequential corollaries in the field of aesthetics, metrics, politics and even architecture – he expounded and imposed with unrelenting dogmatism, with final judgements without leave of appeal. He only tempered his authoritarianism when confronted by the more intellectual, subtle, confident and assured figure of Hopkins. 3. Patmore is indeed second only to Hopkins among nineteenth-­century poets for the wealth and depth of his reading and his thought. Echoes of the early Fathers and of mystical and esoteric Catholic philosophy are found everywhere in his poetry, essays and aphorisms. These include Tridentine philosophical summae as well as borrowings from contemporary spirituality. At the same time, though, Patmore was honest about himself. He made no great claims for himself as an original thinker or as a philosophical poet. Instead he saw himself as a revisionist and synthesist of earlier writers.24 The aphorisms contained in The Rod, the Root and the Flower are borrowed in many cases, and some of them are literal transcriptions from memorable 24 See Read 1951, 328, where he generously compares Patmore’s aphorisms to Pascal’s Pensées.

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sayings of mystics and philosophers. He actually extracted fragments and individual passages from his mentors, believing he had found confirmations and validations of his intellectual evolution, only to manipulate them beyond recognition. Thus he worked as an eclectic equilibrist and an integrator capable of reconciling without apparent effort, amongst many others, Aquinas, Swedenborg and Hegel.25At heart Patmore remained a true and true Platonist, who had since his youth referred all physical and earthly experience to its heavenly origin: the divine, supernatural and supersensory levels of being overrode earthly reality in all its aspects. Poets who resisted metaphysical imagery and experience, empiricists from Bacon onwards, and pragmatists such as Macaulay, were all kept at a distance by Patmore; all of them were in some sense his ‘enemies’. It follows that he nurtured a rare sublimating attitude and a capacity to transfer every instance of the material and the corporal to its place of heavenly origin, divine or at any rate supersensory. For the same reason he was averse to all anti-Metaphysical poets, and a fortiori to all empiricist materialists and pragmatists. He was therefore bound to have the worst possible relations with science and scientists, even if from his youth he had wanted to become a chemist. This reminds us of Ruskin’s aversion to science. With Ruskin, Patmore shared the same targets (Morley, Huxley), and like him he was still offering at the close of the nineteenth century explanations of a symbolic or allegorical nature, and criticizing the exclusive devotion to ‘phenomena’, which led to the abolition of the idea of God and of cosmic teleology. He contrasted Faraday, the modern physicist and a pious Christian, with Huxley and Morley, and a science which offered parallels to the ‘facts of superior knowledge’ with a godless one. In tension, though, with our perception of Patmore as a Platonist is the high value that he also placed on earthly experience. The essay in which he compares Crabbe with Shelley26 illuminates not only Patmore’s aesthetics but also the vision of the cosmos and that of man from which the former originates: between the extremity of the over-worldly and 25

See Reid 1957, the opening chapters and in particular 66–81 for an overview of these echoes. He claims that Patmore was ‘after Blake, the English poet most completely influenced by Swedenborg’. 26 PA, 122–8.

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vulgar that was Crabbe, and the aerial and immaterial Shelley, the middle ground was that of Coleridge. That is to say, art doesn’t have to be totally suspended in air (Shelley), but neither should it be anchored in or confined completely to earth without ever raising eyes and wings towards the heights (Crabbe): it should actually share earth and heaven, form the foundation of ‘the true, poetic reality,’ that is be ‘as much real as ideal’ as in Coleridge’s Christabel.27 Here one touches on the quarrel between religion and science which pervades much of Victorian literature. The world didn’t have to be denounced as the devil’s kingdom and a lair of temptation, but rather to be enjoyed as a perfectly innocuous source of spiritual sustenance and divine revelations. At the end of The Rod, the Root and the Flower Patmore cites St Ignatius Loyola and that simplest of phrases of his which summarizes his entire vision and which recurs in the First Principle and Foundation from his Spiritual Exercises: ‘All creation is made for man’. This was a truth which his fellow-Jesuit Hopkins had had real difficulty in embracing, as had many Victorians attracted by the religious life. Unlike Hopkins, in his spiritual life Patmore was a joyful follower of Loyola rather than a troubled medieval in his relation with the world.28 For this very reason he had no partiality for the great texts of defeatist and even self-punishing mysticism, nor for the hair-shirt and the scourge, or all the hermitical temptations which had brought the figure of St Simeon the Stylite into prominence during his lifetime. At the same time he was also mindful that the saints had often been placed under orders not to inflict corporal punishment on themselves by their spiritual directors, for fear it would become a source 27

28

The Platonic myth of the cave was clearly incomplete for Patmore; he supplemented it by wishing that one really should turn back to look at the face of God. In one of Felix’ dreams in The Angel in the House, Plato’s kite is the first to hurl itself towards the heights, but then falls to earth for the lack of a ‘tail’, that is to say because it is too much – or rather only – spirit. That of Felix, however, remains suspended in air, and has a train of flowers which are not earth though their roots touch ground but also take root (see Reid 1957, 42, who points to Patmore’s disagreement with Plato and to ‘the inadequacy of Platonic love’, and PHE, 429–30). See also the aphorism in RRF, 6, according to which the spirit is again like a kite tied to the earth and going up with all the weight of the things that are connecting it to earth. Contrary to Reid’s opinion in Reid 1957, 109 and 119.

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of pleasure. Kempis, according to Patmore, had said inappropriate things for those that inhabit the world: ‘to stifle human affections must be very often to render the love of God impossible’. A most curious aphorism illustrates a quite minimalist concept of holiness and paints a picture of man as non-ostentatious, gentle, imperturbable and theologically jejune. Patmore therefore was not so distant from the Catholicism depicted in Browning’s ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’. He was the opposite to a type of ‘puritan’ Catholicism which relies on penitence and abstention;29 he did not deny himself good food nor did he join in the campaign against alcoholism of which even Cardinal Manning had declared himself a supporter (the cardinal had celebrated his first marriage). Patmore was in fact a hardened smoker who proclaimed that smoking, far from being a vice, was an elixir of incomparable meditations and contemplations. There was bad blood between him and Newman, whom he blamed for being too Protestant, and saw the non-Catholic Keble, the Tractarian, as being more Catholic. 4. According to an extravagant pansexual plan – a highly personal revision of the Catholic catechism – Patmore saw a cosmic marriage between God and the human soul, and continuously described a fanciful scenario of carnal and spiritual conjunctions of the Trinitarian hypostases. The coming into being of all the Heavens and Creation had the form, not at all metaphorical, of unions of bodies and spirits. The married couple bore witness to the love of God for the human soul which was always feminine, but also to the union of the infinitely great with the infinitely small, which came about with the Incarnation. Patmore’s God interacts with man and the world, and is never seen as puritanically distanced from man by a limitless 29

§ 123.1. A Spanish novel of no artistic worth was praised by Patmore in his old age (PA, 192–8) as an exemplary union of ‘the gravity of the subject’ and ‘the vivacity of the approach,’ and also as an emblem of art and the Catholic mens, that is, the Catholic verification of the proverb ‘the best is the enemy of good’, as opposed to Protestant perfectionism. Patmore added pointedly that an English novelist would have sunk the protagonist – who believes he has the priestly vocation and then marries – into the abyss of despair. The essay’s discussion confirms that Christian matrimony devotedly lived has a higher religious value than merely spiritual fecundity, or than the priestly life chosen without vocation. Patmore accepted half-heartedly his daughter Emily Honoria’s entering a convent.

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abyss (expressly, as it will be for Hopkins, he is a synthesis of opposites, of ‘infinities and limits’). Likewise, the Incarnation is the reconciliation of ‘the highest with the lowest’. The Incarnation is central to the divine plan. It is God who wishes to join Himself with matter and the human body, that body assumed by Christ in Mary’s womb, and rendered divine in Christ by means of the overcoming of every instinctive refusal of the Cross. The body for Patmore is, tout court, the woman, that is, the Virgin’s womb and receptacle for Christ. As such the body – as the hymn ‘To the Body’ explains – is the ‘wall of infinitude’, the place where divine infinity ends and is limited by human finiteness. The Incarnation is not a remote event, but always and for each man actual and present.30 Patmore silently supports what Hopkins was to affirm openly on the authority of Duns Scotus: the Incarnation of Christ would have happened regardless of the felix culpa.31 The sexual, or more precisely coital, metaphor winds its way everywhere in Patmore.32 When speaking of artistic creation, and in a way not altogether different from today’s gender criticism, Patmore postulates, most distinctly, one feminine and one male literature, and posits in almost every critical essay his mythology of a mind so to speak hermaphroditic and bisexual, which should join the density of content of the male mind to the feminine expressive facility, or the masculine respect for the ‘laws’ to the feminine ‘inflection’ of the laws themselves (such is the third sex postulated by Plato, the creative, invigorating genius which ‘contains and is the other two’). The distinction derives from Patmore’s psychology, itself sexual, and more exactly from the theory of the double consciousness,33 a ‘duality’ of the male conscience – the seat of morality – and a feminine, 30 RRF, 103 and 122. 31 The human body, ‘though laid the last’ was ‘longed for from eternity’ (‘To the Body’, § 178.5 n. 107). Such a theological point was to be developed explicitly in a poem, only projected, on the marriage of the Virgin, as it appears from a note made by Patmore, reported by Page 1933, 133. 32 Cf. Reid 1957, 209, 219–20 and 228, for the extension of this metaphor to prosody, painting, architecture, and even politics. Patmore said in 1887 that there were painters (Rossetti and his followers?) that were defective in the ‘masculine principle’, and that they only painted ‘ugliness and corruption’. 33 RP, 107.

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more sensitive one which gently pushes the first towards apparent good and which must consequently be kept subject to it. Patmore recognized the synthesis between masculinity and femininity in very few writers: more often he noticed changes of sex – above all in the ‘feminine’ Romanticism of Keats and Shelley – and in his essays after 1880 he branded art and literature as sterilized (‘emasculate’) and ‘impotent’.34 5. Patmore remained a sui generis believer and a follower of a selective, refined and almost insulated Catholicism. One of his reasons for becoming a Catholic, he confessed, was that Catholicism had very few binding dogmas, and dogmas, according to him, that had been almost unwillingly proclaimed by the Church, and proclaimed to consolidate broadly unanimous beliefs. He left the rest to the free and anarchic speculation of the individual. On the other hand, the mysteries of Christianity could only be scrutinized by the happy few, and the Scripture contained for him hidden and enigmatic meanings which were not clear to everyone, and had to remain veiled for the good of the readers. He did not positively wish to proselytize. He was opposed to the disestablishment of the Church of England because it would encourage conversions to Catholicism en masse, whereas he wanted to keep the ranks of English Catholicism strictly select. He also resisted Catholic emancipation, though like Hopkins he had nothing to object about the fact that English Catholics, once emancipated, were sincerely patriotic. The somewhat oxymoronic and excessive label of an ‘anticlerical Catholic’, which was coined expressly for him, was due to the severity with which he attacked priests – many of whom, he noted with consternation and with no spirit of ecumenical tolerance, were Irishmen in England. His political ideas suggest, especially after 1870, a defensive conservatism deaf to the clamour for reform and change in Victorian life. His political essay of major prominence is the late polemical and hand-in-glove ‘Distinction’,35 which attacks democracy understood in a way which is close enough to that intellectual philistinism which was the target of Matthew Arnold, in

34 PA, 19. 35 RP, 117–36.

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turn a true and convinced democrat.36 For Patmore, democracy was just a political form in which the mob could express and often impose its will, a form which was contrary to nature and ‘necessarily self-destructive’. He foretold a violent end to unbridled English democracy.37 After 1870 he was one of the many spiritual exiles that were nostalgic for an ordered cosmos, and who closed the blinds on a world they no longer understood, a world identified with the rural compactness of the early nineteenth century as lauded by Barnes, the Dorset dialectal poet. At the end of the century Patmore still reaffirmed contra omnes the theories expounded in The Unknown Eros: that the moment was not one of the waning of religion but rather it was actually the beginning of a new era of incalculable expansion for the ‘real apprehension’ of God, in which the thirst and reverence for the mystery would grow, rather than diminish. Arnold had announced it shortly before, but with an entirely different underlying meaning. Christ, Patmore warned, had not promised men a materially improved world, so Christianity could not be blamed for its ‘failure’.38 6. There are naturally in all of Patmore’s superhuman moral cleanness, as stated earlier, some obscure corners, some controversial features, excessive self-regard and a streak of ambiguity. ‘Toys’ and some revelations in the letters39 open a chink on a vein of sadism and relish in physical punishment. Children in Patmore’s eyes were anything but innocent and they harboured more violent and evil inclinations than adults did. He did not object to the beating of his lazy, indolent workers that were restoring his farm.40 Critics working in the last twenty years on Victorian literature 36 For Patmore, as for Arnold, America represented the ongoing deterioration and practically the anticipation of that process which awaited England, by now swiftly becoming uncultured. 37 The suggestion of the ‘closed number’ is well expressed in the following aphorism: ‘The holier and purer the small aristocracy of the true Church becomes, the more profane and impure will become the mass of mankind’. 38 Shamelessly deaf to every socially progressive dimension of religion, Patmore goes so far as to make Christ a guarantor of imperialism and slavery. 39 Champneys 1901, I, 228, and II, 237. 40 Patmore’s cruelty was picked up by Conrad in his short story ‘Chance’, under the fake but unmistakable guise of Captain Carleon Anthony (Oliver 1956, 68–70).

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often display suspicions of organized religion and an attempt to uncover unacknowledged drives and sexual perversions in the lives of their writers. Such critics gleefully overturned the icon of an almost saintly Patmore into that of a ravenous and incontinent sex maniac. There has been a systematic attempt to bring to light and prove in him an overpowering and insoluble clash between the purely physical and sensual instincts and their presumed sublimation. This is in substance that same mix of unctuosity and lust which the poet Housman acutely pinpointed, and which eyewitnesses and acquaintances were already assuming to be true. In the exasperated search for shadows and skeletons in the closet, speculations were rife to which was given the patent of absolute truth. This was done not only concerning Patmore’s possibly unconsummated marriage with his second wife but also with regard to an incestuous passion for his daughter by his first marriage. This daughter had adopted her mother’s name, Emily Honoria (also the name of the wife in The Angel in the House). Other questions arose: perhaps Patmore had sexual relations with his third wife even before the death of the second (he had long been sexually abstinent, and the third wedding was celebrated with what looked like unseemly speed). Patmore’s friendships with noted pornographers were also noriced, as was his passion for collecting pornographic material. His biographer, Derek Patmore, one of his own descendants, raised all these questions in a bid to revise Patmore’s reputation for sublime sanctity. § 173. Patmore III: Biography The importance his father held for his firstborn son, born in Woodford in Essex in 1823, was proportionate to the absent-mindedness and superficiality with which he attended to his upbringing; the mother, of Scottish ascendancy and strict Presbyterian persuasion, remained, strangely, ever a figure in the shadows. Patmore’s father was a second-rate writer who, in the underworld of Grub Street boasted the acquaintance of Lamb, Leigh Hunt and especially Hazlitt, whose flings with the daughter of his landlord he timidly backed up. A typical Regency man, he was also rumoured to have been the participant in an incredible cloak-and-dagger episode that ended tragically, through a sheer misunderstanding, with the death of one of the duellists for whom he was the second. A free-thinker, though

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inspired by an abstract, democratic respect for ideas, Patmore the parent wanted his son to be home-educated. Left to himself, Patmore, as he told later in old age in a succinct autobiography expressly commissioned to him by Hopkins, felt religious faith slowly germinating inside him like an ‘unconscious reality’. From very young he had recited his prayers mechanically with his grandmother, and was only slightly more filled with ardour and felt more warmth when he fell in love for the first time. A brief trip to Paris, where he was an unenthusiastic student at the Collège de France, resulted in Patmore taking a fancy to the daughter of the serial novelist Mrs Gore, who kept a salon in Place Vendôme. Such young passion left an enduring mark, because the young lady was Patmore’s very first ‘angel in the house,’ and he had a portrait done of the sixteen-year-old which he hung on the wall of his bedroom. 2. Having returned home Patmore believed for a time, as confirmation of his versatility, that he had the vocation of a painter, and he won a prize in 1838 by presenting a copy of a painting by Landseer. A short while later his father provided him with a laboratory to develop other hidden talents of his, in particular those of a scientist. It was thanks to his father that he came to know and love the great English poets and dramatists, and that he was introduced into the literary circles as an enfant prodige. A precocious essay on Macbeth, with sparks of originality, argued that Lady Macbeth nurtured the objective of killing Duncan the king even before the prophecy of the witches.41 The last improvident act of Patmore’s father was a daring investment in railway shares which led him into financial difficulties and prevented him from putting his three sons on a secure footing. He and his wife had to take refuge in France to escape his creditors. In order to survive Patmore took on hack work and anonymous reviews for magazines, and was rescued by a wealthy aristocrat, poet and critic, Monckton Milnes. For twenty years – from 1846 to 1866 – he lived quite comfortably as assistant librarian of the British Museum. He got married a short time after securing this job, found himself a house in the suburbs of Hampstead and became a sheltered house-husband. Emily 41 The essay, unsigned, was published anonymously in the third issue of The Germ (§ 207.1).

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Andrews, Patmore’s first wife, came from a Dissenting family, but had moved over to the Anglicanism of the husband, who was for his part dissuaded for the moment from turning Catholic; it was she who actually held up a conversion that he would have embraced a long time earlier. It was within the circle of family friends that Patmore met this second, though indeed unique and true ‘angel in the house’. They declared their love to each other, were engaged in May 1847 and were married the following September. Emily Patmore was a highly gifted woman who emanated an irresistible spontaneous fascination; Patmore’s house guests visited more to see her than him. The poet and engraver Woolner portrayed her in a cameo, Millais in a painting; Browning dedicated a poem to her. She died of tuberculosis in June 1862 aged only thirty-eight, after a long illness borne with characteristic Victorian firmness. Eighteen months elapsed between the calamity and a trip to Rome which had for Patmore two decisive consequences: his conversion and his second marriage. The letters sent by Patmore from Italy – lengthy, and the most detailed and wittiest ever written by him – come across as the typical Italian diary left behind by all nineteenth-century English travellers. They are rife with excessive, extravagant judgements, ad-lib remarks against the mainstream and delusional perspectives, even caused by a particular acute allergy to the Roman sirocco. True to form, he was to find that Rome fell well below expectations, and that the Roman forum and other vestiges of the ancient world were just a pile of rubble; the Vatican Museums, the Pantheon and St Peter’s are described in exactly the same unfavourable terms as in Clough’s Roman letters of 1849, and by using a quite modern estranging technique.42 This fierce hatred soon subsided, thanks also to the affability of the Catholic prelates and the acquaintance of his future wife. On her deathbed, Emily had expressed the desire that Patmore should remarry, and he willingly consented. Engagement and conversion were simultaneous; but it would be wronging Patmore to suggest that the latter was instrumental and almost opportunistic, with the marriage in sight. He abandoned Protestantism with precipitous excitement, running in the 42 SSI, vol. I, 301–6.

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middle of the night to waken the Roman Jesuit priest with whom he had taken his first steps towards the new faith. The spiritual and highly gifted Marianne Caroline Byles had been a pupil and almost like a second wife to Manning, when the future Catholic cardinal was still an Anglican canon. The woman would have probably taken the veil, and had anyway solemnly vowed not to marry, when Patmore – who had thought her, because of the modesty of her dress, to be a lady-companion of an older woman – obtained her hand. The wedding was probably a white and ‘virginal’ one, because of that vow of chastity that she, it is thought, wanted to maintain throughout her married life.43 She consented to burdening herself with raising the six children of the preceding marriage without giving any to the poet. One daughter became a Catholic nun, and died in 1882 leaving poems of ardent spirituality; an even more talented poet, eulogized by Hopkins, was the son Henry, who also died at a young age. A cultured, devoted woman, and translator of St Bernard, Marianne died suddenly in 1880, and after a year Patmore married for the third time, the family educational instructor, producing one child at the age of sixty. 3. A phrenologist had prognosticated to Patmore, still young at the time, that he had a predisposition for business affairs, and the prophecy was fulfilled (in a sense) when Patmore courted and married a young woman who turned out to be an heiress, his wife Marianne. Thanks to this gift he could acquire and reorganize a vast holding in Sussex; he himself documented the restoration work in a little book published in 1886. There was further confirmation of it when in 1874 he sold the property with conspicuous assets. Patmore could then fulfil his dream of becoming that ‘country gentleman’ his alter ego Felix Vaughan is in The Angel in the House. He assumed the manners of the patriarch over time. Acquaintances remembered him as a gangly figure walking awkwardly on his very long legs, and an obstinate smoker. He may also have embarked on a passionate love affair with the Catholic poet Alice Meynell, a romantic fling that possibly arose and was played out under the eyes of the unknowing husband Wilfrid 43 Reid 1957, 26–8. This information is confirmed by a witness, however, and not by first-hand admissions of the interested parties. See also Maynard 1993, 152 and 353–4 n. 13.

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Meynell, who often hosted Patmore in his London house. Patmore may have sought such a relationship because his wife, quite a bit younger than him, had no literary or cultural interests. The correspondence between the two poets was burned on Patmore’s death, but in any case Alice Meynell had already been ‘pinched’ from Patmore by Meredith during her lifetime. A farmer, and no longer a poet, and only an essayist in the magazines and a political, architectural and literary reviewer, Patmore dedicated himself to contemplation and reflection in his final years, steering clear of active life. He had a Catholic church built in the Hastings area, dedicated to St Mary Star of the Sea, and between 1877 and 1885 he went four times on a pilgrimage to Lourdes to accompany his two invalid sons. He passed away in perfect peace, almost with a burst of good humour, in 1896, having been enrolled a Third Order Franciscan, and was buried in the Franciscan habit as was his wish. § 174. Patmore IV: Youthful poems of frustrated love Patmore is the Victorian poet who managed his talent best, or at least the poet gifted with the highest level of literary modesty in the first half of the century. He avoided showing off his poetic training and publishing a flood of private, adolescent-style confessions which would have had little or nothing to do with poetry and much with formlessness and rashness. He held back from issuing much of his immature work, more or less selecting what was more effective, as he was writing or immediately afterwards, from the ephemeral exercise. His poetic vocation matured in the wake of the publication of Tennyson’s poems in 1842, and it was as a disciple of Tennyson that he was hailed by the first critics of his collection of 1844. The scathing reviews which it received in Blackwood Magazine were due, more than to its specific demerits, to his father’s literary enmities. It was even rumoured that Coventry Patmore was the nom de plume of the future Poet Laureate, who had been absent for almost a decade from the poetic limelight. At the age of twenty-one Patmore was not afraid of revealing his own personality to the public, a fear which caused his predecessors and contemporaries alike to tremble and often prudentially induced them to preserve their anonymity. The dominant form he employed is the firstperson narrative in flexible metre, and worked in the manner of the painter

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with words. In these earliest poems, he soon sensed his own subject-matter and the theme of which all his work to come would be a variation, that of love and falling in love. This is however a love which – based on his unhappy passion for Mrs Gore’s daughter – was quite different from the purified and sublime love of The Angel in the House, a love which is just the uncontrolled, romantic passion that tosses and turns in the lover’s mind like a ghost in search of peace.44 2. The rejected suitor of ‘The Yew-berry’ reacts romantically, believing himself to be the centre of a collapsing world, and is then left marked forever by that experience. In his unbalanced reaction, his disappointment paints nature, delightful until that moment, with his dark bitterness, and sees corruption and the stench of rottenness arising from it, reflecting fatalistically that the law of change is ‘predetermin’d’ in earthly matters. In the ballad ‘The Woodman’s Daughter’ too – which struck the imagination of the Pre-Raphaelites with its Maeterlinck-style lugubriousness, and inspired a painting by Millais – unrequited love causes hallucinations of a ‘forsaken garden’.45 ‘The Yew-berry’ launches the quintessential Patmorian love triangle between the woman, the lover and the rival. His nameless protagonist is a remote preparatory study of Frederick Graham in The Victories of Love (the sequel of The Angel in the House). The Victories of Love will be in fact hinged on the second theme, or musical counterpoint, of Patmore’s adult poetry, namely that of the frustrated lover trying to survive and making a virtue of necessity by marrying another woman (this development is naturally absent in Patmore’s juvenile poetry). In the light of ‘The River’, Patmore was at that stage in his career more the poet of impeded and frustrated 44 In almost every one of his juvenile poems the theme of the lover’s insomnia recurs. Felix Vaughan too is an insomniac, particularly in canto I.10 of The Angel in the House, when he has to go to church at nine o’clock but awakens at three in the morning. The symbolic image of fruits, sweet and inviting on the outside but bitter when bitten into, also recurs. The worm-eaten peach, inside of which the wasp is lurking, reappears in ‘Tamerton Church-tower’. This image will be overturned in the magnificent poem ‘Arbor Vitae’, included in The Unknown Eros: the fruit of the very ancient oak has a ‘rough […] rind’, but beneath the skin a ‘Heart-succouring savour’. 45 As an ersatz of sex the lover offers the woodman’s daughter some fruit, as do Christina Rossetti’s goblins (§ 202).

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love than of realized love, and he seemed more oriented to The Victories of Love than to The Angel in the House. At the same time the love story in this ballad is almost a pretext for showing off veiled scenes of nature, gloomy and pale moons, and a whole series of hackneyed motifs, though offered with precociously remarkable taste. The story is tragic, even if the suicide of the young lover is only just suggested, and cloaked in uncertainty, as Hopkins pointed out. ‘The Falcon’ is a free and easy recast of Boccaccio’s novella which most fired the imagination of the Victorians, and returns in a more optimistic way, but perhaps only because of the connection with the source, to love’s total dedication and to the achievement of its goal. The ethics of romantic squandering in Hubert-Federigo clashes with the cynicism of the woman, who will be, she says, his ‘great debtor’ for eternity in exchange for a yearned-for refreshment. Patmore has Hubert keep alive the falcon not just to offer it to the woman when she condescends to accept his love, but because of its big eyes that remind him of hers. The moment in which Hubert – forcedly unconcerned about the caresses of the bird of prey which he carries on his arm – touches and strokes its plump form and eventually cuts its throat, has an uncommon intensity. 3. ‘Tamerton Church-tower’, the longest and most imposing in the collection of the same name of 1853 (then drastically thinned out in the reprints),46 shows an even greater ability to recreate pure atmosphere, as if

46 A little, exquisitely crafted jewel, which was not sacrificed, is ‘The Year’. A provocative, descriptive and inventive minor masterpiece, ‘A London Fête’ recounts an event which only Browning’s pen could have depicted with the same incisiveness. Distancing himself from the obsessive rut of love and the promise of love, Patmore does indeed portray in ‘A London Fête’, without pathetic or moralistic diffuseness, but with a forthright narrative rhythm, the hanging of a criminal, placing the emphasis – with the same estrangement effect as in the Roman letters of 1862 – on the various and changing reactions of the spectators. The final, scathing lines already focus on detailed, decentralized particulars with a technique which we will see at work in The Angel in the House: the crowd slowly dispersing, the thief who unobserved has been doing a little looting, the children who, having been prompted by the spectacle, imitate the executioner in their games. The poem may be placed alongside works dealing with capital punishments in Browning (§ 126.3 n. 189), in Alexander Smith (§ 228.6), and the earlier example in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (Volume 5, § 35.6).

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the setting were the focus point (the torpor of the summer heat in Cornwall and Devon) and not the story itself. Added to this is the awkwardness in disentangling, through short revelations, a brief story that begins in medias res. The poem represents Patmore’s last debt to romantic passion,47 which in this case has a tragic outcome as a consequence of the lover’s immaturity. The protagonist is a young man raring to crown his life with a love-marriage, but too hastily believing that a woman of whom he has only heard talk of without ever seeing her is capable of guiding him, ennobling him and even transforming the world. The honeymoon, a Handel-style musicon-the-water event, is interrupted by a sudden storm, a foreshadowing of impermanence. The intoxication of possession plays a brutal joke on the newly married man (‘All perfect my contentment was, / For Blanche was all my care’), as he assists helplessly at the death of the woman swallowed by the waves. The widower is then obsessed by her memory, and it is through nature and in meeting other men that he recovers his psychological balance. In so doing he looks once again ahead to the hero of The Victories of Love.48 This suitor is already a Felix, where his friend Frank is the cynical ladies’ man who reveals his personality in some little foul-mouthed songs which exalt sensual satisfaction. Patmore corrects the candid gullibility of the one as much as the shameless amorality of the other. It’s up to Frank the cynic to distract the morbid dreamer from a philosophy of abstention and discouragement. § 175. Patmore V: ‘The Angel in the House’ I. Scenes of domestic happiness The Angel in the House, published in two separate parts in 1854 and 1856, and revised in 1879 and in 1886 including Hopkins’s uninfluential suggestions, is universally reputed as Patmore’s most famous work, and it was one of the major poetry best-sellers of its time. In it the poet narrates

47 The lyric ‘Eros’ already explores tender, adolescent love in a context of clear light, small flowers touched by a light breeze, and a ‘radiance of Eden unquench’d by the Fall’. 48 The parable of guilt, punishment and atonement emerges from the fact that Patmore compared this poem, at least as regards its length, to Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.

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in the first person the story of his own falling in love and first marriage, in a skilfully and ably disguised form and projecting it onto an emblematic dimension.49 The young Felix Vaughan (the coupling of a very common surname50 with a programmatic first name, with an immediately obvious allegorical intention, like Bunyan with Christian), having finished his university studies visits the residence of Dean Churchill on Sarum plain and sees again his three daughters with whom he played as a child. His gaze rests on Honoria, that is the woman worthy of honour and the sum of all virtues.51 Having conquered the rivalry of one of her cousins, he obtains the father’s consent and that of the young lady – ardently yearned for – and eventually marries her. There was a follow-up planned, but not written, which should have dealt with the couple’s marital relationship. After a very protracted gestation period the poem was written all at once – the first part in six weeks – on the wings of a missionary-style enthusiasm and a supernatural mandate that Patmore claimed to have received, to ‘sing the praises of marital love’. As the quintessence of the English Biedermeier The Angel in the House was read almost straight away on publication, insomuch as it overturned the Romantic conception of free, extramarital and adulterous love by glorifying its sweet imprisonment in the context of 49 His wife Emily, to whom the poem is dedicated, is a central source of light in Patmore’s poetry, and supplies the role model for Honoria and also for Amelia (whose name is almost an anagram of Emily’s), the protagonist of the poem of the same name written a good fifteen years after Emily’s death (§ 179). However, as I shall say more at length, the poetic transfusion is not exact in The Angel in the House. There were very few passages, by Patmore’s own admission, which referred directly to Emily and described her physically. To anyone who knew her (see Champneys 1901, I, 118n.) she evoked a still form (such as that of a medallion or cameo, as she was subsequently engraved by Woolner), and a spiritual physiognomy on the whole different from that which is presented in the poem. Both protagonists are orphans, which was true for Emily but not for Patmore, who at the time had both his parents, and had not been to Cambridge for his studies. Emily’s father, a Nonconformist minister, was made an Anglican dean, modelled on various acquaintances frequented by Patmore (Page 1933, 74–5). Patmore also reflected himself, at least in part, in Frederick, the defeated rival. 50 Also the surname of the seventeenth-century mystic poet. 51 The name of Felix’ first love is the fairly prosaic one of Fanny Fry.

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the domestic idyll. The idyll was almost by definition rural in its setting, and a similar exemplary love was bound to strike roots within the narrow confines of the English countryside, cut through by streams, cheered by the voices of children, the ringing of the silver bells and the bellowing of the cattle. Its symbolic and almost invariable weather is that of springtime and the rebirth and flourishing of flowers, nature in bloom enjoyed from the window-sills opening out to a radiant dawn and the blazing sun climbing up through the clouds.52 Never does the engaged couple raise their eyes to see beyond these horizons, nor are they affected by the fascination of the exotic. When for one solitary time Honoria must absent herself from Salisbury to spend a month in London, Felix gets a very real sense of his soul filling up with terror on account of the ‘harmful influence’ of the metropolis, from which his fiancée might return scorning ‘our simple country life’. The poem exudes the feeling of the old world’s compactness and of self-sufficient immobility regulated by an ‘order’d freedom sweet and fair.’ It is a happy island where life moves between parties, dancing festivals, respectful courtships, embroidery, reading and singing to the accompaniment of the piano,53 and games and outings in the countryside. 2. On Patmore’s death, 250,000 copies of the poem had been printed. The public who had proclaimed The Angel in the House a success were however ‘readers of only moderate culture’ and the ‘new-rich’ middle class54 desirous to see their own affluence and their own ideology of stability mirrored – even partly nostalgic, as new values were looming. This almost unprecedented success caused official criticism to respond that it was an easy and backward-looking work and a collection of maxims and 52

Hopkins captured the fresh scent of the work perfectly, describing it as a ‘basket of violets’. On the Victorian propensity for flowers, ‘scattered here and there all over the poem’, see PHE, 422. 53 The young man who takes himself off to find the young Churchill family members, hears the symbolic and prophetic notes of Mendelssohn’s wedding march through the opened windows. This is also an indication of the almost perfect contemporaneity between the writing of the work and the time in which it is set, as Mendelssohn’s incidental music was completed in 1843. 54 PHE, 422. See also Gosse’s appraisal, reported in FL, xxviii.

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edifying exempla in the style of the likewise popular Proverbial Philosophy of Martin Tupper.55 As I have hinted, this interpretation was the fruit of a drastic simplification of the complexity of the work. The idyllic element in The Angel in the House is not the whole story, and the poem’s backdrop is a marital philosophy which is a good deal more profound, sophisticated and insidious than the banal one of the popularizers of the time. To this can be added that, playing as it does a continuous and often light-hearted game with its sources, The Angel in the House is the classic ‘poets’ poem’. Even Hopkins, who considered obscurity a necessary poetic ingredient, regretted the metaphysical subtleties of the ‘preludes’. He was partly the ‘common reader’ faithful to the stylistic and derivative Victorian norms, and alarmed by a conceited language that was only practiced by Browning.56 The title itself – just to convey an idea – is the same as that of a poem by Leigh Hunt. Its true meaning, moreover, is not the more obvious and reductive one of the spouse as an angel of the domestic hearth, nor is it entirely that of the woman-angel of Dante and the Stilnovisti who had come back into favour thanks to Rossetti. It owes something, in fact, to Swedenborg’s definition of an angel, and to the angelic unity of the married couple in heaven. Patmore’s whole preluding in The Angel in the House is not understood – and may even become decidedly annoying – without a minimum of knowledge of the Christian, Catholic and esoteric nuptial mystique. In itself, the idyll harks back to Crabbe, Austen, Goldsmith and, among the more recent and almost contemporary authors, to Wordsworth, Tennyson and Trollope. But its plot is also, it has been shown, an ingenious pastiche of serialized novels and feuilletons reviewed anonymously by

55

56

This misinterpretation is repeated in PGU, vol. 6, 85. Patmore laughed heartily whenever somebody pointed out to him echoes of Tupper (Meynell 1903, 3). It is just as inappropriate to speak of a ‘Stilnovistic metaphysics turned bourgeois’ (PSL, 632). Praz wrote in PHE the definitive chapter on the echoes of John Donne. A more farfetched derivation but nevertheless a plausible one – to which both Page 1933, 81, and Reid 1957, 246–9, give credit – is that from the poem Fair Virtue by the Caroline poet George Wither. Chesterton spoke acutely of ‘exquisite Elizabethan perversity’ in Patmore (VAL, 48).

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Patmore in the years preceding the drafting of the poem.57 Nevertheless it is worth noting that this poem, a work of the 1850s, is in its own small way a precursor of the ‘modern novel’, and of an aesthetics that admits the ordinary, the pedestrian and even the bathetic to the domain of art, and which often and intentionally shifts the narrative focus, with a technique that anticipates the nineteenth-century estrangement effect, from the heart of the action to its outer limits. The Angel in the House is a collection of often non-poetic and non-exceptional situations where a whole concept of literature as pompous sampling of grand themes is repudiated through the pondered choice of the author. Its plot is anything but exciting, and it does not take advantage of the leading device of contemporary narrative, the sensational turning point. 3. For several reasons, The Angel in the House – although the most representative of Patmore’s works – is not however his masterpiece. Echoes and reprises are not fused with one another, and the gap between metaphysical embroidery and pedestrian realism is evident. The metre of iambic octosyllabics with alternating rhyme, which Patmore held to be suitable for the theme of the happiness of love, fails to relieve a feeling of monotony; it actually aggravates it. Its division into two books – framed between a prologue and epilogue, and in turn subdivided into a sequence of titled cantos, twelve to each book, until it reaches the classic epic number, twenty-four – follows a rigid and ever more tedious symmetry. Each individual canto is then subdivided throughout into two distinct parts: one of ‘preludes’, in its turn organized in a series of self-contained separate sections – usually not more than six and not less than three – and a more properly narrative section. These narrative parts within each canto, which bring us through the salient stages of the courtship up to the eve of the wedding, are brief vignettes of no more than a few dozens of lines. They are rapidly outlined miniatures without the slightest imperfection, but devoid of depth, entirely resolved in their polished surfaces. The ‘preludes’ are distilled and esoteric variations on Patmore’s nuptial philosophy, and comments on and prefaces to the single actions. Their merits are uneven: some are enlivened by

57

Page 1933, 69–72.

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effective and sharp witticisms, others are feeble, specious and repetitive wordplay, sugary rigmaroles and fervent nursery-rhymes.58 In particular, in the quatrain which invariably closes them, Patmore often retraces the most well-worn methods and ploys of metaphysical erotic wit, whose everlurking risk is tautology. § 176. Patmore VI: ‘The Angel in the House’ II. Angelic catechesis and ironic distancing The first preludes overflow with a hyperbolic diction directed at the woman as ‘virgin’ and ‘bride’ who leads the way to the purification of man, a path which having begun on earth will then have to be followed together to reach its end in the heavenly spheres. Patmore expatiates on the complex theological disquisition which states that where the concept of time no longer exists, honour and happiness must be present. Thus, in the afterlife, where every joy reaches its zenith, the joys that were already paradisical in human life cannot be lacking; the future paradise would be reduced in substance to nil if its bliss had already been enjoyed in separation. Patmore takes as his starting point the story of the creation of the cosmos and then, in order of rank, of man and woman.59 But the story and memory of Eden does not hold weight for Patmore, who is – already at the time of writing this poem, when he was not yet a Catholic – the least afflicted of the Victorian poets by the Protestant sense of guilt. Eve, who is ‘Marr’d less than man by mortal fall’,60 is not the fragile, perfidious Eve, but the benefactor of mankind who restores at least one copy from lost Eden. The hypostasis of the

58

GSM, 453, is among the few to praise the ‘preludes’ as being the cornerstone and the strong point of the poem, to the detriment of the narrative sections. Grierson, not by chance, had been the rediscoverer of Donne. 59 Section II of Prelude I.4 is one of Patmore’s best examples of ingenuous, mythical metaphysics: it describes the ‘tribute’ to woman from the whole of nature, which is animated and lavish with its spontaneous gifts. 60 In the important scene of the letter (II.12) in The Victories of Love (§ 177) Felix has spied a little book in which his wife notes down her daily shortcomings, and he reaches the conclusion that she is without fault: ‘Faults had she, child of Adam’s stem, / But only Heaven knew of them’.

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feminine, before it is realized in Honoria, is already present in the preludes, but not as a frozen motionless statue, the femme fatale or sans merci of the Romantics; her ‘true nature’ is not to repel or hurt, it is rather a ‘pleasure in her power to charm’ and an inclination ‘to attract’.61 The cliché of the Titanic man is at the same time dismantled, as man has to kneel humbly before this ‘Venus Victrix’.62 In the presence of woman, man receives an injection of pure moral strength capable of extirpating evil and the desire for transient things. Woman is the sensible form of the absolute love of God, a divine intermediary, dematerialized like a ray of light, and her body, beautiful as it is, is only a clothing for the spirit, and her face an altar. This concept of love is Platonic, not so much in the sense of exemption from carnal relations as much as in that of the purity, spirituality and sublimation of the senses,63 a theme more fully developed in the odes of The Unknown Eros. 61

See the charming scene in the prelude II.2, which describes the thrill and the agony of the young girl who finds herself in love, like a little bird emerging timidly from the nest and beginning to take its first tentative steps into the open. She renounces solitude and goes forth to the freedom of love, even if she still wishes to withdraw fearing too much haste. But looking in the mirror she recognizes in herself an uncontrollable craving for devotion. Patmore readily allowed for, even encouraged, a grain of vanity in women, a vanity that should not cease – should actually be practiced in a more studied fashion – after marriage (§ 171.3 n. 12). 62 A title which could well have been that of a painting by Rossetti. 63 On the dream of the three kites, see § 172.3 n. 27. Patmore distantly refers, to disavow it, to mercenary love which puts a price on the female body and sells off Paradise: prelude I.10, in the form of a riddle, establishes that life prospers for whoever is stripped of their bodily flesh leaving only the soul. Respect for his own body and that of others is expressly represented in the prelude to I.12 as one of the endowments of the Victorian gentleman, whose counterpart is the ‘churl’ who sees the crowning of his egotistical love, not in matrimony, but in the ‘chace’. The disorder of anyone who subverts the plan of divine love is represented by the image of a maniac who grabs a cup, overturns it and only ends up with the ‘taste of earth and guilt’. Patmore also illustrates the intangibility of feminine beauty, which must always be the mediation of the Divine, with the beautiful and fresh image of the child running towards the rainbow believing he can grab it. In the letter II.12 in The Victories of Love, Felix affirms that ‘intimacy in love is nought / Without pure reverence’. This letter is a hymn to monogamy, to conjugal temperance and chastity, to the sublimation and volatilization of impulses.

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2. Compared to the youthful poetry, where love is aleatory and impermanent, woman is now sent from Heaven to teach deluded mankind ‘to see / The rhythmic change of time’s swift flow / As part of still eternity’. The man in love no longer has doubts about eternity or his feelings, and the declaration of love cut into the bark of the beech tree grows, and enlarges both on the bark and in the heart. Married love is that unique thing which, whereas everything else is satisfying, remains unsatisfied, and is symbolized by the immortal flower of the amaranth. For this reason, the courtship never truly comes to an end in Patmore: the married man shouldn’t do anything other than keep alive inside himself the memory that his present spouse is the same he had desired before and who had given in to his amorous advances; she herself had to deny herself, commit herself to keeping the desire always alive and, like a spirit, ‘elude embrace’. In order to keep the flame alive between the married couple, a ritual had to be continually played out and informality banished; the majesty of love had to be always upheld. Within three days of the wedding, Honoria is still a ‘sweet stranger’ to Felix. The love of the couple was called to exit – from isolated and isolating love – ad extra, towards all creation, and to be a love which ‘grows from one to all’, and make a ‘continent’ out of an ‘island,’ or better still a ‘world-embracing sea’. Patmore envisions a unifying impetus which was established at the Creation in the bosom of the Trinity: not only was humanity created as the unity of man and woman, but human marital love is the misty image of divine love incarnated. Already by the end of the first book the preludes take on a catechistic tendency aiming to plainly and fastidiously clarify the duties and relations between the married couple. Patmore was simply translating and celebrating the wisdom of many Victorian women and wives, and most of all that of his own wife in whom, under the mantle of submission and humility, a strong and well-founded temperament was concealed, along with an infinite tact and talent for dissimulation. The woman, not the man, took the helm in marriage – the husband is ‘the despot’ and lord only ‘out of courtesy’ and only in name – even if she pretended to be subordinate to the husband. It was an unpardonable oversight on her part to be really humble, rather than out of cunning. 3. With the poet Felix Vaughan – who could have aspired to fame, but writes only through devotion to his wife, and at the beginning of the

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poem prepares to recite the poem of their love on their tenth wedding anniversary – Patmore confessed to having found himself at a crossroads: he could either seek further success and continue the exhausting search of poetic matters ‘in these last days, the dregs of time’, or write poetry about the first of poetic topics in order of importance, but the last in his times, namely love which must ‘make, not follow, a precedent’. In these words there is perhaps an echo of a voluntary rejection of a fashionable literary career that Patmore would have easily been able to follow in his father’s footsteps.64 The time for heroic poetry had passed, and that of love poetry set in, the one poetic topic above all other mortal things worthy of writing about; and an even more enduring fame would smile on the poet who championed his own wife and conjugal love. Patmore’s poetics is all here: to write poetry is to write about love, undying love, and not about something which is fleeting and reminds us of the dead in the grave.65 The mission which Patmore felt he had been divinely set was to reveal prophetically to humanity – like a new Moses or a Joshua – new Tables of the Law, which were like stars forever in the firmament but no longer or not yet noticed. Such a mission bordered for Patmore on the fear of someone who challenges the unspeakable, to follow an over-used figure of speech which in his case was truly felt. For everything poets had found an image, but in the universal book of nature conjugal love does not have a metaphor, and he who admits to having nothing to say is the one who speaks more clearly. In the prologue to the first book, the wife candidly asks the husband, who is about to begin reading, if he would set about writing poetry about King Arthur or write another Jerusalem Delivered. In the second book, the couple agree to celebrate the perfection of their marital union on the day of their tenth wedding anniversary, while the squall their children are making provides a contrapuntal effect to their conversation. There is little lacking to achieve an ecstatic situation, and time, which usually causes everything to fade, almost causes her beauty to rejuvenate instead. The reading of the poem, which gets underway with high-sounding descriptions, 64 Larbaud 1951, 71. 65 The acme of life is not the sum of important deeds or even death itself, but the moment in which the lover has brought his spouse across the threshold.

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is interrupted for the first time by the ‘Loves’ who – in a witty interlude in a domestic play – have captured a hedgehog which then, straight away, they set free amongst all the din. Patmore’s irony makes of the husband a bard who tolerates the interruption as fair play, and makes of the wife a Venus who immediately recovers from her fright. 4. Felix Vaughan is also the college and university student of much of the poetry of the period. He differs from the prototypes of Tennyson, Arnold and Clough by being someone who is just a little less awkward and unprepared for life. Underneath the disguise he is a charming, loveable twenty-year-old Patmore, though pathetic in his ingenuity and with his castles in the air, and ultimately kept at a distance and almost repelled by the author, by then a decade senior. An impalpable irony, not always easy to decipher – so that it can even be mistaken for an identification – spreads over the actions of this protagonist, many of which reveal his immaturity, hyperactivity and inconsistency. His love letter, which was not even sent, contains a cento of swooning sentimentalities, and comes across as a parody of courtly hyperbole and of the medieval débat. To ease the distress he leaves the house and meets his loved one who is peacefully embroidering in a field: the hyperbolical simile which follows (she smiles at him like the frozen moon smiles on Etna in flames) is naturally to be attributed to the Felix of that time. This scene, which threatens to become rather melodramatic, is interrupted by the dean showing up and by the warm jump of the Alsatian dog. In an extended dream, Felix imagines the death of his wife, who in fact is still just his fiancée; on waking he runs out to verify that his dream is not real. The overindulgence comes to a climax when he buys a revolver to escape the dangers, just out of love for Honoria. His praiseworthy ambition to improve his own economic situation so that he can obtain the hand of the young lady translates into laughable or fantastic expedients: he rushes to collect the monthly rent from the farmer and he spends whole nights studying how to get experience as a politician and get elected to parliament. The temporarily abandoned young man is struck with a lethargic melancholy: he climbs the hill to see from a height the trail of smoke left by the train going off in the distance, then walks restlessly in the places which only a short while before had been trodden by the young girl. In the light of The Victories of Love, where the too beautiful, too perfect, Edenic world will

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show its reverse side, one could add that Felix is a poor deluded man: reality is vaster and multifarious, and life quite another thing. The sublimation of the sensual, above all, is, for Felix Vaughan, anything but acquired from the beginning, but rather the goal of a continuous battle whose outcomes are far from predictable.66 Felix doesn’t make mystery of the fact that he had walked the path to maturity: he points to his pride in the past, his vanity, his ‘blushes’, his vices, recognizes his despicable deeds and makes a solemn promise to avoid every egotistical act and every sin.67 Like Patmore’s previous protagonists, Felix is by nature hot-blooded and undisciplined, but he admonishes himself that strong passion generates a weak will. There is one occasion in particular in which the young man reproaches himself for having lost his compass: when he is sucked into the vortex of the dance and he would have wanted to hurl himself at Honoria, caresses her hands in excitement and is about to abandon himself to the pure pleasure of the senses. This scene at the ball is repeated, but reversed, in the second book, when the woman is seen as if bodiless, a ghost visible only as a hallucination to Felix, even her clothing having become an impalpable fog.68 5. The second book of The Angel in the House appears to have no other objectives than that of the imperative symmetry of the twelve cantos. Its development is extremely slow, with no or little cutting edge and frequent repetitions of scenes, such as that of the dance, having the dean decided that a year must pass before the wedding takes place. In reality the numerous digressive and accompanying scenes are not only exquisite and humorous vignettes but also instances of minute and complete realism which do not ignore or omit even the most marginal or uninspiring details. One such enjoyable interlude is the conversation between Honoria and her 66 Symptomatically, Guidi 1946 marvelled and almost raised his eyebrows noting in certain parts of the poem ‘a warmer and ungovernable passion’ (83), and a ‘psychology […] also somewhat turbid here and there’ (61). 67 The presentation of himself as a Don Juan-style globe-trotter who has had a few ‘flames’ in many places and chases after women, is a boast which could be falsely innocent, and could authorize the conjecture that the Felix of the poem – and perhaps also Patmore in reality – had not reached matrimony as virgins. 68 Nature was inspired by a more divine sentiment when she formed Honoria, omitting ‘the grosser elements’ and making her ‘all of air and fire’.

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aunt Maud, who advises her against marrying Felix and urges her to aim higher. A second, even more theatrical interlude, is the long rambling speech of the governess following a reception in Felix’ house.69 There is enough time for Felix to see his old flame again, and her ostentatious, superficial beauty which one day had dazzled the young, ‘love-sick’ man, and who now appears to him transient in the present of Honoria, whose even smallest action has ‘an air of immortality’. The fleeting encounter with Frank, his ex-companion of studies at Trinity and very different to the cynic of the same name in ‘Tamerton Church-tower’,70 introduces a second instance of Patmore’s optimism, since he is a true copy of Felix and he has also found a woman who is heaven itself, and here on earth the means to reach it. The nuptial homily to the newly-weds and to Felix in particular comes from his new father-in-law, while the bride changes her clothes for her wedding journey. An umpteenth, violent anti-climax, resembling one of Browning’s typical abrupt transitions, interrupts the flow of the stuffy warnings when the dean switches to a series of mostly uninspiring and dull suggestions. A fade-out shows the married couple in the carriage, Honoria showing off in the shawl given her by her aunt. Symbolically, night descends on the

69 In the bridal-suite that welcomes the married couple and is visited by all the ladies, Queen Elizabeth had once slept, passing through from Salisbury. The stories depicted on the walls are of punishments meted out in an exemplary way for mad and egotistical love-affairs – like that of the impious philanderer Ixion – and reciprocal love. Once Honoria is conquered, Felix recognizes his own destiny is the opposite to that of Ixion (prelude of II.8). Also on the walls of the bridal suite are scenes from the story of Psyche and Cupid, the myth which is most frequently recalled in the poem and is evoked at length in The Unknown Eros. In the first of the numerous references to Psyche and to her butterfly iconography in The Angel in the House, Psyche is the spirit to which not everyone can give wings, as they are incapable of sublimating passion; an extremely subtle comparison is made between love in laziness – but always ready to rouse itself – and the silkworm: this is the spirit which acquires the wings and longs for the marital state, ‘Cocoon’d in silken fancies sweet’. A brilliant and witty idea is, at the end of the flower show in I.4, that of having a book about butterflies presented as a prize to the winner, Mildred Churchill, sister of Honoria. 70 § 174.3.

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scene and Venus shines down on the couple in every sense.71 Their married life, fleetingly described at the end of the poem, is the quintessence of the uneventful and the commonplace. The couple also play at not being married yet, to relive the pleasure of the electrifying courtship; they confess their sins and virtues to one another, until the pretend-fiancées joyfully throw themselves into each other’s arms, or until the fun-loving children show up again to interrupt them. In the final part of The Angel in the House the cliché of the attraction of the budding rose, and of its inevitable withering (which would be, but is not, the symbol of the married woman) is dismantled: nothing is said to be sweeter than the ‘ten-year’s wife’, nothing has a maturer beauty, just like the golden apple is preferable to the bitter green one. In the very last scene, a friend meets the couple and pays a compliment to one of the children, and to the whole family, which evokes the image of the most perfect happiness. § 177. Patmore VII: ‘The Victories of Love’. The polyphonic, reversed rewriting of ‘The Angel in the House’ Patmore did not forget Felix Vaughan’s defeated rival in The Angel in the House, and he completed The Victories of Love between 1860 and 1862. This can be seen as a rib protruding from its torso, or like a branch having grown disproportionately and become almost autonomous, so as to reach the entire length of the trunk. The Victories of Love is the minor masterpiece of Patmore the verse narrator. Neglected by the critics, it has always 71

One of the very few really autobiographical facts included in the poem is the hiring of a pair of beach sandals during their honeymoon. The two newlyweds then climb into a boat to go visit the warships in the bay: such an apparently bizarre action in reality constitutes an imperceptible trait d’union with Victories: among these ships is the Arrogant, belonging to Felix’ onetime rival Frederick Graham, now most friendly and cordial with the couple, and apparently feeling freshly encouraged. For once, Honoria makes a wrong move, and is actually the protagonist of an unpardonable gaffe. ‘The Rosy Bosom’d Hours’, an unrhymed poem which borders on and overcomes the ecstatic tones of all the other preceding poems, describes a honeymoon, the unrepeatable climax of intoxicated conjugal happiness, and the re-establishing of Edenic ‘health’. It is set in Sarum Plain, and thus it ideally belongs to The Angel in the House.

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been read with hasty judgements incapable of fully appreciating the skill and originality of its design. Patmore is still the poet of conjugal love, but a poet who is freer now from the schematic frames of The Angel in the House, and a love which is much more uneven and rough. Having abandoned the organization of the poem in the form a chain of overlapping vignettes that are too alike, and replaced it with a more wide-ranging and varied plot, and having also dispensed with the philosophizing and ‘metaphysical’ preludes of The Angel in the House and renounced the heavy and omnipresent didactic aim, Patmore indulges now in the pure pleasure of narrating. Thus a little parodic jewel – polyphonic and relativistic – emerges, which has nothing to envy Clough’s Amours de Voyage. Relations between the protagonists in the two poems are reversed: Felix and Honoria’s story comes now second,72 in the form of the distant memory and regret of Honoria’s rejected suitor Frederick Graham. The latter, however, has not abandoned himself to desperation, but has fallen back on a young girl of humble birth and of iron-cast principles who, a sort of reincarnation of Richardson’s Pamela, brings forth a well-founded marriage, gives her husbands numerous offspring, comforts him in his not too few moments of difficulty, and in the end dies of tuberculosis. It is superfluous to remember that The Victories of Love was written on the eve and in the expected certainty of the death of Emily Patmore, who was however as far from the portrait of the new ‘angel in the house’ as she was from that of Honoria. The structural and formal difference between the two poems lies largely in the narrative pace and in the period timeline which encloses them. The Angel in the House is an eminently synchronic poem and, accordingly, the characters surprise themselves living in the same, unchanged scenery, having the same physical features, feeling the same emotions. If however there really is a change, it is the burgeoning of an imperceptible – and unstoppable – feeling which is already by definition unsurpassable or impossible to be perfected.73 The 72

Aside from the amazing, highly creative letter to Honoria from Felix (I.17), in which, during one of his brief absences, he restates his unchanged feelings of love to her and far exceeds the peak of hyperbolic language. 73 That of Felix and Honoria is ‘the unfinish’d song / Which never could be finish’d’ (II. 12). In the lengthy letter to Honoria in the second book of Victories, Felix defines

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Victories of Love begins contemporaneously with The Angel in the House, but closes many years later;74 furthermore, all the characters feel in themselves the difference between past and present, and are aware of the inexorable passing of the years which, if nothing else, scars happiness with sorrow.75 The first half of the first of the two books of The Victories76 is undeniably a repetition of The Angel in the House, even though its plot is approached from a different angle. The epistolary novel in verse expands then into letters which do not only have the aim of exemplifying the spiritualization and the nobleness of a second marriage, but are enriched by the additional, if not indeed primary effects of comedy and satire. In this transition from the one-sided, first-person narrative of The Angel in the House to an epistolary polyphony – which also comprises among its ‘voices’ the diary letter, the unaddressed letter and the posthumous letter – lies the chief originality of The Victories.77 This polyphony serves to weaken the monolithic compactness of matrimonial idealism, and to subject love to a kind of freedom of opinion, by showing a polyvalence and co-presence of views. Only Felix Vaughan retains the same voice of unchanged, ecstatic adoration. 2. The result of this new organization is that The Victories of Love is one of the first, most pleasing instances of Victorian relativistic narrative and of the indirect point of view. In the initial letters, all written retrospectively

himself, and he is, the same man who twenty-two years earlier had trodden the path that brought him to the young girl to ask for her hand. 74 The letter in II.12 is written exactly on the twentieth anniversary of the marriage of Felix and Honoria. 75 The couple formed by Felix and Honoria cannot be compared – in its unchanging happiness which cannot be stained, and being a kind of Edenic repetition in the fallen world – with that formed by Frederick and Jane, as she acknowledges in II.8 referring to the Vaughans: ‘he’s always well, she’s always gay’. 76 The two books are no longer subdivided into symmetrical groups of cantos – or rather, letters – as in the over-complex structuring of The Angel in the House: with a conspicuous innovation Patmore included nineteen in the first book and thirteen in the second, plus a ‘wedding sermon’. 77 Prosodically the octosyllabics in alternating rhyme are replaced by rhyming octosyllabic couplets, the monotony of which is, however, alleviated by the continuous change in rhyme.

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by the defeated rival, there is a return to the introductory phases of The Angel in the House: the three Churchill sisters are portrayed from a different viewpoint, the entire courtship of the engaged couple is recapitulated in a rapid sketch, though rich in factual detail, in surprising revelations and psychological undertones that Felix had missed. The re-narration of the scene on the part of the defeated suitor contains in turn a physical and psychological portrait of the rival, just barely marked by a few hints of rancour. The tenth letter of the first book reprises, though still obliquely, the concluding scene of The Angel in the House, that is the visit of the engaged couple – on their part completely and ingenuously ignorant of their friend’s still unsoothed passion, which he knows how to mask – to the torpedoboat of which Frederick is captain (the ship of the poor repressed Graham is initially named the Arrogant; the second is named Wolf, which is also the name of the Churchills’ Alsatian dog, Honoria’s faithful and affectionate companion). As in Smollett and Richardson, unexpected facts – perhaps not entirely credible – come to light from opposing revelations and additions, and as if from alternate and intermittent lights.78 In the letters which, within the polyphony and the variations of their composition, also include pure gossip, we see a comical and farcical Patmore coming to the fore to point out that not all love and not all the characters of this new plot are enveloped in that sanctimonious air with which The Angel in the House is saturated. The chief and spiciest of the revelations is that Honoria – so says her sister – was actually on the point of accepting Frederick, and had burst into tears when he had announced that he was departing on a mission which would keep them apart for two years. In this arbitrary version it is directly insinuated that there was a suspicion that Frederick had refused Honoria just on an incomprehensible whim! All of the vague, lofty poetry in The Angel in the House is swept away by the letters of the sister Mildred. With her limitless spite she paints the mature Felix as a philandering Don Juan – which is how he described himself jokingly in The Angel in the House 78 Digressive letters such as these are worthy of the best descriptive novelist. The one that relates Jane’s visit to the house and park of the Vaughans (II.3) is a free-flowing letter most skilful in its transitions from one scene to the next. Another admirable letter is in I.18, where Frederick relates his visit to his birth-house.

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– who now loves to give parties to which he invites all the beautiful women of Wiltshire. He flirts with them like a tomcat, and would even lightly flirt with Jane herself, Frederick’s wife. By means of their individual letters a self-portrait is painted of their respective senders, who make up a circle of small-time aristocrats or new-rich petite-bourgeoisie – mostly useless degenerates – on whom an extraordinary, uncommonly acrimonious satire is intermittently unleashed. The sister Mildred – now Lady Clitheroe – writes letters filled with falsehood and intrigue flavoured with an affected frankness. She is a perfectly worldly-wise woman who would want to influence the young nieces and nephews and who becomes a cynical, elderly Jane Austen-type match-maker. In particular, she imparts a long list of pieces of advice in the art of seduction to the newly married niece which silently turns her father Felix’ conjugal philosophy completely on its head. The barrier against corruption – a real and proper wall against high society – is erected by Jane’s letters – letters as if coming from the pen of a new and wholly virtuous Pamela, ingenuous but also rich in recognitions of divine benevolence, in examples of thrift and Puritan industriousness. But they are also letters which are occasionally less innocuous, and indeed wide awake to the understanding, on one hand, of the coldness with which the new relatives treat her and, on the other, to the false kindness shown to her by them all, knowing her to be near the end and giving her up for dead. The epilogue, separated from the epistolary body of the work, is an arid wedding sermon by Dean Churchill, which seems to have been sent to Emily Graham from aunt Mildred and written in a fair copy by the other aunt, Mary. It is a final variation on the polyphonic intrigue: a serious, official voice which at the same time has the function of making some resolute reminders very clear. It revolves around the theme of love as a distributive balance between prayer and action, and of the ‘virginity’ of marital love, the thematic fulcrum of The Unknown Eros.79 The argumentative goal of The Victories of Love is the very same as that of The Angel in the House,

79 Patmore always blames the absence of vigilance of the senses with the adjective ‘frantic’: the Dean uses it in his sermon cautioning that the law of marital love is virginity; on the other hand the recurring adjective used for marriage is ‘vestal’.

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the incomparable joy of adult marital love, superior to that of young love, which doesn’t carry regret. 3. For a quarter of the poem Frederick is a faded copy of Felix, though he diverges from him from the moment he is turned down. He then becomes more human as a character, more balanced and real, and through him Patmore approached a form of realism which was far less sugary and much more natural. Frederick certainly seems to have achieved matrimonial happiness, but at a fairly higher price than that of Felix. The experience left him scarred. His is a wedded bliss that subsequently slips away from him, as he becomes a widower, even though he is resigned to it as a pious Christian should be. Immediately after Honoria’s refusal, Frederick is the rejected suitor who has a strong wish to heal80 and avoids the temptation to embrace Werther’s fate. He climbs and descends, as if on a swing of frenzied delusions and reignited hope,81 from the ship that must take him far away. He nobly declines the advice of his mother who only suggests to him that Honoria is beneath him. Though rejected, he perseveres in his adoration and would like nonetheless to be allowed to be her servant; and he pays his respects to Felix in an atmosphere of perfect courtly politeness.82 Time and distance alleviate his pain and allow him a calmer, more objective analysis of his situation, and restore welcome flashes of memory of his first love, dazzling, long-cherished daydreams, elaborate in their development until the chaste kiss which heals his illness. The antidote to his frustrated passion is initially, oddly enough, the sinecure as a ship’s commander. His ship departs for the Levant prudently removing the object of his desire from the scorned lover. The antidote above all others is provided by the books which he has his mother send him as a supplementary source of 80 He brings this up in his first letter to his mother in which he declares himself to have been perfectly vaccinated by now: he actually uses the image of the infectious disease which is contracted once only. 81 Two years on from the refusal, Frederick believes he can pull off a miracle and that he still has options. This illusion is routed in the letter in which he says he has discovered that Felix and Honoria are to be married on the following Tuesday. 82 Frederick, who furthermore lives far from swimmingly, is resolute in his pre-emptive refusal of at least half of the inheritance received from his uncle, which then went to his cousin Honoria, who had no need of it.

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memory-cleansing, even if he almost immediately returns them to their sender. Frederick hadn’t followed the scholastic curriculum of the wellto-do, as he became a marine cadet early on, and so his culture is limited, so much so that he is excluded from drawing room conversations even in French.83 The balance and spirit of survival – this is given as an indirect diagnosis – come to him from that important form of education and preparation of the heart84 which the most erudite and cultured Oxford youth did not receive (and we know from Clough and Arnold how unprepared they were for life). In one of his first letters, Frederick shakes himself off from any apathetic and languorous musings on lost love just while watching the forthright, vigorous activity of the farmworkers and the cheering rays of the sun. The fact that Frederick then falls in love out of the blue with the daughter of the chaplain on board the ship, and in the twinkling of an eye marries her is in itself a small, unforeseen element of melodrama in which however the protagonist, aware of the diversity between the two women,85 later recognizes the hand of providence.86 From here on, Frederick is the model of the secretly frustrated though always self-controlled rejected lover

83

Knowledge of French – which was also as incomprehensible as Greek to the governess in The Angel in the House – is an indispensable requirement of the educational curriculum and the passport for high society. Patmore was sent to Paris by his father at sixteen years of age expressly to learn French. 84 See the mother’s ad hoc reprimand: ‘Let’s complain / Of the heart, which can so ill sustain / Delight’. 85 It is only much later that his wife Jane will get the feeling that her husband now loves her more than Honoria. Significantly, Frederick will always keep the distance between his own family and that of the Vaughans, and he will always sense an unbridgeable gap in class – and in reality a gap in moral stature – between the two women. 86 Being more doubtful than Felix from the point of view of religion, Frederick often addresses the Victorian Deus absconditus and debates with Him about the injustices he has endured. Jane, a Dissenter, suspects that his is not a strong and fervent faith and tries to turn him towards the Bible. It is the succession of misfortunes that makes Frederick believe. He completes his journey when he prays for the life of the dying Jane: it is then that the mystery of God and all things, the traditional Victorian veil, is torn apart: ‘being about to die makes clear / Many dark things’. Like Felix, Jane and Frederick are obsessed by the doubt of the indissolubility of marriage in Paradise, but they resolve it in exactly the same terms as in The Angel in the House, thanks also to

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and – the reverse side of Felix in The Angel in the House – of the husband who patiently accepts a life which is no long rosy and filled with laughter, but paved with misfortune. 4. The new ‘angel in the house’ is Jane, Frederick Graham’s spouse, and ‘new’ because she is a humble angel and a feminine Christ who climbs her own little Calvary without complaint, always diffusing an air of goodwill around her. She is not the dazzling angel in triumph as is Honoria, but one that is even more angelic and earns its halo in suffering and death, accepted without dismay, without question and without claiming pious falsehoods. She is simply inner beauty from start to finish, according to the simile of the church glass which is an inexpressive and confused muddle of lines if the church is dark, but comes to life with figures of saints and the living words of the Bible when it is illuminated on feast days, thereby a form which betrays or reveals a rich interior and a treasure of devotion, of faith and of morality. The ‘vain’ Honoria is not substituted but completed by a new image of simple, basic87 and self-effacing femininity,88 all substance but also anything but simple and unassuming, instead intuitively bright and always vigilant.89 Patmore, at this stage having almost completed his conversion to Catholicism, bestows with her an act of homage on the healthy even if unrefined powers of evangelicalism, certainly healthier than those of a useless, morally exhausted neo-aristocracy. Jane remains until the end

Jane’s fine theological wisdom, based on the axiom that the divine word only teaches that which cannot be learned from common sense alone. 87 Jane superimposes herself on Honoria in her dream before her death (II.8), in which she imagines that Honoria urges her to look at herself in the mirror, where she catches sight of ‘Honoria’s smile’, and also ‘[her] own’. 88 In dress, Jane adopts a Spartan and essential manner which she only timidly varies, more than anything to please her husband, as the Bible teaches. She criticizes women who, like the admiral’s wife, spend hours in front of the mirror preening themselves. 89 As soon as she meets Honoria, Jane has no problem recognizing that it is she who is her husband’s true flame. The inference that ‘she never reads’ is true only in the sense that she only reads, and discusses also, the Bible. With the evangelicals she maintains that all other reading – entertainment and fantasy – is not just useless but wicked (§ 2.1). She has never gone to the opera and she confesses to have always held that theatrical performances were ‘sinful’ (II.2).

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on the outside of high society, which continues to marginalize her as she will never learn social etiquette. The Graham family rises then to the second best ideal of Patmore’s Biedermeier sanity: nothing is more so than the little portrait of Frederick, sitting comfortably at the fireplace ‘reading and smoking’, caressing a cat, looking at the fire and chatting on the events of the day and immersed for the most part in a calm, satisfied silence. For Frederick, every separation from his people on going to sea concludes with the longed-for return to his homeland, to the English ‘sacred soil’, in the English ‘sweet country’ he knows, where ‘men and women lordliest grow’. The couple is grateful to God for the sedentary post finally obtained by Frederick, who will now not have to journey again on a ship. A perfect representation of intimacy, enjoyed with satisfaction by Frederick, is his visit to his birth-house, which awakens in him moving memories of his infancy, while his carefree children are intent on the game they are playing and his industrious wife is embroidering after the meal.90 5. Jane’s death occurs well before the conclusion of the poem, which continues to include letters from her come to light afterwards, or diary pages which recount the development of the illness, according to the device of announcing the death without any suspense and to describe its slow onset later. These letters are meant as a comfort to the husband: they will expressly help her, in death, ‘to break the silence of the grave’, and they are offered in the querulous voice of a woman who makes herself small, humbles herself, pardons all that is pardonable, lavishes comfort on the survivor, and is lucid even in the organization of her own funeral. The scene is the typical Victorian one of the last words of the dying man or woman, who were often more steadfast and had drier eyes than those of the family members gathered at the bedside. She urges everyone to weep, but not to despair as every Victorian ought to do, and to put to one side at once outward and

90 The symbolic calm after the storm was said by Ruskin (Meynell 1903, 4, and Page 1933, 47) to be the best description of a storm ever given in poetry. This tempest does not frighten the Grahams in the slightest as they watch it unfold during the picnic, whose place is reached on the back of a humble donkey. GSM, 454, erroneously attributes Ruskin’s judgement to the other storm in ‘Tamerton Church-tower’ (§ 174.3).

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inward expressions of pain so as to regain a more masculine attitude. She maliciously goes so far as to imagine that Frederick can take another wife.91 Frederick, we are led to understand, withdraws into himself and meditates on returning to sea. The finale is cathartic, combining tragedy with comedy leading to a happy ending and ultimately flowing into an epithalamium, since death is wiped out in a life which continues and flourishes again in the marriage between Frederick and Honoria’s three children, celebrated in a restored atmosphere of radiance, harmony and music. A delightful stroke of genius and malice is Jane’s deathbed recognition, in this marriage between the children of Honoria and Frederick, of a subtle form of compensation and vicarious gratification for their unexpressed and repressed love. § 178. Patmore VIII: ‘The Unknown Eros’. The ‘Eroica Symphony’ of virginal love The innumerable, incomparable gems of The Unknown Eros,92 in which Patmore gathered together practically all the scanty fruits of his second and most arid poetic phase from 1868 onwards, constitute the pinnacle of his poetry. The reader of The Angel in the House is surprised, and in some cases even violently shaken, by a poetry entirely resolved in the purest lyrical impulse and conveyed in bold imagery, broken and rugged metres and majestic or whispered sonorities, and uttered in words of supreme rarefaction. Its range of neologisms is often justified by the originality and compelling obscurity of the concept. Patmore began to call them Odes because of the rejection of stanzaic divisions; indeed they are the first written after Keats and after more than a half-century, and harking back to the tradition of Spenser, Milton, Cowley, Drummond, Wordsworth and of the Italian ‘canzone’ in semi-free metre. The only defect in the work

91 Just as Emily Patmore effectively authorized and advised her husband on her deathbed. 92 Nine odes from the new poem were written in 1868, but disappointed by the first reactions Patmore burned all the existing copies; only some were saved from the pyre by his daughter. In 1875 a series of another ten followed, which, added to the preceding odes were first published in 1877. The final version, from 1885, was opened by a preface which introduced two books, the first containing twenty four odes, the second, eighteen.

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taken in its entirety – undoubtedly a serious one – is its intermittency and inadequate organicity, which has caused vast sections of it to become unreadable. Though not intentionally organized freely and randomly,93 The Unknown Eros remains rhapsodic and structured in series and cycles which are in themselves compact, although of an uneven poetic quality and not relating well to each other. The formal looseness is justified by the fact that the collection is a composite poetic diary from 1868 to 1885, in which disparate strands of private and public life intertwine. These strands comprise philosophical poetry and the panegyric of virginal love, the polemic against science, the domestic idyll, the invective in an exalted biblical tone and the mythological remake. All this generates frightening hiatuses and depths of kitsch, along with dizzy ascents towards the ineffable. What is certain is that The Unknown Eros testifies to Patmore’s aspiration to renew – we could even say to revolutionize – his art, first and foremost in the area of technique and versification. His voice is no longer that of the skilful, consummate polyphonic ventriloquist, nor his vein that of the neat etcher in Jane Austen’s style, or the water-colourist or the oil-painter painting with vivid colours and marked contours of the two preceding poems. His voice, on the contrary, is winged, inspired, deployed in solemn hymnodic song. The more intense lyrical meditations have a free asystematic character; they are very modern ‘occasions’ and epiphanies enveloped in subtle, ethereal light. The prosodic monotony of The Angel in the House and The Victories of Love is, moreover, swept away by an oscillating, rhythmic metre, which Patmore proudly thought ‘the best ever invented’, based on lines of variable syllabic consistency – from two to twelve syllables, alternating with lines of four and six syllables – following closely on each other, and whose effect comes close to that of Hopkins’s sprung rhythm. Likewise rhyme no

93

See my comment below on the subdivision of the two books, and Reid 1957, 281–307, who posits a bipartite structure, the first part being dedicated to manifestations of natural love, the second to spiritual love. According to Page’s fanciful theory (Page 1933, 103–16), the single odes were thought and actually understood to be dramatic monologues by the individual characters in The Angel in the House, implying that The Unknown Eros would be an exact continuation of it. The critic is a staunch supporter of this continuity between them.

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longer has a fixed recurrence but follows the changeable, unpreordained flux of emotions.94 Patmore was the first to quick-wittedly foresee that The Unknown Eros would only be read by the ‘invisible church’. These odes represented something unprecedented, with their astonishing technique and transcendental contents, in the English poetic scene of the 1870s and 1880s, and a poetry which subverted the poetic dictions of late Victorianism and set itself almost exactly on the same path as Hopkins and the slightly younger neo-Baroque and neo-metaphysical Catholics such as Francis Thompson. To be sure Patmore was crushed – just as Hopkins would have been if he had been published at that time – by the new ‘aesthetic’ vogue and by the adepts of a purely verbal symbolism, adverse to ordered and orthodox religious cosmologies.95 Likewise this Patmore of the Odes was later ‘removed’ – at the start of the twentieth century – by the avant-gardist aesthetics of a dry and sober poetic mode. Rather inexplicably, and keeping in mind Hopkins’s revival, the eclipse of The Unknown Eros has been so far without recovery, apart from the re-evaluations at which I hinted above.96 2. The general Proem, set up as an imaginary dialogue between the poet and an interlocutor who is actually his own conscience, reaffirms the function of poetry as the final source of truth amidst the babbling of the shouting masses, those who acclaim ‘opportunism’ and the supporters of the culture of the useful. Patmore, who had in a way soundproofed himself against the surrounding reality, hears now the perverse cacophony reigning outside, and feels he is being newly and urgently called back to utter 94 Patmore drew attention to the fact that every line, even having a different syllabic consistency, required the same reading speed, just as in the musical bar. The foundation of this metrical regularity is the pause and not the syllable. 95 ‘The Two Deserts’ essentially attacks science, because it ruins the poetry of the sidereal cosmos. We need to put down the telescope, Patmore says, because, after all one sees better without it, or rather because it allows us sights which destroy or spoil the myth of the beautiful moon, and tell us the sun is a terrifying fireball. Science, he adds, sullies God’s plan with close-up visions, destroying the mythical image of the beauty of the stars, which are contemplated as a guarantee of man’s eternity. Patmore is more lenient with the microscope, but it is definitely better not to trespass beyond what is visible to the naked eye, which presents us with a ‘royal-fair estate’. 96 § 171.3.

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the ‘word’. The public backdrop of The Unknown Eros is in fact no longer the protected and waterproofed marital neo-Eden. That world which in The Angel in the House he had tried to freeze and immobilize had slipped out of his hand in protest, and it had revived immediately afterwards, though quickly deteriorating in its movement. The poet is then speaking, or rather he breaks his silence, on the edge of the abyss, almost constrained and inwardly moved by the feeling that the ‘end is nigh’, and in the urgency of a collective and above all English deliverance (the ‘mythic time / Of England’s prime’). His is like a desperate cry, a groan from the biblical prophets and the poets of all setting empires: England blinded, spent, sapless; a body shaken by the last shivers, and assisted by doctors who prescribe ineffectual palliative treatment. Many sections of the poem draw, with vivid imagery of dryness and disgust, a Patmorian ‘waste land’ abandoned by God, where the joyous cry from the virgins in the Gospels, that the Bridegroom is coming, is taken as blasphemy.97 Patmore was aware of having very few listeners for this message, perhaps only his conscience which returns to close the poem in the epilogue.98 However, he consoled himself by saying that his word was not aimed at the present generations but at the future ones, since historically the ‘good or evil seed’ would grow ‘for its first harvest, quite to contraries’. 3. The most notable of the small quantity of poems written between The Angel in the House and The Unknown Eros is ‘Olympus’, sharp-witted and almost crepuscular, and a very long way from the new, fully developed lyricism of The Unknown Eros. It is a new idealization of domestic life, which is the highest and most desirable goal, made by contrasting its opposite, since the poet, in whom it is not difficult to recognize Patmore himself, realizes that the evening at the writers’ club – ‘like a careless parliament /

97 This alludes, amongst other things, to the Second Coming. There is also another allusion to Christ’s gaze penetrating the darkness, crossed by the ‘gray secret lingering in the East’. 98 In this very bitter epilogue, Patmore is aware of having spoken – in a language which was as good as dead – of harsh doctrines which contain dangerous truths, almost deviant in their untruths. For him, prophetically, a Dionysian tearing of limbs, inflicted by the ‘acorn munchers’, was in preparation.

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Of gods olympic’ – is only apparently more ‘spiced’ than ‘domestic bliss’, to which the poet returns. The lyric provides a clever demonstration of Patmore’s substantial and deliberate isolation from the groups and cultural movements of the 1860s; in short he felt like a fish out of water but had no sense of envy. The origin of The Unknown Eros can in fact be loosely traced back to Felix last letter to Honoria in The Victories of Love, in which he asks himself, sceptically, what could be the success of someone who writes poetry on marital love to an ‘unhomely’ generation, lacking a sense of ‘domesticity’, perhaps also a sense of ‘holiness’. He longs, however, to inflame future generations with his words, so that authentic love can be transmitted through history as the pride of the English race. The blatant denial of this wish is in the hard-headed, mundane and opportunistic letter of aunt Mildred to the newly wedded Emily, in its turn disavowed by the closing wedding sermon of Dean Churchill. Of the two sections in The Unknown Eros, simply entitled by two dates, the first is a series of comments on the year 1867, which saw the passing in Parliament of the ‘menacing’ Second Reform Bill. It mourns the extinction of the spiritual, enlightened aristocracy and witnesses the advent of an ‘orgy’ of democracy looming on the horizon. In 1867 Patmore thought it possible that a small band of people99 could sway or stem a drift towards folly with the force of a courageous word. In his poems commenting the five-year period from 1880 to1885, however, much more pessimistically he noticed around him the marks of a generalized assent to specious and damaging ideologies and he raised up an even more nostalgic hymn to the England of once-upon-a-time, ‘equal in inequality’.100 The righteous were biblically

99 It is a singular coincidence that Patmore employs exactly the same term, ‘remnant’, as Matthew Arnold in his American lectures of the early 1880s, to mean the group of wise men who remained as enlightened guides in society. The tree in ‘Arbor Vitae’ – bare and essential in its imagery – has all the marks of a symbol of ancient, unrefined wisdom which still nourishes and quenches the thirst, though abandoned and scorned by the civilized. ‘The Standards’ was in turn written in the wake of Gladstone’s pamphlet against the Catholics and Vatican I, and is like a war trumpet calling the Catholics to gather in the ‘little band’ led by Newman. 100 The societal model in which employer and worker are perfectly integrated closely recalls, or anticipates, that described in the sonnet ‘Tom’s Garland’ by Hopkins.

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besieged, and the nation could not raise itself up if and when ‘its Lords [were] drunk’.101 4. In the much more rarefied context of the personal and autobiographical poems, The Unknown Eros is psychologically marked by absence and loss and by rejected or sublimated desire. After 1862, Patmore had come to find himself between the anvil of the loss of his first wife and the hammer of the possible vow of chastity of the second. Above all he had found himself intensely influenced by her superior mysticism and her heavenly spirituality, and guided by an ever stronger motivation towards Marian devotion. The many, irrepressible lyrical outbursts sound like overemphatic compensation for a form of spiritual celibacy, an expressly and deliberately chosen (or in any case closely monitored) virginal and platonic eroticism.102 Never is his personal information so ambiguous and distorted as in this case: the two Patmorian ‘angels’, or three if we choose to add the daughter now a nun, superimpose one another imaginatively, and the absence is, through a deliberate and very functional overlay, wisely never resolved by the poet, as much that of his first wife assumed into heaven, and yearned for, as that of the second one, sexually distant on account of her vow of marital chastity, if it really was observed. Virginity and desire don’t cancel each other out but integrate acrobatically and nourish each other reciprocally,103 and the former was apt in the highest degree to provoke the latter through its staunch prohibition or even postponement. Patmore prayed for reconciliation with his first wife Emily, and spoke to her by addressing impassioned hymns in arcane and dreamy imagery; he looked forward to meeting her in heaven and meanwhile he was living intense visionary couplings in interstellar, sidereal scenarios and in an 101 The ending of ‘Crest and Gulf ’ has the same imperious and sustained rhythmic cadence as many of Hopkins’s endings: the poet feels the overlooking ‘fly-wheel’ of God, which can only check itself but cannot stop ‘The amorous and vehement drift of man’s herd to hell’. 102 A somewhat retrospective essay dedicated to Goldsmith (CP, 59–64) contains, as I mentioned in § 172.3, an argument which is not against ‘passion’ but rather against its disordered and uncontrolled forms; however Patmore, recollecting The Unknown Eros, declares passion in critical or obstructive conditions equally poetic. 103 Maynard 1993, 235–7.

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intolerable gleam of light, adamantine stalactites and purest rainbows. By now newly married, and still doubtful that relationships would continue to exist in the afterlife between relatives, in ‘Tristitia’ he foresaw a perfected, distilled and refined unity. ‘Tired Memory’ hinges on an almost mystical, psychic nocturnal encounter, but also reveals in a confusing and twisted way the need for the comfort of another woman, depicted like his wife’s messenger who has given back to him the strength and vigour to live, and he questions himself if that is really ‘betrayal’. In their own ‘terrible’ way a series of deeply sincere meditations reveal, for the first time in Patmore’s poetry, fatigue, frustration and even rebellion, along with another of dialogues with and appeals to a God proverbially deaf to his entreaties, one minute benevolent, the next, severe.104 ‘Legem tuam dilexi’ addresses a God who is actually a child, hovers over man whom he seduces to marry him,105 the joy of whose love pervades the corridors of the heart and mind and the whole being, like a flood or an avalanche. One of the more intimate hymns to regenerating pain – the Purgatorial fire which causes man to become again as a mirror of God – is ‘Pain’. 5. Virginal love, the great symphonic – or more appropriately, rhapsodic – theme developed in The Unknown Eros, is first explored in its first book in the context of nature, in a series of magical and most delicate preludes which celebrate nature’s state of anticipation, the anticipation of fertilization and blossoming. In the meditation ‘Wind and Wave’, Patmore describes the periodic, rhythmical cosmic and aerial pairing of the male and female principles with images of gushes and cascades, seas and waves rippled by the winds. In ‘Winter’ he declares his fondness for the season for heralding spring. In the exquisite ‘Saint Valentine’s Day’ he salutes the 104 The enchanting ‘The Toys’, one of Patmore’s most famous and anthologized poems, tells of a father who beats his son, then repents and goes to reconcile with him, but finds him already asleep. The climax of the pathetic story is the mixing of the father’s tears with those, still warm, of the sleeping son who is protectively surrounded by his toys. The simplicity and the strength of this terse composition are slightly spoiled by a final moralizing: the father, Patmore, who pardons his son, is the image of God, irate at first, then merciful. 105 God imprisons man by means of ‘stress / Of bonds unbid’, another expression which recalls Hopkins’s ‘instress’.

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melancholy and restrained joy of a day in ‘praevernal’ February – a day of unsatisfied desires, unreturned kisses, and tears which flow for no reason – and the faint announcements of the flowering to come. Virginal love, which becomes above all – and only – human and matrimonial, sung in the odes of the second book, was enigmatically referred to by Patmore as ‘Eros’. And pour cause in one of the odes – passing from Greek to Latin – he explicitly contrasts Eros with a more disincarnate ‘Amor’. The purest emblem for such an oxymoronic love – a thrill in the flesh and in the senses, a bursting desire, but ultimately disciplined, consumed by the spirit and in the spirit without a physical joining of bodies – is seen in the Virgin.106 ‘Eros’ was ‘unknown’ to Her (who also felt a creature moving in Her womb) according to an ingenious interpretation from which it is possible to conjecture Her astonishment as written in the Gospel verse (‘I know not a man’). The eponymous composition of The Unknown Eros and the inaugural one of the second book – a hymn having a portentous, almost Shelleyan opening – questions the epiphanic revelation – arcane and mysterious – of divine love, as a bird coming from space and whose wings caress the poet’s face, provoking childish flutters, hidden starts, and turmoil in the veins. The descent of this winged ‘Eros’ from the sky is sanctioned by an ‘obscure rite’ and by the ‘sacramental sign’.107 This profoundly inspired ode is, therefore, in one of its numerous suggestions, a paraphrase of the Annunciation, and a real dramatic monologue pronounced by the Virgin. It is not possible to

106 The dedication to the Virgin of the whole poem – or of the cycle of poems on virginal and marital love – occurs, curiously, in the penultimate number of the collection, ‘The Child’s Purchase’. This poem begins in an anecdotal way, with the pathetic little story of the child who gives back to his mother (in exchange for a kiss) the money which she herself had given him, not spent through his indecision. It then switches to the more conventional Marian hymnology with a long series of apostrophes and pleading invocations. Patmore contemplated but never composed a vast poem on the Blessed Virgin, on which subject see the long excerpt of Patmore’s poetic projects in Page 1933, 129–46. 107 ‘To the Body’, supreme among Patmore’s hymns to the sanctity and dignity of the body, places the body directly as a fixed target ab aeterno by God in his love for creation, verified through the incarnation of his Son: the body, once again and primarily, is that of Mary, finiteness containing the Infinite, and the receptacle of God Incarnate.

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clarify, however, the meaning of the expression ‘virgin spousals’, perhaps because Patmore expressly wanted to keep it ambiguous, and to avoid tracing the divide between Marian Eros, which is completely spiritualized, and a marital virginity in spirit, a sexuality consummated but chaste according to Paul’s admonishments and the teachings of the Church against fornication and immodesty. Eros in ‘The Contract’ is disciplined and restrained, and sometimes denied by an Eve who is the moderator of an easily persuaded Adam and his impulses, before ending up before the Fall as Eros which is, perhaps, superfluous. In this ode Patmore refers to the tragic failure of that ‘contract’ – but not to desublimated and completely carnal Eros as its legacy; he rather announces the new Eve, the Virgin, to whose motherhood the entire afflicted humanity looks. The Fall actually rendered a second, ‘virginal marriage’, necessary, that of Mary – the second Eve, and the only woman without sin – to St Joseph, the perfect analogues of the progenitors of humanity. The free adaptation of the Psyche and Eros myth – made in three less inspired sections of the second book, and in others which were later deleted due to the loud protests of some critics and advisors owing to their presumed audacity and theological improprieties – also repeats the story of the Annunciation using it as an analogical precursory myth, as is confirmed by the repetition of entire textual segments (the opening of the first episode follows to the letter that of the ode ‘The Unknown Eros’). Patmore stages – or rather covers and hides in the reprising of this myth – the wedding of God and the soul, as a symbol and even the reality of matrimony and of human and nuptial love.108 The celebration of love is held – in ‘Deliciae Sapientiae de Amore’, which mimics the pomp of an epithalamium – in the Palace of Virginity, where the impure have no access, but only those who are truly virgins, or the married ones, provided they are

108 Patmore, along with Pater, maintained that paganism had prefigured in some myths (as in particular that of Eros and Psyche), God’s love for Man, and the paradox and oxymoron of a virginal Eros, which was that of the Virgin. Patmore’s interest in nineteenth-century revivals of this myth is witnessed by an essay in CP, 147ff. Patmore’s daughter, the spouse in the Song of Songs and the iconographies of the soul in St Bernard and St Teresa were fused in the figure of Psyche (Reid 1957, 103), though certainly not the mystic Marie Lataste, as Page 1933, 125, supposes.

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‘virginal of thought’. The chosen ones in love, tautologically, love God, and whoever loves God is dressed in the nuptial garments of virginal ardour.109 § 179. Patmore IX: Final idylls of senile love The poems published or composed by Patmore after 1868 and not included in The Unknown Eros, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Apart from the esoteric Trinitarian fantasy ‘The Three Witnesses’, the Nativity scene entitled ‘Regina Coeli’ (perhaps the only piece left complete of the planned poem on the marriage of the Virgin) and a pair of others, all speak of courtships and loves, but in a calm, sedate and at times even malicious tone.110 Metrically regular, all have an exactly localized setting. They are then, in short, the exact opposite of the passionate and sublime lyricism of the odes in The Unknown Eros, and if anything they recall the rural idylls of The Angel in the House, but with protagonists who are by now no longer in the flower of youth, and who nevertheless court successfully young farm-girls.111 The

109 ‘Auras of Delight’ describes in a dream-like fashion this house of pure love, an infantile dream of purity which is later distorted and spoiled, but never totally abandoned as in Wordsworth. Patmore frequently wonders in The Unknown Eros whether woman is none other than the soul of man, and whether his enjoyment appertains to God himself. This implied that womanly beauty had to be given back and dedicated to God, as Hopkins was also preaching. It is moreover the woman and the bride that make the rays of the infinite sky tolerable, which would be otherwise exhausting. 110 ‘The Girl of All Periods’, almost alone, sets the courtship in a more realistic scenario and in an unusual situation: a ‘modern’ girl who is opposed to marriage and male dominance climbs onto a railway carriage where she is being watched good-naturedly by the narrator (Patmore himself ), and slowly but surely she accedes to the compliments of one of the young travellers. 111 Such is the male lover in the idyll ‘L’allegro’, who experiences love and all the fullness of its luxuriance in the isolation of September with his young girl companion. The short, witty and fresh lyric ‘A Kiss’, which however appeared to be too risqué to Hopkins, returns to the allegorical spirit which informs the early Patmore by giving the two protagonists, almost certainly of the same age, the names of Victor and Amanda. The kiss that causes them to fall in love is at the same time both passionate and altogether chaste, because from that kiss are born ‘thoughts that soar ’bove kisses so’.

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brief verse story entitled ‘Amelia’,112 whose plot could have been conceived by Wordsworth or by Christina Rossetti, is the only poem of these final ones to which it is necessary to dedicate a few words, though it is certainly not that masterpiece, nor even his most beautiful poem, which Patmore claimed with blind enthusiasm to have composed, and which he always looked on as one of his favourites. The setting is Pre-Raphaelite, though not in a literary but rather in a pictorial sense. The place for the meeting of the lovers is buried in flowers which are named one by one, and in its ‘romantic’ luxuriance it seems like the transcription into words of the canvases of minor English painters of the early Victorian period. Amelia cannot go out with her boyfriend due to the morbid affection of her mother, who also fears the repetition of obscure dangers and insidious past affairs. Together at last, the couple finds and feels a sense of their own unity in nature, and they agree to turn silently to the Creator in gratitude on behalf of all Creation. Amelia resembles, like two peas in a pod, the preceding lady in love – Millicent – and even has her physical features, or so believes her infatuated suitor. He even gives her a present of a bracelet of pearls belonging to the deceased, which Amelia accepts out of love for her by now innocuous rival (‘For dear to maidens are their rivals dead’). Their innocent effusions follow with the rhythm of a highly dignified rite. Even one involuntary, racy detail (her breast, scented with azalea, to which the young girl presses her lover’s face) is neutralized when it is noted that the girl just wanted to keep her tears of happiness hidden in that way. The poem has always been seen as a final tribute to Patmore’s deceased first wife Emily, even if the plot seems to refer more to the circumstances of his second marriage. In fact, Patmore declared his love for Emily while out for a very similar stroll, taken across the fields of Hampstead Heath.113 In reality Amelia is, like all Patmore’s heroines, polyvalent, and not the precise incarnation of this or that person who was close to him.114 Read

112 Page 1933, 140, maintains that this is ‘a study for the history of Joseph and Mary’, belonging to the planned poem on the wedding of the Virgin. 113 Reid 1957, 21–2. 114 Anyone wishing to indulge in the game of allusions and identifications could certainly conjecture that Patmore himself, given the not-too-young age of the protagonist and that of the much younger girl, was prophetically prefiguring his third marriage

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on the basis of that compositional principle, Amelia reveals some ambiguous and worrying implications which brings to the surface its connection with the underlying theme in The Unknown Eros: repressed and postponed desire and virginal love. Amelia’s mother might not be totally wrong – actually she might be singularly far-sighted – to deny the daughter permission to go out alone with her lover. The text does not clarify either the nature of the ‘dangers’ of love or the person responsible, of whom the daughter was a victim. As a result, the suitor curses the ‘long months’ of waiting before the yearned-for meeting can take place. The mother, however, while greeting the couple makes the young rustic promise to ‘behave’. That advice falls on deaf ears as the development of the poem has all the hallmarks of a foiled attack on Amelia’s virginity, set in a Nature scene which doesn’t hide the physical actions of its own sexual intercourse, amongst the ‘daisies’ in particular, ‘Engross’d each one / With single ardour for her spouse, the sun’. Before the tomb of his first betrothed, the suitor cannot but confess his own indignity in a most allusive way as compared to his previous lover, who is expressly referred to as a ‘virgin.’ § 180. Patmore X: Essays and aphorisms In the preface to The Rod, the Root and the Flower (1895), Patmore stated that it had taken practically all his life to compose the aphorisms that were gathered together in the work. Therefore it is not unreasonable or out of order to treat them inside our chronological timeline, the year 1870. This notebook can be easily assumed, along with the collections of articles and reviews personally edited by Patmore, to be a retrospective illumination and a summary on his poetic technique, his aesthetics, ideo­logy and spirituality. The anachronism of Patmore’s essays, and above all that of his intense essayistic activity subsequent to the drying up of his poetic vein after 1885, is all the more remarkable if we take up again, and close, that comparison with which I opened this discussion, and read these essays in parallel with those of Wilde, as undoubtedly contemporary readers did. For almost seven years Patmore found himself to be the major with the young governess Harriet Robson, and that the latter was therefore the chief inspiration for the protagonist among other figures.

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surviving essayist of the old guard, the one who filled, apart from Wilde, a vacuum of great figures. He himself used to notice the disappearance of Arnold, the silence of Newman, the even too self-conscious ‘distinction’ and diversity of Pater. After 1880 Ruskin was becoming mentally ill and inevitably inactive. Patmore is, in more than one sense, a follower of Arnold, even if his scope is much wider, and his eclecticism more eccentric. His essay writing is just as pleasing and crystal clear, brought to life by witticisms and boutades which only occasionally result in convoluted or obscure passages (and that more often in essays on theological topics). Such essays, whether of immediate interest or theoretical, are also similar to Arnold’s in length and style, above all those of the arts feature or short essay which Arnold mostly wrote in his final years. Even more concise than Arnold in his late works, Patmore chose more often the measure of the aphorism, never exceeding in his essays, for editorial exigencies in the periodicals that published them, half a dozen pages. As a literary critic he had the same aversion towards the Romantics as Arnold – excluding Wordsworth and Coleridge – perhaps in his case also due to the fact that he traced in Romanticism the presages of Decadentism. His incisive essay-review on the debunking biography of Shelley by Dowden precedes that of Arnold, and was inspired by the same book, as Patmore took care to point out in the reprint of the same essay in volume. It anticipates with amazing, almost preordained synchrony Arnold’s outraged condemnation of Shelley, dictated by proud, moralistic reservations held about Shelley the man more than Shelley the poet, and about a degenerate ‘world’ which had only one redeeming asset, Shelley’s first wife, Harriet. Arnold, as much as Patmore, was anxiously aware of the ‘sense of an ending’ and of the breaking up of a system and of an organic culture, and of the advent of new uncultured masses and new tastes. An essay which could easily be taken for one of Arnold’s is the one placed at the opening in Principle in Art.115 There Patmore distinguishes between an impressionistic critic and a ‘judicial’ one, echoing Arnold’s polemic against decorative or ‘Elizabethan’ art; and he ends by expressing a wish for the setting up of an Academy dictating the laws of taste and the principles of Art.

115 The essay bears the same title as the book.

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§ 181. The Rossetti family Eighteenth-century Italy was – at least in one case and thanks to political exile – the parent country of a literary family of incalculable importance in England. To the good fortune of the English literary scene, Gabriele Rossetti was not a temporary expatriate but he put down roots in England, and fused them with another Italian lineage – that of the Polidoris – by marrying the daughter of Gaetano, who in turn was the father of Byron’s secretary. From this rich cultural blend there emerged a remarkably progeny: had Gabriele Rossetti not fled from the Neapolitan jails, the history of literature and the visual arts in nineteenth-century England would have been decidedly different from what it is. Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti are now recognized as major figures on the literary and aesthetic scene in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Looking into the world of the future, we would perhaps have had just another obscure, imaginative Dante scholar and maybe a second Ippolito Nievo – or even a poet of the stature of Carducci, and another Deledda – had not Gabriele Rossetti emigrated to London. With regard to English literary history the most striking absence would have been that of Pre-Raphaelitism, an artistic and cultural movement which brought together a key group of artists, who were followed by a second generation, whose most important members are themselves major figures. Morris and Patmore, Swinburne and Meredith, Wilde and even Hopkins depended on and were descended from the Pre-Raphaelites. 2. Who exactly was Gabriele Rossetti?1 He was a precocious Abruzzese poet born in 1783 to a very humble family in Vasto. The family name was Della Guardia, but Gabriele was subsequently dubbed ‘Rossetti’ because of the colour of his hair. He had won the patronage of a local marquis, who employed him as his secretary and sent him to study at the University of Naples. Here Gabriele was the librettist of San Carlo Theatre, a post he held both before and after the coming of Napoleon and the banishing of the Bourbons. He was also an extemporaneous poet whose passionate lines advocating the unification of Italy were sung by the secret society of the Carbonari, despite the fact that Gabriele Rossetti himself had no

1

Cf. E. R. Vincent, Gabriele Rossetti in England, London 1936.

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great interest in politics. From this position he moved to the quieter and less high-profile post of superintendent of the Bourbon museums. He was in danger of being sentenced to death when the Austrians, in the absence of Ferdinand I, decreed the suppression of the movement of the Carbonari and of Neapolitan groups of liberals after the defeat at Antrodoco in March 1821. His exciting escape came about thanks to the notoriety his poetry had earned him, and in particular to the friendship of the consort of the admiral who commanded the English fleet stationed in the bay of Naples. He disembarked at Malta and spent three years there where he was introduced to the ambassador Hookham Frere, and at his suggestion he reached London in 1824. With his southern-Italian resourcefulness Rossetti knew to introduce himself early into London literary circles. He rapidly managed to make contact with Coleridge, Campbell, Rogers and the Dante translator, Henry Francis Cary. Within two years of his arrival in London he married a much younger woman, Frances Maria Lavinia Polidori. Frances Polidori was the daughter of a Tuscan emigrant, Gaetano (Gaetano had worked as a secretary to Alfieri, as a translator and printer) and she was sister of Byron’s physician, John William Polidori. A professed Mason and adept Gnostic, astrologer and Cabbalist, Gabriele Rossetti developed a vocation as an eccentric and esoteric Dante scholar. He wrote, amongst other works, two critical commentaries on Inferno and Purgatorio, and as a poet he penned poems which were later collected and edited by Giosuè Carducci. He urgently needed to be in employment and found it as professor of Italian at King’s College in the Strand, London, where he had Panizzi, another well-known emigrant, for a rival. He did earn, however, respect and esteem from other Italian exiles, and the friendship of many Englishmen. Charles, the ‘Italianista’ Lyell’s Christian name, and the father of the celebrated geologist, was attributed by Rossetti to his first-born son, in addition to that of Dante and Gabriele. His daughter Maria Francesca, the only child to be given an entirely Italian name, was born before Dante Gabriel. After Dante Gabriel another two siblings were born. Gabriele Rossetti, who always spoke Italian with his children at home, turned in late in the evenings, spending some time with them every day telling fables and singing nursery rhymes. However, he did devote himself to his work at his desk early in the morning, where, sniffing tobacco and armed with his eye-shade owing to his myopia, he immersed himself in his Dante studies. The upbringing of the four children

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was delegated completely to the mother who, herself a daughter of a pureblood Englishwoman, brought them up in the most orthodox Anglican devotion. This explains how almost every trace of Italian Catholicism disappeared from the Rossetti siblings, above all from the two Rossetti sisters. It is necessary to add that Rossetti the father, who was married under the Catholic and Anglican double rite, was that true-Italian species, a Catholic to all appearances but deep down a fierce anticlerical, or more precisely, antiPapal. Before he died (towards the end of the 1840s) and having become almost blind over the years, Gabriele Rossetti received an invitation to return to Italy, where General Pepe and the liberal Count of Camaldoli had offered him a dignified and well-remunerated occupation. He refused on the advice of his friend Lyell and also on account of the repression of the Neapolitans unleashed by Ferdinand II after the 1848 uprisings. In that same year Gabriele Rossetti, resigned but peaceful, hailed ‘blessed England’ which was enjoying a period of admirable, political calm while all Europe was a stormy sea. In 1872 – eighteen years after his death – it was proposed in Italy that a monument, dedicated to him, be erected in Florence, and it was suggested that his body be transferred from Highgate cemetery to Santa Croce. This did not happen either, but he is commemorated by a marble slab in the basilica which houses the glories of Italy. 3. The four children of Gabriele Rossetti and Frances Polidori were very different from each other. Among them the most turbulent life was that of Dante Gabriel, and the most calm and retired that of Maria Francesca. Ruskin was attracted to her, but despite this attention she became an Anglican nun and died in her convent. Physically the most Italian in appearance, she was also the author of, amongst other things, a compilation of the works of Dante, entitled The Shadow of Dante, which achieved some renown in its time. The other Rossetti sister, Christina Rossetti, the gifted poet, seemed nun-like only in outer appearance. The two sisters’ fanatical religious fervour prompted much comment in their time. Dante Gabriel provoked remark for different reasons; he was reckless, wild, but also full of remorse and profound self-recrimination.2 William Michael Rossetti – who could have become a

2

See the biographies of the two brother poets in the following sections.

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poet in his own right, but from his youth was forced to sacrifice his vocation to support the family – became a noted art critic and a cultural figure, and edited the poetical works of both Dante Gabriel and Christina. His scholarly merits are historically incalculable, although, as I shall notice, doubts were and must still be cast on his editorial policies. He was his ‘brother’s keeper’ for Dante Gabriel, in whose footsteps the latter moved just as Stanislaus Joyce would dog Joyce decades later. The pre-eminent geniuses in the family were Dante Gabriel and Christina. The poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, while Christina Rossetti is one of the major English female poets of the century. The love for poetry blossomed in them and in the other two siblings out of fun, in the taxing challenge of composing bouts-rimé sonnets. In this competitive game, once the rhyme-scheme of the lines was established, the winner of the game was the one who made the most beautiful poems in as little time as possible. One easily imagines how many cold and boring days the four siblings spent in this way in front of the fireplace. The great poetry of the two Rossettis thus sprang from that fervent family environment and from an almost self-taught training. Tennyson’s poetry also arose from a family environment, but later from the university, so that reading the poetry of Dante Gabriel and Christina after that of Tennyson and the other universityeducated poets, Arnold and Clough, is a striking change of experience. There is no trace of the lecture hall in the work of the Rossettis. 4. Due to the climate of heartfelt, spasmodic tension – both human and artistic – it has been frequently observed (which does not render it less true) that the Rossetti quartet is a later replica of that of the Brontë siblings. In both cases the father instilled in his four children a love for the arts, writing and poetry. In an even more surprising analogy, in these four siblings, three produced work and the fourth remained almost mute artistically. The halo of legend, myth and mystery – which has singularly and even too morbidly fascinated biographers – surrounds the three Brontë sisters as much as the three Rossettis. Beyond that observation – which is clearly substantial – it is not possible to proceed with comparisons, as there is an insurmountable difference in the fact that, while the Brontës lived in unrefined, rugged Yorkshire and in a climate of almost primeval tensions and feelings, the Rossettis were born and lived in the more cosmopolitan

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London milieu, subject to more varied influences, among which those of a partly aestheticized cultural life. § 182. Dante Gabriel Rossetti* I: An Anglo-Italian Janus Few other figures in nineteenth-century English culture can parallel the non-dilettante eclecticism – although practiced with the highest 3

*

Works, edited by his brother W. M. Rossetti, London 1911, presented in rather a dull typographical style, is accompanied by critical apparatuses which are by now much dated, though it is useful for first-hand commentaries and criticisms. Poems, ed. O. Doughty, London 1957 (adopts the text of the editions of 1872, 1881 and 1882, though noting Rossetti’s revisions from 1881, but breaks up the unified whole of The House of Life); Collected Writings, ed. J. Marsh, London 2000; Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. J. McGann, New Haven, CT and London 2003. Poetry anthologies with commentaries are edited by E. G. Gardner, London 1912; by G. Lucas, Cambridge 1933; by P. F. Baum, New York 1937; by C. Wilmer, London 1991. Two annotated edns of ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and The House of Life are edited by P. F. Baum, respectively Chapel Hill, NC 1938 and Cambridge, MA 1928. The letters are edited by O. Doughty and J. R. Wahl in 4 vols, London 1965–1967. The correspondence with Jane Morris is published separately, ed. J. Bryson, Oxford 1976. Pre-Raphaelite Diaries and Letters, ed. W. M. Rossetti, London 1900; Rossetti Papers 1862–1870, ed. W. M. Rossetti, London 1903. Life. J. Knight, Life of Rossetti, London 1887, is still useful for the sobriety and judicious conciseness. The critical-biographical work and memoir-style approach of Rossetti’s brother, William Michael, in Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer, London 1889 (with paraphrases of The House of Life) and Some Reminiscences, 2 vols, London 1906 (contains the English version of a verse autobiography by his father) remain indispensable, at least as a starting point. A. C. Benson, Rossetti, London 1904; M. L. Giartosio de Courten, I Rossetti. Storia di una famiglia, Milano 1928; E. Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Work, London 1928; V. Hunt, The Wife of Rossetti, London 1932 (a vast, imaginative novel-style elaboration on Rossetti’s relationship with E. Siddal); F. Winwar, The Rossettis and their Circle, London 1934; O. Doughty, A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London 1949 and 1960 (a substantial standard biography, attacked without justification by following biographers); H. Rossetti Angeli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Friends and Enemies, London 1949 (corrects Hunt 1932 just as much as – more pointedly – Waugh); R. G. Grylls, Portrait of Rossetti, London 1964; G. Pedrick, Life with Rossetti, London 1964 (centred on the figure of Rossetti’s painting assistant, H. Treffy Dunn; demonstrates the importance and the diffusion of the legend of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites);

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professionalism – of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882). His poetic gift and pure verbal talent, which were transfused into one of the most refined, esoteric Victorian collection of sonnets, have few matches and few terms of comparison amongst the generation of poets born before 1830 in England, and are second only to Tennyson’s. His strictly literary merits are exemplified

G. H. Fleming, Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, London 1967, and That ne’er Shall Meet Again, London 1971; B. Dobbs and J. Dobbs, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Alien Victorian, London 1977; J. Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London 2000. Criticism. Buchanan’s scathing attack is included in the collection Notorious Literary Attacks, ed. A. Mordell, New York 1926; Swinburne’s essay of 1870 is included in his Essays and Studies, London 1875; that of Pater in Appreciations; for Patmore’s essay on Rossetti see § 171.1 n. 2. A. Galletti, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti e la poesia pre-raffaellita’, in Studi di letterature straniere, Verona 1903, 1–68; L. A. Willoughby, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and German Literature, Oxford 1912; F. S. Boas, Rossetti and His Poetry, London 1914; R. L. Mégroz, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter Poet of Heaven in Earth, London 1928; R. D. Waller, The Rossetti Family, London 1932; B. J. Morse, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Blake’, Englische Studien, LXVIII (1933), 227–48; K. Preston, Blake and Rossetti, London 1944 (traces, with curious diagrams, parallels between Rossetti the father and Blake, though much of it is rather fanciful); J. Masefield, Thanks Before Going: Notes on Some of the Original Poems of Gabriel Rossetti, London 1946; N. Gray, Rossetti, Dante and Ourselves, London 1947; F. L. Lucas, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, in Ten Victorian Poets, Cambridge 1948, 101–114; G. Hough, The Last Romantics, London 1949, chapter II, 40–82 (still the best short reading of Rossetti’s poetry, complete with a precise placement in perspective of Pre-Raphaelitism); C. M. Bowra, ‘The House of Life’, in The Romantic Imagination, London 1950, 197–220; O. Doughty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London 1957; R. Lo Schiavo, La poesia di Dante Gabriele Rossetti, Roma 1957 (good on Rossetti’s Dantesque inspiration); J. Savarit, Tendances mystiques et ésotériques chez Dante-Gabriel Rossetti, Paris 1961 (a little-known and seldom quoted study, the most extravagant ever dedicated to Rossetti, practically lifted straight from Praz and his fixation on ‘sadomasochism’; underlines in a very forceful way the mystical, theosophical, hermetical, occultist and Orphic hallmark that emerges in Rossetti’s poetry, based on allegedly habitual reading of the literature in that tradition); H. Talon, ‘The House of Life’. Quelques aspects de l’art et des thèmes, Paris 1966; R. D. Johnston, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, New York 1969; R. M. Cooper, Lost on Both Sides: Rossetti, Critic and Poet, London 1970; D. Soenstroem, Rossetti and the Fair Lady, Middleton, CT 1970; S. J. Spector, ‘Love, Unity and Desire in the

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and completed not only by his work as a critic and prose writer – meagre but no less important – but also by that of the translator (almost just as essential to his work as a poet). He was the author of the most elegant, creative versions from the early Italian poets and the early Dante, collected

Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, English Literary History, XXXVIII (1971), 432–58 (among the best of the long essays, focused on the theme of isolation in love); J. Vogel, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Versecraft, Gainesville, FL 1971; J. H. Buckley, ‘PreRaphaelite Past and Present: The Poetry of the Rossettis’, in Victorian Poetry, ed. M. Bradbury and D. Palmer, London 1972; R. R. Howard, The Dark Glass: Vision and Technique in the Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Athens, OH 1972; M. Praz, Il patto col serpente, Milano 1972, 117–88 (gathers all of Praz’s writings on Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelitism); L. Stevenson, The Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Chapel Hill, NC 1972, 18–77; M. Henderson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London and New York 1973; Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J. Sambrook, Chicago, IL and London 1974; R. Stein, The Ritual of Interpretation: The Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rossetti and Pater, Harvard, MA 1975; M. W. Ainsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Double Work Art, New Haven, CT 1976; F. S. Boos, The Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Critical Reading and Source Study, The Hague-Paris 1976 (an attentive and extensive close reading of stylistic variations; documents echoes in Rossetti’s poetry); F. V. Rutter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Man of Letters, New York 1978; J. Rees, The Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Modes of Self-Expression, Cambridge 1981 (asystematic, with several inaccuracies but also some excellent insights); VP, XX (1982), an issue entirely dedicated to the poet; D. G. Riede, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision, Ithaca, NY 1983 (places Rossetti in the epistemological crisis of the mid-Victorian period), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti Revisited, New York 1992 (a general presentation of the painter and the poet, with particular emphasis on the conditioning suffered by Rossetti from the Romantic concept of absolute genius); I Rossetti tra Italia e Inghilterra, ed. G. Oliva, Roma 1984 (with compelling essays by C. Rawson, T. Pisanti, G. G. Castorina, G. Micks La Regina); E. Schulte, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Napoli 1986; G. Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art, New York 1988; E. E. Bass, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Poet and Painter, New York 1990; J. McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must Be Lost, New Haven, CT 2000; B. Donnelly, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Painter as Poet, London 2016. Rossetti as a Painter. F. M. Hueffer (Ford), Rossetti: A Critical Essay in His Art, London 1902; V. Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Catalogue Raisonné, London 1971; Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Double Work of

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for the first time in a complete anthology in 1861, including an unabridged translation of the Vita Nuova. No less worthy of note is his intuition as a discoverer of the authorship of early, anonymous works left to the library of the British Museum by their faint-hearted authors, such as the debut poem written by Browning. However, Rossetti was in his time – and still is today – more renowned universally as a painter and the founder and leading exponent of Pre-Raphaelite painting and later a prolific and unmistakable author of seductive and opulent portraits of femmes fatales. To this one must add his magnetic, unequalled ability as a cultural organizer, in a period in time – 1848–1855 – in which England, so guarded and proudly isolated, allowed itself to be infected by avant-garde ardour and velleities, and as such became in some aspects – almost exclusively thanks to Rossetti – the country leading the way in Europe. It is often said of the Victorian writers that they were insular, the opposite of the Romantics; Rossetti was an inexhaustibly gregarious man who gathered groups of the new talents in the country’s literary and artistic life, from the moment of their first arrival on the scene, such as Patmore, Meredith and Swinburne. However, he was most adept at attracting them to, though not always able to keep them in, his circle. 2. Like all eclectics (and in this regard Hopkins comes to mind) Rossetti the poet was also an inclusive, almost indiscriminate adapter of attitudes and sensitivities that he considered suitable for his writing. His intuition for discovery was fused with his flair for an exceedingly chameleonic emulation. As with few other writers, what mattered to Rossetti were the authors and books that he had read since adolescence, and that had left on him an indelible mark. His receptiveness extended to disparate influences, neither of which is really reconcilable with the other, and yet they were amalgamated in a melting pot from which an unmistakable mixture emerged. There are three major traditions which are interwoven in the work of Rossetti the poet: that of oneiric-visionary poetry, that of the Stilnovo Art, ed. M. W. Ainsworth, New Haven, CT 1976; M. T. Benedetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Firenze 1984 (with translations from the poems), and I Preraffaelliti, Firenze 1996; A. G. Faxon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London 1989; J. B. Bullen, Rossetti: Painter and Poet, London 2011.

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and Dante trademark of the angelic woman, that of the Gothic, ‘dark’ and often even ‘diabolical’. In 1847 Rossetti bought a Blake manuscript for ten shillings from a British Museum official, Blake being at that time an author who was almost entirely forgotten. He became an expert on Blake and some years later he wrote an introduction to an edition of his works.1 As a purely lyric poet Rossetti breaks with the Victorian principle of reality, and instead conceives of poetry as a state of suspended, confused and mystical awareness, of trance and perceptive hallucination, of exasperating psychic dialogue with an absent woman lover.2 Tennyson, Keats and especially Coleridge loom behind Rossetti’s early and late ballads with their the exotic lexicon, the dust of the archaic and their intrusions of the supernatural. At the same time the static interiors are decorated with antiquated, ‘Flemish’ furnishings and inhabited by characters hypnotically occupied in ritual actions and methodical ceremonies. Dante’s influence, against all appearances, comes after. It has been observed that

1

2

What he did amounted in fact to the completion of a biography left unfinished by A. Gilchrist. A large part of Rossetti’s introduction is dedicated to the ‘exalted’ family line descended from Blake both in painting and in poetry. The early Blake was, for Rossetti, a visionary who only came second to the late Blake for his ‘depth of thought’. Blake’s illustrations to the Book of Job were, according to Rossetti, informed by free ‘spiritualism’, immune from any ‘aesthetic trait’, above all in the female figures, who were desirable women of the real world, both fleshly and spiritual. I don’t believe in the theory that Rossetti was a competent theosopher or esoteric occultist, as claimed with an impressive array of erudition in Savarit 1961: that Rossetti, that is, had stowed away in his memory, as the critic claims, mystical texts which he read systematically in an omnivorous way. Savarit’s exegesis is itself esoteric and initiatory, but the result is often most unreliable and of dubious usefulness: what exegetic value – to give an example – can ever be gleaned from the knowledge (273) that an eidetic and figurative element can be found in the works of a hermetic Italian of the name of Cyprian Piccolpassi? The same critic dedicates numerous pages (in particular 353–61) to a clinical approach to Rossetti, to demonstrate that hallucination, synaesthesia, and the theme of the pictorial and literary double (and also the sheer duplication of the same pictorial subject) depended on the habit-forming and high consumption of laudanum, which had allegedly the same effects for Barrett Browning (§ 62.1 n. 27). There is always a ‘literary’ explanation (Keats’s and Tennyson’s tradition) for these linguistic ‘short circuits’, as is brought to light in Boos 1976, 71–2.

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the esotericism of Rossetti’s father – the obsessive lectures which Gabriele Rossetti gave his children about the supposed theosophical and occultist tracks in the divine poem – had from the beginning an alienating and retarding effect on the in pectore poet that was Rossetti. It is also often pointed out that Rossetti’s Dantism is selective and distorted. He did not so much care for the Divine Comedy – from which he, after all, only translated a passage from the Paolo and Francesca canto – as for the Vita Nuova, and a Vita Nuova permeated by ‘romantic’, erotic undertones which are foreign to Dante. This distortion is accentuated in Rossetti’s pictorial works inspired by the Comedy, notably in the marked discrepancy between Rossetti’s lack of a real religiousness (and of an interest in metaphysics) and the ironcast theological scaffoldings of Dante.3 But there is another facet on the Rossetti prism: that which is illuminated by the reading of Poe, of whom Rossetti – yet again – was one of the discoverers in Europe, considering that ‘The Raven’, which Rossetti expressly echoes in ‘The Blessed Damozel’, had only appeared in 1845. Like Poe, the adolescent Rossetti read books of the ‘dark’ tradition, such as those of Monk Lewis and Hoffmann, and he took his first steps as an author in the realm of the diabolical. It is all too easy to relate all this with his aporias and behavioural unbalances, and with his variously successive and sometimes synchronic states of mind. Early psychological and Freudian criticism discovered and emphasized in Rossetti geographical, racial and even zodiacal polarities and schizophrenias, and the more obvious mixing of blood and the joint effects of different cultural climates. He shared the sinful, sleepy lethargy of the Italian Meridione, but harboured a hovering feeling of guilt and sexual restraint instilled by his Protestant mother. Yet outwardly, as his brother recalled, nothing would cause others to notice non-English blood in his veins. Far from appearing or wanting to appear Italian-English, he affected an almost vulgar chauvinism and he felt he was a sort of John Bull character. In living through, restraining and sublimating the eruption of sensuality Rossetti is not too different from the young Clough. His ambivalence is reflected most obviously in the high instability of the female figure in his poetry. She is the Virgin3

T. S. Eliot confessed to having been precluded from the precise experience and knowledge of Dante’s world by the ‘Pre-Raphaelite tapestry’.

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like, angelic woman – a romantic source of inner peace – but at the same time untrustworthy and mercurial, and viewed with fear like a treacherous prostitute. In both cases she is a woman caught in a haunting pose which is repeated from poem to poem and painting to painting: a woman who bends down smiling from on high, often from a window, with flowers in her hair, like the womanly figure in ‘The Blessed Damozel’, or the Beatrice of Dante’s memory in ‘Dante at Verona’. But she may be leaning down provocatively and laughing with a coarse, vulgar laugh, and in doing so she shows the rotundity of her breasts, like the young girl – now no longer the young girl – of ‘A Last Confession’. In both cases the woman concentrates and emanates her evocative, seductive powers from the erogenous zone par excellence of Rossetti the painter-poet, her hair of varying colours, reddish or brown, which hides her face like a waterfall. On the motif of the woman’s obsessive driving force the three traditions I mentioned above are superimposed on one another. Rossetti’s great lyric poetry, which hinges on the post-Stilnovo and oneiric poetry of 1849 and on the even darker The House of Life, becomes ever more gradually a poetry of absence, and on account of this a poetry of erotic frustration. It is a cupio dissolvi, as Pater observed, only compensated by the briefest fleeting epiphanic reappearances, rather than the Patmorian celebration of inebriated, jubilant unions and of the ecstasy of fulfilment. The Dantesque theme of the post mortem reunited couple became, through tragic coincidence, a personal reality on which many compositions morbidly flourished, in the form of inexhaustible variations.4 3. For more than one reason Rossetti’s poetic journey, taken as a whole,5 marks historically the bridging point between the literary aesthetics of

4

5

This point is well made in Hough 1949: ‘It is as if Elizabeth Siddal had had to die in order to fulfil her role in his poetic myth’ (76). On the coexistence of both Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris as the woman in Rossetti’s House of Life, see § 193.2. Rossetti’s love is as much the love of death as the love of the absolute, as in the Wagnerian vortex in Tristan und Isolde. On Rossetti’s monadic and isolated love – not open ad extra – see the excellent Spector 1971. Both for stylistic continuity and the scarcity of Rossetti’s production after 1870, the discussion of his work after this date will be included in the present volume.

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Arnold, who saw poetry as magistra vitae – as a task of almost militant resolve and a philosophical-religious investigation – and late Victorian aestheticism, practically locked in the glass case of the solipsistic cult of form and beauty. With Ruskin, Rossetti is the almost ex nihilo creator of a poetic current which emerged towards the end of the 1840s and then pressed forward to be received and reoriented by Meredith, Pater, Wilde and other Decadents. He founded this new orientation for the simple reason that he had followed a course of education which differed from that of the majority of contemporary poets who, with the sole exception of Browning, were products of the Arnoldian public schools and the universities. He was not a model student in the schools he attended, and learned there only what was useful to his development as an artist. He was among the few Victorian poets who lacked a vast scholarship, and he had notably ‘small Latin and less Greek’. Being a Londoner and the son of an emigrant, practically giving him dual citizenship, he acquired a kind of immunity and statelessness, thanks to which he could feel less encumbered by the weight of social and public responsibilities which oppressed his contemporaries; so he could later turn life into art or aesthetic activity. The so-named Tudor House – castle, harem, immense museum of the most heterogeneous collections, which Rossetti inhabited surrounded by a group of blind fanatics who inevitably became compassionate and caring nurses – is a model in miniature of the house of Dorian Gray or of Jasmin Villebon, the protoaesthete of Pater’s Gaston de Latour, or of Des Esseintes from A Rebours. Rossetti was born and grew up in a family environment where political and ideological debates were rife, but, at such a distance from the theatre of events, we may suppose only in pretentious, manifestly ‘southern’ and unrealistic ways. His own father, more than a man of action, had been and continued to be a man of letters engrossed in his daily esoteric studies. In Rossetti we meet the first Victorian poet showing no real interest in politics, and uninvolved in any patriotic activity, whether idealistic or humanitarian.6 6

From France, where he found himself on a trip with Hunt in 1849, Rossetti sent to relatives and friends sonnets in a humoristic, epistolary form, which followed postrevolutionary events with feigned or tepid interest. He then visited Waterloo with a sceptical attitude, without softening at the thought that every sod covered the remains

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He was in short one of the non-prophetic poets of his age, a poet who did not yearn to assume that role and whom no one pressingly requested him to adopt it. It is for this reason that in him we no longer feel the urgency of the mediating role between the establishment and the masses, to which almost all Victorian poets felt they were called. One never finds a strong persuasive message in his poems, never the moralizing tirade, or the severe and occasionally apocalyptic reprimand. He did not write, nor was he concerned about writing, for an audience. Satisfied and amply remunerated by the painting commissions, he published either for himself or for his close circle of friends and acolytes; so it was said and repeated that he is a ‘poets’ poet’, a poet who savours and distils his verse, and a verse which was hardly ever accessible at first blush and furthermore always requires – as one expert interpreter, Swinburne, recognized in his review of 1870 – slow reading and rereading and an accurate critical analysis. The scarcity of his production is explained by his parallel activity as a painter, and is due to long periods of inactivity because of his poor health, but also, and to a greater extent, to his strong desire to offer works without imperfections, finished down to the last detail. The early Rossetti even outdoes the post-1870 poet, and presents himself directly as a mature poet, for the sole reason that he wanted to keep his apprenticeship jealously hidden,7 and knew how to do

7

of thousands of dead. Like all his fellow-nationals, Rossetti could also comment on political affairs in poetry, but what strikes one is his indirect and desolemnizing manner. One sonnet, only published in 1904 and on the theme of the liberation of Lombardy by Napoleon, presents Europe in the guise of a prostitute – as Barrett did of Italy (§ 70.3) – after performing her services, and whose enfeebled client is Napoleon himself. However, from this relationship is born a son who will in turn reproach his mother for her sin. In the sonnet dedicated to Nelson, Rossetti keeps triumphal patriotism under control: the death of the great admiral is seen through the eyes of three very young sailors at the time, who are now three elderly white-haired men waiting to see soon again the everlasting spirit of their valiant admiral. A very late protest sonnet denounces the killers of the democratic Tsar of Russia Alexander II, an event which shortly afterwards would give rise to Vera by Wilde. This is really the whole output of Rossetti the political poet. Stylistically, Rossetti stands out as a ‘synchronic’ poet, and the fact that there are no recognizable stylistic phases in his rather long career is a confirmation of this. The evolution of a Christian and sacred Art into a secularized one is discussed in my

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it. His continuous revisions of his poems were dictated by the tormented ideal of formal perfection and by the inexhaustible search for the mot juste. He actually appears to be a symbolist through a type of fragmented and decontextualized poetry – which is more evocative rather than directly declaratory – and which leaves the reader with the task of filling the gaps, and even more so through the weave of musical sounds in which some of his poems are entirely resolved. They are nearly asemantic creations which, irredeemably diverging from the content-oriented aesthetic of the times, look ahead to the autonomy of the signifier of the poetry of later decades, a formal pre-eminence that was misunderstood by his contemporaries, and explicitly noticed (although to be stigmatized) by Buchanan in a famous, scathing review.8 In Rossetti’s sonnets, in particular, one feels, alongside neo-Elizabethan and metaphysical cadences, the symboliste approach in textures of words which come together in a non-preordained but rather a surprising way, each of them chosen for its evocative, or simply phonetic rather than denotative value, up to the limit of the supremacy of sound over meaning. The ‘musicality’ as well as the poetic lexicon of Rossetti have been frequently traced back to his Italian origins. In his language, it has been observed, there is a lack of the strength, of the forcefulness of the idioms and the mimicry of spoken English.9 This is allegedly due to the fact that English was not for him a natural language, but one that was to a certain degree inherited and acquired with a residue of bilingualism, as was to be the case, no doubt to an even greater extent, with Conrad and Nabokov. Whatever the explanation, Rossetti’s idiolect perhaps reaches the zenith in terms of artificiality, construction, stylization, mannerism in Victorian poetry, even including impurities in syntax and grammar.

8 9

following section. This ‘diachronic’ and evolutionary dimension – with the emphasis on form just as much as content – is in my opinion over-accentuated by Boos 1976 and especially by Riede 1983, who disagrees with Rees 1981. § 191.6 PGU, vol. 6, 359. The opposite theory held by C. Rawson, ‘Some Aspects of Rossettian Verse and the “Colloquial Tradition in English Poetry”’, in I Rossetti tra Italia e Inghilterra, 223–38, is less tenable.

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4. Rossetti foreshadows a kind of British Decadentism which is a distinct sub-species, or rather an almost diverse offshoot of the continental version, above all French: a painful, tortured form of Decadentism always subject to hesitation, rethinking and moralistic scruples. He lacked Wilde’s propagandism and proselytism, his sense of smugness in the struggle against literary conventions and against ‘truth’ in favour of beauty; he lacked the hedonism of Pater’s instantaneous emotions. The sonnet was for Rossetti ‘the monument of the moment,’ but such a ‘moment’ was something quite different from Pater’s ‘moment’ in the Conclusion to The Renaissance. It was an epiphanic moment revealing hidden emotions and unattainable, suprasensible realities, not just a fulfilling moment even in its ephemeral duration to be sought, as Pater said, ‘simply for love of the moment’.10 If one looks at Rossetti against the litmus paper of religion, he can even end up as the umpteenth Victorian poet of the Deus absconditus. But rather than placing him near to Clough and Arnold, this motif manifests itself in a completely different way, and arises from a position of personal, modern existentialism. He was never shaken by doubts concerning the beginning and end of creation as raised by the evolutionists;11 nor did he ever seriously confront biblical new criticism. His religious conflicts are not formal questions passed through the sieve of reason, even if not resolved, but rather they are tied to imbalances which were entirely personal, not collective. He was born and lived in a family saturated with religious sentiment and devotion, at least on the part of his mother and his two sisters; and all the siblings were brought up formally as Protestants, something that was more or less tolerated by their antipapal father.12 However, as a result – quite common for the time – one of the boys, William Michael, became a professed atheist, the other, Dante Gabriel, a believing aesthete.13

10 11 12 13

Rees 1981, 44–5. Pater praised the hardly successful poem ‘Soothsay’, a decalogue or catechism of fortitude, humility and Victorian industriousness, and at the same time a disconsolate lay gospel of immanentism. Knight 1887, 16. Rossetti never understood his sister Maria Francesca’s decision to become a nun. She died in 1876, in a mystical delirium very similar to that of Patmore’s daughter, who was also a nun (§ 173.2).

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In Rossetti there was a brief and unconvincing moment of Catholic or Anglo-Catholic Art, which was embraced owing to a widespread vogue in the 1840s, and as if yielding to the pressures of the other, more believing Pre-Raphaelite brothers. Swinburne, in his review of 1870, aptly pointed out that Rossetti had been gradually attracted by the ‘physical charm of Christianity’, with ‘no admixture of doctrine or doubt’. The difficulties of sacred art, of allegory and sacramentalism of the universe against the free and unanchored flow of the symbol, are well reflected in the trio of sonnets ‘Old and New Art’ in 1849. The same conflict may be seen in his early paintings, which display a wealth of unconnected, esoteric and unrelated symbolic elements. Some of the more celebrated poems by Rossetti deal with the impotence of allegory – or rather with that particular form of uncontrolled allegory which heralds a non-transparent symbolism – such as ‘The Woodspurge’ and ‘The Monochord’, in which there is no reality other than the perceived phenomenon, or a sacramental symbolism which never quite takes off.14 In his last twenty years in particular, Rossetti’s poetry reflects the sway of a cosmos with no fixed points, and as a result his work foreshadows Pater’s relativism, not in its self-satisfying nature but rather in the form of a painful nostalgia for the more structured and temperate literary cultures of the past. 5. By 1870 the esteem, benevolence and following that Rossetti had enjoyed from the start of his career had already for the most part faded out. Ruskin shook his head at every new work that was brought forth by his pen or paintbrush, Hunt and Millais were by now working independently, and Patmore had left the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, even as a simple supporter. Rossetti’s poetic collection of 1870 was well received mainly because the reviews were skilfully manipulated. Tennyson confessed his horror at the more risqué sonnets of The House of Life to his son in private, and Browning explicitly satirized Rossetti under the semblance of a Don Giovanni in his Fifine at the Fair. I will discuss Buchanan’s headon attack, published in 1871, later on. It was left to the principal English Decadents to run to his assistance and render him justice. By 1883 two of Rossetti’s exceptional supporters and admirers were Swinburne and Pater,

14

See Riede 1983 for a thorough examination of these reasons.

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who fully appreciated his innovations and preannouncements. Swinburne, on the publication of the 1870 edition, dedicated an opulent hymn to the ‘master of words’, his immaculate style, and his perfection and grace of form, using fanatical and hyperbolical words. Pater discovered in him the right language to convey ideals, and one reflecting back his ‘interior information’ with perfect transparency. It was for him a language reserved for the happy few – as Pater’s own language was after all – but one behind which, as Pater and Swinburne both reasserted, the thought was clear and sound. Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelitism passed on to Hopkins, Morris, Meredith, Symonds at one stage at least on their journey, and to a crowd of lesser writers in the 1890s, when it appeared to Yeats that ‘they were all Pre-Raphaelites’. For Yeats – and later for others – the influence of PreRaphaelitism had already become something vague as time went on. It was a Pre-Raphaelitism in which there were three overlapping layers, both consecutive and deeply different: the sacred Pre-Raphaelitism of 1848–9, the second, ‘decorative’ and Arthurian style of Morris and Burne-Jones, the third the fateful portrait-painting of Rossetti, on which it was even incorrect, Yeats said, to place the label Pre-Raphaelitism. 15 The anti-Rossetti campaign was unleashed from the start of the twentieth century, when critics began to denounce the dangerous contagion of a poetry which suddenly appeared as a cold combination of rare words extracted from the dictionary, expressing ideas that were no longer relevant. In other words they criticized a manner of writing which gave rise to multitudes of imitators with no vigour, who were ‘emasculating’ English poetry, something which all the Decadents were guilty of, amongst other things, according to an interpretation which involved Pater and the other aesthetes. To say that Rossetti was an old ‘impostor’– according to Chesterton’s and Waugh’s definition – for having confused poetry with painting – was however purely and simply a mistake. Between the two wars Rossetti was 15

In Italy, where a Pre-Raphaelite exhibition was held in Rome in 1890, D’Annunzio, penalized by a scant knowledge of English, sprinkled his novels with Rossettian references – the refined languor, red hair, fatalistic attitudes – imitated and acquired second-hand. Giovanni Pascoli independently felt the effects of early Pre-Raphaelitism and of its natural and naturalistic themes.

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ignored or once again thrown to one side, but his legend was revisited even if through a non-objective interest, or rather through gossip and scandal, a certain perspective from a distance having matured in the meantime. There was a continuous stream of biographies produced during that space of time, each of them reaching even further back into the Rossetti genealogy, or really just adding to what was already known by upturning some stone or elucidating some new skeleton in the closet. The Rossetti myth ended up just one step down from the glamour of the Brownings,16 and real and proper novels were added to the fictionalized, even invented, apocryphal biographies, freely drawn from Rossetti’s life or inspired by it. The decline of Rossetti’s fortunes in the twentieth century and beyond is due to the fact that he had become almost solely a legend, and had ceased to be an artist. Later, as with Wilde, one had to overturn the judgements of his contemporaries and his immediate successors, recognizing that life held less importance than art, which was, at least for Rossetti, something utterly superior to it.17 § 183. Dante Gabriel Rossetti II: Painting into literature and nonfigurative poetry The adolescent Rossetti grew in the era of the illustrated text par excellence and of the cartoonists, more famous and better remunerated than 16

17

Rossetti, as a confirmation, shares scholars and biographers with the Brownings. The biography by Doughty (1949 and 1960) was falsely accused of romanticizing and inventing, though he legitimately reads the poetic and pictorial works in a balanced way, as a biographer should do. Critical perspectives have radically changed in the last two or three decades for all Victorians, with the inclusion of Rossetti, as we have already seen, within the category of ‘the betrayal of language’ and of the fragmentation and reconstruction of the self. Riede 1983 pointedly notes the ‘belatedness’ of Rossetti and his initial close study of the interweave of the looks in Giotto’s painting of Dante (§ 190.2). The feminist, intertextual and new historicist approaches cannot be ignored, the latter focusing on a Rossetti working in the era of the ‘mechanical reproduction’ of the artistic object, vainly rebelling against the laws of the marketplace and attempting to safeguard the reasons of the imagination and of pure art. For more on this, see McGann 2000.

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the novelists. Illustrated books left a mark on him which was equally as strong as the purely verbal contents. His father proudly pointed out to his English friends that the youngster seemed to have an equal predisposition for poetry and for drawing, and indeed Dante Gabriel drew inspiration from his de chevet books to sketch on his own: besides Dante, Poe (a ‘deep well of delights’) and Goethe, and sketches of ‘The Raven’ by fine-tracing in pen and ink, and inspired by Faust. Rossetti’s debut picture was originally on the Faust theme, later put to one side in favour of the Anglo-Catholic episode of the adolescence of the Virgin. Rossetti the illustrator was later at work on the numerous illustrations – not always in harmony with the text – made to accompany the poems of friends and acquaintances, from those of his sister Christina to those of Browning, Tennyson and Allingham. The Arthurian legend and ‘Dante’s dream’ are only two among his most drawn-upon repertoires of suggestions arising from literature, as much in drawing and watercolours as in painting and oil. Painting and poetry, and the literary and pictorial careers, seem then to proceed at an equal pace in Rossetti’s work, until he could foresee a harmonious, productive mutual and essential relationship.18 Rossetti – and this is another unmistakeable Decadent foreshadowing – welcomed in the literary domain, with the notable exceptions of Ruskin and Browning, the absent Muse of British culture in the early and mid-nineteenth century, completely absorbed by classical philology: figurative art as celebration of beauty independently of content. He carried with him both his Italian and his Catholic heritage, the legacy of a land where figurative art was born and had spontaneously and abundantly developed. Wordsworth preferred to contemplate natural beauty directly rather than its representations; Tennyson, and Clough and Arnold from Rugby before them – Browning is the one exception that confirms the rule – were not overly interested in artistic culture, and Arnold the father along with Arnold the son actually preferred to climb and admire Mount Vesuvius close-up rather than lock themselves up in the art galleries. The incompetence and disinterest in art did not create a 18

Pater’s and Wagner’s indissoluble trinomial of art, word and music is shared by Rossetti, simply by the fact that ‘The Blessed Damozel’ later became a painting by the same Rossetti and thence, with Debussy, the musical cantata La damoiselle élue.

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sense of inferiority in them, but almost rather one of pride: the great plastic and figurative art, which belonged almost by definition to the Catholic world, and which often tried to represent the un-representable Divine, was for them a culpable distraction. As hagiography of the saints – and of the Madonna – it faded into superstition, as Ruskin never tired of pointing out. Until Hopkins, all the poets who were ideally descended from Arnold’s public schools nurtured the Puritan suspicion of the organ of sight, and Hopkins often surprised himself sinning simply through an excessive freedom given to his eyes. 2. Regarding the axiom that Rossetti is an eminent poet-painter and painter-poet, and therefore a pictorial poet – an axiom which is presumably indisputable and still held today, on which the scathing criticisms of Chesterton and Waugh in the early 1900s hinged – there is much that is exceptionable. The two spheres were kept distinct from one another by Rossetti himself, more or less according to the same terms used by Wilde when he said that he had put his genius into his life and only his talent into his art. After 1850 Rossetti could allow himself to be a poet thanks to his income as a painter. He earned as much for one painting as Matthew Arnold did by writing two or even three critical essays; debuting poets fared even worse, as their first collections were often published at their own expense. The old hand Leigh Hunt explained this to him – namely that one could not make money writing poetry – when acknowledging the receipt of his early poems. Rossetti acquired an almost cynical wisdom in this regard: ‘I am a poet first of all […] but as it is the painting and not the poem that is a source of income, I especially expressed my poetry in that form. After all, the question of the daily bread has created the situation where a good part of my painting is nothing more than stuff to make farthings, whereas my poems, not bringing in anything, can avoid being prostituted’. One detects an underlying feeling of guilt in this confession of Rossetti’s, who was at that stage dominated by the market and besieged by the pressing requests of the clients, to such an extent that his art was modified and partially commercialized, and if nothing else, conditioned, after 1860 (these clients were the likes of James Leathart, lead merchant of Newcastle, or Leyland, a rich Liverpool ship-owner). He took advantage of the favourable times, that is the sudden affluence of the new rich and

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parvenus who were creating a market for painters, and were above all constructing luxurious dwellings, now that the period of austerity and even indigence had passed and new leisure spaces were opening. He was not a ‘cultured’ painter, nor was he above average technically, notwithstanding his artistic studies. Access to and knowledge of the old masterworks which were housed in the principal European art galleries was at that time more difficult than today. Engravings existed but photographs and monographs of pictures and artists were not available, at least not by today’s standards. Rossetti was thus in touch with Italian art without ever taking on as much as one trip to Italy, in contrast with many of his Pre-Raphaelite companions who travelled there to study. The contradictions and involutions are innumerable in Rossetti the painter. He was a Pre-Raphaelite in crisis pretty early on; he was not a colourist in the early days, and he defined ‘slushy’ the chromatic excesses in Renaissance and Baroque painting; but he ended up with the same flaw at the end of his career. His sumptuous portraiture of women which he inaugurated at the beginning of the 1860s established a female ‘type’ – recalling amongst other things the old and most hackneyed ‘Raphaelitism’ – which was destined to be of wide appeal, but more important for future developments than for its intrinsic pictorial realization. His inclination towards purely decorative outcomes caused him, predictably enough, to enter into conflict with Ruskin, who lavished efforts to promote and protect him. He was, Wilde recognized, the creator ex novo of a feminine icon; he imposed a dress and coiffure fashion, facial traits and poses. It is often pointed out that his feminine ideal still survives today – or more precisely survived until some time ago – in high fashion and beauty competitions.19 3. The painter-poet exists – that cannot be denied – and it is the poet that works according to the forms and fashions of ekphrasis in the sonnets written in Paris and Bruges in 1849. Some of these are direct transcriptions in words of paintings personally seen in galleries and churches, paraphrases of the pictures and at the same time free interpretations and suggestions of the facial expressions, and reconstructions of the process of pictorial

19

Riede 1992, 163.

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production. An uninterrupted collection of sonnets transcribe the paintings of others as well as his own, most interesting as a verification of the interchangeability or the autonomy of the two arts. Nor is the purely figurative Rossetti missing, Rossetti the limner and landscape artist, the accurate engraver, whose ‘Winter’ and ‘Spring’ sonnets are outstanding examples. And yet Rossetti is not always and after all a visual and figurative poet; he himself was the first to recognize this, even if perhaps with an over-drastic diagnosis: ‘no poetry could be freer than mine from the trick of what is called “word-painting”’. More often his poetry revolves around modalities which are not visual or figurative, or on images that are not entirely representable or translatable – and at times not even partly – into optical terms.20 § 184. Dante Gabriel Rossetti III: Biography Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s birth-house, in the heart of London and a few hundred yards from Piccadilly Circus, was like a sea-port when he was born in 1828. Italian expats would gather there, and even the likes of Mazzini and Paganini could turn up. Working artists, wandering organists, bread shopkeepers were all habitual visitors, but also some chosen English friends of Professor Rossetti. His wife’s original family, being related to the two Polidoris, had rather much stronger and older connections. Dante Gabriel, precocious in his readings and in painting, composed when just six years of age tragedies and poems in collaboration with his three siblings. Among these works there was a play with an Italian setting where the devil played a major part. He had also completed sonnets, all more or less already dedicated to motionless female poses. This fervour found recompense in grandfather Polidori, who in his rudimental printing press proudly printed his grandchildren’s works. Rossetti chose painting – after having refused with disgust a job as a telegraph operator at the Vauxhall Bridge Station – at an age on which his biographers cannot agree – either on account of his talent or out of need (the family supported itself on the pithy earnings

20 For excellent comments on this see Boos 1976, 231, where the scholar analyses what she defines the non-image ‘spirit-fann’d daydream’.

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received from the exhausting private Italian lessons given by the professor). From 1836 Rossetti had been enrolled at King’s College, London – the same college where his father had taught for a miserable fee – paying a reduced charge. In four years of study at a little art school in Bloomsbury between 1842 and 1846 he was anything but a model student. Having been accepted into the Royal Academy Antique School in 1846, among very few other sons of immigrants, he spent his time boringly copying busts. Dissatisfied, and aware that he lacked painting technique, he turned to the painter Ford Madox Brown after little more than a year, and offered himself to him as a paying pupil with a letter which Brown straight away took to be a joke. He began to frequent his workshop for a couple of shillings, but even Brown put him to copying ‘little jars of pickles’ and other still life. 2. Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Siddal was introduced to Rossetti by a brother Pre-Raphaelite21 who had noticed her in a hat shop where she had been working as an assistant. At the time seventeen-year-old Elizabeth became the model for many associates of the confraternity, such as Millais and Hunt. Under Rossetti’s guidance she herself became a sensitive and not at all mediocre poet and painter. Ruskin was struck by her, putting his own personal doctor at her disposal when she showed signs of tuberculosis, and he financed expensive care and therapeutic treatments in France. The marriage of Rossetti and Siddal was only formalized in 1860, when the woman’s days were numbered; she died in 1862 from an overdose of laudanum, regularly prescribed by the doctor. We know about the woman’s figure, and about her controversial and exhausting engagement to Rossetti and the circumstances around her death, from the most varied and fantastic reconstructions that have flourished ever since. Rossetti chose Siddal as his main inspirational pictorial muse. In the reality of daily life their relationship was less fruitful, and began to deteriorate soon after the peak of infatuation. Siddal was a psychopath who courted death, and was above all sexually frigid and inhibited. Relations between them before their marriage were almost certainly platonic, even though they were living under the same roof (the studio in Blackfriars). To give herself sexually to 21

On the events that led to the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood see § 207.

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him she wanted Rossetti to marry her, and the relationship was marked by rows and scenes of jealousy. Rossetti’s procrastination was, according to his reticent contemporaries, related back to his straightened economic situation and the presumed ill health of Rossetti himself. In reality, it is known that already after 1854 Rossetti was no longer in love with Siddal and, according to an even more alarming conjecture, he put off the marriage sine die – ardently requested by her, as she was actually convinced she could die from one day to the next – in the hope that he could be free to marry his latest but unreachable flame, Jane Burden. Siddal’s death was not however accidental, actually it was almost certainly suicide: a short while before her death it is though that Rossetti had had a row with her, and that, having left her, he had visited another woman, almost certainly Fanny Cornford, the ‘governess’ of Tudor House. A note in the deceased woman’s handwriting was probably found by the husband on his return and then destroyed. 3. Rossetti had become infatuated with Jane Burden, Rossetti’s second archetypal incarnation of his art – the brown-haired, melancholy and mysterious daughter of a stable-hand – whom he had fortuitously noticed one day in the crowd during the frescoing of the Oxford salons in 1856. Not to lose her Rossetti encouraged her marriage to Morris, who tolerated, and actually acted recklessly by encouraging, Rossetti’s flirting inside his own domestic walls, even while Siddal was still alive. Later he often entertained the widower at his manor at Kelmscott just outside London, where he had daringly started a decorative arts firm. After 1862 Rossetti became ever more depressed, unstable and afflicted by forms of neurosis that found their origins in Jane’s temporary absences. He drank and took sleeping pills, even toyed with suicide and cultivated morbid fantasies that his wife’s spirit was present in his life. Seized by a hallucination he once thought that she had been reincarnated in the form of a chaffinch. Within a period of eight years he decided to resume work on the sonnets of The House of Life, which he had hidden in his wife’s tomb, overwhelmed by remorse. However, he did not have the courage to personally retrieve them and he entrusted the task to a friend. The manuscript had to be cleaned of the hair of the deceased which had stuck to it as it had grown, à la Poe, even after death. Immediately afterwards (1871) Rossetti was violently shaken by the scatter-brained attack of Buchanan and by the

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satires and parodies of Browning and Lewis Carroll. The artist’s activity and very survival seemed from that moment to depend entirely on drugs, which he swallowed in such doses – whilst always diluted on the sly by his friends – that in 1872 he collapsed and his life was in danger. Worn out physically and spiritually, Rossetti died on Easter Sunday, 1882. Like Wilde, he asked for a Catholic priest almost in articulo mortis, motivated thus: ‘I have no use for the Christian religion, I only want a confessor who will absolve me from my sins’.22 This request confirms the sense of guilt with which Rossetti was afflicted, but also his dramatic and hard-fought lack of religiosity. However, he was not anointed either by a Catholic priest or, as was the wish of his sister, an Anglican one. § 185. Dante Gabriel Rossetti IV: ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and other poems in the sensual Stilnovo style While it is possible to retrace a certain evolution and even stylistic, formal and ideological transformation in Rossetti, it becomes extremely difficult to order his poetry chronologically and thematically. Not being a professional poet he appeared in print from his beginnings in magazines and dribs and drabs, without being able to gradually gather his output – even if he wanted to – into substantial, organic collections, according to the fashion of all his contemporaries. Once ready (his forty-second birthday having passed), the poetic edition which came out in 1870 contained poems whose first publication was definitely datable but whose conception and drafting were less certain, as testified by the chronological table appended by his brother, who was subsequently caught out in error or corrected by later scholars. On the other hand a close comparison between the first drafts and those that followed brings to light minimal and sometimes imperceptible stylistic and lexical variations, but also cuts and additions of numerous lines, almost posing the question as to whether we are dealing with two distinct versions of the same text.23 There is also 22 23

Doughty 1949, 654. One of the most evident cases in which Rossetti’s revisionism entails the creation of two different poems is ‘Pax vobis’: in the first edition of 1850 a monk who ‘strove, but could not pray’ abandons his habit in exchange for a worldly life; in the 1881

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the embarrassing case of some ballads which, begun at a very early age, were brought to conclusion – without any discernible signs of stylistic discrepancy – just a few years and actually only days before his death. The 1870 collected edition also shows evident thematic, temporal and formal hiatuses that can partly be traced back to the three strands of Rossetti’s inspiration that I mentioned earlier. For all these reasons Rossetti’s poetry cannot but be considered an extremely erratic trajectory, and a coexistence, at times disconcerting, of diverse and contradictory motifs, rather than a controlled development over time. My discussion, which will necessarily take account of that, will be forced to move forward and backwards even too many times, without following at least in this case the exact chronological progression of Rossetti’s compositions.24 There is however no doubt that the gateway to Rossetti’s poetry has to be, as in practically every edition before and after his death, ‘The Blessed Damozel’, which of Rossetti’s prism expressed the most juvenile and incorrupt facet, that of a still auroral poet and the silvery falsetto voice of a young boy. An almost perfect synchronism has most nineteenth-century poets appear on the scene with a kind of oneiric-visionary poem: before Rossetti, Tennyson, Browning and Arnold; after him, Hopkins. It could be asserted that ‘The Blessed Damozel’ is a well-masked re-edition of the several Victorian apocalypses presented in the debut works of several poets. However, it is a rose-tinted vision of the afterlife, filtered by texts which are no longer the Bible in the powerful Milton-style version in solemn blank verse, but rather the primitive, gentle and flowery Italian poetry of the Stilnovo. There is nothing dramatic in the exquisite composition; instead, everything is revision the monk ends up staying with the life dedicated to God (see Doughty’s edition, 270). 24 Rossetti, in the 1870 collection and the editions following it edited by his brother William Michael, actually abandoned a chronological ordering of the poems. The 1911 edition adopted the criterion – through force majeure, though condemnable philologically – of a reorganization of the poems in the following groups: Principal, Miscellaneous, Fragmentary, Youthful, the final group. On the chronological amplitude of The House of Life, see § 192.1. The two dates which in some cases I place in parenthesis after the poems’ titles refer, when it is known, to the timespan of the writing of the poem.

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immersed in a tender melancholy. The tears of the damozel for her separation from her beloved who remains on the earth, are mixed with a smile, and the atmosphere is at least Purgatorial. The terrestrial world in ‘The Blessed Damozel’ is redeemed; it is not a hell from which to yearn for an escape, rather, by virtue of the sublimating force of love, the model for the ‘eternal union’ in heaven. 2. The development of the timeline in ‘The Blessed Damozel’ is realized – according to the paradoxes of visionary fables – within an absence of time, that is to say within a dimension of declared and reconfirmed absence of temporality and the total extraneousness of ‘Heaven’ to the jurisdiction of time in force on earth. There is no death or time in Heaven, being a kingdom of ‘deathless love’s acclaims’, of the ‘infinite union,’ where the ‘pulse’ of time across the planets cannot reach. The timespan of the poem moves – for those on earth – from midday to afternoon, bathed in sun until twilight. The year draws to a close on earth because the leaves are falling, but in Heaven it is forever Spring because the Blessed hold flowers which do not wither in their hands.25 The poem ends when the departure towards the heavens can no longer be postponed, with the reunion of the circle of the Blessed in adoration of the Creator. And yet time is at least relative, and its calculation varies depending on the point from which it is measured. The blessed damozel, alone among the angelic creatures, demarcates but also shares the two visions amphibiously. She, who ought to be outside time, instead feels and lives sorrowfully within the time dimension: to those who have remained on earth her departure seems to have taken place ‘ten years of years’ before; to her it seems ‘she scarce had been a day’ in Heaven. Such is the way with space also. Heaven is the denial of space, which begins from below the ‘bar of Heaven’ from which the damozel leans this golden bar is in reality a ‘bridge’ which connects in an almost impossible way two spheres which should by definition be antipodally distinct from one another and non-communicating. The dual regime of space and time is mirrored in the dialogic and dramatic organization: the poet’s voice to which is entrusted the opening passage has a vision of the 25

It is clear that these lines will influence Hopkins the Pre-Raphaelite in ‘Heaven-Haven’.

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opposing spaces; the male lover left alone on earth speaks and intervenes in a cracked voice; in the central part the damozel pleads for and prophesizes the imminent reunion.26 3. Rossetti’s Heaven is a domesticized afterlife, a bastion in the air, a sidereal far-off place which even allows natural dialogue: a cosmogony and fairy-tale-like cosmography which ingeniously contradicts all scientific hypotheses.27 Flowers, real and embroidered, and garlands abound;28 but it is also a musical Heaven, where the souls communicate by singing and the blessed men and women are choristers who express ethereal words in song, in the language of the stars. All the surfaces are polished, corners and edges are abolished and round shapes dominate. Everything or almost everything is arranged in a circle. The Virgin’s handmaids, like songbirds, form a circle, and the angels are arranged in a circle around God. The bar is circular and smooth, also the halos are circular and the reclined heads are curved in shape. The twenty-first stanza is a painting by Fra Angelico transferred to the page, with the angels in the background with golden halos and tinkling ‘citherns and citoles’. This prevailing spirit of sedate harmony is concentrated in the female activity par excellence of embroidery, one in which the Virgin Mary is presented in Rossetti’s first painting of 1848: the blessed damozel is one of Mary’s five embroiderer-choristers, who weave and embroider the golden ‘birth-robes for them / Who are just born, being

26

The demarcation and incommunicability of the two realms is even more accentuated in the second of Rossetti’s two paintings, identical in title and subject, in which the lover is placed outside the picture and spatially separated. The alternating dialogue is in turn a revival of the primitive medieval poetic genre of the dialogic poem (the ‘contrasto’), the best-known Italian example being that of Cielo d’Alcamo, which Rossetti was later to translate (§ 191.4). 27 The fourth stanza emphasizes the hallucinatory and visionary nature of the lover’s experiences, who takes the autumnal leaves, which are tickling him as they fall, as the loosened hair of his beloved. 28 The damozel’s dress, sensuously parted for its entire length, does not bear ‘wrought flowers’ – that is, probably ‘embroidered’ – but ‘a white rose of Mary’s gift’.

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dead’; in the same way, as they also represent the ‘five sweet symphonies’,29 among them there is the patron saint of music, Cecilia. 4. ‘The Blessed Damozel’ was first published, with four sestets less than in the version of 1870, in The Germ in 1850, but it had been composed and privately printed by the grandfather Polidori, three or four years before, when Rossetti was younger than nineteen years old. It has very little to do with the debutante poet, though, even if it is read in the older version. Rossetti was a very skilled and brilliant masker of his borrowings from others’ work, just because he rewrote and personalized them. He even revealed that ‘The Blessed Damozel’ had been inspired, among other texts, by Poe’s ‘The Raven’, and that he had turned it upside down. The angelic, musical bliss of Rossetti’s Heaven is, on the other hand, that same one which was denounced in Barrett’s ‘The Cry of the Children’,30 published in 1844, because it was deaf to the cries of working ‘children’ and miners. The closest reference to this poet, who was included by the early Pre-Raphaelites among the ‘immortals’, surfaces in the angelological poem The Seraphim. In particular the ending of ‘The Blessed Damozel’ ‘in the minor key’31 – ‘I heard her tears’ – is very similar to that of A Drama of Exile, which is a bare caption which tells of the quite audible sound of tears falling. The older Patmore momentarily aligned with Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites of 1848 because he also independently prefigured the post mortem reunion of the two lovers, and also because his Paradise was not very far removed from the unison already achieved by the loved ones on earth. ‘But shall God lift / To endless unity / The soul whose likeness with thy soul / Was but its love for thee?’: in their ‘metaphysical’ contortion these lines are almost Patmorian, and they sound as a pre-announcement of the ‘preludes’ of The Angel in the House. 5. The most obvious and immediate resonance in ‘The Blessed Damozel’ remains that of Dante. The singing damozel is a less austere, intermediary Beatrice – a more softened naïve version – whose assumption into Heaven 29 Numerical symbolism is used in a most traditional way: the three lilies, seven stars, ten years, until the ‘unnumber’d’ souls of the Blessed. 30 § 67.2–3 31 Boas 1914, 37. For Barrett Browning, see § 65.3.

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has not completely caused her to lose nostalgia for earth. The other inhabitants of Heaven are reduced to just little flickering flames, but the damozel has beautiful, palpitating, fleshy breasts which – a detail in such open view that no commentator on the poem has missed it – warm the cold bar on which they are leaning. While the souls of the Blessed are lured into the spiral that stretches up towards God, the damozel remains chained to the bar, and her gaze is turned downwards looking for her lover. She could join the ascent – or pray for such to happen – but only when he will reach her in Heaven.32 The three final sestets almost deconstruct the poem, since they infer or conceal that Heaven has to be modelled on the earthly world, and that Heaven has to be a perpetuation of the union of body and soul on earth: the damozels asks Christ ‘only to live as once on earth / With Love, – only to be, / As then awhile, forever now / Together’.33 She invokes Him to grant a recovery of the totality of love, as much in its spiritual component – on its own insufficient – as in its corporal component. At the end the damozel is sorrowfully resigned to wait, but the bell for departure sounds: the future is simply a trustful prayer, but she does not know how to hide an expression of desperation and she covers her face with her hands, taking to crying audibly; in this case, she is very much indeed a humanized Beatrice. 6. For a very brief period Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelitism coincided in painting and poetry with an exhumed ‘Catholic Art’ expressing veneration of the Madonna and other haloed women saints, in aseptic and purified settings imperceptibly veined with sensuality, malice and domestication. The Vita Nuova had for the young Rossetti the value of an initiation (he dedicated two sonnets to it, the second formally to the memory of his father who had introduced him to it), and it represented the paradigm of the sublimation of carnal love – over and above that of ‘man’s shameful 32 33

Two spiral ascents take place in the poem: the damozel will take her lover by the hand towards the Madonna, and the Madonna takes both by the hand to lead them to Christ, God the Father and the circle of the Blessed. The seventeenth sestet expresses the Dolce Stilnovo concept of natural connection between Love and Spirit, and between love and the manifestation of God, but implies that flesh and sin are excessively heavy and so the lover is not worthy to ascend to such heights. Only love – ennobling love – represents the trait d’union between the lovers.

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swarm’ – in ‘spiritual love’. The devotional poem ‘Ave’ (1847), which is really composed pictorially of many separate tableaux, presents the Madonna as an elder sister of the blessed damozel. Mary is watering the flowers – the subject of a watercolour from 1885 – when she hears the mysterious, allencircling voice of the Archangel Gabriel the Announcer, a theme developed in oil in 1849. In a most rapid reversal, Mary – waiting for her risen Son with the apostles – scrutinizes the sky from the window (another subject of a watercolour from 1858), and she embroiders as in the early paintings but also weeps just as the blessed damozel did while waiting for her lover. Finally glorifying Mary’s assumption into Heaven, and dwelling at length on a new angelic scenography and choreography to describe the cherubim ‘float[ing] inward to a golden point’, ‘Ave’ transposes onto a religious plane the theme of the reunion of the lovers in ‘The Blessed Damozel’. In the final stanza Mary, like the blessed damozel, bends downward from Heaven towards the shadow of the Earth. 7. The most obvious fruit of Rossetti’s Dantesque inspiration is his long and not very successful verse tale in laboured and often concettist iambic tetrameters ‘Dante at Verona’, begun at almost the same time as ‘The Blessed Damozel’ but only published in 1870. The rift between the two compositions is deep, whether because Rossetti’s Dante – who is also ambiguously Dante Gabriel himself – is no longer the adolescent Dante of the Vita Nuova but the more mature Dante, ‘widower’ of Beatrice and ravaged by exile and by now focusing on the Divine Comedy, or whether because Rossetti places himself here completely outside of the oneiric atmosphere and he observes, perhaps for the one and only time in all his poetry, a maximum of adherence to history. Under this guise, of a storyteller re-evoking history, which for him was not the most suitable of roles, Rossetti follows the stereotypes of a surly but also at times kindly Dante, a Dante who is never servile, ready to affirm his dignity even if forced to shake hands, and never disposed to endure the mocking jests or the scorn of Cangrande, which were not historically so atrocious as Rossetti describes them.34 Formally the 34 The popularity of the Florentine and Italian settings in English novels of the 1850s and 60s was also partly owing to ‘Dante at Verona’. The erudite and pedantic Rossetti, who cites in notes the difficulties of rendition of some Italianisms, and is not ashamed to resort to paraphrasing, began with this poem to present himself as a poet in his

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poem reproduces the organization of Browning’s Sordello, and provides a series of successive tableaux and sketches, some of which graphically vivid. Such are the scenes of the infliction of exile, Dante’s first wanderings and his arrival in Verona, the crowd of the flatterers, the grovelling pen-pushers, the mundane clerics, the risqué ladies, the brazen court jesters, all prostrate in adoration at the feet of twenty-seven-year-old Cangrande who spends his time between revelry and military raids. Beatrice dominates ideally the scene, but she is the deceased Beatrice of Dante the exile, the visionary and ghostly icon to whom he reaches out paranormally, according to the presaging, obsessive formula which resonates inside him, ‘Behold, even I, even I am Beatrice!’ Dante the pilgrim, his heart weighed down by the actions of his fellow citizens and by his exile, is filled in spirit by Beatrice who is looking down on him from Heaven. So he lives a double existence: physical in the misery of the earthly world, spiritual in his contemplation of Beatrice. His imprisonment and lack of movement is nothing when compared to his freedom of thought. Precisely as with a Giotto-like damozel his much-loved city comes to him in a dream, riding on a white palfrey and holding a sceptre of lilies in her hand. Arriving before Cangrande she incites all the souls to struggle for the general good. This damozel speaks to Dante in a vision and glorifies him, but, just as in ‘The Blessed Damozel’, the apotheosis has to wait. § 186. Dante Gabriel Rossetti V: Rhapsodies on disappointed waiting Right up until his final works, culminating with The House of Life which he finished in 1881, Rossetti’s poetry becomes an ever darker and prevalently nocturnal reworking of the auroral setting of ‘The Blessed Damozel’. Its recurring theme is that of waiting, poignant but always obscurely frustrated, and of the purely visionary prefiguration of the earthly and supernatural reunion of the lovers. The distinctive characteristic of Rossetti is, as I mentioned above, the mediumistic capacity with which he knew how to prefigure his tragic affective destiny from the days of his youth. The Dantesque experience of being deprived of his loved one, as reflected in own right, plus translator and literary critic at the same time. For analogies with Carlyle’s surly Dante, see § 18.3.

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the Vita Nuova and later in the Commedia, was so morbidly entertained that it ended up becoming a poetic and autobiographical reality in the form of the celebration of an ever-elusive absent beloved. He adapted his own life to Dante’s personal myth, and in particular he conformed to it his relationships with the two main loves in his life, Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris. The former eluded him sexually at first through her sheer indolence and her murky cupio dissolvi, and then with her actual death. The latter was unreachable because she was the wife of Morris and also by her physical distance from him after 1872. However, it would be useless to put a definite face and identity to Rossetti’s absentee lover, or to establish to which of the two women or even to which of his other lovers his yearning for union and reunion refers. Rossetti does not create ambiguities or cover up the traces in deference to Victorian reticence; he transfigures and mythologizes his biography, turning every possible woman in his life into an abstract and ideal persona, the poet’s ghost and simulacrum, without a face simply because it subsumes and reassumes all these simulacra. He did the same thing as a painter with his portraits of women, in which faces are moulded by the recreative imagination from the most fleeting counterpart in reality, the complete opposite to a photographic likeness. 2. Rossetti did not include in The House of Life lyrics pervaded by his visionary trance, which lack the formal scheme of the sonnet and accentuate the tendential characteristics of that collection, the neo-metaphysical coldness, the protracted artificiality and the overuse and superabundance of oneiric situations. ‘The Portrait’ germinated from a poem which, as his brother claimed, was the work of the poet at thirteen. The fact that it had been composed well before Rossetti’s marriage and the death of his wife, and that it can be easily related to those events, proves that Rossetti had already identified his most typical poetic situation, to which his biography would perfectly adjust. Beginning with a literal quotation from Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, the poem is a short monologue of a painter recollecting his intoxicating moments of panic fusion with his deceased wife. The unison of their previous life is now only entrusted to art, to the painting that ‘speaks’, not just for the real ability of the artist but for

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the hallucinated sensuality and vibrancy of the lover, who found inspiration in a past moment of similar exceptional intensity and sensual fusion in a little damp, iridescent glade. ‘Love’s Nocturn’, one of Rossetti’s most hermetic visionary poems, is a darkened, far less colourful version of ‘The Blessed Damozel’. It is a surreal journey cadenced by arcane and transcendental apparitions in a ‘dreamland’. These dreams occur while awake, among which is also the dream of the unrealized ‘bridal unison’, the dream of the ideal woman of Rossetti as a young man, who began the poem subtly alluding to his erotic frustrations, and dream of the woman who perhaps merges, in the adult Rossetti who completed it, with the shy and frigid Siddal. The geography of this kind of Hades where shadows and translucent bodies hover, and where it is imagined that the poet himself wanders around in search of his beloved, is a hallucinated transfiguration of the Dolce Stilnovo afterlife of ‘The Blessed Damozel’. The sexual intercourse of the two separated lovers is prefigured in ‘The Stream’s Secret, 35 completed in 1869, with indescribable trembling of desire, foretasted in a scenery which is stupefyingly metamorphic in its series of miniatures. Here too the woman is an umpteenth version of the blessed damozel who, in anticipation, will have the grace to ‘lean out’ to a lover who ‘kneels beside her feet,’ and who envelops him in her ‘sheltering’ hair. 3. On the theme of absence and re-coupling there flourished, at the most prolific point in Rossetti’s career as a poet – that is around the year 1850, following on with a more sluggish rhythm – the richest series of brief and elegant variations, which are no longer gloomy and oneiric but elegiac in tone and in the manner of the neo-Elizabethan and Metaphysical poets, played out on the counterpoint and almost the correlative of a nature which 35

Written, according to Doughty 1949, 403ff., with Jane Morris in mind rather than Lizzie Siddal. The entire poem is an address to the stream, to which the poet turns to receive news of his absent beloved, received in turn by Love who may have dipped his own hair in the spring. The personification of Love is a stylistic feature of the Dolce Stilnovo and of the neo-Metaphysical poets whom Rossetti liberally echoes in The House of Life (§ 192.1). There are also in this poem disquisitions on love and on the outcome of sexual intercourse which hark back to Donne’s ‘The Extasy’. The protracted, daring personification of Love’s Hour is also metaphysical.

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is melancholic, tender and autumnal. They are lyrics that responded, at least at the beginning, to conventional, literary clichés more than to biographical events which had not yet matured, but were later made more substantial and intimate by them. Furthermore, some of these elegies and country ditties possess a diction which hinges in a quite modern way on a strong despoliation of language, on the reduction to a minimum of syntactic connections, and on the shift of the poetic accent on the phonetic and alliterative recurrence and on the parallelistic, isosyntactic texture, almost as if the painter-poet had acquired the manner of the musical poet, or had become one. 4. The same theme is objectivized in the medieval-style ballad genre in ‘The Staff and Scrip’ (1849, published in 1856). The whiter-than-white knight, returning from the Crusades, comes to the help of the queen in her castle which is in flames. Deciding to refuse rather than enjoy love, the knight kisses his weapons and other accoutrements before the battle that will result in his death. Rossetti has the knight leave his pilgrim staff and his scrip to the woman as tokens. The knight, who dies in the assault although winning it, waits in Heaven ‘five years, ten years’, thus exchanging roles in respect of ‘The Blessed Damozel’, but he is recompensed in the end and reunited with the woman both spiritually and physically, while she also keeps her intact and sensual lovely whiteness. The ballad could indeed appear to derive from those written by Barrett Browning on Arthurian themes in 1838 and 1844,36 which Rossetti imitates with a quicker pace. The pilgrim knight emerges from his battle with the flesh (and perhaps with Satan himself in person) having crossed the ‘desert tracks malign’. Having overcome the flesh he experiences extreme agitation at the sight of the lady of the castle: even she lives in a state of resignation and dejection of a sexual nature. Her ‘reawakening’ is a resurrection of the senses; sex is not

36

§ 66. ‘Penumbra’ denounces the infidelity of woman or her availability to all, in the vagueness of an oneiric idea, or sudden ‘flash’. The poet – and the entire world with him – is worn out by impotence and abstention.

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consummated, however, but sublimated, through the exchanging of gifts and vicarious rituals, such as the kissing of the sword.37 § 187. Dante Gabriel Rossetti VI: From Christian to diabolical art … Christian art and diabolical art were born in Rossetti as one creation and then proceeded for a long time at equal pace, the former never really drying up and yet always more and more eclipsed by the latter.38 It was not a fortuitous situation but rather a deliberate ‘juxtaposition’ – not all that different from that of Clough –39 that made by Rossetti in placing the poem ‘Eden Bower’, written much later (1869), immediately before ‘Ave’ in the 1870 edition. ‘Eden Bower’ reworks the apocryphal story – ever present to the Victorians after all – of the Temptation and the Fall, being the work of Lilith, the wife of Adam before Eve. Driven by his desertion she challenges God and directs lewd and torrid allurements at the Serpent to take on its disguise for the ruin and future eternal pain which would be the legacy for mortals. As already hinted, across the entire span of Rossetti’s poetry – and also of his painting – the archetypal image of the blessed damozel is removed and reversed by figures of satanic, vindictive, evil or ‘fatal’ women, sphinx-like and mysterious: women who are no longer agents of salvation for the loved one but deceitful, or self-declared workers of madness and perdition. The poetic scenarios are no longer that paradisiacal and transfigured one of ‘The Blessed Damozel’ but are injected with sadistic, infernal and telluric passion. Rossetti is keen to capture – in myth, legend, the Scripture, and history – the reverberations of this dark, destructive fascination, and to repeat them as much in the pictorial version as in the poetical one. Whereas the late portraits of Rossetti are like

37

38 39

The far less successful ballad in the Coleridge mould – ‘Stratton Water’ – also turns on the theme of post mortem re-coupling, telling how, under the gratuitous banner of the macabre, a woman who is believed dead is saved by a flood, and is then led to the altar by her lover from a former time. The pictorial versions and studies of ‘The Blessed Damozel’ date back to the late 1870s, as do the numerous repeats of Beata Beatrix and other Dantesque subjects. Sonnets on sacred pictorial subjects were written by Rossetti right to the end of 1881. § 142.1.

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a museum collection of static poses which are enormously evocative, the poems to which I am referring are usually in the form of dialogue and of rhythmical and strongly dynamic ballads. ‘Eden Bower’ consists, after a single introductory stanza, of a long address saturated with sensual and sadistic persuasion. In ‘Troy Town’ Helen turns in prayer to Venus, successfully beseeching her to accept the bowl modelled on her snow-white, desirable breast, as a pledge of a destructive plan, namely the burning of Troy of which Paris is the instigator, urged on in a dream by the vision of that incomparable anatomical part. ‘Sister Helen’ (1852–1854) is also in dialogue form, but it is more true to say it is antiphonal, interwoven with short captions of a few sharp words placed in stanzas of seven lines, each like a brief, self-enclosed act of a dramatic action, like one of the stations of the via crucis of a destructive, vindictive passion. In this most effective poem with its medieval and Gothic setting, cadenced in a narrative rhythm which is never again so relentless in Rossetti’s works, betrayed love casts its curse on the traitor with a sadistic, unstoppable desire of mutual damnation.40 2. The long and much more detailed dramatic monologue in the Browning mould, ‘A Last Confession’,41 completed over a span of more than twenty years (1849–1870), on closer inspection simply overturns the roles in ‘Sister Helen’, inasmuch that a male is the killer of a woman who has moved him to pity as a foundling picked up by him in the street. She has in turn enthralled him with her feminine, pubescent sexuality, and eventually abandoned and betrayed him for the irresistible attraction of a

40 The curse of the seduced and abandoned woman, and close to death, is exactly that of prolonging the agony of her lover who is himself also at the end of his life, and so to condemn her own soul to the flames of eternity as much as his. In vain the relatives of the dying man, and in some additional stanzas in the revised edition of 1881 his fresh spouse, go up and beg her to rescind the curse. These supplications are reported to her by her brother while she, like the enchantress of Theocritus reprised by Virgil (GSM, 443), symbolically melts the wax statue of the man in the fire. 41 The protagonist is a double of Browning’s deranged murderers – not the ‘Italian in England’ as it would appear, but of Porphiria’s lover – and also of the mad protagonist in Tennyson’s Maud.

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promiscuous, carnal love.42 The thread running through the monologue is made up of the rhythmical, associative surfacings, gradually ever more sinister and disturbing, of the motif of laughing. It is the candid, open laugh of the female child; the angelic laugh of the unmistakeable heavenly damsels with their shining hair who once again lean from on high in the man’s vision of pure love which is soon muddied. It is finally the coarse, vulgar laugh of the dark-skinned prostitute, seen at the window prior to the murder – an umpteenth variation on the opening theme in ‘The Blessed Damozel’ – and perfectly superimposed, in the blind rage of the murderer’s fantasy,43 over that of the altered woman. The turning point in the story is in the disturbing initiatory anecdote of the gift of a glass statue of Cupid which wounds the girl by shattering to pieces as it hits the ground when she tries to hang it on the wall. It is her lover who has caused her to shed blood, in a distant forewarning of the murder; at the same time the scene symbolizes the discovery of the hazards of love. The wound is a metaphor for defloration, and what follows – the medication, the kisses and caresses intent on consoling her – is a murky interlude of vicarious actions. Shortly before the tragedy the young girl, who had already made up her mind to betray, enters a church and kneels, not before the ancient effigy of the Madonna, but before a vulgar, glittering Madonna of more recent manufacture. This scene destroys, in fact desecrates the Catholic Marian cult. The foundling in this poem recalls Browning’s Pippa and Marian Erle in Barrett’s Aurora Leigh, but only until Rossetti makes her fatalistically descend the slippery slope of evil. A more sincere request in prayer made by the man, imploring that she remain faithful, goes unheard. The murder itself is not really narrated but painted, with flashes and patches of red on the dark sand of the bank of the river, and with the vision of the insolent laugh, one last time, with which the woman enters into the divine presence. 42 Doughty 1949, 124–5, suggests that the poem is a transfiguration of the troubled relationship between Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal; but this holds only in the first ‘act’ of the story. 43 Rossetti the realist is always a visionary realist: see the flash, through the words of the guilty party, of that knife which – following the double, deceitful intention at work at the back of his mind – he bought to give it to the woman, though, unconfessedly, actually to kill her with it.

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3. The only poem by Rossetti with a contemporary Italian setting, ‘A Last Confession’ is deceptive right from the start and the subtitle itself – ‘Regno Lombardo-Veneto, 1848’, and written in Italian according to a frequent mannerism of Browning. It promises a likely historical and psychological subject matter which fades bit by bit, and instead unveils the same falsifying attitude of the contemporaneous story ‘Hand and Soul’. Browning’s Italian monologues were more likely to be true and historically documented. Anyone would have been able even in 1848 to pick out the inaccuracies in ‘A Last Confession’ – indeed because they were deliberate – and the purely invented geographical places and time-frames. The poem is also enriched, or more precisely embellished, by a folksy nursery-rhyme created by Rossetti ex novo and which he has the foundling recite, given in both languages. And therein lies (it could be said from the start) Rossetti’s direct tribute to the Italian unification cause, all the more due from a natural son of that country. Here is the 1848 poem which we find in other enlightened English and proItalians like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Clough and Arnold. But what a difference, what a distortion of the archetype. Rossetti was disinterested in politics, even Italian politics. The almost Italian Rossetti, son of the exiled Carbonaro, is silent on public heroism and instead moves the spotlight to the private and intimate sphere, on the obsessions and the imbalances of his protagonist. He discovers the psychological and psychologically unstable dimension of the patriot – the patriot of tradition: always stentorian, of sterling character, but always confused, amorphous within the group, without stature or drive – and his sensuality and sexuality are violent and repressed. Rossetti, no matter how much he may have wished to, delivered a very poor service to the Unification cause, choosing a patriot for a protagonist who gives his heart for his country but is incapable of keeping himself in check, betrayed by his impulses and for this reason unrealistic and ineffective. This poem shows how right Barrett was in Casa Guidi Windows: with patriots like that, independence was just a mirage!44 4. There is nothing diabolical to tie the woman in ‘The Last Confession’ with the female protagonist in ‘Jenny’, the most risqué and scandalous 44 See § 70.3 for other recurrences of the poetic cliché, shared by Rossetti’s patriot, of Italy as the ‘mother in tears’.

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dramatic monologue in Rossetti’s oeuvre (begun in 1847–1849, completed in 1858 and revised in 1869). Jenny, a prostitute, lacks the malice of the woman loved by the Italian patriot, but she does have a hint of the attractive, languishing, enfeebled look – Eastern and Southern – of Rossetti the artist’s portraits. She does not have the boisterous laugh but has the smile on her lips while she stretches out exhausted in the arms of the young client. And yet the two women share a mysterious and unfathomable ghostly power which frightens whoever confronts them, and by bewitching them induces them to a painful brooding. The hallucinated dreamer in ‘Jenny’ follows her ‘reverie’, always ready to project the girl onto a mythical and malicious ‘queen of kisses’; he no longer sees the woman in her, but rather ‘A cipher of man’s changeless sum / Of lust, past present and to come’, a ‘riddle that one shrinks / To challenge from the scornful sphinx’.45 In ‘Jenny’ Rossetti ingeniously exploits the structural rule of Browning’s dramatic monologue, varying it in the form of an apostrophe, of an enquiry without a response, since the interlocutor is not only silent but in the throes of sleep and of dream. Taken on its own, the rhapsodic embellishments in ‘Jenny’ are not always inevitable; actually at times they are decidedly rambling and confused. In spite of Rossetti’s convictions, the best sections are those where the painter in him speaks: the chiaroscuro which veils the delicate nudes, the interior of the love-nest, the dashes and flashes of the metropolis waking up. Rossetti, like Clough in Dipsychus, effectively confronts a thorny situation which the Victorians usually hide in art. There is however a notable difference between ‘Jenny’ and the suppressed scenes in Clough’s poem.46 Like every integrated Victorian, Rossetti practises reticence and ellipsis, always showing fleeting and foreshortened views, and not representing the sexual intercourse but only the scene following its

45 A sphinx, an inscrutable fortune-teller on whom a similar power of divination is brought to bear, is the lady-croupier in ‘The Card-dealer’ (1848–1852). In a visionary way the game at her table is a metaphysical match in which the players are always losing. The sonnet ‘Astarte Siriaca’, written by Rossetti as an ekphrasis of his own painting, ends studying the face of the goddess, ‘Amulet, talisman and oracle’ of Love’s ‘all-penetrative spell’, ‘Betwixt the sun and moon a mystery.’ 46 § 144.3.

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consummation. Above all he pays homage to the cliché of the redeemable prostitute (see the clear, audacious Marian reference, ‘full of grace’), and such only through necessity –47 the cliché of the Gospel’s ‘lily’ of the field which has no need of care. Nor is there the lewd satisfaction of the act in the young friend but rather a sense of shame and even of annoyance and disgust for the purely physical lust. Besides, Rossetti attributes to him a laborious and strident effort of social contextualization of a problem which was much debated, having him speak at length on the marginalization of which the prostitute is a victim, and on the conformist censure which should give place to sympathy and indulgence.48 Rossetti’s warnings, as we shall see, were not enough; but Buchanan, whose pamphlet hinged on this work, was decidedly off the mark: there is very little missing in ‘Jenny’ to make it the corresponding literary work to Holman Hunt’s The Awakening of Conscience. § 188. Dante Gabriel Rossetti VII: … and on to the phenomenology of the real Conceived in 1847 at the heart of early Pre-Raphaelitism, and published among the very earliest Rossetti pieces in The Germ, ‘My Sister’s Sleep’49 shows a second form of erosion of Christian art, the emptying

47 Meaningfully, she is ‘fond of a kiss, and fond of a guinea’. 48 Some critics (see Spector 1971, 435–6) have detected an ironic treatment of the monologist on the part of Rossetti. Jenny’s young client is undoubtedly the immature intellectual in search of relief for the senses, and the umpteenth appearance of the public school student with his inevitable pubescent disturbances. It has also been noted that he, steeped in bookish culture, not only imparts to the prostitute conventional, old-fashioned, ‘poetic’ and ‘aesthetic’ admonishments (the flower, the lily, the rose pulled before it blossoms), but also repeatedly uses the infelicitous metaphor of the ‘book’ at his own cost. Such depiction of femininity is always after all – as one could say, from a feminist perspective – an arbitrary ‘construction’ of the woman from the male point of view. However, it must be remembered that Rossetti’s portrait-painting precisely rests on the mythological, dream-like approach to femininity (from Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris to Proserpina, Pandora, etc., right up to Astarte Siriaca). 49 Naturally, nothing in ‘My Sister’s Sleep’ refers to events which occurred in real life.

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of religion and its reduction to a series of mechanical and listless acts. In pictorial terms it is a sketch of modern life with sharp surrounding elements as in a Dutch painting, but with purposely dull and grey colours; in terms of form it is a uniquely short, stripped down one-act play in a realistic mould. The mother ‘leans over’ her moribund daughter who is taking a sleep, and when she wakes she attends to her embroidery with slow, unemotional movements, the favourite occupation of St Anne in Rossetti’s painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, and also of the choristers in ‘The Blessed Damozel’.50 The scant signs of the exterior precede the otherwise sober description of the interior and of those who are awake. The third character of this word-painting is the poet who is narrating, a student with an oppressed mind searching in vain for peace. There would be no indication that the suffering and death of his sister take place on Christmas night; those present realize it too late and they sing hymns without too much enthusiasm. In the upper floor, Christmas is otherwise celebrated hurriedly by persons almost taken by surprise by the ringing of the bells. Any state of euphoria and any atmosphere of celebration of the feast in this Christmas-time ‘set piece’ are entirely absent. The mother prays for her daughter’s health – although her prayer, like that of the patriot in ‘A Last Confession’, remains unheard – but not the son who, insensitively, buries his face in his hands in a gesture of discomfort if not desperation. His sense of loss and mental emptiness, described in the third but last stanza, is extraordinary. The great Christian celebration does not affect the dull, torpid atmosphere, and is in stark contrast to it. The sister, in a perfect parallelistic overturning of events, dies on the stroke of midnight, at the exact moment in which the birth of Christ is celebrated. In an enigmatic way, with a late allusion to the theme of ‘The Blessed Damozel’, Christ salutes the sister’s arrival in Heaven and her assumption into the ranks of the ‘newly born’.

50 Many contemporaneous ballads (such as ‘The Bride’s Prelude’, see § 194.2) repeat the motif of the sick or moribund girl, surrounded by the family’s precautions not to disturb her sleep, which are represented here in the form of the candle held at a distance so as not to hurt the eyes of the invalid.

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2. Religion is in turn inserted in the purely anthropological and historical becoming in the rhapsody ‘The Burden of Nineveh’ (1850), which harks back as much to the recurrent Victorian poetic leitmotiv of the decline of ancient civilizations as to the positivistic, ongoing debate on religion and in particular on the historical guarantees of the Christian faith. Every religion – like every civilization – has had its cycle, and having reached its zenith has gone off into the sunset. The levelling imposed by time on ancient religions – expressed by the alignment of the exhibits inside a museum –51 would, in short, involve the Christian religion itself in a not-too-distant future. There is a clear line of demarcation in the poem between realism and reverie, between a present purified of every Rossettian, nocturnal fogginess (the place from where the poet is speaking is clearly indicated: outside the British Museum), and the legendary past from which comes – as the fruit of recent excavations – the grotesque winged statue venerated like a god by the ancient Assyrian civilization. The Babylonian exhibit, a relic of defunct paganism, is the object of pressing inquiries, like Keats’s Grecian urn, Blake’s tiger,52 Barrett’s gods in ‘Pan is Dead’, or the femmes fatales of other poems by Rossetti. 3. Setting aside The House of Life and the three very long ballads written at the end of his career, the only other organic group of Rossetti’s compositions is that of the eleven songs, almost all of them traceable back to the early 1850s, which appear together, numbered, in the 1870 poetic edition. They were also oddly positioned in a non-chronological order and arbitrarily placed in a tail-piece to The House of Life, and then inexplicably split up again, by Rossetti’s brother William Michael, who mixed them up and distributed them in the most varied places in the posthumous editions that he himself edited. In their general tenor these songs are not different from the other numerous poems on the theme of the absent woman lover; they actually complement each other. They are disconsolate arpeggios on the imprisonment of ‘perfect pain’, and on the poet’s solitude and introversion, though these feelings are ‘sweet’ to such an extent that they are preferable to the company of others and community life. In particular they 51 52

Rees 1981, 54 Boos 1976, 212.

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contain obscure confessions which refer to Rossetti’s tortured relationship with Elizabeth Siddal. But some poems in this group did not pass unobserved for the even more marked neatness of their settings, for the strong, unusual and enigmatic character of the imagery and, one would say, for their nature as objective correlatives and their disarming endings. They have been in fact the object of microscopic investigations, as if they were metaphysical, sibylline little parables in which the key to a pure phenomenological attitude towards reality is contained. Rossetti works, if this is the case, by default, with elliptical and whispered utterances, alien to all Victorian rhetorical grandiloquence. It is incontrovertible at least that these intense contemplations of natural spectacles show the emptying of the Victorian sacramentality of nature and the impossibility of finding, and really feeling – let alone singing at the top of one’s voice – the sacrality of the world. Before Rossetti, almost at the same moment and completely apart from him, the two Brownings were ‘reading’ nature as ‘God’s book’, as did, and more than all the others and with unrestrainable appeals to the super-sensory, Hopkins in his joyous sonnets. Rossetti, on the contrary, though he wants to, no longer succeeds in re-composing a chaotic array of disjointed fragments which no longer have direction in a unified plan reflecting a superior reality. 4. The lyric on which this interpretation is almost entirely based is the very short and highly celebrated ‘The Woodspurge’ (1856). An apathetic Rossetti, almost driven by the gusts of wind, 53 contemplates a woodspurge in a field and does no other work than a cold botanical cataloguing; all that stays with him of the experience of his walk in the fields is that ‘the woodspurge has a cup of three’. The assumption that the universe is no longer ‘indexed’, on the strength of this phenomenic perception, can be inferred by the silence that falls immediately after this revelation and brusquely – almost precipitously – closes the lyric. This phenomenic revelation might have urged a poet like Rossetti to develop a numerological –

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The poet who rests his head in his hands is caught in an attitude of silent discomfort which is analogous to that of the brother in ‘My Sister’s Sleep’ (§ 188.1).

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in this case Trinitarian – implication which does not come about here.54 In ‘The Honeysuckle’ (1853) we find an example of another disconnected experience, devoid of meaning and dictated in its implications by a whim of an almost absurd nature: the poet picks a honeysuckle, sees it destroyed by the wind, then contemplates a field with flowers, but rather than pick another he throws away the one he had already picked.55 ‘The Sea-Limits’ (1849), one of the purest and most sublime expressions of Rossetti’s melancholic lyricism, does not attribute any other metaphysical state to man except his insertion in the continuity of time and space, and in the movement upwards which envelops him and amalgamates and unifies ‘Earth, Sea, Man’, which are ‘all in each’. But Rossetti is then incapable of bringing this movement to a conclusion, which appears to be a vague yearning for a ‘mystery’ and is subject to those same never-ending oscillations of the sea which are the dominating image of Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. The quite impenetrable sonnet ‘The Monochord’, included by Rossetti in the second, enlarged edition of The House of Life, also shows a sense of loss and separation, an impotence to share the chain of Nature’s mutability, of which Dylan Thomas was so euphorically to see himself as an integrated part, an impotence symbolized by the pause to reflect while holding his breath on ‘the bitter bound,’ and by the image of sterility of the ‘vortex’. The poet probes, in the double interrogative of the octave, but without reaching any 54 C. Maxwell’s reading (‘Devious Symbols’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Purgatorio’, VP, XXXI [1993], 19–40) brings to light an unexpected etymology in ‘woodspurge’ – that of botanical treatises – according to which Rossetti would wish to represent, or better still to predict, his real ‘purgation’ or even ‘expurgation’. ‘The Woodspurge’ would thus become an almost penitential poem. The vision which Rossetti was incapable of recovering was really that of the Tractarian tradition, that is to say, the allegorical, sacramental, Trinitarian, typological and allegorical reading of Creation. 55 Perhaps the image of the picking of the flower refers to the female ‘flower’ and the monogamous choice. In this way it is perhaps possible to interpret the parable of the wise virgins in the Gospels, resembling the honeysuckles not yet gathered, which preserve their scent and dewdrops. In such a web of autobiographical allusions this lyric reveals – or masks – Rossetti’s reluctance to marry Elizabeth Siddal (in 1853), and the prohibition by his conscience – probably transgressed – of sexual promiscuity.

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certainty, the mysterious and ‘ineffable’ law that presides over the unity of Nature, and which leads towards an ambiguous finality, as it could be either constructive as much as destructive (‘cloud’ and ‘flame’), stretching out equally to nothingness and to life.56 A final metaphysical song, ‘The Cloud Confines’, which did not form part of the songs of 1870 but was composed just one year later, explicitly doubts the finalism of the universe and the afterlife with the suggestive image of the cloud that doesn’t open, and whose lips do not reveal what they contain. 5. ‘Chimes’ from 1878 is unique in Rossetti’s poetry because it is a poem made up entirely of sounds, a phonological weave that borders on the asemantic and therefore becomes rarefied in meaning and a pure phenomenology of language, almost as if it had been reduced to something within the confines of sound only, while losing all syntactic links. Each of the seven extremely drained sections expands from a phonological dominant, and is a musical reverberation based on a precise consonant sound. That which the words convey separately is a sense of reciprocal disconnection, the suggestion of desolation and abandonment. The poem makes sense and communicates by use of evocative flashes and unrelated images that cannot be fitted into a logical texture or a development. Many of the 56 The second tercet, an enigma for all critics, may perhaps be explained as the grateful and flashing ‘rapture’ which ‘regenerates’ one that shortly beforehand – while pausing before the musical rhythm of the ocean and the ‘vast vault’ of the sky – was in an ‘emergency’ situation. The poet starts walking and moves, with the help of a warm breeze, to a sheltered space, and in so doing he can now turn around to look, as if symbolizing past experiences, the places where he was in ‘dismay’. The ‘difficult eddies’, as much as the ‘devious coverts’, point him towards a path along his own footsteps with a laborious movement or in a zigzag motion. However, the poet misses the message of this epiphanic ‘regenerate rapture’, since even the sestet is composed of two non-rhetorical interrogatives which remain, in effect, unanswered. In 1870 the sonnet bore an inscription which was removed in 1881 – ‘Written during Music’ – which was reflected in the first line and referred to the rare instrument of the title: the sound of the air seemingly produced by the sound box of the sea, the ‘moved air’ and the ‘moving sound’. In 1881 the allusion to music was attenuated to give a cosmic halo to the first line and the feeling of a vaster horizon: the ‘vast vault of the sky’ and the ‘ocean’s sound.’

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rhyming couplets are without a verb, so there really is not any action: it is a form of communication, one could say, through ideograms, which looks to Pound and the Imagism of many years later. § 189. Dante Gabriel Rossetti VIII: The prose stories Without counting innumerable prose sketches which Rossetti used for his poetry as skeleton drafts,57 and other short passages complete in themselves but also used as preparatory for short stories (and actually plays) that were never written, there are at least two complete or almost complete works, both appearing in 1849, by Rossetti the inventive prose writer. ‘Hand and Soul’, which the poet boasted of having written in just one night to complete one of the numbers of The Germ, seems casual in its simple plot and completely lacks credibility and bite. The stylistic area of the piece is that of artificial, historiographic and critical prose, except for the vigorous and intense dialogue scene – even filled with banter – in the second part of the story, which takes place in the present in the Pitti Gallery in Florence, where student artists of various nationalities mock an important painting by an imaginary twelfth-century Tuscan artist called Chiaro dell’Erma. The far from linear parable of this painter adumbrates the genesis of the painter’s vocation as a necessary reconciliation – if not a compromise – of discordant objectives, and thus its aim is to establish a theoretical approbation of Pre-Raphaelite sacred art. In its final suggestion the story bestows autonomy on art – even from market conditionings – and claims its nature as an expression of inner spirituality. In a historiographical sense, Rossetti salutes the anonymous twelfth-century precursors of Cimabue and of the early Florentine pictorial art, and points to the dual

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‘The Orchard-Pit’, a death fantasy left by Rossetti in a fragmentary state, is a contamination of the myths of Edenic temptation, of Proserpina and of the Homeric sirens. The tempting but lethal fascination with the apple – which through a probable but very useful typo is in the poem ‘bitter’ and ‘bitten’ – and the illusory song of the life and love of the siren which reveals itself as Death, are tortuously followed in the longer prose passage of the same title. The parallel treatment in poetic and prosaic form – and the presence of the sirens – invite comparison with Arnold’s ‘The New Sirens’ (§ 152.5).

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love of God and pure art as their original motive. The first manifestation of the artistic impulse is indeed a non-religious art, a ‘visible embodiment of thoughts’ and an almost tingling delight of the senses. The painter feels simultaneously the spirit of emulation and rivalry and the search for independence of style. Chiaro’s next experiences illustrate somewhat laboriously the assumption – at first believed erroneous by him by virtue of his scruples – that faith is not alternative to the adoration of beauty and that, above all, God does not ask for a didactic and moral art performed to impress the spectator. This is proved to him by a skirmish, described with an excessive, sketchy verve, between rival Pisan families, actually under one of his own painting representing the allegory of peace. He confirms this definitively with the apparition of a female form by which he feels overcome but which at the same time sounds to him as the echo of his own spirituality. This woman, who is the incarnation of the painter’s soul, is the mystical and dematerialized blessed damozel, who comes forward and speaks from another world and in typical Rossetti style holds her loosened hair over the painter’s face and covers it. She tells him of the vanity of fame but also denies him every oratorical and persuasive skill, encouraging him to suture everything which he considers divided: Heaven and Earth, sacred and profane, faith and worldly love. Art which comes spontaneously and responds to an interior inspiration, pleases God; it will be blessed by God, even if carried out without directly thinking about Him. 2. The picture of one’s inner nature and of the soul actually constituted a precept which was foreign to the Pre-Raphaelitism of 1849. So ‘Hand and Soul’ is an imaginary tribute to that primitive art form to which the Pre-Raphaelites turned, but it is also, at least where Rossetti is concerned, an admission of a distance from some of its points of reference, first and foremost that of a popular and socially efficacious art. Although the story unfolds and develops up to a certain moment in strict accordance with the ‘horoscope’ of Rossetti’s career, it then lapses quite into a student-style farce. It is easy to guess, under the guise of Chiaro – he is presented as a pupil of Giunta Pisano, and suddenly realizes that he has nothing to learn from him – the Rossetti who turned to Ford Madox Brown. In the same Giunta Pisano and in the other imaginary rival, Bonaventura of Lucca, the other two components of the founding nucleus of the Brotherhood may

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be guessed. Rossetti the ‘forger’ mentions with perfect seriousness a ‘triptych’ in Dresden which is non-existent, as is its author. In the feignedly autobiographical epilogue (Rossetti had never been to Italy, let alone Florence) the narrator chances on Chiaro’s painting of the Soul, and he resorts to a scholarly footnote to position the painting, number it and then include it in the gallery’s catalogue. It is symptomatic that such a ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ painting is found near the Berrettino by Raphael himself, but that no one cares about that primitive painter: even the Italians who are present attribute the interest of an Englishman, who copies it, to a love of ‘roba mistica’ [‘mystical stuff ’], very similar to the ‘nebbie di là’ [‘fogs over there’]. 3. ‘Saint Agnes of Intercession’, which was never brought to conclusion, was also planned to be published in The Germ, but the journal ran for only four issues, and the story came out much later in 1886. It too mixes autobiographical reminiscences – the exiled father who hums wartime nursery rhymes to his children, as indeed did Gabriele Rossetti – with the fruits of forgery, including an epigraph attributed to Sterne which is clearly Rossetti’s own work. From the strictly literary point of view ‘Saint Agnes of Intercession’ is a good deal less immature than the preceding story. One appreciates a strong adherence to the contemporary standards of fiction and to those of the nineteenth-century masters of intrigue, no less than a fluid style serving an ingenious and compelling plot rich in twists and coups de théâtre. A young painter falls in love with a friend of his own sister and strives to be in a position to marry her. In the portrait of a woman which he exhibits – for which he has used his girlfriend as its model – a critic discovers a similarity between her and a St Agnes by the same Angiolieri (another invented name) whom the painter had studied when a child and who had remained unconsciously stuck in the depths of his memory. The painter now wants to see the primitive and ‘original’ version of his own painting. The story from here on assumes an air which is pre-Henry James and pre-Hitchcock. After various attempts coming to nothing he learns that the painting is to be found in Perugia; rushing there he discovers that the picture – and here we are with Wilde – is the exact likeness of his girlfriend. The natural climax of the story is the moment in which the painter discovers that also hanging in the Perugian gallery is the self-portrait of Angiolieri, which naturally enough bears a striking

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resemblance to him. On his return he falls gravely ill. He recovers again, but is considered mad by his parents when he recounts the events, pretending to believe he is really the reincarnation of Angiolieri. 4. ‘Saint Agnes of Intercession’ may be seen as a free commentary between the lines of the events of early Pre-Raphaelitism. The painter has the painting of his betrothed accepted to the exhibition after some anxiety, and this detail cannot but recall Rossetti himself and his fright of placing himself at the mercy of the admission appraisals. The poet-critic of the story, author of a conventional, mawkish poetic specimen invented by Rossetti only to ridicule it, represents the hostile press of the time, against which Rossetti takes his revenge. The painter laughs nervously at a veiled conjecture from the critics, referring to the weak prospects of the market; however his picture is sold. Although he is represented in a negative light, the critic is not however completely obtuse, indeed sharp enough to provide the turning point of the plot, the discovery of the mysterious similarity between the woman in the picture and Angiolieri’s St Agnes. Even in ‘Saint Agnes of Intercession’, not all the precepts of PreRaphaelite aesthetics of 1848, and in particular that of Rossetti, can be said to have been respected. Every artwork, Rossetti said anticipating Barrett Browning’s aesthetics in Aurora Leigh to the letter, ‘should be wrought out of the age itself, as well as out of the soul of its producer’;58 but only the second part of this affirmation appears applicable to Rossetti’s early canvasses, which had sacred subjects. The painting exhibited in the story follows an ‘uncompromising adherence to nature’ and has a modern subject, and it is specifically ‘English’ in terms of ‘theme, costume and accessories’. The similarity between the two paintings – that by the Pre-Raphaelite painter and the one by Angiolieri – is one of ‘style,’ and yet the face in the second picture is ‘exactly the same’ as that of St Agnes. Angiolieri, the imaginary contemporary of Benozzo Gozzoli who was introduced to the three founders of Pre-Raphaelitism in 1848 by the engraver Lasinio, has in reality almost completely put into practice the realignment of his life to art and to the skill in shaping the inner life which characterize the mature Rossetti. 58 On Aurora Leigh see § 71.2.

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The fourteenth-century painter, we learn from the entry in the catalogue in the Perugian gallery, only gave the dying lover in the painting the ‘attributes of Saint Agnes’ at a later moment. The nineteenth-century painter of this story discovers he has painted not a living model but to have brought to life on the canvas the ‘dream of his childhood.’59 § 190. Dante Gabriel Rossetti IX: Painting up to 1865 The two Rossetti oil paintings in ‘early Christian style’ of 1849 and 1850 – which show traces of influence from Rossetti’s teacher, Ford Madox Brown, in particular during his ‘Nazarene’ phase – seem to be out of sync and suggest different – if not directly opposing – pictorial concepts. The first, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, appears to refer to a moment which follows the second, Ecce Ancilla Domini. This latter is a bare unadorned picture, resolved in an essential, divisionist colourism, in which a Whistlerian whiteness predominates. Mary is shown in a bashful, terrified state, pale and extremely thin. The uncertain, simple perspective is partly imitated from the works of Flemish painters Rossetti had seen on his 1849 trip to Paris and Belgium. His sister Christina posed as Mary in the painting, while his brother William Michael lent his face for the Archangel.60 The Girlhood has more figures with intense, solemn looks. There is a more varied colour palette even if it is always transparent as in a watercolour, and with ampler drapery. The embroidery table in the first painting is now opened out, and the embroidered lilies are a little more faded. Mary is really copying the work from nature, and there is a lily – the symbol of purity – with its stem miraculously erect and being contemplated by the angel. The vase in which it is placed is decorated and placed on top 59

In the introduction to Blake’s biography by Gilchrist (see above, § 182.2 n. 1), Rossetti affirms that it is not possible for an artist to express his own totality without sometimes freeing himself from the ties of nature: from the outset the artist has to conceive the ‘completed form’; only then, as the painting unfolds, does the support of and comparison with Nature take over. Blake himself was not always faithful to the rule of adherence to Nature and he broke it very often. 60 There are very many ekphrastic sonnets on Annunciations circa 1849, the work of painters of the most varied schools and nationalities, and a tangible sign of a long and accurate study before Rossetti’s debut painting.

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of the plinth formed by books of the theological virtues. St Anne, draped like a lady from the fifteenth century, is almost rubbing her hands as she observes the embroidery on which her daughter is working in a not overly enthusiastic and almost absent-minded manner. The common element in both paintings is the screen curtain, which in the second picture is pulled to the right revealing St Joachim, whose model was the only domestic servant kept by the Rossetti family, his head blithely leaning backwards as he cuts off a bunch of grapes. The naïve characteristics of the Girlhood are contradicted by and inconsistent with the picture’s dense, minute and coldly artificial symbolism. At the bottom of the picture there is a palm branch with six leaves and seven slips of a blackberry bush which bears the gospel quotation prophesizing Mary’s pain. This is a detail which is only perceptible to the naked eye, as always in Rossetti’s work. The triangle, drawn with the symbols of the Trinity and the Holy Spirit in the corners, sits in the middle of the red drape which hangs from the balustrade, symbolizing the blood of Christ. In the middle distance there are climbing vines, following an overused typological technique, on a cane frame in the shape of a cross. The background is Lake Galilee. All Rossetti’s paintings of a biblical and religious theme would be characterized by a similar hallmark. According to Ruskin, an 1857 oil painting of St Catherine had very little to do with religion. One of the culminations of the religious paintings and watercolours is The Wedding of St George and Princess Sabra (1857), but the picture shifts the theme to spiritualized carnal love.61 In the many reworkings of this subject Rossetti, except in one case, always focuses on the follow-up to the sexual intercourse: here the erotic swoon of the saint with the princess. In 1858 Rossetti began an altar piece for the cathedral church of Llandaff in Wales, a Nativity sui generis which is crowded with symbols. The mixture of aestheticism and religion appears in a drawing which later became a sonnet, Mary Magdalen at the

61

Not counting the much researched and versatile lock of female hair, which after a complicated journey passes through the eyelet of the knight’s armour, a detail which caused Roger Fry to pronounce the undoubtedly right guess that it is like a ‘modern Carpaccio’.

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Door of Simon the Pharisee (1858), a Magdalen who already has much of Rossetti’s femme fatale in her look – even if she takes away the roses from her hair, vainly dissuaded by her lover. In the brushstrokes in the clothes and in the floral cascades this drawing is marked with a fullness and a turgidity which are by then the antithesis of the bare colourism and of the volumetric essentiality of the two debut paintings. The religious sentiment is diluted and dissolved in complex and abstruse symbolism in Mary in the House of St John (1858). 2. Apart from the two oil paintings of 1849–1850 and Found, a tribute to the moralizing realism which was the first banner of Pre-Raphaelitism,62 Rossetti’s entire decade from 1850 to 1860 is taken up with drawings and watercolours. This production finds its guiding light and his inspirational literary text – like much of his poetry too – in Dante’s Vita Nuova, assumed as a veritable autobiographical frame of reference. The first signs of Dante’s influence are in the typical ‘linear’ style, with elongated figures and cuneiform characters, sobriety and essentiality of treatment but also a studied arrangement of the elements. In the drawing The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice, in an austere style with black brushstrokes, strange objects are bunched together. Characters and apparently unrelated details in the background are dense with meanings which even surpass the original intentions of the source work. The subject was then re-executed in colour with a skilful mix of Flemish, Dühreresque and fifteenth-century elements from painters such as Ghirlandaio, Lippi and Botticelli, which caused Ruskin to marvel at them. Another episode from Dante’s juvenile work inspired a similar replication of a Dantesque theme: The Salutation of Beatrice, which, in the first execution of the drawing (1849–1850) captures – in two panels separated by a Cupid – as much the two highlights of the narrative plot as the stylistic transition from the flat, elongated figure of the first to the more rotund figure of the second. The scenes from the Vita Nuova can also be interpreted as a symbolic, coded, parallel illustration of the evolution of 62

In this painting – practically unique for its modern subject, unfinished and painstakingly retouched during Rossetti’s career – a farmhand, at the first light of dawn in the deserted streets of London, surprises his one-time lover who is overcome with shame. He is carrying the little lost sheep of the Gospel in his cart.

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the relationship between Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal. This work contains unusually mannered symbolisms which are quite often bizarre, in particular those connected with the colour of the clothes of the painted Beatrice, to cite an example. The third Dantesque subject of profound allusion or autobiographical premonition for Rossetti, later frequently re-elaborated and reworked, is Dante’s Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice, first painted as a watercolour in 1856, and played out on the symbolism of the poppy (sleep and death) and hawthorn blossoms, the bringers of life. At the turn of the 1850s, the Dantesque scenes denote a fifteenth-century pictorial mode which tends to make them more curved and polished. 3. Following a new watercolour technique no longer based on the softened colours and the rounded, elongated figure, Rossetti executed studies and scenes inspired by a second myth, rich in personal references and resonances, namely that of the Round Table, assimilated from the pages of Malory. The surface of these watercolours is now rough and grainy, the colours are not just spread but also rubbed onto the paper, scratched and cut into it by the reverse end of the brush, giving the effect of a wax crayon. At the same time a kind of stiff-looking figure stands out, with an accentuated and noticeably grimacing expression, ‘expressionist’ or surreal. Primitivism in these watercolours really follows a style which is poles apart from the sharply defined one of the future Rossetti portraits of females. This is shown in the slightly disproportionate acute angles and pointed arches (far removed from the prevailing rotundity of ‘The Blessed Damozel’) and in the absence of any linear definition. Even in these Breton cycle scenes the religious theme – the search for the Holy Grail – appears somewhat secularized. On the other hand, Rossetti, like Tennyson, fuses the cycle and the story of Lancelot and Guinevere with the Temptation of Eden, inserting the symbols of the serpent, the apple and the Cross. His fascination with the Breton cycle expires at the end of the 1850s: a Damsel of the Sanct Grael of 1874 already exploits the tones of the sensual, drowsy and languishing beauty of the third most important model to Rossetti, Alexa Wilding. 4. For the most part executed in pencil, the portraits of Elizabeth Siddal spin out into a copious series, beginning with that of 1853 which depicts her with a lock of hair between her lips. Her hair is given

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prominence and special care in other drawings, also unfinished. The last charcoal drawings dedicated to her portray a woman who is devoured by evil, all eyes lit up like small flames. Even after death Elizabeth continued to invariably lend her face and features – obsessively multiplied in King Arthur and the Weeping Queens – as much to Dante’s Beatrice as to Guinevere. The oil painting Beata Beatrix of 1864 presents a studied colouristic background (red for death, green for life, purple for suffering). The symbolic details include the poppy flower being delivered into the hands of the blessed lady by an unusual red-coloured dove; the colour red is symbolic of the typically Rossettian hendiadys of the spiritual – rather the divine in this case – and the carnal.63 This is Rossetti’s masterpiece of the oneiric sfumato and ecstatic trance: the sundial, with the pointer singularly projecting and tapering, signals the proverbial ninth hour. The woman’s thick hair, painted in relief, at that time signified an autobiographical premonition,64 because it would be the receptacle of the poetry which Rossetti believed he had definitively buried. A series of impenetrable elements, both symbolic and figurative, placed by Rossetti in the background of the canvas – Dante’s silhouette sucked into the shadow, a well, a tree in blossom, a river – all come clear in the innumerable repetitions which make Beata Beatrix the most replicated picture in all of Rossetti’s work. In them, Rossetti puts further emphasis on Elizabeth’s pose and reduces it to the bare essentials; the poppy flower becomes white ‘perhaps to symbolize the purity of the death of the woman’.65 In Dante’s Dream from 1871, Rossetti paints beautiful female figures – typically Rossettian – with darker colours and decorative elements which had been established in earlier works. In this work the three Beatrice’s pose in Beata Beatrix – the mystical-sensual weariness and the hypnotized, stunned look – recurs in various studies and preceding watercolours, above all in a drawing from 1853 portraying the return of the poet Tibullus to Delia. Now a sinner, meeting her beloved she keeps her eyes closed with a lock of hair between her lips. It can also be seen in St Cecilia from 1856–1857, a drawing in an unusually marked style – even ‘barbaric’ – which portrays the saint playing the organ in ecstatic rapture, in the middle of a teeming crowd of objects which are, in this case too, purely symbolic. 64 Benedetti 1984, 246. 65 Ibid., 299. 63

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handmaiden figures with their extremely white waxen faces, full lips and beautifully adorned tawny hair, are almost like sisters or triplets. Beatrice has the face of Jane Morris but Elizabeth’s blonde hair. A third repetition of this picture in 1880 adds more distinctly decorative art features and Michelangelesque forms. § 191. Dante Gabriel Rossetti X: Rossetti the Dante scholar, translator and critic Rossetti first came into contact with the works of Dante ‘growing up’, but it was not a labour of love before 1845. His brother William Michael and the following biographers have listed the numerous and disparate texts on which the adolescent Dante Gabriel formed his early literary enthusiasms, often complementing his reading – if in a foreign language – through translation. So Rossetti, even before he translated from the Italian, was a translator of the most universally famous ballad by Villon and of others in old French (which deal not by chance with the theme of the break-up of lovers), of the Nibelungenlied and of ‘Lenore’ by Bürger, and of another ballad, that too chosen with much foresight, of the German poet Hartmann von Aue.66 It was from 1845 that Rossetti patiently began translating and slowly polishing his most imposing and unified translation work, Dante and His Circle,67 completing and publishing its first edition in 1861. Around the integral text of the Vita Nuova Rossetti arranged an anthology – divided into two parts and accurately furnished with introductions and biobibliographical indexes – of versions of works by the poets before Dante and by the Dantesque and Stilnovo poets. Rossetti was of course the best-placed, almost predestined Englishman to carry out such a task: not only was he an Anglo-Italian, but Dante and the Stilnovisti and all the thirteenth- and

66 The leprous Heinrich has neglected God for too long, but the virgin who offers to save him has over-neglected the world: in this legend one can therefore loosely track the emergence of the typically Victorian dilemma between enjoyment and renunciation of the world, often incarnated in the figure of St Simeon the Stylite and the hermits who wish to reach Heaven as quickly as possible. 67 Dante and his Circle is the 1874 title; in the first edition, the title was The Early Italian Poets. The first volume was dedicated to his wife, the second to his mother.

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fourteenth-century poets up to Petrarch were one of the sources of his poetic eclecticism. His father was a professional Dante scholar – as Rossetti dutifully mentioned in the preface – and a sophisticated though fanciful Dante critic. His merit was that of having filled a gap, since little or nothing was known of the thirteenth-century troubadours or Provençals, whose themes and terms, of the angelical woman and of the religion of love, were being used without knowledge of the exact source.68 But with the critic and philologist – and also with the historiographer, inspired by curiosity and love of the anecdote – the original and re-creating poet cohabited together. The years spent on this vast and remote poetic body of work provided a form of invaluable apprenticeship, and a testing ground for his poetry. They also ultimately supplied new life-blood to English poetry itself. It is not unusual to find echoes of Rossetti’s poetry in his translations, retracing themes and devices favoured in his lyrics of the same period and later, as well as an identical idiolect, lexical recurrences, the same turns of phrase and the same expressive idiosyncrasies. 2. Victorian translation occupied illustrious academics and professional poets. However, Browning, Tennyson, Arnold and even Clough had been engaged in the classical repertoire or just sporadically in the works of the day. Rossetti had the merit of presenting an outdated and almost buried repertoire – apart from Dante – to the English cultured public, but one not aesthetically inferior for all that, and above all an anthology which in itself was an organic work, not a series of scattered ‘specimens’. Before him only Byron and Shelley, among the major poets, had made courageous incursions into Italian literature; after him, Rossetti’s translations of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian poetry will be silently treasured by T. S. Eliot. Rossetti in fact remedied the disinterest that affected the pre-Dante poets of the period, whose existing editions had very low philological standards. In Italy too, he noted, the works of these poets consisted of nothing more than a catalogue of ancient words with which to enrich the historical dictionaries. Being a poet Rossetti was an almost infallible anthologizer, and he diligently selected the absolute best from a

68 Hough 1949, 72.

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most copious repertory. His declared aim was that of providing a metrical, rhyming version. Even if today it appears self-evident, the distinction he makes between fidelity and literality is most useful, the latter being lost in a rhyming translation, something which has often given rise to pedantic and pointless complaints to the translator for having ‘enriched’ or conversely ‘impoverished’ the original. To exemplify this, the Dantesque translation by Cayley is quoted and eulogized by Rossetti as being ‘faithful’; Carlyle’s versions are criticised as being slavishly ‘literal’. The only violation against fidelity in favour of literality can be found in the case of Fazio’s Dittamondo [‘Song of The World’ – Rossetti’s title], the translation of which does not respect the original metre in tercets. 3. In the Vita Nuova, Rossetti perceived the ‘murmur’ which prepared and preannounced the ‘sea’, or rather saw it as a book which was eminently ‘juvenile’,69 and which established the ideal of the feminine for generations to come. He himself had received from its pages the stigmata of the hegemonic supremacy of love, and sentimental, emotional, even soppy and morbid love. Dante’s work was for him a realistic, disguised canvas, an ‘allegorical superstructure’ over and above ‘real events’. The chapter dealing with the marriage feast is nothing more than a veiled, fleeting hint at Beatrice’s real marriage with Simone de’ Bardi; and the ‘donna gentile’ who comforts Dante after Beatrice’s death could be seen as, and actually is, Gemma Donati, married by Dante just a year after the death of Beatrice. Re-reading Dante in the light of Rossetti one is struck by the quantity of precursory elements derived from Dante: for instance, the personification of Love, who in a dream holds Beatrice and offers his heart to her as a meal; the analysis of the beatifying virtues of Beatrice’s greeting, the numerical symbolism of three and nine, a sophisticated discussion on which can be seen in chapter XXIX; the distinction between the heart as the appetite and the soul as reason, as put forward by Dante in chapter XXXVIII. Rossetti, in his desultory annotations to the text, shows off the calm control, moderation and scrupulousness of the scholar. However, the contents show another 69 The etymologist explains ‘nuova’ as ‘young’ but also, in a mystical sense, as ‘regenerated’, and with Beatrice he advances the theory that ‘Beatrice is Love’.

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side to the reader, who detects in these pages traces of Rossetti’s own psychological story. One feels already immersed, with very few discrepancies, in Rossetti’s world, that of his early lyrics and of the whole cycle of The House of Life. He was to translate very little else from Dante, whether due to the fact that the Divine Comedy was already authoritatively translated in English (the latest version was that of Henry Francis Cary, most highly praised by the Romantics and by Rossetti himself ), or whether because the Vita Nuova – more ancient and more juvenile, more passionate and idealistic, and less theologically based – was the work by Dante by which he was more strongly attracted. 4. The anthological section dedicated to the pre-Dante poets in Dante and His Circle, preceded by short accounts of the poets presented, gathers fairly well-known texts such as those of Guinizelli alongside other very rare specimens, which are unknown even today among the Italian middlebrow public. In two cases – Ciullo d’Alcamo (sic in Rossetti) and Saladino da Pavia – Rossetti translated dialogue poems which refer us to ‘The Blessed Damozel’. There is a wide selection from Jacopo da Lentino, whose sonnets and short songs also have something of the cheerful candour of ‘The Blessed Damozel’ about them. A good deal of thirteenth-century Italian poetry revolved around the features of the Dolce Stilnovo woman, the angelic woman capable of infusing kindness into the heart and of being an intermediary for the poet-lover of a divine love directed towards the Creator. Hence a frequency in Rossetti’s book of lyrics – some of which in themselves not exceptional – of a theoretical and speculative nature about the concept of love. If one is to judge by the choices and criteria adopted in making this anthology, Rossetti’s idea of the thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury Italian literature is not far removed from the image we have of it today. In the first place it is for him a culture which is highly literary and in which the versified letter, and the sonnet even more so, were exercises in style, though they also actually served the purpose of communication for events of daily life. The court functionaries and the monarchs themselves participated in this culture not as dilettante or secondary figures; Rossetti also included, in fact, two poetic specimens by Frederick II and King Enzo. Politics and religion were the other two major branches of medieval knowledge, and it is no wonder that they are represented just one step below love.

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Rossetti rightly conceived the medieval world to be factious, divisive and always ready to catch fire. On close inspection this aspect fascinated him for obvious reasons – the circles, the guilds, the confraternities. The other side of the coin, however, is represented by Angiolieri’s frank and at times coarse anti-Dolce Stilnovo style and by a humble and more bourgeois vein of the Folgore da San Gimignano kind. In the case of Cecco Angiolieri, Rossetti imitates his rough lexicon in his versions, which are saturated with corresponding popular and witty expressions. In Folgore he captures the ease of a domestic world of refined leisure, the pleasure of the word-play and the taste for outdated words. The rural ballads of Sacchetti, describing farmworkers getting up in the early morning to go into the fields, and shepherdesses happy in their miserable lives, acquire, once translated into English, an unexpected pre-Victorian veneer. 5. The preface to Dante and His Circle dedicates a large space to the history of Florence at the end of the fourteenth century, in order to give an account of the circle of friends that had spontaneously grown up around the magnetic figure of Dante himself. In this case too Rossetti developed a vague feeling of controlled identification. Dante’s circle formed an illustrious precedent for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Every member of this circle, of whom Rossetti gives a separate and distinct assessment, is presented as a satellite that orbits around a principal planet. Shrewd conjectures, which were in part discussed with his brother, led Rossetti to taking a position on important biographical and literary cruces of the fourteenth-century authors. The choice of the poets from the Dante circle was indeed dictated by reasons which were not only aesthetic, but also by the connection that existed between the texts and the authors within the radius of that orbit. This is why a sonnet of Cavalcanti was included which explains Dante’s dream; why the epistolary sonnets abound, as well as the verbal crossfire between the various friends of Dante and between them and Dante himself. Most of all, Rossetti catches the reflections of the Vita Nuova, as well as the echoes that this esoteric work was capable of evoking, and the fascination and curiosity Dante’s Dream could arouse in everybody – just as it had in himself and in his painting and poetry – a dream which was obscure to its dreamer, and which his friends ingeniously competed to explain for him.

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6. The remainder of Rossetti’s work was sporadically that of the art and literary critic,70 but the only one theoretical piece which merits attention is ‘The Stealthy School of Poetry,’ a brief apology requested by a pamphlet by Robert Buchanan, which had such a damning effect on the mental equilibrium of the poet-painter. What was so upsetting then about this piece entitled ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, by an obscure Scottish poet and critic, published in its first edition under a false name in 1871 and the following year in a revised and augmented edition? In itself ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ is one of the quite common examples of atavistic, obscurantist British dilettantism, pragmatic and without crazy ideas, and it fits in well with other extemporaneous documents which for reasons extrinsic to their polemical value have had a certain posthumous hold, like Kingsley’s review against Newman or Ruskin’s attack on Whistler. Like these, this pamphlet may be read not only as a symptom of and a synonym for fin-de-siècle revanchist criticism – as a dam erected to oppose the spread of aestheticism – but also like a gallery of sketches in which a bursting creativity (which Buchanan possessed in small doses) flows freely. In one of its aspects – that of aesthetics – ‘The Fleshly School’ is nothing more than an Arnoldian appendix. It derives from Essays in Criticism and corroborates, while faithfully underwriting, the pronouncements which in those same years Arnold was anxiously launching against the nefarious penetration of French literature into England, by now lacking in Hebraism.71 Buchanan’s aesthetic is far simpler and more linear: ‘poetry must be [ …] sown with the fresh and beautiful idioms of daily speech; and it must deal with great issues in which all men are interested’. He is as such a second Jeremiah who inveighs against the corruption of customs and turns

70 As an art critic he occasionally replaced his brother William who wrote in The Critic. Among Rossetti’s reviews an important one is devoted to the portrait of Chaucer by Madox Brown (the same Rossetti posed as model), in which Rossetti claims to be his discoverer and prophet, and another is on the painting by Hunt, Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus, of which he praises the precise rendition of the characters. On Rossetti’s main piece of literary criticism – the integrations to Gilchrist’s biography of Blake – see § 182.2 n. 1. 71 § 168, but Arnold’s most severe attacks on aestheticism came after 1870.

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nostalgically to the native, contemporary, English purity which, according to a medical metaphor, suffers from a foreign infection and of an illness which is typically ‘Italian’. Buchanan’s metaphorical lexicon is extraordinarily similar to that of the apocalyptic literature of Thomas Arnold of Rugby and of Ruskin; like them, he resorts to the image of the ‘miasmic cloud’ which is irreparably infecting the age. He was not against all things fleshly on principle; he admitted that all literature revolves around the body and the flesh. He declared himself a Puritan but not a purist, and he bowed to Chaucer and Rabelais. He was in fact concerned with the ostentation of nudity, but in order to ostracize it he had to describe female flesh which is either glimpsed or shown without veiling in photographs or spicy magazines. He too was a secret, denegating victim of the morbid obsession with the high-kick of the Parisian CanCan, which Rossetti had seen in person in Paris in 1848 and had been disgusted by. At last Buchanan cannot refrain from the delightful parody of the eager lover in the paraphrases he gives of the snaking spirals of sexual intercourse. Rossetti’s ‘cunning’ (he had responded to the first version of the pamphlet) had been for Buchanan that of justifying the flesh as far as conjugal love is concerned, but it too was always animalism, not sublimated love. Buchanan perceived straight away in Rossetti and in his poetry the full affirmation of lubricious sensuality; not only that, he also discriminated between a carnal literature intended for sexual stimulation and another literature, just as carnal, which is informed by didactic objectives. Rossetti is for him the last representative of a school which is not only fleshly but ‘scrofulous’, a school which, apparently eradicated and extinct forever in the nineteenth century, had been picked up by the ‘degenerate’ Poe and given new life by Baudelaire. Baudelaire praised the debauched and morbid nature of the Parisian in a worthy entourage (and both Baudelaire and Poe were in their turn descendants of the hated ‘Italian School’).72 Buchanan was a however a shrewd reader and interpreter of Rossetti in spotting in the ‘fleshly school’, even if just to criticise it in an Arnoldian fashion, the 72

Swinburne is Buchanan’s other target, in his turn an English Baudelaire and exponent of the ‘scrofulous’ school; however, for Buchanan, Swinburne was already showing signs of recovery.

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primacy of poetic expression over thought and the prevalence of sound as an end in itself. His explicit theoretical premise is, assenting to Goethe, that poetry is expressible thought, spiritual thought over-abundant with ideas, a poetry therefore capable of holding something of itself even if reduced to prose. In the detailed examination of some of the more representative of Rossetti’s compositions, Buchanan demonstrates an uncommon insight in highlighting with precision some of their characteristics, obviously ignoring that his hostile reviews would soon be turned inside out like a glove by a new and different class of readers. At least one of the constituent veins of Rossetti’s poetry was traced back by Buchanan to its primal source, that mixture of the profane and the sacred, of things religious and erotic which, inherited according to him by Baudelaire, harked in fact back to the vilified Crashaw and to continental, Catholic Baroque: conversely, Crashaw was ‘a Rossetti of his time’. 7. Buchanan had claimed to have traced the exaltation of ‘carnality’ in Rossetti’s work, but Rossetti had a million reasons to retort in ‘The Stealthy School of Poetry’ that his accusations had been made on the basis of an unfair and targeted extrapolation of individual sonnets from The House of Life and, more seriously, of single, very short quotations uprooted from their contexts. For every sonnet such as ‘Nuptial Sleep’, which described post-coital languor, there were dozens which sang the praises of the conjoining of bodies and souls. The harlot’s laugh in ‘A Last Confession’ had an irreplaceable internal psychological function; ‘Jenny’, too, could only have been written by him – after having weighed up and rejected a treatment ‘from the outside’ – from an inner point of view. The accusation that form was pre-eminent in his poetry, that expression was more important than poetic thought and sound more than meaning – an accusation that could be literally applied even to Mallarmé and the symbolists – was hurriedly rejected by Rossetti by pointing out that his themes – love and hate, analysis of passions, deep disillusion – had all been treated by Shakespeare himself. This ‘accusation’, in reality not entirely a false one, was the best indirect acknowledgement that Buchanan, who had not yet read ‘Chimes’, had understood at least something, if not all, of Rossetti’s poetics.

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§ 192. Dante Gabriel Rossetti XI: ‘The House of Life’ I. Stylistic contamination and structural unity The House of Life,73 with its 102 sonnets (plus an introductory one), may be taken as a whole as the peak of Rossetti’s poetic oeuvre. It also forms the ‘poetic edifice’ of his life, since its writing covered a span of more than thirty years from 1847 to 1881. This was exactly double the time it took Tennyson to complete another work of an occasional nature, In Memoriam, which consisted of single compositions which only afterwards their author realized were informed by the same inspirational sentiment and had originated from a similar private loss, just as Rossetti’s were. Their emotional, not only artistic value is shown by the fact that Rossetti, with a morbid, necrophiliac gesture which I have often noticed, buried the manuscripts of the sonnets written until the death of his wife in her tomb only to reexhume them later. They had been dedicated to her along with others which had been darkly inspired by less-defined erotic passions. It would be gravely mistaken, however, to consider The House of Life an immediate transposition of biographical material. It must be placed alongside the great songbooks of the mid-Victorian period, alongside In Memoriam, Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love. However, The House of Life stands apart from them and outdoes them in at least three aspects: in its capacity to plot oneiric, visionary and even surreal settings in which autobiographical references lose focus and any biographical correspondence; in a linguistic orphism which rests on a cultured, alchemical lexicon, and on the studied recurrence of words of profound personal effect; finally in

73 The collection received its complete, definitive configuration in 1881. A first edition, almost half of the total, came out in 1870. As I will discuss, the second part contains sonnets which were written after 1870, some even after 1880, though also others written at a very early age. Even setting that aside, the two parts of The House of Life could not be separated in this discussion. On the dating of single sonnets in The House of Life see the chronological table in W. M. Rossetti’s edition and the corrections provided by F. M. Tisdel, ‘Rossetti’s “House of Life”’, Modern Philology, XV (1917), 257–76. I will identify the single sonnets with Roman numerals.

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the skilful revival of a quite disparate range of ‘courtly’ devices and stylistic features, drawn from the allegorical and figurative Dolce Stilnovo and Renaissance traditions, in which every residual autobiographical detail is filtered or transcended. The Dolce Stilnovo had been fully assimilated by Rossetti during his translator’s apprenticeship and with his versions of the thirteenth-century Italian poets and of the Vita Nuova. In the first sonnets of The House of Life Rossetti celebrates the perfect, Stilnovo physical-spiritual union, which as such identifies itself with divine love; he celebrates the desire which is ever ‘desire in deity’ (VI). And love is Love, an abstract but personified power to which the poet turns and which he addresses more frequently than the woman. Love is an intermediary who guides him to her.74 Perfect love in body and spirit raises the lovers to nobility, and by virtue of this nobility it excludes them from the sphere of other mortals. They in their turn function as intermediaries for whoever wishes to know the perfection of love.75 However, Rossetti’s Stilnovo is enriched and updated by elements of Renaissance allegory and even Baroque pageantry. In the sonnets of The House of Life Love often becomes a stylized Cupid, the blind little deity who sticks his arrows in people’s hearts, amuses himself playing with the ladies, distributes and receives gifts. There are many Renaissance ‘allegories’, emblems and ‘transfigurations’ of Beauty on the throne and other personified abstract powers, to which Rossetti always attributes the capital initial (e.g. Love, Hope, Song, Fame, Oblivion, Life, Death, etc.). On the stylistic and constructive plane the Rossetti sonnet of The House of Life is a major exercise in combination, an eclectic amalgamation of argumentative modules and procedures imitated from the Stilnovisti, the Elizabethans, the Metaphysical and the Baroque poets, which Rossetti

74 But the woman in XXVII is love tout court: ‘and is not thy name love?’ 75 The recurring metaphor of the birth of love as a mother giving birth (II) is typical Dolce Stilnovo, as is that of the male lover portrayed as an infant (an image which is reversed in sonnet XXII, where the woman is a child), and that of the lovers presented as twins (XV). In L, love is dead and a rebirth is awaited which is delayed. In the sonnets on the theme of absence, this image undergoes a decidedly pessimistic about-turn: it becomes a stillborn child (LV).

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had grasped and perfectly assimilated, such as the extended metaphor, the exemplum,76 parallelism and contrast (often neatly developed in the two sections of octave and sestet), the rhetorical question, the ‘definition’, the presentation in dialogue form, all of which he knew how to re-use with supreme self-confidence.77 2. The list of Rossetti’s borrowings and models, and the amplitude of the time span over which it was composed, suffice to suggest that The House of Life is a composite work. The varied typology of its sonnets opens up gradually like a fan resulting in a heterogeneous work: the hyperbolic, idyllic sonnets, celebrative of the stupefying unity in love, and the epithalamia and the propitiatory hymns of the beginning are followed by sonnets of agonizing expectation and of the visionary reunion in life and after death. With the second of the two parts into which the collection is subdivided we enter a more confusing sequence of sonnets at times metapoetic, other times introspective, metaphysical, of religious enquiry, or of a gnomic and sententious type, ending with others actually ekphrastic, based on paintings of Rossetti or preparatory studies for them. Yet I will try to demonstrate that The House of Life is a unified and structurally indivisible collection. Imperceptible internal links connect even the parts and phases which appear to be more disconnected, and whose function and outcome is not often pointed out or appreciated. Suffice it to think that it was no other than Rossetti’s brother who, on first seeing the work, 76 In the cases of vehicular exempla or parables Rossetti often manages to skilfully compress little narrative plots into flashes from which the sestet extracts the metaphorical meaning. In XCI the octave – two rival lovers are reconciled on the tomb of the deceased loved one – presents the speediest advance in time, from the birth of love in the suitors to the woman’s sudden death. 77 Side by side with the Italian translations must be placed, in order of formative importance, the prodigious juvenile bout-rimé sonnets – even those written in adolescence – which form a little self-standing collection of poems and in a rather personal way weave a tapestry on the theme of the absent lover. The relevant elements in The House of Life are all there: the stylized, intellectualized vision of the woman, the death of the beloved, the mysterious forbidden love, the longing for reunion. Rossetti probably mourned, at such an early age, not so much a deceased lover as a conventional role.

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complained about the absence of internal cohesion and sensed the lack of any control over the chaos. This verdict was supported, in his opinion, by the erratic and extempore manner in which the work came to be formed. Its two parts, which bear two titles almost exactly reversed and connected to one another (‘Love and Change’ and ‘Change and Fate’), are also numerically balanced, and the internal unity is ultimately emphasized and corroborated by the presence of several cycles of sonnets grouped together under a single title. However, one cannot deny the greater compactness of the first part, ending at sonnet LIX, whereas in the second part Rossetti includes – to balance it with the former – pre-existing sonnets of a more varied nature. The continuous, agonizing and frustrated dialogue with the absent woman is muted in the second part and gives way to the soliloquy. The male lover has entered a path of regeneration after his acceptance of absence. Hence the frequency of expressions denoting distance; hence the over-abundance of words – particularly in the final sonnets – including the prefix ‘trans’ in their titles and subject matter, such as ‘transfigured’, ‘transformed’ and others. In the light of its epilogue The House of Life – which, as I mentioned, begins following a closely controlled, refined reprise of the forms of past traditions – re-enters the Victorian groove of a poetry as recollection of a crisis crowned by the recovery of moral equilibrium, both psychic and emotional, after a debilitating and almost unbearable period of spiritual unease. 3. Despite this high sophistication and intertextuality The House of Life had and still has a very limited following, and one almost confined to the cultured elite, as Rossetti himself foresaw, aware he had written his sonnets for the ‘chosen readers of poetry’. The reasons for the unpopularity of the work lie in his courageous challenge to the established forms and rules of such a genre as that of the love song-cycle. The absence of recognizable points of reference, both spatial and temporal, of a regulating rhythm of identifiable external events – as happens with Tennyson and Barrett Browning – undoubtedly means in the long run that the sonnets are more and more equal among themselves and generate a spasmodic and slightly oppressive concentration on the narrow setting of vision. In the same way the repetitive play with personifications may leave one cold. Contemporary and subsequent critics noted and stigmatized this artificial nature of the

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work and its typical ‘hothouse’ atmosphere, invoking the freshness of simple things and saving and eulogizing of the not-too-many instances of spontaneity in the collection. Two accusations are however entirely unjust and by now negligible, having arisen out of Victorian linguistic purism. The sonnets in The House of Life follow an ‘Italian’ scheme, slightly anomalous but functional, varying the arrangement of the rhymes in the two quatrains, but without altering the internal balance of the sonnet. As for Barrett Browning, although with lesser insistence, the occasional ‘imperfect’ rhyme – that is the simple assonance – was roundly attacked by critics. This, once again, breaks the rigid formal schemes within which the Victorian poets worked. The same critics denounced the ‘carnality’, explicit though more often only alluded to and muted by the sfumato technique, or even rather camouflaged, of some sonnets, and at any rate always solemnized in their mystical, spiritualizing yearning.78 § 193. Dante Gabriel Rossetti XII: ‘The House of Life’ II. The esoteric and Dantesque texture As Rossetti’s brother William Michael was the first to point out, the title The House of Life contains a reference of an astrological and zodiacal kind: the word ‘house’ must be taken to have the same meaning as that which it has in ‘the house of Lion’; life, according to this allusion, is placed under the influence of the position of the stars, in this case of the

78 The sonnet ‘Nuptial Sleep’ was second only to ‘Jenny’ in Buchanan’s hostile review. Transposing it in religious and suffused language it describes the end of sexual intercourse (metaphorically, the last drops of the rainstorm just ended). The imagery of deflation can easily be read in a sexual sense, but there is also the delicate image of the flowers which separate from a single stem. The sestet is a masterpiece of Rossetti’s oneiric imagination: the sinking and the re-emergence of the souls during sleep and waking, but all this is expressed with arcane terms and through bewitching scenes of smooth surfaces and ethereal places in the world of dreams. This sonnet, numbered VIa, had editorial vicissitudes which were very similar to those of the conclusion to Pater’s The Renaissance: it was included in the 1870 edition, excluded from that of 1881 due to Buchanan’s vituperations, and only readmitted into the first complete edition of 1886.

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houses of Change and Fate.79 This reference, it must be admitted, seems very general and little developed throughout the work. However it is not useless, and it corresponds by and large to an internal division: the hour, the moment of the reunion of the lovers takes place, in LV, in the ‘house of love’. The architectural, figurative model is without doubt much more plausible. It has been ingeniously conjectured that the numerical relationship in the sonnets that make up the two parts may be that of the octave and sestet in a sort of hidden iconic allusion, and of a gigantic technopaegnion. This would constitute the fusion of the astrological and the architectural theme, since the ‘house’ is made up of rooms and many tiny ‘cells’ of single sonnets which together form a house, or better still – given the mortuary theme – a mausoleum. Forming the collection was a task of amalgamation of different levels of homogenous and heterogeneous subgroups of sonnets belonging to various periods of production, and whose chronological sequence, in the two stages of the organization of the work – those of 1870 and 1881 – was not always followed. The body of work was on both occasions more disassembled than re-assembled; actually, the chronology, looking at the dates of composition, even ended up for a large part being reversed between the first and the second part, which gathers together sonnets just written but also some among Rossetti’s most precocious, dating back to 1848 and even 1847. There is a perceptible indication of this lack of homogeneity in the pronominal oscillation in the sonnets, in which the poet speaks of himself in the first person, but also addresses himself as ‘you’. 2. Rossetti presented The House of Life as a public, paradigmatic work, in a way not too dissimilar from Tennyson’s In Memoriam. He not only spoke of ‘a complete dramatization of the soul’ but also contemplated a denial of the ‘personal character’ in the sonnets, as Browning had done with Paracelsus. This was in itself quite superfluous, because The House of Life is everything except a spontaneous outpouring.80 And yet since the day after 79 See Savarit 1961, 26–8 n. 23, for a comprehensive discussion of the astrological implications. 80 The explicit LX and the more Metaphysical LXI establish the origin of poetry in the tears of one’s life and its efficacy as the provoker of weeping. But XLVII calls to

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the work was published readers and critics racked their brains to reconstruct, behind the mists of vision, the reflection of Rossetti’s relationships with the two women in his life. The actual facts behind the poetic transfiguration are as ephemeral as ever. If it is true, as William Michael Rossetti claimed, that some sonnets date back to 1847 – when Rossetti had not yet known either Elizabeth Siddal or Jane Morris – The House of Life actually takes its cue from Rossetti’s affective prehistory, and from erotic passions that were very probably only virtual. It is thought that Lizzie presides over the first part and Jane over the second part of the collection, but an insoluble – because deliberate – superimposition of the two figures dominates the work. While Rossetti’s brother maintained prudent reticence about the two recipients of the sonnets, according to the most t­ rustworthy of successive biographers only eight sonnets were ideally inspired by Elizabeth Siddal in the whole collection, and the rest by Jane Morris; but having said this it is impossible to quantify the percentages in any accurate way. Even where Jane would be dominant, it has been noted that her brown hair was kept blonde or red, the colour of Siddal’s hair, by means of makeup. Likewise, the distance from the beloved which is often regretted by Rossetti may be ambivalent in any sonnet: physical distance from Jane and otherworldly distance from Siddal after her death. One hundred and two sonnets revolve in concentric circles around the experience of an intense love, lived and consummated under the sweet influence of Cupid, with no sense of place – if not that which is represented by unchanging backdrops of stylized flowing rivers, seashores or beaches – and without any sense of time, if not that of the changing of the seasons and the alternation of day with night and the moonlight. Rossetti is not Wordsworth who, in his maniacal topographical and temporal precision allowed the identification of the precise locations in which his poetry had been conceived

mind the necessary assuaging of the tormented scream and of the desperate pain, employing the metaphor of the mother who trembles on hearing her son utter his first articulate words. The sonnet is therefore a word interrupted by tears, and a word which, soothed, has become distinct and musical, surviving the biographical context of immediacy, even if the impending desperation is so great that song threatens to turn out ungainly.

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and often written. Rossetti’s geography is the oneiric and visionary one already announced in ‘Love’s Nocturn’ and ‘The Stream’s Secret’. 3. The introductory sonnet clarifies Rossetti’s aesthetics and his compositional procedure of occasionality. It describes the erection of a monument to the moment which, in so far as it is a monument, miraculously renders it a perennial act. With an underlying Horatian allusion – exegi monumentum aere perennius – which is not usually noted, Rossetti establishes from the beginning the sonnet as an agent of perpetuation gushing from the intimate, capable of withstanding the wear and tear of time. The sonnet being built thus as a monument will always have its ‘crest’ raised and be ‘in bloom’ as confirmation of its strength and as a show of defiance; it will also be capable of being a comfort in death, and an exorcism of death. Following on the goldsmith-sculptor metaphor is the numismatic one of the sestet. The double function of the sonnet, like the two sides of a coin, lies in the antithesis ‘death’ / ‘immortal’ which the sonnet overcomes: it is both baptismal rite – or lustral rite – and funereal rite, and as such a coin that is exchanged for life and death, or love and death. The aesthetics of occasionality and of the eternalizing of the moment is reasserted in various successive sonnets, which immortalize fleeting moments of the intercourse and eradicate love from the becoming. This aesthetics is expressly recalled again in the last sonnet of the first part, a reply to the opening one, in which the cycle of the seasons symbolizes the transience of time, but the laurel, love’s last gift, is a sign of immortality. Not the last sonnet but one of the final ones – XCVI – introduces the metaphor of poetry as a mirror of memory, on which appear ‘thy love’s death-bound features never dead’. 4. Following the opening sonnets, which are emblematic allegories of the birth of love, comes a homogenous series of idylls, exceptionally more contextualized and less sublimated in terms of atmosphere. XI even sees the woman at her writing desk, her heart pounding, the ink running in a rivulet which is staining the white page, from which the sound of a sublime, harmonious melody rises up which reveals her soul. Immediately after it XII recalls a stroll on a June day and an inevitable moment of lovemaking with perfect fulfilment. There is the intoxication and ecstasy on the bank of the river on the first signs of spring. Following this idyll

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the hyperbolic diction overflows, placing the woman in her supernatural perfection: XXVII attributes the meaning of all things and the resolution of all conflict to the woman; XXVIII revolves around the paradox of an infinite love that fades out and yet remains infinite, inasmuch that love does not ever fulfil her and after every ecstasy and rapture the flame of desire reappears in her eyes. Other sonnets are organized according to the ‘metaphysical’ device of the ‘definition’ or of the mythological comparison.81 The first demarcation in The House of Life just about cuts the first part at the halfway mark, with little ‘alarms’ which are overcome, thanks to Love. Actually in XXV one can still palpably feel the moment of transition between the ‘old’ and the ‘new love’, between Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris. In this sonnet a time is foreseen when the ‘winged’ female lover will no longer be within reach and the male will wander, conscious of her unattainability, watching a sky without wings, and the arresting image of the wood in which ‘the bloodied feathers’ are ‘scattered’. XXXVI is a confession of a sense of impending death which is only crossed by flashes of the woman’s existence – perhaps memories – as she lives on in her amulets; but she is fragmented in lips, hands, eyes and above all that braid of hair which is ‘all love hath to show,’ in contrast to her heartbeats that had stopped ‘long ago’.82 This turnaround is sudden and enduring, and results in sonnets which are interwoven with exalted, mysterious, oneiric figures of nocturnal absence, hardly revived and torn apart by epiphanic flashes, longings for earthly and supernatural reunions and despairing, dream-like memories of the woman’s features and postures.83

81 82 83

The male lover is a young Paris (XXXIII) subjected to a new arbitration. In XXXII the gap between the lovers is closed, as in Barrett Browning (§ 68.3), and the lovers are placed on the same level in the giving and receiving of love. The hair is that of a deceased woman, and at least in this the autobiographical reference to Lizzie would appear inevitable. ‘True Woman’, the second and slightly less successful internal cycle of the first part, comprises three sonnets which were written among the last in 1881. At a distance it is once again brimming with astonishment at the perfection of spiritualized beauty, with tender comparisons with the pearl, jealously guarded by the sea, and with the buttercup under the snow.

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5. The internal cycle ‘The Willowwood’ (XLIX-LII), the first and one of the most admired in the collection, comprises four sonnets connected by a faint narrative thread. The male lover leans over a pond or well and sees the image of his lady reflected back to him; Love is seated beside him. In the first sonnet, Love is holding a lute and imperceptibly, at the sound of the instrument, the lover discovers his beloved’s features in Love’s eyes and he is moved. The ending of this first sonnet produces one of the most glorious oneiric images in Rossetti, in which the gentle ripples of the pond are transformed into the woman’s tresses, and her lips rise from the waters, overflowing with kisses. In the second sonnet Love sings, and the image of this nostalgic and indescribably melancholic song is just as lovely, similar to that of the spirits of Hades who yearn for rebirth. Suddenly, silent disturbing thoughts are formed of days past. However, the two lovers enjoy – in an imaginary way – a moment of respite, living in suspended time, and their kiss lingers on charmingly. In the third sonnet, Love’s song is directed towards whoever cannot enjoy this supreme moment of physical and spiritual union and who yearn for it in vain, but instead must wait. Love’s song sorrowfully admits that the lover is worn out by this absence, by the struggle and the tantalizing frustration; the two souls will wander as forms burning with desire, without ever getting to eat the food for which they long, their only relief sleep and forgetfulness. Finally, in the fourth sonnet, there is the most delicate of images in the roses which, having huddled all day in the heat of the sun, begin to droop and wither: the epiphany and the intoxication of the kiss – which lasts for the whole song – also come to an end, and the face reflected in the water vanishes. The decision to physically ‘drink’ that face which had appeared and vanished, that is to drink a mouthful of that water, is almost brutal. 6. The relevance of the Dantesque organizational84 model of The House of Life, among so many possible which have been found and tried out, has often escaped the critics because it is objectively very weak and even distorted. The collection exceeds by two or even three sonnets the hundred compositions and so the number of cantos in The Divine Comedy. It does 84 Boos 1976, 260–5, superficially discusses the relationship with and the echoes of The Divine Comedy in Rossetti; at any rate she does not cite Morse 1933.

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not reproduce its number of parts – reducing them to two – simply because Paradise cannot properly be made attainable in the existential conditions from which Rossetti’s sonnets originated. To look at it another way, the development of The House of Life seems reversed, since the progression is from Paradise to the Earth of the lovers and to the Hell of absence, then to the Paradise of the lovers spiritually reunited after death, a Paradise yearned for but only anticipated and thus downgraded to Purgatory. The Dantesque model comes to the fore in the second part of the collection, which begins and continues under the mark of the almost complete disappearance of the woman, and with sonnets which are of a meditative type – religious and metaphysical – and reflect a more sorrowful Rossetti, a broken man incapable of recovering stability. Not by chance biblical quotations and admonishments increase, while they are far less numerous in the first part. In this segment of confessions and self-probings one can see the comeback of the maternal côté – English, Puritan, and even self-repressive – in Rossetti, especially in the most precocious sonnets, composed in his twenties in the full flowering of his ‘Christian Art’.85 The two parts of The House of Life then precisely illustrate the double-sided, Janus-like nature of which I discussed while introducing Rossetti; the second part brings back to the surface the feeling of guilt and remorse. A clear proof may found in the sonnet ‘He and I’ from 1870 (XCVIII), which effectively places this psychological split in relief by materializing it in the image, which Rossetti uses on at least two occasions in painting, of the ‘double’. The poet splits in a bitter ‘self ’ crushed by guilt and in a later, ‘new Self ’ more trusting and 85

Sonnet LXXXII – the temptation to tear down the fruit before it has ripened, or rather before its ripeness has vanished and the fruit begins to rot – may be a reinterpretation of Original Sin, as in ‘Goblin Market’ by Christina Rossetti. The first of the two Clough-style interior voices in this sonnet anticipates a moment of full and regular possession; but the second is impatient and proceeds to taste the fruit. LXXXV is a Dantesque vision of Hell: there descend there, to fall victim to Satan the ‘Torturer’, the ‘fair deeds’, condemned for a ‘soul’s sin’. This sonnet too has a sexual background in the turbid and persistent comparison between the good actions and the ‘virgins’ who, being the objects of God’s ‘desire’, could have become saints, and whose ‘maidenhood’ is instead rendered ‘abominable’ by sin, the ‘destined wife’ of the Torturer.

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cheerful. The predominant manner changes too, becoming self-assertive, firmly appealing in order to retrace his own steps and turn back.86 Sonnet LXVII speaks expressly of a ‘turning point’ at the well, as soon as a stone symbolically thrown into the stagnant water has destroyed the reflected image of the sky but also that of his past self. The pond water is not, as in ‘The Willowwood’, the backdrop of an amorous epiphany but rather a symbolic pond, the Samaritan’s spring, in which one was certainly not to dare throw stones but should only drink from it. With these sonnets, even though they are far more objectivized, Rossetti eventually realigns himself with the confessional poetry of the early Victorians, recalling as he does Arnold’s precepts concerning work and activity and the parable of the misuse of the talents, and even echoing the more agonizing Victorian experiences of the Deus absconditus.87 In this context his confessions of artistic impotence88 and in particular the youthful triptych of sonnets LXXIV-LXXVI that preach an art at the service of faith (in lines which are among the poorest ever composed by Rossetti) are not out of place. Also the two ekphrastic sonnets LXXVII and LXXVIII are introduced pour cause, because they sharply juxtapose the emblems of sublimated love and diabolical love,89 namely the blessed damozel and Lilith of other poems 86 This is often expressed with the quite varied metaphor of the wanderer in the forest, or the hill-climber. 87 Rossetti, it is often pointed out, anticipates the near-contemporary ‘terribilism’ and auto-flagellation of Hopkins, who transcribed some of these sonnets in his exercise book as a young man. On the basis of the fact that death cannot be postponed – summed up in the biblical phrase ‘tomorrow you will die’ – Rossetti exhorts in ‘The Choice’, the first internal cycle of the second part (LXXI–LXXIII), that the Epicurean, quietist option be eliminated and instead the perspective of ‘thought’ and ‘action’ be embraced. Anyway, as in many of Browning’s monologues concerned with Streben, the metaphysical quest is never ended, because beyond the farthest point of infinity stretches – still unexplored, as in Leopardi – infinity. The unfathomable and disturbing mystery of the afterlife is the subject of LXXXIX: man ‘strains his blind surmise’, but the mystery escapes him. 88 In XCI – ‘Lost on Both Sides’ – Rossetti confesses himself to be a failure as a painter and a poet. 89 The unconquerable demoniacal is the subject of ‘Retro me, Sathana!’ (XC, 1847), the octave of which apocalyptically foretells the storm which throws the knight from

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by Rossetti. Even sonnet XCIV, on the subject of Michelangelo’s kiss, represents an example of senile chastity, strength, restraint and acceptance of the little that life has to offer. Sonnet XCV, among the most persuasive and quietened of the entire collection, chooses the image of the vase as an emblem for the end of the path to Purgatory, its rounded surface telling stories which are fully understood and internalized by the observer, and illustrations of actions halted in their joy and in their happy realization. Hope, as the religious salvation and the alter ego of the woman assumed into Heaven, emerges together with Peace as the dominant motif in the last fifteen sonnets, and constitutes the principal subject of the final one. § 194. Dante Gabriel Rossetti XIII: The final ballads Three long verse narratives telling of deeds both historical and imaginary, and based on the premonition of love rejected, unsatisfied or betrayed, or on the heroism of the past, were written and completed by Rossetti after 1870. They make up, along with the later sonnets of The House of Life, the most significant and almost unique proof of his waning poetic genius in a decade ever more marked by physical and mental exhaustion, and therefore more devoted to replicas of his most successful portrait-paintings. However, they are poles apart from the dense, spasmodic linguistic concentration, both abstract and visionary, of the sonnets. Rossetti returned to a genre he had regularly employed at the start of his career,90 but the three ballads, though noteworthy as experiments in metre, are too distant, in both the complex plot and the rather gratuitous and sensational overloading of details, from the true source of Rossetti’s inspiration, except for the sections where elements of witchcraft,

his cart, adrift without a driver. Satan is met head-on in the sestet, with his power to attract many men to himself. The last four lines are concerned with endurance and the task of walking through the narrow door. Satan will await the day when the ‘phials’ of the apocalypse will be overturned. 90 Each of the three ballads (as Boos 1976, 104, rightly notices) contains analogies and parallelisms with previous compositions and may be considered a reworking of them: ‘Rose Mary’ harks back to ‘The Bride’s Prelude’, ‘The White Ship’ has ‘The Staff and the Scrip’ as its antecedent, and ‘The King’s Tragedy’ remoulds ‘Dante at Verona’.

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mystery, cursing and premonition come into play. Admired by Pater, who inexplicably judged ‘The White Ship’ Rossetti’s most representative work, they escaped almost unscathed from the attacks of posterity, until the close reading they underwent at the hands of more recent critics, resulting in an overvaluation which in my opinion is not convincing.91 2. One must discuss the unfinished ‘The Bride’s Prelude’ before the three principal ballads of Rossetti’s final decade. Begun and continued for a good part of the year 1848–1849, further expanded and revised in 1859–1860, it was only published in 1881, without the more ‘Gothic’ ending that Rossetti had intended to add. This ballad hinges almost exclusively on the atmosphere that it creates – the soft air that fills one’s lungs, the panoramic views and close-ups that slow down and often almost halt the story, the minstrels, the palfreys, the jousts and the sporting entertainments, the timid and attentive handmaids, the gems of gold, the valuable hand-worked textiles. All this seems to derive from Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and Coleridge’s Christabel.92 The narrative itself is full of the paraphernalia of the medieval ballad, with some dashes of Boccaccio-like boldness (the high-ranking woman cured by the ex-seminarian, to whom she takes a fancy and of whom she becomes the passionate lover). It enshrines a parable about the oppression of the senses (the protagonist was also in a convent) and about youth’s wings clipped in its instinctive impulses. The healing effectiveness of sexual gratification is indirectly exalted. The girl’s fall from the horse is symbolic: it is the revival of the senses, and likewise the recovery which symbolizes carnal love being satisfied. The ending confirms the generally accepted law of forgiveness: that of the merciful God of the New Testament – stories of which are represented on the tapestries – and 91

Most notable of these are the long and admired discussions in Riede 1983 and Boos 1976, and the more undecided judgement – not far removed from my own – in Hough 1949, 69. 92 The colouristic, chiaroscuro contrast in the opening between the two sisters is just as successful and prolonged; I would define them as ‘the dark one’ (Aloyse) and ‘the sunny one’ (Amelotte). The first takes refuge in the symbolic shadow of the room, the other opens up to the light and to the world, moving ‘Rossetti-style’ to the window to enjoy the blazing summer sun. Aloyse is the embroiderer devoted to Christ, like many of the early Rossettian female figures.

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the sister’s forgiveness on the part of her siblings for her pre-marital adultery. The happy ending is crowned by the revelation that her lover is alive. 3. The plot of the long ballad ‘Rose Mary’, written between 1871 and 1879, also deals with the expectation of the husband-to-be; obscure premonitions (on his journey he has to survive a dangerous ambush) are communicated by the young girl to her mother through magic and read from a beryl-stone, a priceless sphere taken from the bottom of the sea. The story, punctuated by the songs of the spirits enclosed in the magic sphere, unravels with complicated, gratuitous concessions to magic and the more disparate of Gothic mannerisms: its flow, as the mother says to the girl, is like ‘the torn thread of a broken dream’. There was actually no necessity to weigh down the development by attributing the blame for two distinct and diverse wrong-doings to the engaged couple: they had pre-marital sexual relations, but the husband-to-be had betrayed the unknowing Rose Mary with another woman, whose brother according to medieval custom will kill the evil knight, thus avenging the dishonour. The prophecy of the sphere is deliberately incorrect owing to Rose Mary’s secret sin; but the mother’s divining ability is incongruous: she suddenly senses that the lover is dead in the ambush. Almost like a sleep-walker, Rose Mary in the last scene climbs to the altar where the beryl-stone is kept and shatters it with her father’s sword, but in so doing she meets her death. The work revisits quite late in time the series of the courtly medieval ballads by Tennyson and Barrett Browning on the theme of purity betrayed; however, its more precise lineage is that of Barrett’s ‘The Lay of the Brown Rosary’ and of the ‘cognitive ordeals’ composed by her between 1838 and 1844, having as protagonist a poet but always concluding with his sudden death on receiving knowledge.93 The ballad may be taken as a parable about the overcoming of evil, which however is so absolute that it necessarily brings about death. While the knight ends up irrevocably condemned, the young girl, saved by remorse, is assumed into heaven amongst the choristers of the Blessed Virgin, purified like the ‘blessed damozel’. At the same time the evil

93

§§ 64.4–5 and 66.2.

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deceitful spirits expelled from the beryl-stone are typical Luciferian spirits, or satanic Victorian angels enveloped in an elegiac light. 4. The farrago of details was notably thinned out in the fast-moving ballad composed of simple concise couplets ‘The White Ship (1880), based on an anecdote dating from 1120 related by the sole survivor of a marine disaster in which the young Henry I, the depraved heir to the throne, perished – not however before having carried out a redeeming act of courage. The more unified ‘The King’s Tragedy’, composed after 1868 and completed in 1881, was a revision in the form of dramatic monologue of a ballad by the Scottish king-poet James I, and tells of the heroic and also in itself ingenious sacrifice – the result of the readiness of spirit no less than that of courage –94 on the part of the Queen’s lady-in-waiting in order to save the lives of the royals who were being threatened by the rebel English subjects. The ballad flows smoothly, but at times so overwhelmingly that it appears flat; it actually exhausts itself every time it tries to bring back to the surface the political negotiations between the king and the rebels and the intrigues of power. It also wears thin in the interludes and the slightly over-naïve skirmishes between the young sovereigns. It is saved as usual by the descriptive interludes which give off the scent of Scottish landscapes and the atmosphere of nights illuminated by the moon and swept by winds and rain. An old wizard-lady, to whose responses the king turns a deaf ear, is the only supernatural apparition. The insoluble ambiguity which characterizes the supernatural premonition in these last of Rossetti’s ballads does not escape the king, and the premonition always speaks with a divine and the same time diabolical voice, which should be interpreted cautiously and is often misunderstood.

94 The lady-in-waiting actually inserts her own arm into the lock of the crypt where the king is hiding, into which the rebels are trying to penetrate. In this way she at least saves the queen, who will be then able to avenge her husband. Rees 1981, 105, observes – in my opinion too insistently – the posthumous vendetta of the queen, who cannot really be compared to the protagonist of ‘Sister Helen’.

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5. ‘The Ballad of Jan van Hunks’,95 begun by the nineteen-year-old Rossetti, continued into the early 1860s, was practically completed on his deathbed. It is a weird, grotesque and almost unrecognizable example of nineteenth-century Faustian imitation. Precisely by reason of the Faustian theme, and closing in perfect coherence Rossetti’s poetic career, it realigns itself with Sorrentino, a youthful work which presents a caustic, cynical devil who is expert in amorous intrigues. Everything is clouded in pipe smoke in this poem which describes a smoking competition with coarse gracelessness; from it emanates a bitter taste of tobacco in dense bluish clouds. The reckless, indifferent challenger of the Dutch king of smoke is naturally Satan himself in disguise. The game is also a spectral allegory of the Judgement because as the competition is unfolding, the poor are enduring the intense cold in the streets without disturbing the thoughts of Hunks. His sons, who have married not to further their interests but out of genuine love, are knocking vainly on the door. It falls to the priest to certify at the end van Hunks’s death, to recognize Satan and expel him with the Sign of the Cross. Van Hunks is carried off to Hell by Satan on his back, and a pipe for the devil is made with his body. § 195. Dante Gabriel Rossetti XIV: Development and influence of Rossetti’s portraits At the beginning of his career, Rossetti’s models for the persons portrayed in his pictures had been the members of his family, particularly his sister and his mother; used again after a long spell of time they revealed the signs of the years and of anxieties. There had also been portraits of his father or self-portraits which retrace the path of the poet-painter from youth to maturity; or portraits of artists and poet friends of his, among which the incisive and sinister one of Browning and one of Swinburne stand out. Swinburne’s portrait in particular manages to reproduce the astonishing, ephebic and almost feminine beauty emanating from his clear eyes, his languid lips and most abundant head of tawny hair. The evolution of Rossetti’s portrait painting is marked by the hegemony gained by the 95 I follow the text – in this instance only – of the edition of the works edited by Doughty.

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successive models of the artist. They were almost invariably tied to him by a morbid affective relationship. But that evolution may also be read according to the frequency with which their faces were painted – from the restless romanticism symbolized by Elizabeth Siddal to the destructive sombreness of Jane Morris to the overflowing, sensual fullness of Fanny Cornforth. Increasingly after 1860, and predominantly after 1870, Rossetti actually became a painter of faces and a portrait painter. Although he may defined the highest devotee of feminine sensuality, he is not a painter of full figures. Whenever he paints the entire figure he paints it fully clothed; nudes are almost non-existent. For Rossetti femininity is concentrated in the face, of which the head of hair is an integral part. In the second instance it rests in the hands: symptomatically the unfinished works leave all the other parts of the feminine body sketched out only, except just the hands and the face.96 2. The advent of Jane Morris in the portraits – Rossetti’s brother William Michael considered her beauty to be a non-English type, but rather Greek-Ionic, enhanced as it was by the brown-black hair parted in the centre of her forehead, and by the tight mouth protruding in the form of a bud –97 dates from 1857, while Rossetti was still in the middle of the Siddal period. It resulted in Rossetti’s art in portraits and numerous and enduring uses of her figure over time. Hers was not the sensual beauty enthroned but the reclining, spiritualized, meditative beauty, set in sfumato and Da Vinci-style shadowy and tanned backgrounds. She was Pia de Tolomei in a painting of high symbolic concentration; a Botticellian Persephone, Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’ and Pandora. Fanny Cornforth – according to an account which was perhaps apocryphal but not improbable – was also approached and practically chatted up on the street. In her portraits Rossetti accentuated the rich, opulent beauty – ever more so

96 One of these is an evocative and charming study, one of the last left by the artist, only fully portraying the beautiful hands of Jane Morris and her face in her usual pensive mood, and a study which perhaps might have been deliberately left in that state. 97 Jane Morris bewitched everyone who got to know her: from Bernard Shaw – to whom she seemed like a sphinx – to Henry James, who saw her as a Paterian Gioconda, a synthesis of all the Pre-Raphaelite works which had never been executed.

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with the passing of the years – painting it also in scantily dressed and inviting poses, were it not for the residual and inextinguishable melancholy and typical Rossettian frustration.98 Innumerable other women posed as occasional models for Rossetti, ladies of high rank and daughters and wives of customers, especially women of the common people, prostitutes, shop assistants and washerwomen. Immediately after the glorious trio of Rossetti models stand out – for their uncommon beauty, and the sadness and sensuality of the face – Alexa Wilding (another woman of the street) and Marie Spartali, daughter of the Greek consul in London. 3. Almost always set and immersed in a floral halo, the Rossettian face is erect but more often bowed, and almost invariably bowed in the portraits of Jane Morris, her head languidly supported by her hand and in such a pose always caught in a pensive mood, with her eyes staring into the abyss but never at the observer, thus betraying an interior thought or a distant memory. This pose is often completed by the model fiddling with her necklace and jewels. Her hands, whether they be plucking the harp or clutching Pandora’s vase, are often knotted or appearing to be like claws; the skin is alabaster and pale, layered with powder, very modern for its time. The lips are pouted, swollen and angular. The curve of the hands and neck is gentle, often adorned with a necklace. When all the elements of the Rossettian woman are viewed together, her salient characteristics are her imposing presence, her indolence, detachment and arrogance – which invites religious and submissive contemplation rather than allurement – and hence latent cruelty. The full view shows the head of hair tumbling down and tied with flowers or magnificent hair slides, so frequent as to have an even exaggerated prominence and to betray a fetishistic cult. Furthermore there are the elaborate and complex hairstyles, miraculously and gracefully worked by the coiffeur. The adornments are sumptuous in the oriental-style veils, the clasps, the fans, the belts and in the feathers of strange, exotic birds which cram the work of someone who had debuted in 1849 with the most austere

98 Fanny became Rossetti’s lover-governess at Tudor House. The mutual familiarity established a light-hearted confidentiality: Rossetti called her a ‘little elephant’ after the woman had, over time, assumed matronly, Junoesque features.

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of Annunciations.99 Indeed Rossetti ended up painting his women, their faces and female bodies in the darkness or half-light and according to the manner of Da Vinci’s portraits and – why not? – those of Raphael. The column-like neck or more exactly the swan neck of Rossetti’s women is in the typical Fuselian and Da Vinci style. Rossetti’s obsession with the female figure had double origins: it was the psychological and psychoanalytical symptom of a narcissistic transfer of the woman as alter ego,100 and at the same time it was requested by the clientele. He came to replicate and triplicate some of his fortunate subjects for an avid, never relenting market. His female form imposed over time a typology of a surreal woman which distanced that model from the historical Victorian version, and from the crinoline and the corsets. Rossetti’s various faces changed with the years but all ended up looking like one another in an ever greater alienation from reality,101 to such an extent that in some cases the same experts have found it difficult to establish the identity of the model with any certainty. Wilde was to point out that for Rossetti – and especially after Rossetti – it was reality that modelled itself on art, and that it was the female fashion and the very faces of women which imitated Rossetti’s paintings. Rossetti’s woman is already very much an ambiguous, feminine beauty, pale with a tainted charm, decadent and ‘fatale’. It is mainly from the portraits of his women that the polyvalent, tentacular, powerfully evocative influence of this artist radiates, figuring unanimously as the inspirer, together with Whistler and

99 Among his most decorative productions is Monna Vanna (1866), with the fan, the flowing, tumbling hair parted on the forehead, the hair slide, the broad, Titian-style sleeve, the floral decorations of the dress and the jewelry. It is actually the decoration which causes the face to appear out of proportion, being too small. Venus Verticordia (1864–1868) seems to be purely decorative on account of the recurrence of the motif of the butterfly. 100 The obsessive repetition of the same theme surfaced again through the influence of drugs such as chloral hydrate, to which Rossetti became a slave. 101 M. T. Benedetti, I Preraffaelliti, Firenze 1985, 50.

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Solomon, Crane and Beardsley, of Art Nouveau, up to Khnopff and Klimt, the surrealism of Dalí and the expressionism of Munch.102 § 196. Christina Rossetti* I: Dante’s ‘sister’ Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894), the youngest of the four Rossetti siblings, started on the road towards poetic and figurative art in 103

102 Rossetti’s artistic crisis was therefore masked by and in decoration. The series of pictures with the amateur-musician as subject are of exquisite, refined and sometimes cold decoration. Veronica Veronese portrays a lady-musician who is inspired by a small bird, transcribing notes onto the manuscript and then plucking the strings of a violin hanging on the wall. The Bower Meadow (1872) presents a couple of female musicians with pure Rossettian faces: big eyes lost in space, long necks and fetching hair-slides, their fingers bent to pluck the strings of sistra. The Day Dream, dating from 1880, and one of the last paintings completed by Rossetti before his death, is all saturated by decorations and botanical and floral designs. *

The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition, ed. R. W. Crump, 3 vols, Baton Rouge, LA and London 1979–1990, replaces the 1904 edition, The Poetical Works, London (repr. Hildesheim and New York 1970), prepared by the poet’s brother W. M. Rossetti; I will deal below with the merits and shortcomings of each and their influence on critical approaches to Rossetti. Another recent edition is The Complete Poems, ed. B. Flowers, Harmondsworth 2002. Selections are edited by W. de la Mare, Newtown, CT 1930, by E. Jennings, London 1970, by C. H. Sisson, Manchester 1984, by P. Porter, Oxford 1986, by D. Roe, London 2008, by R. Gill, Oxford 2013. The narrative prose is collected in Commonplace, and Other Short Stories, London 1870, except for the story Maude, London 1897, and the tale Speaking Likenesses, London 1874. Modern editions are: Maude: Prose and Verse, ed. R. W. Crump, Hamden, CT 1976; Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers, ed. N. Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher, Chicago, IL 1992, and C. Rossetti and D. M. Craik, Maude, On Sisterhoods, A Woman’s Thoughts about Women, ed. E. Showalter, London 1993. The religious, devotional, and theological prose includes Annus Domini, a Prayer for Each Day of the Year (1874); Seek and Find (1879); Called to Be Saints (1881); Letter and Spirit (1883); Time Flies (1885); The Face of the Deep, a Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892), all published in London for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and now collected in Prose Works by Christina Rossetti, ed. M. Keaton, 4 vols, Bristol 2003. The Collected Letters of Christina Rossetti, ed. A. H. Harrison, 2 vols, Charlottesville, VA 1995, expands Family Letters of Christina Rossetti, ed. W. M. Rossetti, London 1908 (here

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the same hard-working, productive family environment I described in speaking of Dante Gabriel. She took part in the hectic activities that led to the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but being a woman she played a subordinate role in relation to it. Thanks to the severe, mystical beauty of her youth, completely lost as an adult, she did however pose as the model for her brother’s two early paintings, and was herself an amateur artist and painter. For this reason she was for a long time attributed a parasitic

cited as FLT). Among the numerous Italian editions are Praz’s translations in PIO, 397–408; Il mercato dei folletti e altre poesie, ed. F. Gargaro, Città di Castello 1931; ‘Goblin Market’ e altre poesie, ed. G. Mattarelli, Torino 1934; Poesie, ed. F. Donini, Napoli 1984 (with a remarkable introduction); Il cielo è lontano. Poesie 1847–1881, ed. G. Scudder, Milano 1995. Life. M. L. Giartosio De Courten, I Rossetti. Storia di una famiglia, Milano 1928; M. F. Sandars, The Life of Christina Rossetti, London 1930; L. M. Packer, Christina Rossetti, Berkeley, CA 1964 (an excellent biography, though not unanimously praised owing to the attribution to Rossetti of an alleged but undocumented secret love [cf. § 199]); G. Battiscombe, Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life, London 1981; K. Jones, Learning Not to Be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti, Adlestrop 1991; F. Thomas, Christina Rossetti: A Biography, London 1992 and 1994 (useful in throwing light on Rossetti’s humanitarian work); J. Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life, London 1995 (partly focusing on an alleged incestuous relationship between father and daughter). Criticism. M. Bell, Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study, London 1898 (hagiographic, although the result of personal acquaintance; reticent regarding marriage and engagements); M. A. Bald, Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge 1923 (debatable overview of influences and literary ancestries); J. De Wilde, Christina Rossetti: Poet and Woman, Nijkerk 1923; W. de la Mare, ‘Christina Rossetti’, in Essays of the Royal Society of Literature, London 1926, 79–116; E. Birkhead, Christina Rossetti and Her Poetry, London 1930; D. M. Stuart, Christina Rossetti, London 1930, and Christina Rossetti, London 1931 (insightful investigation into the poetry, especially in the first of the two studies); F. Shove, Christina Rossetti: A Study, Cambridge 1931; E. W. Thomas, Christina Georgina Rossetti, New York 1932; V. Woolf, ‘“I am Christina Rossetti”’, in TCR, Second series, 237–44; F. Dubslatt, Die Sprachform der Lyrik Christina Rossettis, Halle 1933; M. Zaturenska, Christina Rossetti: A Portrait with a Background, New York 1949; M. C. Bowra, ‘Christina Rossetti’, in The Romantic Imagination, London 1950, 245– 70; F. Rota, Amore, sogno e morte nella poesia di Christina Rossetti, Torino 1953; M. Satwell, Christina Rossetti: Her Life and Religion, London 1955; H. N. Fairchild, ‘Christina Rossetti’, in Religious Trends in English Poetry, New York 1957, vol. IV,

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kind of standing both towards pictorial and literary Pre-Raphaelitism and towards her brother, as witnesses the reductive label, ‘Rossetti’s sister’, given to her by the later Victorians and the first anti-Victorians. This classification was eventually rectified after 1930, and she was then gradually and fully acknowledged as an independent poet, indeed, as some have argued, the greatest woman poet in the language,1 and the greatest religious English 303–16; T. B. Swann, Wonder and Whimsy: The Fantastic World of Christina Rossetti, Francestown, NH 1960; C. Battiscombe, Christina Rossetti, London 1965; F. L. Lucas, ‘Christina Rossetti’, in Ten Victorian Poets, London 1966, 117–37; L. Stevenson, The Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Chapel Hill, NC 1972, 78–122; R. W. Crump, Christina Rossetti: A Reference Guide, Boston, MA 1976; R. Bellas, Christina Rossetti, Boston, MA 1977; N. Jiménez, The Bible and the Poetry of Christina Rossetti, London 1979; G. Franci, ‘Le due sorelle: Christina Rossetti o l’Io diviso della donna vittoriana’, in Come nello specchio: Saggi sulla figurazione femminile, various editors, Torino 1981, 29–49; E. K. Charles, Christina Rossetti: Critical Perspectives, 1862–1982, Selingsgrove 1985; J. J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory, Oxford 1985, 207–52 (important discussion of the evolution of Rossetti studies); D. Rosenblum, Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance, Carbondale, IL 1986; The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. D. A. Kent, Ithaca, NY 1987 (a collection of essays covering the whole range of Rossetti’s work, some of which will be cited below); A. H. Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context, Brighton 1988 (an adaptation of deconstructive theories to the text; laborious, insecure and derivative analysis of Rossetti’s relations with Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, Tractarianism and Provençal, Dantesque and Platonic-Augustinian traditions); K. Mayberry, Christina Rossetti and the Poetry of Discovery, Baton Rouge, LA and London 1989; M. Del Sapio Garbero, L’assenza e la voce. Scena e intreccio della scrittura in Christina Rossetti, May Sinclair e Christine Brooke-Rose, Napoli 1991, 1995; A. Leighton, ‘Christina Rossetti’, in Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart, Brighton 1992, 118–63 (the most wide-ranging deconstructive investigation, bringing to light the secret instability of Rossetti’s moral world); M. Arsenau, Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics, Basingstoke 2004; J. Ellis D’Alessandro, Christina Georgina Rossetti: The Italian Heritage, Pisa 2004; The Demon and the Damozel: Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, Athens, OH 2008. 1

This opinion was launched by her first fervent admirers such as Sharpe and Gosse. It was repeated by Donini (in the introduction to Poesie), apparently excluding Dickinson. Donini’s elevated verdict conflicts, however, with a highly exacting, scornful and at times vitriolic reading.

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poet to succeed Keble and to precede Hopkins. No less noteworthy, indeed in recent decades increasingly popular and esteemed, is her secular writing, especially her poetic fable, ‘Goblin Market’, remarkable for its subtlety, ambiguity and haunting suggestiveness. To these should be added her stories and narrative sketches, works of rare stylistic neatness which make her a narrator to be carefully reread and reconsidered. Compared to her brother, the artistic-figural side is almost absent in Christina; stimulus from artistic masterpieces does not feature in her writing, and there are few direct connections with pictorial art. Nor does use of mythology and personification, a hallmark in Dante Gabriel. In her later years she wrote a few pages of somewhat unoriginal criticism and presentation on Dante, and there are superficial echoes of Dante in her collection of sonnets Monna Innominata; but they are certainly not enough to define as ‘enormous’ Dante’s influence on her.2 She admitted to being the least Dantesque of the four siblings. Both Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were however attracted to the singular, sinister fascination of the fatal, Gothic and diabolical tradition absorbed in their childhood and youthful readings of Maturin’s Melmoth and Poe’s ‘The Raven’, a tradition Christina picked up in a form much less flamboyant and theatrical than her brother. If it was Rossetti, as we have seen, who founded English aestheticism, his sister touches upon it lightly in advance, sensing and discussing as of 1848 the seductive but problematic nature of experience, that is the conflict between euphoric enjoyment of the passing sensation and its renunciation.3 Yet we might still say that Christina Rossetti remains the most genuinely Pre-Raphaelite of the poets from that school, whose boundaries were swiftly crossed by her brother, who eventually abandoned the movement in the hands of Holman Hunt and other artists. Her many visions of heavenly bliss are at times exact copies of the rarefied, dream-like atmosphere of ‘The Blessed Damozel’, painting as they do a sugary and misty paradise full of palms and haloed 2 3

According to Harrison 1988, 142–85. Harrison 1988, 21ff., carries out a careful examination of Rossetti’s ‘important features’ of ‘aesthetic’ poetry, as described by Pater in the Conclusion to The Renaissance: tension between beauty and death, human and divine love, the ephemeral and the eternal, the sensorial and the transcendent.

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saints with tender eyes often veiled with nostalgic tears, and busy in singing and embroidering.4 No less numerous are the poems describing convent life and nuns in the act of taking the veil; they fulfil a strong, conflicting interior need, but respond to a subject that was in fashion among the painters and evident in paintings by Millais, Collins – the novelist Wilkie’s brother – and other Pre-Raphaelites.5 And Christina really does go back to nature – a cornerstone in the Pre-Raphaelite agenda – described in all its blossoming luxuriance, a nature that is the background to her country stories which often end with an apt caption, also frequently found in the paintings. Christina Rossetti was arguably the only one to remain faithful to the original Pre-Raphaelite programme advocating a religious and sacred art, and to emphasize and enhance the underlying biblical, Tractarian and typological origin of Pre-Raphaelitism.6 In these respects she can be seen as an anachronistic Tractarian poet who for nearly half a century floated easily across that no-man’s-land which was neither pure Protestantism nor Catholicism, in a time after 1845 when nearly everybody had either decidedly forded the Tiber or else had withdrawn to conservative positions, if not falling directly into the arms of scepticism. Yet her feeling for nature makes her the most direct descendant of rural Romanticism,7 and in particular the pupil of the least influential but most orthodox Romantic, Wordsworth, whose poetry was not so remote

4 5 6

7

A prefiguration of paradise spoken by a martyr (‘Martyr’s Song’) quotes verbatim that ‘golden bar’ from which Rossetti’s Damozel leans. Cf. Bowra 1950 and J. Bump, ‘Christina Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’, in Kent 1987, 322–45, for a more detailed analysis of Pre-Raphaelite pictorial echoes, especially echoes of the convent life. Ruskin’s support, particularly for the principle of nature’s sacrality in the second volume of Modern Painters, and remarked on by Rossetti in her devotional treatise Seek and Find, is aptly commented on by Harrison 1988, 24ff. For a more detailed analysis on the relations with Tractarian typology and devotion, cf. the richly documented essay by C. Musello Cantalupo, ‘Christina Rossetti: The Devotional Poet and the Rejection of Romantic Nature’, in Kent 1987, 274–300. Still surviving in William Barnes (§ 213), the Dorset dialect poet.

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from that of Keble and of The Christian Year.8 Rossetti’s nature is never typically romantic, or eminently pantheistic, and one in which the subject is reconstituted without transcendental appeals,9 nor is it ever distorted by the visionary, hallucinated imagination as in Dante Gabriel; it appears in its flat, humble reality and with occasional half-hidden personal cues – alternating seasons, falling autumn leaves, birds waiting to mate, the swallow, the skylark, as if in a toned-down, somewhat tamed version of Shelley’s or Keats’s nature poems. And these nature sketches frequently focus on modest peasant girls, and end with pious, moralistic little lessons, themselves also Wordsworthian in spirit. Further back, Keble’s Tractarian poetry looked to Herbert and the meditative, metaphysical and Protestant tradition, and Herbert is also Rossetti’s secret master: Herbert the devout priest, Herbert the quasi-saint, but also Herbert the incomparable verse craftsman and the inventor of metres ever new. 2. All in all, there is nothing in Christina Rossetti of gaudy neoBaroque effervescence à la Crashaw – Herbert’s historical counterpart, later to be assimilated by the later Patmore and by Hopkins, both so close to her in many ways – and nothing even of the lacerating, stentorian, pretentious and declamatory vein of a poet so unlike her, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. We shall see in the biography how Rossetti lived out of the limelight, always seeking ‘a place at the back’. Apparently, she simplifies the Metaphysicals and avoids any, hermetic or initiatic, grumpy or clammy diction, typical of other poets and of her brother above all. Further fostered by austere evangelicalism, always admonishing each artist about art’s seductions, the Herbertian and Tractarian genealogy lent Rossetti’s poetry 8

9

A copy in possession of her sister Maria Francesca was illustrated poem by poem by her. L. Schofield, in Kent 1987, 301ff., maintains that Keble’s practice is ‘radically different’ from that of Rossetti, less orientated towards the reader and more towards the poet’s inner self; but analysis and comparison contradict this statement. It is however true, as we shall see (§ 198), that Rossetti is different from Keble in a greater oscillation and uncertainty of the poetic ‘I’. Cf. Musello Cantalupo, essay quoted in n. 6 above. This opinion contrasts with that of Bowra 1950, who finds a Romantic poet who gives a precise name to the search for a world beyond the senses, an ‘authentically Romantic temperament’, caring for this world yet ready to renounce it.

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remarkable expressive restraint and concision. As noted by Virginia Woolf back in 1930, there is nothing in her of idleness, superfluity, ornateness. All is in an exquisitely low tone. She never had the ambition to write the poem, or even a poem: her most usual chosen measure is that of epigrammatic brevity, which makes her production fractured and fragmented. So her figure is outlined and takes substance from the whole rather than from one or two isolated lyrics, except of course for ‘Goblin Market’. Her vocabulary is limited and made up of commonly used words; sophisticated compounds are practically never seen, nor are stretchings of meaning or newly coined words. Compared to other contemporary poets, there is hardly in her any use of long, three-syllabled, Latinate words. The syntactic construction is elementary and in her devotional lyrics clearly betrays the influence of the biblical style in the anaphoric passages, in parallelisms and protracted isosyntacticisms, also corresponding to a musical procedure of theme and variations, making her the poet most addicted to parallelism among the Victorians, in this case too second only to Hopkins.10 Her verse technique is polished and deeply vigilant: onomatopea is abundant as are alliterative chains and phonosymbolic reiterations often reproducing and imitating nature’s sounds – the sounds of work on the land or of the tolling bells. Highly unstable metric solutions and constructions follow one upon the other in nervous discontinuity, something which Ruskin, among others, blamed.11 With her natural and spontaneous verbal talent she found the open form more congenial than the closed one handed down in literary tradition; she personalized it and made it pliable, almost re-creating it ex novo in alternating measures. She composed very little in blank verse or other codified metres; her sonnets are metrically and structurally correct but not suitable with their prosodic constraints to her tale-telling (witness her continual recourse in many of them to the conjunction ‘and’).12 This gives the sonnets an over-extended syntactical measure and generates 10 Particularly pre-Hopkinsian is the habit of doubling and tripling noun and verb expressions to signify the intensity or tumult of the action or the sensation described. 11 The most frequent prosodic unity is the seven- or even six-syllable line; only in her sonnets and in very few other examples is the line extended to the decasyllable. 12 On the technical features of the sonnets cf. Stuart 1930, 120–36.

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over-fluid sentences; even her very few dramatic monologues, written in obeisance to the Victorian poetic genre par excellence, are cold and awkward. The fact remains that such subdued simplicity is often highly deceptive and that the key used by her father to interpret Dante may hold true with her too. There is in fact in Rossetti’s poems a superficial textual level accessible to all, which seems to exhaust their meaning, yet there are also various subterranean strata where double, triple, even multiple meanings are unleashed. 3. The assessment of Christina Rossetti’s role in English nineteenthcentury poetry and even some idea of her overall significance depend mainly on the reconstruction and organization of her poetic corpus. This is anything but a simple or secondary issue, and has proved a difficulty for the poet herself and for her successive editors. According to the solution selected, this has had a weighty outcome for critics, too, although not as revolutionary as has been claimed. Her grandfather, Dr Polidori, prophesied for her ‘more spirit than any of the others’. In 1847, when she was only seventeen, he printed a small book of her verse using a press of his own. In 1850 she contributed seven anonymous poems to the Pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ; in 1861 she appeared in her own name before a wider public with the brief lyric ‘Up-hill’ in a popular journal. She herself edited three main editions of her poems: in 1862 Goblin Market and Other Poems, in 1866 The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems – both with frontispieces illustrated by her brother – and in 1881 A Pageant and Other Poems. Each of these collections, gathered together in 1890 in one single edition, contained preexisting compositions. Neither the 1890 edition nor, even more so, that of 1904 edited by William Michael Rossetti, presented however the poems in chronological order. In the former, the disposition appears intentionally anti-chronological, even chaotic, erratic and random. Patiently pieced together, the poet’s forty-year career shows a regular output if we except (sometimes long) periods of complete silence. Rossetti’s inactivity in the 1867–1875 period is similar to Tennyson’s ten-year silence after 1832, or to Hopkins’s seven-year non-production before 1875; expressively void are the years 1867, 1868, 1874, while the early 1880s and early 1890s are, if not completely empty, very arid. From this viewpoint we gather that almost every year after 1858 saw the production of a long, ambitious composition

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– ballads, visionary odes, cycles of sonnets or even anecdotal stories in verse that dive into the sensational – though only moderately successful or even being a definite failure. This further confirms that Rossetti’s greatness lies in poems of a few lines. However, apart from voluntarily confusing the writing chronology, the 1890 collection was a conscious effort on the poet’s part to establish an exact interpretative key of her poetry. That edition was in the first instance incomplete, being just a drastic selection of her corpus until that date, dictated by the criterion of aesthetic success and by the popularity of certain poems with a very varied audience of readers. It was an edition where appealing, apparently innocuous and entertaining poems equalled or outnumbered the religious ones, thus creating the impression of an author of exquisite, slightly melancholy country scenes. A number of disquieting youthful poems and hundreds of extemporaneous, more intimate poems were excluded, as was a whole dull mass of devotional lyrics so far never published in any form. These were almost integrally included in William Michael Rossetti’s 1904 edition, which did not follow a chronological sequence, or at least it did, but only within arbitrarily constituted groups of poems having consistent themes. A second conclusion emerges from this: both Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were aware of the only partially developmental – indeed to a certain degree synchronic – nature of their poetry. Until 1866 Christina’s poems were dated in the notebooks in which they were collected, where occasionally we also find an indication of the place where they were written, as in a sort of private poetic diary. Thereafter this dating becomes more erratic; but where the composition date is known, we see that many poems very similar in tone, manner and content may be separated by ten- or even twenty-year periods. Unlike her brother, Christina did not in fact evolve noticeably in style, subject-matter or spirituality.13 This is highlighted by a certain amount of repetition in situation and phrasing, or by an interminable series of little pictures with variations on one single subject, and exclamations and 13

‘one is so different, and yet so vividly the same’, says a letter (FLT, 55). Rossetti’s thematic and stylistic synchrony is discussed by Stuart 1930, 177, and was noted by Virginia Woolf the same year. On synchrony in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetry cf. § 182.3.

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implorations echoing lyric after lyric in precisely the same words. Studies on the manuscripts and those following the publication of the modern variorum edition have in turn blown Rossetti’s revisionism out of all proportion. She composed for the most part spontaneously and instinctively; she renamed her poems at later dates but did not revise their texts, at least not as feverishly and anxiously as did other Victorians.14 This variorum edition – which reinstates chronology, though not completely – was of course a long-awaited, essential instrument; but it obliterates what has been shown to be an inner synchronic logic – rather than the apparent chaos – of the sequence in the various collections and in the 1890 edition bringing them all together.15 § 197. Christina Rossetti II: Culmination, decline and revival of Rossetti’s poetry The facility with which Rossetti gained her position and obtained approval while yet alive, both with the élites of professional poets and with the general public, is exceptional yet basically comprehensible. She was seen in different ways at different times: until the end of the century she was the trail-blazer of poetic Pre-Raphaelitism, so much so that with one of his pompous, excessive definitions her boundless admirer Swinburne called her the ‘Jael who led the army to victory’. She was then the popular religious woman poet overflowing with moving religious fervour, whose Christmas carols, set to music by Holst, were soon sung even in church. She was the exquisite metrist, in spite of Ruskin’s verdict accusing her of lack of ‘form’ in 1861. Thus it came about that when the mediocre poet Alfred Austin’s death left the post of Poet Laureate vacant in the early 1890s, some hoped for a notable change of course and that the position would be assigned to a woman poet: in fact to her. (Forty years before, something similar had already happened when Tennyson had been appointed, though many had whispered the name of Elizabeth Barrett; Patmore on the other hand 14 15

In spite of the view of Harrison 1988, 4ff., who says that she was an untiring revisionist. Cf. the excellent analysis of the ingenious internal links (thematic, contrastive, parallelistic, etc.) between one composition and another by D. Rosenblum, ‘Christina Rossetti and Poetic Sequence’, in Kent 1987, 132–56.

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had upheld the candidacy of Alice Meynell.)16 At the turn of the century Rossetti was still closely identified with her brother; indeed a certain impatience had arisen towards her overdone, narrow-minded piety due to lack of real life experiences, and her poetry was seen as displaying a depressive monotony.17 Between 1890 and 1930, however, if she was not anyone’s real favourite she was not targeted by the crossfire of aesthetes, neo-Georgians and Marxists. The real turning point was a short note written by Virginia Woolf in 1930 on the centenary of her birth. This note starts out as a little, vixenish Strachey-style portrait of Victorian phobias and flamboyance in the persons of her strange suitor Charles Cayley and her sister Maria Francesca. But it also highlights the fact that as a poet Rossetti was profoundly committed to her art, and that poetry counted for her more than anything else – and that it counted above all for Virginia Woolf herself. Centenary duties done, deepest darkness descended on Rossetti as on dozens of other Victorians. Brilliantly answered by McGann,18 the question was how it happened, after 1930 and an esteem such as that expressed in Woolf ’s words and confirmed by further authoritative critical works around 1930, that she practically disappeared from the academic scene for nearly three decades, and only received marginal interest for more than a decade. This seems even more odd given the sudden acclaim that smiled upon Hopkins’s poetry, which effectively came before the public eye with the second edition of his poems in that very same year 1930. The two poets, Rossetti and Hopkins, had after all more than one declared and evident feature in common; indeed, Christina Rossetti’s vein had two genuine followers in Hopkins and Meynell, both poets discovered rather late, and who, due to one of those not infrequent anomalies noticed in the literary reception of authors, were felt to be contemporaries by one or more of the future generations.

16 17 18

§ 60.1. Rossetti herself acknowledged (FLT, 31) her own one-sidedness compared with the ‘many-sidedness’ of Barrett Browning. McGann 1985, 232–52.

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2. Hopkins made Christina Rossetti’s personal acquaintance when she was twenty at the house of a Pimlico vicar.19 Hopkins’s sister was also a Protestant nun in the same All Souls convent entered by Maria Francesca Rossetti. For obvious reasons the two poets did not meet again after that occasion. Since they had two predecessors in common – Newman the poetpreacher and above all Keble – there is a historical trait d’union between Rossetti and Hopkins. He read her with profound, unmasked admiration and he dialectically accepted her with his ‘answers’, that is, poems written as if at her direct solicitation, and almost ‘continuations’. The young Hopkins used the same supporting images, and launched into the same impassioned dialogue with God laced with jubilation, discouragement, self-flagellation; surprisingly, we find the same words, the same cadences, the same formulae, the same devotional ‘grammar’ in the two poets. After 1875 and until 1889, the year of his death, Hopkins and Rossetti echoed one another incognito, in subject-matter, motifs, vocabulary.20 Anyone reading them in reverse order notes how Hopkins synthesizes in unforgettable imagery and formulations what is more verbosely diluted and frequently repeated in Rossetti, who naturally lacks – among many other things – the complex, highly personal philosophical-theological framework of the Jesuit poet, as well as his theoretical labour on verse and his rhythmic experimentalism. It is Rossetti who indelibly sets the world’s depreciation, in terms later made famous by Hopkins – and thought of now as proverbial – of paradoxical antitheses: the loss of the world and of its alleged delights brings heaven’s rewards, with an overturning of renunciation only possible in terms of the opposition between the earthly treasure devoured by moths and the 19

Packer 1964, 185. See, for a romanticized description of this reception (another guest was the opera singer Jenny Lind), Zaturenska 1949, 130–4. 20 See only these few literal echoes: ‘The road to death is life, the gate of life is death’; ‘our life is death, our death is life’; ‘He hath not lost his life who seems to lose’. Such antitheses, echoed literally, form the conceptual pivot of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. It is difficult to say which came first, as the two poets were writing at the same time from 1862 to 1889; the second Rossetti quotation is actually later than Hopkins’s ‘Deutschland’, being dated 1882. I agree with Bump, essay quoted in n. 5, regarding the Pre-Raphaelite continuity between Rossetti and Hopkins – at least until he entered the Jesuits.

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incorruptible heavenly treasure. Hopkins’s most typical metaphors and oxymora were in part coined by Rossetti: the chiasmus between silence and speech, earthly silence sublimated in expressive speech and song in front of the Father; the other antithesis of the ‘storm’ and the ‘calm’ as the spiritual condition and symbolic rhythm of the apprehension of God.21 Rossetti also anticipates Hopkins’s profoundly human tension in feeling nostalgia for a world which was to all effects delightful from a position of spiritual retreat and renunciation. The conventual motif, found in many compositions on nuns and monks who have entered, or are about to enter, the religious life, is transmitted to the young Hopkins and is then the catalyst-centre for the ‘Deutschland’. Its five nuns are however purified of any Pre-Raphaelite languor and made almost masculine in their heroism and the sacrifice of their lives. Frequently both poets depict and give speech to historical saints and, more particularly, martyrs. Rossetti’s poem on St Dorothea was not only re-echoed in its lullabies and naïve cadences by one of Hopkins’s, but she passed the saint’s cult on to other Pre-Raphaelites and other Decadent poets and artists, Swinburne, Morris and Burne-Jones among them. Much more sporadic and blurry were the relations between Christina Rossetti and the other great late nineteenth-century poet, at least in part religious, Coventry Patmore. A number of letters indeed reveal a certain cutting resentment towards this poet – attracted by Pre-Raphaelitism in youth, later moving on – and his ‘polygamy’. This is perhaps due to a ‘resolute’ Protestantism22 that distanced Rossetti from a definitely Marian Catholicism such as that of Patmore. 3. In view of Hopkins’s popularity in the 1930s, McGann is right when he says that Rossetti left indifferent critics who at the time above all sought in poetry mental contortions, ambiguity and paradoxes of a ‘metaphysical’ type, all of which Rossetti apparently lacked. Therefore, while Hopkins was hurriedly canonized rather late in the day within the context of a religious 21

22

‘Rest’ sounds like Rossetti’s ‘Habit of Perfection’ in its series of oxymora prefiguring eternal peace (the ‘blessed poverty’, the ‘clearer obscurity of midday’, the music ‘more silent than any other song’); furthermore, time is opposed to the abolition of time; that is, rest, eternal rest, will end on the Day of Judgement. McGann 1985, 240 n. 18.

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poetry founded by John Donne, the wholly spontaneous, naïve Rossetti was equally peremptorily marginalized.23 After the Second World War, the New Critics’ dislike conditioned increasingly brief, condescending presentations in anthologies and literary histories, in which the derogatory adjective ‘perfunctory’ frequently popped up.24 Those thirty years of ‘critical’ silence of which McGann speaks – but we could actually double the period and extend it to the early twenty-first century – saw the start of a curious, often morbid interest in the life of the poet, almost as if there were nothing new to discover in her poetry and as if it merely served to elucidate her biography. Prompt opposition against this method proved useless, as is witnessed by the fact that one of the most severe books denouncing it25 was followed at the start of the 1990s by an unprecedented burgeoning of frighteningly voluminous biographies – two a year at times – mainly authored by versatile women writers and followers of the Rossetti cult. Since 1930 biographers had been reminded of the dramatic principle in her poetry by critics who observed that it is an exercise in imagination and that it describes experiences – often unlucky, such as the ‘broken engagement’ – which perhaps had never occurred in real life. This motif appears in her poetry well before any likely drama of frustrated or repulsed love, although it may well have been exacerbated by experiences undergone 23

McGann ingeniously points out this precomprehension but is less convincing in the subsequent investigation into the intellectual foundations of Rossetti’s poetry, marginal and secondary in his opinion. As I will further highlight in the chapter specifically dedicated to Hopkins in Volume 6, the infatuation of the New Critics with him was a flash in the pan. Hopkins was promptly decanonized by later critics, agnostics and historicists, and practically re-canonized – anything but unanimously – only in the late 1960s. Secondly, McGann attributes a founding power to Rossetti’s Adventist and ‘pre-millenary’ ideologies, and even more so to the doctrine of the ‘soul’s repose’ – a real sleep between death and judgement, on which many poems are allegedly based – and this would radically clash with Tractarian doctrines. In a contorted passage (240, n. 18) McGann holds that it is a ‘grave misunderstanding’ yet not ‘wholly mistaken’ to say that Rossetti’s poetry expresses Tractarian ideas and religiousness. 24 Fairchild, intervening in 1957, without mincing his words, stated that Rossetti had written hardly any gems in a mountain of rubbish. 25 Harrison 1988.

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later. Many a time a thirty-year-old Rossetti overdoes the dramatic selfprojection and depicts herself as a flabby and wrinkled old woman. In other words, she applies to herself a female version of Tennyson’s ‘mask of age’.26 There is by now a general agreement that it does not matter to whom Rossetti’s desperate, passionate lyrics of lost love were addressed. As we have seen for her brother, Rossetti appears yet greater for having foreseen through the imagination alone her own personal myth, and for having constructed it, adapting so perfectly and admirably her life to art, rather than art to life. § 198. Christina Rossetti III: Aporias under scrutiny Saying that Rossetti was a woman of her time,27 as has been done recently and emphatically, is like kicking down an open door. The really excellent new philological tools available today are hardly necessary in order to realize that we are dealing not only with a vigilant, consummate poet whose naturalness masks a highly sophisticated verse-maker, but with an astute poet with an eye to her own purse, fully aware of working in the late nineteenth-century literary market.28 Christina Rossetti was a woman neither wholly remissive, nor out of this world, nor constantly lost in meditation and prayer. Firstly, no death wish surfaces in her letters, which are airy, jovial, sparkling and humorous, and display a will to live in the same world which is rejected in the poems. We can easily find in them the same topics of conversation and discussion – including the same attention to current affairs – as in other Victorian letter collections. Like nearly all Victorians, Rossetti had an interest in politics and society. She criticised and blamed vice, selfishness, the rush for luxury, mass civilization; from her position 26 § 80.3. 27 Rossetti said that the cloistered life to which her poetry repeatedly aspired was not for her and could never be a real life choice. Cf. on this point the prose tale Maude and my discussion (§ 206.2). 28 Aesthetic ambition was never far from sales prospects. In her letters she often reveals that her works, those for children especially, had ‘an eye to the market’ (FLT, 44), and many letters to her siblings deal frankly and shrewdly with financial matters. Her very rivalry with the women poets of her time – Dickinson among them – involved commercial success.

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as an enlightened conservative she was, like nearly everybody else, sympathetic towards the exploited. Moreover, endeavour followed words. As a nurse she was to have gone to Crimea with Florence Nightingale though she didn’t; she then worked as a social assistant for fallen women, and lastly as an active antivivisectionist. The difference is that she was never willing to mix poetry with protest, and had the modesty – or fault, according to some – to refuse to write directly on politics or philanthropy.29 2. She accepted an awareness of gender with its many consequences. According to the female stereotype of the time, she attributed to herself only pathos and sensitivity, not the clear thinking that was the traditional male prerogative: ‘Men work and think, but women feel’, where the ‘but’ almost betrays a sense of pride. She called for no rethinking of the roles in community life which centred on monogamous marriage dependent on the man’s guidance, while the woman, with a term found in Clough also, was the biblical ‘helpmeet of man’. Almost all scholars quote a rather hesitant letter30 where Rossetti has recourse to the Bible – the subordination of woman to man established in Genesis – to distinguish male and female tasks, a distinction that could only be overcome in cases of force majeure (for example when women’s rights are overpowered, in which case suffrage must be offered to women too, even to married women and mothers). It was in her own family that she first experienced the submission of women. She was educated at home, as was Elizabeth Barrett, but she never became

29

In advance of Wilde, one of her few poems with a political background is the ballad ‘The Royal Princess’, where the heroine’s father is a cruel tyrant who knows neither benevolence nor forgiveness, and who sends his people to toil in the mines, considering them even less than a mere workforce. A rebellion is quelled with bloodshed, but the young princess bravely gives bread to the rebels and offers them her wealth. Rather forced and swimming in sentiment are the few other poems commenting on political facts. One of these commemorates a heroic episode of the Indian Mutiny; two others describe the desolation in France after the Prussian victory of 1870 and are explicitly inspired not by ‘political partisanship’ but by ‘human solidarity’. In ‘The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children’, of 1865, scandalous topical subjects are also touched upon in a spirit of bitter denunciation (such as the ostracised unmarried mother and the aristocratic lady, the only one of her class to care for the poor). 30 Cited in Bell 1898, 111–12.

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a virtually self-taught woman; she was excluded from one confraternity, male by definition as was the Pre-Raphaelite group, and became a patient model for the painters of that community, for her brother Dante Gabriel first of all. After 1861 the latter was not only her manager but also the tough critic and authoritarian judge of her poetry. She always lived surrounded by masculine figures who tended to vilify and suffocate her, not only her two brothers but also the reverends, the ministers and the churchmen to whom she confessed or whom she frequented. The diktats of her brother Dante Gabriel were accepted but at times refused, as she always refused the good matches approved by her family. She obtained redress mainly in the jurisdiction of the imagination, in the autonomous space of poetic writing, where she was forced to make the best of things using the stereotypes of male writing. The males in her poetry do not always show up well: very often they are waverers or procrastinators, like the prince in ‘The Prince’s Progress’; or they are human larvae who eventually vanish from the scene, decimated with a cruel gesture that brings to mind D. G. Rossetti’s ‘Sister Helen’.31 Christina’s most famous poem, ‘Goblin Market’, offers a uniquely female cosmos, the only masculine figures being subhuman, practically sexless elves. As in Barrett Browning, very few indeed are the father figures; idealized mothers prevail. Rossetti’s proverbial mildness often makes dream-like images and rash acts unbelievably astonishing: such are in ‘Symbols’ the cruelty with which the poet tears off the rose and breaks the three eggs; or the hand-held knife ready to stab in a poem having a revelatory (because to a certain extent sarcastic) title, ‘Endurance’. The surfacing of the repressed is hidden and rendered innocuous behind the convenient, traditional screen of fable and dream, easily passed off as inexplicable and involuntary. 3. Christina Rossetti’s dualisms, becoming real splits in consciousness and ground for deconstructive exercises, had in fact already been glimpsed by nineteenth-century readers and critics. Deconstruction therefore only speaks a more sophisticated language and pivots on findings which were already known. In the first instance, there is in Christina and

31

§ 187.1.

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in her brother Dante Gabriel an evident Anglo-Italian dualism. The poem ‘Enrica’, whose title role is an Italian expatriate, dwells with sharp irony on the Mediterranean exuberance and intemperance of the lady in question, but also contains a cutting self-portrait, that of the ‘trim, correct’ woman, ‘of semblance cold’, even ‘colourless and chill’. Another poem, written in 1865 after a trip to Italy made prudently close to its northern frontiers, has an Italian title, ‘Io ti saluto Italia’, ambiguous and to be taken in two senses, the second of which is a farewell gesture before the return ‘home’. Through a stereotype used quintessentially by Barrett Browning, Italy represented for Rossetti the imagination, escape, and the greatly feared relaxation of moral curbs.32 William Michael Rossetti even thought that that his sister would have wanted to settle in Italy, had it not been for the family breakup that would have ensued. Alice Meynell, who had already ‘discovered’ Patmore, just before the end of the century offered in turn two brilliantly lapidary definitions of Rossetti’s spiritual world, and definitions which include in a nutshell practically all the essential developments of future criticism, whether deconstructive or not. Regarding ‘Goblin Market’, she noted the almost inexplicable and uncalled-for ambivalence of the fruit, first ‘poison’ and then ‘refreshment’, thus implicitly suggesting the instability and near-hazard of the allegorical, symbolic and even semantic values implied in it. Her other yet more decisive definition is one that could be applied to Hopkins as well, as I announced: Rossetti, Meynell said, sings ‘a song of penitence for love that yet praises love more fervently than would a chorus hymeneal’.33 The ever-present expression, from the Book of Proverbs, ‘hope deferred’, is accompanied every time it appears by a frustrated sigh of sublimation. The fullness of heavenly life should have been attained straightaway, not deferred; such a delay in reunion is ambiguously and mysteriously confused with an apocalyptic, messianic expectation, since the time for which we desire an end is also the time of the ‘second coming’. Yet other ballads clearly side against the postponement of hope in a second Rossettian voice which expresses the voluptuousness of a world full of splendour and resists the lure of death, imploring for ‘another year’ or at 32 33

Sandars 1930, 162ff. Cited in Packer 1964, 142.

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least ‘another day’ of life: ‘Here I feel warm and well-content and gay’.34 The ‘hope deferred’, in this second meaning, was tedious and unbearable since it took away the enjoyment of pleasures, postponing or abolishing them. At least occasionally, in spite of warnings to be stronger, Rossetti indulges or lets her heroines indulge in a dreamy, torpid night-time swoon in the moonlight, in spite of imperiously spurring herself to a wakeful life and making a brisk pace forward. Because of such wavering and unsolved dualisms, some have made of Rossetti a poet of the ‘double’;35 others have actually overturned the hierarchies, arguing that the world had a slight advantage and that ‘every time Rossetti expresses her desire for Jesus, what she really desires is union with a man’.36 4. A real turnabout came to bear on this picture with deconstructive critical appraisals37 which take to the extreme and considerably broaden Rossetti’s ‘aporias’ so well pinpointed by Meynell. These studies do not deny that Rossetti is a religious poet, but they stress that her poetry casts doubts on what intellectual speculation and religious faith had fixed or claimed to have fixed. ‘Imaginative scepticism’ comes into play in Rossetti’s poetry and clashes with moral imperatives and checkmates them, or at least it sets them teetering frighteningly, emptying them of their fixed, preordained meaning. So Rossetti perhaps was unable to control that vein of ‘whimsy’ and the ‘violence of her imagination’. According to such views, some of her most demanding ballads explore the inexplicable volubility of the heart and the moral ‘nonsense’ of love and desire. Other poems, read until now in the light of an indestructible faith in an intelligible and finalized cosmos – like the famous ‘Up-hill’– are modern explorations of the unfathomable and examples of an excruciating metaphysical doubt and of cosmic pessimism, and make the cosmos itself a prey to chaos. Under the force of such arguments, Rossetti may also come within the paradigm of the ‘betrayal of language’, since it is the reference mechanism that in her is undermined. The neuter English ‘it’ is a very commonly used stratagem 34 35 36 37

‘The Poor Ghost’, a male spectre in this case. See above all the essay by Bowra 1950. Fairchild 1957, 307, though denying this overturning. I refer especially to the opinions of Leighton 1992, and to AVP, 357–66.

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of non-determination, and a riddling tendency is typical of much of her poetry. To this another keyword and another situation are linked, the ‘secret’ or a ‘secret’, something that one could or would like to reveal but which eventually remains unknown to the subject, and the exploration of which is the very matter of the poem.38 ‘Goblin Market’ is mostly based on the simple exchange of words that have whimsically become mere signifiers and which convey wavering and relative signifieds, referring to a code which has almost gone haywire. Similar ingenious deconstructive investigations have come from a criticism based on Derrida’s Spaltung of the subject, though to a certain extent unknown to the subject himself or herself. This becomes a sort of compulsory path which, in the worst of cases, is followed even when there is no clear proof of its existence. In spite of that, there are moments when Rossetti unmistakeably doubts the foundations of her faith, investigating them down to the loss of any organizing faculty of the ‘symbolic’. Such interpretations, in the case of Rossetti at least, are bound to sacrifice a great deal of her entire corpus and make the most of a few carefully chosen poems. They also exploit Rossetti’s secular compositions or those that effectively move in the area of the symbolic, while overlooking the devotional poems, the numerous religious allegories, and hundreds of other compositions based on the indestructible Tractarian and typological dynamism between natural and supernatural, which joyfully extol an unbreakable order of correspondences. There can be no doubt, though, that the former are among the most fascinating and most modern works not of Rossetti alone, but of the whole of mid-Victorian poetic canon; and that the latter, apart from certain exceptions, are the most second-rate and colourless. I may add that in Rossetti’s poetry the reconsideration, the involution and even the disavowal are so frequent that here it would have been an impossible task to try to reconstruct and follow step by step the oscillations between one register and the other, secular and devotional, allegorical and symbolic, realistic and oneiric. Mainly for this reason I shall make no attempt to deal with Rossetti’s poetry chronologically and systematically, or shall do so only very broadly.

38

See in particular the poem ‘Winter: My Secret’.

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§ 199. Christina Rossetti IV: Biography Perhaps untrue, perhaps exaggerated, yet quite plausible are the numerous anecdotes told of the lives of the two Rossetti sisters. It is said that Maria Francesca refused to visit the halls of the mummies in the British Museum for fear of being caught in that irreverent act by the Last Judgement; and that Christina avoided stepping on waste paper in the road for fear it bore the name of God. She became Swinburne’s admirer after meeting him, yet she glued paper strips over the more scandalous of his poems so she would not be tempted to read them. Such rigid, puritanical piety, instilled by their mother, clashed with a volatile, rebellious character recounted in many other anecdotes. One of these tells that Christina as a child, scolded for some disobedience, seized some embroidery scissors and slashed herself. From a young age, she imposed on herself a life of sacrifice and renunciation, forbidding herself various pleasures and innocent pastimes such as the theatre, the opera and chess (due to her uncontrollable desire to win), and perhaps cards as well.39 As an adult woman her character was anything but conciliatory; her relations with almost all the women with whom she came into contact were caustic: for instance with her two sisters-in-law, Lizzie Siddal and Lucy Brown, and also with younger contemporaries, towards whom she was never generous with praise. Objective and often defined impersonal, the hundreds upon hundreds of pious poems she wrote are a continuous, severe examination of conscience, and hide a temperament difficult to discipline and a tormented effort to overcome even the smallest acts of rebellion. 2. All or nearly all the Polidori women were destined to be governesses, but poor health was the reason for Christina, prudently, being exempted from continuous work. Her brother William Michael practically supported the Rossetti family from the age of fifteen as a clerk in the Inland Revenue.

39

An allusion to this is found in the witty poem ‘The Queen of Hearts’, which in turn recalls, for the inscrutable expression of her opponent, Rossetti’s ‘The Card-dealer’ (§ 187.4 n. 45). Another alleged, hardly credible story, told by Virginia Woolf, is that at a party the adolescent Christina stood up and in the centre of the drawing-room exclaimed: ‘I am Christina Rossetti!’, before sitting down again and plunging into stubborn silence.

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Maria Francesca left home to become a governess, and even their mother was obliged to give private lessons. Dante Gabriel alone was allowed to follow his vocation as a painter. Mother and daughter were inseparable companions especially after the two brothers had started life on their own, and after the death of Maria Francesca in 1876. Christina dedicated all her books of poems to her mother, and in particular the moving introductory sonnet. With great initiative that met with little success, the two women also took up teaching, and in 1853 they started a day school for the children of the shopkeepers and labourers in the highly populated, industrialized county of Somerset. The next year Rossetti was eager to follow Florence Nightingale to the Crimea; being too young, she was refused permission. The scale of her humanitarian activity increased from 1859 to 1864, and at times after that date when she was an assistant at a hospice for penitent prostitutes. She fell seriously ill in the summer of 1845, eighteen months after her father, then almost blind, had lost his job at King’s College; behind this illness was perhaps a rejection of religion rather than a religious crisis, as reflected in the tale Maude.40 These and other illnesses as a young girl were therefore, like Barrett Browning’s, imaginary or psychosomatic, and simple reactions to times of difficulty. But it was a real disease, Graves or Basedow disease, a thyroid dysfunction, that struck in 1873. It left her physical appearance visibly marked; eventually a tumour killed her after terrible suffering in 1894. 3. Rossetti had spent her last years at home looking after her three maternal aunts. Her physical reclusion was compensated for with the great, open-minded imaginative freedom with which she allowed herself to explore any sphere of passion or emotions. It is time to complete and subvert the image of a listless and asexual poet, with that of a passionate and volcanic woman whose emotional life pulsated under the ashes. Her volatile character surfaced unmistakably in her painful refusal of not one but two offers of marriage. In 1850 she refused James Collinson, a Pre-Raphaelite 40 In a letter dated 1881 (FLT, 103), Rossetti confessed to her brother Dante Gabriel on his deathbed that she had doubted or rejected her faith twice: when young, before her ‘general confession’, and when unspecified ‘circumstances’ led her ‘(rightly or wrongly) to break up the practice’.

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Brother who had shortly before converted to Catholicism; and in 1866 the polyglot translator of Dante, Charles Cayley, formerly her father’s pupil in Italian, because he did not have sufficiently religious principles (the two former betrothed continued however to meet up; they even lived a sort of Platonic love and mariage blanc). Both Collinson and Cayley have been turned into comical caricatures by biographers, to the point of making Rossetti’s feelings for them appear a blunder or a screen. Collinson, whose standing as a painter was almost nil, was the laughing stock of the PreRaphaelite Brothers. In spite of this, Christina always kept a fond memory of a mediocre painting of his, showing St Elizabeth of Hungary, a saint also venerated by Kingsley the novelist.41 In 1885 she still treasured the memory of a sonnet the poet-painter had dedicated to her.42 These two sentimental relations were revealed, fairly discreetly, by her brother William Michael; he did not even keep back the letters revealing them, which he printed in 1908. From the start of the twentieth century, however, Rossetti’s life once more became a hunting ground for biographers, itchingly anxious to probe into the story of her love life. The ever more voluminous biographies streaming out over recent decades differentiate themselves one from the other only in some extra titbit concerning the accompanying characters and in several more or less demonstrable conjectures. All stem from the undeniable fact that there are vacuums, shady areas, enigmas hidden – perhaps intentionally – by the ‘official’ biography.43 Packer’s 1964 biography was alternative and boldly provocative since it largely pivots on a love that seems to have been hidden by Rossetti herself and by her brother William: that for William Bell Scott, a Scottish bohemian poet and painter welcomed into 41 Volume 5, § 151.2. 42 Thomas 1994, 95. Collinson is a poor, faded copy of Hopkins: a Pre-Raphaelite Catholic artist and poet-painter, he was accepted as a novice in the Stonyhurst Jesuit college where Hopkins was later to study; however, he quickly tired of the menial offices of the novitiate and was asked by the Jesuits themselves to leave the Order. He married a Catholic and continued as a painter with varying degrees of success. 43 An added impulse came in 1930 with the scandalistic biography of Elizabeth Siddal by Violet Hunt (cf. § 182.1, bibliography of D. G. Rossetti). Several times the anything but ‘critical’ biography by Zaturenska 1949 makes obsequious reference to Hunt’s work.

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the Pre-Raphaelite group. Unlike the listless Collinson, he was full of energy, roguish, libertine, almost polygamous. This love almost surely never came to fruition, and it was also unconfessable since Christina was already engaged when she met him and because, after the engagement with Collinson was terminated, she learnt that Scott was already married. Scott perhaps never realized Christina’s infatuation. One of the theories in Packer’s biography is in fact that Rossetti’s Il rosseggiar dell’Oriente, a songbook in Italian, was secretly addressed to Scott. Throughout her life she regretted this lost dream of love, taking the secret with her at her death: ‘I was so much in love with him’, were Christina’s dying words, heard only by her brother. These words had always been taken as addressing Cayley or even Collinson, yet Packer believed them to refer to Scott. Thus Packer’s biography unrolls as an exciting detective story, tracking the movements of the poet and interpreting even the most imperceptible poetical quiver. In this version, it is William Michael who is guilty of throwing us off the scent. Packer’s procedure is by circumstantial evidence, that of an unrelenting judgement of intentions and of a flurry of questions tending to break down alibis and the alleged proofs of Christina’s official passion for Collinson and Cayley.44 I believe Packer’s work deserves wider credit than it has received. Nearly all later biographers have attacked it, accusing it of building castles in the air, following in William Michael’s footsteps and approving his reticence. It has been objected in particular that each of Rossetti’s love poems can have two if not three internal addressees, and that given the scarcity of contextual references a poem may refer to one or another of her suitors, or to no-one 44 A further question comes to mind, one that no biographer has ever answered nor yet even asked: did Rossetti ever have sexual relations with a man? Was that for Scott only an unconfessed, Platonic passion? Nobody denies that he courted her during their many years of acquaintance and frequent meetings. Was it a sexual sin with which she reproached herself so often, mainly in the poem ‘The Convent Threshold’ (which I discuss below)? The only person to have imagined that Christina was at least on the point of losing her virginity is the above-mentioned Violet Hunt. ‘Goblin Market’, as we shall see (§§ 202–3), gives us a powerful insight into whether the affair was consummated in reality or only in the imagination. After thirty-five, Rossetti almost certainly chose spiritual fertility, taking a vow of chastity and giving up the idea of marriage (cf. Marsh 1995, 361, and below, § 202.3).

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in particular. However, nearly all later biographers have not practised what they preached. Jan Marsh, Rossetti’s last biographer, excludes the Scott hypothesis but in turn unearths a fourth, equally dubious love repulsed and frustrated, that for the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Brett, the author of at least one famous painting, The Stonebreaker; there may be an allusion to his first name in the poem actually entitled ‘No Thank You, John’.45 4. There is a further biography of Christina Rossetti. It is that drawn in pictures spaced over the years, in oils portraying her as the Virgin, and her brother Dante Gabriel’s charcoal and pastel portraits of his sister between the ages of sixteen to fifty. Compared to photographs, her portraits are, to tell the truth, false likenesses. Pre-Raphaelite sugariness and mellowing are at work on her features, not rounded but somewhat hard and angular. Dante Gabriel always stresses the dreamy intensity in her eyes and a rosebud mouth, not exactly noticeable in Christina; at least he spares her least attractive feature, an excessively protruding chin. There is above all a pastel of 1866, hands together close to her face, slightly in profile and with a look more intense and dreamy than Rossetti ever gave his sister. This portrait is very similar to those he did of Jane Morris in the same period. It contrasts with the much sharper lineaments we see in a photograph taken by Lewis Carroll, which seems to show another woman. Her attire is also touched up in line with Pre-Raphaelite fashion. Christina Rossetti followed no fashion and her clothes were out-moded, with the austerity of a pew-opener, as she was portrayed in Beerbohm’s pungent cartoon.

45 The other yet more sensational report in this biography is the alleged incestuous relationship (Marsh 1995, 260ff.) between father and daughter when she was about twelve to fifteen. The two were often in the house alone, seeing that the mother and the other siblings were out at work to support the family; her father, who ‘was no tyrant’ like Elizabeth Barrett’s, is often caught by the biographer declaring in letters to an acquaintance that he regretted having only four children, a confession that would seem to indicate that after Christina’s birth he had no further conjugal relations with ‘dear Francesca’ his wife, so being forced to turn his attentions to his daughter.

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§ 200. Christina Rossetti V: Poems on unrequited love The conventional, pragmatic starting point of Rossetti’s poetic apprenticeship, lasting from 1842 to 1847, is the late Romantic, Tennysonian, allegorizing visionary vein. The long ode ‘Repining’ is about a solitary spinner, a ‘damozel’ like Mariana and the Lady of Shalott. It is an apocalyptic vision on the lines of Tennyson’s ‘Armageddon’, an ad extra outgoing followed by a precipitous, horrified return, as ‘outside’ a cosmic cataclysm is in progress as well as the war of the elements – avalanches, landslides, floods, shipwrecks – and of men. On the same lines the wanderer in ‘The Dead City’, another long ode from 1847, discovers the ultimately illusory nature of the splendid ‘palace of art’ and of abundance: ‘Enter in, and look, and see / How for luxury and pride / A great multitude have died’. The motif of the abandoned woman pining away in solitude – sublimating disappointed love, longing for death and reunion in the life beyond with her beloved – blends, shortly after 1848, with Tennysonian escapism and disenchantment in a series of situations dear to Pre-Raphaelite painting and literature, perhaps against the background of real disappointments in love. We might say that all of Rossetti’s poetry on unhappy love is the transposition into romance and the controlled transfiguration of the emotional experiences of a twenty-year-old. Tennyson lies again behind the melancholy for the short-lasting spring prime, the summer sun, flowers; and dozens of poems are embroideries on the usual rose that withers. But the influence of her brother’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ eclipses that of Tennyson in short and very short lyrics that foresee a flowery paradise where the lovers, separated on earth through a mysterious, fatal ban, will be reunited in ‘perfect peace’, even while tender eyes look towards earth and its lost delights. Nostalgia for the world and the squarely determined yet joyful renunciation alternate like two voices and two pendular movements. The lyric ‘Shut Out’46 gives us a glimpse of the symbolic garden of the world from outside the wrought iron gate; this garden is an Eden guarded by a grim spirit barring the way and replying to anyone who begs to enter by building a wall; thus the poet has to be content with a bed of

46 An almost exact imitation of Barrett Browning’s ‘The Lost Bower’ (§ 66.4).

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equally symbolic violets. On the other hand, she looks towards scented, musical ‘shelters’, with languid yearning like that of a woman about to take the veil, who has chosen not the blinding sun but the shade and peace of the convent. Then there are the poems on one of Rossetti’s most typical themes, later to influence the young Hopkins so greatly: disappointed virgins who enter a convent, cut their hair and give up the idea of married life, though as usual with a touch of regret. This certainly represents the imaginary obverse of disappointed love, never really considered a practical possibility. Yet this topic never ceases to be an original ‘dramatic’ motive of Pre-Raphaelite poetry and, above all, painting.47 For Rossetti, life in the convent was the exemplary transition from the renounced earthly marriage and the achievement of heavenly marriage, between the bridegroom left and the Bridegroom found, thus fulfilling the idea of ‘hope deferred’, the hope of reunion with Christ in eternal life. However, there is an unmistakeable, intentionally dark feel of an event actually experienced in the ‘dramatic’ monologue ‘The Convent Threshold’, in which the future nun says farewell to her beloved at the convent door, vainly attempting to convince him to follow her example. She is a woman who has sinned with a relative and must start a life of purification before the inexorable day of justice arrives and it is too late. Death is the most disturbing alternative to the convent as an answer to disappointed love, and the surest way to reunion with Christ in eternal life. Almost the only prospect, so appealing not only to Christina but also to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and previously to Tennyson, is that of identifying with the dying or dead person, so soon to be forgotten by the loved one who will remain and find peace, in some cases actually refusing to be taken up to heaven, wanting to continue to savour earthly joys. She worked on this motif from 1849 onwards, and thereafter occasionally, with numerous exquisite variations, at times very brief, often not more than two lines, which show a supreme constructive balance. 47 An 1882 poem is on a nun ‘of mercy’ who has repressed every desire for a worldly life. ‘An Immurata Sister’ is a short dramatic monologue by a nun expressing the desire to retire from the world. Rossetti’s interest in 1846 in Magdalen (the subject of paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) who refuses robes, pearls and jewels to follow Jesus, is typically Pre-Raphaelite.

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2. The autobiographical background should not be underestimated in Rossetti’s poems of unhappy, frustrated love. This is shown in the two successive collections – not very extended, according to Rossetti’s usual poetic brevity – by a thick curtain of caution and precaution with which she tried to camouflage it. Of course this does not in the least mean explaining the biography through her poetic work, as has often been done. There is no need, in other words, to give a name to the beloved to whom the poems are addressed or to identify exactly the underlying personal story – whether it was Collinson or Cayley (usually considered the most probable recipient) or William Bell Scott, or yet another that the biographers have yet to discover. All these possible figures are as if brought together and summed up within an experience emotionally distanced and objectified, and thus made ready to become poetry. In Monna Innominata, a cycle of fourteen sonnets completed by 1882 but very probably conceived and begun a number of years or even decades before, the distancing stratagems multiply until they seem artificial and stuck on. In the title, the paradigm of the hidden naming involves the poet herself; it is as if she had wished to delete any trace of her identity, yet had wanted to become one with the model of a femininity historically dominated to the point of indistinction, and unworthy of being named. Much attention has been given to the fact that, however nameless, the woman in the fiction of this collection sings of a passionate, desperate love, not only taking the initiative – ‘I loved you first’ –48 but even appropriating a poetic tradition quintessentially masculine. In the short prose preface – another unusual element, and a further distancing filter – Rossetti, the sister of the translator of early Italian poets and of Dante, salutes Beatrice and Laura, made immortal by the great Italian poets. Yet she considers them unappealing, simply abstract archetypes emptied of humanity, and she recalls other women of whom other earlier poets had sung – unnamed poets again. At that time ‘one can imagine’ that women may have had the same poetic talent as poets and that they may have written poems. The 48 AVP, 344–5, points out that ‘happy’ in Rossetti’s time meant ‘married’, therefore ‘unhappy’ meant a ‘spinster’: this is then a further stratagem by which Rossetti wanted to claim the right to speak about her own sexuality. A spinster conventionally should keep quiet on such a subject.

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songbook claims to be the imaginary voice of those women or of one of them, had she been able or had she desired to write poetry; it therefore also claims to be a conscious, parodic counterfeiting of the idiolect, stylistic cunning and love rhetoric of the Elizabethan and Metaphysical sonnets. The long time spent in their making allowed Rossetti to compose a highly formalized cycle, one of the very few cases, in her poetry, of a dialogue with the monuments of courtly sonnet-writing. Between the preface and the text there is a third intermediary layer and a third diaphragm, since each sonnet is preceded by epigraphs of one or two lines in Italian from Dante or Petrarch, whose function, and relation with the single sonnets, is not immediately clear, indeed at times frankly incomprehensible, though often variously and unconvincingly explained.49 Moreover, the songbook has a declared iconic intent and motivation, common in Italian songs and lyrics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: it is a sonnet of sonnets, in that each sonnet is like a line of a sonnet sequence, whose fourteen lines are equivalent to each of the fourteen sonnets.50 The contrast between Monna Innominata and Rossetti’s more deeply felt and almost improvised lyrical vein, and the sparkling countryside ballads is evident. However, her carefully thought-out and finely chiselled work results in a product that is far from convincing and feels like a cold academic exercise. It comes home several lengths behind Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. The latter work, in the preface, is held up as a model of feminine poetry – at last! – but a model overturned in its outcome, since it is the expression of a passion happily shared, while Rossetti sings a dirge for an unrequited love.

49 The most extensive, taxonomic and formal analysis of Monna Innominata still is that by W. Whitla, ‘Questioning the Convention: Monna Innominata’, in Kent 1987, 82–131. The epigraphs, according to Whitla, may be subtexts or kinds of signals referring to Dantesque (most frequently) or Petrarchan situations having an incidental relationship and implication with Rossetti’s context. It is undoubtedly true that the Dantesque quotations come from Purgatory and, in the final sonnets, from Paradise, and that all belong to episodes where poets appear and are recognized (Sordello, Casella, Statius, etc.). 50 The logical and argumentative progression, if there is one, is rather vague. The attempts by Harrison 1988, 153ff., and Whitla, art. cit., to reconstruct it are of no great assistance.

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3. The outline of Sonnets from the Portuguese is followed more than Rossetti had intended to distance herself from it. The development of Monna Innominata follows in fact an alternation of unexpected emotional outbursts and calls for reason, of jubilation and humiliation, declarations and denials, absences and (often only dreamt-of ) encounters; and the loved one rises up in the same emblems and traditional idealizations as in Barrett’s collection. He is the whole wide world, the whole wide world is all in him, sweet is what he says, he turns day into night with magic power. The apotheosis is followed by the declaration of the perfect equality of the lovers through their love, a daring declaration that overturns the historical stereotype, particularly the Victorian stereotype, of a woman whose task was only to give, and to be the helpmeet of the man. This declaration is however almost belied by sonnet nine, which has to admit the clear superiority of the beloved over the woman, so fearful, so fragile in spite of the strength of her love, once again so mild as to set herself willingly to one side should another woman be more to his taste, and more witty, more lovely: ‘you companioned I am not alone’. Monna Innominata dialogues both with all Rossetti’s conventual poetry in proclaiming that divine love is indeed superior to human love, but without putting the latter out of the picture, instead setting up both as reciprocal and interchangeable. Earthly love would live after death as spiritualized love, and a human life lost would be in heaven a ‘life reborn’;51 the same earthly beauty, the same withered youth would be given back in enhanced splendour. 4. Rossetti used the Italian language almost as if it were a sort of shorthand or code; she had recourse to it to deliver and confide to herself her innermost griefs and hardest decisions. In a poem written in 1847 when she was seventeen, we find this solemn repudiation of love: ‘O ruscelletto, / Dì al dio d’amore / Che questo petto, / Che questo core, / A lui ricetto / Più non darà’ [‘O little stream, / Tell the god of love / That this breast, / That this heart, / To him a shelter / No more will give’]. The twenty-one short, crisp 51

The sonnet ‘At Last’ repeats that love generates love and will be empowered in afterlife. Heaven is the goal and the close of ‘life’s unending quest’. Likewise, ‘In the Willow Shade’ celebrates the eternity of love in life and especially in death and after death.

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compositions in Il rosseggiar dell’Oriente, subtitled ‘Song-book to a distant friend’, can be thought of as the counterpart of Monna Innominata, and were perhaps also kindled by her repressed love for the translator Cayley and her regret at not having married him: ‘Più ma assai più di quel che non dicea / Nel cuor ti amavo’; ‘Quella che diede un “No” volendo un “Sì”’ [‘More, much more than that I did not say / In my heart I loved you’; ‘The one that gave a “No” meaning a “Yes”’]. Yet in this case too Rossetti artfully managed to eliminate any clue that might lead to a clear identification, so much so that pre-1930 criticism, unaware of any possible love for Bell Scott, had already noticed that the small collection contains many double-edged terms and allusions.52 As a further confirmation, they were poems jealously hidden away by her, kept under lock and key and seen or read by no-one until her death. This temporarily absent destination perhaps explains the colourful, easy-going and hardly ‘poetical’ Italian: ‘Chi sa se valga un fico?’; ‘bagno il letto’; ‘ti raccomando / Di quando in quando / Circoli quadri, / Idee bislunghe’ [‘Who knows if it’s worth a fig?’; ‘I wet the bed’; ‘I recommend / Every now and then / Square circles / And overlong ideas’]. It also explains the incipient, spontaneous foundation of a new tradition in Italian poetry, familiar and anti-rhetorical, more personal and less stilted, at times even curiously inventive (in one composition the loved one had sent an enigmatic ‘tocca-caldaia’, and his beloved sends it back as a memento), recalling Giuseppe Giusti’s playful poetry and, in the diminutives and the cult of tiny things, Giovanni Pascoli.53

52

53

Cf. Stuart 1930, 65. Packer 1964, 165ff., of course identifies ‘the distant friend’ not as Cayley but as Scott, on the basis of an undeniable time shift between the intense passion vibrating in the collection and the stature of the man, and especially between the composition dates (1862–1868) and the period in which Cayley unsuccessfully paid court to Rossetti. Cf. in this regard the excellent remarks of Donini, 27–8 (introduction to the 1984 anthology) on the Italian vocabulary.

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§ 201. Christina Rossetti VI: Poems with a rural background on pairs of sisters In Rossetti’s colourful and fragrant nosegay of poems of country life the very names of the protagonists – Meg, Molly, May, Margaret – suggest and embody the essence of that milieu, with a tiny, unspoken protest against invading industrial sprawl. A careful, moved observer, Rossetti, recalling Wordsworth, clearly intends to separate this rural world from the urban context, knowing full well that ‘one day in the country / Is worth a month in town’; she contrasts the truth of her characters with the ‘grand ladies in silk and feathers’. The protagonists are labouring hard at their rural tasks; they are milkmaids and farm-labourers, spotless and sincere, stocky and ‘creamy’ like the warm fresh milk flowing into their buckets. Yet among them there often is a careless workmate, curious or impatient or decidedly slothful. Both the former and the latter are preparatory studies for the sisters Lizzie and Laura, the heroines of ‘Goblin Market’. Curiosity impels that single peasant girl to leave her home, and to go ‘loitering’ and to wander about often after dusk or even at night at most suspect and shady hours; this opposes her to the sedentary, homely state of the others. All except one, these young country girls make quick and active use of time and fulfil the Puritan duty to avoid any instance of wastefulness, thus leaving no opening for the imagination. Meanwhile, that one girl lazes the time away. Yet, by a strange reversal, one of the two female figures wisely waits on the sidelines, and the other acts impulsively. Impatience is often active and often regretted, like plucking an unripe fruit or a flower, only to watch it wither away. Patience achieves something much greater and longer-lasting, often a happy marriage after a judicious wait; she who cannot wait incurs the prompt curse of sterility, finding neither suitors nor a husband. This plot is wonderfully retraced again and again with very few variations, but those few brilliant, in dozens and dozens of poems. They should be read for their intrinsic value as much as for the confrontation between Rossetti’s two souls or selves, between the avid, unrestrained tasting of the world’s delights (the world of the senses too), and renunciation in view of a greater good hereafter. Rossetti thus identifies herself both with the patient, fearful virgin and with the imprudent one, according to two different levels of autobiographical projection. The most perfectly devised of these compositions is

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‘An Apple-Gathering’ (1857); though brief, it has the unmistakeable air of a parable. The nameless girl picking the blossom to adorn her hair seems to be indulging in a gesture that is innocently narcissistic or perhaps simply coquettish; in fact picking blossom too early means doing without the fruit, so her gesture threatens future sterility. She is a new Jeanie or a new Laura – two of the ‘Goblin Market’ figures – who impatiently refuses to ‘wait’, unlike the other country girls. When the time comes to pick the apples, the girl is ‘empty-handed’, while the others have a ‘basket full’.54 Having brought home no fruit, the girl is left by her suitor, who has moved on to Gertrude and helps her carry her heavy basket. The lover, he too a prudent Puritan, looks for a bride with a dowry rather than a flirt who puts flowers in her hair but ‘in due season’ returns home empty-handed. As in ‘Goblin Market’, marriage rewards practical productivity,55 not dreaming poetry: the peasant girl dreams of absolute love, perhaps not even conjugal love; she is a countrified Madame Bovary. When the others go back home in the evening, she stays in the orchard and ‘loiters’, the same verb used in ‘Goblin Market’ to mean desire and sinful swooning.56 2. Rossetti’s many little pictures of rural life are not an end in themselves; they appear as objective correlatives of the poet’s changing mood as she looks at them, although each is a finished, self-standing composition. The Victorian, precarious mark of human love is reflected in the autumnal or wintry decay of nature and in the rhythm of the seasons, depicted without digressive side-steps and with no superfluity, in short lines often excellently balanced. However, nature’s cycle differed from the human cycle 54 Clearly referring to future rounded bellies in pregnancies after marriage. Again: her companions are ‘plump’, an adjective also found, and applied to fruit, in ‘Goblin Market’. 55 One may sense an allusion to capitalist accumulation in ‘apples piled’. 56 Fulfilled conjugal happiness crowns healthy country courting, when sometimes a farm labourer weds a bride who ungrudgingly accepts a previous affair of his; but there is also the sullen, capricious girl, a bit of a belle dame sans merci, who is contemptuous of her lover and claims back her freedom; or the peasant girl who takes the eye of a gentleman then to be abandoned with a child, thus full of repressed revenge. In ‘Love from the North’ the narrator is a dream-filled woman; during the wedding itself she falls for a romantic man from the north and elopes with him.

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in reflowering annually, thus escaping inevitable decline. The succeeding months with their displays, emblems and anthropomorphic personifications had an unspeakable appeal for Rossetti, as is shown by numerous poems animated with naïve, fable-like pathos and infinite grace. The delicious zoological pantomime, ‘The Months’ (1879), might be taken as the synthesis of all Rossetti’s poetry. Within a brief dramatic action the speaking months follow one another to the footlights, forced to enter and exit the stage by the pace of the passing year, with all their pleasant features and conventional symbols, and with typical products of the land associated to each of the twelve months. Minimal captions notify scene changes, and each picture differs from the others in details and ingenious metric variations, with a sequence of song contests, arias, recitatives and cabalettas. The motif of the successive seasons often aligns with the spiritual calendar, or is the backdrop for inner motions. But here in ‘The Months’ all is lightness, all is pure pleasure in fable-like personification, infantile regression to a new Eden or a well-protected Noah’s Ark. Even the death of each month is a sweet, melancholy remembrance. This pantomime is a much less murky and dark ‘Goblin Market’; in fact offers abound of those innocuous fruits so sinisterly prepared by the goblins. Each of the twelve months is a goblin turned good and generous, ready to invite the homeless, thoughtfully distributing refreshment or at least flowers and buds. As also in Hopkins, the cyclical rhythm makes of nature something never consumed and eternally new, an everlasting return precluded to man. December is cheerful because the days grow longer again and because an inner sun shines: it is the month of Christmas. The close of this delicate poem coincides with the return on stage of the twelve months and their dance, a dance that can only be circular.57 3. For the first time in 1850, Rossetti identified and made use of one of the most fertile, personal situations in all her poetry. The prose tale Maude58 explores her relationship – or more often the conflict – with her sister, the autobiographical roots of which I mentioned above. After ten years, 57 A much more rueful, compressed version of this poem is ‘Tempus fugit’, in which winter persists and the cyclic rhythm does not reopen. 58 § 206.2.

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the relation found its most memorable objectification in ‘Goblin Market’. ‘The Lowest Room’ (1856) is still far removed from this masterpiece since it contains a conflicting discussion between the two sisters that is too openly intellectual and ideological, and this contrast is too easily solved by reasserting the honest gospel of work over the unproductive appeal of poetry. The wise sister is in fact recompensed with a happy marriage. Like ‘Goblin Market’, this poem contains a sudden leap forward, with a pretty picture worthy of Patmore representing matrimonial happiness with laughing offspring, who twenty years on look very like their parents. The restless sister, in the meantime, has learnt the hard way to mortify herself, and that the last shall be the first and vice versa. Not two but three sisters, indeed explicitly three ‘virgins’, are the protagonists of the charming, fable-like ‘Maiden-song’ (1863), which splits the thoughtless sister into two distinct hypostases. The domestic industriousness of the lovely Margaret clashes with and overcomes the curiosity and weakness of May and Meggan, unable to resist the world’s temptations; just for once, however, in this case there is an almost happy ending in store for all three, especially the latter two. In fact while Margaret stays at home, sewing and singing in perfect communion with the nature outside her window, Meggan receives and accepts the suit of a shepherd – through fear that the more attractive sister at home will achieve marriage before she does. May has the same idea and accepts a second shepherd. The frame is the same as in ‘Goblin Market’: Margaret sacrifices herself while the other two simply ‘loiter’ – that recurrent verb once more. Expectation and renunciation are rewarded both from the human and from the religious viewpoint, since Margaret accepts the hand, not of a shepherd, but of a king, a king who may also mystically be Christ himself and the ascetic life, therefore a much higher reward. Better then to wait wisely – but beware of prevarication! – than to be over-hasty.59

59

Among other poems on the same conflict is ‘The Ghost’s Petition’, in dialogic tercets and introducing one unsleeping sister and the other wise, who calls upon her to lie down and sleep because she is wasting away awaiting the return of her beloved husband who never comes. The beloved does really come not only late but, in Gothic fashion, he turns out to be a ghost. ‘Noble Sisters’ is a witty, fast-paced ballad on the same topic, that of waiting for the beloved and of the fearful expectation of a message

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§ 202. Christina Rossetti VII: ‘Goblin Market’ I. The allegory of rewarded expectation and intermediary experience The fairy-tale ballad ‘Goblin Market’ (1859), the second longest and most famous poem by Christina Rossetti, has been that most intensely studied for over 150 years of ceaseless and obstinate critical debate. It will also require a very detailed and circumstanced reading on my part. Given the level of interpretative investigation now achieved, this cannot but be a hierarchizing and integration of the multiple interpretative proposals put forward until now. The centrality of ‘Goblin Market’, its value as a general key to all of Rossetti’s poetry and to its most typical expressive mode – the fairy-tale narrative in a rural setting – were highlighted both by the author in the editions of her poetry she herself edited, and by her brother William Michael in the complete posthumous edition. This composition is in fact placed there at the head of the group of her principal poems. I have already explained what led to ‘Goblin Market’: the idea of country versus town, a timeless countryside albeit recognisably modelled on the landscapes surrounding her Polidori grandparents’ cottage thirty miles from London, where until 1839 – when the property was sold – the young Rossetti siblings spent their summer holidays. To this must be added the contentious, hardly idyllic relations between the two Rossetti sisters; Christina’s trauma and regret caused by the first and then the second missed marriage; the choice of monastic life, followed by celibacy, of her sister Maria Francesca to whom she dedicated ‘Goblin Market’ when first published. According to a simple, over-hasty autobiographical reading, ‘Goblin Market’ is a dream-like deformation of the Rossetti family’s context. Christina is embodied in Laura, while Maria Francesca appears as her sister Lizzie, who in her selfless abnegation also recalls Lizzie Siddal, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife.60 Or the two sisters might be the two successive or synchronic faces of Christina’s personality. There are three scenarios in the from him. This message is delivered by a falcon or a dog or a page, after which the woman departs to seek him. 60 However, two sisters of opposite temperaments are at the centre of obscurely and remotely similar facts in Dante Gabriel’s ‘The Bride’s Prelude’, another poem about love repressed, enjoyed, punished, redeemed and pardoned (§ 194.2).

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poem: the ‘Tennysonian’ farmstead where the two sisters live; the rushflanked brook where they go to fetch water, climbing down a steep bank; the ‘mossy glen’ where first one and then the other sister, in circumstances and for ends vastly different, encounter the fruit-merchant goblins.61 Among the keywords that keep surfacing in the poem are the verb ‘loiter’ and the adjective ‘tedious’, indicating the spoilt Laura’s unhealthy dawdling to seek superficial satisfactions that do not satiate and contravene the biblical and Victorian ‘work’ and ‘will’ ethic, imperatives faithfully observed by Lizzie and reluctantly shared by Dante Gabriel. The happily ending development of the story is closed by an epilogue that leaps a gap of numerous years from the initial action: the whole tale, in the light of this scene, is a flashback. Narrative objectivity, entrusted to the third person mode, drops almost at once: the goblins, first ‘kind and full of loves’, and with voices as sweet as those of doves, enough to justify Laura in yielding to temptation, are unmasked as evil forces by small but more and more unmistakeable hints at their cunning, wickedness and eventually sadistic hardness. Formally the poem is a banquet of languages. It is cadenced in separate, freely organized sections not answering to any definite stanzaic measure; the prosody is irregular and erratic, ranging from a minimum of four to a maximum of ten syllables per line; rhymes crop up at unordered intervals, rhythm is for once skilfully varied.62 Never, before ‘Goblin Market,’ had the choice of words been so painstaking and sophisticated, and so highly relished, with lists of rare fruit-words placed in the mouths of semi-human or semi-bestial goblins,63 and offered to the palate no less than to the ear. Crescendos of onomatopoeic verbs follow closely one upon the other at each change of scene; anaphoras abound, with repetitions, distant recalls, isosyntactic instances, while figures of repetition and reiteration indicate

61

Like Hero, the main figure in a fairy-tale story (§ 206.5), the two sisters live on the border between a non-fable world and fairyland (Marsh 1995, 229). 62 They elicited excessive praise from Saintsbury in a memorable passage (quoted in Sandars 1930, 109–10) that seems to have dropped from Carlyle’s pen. 63 Rossetti’s inventiveness in characterizing the anthropomorphic goblins has been linked back to the fact that the Rossetti house was near the zoo, often visited by the siblings in childhood.

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the force of the appeal, indeed the inebriated delirium of the imaginary tasting.64 ‘Goblin Market’ almost at once soared above the rest of Rossetti’s production, proving the most compelling and dazzling poem she had ever composed. She herself said that it really was nothing but a fairy-tale; yet anyone willing to abandon himself or herself to the sheer pleasure of reading would notice at once a sequence and an accumulation of shocking, enigmatic details that cannot be missed and that need a transposed, cyphered reading. Within certain limits, this poem can be presented as an open text unleashing a multiplicity of suggestions which far from eliding with each other all appear equally convincing to the interpreter. The latter has to answer the following questions in particular: what do the fruit-merchant goblins really represent? What is the nature of their invitation? What lies behind Laura’s encounter with them, and what is the meaning of the bartering of a lock of hair in exchange for tasting the fruit? Lastly, what is behind her sister Lizzie’s second encounter with the goblins and her rescue mission? Finally, and most important: how can we explain the epilogue? All these queries, are related to the fact that an allegorical reading of the poem, possible up to a certain point and to a certain level of the text, becomes unsatisfying and disappointing, and no longer holds. This is because the poem postulates a replacement or integration of the allegorical model with a symbolic reading. 2. Rather than being naïve as Rossetti claimed, the shrewdness of ‘Goblin Market’ can be measured and verified through its dialogue with the poetic and fairy-tale tradition. As in ‘The Lady of Shalott’,65 the story 64 The influence of nonsense literature should not therefore be forgotten. Rossetti herself wrote nursery rhymes and poems for children, such as the Sing-song collection, and other compositions in a form usual in children’s literature, the nonsense alphabet. More precisely, ‘Goblin Market’ corresponds to the genre, frequent in Lear (§§ 218–21), of the ‘food fantasy’, in which full rein is given to the pleasure of naming and listing fruits, jams, cakes and also a wide variety of dishes and delicacies. It possesses other linguistic idiosyncrasies such as onomatopoeia and newly coined words. In Lear too we find playful series of gerunds or verbs in the past tense having the same endings. Just as Lear’s nonsense makes sense, so in Rossetti the nonsense scenario is laden with more obscure, disturbing meanings. 65 § 84.1–4.

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starts with a ban transgressed and closes with a curse announced. Or it may so close – as it has effectively already closed for Jeanie, a character only mentioned and vaguely recalled, and a sort of third sister. The ban and the curse recall a mythological or biblical topos, ranging from the Gorgon’s petrifying gaze to the prohibition on looking back laid on Lot and his family. In both cases the ban is on gazing, and the curse is set in motion when the eye yields to temptation: the fruit is sweet to the tongue but also ‘sound to the eye’, and Lizzie tries to dissuade her sister from ‘peeping at goblin men’. The resulting punishment for the first greedy sucking and the satisfaction of tongue and eye in Laura is deafness and blindness: never again does she hear or see the goblins, and she is also threatened with biblical sterility. The difference made by the epilogue in the two poems, by Tennyson and Rossetti, is, however, crucial: tragic and elegiac pathos in Tennyson, middle-class, Biedermeier idyll in Rossetti. On the other hand, the theme of the heroine, abandoned or sinning or struck sterile, is recurrent in Barrett Browning’s poems and ballads of 1838 and 184466 (Barrett, as often mentioned, was avidly read and admired by the Pre-Raphaelites). As a simple fairy-tale ‘Goblin Market’ evokes and overturns the tales of Snow White and the seven dwarfs and Cinderella, for the materialization of the voice of conscience and the forewarning of the curse. To prove the wealth of sources behind the poem it is enough to say that these echoes are not generally found in the numerous informed articles and essays that have appeared and continue to appear year in, year out. ‘Goblin Market’ is in fact a highly derivative text, as are many in Romanticism and Victorianism; over time, similarities have been found with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Coleridge, Hogg, Barham, Allingham and Dickens,67 66 § 64.4–5. 67 In Gabriel Grub’s story in Pickwick Papers there appear good goblins to redeem a misanthrope, whereas in the Old Curiosity Shop the dwarf Quilp provides an equation between food and female flesh to sample. In a scene in the fifth chapter of the novel, Quilp is introduced with his young, desirable wife; he smacks his lips as if she ‘were really a sweetmeat’. Like Rossetti’s goblins, Quilp is a dwarf, though a good deal more deformed, repellent, dirty and openly sinister. His legs are crooked and he ‘sidles’ as he walks; his face, ugliness and movements are ‘perfectly goblinlike’. In Dickens’s novel Quilp cossets and compliments Little Nell equivocally, and

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as well as with the tales of the Arabian Nights and the Germanic sagas read in Rossetti’s childhood (and even with samples and repertoires of London street sellers’ cries).68 ‘Suck’ is one of the thematic verbs recalling the vampire myth; also a text that was taboo, Uncle John Polidori’s The Vampyre – which must have been known to Rossetti and was in fact notorious in the household – might have furnished her with some hints, along with past and contemporary demonic literature. But ‘Goblin Market’ stretches on to dialogue with later texts, and these too are details not contained in the files on sources and influences. ‘In Country Sleep’ by Dylan Thomas seems based on it; and Forster in Howards End was to remember it in the famous reading of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, where the music materializes in the ballet of the treacherous goblins as they are chased away, yet are always ready to return on stage. 3. The first and most immediate figurative reading may be summed up in the following terms: in ‘Goblin Market’ Rossetti severely admonishes herself against satisfying her senses and sexual enjoyment, within and above all outside marriage. As we shall see, there are various implicit addressees in ‘Goblin Market’; the first is in this case the poet herself. The emotional and temperamental juxtaposition of the two sisters is that between rational self-control (Lizzie) and unbridled instinctual action (Laura). The goblins and the fruit polarise and activate all five senses, taste (the fruit’s sweetness), smell (‘odorous […] mead’), touch (the velvety peaches), sight (‘Lizzie cover’d up her eyes’), hearing (the sisters hear at first the goblins’ cries). That the poem then, through the tasting of the fruit, reflects the loss of virginity is indicated by the text and corroborated by several different, mysterious tricks her in the hope of capturing and marrying her. Speaking to Nell, he calls her ‘my little cherry-cheeked, red-lipped wife’. In an issue of Playboy, the chapter of the text’s posthumous influences closed with a flourish with a series of photographs – a montage of nudes and off-colour poses. 68 The catalogue of inviting fruit, luscious and tropical, sounds again, for example, with unmistakable echoes, in Dickens’s story A Christmas Carol. In a passage in Edward Lear’s Calabrian diary, the Italians say that no fruit grows in England, but in Italian the English answer: ‘abbiamo Currants – abbiamo Goosberries – abbiamo Greengages’ [‘we have Currants – we have Gooseberries – we have Greengages’]: three of the delectable fruits offered by the goblins.

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and enigmatic details in other poems; in particular this finds confirmation, as we shall see, in an episode among the most intricate, obscure and contorted in ‘The Convent Threshold’. We are led to suppose that Christina, if she really is reflected in Laura, had effectively lost her virginity and had then been aided in overcoming the trauma by her sister, thus mending her ways and putting her guilt behind her on the path to atonement (according to the Gospel teaching ‘go and sin no more’). Such a love story may actually have happened or was perhaps only morbidly imagined, or it was a recurrent, indelible temptation. Promptly taken up by the more curious biographers, for some time there was a rumour in the Rossetti circle that it had been her own sister to dissuade Christina at the last minute from eloping with Collinson, already married by then. Maria Francesca, it was hinted, had put her under police-type surveillance, and to stop her mad act had even spent the night sitting across the doormat!69 If all this is true, the poem teaches that senses are to be treated as Lizzie treats them, not as Laura does. Laura learnt the lesson, we presume from the epilogue, only after giving in to temptation and tasting the ‘fruit of sin’; the wise Lizzie already knows, prior to the experience – in a sort of previous understanding and without going through the experience – the vanity of the senses and the need to control impulses and erotic pleasure. If Lizzie is Maria Francesca Rossetti, she knows this well enough to give up such pleasure definitively and make peace with herself in the convent cloister. It is significant that Lizzie is not present in the epilogue, and we may imagine that she is absent precisely because she has in the meantime entered a convent. The enigma of the fruit can therefore be explained as impulses and temptations that can be vicariously experimented in order to be made relative and conquered: in other words, it is needful to know – not to experience directly – the dangers in order to avoid them. Lizzie transmits these impulses to Laura in an intermediary way, and in fact the fruit she brings her, plastered all over her face, is no longer fruit in its original state but cleaned and prepared, its 69 Cf. Zaturenska 1949, 70. Marsh 1995, 258–9, maintains that the goblins, again in a deformed dream, are a paternal call, in that Rossetti’s father used to bring home fruit to curry favour with his daughters. Hero’s father too, in the tale of the same name (§ 206.5), wants to lie with his daughter and is tempted to commit incest.

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toxic value defused, for the very reason that in the passage from the goblins to Laura it has lost its freshness and was not sampled on the spot. Laura undergoes a prompt vaccination, no longer feeling any desire from that moment on, and the fruit thus administered has the unpleasant taste of wormwood. We know from the poem of no significant relapses or of new temptations undergone and accepted by Laura; she herself even transforms into the ‘wise’ Lizzie at the end, and gives her children the same advice and prior admonitions that echo almost to the letter those her sister had once vainly given her.70 4. This interpretation hinges in turn on a pre-text: the sampling of the fruit offered so ambiguously and insinuatingly by the goblins is a metaphor of the sin of Eve and hence of Adam. ‘Goblin Market’ is therefore the umpteenth Victorian rewriting of the Fall from the sexual viewpoint. It cannot be a coincidence that the apple is curiously always the first fruit cited in the goblins’ long list. Allusions to Eden abound – allusions to the ‘unknown orchard’ and especially to the ‘fruit forbidden’ –71 and again they

70 The classic ethical question on the prevention of sin by experiential or simply preventive methods – without actual experience – harks back in English literature at least to Robert Burton in the seventeenth century. The following aphorism from Newman is cited by FitzGerald in the Polonius collection: ‘In spite of all that grovelling minds may say about the necessity of acquaintance with the world and with sin in order to get on well in life, yet, after all, inexperienced guilelessness carries a man on as safely and more happily’. The query comes up frequently in Victorian pedagogical novels, for example in Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and in Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Volume 5, §§ 213 and 146). In the latter novel the young widow Graham holds that her son will be immune from the vice of drinking by making sure he knows nothing of it, whereas her acquaintances in chorus say that temptation can be overcome only when it is experienced at least once. The reference to sex is implicit: children want to infringe prohibitions and desire what is banned, and liquor and wine are metaphors, as is fruit. 71 This is how Laura defines the fruit when Lizzie returns home after the goblins’ rape. A valuable spingboard for interpreting ‘Goblin Market’ is the juvenile poem ‘The Dead City’ (§ 200.1); there too we find a list of exotic, tropical fruit expressly symbolizing a life of hedonism and pleasure. On a decked table with guests made of stone – who in the vision undergo a Dantesque retaliation – apples are once more cited at the head of the list, followed by nectarines, peaches, plums, ‘yellow melons’,

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cannot be coincidental. Given the overwhelming quantity of powerfully evocative clues, admissions and proofs, we are bound to postulate and accept that the barter between food and sex, and the sexual fulfilment in the tasting of delectable, flavoursome fruit, anthropologically goes back to the folk tradition that attributes the substitution principle to the Bible, interpreting the yielding to diabolical temptation as a yielding to the sexual impulse, and eating the apple as the metaphor for the sexual act, according to a transfer frequently intended by the Victorians. The goblins are the materialization of man’s animal nature; they are hybrids offering unregulated sex outside marital dispensation,72 under the guise of the fruits whose roots are almost anthropomorphically carnivorous and thirsty: the epithet ‘hungry thirsty’, without punctuation, conveys the full measure of avidity and voracity. Faced with these, Laura (blonde in accordance with the Victorian archetype of the seductress-seduced) represents capitulation to erotic impulse; the other sister, Lizzie, the repression of impulse, is described figuratively in the comment ‘veiled her blushes’. The savouring scene is to say the least alarmingly precise and allusive. The repeated sucking has a very evident substitution effect, and is a metonymy for sexual pleasure; the ‘honey’ that Laura seems to be sampling is an almost codified metaphor for male sperm; undercover sexual references are in the images

apricots, pears, figs, cherries, ‘dark mulberries’, ‘sultanas’, strawberries and lemons. Given the familiarity with the Confessions, a work that the Rossettis’ mother used to read them when they were small, it does not seem irrelevant to recall St Augustine’s anecdote on the theft of pears (Harrison 1988, 98–9). The symbol of sin, an apple in a girl’s hand, appears in Millais’s painting Autumn Leaves. 72 The vaunted qualities of the fruit offered represent human attributes, specifically female, whether appealing or equivocal, such as their ‘wild’ quality (in the word ‘berry’ and its compounds), their rotundity, the colour of the skin or rind, even virginity. The adjectives are in many cases deliberately out of place, since they express such connotations: cherries are ‘plump’, apples are round (Tasso had already famously used apples – ‘le poma’ – to allude to women’s breasts), just as the melons and peaches are round; and the cherries are even ‘unpecked’, meaning they have not yet been touched. But on the subject of human features the equivocal, yet still conventional ‘down’ upon the peaches must be noted, and the metaphors of head and cheek (‘swart-headed’, ‘cheeked’). The skin’s colour appears again in ‘swart-headed mulberries’.

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of liquidity countering the images of hardness. The lock of hair73 stands for the female sexual organ; yet the severing of the lock is also symbolically an inverted castration: in fact the consequence of deflowering is the cessation of fertility, and precocious physical decay.74 In a way incongruous only if seen from the point of view of a fairy-tale, Laura is excluded from any prospect of marriage: whoever yields to the goblins’ invitation loses any hope of marrying and having children. Here there is a brief appearance on stage of the third character in the ballad, the sisters’ friend Jeanie, whose withered daisies anticipate the sterility of the kernel-stone – an echo of Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’ – that Laura plants in desperation later on and that bears no fruit. 5. Sensual enjoyment is something that does not last; even the goblins say so en passant: ‘Morns that pass by, / Fair eves that fly’. But among the negative consequences there is the creation of a dependence, fostering rather than fulfilling desire, and triggering an unstoppable escalation when it seemed that just sampling the fruit once would provide permanent satisfaction. The secret illusion of Laura, Jeanie and all future experientialists is that the good they seek is everlasting, only to discover that it is transient and that, as Baudelaire too knew, flesh is sad and the prompt legacy of pleasure is pain. Triumphant onomatopoeia greets Lizzie’s arrival at the goblins; with feet firmly on the ground, she explains unequivocally why she has come; the goblins, humanly scratching their heads, find they have a problem. They want no money, but they raise their price: they foretaste a sexual orgy, a collective rape. In an impressively onomatopoeic crescendo 73

It must be noted, in the light of the scene following upon that of Lizzie’s encounter with the goblins, that Laura makes a mistake: the goblins ask for nothing, at least explicitly. They do indeed cry ‘come buy’, but later on they do not ask Lizzie for any money either. It is Laura who believes they require payment, and so she freely declares she has no money, hence offering them a lock of her blond hair. 74 The substitution principle may be found again in an allusion to perforation of the hymen, so again to the loss of virginity. There is a small point of incongruity in the poem: only after Laura has met the goblins does Lizzie remind her of Jeanie’s miserable end. With her sister’s good so much at heart, Lizzie failed to remind her in advance of this fact, perhaps for two reasons: Jeanie’s sad death has no effect on her sister even now; it was probably Lizzie alone who had some doubt about it.

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they vent their frustration on her, crushing the fruit against her mouth to force her to eat it, but like a ‘virgin town’ she resists; there is a touch of enjoyment in that inward laughter of pleasure and fear in feeling the fruit pulp dripping off her. Lizzie remains silent, without speaking and without eating, and her mouth, representing the sexual organ, remains firmly shut. The goblins may collectively ejaculate around the orifice but not within it; this explains why the fruit has no lethal effect on her, unlike that on her sister. The juicy fruit, as before, lodges in the dimples on her chin and streaks her neck. If ‘Goblin Market’ reworks the myth of the Fall, this theological plan now requires a Redeemer. Lizzie is a biblical, wholly Tractarian ‘type’ of Christ in that she makes a parallel renunciation and puts herself at risk for her sister. In the form of an ironical reversal, and also owing to the dropping of a tear ‘more rare than pearl’, the cutting of Laura’s lock may basically allude to a nun’s taking the veil.75 The scene to be interpreted as the failed rape of Lizzie by the goblins becomes, from this viewpoint, an allegory of martyrdom: she undergoes torture but resists, which provokes the rabid fury of the goblins who fling her penny back at her in frustration. As Christ on the Cross saved humanity and offered himself in the Eucharist, she then takes her sister the redeeming Host, that is, the fruit with which her face is stained, for her sister’s benefit. And in effect, at night there comes about the miracle of her sister’s ‘resurrection’, according to a fate so different from that of Jeanie, due exclusively to the act of expiation of her sin by Lizzie. 6. The fruit and vegetable ‘market’ was actually the Covent Garden Market in London, where exotic fruit from the far-flung Empire was to be had by those customers who were sufficiently well off, the only ones who could afford similar delicacies (the majority of the English population of the time hardly ever tasted them). Before she yields to the goblins’ invitations, Lizzie is amazed at the unusual quality of their merchandise. It is not local, so it is exotic, and not for everyone. Anthropologically she realizes that the bounty of the products of the soil, in similar environmental conditions, 75

See the mention of the cutting of golden hair in ‘Three Nuns’: ‘gold was left behind, curls shorn’. This three-part poem was incorporated into the tale Maude, where in the last scene Agnes places a tress of Maude’s hair beside a lock of Sister Magdalen’s.

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depends on its being home-grown, according to a normally credited though misleading opinion. This makes her wonder where such rare fruit could be grown. Up to the point where it can be considered a more or less realistic poem, ‘Goblin Market’ shows us two lively country girls who get up early in the morning and take care of the animals, do the housework, milk the cows and fetch the honey; but to earn a living they have to sell their farm products. Two dinner tables are provided in this poem: the rich are served both the goblins’ fruit and the cakes of fine white flour, ‘cakes for dainty mouths to eat’, while almost everything the two sisters grow and produce is sold away. Therefore these two ‘modest virgins’, probably Dissenters, perhaps orphans,76 live in poverty or in straitened circumstances. Their great honesty is shown by the fact already mentioned more than once, that Laura makes it perfectly clear that she does not want the fruit from the goblins for free, still less does she want to steal it. But in their countrified ingenuousness they seem little aware of market laws and current prices:77 in the first case Laura wants to buy costly fruit without a penny in her pocket; in the second, Lizzie goes to the goblins with one single silver penny, which although worth a lot, would buy very little to take home. Ever the good Puritan, Lizzie goes home congratulating herself on three achievements: she is taking her sister the fruit that will heal her, she can feel the unspent penny rattling in her pocket, and moreover her virginity is safe.78 In its second allusive value, the market is that of prostitution, or at least the corner market on the road where the Rossettis lived, and where there was also a barber with piquant photographs in his shop window. The 76 Stuart 1930, 56, notes that the two girls have no maternal or paternal figures, nor do they have anyone to advise them. 77 The value of the exchange of goods was something all the Rossettis were aware of due to their own poverty. Art, particularly painting, was a source of income. See the allusion to the sonnet as an asset to be bartered, as well as a key to immortality, in D. G. Rossetti’s The House of Life (§ 193.3). 78 Similar and directly echoed is the situation in Rossetti’s late poem ‘Johnny’, written before 1882. In order to cure his mother, the protagonist sacrifices not one lock but all his own hair, and returns from the barber’s ‘jingling money in his pocket’ (§ 206.1). Lizzie’s parsimony contrasts with Laura’s wastefulness; the latter returns from the river with ‘her pitcher dripping all the way’.

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‘swart-headed mulberries’ and the ‘wild free-born cranberries’ – like the knights who move into Camelot from the outskirts in Tennyson’s Idylls – allude to the women of easy virtue available in a large city like London, where emigrants arrived from all corners of the Empire.79 From all of this we can assume that Rossetti had at least a second specific historical recipient, apart from herself, for her fairy-tale and her advice on temperance, selfrestraint and life in the straight and narrow. ‘Goblin Market’ was started and carried forward more or less at the same time in which Rossetti began working at Highgate in one of the many houses for the rescue of fallen girls in London at the end of the 1850s.80 There is therefore good reason to believe that the poem came into being for an additional purpose as well: to be read as an exemplary story to the inmates of such houses (years before Dante Gabriel Rossetti had written ‘Jenny’,81 a not dissimilar monologue). So the domestic environment of ‘Goblin Market’ is a sort of small prison where the fallen girl – Laura – is rescued, and where the memory looms of a lost girl, Jeanie. The scene of the encounter between Laura and the goblins would have been easily deciphered by the Highgate prostitutes as an ironical reversal of a normal sex-for-payment exchange. The end of the poem, with its celebration of a wedding before a respectable marriage

79 Characterizing the female as fruit or a female animal is a practice confirmed by anthropology; after all the slang word indicating the female genital organ is frequently, and at least in Italian, the feminine form of a fruit. 80 Cf. D. M. R. Bentley’s detailed essay ‘The Meretricious and the Meritorious in “Goblin Market”. A Conjecture and an Analysis’ (in Kent 1987, 57–81), which picks up a hypothesis already advanced by Zaturenska 1949 and Packer 1964. 81 There can be no doubt that the name Jeanie evokes and retraces that of Jenny, the protagonist in Dante Gabriel’s monologue of the same name (§ 187.4). As McGann 1985 brilliantly argues, Jeanie points to the Victorian ideological values of love and marriage, especially the theme, and deterrent, of the ‘fallen woman’. McGann also points out that the two women, Jenny and Jeanie, are the echo and the copy one of the other, and that they are closely, symbolically and ideally related. Indeed, on more than one occasion McGann commits an innocent lapsus and misquotes Jeanie as ‘Jenny’ (222).

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and ensuing offspring, is after all a typical Victorian epithalamium and an edifying religious icon.82 § 203. Christina Rossetti VIII: ‘Goblin Market’ II. Further symbolic implications The figurative and metaphorical interpretation so far carried on achieves only a certain depth, as I mentioned, since it uses allegorical keys that do not solve or explain all the text’s discontinuities. An allegorical model implies an inflexible code of univocal correspondences; in this case we need to replace it with a symbolic model pivoting – as its nature requires – on the symbol’s indeterminacy. This operation, taking advantage of multiple, subjective and relativistic reductions, allows us to shed light on the most recondite and enigmatic implications still remaining after an allegorical reading.83 All this is further confirmed by the epilogue of the ballad. The first allegorical reading of ‘Goblin Market’, the first reduction of the text from symbolic to allegorical, is carried out by Laura herself in this distanced epilogue. Many years after the incurred peril she, in an act of self-hermeneutics, descants on her own early prime to her children. She interprets her experience many years later, explaining and summarizing it, but in so doing she reduces, falsifies and deforms it. She has appropriated the version of the fruit’s traitorous poison, concluding that the glen was enchanted and the goblins were the forces of evil, since the fruit – fortunately 82

83

I do not find that defeated tone that feminist scholars have found in the epilogue; it is of no help to insist on the fact that the figures of the husband and father are missing, and, due to this absence, on the planning of a matriarchal model with homosexual undertones (the two sisters’ kiss, the fact that they lie embraced in sleep, the head of one on the breast of the other, something highlighted in D. G. Rossetti’s illustrations). In Christina Rossetti the crowning of love is always heterosexual and within marriage. The two approaches are exemplified by McGann 1985 and Leighton 1992. McGann expressly says that the poem is a ‘Christian allegory’ and that such an allegory is a ‘conscious part’ of the composition (220), whose definite intention is the reconstruction of the English societal model. Leighton provides a more detailed exploration of the unstable symbolism of the poem. I follow a number of her ideas in this section.

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rare and difficult to come by – tasted so sweet yet it poisoned the blood. And she tells them of the lesson she learnt, of sisterly love, of the aid and practical moral support between sisters in difficulty. The fruit, with a definition as summary as it is drily univocal, was a ‘fiery antidote’. Not only does this explanation drastically impoverish the clues in the text: it also sounds false in its simplification. Rossetti had her own good reasons for including at the very end of the poem a misleading explanation that preemptively defuses and normalizes the text. These reasons were that the ending was to be reassuring for anyone who might find disturbing signals within the poem. This is confirmed once more by the fact that with suspect frankness she claimed it was only a fairy-tale. What Laura’s reconstruction artfully hides is the symbolic instability of the fruit, which implies most unexpectedly that the moral universe at a deep level crumbles or trembles in its referential axis, in spite of the explicit professions that Rossetti tirelessly pronounces elsewhere in her poems. The fruit is a double-edged symbol, evil and redemptive at one and the same time, ‘lethal the first time and restoring the second’, as Alice Meynell had disconcertingly observed. This contradiction is usually explained away by critics with a good deal of conjuring: fruit is poison that changes into antidote through an ‘inverted parallelism’ and a Eucharistic transubstantiation; the fruit of Eden condemns lost humanity yet is harbinger of redemption; or it represents the ‘bitter repressive wisdom’, in other words the renunciation of art in the feminist view. The allegorical-religious interpretation is evidently forced, since it purifies the fruit of any idea of sinfulness while the goblins, declared to be ‘evil’, almost appear to be bestowers of spiritual light. To return to the text’s complexity prior to Laura’s interpretation of its plot, we may say that Rossetti deep down absolves, if not approves, Laura. Unlike Lizzie, who overcomes evil without experiencing it, Laura desires just the same to run the delicious risk of transgression. To sum up: making the attempt is good, but it is yet better to have learnt the lesson by having at least once enjoyed the pleasure and the transgression. At the end of her Bildung Laura recalls her past with no particular shame and with no moralistic compunction. 2. ‘Goblin Market’, however, contains further amazing symbolic suggestions and places en abyme the verbal and poetic communication and its own nature as a message choosing and selecting its recipients. The goblins’

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invitation is a ‘conative’ message not directed at all customers but mainly at ‘virgins’, a word to be taken in its literal sense and in its sexually distinctive sense as future wives but not yet brides; the third of these listeners, tempted and fallen, is Jeanie. Among all possible customers and listeners, Laura and Lizzie are those who receive and decipher the message, persuasive in that it exploits all the possibilities of argumentation. The goblins are the poet’s first surrogates, in that as any persuasive shopkeeper they use language and its devices to convince the purchaser; above all they offer words and indeed linguistic inventions in which – as I have already mentioned – a taste for lists, variations and lexical combinations is freely satisfied. In their fruit catalogues the ‘-berry’ suffix recurs insistently; these suffixes, linked to changing prefixes, result in English words identifying types of fruit so exotic and rare as to have no acceptable translations in some languages (such as for instance Italian), and therefore no corresponding object. ‘Goblin Market’, therefore, cheerfully does away with the mechanism of referentiality. With its highs and lows and laws of exchange, the market is also the market of the meanings, and the meanings are free, fluctuating, ungoverned. The consumed fruit is poetry as the reign of the symbolic and the imaginary, a poetry which was received with a curt denial in the Victorian utilitarian environment, but tasted in all its intoxicating, delectable nectar by others. Laura offers herself up to its seduction, Lizzie resists. Laura is Romantic languor inclined to reverie, Lizzie is activist Victorian vigour suspicious of poetry.84 One is dream, the other is action. Laura hardly manages to drag herself to her tasks, always slightly weary. The contrast is even greater when Lizzie is as happy as a little bird seeing the beauty of the new morning, while Laura obsessively awaits the night. Lizzie is the typical Victorian nurse figure when she watches over Laura believing her to be at death’s door, in a situation closely recalling that in her brother Dante Gabriel’s poem ‘My Sister’s Sleep’. Lost in an ‘empty dream’ after eating the fruit, she experiences the ephemeral flash of poetic vision when she sees and hears the goblins once only, thereafter falling into a heart-breaking Sehnsucht, able to taste the fruit only through a third 84 In strong symbolical contrast with Laura’s languor, we see the haymakers passing below the window on their way to the fields.

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person. The parable is in short that of Victorian escapism, now made impossible by the clamp of ‘responsibility’; it is the needful yet painful shift away from Romantic aestheticism, or also from the nascent aesthetics of Pater’s Decadentism with its omnivorous taste for experiences.85 Additionally, ‘Goblin Market’ places en abyme the interpretative and hermeneutic act: as always in criticism, every interpretation is, like Laura’s, an impoverishment of the text and of its complexity, a reduction, and a wasting, of its suggestions. § 204. Christina Rossetti IX: Fairy-tale ballads and dream fantasies ‘Goblin Market’, as not infrequently happens in major poets, is the central, cardinal and governing text to which most of the previous work looks, as if magnetized, and from which a network of interrelations and references is formed. In particular we must return to ‘The Convent Threshold’ for confirmation that the protagonist of that composition, about to take the veil, heralds Laura, though instead of overcoming her traumatic experience, being vaccinated and embracing matrimonial fecundity, she chooses monastic life without thinking twice, as Maria Francesca Rossetti did in real life. Outside the fairy-tale sphere this protagonist has undergone an experience not so different from Laura’s, an experience expressly and severely defined as a sin and a pleasurable sin: ‘You sinned with me a pleasant sin’. In her case too it was pleasant to sin, and this is said when the experience is over. The sin with which the woman reproves herself is sexual or at least so it appears given the reticence and circumlocution used (‘The Convent Threshold’ is mainly retrospective, as is the epilogue of ‘Goblin Market’): she has compromised herself with a person with whom she has ‘blood’ relations, a relative therefore. Even wishing to set aside any possible incestuous

85

Wilde was indeed to say that the best way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. To the fruit’s seduction, later mastered, and to the refusal to taste it, feminism made the important addition of an appropriation of masculine writing on the part of the woman. From this standpoint, the fruits of which we are speaking are the fruits of art, and the ‘glen’ is a ‘chasm in the mind’ (GGM, 570–1).

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allusions, the continuity of the blood image is to say the least disturbing. In one of the stages of the retrospective the woman tells her lover of a dream, yet her account does not make clear whether the arrival of the seducer – at that classically Rossettian moment of temptation, dusk: ‘It was not dark, it was not light’ – is inside or outside the dream, or whether the words of the following dialogue are dreamt or real.86 Given the insoluble, deliberate ambiguity we cannot say if the woman answers him ‘half asleep’ in a dream or in reality. All this could again be a way to smuggle in, between dream and reality, irregular sexual intercourse, to hide a scandalous situation by means of an expedient. Whether dream or reality, thus reconstructed the scene leaves no shadow of doubt: the pillow damp with sweat, above all the red sheets, therefore blood-stained, alluding to a deflowering, are explicit details. Signs of probable sexual violence – bruises black and blue – are seen on the woman’s face when she wakes, not counting the enigmatic little detail, ‘frozen blood […] on the sill’. 2. Further evidence comes in Rossetti’s innumerable poems in the form of dreams, since they are not necessarily dreams really dreamt but prudent devices to be free of and defuse ‘daily’ inhibitions and repressions. Furthermore, she systematically claimed her own inability to explain them. ‘My Dream’, which Rossetti herself brings to a close declaring that she cannot tell its meaning, is in the best story-telling style, dream-like and fairy-tale-like, of ‘Goblin Market’. The symbol of evil has shifted to the crocodiles and their devouring king.87 The greed of this king and the disgusting details of his meal – the liquid fat running down his chin from his horrid cannibalistic feast – irresistibly recall the scene of the violence undergone by Lizzie. When the avenging ship arrives, the ‘prudent’,

86 Rossetti often pretends not to know whether her protagonists’ visions take place in dream or in waking life: ‘Asleep or waking, for I know not which’ is the state in which the vision unfolds in ‘An Old-World Thicket’ (§ 205.3). 87 The story ‘Vanna’s Twins’ (§ 206.4) has a connection with this poem; the Neapolitan emigrant Vanna says in fact in her own language that ‘there are no crocodiles in the bath’ [‘non vi son coccodrilli nella vasca’] where the twins are happily splashing. Packer 1964, 94, suggests that the crocodile is a depiction of William Bell Scott, majestic and outlawed.

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deflated crocodile king weeps proverbial tears, faithful to the paradigm of enjoyment and expiation. The inexplicability of the poetic text, her own in particular, is the very subject of poems in which Rossetti foresees and precedes the interpretative act; miming it, she frustrates and voids it under a mischievous teasing of the reader (‘only just my fun’). One of her most attractive, witty little poems, yet one of the most profoundly modern, is ‘Winter: My Secret’. Metapoetically it compares the poem to a secret jealously kept by the poet, vainly threatened by the ‘curious’, and a secret apparently unknown even to herself, because it is ontologically congenital with poetic composition. 3. The miracle of ‘Goblin Market’ did not come about again in the fairy-tale ballad most similar to it, ‘The Prince’s Progress’ (finished in 1865 at Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s suggestion, from an 1861 nucleus). The ballad is somewhat slow and casual, filled with too many adventures which are an end unto themselves and are marked by a feeble and outward sense of the marvellous. It opens with the betrothed girl waiting, as in ‘The Bride’s Prelude’ and others by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Tennyson; the mixture of romance and realism looks in particular to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Her beloved arrives late since he crosses impervious mountain passes while his betrothed fidgets and worries; the ‘strong’ prince has an effectively ‘weak character’; he takes his time, wanders around, stops so long on the road purely out of curiosity. So when he finally arrives he finds the princess dead, in a very Tennysonian and Barrettian manner underlined by the virginal white robe in which she is laid out in the coffin. It is evident that this knight is the masculine counterpart of Laura, in that he loiters, daydreams, lives in a nocturnal reverie, insensible to Rossetti’s symbols of activity (such as the lark), not strong enough to chase off the ‘poetical’ fears or to put an end to procrastination. He is attracted by the milkmaid’s milk after the first mile on the way, a ‘tedious’ way for him. That milk falls within the symbolic range of the temptation of the senses, like the goblins’ fruit; and the milkmaid, like the goblins or an infernal Charon, claims an offering for her milk, not in the form of material riches but in that of company ‘for one idle day’, in the shade of a tree which turns out to be an apple-tree (which thus unleashes its threatening Edenic association). The satanic temptation is clear in the metaphors of the snake at the climactic

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point of the ballad: the girl twists her hair into a ‘cunning braid’, ‘And writhed it in shining serpent-coils’, with a result not very different from Lilith attacking not Eve but Adam, or an Eve disguised as a man.88 After the night of love, which Rossetti glosses over leaving details to the reader’s imagination, it is inevitable that surrounding nature, until then luxuriant, becomes blighted and bare, if not repellent: a symbolic, hallucinated wilderness recalling the sterility of the kernel-stone planted by Laura in ‘Goblin Market’. Further on the prince is attracted by a light in a cavern where he finds a strange sorcerer; on his way once more, he feels the need of more company, preferably female, which comes to him in the form of mellow voices calling to him near an overflowing river. In his second experience with the sorcerer in the cavern, less plausible and more laborious, the prince once more must earn hospitality with work. The elixir of long life meanwhile kills the magician who made it; from this miraculous potion, thinks the foolhardy knight, his love will benefit, and his bride forgive his tardiness. The ballad is in no way an edifying story, since it tells the tale of a ‘straying’ with an opposite ending to that of ‘Goblin Market’. Many autobiographical, allegorical and symbolic interpretations have been given of this poem, and Rossetti’s belated lovers or prevaricators were identified with the prince, such as Collinson and Cayley, or even more probably Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself, who married Elizabeth Siddal when she was already dying, and after he had allowed himself innumerable distractions. The overlapping of the trappings of the courtly medieval ballad with the religious symbolism of the heavenly bridegroom paying court to the soul is much more problematic. In transforming and reducing this heavenly bridegroom to the level of a belated philanderer, Rossetti would even open up the prospect of a sacrilegious parody.

88 In her few poems on the Fall, Rossetti takes pity on the sin and introduces a suffering, repentant Eve. Recalling ‘Eden Bower’ by her brother (§ 187.1), as well as Clough and Barrett Browning, but less diabolically, she composed zoological idylls in which Eve is pitied by all the animals.

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§ 205. Christina Rossetti X: Apocalyptic visions and religious self-probings An eclectic poet, or at least one with a double physiognomy, Christina Rossetti could work on two parallel tracks and compose secular and religious poetry in the same breath, just as she could write for adults and children, and switch from the fairy-tale to the weighty biblical commentary.89 She made a clear division in the overall editions of her work by isolating the group of ‘devotional lyrics’. These, with the addition of others taken from her theological and spiritual books, took up a little less than half of the edition edited by her brother William Michael in 1904, who also adopted the same division. It is in fact very difficult if not impossible to separate these two spheres, seeing that the secular and religious poetry are to a large extent the exact counterpart one of the other – I would say almost a backlash. From disappointment on earth comes faith in divine hope, from the deterioration of the world, passing by with its short-lived spectacles, comes the contemplation of eternal beatitude. The latter appears as an aspiration to renunciation taken to the point of desiring death or of envisaging a life in the cloister, or a yet more heroic choice, the martyr’s sacrifice – or more precisely, as always, woman’s martyrdom. To this type of figure Rossetti dedicated several dramatic monologues, the last one in 1882, invariably set at the precise moment of the farewell to the beloved. Confirming my synchronic vision of Rossetti’s poetry, this pathway is studded with relapses, and giving up the world is never definitive in spite of the most solemn repudiations. The 1847 lyric ‘A Portrait’ lists a stringent programme of abnegations and swears in particular to keep severe vigilance over the eyes, which are never again to dawdle on vain worldly shows. Yet, in another poem from 1882 Rossetti must take strength from this precept:

89 Sing-song – a collection of ditties for children in quatrains, tongue-twisters, mnemonic charades, riddles, definitions, lullabies – has many similarities with Carroll’s Alice and also, it has been noted, with Stevenson’s Garden of Verses. It was dedicated to the small son of a mathematics professor at Cambridge, Arthur Cayley, the brother of the translator she had turned down. Also much indebted to Carroll is Speaking Likenesses, an unsuccessful triptych of stories with disturbing implications (§ 206.6). On her works of biblical comment cf. § 206.6.

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‘Never despairing, often fainting, rueing, / But looking back, ah never!’90 At times it is even difficult in Rossetti’s poetry to separate the erotic, not just the secular, from the mystical: ‘Confluents’ expresses the mystical urge to be united with the divine loved one beyond any barrier or veil, but with words that could be equally applied to a purely sexual desire. Just as ambiguous, as I have already mentioned, is the meaning of the frequently recurring expression ‘hope deferred’, which is both the tedious, exhausting earthly expectation of the heavenly reunion, and the frustrated wait for a material, terrestrial benefit, perhaps married fertility, perhaps literary success. On such a conflict, on these ambivalences and their transposition onto the level of fantasy, symbolism or even of the imaginary, fable-like story, the best, airiest and freshest part of Rossetti’s ‘religious’ poetry is woven. Much more cumbersome are the vast architectures, ambitious, visionary and allegorical, composed more and more often by her in the last twenty years of her life. 2. The long and confused ode in quatrains ‘From House to Home’91 from 1858, the most important of Rossetti’s allegories, looks back to the atmosphere of ‘Repining’ and ‘The Dead City’ – and yet it is almost contemporary with ‘Goblin Market’. Until halfway through it is its transposition, before branching towards a visionary close not dissimilar from that of the later poem. The whole of the first part, more precisely, is the rewriting of the voluptuous lingering in the paradise of the senses, by a woman who is, like Laura in the goblins’ glen, vainly summoned to things spiritual by the figure, now a male counsellor, of a ‘friend’ whose identity is intentionally left in abeyance, and who is at times, only at times, a purely inner second voice. Recalling Coleridge and Tennyson, the palace of delights has a Noah’s ark outside among shady gardens, where variegated fauna, some ignoble, live in freedom and in perfect harmony. The Eden thus recreated in the imagination abounds with outlawed creatures who, like the partly animalesque goblins in ‘Goblin Market’, live in joyful anarchy and 90 ‘A Life’s Parallels’. 91 The youthful lyric (1847) ‘I Do Set my Bow in the Cloud’ shows the origin of this transition: from the ‘home on earth’ to the ‘home in heaven’. In other songs ‘home’ is unmistakably the ‘eternal life hereafter’.

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primordial vitality, satisfying their senses and ‘reproducing in peace’; the moles attend to another allusive action by frantically digging their tunnels. At this point the scene of the goblins’ temptation recurs with the twofold and contrary response of the sisters. The ‘friend’, who has also shared those sensual joys with much greater restraint, reminds the woman, with the wisdom of a Lizzie, that it is time to be on the way towards the ‘distant land’, and her refusal to follow him causes him to abandon her. Like Laura, she is deluded into thinking that there is in that amoral ecstasy an ever-new gentleness growing day by day; the prospect she will not accept is that her present life is an ‘exile’ and that her real ‘home’ is in the hereafter. After the friend has left, there takes over the predictable Rossettian topos of surrounding desolation, as in ‘Goblin Market’ and ‘The Prince’s Progress’. Above all she is overwhelmed by frustration, a frenetic, obsessive feeling at being deprived of her now-ruined palace. Aid comes no longer from her nearest and dearest but, in the allegorical-visionary turningpoint of the poem, from the direct intervention of higher powers. The female figure, grieving and deathly pale, emerging from the shadows has always been recognized by critics as the transfiguration of the repentant protagonist taking on spiritual life. On the basis of Rossetti’s well-known aversion to all things Marian, the evident attributes of the Madonna of the Apocalypse have never been accepted. These include the endless sadness, the weeping and the blood, the thorns recalling the Cross, the chain anchored in heaven to be vainly shaken by the winds while fixed to a Rock, the cup of bitterness that turns bitter-sweet and descends from on high to symbolize the birth and death of Christ. At the highest moment, the woman receives, as if thunderstruck, the vision of the end of time, that is of the end of change and the accomplishment of all becoming; the dead rise in their multitudes, and ‘all things are made new’. In comparison with ‘Goblin Market’, ‘From House to Home’ strikes one with its assertive, conceptual, apophthegmatic diction. The whole retrospective is opened and closed by the peremptory assertion that the world is a ‘tissue of hugged lies’. One of the last quatrains states that the vaccination against the life of the senses and repentance have been effected; not unexpectedly, the final resolutions and projects resound with Laura’s vows in ‘Goblin Market’.

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3. In the allegory of the three ships in ‘A Ballad of Boding’ – recalling Coleridge and D. G. Rossetti’s ‘The Choice’92 – one ship symbolizes a terrestrial, hedonistic life of pleasure, the second a sceptical life with no objective, the third a difficult but rewarding spiritual life. It is in itself a laborious, unsuccessful transposition of the spirited rural plots and of the psychological clash between the three peasant girls or sisters found in so much of Rossetti’s poetry. The poem is intended to illustrate the saying facilis descensus Averno but not its opposite, something Laura and all her look-alikes know very well. The inevitable satanic hypostasis is a complicated watery metamorphosis: a spurt of water that turns into a monster with tentacles, vomiting smoke and flame. The other expected temptation is put into play for those in the third ship with childish cajolery and slimy enticements, but is thwarted by a bird, a Christ figure, descending from above to envelop the world. Satan withdraws, thrashing his tail, but he is defeated, and the epilogue shows the wreck of the first two ships, while the third, in Tennysonian mode, ‘crosses the bar’ and sails rapidly on. The cycle of allegorical poems of some length closes in the early 1880s with ‘An Old-World Thicket’, yet another, equally wearying apocalypticvisionary poem, and with ‘All Thy Works Praise Thee, O Lord’, a sequence of speeches in praise of the Father offered up by the representatives of the whole of the cosmos. 4. Christina Rossetti’s vital importance for English religious poetry in the late nineteenth century lies wholly in her lyrical-meditative, intimate, introspective and confessional vein deriving from the seventeenthcentury Metaphysical poets, mainly Herbert. This tradition came to a stop during the Augustan period, to practically wither away in pre-Romanticism and Romanticism, and to reappear with the Tractarian poets. Through Rossetti’s acknowledged influence it would be handed down, as I mentioned, to the chief two end-of-century religious poets, Hopkins and Alice Meynell. Rossetti’s religious poetry then clearly differs both from the even more emphatic, always dangerously pantheistic sacramentalism of Barrett Browning, and a fortiori from that of the generation of ‘honest doubters’ 92 § 193.6 n. 87.

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such as Browning, Arnold and particularly Clough, or even Tennyson. She never ventures into tortuous, devious and insoluble arguments concerning the rational basis of historical faith shaken by German biblical criticism. Her religiousness derived in fact from pacific orthodoxy and a fervent, practising faith inherited from her mother, made up of daily prayers and nurtured, as in Keble, by continual reference to the liturgical calendar. Her poetry can be defined as penitential and purgatorial in the most precise Tractarian and evangelical sense of the words. There are two ways of beating one’s breast and condemning one’s sins with no indulgence and with the utmost self-chastising rigour: the hyperbolic and ironical way of St Teresa of Ávila who keeps declaring her own wickedness, and the way of the publican who, repentant, acknowledges his own unworthiness. Rossetti was a poet of the latter sort. Hardly ever does her poetry glorify her firmly acquired righteousness; it feeds an aspiration that never achieves its object, ever failing to reach its expectations. Dozens and dozens of compositions, wonderful in their continually changing vocabulary, metre and even formal solutions, are excruciating probings that exude the deepest bitterness and express a piercing desire for purification. They describe an inner world of egoism while love reigns all around, a world of solitude and sterility solaced only by the hope that such suffering shall receive compensation, indeed reward, in future life. The hidden life she longed for, often that of an anchorite, was an outpost of eternal life, to which she looked with apocalyptic yearning and frenetic calls for a total regeneration of the world and for Christ’s ‘second coming’. One of the recurrent, basic topics is the thought of human vanity: she often returns, quoting it word for word, to the first line of Browning’s monologue of the Bishop at St Praxed’s who begs for a mausoleum in that church, originally from Ecclesiastes – ‘vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!’ – and she repeats it in catalogues and Herbertian lists of images, comparisons and metaphors that illustrate it. Also frequently recurring is the image of the ‘falling’ or ‘withered leaf ’. She admonishes herself severely to wake from a life that is always on principle too lazy and paralysed, unproductive and impotent, and to aid nature in its cyclical renewal. From early youth Rossetti had learnt to see in nature the foil of sinning man and also a repertory of ‘types’ in the real Tractarian sense, of prefigurations and signals from the invisible world – like the flower, ‘type

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of her the Undefiled, / Arrayed in white’. All these chords were touched mainly in the form of the short, stylized and balanced, first-person confession, never formally provisional; or in that of prayer and supplication and in modes such as remonstrance and protest, as later in Hopkins; or in stylistic variations as those of dialogue, psychomachia and dramatic monologue, attributed to a biblical speaker addressing the just and often terrible God of the Old Testament. 5. In Rossetti’s Christological meditations, man is always the image of sterility fertilized by Christ; he is often a plant with ‘weak branches’, or else a rebel refusing entry to the bleeding Christ knocking at the door, as if in a paraphrase of Holman Hunt’s Light of the World. Yet it is not always the poet who addresses Christ, it is Christ who reproaches and stirs up man and stimulates and exhorts him gently. In Rossetti’s theology man, like the prince in the ballad of the same name, is struck by occasional terrifying crises of will and waves of apathy, and it is then Christ, allowing him to remain passive (almost with a touch of Molinism),93 who indulgently instils into him ‘love, hate, desire, will’. Christ is the loving shepherd of the lost sheep in the Gospel, or more precisely he who seeks it. God the father, however, is undistinguishable from the severe, irate God of the Old Testament wielding his rod of punishment, although Rossetti often ends up sharing the apprehension of the God of the Tractarians, as the synthesis and oxymoron of rigour and love. The cycle of sonnets Later Life,94 completed in 1882, is a collection of twenty-eight spiritual sonnets – not a random number, but iconic or architectural as in Monna Innominata, being a ‘double sonnet of sonnets’, that is, a double coronet of fourteen sonnets. Once more the numerological symbolism of the Provençal and the Italian poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and of the Metaphysicals comes to mind, in particular the ‘corona’ of the former Catholic Donne in honour of the Madonna. Never the recipient of unconditional consensus, Later Life indirectly confirms that her religious vocation was expressed best in an almost extemporary, non-systematic form, when she herself intimately chose her own metric and prosodic form. In Later Life she is certainly a prisoner of 93 § 127. 94 Life spiritual, eternal.

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the structure she herself has thought up, and only with difficulty can she comply with its constraints. The collection inexplicably comes apart when the religious theme is momentarily silenced and a number of occasional sonnets are included, going from the seasonal arabesque of the triad of sonnets eighteen, nineteen and twenty, to a couple of diary-type, impressionist and mainly uninspired ones, written during a journey to Italy in 1865 at the foot of the Swiss mountains and on the shores of Lake Como. The most original elements of Later Life, largely consisting of a series of repetitive warnings to leave appearances behind and to follow the refreshing bitter sweetness of a life in Christ,95 are found in the realization of that sense of limit so morbidly investigated in Dante Gabriel’s phenomenological poetry – the sense of an obstacle barring the way to total knowledge, which is in fact the metaphysical, or rather physical, limit that hides what is behind it. They are also found in the thoroughly modern revelation of a psyche tottering on the edge, wavering between opposing drives, even possibly of a personality split into two identities.96 The subject declares his/her own unworthiness to a God who must do everything or nearly everything for him or her, whose embryonic, upward-tending grace is stimulated and oriented, but may never be coerced. A very slight diachronic trace is reflected in Later Life in a diary-like pace justifying mood changes and the rhythm of the up-lifting and down-falling. The fourth sonnet is ‘terrible’, full of discouragement, impotence, prostration; it queries the mystery of why the more man aims at the best, the more he is paralysed. The seventeenth echoes it, once again confessing all the ‘weariness of being’. Yet Rossetti comes to her 95 The twelfth sonnet contains a short definition of the allegorical path of ‘Goblin Market’ and the personal lesson learnt by Rossetti from the symbolic experience described therein: ‘When I was young I deemed that sweets are sweet: / But now I deem some searching bitters are / Sweeter than sweets’. In its alarmingly vivid description of the last death throes, death leading to Christ and therefore the only real life, the twenty-seventh sonnet surpasses all Rossetti’s previous death lyrics. 96 ‘Who Shall Deliver me?’, made up of swift tercets whose first lines all end on the word ‘myself ’, asks the worrisome question of how to separate self from self, how to defend oneself against self, ‘most loathed of all’. God must help whoever prays to be free of the worldly self and the sense of heaviness and encumbrance: ‘But who from thy self-chain shall set thee free?’

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own aid straight away in the eleventh sonnet reminding herself of divine bounty that bears with human weaknesses, and of the gracious intervention of God who raises the fallen. Two successive sonnets recall the guilt of our ancestors in Eden, then their immediate repentance and acceptance of the new divine law. Rossetti’s theological wisdom is highlighted in the thirteenth sonnet, a Herbertian catalogue of stinging, imaginative definitions of shame, a positive, therapeutic virtue that cancels sin and restores vigour. 6. Published in a volume in 1893 in eight separate sections for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the countless short religious compositions gathered from Rossetti’s didactic and exegetical works in prose were rightly excluded, almost in their totality, from her editio minor edited by her brother William Michael in 1894. The obvious reason for this was that Rossetti herself was aware of a deliberately and profoundly different writing register and of a kind of poetry serving a practical objective. In other words, the aim was first and foremost to illustrate and accompany another text, and to form and train a conventicle, rather than to target an educated reading public with an aesthetically ambitious product. Generally very brief, these poems were in fact composed somewhat mechanically – fluid poetry, flowing but flat, with only the very occasional metaphysical subtlety; always irreproachable in its rhyme schemes, but less so lexically and rhythmically; anonymous and stereotyped in imagery and metaphor, more often neutral. Within the framework of these didactic requirements, the connecting threads, shown in the titles of each of the eight sections, are unfailingly the yearned-for, safe achievement of ‘hope deferred’ and the foreshadowing of the heavenly Jerusalem in the flowery, fairy-tale sweetness acceptable to a facile imagination; or the sweet, untiring compassion of Christ and vigilance against worldly temptations. One of the eight sections, closely imitating Keble and Newman, winds through the liturgical calendar. § 206. Christina Rossetti XI: Narrative and devotional prose Many of Rossetti’s post-1880 poems are surprisingly anecdotal and apparently without any personal reverberations. They were in fact taken from memoirs or sensational stories, in the manner of the later Tennyson and Browning. It is difficult to find any logic in or a connection between such banal, everyday stories and the contemplation and dematerialization

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of her contemporary religious poems. A certain allusive link does however exist. Imperceptibly, in these compositions Rossetti insists on the purely material, opportunistic drive and on the avid acquisitiveness impinging on the protagonists. For example, ‘Johnny’ – a poem taken from a memoir of the French Revolution – tells of a modern Samson’s sacrifice of his golden hair in order to save his dying mother; it is thus closely woven with distant echoes of the crucial theme in ‘Goblin Market’. ‘Brother Bruin’ is about a circus bear that entertains and makes audiences laugh until it becomes old and is beaten to death by its owner, who then sells its skin but fails to prosper, ending up in the workhouse like someone out of Dickens. With echoes of Lear and Carroll, the charming zoological fantasy ‘Freaks of Fashion’ depicts examples of social climbing and individualism in its humanization of animals and birds who wonder among themselves what is fashionable, each of them describing its own outfit as le dernier cri. The emphasis on human greed that blinds man to the things of the spirit is only one of the motifs connecting this last flowering of Rossetti’s work to a series of stories and one short novel, which is all she contributed, with no regularity, to prose fiction. The autobiographical story Maude, written in 1850 when Rossetti was only twenty, was followed by Commonplace in 1870, where some ten unpublished pieces composed between 1852 and 1870 were gathered. In line with the lesson learnt in the country poems, the parable of improvidence corrected by generous and patient altruism is the connective thread. Reflecting a distinction also found in her poetry, they differ only in the choice of genre, ranging from the realistic, or more exactly the sketch of provincial life, to the fairy-tale and the visionary. As I mentioned in the general presentation, this narrative corpus is a small underwater continent. It was ignored by contemporaries and is also little known today, in spite of all that has been done to upgrade Rossetti.97 Her best stories, those with a realistic background, reveal her first-rate talent 97 In spite of declaring as its objective the exploration of all of Rossetti’s works, not even Kent 1987 includes any in-depth treatment that proves really useful. The double VP Rossetti issue a hundred years after her death (1984), containing a dozen essays in over 200 pages of text, and claiming to provide a further updated account, also fails to give a separate, sustained and systematic contribution on her narrative.

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as a narrator and as a stylist, and like the majority of her poems display a rare formal neatness and a skilful control of narrative technique. The inexorable fatalism of Maude is at least two decades in advance of the naturalistic tale, and its unadorned, terse style, alien to any open search for effect, evokes the ‘scrupulous meanness’ of the young Joyce in Dubliners. The other stories are in line with George Eliot’s rural or provincial novels, Mrs Gaskell’s works and even the verse stories of Crabbe and Clough; yet they have a didactic and even moralistic intent that is never cumbersome or obtrusive, or over-heated. 2. ‘A penny for your thoughts’, the first words spoken in Maude by a mother to her fifteen-year-old daughter on catching her writing poetry, recall the value of the penny exchanged in ‘Goblin Market’. The phrase both evokes and introduces Rossetti’s motif of the secret, a secret that is this time explicitly the jealous guarding of poetry as a private space not to be desecrated. Maude keeps her poetry notebook under lock and key; on one occasion she disappoints a parlour-full of friends by refusing to recite her verse in public. As a consequence of an early merchandising and publicizing of the word, she sees how her poetry is the subject of unpleasant misunderstandings among her very few listeners; there are already those who accuse her of affectation and insincerity. Filling almost half the story and triggering those bouts-rimés that were a fascinating game in the Rossetti household, Maude’s poems are the same that Christina composed or had already composed in 1850. The story’s profound pessimism reflects her moment of crisis at the time, when she was not only frustrated as a poet but beset by two alternatives, love in marriage and the convent’s call. Neither of these roads was taken, and the end in sight, which indeed arrives for this sickly girl, can be nothing but death, longed for in many of her poems. The setting and characters in Maude – one of Christina Rossetti’s favourite Christian names, assigned to various other heroines in her poetry, though none of them a writer – are middle class and urban, corresponding to the rural world of the country poems, a world once more entirely female, in which every male presence is carefully hidden and in which every female figure – in the usual surroundings of these girls, often relatives and yet more often sisters – holds paradigmatic values, unveiled and set on show. Together with Maude are her two cousins Mary and Agnes, healthy and

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joyful, and above all a philanthropic young friend with the meaningful name of Magdalen. The story traces the usual path towards Rossetti’s unhappy love as described in her poems: the sociable Mary marries while Magdalen enters a convent. Like Rossetti herself, Maude confesses to her friend Agnes that she had thought of becoming a nun but had regretfully given up the idea; she reveals that she once refused to take Communion, approaching that rite once more thanks to the therapeutic value of ‘shame’, extolled in her poetry too. An accident costs Maude her life. At the hands of a different novelist this accident – the overturning of a carriage – would almost certainly have demanded and received rivers of ink. In Rossetti, it shows her laconic, undertone style, as it is dealt with and minimized in a short paragraph, almost in brackets, at the end of a chapter. The dying Maude expresses the desire – later harboured and realized by Hopkins – that her poetry be burnt, the common destiny of the Victorians’ private diaries and very personal letters. 3. The title of Rossetti’s 1870 volume and of its opening piece, Commonplace, tells the story of three unmarried sisters, now almost hopeless spinsters, the daughters of a military doctor who retired thanks to a fortune left to him and who is now missing – or at least believed missing – in a shipwreck. His place at table is regularly set for him every morning by his daughters awaiting his return. This small eccentric detail is corroborated by humorous vignettes of their provincial world of small talk – the seaside town where the story is set is probably Hastings – and this is enough to recall the bitter-sweet comedy of Jane Austen (with the addition of a satirical barb or two worthy of Thackeray, the favourite novelists of the poet and her siblings in their youth). ‘Commonplace’ may be a good synonym for that term the English never mentioned or used, Biedermeier, although they illustrated it in the second half of the nineteenth century perhaps even more than the Germans. This long story, or short novel, therefore pivots yet again on the differences in character and psychology, and on the different fates, of three sisters: Jane, the youngest, is the most beautiful and the vainest; Lucy, the second, lives the life of a recluse having read the newspaper announcement of the marriage of her ex-fiancé to another woman (perhaps just as Rossetti read of Collinson’s marriage); Catherine, the eldest, has sworn never to marry. Against all expectations the story has

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a happy ending. Jane entraps a mature widower, but the character in which Rossetti is recognizable is Lucy, who encounters an old flame whom she marries after all misunderstandings have been cleared up. If Jane is the opportunist for whom everything turns out well, the most sorrowful and most complex character, Lucy, represents waiting finally rewarded and the eventual renunciation of celibacy. Only in appearance are there no nuns and no sacrificial acts in the story: the old maid Catherine is the regular character who looks forward to another, spiritual, marriage. She chooses celibacy. 4. ‘Vanna’s Twins’, in spite of a shade of sentimentalism, is the jewel of Rossetti’s stories. It is unusual in its plot, stylistically trenchant, perfectly constructed, cathartic in its epilogue. A woman seeks a lodging one night in a seaside town; tired and hungry, she needs shelter; she is taken into the clean, comfortable home of a couple of Italian immigrants, rough but sound, where she recovers and stays some time as a paying guest. Rossetti pays off a debt to the country of her ancestors: with discretion and love she portrays these two southern Italians, Neapolitans in fact, adding a few details on their superstitions, habits, physical appearances and even a phrase or two of the language. An Italian reader is struck by the deformed, unguessable name of their home town, ‘Vascitammò’.98 What we see first of all is the overturning of the conventional Italian villain and plotter of the Elizabethan theatre, or the southerner either astute or sensual and brutal, highlighted for example in Browning.99 This Italian couple are Nicola and Vanna, all smiles, generosity and outgoing friendliness, both fervent Catholics. The woman narrator’s admiration (the story is written in the first person as if in a diary) is mainly directed at the twins who are happy and playful, as their names suggest, Felice and Gioconda: two chubby little angels who adore each other (the bath scene is wonderful, with the two of them splashing happily in the

98 This place name contains an anagram of Vasto, the town where Gabriele Rossetti was born. The eventual return of the couple to Italy has been seen as an echo of his wish, always postponed, to return to his native country (§ 181.2). 99 And what a difference there is, even compared to the Italian murderer in ‘A Last Confession’ (§ 187.2–3) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti!

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water). This little Italian family is a model of activity, resourcefulness and spirit of initiative; it is almost as if England has infused into them – typically indolent Catholics – a little Puritan pioneering spirit of the frontier. The narrator strikes at her own English ‘laziness’ by contrasting it with Italian, or rather southern, generosity. A good-for-nothing Englishman breaks up his family living nearby, leaves his wife and above all indirectly causes the tragic death of Vanna’s two children. They are found embracing each other dead from cold in a snowstorm on their way to take food to some sick children. Further, the story teaches the need to bow before the unfathomable divine will, even when it appears cruel. Still believing in God, while distraught by grief, husband and wife return to Italy, united as never before. 5. Among Rossetti’s short and undistinguished fairy-tales, always spiced with the supernatural, ‘Nick’ is the story of a wicked, envious peasant whose wish is granted to be turned into whatever he wants, just for one hour, in order to satisfy his envy and damage someone happier than himself. Realizing he has cut off his nose to spite his face, he ends up wishing to turn back into himself and repents, carrying out various acts of reparation and generosity. ‘Hero’, recalling Arnold’s ‘The Forsaken Merman’, is a young woman who believes her father and her betrothed do not love her enough; the queen of the fairies offers to allow her to satisfy her own vanity and turn into the object she most ardently desires. Like Nick – in a new parable on repentant vanity – she decides to return to what she was before, and she too, like Laura in ‘Goblin Market’, eventually recounts to her children her own ‘brief pre-eminence’. The most incisive of Rossetti’s tales of the surreal, or rather historical fantasies, is ‘The Lost Titian’, a second minor masterpiece. As Browning alone could do, few light touches are enough to recreate the atmosphere of secret rivalry, envy, gossip, and of unbridled, often abject, ambition in which the Renaissance and Venetian painters worked. In its sophisticated writing, this story has phases and moments worthy of Walter Pater or Henry James; at the same time it follows in the wake of the two by Dante Gabriel Rossetti,100 indeed even surpassing them

100 § 189.

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in narrative skill. ‘The Lost Titian’ is in fact played out on a historical fake – Titian’s alleged life masterpiece – of which the reader is informed in the short preface to ‘Commonplace’, similarly to the trick thought up by her brother at the end of ‘Hand and Soul’. Titian loses his masterpiece at dice the evening before it is to go on show; it passes to his greatest rival, who at first prospers, but then, like the bear’s master in ‘Brother Bruin’, goes into decline and bankruptcy. Artfully, he repaints a grotesque, monstrous subject to cover the Titian when all his possessions are confiscated to pay his gaming debts; thus rendered unrecognizable, the picture is taken from him, but the painter dies with his secret untold. This is a new appearance, though in a totally different and ironical context, of the motif, dear like few others to Rossetti, of the secret of art. 6. Speaking Likenesses (1874) has a somewhat rarefied family air with ‘Goblin Market’ and inevitably with Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece. There are three stories here, imbricated according to an inflexible design – from reality to dream to the sudden recall to reality, enclosed within a frame. The three stories are told by an aunt while her nieces attend to their sewing and embroidery; unsurprisingly, one of them answers to the name of Maude, a knowing little girl who often interrupts her aunt’s rather exhibitionist flow of words. In the first and longest of the three stories we find once more Rossetti’s motif of the birthday feast where for the most part appealingly juicy fruit (to be eaten but sparingly) is served up. In the second story grapes do the tempting and are always refused. The third is a parable as well, on the antithesis between wisdom and inexperience. Of Rossetti’s devotional and spiritual works, the most interesting is Time Flies (1885) for the light it throws on her poetry. It is a daily diary of meditations and memories, characterized by occasional brevity bringing to mind Patmore’s almost contemporary collection of aphorisms. A number of recollections from long ago are of great value. A frequently quoted short passage recalls the intense, macabre contemplation in early childhood of a dead mouse, whose funeral rite is conducted by Rossetti’s grandparents. Both this diary and, to a greater extent, The Face of the Deep, a torrential comment on the Apocalypse, reveal Rossetti’s constant meditation on time and the trusting, almost longed-for expectation of the Day of Judgement and the ‘second coming’. The other devotional and religious works, including collections of prayers, comments

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on the liturgical calendar, analyses of the Ten Commandments and more, rarely reach this pitch of interest. § 207. Pictorial Pre-Raphaelitism* The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in the year connected by definition with European revolutions. Its name intentionally recalled that of a political-religious sect and was chosen in order to épater le bourgeois during a meeting between Rossetti, Millais and Hunt. All twenty-yearolds and newly made friends, they wanted to make a splash with a new art to be shown at the Royal Academy in London. Like a joke or a bet, the idea materialized in an instant in Millais’s house, while they were looking through an album of engravings by Paolo Carlo Lasinio – defined ‘execrable’ by Ruskin and not even approved by Rossetti – of the frescos in the Pisan Camposanto. Other painters and artists were immediately recruited up to the fateful number of seven; the immediate outcome was the issue of the four numbers of the official magazine of the Brotherhood, The Germ. 1

*

H. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols, London 1905; R. Ironside, Pre-Raphaelite Painters, London 1948; G. Hough, The Last Romantics, London 1949; W. E. Fredeman, Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study, Cambridge, MA 1965; I Preraffaelliti, ed. R. Barilli, Milano 1967; J. Hunt, The PreRaphaelite Imagination, London 1969; T. Hilton, The Pre-Raphaelites, London 1970; R. Watkinson, Pre-Raphaelite Art and Design, London 1970; L. P. Finizio, La confraternita dei Preraffaelliti, Roma 1977, and Moderno antimoderno. L’arte dei preraffaelliti nella cultura vittoriana, Napoli 2004; G. P. Landow, William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism, New Haven, CT 1979; H. L. Sussmann, Fact into Figure: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Columbus, OH 1979; C. Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites, London 1981; Q. Bell, A New and Noble School: The Pre-Raphaelites, London 1982; Pre-Raphaelite Papers, ed. L. Parris, London 1984; M. T. Benedetti, I Preraffaelliti, Firenze, undated [1986]; E. Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, London 2000, and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites, Cambridge 2012; J. Marsh, The Pre-Raphaelite Circle, London 2005; E. Bizzotto and P. Spinozzi, ‘The Germ’: Origins and Progenies of Pre-Raphaelite Art and Aesthetics, Oxford 2012; L. Smith, Pre-Raphaelitism: Poetry and Painting, Horndon 2013; R. Wittmer, Das Andere der Moderne – die Präraffaeliten, Hamburg 2016.

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Contrary to expectations, both Rossetti’s first painting, analysed above,1 and those of Hunt and Millais exhibited in 1849 at the Royal Academy were praised by the critics, who failed to notice the enigmatic acronym used by the artists in signing their work, in the hope of creating a much greater hue and cry. The paintings exhibited, indeed, sold almost immediately; with the proceeds Hunt and Rossetti travelled around France and Belgium for two weeks, and on their return Rossetti rented a studio all for himself. The three founders were however lambasted in 1850 when they exhibited for the second time, though defended by Ruskin who entered the arena in The Times. In 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, Hunt and Millais once again exhibited at the Royal Academy, and the severest criticisms were compensated in part by the reviews written by the youngest Rossetti sibling, William Michael, in the Spectator. Rossetti’s charisma was for a few years the only cement holding together a group of painters and artists having in common only a vague desire to burn bridges with tradition. Disagreements and signs of a break-up had emerged since the start of the movement, which answered the contingent opportunistic aims of all three of the founding members. Hunt claimed the paternity of the idea and played the part of founder-in-chief; he wrongly considered himself to be Rossetti’s teacher and the brain behind the group, supported in this impression by the initial predilection for him shown by Ruskin.2 By 1856, perhaps even earlier, the Brotherhood had in fact dissolved. Hunt went on with his strongly religious painting and his realistic devotion to nature, setting out on a long journey to the Holy Land in order to obtain first-hand experience for a series of paintings on the life of Jesus. A few years later, without any qualms, Millais betrayed the original ideals behind the Brotherhood by accepting election as an Academician. As we have seen, Rossetti built up another group of companions to start a new, more ‘decadent’ approach to life and art. His ‘epicureanism’ was attacked much later, but nonetheless violently, by Hunt in 1867. In 1857 a second Pre-Raphaelitism arose, profoundly different and more influential, through the painting of the 1 2

§ 190.1. It seems that the name of the Brotherhood was decided by Hunt, while Rossetti suggested ‘Early Christian Art’.

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frescos in the old library of the University of Oxford. The main figures of this fresh version became the new initiates, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, together with Rossetti. 2. The focus on religious topics, one of the main features of the first Pre-Raphaelitism, is due as much to the strong wave of home-grown evangelical piety and Tractarian devotion of the 1830s and 1840s, as to the mediation and previous example of the Nazarenes, introduced to the PreRaphaelites by Ford Madox Brown, Rossetti’s master, after he had met and got to know them in Rome in 1845. In those twenty years (or more if we think of Hopkins) this group of early nineteenth-century German painters exerted a profound influence on many of those who were then working in painting and visual arts, almost in principle susceptible to the temptations of pure beauty. The Nazarenes were already a brotherhood inspired by a ‘romantic’ return to the origins and to the sources of early religion; they led a semi-monastic life, never painted naked flesh from life to avoid the ‘sensuous’, and set up and really lived a harmonious bond between religious faith and art. This bond had only been possible in the Middle Ages and later only in Renaissance Florence with Savonarola.3 The Pre-Raphaelites imitated the Nazarenes’ thrifty style of painting making virtue of necessity, which essentially meant using non-professional male and female models for their pictures, or their own Brotherhood members, or relatives and acquaintances. Elizabeth Siddal posed not only for Rossetti but also for Millais, as Ophelia in the picture of her death by drowning. The curriculum of the painting academies where the three most important Pre-Raphaelites had studied was still strictly modelled on Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art, and it clipped the wings of the imagination and imposed on young

3

The Nazarenes influenced not only the Pre-Raphaelites but also the Scottish painter William Dyce (1806–1864), who worked outside the Pre-Raphaelite orbit, being one generation older. Dyce owes the neatness of his drawing and the intimacy of his atmospheres above all to the painting of the Nazarenes’ founder, Friedrich Overbeck, whom he frequented in Rome. The Nazarenes themselves were in line for doing the decorations in the new Parliament in Westminster Palace (1840–1850) in London; they had already completed similar decorations, mainly the work of Cornelius, in Munich for Ludwig of Bavaria, and in Berlin.

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painters a servile imitation of the great Renaissance masters. During their studies Rossetti, Hunt and Millais each arrived independently at the conclusion that painting after Raphael had become too manneristic and too indoctrinated.4 Raphael they admired, and he was not their real target: their targets were painters like Reni and Carracci who had accentuated Raphael’s poses and imposed a manner. Thus the whole of early painting came back into fashion along with the Italian Trecento and Quattrocento from Beato Angelico to Gozzoli and Ghirlandaio. This was of course also the teaching imbibed from Ruskin. With such premises, it is difficult to reconcile the intrinsic contradictions that immediately became apparent, both between the individual Pre-Raphaelites and even in each one of them considered separately – not to mention the weak and vague links, at times even inexistent, between this painting and that before Raphael. Pre-Raphaelitism lacked a theoretical mastermind and never issued a formal aesthetic manifesto, but only a List of Immortals. The return to nature preached by Ruskin – therefore a strong realistic tendency – and the escape from the present towards medieval romance cohabited in Pre-Raphaelite productions. The Pre-Raphaelites thought themselves both archaic and modern, to the point of also painting in support of liberal ideas, and of even choosing as their subjects crowds of labourers at work, the fallen and redeemed woman, or the scourge of emigration. Their realism always remained, however, a partial one. No Pre-Raphaelite was sufficiently naturalistic, they all adorned and refined reality, both because in many cases they failed to detach themselves from literary mediations – the Bible, the Gospels, medieval literature – and because behind their pictures there always lurked a network of symbolic meanings to be deciphered, and there was always a studied, unnatural feature in their attitudes, an air of premeditation and artifice that was in itself a sign of mannerism – while also, underneath the documentary and almost photographic spirit of their scenes, an insuppressible tendency to moralize. 3. What concrete and lasting results can we recognize in Pre-Raphaelite painting? What role did it therefore have outside England on the wider 4

In a series of letters to the Times, Ruskin (§ 55.2) praised the honesty of the PreRaphaelites, their taste for literal truth and their faithful portrayal of single episodes, which Raphael and those coming after him had ‘betrayed’.

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arena of European art in the second half of the nineteenth century? At this distance of time, the authentically revolutionary effect and the disruptive power of Pre-Raphaelitism seem really slight. Praz rightly remarked that we can even see in it a ‘certain affinity with what it reacted against’.5 The boundary between the Pre-Raphaelites and the non-Pre-Raphaelites was very vague, so much so that various painters entered and then left the orbit of the movement. Its precepts were so ambiguous that they contained at one and the same time the provision and the prohibition of the same practice. Almost all English painters after Turner and up to Whistler can easily find a place under this label. Pre-Raphaelitism was not really an avant-garde like those in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nor is its painting poles apart from what went before, and immediately recognizable as such, as were Cubism or Abstractism, or in music the twelve-note composition versus tonal music. Open-air painting, mainly carried out by Hunt, apparently brings the Pre-Raphaelites closer to the impressionists; the former, however, had no good opinion of the latter and accused them – significantly – of immorality. In 1864 Rossetti saw Manet’s pictures in Paris and found them alarmingly incomprehensible. Manet was for the impressionists the external supporter and inspirer, as Ford Madox Brown was for the Pre-Raphaelites. Hunt called the impressionists’ work unequivocally ‘horrendous’. And yet except for a couple of points, the impressionists’ agenda applies to the Pre-Raphaelites: both groups harboured a dislike for academic art; they were realists although with the reservations already mentioned; they refused the studio habit and worked in the open air. The salient differences are the punctilious disinterest the impressionists had in the human figure, and, even more important, the Pre-Raphaelites’ grafting of symbol and allegory onto direct observation. The Pre-Raphaelites wanted to see the world unblinkingly, but in fact ended up by producing simple illustrations. A later post-impressionist movement was however influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and by the medieval revival. These were the French Nabis of the 1890s, whose theoretician, Maurice Denis, preached, explicitly referring to the Pre-Raphaelites, an art that was sacred, indeed Catholic,

5

PSL, 556.

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and modern, and hailed the collaboration between artists and writers, and the freedom of the imagination. I have already spoken on the suggestions spreading throughout Europe from Rossetti’s ‘fatal’ painting. It remains to be said that it was the second Pre-Raphaelitism, that of Morris and BurneJones, that set in motion the most advanced and brilliant elaboration of the movement, hinging on the reduction of the anecdotal and narrative painting, and heading towards stylization and pure decoration. 4. Unlike his sedentary disciples, Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893) had travelled at length in Europe before 1846, restlessly seeking masters. A temperament as independent as his could not accept constraint by the precepts, however bland, of any movement; he was in fact a forerunner of Pre-Raphaelitism, yet he never joined it. While not exactly avoiding historical or religious subjects, his painting is Pre-Raphaelite in its light, clean tones, in the colour without depth applied with fresco or even water-colour technique, and in its meticulous attention to details, no less than for its social realism, one of the Pre-Raphaelite focal points. The Last of England (1855), a tondo showing two emigrants of indomitable inner strength, transposes exile into painting – voluntary or forced or even undertaken as missionaries, an event that was socially widespread and often coincided with the final unravelling of the plot of a poem, as in The Bothie by Clough. In the vast canvas entitled Work (1852–1863), unbelievably over-crowded with figures, we see the full social spectrum in a mass scene where everyone is agreeably carrying out his and her own task, ranging ideally from intellectual sloth, which is the moment of sowing, to purely manual and physical labour. Like Hopkins’s Harry the ploughman or Tom the miner, at the centre of the picture we see the well-lit, tapered figure of the first of the navvies, in solemn stance, without a grimace, classically impassible, holding forth his spade as if it were a lance. Somewhat plumper, and beer-flushed, are the figures of the other labourers. 5. Of the three major Pre-Raphaelites, for quite a time Holman Hunt (1827–1910) embodied the religious and pious matrix of the Brotherhood, already with an aesthetic touch. His debut came mainly with two Shakespearean oil paintings – Claudio and Isabella and Valentine rescuing Silvia from Proteus (1850–1851) – which however focused on two instances

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of ethical intentions and the theme of guilt and redemption. The full revelation of Hunt’s painting came in The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1860), already showing his tendency to over-fill the canvas and divide it into several compartments, distanced planes and almost embryonic individual stories, together with a luxuriance of descriptive detail that is an end in itself, as is visible in the gilding and the elaborate arabesques on the balustrades and ceilings. In a circle around the young Christ are characters posing expressively, while at a distance in a perspective constructed by pillars is the tiny figure of a mother with her small child in her arms surrounded by nursing women. Outside the temple a blind man begs and we glimpse a carpenter’s yard: in effect three Gospel episodes, three pictures chronologically sequenced, are compressed onto a single canvas. The Scapegoat (1854–1855), however, isolates a single element standing against a backdrop of leaden light; formally inspired by an open-air studio in Palestine, it actually constitutes the first instance of an overflowing of realism into hyper-realism if not surrealism, as in the impressionists. This is also evident in the marked, unnatural contrast of lighting in another famous picture, The Light of the World (1853), showing Christ, lantern in hand, knocking at a door. Again, in The Shadow of Death (1870–1873), the carpenter’s workshop is full to overflowing; Christ, in ecstasy, raises his hands and draws behind him, involuntarily or more exactly ‘typologically’, the shadow of the cross that Mary, seen from behind as she takes something from a chest, sees awestricken. The workshop is chaotic, full of wood shavings, tools all over the place and even two apples left under the window. One of Hunt’s last works, confirming the inseparable symbiotic links between poetry and painting in Pre-Raphaelitism, is The Lady of Shalott (completed in 1905), a lavish, over-loaded picture full of trouvailles and symbolic rubbish, by then almost in Art Nouveau style. 6. One of the major innovations of the Pre-Raphaelites with respect to classical painting, even to a certain extent with respect to the Nazarenes, was that of dealing with sacred subjects in unassuming garb and with a tone of utter familiarity. The veristic, photographic precautions taken by John Everett Millais (1829–1896) prior to painting his Christ in the House of his Parents, a kind of overturned repetition of Hunt’s The Shadow of Death, are almost ludicrous. He asked a real Oxford Street carpenter to

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pose as St Joseph, which he did. The calves’ heads framed in the open doorway pushing against the field fence seem to be curiously observing the scene; they were painted using as models the heads of two sheep (unshorn) acquired from the butcher. This painting was superbly satirised by Dickens in Household Words, even beyond the realistic, indeed veristic intentions of Millais. Dickens, an inveterate representative of Victorian ostracism of kitchen-sink aesthetics, was not wrong in noting the absence of anything uplifting (St Joseph has even got varicose veins and a hint of hair combed over baldness). Even an incredulous Queen Victoria requested a private viewing of the painting.6 In this picture, only later commentaries have highlighted, within the realist intention, the ‘typological’ element of Jesus showing his hand hurt by a nail, in a kind of premonition of the Cross. Millais’s evolution, however, became rapidly orientated towards a celebration of upper-class taste. Even dressing as a dapper gentleman rather than as a dishevelled artist, and emancipated from the Pre-Raphaelite ranks, he became a superb painter tout court. Suffice it to look at the pure pictorial and dramatic effect of a painting – capable of evoking long preliminaries and condensing wide time periods – such as Order of Release (1853), all a skilful, expressive play of glances and hands. 7. Many secondary Pre-Raphaelites are today authors of one painting only, in which they elevate the genre painting with noble, dignified, decorous and modest figures with nature as the backdrop. Halfway between stylization and natural representation is Arthur Hughes’s April Love, inspired by one of Tennyson’s songs, ‘The Miller’s Daughter’, featuring a strong colour contrast, the woman’s violet dress clashing with the dark green surroundings. Meredith posed for Wallis’s Death of Chatterton. Brett’s The Stonebreaker is permeated by an idyllic vein that attenuates its theme of social denunciation. Bowler’s elegiac The Doubt: Can these Dry Bones Live? depicts a woman in one of the postures and rites most typical of the poetry of the time, the visit to the tomb of a dear departed one. Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), judged by some to be the best Pre-Raphaelite painter, represents the movement’s involution, to the point of the blatant 6

Ophelia (1851–2) is striking in its detailed botanical precision and for the symbolic embroidery of flowers, not all present in Shakespeare.

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disavowal of all its original precepts. Renouncing any option in favour of primitivistic painting he turns to Michelangelo with his smooth, amazing contaminations enacted in a climate of chilling, dream-like revisitation. His perfectly self-conscious recastings were the result of an artistic education achieved in those Italian picture galleries that the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti especially, had never visited. As well as Michelangelo it is the whole of the Renaissance and particularly Venetian painting – Mantegna, Carpaccio, Giorgione – and classical sculpture that amalgamates and flows into this accomplished synthesizer, whose pictorial cycles on Perseus and Pygmalion rediscover the mythology so abhorred by the Pre-Raphaelites, attenuating passion in solemn depictions under a glaze of arcane composure and impenetrability. § 208. Minor Pre-Raphaelite literature A Pre-Raphaelite poem was easily turned into the subject of a picture or painting, and a picture became an illustrative poem. Rather than a transfusion, it became a sort of osmosis, two communicating spheres feeding each other. Dante Gabriel Rossetti launched the dual-faced figure of the painter-poet or poet-painter, at times sculptor or illustrator, in turn, of his Pre-Raphaelite brother’s poems. To remain in the domain of poetry, however, and excluding artists such as Dante and Christina Rossetti who have a story of their own, does a school of Pre-Raphaelite poetry really exist? This classification, in its proper sense, has frequently and rightly been questioned. As illustrators, the Pre-Raphaelites even managed to pre-raphaelite non-Pre-Raphaelite poets, for instance when they chose Tennyson’s languid passage or Chaucer’s pastoral picture or Shakespeare’s group scene. Secondly, the Brotherhood admitted and co-opted poets in the making or already made, but coming from the periphery, isolated and in need of acknowledgement and protection. Nor did Rossetti discriminate between a Pre-Raphaelite and a non-Pre-Raphaelite, animated as he was, first and foremost, by his intention to create a group of artists committed to renewal simply for the sake of renewal. This meant that practically every poet, writer or artist who came before the public eye after 1840 was beckoned and flattered by Rossetti, or requested to become a member and supporter. He was usually immediately accepted, and found his poetry in

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an issue of The Germ. This was how such different types of poet-painters gravitated into the Pre-Raphaelite orbit – Patmore, for example, who by the age of twenty wanted to be a painter rather than a poet; or Edward Lear, the author of limericks yet better known to his contemporaries as a landscape artist. These ‘Pre-Raphaelite satellites’ were for a certain time Rossetti’s friends and collaborators, but such an association was rather brief in almost all cases. However, in one case at least we shall see independent clues and marks of closeness to the movement even without documented personal contacts. Any attempt to furnish a precise definition of the features of literary Pre-Raphaelitism grinds to a halt before the evident differences between one member and another, even between the two Rossetti siblings. Not only do two, or even three, pictorial Pre-Raphaelitisms exist, both synchronically and chronologically, but there are as many other PreRaphaelitisms as there are poets who at one time or another came under the wing of the movement. Each one already shared with it one of its specific components. Over time, ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ has thus come to cover a sensibility and a broad, unspecifiable range of nuances. The early Dante Gabriel Rossetti in ‘The Blessed Damozel’ is responsible for the wider acceptation of the term, almost removed from its most strictly applicable time lapse, and a synonym for refined, decorated, floral, naïve elements, with offshoots reaching out as far as Hopkins and, becoming purely abstract design, to Morris. The late Rossetti, poet and above all painter, inaugurated the genre of the medieval-style ballad enriched with sinister, Gothic elements, arcane rites and numerical symbols; and he it was who set in motion the revisitation of the great western myths, that of Tristram at their head, and reaching out to Swinburne and further still to Morris. Christina Rossetti influenced in turn the devotional Pre-Raphaelitism initially stemming from evangelical and Tractarian religiousness, along with the conventual and funereal vein, the fairy-tales, children’s rhymes and the nonsense genre. § 209. Woolner Thomas Woolner (1825–1892) was the poet-sculptor among the seven Pre-Raphaelite Brothers of 1848, and his first poems, outdoing Rossetti’s sugariness, were published in The Germ. As a sculptor, he more prudently pursued heroic plasticity until 1850, but this did not bring him any success

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with the public or in sales. Inspiring a picture by Ford Madox Brown, he decided to emigrate to Australia in 1852 in search of gold, but returned empty-handed in 1854. Ironically, success came to him as the author of medallions, and this opened the road to fame and gained him remunerative commissions for sculptures and busts of public figures. Having become rich, he followed in Millais’s footsteps – from revolutionary to academic – and left the Pre-Raphaelites to become one of the many blind followers and adulators of Tennyson, as Allingham was also to do. He did two busts of Tennyson and served him even better by supplying him with the idea for ‘Enoch Arden’. The poems published in The Germ were taken up again in 1863 to be encapsulated in a frame and an epilogue. All his later production, which may be considered senile as it appeared well after 1880, shows exceptional thematic and inspirational cohesion. It consists of three mythological poems implicated with each other, one of which, Pygmalion, is about a sculptor. In their best features, all three of these works can compete with the later Tennyson. The lines are finely chiselled, recounting the myth in smooth and solemn verse and in lyrical and dream-like tones which resolve any tension in neoclassical calm, though at times with a certain calligraphic coolness. They are also the works of an ex-revolutionary, prodigal son who discovers and highlights in myth the path leading from chaos and anarchy to order, a notion that shored up the Victorian model not only from the political and social point of view. 2. The lyrics later included in My Beautiful Lady (1863) appeared in the wake of Patmore’s The Angel in the House and Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’,1 in the form of free and abstract variations on the theme of the refreshing, sublime power of human love that prepares for immortal, divine love. Their atmosphere is that of extended ecstasy, in its very nature excluding any space-time evolution; an atmosphere of adoration, of dreamy transfiguration, of the ‘triumph’ of the lady who comes forward, flower- and garland-decked within a nature that does homage and acts as a

1

Right from the first hymn we witness Woolner’s imitative naïveté in a verse form that is imperceptibly varied in metre and prosody from the sestet of ‘The Blessed Damozel’.

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chorus. The philosophy of love is echoed from Patmore’s ‘preludes’, yet the stylized figures comply with Rossetti’s early Pre-Raphaelite ornateness, in their ivy-covered windows, white garments, the woman’s languid postures, now kneeling, now sitting at the mirror to comb her Rossettian ‘braided opulent hair’ flowing to her feet, now sweet music-maker sprinkling her arcane harmonies all around. In the breast of this loved one the humble suitor finds blissful shelter, devoted and adoring as in Rossetti’s Stilnovo, and weeping unceasing tears of happiness. At the poem’s turning point, the looming illness that makes the suitor despair elicits from the lady words of life-giving comfort: the time has come in which the Creator calls her to carry on her task in the world on high – the time has come, therefore, that ideally precedes ‘The Blessed Damozel’. She exhorts her beloved to pray for her during the long period awaiting their heavenly reunion. Left alone, this beloved can only be that same beloved who survives on earth in ‘The Blessed Damozel’. He hears her voice coming from heaven in a blinding instant of auditory epiphany that unleashes copious tears and makes him feel drawn up into a spiral of unbearable light. Almost untranslatable into language, her words are a Rossettian paraphrase, telling him that he will soon have to follow her along the heavenly paths, reproving him for turning his eyes from eternal beatitude and protesting against fate.2 3. Woolner’s triptych of mythological remakes opens with Pygmalion (1881), a smooth poem with touches of humour and generous, imaginative re-inventions. Its happy ending hails and crowns the artist who so aptly manages to elicit and represent the elusive divine essence, becoming moreover a public figure who enables his community to take a leap forward in civilization. Pygmalion is the first of Woolner’s figures to wonder about man’s lost nobility; he yearns to grant insensible men the beauty that brings serenity; he particularly desires to extract form and beauty from the shapeless marble. In the opening scene, the four sculpture subjects he has 2

The third part, opening ten years later and declaimed at the tomb of the beloved, shows a serious worsening of taste, not so much for the vanishing dream and the decidedly more realistic reconstruction of her life as a child, as for the absurd, jarring excursus into triumphantly told English history, one of Woolner’s typical ‘odes to duty’ and a hymn to the Victorian warrior combatting wrong.

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just finished working on are all paradigmatic of succour offered to man by god-benefactors, while describing the processes which led to man freeing himself from his bestial condition. The reanimation and coming to life of the statue of Hebe, the gods’ cup-bearer, on which he works next, symbolizes the incarnation of human perfection sought by the sculptor. With Silenus (1884) Woolner achieves the peak of his smooth, alabaster-like verse, of the statuary ekphrasis and of the search for static scenarios. The poem opens with the most immediate, elliptical and flashing scene in the whole of Woolner’s mythology. The nymph Syrinx confidently awaits the handsome Silenus. She daydreams, innocently looking at her reflection in the water with modest wifely vanity, but here comes the deformed goatgod Pan with the intention of promptly plucking this appealing fruit. The god shows how it is possible to gallop even when one is lame. He joins the nymph in the reeds; to escape him she throws herself into the river, slipping out of the grip of the goat-god who yet manages to seize her breast and tear its ‘tender beauty’. Evidently the poet was not interested in this scene, since he spent nine tenths of the poem on a subsequent, much less piquant story, passing over the climax to describe only its consequences. The sensual and sexual motif remains very evident, however, both as the irrepressible impulse in Pan and as sublimation in Syrinx. Before being shown in Pan, erotic impulse is recalled in the history of the Titan who once in Olympus made an attempt on Athena’s virginity, that same goddess seen naked by Tiresias in Woolner’s next poem. Therefore Silenus seems to be a step back with respect to Pygmalion as it sketches a pessimistic parable on the vanquished ability to control disordered impulse, and depicts the defeat of the purity of feelings. A follower of Dionysus, Silenus is a minor Prometheus who takes civilization to the uncivilized but fails, becoming the first victim of his curse through the frustrated longing for union with the nymph, an obsession of which he is unable to get free. On his return from India, Silenus is already suspicious and dismayed (the reeds whisper and sway); he comes across Pan crouching down; transfixed, he realizes the metempsychosis of Syrinx and reconstructs what has happened. Through a number of clear analogies Pan is like a ‘type’ of Satan in the Tractarian and typological sense of the word; at the end of Silenus’ biblical tirade in this scene, he is driven away like Lucifer from heaven, and condemned to

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torment. Silenus foretells an unbridled, godless age dominated by bestiality, when only the few elect will escape from Satan’s thrall by daring to oppose him. The second part, opening a long time later, shows Silenus as an old man dragging himself wearily round his tasks, babbling and spilling wine over himself. He is, in fact, the more traditional Silenus of Rubens. The curse is fulfilled, and Silenus realizes, through a second unending monologue, that he has become a beast.3 4. Tiresias (1886) also opens with a chase, Tiresias chasing a deer escaping from him. Too encumbered further on with the sequel of the ‘marvellous’ vicissitudes of the seer and the wearisome, long dialogues it contains, the poem offers its best at the beginning, in the scene of the blinding of the hunter Tiresias. He has given up the chase, and on his way home he unexpectedly comes across Athena splendidly naked. It is a tightly rhythmed scene full of slight hints of what is to come and played out in a story full of internal references. Nature and the tangled bushes into which Tiresias plunges already bear the warning signs of the root that twists and of the anthropomorphic clutch; the streams are ‘disdainful’, they run haughtily among the flowers that watch with impish looks and wry smiles. The development illustrates the clash between fate and human and even divine activity, in the end impotent to change it. But in the multiple personal action of Tiresias it also illustrates the fundamental value of illusion and of active tenacity even when it is systematically and ‘fatally’ defeated. Tiresias is always on the side of order and approves and upholds its supporters; the latter are however never heeded and in the end are driven away by the thankless. He pessimistically foretells a tragic future and a beastlike humanity, stupefied and fumbling, but there is a final invitation to find somewhere in life a ‘seesaw balance of content and strife’. § 210. William Bell Scott Until some time ago William Bell Scott (1811–1890) was remembered with deprecation and disapproval, and rather than for intrinsic artistic demerit for his biographical romance, rich in so many murky love affairs 3

Respect for the myth, in this case at least, induced Woolner to make Silenus undertake an extreme though fatal act of heroism again the warlike king Lycurgus.

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including his scandalous polygamy, and for the allegedly great responsibility as the deplorable corruptor of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (as well as for being Christina Rossetti’s third ghost-suitor,1 as I have recalled). Growing up in Edinburgh in a family of artists, and in an ambience of cultural ferment, his debut as a painter and poet was anything but promising. As a painter he was completely obscured, even later on, by one of his brothers. Leaving the family, he emigrated to London in 1837 where, like Edward Lear, he earned his bread as an illustrator; later he obtained a steady job as the headmaster of an art school in Newcastle. His friendship with Rossetti lasted until the latter’s death, and began when Scott wrote a poem on the ‘career’ of a prostitute, an arpeggio on a scabrous, equally morbid Rossettian theme. This painter and poet frequented by Rossetti was married to a woman who was apparently sexually frigid; according to biographers she happily put up with the relationship between her husband and Alice Boyd, the owner of the Scottish castle of Penkill where Rossetti was often invited to spend periods of rest, later more often of convalescence, but where in fact he usually ended up as a companion in debauchery. Thus, when Scott fell for Lady Trevelyan, a witty rich patron of the arts, he had three women lovers in his life. As a painter, Scott is remembered almost solely for the murals of historical events painted on the stairwells of his two aristocratic mistresses’ castles; another canvas drew public attention because it was said to show quite openly one aspect of the Pre-Raphaelite manner, the spasmodic meticulousness of photographic details.2 2. At least one documentary merit must be attributed to Scott the writer: to him we owe the most famous visual, almost graphic presentation of Rossetti the father working on his Dante manuscripts, and of the hard-featured, melancholy seventeen-year-old Christina. The sketch was made when Scott came to meet his friend Rossetti for the first time. His masterpiece is his memories, a wealthy mine of information and first-hand accounts by a witness of the literary scene, of which he was part until the

1 2

§ 199.3. PSL, 557.

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burgeoning and almost the withering of the Decadent movement.3 Scott the poet cannot but be read in connection with the two Rossettis, whom he preannounces and echoes. Until 1847, then thirty-six, he had followed a wholly different path from Pre-Raphaelitism since he had been a revolutionary trusting to the French Revolution’s three key-words, as well as a potential Spasmodic who had just written a poem on humanity’s progressive destiny. He wanted to be considered a radical philosopher and looked far from kindly on Tractarianism. The muddled, disorganic ballad ‘Rosabel’, which was in essence a concession to the Victorian poetry and narrative prose topic of the ‘fallen woman’, inspired not only Rossetti’s ‘Jenny’ but also his unfinished picture Found.4 According to his detractors, Scott inserted therein a section of his past, for the protagonist was one of the prostitutes he frequented, perhaps a Rosabel actually met on the Edinburgh streets. In the cadenced development of the poem we first see the God-fearing young girl betrothed to her devoted young man, then the seamstress in the city who, like Barrett’s Marian Erle, falls for the temptations of the great world, then the irreversible descent into sin. Rosabel’s ‘unfortunate end’, in the last section of the ballad when she is alone in the street, can only be in the workhouse or in the hospice for ‘fallen’ or ‘depraved’ women where Christina Rossetti occasionally assisted. 3. Scott contributed to The Germ as did many another outside supporter and collaborator. In a sonnet of greeting and encouragement to the Brotherhood he defined himself as one of the many standing ‘apart’; not without cutting irony, he praised their honesty, noting enigmatically their ‘conventional vitality’. He was indebted to Rossetti for later poems in the form of ekphrases and a number of ballads with archaic topics and atmospheres set in Ossianic or Nordic landscapes. He was also the author of ballads on repressed or fearful love, unspoken and postponed, with leading figures named Teliessin, Oisin, Thorolf and Gudrun; and of parables on self-castigating monasticism rewarded by God. Others concern the distress of wavering saints obliged to overcome diabolical hallucinations 3 4

Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, ed. W. Minto, 2 vols, London 1892. §§ 187.4 and 190.2 and n. 62.

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of the seductive sorceress type. Scott’s Satanism, Scottish in setting and every now and then spiced with Scottish terms, was to find its best expression in the agitated and lively ‘The Witch’s Ballad’. For Scott, Dante was significantly and above all the poet of the Inferno; as Rossetti had done, he criticised the Italian poet for making Beatrice a heartless woman and for transforming her into a theological hypostasis in paradise. Several short cycles of love sonnets come within Rossetti’s manneristic style; with their dreamy air, personifications and emblems, they recall not only The House of Life but also its microscopic contemplations of nature, where the barrier separating man from the direct vision of God becomes perceptible, such as in Rossetti’s ‘The Sea-Limits’. Whether or not the love-story between Christina Rossetti and Scott was real,5 in Scott’s poems there are pictures of the Scottish landscape across which move the same virgin country girls so dear to Rossetti, virgins picking fruit, mushrooms and apples as well, and ‘damozels’ lingering, aware of the court paid them by some young man.6 These are impressionist pictures veined by a sweet idyllic sense, composed in a more cordial tone, and slightly rippled by thoughtfulness. § 211. Allingham William Allingham (1824–1889) did not lack many of the potential requisites to be a Spasmodic poet. He was born in the provinces, he was the son – like one of the historical Spasmodics – of a country, Ireland, historically even more unredeemed, he had no university education, and he was given a clerk’s training (as an employee of his father, a banker and small landowner, later a customs officer). All this might have seemed a propitious launch to a Titanic poetic career. Instead of which, he was a Pre-Raphaelite satellite, second in importance after Patmore, all through the 1850s and into the 1860s, when moving to London his vein rapidly ran out. He had placed

5 6

Some of Scott’s poems were addressed to an elusive Mignon; ‘Rose-leaves’ is in fact addressed to a Christina by offering her roses and petals that may be faded; this poem, if autobiographical, sounds a bit like a final settlement. A nymph seller in Arcadia calls to her all the country folk with the same cry as Christina Rossetti’s goblins: ‘Virgins, virgins, come and buy’. One poem is indeed entitled ‘An Apple-Gathering’ (see § 201.1).

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himself spontaneously under the protection and auspices of Rossetti; but at the first sign of endogenous decline and of collective blame on the part of the general public he shared the movement’s diaspora and became a member of Tennyson’s entourage. From the outset he actually had only superficial points of contact with the aesthetic tenets of the Brotherhood, for that matter only instrumental in view of his launch into the literary world. His basic indifference to religion is not Pre-Raphaelite. He is in fact a secular, or at the very most a pantheist poet and in any case a non-Catholic Irishman, since as an ‘Ulster Protestant’ he felt all the weight of sin and damnation on his shoulders. There is no sign in him of connections with the tradition of illustrative poetry and of ekphrasis, unless we mean a generic local descriptiveness, or his swift kaleidoscopes of Irish background, country, village and sea. The Pre-Raphaelite predisposition, if any, may be seen in the ingenuous fairy-tale and eerie features of Ireland, in a visionary and dreamlike poetry slightly disturbed and sinister, which every now and then takes the form of the ballads of olden times with Gothic overtones, and in the simple rural idyll. ‘The Fairies’ is frequently remembered. Conceived prior to Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’, and its precursor in its simplified diction, it presents ‘goblins’ that frighten the fairies, one of whom is tricked, kidnapped and even perhaps raped by them. In many other fables, where we find hoary kings and wicked witches, the clash is between the forces of evil and those of good, with the latter that do not always win; or else there is some unsettling though vague hint of sadism, violence and burglary, as in the ballad ‘The Maids of Elfin-Mere,’ where the bloodstains on the shore reveal to the shepherd-boy the almost certain death of the three spinners to whom he has taken a fancy. With gratuitous ferocity ‘The Ballad of Squire Curtis’ tells of the murder of a wife, carried out on the basis of very flimsy suspicions if not real falsity, in a tense, hallucinatory atmosphere. A number of compositions are expressly entitled ‘dreams’; here, personal events and historical or collective memories are set in action in front of the dreamer, who in the end mourns the disappearance of such pleasant images; nature too is animated by magic and transfigured for the poet who loses himself therein, leaving the town behind.

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2. The Irish are quintessential masters in blurring the borders between reality and the imaginary. This happens paradigmatically to the Irish lad in an untitled poem of Allingham’s, very simple and evocative. The boy looks out of the window before going to sleep and sees the silver moonlight on the moors; the poet wonders whether what he is looking at is in the ‘land of memory’ or not, and whether it is ‘within him or beyond’. In Allingham, the Celtic and Irish roots in all their range of tones and connections really predominate over any external support for an inclusion in a movement. This happens not only out of respect for a recent flair for marginality, but on the strength of an objective element in his nature and in his poetry. Politically prostrate and poetically hibernating in the late eighteenth century, Ireland awakens once more with Allingham although still without shining with its own independent light. This was acknowledged by Yeats, one of the first objective admirers and anthologizers of his predecessor’s poetry. Among so many strong, solemn, stentorian voices proclaiming themselves (or being proclaimed) ‘bards’, Allingham appeared in the 1850s with a poetry and aesthetic of the tiny, humming ‘songs’ found ‘here and there’, even heard echoing in nature and the sea or uttered by the people, and songs in which the poet pretends to be (indeed, to a certain extent, actually is) only the collector adding a few marks and a few words. Therefore the poem springs spontaneously from such sources not as the poet’s property but belonging to all – belonging, that is, to the community. Allingham takes on and becomes one with the voice of that nameless commoner, the son of peasants or fishermen, and of the poet who cannot use far-fetched intellectualisms; he can only depict feelings and reactions of that genuine, infantile soul that lights up with primordial affection in front of nature’s essential wonders. Without any sententious undertones he does not sermonize and brings his compositions to an early close; they are intentionally brief, having no moralistic ending. Occasionally his brevity achieves a couplet that may be almost a boutade, or apparently unpretentious, playful lines that overturn the diction of every dignified, bard-like tradition, or small squibs of biting, satiric verve verging on the misogynous. Yet it also achieves depictions, sketches, impressionist flashes such as in the seven-line poem ‘Four ducks

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on a pond’.1 This poem is surprisingly evocative of the Imagistic poems that were to appear decades later, and to William Carlos Williams’s famous ‘The Wheelbarrow’, except for an innocent little closure, sentimental and nostalgic. To say that Allingham is the poet of the peasantry and sea-going community of Donegal in Ireland – more specifically of his native town, Ballyshannon, as Yeats rather unconvincingly suggested – might be the indisputable proof of its local and regional nature. Allingham’s idyll actually follows in the tracks of the more generic, schematic efforts of the regional poetry of other Victorian regionalist poets such as Barnes, and also of nonregionalists such as Tennyson, or even of simple admirers such as Clough; and this makes Allingham’s Irish regionalism almost indistinguishable from that of, say, Dorset, Lincolnshire or Scotland. In Allingham we find all the thematic and linguistic stereotypes of regionalism: plump, clean, candid country girls – haymakers in the fields, fruit gatherers or milkmaids – who are genuine beauties, however rustic, and courted by lads who are generally turned down though they never lose their spirit, even managing to laugh about their troubles.2 Traditionally these are petulant beauties, each more attractive than the last, praised in excessive eulogies and in streams of predictably conventional comparisons. Among these, the song to ‘lovely’ Mary Donnelly has enjoined a certain favour. Even Allingham did not feel able to adopt the major requisite of linguistic realism: he backed off from a solution as radical as that of Barnes and made do with a compromise, using Irish dialect words frugally and without corrupting pronunciation and phonetics. 3. Nostalgia and a painful imaginary return to his birthplace, therefore the feeling of exile, are among the themes most commonly touched upon in Allingham’s poetry. He often surprises himself in ‘pensive retrospection’ and in the adult’s damp-eyed regret for past youth and its vibrant communion

1

2

In two quatrains, ‘An Evening’ presents separately, one after another and with no finite verbs, a series of landscape impressions. Allingham is also a skilled onomatopoeic poet, reproducing for instance the chirping of birds in an imaginary dialogue between the birds and the lover in the fantasy ‘The Lover and Birds’. Slightly bolder, but decidedly less felicitious, is The Girl’s Lamentation, the monologue of a spinner betrayed by her man, tippler and frequenter of prostitutes and good-time girls. Yet he has made her pregnant – a scandalous subject for the time – and vaguely promises to marry her.

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with nature, now lost. In one of his best poems, ‘Adieu to Belashanny’, he depicts himself in the image of the uprooted, transplanted Irish emigrant that he was, who bids farewell to his country and recalls it with longing. Many of his compositions are phantasmagorias or mythologizing recollections of the people and the places where he was born and of the country beside the ‘jagged profile’ of Lough Erne, from which he is exiled in his wanderings in foreign lands. However, at that time, before 1885 and the initiatives leading to the birth of the ‘Celtic Renaissance’, Allingham did not have any support or reference point for a political or civil poetry that could be the voice of a strong nationalist protest; all he could do was take refuge in resigned elegy and the pessimistic memory of a bright past forever lost. The promising sons of Ireland come back from the Continent or the city as failures, like the George Levison in the poem of the same name; or else they are revenants whose whereabouts are unknown but whose footsteps are always expected by their vision-prone countrymen and always mistaken for the drumming rain, as in the poem ‘Footsteps’. In his touching visionary legends the poet writes on Irish historical continuity broken by colonization; the correlative to the dilapidation of Ireland is often the ruin of the many abbeys that embodied the tradition of linguistic-political-religious independence, the epitome of Irish civilization before Elizabethan and Cromwellian rule. Allingham reaches out to his own childhood which is also the childhood of his land harking back to the arrival of the Vikings 1,000 years earlier, a mythical event that was to inflame the fantasy of Irish writers from Yeats through to Joyce. The most vigorous yet sorrowful of these compositions, ‘The Abbot of Inisfalen’, is not on the religious theme of the pious abbot kneeling in ecstatic prayer all day long on the banks of the lough, but on the fractured continuity of history, yet still magically and imaginatively lasting thanks to a fantastic time-stop. This comes about in the form of the abbot’s return to the convent after a 200year period of prayer, during which time the island’s subjugation, and its linguistic servitude, have been achieved.3 Allingham’s political resignation can be gleaned in poems which contain only possible, enigmatic and not

3

The language the abbot hears spoken by his astounded brother monks is no longer Irish but English. There is perhaps the slightest vein of irony in the fact that while

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wholly certain hints in that sense. In ‘The Touchstone’ a man arrives in the community and with his ‘touchstone’ transforms everything, but he ends up in prison and is then killed by the conservatives who are suspicious of novelties. The story in verse ‘Lawrence Bloomfield in Ireland’4 (1864), the most ambitious Allingham ever wrote and the most overtly political, is also based on a compromise: it attacks the abuse of Anglo-Irish power yet it takes care not to approve revolution and independence. It keeps at a distance from the excesses of the imperial system without wanting to overturn it, indeed even shoring it up by taking a position halfway between those of the Protestant landowners and the Catholic peasantry. In Allingham’s view, the Irish question could be solved through a peaceful, inter-class stance based on general humanitarian tolerance and the spirit of collaboration. Such principles are behind one of the most vigorous of his passages in the poem, showing the eviction and requisition of a country community, carried out by needy Catholic mercenaries against their own countrymen. § 212. Procter The London poet Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) constitutes an independent advance notice of the most conspicuous religious type of poetic Pre-Raphaelitism. She never officially entered Pre-Raphaelitism, nor does she appear to have had personal or epistolary contacts with any of its

4

the abbot contemplates and prays far from the world, the political reality which he so totally disregards changes utterly. This poem was quoted in Parliament by Gladstone, and Turgenev claimed that it revealed to him Ireland in a flash. Some of Allingham’s incautious compatriots thought it the best political poem (presumably the best Irish political poem) in English literature. It has been re-examined more than any other work or single poem by Allingham (cf. in particular L. K. Hughes, ‘The Poetics of Empire and Resistance: William Allingham’s Lawrence Bloomfield in Ireland’, in VP [1990], 103–19). It is a curious fact that this work is on Bloom’s bookshelves in Joyce’s Ulysses, and that Lawrence Bloomfield and Leopold Bloom are not only near-homophones but also share the same destiny as ‘aliens’ in their own country. Bloomfield, partly an autobiographical figure, is an Irish orphan who emigrates to England at the age of twelve, then returns to Ireland where, as I am saying, he illustrates the positions of modern, enlightened capitalism.

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members, and to have succeeded in catching their attention. Although by nature retiring, her acquaintances and associations were within another better-known circle, that of Tennyson, Browning and Dickens (whose Household Words published her poems separately from 1853 on under the pen-name Miss Berwick).1 These personages met in her mother’s salon, while her lawyer father was the esteemed confidant of many leading figures on the literary scene, and was in his own small way a respected poet under the name of Barry Cornwall. Procter was the most consistent, courageous exponent of the Anglo-Catholicism of early Pre-Raphaelitism. Unlike Christina and Maria Francesca Rossetti, she converted to Catholicism together with her sister who – another analogy – became a nun in a Catholic order. Her death through tuberculosis before she was forty no doubt impeded Procter from achieving more grandiose, though probably no more intense heights, than those of the poems she herself collected in 1862, as if with a premonition of imminent death, in Legends and Lyrics. Although far from monumental in dimensions, and for this reason almost miraculously unified in style and content, this book makes Procter the foremost religious Victorian woman poet chronologically, and the second in stature after Christina Rossetti, among those born before 1830. At first glance Procter is a double of Rossetti herself down to the austere demeanour and severe attire, and to the noble, ascetic and mystical expression she shows in a contemporary portrait. Her devotional poetry was, like Rossetti’s, not triumphant or hagiographic, but a series of painful, intimate probings carried forward with no sign of gravity or disordered ejaculation, and never lacking a gift that the portrait seems to deny or hide, the gift of lightness, fantasy, wit, even humour. Her style instinctively refuses luxuriance and excess, pivoting on a simple, chaste yet never simplistic and colourless diction, regulated by her sense of measure and innate taste. This saves her 1

In Procter, Dickens recognized and praised a poet with an angelological conception and inspiration which was not so different from his own. Procter’s world is preannounced by that angel on earth embodied in Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens makes of Nell an angel at the end and Nell is repeatedly so referred to, that is, as one of those angels in disguise on earth of whom Procter frequently speaks, or beings who become angels above, such as children who having died on earth continue from on high to intervene in the lives of their loved ones (Volume 5, § 33).

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almost infallibly from any pitfall. Metrically one can only repeat what was said about Rossetti, the extremely wide range, and yet functionality, of her verse forms, among which only the sonnet is missing. The name of George Herbert inevitably comes to mind as her distant predecessor for her humble, quiet devotion, her gentle, intimate lyrical tone, her reiterated parallelistic patterns and her frequent arguments hinging on extended metaphors; and for the crystalline formal closure of her compositions, never unfinished or fragmentary. All this reveals the emergence of a neo-metaphysical Victorian vein well in advance of the rediscovery of the Metaphysicals by the early twentieth-century poets.2 What is most impressive in Procter is the ability to unleash the imagination in metaphysical and fairy-tale parables and in genial dramatizations.3 Especially in her ‘legends’, the final turning point is often a really sensational and narrative stroke of genius that offsets stagnant storylines and arrives like a bolt out of the blue. She is even superior to Christina Rossetti for her moving, overwhelming pathos, only slightly overdone in a few of her compositions. For this reason Procter was one of the many Victorian women poets who gained a favourable, even ‘spasmodic’ reputation, but only for a short time, before falling inexorably into oblivion. Her poetic book was prefaced by Dickens, one of the very few eye witnesses and an invaluable source of information. Her reserve and equilibrium earned words of admiration from that ex-Pre-Raphaelite, and highly prescient critic, Patmore; but no further echo was heard. Many of her short lyrics and a number of her longer legends are in no way inferior to the most famous compositions of Rossetti and Dickinson. After more than a century of oblivion, in fact, they have recently been re-examined and republished in anthologies of women’s poetry. Feminist readings have

2 3

Donne’s quotation is unmistakable in the first line of ‘For the Future’: ‘I wonder did you ever count / The value of one human fate’. In the ‘lyrics’ Procter speaks in the first person while using a feint dialogue, addressing unidentified or named ‘dear ones’ who remain invented interlocutors. The dramatic monologue is a genre she frequently adopts; her colloquial style takes on, at least in one case, the external form of a diary page, and in various other cases she uses the epistolary form. Her alter ego is normally female, but at times male, above all in her love poems.

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rightly stressed the symbolic, transposed leitmotif of up-rooting, emigration, transplantation into different cultures, which involves many of the heroines of her legends. But Procter deserves a much wider readership and fame, and a far greater acknowledgement from the literary establishment. 2. The main situation from which Procter’s poems originate, and one in which they often entirely consist, is the vision, and the vision of supernatural angels and spirits. This depends on the eminently angelogical nature of her poetry. Her antennae are always alert to the perception of angels’ wings on earth, or rather their beating and their rustling, their sagging and their fading. Many lyrics recount visions that were rushing and vivid, visions of prophesying angels who shape a life, visions later nostalgically sought after, yet fading more and more from the mind of the viewer. Another recurrent scene is that of angels who waft dead children up into heaven, and made angels who pay their debts for the care, gifts and compassionate acts and benefits received when they were distressed or neglected orphans on earth, before becoming angels. Procter indulges in moments of profound, heart-rending sorrow for such refulgent angelic visions that vanish, yet their memory fuels the desire to live and eases the most burdensome conditions. However, from such a reverie, protracted and inactive, she never fails to summon herself back to action and to her duty in the present. On this confrontation between past and present, and on the need to look to the future, many of the most dramatic variations evolve in her poetry. She would rather loiter in contemplative inaction, but she corrects and reprimands herself in the same composition by reminding herself that life must continue its cycle, and that the future reserves a yet deeper, yet more complete joy through this experience of grief. Procter’s meditative and more personal poetry pivots on the awareness, not always easily accepted, of the fecundity and fruitful company of grief.4 Life too

4

Procter’s introspective lyrics are based on the frankly admitted see-saw of mood changes, according to the confession of being, ‘without reason’, now ‘gay’, now ‘sad’. Dickens recalled that the gifted, eclectic poet went on to another interest as soon as she had overcome the difficulties of one subject of study.

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is a spiritual journey through pain, hence a real Calvary towards Christ.5 The earthly goal of this journey is death; setting out is always postponed yet always more imminent and longed for; it is heavenly glorification and reunion with the angel throng. One of the purest of Procter’s gems, ‘The Lost Chord’, describes this agonizing expectation of otherworldly bliss through her favourite musical image of heavenly harmony, symbolized by a chord found on the organ that communicates unspeakable peace and fulfilment, something that will be heard again perhaps only in heaven. Procter’s ‘testament’ is a short poem of incomparable wit and lightness, telling of a young girl who leaves each of her friends a gift.6 Soberly and delicately depicted in all its wonders, lyric after lyric, not only is the earthly world not denigrated but it is greeted with a nostalgia that accentuates its irrepressible appeal, while thanking God who made it a transitory place so that the heart will not cling to it excessively. She is a prisoner cut off from worldly shows, yet through the bars she glimpses at least a piece of sky and nature. 3. Yet Procter was no woman or poet lost in reverie. In her case too, feminist critics have found and underlined her active commitment to women’s emancipation, carried out in words and in works, through articles and leaflets appearing in high-circulation papers and, like Christina Rossetti, in forms of assistance of all kinds. In her own poems, wakeful vigilance on the present and on socio-political events is toned down behind a veil, to avoid her having to take a public stand and to spend herself out in transitoriness, so unlike the disordered and combative inspiration of a Barrett Browning. Like all religious poets Procter found the pure, clean God-made world dirtied and infected by factory smoke. Her poetry bears the signs of Chartist unrest and resounds with the distant echoes of the workers’ demands after the hardships of the 1840s. Her children are often poor orphans with nothing to eat, whose only desperate cry is for salvation in death, under the eyes of other insensitively rich children. In ‘The CradleSong of the Poor’, as in Barrett Browning, there is a deafening ‘thunder / 5 6

The reaching for something but never achieving it, a feature of spiritual life, is represented in ‘Discouraged’ by following a river that flows into the sea; this pursuit stops a few steps short of the goal, which the poet has not been able to reach. ‘The Will’.

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Of a city’;7 yet inevitably we hear the ‘fluttering’ of angelic wings near the cradle. This indicates a spiritualist, anti-Marxist solution quite opposed to Barrett’s call to organized political activism, that is the resigned acceptance of death that will take the sufferers to heaven, the only way to ease pain and satiate hunger. At the same time, a couple of poems – dedicated, as in Tennyson and Dobell, to the unburied fallen never to be returned to their families – contain veiled references to the Crimean War. However, Procter had a vision of poetry that was above all idealistic; its sphere of action and influence was that of the spirit and not of common practice. In lyrics that list the tasks of a poet, this poet is not just a verse-maker but someone who conveys a new, deeper sense to expressions and words that are in common usage, the supreme meaning of which has been lost over time. The poet expresses himself or herself entirely but his first aim is to communicate the noble thoughts within him, a message of love which, Procter knows, is destined to remain unheard or even belittled. According to ‘The Inner Chamber’, not even the poem-maker himself, however, knew precisely what potential there was within him, since the source of his inspiration was divine. 4. Even before Christina Rossetti, there is a perception in Procter of a remote, underground reawakening of the imagination against a very practical series of renunciations imposed by Victorian feminine tradition, unwillingly accepted by the invalid spinsters forced to live on the outskirts of a full life. Her poetry exalts the move towards action, the plunge into life, the yearning to throw oneself triumphantly into the ongoing battle; yet she withdraws from this, feeling afraid. Such renunciation is at times easily seen in blamelessly impotent figures, like the blind uncle in the ‘legend’ entitled ‘True Honours’, who realizes his dreams of glorious action through a third person. The substantial chapter of love lyrics lets us glimpse the choice of a celibate life as anything but peaceable, perhaps also a past or feared disappointment in love. There is in fact no vindication of celibacy in Procter. Compared to Christina Rossetti, her nuns are very few, and they even undergo fleshly temptations and are, as we shall see, ‘saved’ at the last minute by purely miraculous interventions. Not always reciprocated,

7

Cf., on Barrett Browning, § 67.1–2.

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her women love passionately but in the end they mostly become resigned, sublimating earthly love into divine love, or awaiting paradise for realization and consummation. There are therefore numberless lyrics on missed chances, declarations of love never spoken, misunderstandings not cleared up, excessive caution, betrothals and idylls broken off, doomed marriages. ‘Metaphysical’ investigations into the nature of love show that love is rarely real, and that many false, spurious forms of it may exist. Human love is not transitory and fleeting but is, already on this earth, a promise of eternity. It is the vehicle and first step towards divine love.8 Having said this, Procter may well appear one of those countless Victorian feminists of the utopic, vaguely mystical sort within traditional religiousness that we have identified in Barrett Browning and Rossetti. Always ready to break their promises, men are light-hearted beings who follow their own fancies and dreams of a career; the woman’s sacrifice is often a useless gesture, misunderstood and later regretted. Always sincerely and reservedly persuasive in tone, a few isolated poems left by Procter are effectively among the most precocious stances on what is now called the otherness and the inviolability of woman.9 5. Legends and Lyrics, Procter’s collection of poems, is interspersed with a dozen longer verse tales, the ‘legends’ of the title, in decasyllabic rhyming couplets or other verse forms. Whereas the short lyrical poetry is all static and eventless contemplation, these ‘legends’ are all action and cover long time periods cadenced by plot twists. They are not all on a par with the lyrics, indeed perhaps their stories could have been handled just as well or better in sober, naturalistic sketches. Both in the fairy-tale and exotic scenarios and in the more realistic stories dealing with middle-class characters, the 8

9

On such Stilnovistic and hence Pre-Raphaelite themes Procter wove some of her most naïve fantasies: in the lyric ‘Sent to Heaven’, a love message is dispatched to the beloved woman in heaven but arrives at the end of a series of vain, pathetic attempts on the wings of a ‘musical chord’; the soul in purgatory in ‘The Story of a Faithful Soul’ is a ‘blessed damsel’ grieving for her anguished lover left on earth; she is allowed to see him at the price of a 1,000-year-long punishment, which is however remitted in the wonderful closure through the heartfelt agony of the loved one left on earth. In ‘A Woman’s Answer’ and ‘A Woman’s Last Word’, two of the many small gospels of Victorian proto-feminism, Procter vindicates the freedom and multiform nature of her own love, and therefore refuses the idea of exclusive ownership by her beloved.

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sense of disappointment in things human is compensated – although not always – by the hope of heavenly joy, or overturned by gratuitous divine intervention. In each of them there is a shade of protest and frustration that some of the closures, intentionally hurried and vague, attempt to resolve. Procter’s poetic book opens with the most heart-breaking, pathetic of the angelological fairy-tales, which reverberates in other delightful stories of angels wafting to heaven – and heaven is often indicated with the Rossettian term ‘home’ – the souls of innocent children and of generous old women. One angel springing to life from white marble is the young choir-girl who appears and vanishes – raised to heaven – to the musician in ‘A Tomb in Ghent’; pure legendary epic is the story of indomitable patriotic heroism in ‘A Legend of Bregenz’. The realistic stories about marriage, though often more powerful and in some ways more bitter, are less successful; they are rehabilitated from the narrative point of view only by unexpected and ingenious inventive closures. Significantly, in ‘Homeward Bound’ Procter foreshadows Tennyson’s ‘Enoch Arden’ with the story of a shipwreck survivor who comes home to find his wife remarried; when faced with such an ineluctable, blindly unjust blow from destiny, he reacts with typically Victorian, gentlemanly silence and departs to wander across the oceans in the vain hope of forgetting. The bitter ‘A New Mother’ again contemplates a woman’s sacrifice rewarded; in her youth the protagonist spontaneously gave up her betrothed to her best friend and marries him later when he loses his wife. ‘Philip and Mildred’ is the nearest thing to a realistic middleclass idyll on Clough’s lines about the vanishing of fresh young dreams of love; it finishes in a marriage contracted without enthusiasm. Doubly and triply punished is the sacrifice of the protagonist of ‘Three Evenings in a Life’, Procter’s incisive and tragic study on frustration accepted and, in the end, sublimated. Not only does the Alice of this poem annihilate herself in devotion to her artist brother by refusing a marriage proposal; not only does she feel depreciated when her brother marries; not only does she yet more blindly decide to devote her own life to his widow: she must also come to terms with her own ex-suitor’s marriage to that widow. This epilogue is masterly in its handling of the device by which she overhears her fiancé’s words to the widow telling her that Alice had quite given up her youthful dream of love. Alice keeps silent and represses and hides her

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feelings like the shipwrecked ‘Homeward Bound’ figure, and she flees having made a pretence for the last time. And yet Procter is ambiguous, perhaps also false, in her comment that this state of anguish will lead to comfort, and will be a regeneration of her ‘own true heart’. ‘A Legend of Provence’ is the best and most enchanting of Procter’s legends. It moves across ground she finds most congenial – the miraculous sublimation of earthly love. In this tale, almost her only one on a nun, we fear we are inevitably about to assist at the impotent failure of religious life contrasted with the call of the world, that of the senses in particular. Sister Angela (who else?), a blameless orphan, then a tireless sacristan and an embroiderer devoted to the Virgin, is seduced and abandoned to a wandering, sinful life by a knight she lovingly tended back to health. As an old woman she wants to return to the convent to die there. Procter brilliantly invents again an effective conclusion: ‘Herself; yet not as when she fled away […] but a grave woman, gentle and serene: / The outcast knew it – what she might have been’ (italics in the text). In a miraculous vision, the Madonna reveals to her that she herself had occupied her place throughout all those years and that no one noticed her absence; at which Angela, with a yet more fitting fantastic turnabout, actually re-enters her old self again, and that role so phantasmagorically vacant, thus making the whole episode of the seduction and flight a mere dream-like fantasy. She dies confessing her sin to her sister nuns. Up until the final scenes, this story could be taken as a parallel development of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’. Yet it is an optimistic solution with a happy ending to the omnipresent parable of the ‘fallen woman’; it is moreover a really unusual sublimating variation on the Victorian motif of the doppelganger.

Part IV 

Other Poets and Poetic Movements

§ 213. Barnes.* The minor ‘classic’ Tennyson loved the poetry of William Barnes (1800 or 1801–1886), and praised his ‘simple poetic mind’ and ‘good-will’. Hopkins and Patmore were his first enthusiastic admirers; Hardy, also taken by storm, dedicated to him a funeral dirge and edited in 1908 the first anthology of his poems. Such fame and contagious attraction certainly could not last, due to at least one of the two primary elements of Barnes’s poetry, indissolubly linked one to the other as form and content. Hopkins admired him for his obstinate, utopian will to activate and retrieve the sources of primitive, delatinized English in order to recover its authentic Saxon spirit, buried and contaminated over time. His other supporters, each in his own way as nostalgic as Barnes himself, saw in him the poet of a rural and not yet urbanized England, the reign of chaste and genuine sentiments, a community not yet marred by progress or torn apart by political conflicts – or, as Arnold would have said, by the ‘dialogue of the mind with itself ’. This primitivist nostalgia had nothing to say to poets who were the spokesmen of advanced culture, or to those investigating the intellectual issues of the educated and generally to the academia in the late Victorian age. Nor could it appeal to those studying the divided psyche of the metropolitan world and to the 10

*

Poems, ed. B. Jones, 2 vols, London 1962, is the complete modern poetic edition, both in dialect and in non-dialect English; another edition is being published, ed. T. L. Burton and K. K. Ruthven, Oxford 2013–. The reader can however get a fairly clear idea of Barnes’s poetry from the excellent anthology edited by G. Grigson, London 1950 (without notes but with a long introduction and a glossary); other selections are edited by R. Nye, Manchester 1972; by C. Wrigley, Stanbridge 1984; by A. Motion, Harmondsworth 1994 (without introduction and with minimal notes). These editions also add a selection of salient passages from Barnes’s philological writings and of the first historical appraisals (of Tennyson, Hopkins, Patmore and Hardy and others). There is little critical material either in books or reviews. The first biography of the poet was written by his daughter (London 1887). W. D. Jacobs, Barnes, Linguist, Albuquerque, NM 1952; D. Dugdale, William Barnes of Dorset, London 1953; W. T. Levi, William Barnes: The Man and his Poems, Dorchester 1960; D. G. B. Badham-Thornhill, William Barnes of Dorset, Beaminster 1964; T. Hearl, William Barnes the Schoolmaster, Dorchester 1966; F. S. Hinchy, The Dorset William Barnes, Blandford 1966; A. Chedzoy, William Barnes: The Life of the Dorset Poet, Dorset 1985.

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practitioners of a poetry of philosophical-religious inquiry, or already turning to the absolute cult of beauty. For the same reason not only did Barnes not resurface from this suspended floating towards the century’s end; he slipped yet lower. Significantly, one of the very few twentieth-century writers who appreciated him is a non-modernist, E. M. Forster, who like him idealized the countryside prior to urban erosion, denounced the civilization of progress and praised the traditions, the continuity of roots, the ‘memory of the past loveliness and kindness that are gone’.1 2. If we except a youthful, forgettable poem in non-dialect English on a Lapp theme and setting showing a fascination for Nordic exoticism (to which Tennyson had not been immune in his youth), Barnes is essentially the author of the several hundred dialect poems collected for the first time in 1844 under the title of Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (two more were added to this series in 1859 and 1862). If Barnes really deserves to be something more than a name in literary history, it is thanks to this dialect production. Partly due to pressing requests from a London publisher, the rest, in quantity almost as much, in ‘national English’ can only appear a faded copy when read after or together with the former, in spite of the best efforts of those who still want to overcome the dichotomy, inexistent in his case, as we shall see, between dialect and ‘literary’ English.2 The borderline of Barnes’s poetry is in fact, rather than linguistic, geographical and temporal, wholly and continuously identifying with the south-western county of Dorset (coinciding with Hardy’s imaginary Wessex), and even more specifically with the ‘secluded, beautiful’ Blackmore Vale. A native of this area, son of farm-labourers, Barnes was orphaned at the age of six. In temperament fanciful and eclectic, a prodigious autodidact in languages and philological and historical disciplines, he obtained a degree in theology 1

2

E. M. Forster, ‘William Barnes’, in Two Cheers for Democracy, Harmondsworth 1965, 208. A symptomatic coincidence is that both celebrate the ‘home’ as the place where atemporal affections are rooted. Barnes’s poem ‘Leädy-Day, an’ Ridden House’ is the sad elegy of a farm-labourer forced to leave the ancestral home where he was born, and which, as in Forster, is not a building but a living organism embodying family affections. Cf. a further echo of this issue in TLS (2 December 1994), 14.

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from Cambridge as an external candidate at a late age. For many years he was a master in local schools which he himself had founded. Even though he made a number of journeys on the Continent, he never really detached himself emotionally from this rural world and was its Homer and Virgil all in one. He sang of its daily epos made up of innumerable rites repeated with pleasure always renewed. Although observation of country people’s lives is invariably undertaken with the detail of the eye-witness and the loving involvement of those sharing such lives, and although Barnes himself does register in some cases remote yet ever more threatening signals from an outside civilization undergoing rapid evolution, his is a mythmaking, strongly conservative realism tracing a barrier of isolation around an unchanging world, thus autarchic and self-sufficient, in which ‘vew from other peärts did come, / An’ vew did travel vur from hwome’. As if at a standstill, time leaves almost no sign in this kingdom, either in the poems of the first 1844 series or those of the late 1870s. The horizon itself seems a ‘refuge’ and never a call to adventure; it is circumscribed to the field and the farmhouse – ‘there’s nothèn that’s ‘ithout / Thy hills that I do ho about’ – and that is all the countryman knows or needs to know. The enjoyable sense of being sheltered and cut off from the world is fully expressed in a number of poems with the term ‘nest’, expressly referring to the comfort of being cosily shut if not locked indoors and warmed at the hearth when outside there is rain or hail or storm. The daydream he entertains is that of senile sedentariness, a slow, not unpleasant decline of mobility which on the hearth or in company serves to call up the good old days and live back through the holidays, the courtships, the wakes. Like Lamb and De Quincey, in one poem he pays emotional tribute to the old stage-coach at a time when ‘Noo iron raïls did streak the land / To keep the wheels in track’, thereby greeting another type of protective warmth, that inside the coach, covered in blankets, while outside the storm roars. The two poems entitled ‘The Railroad’, written during an imagined train journey, convey a great sense of speed and evoke and bring together a number of fundamental points of reference, among which an oak seen at a distance, for Barnes the most immemorial of trees, and of course the hay wain in the background to the train. The country folk are always happy to meet and do the same old things, with no sense of wearying routine; the old ones smoke and

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chat under the trees, the little ones play, the youngsters pay court and flirt after their hard work in the fields; and every Sunday the people troop dutifully and piously to church in answer to the festive call of the bells, those custodians and witnesses to continuity and themselves the historians and registrars of the community, having rung for christenings, births and marriages since time immemorial. The poem ‘Praise of Dorset’ praises a land and its traditions, proudly refusing to acknowledge anything good beyond its boundaries: it had practically everything, everything was good, and in any case its inhabitants were content just as they were and with what they had, and wanted nothing more than to be left in peace. 3. The most typically recurrent situations in Barnes’s poetry are those where the farmer labours hard yet is regenerated by such work within his natural habitat, thanks above all to well-earned rest that follows, and the sentimental and marriage idyll. These are interrelated situations, since the happy end to the idyll is the condition that follows upon the strain of work, chronologically speaking. Rural inspiration, lived and experienced in unison with nature in all its hidden and most changing aspects, the celebration of its sights and its regenerative power, make of Barnes a follower in the steps of Wordsworth and his continuator. Many of his poems, or parts of his poems, re-echo Wordsworth’s Prelude, or foreshadow it, given their time of writing. Such are especially the poems remembering the intensely lived instants of immersion in nature as a country child, and when the simple, honest beauty of the girls makes the heart ‘leap’, a verb often used in similar circumstances by both poets. Barnes’s nature is for this reason the same as that appearing in Hopkins’s joyful sonnets of 1878; if he sees no divine flashes in nature, he feels nature in all its natural harmony as the friend of man. Equally in line with Hopkins is the fact that the decline of everything human stands out against nature’s ceaselessly renewing background. The Virgilian, Georgic character of this poetry is seen in his loving habit of dwelling on minute descriptions of farming processes with the exact and appropriate use of their terms. Some poems are small domestic pictures of unusually realistic precision, such as the one with a wife boiling potatoes and cooking the meagre meal against her husband’s return; or another, a dramatic, action-packed tour de force in which two land-labourers have to get a cart out of the mud. Such operations

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are never performed superficially or impatiently; they are attended to with priestly devotion and rituality, since any country object or event for the farmer is in some way sacred and spiritual. An almost imagist poem is ‘The Wold Waggon’, an accurate, competent description of the parts making up this familiar, indispensable vehicle. Here and in other examples attention is focused on the context and the scene – the cow being milked by the farmer’s wife, the water lily in the pond, the clear or cloudy sky – and the poem seems to give a pictorial representation on the lines of the seventeenth-century Dutch Biedermeier, the proverbial antecedent of a great deal of Victorian narrative – on the lines, that is, of those little pictures, little not only in size, with the dog in the courtyard, the children playing, the country tasks and the rural entertainments, the smoking chimneys, more or less in the same relaxed atmosphere as in Schubert’s Lieder. In Barnes the very trees are humanized (‘trees be company’, as in the title of a poem), and timeless witnesses, like the bells, of the difficulties of rural life. And it is trees that generally embody the strength of old age, steadfast, untouched by natural calamities: the knotty oak or the ever-present elm, the ‘elm’ that in Arnold too propagates beneficial associations.3 4. Although she never names Barnes among her readings, we may assume that Christina Rossetti understood this sudden, luminous epiphany of the rural world in 1844 when she was only fourteen. There is a crowd of echoes and themes in common.4 First of all, the rhythm of country life with its related moods marching in time with the seasons: in Barnes too the farmer communes with the burgeoning of spring, enjoys the hot summer sun, lingers to breathe in the last blaze of autumn, waits patiently at home during winter.5 Just as recurrent is the binary rhythm of working day and night, industriousness and rest – the rest of the field workers who eat and drink at midday under the trees. While they eat, they sing, chat and jest

3 4 5

On the ‘signal-elm’ in ‘Thyrsis’ cf. § 159.5. §§ 202–3 for references to ‘Goblin Market’. ‘The Months’ by C. Rossetti (§ 201.2), based on the same procedure of dramatization and personification, reworks ‘The Year-clock’ by Barnes.

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innocently.6 Barnes shared with Rossetti the unwritten moral law that daytime is for hard work in order to earn nightly rest blessed by a provident God. Barnes seems to turn specifically to the future author of ‘Goblin Market’, when in a poem he declares that one must not ‘turn […] the night to day, an’ day to night’. At the end of the working week comes the day of rest, the holidays and village festivals, the dancing, the suppers, and the parlour games, with the peasants in their best attire and the nervous girls at their toilet choosing their most suitable garments with care. In Barnes there are already those country men and especially women with meaningful, emblematic names who turn up in one poem after another, such as Fanny, Polly, Jeanie. Country girls have the same tasks as in Rossetti: they sow, they scythe, they thresh the corn, they pick fruit and of course they flirt and are courted. However, only in very few cases does Barnes evoke superstition and magic, or tell stories with visions of fairies, goblins and ghosts. In his poetry there is only the sunny or silvery face of the country world: that shadow, that remote undertone of sinister and disturbing threat that snakes through Rossetti’s countryside is missing. The skies are always blue, the clouds snowy white, the roses coming into bud, spring is eternal or at least will return after a short break. The courting between country boys and girls in Barnes is pure and idyllic, carried on amidst blushes, modesty and often witticisms, full of innocent startles and chaste expectations, within untouched nature and among friendly flowers.7 And the ‘evening strolls’ of Barnes’s ‘virgins’ are always innocuous, and allow them an even more magical immersion in the natural world. Rossetti’s verb ‘loiter’, which always implies an unhealthy, sinful lingering, never appears in Barnes, replaced when necessary by the more anodyne ‘saunter’.8 Barnes’s Poll in ‘The Milk-Maid o’ 6

7 8

Among those occasional jests, there is that of the farmer who puts a stone into his companion’s jacket, or another when someone blocks up a chimney thus filling the house with smoke during a celebration. There is also a dialogic eclogue between two Plautus-style countrymen trying to outbluster each other. The attractive eclogue ‘A Bit o’ Sly Coorten’ is an innocent skirmish and tiff between a jealous lover and Fanny, a flirtatious, slightly mischievous peasant girl. ‘Minden house’ closes with a little lesson reminiscent of Rossetti’s ‘Maiden-song’ (§ 201.3): staying at home and minding the house is a much more felicitous means of getting a husband than going out and about.

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the Farm’9 seems a look-alike of Rossetti’s Lizzy: a milk-maid, she is the first of the family to rise gaily and industriously at dawn to go and do the milking, then waiting to make the butter and cheese. Other poems present the classic Rossettian couple or threesome of peasant sisters often addressing words of firm though implicit criticism at the lazy and praising the Puritan gospel of work: ‘they that ha’ their work to do, / Should do’t so soon’s they can’.10 Among the many varied tasks of these country girls is that of harvesting apples; one poem in particular introduces the everpresent Poll who is picking them. Such apples are however picked and even bitten into without any biblical or sexual second meanings. The apple tree is in Barnes an apple tree, not the Tree of Knowledge as in Clough, Barrett Browning and in particular Christina Rossetti. Almost no other poet knew better than Barnes how to ease the world of its weight of original sin and how to depict it always as an Edenic world, seen through the sinless eyes of a child.11 5. Only Patmore or at most Tennyson in some isolated rural idyll can rival Barnes as the poet of love with a happy ending; every other Victorian could only resignedly lament love as being precarious. This is due to the fact that in Barnes love blossoms within a single social class featuring strong, consistent values, descending from a patriarchal and hierarchical ideal of the family. The proud self-sufficiency of the Dorset microcosm must necessarily coincide, in the world depicted by Barnes, with its utter deafness to the ideologies reverberating outside its boundaries. Thus it would be vain to seek in Barnes echoes of the debate on woman’s subordinate position, since the woman’s task was simply and solely to look after the house while 9

10 11

In ‘Teaken in apples’ we find the abbreviated names of several young peasant girls who in Rossetti take the eye of the men. The baskets are always full of apples (and nuts too, in ‘Out A-Nuttèn’), never left empty by some dreamy young country girl (§ 201.1). The only exception may be an instant of weakness and foolishness in the peasant girls in ‘Haven Woones Fortune A-told’, who out of vanity have their palms read by gypsy women while their dog laps up almost all the milk of one girl. The theological concept of ‘natural man’ as ‘unfallen man’ is energetically developed by Barnes in his theoretical writings (cf. Grigson’s introduction to the 1950 anthology, 15).

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her husband laboured in the fields: ‘Woone faïthful heart at whome to light / Their bit o’ vier at night, / An’ hang upon the hedge to dry / Their snow-white linen’. The female Dorset type constantly sung and described is the girl who has ‘cheeks like cherries’ or like the rose. The second series of dialect poems presents once again similar portraits of buxom, healthy girls who wed early and well. ‘Jenny’s Ribbons’ is both Pre-Raphaelite and Patmorian: it shows us the wifely vanity of the young woman getting ready to go out and choosing multicoloured ribbons; in particular, as in Patmore’s ‘Amelia’,12 we see the slightly worried mother who advises her daughter and her beloved about to go out for a walk that they should not be late home. ‘I Know Who’ is again Patmorian in recalling a successful courtship in a nature of deep strong colours under a bright blue sky. These anxious, chaste courtships, in the evening and often at the window, against the background of a humanized nature that seems to partake of the lovers’ anxieties, could not be more attractive for the poet who had written The Angel in the House. And it is no coincidence that dozens of times the word Barnes uses to indicate the virtuous wife devoted to her husband and children is ‘angel’. There is a further biographical coincidence linking Barnes and Patmore: they both lost their wives early on, Patmore the near-convert and Barnes the fervent Anglican (in the English verse elegy ‘Plorata Veris Lachrimis’). They both firmly believed in their reunion in heaven with the deceased. Barnes’s uncontaminated, radiant scenario deteriorates over time with human loss, of children, relatives and above all spouses. In the third series of poems we eventually see more and more widows appear and fatal accidents at work, especially with child casualties; the poet visits their graves and invites others to accept with resignation the misfortunes sent by God. 6. The only point of contact, or rather friction, between this impermeable Dorset civilization and the rest of the world came about in fact whenever its existence was threatened, as it actually was as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Barnes was thirty at the time of the ‘Swing Riots’, the protest by disinherited, impoverished farmers in many counties of southern England; his own grandparents had also been evicted from their land. In a 12

§ 179.

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poem a farmer sadly leaves his land and home, the centre of family affections for so long. ‘The ’Lotments’ dramatically represents the grief of the evicted peasant who may be forced to emigrate or resign himself to going into the workhouse; it also represents the happiness of those who can still keep their own small patch of ground. In another eclogue, ‘The Common a-took in’, a farmer complains that he must sell his animals because he no longer has pasture for them since it has been confiscated. These dialogic eclogues, generally placed at the end of the internal subdivisions of the three series of dialect poems, are a little less sunny, detached and self-assured; in them, the farm-workers who speak are more realistically worried about the future awaiting them, nor do they spare sarcastic bitterness and protest against the governing class. In the eclogue ‘The Times’, a farm-worker has taken up with the unions and denounces hardships and exploitation, accusing the political class and hoping that farm labourers will get organized among themselves rather than trusting to strangers. But Barnes is ultimately fairly prudent regarding the political involvement in the area; the speaker warns the unionist of the dangers. 7. Overall, one of the limits of Barnes’s poetry is its monotony and lack of variety, although this was a well-pondered choice. The spokesman of the Dorset peasantry could not give way to the exotic or fantastic, nor could he indulge in poetry as ‘entertainment’. For him it was an imperative both moral and aesthetic not only to speak their language but also to avoid speaking of anything but their lives. This is why the repertory of situations becomes repetitive and, in the long run, almost asphyxiating, suffocated as it is within the county’s horizons; even the vocabulary is limited and hackneyed. Such is the infantile, participated delight in this unshadowed rural world that some poems are disarmingly simplistic in their content, and come close to the naïve singsong. Nothing would be further from the truth, however, than to consider and present Barnes as an improvised, extemporary poet of uncouth, immediate spontaneity. On the contrary, he is one of the most exquisite verse artisans of all Victorian poetry, so much so that Patmore had no hesitation in defining him a ‘classic’. His compositions, at times highly complex in metre, rhythm and verse arrangement, are clear, precise, flawless miniatures yet also without jolts and surges. If they lack what Hopkins called the ‘fire’

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they show no constraint or contortion, and exhibit a mellow, smooth, fluid and euphonic musicality. In their craftsmanship and suavity they recall the Elizabethans, or Donne at his airiest, or Carew and Herrick. In him dialect is not an impediment but in fact an enhancement of the harmonic, flexible features of his verse. Patmore, again, noted that dialect, unlike what happens in Burns, becomes immediately comprehensible after the first encounter even to non-English ears, and almost without any need of a glossary. Thanks to today’s increasingly detailed attention towards popular folklore, gone is that depreciatory attitude of the nineteenth century that still considered dialect poetry with suspicion as a literary by-product and as a creation congenitally inferior in nature and nobility to the ‘high’ tradition. In the ‘dissertation’ appended to Poems of Rural Life there are expressions of disdain towards a class of readers considering dialect a tool suitable ‘only for animal wants and passions of a boor’. As I have recalled more than once, dialect in Barnes was a choice of almost mathematical consequence. The foremost recipient of Barnes’s poems is the countryman in whose language the poems are written,13 who will be comforted and strengthened in his love for God, his moral feelings, his dignity and self-respect. They reawaken in him a feeling for nature and enable him to enjoy the pleasures of the hearth and the farm. Barnes is the prophet of this community of survivors; he always speaks in the first-person singular or plural, in the present or more often in the past, but he identifies with the figures of the countrymen and of the countrywomen. Some compositions are choruses, while in other cases he chooses a more openly dramatic form, especially in the eclogues, where two or more characters converse, exchanging witty, even salacious tit for tat on anecdotes and events from the everyday life, but also on politics and society. Indeed the three series of dialect poems, together with the two of English poetry, form a single work in which the sense of the community is everywhere prevalent: not 13

We must recall that, as in any dialect poem, Barnes’s written dialect of Dorset is a personal approximation to a language existing only orally, and subjected to inevitable fluidity in phonetics, morphology, lexis, grammar and syntax. This explains away the bewilderment of many critics when noticing the wide differences between Barnes’s Dorset dialect and Hardy’s Wessex dialect.

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separate or separable poems, but single small acts in a drama with many voices and many figures, each with a name, yet all symbolic and collective; one at a time they come forward, each with his or her own story. Barnes therefore consciously excluded from his range of readers the city-dwellers and the sophisticated, incapable of sympathy towards the rural world. He wrote in dialect not so much – as he modestly claimed – because ‘he couldn’t help it’, but through a hidden spirit of confrontation.14 Actually, even city-dwellers could learn something from his dialect poems. He not only defends rustic life, he elects it as a dispenser of knowledge; peasant patriarchs often express in a couple of words universal truths which city language had made long-winded. Precisely as a peasant patriarch Barnes appears to us in photographs and caricatures as an old man; they show us his flowing, shaggy, greying biblical beard, his skull high and round with a wisp of receding hoary hair, wrinkled features and austere mien, and a black tunic – or rather the cassock of the church minister he really was. 8. Philologist and theoretician, Barnes had no problem in defining himself a ‘linguistic conservative’.15 He denounced something which is very simple: that English had become a hybrid language through the ‘useless’ injection of words from Latin, Greek and French, whereas words already existed with exactly the same meaning in the archaic language still used by country folk, or they could be formed from this language on the model of a strong language evolving through endogenous development, as German had been and still was at that time. With a utopian outlook, he believed it possible that even all the words to be invented for new things and actions, ceaselessly imposed by progress, could be created in this way. He gave the example of the railroad, whose semantic field could have been covered, with a bit of good will, without Latinate neologisms. With obstinate consistency, he went to the length of drafting a new dictionary of old and 14 15

Grigson 1950, 11, in the above-mentioned introduction. Barnes’s position was compliant and traditionalist also towards the ongoing debate on faith and science, as Tennyson good-naturedly pointed out when Barnes visited him at Farringford in 1863, having spoken to him of his own Darwinian, pantheistic sympathies, which were ‘speculations’ that ‘made him uneasy’.

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new words to take the place of the Latin derivatives, sounding as comic as Orwell’s ‘newspeak’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ‘dissertation’ appended to the dialect poems is a passionate defence of the need to safeguard the linguistic minorities, threatened by ‘book English’ imperialism open to contamination; it is also a historical-philological case history of the rise of the English language and a synthetic description of the phonetic and morphological rules of the Dorset dialect. As a historian Barnes emphasizes the early formation of a south-west England community, close-knit in language and tradition, created by Danish invaders at the end of the sixth century. A western Saxon reign had gradually grown up at that time when the spoken language was the forebear of the current Dorset dialect, or more precisely ‘a separate branch of the Anglo-Saxon language’. This proto-English, later corrupted, was a language Barnes had no hesitation in defining as superior, especially for two reasons, its immunity from outside influence and the regularity of its verbal inflexion. Barnes’s crusade is based on the assertion that English had betrayed purity in the name of alleged elegance; now elegance is simply uselessness, as is shown by English phrases compared to Latin phrases having an exactly equivalent meaning in Saxon terms; even a presumed euphonic motivation fails, since Greek too separates the verb and preposition as does Saxon. The Dorset morphology, grammar and phonetics – modelled on metathesis and vowel and consonant changes found in the purest European languages – are comparatively more regular than in English; the dialect is actually superior in having a wider range of shades of meaning. With highly eccentric reasons Barnes eventually puts forward the issue of language both as a political factor of integration and aggregation of the state set-up and as a possibly negative tool of mystification and an instrument of power.16 Language and sermons from the pulpit should also take note of this native, Saxon roots, since in this case too linguistic corruption might, and indeed did, have undesired and undesirable collateral effects: it might even make 16

Barnes’s statement that the aristocrats’ Tuscan was by its very nature a language less distant from that of the rustic folk is to say the least debatable. With regard to the Italian context, it is worth recalling Manzoni’s protest against the Latinate language used by the powerful.

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congregations abandon the faith through total incomprehension.17 The need to be understood, to be spasmodically comprehensible to hearers – what I shall call the ‘sense of presence’ – is a further evident link between this poet and Hopkins. § 214. Cook The untiring, militant vitality of Eliza Cook (born in the London suburbs in 1818 or 1817, or even in 1812 according to some; died in 1889) came to a stop in forced inactivity during her last twenty years of painful penance caused by a form of articular semi-paralysis. Self-taught, the youngest child of a merchant in easy circumstances, she became all the rage in the 1840s and 1850s with poems and prose works targeted at one sector of the public, the farmhands and labourers and the semi-literate middle class. These writings were characterized by an advanced type of open-minded democratic spirit that was in no way revolutionary. Following in the wake of the sallies of a Barrett Browning, Cook made herself heard every time it was necessary in England to attack unjust measures against the workers and to support other claims and encourage and welcome any sign and any gesture of freedom both within Europe and beyond. She founded, directed and was the main, and almost single-handed editor of a monthly periodical from 1849 to 1854; its sales even outdid those of Dickens thanks to the limited cost. Even in launching the complete edition of her poems (1874) she proudly underlined the accessibility of the book. She named ‘the people’ as those to whom it was directed and she proclaimed herself the apostle of the poor and the workers. The decline in aesthetic ambition in Cook is therefore the cause and effect of the expressive simplicity in her work – conceptual, prosodic and lexical – forced upon her by her own voluntary choice of readers, never before so specific.

17

Barnes cites an anecdote apparently based on truth: that of a church minister who expressing a moral concept in difficult, Latinate words creates a ludicrous ambiguity. Dialect was unambiguous, unlike, in many cases, non-dialect English. In one poem there occurs the homophony of ‘firs’ and ‘furze’, inexistent in dialect since it has two different words; as a result of which a farmer buys furze instead of planks of firs at an auction!

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Writing poetry for the people implied operative choices that were by no means indifferent with respect to other poets. The latter often did not bother to carry out any prior investigation into the readership they hoped to address, in some cases addressing themselves alone. To give a few examples: writing poetry for the people implied the complete suppression of mythology, references to which are found in Cook only in rare cases of comic or farcical vulgarization and in unpretentious rigmaroles; it meant abolishing all discouraging funereal poetry and leaving the dead to bury their dead and the living to care for the living; and it meant refusing any ‘spasmodic’ or ‘morbidly painful’ vein. Not all ‘high’ tradition was expelled, yet it was conveyed in the form of didactic mediation and of the parcelling up of knowledge for the benefit of the semi-literate in easily memorised quotations, fragments and slogans chipped off the major poets, more or less as Matthew Arnold had done in his educational essays. Her source of inspiration thus becomes native and local; exoticism and xenophilia are disparaged. Cook constantly and sincerely prefers the dull English birds like the robin and nightingale to Tennyson’s ‘bulbul’, synonym for ‘Arabian’ escapes.1 And the more unassuming and more visible English plants take pride of place over the lush foreign flora. Browning and the other Victorian expats together with any other enthusiast of Italian scenery must have felt their ears burning when they heard such criticism of the traditional ‘land of song’. Venice in particular, with its gondoliers’ songs and its carnival, hold no attraction for Cook, indeed they repeatedly rouse her impatient irritation. Proclaiming herself the people’s apostle also meant silencing any private dimension. This explains why Cook’s poetry is never quite lyrical or personal in nature. She loses her identity electing herself a member of the farming and workers’ community (hence her very common use of the chorus); she camouflages herself therein with no time to unleash her inner dramas; this she does not through reticence2 but as a consequence 1 2

§ 824. Her love stories with her literary patrons were of course quite unusable for the purposes of a poetry about and for the people; even more so was the messy relationship with the actress Charlotte Cushman to whom Cook sent love sonnets. The identity of the proletarian poet was a mask she adopted: Cook, offshoot of the middle class, was a George Sand in reduced scale, and wore trousers and male attire.

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of aesthetic consistency.3 The task of interesting, entertaining and above all educating and guiding her listeners was effectively carried out by Cook in a poetry that was studiously varied within a limited number of keys, and full of reiterations and reduplications. She is labelled a ‘sentimentalist’, which to an Italian reader immediately brings to mind the book Cuore by De Amicis. Acts of utter sublime generosity follow one upon the other in her poetry, and they are often concluded by the tragic end of the performer, like the intelligent dog which saves its owner with food allowing his survival in the desert, or the peasant boy who falls from a rock where, with an act of exquisite kindness, he had climbed to gather some flowers to fulfill the dying wish of his aristocratic friend. The height of kitsch is reached in the lyrics that are made to issue from the mouths of ravens, nightingales, horses, dogs and other animals, or in the interminable song on ‘curls’, worse than any other poem for young ladies ever produced throughout that period. Hence there is nothing in Cook of the neoclassical, distilled vein essential in a Procter or a Christina Rossetti; her poetry is, if anything, ruffled and exuberant like Barrett Browning’s. Quite understandably, the latter kept her at a distance and made ironic comments on her surname. From the purely technical aspect, while not all being quite mass-produced, her verse has no metric pliancy and marches along too regularly with a mechanically monotonous effect and an excess of rhyming couplets. 2. Straight after her death Cook’s reputation became one of the most unstable of any Victorian women poets of any repute, and she is still the most neglected. The reasons for this are the low metric quality of her poetry, her overly close links with her own time and its ideal public, and primarily the lack in her production of any sustained effort, of a single poem or a collection of connected short poems that could represent and unmistakeably identify her. We find instead only an inspiration that crumbles into an indistinguishable mass of short or even very short lyrics. In

3

The only exception was the loss of her mother when she was small, a theme found in dozens of lyrics; however, she made the topic universal by transforming her loss into a collective experience.

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the complete edition two poems – too short in any case – are placed at the head of a weighty mass of compositions gathered under the label of ‘miscellaneous poems’. Cook’s kind of inspiration is shown in the first of these two poems, ‘Melaia’: a talented sculptor working during an unspecified art revival in ancient Greece is asked by a stranger to sculpt not ‘gods and heroes’ but a ‘simple dog’. Such a request might be taken as a mise en abyme of Cook’s poetry; it imagines in fact, and starts, a revision and an overturning of the hierarchy of the protagonists and values in art, raising animals or certain animals to a rank equal to or above that of men. The sculptor in ‘Melaia’ announces an artist who, initially only curious, later performs a reversal of his art. Horses, dogs, cats, birds in this poem are fully worthy to be the protagonists, simply because they always prove to be more faithful to man than the men who betray their fellow-men. However, no later than in the second fairly long poem of her book, Cook does make exceptions; these are the children, the patriots and of course the yokels. As in Barnes, Cook’s poetry is supposedly uttered from a farmyard full of farmworkers, a farmyard inhabited by domestic animals and surrounded by working tools and equipment, with all around country scenes changing according to the season. After Barnes, Cook’s is thus the second English rural Biedermeier elegy of the early nineteenth century, a second celebration of a united community, however utopian, at the height of the expansion of the manufacturing, textile and coal industry, with its inevitable social remixing.4 She has no hope or expectation of this community being renewed, but she jealously tries to keep it separate and poised out of time, a time which is not disavowed but a time of cycles returning ever the same, as in Barnes. Not by chance does Cook’s poetry describe and recall the continually repeated events of a comedy or rather a rural epic with the identical, recurrent characters and scenarios, in which whatever

4

The discriminating factor between Barnes and Cook is unquestionably the English language that Barnes abandoned for the Dorset dialect (§ 213) in obedience to a yet stronger realism. Cook the Londoner had no peripheral linguistic community of reference. Yet the difference is only slight or apparent, since Cook has recourse several times to the Scottish dialect which, according to Dobell as well (§ 226.3), was near enough to a ‘people’s language’ to satisfy the English imagination.

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happens outside the community has on principle no value or recognition, in the conviction that the community is perfectly self-sufficient, never importing – and indeed rather exporting – its culture.5 This is a closed and protected community, for which the only accepted departure is the departure for the war of liberation that honours and illustrates patriotic heroism, or else the departure of the emigrant, whose grief in leaving is as acute and boundless as is the joy of his return, welcomed by everyone. A real objective fetishism invests in Cook things that are both old and English. The gravitation of Cook’s interests and preferences towards whatever is old is so very evident, even in the titles, that no critic has failed to notice it: poems are dedicated to an old armchair, to an old gate, to an old plough preserved from any rustiness, to an old ruined mill full of memories, to the old stream, the old barn, the old clock, the old straw hat; even the old worn blanket, ‘grandfather’s stick’, and the child’s red shoes all earn themselves a moving ode. Household objects achieve an almost sacred value; as in many nostalgics of the time, but above all in Cook, they become mute witnesses and custodians of a civilization and of family traditions. They are the memory, the living register of community and of family affections. Nationalism for Cook is first of all geographic: how often does she repeat that the Thames and London have no equals; how often does her partisanship and jingoism affirm the superiority of every English sight over any continental contender. Even Titian comes nowhere near Wilkie! And the continental earth produces fruit that only seems tastier, but it is in fact a sophisticated flavour that soon palls, so preference always returns to the great variety of English berries.

5

The rejection of the modern and civilized may be seen in her idealization of the primitive, the uneducated, even the wild and untamed. And physically as well: dark-skinned gypsies and uncouth sunburnt farmhands were unusually better-looking for her than the English blond, fair-skinned type. In some poems, these gypsies and farmhands are covertly objects of a libido controlled with some difficulty by aristocratic ladies. Dogs are often picked up in the street and trained, that is, removed from their wild state; the same happens painfully for the horse Dobbin, the youthful poet’s best friend.

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3. Some of these old things, admitted as less functional if not rusty, are always preferable to those imposed by the ‘fashion and form of a modernized date’; others survive only in memory and bring back even more nostalgia because they are no longer used or are worn out, or lost, or replaced by others more ‘eye-catching’ yet much less beloved. All this nostalgia thus betrays an involuntary admission: that that world was passing away, and time, rather than giving back the unchangeable, ‘changes everything’. A statement often heard in Cook is that all is unchanged, yet it is often contradicted by the other ‘Oh, how the world has altered since some fifty years ago!’ The England she wanted to perpetuate or rather bring back to life, with any corrections required, was that preceding the Industrial Revolution, with its countryside and its still-tamed proletariat. Her unconfessed political project was to tame the rural masses, those already urbanized and those in the factories, and make them immune to subversive propaganda tending to remove them from the nation state and give them a revolutionary political conscience. The farmhand and the workers are the object of reassuring messages, from the little picture photographically reproducing the sights they had before their eyes every day – often inspired by the most generic, trite sacramentalism – to the hymns of thanks to the Creator, to appeals for temperance, to praise for the frugality and work that ennoble man. Cook taught the poor that there was nothing to envy in the rich, either for physical talents or spiritual gifts, which the rich did not possess and of which the rich were themselves envious; excluded from pleasures and luxury, they were ‘free from the evils of fashion and gold’. In her definition, noble is not he who is born noble, but he who is honest and has the gift of humility, balance, moderation. The gnomic ‘Fire’, containing admonishments to youth on moderating sensual, perhaps sexual, passion, extends to a range of connotations of the term, even to a threatening warning in a political tone: ‘for if it swerve / Into freedom’s open path, / What shall check its maniac wrath?’ Echoing in her poem ‘A Song to “The People” of England’ is Arnold’s very word, ‘anarchy’, of course as a calamity to be avoided by prudence and reason. In a quatrain of this poem Cook says she is sure that England will soon respond to the people’s complaints with ‘wider concessions’ and solemnly declares that the working population is the backbone of the nation. In another quatrain the spectre of revolution is signalled

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§ 215. Ingelow, Greenwell

simply to create panic in the governing class, requested to put itself in the place of the workers to avoid unleashing the ‘cataracts of revolt’, and to place trust in democratic, legal means such as schooling and the press. Should the elation of war in defence of national freedom and in aid of oppressed nations not suffice, she associated and put on the same footing the poor and the rich, the worker and the master in holding aloft and renewing the legendary heroism of the British Navy, thus calming or postponing excessive political claims. Messages that came too late or went unheard. We may wonder to what extent the underpaid haymakers believed in her advice, and whether they would be content, as her optimism suggested, with the warmth of the sun and the song of the lark. Even more anachronistic is her poem ‘Song of the City Artisan’; in it the protagonist claims he is immune from any envy towards the rich and voices the strangest kind of inertia. § 215. Ingelow, Greenwell Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jean Ingelow* (1820–1897) would have considered it uncomplimentary to be introduced as a ‘poetess’ and ‘novelist’, however prolific she was in those roles. However, by irony of fate she, the most famous, widely read English woman poet of the whole nineteenth century after Barrett, has been recently rediscovered almost exclusively or at least primarily as a member of the Portfolio Society. In the 1850s and 1860s this Society brought together well-born spinsters dedicated to cultural and philanthropic activities and to improving the condition of women. The first series of her poems, published in 1863 when Barrett was dead and Procter was dying, had unparalleled success, and the book was immediately republished and sold like hot cakes in America too. The ecumenical dimension of this success is due to the fact that of all her contemporaries Ingelow wrote a poetry having very few feminine marks, 6

*

Poems, London 1899, collects all of Ingelow’s poems except some nonsense verse for children; her many novels were published from 1851 on. M. Peters, Jean Ingelow: Victorian Poetess, Ipswich 1972; J. Wagner, ‘In Her “Proper Place”: Ingelow’s Fable of the Female Poet and Her Community in “Gladys and Her Island”’, VP, XXXI (1993), 227–40; H. H. Johnson, ‘“Matters That a Woman Rules”: Marginalized Maternity in Jean Ingelow’s “A Story of Doom”’, VP, XXXIII (1995), 75–89.

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so much so that by the end of the century she was preferred in the popular taste to Hemans and Landon for her utter lack of sentimentalism. Both the first series and the two less successful ones that followed in 1874 and 1885, invaded genres that were typically masculine and were in line with the proven ‘masculine’ formula of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold and Clough until the early 1850s: the miscellaneous collection for the enjoyment of various categories of readers. Moving to London from her native Lincolnshire in 1850, with no reverential fear Ingelow mixed on a par with the greatest male literary figures of the moment.1 Christina Rossetti had immediately understood that this was the case; she in fact saw in this rising star a highly dangerous, ‘formidable’ rival, not only ‘for any woman’ but also for ‘many male poets’. Indeed, Ingelow’s poetry presents dramatic monologues on patriotic themes that seem a copy of Browning’s, along with historical ballads, eclogues in country settings and love idylls often interrupted and fading into frustration and melancholy, with an added ‘spasmodic’ inkling; both these types were written in the wake of Tennyson, or of William Barnes in the dialogic eclogues. Born in the same county as Tennyson, Ingelow was in his debt in particular for stylized and atmospheric songs which were often honoured by being set to music. As Cook may be blamed for not having written poems with a longer trajectory, so Ingelow may be blamed for the opposite: she is too insistent in seeking length, occasionally successful in verse stories that are brisk and streamlined, but getting shipwrecked every time she attempts more ambitious pieces and a more daring structural complexity. However, in 1863 and especially in 1874 and 1885, her poetry seemed somewhat dated, since by then Tennyson had shelved his

1

‘Gladys and Her Island’, highly praised by feminist critics, is however the only sustained ‘coming out’ of Ingelow qua ‘poetess’, being a pre-Forster parable on women’s liberation from their incarcerating social roles. It tells of a schoolteacher who takes a day off and reaches an island, a tropical Eden where she has a number of visionary, hallucinatory experiences and encounters that are rather unlikely, before sunset necessitates her return to the ranks. A curious fairy-tale expedient is in her wondering about the meaning of the parable in the ‘moral’ placed at the end, as if the poet was herself the interpreter of her own poem. This rather disappointing moral is that we should try to be as happy as possible.

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early lyrical-musical manner,2 while Browning had abandoned the dramatic monologue and was heading towards a poetry of classical inspiration. Still in 1885 very short, static lyrical oases and soft funeral odes – in every way similar to ‘Claribel’,3 the first poem approved by Tennyson – and others of languid pessimism depicted in natural correlatives, contrast with endless narrations entirely based on pure sequences of events. Yet in spite of this, in almost every single genre she inherited and on every already-exploited theme, Ingelow managed to compose at least one poem, out of all her vast production, that is memorable and regularly appears in anthologies, either for its particular scenario, or for the unusual setting, or for the exquisite quality of its imagery and its stylistic and linguistic features. 2. The trace left in Ingelow by biblical criticism and Darwin’s evolutionism may be detected in the lyrics and poems she repeatedly dedicated in the first or third person to the theme of Faustian renunciation and to the figure of the hopeful scientist who backs away in horror from the abysses of a non-finalized cosmos and an unknowable God. She also probes a dubious sacramentalism, uncertain and bewildered although closing on a note of recovered certainty. Such daring speculations are compensated by and interspersed with mealy-mouthed sermons on an honest life and by moral tales on selfishness punished and reparation which lead to ‘A Story of Doom’. In this poem of biblical style, running to nine books, Ingelow retells Noah’s story in a fantastic, fairy-tale mode. In Ingelow, the intellectual is much less happy and carefree than the farmer, in line with a commonplace and a recurrent motif of the poetry of the late Romantics and Victorians. In ‘Scholar and Carpenter’ one such intellectual is an afflicted Arnold-type ‘scholar’ openly dialoguing with his own mind as in Arnold. He takes to heart and imitates the calm serenity of the old carpenter with whom he shares a frugal meal, imagining a reciprocally fruitful encounter

2 3

A deputy Poet Laureate poem is the greeting, based on one by Tennyson (§ 99.5), to the Danish Princess Alexandra, bride of the future Edward VII. Also in the archaic –th endings of the third person singular of verbs. Curiously, the pen-name Claribel was used by the poet’s cousin Charlotte Barnard, author of many musical versions of Ingelow’s poems.

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between classes.4 Within the uneasy Victorian thematic frame of precarious love Ingelow wrote her best lyrics, with ‘Divided’ top of the list. Here the broken unison is symbolized by the hands that must part when the tiny stream, growing into a river before flowing into the sea, divides the lovers who are walking on opposite banks.5 Ingelow was part of an intelligentsia who observed country folk and the poor and described their world, but in detached, lady-like style, quite unlike Cook. Whoever like her stayed comfortably in London could salve their conscience with little pictures centred on farm labourers and shepherds toiling from morn until night, whose nitty-gritty speech was the opposite of that used in the salons and clubs to debate metaphysical issues. In ‘Supper at the Mill’ a few humble people speak without expressing anything much apart from exchanging banalities. This is the first appearance of a dialogic scene looking back to Crabbe’s unassuming photographic accuracy, while unintentionally opening the way to the realistic theatre decades later, and even to the degraded colloquialism of twentieth-century proletarian drama.6 Each of Ingelow’s three series of poems includes at least one of these strange, discordant dialogic sequences. In ‘Afternoon at a Parsonage’ one breathes the atmosphere of the boring inconclusiveness of tiresome afternoons spent oppressingly indoors. The interlude ‘Preludes to a Penny Reading’ reminds one distinctly of the artisans’ farce in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

4 5 6

In ‘Reflection’ we also see an encounter between an intellectual and a milkmaid, with another celebration of the rural work ethic that drives off irrational fears. ‘The Four Bridges’ has a Pre-Raphaelite tinge; it speaks of the happily-ending love of the village tomb-engraver for a flowery Eglantine. The long ballad ‘The Sleep of Sigismund’ also has a rough Pre-Raphaelite texture, recalling Morris in particular. Barrett-like and above all pre-Wilde is the fable ‘The Star’s Monument’, illustrating the poetics of the ‘young poet’, intermediary between God and the world. The world is reflected back in enhanced light through the fable of the star extinguished in heaven, and to which the poet’s epitaph is dedicated, ‘for all the time it lived, it shone’, implying that the poet’s task is to squander all his light in an effort that in effect ends in suicide. As in ‘Gladys and Her Island’, the text of the epitaph and its subject have been the object of opposing interpretations. The witty, exquisite ‘Echo and the Ferry’, on a little girl who does not want to grow up, leaves reality and lives through a series of surreal vicissitudes, brings Carroll vividly to mind.

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with its several variety performances by as many personages awaiting the Sunday sermon, with their blunders and the inattentive chattering of the humble audience accompanying the spirals of folk songs, which must be thought as sung with utter clumsiness. As a girl, Ingelow lived on the Lincolnshire coast, and her poetry abounds with sea stories on sailors, disasters and shipwrecks, treacherously murderous tides, and ineluctable catastrophes that provoke innocent, much-lamented casualties. ‘The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire’, the most famous among all her poems, is on these themes; epic in tone, rugged and archaic, the fast-moving story recalls the high tide in 1571 that swept away the village of Boston where the narrator was born. The tale is told by an old spinner, and dedicated to her daughter-in-law who was minding the cattle out in the pastures when the flood came. The dramatic monologue ‘Rosamund’ merges history, invention and even humour in an elliptically tense style: it is a dialogue through Bible verses between the valorous Spanish captain, saved by an Englishman during the wreck of the Invincible Armada, and the daughter of his deliverer. The latter is left to wonder whether to bless or curse the love that blossoms between the two, all of his own doing. ‘Winstanley’ exudes a sense of Melville’s unreliable, treacherous sea; it is about the hero who, for the good of the community, builds a lighthouse on a rocky islet that has been the cause of so many shipwrecks, only to see the waves demolish it straight away. 3. Together with Christina Rossetti and Jean Ingelow, Dora Greenwell* (1821–1882), born in Durham but moving to London in 1875, is the third of the apparently close-knit trio of unmarried women poets who saw one another frequently, exchanged letters, at times published in collaboration, were good to their neighbours, and even entered into embroidery contests. In the eyes of their contemporaries, they formed a minor trinity ready to take

*

Greenwell’s poems, published between 1848 and 1867 in several editions, have never been collected in a complete, organic edition; Poems, ed. W. Dorling, London 1889, is not a really representative anthology. For titles and details of her essays and her devotional prose cf. the appendix to C. Maynard, The Life of Dora Greenwell, London 1926, which I have used. Also useful are W. Dorling, Memoirs of Dora Greenwell, London 1885, and H. Bett, Dora Greenwell, London 1950.

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up Barrett Browning’s legacy, to whom all three publicly and emphatically declared their debt.7 However, already at the end of the century Greenwell’s not very copious poetry was classified – or rather liquidated – by Saintsbury as being without that quite empirical variable so frequently applied in English critical opinion: ‘inevitability’. No later than 1926 when her collected edition was about to go out of print and nine-tenths of her prose was already out of print, she was brought back into fashion in a voluminous critical biography of great value. This re-evaluation was however the consequence of the ill-­concealed British irritation with what one might call CatholicMediterranean poetic mysticism. Greenwell was in fact depicted mainly as an essayist, an original thinker, a savante, even ‘prophetess’ and ‘seer’, and the only Victorian female theologian of the last hundred years to have spoken, unheard, to her own time, and whose prophesying was understood and fully appreciated only half a century later. Therefore somewhat belatedly Greenwell too, a woman, fell victim to that damaging misunderstanding that had already transformed Browning during his life, and immediately after his death, into a treasure of moral and religious teaching. Greenwell’s inferiority to the other two poets of the trio was in time taken for granted. Her alleged lack of metric skill, her awkwardness and syntactic inexperience, her structural shortcomings were found intolerable, and all in all it was said that she lacked the pure and simple stuff of a poet. Our own time has overturned this diagnosis, subordinating – although not underrating – the essayist to the poet, and indeed rediscovering a poet whose centre of gravity must be shifted or broadened, and a poetry not to be evaluated solely in the mysticreligious sphere. To be sure even today, re-read at a distance and with greater objectivity, Greenwell’s poetry is unquestionably for the most part neither ‘inevitable’ nor prophetic, and not only formally flawed but lacking a really distinctive feature and showing a passive plagiarism of fashionable themes, motifs and genres. As in many another poetic collection of the time, there is in Greenwell a confused and indiscriminate looting of history and daily 7

Greenwell’s gratitude was expressed in a couple of sonnets, the first of which (1851), with a recurrent epigonic image, acknowledges in the work of the older poet the almost paralysing power that overcomes, exhausts and almost silences the voice. The second sonnet was included in the 1861 volume, expressly dedicated to Barrett.

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events in search of marginal, unusual and forgotten episodes, a jumble of derivations and suggestions, a concession to the most varied solicitations, all this resulting in an ‘already heard’ type of poetry, yet again conventionally miscellaneous and dangerously unbalanced.8 Amidst such dissonance, Greenwell’s religious lyrics are however noteworthy and compact, reaching an unprecedented Catholic-Baroque daring in the vibrant confrontation of the poet with Christ the Saviour crucified.9 Christ suffering on the Cross, God yet man, and in his suffering crowning his humanity, consecrating human pain while sharing it – this is the pivot on which Greenwell’s earliest poems turn, those collected in 1851 in Carmina Crucis. In a few isolated cases, in the later poems of 1861 this confrontation became dazzling enough to provoke reverberations and repercussions – anything but Baroque – at the level of style, in the form of a linguistic paralysis and aphasia that result in a series of gasping, elliptical ejaculations.10 The terms used to express this mystical contact are those of an ardent, physical and carnal earthly love, in her case really sublimated because never to be consummated in her lifetime: a love giving freedom through and in Christ, a sweet captivity that liberates her from the other very real imprisonment within family, solitude, and illness.11 So in her poems the perfect union of hearts 8

To give only a few examples from the list, such are the re-elaborations of classical myth (Persephone), Nordic myth (Sigurd) which we also find in Tennyson and Arnold, or the celebrations of the Victorian theme of absolute love, compensated by other poems on precarious love, or the exotic variations in which, however, we do find a more personal echo and an occasional vein of female sentimentalism; or protesting, humanitarian, political and purely narrative and sensational poems. 9 With a clear, revealing tribute to the Baroque emblematic tradition, the 1861 volume bore the epigraph Teneo et teneor, accompanied by the emblem of a hand grasping a cross. Common in Greenwell is the Baroque habit of accompanying religious poetry with edifying emblems and sketches drawn by herself, and Latin mottos. 10 ‘Home’ is the home in the afterlife as presented by Christina Rossetti (§ 205.2); in only two concise stanzas of eleven lines in all, almost without finite verbs, this poem describes the forthcoming physical-spiritual union of the soul with Christ. A richer, more emblematic version of Christ’s coming to fetch the soul on earth is in ‘The Soul’s Parting’. 11 ‘The Broken Chain’ takes the opposite view: ‘a sadness will remain / In the breaking of the chain’.

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and spirits can be taken as the earthly union with the beloved in love and in prayer; yet it is revealed as a mystical union, with an angel heralding death, or more often Christ himself, coming to take the woman up into heaven. In lyrics that seem purely erotic, we often realize that love, while not ceasing to be love for a beloved person, is at the same time a purely spiritual essence, and that the couple are indissolubly raised up to heaven, where earthly ‘holy chains’ shall be further strengthened. Hence the recurrence of images of expenditure, of sacrifice and above all of the burning thirst that the earthly divine lover requires and often stimulates;12 hence a human love that is, in its entirely free gift of life, the echo and prefiguration of divine love. This is suggested for instance in the poem ‘Daria’ where, willing to die for love of the woman, the lover and Christ the divine lover are indistinguishable and are as one, so that the woman realizes that nobody on earth will love her enough to give his life for her.13 As I have mentioned, the label of religious poet bestowed on Greenwell has overshadowed her more limited, extemporary production, which is satirical, humorous, even scandalously impertinent and turns inside out the ‘high’ poetry with its gift of unequalled freshness, an aspect that also occasionally surfaces in her letters, full of sharp little barbs. ‘Fidelity Rewarded’ is the usual Victorian poem on the inseparable, faithful domestic animals to be found in Barrett Browning, Arnold and even Cook, although Greenwell is able to ape herself in it, since the 12

13

Like the flower and the little bird in ‘The Secret’, who ‘expend’ themselves in scent and song and die witnessing a God-invoked mission while teaching the transitory nature of the things of the world. Greenwell’s devotional poetry itself is filled with images of absorbed light: in ‘The Sun-Flower’ the flower turns its petals towards a sun that is immutable, impassible, never changing, while the flower absorbs the flame it sends forth. ‘Qui sait aimer, sait mourir’ echoes Ingelow’s poem ‘The Star’s Monument’ in its images of the wasteful emanation of the star’s own gift, first to the rose, then to the lily, and finally to the poet: the sun as a male pollinates and penetrates the rose with its flame that burns, drains and dries out; the poet himself must ‘consume in fire’ his ‘fervent soul’. The separation, in space above all, of the divine plan from the human one never stops Greenwell from seeing their interdependence; in the ‘metaphysical’ sonnet ‘Life Tapestry’, human and divine life intersect and complement each other like the right and wrong side of a tapestry copied from a model: in life it is the wrong side to be embroidered, trusting to Christ to see the completed work; the imitatio Christi can however only be a poor copy of the model, a minor shift of lines and threads of love.

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animal speaking is like the soul in the devotional poems that waits, expectant and above all spying on the ‘pace’ of its master, a god the animal watches with the same submissive, trusting devotion – this time not well rewarded, since the dog will be vivisected – with which man watches God. Within its protective shell of wit, ‘A Scherzo’ contains a further destructive outburst, another surge towards evasion from imprisonment within a given role, in its catalogue of the bizarre, eccentric, decidedly impossible desires of a ‘shy person’. 4. Greenwell was only one year older than Arnold, and her theological work may be seen as a timid, minor and unheard dissension from what that nineteenth-century champion of reductionism was laying down in weighty books on the Bible and in his innumerable articles and essays.14 The rather over-praised prophetic ability of Greenwell as a thinker lies in her indifference and Olympian calm when faced with the same impellent, ruinous queries of German biblical criticism;15 it lies in particular in her having predicted, already in the 1850s, that such criticism would never gain ground since it was a merely negative thought. She showed an early ecumenism in her almost unconcealed sympathy for Catholicism. In her letters and essays there are in fact frequent hints of envy and desire for the ease and gratifying pliability of Catholicism, with arguments that appear to be echoed if not actually lifted from Browning’s Bishop Blougram monologue.16 Where Protestantism offered a safe ‘ladder’ to heaven – albeit a ladder almost impossibly difficult to climb – the Catholics’ path to heaven was gentle and wide. Greenwell was also envious of the fact that between hell and heaven there lay Purgatory for Catholics, allowing the sinner a margin of error not available to Protestants. Hence her irenic indulgence towards evil and her underlining of the innate goodness of the human heart. Her warm mystic impulse was recognized

14

15 16

The 1861 essay ‘A Present Heaven’ is even prior to Arnold’s early reductionism in that it supersedes the superstitious, purely historical approach to the Gospels with an intimate, ‘prophetic’ acceptance (Maynard 1926, 114). Both Arnold and Greenwell were fascinated by the personality of Lacordaire, to whom they each dedicated a piece of writing (§ 169.6). Her brother William Greenwell became canon of Durham Cathedral, but her other brother Alan, also a clergyman, lost his faith and became a follower of Comte. § 123.

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by her contemporaries as something alien to the controlled English and Protestant tradition, and tending dangerously towards the current of thought of the great classic mystics such as Thomas à Kempis, Fénelon, St Teresa and St John of the Cross. Even her meditative handbooks point to some kinship with St Francis de Sales and the seventeenth-century Catholic spiritualists in conceiving the spiritual life as a competition between an unsuppressible tension towards beauty, and the world as perfection in itself, and the imperious call to a life of rectitude and renunciation. Instinctively Greenwell recognized her attraction for the pagan, the tropical, the strong colours, even for something approaching unbridled disinhibition; this is visible in her plunges into the uncontrolled, colourful exoticism of some of her poetry. Anticipating Pater, she actually withdrew from a world requiring only renunciation and looked for a more open and sunnier spirituality. Rather than dwelling on such an important aspect, female criticism of late has preferred to re-evaluate Greenwell’s public addresses (some of which aimed at denouncing the subordinate state of women and inhumane working conditions) in order to stress her philanthropic aid work. This work was performed in the poverty-stricken ghettoes of the northern counties where she lived after temporarily leaving Durham in the early 1880s, and in Sunday schools and evening schools for workers, in prisons, workhouses and madhouses after she had returned to Durham, distributing not spiritual aid alone but also financial support, and devolving part of the very modest dress allowance received from her mother, as well as any profit from her works. Feminist critics have recently made much of ‘Christina’, a dramatic monologue on the theme of the ‘redeemed sinner’ in the form of a deathbed confession; this was in 1851, pre-dating ‘Goblin Market’. However, this and the other poems Greenwell wrote as an active philanthropist never achieved the heights of her mystical lyrics, and Rossetti’s ballads are something very different to ‘Christina’ and its colourless blank verse, a measure little to Greenwell’s taste. The episode of the child’s death, the visit to the churchyard and the encounter between the two women at the grave is flawed by a sentimentalism rarely found in Greenwell. Against a totally realistic background (the nature of the sin is left unspecified),17 the unnamed sinner to whom the monologue 17

The sinner represents one of the few cases of negative absorption of a superior light: she is a leaf on a branch that is soon to wither.

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is entrusted and her friend, benefactor and saviour, are in any case two ideal sisters, but sisters who become like mother and daughter after the conversion, since Christina had lost an infant daughter and acquires a spiritual one. Christina does however treasure in herself one authentically and intimately Greenwellian feature: the redeeming presence of the Cross, since it is a crucifix given to the sinning woman that is the sign, and represents the impulse, of her redemption. § 216. Victorian women poets Recent editorial initiatives1 have reconstructed a detailed and even over-exhaustive archive of the major and especially minor female poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century, re-assembling a literary canon otherwise completely swamped. Apart from Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and a few other figures to whom I have dedicated their own space, the works of these authors had been out of print for a very long time, and yet before the end of the century they had sold in thousands of copies and were in many cases reprinted before a sudden, vertical drop in interest. One can mildly criticize the usefulness of this rediscovery because the feminists themselves, having imposed a sort of monopoly on this canon, always trace back the single figures to a defined role of ‘poetess’, and find the same biographical and productive clichés and a commitment to the same social and political battles, and – more intrinsically – the same language, the same range of topics, even the use of the same metaphors, the same reference frameworks, the same personal myths. The resulting, implicitly admitted lack of individuality in all, or nearly all, these minor poets, on the one hand exempts the critic from providing a detailed presentation of each one of them, almost authorizing avoidance of their names; on the other hand it depreciates and empties out the work of disinterring them, which has in this case a merely documentary aim. Much Victorian female poetry was, in short, paraliterature or instrumental and sectorial, though even the ‘high’ 1

Cf. the anthologies of Victorian female poetry (where almost all the poems I cite may be found) Victorian Women Poets, ed. A. Leighton and M. Reynolds, Oxford 1995 (with ample presentations), and, for a combative re-reading in deconstructionist and feminist style, AVP, 318–77, and A. Leighton, Victorian Women’s Poetry: Writing Against the Heart, Brighton 1992.

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poetry of the Oxford and Cambridge ‘defectors’ had, to some extent, to come to terms with this form of compromise, as did the novel, whether written by men or women. I would also point out that in the attempt to build up a rather too cohesive group of women poets, and to identify a consistent type of writing or even a spontaneous school and a so-called ‘matrilinear lineage’, women critics have agreed to predate Victorian female canon and to shift back its terminus a quo by a number of years. They have added figures of ‘proto-Victorian’ women poets such as Hemans and Landon, whose birth, death and publication dates fall within women’s Romanticism, and whose biographical and productive ranges overlap those of poets such as Keats, Shelley and even Coleridge and Wordsworth – poets excluded from Victorianism although obviously involved in its genesis. 2. Deep ties of affectionate friendship and a real team spirit existed among almost all the major and minor women poets of the time. Their mutual contacts were routine: they met up, they travelled together, they inspired each other, they commented on each other’s work, they wrote dedications and admiring little pieces to each other. This was contradicted at times in subsequent private confessions, where a touch of envy might surface. Couples or trios of sister poets, or occasionally a small literary dynasty, represented a typically Victorian and English phenomenon. Besides the most famous cases of the Brontë sisters and of Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, there were the poets/artist sisters Sarah (1805–1848) and Eliza (1803–1846) Flower; the ‘three Anglo-Irish graces’, Helen Selina (1807– 1867), Caroline (1808–1877) and Jane Georgiana Sheridan (1809–1884), granddaughters of the dramatist of the same name. Further, Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829–1925) was the mother of Hilaire Belloc, and Coleridge was the father of Sara (1802–1852). The family environment was nearly always middle class, very occasionally the well-to-do. The fathers were invariably merchants in easy circumstances (although always on the verge of falling victim to the risks inherent in that position), small-time bankers and business agents, lawyers, parish rectors, or landowners. A small percentage of women poets was born in poor, working-class families, such as Eliza Cook,2 the Irish Frances Browne (1816–1879) and Ellen Johnson 2

§ 214.

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(1835–1873). The fragility of the nineteenth-century woman responded to – or rather was a commonplace for – her proverbially delicate physical constitution, a sort of protective label; however, with a few exceptions, such delicacy was belied by an unusually energetic temperament and by more than average longevity. What the women writers appearing in the early nineteenth century had much more in common was the lack of freedom of movement imposed on them by prejudice against women’s writing, by the distribution channels, and by the readership which the ‘poetess’ was addressing. The Annuals, almanacs in which women’s poetry was mainly published until 1850, were read by a specific female audience whose taste and outlooks had to be carefully respected. However, well before their male counterparts, and with greater insight and flexibility, women poets and authors realized that although convention and need might require them to serve a market, they could also exploit it. They often vibrated with a veritable compositional erethism that made words flow from their pens not only in thousands of poems and stories and novels, but in essays, pamphlets and newspaper articles as well. In this they were not followers of Adelaide Procter’s tyrannical brevity, but of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s diffusion, intemperance and ungovernable expressive urge. On the scene there even appears a professional poet who knowingly writes for money and not always out of inspiration, and indeed for the very purpose of complaining about her exclusion from the written word or about her marginalization. Beside the woman who was and felt suffocated, there was therefore the totally emancipated and independent woman, faber suae fortunae like a Landon – for a time an advance embodiment of Barrett’s Aurora Leigh, since she was an orphan who had lived alone in a London attic – and like the theatrical prima donna, poet and dramatist, memorialist and essayist Fanny Kemble (1809–1893), whose father was the celebrated Shakespearean actor. Both Kemble and Sarah Flower took up the parallel line of drama; others were first novelists (and as such I shall deal with them) and then poets, such as the three Brontë sisters, George Eliot and Dinah Mulock Craik. 3. An indelible mark, today subjected to radical reinterpretation, was historically branded on the skin of many Victorian women poets. As male critics of the time believed to be natural in the weaker sex, this was the equation between the feminine and the sentimental, an equation handed down to them by their ‘foremothers’ Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth

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Landon. The sugary, facile poetry of the former was recited in Victorian girls’ schools for many years, but was already criticised by the Romantic poets with the exception of Wordsworth, and later parodied and ridiculed in some of its products at the end of the century. Even more severe, if possible, was the censure that fell on Landon and her long, rambling poems, of which immediate posterity only salvaged a lyrical flash here and there. As mothers, or even as spinsters, the later Victorian poets were almost unanimously, in an even minor portion of their production that however is never absent, writers for and on childhood, in the form of fables, nonsense rhymes and edifying tales.3 To varying degrees their unifying factor was devotion and faith experienced with ardour and torment, even leading at times to forms of Catholic mysticism. Such leanings bring Menella Bute Smedley (1820–1877) close to Dora Greenwell. It is no coincidence that many poets may be tacitly defined not only ‘religious’, but that they should also come from Dissent and evangelicalism and that some eventually converted to Catholicism – not the facile, worldly Catholicism of Browning’s Bishop Blougram but the Catholicism of the mystic, contemplative saints of the Counter-Reformation. Those following such a path were not only Adelaide Procter, as we have seen, but also Mary Howitt (1799–1888), the author of light, sanitized imitations of Coleridge, and Bessie Rayner Parkes. A crucial figure in the young Browning’s formation,4 Sarah Flower composed the most famous and popular Anglican hymn after and together with those of Newman, as well as a drama on martyrdom, Vivia Perpetua, set in Africa in the early centuries of Christianity and curiously reminiscent of Newman’s Callista.5 These religious poets, Catholic especially, practised a religion that was anything but quietist or, in Browning’s sense, ‘Molinist’. They were able to cut themselves off from the world in order to meditate and contemplate in moments of blinding mystical ecstasy, but a minute later or even at the 3

4 5

Sara Coleridge, the editor of her father’s works, was recognized as a typically masculine intellect, equalling only George Eliot in her own century; the flowing lyrics and interludes of Phantasmion are, however, quintessentially of the most delicate and feminine type. § 108.2–3. § 30.3–5.

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same time they could descend into the world. As authentic militants of a proto-feminist Catholicism, they fought with equal ardour in the field of the contingent and the daily, and were perfectly aware of the reality of their sex and their class. Seeing how narrow were the margins of independence allowed to women’s poetic word, their personal voices were more often consigned to private documents, a diary or other extemporary expression. In her memoirs Helen Dufferin, one of Sheridan’s grand-daughters, has left us a stylistic gem bursting with witticisms; it is indeed to her distantly Irish verve that we owe a number of flippant, humorous, and light-hearted poems together with a few biting satires on the bourgeoisie, at times reminiscent of Byron’s Don Juan, just as other compositions of hers approach the surreal and the grotesque. Her ‘The Mother’s Lament’ is on the lamentably long nose of the narrator’s son-in-law. 4. The much talked about Letitia Landon, a flirt accused of scandal and the object of salacious gossip, was in Regency times (when such female figures were really few and far between) the prototype of the worldly woman and woman poet. She was also a beautiful woman who took care of her appearance, her person, and her fashionable attire. Beside the unquestionably prevalent figure of the timid, God-fearing Victorian ‘poetess’, colourless and quietly dressed like Emily Tennyson and Christina Rossetti (caricatured by post-Victorians such as Beerbohm), one can set Caroline Clive (1801–1873), an English George Sand who scandalized right-thinking people for undertaking an unchaperoned journey to Paris and for honeymooning before she got married. Or we might set Helen Dufferin herself, a new Helen to whom Browning dedicated a sonnet; or the icon of the adulteress, as her sister Caroline Norton was suspected of being, later mythologized into the heroine of a novel of Meredith’s. The transgressions of the Victorian woman poet were however for the most part vicarious, implemented according to what I have called (and analysed in Rossetti and Procter) the vindication of imagination over the constraints of custom and education, as momentary compensation for menial care and the often demoralizing tasks of wife and mother. Some of them could (or imaginatively did) boast exotic forebears, of which Italian ancestry was the most prestigious. As Kemble said in one of her poems, Italy was the ‘land of [the] soul’s adoption’, a land that was the common symbol

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of maternity and the mother’s womb, a myth later elaborated at length in Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. Felicia Hemans was Italian through a few drops of blood on her mother’s side (she was the daughter of the Consul of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Liverpool). Jane Frances Elgee (1821–1896), Wilde’s mother, called herself Speranza and passed herself off for one of Dante’s distant descendants. Where this romantic connection was actually non-existent, it was replaced by a journey and an often lengthy stay in Italy, in Rome or Florence. But such journeys, often made only in spirit and imagination, included not Italy alone but also distant, far more exotic lands such as Africa or India (‘I would like to become a gypsy and lead the life of a wild Indian’, said Howitt who had never been further south than Rome).6 Fame and modesty, expression and silence, submission and independence are the pendulum not only of the life but also of the major and minor poetry of women. Thanks to recent criticism, the signal recurrence of two myths has been identified and discussed. These myths embody the contradictions of nineteenth-century femininity and they are myths to which almost every woman poet dedicated at least one poem. They are that of Sappho, the creator-poet who throws herself into the sea for unrequited love, and that of Madame de Staël’s Corinne, who finds expression in art, albeit sacrificing, at least in part, her femininity. These myths, especially the latter, helped to forge the heroine of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh.7 The force of these contradictions lies in the fact that this femininity always resurfaced in its most traditional, universal aspects. The event of birth as seen from the irredeemably feminine perspective calls forth, in fact, some of the most daring and original poetic creations in women’s poetry, such as in Clive’s ‘The Mother’ or in ‘A Natal Address to my Child, March 19th 1844’8 by Eliza Ogilvy (1822–1912), one 6 7 8

Africa, the land she had always longed for, was where Landon in fact died, either poisoned or perhaps a suicide. § 71.4 n. 112. Cf., by the same poet, the strongly contrasting treatment of the theme, easily taken for granted, of the equivalence or overlapping of birth and death in ‘Newly Dead and Newly Born’. In speaking of old age Ogilvy manages to write a witty little poem on ‘grandmother’s birthday’.

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describing the experience of giving birth and fear for the child’s life, the other describing, with crude anatomical humour rich in unexpected and candid associations, the antipoetry of birth. 5. Protest against the condition of women vibrates in the words of these poets, in many cases explicitly but in some others implicitly and almost in the form of Freudian denegation. Open to interpretation cum grano salis is even that protest hidden under servile, conventional assent to female subordination. The militancy of poetry continued in many of them by merging both in philanthropic activism (which in fact did not attack the status quo) and in the field of radical reform, only seldom in that of revolutionary action. The Victorian woman was first and foremost the person on whom fell Victorian family instability and the precariousness of life, so thoroughly analysed in Dickens and Thackeray’s novels. The merchant head of the family could go broke overnight, or else disappear for mysterious reasons never to be seen again; bankruptcy was the order of the day, and mother and children were left on the street. It was more likely that a woman, if she could avoid spinsterhood, found herself with a selfish husband, hard and scrounging, rather than happily married; separations and divorces were the rule rather than the exception. The long-standing marriages of the Carlyles, the Brownings and the Howitts – though not quite so durable, as has been demonstrated – contrast with the failed marriages of Felicia Hemans, Caroline Norton and Fanny Kemble. Even in happy marriages they continued to warble on the theme of precarious, tormented love between husband and wife. The women’s tireless, frantic and versatile writing responded in some cases to the need for money in order to maintain offspring, given the non-compliance and irresponsibility of the husband, or because he had abandoned the family home. Her unhappy marital vicissitudes made Caroline Norton take a stand in public to get the unfair English marriage law changed, since it safeguarded only the man’s privileges and granted the woman no independence, especially financial. Education, reading and poetry writing were pastimes for Victorian women but also a channel for self-promotion, since there was no legal provision for state education for women. They were either self-taught or educated by their own fathers or, if they were lucky, by a governess. Noble in intention, all the proletarian poetry by women is, with few exceptions, instrumental,

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extemporary or purely sentimental, seeking a difficult synthesis between the reasons of art and the enhancement of humanitarian sensibility. Dozens of poems, mostly dramatic monologues in all possible registers and in all possible settings, illustrated the theme of the woman who had gone astray. We find it especially in its horrifying variations in a poem by Clive and in one by Emily Pfeiffer (1827–1890), in which the woman commits suicide by throwing herself into the river with the intention of carrying out a gesture of sublime, disinterested charity for the sake of the lover who has abandoned her. A serial production of imitations of Barrett Browning’s ‘The Cry of the Children’ renewed the protest against working hours in mines and factories and the bitter realization that death was preferable to suffering and hardship. Except for Wilde’s mother, all women poets were sturdy supporters of the causes of oppressed peoples. With facile conventionality Helen Dufferin nostalgically and sweetly glazes in dozens of works over endemic scourges such as Irish emigration. But hearts beat fast for a still ununified Italy. Smedley dedicated a poem to the deceased Garibaldi, but her ‘Cavour’ follows the cliché of Italy the mother, indeed the ‘widow’, an other idea originating in Elizabeth Barrett. § 217. Victorian nonsense* Two definitions with two different degrees of precision can be given of Victorian nonsense. According to the first, nonsense is a literary genre derived from children’s literature and a development of the fairy-tale with unnatural and supernatural elements. It stems from an alternative law to the principle of reality, though it works more or less with the same ingredients

*

The first overall evaluation, and re-evaluation, of nonsense literature was given at the beginning of the twentieth century by E. Strachey, ‘Nonsense as a Fine Art’, in the Quarterly Review of 1888; the ‘laws’ of the genre – linguistic, syntactic, morphological, logical, etc. – as well as its philosophical premises are studied in depth, with references to and examples from Lear and to a greater extent from Lewis Carroll, in E. Sewell, The Field of Nonsense, London 1952, and in the brilliant study by J.-J. Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature, London 1994. See also S. Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature, Baltimore, MD and London 1979.

§ 217. Victorian nonsense

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as are found in reality, such as animals and humanized and speaking objects mixed with human beings. In the second, more etymological definition, nonsense implies the linguistic puzzle, the sheer word game based on ingenious mechanisms of deformation and reformation of the langue in a number of favoured and codified genres. In practice the two types are frequently found in a state of contamination. Historically, both descend from oral and anonymous literature and folklore, and there they mostly remained for a long time, except in the case of certain original uses in literary texts (Shakespeare, Swift, Sterne in English literature) or of fable poets such as La Fontaine. While at the start of the nineteenth century the anonymous, the apocryphal and the popular element rose throughout Europe to a height almost greater than that of traditional authorship, the Romantic revaluation of the imagination and of the oral tradition produced in England the single, fairly important result of the Shakespeare retold to children by the Lambs and Hood’s humorous verse. Yet over a few decades the situation changed radically. After 1820 Grimm and Andersen began to be translated, and an unprecedented blossoming of minor original literature for children appeared and rapidly achieved huge popularity. The relevant figures at the time were Surtees, Jerrold, Calverley and Barham, the author of the Ingoldsby Legends. From this ferment Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll would come forth. 2. Such great success has no single explanation and is due to connected factors. In the more circumscribed acceptation of a language game, Victorian nonsense is unthinkable unless it is considered within the epistemological context of the current speculation on language. Pioneers such as Max Müller were already investigating the gratuitous nature of language and the arbitrariness both of the linguistic act of naming and of the connection between words and referents. However, in the rise of nonsense other reasons, cultural, social, sociological and even political are also relevant. Seen from the viewpoint of the recipient, nonsense literature served a public that had grown out of all recognition – the children of the Victorian population boom. Educators, pedagogues and philanthropists did not intend to leave children to themselves and were committed to employing them in healthy entertainment, whether playing or reading, thanks to the rise in literacy as a result of a more effective schooling policy. The education of children in the 1840s was one of the issues on

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the agenda. In a societal model where the principle of responsibility was widespread, enlightened intellectuals could well rise up in defence of children’s rights, children that a cynical textile and mining capitalism exploited as a workforce. Such rights were first and foremost political, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning denounced in ‘The Cry of the Children’,1 yet at the same time they were simply rights to the exercise of the imagination, violated and trampled on by child labour. Inspired by a parliamentary report on the state of working children in England, Barrett Browning’s ‘The Cry of the Children’ had been followed by the most incisive vindication of the rights of the imagination, Hard Times by Dickens. Seen from the viewpoint of the sender, on the other hand, nonsense may be the touchstone of Victorian schizophrenia. In a cultural model that was too adult and even too apt to make people responsible, the writer takes an instant to relax, gives himself a break and for a moment becomes a child again, belatedly reliving a childhood that had come to an end too soon, or perhaps was never really experienced.2 Nonsense literature may thus be seen as one of the forms of transgression emanating from that closed-in, rule-regulated culture that was Victorianism, as happens in all ‘closed’ cultures: a form which may be set beside pornographic literature, sceptic literature with its prototype in FitzGerald, and even dialect literature in some respects. The nonsense author himself acknowledged that his production – often extemporary – had a subordinate aesthetic status. He knew in advance that it could find no place in the canon of accepted ‘high’ literature, severely conceptual and profoundly serious as was that of the Victorian age. Even established poets such as Tennyson and Browning indulged in this type of writing, which gave pleasure, enlivened parties and meetings and accompanied other pastimes. When published, its natural corollary was the illustration. Yet poets were aware of its ephemeral and occasional value. Only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the unfortunate pairing of nonsense with children’s reading reconsidered, and nonsense was raised to the level of serious, adult literature, albeit such in subtly oblique forms.

1 2

§ 67.1–2. This is the explanation of Chesterton, himself a nonsense author, in VAL, 152–3.

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The challenging, perhaps excessive interpretation of Victorian humorous and nonsense literature given by Orwell in 1945,3 to which I shall refer, was after all a forerunner of the Bakhtinian theory of the carnivalesque and of comedy as the debunking of the powerful, since it rests on quite a different equation, that of comedy with the subversion of the established order, according to Orwell’s aphorism that ‘every joke is a tiny revolution’. In Orwell’s view, it is in the very nature of comedy that sooner or later ‘topics which the rich, the powerful and the complacent would prefer to see left alone’ will come into play; hence the writer of comedy knows and is convinced that society is not good, but corrupt. With Orwell, Lear in particular becomes a writer of a Swiftian type who, using anticlimax, knocks man, the rational being, off his pedestal to find his absurd, illogical rock-bottom. Such a reading does not conflict with that of psychoanalysis: it integrates it. Psychoanalysis has systematically charged with sense, underground and latent, the nonsense production of Lear, Christina Rossetti and above all Carroll, which too frankly presented itself as nonsensical. This reading has therefore reinterpreted nonsense not so much as children’s reading but as literature also and above all for adults. § 218. Lear* I: Genesis and morphology of Lear’s limericks A question still debated today is whether Edward Lear (1812–1888) can be considered to come within the canon of English literature, for the reasons I mentioned above. A number of literary histories, past and present, 4

3

See the short yet incisive essays, ‘Funny, But Not Vulgar’ and ‘Nonsense Poetry’, in OCE, vol. III, 324–9, and vol. IV, 64–8. Both essays arise from Orwell’s disappointed awareness of contemporary humourism (which was no longer revolutionary but had become politically domesticated, thus no longer willing to dig in the mud) and of the tendency, visible in Punch, ‘for at least forty years past […] not so much to amuse as to reassure’. Animal Farm is, according to Orwell’s definition, a work of politicized nonsense.

*

The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, ed. H. Jackson, London 1947, from which I shall cite according to page and limerick number; The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse, ed. V. Noakes, London 2001, 2002, 2006. Letters, ed. Lady Strachey, 2 vols, London 1907 and 1911; chosen by V. Noakes, London 1988. Lear’s many travel diaries have been anthologized in Edward Lear’s Journals, ed. H. Van Thal, London 1952.

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do not even mention his name. I too could have persisted in this omission or perhaps merely included his name in a footnote, had his creative work, however little it is, only consisted of a dozen or so ballads and prose tales expressly addressing young readers. However, he also produced a collection of limericks that, although passing itself off as nonsensical children’s poetry, has every right to assert itself as a work of denunciation among the most ingenious and explosive of all Victorian literature, inversely proportional to its alleged and declared innocence. We are indeed speaking of a cycle made up and held together by many internal links, although always unadvisedly taken and judged piece by piece. This cycle of limericks

A Note on Translations. For the very reason that rhyme is the sine qua non of the limerick and therefore must be strictly reproduced in any translation, translating limericks is a taxing and extremely arduous task. Every translator who has tried to respect this rule has been to some extent inaccurate. Praz wondered quite reasonably if Lear’s limericks were not untranslatable by definition. As I shall explain, in the first line one can innocently change the name of the town or the place of origin of the main character in order to start off the limerick in any other language; but in many cases the remaining lines have entailed – and cannot but entail – much more unjustified poetic licences, with the result that the translation in languages other than English becomes an almost independent creation and one quite extraneous from the original. Life and Criticism. A. Davidson, Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet, London 1938, 1968; C. Izzo, Umoristi inglesi, Torino 1962; J. Richardson, Edward Lear, London 1965; V. Noakes, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, London 1968, and, rev., 2004 (the standard biography); E. Kelen, Mr Nonsense: A Life of Edward Lear, London 1973; Lear in the Original: Drawings and Limericks from his Book of Nonsense Drawing, with an Introduction and Notes, ed. H. W. Liebert, New York 1975; T. Byrom, Nonsense and Wonder: The Poems and Cartoons of Lear, London 1977; J. Lehmann, Edward Lear and his World, London 1977 (with illustrations); H. C. Bibby, The Art of the Limerick, London 1978; I. R. Hark, Edward Lear, Boston, MA 1982; SSI, vol. I, 245–8; A. Caboni, Nonsense. Edward Lear e la tradizione del nonsense inglese, Roma 1988; S. Chitty, That Singular Person Called Lear, London 1988; P. Levi, Edward Lear: A Biography, London 1995. On Lear the illustrator and painter see B. Reade, Edward Lear’s Parrots, London 1949; P. Hofer, Edward Lear as Landscape Draughtsman, Oxford 1968 (compendious catalogue of water-colours, with a careful introduction); Edward Lear’s Birds, ed. S. Hyman, London 1980; Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry, ed. J. Williams and M. Bevis, Oxford 2016; J. Uglow, A Life of Art of Nonsense, London 2017.

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checkmates Victorian society with the same vitriolic bitterness as do the novels of Dickens and Thackeray. It depicts a small odyssey of the deviant man, who by virtue of his deviations is excluded, marginalized or repressed. Partly modelled on Lear himself, the ubiquitous ‘old man’ is a poor devil of an outsider who vainly seeks his place in the rigid moral and behavioural framework of Victorianism. There is however a second related aspect that concerns the whole of Lear’s production, from his limericks to his nonsense poems, from his travel diaries to his letters. This other aspect shows him as a pioneer in the fluidification of established, codified language towards an estuary of neologisms, distortions, malapropisms. This approach was not unusual since the time of Shakespeare, Rabelais and Swift, and was at times adopted by other humourists, but by Dickens alone on a regular scale. The logic determining Lear’s exclusion or only passing mention in works of literary history by his contemporaries demonstrates their inability to understand the value and effect of these two connected phenomena. It is only by removing the limericks from the children-book entertainment ghetto and re-reading them as texts for adults that their full potential can be appreciated. For many years that aesthetic of the ‘charming’ held sway and placed Lear’s limericks in the category of the innocuous amusement, or at the very most of gentle social satire. Even Ruskin, forty years after the publication of the first edition, set them at the head of his list of the hundred ‘most delightful’ books. On the other hand, as for almost all the Victorians, even objective critics were conditioned by a tendency to gossip about the private life of a man who was unquestionably ‘singular’ and to cast light on his infantile malaise, his parents’ desertion, his solitude, and above all the crucial failure of his timid senile courtships and the longer, obsessive but fleeting male friendships.1 Equally as hazardous and misleading as the aesthetic of the ‘charming’ was another school of thought that, supported by T. S. Eliot, insisted on the pure nonsensicality of Lear’s limericks and alleged that the phonetic-melodic element prevails over the semantic one, therefore assuming in fact that the limericks really had no 1

These alleged scoops and shocking revelations are not enough to raise or differentiate works that the authors themselves admitted had fallen – or were always on the point of falling – into the travelogue genre, a pure and simple travel account.

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meaning at all. Ingenious analyses have taken this as a starting point, seeing in Lear and to a greater extent in Lewis Carroll reflections and intuitions on the functioning of language that approach those of Husserl, Fónagy and Chomsky.2 Even the surrealists’ tribute to and praise for Lear is the fruit of misunderstanding, since the surreal method is based on the overlapping of oneiric and unconscious life upon daily life, and the limerick procedure is only very superficially similar. The real, revolutionary legacy left by Lear’s limericks to twentieth-century literature is the unprecedented enunciative reduction, the juxtaposition of separate snapshots, which almost become flashes, and the suppression of any sentimental, moralistic emphasis with the adoption of a ‘new objectivity’. If Lear’s nonsense as a language game looks to Lewis Carroll3 and Joyce, in its other aspects, concerning contents and representation, it heralds two developments: on the one hand the existentialist and nihilist theatre and narrative of a Ionesco or a Beckett, just as spasmodically concise in their expressiveness, and on the other the political tale, with only apparently nonsense elements, as in Orwell.4 2. Lear’s 200-plus limericks came out in a first series in 1846 with the title A Book of Nonsense and the playful pen-name of Derry down Derry as their author. This original work forms the basic text and the most inventive spring of Lear’s creative fantasy. A second batch, already with a slight drop in inventiveness, was added by popular request in an extended edition in 1872. As has been repeatedly remarked, Lear did not invent the limerick. It appears that he learnt of its existence from an anonymous collection published a few decades earlier and from certain opening lines that had become proverbial. But it is barely necessary to mention here that the genesis of the limerick is anything but clear. One theory that has gained

2 3 4

Cf. for this type of reading Lecercle’s book (1994) listed in the bibliography of § 217.1. Lear and Carroll wrote and published at almost the same time, but oddly enough they had no knowledge of one another, or so they claimed (Davidson 1968, 160–1). I find Orwell’s argument in ‘Nonsense Poetry’ (cf. § 217.2 n. 3) quite incomprehensible. He finds in fact a ‘political significance’, indeed ‘the whole theory of authoritarian governments’, reflected in the moral of Lear’s ballad ‘The Pobble Who Has No Toes’: ‘It’s a fact the whole world knows / That Pobbles are happier without their toes’.

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credit is that it came from convivial songs ending with the refrain ‘Will you come up to Limerick?’, hence the name. Another theory is that the formula was brought back to Ireland by a brigade of Irish soldiers on their return from France. The fact remains that the limerick was originally a soldier’s song, mostly licentious, somewhat similar to Italian osterie [‘tavern songs’], a tradition that stopped with Lear and soared up again after his death in his twentieth-century imitators. Lear’s indisputable merit was in raising the limerick to literary dignity and ensuring its future, and in creating, or rather inventing, a place for it in the genre catalogue and bestowing upon it an unmistakeable formal and argumentative pattern. The result is that even in common parlance Lear is the limerick, or – as someone wittily suggested – the learick. 3. From the metric viewpoint, Lear’s limerick consists in a verse of four lines, of which the first and the fourth repeat the last word and in which the lines rhyme on an aaba plan. As regards prosody, the first, second and third lines have three accents in anapaestic or spondaic feet, while the fourth has four.5 Within this framework Lear’s limerick has a binding thematic and procedural configuration, and a grammar and syntax that are practically fixed. The single limericks are as many controlled variations. Within its four lines the limerick is like an instantaneous single action, or theatrical act, with a highly compressed telegraphic plot and staggering ellipses inscribed within a climax, in an inexorable fantastic crescendo. The incipit introduces in most cases a male protagonist, the proverbial ‘old man’, which does not (necessarily) mean the literal statement of an age but is much more likely to be a term of endearment,6 seeing that the accompanying vignettes show these ‘old men’ as not in fact looking particularly old. Lear’s fancy runs wild in indicating whence these ‘old men’ come. These places of origin are

5 6

In some editions the fourth line is broken into two rhymed hemistichs, making the limerick into a pentastich. In this case the third and fourth lines have two accents each. A certain number have women, or young people, as protagonists, and others introduce ‘a certain person’. The difference in age (as in 5/2, with the grandmother who threatens to burn her granddaughter) often serves to illustrate adult, patriarchal oppression of young people.

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variable, inconceivable and extravagant, and naturally do not answer to any plausibility, nor do they presuppose any national or geographic implication. Acrobatic, occasionally imperfect, highly amusing and far-fetched is the rhyme with this place of origin which is invented for the second line; the place is hardly ever English and therefore in most cases there simply is no easy rhyme. With this second line the limerick plunges into comedy or more exactly into the grotesque and the absurd, since the leading character of each single limerick systematically sets about some improper action with unsuitable tools, or says something out of the blue, or simply behaves in an unseemly way in violation of the oft-repeated word ‘conduct’ or one of its synonyms. It often happens that he (or she) purchases something weird, or pairs of things that go together no better than chalk and cheese. He is poor but he may invest everything in something extravagant such as eccentric garments; he takes on strange postures, he acquires some permanent form of invalidity or deformity; he eats atrociously disgusting concoctions, or drinks outrageously incongruous drinks. His actions are similarly wayward, unpredictable and casual, since his movements are often restless and uncontrollable. From the rhetorical viewpoint, all these acts are informed by paradox and hyperbole – the ‘Old Person of Ischia’ (9/2), for instance, does not just eat lots of figs, he eats ‘thousands of figs’ – which, applied to the physical form, may be translated into a perspectival deformation. Certain parts of the body at times extend or inflate impossibly, like nose, beard, chin or eyes, a hypertrophy which is registered while the other parts keep their natural size; or the opposite case, the catastrophic weight loss. The very proportions of reality are falsified by real hallucinations on the part of these disturbed people, further deformed by their accompanying sketches: a ‘brute’ of a bee stings the old man in the tree (7/2); a limerick on Swiftian lines is that (40/1) of the Lilliputian man of Leghorn, ‘the smallest that ever was born’, who is attacked, indeed ‘devoured’ in the end, by a ‘puppy’ shown in the sketch as about five times his size, and thus overturning any scale of proportion.7 An eminently dynamic if not dramatic creation, the 7

197/2, very similar, is actually a case of contradiction and overturning of the text on the part of the sketch: a man of Ancona finds and walks up and down a stray dog defined ‘small’ in the text but shown by the drawing as several times bigger than

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limerick has in its third line its most natural and incisive development with the introduction of an interaction – or more precisely, a violent juxtaposition – between the single individual and society, which he or she provokes inducing some reaction. The success of the limerick, like that of any joke, comes at the very end, in which all premises are overturned. The fourth line must be and in the best limericks actually is a lightning closure unleashing all the reader’s expectancy and curiosity. In this fourth line there is always an adjective diagnosing or summarizing in one word the personality of the protagonist in the light of what has just happened: bizarre adjectives, at times really nonsensical or freshly coined for their evocative associations (‘ombliferous’, ‘scroobious’, ‘globular’), invented from a mobile, highly elusive, oscillating viewpoint. Such adjectival diagnoses, for the very reason that they often convey the interpretation of respectable society, have at times to be taken in their opposite sense and in no way do they express, if negative, the opinion of the writer.8 The illustration is an integral and unalienable part of the text: it underlines, enhances and magnifies details, and proves essential every time it shows the hallucinatory disproportions between men and fierce or fearful beasts, or between the poor scaled-down victim and his impressive, imminent avenger. § 219. Lear II: The individual versus society Lear’s collections of limericks arose as a means to distract and amuse the Earl of Derby’s children. A promising illustrator, Lear was employed by the earl and became his protégé. He himself explained the genesis, nature and aims of the collection in order to prevent any search for assumptions or remote meanings, let alone any political undertones, calling them whimsical and innocent creations all played out in the knowledge that they were ‘perfectly clear and bright, and incapable of any meaning but one of sheer nonsense’. Such defence and detachment were of course too ingenuous to be credible,

8

himself. 191/1 creates again a friction between the text and the picture: the whiskers of the wild man in the tree are called ‘lovely to see’, yet the picture shows them as shaggy and unkempt. The ‘silliness’ of the old man from Chili (6/1) who sits on the stairs eating apples and pears, may in fact be an extremely ironic judgement.

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since the limericks, rather than being senseless, make an awful lot of sense. At the very least they are double-edged, since behind their appearance as children’s literature and consumer texts, they are one of the most self-conscious and highly pondered Victorian instances of what Matthew Arnold called ‘criticism of life’. Apart from age, role and origins, Lear’s character is only one: the eccentric, the drop-out, forgetful of good manners and etiquette, who is warned, branded, treated, but more often than not, once he is declared incurable, punished, repressed and in the end brutally and summarily eliminated from respectable society. Limericks are therefore also a homage to creative imagination and a plea that its spaces and freedom of movement be preserved. As we have seen, the creative imagination was severely trampled on in the Victorian nineteenth century, surviving perhaps only in the brief span of early childhood. 2. Disturbed and scandalized, society is repressive as far as it can be. It treats with miserably playful therapies, such as glue for the rider who fell from his horse (27/1); it persuades or runs for shelter; hardly ever does it understand and take pity. The most terrifying closures in Lear’s limericks are those in which society barbarously ‘smashes’ the disobedient transgressor.9 This ‘balanced’ community plays a contrasting role in almost all limericks: ‘they said’, or similar formulae in the third line, take up the story and establish the interaction between the individual, always sufficiently identified, and a society that in the generic ‘they’ conserves a yet more threatening anonymity.10 The friction between the individual and society looms in a multiform phenomenology, constituting a catalogue of repressive

9

10

In certain cases, he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. The old man who rings the gong all day (6/2) is smashed by it, according to the law of retaliation; a similar fate strikes the old man of Buda (14/2) who threatens people with his hammer and is also smashed by the community. In 24/2 the protagonist comes out the winner as it is he who smashes the others with a poker. A further relativist contrast is found in the limericks on slight misdemeanours which are severely punished: for an innocent prank such as the theft of a few hens, the old man of Cheadle (49/2) is put in the stocks; naturally the pilferer is only ironically ‘horrible’ in the fourth line. The aggressively anonymous ‘they’ has been seen by some as the forerunner of existentialist philosophy and of Heidegger’s Dasein (Lecercle 1994, 108–11).

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pathologies that is frightening in its precision and scientific completeness.11 It surfaces first in the disturbed sleep of many of the protagonists, either in real insomnia or in sleep visited by dreams, perhaps pleasant, perhaps ‘horrible’ nightmares (33/2). In the daytime repression may be vented in thoughtless gestures or in unspecified symptoms of an unknown disquiet, as in the uncontrollable cry of the young Russian woman (48/1), and in whole series of food and dress eccentricities. In a number of limericks Lear explicitly indicates that eating and drinking, often over-eating and overdrinking, or wearing extravagant garments, are safety valves for repression, and one of the ‘remorse’ and ‘regret’ therapies, even though greediness in more than one case turns out to be tragically destructive, causing death by choking (39/2). In this deformed universe of Lear’s, there seems to be no possible way out; all escape routes are systematically and pessimistically blocked up, so that the only ferociously ironical solution appears to lie in a spirit of compliance and adaptation, or in the annihilation of the personality, or else in an extreme measure such as suicide.12 Yet one possibility remains: that of stoic resistance and of voluntary and resigned exile. The interaction between the individual and society may indeed be absent, as in limericks depicting a very modern sense of alienation and incommunicability: answers to questions may be vague, evasive or impertinent, responses in the form of tongue-twisters, incomprehensible phonation or even silence: the absolute refusal of conversation, or its opposite, a flood of words.13 In Lear’s few limericks that do not present any interactive dynamism, the protagonists are deluded optimists, ecstatically immersed in worlds cut off from social living, or lost in music or reading, in contemplation or reverie: the ‘romantic’ person eating a horrible concoction beside the sea (161/1),

11 12 13

The very words ‘oppression’ and ‘repression’ were not unknown to Lear. The weight of religion on the human mind is defined as ‘oppressive’ in a letter of 1863 quoted in Noakes 1968, 151. The Tartar (50/2) commits suicide by cutting his jugular vein. The suicide who in 52/1 throws himself into Etna seems a parody of Arnold’s Empedocles (§ 155), since he is a stoic who claims that the crater of a volcano is not after all really so very hot. A living target – the hated Gladstone – is both the ‘promiscuous’ and the ‘afflicting’ orator of the Station (207/1; cf. Davidson 1968, 219).

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the contemplative person who climbs to the top of a tree (22/1), the daring astronaut who studies the moon from a hot air balloon (40/2). Yet things do not go well for them either: the absent-minded person is punished in the form of a theft; worse still, the reader of Homer rolls down a cliff (34/1). Then there is challenge and derision, as in the case of the man who significantly lives ‘on the border’ (202/2), in utmost disorder, thus vexing people;14 euphemistically dubbed an ‘eclectic’, a man is upside down (181/12) in order to see everything topsy-turvy, therefore right. Flight from the oppressive community life is the instinctive reaction of many protagonists often called ‘unhappy’. These are flights of laughably short radius, at times for a destination that is pitifully the tree in the garden; it may be a flight in a boat across the pond, or, just as pitifully, flights ending in disaster, longed for but impotent, therefore never undertaken, like just looking at the sea from the tree without having the courage to run away (10/2), or like that of the old man ‘of the coast’.15 Only one limerick closes with a flight happily achieved, that of the man (21/1) who with ‘amazing presence of mind’ bought a horse and galloped ‘away from the people of Basing’; equally rare and exceptional are the limericks in which the deviant becomes dangerous, furious or destructive. At the most he shelters in sporadic normality, in controlled iconoclasm and transgression, as in the case of the Londoner (46/1) who walks down the Strand with a pig in each hand. This man is guilty of ‘strange and unmannerly’ conduct, though strange during the day but normal in the evening, in accordance with the schizophrenia well known to Victorians and reflected here in geographical opposites, between London and his native town of Anerley. Such eccentricities can be overcome and the ranks of respectability re-entered, but only by giving up the free use of the imagination, thereby increasing the repression, albeit saving physical integrity. Some doubt is cast on the authenticity of such recoveries by the renewed and enhanced eccentricity, both of the illness and of the therapy: 14 Pouring tea into a hat may be the surrogate of the unseemly habit of urinating in public. 15 This limerick (44/1) is a parody of Tennyson’s St Simeon Stylites and other hermits, since he refuses mysticism and opts for the Biedermeier, biting into hot buttered toast at the arrival of the cold season.

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the man who eats live rabbits gives up the habit when he turns green, or another is healed from a symbolic plague by butter. Even stranger is the treatment thought up by the man who never can get any rest (45/2) and is made to spin like a top nose-down. The height of ironical integration and of regained unison between the individual and society is offered in the ‘old man of Dumbree’, who taught little owls good manners (184/2). 3. Rather than being relieved, the isolation of the individual is enhanced and ironically aggravated in the matrimonial and family limericks. Demonstrating Lear’s misogyny, they depict life in marriage as yet more alienated and hallucinated. I will cite only two of the most transparent and immediate examples, that of the disgusted husband who shuts his wife up in a box, and its pendant (28/2), where the nagging wife by mistake – or perhaps not – puts her husband in the oven. Wedded disappointment is always in the air; some of these limericks – a Bohemian woman marries a thief thus grieving her father (30/1); a Quaker marries a Jamaican only to repent immediately – seem to prelude a prompt separation. Thus the father figure who is the protagonist in some limericks seems to be a widower or else separated from a wife who never actually appears but has left him numerous offspring whom he feeds on incredible, sometimes quite horrifying diets.16 The only real friend of the man in Lear’s limericks is an animal, for the obvious reason that Lear was writing and reciting them to the Earl of Derby’s grandchildren, who could see such beasts in the family zoo. In spite of this, Lear admonished his young listeners that appearances were not to be trusted even in the animal kingdom: care and discrimination were needed. Among animals too enmity and repression might be found: stinging bees and wasps appear, together with the beetle and the threatening bull; other animals are slimy, untrustworthy, traitorous, like the monkey or the donkey; yet others appear to unquiet minds as terrifying, monstrously gigantic, almost prehistoric in size. However, in some cases friendly and fraternal relations of reciprocal, silent understanding, that repay the alienation undergone among humans, prevail between man and animal. Coexistence, physical nearness, supportive company are to be 16

24/1 is directly allusive in an autobiographical sense: a father of twenty feeds all his offspring on buns; Lear’s father had twenty-one children, one more.

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had.17 Hens, larks, wrens and owls nest in overgrown beards (3/1) and are welcomed on ladies’ hats (5/1); the owl returns to the man’s side in a small internal collection of limericks having him as the leading figure. Noah’s Ark materializes once more every time Lear puts on stage a character who trains animals: as a piper careless of danger, he tames piglets or hypnotizes a snake and makes it innocuous. He fearlessly rides a crocodile, his smile softens the heart of a ‘horrible’ cow; he dances a quadrille with a raven, a waltz with a fly; he lovingly feeds the fish even though the drink he gives them is indigestible and preposterous; and he even communicates with a frog. Flight from repressive society is often, unsurprisingly, carried out on the back of some animal, and the most improbable animals are used as fantastic means of transport; even the ‘quiet’ old man studies his books in the heart of the wood in the company of wrens and rooks. As the animals in these limericks are anthropomorphized and humanized, so the men themselves are frequently animalized: the crane-man, the duck-man, the bird-man, and in the first place the owl-man in the incomparable limerick 51/2 and its yet more impressive accompanying vignette. In these limericks and their respective illustrations, where there is a man who through familiarity with an animal has, chameleon-like, practically taken on its likeness, we find ourselves already in the world of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. § 220. Lear III: Further nonsense poems and prose What distinguishes the limericks from Lear’s (few) other poems is the former’s spasmodic concentration compared with the latter’s affable expansion. It is also the shade of shared elegy that overturns the glacial impassivity and sharpness of the limericks. A quite by-the-way production for children, these poems are nowhere near as great as the limerick cycle in spite of being just as, or even more popular, and being found in anthologies. Mostly ballads and fables, trochaic in rhythm and usually with alternating rhyme, regularly accompanied by one or more highly 17

Friendship with and threat of animals are contrasted in the last two limericks of the first enlarged edition (58/1 and 2): in the first the old man has an extremley long nose on which birds are perched; in the second a young woman is pursued and finally caught by a bear, and dies of a broken heart.

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appropriate illustrations, their protagonists are young people and humanized, speaking animals and inanimate objects. Here Lear’s nonsensical flair is satiated with the generous employment of linguistic invention, deformations and malapropisms in vocabulary, onomatopoeia and word-coining. Some expressions such as ‘syllabub sea’ and the ‘runcible spoon’ bring into play a semantic stratification and compression that looks ahead to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Evocative words not to be found in the dictionary or on maps have become proverbial, such as the ‘Bong-tree’, the ‘Chankly Bore’, the ‘Torrible Zone’ and names such as Quangle Wangle, whose gender and classification are profoundly mysterious, or as the ‘pobble’, another altogether indefinable creature out of Lear’s fantasy. The muddle-headed Jumblies set out to sea in a sieve, while the ‘dong’ in turn goes crazy after the departure of a ‘Jumbly’ girl with whom he is in love. All these beings bounce from poem to poem until they build up a small, private fablelike mythology. The narrative pretext for such evolutions is the voyage, a visionary sea voyage studded with many and various vicissitudes,18 begun inevitably with plenty of provisions and seemingly undertaken to find yet more food, just as plentiful and yet more unusual and exotic at every landing. So this voyage is made purely to whet the appetite and to stimulate that satisfaction in the listeners. In these ballads we always set out towards a land of plenty; accurate descriptions overflowing with names of tempting delicacies are not lacking. Lear’s nutritional fantasy is allowed full rein in ‘The New Vestments’, describing the eccentric dress of the old man made of various foods, promptly devoured by animals as soon as he sets foot outside his door, until he finds himself naked and, like the eccentric population of the limericks, he reforms. 2. Still less successful are two short prose tales. Excessively overburdened with the fabulous, one tells of the adventures of a foursome of youngsters who want to see the world. In the crew are a cat and that indefinable Quangle Wangle, taken aboard as cook and galley-person, shown in the 18

As if corresponding to the limericks’ protagonists, the duck and the kangaroo as well as the dragon-fly and the fly, in the short ballads with those names, are anxious to see the world and escape routine. In another ballad the nutcracker and the sugar tongs, tired of their ‘stupid existence’, run away on horseback.

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illustrations as a stylized, black creature made of stalks of hay and grass, with arms and legs that finish in long pointed fingers and toes. In the related poem ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat’ he has a fur-lined hat containing what amounts to a whole zoo. The innumerable adventures of the foursome have invariably something to do with nutritional and culinary operations: every place they visit spontaneously gives up its own products, and the sea offers fish with no effort on their part. Droves of intelligent, tender-hearted animals converse and entertain the four youngsters, although there are a few, like the rats, that are fussy and untrustworthy. Huge destruction is planned by other monstrously threatening animals, but in the end such disasters are averted. The occasional verbal flair saves an array of evolutions not entirely fresh and novel.19 In the more compact, symmetrical zoological fantasy of the seven lake families, each family sends its own five children out into the world with a totally unheeded warning intended to teach generosity and altruism. The ensuing punishment is death, at times inflicted at their own hands. In both tales Lear parodies the serious tradition – as in the evening prayer recited by the flies and in the farcical description of the moon’s appearance. Within the parody genre Lear left a number of cutting pieces, such as the famous and highly praised ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, and above all a strident ‘Eclogue’ in which, in the person of an Edwardus, he converses with John Addington Symonds on the bad weather in Cannes. Here, as a Virgilian Menalcas, Symonds’s consort Catherine acts as judge in a dispute, a judge who loses patience and declares both parties to be two nagging bores. In the domain of the cookbook parodies there are some flavoursome nonsense recipes that break into flagrant mocking, with the final instruction to throw the horrible mess out of the window, and other catalogues of botanical vignettes on non-existent flowers with high-flown, invented Latin names.

19

A rather over-exploited pun, ‘sage’ is at the root of a verse parable on human stupidity in ‘The Two Old Bachelors’. Wishing to cook a mouse but not having any sage and onion stuffing, the two poor old men are aided by a … sage, who upon hearing their request throws his book at them; on returning home they find the mouse has fled, so they decide to leave, never to be heard of again.

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§ 221. Lear IV: The landscape designer, painter and diarist Whoever simply enjoys the good mood of the nonsense poems and the ruffled humourism of Lear’s letters without the complementary lesson of the limericks can hardly believe that Lear’s childhood was a small hell, spoiled and made bitter by jealousy, resentment and some obscure episodes, even allegedly by rape.20 The financial collapse of his father, a speculator on the London Stock Exchange, flung the extraordinarily numerous family into chaos when Lear was still very young. His mother had eyes only for her husband, trying to ensure he had everything he needed while in prison; when he came out the couple lived alone, sending their children out into the world to earn their bread. Never forgotten by Lear, the parents’ ingratitude was compensated by his elder sister who had a small income of her own. She looked after him and helped him, and had him taught drawing after discovering his talent. At fifteen Lear was selling sketches of various kinds for a few pennies outside shops, bolstering his earnings by reproducing anatomical details for doctors and hospitals. By a stroke of luck, when he was twenty his volume of illustrations on psittacidae (parrots) won him the attention of the Earl of Derby, the owner of a magnificent private zoo at Knowsley, near Liverpool, who employed him as his children’s tutor. Since an early age Lear had been very delicate, suffering not only from chronic bronchitis and asthma but also from terrible attacks of epilepsy.21 As for Rossetti with Lizzie Siddal, poor health was the official reason for his never having married, though he might well have entertained a vague feeling of disgust for family life given his treatment at the hands of his parents.22 However, he resigned himself to life as a bachelor after at least one official offer of marriage to the daughter of a functionary, and perhaps another, kept secret and possibly never actually made, to an Anglo-Italian woman met while travelling. He consoled himself with the thought that marriage would have hindered his work. However, by his side were faithful domestics such as the polyglot Albanian Giorgio Cocali, and towards the 20 Chitty 1988, 14. 21 Kelen 1973, 55ff., traces the roots of Lear’s wandering – and, more questionably, certain features of his writing, such as the play on words – back to his epilepsy. 22 Noakes 1968, 45.

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end of his life, as in many limericks, an animal, the cat Foss. I have called Lear a misogynist, and he did like to be surrounded by male figures for whom he felt a rarely reciprocated attachment. His sympathies and inclinations were, therefore, homophile, but of the nature of that undecided, amorphous homophilia so common to many in his times, as in the case of his near-contemporary FitzGerald.23 2. His photographs, one in particular, show us Lear at a certain age in the character of an easy-going, very Pickwickian traveller, in an awful checked suit, glasses, bowler hat, thick beard and above all his inseparable sketch album; his nose was the excessively pronounced one of some of his limerick characters. Such snaps should not lead us astray, since his playful, joking side, witnessed by all his contemporaries, concealed his adult self in an umpteenth case of Victorian double personality. From his twenties Lear was as if constantly running away from himself, compensating and drowning his nerviness and bad moods in endless movement.24 These were the reasons for his Mediterranean travels and long stays on the Continent away from England, although he was in fact forced to this in order to acquire materials for his paintings. He painted them in series in an attempt to satisfy his real infatuation with exotic landscapes that were all the rage in English art at the time. The market was already saturated and very choosy, so these paintings gave him just enough, and not always quite that, to live and travel on. Some of the limericks’ place-names were spots Lear had visited. Apparently a lover of the easy life, over-weight and a chronic invalid, 23

See the balanced reconstruction of Lehman 1977, 30–2, while. Chitty overdoes his homosexuality, attributing to him infatuations, whether or not actually carried through, with hosts of young and not-so-young lovers. 24 In a letter dated 1860 (Noakes 1988, 168) Lear confesses to an everlasting wish to set out, as everyone has who would like to but cannot, and therefore ‘grimly they smile and say – oh! lovely clime! – cursing and pining away the while inwardly’. The selfportrait in verse, ‘How Pleasant to Know Mr Lear’, reveals and confirms that the marginalized, deviant eccentric of the limericks, often fairly resigned to deformity, is Lear himself. He has the same physical idiosyncrasies, the same vaguely transgressive tendencies and weird way of dressing (it is difficult to say whether he is wearing a raincoat or a nightgown); and he is the victim of the same aggressive derision on the part of boys and society.

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he set out on laborious, uncomfortable treks in countries on the outskirts of civilization and lacking proper means of communication, where the danger from infective diseases and, even greater, from political turmoil was always in the offing. After 1837 he lived almost permanently in Rome for almost ten years; then he travelled through Greece and the Aegean, in Albania and Palestine in 1848–1849; and he went as far as Egypt and along the Nile in 1854–1855, from there to Corfu and Malta and back to Rome. In 1872, thanks to the aid of the Lord Governor General of India, he visited a good deal of that country.25 In 1885, at seventy-three, he confessed that he had lived at least fifty years of his life in Italy, where he died in 1888 in a villa he had built in Sanremo and named after Tennyson. 3. A minor product of Victorian eclecticism, Lear was a part-time writer. The other part was what really counted for him. He was an illustrator, graphic artist, cartoonist and painter who exhibited regularly or at least put his paintings on sale, almost all of them landscape oil paintings after 1860. His whole life was spent in the service of this activity in the field of figurative and graphic arts, of which his writing could be described as a surrogate or collateral product, or even a momentary distraction required by the mirage of extra profit. As the follower of two adjacent but independent arts, painting and literature, he shared the ambivalence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the whole Pre-Raphaelite constellation, who boasted similar eclecticism in all the seven founding members of the Brotherhood, and also in satellites such as Patmore and the second Pre-Raphaelite generation of Morris and Swinburne. Lear himself was indeed a belated, elderly Pre-Raphaelite satellite when, on coming back to England after his first ten-year stay in Rome, he rather curiously enrolled in the same art school attended by Rossetti, and like him had a good deal of trouble in getting himself accepted as a pupil at the Royal Academy in January 1850, at the not very tender age of thirty-eight.26 A few of the 1848 Pre-Raphaelites or simple supporters were at the same time painter-illustrators and just poets 25

The diary of his journey to Petra in 1858 reflects the Victorians’ amazed, dazzled encounter with a fabulous buried city, such as Tennyson’s Timbuctoo (§ 80.2). 26 Lear remained at the Royal Academy only nine months, until November 1850; after that date he mainly studied on his own. However, having decided to become

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and children’s story-writers. Lear came close to these, Woolner, Allingham and Christina Rossetti, whose debt to the nonsense and nursery-rhyme tradition must not be undervalued.27 His last work as an illustrator was that of preparing 200 illustrations for Tennyson’s poetry, focusing on its ‘scenic touches’. His eclecticism also extended to the field of music, since a number of Tennyson’s lyrics were, if not illustrated, set to music by him. 4. Posterity partly or completely inverted these roles. While today he is just a name as a painter or cartoonist, he is still reprinted in anthology selections to satisfy popular demand for those diaries that served as memory joggers for the vedutista and that Lear himself published in his lifetime to obtain some further income. Printed in 1851 and admired by Tennyson, who wrote a poem on it, Lear’s Greek-Albanian diary shows the painter in words, almost the landscape photographer, still predominant over the graphic artist. He observes the journey’s events and the out-ofordinary humanity with humour and tolerance, never with scandalized disapproval of its idiosyncrasies. However, in order of merit, the best diaries and the ones that most deserve to survive are the Italian (Abruzzo and Calabria) and the Corsican ones, since, in the former especially, anecdotes and sketches prevail over detailed, rather wearisome landscape descriptions. In the Abruzzo diary there is a hilarious story which is a forerunner of today’s Italian jokes on the Carabinieri, in which Lear tells how he was taken for none other than Palmerston by a Carabiniere who had seen the seal on his passport, a misunderstanding later sorted out by an officer when the unfortunate tourist – Lear himself – was about to be thrown into prison. The Calabrian scenery – with its deep, leafy gorges, its shady woods inevitably concealing a monastery, its processions through village streets – was imaginatively superimposed by Lear onto Radcliffe’s novels, Radcliffe having in turn taken inspiration from the iconography of Salvator Rosa. Both Radcliffe and Rosa are recalled quite openly in the text. Structured as a series of visits to towns and places in Calabria, where Lear was hosted and welcomed by local personalities, this diary contains

27

a painter, he took lessons from Holman Hunt. He was fond of defining himself a second-generation Pre-Raphaelite. § 202.1, especially n. 64.

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a gallery of sketches that magnify strangeness, tics and abnormal conduct, thus appearing to be prose limericks or perhaps a preparatory exercise for such compositions.28 This diary was begun in the summer of 1847 on the eve of the uprising in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, so Lear actually experienced the underlying revolutionary ferment and witnessed the nobility’s scarcely hidden fear; he was even taken for a suspect on more than one occasion. The final pages describe the suspense before the revolt, and the diary closes with the scene of the people’s jubilation after the king had been driven out. The very detailed diary of the 1868 tour in Corsica registers with surprise the proud pro-French nationalism of functionaries, but also the residual pro-Italianism among the guest-house owners, who are (or at least appear to be) all widows. 5. Among the most pleasant of Victorian epistles, Lear’s letters attempt to hide his innermost feelings, and nearly always succeed. However, an indefinite number but probably very many letters were destroyed by the correspondents themselves or have been lost. He used to repeat that life could and should be lived extracting from it all possible enjoyment and well-being.29 Thus we never hear him protest or blame or express bitterness, even when tormented by poor health or lack of success with his paintings. Few others had his capacity to depict himself without any heroics; he knew his own limits and mocked them. These letters are frequently accompanied by sketches and caricatures of himself that exhibit many features – long legs, the ‘globular’ shape – of the poor old men of the limericks. Being in temperament one who avoided debate, whether political or religious, the few times he actually takes a stand we find him a real traditionalist: he is 28

Characters all set to become the object of a limerick are the Calabrian noble lady who only answers ‘nirr si’ and ‘nirr no’; the baron who lets off a ‘hurricane of whys’; and Ciccio the cicero who at the end of every utterance says ‘dighi dòghi dà’, which appears to be the trigger generating the ballad ‘The Courtship of the Yonghi-Bonghy-Bò’. It is no coincidence that a Calabrian baron is ‘globular’ like the ‘person from Hurst’ in a limerick (15/1); nor is it by chance that the Calabrians too are divided and classified according to Brobdingnagian corpulence and Lilliputian smallness. A hostel-owner of the first type is at the centre of an enjoyable anecdote when she covers Lear and his companion with Italian curses because they refuse to spend the night in her filthy inn. 29 Noakes 1988, 178.

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happy when and where all the English are happy, and seethes in front of other sights, according to preconceived reactions. For example, we find him in Rome hurling the usual barbs at the sight of the Pope on his throne and the cardinals – a further locus classicus of anti-Catholic Victorian letterwriting – and at all the indecencies of Roman superstition.30 Having passed unscathed through the whole Tractarian upset, we find him with Ruskinian disgust in Venice. The reason for our inability to discover the real Lear in his letters is that, like those of FitzGerald but for totally different reasons, they were not written first and foremost for the purpose of informing, but are rather a continuous gush of verbal games and mannerisms. There are even a few letters written in doggerel, full of malapropisms or in rhyme and other acrobatics, or in the form of charades; others are visual letters in the form of a spiral. All in all, we find ourselves in an atmosphere of conscious linguistic effervescence, not unknown to the youngest Victorians who overcame the habit in time with a more practical and more serious tone; but Lear did not. In him, this tendency becomes even more pronounced. § 222. Humourists Apart from the innocuous, impeccable vers de société of Frederick Locker-Lampson (1821–1895), the Victorian heir to Praed and previously to Prior, humourism after Lear is almost invariably – and only apparently gently – satirical, polemical and therefore political. Before Carroll and others born after 1830, the stage was occupied by extemporary poets who, except perhaps for one, were not of the first rank. First in time came William Brighty Rands (1823–1882), whose satirical temperament was stimulated by a Dickensian clerkship as a stenographer in the House of Commons. The author on whom he based his main work, Lilliput Legends, is however Swift. In these fairy-tales with their delightful developments, the novel Gulliver sees a downsized and overturned world through Swift’s optical 30 Reaching the foot of Mount Athos, Lear severely attacks (9.10.1856; Noakes 1988, 139) the hermit’s life in exceptionally vibrant terms, in order to maintain that one is closer to God in labouring through everyday life. With a very rare open statement (ibid., 216), Lear attacks the painter Holman Hunt’s literalist religious fanaticism, thus showing himself to be a reductionist who does not believe in miracles.

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device, a world requiring a magnifying glass for its observer to return it to its natural size. Rands is in fact the humourist poet closest to Lear in his impatience with rigid protocol and his need to deface it. The episode of a Petronella who doesn’t want to go to church is an extended limerick. She is changed into a statue of stone at the desire of her grandmother, an adult figure embodying the instance of repression, as in Lear. Songs of the Governing Classes is a yet more explicit title of a collection of eccentricities by the versatile writer Robert Brough (1828–1860). In the bubbly ballad ‘The Marquis of Carabas’ the corrupt and ailing lord’s arrival by coach is greeted with a running commentary by the salacious, telegraphic, multicoloured murmurings of good-for-nothing onlookers. Reminiscent of Hogarth’s ‘progresses’, Brough’s other satires in ballad form from the manin-the-street’s point of view strike at figures of a penniless, mentally hazy and libertine nobility. Brough’s democratic ideas and the battle against privileges and minor tyranny come out in a poem on Lady Godiva. Yet this humourist also left nonsense rhymes that are powerful and racy, in which the adult acts like a child and indulges his weaknesses, many forbidden things being allowed in carnivalesque situations. 2. Other targets of humourism and satire were science – such as the rewriting of Aristophanes’ Birds by Mortimer Collins (1827–1876), full of banter aimed at the positivists – and religion. A little-known masterpiece of Victorian irreverence, bordering on hilarious comedy and Catholic joking, yet a metric tour de force and an impressive adaptation of terza rima, is ‘Dudman in Paradise’ by the highly gifted, eclectic Sebastian Evans (1830–1909). As in other amusing parodies of Christian dogma, gospel episodes and stories of the saints, Evans is here careful to warn his readers that the episode comes from an anonymous author and that he is simply passing it on, a distancing stratagem that succeeded in limiting his notoriety as an iconoclast with contemporary readers, who took him for an author ‘as pious as Milton’. Dudman is the ‘villein’ of the prince; dying at precisely the same moment as his master, he wants to sneak into paradise in his wake. The satire is therefore targeted first and foremost on the worldly clergy gathered around the prince’s deathbed to save his soul, but in reality to get their hands on his legacy, while no priest is concerned about saving the soul of the poor yokel. It then becomes an unbeliever’s

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satire on the myth of paradise and salvation in afterlife, and on human injustice and class divisions on which divine justice is modelled. About to be driven from the gates of paradise for his poverty, Dudman’s ‘wily brain’ perseveres and wins through, thanks to a series of responses showing all his mischievous, cuttingly witty spirit. He obliquely reminds Peter, the ‘janitor of Heaven’, of the crowing of the cock; St Thomas, of his little faith after the Resurrection; St Paul, that he had been a persecutor before being received with open arms by Jesus. Referring to an account from unspecified ‘Jewish annals’, Evans also wrote a parody of the Apocalypse in ‘The Fifteen Days of Judgment’, in which he gives rein to his taste for the grim and cataclysmic, and for archaic words that sound gloomily threatening and terrifying. § 223. Chartist poetry No really great poet arose from the militant poetry of the radicals, socialists and Chartists. It would be true to say that the greatest Chartist poet and poem are Clough and The Bothie.1 Such as it was, and quite apart from the contingencies triggering their proclamations in verse, the fame of the so-called political poets survived in spite of this label and through the greater popularity of their nature, lyrical and even erotic poetry. This is the case of the pioneer of Victorian political poetry, Ebenezer Elliott (1781–1849), who owed his popularity to his Corn Law Rhymes (1831), denouncing the injustice of the laws that to all practical effects taxed bread, the staple diet of the poor and the labourers. Today, however, his poetry is appreciated for the elegance of its descriptions of natural scenery, and perhaps also for some educational or epigrammatic sketches exemplifying the law of surplus value and of the mechanism of capitalistic accumulation. The folk chorus ‘The Song of the Lower Classes’ of the agitator turned MP Ernest Jones (1819–1869) has the rhythm and ear-catching memorability of a slogan, but had its refrain – ‘we’re so very, very low’– really been accepted by the class to which it was addressed, no political conscience would have resulted. The most prolific and prolix Victorian political poet 1

Cf. AVP, 178–204, for an extended and detailed overview of Chartist poetry against the background of Clough’s poems.

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was Gerald Massey (1828–1907). A self-taught man who was spared factory work, he was perhaps George Eliot’s model for Felix Holt in the novel of the same name. However, Massey cannot really be defined a Chartist poet since he started writing poetry at about the age of twenty when the decade of proletarian and consequently poetical radicalism was nearing its end. In fact he joined that bland, philanthropic form of socialism, openly declaring itself Christian, led by Kingsley and Frederick Denison Maurice. His poetry also reflects the reformism of the 1850s and a time of relative peace among the classes, above all the reactionary, often irrational celebration of that infallible coagulator that was British heroism past and present, and the chauvinist patriotism and war-mongering passed off as defence of oppressed freedom anywhere.2 His career continued for years, not always exclusively dedicated to poetry; in any case, his political poetry alternated with a conventional lyrical, idyllic and religious vein which in time eclipsed it.3 § 224. The Spasmodics* Three major poems which founded and typified between 1839 and 1853 the ‘Spasmodic’ school in the most distinctive sense of the term are, in order 2

3

*

AVP, 271–4, notes in detail the relative, perhaps casual, similarities between Tennyson’s Maud and some of Massey’s almost contemporary compositions against the backdrop of the Crimean War. In addition, Massey’s ‘Sir Richard Grenville’s Last Fight’ (1859) is based on the same heroic event as Tennyson’s later ballad ‘Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet’. Numerous historical poems were composed by Walter Thornbury (1828–1876) in the same vein as that of painters who depict one single subject throughout their whole production. Some also focus on skirmishes between Cavaliers and Roundheads from the Jacobite viewpoint. In one of them, three Jacobite anti-Cromwellians sing in a tavern an incisive refrain based on word-play: ‘God send this Crum-well-down’, ‘crum’ referring to the ‘crumb’ or the bread they were dipping into their beer. For general information on the Spasmodics see J. H. Buckley, The Victorian Temper, London 1952, 41–65 (a review of poets and critics connected to the movement), M. A. Weinstein, W. E. Aytoun and the Spasmodic Controversy, New Haven, CT 1968, and ‘Spasmodic Poetry and Poetics’, special issue of VP (42, 2004), ed. J. Rudy and C. LaPorte.

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of publication, Festus by Philip James Bailey, A Life-Drama by Alexander Smith and Balder by Sidney Dobell.1 They were all the rage during those fifteen years, establishing a vogue based on the lush blossoming of tropes and rhetorical and bombastic diction. Their megalomaniac form was prevalently dramatic and the titular figure was caught in an unsolved hubris of obscure, sublime ponderings. Created by the felicitous metaphorical genius of the Victorians, the name was altogether appropriate, but less plausible and justifiable when applied to a school.2 Rather than speaking of Spasmodic poets, it is more appropriate to speak of Spasmodic poems, and poems that were not in themselves the masterpieces of their respective authors in two cases out of three, and poems that unquestionably stand out among the rest of a production decidedly less spasmodic. Contemporaries soon remembered the works but much less their authors, because the authors themselves awoke no biographical curiosity and failed to create a personal myth as they had perhaps hoped for. We know very little of Bailey, which is strange seeing that he lived to the age of eighty-six, but spending many years in a sort of ivory tower far from the metropolis. He was therefore known simply as the author of Festus, and indeed became known as ‘Festus’ Bailey. Not only Bailey, but Dobell and Smith too were not Londoners, and felt outsiders in search of their own identity (an identity that for Smith, a Scot, was on 1 2

The trio of Spasmodic poems can be enlarged with yet more unremembered works such as Orion (1843) by Richard Hengist Horne, and Gerald (1842) by J. Westland Marston. On Ebenezer Jones see § 229. According to Buckley 1952, 253 n. 2, the name was coined jointly by Charles Kingsley and by the Scottish poet and academic W. E. Aytoun, the former slightly before the latter. In 1853 Kingsley was in fact the author of an essay on Alexander Smith and Pope. In its own small way, ‘Spasmodic’ is therefore part of the long list of mocking or even derisory labels – Gothic, Baroque, Romantic, etc. – of which literary history is full. Yet it contained an implicitly pathological and neurotic nuance and the suspicion of a psychiatric blemish. As such it was in fact used by the psychiatric science of the time, which included within the symptoms of ‘spasmodic neurosis’ language ailments such as over-use of tropes, word-play and double meanings (AVP, 253). Dickens, however, frequently used the adjective satirically and playfully in Dombey and Son targeting the minor character Miss Tox (Volume 5, § 42.1 n. 200). The epithet was well chosen if we think that Spasmodic poetry came to be summarised in Bailey’s line: ‘we should count time by heart-throbs’.

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a national scale). Those three Spasmodic literary works sprang from poets whose natural habitat was uncorrupted nature, though they were exiled in the urban inferno; in ironical contrast, and with a kind of retaliation, they had grey, prosaic middle-class clerical lives, and their dreams of glory were bitterly frustrated. As a consequence none of them made much of a splash or was welcomed as a permanent member of London literary cliques, a further confirmation of the alienation and chronic isolation that marked Victorian poets.3 It was the enthusiastic Scottish critic George Gilfillan who spoke about a Spasmodic ‘school’, and who launched and supported Dobell and Smith, although those directly concerned were not aware of such an affinity. Both actually lived for some years in a fellowship of life and art, but issuing no contagious proclamations, let alone enrolling proselytes. However embryonic, the Spasmodic was, with Pre-Raphaelitism, the only other poetic ‘school’ in England in the mid-nineteenth century. There is no evidence, though, of any personal relations between them and the supposed leader of the movement, Bailey. 2. The ideal and even literal matrix of the three Spasmodic poems is Goethe’s Faust. They can be seen as symptoms of the interest and wide resonance of Goethe’s masterpiece in England in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Ignoring Carlyle’s famous prompting, however, Goethe was opened without at the same time closing Byron’s Cain and Manfred. The three poems are therefore late by-products of Romanticism, whose demise was felt yet more poignantly and further bewailed by young poets in an aesthetic milieu that, as I have often mentioned, predicted a rapid, inexorable loss of status for poetry, in line with the threatening utilitarian diagnoses of Macaulay, Fox and Mill (and also according to the authoritative

3

The Spasmodics were to a certain extent also excluded from literary circles: they posed a threat to the dominant culture since they sprang from the proletarian class, which in the common opinion could not and should not produce poets, only work-force (AVP, 169). The Spasmodic-wrecker Aytoun was as much of a conservative as the Spasmodic-defender Gilfillan was a liberal. It is not however true that this divergence was due to the fact that the Spasmodics spoke with unprecedented frankness on politics, marriage and sex: Barrett Browning and Clough spoke about politics, and Clough about sex and marriage, with just as much daring, if not more.

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classicist and rationalist preface to his Philip Van Artevelde by the dramatist Sir Henry Taylor).4 The time of Festus’s appearance, 1839, was one of open hostility towards lyrical and imaginative poetry, mistreated by bilious critics headed by the notorious Christopher North.5 Yet, ever since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the progress of science had fostered in England the myth of the demiurge, the mirage of the Titanic challenge and the quest to overcome the limits of human knowledge. Bailey resembled a debuting Browning and for fifty years was piétinant sur place. Dobell and Smith instead descend from Keats and Shelley, and were in a position to take advantage of that very recent updating of Romanticism that had taken place before 1850 in Tennyson’s poetry. In a looser sense, Spasmodism actually arose a few years before Festus, involving almost all the major poets appearing after the end of Romanticism. It surfaced with the early Faustian, visionary works of the young Tennyson and with Pauline by Browning, whose 1835 Paracelsus might be awarded pride of place as the founder of early Victorian, Spasmodic Faustism. Again in a general sense, Elizabeth Barrett’s more or less contemporary youthful works, and even some of her later ones, may be considered Spasmodic.6 The last sparks of this fashion are to be seen in Tennyson’s Maud – which dwelt on a public event, the Crimean War, which is also one of the points of juncture of two of the historical Spasmodics – and even more distinctly in Arnold’s ‘Empedocles on Etna’. It was indeed Arnold the critic and self-critic who, in his 1853 Preface, liquidated any Romantic resurgence, any morbid, unhealthy, twisted and intellectualistic contortion that did not flow into action. Whilst never actually naming them, Arnold’s Preface painted a perfect portrait of the Spasmodic Titan, apparently its first and most immediate target. Before 1853, Bailey, Dobell and Smith had been read and reviewed with respect and admiration, albeit mixed with some reservations, by all major poets and critics. In a very contentious piece Clough found no difficulty in placing Smith ahead of Arnold himself, and that review irritated Arnold exceedingly. After Arnold’s Preface 4 5 6

§ 230. § 81.1. Barrett expressly dedicated two sonnets to Dobell.

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§ 225. Bailey. ‘Festus’ and vulgarised Faustism

the inversion in tendency became quite obvious, and the accepted attitude suddenly became one of hostility, ridicule, even parody, such as that of the poet and critic Aytoun who, as early as 1854, made fun in his Firmilian of the Titanic hero and of stylistic eccentricity. After 1854, however, critics continued to attack a movement in its death throes, or become precociously innocuous. Smith and Dobell both died romantically young, the former at thirty-eight, the same age as the latter when he stopped writing, paralysed by partial infirmity, physical and mental. Incredibly long-lived, Bailey died in 1902 after spending his life touching up and thus damaging his early works.7 Dealing with the Spasmodic school today means of course doing archaeological dig. As Patmore admitted in his ample, 1854 review mainly on Smith, the only possible way to save Spasmodism is, as happens with any spasmodic phenomenon, that of highlighting its least spasmodic features. § 225. Bailey.* ‘Festus’ and vulgarised Faustism A native of Nottingham, started in the direction of poetry by a father who was an ingenious jack of all trades, Philip James Bailey (1816–1902) began Festus when he was only nineteen. First published in 1839, the poem was reprinted and substantially lengthened over four successive revisions, the last in 1889, demanded by an even huger success with the American public. Over exactly fifty years of its gestation, Bailey took it from 10,000 to the impossible figure of 40,000 lines. In the last edition, which Bailey claimed to be the final one, a number of satellite works were amalgamated in part or wholly. These secondary works had gone totally unnoticed. It may be believed that today very few people would have the patience necessary 8

7

Buckley 1952, 60, improbably argues that Spasmodism ended up being channelled into Wilkie Collins’s psychological mystery novels.

*

As well as Festus, Bailey was the author of The Angel World (1850), The Mystic (1855), The Age (1858) and Universal Hymn (1867). E. Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, London 1912, 61–93; A. D. McKillop, ‘A Victorian Faust’, PMLA, XL (1925), 743–68; E. Goldschmid, ‘Der Gedankengehalt von Baileys Festus’, Englische Studien, LXVII (1932), 228–37 (a mere summary of the second, 1845 edition); G. A. Black, ‘Bailey’s Debt to Goethe’s Faust in his Festus’, Modern Language Review, XXVIII (1933), 166–75.

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to read right through this 1889 edition. Whoever manages to do so is irritated from its very preface by its heavy, tortuous, twisted style, necessitating notes and explanations as if it were a passage of Latin poetry. The construct is often complicated by the fact that the poet encloses various subordinate clauses within the sentence, so its conclusion is delayed, somewhat similarly to the German syntactic rule. Verbs or possible participles float around apparently freely on the page with no immediate or obvious syntactical connection. Unusual words, invented and coined – verbs above all, created with the prefixes im-, in- or dis- – make the reading difficult, increasing in number as the work proceeds and forming a small personal glossary. After a few lines of introduction, every scene immediately sinks into a quagmire of captious disquisitions that become more and more repetitive, the evident result of frequenting the domains of metaphysical and theological speculation and of an ambitious attempt at re-elaboration and synthesis. The author of this work is the last ‘grammarian’ of the nineteenth century, the last encyclopaedist able to wander through the whole known canon, literary, biblical, philosophical and scientific. His ever-flowing eloquence can only be compared with that shown in Browning’s Sordello. Structurally the 1889 poem consists of half a hundred episodes or scenes in blank verse, interspersed with and varied every now and then by choruses and songlets in rhyme. These scenes follow an introduction and are closed by an envoy; all are preceded by a synopsis which in its didactic or telegraphic clarity provides a useful short-cut and could actually replace the sequence of events and the copious debate it introduces. Festus is in fact a denial of the dramatic principle at least in its nearly total lack of action, where the classical drama, unitary at least in spirit, depends on the occasional lightning-quick rapidity of events and of their overturnings. Festus, however, is an argumentative drama in which the characters hold forth for dozens of pages and often in thousands of lines with speeches that are scarcely interactive and seem to be full-fledged orations. The scenario is mainly hallucinatory and visionary – stellar space, the circles of the old Ptolemaic cosmology, up to the divine throne – and is anyhow deformed and weird even when it intends to be realistic, as in the scenes set in ‘Faustian’ places such as the market, the churchyard, the countryside, or during folk festivals. 2. The Faustism of Festus is modernized and ‘remade’ since Lucifer returns to earth to damn the Everyman, that is Festus, for the second

§ 225. Bailey. ‘Festus’ and vulgarised Faustism

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time, and is forced to undergo a second dethroning and an unpredictable redemption, he being the divine Antagonist, therefore utterly unredeemable. In other words, Festus is an overturned Faust when one considers that it is not Festus who undergoes Lucifer’s temptations, rather the latter who is constantly catechized and refuted. The parable of a post-Romantic, Victorian Faust is set within the debate between faith and science in the early English nineteenth century. Bailey formulates a very prudent answer regarding the highly risky prerogatives of nascent scientism. Not only did scientism envisage the figure of a new, all-powerful demiurge possessing semi-divine creative powers, it also took a stand on the question of faith and it queried traditional authority. Lucifer really does intend to frighten Festus with the hypostasis, much feared in Bailey’s time, of an epicurean God too busy in ‘eternally adoring himself ’. In his own way, therefore, Bailey writes one of the many – indeed one of the earliest – Victorian conservative and orthodox responses to German biblical criticism. Faustism appears through further literary citations: the pact, the parodic scene of the jewels given to Festus by a woman named Helen, obviously recalling Goethe. These citations, however, fall within the atmosphere of a careful modernization and contamination. Festus has the merit of having cleared the way for the greatest (non-spasmodic) Faustian work of the English nineteenth century, Clough’s Dipsychus. Lucifer in particular tends to debase sublime situations into a rude, unimaginative tone, and shows the same cynical, vulgar ‘little voice’ that he possesses in Clough. But Dipsychus is quite unlike Festus in his tormented, insoluble religious doubt and in his sexual troubles.1 As well as a Faustian or Clough-like character, Festus becomes a venerable sage who, after the halfway point in the poem, goes on to impart ever more frequent teachings in line with the best orthodoxy, communicating them in particular to his look-alike, a student animated even more than he himself is by ambitious ‘Faustian’ intentions. The idea of the poem was to the same measure inspired by 1

§ 143. When the curtain rises Festus is in every way similar to Dipsychus in declaring his metaphysical doubts and also a love affair that ended badly; the nineteenth scene carries fleshly temptation to its conclusion, since Festus meets a Helen and withdraws with her in private, neglecting his previous lover. He himself sets forth this diagnosis: ‘I cannot bear to be alone, / I cannot mix with men’.

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the European angelological poems of the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, by Klopstock and De Vigny (the latter also influencing Barrett Browning’s The Seraphim),2 and obviously by the Divina Commedia. His effort was that of writing philosophical and theological poetry in the wake of the Paradiso, as well as a metaphysical, visionary journey and the cognitive exploration of the afterlife culminating in the encounter with God. Exactly at the mid-point of the poem, Festus is sent into the world by God’s own voice, like a Dantesque missionary and pilgrim, to teach divine law. The poem aims to illustrate the road to be undertaken once more, in a different historical atmosphere threatening to interrupt it, towards faith, the knowledge of God and the reunion of creation with him, according to an unquestioning belief that, as in the medieval summae, intervenes where reason admits its defeat: ‘where finite reason ends, / Faith leaps’. 3. Every act of this Cyclopic via salvationis consists in a close confrontation between Festus and Lucifer. This confrontation runs to thousands of lines and is never brought to a conclusion; indeed, scene after scene, it starts out again from square one. The drama inevitably closes with the victory of Festus who refuses the demon’s destructive words, always finding the thread leading to God and his inflexible governance of the world. In the whole poem there is not one single in-depth mention of the Fall, that primeval stain that tormented and obsessed the Victorian imagination, except for the claim that the earth is so beautiful and innocent that the Fall might appear never to have happened. The story is very vaguely set in the world’s last days, in the immediate eschatological vicinity of the Judgement. But Bailey is no tragic, calamity-inclined apocalyptic, but an irenic neo-illuminist who firmly believes in God’s plan for redemption, a God who cannot really envisage the damnation of this world, allowing each one to recover. Festus understands, well before most flummoxed Victorian doubters, that the ‘irate’ God, when he comes to judge us, will be ‘mild’. In one of the many farcical scenes, Lucifer believes that his triumph is imminent when he sees humanity sunk in debauchery, yet he is forced to run away by a long tirade

2

§ 64.1.

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§ 226. Dobell. The second Titan

from Festus who foresees a renewed world. Like Bailey, in Sartor Resartus Carlyle had just said that created man should have been annihilated in order to be re-transformed and eventually reunited with God. Bailey actually speaks of a divine ‘trilogy’, of a three-part story structured in creation, destruction and recreation. Evil exists and God cannot annihilate it; but this does not in turn imply an underlying Manichaeism, but a challenge to enhance and empower free will. In another scene, the twentieth, one of the most endless of the poem, proof is furnished and brought to fruition that the whole of creation tends towards God and reveals him: within the frame of a Dantesque hyperuranian journey going right back through the whole of history, the greatest spirits file in front of the protagonist from ancient days down to present times, united in the common search for the Absolute and Truth, although in diverse forms that may even be unconscious and negative. At the end of the vision Festus faces the spirit of his beloved Angela, already taken up to heaven, a ‘blessed damozel’ who will pray for him and meanwhile foretells his future salvation. Along the lines of Browning’s recent Paracelsus, the poet depicted by Festus is the vehicle of truth and love, a poet who loves all forms of life, able to absorb and re-echo in himself all animal and vegetable life. This poet is modelled on Shelley, celebrated in many metapoetic poems by Elizabeth Barrett3 which were already familiar in 1839. § 226. Dobell.* The second Titan Equally precocious, Sydney Dobell (1824–1874) was, like Bailey, of a very religious temperament, though tending towards a liberalism equidistant 4

3

Shelley is also celebrated in A Life-Drama by Smith (§ 227), where the protagonist Walter in Scene IX maintains that the poet is a living repertory of images, and ‘draws images from everything’.

*

Poetical Works, ed. J. Nichol, 2 vols, London 1875; Thoughts on Art, Philosophy and Religion, ed. J. Nichol, London 1876; Poems, London 1887 (an anthology of the best compositions, with an anonymous introduction). R. Preyer, ‘Sydney Dobell and the Victorian Epic’, University of Toronto Quarterly, XXX (1961), 163–79; M. Pittock, ‘Dobell, Balder, and Post-Romanticism’, Essays in Criticism, XLII (1992), 220–42; M. Westwater, The Spasmodic Career of Sydney Dobell, Lanham, MD 1992.

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from both Catholic and Calvinist extremisms. He too was an amateur, fastidious student of philosophy and aesthetics. However, he differs from Bailey in his curious utopian pragmatism and especially a notably active and combative interest in contemporary historical events. This is reflected in his political poetry denouncing tyranny and supporting the continental independence movements of the mid-nineteenth century. This interest is his most novel, long-lasting feature, and is the reverse side of Balder, the Spasmodic poem which for a very short time drew him to the attention of his contemporaries. The poem may be read autobiographically as a fantastic compensation for a Titanism that was repressed and frustrated. Dobell’s father was a wine merchant from Kent, his mother the daughter of a radical politician and founder of a religious sect modelled on primitive Christianity. Dobell grew up loving poetry and dreaming of the heroics and ideals of the past; more prosaically, he was obliged from early age to spend several hours every day keeping the books for his father’s business. A model fiancé, then husband, and his wife’s inseparable life-long companion, he continued in business even when his first successes made him moderately well known. After he fell a prey to the most serious of his various illnesses, his Titanism decreased and was defused in the attempt to set up an innovative system of cooperatives in the wine trade. His physical and poetic decline was due to accidents that were quite trivial, indeed almost ironical for a poet suffering from a serious case of demiurgic Titanism: a fall from a horse, and, in a sort of parody of Empedocles, another into a hole in the ground in Naples, where he had wanted to experience St Paul’s sensations on his arrival in Italy.1 When he published Balder Dobell was thirty as was his protagonist, yet he was careful to write an excusatio non petita: he felt the absolute need, as had Browning in his preface to Paracelsus, to state that the author and his dramatic projection could not and should not be confused one with the other. 2. Dobell made his first appearance in print in 1847 with an anti-war poem inspired by the massacre of the Sikhs at Ferozepore, but the public theme immediately countered, or rather was amalgamated with, the lyrical motive of the end of love, an end always due to the misfortune of one of the two lovers, often for the imagined death in war of a loved one or a son. 1

Dobell’s Titanism was further encouraged by his wife’s illnesses; she was a life-long invalid.

§ 226. Dobell. The second Titan

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This theme is developed in sober accents and a respectful firmness reminiscent of Wordsworth. In 1850 Dobell already responded to the irresistible attraction of dramatic opulence with The Roman, a verse drama achieving immediate success thanks to contemporary enthusiasm for the Italian cause. Although the drama is actually set in Milan, the cause in question was naturally that of the Roman Republic that had been founded and had been rapidly crushed in Rome. The protagonist is a tribune disguised as a monk who dreams of reinstating a republic by means of his inflammatory speeches to the weary, disappointed people. The drama stayed for some time in the memory of its first readers, even of Patmore who was always quite critical of the Spasmodics, thanks to the opening speech of the false monk, a piece in the grand style pivoting on the somewhat trite personification of Rome as a lost mother overflowing with unrequited maternal love. In the parallel sentimental plot the patriot is enamoured of a Milanese noblewoman who saves him from a certain death sentence by offering her body to a pro-Austrian libertine. Undaunted, she eventually stabs him before the lover’s execution and escapes, having obtained a safe conduct pass. The Roman, however, has nothing of an action drama; as a static and slow historical drama, often interrupted by lyrical, idyllic interludes, it is the opposite, to give just one contemporary example, of a drama perhaps even too full of action such as Taylor’s Philip Van Artevelde, as we shall see. At the same time it differs from Casa Guidi Windows and Amours de Voyage, in which Barrett Browning and Clough had dealt with the same events from the epic-lyrical viewpoint and with realistic and narrative accuracy, the former, and in terms of a satirical and playful transposition, the latter. In two scenes Dobell attempts the farcical sketch, setting the first in a tavern where Milanese people with carnivalesque nicknames jest with exuberantly over-the-top Italianisms. Even more carnivalesque is the trial during which the patriot is condemned to death, accused by irresolute, talkative caricatural women. In its occasionally grisly action and in the figure of its protagonist, The Roman perhaps owes something to Browning’s Pippa Passes, although the ending is quite different.2 2

Dobell’s passion for all things Italian is confirmed by his ode on Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand, and by one of his very last poems commenting on the defeat at Mentana.

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3. After The Roman Dobell specialized in dramatic monologues and in obsessive, unbalanced laments of women who have lost their husbands or next-of-kin. The trigger for his poetry between 1850 and 1860, his most productive period, was the Crimean War which aroused enormous interest in the literature of the time, since it was practically the only war in which Britain became involved since the Napoleonic wars and after more than thirty years of peace. This public motif thus flowed into an abstract situation that Dobell had dealt with rather frequently since his beginnings. Truly ‘spasmodic’ compositions, expressly outpourings of the mind of the crazy and the paranoid and springing from situations bordering on delirium, began to appear in 1850 and followed one after the other, foreshadowing by a few years the sensationalistic, macabre manner of the late Tennyson. As always happens in poets suffering from a tendency towards stylistic tumefaction, formal constraints had a beneficial effect on a collection of sonnets inspired by events and accounts of the Crimean War, published in 1855 together with others by a third Spasmodic, Alexander Smith, during a three-year period that Dobell spent in Scotland. Of all Dobell’s collections the best by far is England in Time of War (1856), which turns concentrically around an interrupted idyll and the soldier’s departure for war, confidently expected by his beloved or his wife at home, but never to return, having fallen in war to the grief of his family.3 With this collection Dobell invented from scratch a poetic situation without precedent before or after in Victorian poetry, at least for the hypnotic fixity and the free flow of recollections. Alienation caused by the war marks for ever the body and spirit of its victims, a theme appearing well in advance of the soldier poets of the First World War such as Owen, Brooke and Sassoon. In Dobell’s case, however, it was experienced only at second hand, as he never fought himself nor did he lose any family members in the war. For the very reason that they are attributed to simple people, orphans, milkmaids, peasant girls, some ballads are phrased in a summarily elemental language, and even written in the Scottish dialect with a strong, bitter flavour in their onomatopoeic refrains. The Scottish dialect was adopted by Dobell 3

A rare case is ‘Afloat and Ashore’, the happy return home of the veteran soldier to embrace the beloved woman awaiting him.

§ 226. Dobell. The second Titan

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both because it was taken as a ‘Doric’ idiom embodying the language of the poor classes, and because the valorous Highland regiments effectively sent to the Crimea were tragically decimated. Dobell’s most powerful and daring composition, at least in parts, is the dramatic monologue ‘Home, Wounded’, written from the point of view of an injured veteran condemned to life in a wheelchair. It is a flow of blurred memories and feelings and a sorrowful, afflicted phantasmagoria on once much-loved places. Also memorable are the delicate variations in ‘A Shower in War-Time’, which, though rhymed, has lines of varying length that make it resemble a free verse poem, an impression enhanced by soft, rocking refrains. In his best work Dobell echoes Tennyson’s Maud for his search for a poetic rhythm that is purely associative and hypnotic, thus naturally disconnected, which in both poets is a foreshadowing of the twentieth-century stream of consciousness, as I mentioned regarding Tennyson. 4. Dobell’s Balder was rightly greeted with much less favour than the previous collections of poems and The Roman. His intention was to exemplify the parable of the humanized egoist who belatedly repents. Balder was to follow the same itinerary as Bailey’s Festus, taking its emblematic protagonist – according to Carlyle’s paradigm –4 from doubt to faith, from the perception of chaos to the humble, humiliating discovery of a cosmic order regulated by God. This intention was disclosed in the preface to the second edition of the poem in 1854, which followed only one year after the first. But Balder was itself just the first part of a trilogy – to judge by the confused drafts left by the poet, we can be thankful that he never completed it. The trilogy was imagined as a vast historical drama having as its background the struggle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines in sixteenth-century Europe; through an utterly eccentric device the whole was to become a pageant recited in front of a repentant Balder. Nearly all the dramatic paraphernalia of Balder are no less gratuitous. The mythological references to the eponymous figure of the Nordic god, a historical stand-in in advance of Christ in Arnold’s Balder Dead,5 are slight and artificial. From 4 5

§ 10.1. Balder is a Faust aspiring to divinity; he challenges death in search of the immortality of a god, and proclaims himself a god, frequently a pagan god. But this is not

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the first pretentious speechifying that occupies a good deal of the drama the reader somehow gathers that Balder is a Faustian poet determined to extract the secret of reality, and aware of his own irrelevance to the natural world.6 Spurred on by ambition to be the ‘king of men’, he proclaims himself the demiurge of a better world. It is on the political stage – nations at war that need a leader – that the poet will act, fulfilling his desire for power and dominion. Dominated like Goethe’s hero by boundless ambition, he sacrifices various human lives, and even his little daughter when his death is announced. He thus survives, but he also sacrifices his wife who by the loss of her daughter had been condemned to irreversible madness. Buried here and there within the prolonged delirium of the hero are some clear and vigorous flashes: marked by the misfortune he reads within himself and repudiates his thirst for Titanism and self-exaltation; like Faust, he confesses he has tried all, and known all, but gathered in nothing; he yearns for total destruction that is also total regeneration. The self-confession proceeds through a number of scenes in monologues that are increasingly solemn, inflated, grandiloquent; when he declares himself cured, we see Balder as being increasingly ill, since he interprets literally his wife’s cupio dissolvi. The drama closes in fact with a clear indication of her imminent elimination. 5. Already at the end of the third of the over forty scenes in Balder we have reached the eve of a great action which is announced, and which seems an urgent descent into history’s fray. But we have already guessed that the whole performance will lie in the field of pompously lauded hopeful intentions, never to become any action at all worthy of that name. Nine tenths of the drama play out indoors, in the poet’s study lined with books, manuscripts and busts, and in two thirds at least it is full of monologues if not soliloquies addressed by Balder to Balder, since in the captions he is always emphatically presented as ‘alone’. A wall physically divides the poet’s study from the little room from which issues the voice of his wife Amy, in

6

enough to conclude that Dobell is a precursor of the early twentieth-century pagan mythologies of the hero in Nietzsche and Lawrence, as does Pittock 1992, 228–9. We learn in a slight hint from Balder that he really possesses magic and necromantic powers: he has turned dust and ashes into jewels.

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§ 227. Smith I: ‘A Life-Drama’

several scenes simply a voice with no appearance of the woman herself. In most of his speeches Balder is a great set-designer and a poet who descants at length on the sights offered by the seasons and by the hours of the day reflected in the changing aspects of nature. His words are skilful, luxuriant and at times powerful, yet they are an end unto themselves, lacking any dramatic function. The drama could be pruned of its over-charged branches, cut back to a collection of Amy’s songs and grieving elegies and to a carefully chosen number of the protagonist’s monologues. The lack of real dramatic interaction creates a counterpoint of voices which, motivated in themselves by the insensitive, deaf selfishness of Balder, in the end leaves an unpleasant impression. Where Balder vents in heroic verse his delirious gigantomachy, Amy chants lullabies and pastorals and more and more often presentiments of death in clear rhymed songlets. § 227. Smith* I: ‘A Life-Drama’ The Scot Alexander Smith (1829–1867) was the most gifted and most complete artist of the three main Spasmodics, and the only one that can be defined a poet tout court, above and beyond any school label. However, this is only in part due to his alleged opus maius and his Spasmodic title par excellence – A Life-Drama – and to two other long poems, which form the whole of his strictly poetic canon together with a small number of other poems. As we shall see, his reputation rests in fact on his later, much more valuable work as a ‘prose poet’. To judge from his poetry alone, Smith is even the most disappointing of the three Spasmodics, although this is due more to a wrong formal option than to the quality and content of his inspiration. His problem was his obstinate choice of a medium that was not congenial 7

*

Poetical Works, ed. W. Sinclair, Edinburgh 1909, with a good critical-biographical profile; Dreamthorp (London 1863) is the only prose work reprinted separately (New York 1972); the others are A Summer in Skye, 2 vols, London 1865, Last Leaves: Sketches and Criticism, Edinburgh 1868. T. Brisbane, The Early Years of Smith, London 1869; H. W. Garrod, ‘Matthew Arnold’s 1853 Preface’, Review of English Studies, XVII (1941), 310–21 (an excellent reconstruction of Arnold’s reaction to Spasmodic poems and to Smith in particular, the basis for the famous Preface [§ 161.2]); R. Cronin, ‘Alexander Smith and the Poetry of Displacement’, VP, XXVIII (1990), 129–45.

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to him, that of poetry, whereas the ‘lyrical’ and subjective essay and the surreal prose sketch of contemporary life, of which he left too few examples, should have been his elected expressive mode.1 His dramatic and narrative poems are badly constructed and awkward, and they lack verisimilitude; the lines seem to run smoothly but they go round in circles, and instead of expediting the action they stop short in complacent dawdling over natural descriptions which in the end seem all alike. Or they get bogged down in over-elaborate and protracted similes that attempt to depict a state of mind, yet are in themselves pure and simple bravura pieces. Apart from these unbearable mannerisms that brought down upon him a veritable lynching on the part of the end-of-century and early twentieth-century critics,2 Smith is one of the most classic poets of post-Romantic unease, so very much post that in numerous ways and chords he approaches the Decadents. The basic theme of his art is the alienation of the poet condemned to live in a civilization of advanced capitalism. Knocked off his prestigious prophetic pedestal, and employed in servile tasks, he is frustrated by a delayed or denied promotion and also disappointed by an eroticism lapsing into bourgeois compunction. In search of lost authenticity, Smith harbours a boundless sentiment of uncorrupted nature, a nature that is always identified with that of the sublime, harsh Scottish landscape; and he is nostalgic for the compactness of the rural world of the Middle Ages or even the Celtic past, when the first dawn of Christianity was just starting to shed its light.3 1 2

3

Smith wrote only one imaginative story, ‘Alfred Haggart’s Household’, published serially in 1865, and he drafted but never actually wrote a novel. The repeated, brutal accusations of plagiarism were revealed as baseless, or at least they attacked a phenomenon that is quite normal in beginners. Clough was right, however, when he said that Smith’s language was artificial and not his own, using the witty metaphor of the bank cashier who handles and gives out money that does not belong to him. The son of poor people, Smith had almost no education and followed in his father’s footsteps as a lace-pattern designer. Like Clough, he was destined for the ministry but had to give up his studies through lack of means. From 1853 he was the secretary of the University of Edinburgh, at that time a badly paid clerk’s job, not unlike that obtained by Clough in the same years at the University of London (§ 134.4). In 1857

§ 227. Smith I: ‘A Life-Drama’

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2. Although shorter and much less pretentious than the other two Spasmodic poems, A Life-Drama (1852) perhaps outdoes them in terms of Spasmodic poetic flaws. Magniloquence overflows from the very title, brazenly epical; the eloquence of the hero, a poet with the uninspiring name of Walter, swells with Shakespearean tones of bitterness and Hamletic distress in daring, euphuistic metaphors and refined periphrases, heroic hyperboles and mythological embroideries. On the other hand, the stiffness and aloofness of the diction is broken by plunges into the prosaic and realistic and into unnecessary and crude circumstantial hints; some lines taken singly could be seen as the non plus ultra of the prosaic. The development of the poem overwhelmingly confirms that Smith had not a crumb of familiarity with dramatic writing and was quite unable to handle its mechanisms. The pace is irremediably disjointed and lacking in internal cohesion, and each single scene is anything but dynamic, indeed it is above all lyrical in nature. It materializes in fact in a flow of sensations, momentary moods, dreams, and often in the entire recitation of several poems and ballads that the poet-protagonist has composed to express his frustrations and aspirations, some of them even containing others.4 Yet, just as Werther is an anti-Werther novel, A Life-Drama is an anti-Spasmodic poem since it makes its protagonist aware of the vanity of his immature wish to keep alive a role that was not within reach of the poet; and because it eventually tames him convincing him that he has to find his place in humdrum everyday life. As an autobiography, it served to detoxify Smith, to free him from the sterile and obsessive pursuit of poetic fame, and led him towards that idealization of retirement from the world that he developed in his best essayistic work, Dreamthorp. 3. Walter presents himself in A Life-Drama in a manner not unlike the first emblems of the poet in Tennyson, Barrett, Browning and even Arnold. He appears as the post-Romantic poet par excellence, the goldenhaired Apollo ‘ever young and ever beautiful’, a potential star giving off

4

he married a woman of aristocratic origin from the Isle of Skye, realizing Hewson’s idyll in Clough’s The Bothie (§ 139.3). This is also due to the fact that Smith fitted previous lyrics into an already loose storyline (Sinclair, introd. to the 1909 edition of the poems, xvii).

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divine light, Shelley’s wind that sweeps away the clouds and makes the stars sparkle in the firmament. He yearns to perpetuate his fantastic golden exile, yet he knows he cannot and recognizes in himself a ‘departed bard; / One who was born too late into this world’. He too yearns for a lasting physical-spiritual fusion with a female hypostasis, but knows it is destined to become sublimated and spent in death. Sacrificial acolyte of poetry, aware that he has not written a divine poem, he criticises many of his numerous poems as soon as he reads them to himself, and he comes to the footlights tearing one up, disappointed both at his own insufficiency and at the inability of poetry, in the present time, to touch an obtuse bourgeois public. His thoughts turn nostalgically to an unnamed ‘poet’ having the combined looks of Shelley and Keats, able to transmit and condense the divine message to men: a poet the early Victorians looked to when they hoped that the great waterfall of lay religion coming from the Romantics would not be extinguished (‘A mighty Poet, whom this age shall choose / To be its spokesman to all coming times’). Among his tasks there would also be that envisaged by Dobell’s Balder, the solution of the great political and social issues of the time. This poet was to die young, like almost all the Romantics, in order to keep intact the myth of his promise. It is a fact that the Victorian poet, living longer, was always blasted by critics who accused him of not having known how to bear fruit, how to write a poem ‘round and perfect as a star’. The poet is born in nature and is nature’s offspring, yet he must become urbanized; his impossible ideal is to isolate himself in a glade to sing and poetize in solitude with a woman, in vapours of a moonlit night far from the city. Already at the end of the first part of A Life-Drama the woodland idyll with the ‘lady of the forest’, the Romantic hypostasis of the feminine and the emblem of inspiration, has dissolved, to be perceptibly replaced by a more realistic atmosphere in which the poet must undergo his apprenticeship in the world. From the dream-like forest the scene changes to the city and in other better identified places. In the very weak sequel of the poem, a few years later Walter pays court to the daughter of solid and conventional bourgeois parents, but before he becomes worthy of her hand, and of being admitted to the enjoyment

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of conjugal love, he must expiate a sin of the flesh.5 In a rather murky scene, the most realistic in the poem and one closely reminiscent of those in Clough’s Dipsychus, Walter is just about to throw himself from the parapet of a bridge and he asks a passing prostitute to pray for him, seeing that his own prayers have been unheard by the Father. The poem, completed at last, is not the divine poem the poet in his youthful exaltation had longed to compose. The penultimate scene seems a preview of the final scene in Aurora Leigh,6 for it shows the resigned severance of any Faustian ambition. It informs us that the poet’s final message, like that agreed upon between Romney and Aurora Leigh, is the superiority of love over every form of knowledge. For all this Smith bids farewell to his hero with a somewhat false and provisional utopianism: Walter will go amongst men to do good, willing to account for his actions to God alone. 4. The idealization of a home-grown mythological past, often emblemized in the devotion of the minstrel and the warrior to his own true love, later became the most recurrent theme in Smith’s poems. This is seen in a poem entitled Edwin of Deira (1861), which has intermittently the slightly sweetened flavour of a copy of the crude, elementary epic of the deeds of the Britons before the end of the Millennium. In fact it predates Tennyson’s first Idylls although it was published later. With the author’s voice always hidden behind inflexible narrative objectivity, this poem is another shadowy sign of a distress also expressed by other writers in the guise of nostalgia for primitive life-forms.7 The romantic, action-packed, chivalric story becomes the allegory of the painful yet inevitable conversion to Christianity of pagan England, an animist nation not yet Christianized – in 5 6 7

Inevitably buried in highly Victorian allusions and innuendos, this sin is, according to some, the rape of the young woman. § 72.3–5. It may also be seen as a reflection of the interest in the Celtic world that Matthew Arnold had contributed to awaken (§ 165). The prose version of this regressive nostalgia in Smith is the prose work A Summer in Skye, which goes into details of the local traditions and customs of the past.

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other words, as in Pater, a parable on the twilight of the pagan gods driven out by the one and only Christian God. Smith traces the poetic and fantastic version of the story of the ‘first Christian King / Known in England’,8 who had also been the founder of the city bearing his name, Edinburgh. The six City Poems (1857) are the autobiographical premise for Edwin’s escape into the distant Celtic world. There is here some foretaste of Joyce’s Dubliners, for they consists of objective dialogic accounts of the grey life of that clerical class of which Smith was part, a class which for lack of anything else comforted itself with dreams and daydreams; yet among them there were a few fugitives with whom the poet identifies. In spite of the title, ‘Glasgow’ narrates an imaginative flight into the bracing Scottish glens; other poems describe imaginary emigrations to lands yet more distant. The long poem set in Scottish landscapes, A Boy’s Poem, though making use of a weird structural device, has some affinity with the bitter and unlucky love stories told by Clough in Mari Magno, but it proceeds on the line of long ‘scarlet’ or ‘purple’ passages that are an end in themselves. § 228. Smith II: ‘Dreamthorp’ This collection of essays printed in 1863 is Smith’s surprising exploit because it is the exact, diametrically opposed counterpart of A Life-Drama and the Spasmodic poems, and would seem to have come from a writer who had nothing whatever to do with the author of the latter. Indeed I would have no hesitation in defining it as one of the minor masterworks of English prose that have been overlooked by later critics. In 1870, and before Pater, it has few rivals in England in the field of creative memorialist essays, and is second only to Thackeray’s Roundabout Papers. There are in it amazing forewarnings and discussion points combined with a flavoursome satire of Victorianism, subdued yet no less biting, highly refined and supremely stylish. The book is fittingly subtitled ‘country essays’ (the antithesis is not lost upon us: from City Poems to Country Essays). Among

8

Smith too cites the anecdote from Bede, also used in a sonnet by Hopkins, of Pope Gregory I who one day saw a procession of blond ‘angels’ pass through the streets of Rome.

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the twelve essays it contains, there are in fact some which one could possibly classify as traditional as they are indebted to the stereotype of the historical-critical essay; others are however eminently of the imaginative, diary-like type, whims and flourishes that almost casually present a series of objective considerations only when the essay is well under way. If judged through the criteria of objectivity and internal balance, they are then essays that would be called extremely disappointing; in reality such a distinction does not exist, since it is always the second, personal and fantastic, dimension, that prevails. Even in the more traditional critical essays we never hear the aseptic, rigid, professorial critic arguing from a position of authority. No matter how new and original are the things Smith has to say on an author – and such is not always the case – we would never go back to re-read him in search of an academic presentation. Whether Dunbar or Chaucer, Montaigne or Dickens, the authors Smith reviews are simply pretexts for quite unplanned, free-wheeling considerations. His essay is, or always pretends to be, localized in time and space; he never writes in the regulation timelessness of the academic critical essay. He informs us in every essay where, how and when he is writing it, and what personal mood or circumstance has led him to write it. It is written in an ideal present time, and ideally drafted as if in progress. But the impression received, that it is such a medley of heterogeneous pieces, is after all mistaken. Dreamthorp is a unified book, held together by the free flair of its author and by its rhythm of roughly sketched events as in a narrative storyline. The mask Smith chooses is that of a writer who is world-weary but by now perfectly and lucidly controlled; having left the city, he finds a blissful haven in nature and his own fulfilment in gardening and reading. As a town, Dreamthorp is of course non-existent, only a mental and imaginary place, utopian and invented, like Morris’s ‘nowhere’; if anywhere, it exists in the dictionary, and etymologically it means, as we know, a ‘dream village’. Morris comes to mind every time Dreamthorp is identified as a renovated, clean world that poets alone have been capable of envisaging. This imaginary place is presented in the first, incomparable essay as a sleepy village enlivened by children playing and women spinning – a very old village to judge from its ruins, and surrounded by pleasant countryside. Here ends the poet’s pilgrimage, here he deposits his bag and from here he moves no

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more; here he is content and has nothing more to ask of life. This utopia is of course the reverse of the industrialized city in the throes of haste. All is quiet, time has stopped, this protected community does not shudder under world events simply because their echo does not penetrate its bounds. No train, only a canal joins the village to the outside world; intellectual activities are very rare, every now and then a public speaker enlivens the serenity of the village with biblical sermons; and there is a local library. 2. The second essay in Dreamthorp, entitled ‘On the Writing of Essays’, is a discussion that goes against the tide, not to say thunderously heretical, of the norms in force for this very popular genre. For Smith, the essay arises and materializes precisely and especially in moments of absent-mindedness, when the mind follows its own vagaries or the writer observes everyday life. The essay is not the argumentation of an intellectual position or a well-defined theory, of great moment and universal interest; it is rather the record of a passing mood, ‘whimsical, serious, or satirical’. Indeed, no firm rule exists on writing essays; the essayist is a ‘chartered libertine’, he is a ‘law unto himself ’. His duty is no longer to inform but to entertain and to follow up suggestions freely. He is a poet in prose, a definition of great import anticipating Pater in underlining the literary dignity of essay writing as almost superior to that of poetry. This is what Smith fully demonstrates in his most felicitous style, rich in easy transitions from the short aphoristic phrase, which may even be a cutting boutade, to the long sentence, a style resplendent with precise, accurate vocabulary and the choice of the mot juste. Given this type of vigilance it is not surprising that writing an essay for Smith is, or may consist of, a description of its genesis and development. Too numerous to count are the times when the writer reveals that he must correct one detail or alter another, that he must readjust a sentence that has got out of hand, or that he imparts orders on composition to himself. In these suggestions Smith comes close to a redefinition or even an overturning of consolidated genres. Until 1863 the essay was in no way suitable for effusions and investigations such as could well have been entrusted to lyric poetry. Matthew Arnold was full of doubts and psychologically very fragile in his poems but he pontificated, quite sure of himself, in his essays, which he was writing in that very year of Dreamthorp. And Arnold himself would appear to be the target of a subdued attack on Victorian content-oriented

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poetry, on the supremacy of ideas and the need to continually renew them. ‘Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature […] it is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you say it’: this declaration might well have been written by Pater himself. In contrast to the high tradition of English literature traced by Arnold, Smith carves out his own eccentric, peripheral canon: not Milton and Wordsworth but only Shakespeare the comedian, and then Hawthorne in his stories, the Lyra Germanica, the Scottish ballads, Boswell, Ebenezer Elliot. The reader instinctively supposes that a similarly subjective, wandering essayism is due in the first place to Montaigne, a suspicion arising from the moment Smith claims that every essayist is an egoist.9 He has no difficulty in declaring his own forefathers to be Bacon, Montaigne and Lamb, the latter the last representative of authentically stylistic essay-writing. Together with Lamb, Smith looks towards all those minor Romantic essay-writers who had left equally brilliant examples of lyrical prose. 3. These loans to Romantic essay writing are combined with many predictive prompts and many conscious suggestions that make of Smith a Decadent and even a proto-modernist. The withdrawal from the world in Dreamthorp and the writer’s retirement into his domestic hedonism are very similar to those of the early Decadents, though to be sure without their morbid and transgressive voluptuousness. Smith has already matured the philosophical concept of impermanence and applies it in the aesthetic sphere declaring that it is the condition for the enjoyment of beauty. In the same terms as in Pater, beauty is perceived by the spectator with a sense of melancholy owing to its inexorable transiency. Ahead of Pater and Proust, Smith even appears as one of the first theorizers of temporal and associative relativism. We find in him the announcement of the unequal speed of the passing of time for the subject who experiences it in changeable circumstances of emotion and mood. Only after its halfway point the essay 9

Montaigne’s withdrawal from the world is of course the model for the withdrawal of the writer in Dreamthorp. Smith’s pages on Montaigne are among the first English evaluations on him and his mood ‘ondoyant et divers’ – Smith repeatedly speaks of ‘alternations’. Pater will in turn greatly empower Smith’s indirect or even narrativetype essay-writing. But no direct contact between the two is known.

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‘Christmas’ descants on how poets have imagined the Nativity; it starts in fact with a typically Proustian discourse on the mental associations of the seasons, above all of winter evoking the need for protection and isolation, the torpor of deep snow and almost materializing in the imagination in the form of the hearth and the reading, even more alive and fresh with personal experience than life itself. These memories are always accompanied and stimulated by sensations of smell and taste, such as ‘raisins simmering in a ghostly brandy flame’. Revisiting a place is for Smith the ideal situation for an essay, since the return to a place having an emotional links is like ‘walking away back into [one’s] yesterdays’. Recollection works within a memorial mosaic of separate fragments. 4. It is not only in his way of writing essays that Smith differs from his contemporaries in suggesting a revolutionary norm in the genre. Dreamthorp perpetrates, at least ten years before the advent of the Decadents, an attempt at the Victorian codes of uniformity. That quiet escape to the village implies a refusal of the city, and a refusal above all of that Victorian social life for which Smith was effectively paying in the first person, in which love was emptied of a passion that belonged only to old novels, and faith was purely conventional. The idealization of solitude, and contentment found in repeating the same gestures and the same rites, actually sounds like hopeless defeat. We cannot get away from the impression that Smith’s vindication of the Biedermeier was at bottom only ironical. In the last essay but one, he reveals that it was a natural instinct that led him to solitude, enabling him to submerge himself in the past, historical or individual: it is a most Proustlike opening, or even one of remorseless lucidity anticipating Beckett, and the very opposite of any ‘spasmodic’ profession, since the writer confesses he has given up the fight, is happy and capitulates, satisfied with his books and his garden. Dreamthorp, therefore, is not so very distant from Smith’s poetry, since the village possesses and guards historical depth; it has not been overwhelmed by the passing of time and therefore it still maintains the fingerprints of the past. It is the symbolical place where the dissatisfied poet is able to carry forward an ideal dialogue with a better world, one he can bring back to life. Christmas, in the essay of the same name, is the occasion to live again, in a phantasmagorical kaleidoscope, all past Christmases at the same time. This is the reason for Smith’s surprising approval of routine

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itself, consisting in the fact that routine has the merit of never interrupting – indeed, reinforcing – the chain of historical becoming. In the penultimate essay on gardens, the centuries-old trees bear witness to the past, and are its historians and the custodians of individual and collective memory, which they conserve for the benefit of future generations. 5. Smith’s artist is all the more an eccentric, defined as such in words very similar to those of Hopkins fifteen years later: individualist, anticonventional, constantly at loggerheads with the aesthetics of the time and the rules laid down by current literary legislators. In a world so dominated by the commonplace, individualists were essential as was anyone capable of seeing things from different points of view. Hopkins would have agreed with this statement: ‘The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but what he has peculiar to himself ’. Smith uses the same metaphor as Hopkins regarding the sense of smell when he speaks of a ‘flavour of mind or manner’ separating the great from the minor writer, a sense that cannot but produce something highly individualized, what Hopkins called an ‘inscape’, or in Smith’s words ‘this something peculiar resident in a poem […] which is the final test’. In Smith’s view, significant writers are and must be irregular and alternative, while the real poet is a utopian designer who would utterly transform the whole world if only what he says could come true. In a further, amazing foreshadowing of Hopkins, Smith believes in the transitory character of inspiration, an exceptional, unrepeatable moment before and after which the poet is but a poor devil. He does not speak in abstract forms alone of a physiology and psychology of inspiration; he never fails to set the writer sociologically in a hostile ambience inducing him to choose a second-rate art and to bow to market requirements. He hails the eccentric artist an instant before the definitive disappearance of his role and its rebirth with Decadentism, when aesthetic conformism was dominant and the rules of good writing were peremptory. The closing essay in Dreamthorp is a daring hymn on the ever-wandering spirit of the soul in real art, which means a socially imprudent, risky, changeable, impulsive art, an art wasting its assets and careless of appearances, the only real art that has historically contributed to shaping the world in spite of the always recurrent efforts of pusillanimous bourgeois repression. Smith’s

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primitivism even idealizes the artist as the ‘aboriginal savage’, and the ‘little sweet savour of old Adam’. The essays centring on figures of writers, such as those on Dunbar and Chaucer, are examples of a personal, idiosyncratic reading for the very reason that they attribute to these writers the character of the Dreamthorp dreamer and ‘vagabond’. 6. The time for books and the garden is the prerogative of the other self, not the ‘habitual’ one of the Victorian double personality. Except that Smith in no way wants to repress this second self; rather, he grants it complete freedom of movement and self-fulfilment. Even the idle impulses of childhood must be reawakened in order to overcome the ‘grey cynical man’. Not only does Smith therefore admit the breaking up of the psychic unity, something considered with sinister concern by so many Victorian writers: he puts forward an idea that is scandalously contrary to the Victorian model of responsible activism. His dreamer shares the features of Eichendorff ’s ‘good-for-nothing’, cradled in vain meditation far from the madding crowd. This is not a vindication of idleness but the denial of an empty interventionism which frequently had nothing to say for itself. It is sufficient to look at how Smith treats Bacon and Seneca’s theme of the ‘fear of dying’ in one essay. In itself this essay is a tour de force showing the ever-present interference of the thought of death throughout life, incidentally making use of one of the most surreal and astonishing imaginative episodes ever thought up by Smith: the story of the execution of two Irish emigrants who murdered a railway inspector. The solemnity and weighty suspense of the execution is ruffled by an incongruous and distressing hitch: a lark takes flight a few seconds before it, suggesting a mysterious form of contrast and even of catharsis that recalls certain equally mysterious flashes in Pater’s Imaginary Portraits. The application of this exemplum is, in a sort of paraphrase of Burke’s sublime, that capital executions are good for the people, satisfying their anxiety to know something of that great step and of what comes after it. Therefore they should not be abolished.10

10

On an execution really seen by Smith see Cronin 1990, 130.

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§ 229. Ebenezer Jones Ebenezer Jones (1820–1860) might be defined as a semi-Spasmodic in his own right, without any relationship with the three recognized Spasmodics. His life, with its childhood of suffering, confirms the often incredible hardships undergone by children in Dickens’s novels and in the distressing afflictions of the writer-labourer in those by Gissing. Born into a numerous family in London, he was educated in the most rigorous Calvinist precepts and kept hermetically shut off from the world, portrayed to him by his educators as a bilge of immoral temptations until, hurled out into it at a tender age, he was overwhelmed by all the imbalances coming from such repression. Jones is the best example of the results of literary censorship imposed by Victorian evangelicalism, which only admitted the reading of the Bible and very few other devotional books, forbidding even Shakespeare and any other secular literature. On his own account, from early childhood Jones was allowed only books with ‘useful’ notions and filled with meditative and ‘hysterical’ evangelical fervour; in the schools he attended he underwent the methods normally in use of whippings and terror. After school and his father’s death, at seventeen he was forced to take employment with a tea merchant in the City. The working hours – seventy-two hours a week! – were just a little less than those in the factories and mines, so heartily denounced by the women poets in those years. He himself first appeared in prose with Chartist-type republican pamphlets, until 1843 when his only poetic work was published, Studies of Sensation and Event. This went quite unnoticed and made the young poet burn all the poems for a second book out of desperation, and return to prose with other pamphlets attacking land monopoly and supporting the freedom of the press. An unhappy marriage and at last tuberculosis brought about his early death at the age of forty. Jones has very few equals in Victorian literature in his unbalanced character, reflected in acts and behaviour verging on madness. It is said that as a pupil he reacted violently and dramatically against the gratuitous killing of a stray dog, and this fact was a premonitory sign of the preference he was to show for animals rather than for people. Solitary and introverted, he lived out his last years in London in a house close to Carlyle’s; he used to spy on the latter’s movements but he was too shy to introduce himself. He spent his free time on the bridges

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silently watching the Thames with its gurgling water and chiaroscuro effects. In speaking of his poetry he himself recognized a sui generis, ‘partial’ perception, perhaps meaning a sensory alteration that obscured and impeded any visual definition and any unity of representation, in that he was focusing on ‘unauthorised’ material. Death put a stop to the career of a poet whom a somewhat embarrassed posterity immediately had to recognize as an authentic unexpressed promise of Victorian poetry. The scenes of this poetry in 1843 daringly overturned the clichés of placid natural scenery and of the gentle domestic idyll, replaced by hallucinatory phantasmagorias very similar in its terrifying similes to Dobell’s Spasmodism, and even amazingly resembling the pictorial delirium of a Van Gogh. Jones’s alter egos are always the dazed, the outcasts, the visionary, even the potential suicides. I will only mention ‘The Hand’, in which the poet’s distress is placated by the apparition of a female figure sent by the gods of the woods. With an expected biblical reminiscence of Abraham’s gesture, this female figure stops the hand of the poet about to strike out with a dagger. Stylistically, however, Jones’s poetry is the reversal of Spasmodism; it avoids all mellifluous, rocking, attractive diction, all musicality and harmony, and the affectation of magniloquence. His language uses instead a form of camouflage of the content in the abundance of inversions and syntactical dislocations, making his discourse somewhat knotty and contorted. § 230. Taylor Even before Spasmodism – at least the free, tendential Spasmodism of the early Tennyson and Browning – a chronologically previous answer to it came from Philip Van Artevelde (1834), the only play by Sir Henry Taylor (1800–1886) that obtained a certain degree of success at the time among many others almost immediately forgotten. This dramatist was the forerunner of a de-romanticised, politically conservative classicism that foreshadows the positions of Matthew Arnold by about twenty years, and in many ways anticipates him. From the outside this drama – or rather as the subtitle tells us, this dramatized romance – appears to have all the structural and formal marks of Spasmodism. It has an impressive historical setting, it shows the megalomania that infected the debuting Tennyson and Browning, a form that was indeed dramatic but dramatically

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unrepresentable. In spite of which, the work was staged for six evenings by the famous actor Macready. A few years earlier the first signs of Tennyson’s precocity had been glimpsed in a Faustian type of play; one year later Browning’s Paracelsus would appear. Taylor himself was aware of the impossible length of Philip. It was effectively made up of two plays and an interlude rolled into one, but the two plays corresponded in length to six single plays. The scenery was equally unusual and remote, that of Flanders at the end of the fourteenth century with the troubles between the rival towns of Ghent and Bruges and the later conflict between Flanders, provisionally united under the leadership of Philip Van Artevelde, and the French under Charles VI. Taylor kept his distance from the Romantic poets and their followers, poets who spawned images and colours and took care of rhythmic and melodic beauty without having any elevated, ‘grave’ concepts to communicate. But his main target was Tennyson’s rising star, although without ever naming him, and the sensationalist poetics of the Cambridge ‘Apostles’.1 All this reverberates from the Preface to the play. In advance of Arnold, Taylor claimed that these poets lacked concepts and ideas, having only feelings and images; they lacked the intellectual knowledge according to a very popular aphorism lifted from Goethe: ‘no man can be a very great poet who is not also a great philosopher’. The supposed forefathers of this sensationalistic poetry were two: Byron, the celebrator of superficial passion in people who were ignoble, hot-blooded and uncontrolled; Shelley, whose visions decomposed reality in order to build a semblance of beauty. Imagination was not to be suffocated, but the reasoning faculty was to be elevated into a new form of balance to join reason and poetry in a relationship of mutual collaboration. Philip Van Artevelde embodies these gifts and is shaped by such poetics. He is the anti-Spasmodic and anti-Romantic hero, a dreamer indeed but also – surprisingly – a man of vigour, who amidst general distrust accepts the appointment as captain of the Ghent people in rebellion against the Earl of Bruges who wants to oppress them. History, in point of fact, hands down Artevelde as a politician who really managed to maintain a line of dignity, consistency and decision 1

VAL, 97–101.

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even in the midst of a European Realpolitik that always called for, if not authorized, a Machiavellian pragmatism often ending in bloodshed. The first stages of the play seem to aim at creating in the reader a situation of expectancy that slowly resolves favourably: will the pure hero, under siege by the corrupt, manage to overcome them? Political pragmatism distressingly requires Artevelde to resort to bloodshed, yet he puts to death, for the greater good, only the traitors and the faithless, yet often forgiving them and giving them one last chance; never does he resort to slaughter or mass purges. In its first part, the drama is thus a series of ordeals reinforcing the firmness and self-control of a meditative man who sets aside any Hamletic doubt and plunges into action. The characters of the play separate and group together according to the opposition between reason and impulse, between the incontinently violent and those who try to keep a balance faced with dramatic chaos.2 Flemish history supplied an example of the ‘knight’ for the present time that many Victorian medievalists or revivalists were calling for in the 1830s. Artevelde saves a community in unrest, torn apart by blood-thirsty factions; he is, as some expressly call him, a ‘knight’ without the stigma of the adventurer, and he is blamed and derided for his bookish tranquillity and apparently frail mildness.3 Even in the early nineteenth century, the peaceful intellectual was expected to come out of his shell and where necessary take up arms in the face of urgent contingencies. Artevelde’s speech at his investiture, in particular, echoes Arnold’s mindset as described in Culture and Anarchy; it heralds and promises a relentless battle against the anarchic principle of ‘doing as one likes’.4 Philip Van Artevelde is one of the earliest nostalgic yearnings towards a lost chivalric past, therefore a sign of weariness and the admission of a sense of decline. The regret of the broken community is apparent to Artevelde himself on the verge of

2

3 4

Artevelde’s lieutenant, Van Den Bosch, is an impulsive man who is imprisoned before being won back to reason. The second part opens comparing two opposing factions, those for immediate action of war against Flemish raids, and those in favour of a diplomatic mission, wisely awaiting the outcome. Of course the Earl of Bruges invokes a concept quite different from that of chivalry, killing in its name more than 300 natives of Ghent that he has decided to proscribe. § 167. See also VAL, 100, for Taylor’s conservative attack against the workers’ unions.

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defeat in a battle where he is outnumbered. In one of the last monologues he recalls his now distant, youthful speculation on natural philosophy, his awed contemplation of the visible universe which he saw as teeming with an inexhaustible creative force and an underground, ever-changing energy of matter, a force and an energy similar to that metamorphosis intuited by the dying Paracelsus in Browning, and at the same time to the ‘Heraclitean fire’ described in a late sonnet by Hopkins. In a solemn rejection of Faustism, Artevelde also reveals that the whirling cognitive rush had always to stop at an impassable threshold, since in the end he, like all men, has to humble himself before God: all his intellectual forays ‘were follow’d with a humble heart, / Though an inquisitive; and humbler still / In spirit wax’d they as they further went’. 2. Since Shakespeare, every historical drama in English literature had been unable to escape an implicit and very unfavourable comparison. This colossal multi-scene drama might be considered on a level with Shakespeare’s historical trilogies, in which the faithful reproduction of public history combines not always happily or naturally – even in Shakespeare – with a free imaginary recreation of the individual’s story. The purely historical material in Philip is too long and too vast, especially in the much weaker and slower second part. Even when it is followed only approximately it translates into a sequence of action scenes and pure strategic discussions that respect no unity of time or place. Collateral events are often the subject of greatly detailed accounts, with characters who appear in one scene only. Froissart was Taylor’s Holinshed, and he acknowledged the loan in the appendix to the play. Shakespearean devices – dramatic, scenic and linguistic – are found throughout. Except in very few prose interludes, Taylor writes in a blank verse having an archaic gloss, occasionally using word-games, neologisms, or nonce words; he stages skirmishes and battles of wit that are at times clever, although he does not add any really comic subplot.5 His appointment accepted, Artevelde is like Shakespeare’s Henry 5

The stork that flew away the night before Artevelde’s father was massacred is a Shakespearean omen, an omen of death that is repeated before the appointment is accepted, though it is coldly refused by Philip. Philip’s sister Clara is a petulant Juliet who loves a Montague, that is, Ghent’s bitter enemy.

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V who as king refuses or would like to divest himself of royalty, yet he must accept it and respond responsibly to the collective call. The hostile forces of the story are embodied in the Elizabethan figures of the villain, the first of whom is a Ghent citizen who becomes Philip’s enemy since he is in love with, and is refused by, Artevelde’s future wife, thus deserting to the enemy camp. The second is a French knight found sowing discord among the Flemish, later pardoned by Artevelde, who however treacherously runs him through during the last battle. Between the first and second part, separated by a long time span, there is an almost complete turnover of characters as in Shakespeare, and dramatic continuity is ensured only by the presence of the protagonist. The hero has lost nothing of his nobility even though, at a distance, his moral, spiritual and physical strength is waning. Taylor makes of him an Orsino who loves the nondescript, cradling songs of an Italian lady with whom he has nocturnal encounters. Taylor faces and overcomes what for his contemporaries is a scandalous situation, by underlining the romantic, dreamy, platonic nature of the relationship, however much it is the object of heavy-handed, hearty rumours on the part of the populace, and however great the disapproval of the holy friar, Artevelde’s counsellor.6 When he sees that the end is in sight, his last broken monologues echo in imagery and metaphorical bitterness those of Othello, downfallen and thinking of death and destruction. When all is lost, Artevelde does not flee on the horse he is offered, but remains heroically to await death. § 231. The reawakening of drama. Boucicault, Robertson From Romanticism to the end of the century a decline in theatre is usually and rightly registered. The sceptre was in the hand of poetry and the novel, but that does not mean that theatre was dead. There were plays nearly every evening in London and the number of theatres, variety and 6

In a great lyrical-visionary scene a few lines before the end, the dreamer Artevelde says that one night he saw the face of his beloved wife rise to the surface of the river as he stood over the bridge. This resurfacing, source of unspeakable grief, sounds like an anticipation of Rossetti’s ‘Willowwood’ (§ 193.5). The river, however, in a premonition of death, turns red.

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vaudeville especially, was rising to satisfy the demand for entertainment from the newly rich middle classes seeking distraction and status. Indeed, theatres increase their audiences during the nineteenth century, but such audiences come from different spheres and classes. More or less theatres lost the aristocracy, who preferred Italian opera, but acquired the common people. And therefore the ‘illegal’ theatres increased in defiance of the prohibitions that had authorized only two ‘patent theatres’ since 1843. Other theatres resorted to stratagems such as the burlesque and melodrama, which became more and more drama and less and less melo, abolishing the singing. Beside this ‘spoken drama’, quality tragedies and comedies staged in the two main theatres at the beginning of the century, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, branched out into many surrogate genres. Companies, amateur and travelling, popped up overnight in spite of the air of crisis and disbandment. Smaller theatres closed down by the day; popular actors were highly paid, the price of tickets was low and running costs were high. The theatre crisis was not, therefore, caused by the lack of audiences: it was a crisis in authorship, hence of texts for a new repertoire. Great potential dramatists avoided the theatre not because the audience was low class – they were the same novel-reading masses – but because profits from novels were greater, even sky-high. As we have seen, countless poets gave up drama and, as we shall see in the next Volume, it was above all the born dramatists who converted to novel-writing. The actors themselves were not blameless. One of the Victorian actors, probably the best known, Macready, was manager of Covent Garden and Drury Lane; as such he was an innovator and organizer who introduced order and discipline within the system. He was however responsible for the decline by encouraging the star system and favouring the manipulation of play scripts in order to give greater prestige to the leading parts; in this way any new repertoire was disabled if not actually suffocated at birth. Plays became for the Victorians a service genre – symptomatic of the end of a local tradition that had become parasitic – consisting in the English adaptation of existing French or German works, or that of novels of English authors. All in all, drama survives in the dramatic parody, in the theatrical sketch, in the frequency of ‘theatrical’ characters and in the shows by acting troupes and the description of recitals and performances

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within novels and narrative poems. In poetry there is the overwhelming emergence of a surrogate, the dramatic monologue, together with chamber drama for voices without action, or the dramatic poem. 2. While Browning at the outset wrote for the theatre, Tennyson’s seven plays were composed and staged in his maturity and old age. Between the two came Arnold’s experiments and Clough’s highly original attempts, the Spasmodics’ unstageable plays, Taylor’s disastrous attempt to revive the classics, as we have just seen, and Woolner’s mythological theatre. That is all. The novels of Dickens, Thackeray and the Brontës are more intrinsically theatrical due to their varied, witty and resourceful exploitation of the suggestions of the dramatic world. The Old Curiosity Shop provides documentary evidence in showing us one of the historical vaudeville theatres that were an Astley circus available to the lower classes and the destitute with only a penny or two in their pockets, often at half price if the show had already started. In all of Dickens’s novels, the most classic entertainment for the young man with ‘great expectations’ is to end the evening in a theatre of this type. At least a third of Nicholas Nickleby follows the pyrotechnical goings-on between the so-called actors in a travelling company. In Great Expectations Dickens skilfully works on a parody of a Shakespearean play, a provincial staging of a shabby remake of Hamlet. Thackeray’s Pendennis contains not only a truthful account of the low level of acting of these patched-up companies; it also explores the appeal and self-delusion, especially among the immature country youngsters, regarding the great actress. Passion-ridden victims of this infatuation are Rochester in Jane Eyre and Lydgate in Middlemarch among many others. For young Victorians, the French actress par excellence was Rachel, real name Elisabeth Felix (1821–1858).1 In his late essay ‘The French Play in London’, Arnold recollects his youthful ‘engouement’ for this actress whom he followed to Paris, and confesses to not having missed ‘for two months any of her performances’. Of the collection of thirteen extemporary 1

Daughter of a travelling salesman, she was noticed while singing in the street and was set on the road to acting. Her debut was in 1837 and from 1838 she was the great interpreter of the classical repertory at the Comédie Française. After long, legendary tournées, in America as well, she died of tuberculosis.

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sonnets published in 1867, thematically various and dissimilar in quality, Arnold included three to the dead actress. They are unusually and vigorously narrative. In the first, a carriage awaits outside the Opéra one December evening in Paris: Rachel wants to see the empty theatre, a foreboding of her death. In the second her death near Cannes is described, in a room where a bust lies of the muse of mimic art, Polymnia. The death of the actress is depicted as a happy arrival in the reign of peace and beauty, Greek beauty in particular, far at last from the squalid world of human worries. The third describes the instant of her death, with the consolation of the Jewish faith, though not refusing the Catholic rites. Rachel was also referred to under the imaginary name of Vashti in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. Here a digressive piece on a performance by the famous actress is rich in terminological recurrences of the descriptions of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, and depicts the actress as pure passion to be repressed and as the lack of control over the instincts. Although England could boast Ellen Terry, Sarah Siddons, Fanny Kemble and Helen Faucit, the myth of the fatale, prevalently French, actress continued shortly afterwards with Sarah Bernhardt and Jenny Lind, Wilde’s idols. 3. A few plays by Dion Boucicault (1820–1890) and Thomas William Robertson (1829–1871) are occasionally still staged today for the sake of variety and rediscovery. They are the only timid, contrasting preannouncements of a realistic, even naturalistic, theatre, neither heroic nor in verse, that the Victorian nineteenth century, in its desire to mimic and even imitate Shakespeare, was ever able to offer prior to the theatrical revival at the end of the century. This revival was to be due to Gilbert’s libretti, to the powerful, revolutionary explosion of Wilde and – but here we are at the very end of the century – to the plays by Jones, Pinero and the debuting Shaw,2 or the success of a lyrical, poetic theatre on quite different themes, such as that produced by the Irish Celtic twilight. Boucicault, Irish, then Anglicized and Americanized, was the shrewdest, most gifted Victorian in 2

This in spite of what I shall say in Volume 5 on Charles Reade and Bulwer Lytton, novelists who started as dramatists, and dramatists, like Bulwer, of great promise in his few plays with contemporary settings. I will also deal in Volume 5 with other Victorian novelists who occasionally wrote for the theatre.

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the trade and the one possessing a great stage talent before Wilde. Having started out as an actor, he produced almost 200 plays, amongst which adaptations of Dickens’s novels, with the versatility of a tight-rope walker. After the first of his works, London Assurance3 (1841), still remembered today and considered his greatest hit, Boucicault travelled to France in search of scripts to pirate into English, like Charles Reade; he was later a partner of the actor Kean, and he spirited away Kean’s favourite actress whisking her off to America. In the 1860s he gave the world a trio of purely Irish plays, although in a slightly toned-down dialect,4 quivering with fiery passions and ingenuous heroics on the part of peasants and gentle shepherds who, undaunted and audacious, tackle insoluble dilemmas. Noble bandits hiding in mountain lairs, and rebels, smugglers and Fenians wanted by the English – parts played by Boucicault himself – make for compelling plots. Boucicault, nevertheless, is somewhat poorly treated by historians of drama. His masterpiece, London Assurance, can compare with Wilde’s exploits exactly fifty years in advance, since as far as it goes it is already Wildean, although it is usually condemned as being indebted to Goldsmith and Sheridan. The fact that it was not appreciated by audiences and its genre was abandoned by Boucicault himself, only increases its value as a precedent. The play is based on tricks and mistaken identities, thus on the double as in Wilde’s most famous play;5 the biting airiness of the dialogue is also in Wilde’s style, with (less frequently) cutting quips, mottos, aphorisms and puns. The five acts are managed by the bon vivant profiteer Dazzle, who sets out on the track of a dissipated young university student on the run from the bailiffs, Charles Courtley. The first scene is extremely effective: after his nocturnal gadding about, Charles returns home where one would expect an unctuously moralistic father to be waiting to reprimand him; what we see is a ridiculous, elderly fop full

3 4 5

Cf. the edn of the play ed. J. L. Smith, London 1984. Collected and ed. D. Krause, Oxford 1964. It is however a weak stage device to have father and son pretending not to recognize each other on the estate where both have been invited without knowing the other would be present, and that the son, ahead of Wilde, may be or pretend to be two different people looking so similar.

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of amorous vanity. Even his young betrothed, the poverty-stricken but innocent Grace, might be expected to appear as the classic doll forced into a marriage of convenience; yet what emerges from her repartees are serious comments on current marriage trafficking. After Act I, the other four take place on the country estate belonging to young Grace’s aunt, where plots and spirited jokes risk running out of the dramatist’s control. The deus ex machina Dazzle appears, having wormed an invitation out of Grace’s aunt, and Charles under a false name – this is the climax – is about to steal his father’s bride. The father becomes more and more a Falstaff trying to get off with an exuberant horsewoman who has bewitched him and who takes part in yet another prank. Boucicault writes an excessively risky play, on the verge of that topic of bigamy or married infidelity that for the Victorians was quite taboo. But he can do it because he is perfectly aware that he has stipulated a prior contract with the spectator – as one character declares just before the denouement, ‘it was all a joke’. This spectator could easily take as mere vain boasting the fop’s glorification of an elopement with a married woman and all the advantages society would gain from such looseness of conduct. The Falstaff in this play is in any case bamboozled and in the end repents. The attractively cynical Grace, having always denied the existence of true love, is forced to admit that she is really in love with that young man believed dead, though dead he is not. To judge from this play, it does not seem that nineteenth-century women were always resigned to their subordinate position. All the men but one are simpletons, easily taken in by the cunning and determination of their wives; or else they are dullards like Charles, or laughing-stocks like the husband of the tomboy horsewoman. The closing of the curtain triggers lethal irony: Dazzle shows off his victory by usurping the title of gentleman, while morality is upheld hurriedly and unthinkably by the repentant fop who names ‘bare-faced assurance’ as a synonym for gentlemanliness, no superficial imitation of aristocratic vice but a virtue within the grasp of even the boor. 4. Boucicault composed for the most part outdoors.6 Robertson has gone down in history for a more naturalistic indoor play, the English 6

With Boucicault, theatre took a step forward with its prompt exploitation of technical progress. The case in point is usually the play The Octoroon (1859), in which a

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indoors dominated by the bourgeois domestic rites of the parlour to such an extent that his works are known by the label of ‘cup-and-saucer’ comedies. He may even be considered the inventor of modern stage directions; no longer brief or schematic, his directions specify with all possible meticulous information the arrangement of the decor and furnishings, and the gestures accompanying the lines, down to the tone of voice to be used. Practically the only one of his body of work still to be staged in London theatres, Caste (1867) is inferior to Boucicault’s best drama because it smacks of the moral fable and is therefore more mechanical and less imaginative. In the remarkable Act I two clever, frothy ballerinas tease a couple of awkward aristocrats, but this sparkle declines in the second and still more in the third act, which could have come to a close earlier and with greater effect, sparing us the sentimental ending. The umpteenth obsessive scenario is that of Victorian social conventions debated by novelists at mid-century. The story, hardly new, is that of an aristocrat who falls in love with an innocent yet lively ballerina, Esther Eccles, the daughter of an incorrigible drunkard, and marries her in secret.7 The Marchioness mother disapproves of her daughter-in-law, but when her son the officer leaves for India and is announced missing and believed dead, she wants to ‘buy’ her grandson and have him properly educated. In the happy ending, the dragoon returns alive and well and the whole family is reunited around the new-born child. The play seemed and still today seems daringly democratic, yet in fact the end undeceives the audience: one of the first lines says that an aristocrat who falls in love with a ballerina (i.e. a rich man who marries a poor woman) is something out of a novel or at the very most something seen at the theatre, not something happening in real life. Robertson, all in all, intends to defamiliarize and provide an example of Brechtian estrangement; but he ends up defending a Solomonic message of equidistance that props up the status

7

scoundrel commits a crime believing he is unobserved, instead of which he is caught in the act on an invisible camera. After Boucicault, fires were real, not fake, as was running water on stage: the theatrical and even cinema ‘effects’ of our time have Boucicault as their pioneer. Wilde, in Dorian Gray, was to reset in tragedy the drama of the aristocratic aesthete who falls in love with a ballerina or an actress, whom he then abandons.

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quo. It is all very well to say that love ennobles and overcomes any obstacle; Sam the plumber does a bit of radical, labourer’s propaganda, severe but fatalist, yet he settles down and integrates by opening up a little business that will allow him to live well. The crudest revolutionary message, in fact, issues from the mouth of the ever-drunk, ever-exasperated Eccles; hence it is not to be taken seriously. Class revolution, in the name of abolishing caste, is theatre and nothing but theatre, that is, simple and straightforward entertainment. Indeed, ‘caste is a good thing if it’s not carried too far’. This is the moral of the story.

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.) Achilli, Giacinto  31.1 Addison, Joseph  36.3 Aeschylus  61.1; 64.1; 96.3; 100.3; 161.6; 164.2 Agricola, Johannes, pseud. of Johannes Schnitter or Schneider  115.2 Ainsworth, Harrison  4.4 Albert of Saxe-Coburg  7.6; 67.3; 91.2 Alfieri, Vittorio  14.1; 113.2; 181.2 Alighieri, Dante  10.4; 12.1; 16.4; 18.1; 18.2; 18.3; 18.4; 29.6; 37.2; 44.1; 44.2; 47.3; 49.1; 49.2; 50.2; 52.1; 52.3; 54.1; 54.3; 57.6; 63.4; 64.1;  66.4; 70.2; 70.3; 72.3; 84.6; 87.2; 91.2; 110.1; 111.1; 111.2; 111.3; 112.2; 115.3; 122.2; 125.2; 129.2; 132.2; 133.6; 156.2; 161.4; 165.2; 175.2; 181.2; 181.3; 182.1; 182.2; 182.5; 183.1; 185.5; 185.7; 186.1; 187.1; 190.2; 190.4; 191.1–5; 192.1; 193.6; 194.1; 196.1; 196.2; 199.3; 200.2; 202.4; 210.2; 210.3; 216.4; 225.2; 225.3     Allen, W.  4.5 Allingham, William  11.2; 183.1; 202.2; 209.1; 211; 221.3 Allott, K.  157.5 Altick, R. D.  1.1; 5.2; 105.1; 126.3; 126.4; 131.6 Anaximander 58.1 Andersen, Hans Christian  73.4; 152.6; 217.1 Andrea del Sarto  99.3; 105.3; 107.2; 121.3

Angelico, Fra  44.3; 44.4; 47.1; 49.1; 56.2; 70.3; 185.3; 207.2 Angiolieri, Cecco  191.4 Aristophanes  101.3; 106.2; 159.6; 222.2 Aristotle  8.6; 28.1; 29.2; 155.1; 159.7; 170.4 Armstrong, Isobel  5.3; 71.4; 140.6; 142.3; 149.6; 198.4; 200.2; 216.1; 223; 224.1 Arnold, Matthew  1.1; 1.3; 1.4; 2.1; 2.2; 2.3; 3.1; 3.2; 5.1–3; 6.1; 6.2; 7.2; 8.2; 8.4; 9.1–2; 9.5; 11.2; 14.1; 15.1; 16.3; 16.5; 17.2; 22.1; 29.3; 31.2; 33.1; 33.2; 33.3; 34.4; 36.1; 36.2; 38.1; 40.1; 41.4; 43.2; 49.1; 49.2; 52.3; 57.4; 57.7; 60.1; 61.4; 63.2; 63.4; 64.3; 66.2; 66.4; 67.2; 67.3; 68.2; 70.2; 71.2; 72.1; 72.2; 73.1; 73.3; 76.2; 77.3; 85.2; 87.2; 92.5; 98.1; 100.1; 100.2; 100.3; 100.4; 101.3; 101.5; 102.3; 104.1; 110.1; 124.7; 133.1; 133.2; 133.4; 133.7; 134.2; 134.3; 134.4; 135.2; 136.1; 138.2; 139.4; 140.1; 140.3; 141.2; 142.1; 142.3; 143.2; 144.2; 144.4; 146.3; 146.4; 148–170; 152.7; 171.1; 171.2; 172.5; 176.4; 178.3; 180; 181.3; 182.3; 182.4; 183.1; 183.2; 185.1; 187.3; 188.4; 189.1; 191.2; 191.6; 205.4; 206.5; 213.1; 213.3; 214.1; 214.3; 215.1; 215.2; 215.3; 215.4; 219.1; 219.2; 224.2; 226.4; 227.3; 227.4; 228.2; 230.1; 231.2 Arnold, Thomas (of Rugby)  3.2; 5.2; 8–9; 12; 14.5; 26.1; 26.2; 36.3; 100.2;

346/III 101.3–5; 133.2; 133.5; 134.2; 134.4; 135.1; 139.2; 140.1; 141.1; 143.3; 144.3; 148.1; 148.2; 151.2; 152.7; 153.1; 155.1; 157.3; 157.6; 159.3; 159.4; 159.5; 160.1; 164.4; 168.3; 182.3; 183.1; 191.6; 193.6 Arnold, Thomas or Tom  138.1; 138.3; 151.2 Ashton, R.  33.1 Auden, W. H.  76.1; 96.1; 148.2 Austen, Jane  3.1; 4.2; 140.2; 171.1; 171.2; 175.2; 177.2; 178.1; 206.3 Austin, Alfred  1.1; 77.1; 77.3; 197.1 Avalle, D. S.  107.3 Aytoun, William Edmonstoune  12.1; 224.1; 224.2 Bach, Johann Sebastian  107.2; 121.6 Bacon, Francis 31.4; 31.5; 34.3; 37.1; 37.2; 59.1; 101.5; 170.5; 172.3; 228.2; 228.6 Bagehot, Walter  34.2; 34.3; 74.4; 77.3; 96.1; 98.4; 107.2; 140.1  Bailey, Philip James  5.1; 65.2; 104.1; 224.1– 2; 225; 226.1; 226.4 Bakhtin, Mikhail  5.3; 6.3   Balzac, Honoré de  4.5 Barbarossa, Frederick  23.3; 112.1 Barham, Richard Harris  202.2; 217.1 Barnes, William  75.2; 171.2; 172.5; 196.1; 211.2; 213; 214.2; 215.1 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth  1.3; 5.3; 6.3; 60–73; 89.3; 100.4; 104.2; 105.1; 108.2–6; 117.1; 119.4; 120.2; 120.4; 126.1; 126.5; 148.2; 161.6; 166.3; 171.1; 171.2; 182.2; 182.3; 185.4; 186.4; 187.2; 187.3; 188.2; 189.4; 192.3; 193.4; 194.3; 196.2; 197.1; 198.2; 198.3; 199.2; 199.3; 200.1; 200.2; 202.2; 204.3; 205.4; 210.2; 212.3; 212.4; 213.4; 214.1; 215.1; 215.2; 215.3; 216.1; 216.2; 216.4; 216.5;

Index of names 217.2; 224.1;  224.2; 225.2; 225.3; 226.2; 227.3     Barthes, Roland  16.1 Bartoli, Daniello  111.3; 127 Bartolomeo, Fra  116.2 Baudelaire, Charles  84.7; 107.3; 121.5; 191.6; 202.5 Baugh, A. C.  28.4; 34.2; 44.2; 58.1 Bausani, A.  101.1; 102.1 Beardsley, Aubrey  195.3 Beckett, Samuel  121.7; 126.4; 129.2; 218.1; 228.4 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell  110.1 Beer, G.  58.3; 58.4; 58.5 Beerbohm, Max  91.2; 151.2; 199.4; 216.4 Beethoven, Ludwig Van  30.2; 120.4; 159.7; 202.2 Bell, M.  198.2 Bell, Q.  44.1; 51.2; 52.1   Bellini, Giovanni  49.1; 52.1 Belloc, Hilaire  216.2 Benedetti, M. T.  190.1; 190.4; 195.3   Bennett, W. C.  101.4 Benson, A. C.  100.3; 101.4; 102.3   Bentham, Jeremy  2.1; 7.2; 10.2; 40.1; 40.2; 41.1–3; 41.4; 42.1; 48.2; 104.2; 122.7; 162.4; 166.4 Bentley, D. M. R.  202.6 Béranger, Pierre-Jean de  144.2 Bergson, Henri  58.4; 161.3 Berkeley, George  31.4; 49.1; 144.3 Bernhardt, Sarah  231.2 Besier, R.  61.2; 62.2 Birch, D.  44.1 Bismarck-Schönhausen, Otto  23.1; 151.3 Biswas, R. K.  135.1; 138.3 Blake, William  29.3; 56.2; 76.4; 80.2; 80.3; 99.1; 171.2; 172.3; 182.2; 188.2; 189.4; 191.6 Bloom, H.  44.1; 45.2; 110.4; 149.6

Index of names Boccaccio, Giovanni  72.4; 83.2; 85.3; 114.4; 131.8; 147.1; 147.3; 174.2; 194.2 Bonnerot, L.  148.4; 152.7; 153.4; 156.8; 162.2 Boos, F. S.  182.2; 182.3; 183.3; 188.2; 193.6; 194.1 Borges, Jorge Luis  102.3; 107.3 Borrow, George  33.3 Boswell, James  14.4; 19.3; 22.1; 34.3; 37.3; 228.2 Botticelli, Sandro  190.2; 195.2 Boucicault, Dion  231.3; 231.4 Bowdler, Thomas  2.2 Bowler, H. A.  207.7 Bowra, C. M.  196.1; 198.3 Boyd, Hugh  62.1; 67.1; 71.4 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth  4.5 Bradley, A. C.  92.5 Brakelond, Jocelin de  19.3 Brantlinger, P.  4.4 Brecht, Bertolt  87.4; 231.4 Brett, John  199.3; 207.7 Bridges, Robert  5.2; 78.2; 133.5; 163.5 Briggs, A.  6.2 Bright, John  7.3; 167.4 Brontë, Anne  4.2; 4.5; 61.3; 78.1; 181.4; 202.3; 216.1; 216.2; 231.2 Brontë, Charlotte  1.3; 4.2; 61.3; 71.4; 78.1; 88.4; 149.2; 159.2; 159.6; 181.4; 216.1; 216.2; 231.2 Brontë, Emily  5.3; 15.1; 61.3; 78.1; 181.4; 216.1; 216.2; 231.2 Brooke, Rupert  226.3   Brooke, S. A.  44.3 Brooks, C.  90.2 Brough, Robert  222.1   Brown, Ford Madox  138.1; 139.4; 184.1; 189.2; 191.6; 207.2–4 Browne, Frances  216.2 Browning, Robert  1.1; 1.3; 1.4; 2.2; 2.3; 3.1; 3.2; 3.3; 5.1; 5.2; 5.3; 6.2; 11.1; 13.2;

347/III 14.5; 30.5; 33.3; 38.2; 40.1; 41.4; 43.2; 47.1; 54.2; 58.1; 58.5; 60.1–3; 61.1–2; 62.2; 64.3; 66.1; 66.3; 67.1; 67.2; 68.1–4; 69.1; 69.4; 70.2; 70.3; 71.1; 71.2; 71.4; 72.1; 72.3; 73.2; 73.4; 74.2; 74.3; 75.1; 75.3; 76.2; 76.3; 77.4; 78.4; 79; 80.1; 80.2; 80.3; 82.2; 83.3; 86.6; 87.1; 87.4; 87.5; 87.6; 88.4; 93.1; 94.7; 99.1; 99.2; 99.3; 99.4; 100.3; 100.4; 103.3; 104–132; 133.4; 136.4; 141.1; 143.2; 146.4; 148.2; 148.5; 148.6; 149.2; 149.3; 149.4; 150.3; 151.3; 152.2; 152.7; 153.2; 155.1; 155.3; 155.4; 157.6; 158.4; 161.2; 161.4; 161.6; 164.2; 166.2;  166.3; 171.1; 171.2; 172.1; 172.3; 173.2; 174.3; 175.2; 176.5; 182.1; 182.3; 182.5; 183.1; 184.3; 185.1; 185.7; 186.2; 187.2; 187.3; 187.4; 188.3; 191.2; 193.2; 193.4; 193.6; 195.1; 205.4; 206.1; 206.4; 206.5; 212.1; 214.1; 215.1; 215.3; 215.4; 216.3; 216.4; 216.5; 217.2; 224.2; 225.1; 225.3; 226.1; 226.2; 227.3; 230.1; 231.2 Buchanan, Robert  1.1; 144.3; 182.3; 182.5; 184.3; 187.4; 191.6–7; 192.3    Buckler, W. E.  150.6 Buckley, J. H.  6.2; 94.2; 224.1; 224.2 Bulwer Lytton, Edward  3.1; 4.2; 4.4;  11.1; 15.2; 16.2; 34.4; 86.1;  111.1; 149.2; 231.3 Bump, J.  196.1; 197.2 Bunyan, John  29.6; 37.3; 46.2; 92.5; 122.2; 175.1 Burdett, O.  10.2; 71.1 Bürger, Gottfried August  66.2; 191.1.   Burke, Thomas  9.1; 34.3; 45.2; 48.2; 63.5; 80.4; 149.8; 161.3; 163.1; 169.4; 228.6 Burne-Jones, Edward  12.1; 102.2; 182.5; 197.2; 207.1; 207.3; 207.7 Burney, Fanny  4.2; 36.3

348/III Burns, Robert  10.4; 14.2; 14.4; 17.1; 18.1; 18.3; 20.1; 29.2; 161.7; 171.2;  213.7 Burton, Robert  63.4; 107.2; 202.3   Busk, Mrs  111.3 Butler, Joseph  28.1; 28.2; 28.4; 41.2 Butler, Samuel  41.1; 58.5; 91.2 Byatt, A. S.  96.4; 96.5 Byron, George Gordon Noel, Lord  3.1; 7.6; 8.4; 10.1; 10.4; 14.5; 29.2; 29.3; 36.3; 37.3; 38.2; 41.3; 46.3; 52.3; 60.1; 60.3; 63.1; 63.2; 63.4; 70.3; 71.4; 74.3; 76.2; 78.1; 80.1; 80.2; 80.3; 100.3; 102.3; 104.1; 107.2; 109.2; 111.1; 111.4; 115.1; 118.4; 125.4; 133.4; 137.1; 138.2; 139.3; 140.1; 144. 1; 143.2; 144.4; 152.1; 154.5; 157.6; 162.4; 165.3; 181.1; 181.2; 191.2; 216.3; 224.2; 230.1   Cagliostro 14.5 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro  100.3; 102.3   Calverley, Charles Stuart  217.1 Calvin, John  132.4; 134.2 Camões,  Luiz Vaz de  68.1; 72.3 Campbell, Thomas  37.1; 181.2 Cangrande della Scala  18.3; 185.7 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), 131.6 Carducci, Giosuè  181.1; 181.2 Carew, Thomas  133.5; 231.7 Carlyle, Jane, neé Welsh  13.2–3; 24.2 Carlyle, Thomas  1.1; 2.1; 2.2; 2.3; 3.1; 7.5; 8.4; 9.4; 9.5; 10–25; 26.1; 26.2; 26.5; 28.1; 29.2; 31.1; 31.3; 31.4; 31.6; 33.1; 33.2; 33.4; 34.1; 34.2; 34.3–4; 36.1–3; 37.1; 37.3; 37.4; 39.1; 39.2; 39.3; 40.1; 40.2; 41.1; 41.3; 43.1; 44.2; 45.1; 45.2; 47.2; 47.3; 48.1; 48.2; 51.2; 57.1; 57.4; 57.6; 57.7; 58.3; 59.3; 59.4; 63.4; 72.1; 72.4; 78.4; 80.1; 89.3; 100.4; 101.5; 108.3; 113.4; 116.3; 117.2; 118.4; 120.2; 126.3; 126.5; 132.5; 133.2; 133.7;

Index of names 134.4; 149.3; 150.2; 150.4; 152.1; 157.6; 163.1; 166.4; 185.7; 191.2; 202.1; 216.5; 224.2; 225.3; 226.4; 229.1 Carpaccio  44.2; 190.1; 207.7 Carr, A. J.  77.5 Carracci, Agostino, Annibale, Ludovico 207.2 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)  77.3; 86.5; 184.3; 199.4; 205.1; 206.1; 206.6; 215.2; 217.1–2; 218.1; 222.1   Cary, Henry Francis  181.2; 191.3 Catullus, Gaius Valerius  117.2; 120.4; 121.6; 131.2 Cavalcanti, Guido  191.5 Cayley, Charles  191.1; 197.1; 199.3; 200.2; 200.4; 204.3; 204.4; 205.1    Cervantes, Miguel de  20.2; 140.1; 144.1 Chambers, Robert  5.2; 58.1; 76.4; 93.2; 93.3   Champneys, B.  172.6; 175.1 Chapman, George  100.3; 104.1; 161.4; 161.6 Chardin, Teilhard de  58.4; 93.2; 110.4   Charles I, Stuart  20.2; 37.2; 39.3; 88.6 Charles II, Stuart  39.3 Chateaubriand, François-René de  26.5; 157.3; 163.7 Chatterton, Thomas  100.3; 109.1; 115.3; 207.7 Chaucer, Geoffrey  83.2; 84.6; 108.6; 147.1; 147.3; 161.7; 191.6; 208; 228.1; 228.5 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith  5.1; 6.2; 11.3; 33.4; 38.1; 39.1; 59.3; 102.2; 102.3; 111.2; 126.4; 150.6; 172.1; 175.2; 182.5; 183.2; 217.2; 230.1   Chitty, S.  221.1 Chomsky, Noam  218.1   Chorley, K.  138.2; 145.2 Church, Richard William  28.5

Index of names Churchill, Winston  133.1 Cicero, Marcus Tullius  54.2; 116.2; 131.2; 131.4 Cielo, d’Alcamo  185.2; 191.1 Cimabue (Cenni di Pepo)  70.3; 121.4; 189.1 Clark, K.  44.1; 44.2; 45.2 Claudel, Paul  171.3 Clegg, J.  46.5 Clive, Caroline  216.4; 216.5 Clive, J.  34.4; 35.1; 37.1 Clive, Robert, Lord  37.1 Clough, Arthur Hugh  1.3; 3.2; 5.2; 6.2; 7.2; 26.4; 29.3; 29.4; 33.2; 52.3; 60.1; 61.1; 62.2; 63.2; 63.3; 64.1; 64.3; 65.2; 68.2–4; 70.2; 71.2; 71.3; 71.4; 72.2; 77.2; 82.2; 86.5; 97.5; 98.1; 100.2; 101.3; 101.4; 102.1; 102.3; 104.1; 133–147; 148.5; 149.1; 149.2; 149.3; 149.4; 150.3; 151.2–3; 152.2; 153.1; 151.3;  153.2; 153.3; 154.2; 156.2; 159.1; 159.3; 159.5; 160.3; 161.5;  161.7; 168.1; 171.1; 171.2; 171.3; 171.4; 172.2; 173.2; 176.4; 177.1; 177.3; 181.3; 182.2; 182.4; 183.1; 187.1; 187.3; 187.4; 191.2; 193.6; 198.2; 204.3; 205.4; 206.1; 207.4; 211.2; 212.5; 213.4; 215.1; 223; 224.2; 224.3; 225.2; 226.2; 227.2; 227.3; 227.4; 231.2    Cobden, Richard  7.3 Cohen, J. M.  119.4 Colaiacomo, P.  68.4; 69.2 Colenso, John William  163.3; 164.3; 163.4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  3.1; 5.1; 9.1; 10.4; 13.1; 22.1; 29.2; 36.3; 37.2;   38.2; 41.4; 44.1; 47.2; 56.1; 60.2; 63.4; 66.2; 66.3; 74.2; 74.3; 74.4; 77.2; 81.1; 83.3; 92.5; 101.5; 109.2; 114.5; 115.3; 135.1; 150.4; 158.4; 162.2; 163.5; 163.7; 171.2; 172.3; 174.3; 180; 181.2;

349/III 182.2; 186.4; 194.2; 202.2; 205.2; 205.3; 216.1; 216.2; 216.3 Coleridge, Sara  216.2; 216.3 Collini, S.  150.6 Collins, Charles  196.1 Collins, Mortimer  222.2 Collins, Wilkie  4.4; 5.3; 6.2; 40.1; 58.5; 105.1; 126.2; 196.1; 224.2 Collins, William  29.3 Comte, Auguste  40.2; 41.1; 42.2; 166.4; 215.4 Conrad, Joseph  4.5; 5.3; 102.4; 107.3; 172.6; 182.3 Constable, John  48.1 Cook, A. K.  130.6 Cook, Eliza  214; 215.1; 215.2; 215.3; 216.2 Cooper Willis, I.  62.1 Corday, Charlotte  17.2 Cornelius, Peter  207.2 Cornforth, Fanny  195.1; 195.2 Cornwall, Barry (Bryan Waller Procter) 212.1 Correggio (Antonio Allegri)  44.4 Corrigan, B.  126.2 Cory, William Johnson  1.4; 149.3 Cotter Morison, J.  34.4; 37.1; 37.3; 39.1 Cowell, Edward Byles  100.1; 101.4; 102.1; 102.3 Cowley, Abraham  178.1 Cowper, William  37.3; 64.3; 100.3; 161.4; 161.6 Crabbe, George  31.3; 98.4; 100.4; 133.3; 147.2; 171.1; 172.3; 175.2; 206.1; 215.2 Crane, Walter  195.3 Cranston, M.  41.1; 42.1; 43.1 Crashaw, Richard  171.3; 191.6; 196.2 Croker, John Wilson  83.1 Cromwell, Oliver  10.2; 10.3; 11.3; 12.1; 18.1; 18.4; 19.4; 20; 21.1; 21.2; 23.2; 25.3;

350/III 36.2; 36.3; 37.1; 39.1; 39.3; 113.2; 149.6; 152.1; 223.1 Cronin, R.  228.6 Crowell, N. B.  107.1 Cruikshank, George  49.1 Culler, A. Dwight  75.1; 78.1;  80.2; 81.4; 83.3;  87.2; 91.6; 92.5; 148.4; 149.6; 150.6; 156.8; 158.5; 159.2 Cuvier, Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert  58.1; 94.3 Cuyp, Jacobs 47.1 Dalí, Salvador  195.3 Dallas, E. S.  2.2 Dally, P.  61.2; 63.5 D’Annunzio, Gabriele  107.2; 121.7; 182.5 Dante see Alighieri, Dante Danton, Georges Jacques  17.1 Darwin, Charles  5.2; 28.4; 52.1; 58; 59.1; 76.4; 93.3; 97.4; 103.4; 124.1; 124.2; 124.6; 213.8; 215.2   Darwin, Erasmus  58.1 Davidson, A.  218.1; 219.2   De Amicis, Edmondo  213.1 De Man, P.  77.5 De la Mare, Walter  107.3 De Michelis, E.  60.3 De Quincey, Thomas  3.1; 13.2; 231.2; 171.1 Debussy, Claude  183.1 Defoe, Daniel  71.1; 98.5; 161.6 DeLaura, D.  150.4 Denis, Maurice  207.3 Derrida, Jacques  6.3; 77.5; 198.4 DeVane, W. C.  107.3; 108.2; 110.3; 111.3; 113.4; 124.1; 126.1 Dickens, Charles  1.3; 2.3; 3.2; 4.1; 4.2; 4.3; 4.4; 4.5; 5.1; 6.2; 7.2; 8.1; 8.4; 15.2; 19.2; 30.2; 34.4; 36.3; 37.3; 39.2; 40.1; 41.2; 46.1; 52.3; 56.1; 57.2; 57.3; 57.4; 57.6; 58.5; 86.5; 96.5; 106.2; 107.3; 108.3;   113.3; 118.4; 130.4; 131.2;

Index of names 140.1; 144.1; 144.2; 144.3; 147.1; 149.2; 149.3; 162.3; 166.5; 168.1; 174.3; 202.2; 206.1; 207.6; 212.1; 212.2; 214.1; 216.5; 217.2; 218.1; 222.1; 224.1; 228.1; 229.1; 231.2; 231.3 Dickinson, Emily  60.2; 60.3; 71.1; 196.1; 198.1; 212.1    Diderot, Denis  14.2; 14.5 Digby, Kenelm  101.3 Diogenes Laertius  155.1; 155.2 Disraeli, Benjamin, Lord Beaconsfield  1.1; 4.2; 4.3; 7.4; 7.5; 12.1; 15.2; 16.2; 16.3; 19.2; 22.1; 27.2; 34.3; 39.1; 76.2; 85.2; 89.6; 98.4; 98.6; 149.8; 151.3    Dobell, Sydney  5.1; 104.1; 155.4; 212.3; 214.2;  224.1–2; 226; 227.3; 229.1   Dolben, Digby  28.5; 78.2 Donini, F.  196.1; 200.4 Donne, John  29.6; 69.4; 76.3; 85.3; 92.3; 107.2; 148.6; 171.3; 175.2; 175.3; 186.4; 197.3; 205.5; 212.1; 231.7 Dostoevsky, Fëdor Michailovič  4.4; 5.3; 11.3; 126.4 Doughty, O.  182.5; 184.3; 185.1; 186.2; 187.2; 194.5 Dowden, E.  180 Drew, P.  105.3 Drummond, William of Hawthornden 178.1 Dryden, John  47.1; 133.7; 134.5; 138.2 Duccio da Buoninsegna  70.3 Duffin, H. C.  105.1 Dunbar, William  228.1; 228.5 Dürer, Albrecht  50.3; 54.3; 190.2 Dyce, William  207.2 Edgeworth, Maria  4.2 Eichendorff, Joseph Karl von  228.6   Elgar, Edward  29.7 Elgee, Jane Frances (‘Speranza’),  216.4; 216.5

Index of names Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans)  1.3; 3.2; 4.1; 4.2; 4.3; 4.4; 4.5; 5.2; 7.1; 11.1; 14.2; 16.1; 26.4; 36.2; 39.2; 40.2; 43.2; 44.4; 56.1; 58.2; 58.5; 59.2; 70.3; 71.1; 89.4;  106.2; 124.2; 126.2; 136.2; 206.1; 216.2; 216.3; 223; 231.2 Eliot, T. S.  3.2; 6.2;  29.7; 76.1; 76.3; 77.5; 81.3; 87.2; 91.3; 92.5; 96.1; 102.4; 107.1; 107.3; 119.2;   149.2; 150.5; 150.6; 159.1; 182.2; 191.2; 218.1   Elizabeth I, Tudor  9.1; 36.2; 37.1; 89.1; 168.3; 176.5 Elliott, Ebenezer  223.1; 228.2 Elton, O.  17.1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  15.1; 133.2; 133.7; 134.4; 134.5; 136.1; 149.7; 151.2 Emerson, S.  45.2 Empedocles  5.1; 110.1; 124.7; 143.2; 148.1; 148.2; 148.3; 148.6; 149.1; 154.3; 155; 156.2; 156.5; 156.6; 157.1; 157.4; 158.2; 160.3; 161.2; 219.2; 224.2; 226.1 Empson, W.  5.3; 6.2; 77.5; 107.3 Engels, Friedrich  7.2; 12.1 Epictetus  150.4; 153.1; 164.2 Epicurus  8.3; 30.4; 31.4; 41.2; 42.1; 67.2; 70.3; 83.5; 84.5; 97.1; 99.3–4; 102.2; 102.3; 127; 131.5; 152.4; 153.2; 158.2; 193.6; 207.1; 225.2   Euripides  67.1; 86.4; 107.1; 115.2; 132.5 Evans, J.  52.3 Evans, Sebastian  222.2 Ezekiel 11.2 Faber, Wilfrid  26.5 Fairchild, H. N.  197.3; 198.3 Faraday, Michael  172.3 Fausset, H. I.  75.3 Fazio degli Uberti  191.2 Fénelon, Francois de Salignac de la Mothe 215.4 Fermi, L.  12.1; 17.1

351/III Feuerbach, Ludwig  124.2 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  10.1; 12.1; 14.3; 123.3 Filicaja, Vincenzo da  70.3 FitzGerald, Edward  5.3; 61.3; 89.3; 100–103; 124.7; 136.3; 202.3; 217.2; 221.1; 221.5 Flaubert, Gustave  30.3; 130.6; 201.1 Flower, Eliza  108.2;  108.3; 114.1; 216.2 Flower, Sarah  108.2; 108.3; 109.2; 216.2; 216.3 Fogazzaro, Antonio  60.3 Folgore da San Gimignano  191.4 Fónagy, I.  218.1 Fornelli, G.  12.1 Forster, E. M.  133.2; 150.3; 202.2; 213.1; 215.1 Forster, John  33.1; 108.3; 112.1; 113.2 Forster, M.  62.1; 62.2 Foscolo, Ugo  63.4; 70.3; 156.2; 156.3 Fourier, Charles  71.2; 72.4 Fox, Charles James  39.1   Fox, George  16.4; 39.3 Fox, W. J.  104.2; 108.3; 109.2; 109.4; 149.4; 224.2 Fraser, H.  29.1 Frazer, James George  76.4 Frederic the Great, King of Prussia  10.3; 12.1; 23; 36.1; 36.2; 37.1 Freeman, E. A.  33.4 Freud, Sigmund  6.3; 11.3; 34.4; 58.5; 61.2; 63.5; 75.3; 77.5; 133.1; 148.2; 150.6; 168.1; 182.2 Frost, Robert  107.3 Froude, James Anthony  11.1; 11.2; 12.1; 13.2; 24.1; 26.2; 26.4; 26.5; 27.2; 28.5; 33; 133.2 Froude, Richard Hurrell  27.2; 28.1; 28.2; 28.3; 28.5; 33.1 Fry, Roger  190.1 Fuller, Margaret  71.4; 140.1

352/III Galt, John  40.2 Galuppi, Baldassarre  107.2; 121.5–6 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand  45.1 Garibaldi, Giuseppe  78.4; 140.1; 141.2; 216.6; 226.2 Gaskell, Elizabeth  4.2; 4.5; 7.2; 19.2; 46.1; 59.2;  88.4; 206.1 Gautier, Théophile  84.7 George II, Hanover  23.3; 37.1 Gest, J. M.  126.2 Ghirlandaio (Ridolfo Bigordi)  48.2; 190.2; 207.2 Giartosio De Courten, M. L.  60.3 Gibbon, Edward  10.1; 13.1; 31.3; 34.2; 37.1; 39.1; 39.2; 52.1; 87.4; 152.1 Giddings, R.  150.6 Gilbert, Susan see Gubar, Sandra Gilbert, Sir William S.  89.3; 231.3 Gilchrist, A.  182.2; 189.3; 191.6 Gilfillan, George  34.3; 224.1 Gilley, S.  26.2; 28.3 Giorgione (Giorgio Zorzi da Castelfranco)  48.2; 50.3; 92.5; 207.7 Giotto, di Bondone  44.3; 45.1; 47.1; 51.2; 52.1; 54.1; 55.2; 70.3; 121.4; 182.5; 185.7 Gissing, George  98.1; 229.1 Giusti, Giuseppe  200.4 Gladstone, William Evart  1.1; 7.4; 37.4; 78.4; 96.1; 171.3; 178.3; 219.2 Glanvil, Joseph  157.4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (including references to Faust)  10.1; 10.4; 11.3; 13.1; 13.2; 14.1; 14.2; 14.3; 15.3; 17.1; 18.3; 24.2; 29.6; 63.1; 65.2; 66.2; 80.1; 82.2; 83.2; 83.3; 86.6; 86.7; 87.3; 94.5; 101.5; 104.1; 105.3; 109.3; 110.1; 116.3; 133.3; 134.3; 137.1; 140.1; 140.2; 140.3; 143.2; 145.1; 145.2; 148.1; 148.4; 149.2; 149.7; 150.4; 151.3; 152.3; 152.7; 153.2; 153.4; 154.3;

Index of names 154.5; 155.3; 155.4; 156.2; 157.6; 159.6; 161.2; 162.4; 165.3; 183.1; 191.6; 194.5; 215.2; 224.2; 225.1–2; 226.4; 227.2; 227.3; 230.1 Goldsmith, Oliver  171.1; 175.2; 178.4; 231.3 Gosse, Edmund  68.1; 77.4 32; 175.2; 196.1 Gore, Catherine Grace Frances  173.1; 174.1 Gozzoli, Benozzo  189.4; 207.2 Graves, Robert  107.3 Gray, Thomas  75.2; 157.4; 163.2   Greenberger, E. B.  133.7; 135.2 Greenwell, Dora  6.3; 215.3–4; 216.3 Grey, Lord  7.1 Grierson, H. J. C.  171.3; 175.3; 177.4; 187.1 Griffin, W. H.  126.2 Griffith, David Wark  4.2 Grigson, G.  213.4; 213.7 Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Karl  56.1; 217.1 Gubar, Sandra  203.2 Guercino (Giovan Francesco Barbieri) 122.4 Guérin, Eugénie de  163.3; 164.1 Guérin, Maurice de  152.3; 154.4; 163.2; 163.3; 165.1 Guidi, A.  176.4 Guinizelli, Guido  191.4 Habibi, D. A.  39.3 Hallam, Arthur  5.2; 75.1; 77.2; 77.5; 78.2; 78.4; 81.1; 81.4; 82.2; 82.4;  83.2; 85.3; 86.1; 86.5; 87.2; 88.1; 88.3; 91–94; 97.1; 97.3; 97.4; 98.2; 99.5; 151.2 Hallam, Henry  37.1; 91.1 Halliday, J. L.  12.2; 21.4    Hardman, M.  31.1 Hardy, B.  4.2 Hardy, Thomas  88.4; 101.4; 105.3; 107.3; 148.6; 213.1; 213.7   Harris, Elizabeth  30.2

Index of names Harrison, A.  196.1; 196.3; 197.3; 200.2; 202.4   Harrison, F.  46.5;  47.1; 167.4 Hartley, David  42.1; 42.2; 47.2   Hartmann von Aue  191.1 Hastings, Warren  37.1 Hawkins, Edward  8.6; 137.1 Haworth, Fanny  108.3 Hawthorne, Nathanael  74.3; 78.4; 106.2; 228.2 Hayter, A.  60.2; 61.1; 61.3; 62.1; 62.2; 64.1; 66.1; 68.1; 71.2; 73.4    Hazlitt, William  3.1; 173.1 Heffer, S.  13.2 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  17.1; 126.3; 128.1; 139.3; 164.3; 172.2; 172.3 Heidegger, Martin  219.2 Heine, Heinrich  14.2; 67.1; 102.2; 148.5; 149.5; 150.4; 152.6; 159.1; 159.3; 159.6; 160.1; 160.3; 162.1; 162.2; 162.3; 162.4 Helmling, S.  27.3 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien  42.1   Hemans, Felicia  64.3; 215.1; 216.1; 216.3; 216.4; 216.5 Henry VIII, Tudor  33.4; 36.1; 37.1 Heraclitus  5.2; 16.4; 58.1; 58.4; 82.3; 94.3; 110.4; 153.4; 230.1   Herbert, Edward, of Cherbury  91.5 Herbert, George  91.5; 92.3; 154.2; 171.2; 171.3; 196.1; 196.2; 205.4; 205.5; 212.1 Herder, Johann Gottfried  14.2 Herrick, Robert  213. 7 Hill, A. G.  31.1; 32.3 Hitchcock, Alfred  189.3 Hitler, Adolf  12.1; 58.4 Hobbes, Thomas  59.1; 129.6 Hodell, C. W.  126.2 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus 182.2

353/III Hogg, Thomas  5.1; 202.2 Hölderlin, Friedrich  155.3 Hollingsworth, K.  4.4 Holloway, J.  150.2 Holmes, W. S.  105.1 Holst, Gustav  197.1 Homer  10.4; 17.1; 38.2; 47.3; 49.2; 50.3; 57.5; 57.6; 62.1; 63.2–4; 64.1; 83.1; 87.2; 89.3; 98.1; 108.2; 122.7; 127; 128.1; 133.4; 134.1; 138.2; 139.1; 139.2; 139.4; 141.1; 147.1; 148.5; 149.1; 149.3; 152.2; 152.3; 152.7; 157.2; 158.3; 161.4–7; 163.5; 165.3; 189.1; 213.2; 219.2     Honan, P.  117.1; 127; 130.5 Hood, Edwin Paxton  6.1 Hood, Thomas  217.1 Hooker, Richard  9.1; 48.2 Hopkins, Gerard Manley  1.1; 1.3; 2.3; 3.1; 5.2; 6.1; 6.2; 9.3; 9.4; 10.1; 11.1; 16.4; 20.1; 21.3; 26.4; 28.5; 29.3; 29.5; 29.7; 31.1; 32.3; 33.3; 37.3; 44.2; 44.3; 44.4; 45.2; 51.1; 58.4; 60.2; 63.2; 63.4; 64.2; 76.2; 77.1; 77.2; 77.5; 78.2; 81.1; 82.2; 82.3; 82.5; 86.1; 87.4; 89.5; 91.1; 91.3; 92.3; 93.2; 93.4; 94.2; 94.3; 94.5; 95.1; 96.1; 98.1; 98.4; 99.3; 100.2; 100.4; 107.3; 110.4; 115.3; 119.1; 120.6; 122.2; 122.5; 124.7; 129.4; 129.6; 130.4; 133.2; 133.5; 133.6; 134.4; 135.2; 141.1; 142.1; 142.2; 142.3; 148.6; 149.4; 149.5; 149.6; 150.5; 153.2; 153.3; 153.4; 154.4; 154.6; 157.3; 157.4; 160.1; 161.7; 162.4; 163.1; 163.5; 165.2; 165.3; 165.4; 171.1; 171.2; 171.3; 172.1; 172.2; 172.3; 172.4; 172.5; 173.1; 173.2; 174.2; 175.1; 175.2; 178.1; 178.3; 178.4; 178.5; 179; 181.1; 182.2; 182.5; 183.1; 185.1; 185.2;  188.3; 193.6; 196.1; 196.2; 196.3; 197.1; 197.2; 197.3;

354/III 198.3; 199.3; 200.1; 201.2; 205.4; 206.2; 207.2; 207.4; 208; 213.1; 213.3; 213.7; 227.4; 228.5; 230.1   Hopkins, Manley  91.3    Horatius, Quintus Flaccus  94.7; 97.5; 102.2; 122.3; 131.2; 161.3; 193.3 Horne, Richard Hengist  61.1; 67.1; 74.4; 108.4; 224.1 Hough, G.  44.3; 47.1; 51.2; 92.2; 182.2; 191.1; 194.1 House, H.  91.1 Housman, Alfred Edward  148.6; 172.6 Howitt, Mary  6.3; 216.3–5 Hughes, Arthur  207.7 Hughes, L. K.  211.3 Hughes, Thomas  9.5 Hugo, Victor  60.1 Humboldt, Wilhelm von  149.6; 167.2   Hume, David  10.1; 14.4; 28.1; 31.4; 39.1; 42.1   Hunt, Holman  55.2; 182.3; 182.5; 184.2; 187.4; 191.6; 196.1; 205.5; 207.1–3; 207.5; 207.6; 221.3; 221.5 Hunt, Leigh  2.1; 10.4; 71.4; 74.3; 77.3; 81.1; 81.4; 87.4; 163.2; 173.1; 175.2; 183.2 Hunt, J. D.  1.4; 91.2; 91.3; 94.2 Hunt, V.  193.3 Husserl, Edmund  218.1 Hutton, R. H.  26.3; 99.1 Huxley, Aldous  58.2 Huxley, T. H.  5.2; 58.1–2; 58.4; 59.4; 172.3 Huysmans, Joris-Karl  83.2; 182.3 Ibsen, Henrik  146.2 Ingelow, Jean  215.1–2 Innocent XII, Pope  70.3; 114.2; 126.1; 126.3; 131.7; 132.1–7 Ionesco, Eugène  218.1 Irvine, W.  117.1 Irving, Edward  8.3; 13.2; 24.2 Irving, Henry  2.3 Isaiah  10.1; 11.2; 54.2

Index of names Jack, I.  110.1 James, Henry  4.5; 6.2; 52.3; 75.2; 75.3; 78.4; 105.1; 105.2; 106.2; 107.3; 108.1; 108.6; 126.3; 127; 130.2; 130.6; 151.3; 162.2; 189.3; 195.2; 206.5 James II, Stuart  37.1; 37.2; 39.1; 39.3 Jami  101.1; 101.2 Jamison, W. A.  153.3 Jean Paul see Richter, Jean Paul Jeffrey, Francis, Lord  24.2; 34.2 Jenks, E.  11.2; 41.1; 42.1 Jerrold, Douglas  217.1 Jewsbury, Geraldine  24.2 Joan of Arc  10.2; 14.1; 89.2 John, the Evangelist  123.3; 124.2–3; 125.3; 132.4; 136.4; 164.3   Johnson, E. D. H.  5.2 Johnson, Ellen  216.2   Johnson, M.  29.2 Johnson, Samuel  10.4; 12.1; 14.2; 14.4; 18.1; 18.3; 19.3; 20.1; 34.6; 36.1; 36.3; 37.3; 46.3; 101.5; 148.3 Jones, Ebenezer  224.1; 229.1 Jones, Ernest  223 Jones, H.  107.3 Jones, Henry Arthur  149.8; 231.3 Jonson, Ben  91.5; 133.5 Jordan, E.  96.1 Joseph, G.  84.1 Joubert, Joseph  6.2; 34.4; 162.2; 163.1; 163.7 Jowett, Benjamin  1.4 Joyce, James  31.1; 77.5; 82.2; 107.3; 126.4; 131.5; 133.3; 138.2; 158.1; 166.5; 181.3; 206.1; 211.3; 218.1; 220.1; 227.4 Kafka, Franz  44.2; 107.3; 121.7; 126.4; 219.3 Kant, Immanuel  14.1; 22.1; 34.4 Kaplan, C.  71.4 Kaplan, F.  11.2 Karsten, S.  155.1 Kean, Charles  2.3; 113.3; 231.3 Kean, Edmund  108.3; 109.2

Index of names Keats, John  3.1; 31.4; 38.2; 47.2; 60.1; 63.2; 74.2; 74.4; 80.2; 82.4; 83.1; 84.7; 104.1; 108.2; 116.3; 117.2; 121.8; 122.2; 133.4; 136.3; 148.5; 149.7; 152.4; 152.5; 157.4; 163.2; 163.3; 171.2; 172.4; 178.1; 182.2; 188.2; 194.2; 196.1; 216.1; 224.2; 227.3 Keble, John  5.2; 8.4; 9.1; 28.1; 28.2; 28.3; 28.5; 29.1; 29.5; 47.2; 92.5; 150.4; 153.1; 163.2; 172.3; 196; 197.2; 205.4; 205.6 Kelen, E.  221.1 Kelvin, William Thomson, Lord  58.3 Kemble, Fanny  2.3; 216.2; 216.4; 216.5 Kempis, Thomas à  172.3; 215.4 Kenny, A.  133.2; 134.4 Kent, D. A.  196.1; 196.3; 200.2; 202.6; 206.1 Kenyon, J.  62.2; 71.4; 108.4; 121.3 Ker, I.  26.2; 26.5; 31.1; 32.3 Kermode, Frank  148.1; 155.4 Khayyám, Omar  100.3; 101.1; 102–103 Khnopff, Fernand  195.3 Kierkegaard, Søren  11.3; 26.3; 40.2; 94.2; 148.6; 105.3.   Killham, J.  77.5; 90.2; 92.5; 126.5 Kingsley, Charles  4.3; 11.1; 19.2; 26.2; 27.2– 3; 28.1–2; 28.5; 29.1; 30.3; 33.3; 33.4; 56.2; 58.4; 58.5; 91.6; 130.2; 138.2; 191.6; 199.3; 223; 224.1    Kingsley, Henry  27.2 Kipling, Rudyard  75.2; 107.3 Klimt, Gustav  195.3 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb  64.1; 225.2 Knight, J.  182.4 Knox, John  10.4; 11.2; 18.1; 18.4; 25.3   Krause, D. 231.3 La Fontaine, Jean de  217.1 Lacan, Jacques  6.3 Laclos, Choderlos de  140.2 Lacordaire, Henry Dominique  26.5; 169.6; 215.4

355/III Lafayette, Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier  17.1 Lairesse, Gerard de  47.1; 108.2; 116.2; 131.6 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de Monet de  58.1 Lamartine, Alphonse de  64.1; 116.3; 149.3; 157.3 Lamb, Caroline  7.6 Lamb, Charles  3.1; 10.4; 171.1; 173.1; 213.2; 217.1; 228.2 Lamennais, Hugues-Félicité-Robert de  26.5.   Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, a.k.a. L. E. L., married name McLean  215.1; 216. 1; 216.2; 216.3; 216.4 Landor, Walter Savage  108.3; 111.1; 149.3   Landow, G. P.  44.3; 150.2 Landseer, Sir Edwin  173.2 Langbaum, R.  106.1; 127 Larbaud, V.  171.3; 176.3 Lasinio, Paolo Carlo  189.4; 207.1 Laski, H. J.  41.1 Lataste, Marie  178.5 LaValley, A. J.  11.3 Lawrence, D. H.  133.1; 226.4 Lawrence, Sir Thomas  78.4 Le Fanu, Sheridan  4.4; 44.2 Lear, Edward  202.1; 202.2; 206.1; 208; 210.1; 217.1; 217.2; 218–221; 222.1 Leavis, F. R.  6.2; 75.3; 83.4; 107.3; 150.6; 157.5 Lecercle, J.-J.  218.1; 219.2 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget)  44.2 Leech, John  49.1 Lehmann, J.  221.1 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  36.2 Leighton, A.  6.3; 61.4; 63.5; 64.4; 66.2; 69.3; 71.4; 198.4; 203.1; 216.1 Leighton, Frederick  125.5 Lentino, Jacopo da  191.4 Leo XIII, Pope  26.5 Leonardo da Vinci  71.2; 84.7; 121.4; 195.2; 195.3

356/III Leoni, G.  55.2 Leopardi, Giacomo  48.2; 63.4; 93.2; 102.2; 157.4; 159.3; 193.6   Lesage, Alain-René  121.7 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  159.1; 159.3; 159.7 Levine, G.  30.2; 35; 36.2; 38.1; 39.2; 58.5; 150.2   Lewis, Matthew Gregory, ‘Monk Lewis’, 182.2 Licciardelli, G.  12.1 Lind, Jenny  197.2; 231.2 Linguanti, E.  107.3 Lippi, Filippo  106.2; 107.2; 121.1–2; 121.3; 121.4; 190.2 Lloyd, T.  104.2 Locke, John  31.4. 32.1 Locker-Lampson, Frederick  222.1 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth  138.2; 161.5 Lorrain, Claude  47.1; 47.3; 49.2; 50.3   Lotman, Yuri  11.1 Loucks, J. F.  126.3; 126.4; 131.6   Louis XV, King of France  141.1 Louis XVI, King of France  14.1; 21.2 Lovett, W.  7.3 Lowry, H. F.  160.2 Loyola, St Ignatius  14.5; 21.4; 37.4; 132.4; 172.3 Lucas, F. L.  75.3; 133.5; 172.1   Lucretius, Caro  63.4; 83.5; 99.2–4; 102.2; 110.4; 153.2; 154.2; 155.1; 155.3; 156.2; 161.3   Lukács, György  12.1   Luther, Martin  10.2; 11.2; 14.2; 14.5; 17.2; 18.1; 18.4; 19.3; 23.2; 25.3; 28.4; 31.3; 36.2; 70.3; 110.2; 123.1; 129.5; 132.4; 141.1; 164.2; 170.5 Lyell, Charles  5.2; 58.1; 76.4; 93.2; 94.3; 97.4; 181.2

Index of names Macaulay, Thomas Babington  2.1; 5.2; 18.2; 34–39; 40.2; 41.3; 41.4; 42.2; 43.2; 47.2; 51.2; 59.3; 108.2; 149.4; 163.1; 163.7; 172.3; 224.2 McCue, J.  140.3; 144.1 McGann, J.  J.  182.5; 197.1; 197.3; 202.6; 203.1    Machiavelli, Niccolò  21.1; 34.1; 37.1; 127; 129.6 Mackintosh, Sir James  36.2; 39.1 McLuhan, M.  77.5 Macpherson, James  100.3; 109.1; 109.2 Macready, William Charles  2.3; 108.3; 113.1–4; 115.1; 230.1; 231.1   Madden, W. A.  150.2 Maffei, Scipione  158.5 Mahomet  10.4; 11.2; 12.1; 18.1; 18.2 Mahony, Francis Sylvester, ‘Father Prout’ 123.3 Maistre, Joseph de  26.5; 149.5; 149.8 Mallarmé, Stéphane  74.4; 148.5; 191.7 Mallock, W. H.  149.4 Malory, Thomas  156.5; 190.3 Malthus, Thomas Robert  16.3; 42.2; 57.2; 58.1; 58.4 Manet, Eduard  207.3 Mann, Thomas  46.2; 52.3; 107.2 Manning, Henry Edward, Cardinal  26.5; 28.5; 172.3; 173.2 Mantegna, Andrea  131.6; 207.7 Manzoni, Alessandro  4.5; 26.4; 30.4; 128.4; 158.5; 159.6; 213.8 Marat, Jean Paul  17.1; 17.2 Marcus Aurelius  5.3; 31.3; 150.4; 154.2; 160.1; 162.1; 162.2; 164.1; 164.2   Markus, J.  61.2 Marlowe, Christopher  29.6; 100.3; 104.1; 143.4 Marot, Clément  109.3 Marsh, J.  6.3; 199.3; 202.1; 202.3

Index of names Marston, John Westland  224.1 Martial, or Marcus Valerius Martialis  131.9 Martin, R. B.  101.1; 101.4; 103.2 Martineau, Harriet  108.3 Marucci, F.  122.2   Marvell, Andrew  133.5; 146.4; 146.5 Marx, Karl  4.5; 6.3; 7.2; 11.3; 40.2; 46.5; 57.1; 57.5; 58.4; 59.3; 67.2; 72.4; 101.4; 149.5; 167.2; 168.5; 197.1; 212.3 Mary II Stuart, Queen of England  28.3 Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland  25.3 Masaccio (Tommaso di ser Giovanni di Mone Cassai)  121.1 Masefield, John  107.3 Massey, Gerald  223.1 Maturin, Charles Robert  196.1 Maupassant, Guy de  33.3 Maurice, Frederick Denison  97.5; 223 Mauron, C.  44.1 Maxwell, C. 188.4 Maynard, C.  215.4 Maynard, J.  6.3; 171.2; 171.3; 171.4; 73.2; 178.4 Mazzini, Giuseppe  12.1; 116.3; 134.3; 140.1; 141.2; 184.1 Melbourne, Lord  7.4; 35 Melchiori, B.  105.1; 106.2;  107.3; 121.3 Melchiori, G.  107.3   Melville, Herman  106.2; 162.2; 215.2 Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix  159.7; 175.1   Meredith, George  1.1; 4.2; 7.2; 11.1; 15.1; 40.2; 41.2; 44.3; 58.5; 68.1; 77.2; 77.3; 107.1; 150.3; 173.3; 181.1; 182.1; 182.3; 182.5; 202.3; 207.7; 216.4   Merlette, G.-M.  64.1; 71.1 Mermin, D.  61.3; 72.1 Metastasio (Pietro Trapassi)  99.5 Meynell, Alice  171.1; 173.3; 175.2; 177.4; 197.1; 198.3; 198.4; 203.1; 205.4

357/III Meynell, H.  32.3 Michelangelo, Buonarroti  45.1; 70.3; 121.3; 121.4; 131.6; 169.6; 190.4; 193.6; 207.7 Mill, James  34.3; 40.2; 41.2; 42.1; 42.2;  48.2 Mill, John Stuart  2.1; 2.3; 3.1; 5.2; 7.2; 13.3; 36.2; 40–43; 46.1; 46.3; 47.2; 57.1; 57.2; 57.3; 57.6; 59.3; 59.4; 77.3; 83.1; 84.2; 89.1; 94.2; 109.4; 120.5;  163.2; 167.1; 224.2 Millais, John Everett  13.2; 44.1; 46.5; 99.5; 125.5; 173.2; 174.2; 182.5; 184.2; 196.1; 202.4;   207.1–2; 207–6; 209.1   Miller, B.  61.2; 105.1; 110.1 Miller, J. Hillis  111.2; 149.3; 153.3; 155.3   Milnes, Richard Monckton  121.8; 173.2 Milton, John  2.1; 36.3; 37.2; 37.3; 38.1; 57.3; 64.1; 65.2; 75.1; 80.1; 80.2; 80.3; 91.2; 92.5; 98.1; 101.1; 107.2; 110.1; 110.4; 137.2; 161.5; 161.6; 163.7; 170.5; 178.1; 185.1; 215.2; 222.2; 228.2 Minchin, H. C.  126.2 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti  17.1; 17.2; 36.2 Mitford, Mary Russell  64.3 Moers, E.  71.1 Molinos, Miguel de  127; 128.4; 129.2; 129.3; 129.5; 130.2; 130.5; 131.7; 132.4; 205.5; 216.3   Mommsen, Theodor  152.1 Montaigne, Michel de  101.3. 150.4; 154.4; 228.1; 228.2 Montale, Eugenio  107.3; 120.4 Montgomery, Robert  37.3; 38.2 Moore, Hannah  35 Moore, T.  37.3; 63.2 More, Thomas  37.3 Morley, E. W.  172. 3

358/III Morris, Jane, neé Burden  182.2; 184.3; 186.1; 186.3; 187.4; 190.4; 193.2; 193.4; 195.1; 195.2–3; 199.4    Morris, William  6.2; 12.1; 45.2; 53.2; 71.1; 102.2; 156.5; 181.1; 182.5; 184.3;  186.1; 197.2; 207.1; 207.3; 208; 215.2; 221.3; 228.1 Morse, B. J.  193.6 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  30.2; 107.2; 144.1; 159.7 Müller, Max  217.2 Mulock Craik, Dinah  216.2 Munch, Edvard  195.3 Munich, A.  110.4 Musello Cantalupo, C.  196.1 Musset, Alfred de  121.3 Nabokov, Vladimir  182.3 Napoleon Bonaparte  7.1; 17.1; 17.2; 18.1; 18.4; 23.2; 29.1; 37.1; 73.2; 85.2; 95.3;   134.3; 140.1; 149.4; 149.8; 169.2; 170.4; 181.2; 182.3 Napoleon III Bonaparte  60.2; 61.4; 67.3; 71.2; 73.1; 73.2; 95.1; 95.2; 97.3; 98.1; 108.4; 120.4; 149.5; 158.6; 166.3 Nelson, Horatio  95.3; 116.4; 182.3   Nemoianu, V.  3.1 Nettleship, J. T.  107.3 Newdigate, Sir Roger  1.3 Newman, F. W.  26.3; 161.4; 161.6–7 Newman, John Henry  3.1; 4.3; 5.2; 9.3; 9.5; 11.1; 26–32; 33.1; 33.2; 33.3; 34.1; 34.3; 34.4; 36.3; 37.1; 37.3; 37.4; 39.1; 40.1; 40.2; 41.1; 41.2; 42.2; 43.2; 45.1; 46.1; 46.5; 50.1; 57.3; 58.2; 58.4; 92.3; 94.2; 101.4; 101.5; 116.2; 119.1; 123.2; 123.3; 130.2; 132.3; 133.2; 134.2; 136.5; 142.2; 149.9; 150.2; 150.4; 151.2; 152.1;  153.1; 157.3; 161.4;  163.2; 163.4; 165.2; 170.2; 171.3; 172.2;

Index of names 172.3; 178.3; 180; 191.6; 197.2; 202.3; 205.6; 216.3; 222. 2 Nicolson, H.  75.1; 75.3; 76.2; 77.4 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg  32.3 Nietzsche, Friedrich  11.2; 11.3; 12.1; 58.3; 110.4; 160.4; 226.4 Nightingale, Florence  7.5; 134.5; 198.1; 199.2 Noakes, V.  219.2; 221.1; 221.2; 221.5 Norton, C. E.  24.1; 102.1; 133.6 Novalis, pseud. of Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg  10.1; 14.3; 92.1 O’Connell, Daniel  7.4; 85.2 O’Connor, Feargus  7.3 Odin  12.1; 18.1; 18.4; 158.2–3   Ogilvy, Eliza  216.4 Oliver, J.  172.6 Orcagna (Andrea di Cione)  49.1 Orr, A. S.  107.3 Orwell, George, pseud. of Eric Blair  4.5; 11.3; 12; 17.2; 58.4; 124.4; 169.4; 213.8; 217.2; 218.1   Overbeck, Friedrich  207.2 Ovidius, Publius Naso  56.1; 72.1; 83.2; 84.4; 99.4; 106.1; 129.2; 147.1;  155.2; 155.3 Owen, Robert  71.2 Owen, Wilfred  107.3; 226.3 Packer, L. M.  197.2; 198.3; 199.3; 200.4; 202.6; 204.2 Paden, W. D.  80.3 Paganini, Niccolò  184.1 Page, F.  171.1; 172.2; 172.4; 175.1; 175.2; 177.4; 178.1; 178.5; 179 Pagliaro, A.  101.1; 102.1 Paine, Thomas  1.2; 28.1 Paley, William  59.3 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, Lord  7.5; 221.4 Pappe, H. O.  41.1

359/III

Index of names Paracelsus, Philipp Theophrast von Hohenheim  104.1; 110; 111.1; 111.3; 111.4; 111.5; 112.1; 112.2; 113.2; 114.1; 114.2; 114.4; 122.7; 230.1 Pascal, Blaise  93.1; 94.2; 172.3 Pascoli, Giovanni  102.2; 171.3; 182.5; 200.4 Pater, Walter  3.2; 6.1; 9.4; 10.4; 26.4; 30.3; 31.4; 32.1; 33.3; 44.4; 45.2; 46.1; 46.3; 52.3; 67.1; 71.2; 76.3; 78.2; 89.5; 100.2; 100.3; 105.1; 115.3; 121.6; 133.2; 133.6; 136.1; 144.3; 148.4; 149.3; 149.5; 150.1; 150.5; 152.5; 152.6; 154.4; 158.5; 160.4; 162.4; 163.6; 164.2; 165.3; 167.2; 168.2; 168.4; 170.3; 178.5; 180.1; 182.2; 182.3; 182.4; 182.5; 183.1; 192.3; 194.1; 195.2; 196.1; 203.2; 206.5; 215.4; 227.4; 228.1; 228.2; 228.3; 228.6 Patmore, Coventry  3.1; 6.2; 6.3;  28.5; 57.3; 60.1; 60.2; 61.1; 61.2; 61.4; 63.4; 64.4; 68.1; 68.2; 68.3; 71.4; 73.1; 74.3; 85.1; 94.2; 100.4; 125.5; 133.6; 147.1; 171–180; 181.1; 181.4; 182.1; 182.2; 182.5; 185.4; 196.2; 197.1; 197.2; 198.3; 201.3; 206.6; 208; 209.2; 211.1; 212.1; 213.1; 213.5; 213.7; 221.3; 224.2; 226.2 Patmore, D.  172.6 Pattison, Mark  28.5 Peacock, Thomas Love  2.1; 3.1; 15.1 Peckham, M.  58.5 Peel, Sir Robert  7.4; 7.6; 12.1; 32.1 Pellico, Silvio,  60.1; 114.5; 116.3 Percy, Thomas  38.2 Perugino (Pietro Vannucci)  49.1 Petrarca, Francesco  70.3; 91.2; 125.3; 191.1; 200.2 Pfeiffer, Emily  216.5 Pheraios, Rhigas  60.1 Pindar  68.4; 155.2; 164.2 Pinero, Arthur Wing  231.3

Pirandello, Luigi  107.3; 126.4; 128.7; 154.2 Pisano, Niccolò  121.4 Pitt, V.  75.2; 77.1; 86.1; 89.3; 92.5 Pitt, William, Earl of Chatham  23.2; 36.2; 37.1 Pius IX, Pope  21.3; 70.3 Plato  16.4; 18.2; 28.1; 30.2; 34.1; 34.3; 41.2; 47.2; 76.4; 84.2; 86.4; 94.4; 101.1; 101.4; 101.5; 109.4; 124.3; 167.2; 172.3; 172.4; 176.1; 178.4 Poe, Edgar Allan  29.6; 60.2; 66.1; 71.1; 74.4; 115.3; 122.2; 182.2; 183.1; 185.4; 191.6; 196.1 Polidori, Gaetano  181.1; 184.1; 196.3 Polidori, John William 181.1; 184.1; 202.2 Pope, Alexander  41.2; 63.4; 78.1; 88.4; 100.3; 108.2; 138.2; 161.4; 161.6; 163.2; 224.1 Potter, G. R.  34.2.   Pound, Ezra  6.2; 77.5; 102.4; 107.3; 111.2; 188.5 Poussin, Gaspar  47.1; 47.3; 50.3 Poussin, Nicholas  47.3; 50.3 Powers, Hiram  70.1 Praed, Winthrop Mackworth  222.1 Praz, Mario  3.1; 28.5; 34.4; 171.3; 172.3; 175.1; 175.2; 207.3; 218.1 bibl.; 218.2   Prior, Matthew  222.1 Procter, Adelaide Ann  212 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph  59.4 Proust, Marcel  46.1; 88.2; 159.5; 160.3; 228.3; 228.4 Pugin, Augustus Welby  51.2; 139.2 Pusey, Edward Bouverie  22.1; 25.2; 28.2; 28.5; 46.5; 143.3 Quennell, P.  44.3; 52.3 Quinet, Edgar  64.1

360/III Rabelais, François  102.2; 117.2; 191.6; 218.1 Rachel (Elisabeth Félix), 134.3; 151.3; 158.5; 231.2 Racine, Jean  158.4; 158.5; 163.2; 163.7 Radcliffe, Ann  221.4 Rader, V. R.  96.1 Ralegh, Sir Walter  161.3 Rands, William Brighty  222.1 Ranke, Leopold von  34.4; 37.4 Raphael  44.4; 53.1; 54.3; 116.2; 121.3; 121.4; 130.3; 207.2   Rawson, C.  182.3 Rayner Parkes, Bessie  6.3; 216.2; 216.3   Read, H.  171.1; 171.3; 172.3 Reade, Charles  4.4; 27.2; 28.5; 59.3; 231.3 Rebora, P.  12.1 Rees, J.  182.3; 182.4; 188.2; 194.4 Reid, J. C.  171.4; 172.3; 172.4; 173.2; 175.2; 178.1; 178.5; 179 Reilly, J. J.  29.6 Rembrandt van Rijn  47.3; 55.3 Renan, Ernest  33.3; 124.2; 124.8; 150.4; 162.3; 163.4; 165.1; 167.2 Reni, Guido  44.4; 207.2 Restaino, F.  40.1 bibl. Reynolds, M.  216.1 Reynolds, Sir Joshua  47.1; 55.2; 207.2 Ricardo, David  41.2; 73.3; 167.2 Richardson, Samuel  100.4; 126.4; 167.3; 177.2   Richter, Jean Paul  14.2; 14.3; 15.1; 17.1 Ricks, C.  74.4; 75.1; 79; 80.3; 81.4; 83.5; 91.6; 98.1 Ridenour, G. M.  110.4 Riede, D. G.  148.4; 150.6; 154.4; 182.3; 182.4; 182.5; 183.2; 194.1   Riego, Teresa del  60.1; 63.1 Rilke, Rainer Maria  69.1 Rio, Alexis Francis  48.2 Roberts, J. M.  31.1

Index of names Robertson, F. W.  1.4; 94.2 Robertson, Thomas William  231.3; 231.4 Robertson, W.  39.1 Robespierre, Maximilien François Isidore de 17.2 Rodriguez, Francia  21.1 Roebuck, J. A.  6.1 Rogers, Samuel  47.1; 78.4; 181.2 Rorty, R.  77.5 Rosa, M. W.  4.2 Rosa, Salvator  44.2; 44.4; 47.1; 47.3; 48.1; 50.3; 105.3; 221.4 Roscoe, William Caldwell  149.2 Rosenberg, J. D.  47.2 Rosenberg, P.  11.3 Rosenblum, D.  197.1 Rossetti, Christina  2.1; 3.2; 5.1; 6.3; 28.5; 60.1; 61.3; 64.2; 66.1; 66.2; 71.1; 100.4; 156.2; 157.3; 160.1; 171.1; 174.2; 179; 181.1–4; 183.1; 190.1; 193.6; 196–206; 208; 210.1; 210.2; 210.3; 211.1; 212.1; 212.3; 212.4; 212.5; 213.4; 214.1; 215.1; 215.3; 215.4; 216.1; 216.2;  216.4; 217.2; 221.3 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  1.1; 2.1; 3.2; 29.5; 29.6; 44.2; 55.3; 60.1; 66.1; 66.2; 68.1; 69.2; 71.1; 99.2; 100.3; 100.4; 102.1; 102.2; 108.5; 109.4; 115.3; 136.2; 137.1; 144.3; 150.5; 152.5; 156.2; 158.4; 171.1; 172.4; 175.2; 176.1; 181.1–4; 182–195; 196.1; 196.3; 197.1; 197.3; 198.2; 198.3; 199.2; 199.4; 200.1; 202.1; 202.6; 203.2; 204.3; 205.5; 206.4; 206.5; 207.1–3; 207.7; 208; 209.1; 209.2; 210.1; 210.2; 210.3; 211.1; 216.2; 221.1; 221.3; 230.2 Rossetti, Gabriele  116.3; 181.1–4; 184.1; 191.1; 202.3; 206.4; 210.2 Rossetti, Maria Francesca  181.1–4; 196.1; 197.1; 197.2; 199.1–3; 202.1; 202.3; 204.1; 212.1

Index of names Rossetti, William Michael  152.1; 181.1–4; 186.2; 188.3; 191.6; 192.2; 193.1; 193.2; 195.2; 196.3; 198.2; 198.3; 199.1–3; 202.1; 205.1; 207.1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  12.1; 18.1; 18.3; 20.1; 46.4; 156.2 Rubens, Peter Paul  131.6 Ruskin, John  2.1; 2.2; 2.3; 3.1; 5.2; 7.5; 8.3; 8.5; 10.1; 10.2; 31.6; 40.1; 44–57; 58.1; 58.4; 59.3; 60.2; 63.4; 71.1; 72.1; 74.3;  75.3; 86.7; 96.2; 105.3; 108.1; 108.2; 116.2; 121.4; 121.5; 121.6; 122.4; 124.5; 141.1; 143.2; 149.5; 150.1; 150.4; 161.5; 163.4; 165.2; 168.2;  171.3; 172.3; 177.4; 180; 181.3; 182.3; 182.5; 183.1; 183.2; 184.2; 190.1; 190.2; 191.6; 196.1; 196.2; 197.1; 207.1; 207.2; 218.1; 221.5 Russell, Bertrand  12.1; 42.1; 58.1 Russell, John, Earl  7.1; 7.4; 31.1 Ryals, C. de L.  75.1; 75.3; 84.4 Sacchetti, Franco  191.4 Sadleir, M.  4.2   St Augustin of Hippo  27.1; 92.5; 124.3; 160.4; 202.4 St Dorothea  29.5; 197.2 St Elizabeth of Hungary  199.3 St Francis of Assisi  44.3; 164.1; 164.2 St Francis of Sales  215.4 St Jerome  99.2   St John of the Cross  215.4 St Lawrence  87.4 St Paul, of Tarsus  8.2; 16.4; 28.1; 101.1; 108.1;   110.1; 122.6; 122.7; 129.3; 132.5;   150.2; 155.3; 168.2; 178.5; 222.2. 226.1 St Philip Neri  26.4; 29.5 St Simeon the Stylite  26.4; 74.3; 75.1; 87.1; 87.4; 87.5; 87.6; 153.2; 157.3; 172.3; 191.1; 219.2

361/III St Teresa  178.5; 205.4; 215.4 St Thomas Aquinas  124.5; 129.2; 130.3; 172.2; 172.3 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin de  116.3; 148.4; 149.3; 150.4; 150.6; 162.2  Saintsbury, George  20.2; 26.1; 34.4; 45.2; 148.4; 148.5; 150.6; 202.1; 215.3 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy 10.1 Sala, George Augustus Henry  166.4 Saladino da Pavia  191.4 Sand, George (Aurore Dudevant)  62.2; 71.4; 108.5; 134.3; 151.2; 151.3; 152.3; 214.1; 216.4 Sandars, M. F.  198.3; 202.1 Santayana, G.  107.3; 126.3 Sappho  89.1; 156.1; 216.4 Sassoon, Siegfried  226.3 Savarit, J.  182.2; 193.1 Savio, Laura  60.1; 73.3 Savonarola, Girolamo  4.3; 44.4; 70.3; 207.2 Schiller, Friedrich  10.4; 14.1; 14.2; 15.2; 157.2; 161.1 Schofield, L.  196.1 Schopenhauer, Arthur  5.3; 11.3; 52.3; 93.2; 121.3 Scott, P.  138.1 Scott, T.  28.1 Scott, Walter  3.1; 4.4; 11.1; 13.1; 14.2; 14.4; 28.1; 38.1; 38.2; 39.2; 46.3; 46.4; 47.1; 49.1; 49.2; 60.2; 63.2; 72.1; 74.2; 78.1; 134.1 Scott, William Bell  199.3; 200.2; 200.4; 204.2; 210 Scotus, Johannes Duns  44.2; 172.4 Sénancour, Étienne Pivert de  148.5; 150.4; 151.3; 153.1; 154.1; 154.3; 154.5; 154.6; 157.6; 160.1; 160.2; 160.3; 160.4; 163.1 Sewell, W.  33.1

362/III Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper  31.4 Shakespeare, William  2.1; 2.3; 10.4; 11.1; 17.1; 18.1; 18.3; 20.1; 20.2; 32.1; 37.2; 46.3; 47.3; 50.2; 52.3; 57.6; 66.3; 68.1; 68.3; 78.4; 81.3; 83.2; 84.7; 88.4; 89.2; 89.4; 92.5; 102.3; 106.1; 107.2; 108.3; 109.2; 112.1; 113.2; 114.1; 115.3; 121.5; 124.6; 127; 129.2; 140.1; 149.1; 149.2; 150.2; 150.6; 152.7; 157.4; 158.5; 161.2; 161.5; 161.7; 163.1; 163.2; 163.4; 165.3;  169.6; 170.5; 173.2; 191.7; 202.2; 207.5; 207.6;   208; 216.2; 217.1; 218.1; 227.2; 228.2; 229.1; 230.2; 231.2; 231.3 Shannon, E. F.  91.3 Sharp, W.  196.1 Shatto, S.  96.1 Shaw, George Bernard  195.2; 231.3 Shelley, Mary  224.2 Shelley, Percy Bisshe  3.1; 10.4; 14.5; 36.3; 41.4; 46.4; 60.1; 60.2; 63.2; 74.3; 76.2; 80.2; 82.1; 91.2; 104.1; 104.2; 107.2; 108.1; 108.2; 108.4; 108.5; 109.1–3; 109.5; 110.1; 110.3; 110.4; 111.1; 111.5; 112.1; 115.1; 116.4; 121.7; 125.4; 133.4; 144.1; 157.6; 162.4; 163.2; 171.1; 171.2; 172.3; 172.4; 178.5; 180; 196.1; 216.1; 224.2; 225.3; 227.3; 230.1     Sherburne, J. C.  47.2 Sheridan, Caroline (Caroline Nor­ton)  216.2; 216.3–5; 216.6 Sheridan, Helen Selina (Helen Dufferin) 216.2; 216.3–5; 216.6 Sheridan, Jane Georgina  216.2; 216.3–5; 216.6 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley  231.3 Shorthouse, Joseph Henry  28.5 Siddal, Elizabeth  44.2; 182.2; 184.2; 186.1; 186.2; 187.2; 187.4; 188.3; 188.4; 190.2; 190.4; 191.1; 192.1;

Index of names 193.2; 193.4; 195.1; 195.2; 199.1; 199.3;  202.1; 204.3; 207.2; 221.1 Sidney, Philip  68.1; 91.5 Sinclair, W.  227.2   Sinfield, A.  74.1; 75.3; 77.1; 77.5; 78.2; 84.1; 90.2; 91.5; 92.2; 95.3 Smalley, D.  109.1 Smart, Christopher  107.2   Smedley, Menella Bute  216.3; 216.5 Smith, Alexander  225.3; 226.3; 227–228 Smith, J. C. see Grierson, H. J. C. Smith, J. L.  231.3 Smollett, Tobias  126.4; 140.1; 140.2; 171.1; 177.2 Snorri Sturluson  25.2 Solomon, Joseph  195.3 Sophocles  5.1; 133.1; 142.3; 148.4; 152.2; 154.4; 158.1 Sordello  104.1; 107.2; 111–112; 114.1; 114.2; 114.4; 155.3; 200.2 Southey, Robert  1.1; 10.4; 24.2; 36.3; 37.3; 51.2; 59.3 Spartali, Marie  195.2 Spector, S. J.  182.2; 187.4 Spedding, James  83.2; 84.5; 161.7 Spencer, Herbert  5.2; 47.2; 52.1; 58.2; 58.4; 58.5; 59; 94.4 Spenser, Edmund  54.1; 68.1; 83.5; 126.3; 146.4; 170.5; 178.1 Spinoza, Baruch  32.1; 136.2; 150.2; 150.4; 151.3; 157.6; 162.2; 163.1; 164.1; 164.3; 169.4 Spitzer, Leo  90.2 Staël, Madame de, Anne-LouiseGermaine Necker  13.1; 71.4; 216.4 Stang, R.  2.3 Stange, G. R.  107.3; 150.6; 152.3; 152.7; 153.4; 156.1 Stanley, A. P.  8.1; 8.2; 8.3; 8.5; 9.1; 9.2; 9.5; 134.2; 155.1; 157.3; 159.4; 159.5; 164.4 Stendhal (Henry Beyle)  4.5

Index of names Stephen, L.  44.1; 46.5; 47.1 Stephenson, G.  69.2 Sterling, John  22 Sterne, Laurence  15.1; 15.2; 140.2; 166.4; 189.3; 217.1 Stevenson, L.  5.3 Stevenson, Robert Louis  5.1; 5.3; 8.2;  205.1.   Story, William Wetmore  108.5 Strachey, Lytton  6.2; 9.5; 34.4; 123.3;  133.5; 148.2; 150.6; 197.1; 231.3 Strafford, Earl of  37.1; 108.3; 111.3; 113.2 Strangford, Lord  165.1 Strauss, David Friedrich  5.2; 11.2; 118.4; 123.1; 124.2; 135.2; 172.2 Strauss, Richard  98.4 Stuart, D. M.  196.2; 196.3; 200.4; 202.6 Suckling, John  171.3 Sullivan, M. R.  126.3; 126.5   Sullivan, Sir Arthur  89.3; 99.5 Surrey, Henry Howard  66.3; 68.1 Surtees, Robert Smith  217.1 Svaglic, M. J.  26.3; 26.5; 27.3; 28.2 Swedenborg, Emanuel  60.1; 124.5; 172.3; 175.2   Swift, Jonathan  15.2; 21.3; 37.3; 98.5; 118.2; 133.4; 163.5; 166.4; 166.5; 168.2; 217.1; 217.2; 218.1; 218.3; 222.1 Swinburne, Algernon  1.1; 6.2; 58.5; 60.2; 71.4; 76.2; 102.1; 102.2; 106.2; 141.1; 150.5; 152.5; 156.5; 181.2; 182.1; 182.3; 182.4; 182.5; 191.6; 195.1; 197.1; 197.2; 199.1; 208; 221.3 Symonds, John Addington  220.2 Symons, Arthur  182.5 Taine, Hippolyte  34.3; 76.1 Talfourd, Serjeant (Thomas Noon)  108.3 Taplin, G. B.  68.1 Tasso, Torquato 109.1; 115.3; 176.3; 202.4   Taylor, Harriet  41.1; 41.4; 43.4; 120.5

363/III Taylor, Jane  121.7 Taylor, Sir Henry  224.2; 226.2; 230; 231.2 Temple, Sir William  37.3 Teniers, David  57.5 Tennyson, Alfred  1.1; 1.2; 1.3; 1.4; 2.2; 2.3; 3.1; 3.2; 4.2;   5.1–2; 5.3; 6.2; 8.5; 11.2; 13.1; 15.1; 24.2; 29.3; 36.3; 38.2; 40.1; 41.4; 44.2; 58.1; 58.5; 60.1; 60.2; 61.1; 61.4; 62.1; 63.1; 64.3; 64.4; 66.1; 66.3; 66.4;  68.1; 71.4; 72.1; 73.4; 74–99; 100.1–4; 101.2; 102.1–2; 103.3; 104.1; 107.3; 108.5; 108.6; 110.1; 111.2; 116.1; 119.1; 125.1; 133.3; 133.4; 134.3; 135.1; 135.2; 136.1; 136.2; 136.3; 138.1; 143.2; 144.4; 146.1; 146.4; 147.2; 147.3; 148.2; 148.3; 148.5; 148.6; 149.2; 149.3; 149.4; 150.3; 151.2; 151.3; 152.1; 152.2; 152.4; 152.5; 152.6; 153.2; 153.3; 154.4; 155.1; 156.1; 156.2; 156.4; 156.5; 156.8; 157.2; 157.3; 157.6; 158.4; 159.2; 160.1; 160.3; 161.1; 161.2; 161.7; 166.3; 167.2; 171.1; 171.2; 171.3; 172.2; 174.1; 174.2; 175.2; 176.4; 181.3; 182.1; 182.2; 182.5; 183.1; 185.1; 187.2; 190.3; 191.2; 192.1; 192.3; 193.2; 194.3; 195.2; 196.3; 197.1; 197.3; 200.1; 202.1; 202.2; 202.4; 202.6; 204.3; 205.2; 205.3; 205.4; 206.1; 207.7; 208; 209.1; 211.1; 211.2; 212.1; 212.3; 212.5; 213.1; 213.2; 213.5; 213.8; 214.1; 215.1; 215.3; 216.4; 217.2; 219.2; 221.2; 221.3; 221.4; 223; 224.2; 226.3; 227.3; 227.4; 230.1; 231.2       Tennyson, Charles  74.2; 74.3; 78.1–3; 80.3; 91.4 Tennyson, G. B.  11.2; 13.1; 15.1; 15.2; 15.3; 17.1 Tennyson, Hallam  74.4; 78.4; 80.1; 86.1   Terhune, A. M.  100.1; 102.3   Thackeray, William Makepeace  3.2; 4.1; 4.2; 4.4; 4.5; 5.1; 6.3; 15.1; 29.1; 37.1;

364/III 45.2; 47.1; 52.3; 57.2; 62.1; 100.1; 100.4; 106.2; 107.3; 116.2; 130.4; 134.4; 147.1; 206.3; 216.5; 218.1; 228.1; 231.2 Theocritus  68.2; 75.1; 83.2; 86.1; 106.1; 152.4; 159.5; 164.2; 187.1 Thomas, Dylan  60.2; 142.1; 188.4; 202.2 Thomas, F.  199.3 Thompson, Francis  28.5; 171.1; 178.1 Thomson, James (The Seasons) 74.4 Thomson, James, B. V., 119.1; 172.1 Thornbury, Walter  223 Thucydides  8.1; 8.6; 9.2; 63.4; 139.4; 142.3; 154.4; 161.3   Tillotson, Kathleen  3.1; 4.4; 11.1 Timko, M.  133.4 Tinker, B., 160.2 Tintoretto ( Jacopo Robusti)  46.5; 48.2; 51.2; 52.1; 52.2 Tisdel, F. M.  192.1 Titian 44.3; 48.2; 52.1; 55.2; 92.5; 195.3;  206.5 Tolkien,  J. R. R.  158.1 Tolstoy, Lev  4.5; 45.1 Tommaseo, Niccolò  126.5 Torrijos, José María  22 Tort, P.  58.4 Trevelyan, G. O.  34.4; 37.1   Trilling, L.  151.3; 164.3 Trollope, Anthony  3.2; 4.1; 4.2; 4.3; 4.4; 4.5; 39.1; 58.5; 126.2; 175.2   Tucker, H.  75.1; 77.5; 78.2; 80.2; 84.2; 90.2    Tupper, Martin  175.2 Turner, Joseph Mallord William  44.1; 44.2; 44.3; 47.1; 47.3; 48.1; 48.2; 49.1; 49.2; 50.1; 50.2; 50.3; 51.2; 55.2; 55.3; 74.4; 165.2;  207.3   Turner, P.  106.1 Twain, Mark  107.3    Van Gogh, Vincent  229.1 Vanden Bossche, C. R.  12.1

Index of names Vargish, T.  26.3; 29.1 Vasari, Giorgio  116.2; 121.1; 121.4 Verdi, Giuseppe  111.3 Verlaine, Paul  92.2 Veronese, Paolo  44.1 Veyriras, P.  138.1; 139.4 Vico, Giovan Battista  2.1; 5.3; 9.2; 18.2; 37.2; 152.5   Victoria, Queen of England  1.1; 7.6; 64.3; 67.3; 74.1; 91.2; 139.1; 207.6 Vigny, Alfred de  41.4; 64.1; 225.2   Villon, François  191.1 Virgilius Maro, Publius  6.2; 63.2; 76.1; 111.3; 131.2; 138.2; 152.4; 158.2; 159.5; 161.3; 187.1; 213.2; 213.3; 220.2 Vogler, Georg Joseph  107.2; 124.7 Voltaire, pseud. of François-Marie Arouet  14.5; 21.4; 23.1; 23.2; 28.1; 31.6; 36.1; 36.2; 39.1; 102.2; 132.6; 149.5; 158.5; 159.6; 161.6; 166.4 Wagner, Richard  52.3;  90.1; 152.6; 156.5; 156.6; 156.7; 158.1; 182.2; 183.1 Wallace, Alfred Russell  58.1 Wallis, Henry  207.7 Walpole, Robert  37.1 Ward, M.  105.1 Ward, Mrs Humphry, Mary Augusta, neé Arnold  133.2; 151.2 Ward, W.  134.2; 136.5 Waterston, E. H.  77.5 Watts, George Frederic  13.2 Waugh, Evelyn  182.5; 183.1 Webb, Beatrice  59.2 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke  7.1; 7.3; 74.3; 95.2; 95.3; 134.3; 167.2 Wesley, John  143.3 Wheeler, M.  44.3 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill  13.2; 190.1; 191.6; 195.3; 207 White, Blanco  172.2 Whitla, W.  108.6; 200.1

Index of names Whitman, Walt  107.3 Wihl, G.  51.2 Wilberforce, Robert Isaac,  28.2 Wilberforce, Samuel  58.2 Wilde, Oscar  1.3; 2.3; 3.2; 4.5; 6.1; 6.2; 25.3; 63.2; 66.4; 83.2; 84.7; 87.4; 88.4; 92.5; 107.1; 115.3; 133.2; 149.3; 149.4; 150.5; 152.6; 163.6; 168.2; 168.5; 172.1; 180; 181.1; 182.3; 182.4; 182.5; 183.2; 184.3; 189.3; 195.3; 198.1; 203.2; 215.2; 216.4; 216.5; 231.2; 231.3; 231.4   Wilding, Alexa  190.3; 195.2 Wilenski, R. H.  44.2 Wilkie, David  25.3; 214.2 William of Orange  28.3; 39.1; 39.3 William IV, Hanover  7.3; 64 3 Williams, I. M.  112.1 Williams, William Carlos  211.2 Wilson, John (‘Christopher North’)  24.2; 77.3; 81.1; 85.1; 224.2 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim  149.7 Wiseman, Nicholas Patrick Stephen, Cardinal  4.3; 26.5; 28.1; 30. 3; 123.3 Wither, George  175.2 Wolf, Friedrich August  161.4; 170.5   Wolff, R. L.  33.2 Wood, Mrs (Ellen Price)  4.4 Woods, T.  40.2; 41.2

365/III Woolf, Virginia  60.2; 61.2; 71.1; 149; 71.2; 196.2; 196.3; 197.1; 199.1 Woolford, J.  150.6 Woolner, Thomas  125.5; 149.3; 173.2; 175.1; 209; 221.3; 231.2 Wordsworth, William  1.1; 1.2; 3.1; 6.2; 8.4; 10.4; 15.3; 24.2; 28.5; 29.1; 29.3; 33.3; 36.3; 40.1; 41.1; 41.3; 41.4; 44.1; 47.2; 49.2; 64.4; 74.1; 74.2; 75.2; 77.2; 77.4; 78.4; 80.4; 85.3; 86.6; 86.7; 90.1; 91.4; 100.4; 101.3; 104.2; 107.3; 108.3; 108.4; 109.2; 112.1; 114.5; 116.4; 120.2; 122.2; 133.7; 135.1; 136.2; 140.1; 144.2; 148.5; 150.4; 151.2; 151.3; 152.2; 152.7; 153.3; 154.1; 154.3; 154.5; 154.6; 156.1; 161.7; 162.2; 162.4; 163.2; 171.2; 175.2; 178.1; 178.5;  179; 180; 183.1; 193.2; 196.1; 201.1; 213.3; 216.1; 216.3; 226.2; 228.2 Wyatt, Thomas  68.1 Yeats, William Butler  6.2; 77.5; 182.5; 211.2; 211.3 Young, N.  11.2; 12.1; 19.1; 20.1 Zampini Salazar, F.  60.3 Zaturenska, M.  197.2; 199.3; 202.3; 202.6 Zola, Èmile 74.3

Thematic index

abjuration  11.2; 13.1; 33.1 of love  200.4 abstract art  55.2; 207.3 absurd, theatre  107.3; 126.1; 141.3; 166.5; 217.2 abyss  5.1; 68.2 of atheism  33.1; 134.2 Académie Française  163.4; 163.5 actors and actresses  2.3; 108.3; 113; 216.2; 230.1; 231.1 French  231.2 adultery  4.4; 33.3; 114.1; 126.1; 129.2; 131.7– 8; 194.2 aestheticism  1.1; 3.2; 6.2; 45.2; 74.1; 87.3; 149.2; 150.5; 162.3; 168.2; 168.4; 182; 190.1; 191.6; 196.1 aesthetics aesthetic society  57 avant-garde 178.1 of brevity in the fin de siècle  4.5 kitsch 51 post-Romantic and Victorian  2.1; 2.2; 3.1; 10.4; 18.3; 25.3; 29.2; 36.1; 37.2; 38.1; 41.3–4; 44.1; 44.2; 45.1–2; 51.1; 61.1; 66.4; 67.1; 72.5; 74.3; 77.5; 111.5; 120.2; 121.2; 149; 150.5–6; 161; 162–163; 172.3; 182.3; 191.6; 193.3; 213.7; 217.2; 218.1; 228.5 sacramentalist 72.4 of useful art  76.3 of visual arts  47–50; 55; 207 afterlife exploration of and contact with  5.3; 29.6; 60.1; 64.4; 66.4; 76.4; 82.2; 84.5; 86.5; 87.2; 91.2; 92.5; 93.1;

94.6; 94.7; 95.3; 97.3; 98.2; 102.2; 103.2; 103.3; 105.3; 116.2; 119.1; 122.5–6; 124.5; 124.7; 125.2; 125.4; 132.5; 159.3–4; 160.1; 176.1; 178.4; 185.1–3; 186.2; 200.1; 200.3 aggression governmental in Spencer  59.4 papal  34.3; 49.1 verbal vs charm 150.2 alienation  66.4; 135.1; 154; 219.2–3; 227.1 in Pirandello  154.2 from reality in Rossetti’s paintings  195.3 war alienation  226.3 allegory 182.4 almanacs see Annuals America American colonies  39.1 American democracy  34.2; 147.1; 149.6; 168.3; 169.3; 172.5; 178.3 American expatriates  62.2; 108.6; 124.4 American fame of English authors  15.1; 102.1; 138.2; 140.1; 147.1; 162.2; 215.1; 225.1 American literature  149.3; 163.1 Brahmins 133.7 Civil War  25.1; 57.7 emigration  13.1; 134.1; 134.5 exiled English Puritans  25.3; 152.1 fears of England becoming Americanized  9.1; 98.5; 169.4 anagrams  140.2; 175.1; 206.4 ‘angel in the house’ 3.1; 57.3; 171.4; 173.1; 173.2; 177.1; 177.4 angelology  185.4; 212.1; 212.2; 212.5; 225.2

368/III Anglican clergy  4.3; 4.5; 9.3; 28.3; 166.5 Anglocentrism  149.3; 149.6 Annuals  64.3; 76.1; 81.4; 216.2 Antichrist  9.3; 14.5; 21.4; 28.1; 28.3; 44.3; 124.3; 128.4; 129.5 Anti-Corn Law League  7.3; 14.2; 19.2; 88.5; 116.3; 223 anti-Semitism 12.1 anxiety democratic 104.1 of influence  3.1; 58.5; 75.1; 150.6 sceptic and metaphysical  5.2; 228.6 aphorisms  3.1; 63.4; 148.6; 154.1; 154.3; 171.1; 172.3; 206.6; 228.2; 231.3 Arnold’s aphoristic poetry  151.3; 157.1; 160.1 of Bishop Wilson  168.2 of Carlyle  13.1 collections of  101.5;  171.1 bibl.; 172.1; 172.3; 180 of Goethe  150.4; 230.1 of Newman  26.1 of Patmore  172.3 apocalypse annihilation  66.4; 80.2; 80.3; 82.4; 119.1 in debuting Victorian poets  80.2; 185.1 expectations of the Heavenly Jerusalem 8.3 of the French Revolution  10.2 literature as apocalypse of nature  10.2 matriarchal 61.4; 71.4 as metaphor for regeneration  19.2; 66.4; 80.2; 80.3; 82.1; 158.3 Revelation  16.5; 44.2; 80.2; 83.3; 83.5; 119.3; 193.3; 205.2; 206.6; 222.2 Second Coming  58.3 Apollonian calm  106.2; 155.4 God of light  158.2 poet  155.4; 155.5; 227.3

Thematic index poetry 171.3 apologia of the Biedermeier  228.4 of capitalism  12.1 of the Catholic Church  31.1; 37.4 of celibacy  212.4 of D. G. Rossetti  191.6 of dictatorship  21.1 of Gothic  52.1 of imagination  217.2 of imperialism  75.2 of Newman  27–28; 41.1; 43.2 poetic genre in Browning  105.3; 106.2; 123 of Prometheism  122.3 of rationalistic faith  31.3 of religious tolerance  34.1 semantics 124.1 of Spiritualism  124.4–5 of war  57.5; 97.2 Arabian Nights  80.2; 82.4; 94.6; 202.2 archetypical, method  6.3; 76.1; 158.5 architecture  44.2; 45.1; 45.2; 50.2; 51.1–2; 52.1; 53.2; 172.2 Baroque 141.1 Catholic 54.2 English and neo-Gothic  55.3 Gothic  44.1; 51.1; 52.1 Renaissance  49.1; 54.1 Art Nouveau  195.3; 207.5 Arthurian, cycle and myth  63.1; 64; 66.3; 75.1; 75.3; 84.1; 87.1; 87.4; 87.6; 89.5; 92.5; 95.2; 122.2; 156.5–6; 182.5; 183.1; 186.4; 190.4 asceticism  42.1; 44.4; 50.3; 87.6; 92.5; 119; 123.1; 125.5; 130.4; 181.3; 201.3 three types in Ruskin  44.4 topos of the death of the ascetic  130.4 associationism  41.4; 42; 55.3; 71.2; 91.4–5; 116.2; 131.4; 218.3; 228.3 astrophysics 58.3

Thematic index ataraxy  97.1; 130.4 autobiographies  15; 24; 27–28; 33; 41; 46.1; 58.3; 59.1; 173.1; 182.1 bibl. in verse  69.4; 91.2; 97.2 avant-gardes 6.2; 77.5; 178.1; 182.1; 207.3 Baroque aesthetics 115.3 anti-Baroque  91.5; 100.3 architectural style  51.1; 106.2; 127; 141.1 associationism 17.1 flamboyant  171.3; 215.3 music 124.7 painting 183.2 religion 26.4 style in fiction, poetry and prose  4.2; 92.3; 96.5; 103.1; 150.2; 178.2; 191.6; 192.1; 196.2 beards  13.2; 219.3; 221.2 prophets’ 13.2 beautiful, theory of  18.3; 48.2; 51.1–2; 56.2; 60.1; 66.4; 86.4; 163.2; 168.2; 228.5 beer  4.2; 57.4; 101.3; 166.5; 207.4 belatedness  6.2; 44.1; 75.1 belle dame sans merci  66.3; 75.3; 80.4; 81.4; 85.1; 96.4; 117.2; 122.2; 156.4; 176.1; 201.1 Bells and Pomegranates  104.1; 105.3; 113.1; 114.1; 116.1; 120.2 Benthamism  2.1; 7.2; 10.2; 40.1; 41.1; 41.2; 41.3; 41.4; 42.1; 48.2: 104.2; 162.4 Beowulf  74.2 best-sellers  36.1; 175.1 origin of term  1.2 Bhagavad Gîtâ 153.3 biblical criticism see new criticism bibliolatry  2.1; 9.1 Biedermeier  3.1; 8.5; 76.1; 85.1; 86.6; 98.4; 156.1; 171.1 bibl.; 175.1; 177.4; 202.2; 206.3; 213.3; 214.2; 219.2

369/III Bildungsroman see novels biographical, criticism  40.1; 61.2; 69.1; 111.2; 192.1; 202.1 bivocal technique  86.5; 136.3; 137.1; 140.1; 142.3 black people  21.1; 35 Bloomsbury group  6.2 book market  1.2; 1.3; 4.1; 4.5; 13.1; 14.4; 15.1; 36.3; 55.3; 102.1; 133.5; 182.5; 198.1; 216.2; 221.2; 228.5 bout-rimé sonnets  181.3; 192.1; 206.2 calm Apollonian 106.2 of Arnold’s poets and heroes  156.6; 158.2; 159.6 Hellenic 3.1 illusory 148.2 loss of  156.4 Olympian and Sophoclean  5.1; 133.1; 148.4; 215.4 stoic  153.3; 153.4 Calvinism adoptive  4.3; 10.1; 11.2; 15.3; 26.3; 27.1; 41.2; 46.2; 86.4; 229.1 atheological 11.2 Calvinist born critics  34.3 Calvinistic theory of colour  49.2 divine and diabolical polarity  17.1; 50.3; 51.1; 54.3; 101.2 predestination and damnation  20.2; 28.1; 29.6; 35.1; 39.3; 80.2; 82.2; 87.5; 103.3; 133.2; 143.2 refutation of  34.3 Cambridge ‘Apostles’ 5.2; 74.1 bibl.; 81.4; 82.1; 83.2; 83.3; 83.5; 89.1; 91.1; 94.2; 97.5; 100.1; 152.2; 230.1 Cambridge University  1.4; 3.2; 8.6; 20.2; 22.1; 35.1; 38.1; 58.1; 59.2; 62.1; 76.3; 77.2; 78.2; 89.3; 97.5; 100.1–2; 102.1; 108.6; 149.3; 149.9; 172.2; 205.1; 213.2

370/III Can-Can 191.6 Carbonari  7.3; 116.3; 181.2 caricature  3.1; 9.1; 30.2; 89.2; 113.4; 118.4; 119.1; 128.3; 131.2; 138.2; 166.4; 166.5; 216.4; 221.5 caricaturists and illustrators  49.1 sculpture 49.1 carnivalesque  52.3; 166.5; 217.2; 226.2 Catholicism Adelaide Procter’s  212 aesthetic  29.1–2 anchorage of  3.1 anti-Catholicism  18.4; 25.3; 28.1; 33.4; 43.2; 44.3; 45.1; 52.1; 106.2; 118.2; 123.1; 127; 129.4; 129.5; 132.3; 134.2; 141.1 breakdown of  18.4 British 171.3 Catholic superstition  116.3 Catholic universities  31 clandestine 27.2 conversions to  6.3; 70.3; 151.2; 199.3; 216.3 discrimination against Catholics  7.4; 31.2 duration of  34.4; 37.4 flirtations with  76.3; 215.4 gangrene of and necessity of its regeneration  149.7; 157.6 hermitical  157.3; 172.3 Irish 31.1 Newmanian  26.2; 26.5; 28; 30 Patmorian  172.5; 197.2 philo-Catholicism 34.3 return to  51.2; 133.2 Spanish and diabolical  20.1; 115.2; 116.2 Thomas Arnold of Rugby on  9.1 ‘true’ 18.3; 18.4; 37.4 via media between Protestantism and  9.3; 26.4; 28.2–3; 30.1

Thematic index celibacy  202.1; 206.4; 213.4 ecclesiastic  27.2; 29.5; 30.1; 30.2; 30.4; 202.1 Celts  9.2; 36.3; 39.3; 148.2; 165; 211.2; 227.1; 227.4 Celtic Renaissance or twilight  21.2; 231.3 chaos and cosmos  5.1; 10; 11.1; 15.1; 17.2; 18.3; 19.2; 102.1; 155.5; 161.2; 161.7; 198.4; 209.1; 226.4 Chartism 7.2; 7.3; 7.5; 9.4; 19; 20.1; 21.2; 39.1; 88.5; 91.1; 98.6; 104.1; 138.1; 139.4; 142.3; 212.3; 223; 229.1 chivalry chivalric settings  66; 84.1; 89.4: 96.1; 227.4 in the Middle Ages  49.2 nostalgia for and revival of  57.5; 100.2; 100.4; 101.1; 101.3; 101.4; 129.7; 230.1 Christian socialists  44.2; 59.3; 97.5 Christmas   91.4; 118.2; 188.2; 201.2; 228.4 Christmas carol  197.1 Christmas tales  4.5 classicism  2.4; 148.1; 148.6; 149.3; 159.5; 230.1 clothes, philosophy and semiotics of  15.1; 16.1–2; 17.1 clouds biblical  29.4; 65.3 divine  124.8; 136.5 ‘Medusa’ 50.2 miasmic 191.6 storm  5.2; 8.3; 44.2; 50.2; 56.1 clubs aristocratic  2.2; 4.2 of debates  1.2 ‘Khayyammian’ 102.2 of writers  178.3 colonialism colonial politics  39.3; 41.2; 43.3; 149.6

Thematic index colonial roots and interests of writers  35.1; 62.1 emigration to colonies  19.1; 22.1; 57.2 English  33.4; 211.3 support of  21.3; 35.1; 39.1; 40.2; 43.1; 43.3 colour  45.2; 47.3; 48.2; 49.2; 50.2; 51.1; 53.2; 54.1; 55.2; 115.3; 183.2; 190; 207 common reader  1.2; 4.5; 53.1; 77.1; 89.3; 175.2 common things  3.1 communism  11.1; 42.2; 45.1; 134.3; 138.2 consumer literature  1.3; 18.3; 36.3; 76.3; 161.2; 219.1 contrast between sisters in C. Rossetti  201.3 between writers  108.1; 163.4 conceptual  69.3; 81.3; 105.1; 111.1; 172.5 grotesque 107.2 geographic 4.2 as a structural device  30.3; 68.2; 70.3; 80.4; 192.1; 200.2; 219.2 of voices  29.5; 201.3 Counter-Reformation  127; 170.4; 170.5; 216.3 couples of poets in a dialectical symbiosis 5.2 Crimean War  95.2; 97; 99.5; 147.2; 157.6; 166.5; 212.3; 223; 224.2; 226.3 critical prose egotistic  228 parodic 10.3 Romantic  3.1; 228.2 transcendental  14 Crystal Palace  46.3; 51.2; 95.1 Cubism 207.3 ‘cup-and-saucer’ comedy  231.4 Cupid and Psyche  176.5; 178.5; 179 cyclicism of critical methods  6.3

371/III denial of  159.3 Gibbonian 52.1 as a historical mechanism  5.3; 8.3; 9.2; 10.1; 16.5; 76.4; 80.4; 99.3; 158.3; 160.2; 162.3 as a modern fluctuation between faith and doubt  148.4; 154.4; 160.2; 168.4 seasonal and natural  159.5; 201.2; 205.4 Spencerian 59.1 as a structural device  4.1 Vicoian 9.2 Dadaism 1.1 dandy  3.1; 15.2; 16.1; 16.2; 16.3; 17.2; 37.1; 57.6; 151.2; 152.2 Dante studies  3.2; 181.1; 181.2; 182.2; 185.7; 191 Darwinism  58; 124.2; 213.8 Decadentism  3.1; 3.2; 4.5; 9.5; 10.1; 26.1; 54.1; 77.4; 83.2; 84.5; 84.6; 91.2; 102.2; 102.3; 111.1; 121.6; 127.3; 133.5; 140.1; 148.1; 162.2; 168.4; 172.2; 180; 182.3; 182.4; 182.5; 183.1; 195.3; 203.2; 207.1; 210.2; 227.1; 228.3; 228.4; 228.5 decalogues conjugal  61.4; 71.4; 171.4 of fashion  16.2 parody of the Ten Commandments  133.1; 142.2; 144.4 of pigs  21.3 of the Puritan work ethic 133.1; 182.4 of Tennyson’s appeasement between classes 76.1 decline of ancient civilizations  63.2; 152.1; 188.2 deconstructionism  3.1; 6.3; 11.3; 27.3; 75.1; 77.5; 148.2; 150.6; 154.4; 185.5; 198.3; 198.4; 216.1

372/III defectors from Oxford and Cambridge  3.2; 5.2; 41.2; 93.1; 100.2; 104.1; 110.1; 134.5; 149.3; 157.3; 172.2; 216.1 detectives  4.4 determinism  26.4; 54.2; 98.5 dialect and dialectal dialectal literature  217.2 dialectology  18.1; 100.4; 138.1; 213.8; 214.2 Dorset dialect poetry  75.2; 171.2; 172.5; 213 Irish dialect poetry and drama  75.2; 211.2; 231.3 Lincolnshire dialect poetry  75.2; 98.1; 99.1 Scottish dialect poetry  138.1; 210.3; 226.3 Wessex dialect poetry  231.7 diaries intimate, in verse  9.2; 11.2; 24.1; 34.4; 47.1; 61.2; 92.5; 133.5; 134.4; 135.2; 136.1; 140.3; 146.2; 151.3; 156.2; 172.3; 178.1; 196.3; 206.2; 206.6; 216.3 of a madman  96.3 naturalistic 58.1 poetry in form of diary  71.2; 177.1; 177.5; 205.5 travel diary in prose  8.5; 9.2; 47.1; 52.3; 173.2; 218.1; 221 travel diary in verse  29.4; 71.1; 116.4; 146.5 diarists  19.3; 149.2 didactics didactic essay writing  14.2; 18.1; 55.1; 55.2 didactic function of literature  2.2; 182.3; 191.6 family  41.3; 108.2 public schools  9.1; 63.2 university  89.3; 135.2 Dionysian poet  155.4; 178.3 poetry 171.3

Thematic index dirge for dear friends  86.1; 91–94 definition of Victorian  159.2 for gentle women  29.3 for liberating heroes  17.1; 63.4; 95.3 for pets  3.1; 67.3 for poets  64.3; 159.1; 159.5–6; 165.5; 213.1 for relatives  62.1; 99.5; 159.1; 159.4 Dissent  4.2; 4.3; 11.2; 33.1; 34.3; 36.2; 43.2; 98.6; 104.2; 124.6; 177.4; 203.6; 216.3 blurred boundaries of  4.5 co-opted within the Pale  9.1; 37.4; 165.1; 168.2 criticism of fanatical  118.2 historical damages  9.1; 149.7; 162.4 as lesser evil  118.2 satire of  4.3; 9.1; 118.4 double, literature and motif  5.1; 5.2; 44.2; 86.5; 101.2; 105.2; 108.1; 151.1; 182.2; 193.6; 198.3; 212.5; 231.3 drama decline  2.3; 104.1; 231.1 dialogic or vocal  64.1; 65.1; 126.1.137.1; 139.2 dramatic aspirations of poets and novelists  2.3; 104.1; 105.1; 108.3; 108.4; 113.1; 126.1; 224.1; 226.2 dramatic mask  83.2; 97.3; 105.1 dramatic parody  2.3; 45.2; 56.2; 231.1 monodrama 96.1 theories  2.3; 29.2; 50.2; 113.1; 161.2; 230.1 dramatic monologue alternative to lyrical effusion  2.3; 74.2; 87.1; 100.2; 105.3 morphology  73.4; 75.1; 85.3; 87.1; 96.1; 100.2; 106; 107; 115.1; 120.1; 121.6; 122.6; 126.1; 131.4; 178.5; 187.2; 187.4 posthumous fortune  29.7; 106; 107.3

Thematic index sympathy  5.1; 72.1; 105.3 as Victorian distinctive mark  5.1; 38.2; 75.1; 80.1; 85.3; 104.1; 133.4; 137.1; 148.3; 215.1; 226.3; 231.1 duel, survival of  3.1; 96.3; 96.4; 97.2; 97.4; 144.4; 146.1 dyads in Arnold’s poetry  148.4 of  books in The Ring and the Book  126.3 in Carlyle  17.1 divine and diabolical  18.3 light and darkness  18.3 dystopia  10.3; 21.3 ‘ebb’, as a poetic image  5.3; 9.2; 17.2; 135.1; 154; 156.3; 160.2; 168.4; 188.4; 215.2 economic depression of 1878  1.1 Edda  158.1; 158.2; 158.3 edification, in literature and in the press  1.3; 5.1; 30.3; 46.2; 127; 175.2; 202.5; 215.3; 216.3 education  1.2; 8.1; 8.6; 31; 35.1; 57.3; 58.2; 107.3; 133.2; 149.9; 166.5; 169–170; 198.2; 211.1; 216.5; 227.1 educational curricula  8.1; 46.4; 108.6; 177.3; 182.3; 216.5 educational model in public schools  8.1; 8.4 educational model in universities  57.3 educational value of private poetry  91.2 theory of  9.5; 41.2; 46.4; 59.3; 151.3; 169.4 of workers  32.1; 57.7; 89.6; 98.5; 166.4 ekphrasis  183.3; 187.4; 190.1; 192.2; 193.6; 196.1; 209.3; 210.3; 211.1 Elizabethan decoration  8.4; 148.5; 149.2; 150.6; 161.2; 161.4; 161.6; 163.3; 163.4; 163.5–7; 180 neo-Elizabethan literature  149.3; 175.2; 182.3; 186.3

373/III tracings  68.1; 80.1; 117.2; 133.5; 143.2; 192.1 emancipation Catholic  14.5; 172.5 female  57.3; 89.1; 138.1; 139.2; 171.4; 212.3 workers’ 21.3 emigration to America  7.4 to colonies  19.1; 71.2; 71.3; 138.1 female and spiritual  212.1 of foreigners and Italians to England  116.3; 181.1; 181.2; 182.3; 204.2 Irish  7.4; 216.3; 228.6 plague of  207.2; 227.4 Enlightenment  10.2; 10.3; 14.1; 14.3; 14.5; 18.2; 31.4; 34.3; 42.1; 45.1; 118.2; 133.4; 144.2; 149.5; 150.2; 161.6; 162.3; 162.4; 163.5; 166.4; 170.1; 225.3 Entfremdung see estrangement Epicureanism see Epicurus in Index of Names epigram  34.2; 102.1; 116.1; 118.4; 160.1; 196.2; 223 epithalamium  91.2; 94.7; 96.4; 177.5; 178.5; 192.2; 202.6 epos, domesticized  138.2; 213.2 Erastianism  28.3; 46.5 eremitism condemnation of, or distancing from  26.4; 29.3; 29.5; 74.3; 157.3; 169.6; 172.3; 191.1; 221.5 parodied  74.3; 219.2 temptations of  134.2; 172.3; 205.4 eros denied 87.6 desublimated 143.1 disguised  69 erotic appetite  133.2; 147.2; 151.3; 171.3 frustrated  148.3; 227.1 satiating the unease of living  148.6

374/III unknown, sublimated and virginal  171.1; 176.1; 178.4–5; 179 escapism  6.2; 80.2; 83.1; 83.5; 86.1; 103.2; 136.3; 200.1; 203.2 Essays and Reviews  58.4; 164.3 estrangement  38.2; 63.3; 173.2; 175.2; 231.4 eunuch, as a metaphor  129.4; 135.2; 160.1 ‘Euphuism’ 115.2; 161.2; 227.2 Eurocentrism  35.1; 163.1 Europeanism  149.6; 149.8 evangelicalism  2.1; 4.2; 5.2; 8.4; 9.1; 28.1; 30.1; 33.1; 34.3; 35.1; 42.1; 47.2; 50.1; 134.4; 143.3; 148.3; 177.4; 196.2; 207.2; 216.3; 229.1 evolutionism  5.2; 10.3; 26.4; 28.4; 39.1; 47.2; 58; 59; 93–94; 97.1; 103.4; 110.4; 124.1–3; 124.6; 124.7; 132.4; 215.2 exhibitions Great Exhibition of 1851; 7.5; 95.1; 97.5; 153.1; 207.1 International Exhibition of 1862  98.1 exile from Eden  63.1; 64.2; 96.3 political  181.1; 185.7 spiritual  26.4; 65.1; 72.1; 82.4; 83.3–4; 107.3; 148.1; 171.1; 211.3; 227.3 of the writer  3.1; 5.2; 60.1; 61.2; 86.2; 108.4; 134.3 existentialism  11.3; 157.6; 182.4; 219.2 negative  32.1; 58.3; 94.2; 148.6; 218.1 exotericism  3.3; 5.2; 57.6; 84.3; 86.1; 86.7; 91.5; 107.2; 138.2; 149.4; 153.1; 171.1; 172.3; 175.2; 175.3; 179; 181.2; 182.2; 182.5; 193 exoticism  30.3; 55.3; 64.2; 78.2; 82.4; 84.6; 98.1; 100.2–3; 101.2; 102–103; 113.3; 117.1; 135.2; 153.2; 213.2; 215.4; 220.1 exotic ancestries, often false  216.4 exotic fruits  202.4; 202.6; 203.2 expressionism  65.3; 190.3; 195.3

Thematic index fable and folktale morphology  56.1; 202.1 motifs  30.3–4; 56.1; 69.4; 73.2; 83.3; 85.3; 89.1; 89.2; 89.3; 204.1; 206.1; 215.1; 215.2 faith as antidote of ugliness  3.1; 153.1; 189.1 poetry as surrogate of  2.1; 71.2; 154.5; 158.2 proofs  5.1; 8.2; 26.3; 28.3; 29.2; 30.1; 30.5; 31.1; 31.3; 32; 94.2; 94.6; 118.3; 119.1; 122.6; 123; 126.1; 132.5; 134.2; 164.3; 188.2; 198.4 and science  31.5; 58.4; 59.3; 77.5; 103.4; 119.2; 121.6; 122.7; 124.1–3; 213.8; 225.2 ‘fallen woman’ 33.7; 126.2; 202.6; 207.2; 210.2; 212.5 fancy and imagination  29.1; 63.4; 96.5; 120.2; 126.3 fascism  12.1 fashion expenditures for  57.5; 57.6; 214.3 paleosemiotics of  16.1; 16.2 Regency  3.1; 16.2; 216.4 revolutions in  121.8; 206.1 Rossetti  183.2; 195.3; 199.4 of soldiers in the Crimean War  13.2 see also clothes Faustism see Goethe in Index of Names fecundity, myth of  58.4; 94.7; 172.3; 202.4; 204.1 feminist criticism  6.3; 58.5; 61.3; 61.4; 66.1; 71.4; 72.3; 182.5; 187.4; 202.6; 203.2; 212.1; 212.4; 215.1; 215.4; 216.1 writers and motifs  40.1; 43.1; 57.3; 58.2; 60.3; 61.3; 61.4; 71.4; 72.2; 89; 171.4; 203.1; 212.4; 216.3

Thematic index femme fatale  84.7; 89.5; 176.1; 190.1; 231.2 Ferrara  47.1; 111.3; 112.2; 115.2–3; 121.5; 121.6 fin de siècle  6.1; 102.3 Florence  48.2; 52.3; 61.2; 62.2; 70; 71.4; 72.3–4; 73.1; 73.3; 97.5; 106.2; 108.1; 108.4–5; 113.4; 116.2; 120.1; 120.5; 121.4; 125.4; 126.2; 134.5; 150.3; 151.3; 181.2; 189.1; 189.2; 216.4 franchise  4.5; 7.1; 7.3; 19.1; 21.2; 25.1; 40.2; 42.2; 88.5; 104.2; 178.3 Frankenstein  58.5; 224.2 Freemasonry  23.2; 181.2 Freudian criticism  6.3; 11.3; 63.5; 75.3; 77.5; 148.2; 150.6; 182.2 Futurism 1.1 gender  4.2; 58.5; 61.3; 172.4; 198.2 genius, Romantic theory  2.2; 34.3; 63.4; 109.1; 162.4; 163.4; 163.5; 163.7 genres  4.4; 60.2; 73.4; 75.1; 80.3; 106.1; 113.1; 133.5; 134.4; 134.5; 152.2; 162.1; 205.4; 215.1; 215.3; 217.1; 218.2–3; 228.2 dramatic  6.2; 231.1 hybridization  2.3; 39.2; 45.2; 60.2; 114.1 gentleman commoner 46.5 education  3.2; 35.1; 41.2; 133.1; 170.2 profile of  42.1; 57.2; 92.5; 95.3; 167.3; 176.1 usurped 231.3 utopia of the  31.2; 100.2; 133.2 worker 57.1 geology  5.2; 13.1; 46.4; 47.1; 48.1; 50.1; 54.2; 56.2; 58.1; 76.4; 82.3; 93.2; 94.3; 97.5; 121.6; 181.2 gnosis  76.4; 94.4; 181.2 God double or two-faced, cruel and pitiful  5.2; 29.3; 33.3; 50.1; 113.3; 178.4; 194.2

375/III hidden, or Deus absconditus  5.2; 63.3; 67.2; 69.4; 87.4; 93; 94.5; 122.5; 124.8; 137.2; 144.3; 154.2; 154.4; 172.1; 182.4; 193.6 Gothic architecture  31.6; 44.1; 45.1; 45.2; 51–54; 55.2; 56.2; 224.1 novel  3.2; 4.2; 4.4; 74.4; 97.5; 107.3; 126.3; 157.6; 182.2; 187.1; 194.2; 196.1; 208; 211.1 grand style  55.2; 155.4; 161.5; 161.6; 161.7; 165.4 grand tour  3.2; 141.1; 143.2; 150.3 Great Exhibition see exhibitions grotesque, theory of  49.1; 52.1; 54.1; 54.3; 107.2; 144.1 growth, as a Victorian myth  141.1; 143.3 gypsies  3.2; 117.1; 133.1; 147.3; 153.4; 157.3– 5; 157.6; 159.5; 160.3; 213.4; 214.2; 216.4 hair and hairstyling:  78.4; 118.4; 166.5; 181.2; 202.4; 202.5; 202.6; 204.3; 213.7 in D. G. Rossetti  182.2; 182.5; 183.2; 184.3; 189.1; 190.4; 193.2; 193.4; 195.3 in Pre-Raphaelite poets  207.6 in women idealized by poets  44.2; 80.4; 82.5; 125.5 Hebraism apologia of  124.7 and Hellenism  3.2; 148.2; 149.7; 159.4; 167.1; 167.2; 168.1; 168.3; 168.4; 191.6 Hellenism  1.4; 167.2; 168.2; 168.3; 168.4–5 heredity of characters  58.1; 59.1; 59.2; 78.1; 96.2 legal 58.5 hexameters

376/III experimental poems in  133.2; 133.4; 133.5; 138.1; 138.2; 139.2; 140.1; 144.1; 161.4 in Homeric translations  161.5–7 historiography 10.1; 10.3–4; 11.1; 12.1; 17; 18; 20; 23; 25.2; 27.2; 32.3; 33.4; 34.2; 35– 36; 38.1; 39; 52.1; 152.1 Homeric influence  63 homiletics  26.1; 27.1 homosexuality  6.3; 30.2; 34.4; 78.2; 202.6; 221.1 hortus conclusus  51.2; 84.4 humour  14.3; 25.3; 36.3; 56.2; 100.4; 155.2; 157.2; 166.4; 171.2; 212.1; 216.4; 217.2; 221.1; 222 id  133.1; 148.2 idealism Berkeley’s 49.1 German  102.2; 149.5; 166.5 identikits of the hero  18.1 of the new Englishman  101.3 of the poet and artist  2.2; 45.2 of the politician  43.3 identity, fractured  4.1; 11.3; 193.6 idyll Arthurian  86.1; 95.2 Biedermeier  86.6; 88.3; 98.4; 171.1; 175.1; 178.1; 212.4; 229.1 English  81.4; 86.1; 88.4; 89.1; 97.5; 171.1 of Medieval England  19.2 rural  3.1; 85.1; 86.1; 88.1; 99.1; 179; 211.1–2; 213; 215.1 varieties of  4.2; 75.1; 77.1; 89.1; 92.3; 92.5; 96.5; 97.5; 98.1; 133.2; 139.4; 146.3; 148.3; 148.4; 152.4; 156.4; 157.4; 171.2; 193.4; 202.3; 212.5; 226.3; 227.3 illustrators and illustration of texts  45.2; 51.2; 91.2; 183.1; 208; 210.1; 217.2; 219.1; 221.3

Thematic index imaginary portraits  14.1; 22.1; 25.3; 54.2; 109.3; 133.5; 148.2; 170.3 Imagism  6.2; 77.5; 107.1; 154.3; 188.5; 211.2; 213.3 imitatio Christi 215.3 incarnation  11.2; 29.5; 101.2; 119.4; 135.2; 172.4; 178.5 India  7.5; 7.6; 35.1; 37.4; 38.1; 39.1; 41.2; 43.3; 80.4; 98.6; 102.1; 151.2; 153.1; 198.1; 216.4; 221.2; 231.4 industrialism  7.1; 7.5; 19.4; 37.3; 97.5; 162.3; 167.2; 168.5; 170.5; 228.1 inscape  45.2; 150.5; 228.5 intelligent artisan  1.2; 89.6 interactive text  53.1 intermittence, as a pattern  52.3; 63.4; 80.2; 86.6; 89.1; 92.4; 96.2; 105.1; 148.4; 152.1; 152.5; 154.4; 157.3; 157.6 inventions linguistic  38.1; 81.1; 220.1 of the press  18.1 Victorian 7.5 Ireland Catholic university  26.5; 31; 57.3 English prejudices  9.2; 21.3; 149.6; 149.8; 165.4; 172.5 Home Rule  7.6; 9.1; 43.3; 76.2; 85.2; 104.2; 139.4; 149.6; 165.4; 166.4; 167.1; 168.3; 211.3 Irish history  20.1–2; 37.1; 39.1; 39.3; 149.6; 149.8; 211.3; 218.2 Irish irredentism  7.3; 7.4; 7.5; 19.1; 20.1; 43.1; 138.1; 165.4; 211.2 Irish literature  4.3; 100.4; 211; 216.2; 231.3 Irish myths  18.1; 156.6 potato famine  7.4; 16.2; 134.3; 139.2 iron, civilization (also of glass)  51.2; 57.4; 57.5; 67.2 Islam  18.2; 43.2 isms  1.1; 17.2 isotopies  69.3; 69.4; 105.3; 121.6

Thematic index Italy as curative, tourist and cultural place  22.1; 29.4; 46.5; 47.1; 48.2; 62; 97.5; 108.1; 108.2; 108.4; 108.6; 141.1; 151.3; 205.5; 216.4; 221.2 contemporary  9.5; 29.4; 33.3; 94.7; 106.2; 114; 116; 120.3; 150.3; 173.2; 183.1; 221.4 historical  21.3; 37.1; 106.2; 111; 112; 113.2; 113.4; 115.3; 116; 126.3; 127; 130.2; 170.4–5; 226.2 myth of  6.3; 60.3; 70.3; 70.4; 71.2; 71.4; 106.2; 182.3; 187.3; 198.3; 216.4 Risorgimento  4.5; 7.5; 18.3; 43.3; 60.1; 60.1; 70; 73.1–3; 76.2; 114.5; 106.2; 114.5; 116.3; 166.2; 170.4; 181.2; 187.3; 216.5 seen by English writers  12; 60.3; 70.2; 102.2; 171.3; 181.2; 182.5 vice and superstition  28.2; 44.3; 55.3; 71.2; 116.2; 143.2; 182.2; 191.6 Jacobinism  1.2; 7.1; 9.4 Jesuits  23.3; 170.3 attacks on Jesuitism  11.1; 14.5; 21.4; 37.4; 132.4; 199.3 falsity of  20.2; 39.3; 87.5 philo-Jesuitism  34.3; 34.4; 37.4; 172.3 subtle, in fiction  129.5 journalism and journalists  7.1; 7.3; 22.1; 31.2; 40.1; 41.2; 107.2; 108.2: 108.3; 123.1; 123.3; 149.4; 150.1; 162.3; 166.4; 167.1 juxtaposition argumentative technique  51.2 conceptual in Tennyson, Clough and D. G. Rossetti  94.3; 142; 146.1; 187.1 of images  6.2; 218.1 of scenes  143.4

377/III kaleidoscope  106.2; 116.3; 149.2; 152.4; 211.1; 228.4 kaleidoscopic poetry collections  76.1 kitsch  51.1; 89.3; 178.1; 214.1 Koran  18.1; 18.2; 103.1 lament  38.1; 60.2; 66.4; 92.4; 161.4 Latitudinarianism, or Broad Church  9.1; 26.2; 30.1; 33.1; 39.3; 58.4; 164.1 Lazarus, miracle of  29.6; 93.1; 103.3; 112.6–7 letters  13.2; 27.3; 61.1–2; 68.4; 108.4; 117.1; 126.5; 127; 134.5; 140.2; 150.4; 166.4 liberalism political  12.1; 21.1; 59.4; 104.2; 133.2 profit-making  4.1; 57.2; 57.3; 57.4; 57.7; 98.5 theological  26.2; 28.1; 28.3; 29.4; 30.1; 31.2; 133.7; 226.1 liberism (also laissez faire)  7.3; 7.4; 19.2; 25.1; 57.1; 167.2; 168.5; 169.5 libertinism  3.2; 144.1; 178.3; 210.3; 222.1; 226.2; 228.2 libraries Bloom’s in Joyce’s Ulysses 211.3 Bodleian  102.1; 133.1 bibl.; 133.7 bookworm 101.4 British Museum  173.2; 182.1 circulating 1.2; 4.2; 57.3 cultural importance  13.1; 57.3; 228.1 free 1.2 popular 32.1 Lieder  99.5; 156.1; 231.3 limerick  208.1; 217.2; 218–219; 220.1; 221.1; 221.2; 221.4; 221.5; 222.1 linguistics 138.1; 165; 182.2; 192.3; 211.2–3; 213.8; 214.2; 217, 218.1 literacy extension of  73.3; 75.2; 177.2; 217.2 innocuous 1.2 mass 1.2 upsurge  1.2; 1.3 loisir  1.2; 57.7; 183.2

378/III longevity  1.1; 74.1; 77.4; 78.4; 102.4; 216.2; 224.2; 227.3 lotus-eaters  3.1; 74.3; 83.4; 83.5; 84.1; 84.2; 85.2; 86.7; 87.3; 88.2; 136.3; 140.1; 149.3 Low Church see Dissent madness  5.1; 78.1 Manchester, economic school  57.1 marginality 211.2 Marxism  58.4; 59.3; 72.4; 168.5 anti-Marxism  57.5; 212.3 English  4.5; 67.2; 149.5; 167; 197.1 ‘mask of age’  29.3; 80.3; 80.4; 82.2; 88.2; 135.1; 152.1; 197.3 masochistic instinct  102.2; 143.3; 155.1 mass civilization  143.2; 149.5; 172.5; 198.1 colonization 57.2 literature  1.2; 231.1 schooling  1.2; 1.3; 149.9; 169.3; 214.3 masters maîtres-à-penser  6.3; 9.5; 11.1; 45.2; 149.2; 150.4; 157.2; 157.6; 159.3; 159.4 old, of painting  44.1; 48.1; 121.4; 207.2 materialism  8.2; 11.1; 16.5; 22.1; 44.4; 60.3; 71.2; 72.4; 77.5; 86.7; 94.3; 101.5; 102.1; 102.2; 123.1; 124.1; 124.2; 124.7; 132.4; 144.2; 172.3 ‘matria’  61.4; 71.4 mediumism see Spiritualism memoirs  13.2; 26.1; 52.3; 120.4; 150.3; 157.6; 169.6; 216.2; 216.3; 228.1 mesmerism  5.2; 17.2; 107.3; 120.4; 157.4 mesmeric genre  29.6 metanoia  16.4; 19.2; 130.2 Metaphysical poetry  29.6; 91.5; 92.3; 107.3; 131.2; 171.3; 175.3; 185.4; 186.2; 196.1; 200.2; 212.1 metaphysical quest  5.3; 87.6; 110.4; 120.1; 122.1–3; 123.2; 139.4; 152.7; 157.6; 159.4; 193.6; 200.3; 224.2

Thematic index metempsychosis  44.2; 209.3 Middle Ages  10.1; 10.3; 10.4; 11.2; 14.5; 16.4; 18.2; 18.3; 27.3; 29.6; 44.4; 47.2; 53.1; 106.2; 111; 121.1; 161.6 nostalgia for and revival of  19; 26.4; 31.2; 36.3; 37.3; 39.1; 44.4; 46.5; 57.1; 57.7; 59.3; 76.2; 149.5; 157.3; 162.4; 207.2–3; 230.1 Renaissance anticipations  44.4; 49.2; 170.3 Romantic 44.1 ‘symbolic’ 1.1; 20.1; 126.5; 132.4; 153.3 visual arts  44.4; 47.1; 49.1; 49.2 middle classes  39.2; 149.4; 152.1; 162.1; 163.2; 169.6; 241.1 co-opted in governing the country  76.2 decline of the mercantile  46.2 as a literary addressee  77.1 political rights of  167.3; 169.4 Puritan ancestry  9.1; 162.4; 165.1; 168.2 satire of the  133.1; 140.1; 140.2; 146.3; 165.4; 166.5; 167.2; 169.3; 216.3 utopia of reformed and enlightened bourgeoisie  148.3; 149.8; 169.4; 170.2 without rank but wealthy  4.4; 175.2 minimalism  67.3; 172.2; 175.3; 211.2 miracles  9.5; 13.1; 26.3; 31.5; 33.3; 93.1; 122.6; 123.3; 124.3; 128.2; 136.4; 160.4; 164.3; 221.5 mise en abyme  28.4; 91.6; 105.3; 133.3 misreading 3.1 Modernism  1.1; 11.3; 15.1; 26.5; 33.2; 34.4; 60.2; 76.1; 77.5; 94.6; 102.4; 132.5; 133.5; 143.2; 213.1; 228.3 Molinism see Molinos in Index of Names monasticism  19; 29.5; 46.2; 49.2; 56.2; 66.2; 115.2; 126.5; 127; 130.2; 131.9; 132.1; 132.7; 153.2; 157.3; 157.6; 169.6; 178.4; 197.2; 200.1; 202.1; 204.1; 206.2; 207.2; 226.2

Thematic index money  57.2; 57.6; 99.1; 144.2 morbid states  2.2; 74.3; 149.2–3 music comic operas by Gilbert and Sullivan  89.3; 231.3 musical melodrama  6.2; 111.3; 114.1; 114.4; 156.5; 213.1 musical metaphors  69.4; 80.4; 188.4 nineteenth-century melodrama  52.3; 90.1; 111.3; 156.5–6; 158.1; 182.2; 183.1 operatic music in London  21.1 poems for music  99.5 theories  31.6; 34.4; 81.3; 100.4; 121.5–6; 124.7; 150.1; 156.5; 159.7; 165.2; 183.1; 202.2 tonal and dodecaphonic  207.3 mysticism  8.3; 9.3; 13.2; 15.3; 16.4; 20.2; 28.1; 42.1; 48.1; 58.4; 60.1; 60.2; 60.3; 68.2; 87.6; 89.5; 101.1; 102.1; 114.3; 118.2; 119.3; 130.5; 168.2; 171.3; 172.3; 175.2; 178.4; 178.5; 182.2; 192.3; 199.2; 205.1; 212.4; 215.3; 215.4; 216.3; 219.2 myth biblical and Christian  58.3; 64.1–2; 67.1; 71.4; 202.5 of Dr Arnold of Rugby  9.5 of the great chain of being  58.1 Greek  49.2; 63; 67.1; 76.1; 83.1; 98.3–4; 158.5–6; 209; 215.3 of Newman  26.4 Norse and Eddic  18.1; 99.1; 158.1–4; 215.3; 226.4 of the rebirth of society through art 45.1 Persian  101–103 personal  18.1; 43.4; 44; 52.3; 56.1; 60.1– 2; 62.2; 67.1; 84.5; 105.2; 108.1; 181.4; 182.2; 182.5; 186.1; 197.3 Roman 38.1 scholars of  18.1; 44.2; 76.4; 164.2 mythical method  6.2; 158.5

379/III Nabis 207.3 naming as linguistic act  217.2 paroxysm of  74.4; 81.4; 96.4; 202.1 silenced 202.2 Naples  142.1–2; 143.2; 150.3; 181.2; 226.1 Nazarenes 190.1; 207.2; 207.6 Nazism  12.1; 58.4 neuroses of poets  5.1; 108.2; 184.3 new criticism, biblical  3.2; 26.5; 33.1; 40.1; 45.1; 93.1; 104.1; 118.2; 119.1; 123.1; 136.4; 150.1; 164.1; 164.4; 172.2; 182.4; 205.4; 215.2; 215.4; 225.2 New Critics  6.2; 77.5; 90.2; 148.6; 197.3 Nibelungenlied  14.3; 191.1 nihilism  11.2; 58.3; 88.3; 91.5; 104.1; 121.6; 154.1; 218.1 Nonconformists see Dissent non jurors  28.3; 39.1; 39.3 nonsense  15.1; 38.1; 146.4; 202.1; 208; 216.3; 217–222 Norman, period and influence  36.3; 39.3; 78.1; 100.1; 165.2–3 novel, as genre aesthetics  2.3; 3.2; 10.4; 11.1; 35.1; 41.4; 126.3; 149.2; 172.3 ‘baggy monsters’  4.5; 107.1 classification  4.2 connective threads  4.1 fame  4.5; 6.2; 107.3; 133.5 first person  4.2 male/female  4.2; 61.3; 216.1; 216.2 multiplot and multifocal  4.2; 39.2; 58.5; 72.3 narrative ‘I’  4.2; 106.1 omniscience  4.2; 106.1 of retransmission  4.2; 5.3 rising importance  1.3; 1.4; 2.1; 3.1; 4; 5.3; 26.4; 36.3; 126.4; 149.4; 157.2; 231.1

380/III schools and traditions  4.2 transience  4.1 novella  1.3; 206.1 novels autobiographical  4.3; 15.1; 40.1; 41.1–3 backdated and contemporary  4.4; 5.3; 133.4; 147.2 Bildungsroman  15.3; 71.4 clerical 4.2; 4.3; 4.5 comic and satirical  4.5; 7.5; 29.1; 67.1; 218.1 of conversion  4.3; 30 cyclical 4.1 Darwinian 58.5 of early Christian times  4.3; 30.3–5; 160.2; 216.3 of entertainment  11.1 epistolary  27.3; 57.7; 133.3; 140.2 essayistic 15.1; 52.3 fashionable  4.2; 11.1; 16.2 historical  4.3; 4.4; 28.3; 30.4; 160.2 of the industrial and mining districts 4.2 of Irish settings  4.3 London novels  4.2 martyrologic 4.3; 30.3–5 matrimonial  4.4; 126.2; 231.4 muscular  11.1; 21.4; 27.2; 33.4; 56.2; 107.3 Napoleonic 4.4 naturalistic  26.4; 98.1; 127; 128.6; 149.2 New Testament  4.3 Newgate, or of prison life  4.4 in one, two, three volumes  2.2; 4.5; 52.3 parodic  4.2; 10.3; 133.3 pedagogic 202.3 picaresque  4.2; 15.3 prophetic  11.1; 15.2 reformist  4.5; 15.2; 169.3 regional 4.2 religious  4.3; 22

Thematic index rural  4.2; 88.4; 206.1 Savonarolian  4.3; 44.4; 70.3 sensational 4.4; 105.1; 126.2; 126.4 set a century before  4.4 silly  4.1; 36.3 ‘silver fork’  4.2 of specific years  4.4; 7.1 thrillers  4.4; 114.1; 126.2; 224.2 Tractarian 4.3; 28.5; 30.2; 33.1–2 workers’  4.5; 7.2; 7.3; 11.1; 19.4; 67.1; 71.1 objective or symbolic correlative  6.2; 77.5; 91.5; 92.3; 121.3; 136.1; 150.6; 151.2; 186.3; 188.3; 201.2 occultism 182.2 Oedipus complex  13.1; 61.4; 148.2 Ossian  38.1; 109.2; 165.3; 210.3 Oxford English Dictionary  60.2 Oxford Movement see Tractarianism Oxford University  1.3; 1.4; 3.2; 5.2; 8.6; 9.2; 9.3; 9.5; 26.2; 26.4; 30.1; 30.2; 31.1; 33.1; 33.4; 46.5; 47.1; 62.2; 91.1; 100.1; 104.1; 108.6; 133.2; 134.2; 134.4; 135.2; 137.1; 138.2; 139.4; 148.3; 149.9; 151.2; 151.3; 157.3; 158.1; 161.3; 162.3; 163.4; 165.1; 165.4; 168.2; 169.6; 181.3 paganism  10.4; 18.2; 25.2; 30.3–5; 37.4; 53.2; 69.3; 136.5; 141.1; 158.2; 178.5; 188.2 ‘palace of art’  3.1; 74; 80.2; 83.2–4; 84.1; 84.5; 86.3–5; 89.3; 90.2; 97.5; 205.2 palingenesis   17.2; 40.2; 44.4; 60.1; 61.4; 70.1; 71.4; 73.1; 82.1; 88.2; 91.2; 92.5; 109.3; 129.2; 138.2; 139.2; 203.1 through art  45.1 pantheism  31.3; 76.3; 94.2; 99.1; 112.1; 118.3; 136.5; 161.5; 171.3; 196.1; 205.4; 211.1; 213.8

Thematic index papacy  21.4; 26.5; 28.1; 28.3; 30.2; 36.2; 37.4; 39.3; 53.2; 70.3–4; 73.2; 105.3; 106.2; 110.4; 112.2; 126.1; 126.5; 127; 129.5; 132.3–7; 142.2; 166.3; 221.5 papists  9.4; 34.3; 39.3; 55.2 parallels and parallelisms between arts  47.3; 182.3; 216.2 between Clough and M. Arnold  143.2; 159.5 between Macaulay and Burke  34.3 between past and present  9.2; 19; 28.1; 28.3; 30.3; 50.3; 136.5; 151.3; 153.2; 154.4; 168.2 between Patmore and Wilde  171.1; 180 between Ruskin and Browning  108.1 between Ruskin and Carlyle  45.2 between Shakespeare, Milton and Dante  37.2; 50.2 between T. Arnold, Carlyle and Newman  26.2 between Tennyson and Browning  107.3 between Tennyson and Hopkins  86.1 thematic  65.2; 70.2; 71.4; 89.2; 91.1; 97.1; 109.3; 113.4; 152.7; 190.2; 212.5 parody  15.1; 34.4; 63.3; 70.2; 74.3; 77.3; 86.5; 89.3; 96.3; 101.3; 102.2; 118.4; 133.4– 5; 138–139; 140.2; 140.3; 142.2; 149.4; 166; 176.4; 177; 184.3; 191.6; 200.2; 220.2; 222.2; 225.2 of the biographical genre  15.2; 23.3 of the novel  4.2; 10.3; 15.1; 57.7; 133.3 of Spasmodism  224.2 of women’s poetry  216.3 pathetic fallacy  49.1; 96.2; 121.6; 157.6 ‘patria’ versus ‘matria’  71.4 patriarchal, system  61.4; 71.4; 213.5 patristics  26.4; 29.4; 172.3 peasants  15.3; 28.3; 57.5; 66.3; 75.1; 85.1; 88.1; 88.4; 98.3; 98.6; 99.1; 100.4; 101.3; 138.2; 138.3; 139.2; 139.3; 156.2; 166.2; 177.3; 179; 191.4; 196.1; 201.1; 202.6;

381/III 205.3; 206.5; 210.3; 211.2; 211.3; 213; 214; 215.2; 226.3; 231.3 pedagogy Arnoldian in Rugby  3.2; 8; 9.5; 101.3; 133.2; 143.3 Clough’s  133.1; 143.3 FitzGerald’s 101.3 infantile 217.2 M. Arnold’s  149.9; 165.4; 169–170 of Mill’s father  41.2 in Newman’s university  31 Ruskin’s  55.3; 56.2; 57.2; 57.3 Spencer’s 59.1; 59.3 periodicals and newspapers  2.2; 2.3; 13.1; 15.2; 21.1; 26.5; 27.2; 33.4; 36.1; 40.1; 41.2; 47.1; 57.2; 57.6; 59.2; 61.1; 76.1; 81.1; 86.1; 91.3; 95.1; 96.1; 102.1; 115.1; 117.1; 123.3; 133.7; 134.2; 143.1; 156.5; 159.1; 162.1; 162.4; 163.6; 163.7; 164.3; 164.4; 166.2; 166.4; 167.1; 169.6; 173.2; 173.3; 174.1; 180; 185.1; 189.3; 191.6; 196.3; 202.2; 207.1; 212.1 The Academy 163.1 The Athenaeum 126.4 The Atlantic Monthly 140.1 Blackwood  47.1; 174.1 Cornhill  57.2; 167.1 The Critic 191.6 Daily News 169.5 The Dublin Review 11.2 Edinburgh  25.1; 31.4; 34.2; 36.1 Foreign Quarterly Review 109.1 Fraser’s  15.1; 33.4 The Germ  173.2; 185.4; 188.1; 189.1; 189.3; 196.3; 208; 209.1; 210.3 Hood’s Magazine 116.2 Household Words  207.6; 212.1 London Review  159.5; 169.5 Monthly Repository  104.2; 108.3 Pall Mall Gazette  166.4; 169.5

382/III Quarterly Review  83.1; 217.1 bibl. The Rambler  26.5; 123.3 The Spectator  138.2; 207.1 The Times  32.1; 55.2; 91.3; 165.4; 207.1; 207.2 Westminster  41.2; 59.2 periodizations in Tennyson  75.1 of the Victorian age  1.1 pet names and endearing terms  3.1; 62.1; 62.2; 101.4; 131.5; 151.2; 162.2 phenomenology  5.3; 34.1; 34.3; 34.4; 36.2; 56.2; 126.2; 153.3; 188; 205.5; 219.2 philanthropy  4.4; 9.4; 16.2; 21.1; 21.2; 35.1; 57.3; 71.2–3; 72; 98.6; 152.7; 198.1; 215.1; 215.4; 216.5; 217.2; 223 philistinism  6.1; 15.2; 26.4; 34.3; 149.5; 162.2–4; 165.1; 165.3; 166.1; 166.4; 168.1–2; 169.5; 172.5 philo-French sentiment  23.2; 163.7; 166.3 philo-Italian sentiment 70.2; 166.2; 187.3 photography  7.5; 49.1; 55.3; 121.3; 128.4; 171.2; 183.2; 186.1; 191.6; 199.4; 202.2; 202.6; 231.4 photos of writers  13.2; 78.4; 199.4; 213.7; 221.2 phrenology 173.3 picturesque  3.1; 37.2; 51.2; 106.2; 116.3; 118.2 Pindaric prose  26.2; 46.1; 47.1; 56.2 Platonism  16.4; 47.2; 76.4; 94.4; 172.3 poems and prose in fragments  10.1; 24.1; 41.4; 63.4; 63.5; 75.1; 80.2; 86.1; 91.4; 95.1; 96.1; 102.2; 107.3; 109.4; 115.1; 133.5; 137.1; 141.3; 142.2; 146.2; 147.2; 152.6; 154.4; 155.1; 157.1; 161.2; 161.3; 163.7; 182.3; 185.1; 188.3; 189.1; 196.2; 228.3 Poet Laureate  1.2; 60.1; 61.3; 74.1; 74.3; 75.2; 77.3; 77.4; 78.3; 78.4; 82.1; 86.1; 91.2; 95.2; 98.1; 99.5; 107.3;

Thematic index 108.5; 116.4; 158.1; 171.3; 174.1; 197.1; 215.1 poetry prizes  1.3; 46.5; 63.2 Newdigate  1.3; 46.5; 135.2; 152.1 points de repère  6.3 pornographic literature  172.6; 217.2 Portfolio Society  215.1 positivism  15.3; 16.4; 40.2; 47.2; 51.2; 71.2; 88.2; 88.6; 93.1; 94.4; 121.6; 122.7; 124.1; 124.2; 143.2; 149.4–5; 157.6; 162.3; 164.1; 188.2; 222.2 poststructuralism  5.3; 77.5; 84.1 poverty divide between rich and poor  16.2; 16.3; 41.2; 51.2; 57.5; 70.4; 72.2; 73.3; 76.2; 88.5; 98.5; 114.3; 149.8; 169.3 Poor Laws  7.2 pre- and post-lapsarian state  64.2; 65.1; 69.3; 135.2; 138.2 predestination  39.3; 41.2; 80.2; 87.5; 103.3; 114.4; 125.5 Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting  3.2; 6.2; 12.1; 29.5; 44.2: 45.2; 47.1; 49.1; 55.2; 60.1; 60.2; 70.3; 84.2; 87.6; 102.2; 122.5; 157.2; 171.1; 174.2; 179; 181; 182–195 passim; 196.1; 196.3; 197.1; 197.2; 199.3; 199.4; 200.1; 200.2; 207; 208; 210.1; 211.1; 212.1; 212.4; 213.5; 215.2; 221.3; 224.1 pre-Romanticism  36.1; 60.2; 63.5; 66.2; 74.4; 154.1; 156.2; 165.3; 205.4 prices of books  1.2; 95.3; 102.1; 114.1; 214.1 prism, as a poetic image  5.3; 69.1; 105.1; 118.1; 120.2; 144.2; 185.1 proletariat  7.1; 11.1; 21.2; 60.1; 71.1; 71.2; 71.3; 72.5; 76.2; 96.5; 138.3; 167.2; 214.1; 214.3; 215.2; 216.2; 223; 224.1; 231.2 Prometheism  83.3; 89.4; 102.2; 110.4; 111.1; 111.5; 113.2; 114.1; 114.2; 115.1; 116.1; 119.3; 122.3; 124.7; 137.1; 155.5; 159.6

Thematic index prostitution   71.1; 33.2; 71.3; 111.5; 114.1; 114.4; 114.5; 128.2; 128.6; 130.6; 139.3; 144.1; 144.3; 144.4; 147.3; 151.3; 182.2; 182.3; 187.2; 187.4; 195.2; 199.2; 202.6; 210.1; 210.2; 227.3 Ruskin’s idea of  44.3; 52.3; 54.2 see also ‘fallen woman’ Prussia  1.1; 7.5; 7.6; 13.3; 21.2; 23; 28.4; 36.2; 37.2; 76.2; 149.9; 166.4; 166.5; 169.3; 170.1; 170.5; 198.1 public schools  1.3; 3.2; 8.1; 46.3; 63.3; 100.1; 101.3; 104.1; 108.2; 133.2; 143.3; 157.3; 159.4; 169.6; 172.2; 187.4 Eton  30.1; 78.1; 91.1; 150.2; 149.3; 169.6 Harrow 62.1 Rugby  3.2; 8.1–2; 8.6; 9.5; 26.2; 133.2; 133.6; 134.2; 135.1; 136.4; 139.1; 143.3; 151.2–3; 152.1; 159.4; 169.6 publishing industry development of  1.2; 70.1 devout and evangelical  2.1 rules of market  4.5; 15.1; 29.4 vicissitudes of  192.3 Purgatory  15.3; 29.6–7; 178.4; 185.1; 193.6; 205.4; 212.4; 215.4 Puritans and Puritanism  9.1; 20.1–2; 25.3; 26.2; 33.3; 34.3; 36.3; 37.1; 37.2; 39.1; 149.7–8; 150.2; 152.1; 162.4; 165.1; 168.2; 206.4 Puritan sense of life  44.1; 44.3; 46.2; 47.1; 48.2; 52.2; 53.1; 56.2; 98.5; 101.2; 105.3; 108.1; 133.1; 144.3; 166.5; 168.3; 172.3; 172.4; 177.2; 183.1; 191.6; 192.3; 193.6; 199.1; 201.1; 202.6; 213.4 Puseyism  22.1; 25.2; 28.2; 28.5; 143.3 see also Tractarianism push-pin  2.1 Quakers  7.3; 9.1; 16.4; 35.1; 39.3; 59.2; 97.3; 100.1; 219.3

383/III quatrains in Arnold  154.1; 160.3 in FitzGerald  100.1; 102–103 in Tennyson  91.5–6; 96.3 querelle des anciens et des modernes 37.3; 47.2; 71.2; 133.4; 161.3 racism  58.4; 70.1 railways and railway network  4.2; 7.3; 7.5; 21.3; 44.2; 51.1; 57.3; 59.2; 59.3; 89.6 Raritätenkasten see kaleidoscope reader’s response criticism  6.3 realism  3.1; 4.2; 4.4; 5.3; 55.2; 58.5; 74.3; 80.2; 96.5; 107.2; 114.1; 121.2; 121.4; 127; 133.4; 139.4; 143.4; 156.2; 175.3; 176.5; 177.3; 188.2; 190.2; 204.3; 207.2; 207.4–5; 211.2; 214.2; 231.2; 225.1 reform Dr Arnold’s see pedagogy electoral reforms (or Reform Bills, in 1832 and 1867)  1.1–2; 7.1; 7.3; 8.3; 15.1; 25.1; 35.1; 40.2; 57.7; 76.2; 78.2; 80.2; 88.4; 166.4; 172.1 of prisons  21.2; 59.3; 76.2 Protestant  10.2; 17.2; 18.1; 20.1; 23.3; 25.3; 26.2; 33.4; 34.1; 36.1; 36.2; 37.1; 44.3; 76.2; 85.2; 164.2; 165.1; 168.2; 170.5 Reform of Reform  26.2; 28.1; 28.3; 39.1 of religion  60.3; 164.4; 166.1 of society see palingenesis Regency  3.1; 173.1; 216.4 relativism  5.2–3; 6.1; 6.2; 11.1; 37.1; 57.2; 64.1; 73.3; 104.1; 105.1; 107.3; 111.4; 115.3; 121.6; 124.4; 126.1; 126.4–5; 127; 128.4; 130.6; 132; 140.2; 149.2; 149.7; 150.4; 152.5; 161.2; 177.1–2; 182.4; 203.1; 228.3 relics cult of  30.1; 39.2; 129.5; 131.9 Reliques of Bishop Percy  38.2

384/III remakes  2.3; 61.2; 158.5; 231.1 biblical 136.3 Byronic 80.1 classic  158.5; 215.1; 222.2 exotic  94.6; 100.3; 157.2 film 4.2 mythological  158; 178.1; 178.5; 209.3 Shakespearean 2.3 Renaissance  16.4; 18.3; 26.4; 28.5; 44.1; 44.2–4; 45.2; 49.1; 49.2; 51.2; 52.1; 52.3; 53.2; 54; 55.3; 56.2; 105.3; 106.2; 115.2; 116.2; 121.1; 121.4; 121.5; 121.7; 124.7; 130.2; 131.6; 132.3; 164.2; 168.2; 168.4; 170.1; 170.3; 170.4–5; 183.2; 192.1; 206.5; 207.2; 207.7 repressions and rebellions anti-Catholic riots in 1780  4.4 Chartist 7.3 European risings in 1848  7.2; 21.3; 39.1; 51.2; 70; 138.1; 158.5; 181.2; 187.3 in Hyde Park in 1867  167.2 of Governor Eyre in Jamaica in 1866  13.3; 43.1 of Spanish exiles in 1830  2.1 returnees  13.2; 226.3 Revelation  10.4; 27.3; 31.5; 32.2; 37.1; 64.1; 99.1; 124.6; 132.5; 135.2; 136.5 reviews and reviewers  2.2; 17.1; 18.1; 20.1; 44.3; 48.2; 59.2; 68.1; 71.4; 81.2; 82.4; 86.1; 89.1; 91.1; 91.6; 96.1; 126.3; 138.1; 152.2; 155.5; 159.1; 173.3; 174.1 revolutions in 1830  in France  8.3 in criticism after 1970  6.3 English Civil War  10.2; 18.1; 26.2 French  1.2; 4.4; 10.2–3; 11.3; 14.1; 17; 18.1; 18.3; 19.1; 19.3; 20.1; 21.2; 23.1; 23.3; 26.2; 36.2; 37.1; 39.1; 40.2; 41.2; 42.1; 92.5; 95.2; 98.6; 149.5; 149.8;

Thematic index 151.2; 154.5; 160.4; 163.1; 166.3; 170.3; 206.1; 210.2; 214.3 Glorious Revolution in 1688  4.4; 36.2; 39; 169.4 Industrial Revolution  76.2; 213.6; 214.3 of taste  6.2; 77.5; 107.3 rhetoric of amplification  34.2 Arnold’s  150.2; 167.1 Carlyle’s  15.1; 18.1; 23.1 Jesuitical 87.5 judicial 129.1 natural  31.1; 39.2 Newman’s and Carlyle’s compared  26.2 poetic  6.2; 60.2; 73.2; 82.1; 98.3; 106.2; 107.1; 136.2; 188.3; 200.4; 218.3; 224.1 Risorgimento see Italy Romanticism  1.1; 3.1; 10.4; 14.3; 18.1; 29.1; 36.3; 37.3; 40.2; 41.4; 49.2; 133.4; 140.2; 152.4; 153.2; 163.3; 171.2; 172.4; 196.1 Arnold on  2.2; 148.2; 148.3; 149.2; 163.1; 180 Biedermeier see Biedermeier epigonic  60.1; 63.1; 74.2; 75.1; 83.3; 100.2; 135.1; 148.3; 152.1; 194.5; 215.3 hubris  3.1.; 147.2; 224.1 medieval 36.3 Romantic and Victorian birds  3.1; 81.2; 95.1; 196.1; 214.1–2 Titanic  3.1; 10.3–4; 14.1; 14.4; 63.1; 64.1; 65.1; 67.3; 72.4; 74.2; 74.3; 77.3; 80.3; 96.5; 104.1; 105.3; 110.1; 140.1; 143.2; 147.2; 148.3; 152.3; 153.4; 154.1; 155.3; 153.5; 157.6; 158.2; 165.3; 176.1; 209.3; 211.1; 224.1–2; 226.1; 226.4 transition from to Victorianism  3.1; 29.2; 41.3; 42.1; 43.2; 60.1–2; 71.2; 74.2–3; 75.1; 75.3; 77.5; 83.3; 89.1;

Thematic index 96.5; 104.2; 148.1; 149.7; 152.3–4; 224.2 women’s 216.1 Rome Ancient  38; 44.3; 54.2; 108.1; 112.2; 120.3; 132.7; 140.1; 152.1; 161.3 contemporary  30.1; 108.5; 118.2; 140.1; 140.2; 141.1; 173.2; 221.5 Renaissance 52.1; 116.2; 121.6 seventeenth-century 126.2; 127; 128.6; 131.6 see also Catholicism rose, Ruskin’s and Tennyson’s image  44.2; 75.3; 78.3; 81.4; 88.1; 88.3; 98 ‘rotten boroughs’  7.1 ruins  30.1; 120.3 rumination  3.2; 76.3; 107.1; 155.3 sacramentalism  8.4; 10.1; 18.1; 18.2; 26.2; 28.5; 47.2; 49.2; 69.2; 69.4; 72.2; 72.4; 99.1; 101.2; 143.2; 178.5; 182.4; 188.3; 188.4; 205.4; 214.3; 215.2 Saint-Simonians  10.1; 42.1 schizophrenias and psychoses  5; 75.3; 108.1; 148.2; 182.2; 217.2; 219.2 schools art 3.2 evening  1.2; 31.1 Sunday  1.2; 33.3; 215.4 for workers  1.2; 31.1; 59.3; 151.3 see also public schools science 3.2; 5.2; 7.5; 8.3; 10.2; 14.5; 31.2; 31.4; 31.5–6; 34.1; 37.2; 41.2; 42.2; 43.4; 47.2; 58.4; 58.5; 59.1; 59.3; 63.4; 76.3; 77.5; 80.2; 82.2; 82.3; 86.7; 94.3; 99.3; 100.1; 103.4; 121.6; 122.3; 122.7; 136.4; 136.5; 163.2; 164.4; 165.2; 165.4; 172.3; 178.1; 222.2; 224.1; 225.2 science fiction  58.5 scoops 6.3

385/III Scotland  13.1; 17.2; 18.4; 24.2; 25.3; 34.3; 35.1; 36.1; 39.1–3; 41.2; 45.1; 108.1; 133.2; 138.2; 139.1; 139.4; 194.4; 224.1; 227.1; 227.4 sculpture  41.4; 45.1; 46.5; 49.1; 50.2; 51.1–2; 55.3; 70.1; 108.5; 114.2; 114.4; 121.3; 121.4; 125.4; 125.5; 193.3; 207.5; 208; 209.1; 209.2; 214.2 self-flagellation  49.2; 75.3; 193.6; 197.2 sensationism  10.1; 13.1; 32.1; 144.2 sentimentalism  20.1; 98.4; 165.2; 198.1; 214.1; 215.1; 215.3; 215.4; 218.1 ‘silver fork’ see novels snobbishness  3.2; 44.1; 101.5; 102.2; 107.3 socialism  12.1; 34.2; 40.2; 41.1; 42.2; 57.6; 58.4; 67.2; 72.4; 98.6; 138.1; 223 societies Bible Society  33.3 Browning Society  107.3 Metaphysical Society  99.1 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge  196.1 bibl. utilitarian  41.2; 42.1 songbooks  68.1; 91.2; 146.4; 156.1; 182.1; 192; 199.3; 200; 212.5 Spasmodism  3.1; 3.2; 5.1; 62.1; 65.2; 104.1; 105.3; 135.1; 155.1; 155.3; 161.2; 210.2; 211.1; 214.1; 215.1; 224–228; 229.1; 230.1; 231.2 Spiritualism  62.2; 91.2; 105.3; 108.4; 118.2; 120.4; 124.4–5; 182.2; 185.7; 186.1 sprung rhythm  98.1; 178.1 striving or Streben  121.4; 122.1; 122.3; 126.1; 129.4; 193.6 stupidity  20.2; 24.1; 34.4; 76; 101.5; 151.3; 152.2; 164.3; 166.5; 167.3; 220.2 sublime  8.5; 14.1; 44.1; 48.2; 54.3; 80.4; 109.5; 114.1; 156.8; 227.1; 228.6 suicide  5.1; 15.3; 19.2; 33.1–2; 66.2; 78.1–2; 80.3; 81.3; 83.2; 85.3; 86.5–7; 96.2; 99.2–4; 107.2; 109.1; 113.4; 125.3;

386/III 137.2; 143.2; 148.1; 154.1; 155; 156.4; 168.3; 174.2; 184.2–3; 215.2; 216.4; 216.5; 219.2; 229.1 surrealism 190.3; 195.3; 207.5; 218.1 symbolism  6.2; 77.5; 81.3; 107.3; 163.1; 182.3; 191.7 Lotman’s 11.1 synchronic writers  1.1; 26.2; 41.4; 182.2; 182.3; 196.3; 202.1; 205.1; 208 tales Christmas 4.5 mesmeric 29.6 technopaegnion 193.1 terrible sonnets  29.7; 93.2; 122.2; 178.4; 193.6; 205.5; 213.3 testimony, non-ocular of Gospel miracles  32.1; 32.3; 33.3; 82.2; 93.1; 122.6; 124.3; 146.2; 160.4 theism  31.3; 31.4; 32.2; 34.1; 45.1; 70.3; 76.3 theosophy  22.1; 182.1 bibl.; 182.2 Thirty-Nine articles  3.2; 28.3; 33.4; 134.2 topoi  29.6; 68.1; 82.5; 84.5; 130.4; 202.2; 205.2 Trade Unions  7.3; 8.3; 11.1; 19.1; 19.2; 213.6; 217.2; 230.1 translation  5.2; 13.2; 61.1; 69.1; 70.3; 74.1 bibl.; 78.1; 80.1; 100.1–3; 101–102; 110.1; 121.7; 124.2; 158.5; 164.2; 171.3; 182.1; 191 theory of  150.2; 158.5; 161; 163.5; 165.3; 218.1 bibl.; 218.2 Tractarianism  3.2; 4.3; 8.1–2; 9.1; 9.3; 9.5; 11.2; 26.2; 26.3; 27.2; 28.2–5; 29.1; 29.5; 31.2; 33.1; 33.2–3; 34.3; 36.3; 37.4; 39.1; 47.2; 48.2; 55.2; 76.3; 94.2; 100.1; 101.3; 116.2; 123.1; 130.2; 134.2; 134.4; 143.3; 151.2; 152.1; 153.1; 172.3; 196.1; 207.2; 208; 210.2; 221.5 Tractarian poetry  26.1 bibl., 28.5; 29.1; 29.3; 29.5; 196.1–2; 197.3; 198.4; 205.4–5

Thematic index see also Puseyism triadic schemata  11.3; 17.1; 18.3; 126.3; 148.4 Tristan or Tristram  5.1; 90.1; 97.2; 148.3; 154.3; 156; 182.2; 208 true, in antithesis to the beautiful  18.3; 47.3; 48.2; 49.1; 149.2; 207.2 Tübingen school see new criticism typology of art history  49.1 biblical  44.3; 45.2; 51.2; 55.2; 188.4; 190.1; 196.1; 198.4; 207.5; 207.6; 209.3 cultural  11.1; 142.5; 196.1; 198.4 genetic and sexual  60.1; 195.3 literary  66.4; 126.1; 163.1; 163.2; 192.2 national  115.3; 149.8 uncommunicativeness  5.1; 148.6; 154.4; 219.2 unemployment  7.2; 19.2; 57.2 Unitarianism  104.2; 108.2; 108.3 universities curriculum  1.4; 3.2; 15.2; 31; 37.1; 57.3; 149.9; 165.4 Edinburgh  13.1; 15.3; 21.1; 227.1 London  3.2; 8.6; 104.1; 108.2; 133.4–5; 149.3; 227.1 University College Dublin  26.5; 31.1 see also Cambridge University; Oxford University university students  1.3; 3.2; 5.2; 9.5; 26.1; 29.3; 30.1–2; 89.2; 101.3–5; 138; 147.2; 152.2; 175.1; 176.4; 231.3 doubters  3.2; 33.1; 153.1 frustrated  33.2; 133.2; 143.3; 145.2 ‘scholar gipsy’  3.2; 157.3–4 snobbish 3.2 vicious  3.2; 8.2; 145.2 usury  52.3; 56.1; 57.2; 57.6; 92.3; 98.5 utilitarianism  1.3; 2.1; 5.2; 7.2; 10.2; 11.1; 15.2; 16.3; 25.2; 26.2; 34.2–3; 37.1; 40; 41.3; 42.1; 43.2; 47.2; 48.2; 57.2;

387/III

Thematic index 59.3; 63.4; 122.7; 143.2; 148.3; 149.5; 169.5; 203.2; 224.2 utopia  5.2; 9.4; 10.1; 14.2; 19.2; 31.2; 40.2; 41.1; 43.1; 43.3; 43.4; 45.1; 55.3; 57.1; 57.3; 57.4; 57.7; 61.4; 63.1; 71.3; 72.2; 72.4; 72.5; 74.3; 75.1; 76.2; 83.3; 86.7; 88.2; 89.4; 92.5; 95.3; 98.5; 100.2; 101.3; 103.2; 110.3; 112.2; 132.3; 133.2; 138.2; 138.3; 139.2; 140.1; 148.3; 149.6; 152.7; 153.3; 163.5; 167.2; 171.2; 191.6; 207.4; 212.4; 213.1; 213.8; 214.2; 226.1; 227.3; 228.1; 228.5 vampirism  96.2; 202.2 veil  5.3; 16.1; 29.3; 93.3; 94.1; 94.4; 97.4; 101.2; 103.3; 115.3; 136.4; 177.3 Venice art  44.3; 46.5; 47.2; 48.2; 49.1; 50.3; 51.1; 51.2; 52–54; 106.2; 108.1; 206.5; 207.7 death in  46.2; 52.1; 52.3; 121.5; 143.2 eighteenth-century  121.5–6 gondoliers  90.1; 52.2; 214.1 Venetian riots in 1848  7.2; 52.2; 141.3; 146.1; 166.2 Victorianism genesis of name  1.1

interpretations  3.1; 6.2 medieval 10.1 reception  6.1; 148.2; 91.2 temporal boundaries and periodizations  1.1; 74.1; 148.1; 178.1; 216.1 see also Romanticism: transition to Victorianism visual arts  150.1; 181.1; 207; 221.3 Vorticism 1.1 Wales 7.3; 161; 190.1 Eisteddfod 161.1 Welsh mythology  135.1 workhouses  7.2; 19.2; 40.1; 206.1; 210.2; 213.6; 215.4 for prostitutes  199.2 world, destructive encounter with 3.1; 74.3; 84.1 writers in utrumque parati 5.1 xenophilia  150.3; 214.1 Yale critical school  3.1; 4.5; 44.1 ‘Young England’  12.1; 16.3; 76.2; 85.2 Zeitgeist  1.3; 9.5; 33.2; 149.2; 149.5; 150.4; 170.3

Volume 4

Volume 4 begins with a focus on the pivotal function of religion in the mid-nineteenth century and explores the resulting oscillation between Romantic escape, sceptical solipsism and social responsibility in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Browning, Clough and Matthew Arnold. The aegis of religion was only broken by the advent of Pre-Raphaelitism. This trajectory is reflected in a series of well-known enigmatic masterworks by the Rossettis. In addition to these key works, space is also devoted to often neglected poets and poetry such as Patmore and Adelaide Procter, nonsense verse and Lear’s limericks, the dialect poet William Barnes, and the Victorian ‘poetesses’. Finally, the author rescues from critical oblivion the Spasmodics, honours the minor prose masterpiece Dreamthorp by Alexander Smith, and registers the revival of drama with Taylor, Boucicault and Robertson.

www.peterlang.com

Franco Marucci

Franco Marucci is a former Professor of English at the Universities of Siena, Florence and Venice Ca’ Foscari. His publications include Il senso interrotto. Autonomia e codificazione nella poesia di Dylan Thomas (1976), The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1994), L’inchiostro del mago. Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento (2009) and Joyce (2013). His Storia della letteratura inglese in eight volumes was published by Le Lettere/Editoriale Srl, 2003–2018. As a creative writer he is the author of Pentapoli (2011), followed by Il Michelin del sacro (2012). He runs the blog , with comments and features on literature and music, and a weekly sports page.

Histor y of English Literature

History of English Literature is a comprehensive, eight-volume survey of English literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century. This reference work provides insightful and often revisionary readings of core texts in the English literary canon. Richly informative analyses are framed by the biographical, historical and intellectual context for each author.

History of English Literature Early and Mid-Victorian Prose and Poetry, 1832–1870

‘Franco Marucci’s History of English Literature is unique in its field. There is no other book that combines such erudition and authority in such a compact format. An indispensable work of reference.’ — J. B. Bullen, Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford

Early and Mid-Victorian Prose and Poetry, 1832–1870

Franco Marucci

Peter Lang

Volume 4