Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900: Essays in Honour of Vincent Newey [1° ed.] 0754665992, 9780754665991

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Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900 Essays in Honour of Vincent Newey

Edited by Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies and Philip Shaw

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900

For Vince The echoes will again become the living voice.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900 Essays in Honour of Vincent Newey

Edited by Ashley Chantler University of Chester, UK Michael Davies University of Liverpool, UK Philip Shaw University of Leicester, UK

First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies and Philip Shaw and the contributors 2011 Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies and Philip Shaw have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Styler, Rebecca. Literature and authenticity, 1780–1900: essays in honour of Vincent Newey. 1. Authenticity (Philosophy) 2. Authenticity (Philosophy) in literature. 3. Self in literature. 4. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism. I. Newey, Vincent. II. Chantler, Ashley. III. Davies, Michael, 1970– IV. Shaw, Philip. 820.9’008–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davies, Michael, 1970– Literature and authenticity, 1780–1900: essays in honour of Vincent Newey / edited by Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies and Philip Shaw. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. English literature—18th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. Truthfulness and falsehood in literature. I. Davies, Michael, 1970– II. Chantler, Ashley. III. Shaw, Philip. IV. Newey, Vincent. PR453.C47 2011 820.9’353—dc23 ISBN 9780754665991 (hbk) ISBN 9781315592619 (ebk)

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Contents List of Contributors   Acknowledgements  

vii xi

Introduction  

1

1

Authentic Narratives: Cowper and Conversion   Michael Davies

9

2

Is He ‘Well-Authenticated’? Robert Southey and Anna Seward   Lynda Pratt

25

3

Undefinitive Keats   Nicholas Roe

39

4

‘A Kind of an Excuse’: Shelley and Wordsworth Revisited   Michael O’Neill

51

5

Authenticity Projected: Alexander Pope, Lord Byron and Cardinal Newman   Bernard Beatty

6

Byron, Candour and the Fear of Lying   Philip W. Martin

7

A ‘Gorgeous Fabric’: Authentic Images of India and the Orient in the Works of British Romantic Women Poets   A.R. Kidwai

91

Becoming Ruskin: Travel Writing and Self-Representation in Praeterita   Keith Hanley

107



Authorial, Antiquarian and Acting Authenticity in Henry Irving’s King Lear   Richard Foulkes

119

10

The Authentic Voice of Elizabeth Gaskell   Joanne Shattock

8 9

67 81

131

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900

vi

11

Anthropology, Bestial Humour and the Communal Authentic in Cranford   Nick Davis

12

Thoreau and Creeley: American Words and Things   Geoff Ward

155

13

The Robust Way: ‘The Man Said, No’   Philip Davis

167

14

From Cowper to Conrad: Authenticity at the End of the Century   179 Ashley Chantler

141

Afterword: The Authentic Vincent Newey  

191

A Vincent Newey Bibliography  

195

Bibliography   Index  

201 221

List of Contributors Bernard Beatty is Senior Fellow in the School of English at the University of Liverpool and Associate Fellow in the School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Byron’s Don Juan (Croom Helm, 1985) and Byron’s Don Juan and Other Poems (Penguin, 1987). He has edited three collections of essays on Byron and written on Romanticism, the Bible and aspects of literary theory. He was editor of the Byron Journal from 1986–2004. Pending publications address the theological idea of beauty, Byron and religion, Shelley and theatre, and Victorian bric-a-brac. Ashley Chantler is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Chester. His publications include Heart of Darkness: Character Studies (Continuum, 2008) and, as co-editor, Translation Practices: Through Language to Culture (Rodopi, 2009) and Studying English Literature (Continuum, 2010). He is currently writing a monograph on Ford’s poetry, and co-editing Ford Madox Ford: An Introduction (Rodopi). Michael Davies is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He has research interests in English literature of the Renaissance and Restoration periods, focusing especially on the literary and religious cultures of seventeenthcentury England. He has published essays on a range of writers, from Shakespeare to William Cowper, and is the author of Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Hamlet: Character Studies (Continuum, 2008). Nick Davis is Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. His publications include Stories of Chaos: Reason and Its Displacement in Early Modern English Narrative (Ashgate, 1999), the ‘Inheritance: c.500 to c.1300’ section in The Medieval European Stage, ed. William Tydeman (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and essays on medieval, Renaissance and modern writing, as well as on narrative theory. He is currently working on Models of Causation in English Renaissance Drama, which examines relations between scientific paradigms of thought and the shaping of dramatic action. Philip Davis is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Research into Reading at the University of Liverpool. Recent publications include Sudden Shakespeare (Athlone, 1996), The Victorians 1830–1880 (Oxford University Press, 2002), Shakespeare Thinking (Continuum 2007), Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Why Victorian Literature Still Matters (Blackwell, 2008). He is currently working on a biography of George Eliot for Oxford University Press and an edition of the complete works of Bernard Malamud for the Library of America.

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Richard Foulkes is Emeritus Professor of Theatre History, University of Leicester. His publications include Church and Stage in Victorian England (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Performing Shakespeare in the Age of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage: Theatricals in a Quiet Life (Ashgate, 2005). Recent edited volumes are Henry Irving: A Re-Evaluation (Ashgate, 2008) and Lives of Shakespearian Actors: William Charles Macready (Pickering and Chatto, 2010). He is chairman of the Society for Theatre Research. Keith Hanley is Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University. He is the editor, with David Thomas, of the interdisciplinary journal Nineteenth-Century Contexts (Routledge), and has edited and co-edited numerous essay collections, including, with Greg Kucich, Nineteenth-Century Worlds: Global Formations Past and Present (Routledge, 2008). He has written extensively on Wordsworth, including Wordsworth: A Poet’s History (Palgrave, 2001), and on Ruskin, including John Ruskin’s Romantic Tours 1837–1838: Travelling North (Mellen Press, 2007). He was principal investigator for the AHRC project on ‘John Ruskin, Cultural Travel and Popular Access’, among the disseminations from which is, co-authored with John Walton, Constructing Cultural Travel: John Ruskin and the Direction of the Tourist Gaze (Channel View, 2010). Abdur Raheem Kidwai is Professor of English and Director of the UGC Academic Staff College at the Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is also Visiting Professor at the School of English, University of Leicester. His publications include Literary Orientalism: A Companion (Viva, 2009) and, as editor, Stranger Than Fiction: Images of Islam and Muslims in English Fiction (APH, 2000) and Behind the Veil: Representation of Muslim Women in Indian Writings in English 1950–2000 (APH, 2007). Philip W. Martin is Pro Vice-Chancellor at Sheffield Hallam University. His publications include Byron: A Poet Before His Public (Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Mad Women in Romantic Writing (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1987). He has also published, as editor, English: The Condition of the Subject (Palgrave, 2006), and as co-editor Reviewing Romanticism (Macmillan, 1992). He has been an editor of the journal Literature & History since 1989, and is currently working on the history of handwriting in the Romantic period. Michael O’Neill is Professor of English at Durham University. His recent publications include The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2007), Wheel, a volume of poems (Arc, 2008), and, as editor, The Cambridge History of English Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon, co-edited with Madeleine Callaghan, was published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2011. Lynda Pratt is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham. She has published widely on Southey and his circle. Her current projects include The Collected Letters of Robert Southey (2009 onwards), of which she is general editor, and a monograph on Romanticism and provincial culture.

List of Contributors

ix

Nicholas Roe is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. His publications include Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford University Press, 1988), John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford University Press, 1997), The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (Palgrave, 2002), Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (Pimlico, 2005), and, as editor, Keats and History (Cambridge University Press 1995), Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics (Routledge, 2003) and English Romantic Writers and the West Country (Palgrave, 2010). He has recently completed a new biography of Keats for Yale University Press. Joanne Shattock is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leicester. She is General Editor of The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, 10 vols (Pickering and Chatto, 2005–2006), of which she has edited volume 1. Her most recent publication is, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). She is currently editing, with Elisabeth Jay, a 25-volume edition of the Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant (Pickering and Chatto, 2011 onwards). With Vincent Newey, she co-edits The Nineteenth Century series for Ashgate. Philip Shaw is Professor of Romantic Studies at the University of Leicester. He has research interests in Romantic poetry and prose and the visual arts. His publications include The Sublime (Routledge, 2006), Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (Palgrave, 2002) and, as editor, Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1789–1822 (Ashgate, 2000). He has also written articles on Wordsworth and Byron, William Godwin, eighteenth-century military painting, and Goya’s Disasters of War. From 2008 to 2010 he was co-investigator for the AHRC-funded Tate Research project The Sublime Object. He is the reviews editor for the Byron Journal and a fellow of the English Association. At present he is working on a book-length art historical study entitled Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art. Geoff Ward is Vice Principal at Royal Holloway, and Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of London. His publications include Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (1993; rev. ed. Palgrave, 2001). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and Fellow of the Institute of Directors, he is also an editor of the Cambridge Quarterly. Other recent work includes preparing a programme on the writings of David Foster Wallace for BBC Radio, and he has just completed his own first novel.

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Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the contributors for their essays and for their patience while waiting for this volume to be finished. We would also like to thank those who wanted to honour Vince with an essay but were unable to do so due to various constraints on the book, including Bill Hutchings, Rod Mengham, Brian Nellist, Alan Rawes, Martin Stannard, Greg Walker and Nigel Wood. We are sincerely grateful to Ann Donahue at Ashgate, who wholeheartedly supported the volume from the outset and generously offered suggestions and encouragement during its completion. The first draft of the bibliography was compiled meticulously by Rosamund Brown. Some aspects of Chapter 1 were explored in an article published in Bunyan Studies, 12 (2007); for permission to revisit this material here, thanks are owed to Bob Owens. Parts of Chapter 10 first appeared in an essay, ‘Gaskell the Journalist: Letters, Diaries, Stories’, in Elizabeth Gaskell, Victorian Culture, and the Art of Fiction (Gent: Academia Press, 2010), edited by Sandro Jung, who has granted permission for the author to draw on this work again. We also acknowledge the help and support of Nathan Pendlebury, at National Museums Liverpool, in granting us permission to reproduce the cover image, the original of which is held at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery. Last, but by no means least, we also thank Sue Newey, for providing and checking certain details for the ‘Afterword’ on this volume’s honorary dedicatee, Vince.

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Introduction Literary critics can sometimes be heard complaining of the disparity they feel between their official pronouncements on literature – the things the ‘profession’ conditions them to say – and the things they would really like to say. As if to compensate for this disparity, a career in criticism may sometimes conclude with a semi-autobiographical piece in which the critic reflects on the vivid, emotional encounter with literature, usually experienced in late adolescence, that set them on their way. Wordsworth, in Book 5 of The Prelude (1805), provides us with a paradigmatic case:



I am sad At thought of raptures now for ever flown, Even unto tears I sometimes could be sad To think of, to read over, many a page, Poems withal of name, which at that time Did never fail to entrance me, and are now Dead in my eyes as is a theatre Fresh emptied of spectators.1

As always, with Wordsworth, despondency at ‘thought of raptures now for ever flown’ gives way to ‘sober truth’ and ‘conscious pleasure’. Yet, even as deeper, sustaining joy supplants the wild ecstasies of youth, something of that primal experience survives, confirming the presence of ‘Visionary power […] / Embodied in the mystery of words’ even in the tawdriest of childhood fancies.2 Memories of those first encounters with books, which attest to the power of the literary, thus confirm the poet/critic in his vocation. The problem, of course, is that access to those ‘aching joys’ and ‘dizzy raptures’3 is made difficult, if not impossible, by the very self-consciousness that prompted the thought of their loss. And then the larger questions arise: is the memory of their loss real? Are those glimpses of authentic being not themselves a symptom of critical alienation, a fantasy formation of the professional reader in desperate need of validation? Faced with such conundrums, the mind collapses, ‘Even as a broken mirror, which the glass / In every fragment multiplies’. And yet, as Byron goes on to state, while the ‘one’ may be replicated infinitely ‘still’, that ‘one’ still remains the ‘same’. The thought, in other words, that drove the critic to dismiss the distinction between 1 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 5, ll. 568–75; The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 448. 2 Ibid., ll. 566, 568, 619, 621. 3 William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798’, ll. 85–6; ibid., p. 133.

2

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900

the ‘thousand images’ of his alienated identity and the authentic ‘one that was’ is overcome by the stubborn insistence of the voice that would silence such thought.4 The felt disparity between the official and unofficial promptings of the critical mind is ably conveyed by Matthew Arnold: Below the surface-stream, shallow and light, Of what we say we feel – below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel – there flows With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.5

What one feels ‘indeed’ is the memory of a summer evening, sitting on one’s bed, ‘reading as if for life’, shedding tears at the death of Magwitch, willing Lear to sanity, or struggling to comprehend the moral and psychological forces that impel Isabel Archer’s return to Rome.6 Reading not ‘for life’ but ‘as if for life’, we become informed by the paradoxical vitality of fiction, a qualitative distinction best understood by comparing David Copperfield’s affirmation of the difference between reading and life with the self-abnegating conclusion of Washington Square (1881): ‘Catherine, meanwhile in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy work, had seated herself with it again for life – as it were.’7 Henry James’s ‘as it were’ reverses the progressive work of Dickens’s ‘as if’, forcing the creative dissimilarity between one thing and another, which in David Copperfield (1849– 1850) has become the very principle of spontaneous generation, to a dead, yet strangely dignified, stop. We say ‘dignified’ because Catherine’s life sentence, her disappearance from narrative development, is self-initiated. She seats ‘herself’, rejecting a cad’s proposal of marriage for a life that, from a worldly point of view, seems offensively stolid. James’s ‘as it were’ contains multitudes: the subjunctive tells us of the difference between the formal and the practical – Catherine will not literally be sat at her ‘fancy work’ for life, but she may as well be – and by doing so it tells us something about the quizzical or hedging consciousness that cannot quite endorse the generative potential of metaphor. Perhaps in the end, James, no less than Catherine’s father, is the prisoner of his own irony, unable to recognise that in committing to a ‘morsel of fancy work […] again’ as if ‘for life’, Catherine could be demonstrating the connection between literature and authenticity. 4 Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, ll. 289–92 (1816); The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 113; emphasis added. 5 Matthew Arnold, ‘Below the surface-stream […]’; The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, Green, 1965), p. 543. 6 The phrase ‘reading as if for life’ and the accompanying recollections are taken from Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Jeremy Tambling (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 60. 7 Henry James, Washington Square, ed. Mark Le Fanu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 196.

Introduction

3

What is interesting about the difference between ‘as if’ and ‘as it were’ is that in both cases a yearning for actuality is hemmed in by an acknowledgement of the futility of such a yearning. In the ‘as if’ formulation we say that something could be the case even though we know that it cannot literally be the case. This is, of course, what makes John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) such a momentous and vital account of spiritual conversion. At key moments, usually upon the very threshold of epiphany, Bunyan declares not just that ‘I did’ or ‘I had’ but that ‘I […] was as if I had […] seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me’, and that ‘I was as if I had seen him born, as if I had seen him grow up, as if I had seen him walk thorow this world’.8 It is this oft repeated incantation – not ‘it was as if’ but, more crucially and astonishingly, ‘I was as if’ – that amounts to a leap of faith for Bunyan: a soterial step towards a state of being that can be conditional and uncertain yet still affirmative and progressive.9 Thus, in ‘reading as if for life’, even as we accept the impossibility of such a notion we nevertheless feel, by imaginative assent, that it ought to and indeed could be true. By contrast, when we commit to ‘as it were’, we seem to place a stranglehold on our capacity for assent; ‘as it were’ appears to be tough-minded, clear-sighted and more authentic than ‘as if’, but it can also be irresolute and benighted, its tasteful archness concealing more than a hint of bad faith. To be true to oneself, to be real, is to acknowledge the emotionally untidy, unutterable and risky beginnings of our engagement with literature: reading as if for life. Authenticity in art, as in life, is not reproducible. And yet our best responses to art endeavour to recapture the sense of what it might be like to dwell in proximity to the origins of the work of art. What is it in the work of literature that impels us to make this gesture? According to Aristotle, the creation of art differs from other forms of production in that it possesses itself in its own end (telos).10 By combining the word enteles (complete, fully formed) with echein (the continuing effort to maintain completion) to form entelechy, Aristotle sought to distinguish artworks from products that exist only in terms of their use or availability. In contrast to the industrial product, the entelecheia or artwork is characterised not only by its ability to grasp its end in itself but also by its energeia or ‘being-atwork’. The sense of energeia that resonates here is its link with kinesis, understood as movement or change. We recognise the authentic in art when we are moved to change our perception of that which we thought we knew. But the moment in which we change involves not just a shift in perception, but an alteration of being so jolting that until that moment we never knew ourselves. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 10, 38; emphasis added. 9 Bunyan uses the formula ‘I was as if’ elsewhere in Grace Abounding: see ibid., pp. 80–81, 100. 10 For this discussion of Aristotle, I am indebted to Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 60–67. 8

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900

4

In The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben’s study of the condition of art in modernity, the waning of the artwork’s energetic aspect, the quality that marks it out as recognisably authentic, is linked with the rise to dominance, in the eighteenth century, of the figure of ‘the man of taste’. For Agamben, the Kantian definition of the beautiful as that ‘which gives us pleasure without interest’, and the subsequent emptying out of the energetic, emotional or sensory qualities of artistic production, results in a form of spiritual paralysis.11 Within the mind of such a man: taste has worked like a sort of moral gangrene, devouring every other content and every other spiritual determination, and it exerts itself, in the end, in a total void. Taste is his only self-certainty and self-consciousness; however, this certainty is pure nothingness, and his personality is absolute impersonality. The very existence of such a man is a paradox and a scandal: he is incapable of producing a work of art, yet it is upon art that his existence depends.12

These remarks emerge during the course of a suggestive reading of Hegel’s response to Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau (1762), a satirical account of a young man’s pursuit of good taste at the expense of his moral awareness. For Hegel, Rameau’s ability to judge, but not to create, is indicative of the division between art and spectatorship, genius and taste, which marks the development of Western art. Rameau is inauthentic because he can only judge, not ‘grasp’, the innermost truth that the artwork reveals. As Agamben argues, following Hegel, the only way Rameau can reach ‘self-possession’ is by acknowledging this inconsistency, negating himself, and thereby finding himself again as the object of his own self-division.13 As many of the essays in this collection attest, English literature is similarly marked by the struggle to sustain the pro-ductive, energetic aspects of the act of creation. While it may or may not be the fate of literature to look back, hopelessly, at its lost origins, finding itself only as the object of its own self-division, this straining for completion attests, nevertheless, to the endurance of a certain desire to be. Like the energy released in the metaphoric connection ‘as if’, the power of literature is born out of the gap between fiction and the real. Within this gap, the sensitive reader, as opposed to the man of taste, strives relatedly to grasp what Lionel Trilling calls ‘the marvellous generative force that our modern judgement assigns to authenticity’; generative in the sense that authenticity is not a state to be achieved but is always a process to be worked at or put into action.14 Authenticity resides, then, not in the overcoming of self-division, but in the labours that gesture towards such overcoming. 13 14 11

Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 26. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 12. 12

Introduction

5

The essays in this volume respond to the energeia of literature in a variety of ways. For Michael O’Neill, in his essay on Wordsworth and Shelley, and for Philip Martin, writing on Byron, Bowles and Pope, the focus is on the creative yield of literary rivalry. For Bernard Beatty and Geoff Ward, writing respectively, but from very different perspectives, on the relations between writing and the world, the emphasis falls on the efforts of poets to reach beyond the realm of signs. As Ward suggests, in the course of his essay on Thoreau and Creeley, while authors know that ‘words can never be the things they describe’, they write in the belief that words ‘are also their own things; […] their distance inclusive of a kind of tacit neighbourliness’. What authentic reading strives for is a related form of proximity, a mode of close attention that responds to what Philip Davis describes, after Adam Ferguson, as the ‘animated spirit’ in which the work was written. The connection between authenticity and energeia provides us with a fresh way of negotiating the paradoxes of selfhood. In Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality’ Ode (1807; 1815), ‘shadowy recollections’ of authentic bliss are ‘yet the fountain light of all our day, / Are yet a master light of all our seeing’, so that, despite the heavy ‘weight’ of ‘custom’, we may yet rejoice that ‘in our embers / Is something that doth live’.15 That the primacy of this ‘something’ can only be asserted and not substantiated is beside the point. The Wordsworthian child, unlike Rameau, does not find himself merely as the object of his own self-division: he does not, like the Lacanian subject, misrecognise himself as a unified being concealing an underlying lack; nor, for that matter, does he believe himself solely to be a product of the transformational power of discourse. While theory reduces the pro-creative origins of the self to a retroactive or constructed cause, for Wordsworth authenticity persists in energetic gleams and promptings, in those ‘first affections’ that ‘are yet’ the foundation of our being. It must be acknowledged that not all the essays in this volume would support this claim. The search for the authentic self in letters and biography, highlighted by Lynda Pratt (on Southey), Nicholas Roe (on Keats), Keith Hanley (on Ruskin) and Joanne Shattock (on Gaskell), reminds us that the attempts by writers and critics to single out a deep or abiding self, determined ‘wholly by the laws of its own being’, is qualified, in each case, by messy actuality: the untidy influences of interpersonal, psychological and historical forces that work to shape a life beyond one’s conscious control.16 The problem of how, precisely, to convey the authenticity of a life or, for that matter, the essence of a work of art (see, for example, Richard Foulkes’s essay on Henry Irving’s production of King Lear), or the truth about another country (see A.R. Kidwai’s essay on Romantic representations of India), is an indication of how the real continues to resist the imposition of form.

15 Wordsworth, ‘Ode’, ll. 152, 154–5, 130, 132–3; The Major Works, pp. 300–301; emphasis added. 16 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 99.

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And yet, as many of these essays acknowledge, for all the insistence on the constructed nature of literary identity, a mode of energeia nevertheless survives. For Vincent Newey, whose work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature informs this collection (see our ‘Afterword: The Authentic Vincent Newey’), energy is to be found, not in ‘the sphere of living’ but rather ‘on the inside of experience and being-in-the-world – a dynamis of consciousness and interior effort made manifest in the interchangeable and indivisible activities of “making” and “reading”’.17 Newey traces the origins of this creative interchange to the selfscrutinising intensities of English Puritanism, made manifest in the constructive and deconstructive rhythms of spiritual autobiography, from Bunyan to Cowper and beyond. The idea of authenticity as an essentially Protestant concern is supported by several intellectual historians, including Charles Taylor and Charles Guignon.18 Many of the essays in this collection, however, seek to modify this claim, arguing, in the case of Bernard Beatty’s essay on Byron, Newman and Pope, against the kind of introspection that leads only to the mind in dialogue with itself. Invoking Newman’s distrust of the Protestant understanding of justification by faith and its privileging of the unitary and autonomous self, Beatty advances a Catholic idea of the authentic grounded in the acknowledgement of contradiction and mystery, and committed to ‘the primacy of action in life and of performative action in writing’. The association between authenticity and autonomy is also questioned by Nick Davis, who sees in Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) the emergence of an excursive mode of selfhood informed by the anterior effects of relationships and social networks. What many of these essays share, however, is a concern with the persistence of an element within literature that strives against detachment, disinterest, unity and completion. In this volume, the Kantian ideal of the beautiful as that ‘which gives us pleasure without interest’, which is linked in turn to the rise to prominence of the man of taste and to a certain notion of authenticity as that which stands alone, is set against works that determinedly speak out on behalf of attachment, interest, outreach and bafflement. As Michael Davies argues, bringing Brian Cummings’s analysis of the literary culture of the Reformation to bear on William Cowper’s spiritual struggles, ‘the “paradox of grace” lies in the fact that […] “justification” is “continually in motus”, “iustitia” never becoming a stable “state”, but always a process or flux’. Our failure to be justified may be a consequence of our fall into sin or language – perhaps they amount to the same thing – but this very failure points, miraculously, to the will that would be justified, even in the face of dissolution.

Vincent Newey, ‘Authoring the Self: Childe Harold III and IV’, in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), pp. 148–90 (p. 186). 18 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 184, 286–9; Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 14–24, 26–9. 17

Introduction

7

In Literature and Sincerity Trilling comments briefly on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899; 1902), noting how the story bears a ‘striking affinity with Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau’. The degenerate nephew is, however, no longer the over-refined man of taste, ‘but a man whose foul and bloody deeds make him what the terms of the story permit us to call a devil’. As Ashley Chantler suggests, echoing Trilling, Kurtz chooses ‘the life of savagery’, not out of ‘any sentimental illusion that it is noble and virtuous’, but, on the contrary, because ‘he is appalled by it’. Kurtz’s ‘The horror! The horror!’ thus expresses ‘the view that civilization is of its nature so inauthentic that personal integrity can be wrested from it only by the inversion of all its avowed principles’.19 Conrad’s novel raises awareness of, without ever resolving, the moral implications of such an inversion: would it be better to dwell in the inauthentic continuation of the civilized life or should one rather commit to the authentic closure of the horror? The choice can be rephrased in terms of narrative versus repetition: either we commit to the lie of progress or we throw ourselves into the truth of extinction. From a Heideggerian perspective, however, neither alternative can be described as authentic: the self that chooses the pre-civilized void is no less deceived than the self that embraces the polis. While the latter identifies with the ‘they’ and thereby denies authentic being-fordeath, the former, in its identification with the repetition of horror, commits the more sophisticated crime of seeking to overcome its relation with indeterminacy – with death, that is, understood in its true sense. What Kurtz desires, above all, is ownership of the final word, and yet by doing so he forgets that the animating spirit of language – its energeia – projects beyond the point at which we thought we had arrived, ‘forever generating’, as Vincent Newey puts it, ‘a future from the deleting of the present. Each moment of consciousness, each giving or receiving of thought, is at once a dying and a birth, telos and inception’.20

Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, pp. 106–10; passim. Newey, ‘Authoring the Self’, pp. 186–7.

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Chapter 1

Authentic Narratives: Cowper and Conversion Michael Davies

Extreme distress of spirit at last drove me […] to lay Homer before me and to translate for amusement. Why it pleased God that I should be hunted into such a business, of such enormous length and labour, by miseries for which he did not see good to afford me any other remedy, I know not. And […] yet a thousand times have I been glad of it, for a thousand times it has served at least to divert my attention in some degree from such terrible tempests as I believe have seldom been permitted to beat upon a human mind. Let my friends therefore who wish me some little measure of tranquillity in the performance of the most turbulent voyage that ever Christian mariner made, be contented that having Homer’s mountains and forests to windward, I escape under their shelter from the force of many a gust that would almost overset me; especially when they consider that not by choice but by necessity I make them my refuge.1

Anyone familiar with the life and poetry of William Cowper will be struck by the authenticity of this passage, taken from a letter sent to his friend, John Newton, on 13 January 1787. While the provenance of this letter is not in doubt – it is no inauthentic ‘fake’ or ‘forgery’ – nevertheless it announces something of Cowper’s particular ‘Way of thinking and expressing his Thoughts’, which may be considered ‘authentic’ in another sense: to borrow one eighteenthcentury formula for individual originality, its ‘Style’ remains ‘peculiar’ to him in the same way that ‘every Man has his peculiar Air in moving, speaking, […] and many other Things by which he is distinguishable from all others’.2 In this instance, it is the image of the ‘Christian mariner’ beset by ‘terrible tempests’ that many would recognise as key to Cowper’s authentic literary signature here, variants of which can be seen in so many of the poems he produced throughout

1 William Cowper, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–1986), III, 10–11. 2 Jeremiah Jones, New and Full Method of Settling the Canonical Authority of the New Testament, 3 vols (London, 1726–1727), I, 93–4, cited in Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 33–4. See also Margaret Russett, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 21.

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the latter half of his life, from the ‘tempest-toss’d […] half a wreck’3 found among Olney Hymns to the altogether much ‘deeper gulphs’ encountered amid the waves of Cowper’s last English poem, ‘The Cast-Away’.4 Yet this passage also presents us with problems of ‘authenticity’, albeit to do with ingenuousness rather than genuineness, and with subtleties of sincerity rather than any outright imposture. The project to which Cowper refers in this letter as his sole ‘refuge’ from ‘the force of many a gust that would almost overset me’ is his new translation of Homer, begun around 1784–1785. Having ‘proceeded’ as far as he could ‘in the way of Original poetry’ – by this point he had published Poems (1782) and The Task (1785), as well as Olney Hymns (1779, co-authored with Newton) – Cowper’s Homer would become the most ambitious literary undertaking of his career, yet one rooted first and foremost in a question of authenticity: how could Homeric verse be rendered more properly, more authentically, into English?5 Alexander Pope’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey certainly lacked authenticity for Cowper: ‘there is not to be found in them the least portion of Homer’s spirit’, he wrote to Newton in December 1785, ‘nor the least resemblance of his manner’.6 Cowper’s aim, then, would be to ‘produce a translation of the Old Bard that the Literati shall prefer to Pope’s’, which – composed in heroic couplets – he considered simply ‘inadequate’. Success in this endeavour, he envisaged, would ‘do me more honour than any thing I have performed hitherto’.7 Nearing its completion, Cowper would remain confident ‘about the success of my translation’, having discovered ‘the stile […] in which Homer ought to be render’d and which alone would suit him’: that of Miltonic blank verse, Milton being ‘every where grand and elegant’, Cowper avowed, as his language ‘anticipated the expression of a century to come’.8 What is puzzling about Cowper’s letter to Newton in January 1787, however, is the absence of any such talk of literary ‘success’. Rather than grappling with the ‘Herculean labour’ of translation or extolling the virtues of being ‘still at the old sport; Homer all the morning and Homer all the Evening’, as Cowper would put it to Joseph Hill in May 1790, when addressing Newton he unveils a rather different set of concerns about a different kind of authenticity: that of his personal William Cowper, ‘Temptation’, l. 17; The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–1995), I, 178. 4 Ibid., III, 216. On Cowper’s use of such imagery elsewhere, see Conrad Brunström, William Cowper: Religion, Satire, Society (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004), pp. 128–32, 138–66; Maurice J. Quinlan, William Cowper: A Critical Life (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 194–9, 230–32; Vincent Newey, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982), pp. 271–313; James King, William Cowper: A Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), pp. 84–6, 111–12, 279–81. 5 Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, II, 409–10. 6 Ibid., p. 411. 7 Ibid., p. 400. 8 Ibid., III, 362–3. 3

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and indeed spiritual reasons for producing his translation.9 The language Cowper uses is, in fact, one of evangelical conversion: of the ‘Christian mariner’ battling against fearsome inward ‘tempests’. It is in these terms that Cowper offers himself to Newton as having had no option but ‘to lay Homer before me and to translate’ in order to distract him from despair, though he is equally at pains to state that it is not he, Cowper, who chose to translate the ancient Bard but God, whose ‘Providence […] governs all my thoughts and directs my intentions as he pleases’. Indeed, Cowper claims to have been ‘hunted’ into this ‘business’ by divine ‘force’, with no prospect of achieving any ‘fame and honour and glory’.10 The Cowper of this letter is stamped with a very specific mark of authenticity as a result: not a poet aspiring to impress the literati but one inspired – or rather instructed – to translate Homer by ‘Providence’ and ‘distress’ in equal measure.11 This disparity, between Cowper the master translator of the Classics, the champion of Milton and the challenger of Pope, and Cowper the ever-suffering and passively accepting vessel of divine ‘Providence’, can be unsettling. Which, we might wonder, is the ‘true’ or ‘real’ William Cowper? Which has more ‘authenticity’ for us? If ‘the basic assumption built into the ideal of authenticity’, at least as it might be understood from an early twenty-first-century perspective, is that ‘lying within each individual, there is a deep, “true self” – the “Real Me” – in distinction from all that is not really me’, an ‘inner self […] that makes the person a unique individual’ and which constitutes a stable and self-possessed identity, then we can see how Cowper’s letter to Newton disrupts this concept.12 Such ‘authenticity’ falters at the fault lines we encounter in Cowper’s dichotomous presentation of himself. Either we assume that Cowper is not being entirely honest or sincere with Newton, covering poetic ambition with the stormy rhetoric of the ‘spirit’, or his true motivation for translating Homer is altogether too dark to be articulated to anyone other than his friend and former pastor. Perhaps, though, we must navigate carefully around an idea of authenticity that assumes an unequivocally centred and univocal self when it comes to reading someone like Cowper. After all, the same letter which voices such an impassioned plea about the ‘tempests’ of his despair concludes with Cowper’s equally sincere appreciation of the ‘Cocoa nut’ and ‘Oysters’ he had just been sent. Does such a remark invalidate the remarkable confession that comes before it? Or does it render it all the more ‘authentic’? The purpose of this essay is to examine, albeit briefly, the two versions of William Cowper that this letter to John Newton reveals – if not exactly of Parnassus Ibid., II, 395; III, 374. Ibid., III, 9–11. 11 For similar statements, see ibid., II, 410–13; III, 531–3. 12 Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 6–7. See 9

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also Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus (London: Routledge, 1995); Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 172–205.

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and of the conventicle, then certainly of the literati and of the evangelical Church of England – in order to negotiate similar problems of ‘authenticity’ elsewhere in Cowper’s writings, especially when it comes to religious experience. The focus will remain, then, on the language that Cowper adopts in this letter: that of the evangelical conversion narrative or spiritual autobiography, a mode of writing which, as many commentators have noted, occupies an important place in the emergence of modern ideas of selfhood and of what might be termed ‘authentic’ individualism.13 As the letter to Newton indicates quite clearly, it is in his relationship to the forms of spiritual autobiography, and to the literary shaping of conversion in particular, that key questions arise about Cowper and ‘authenticity’. ‘Those who run out of the holy spirit’, Theodor Adorno observes, in an unmistakeable echo of 1 Corinthians 13.1, ‘must speak with mechanical tongues’, turning ‘words that are sacred’ into nothing more than ‘frozen emanations’.14 Is this the case with Cowper, we might wonder: a poet convinced of his own damnation yet somehow able to write through and within a language otherwise entirely authentic to Christian salvation.

*** Why Cowper, when writing to Newton, would seek to authenticate his Homeric task through the religious language of spiritual seafaring – as a ‘Christian mariner’, that is – can be explained in a number of ways. It may anticipate, for example, some unspoken disapproval from Newton about Cowper’s latest poetic project. Newton had, after all, abandoned the Classics when he underwent his conversion in 1748, despite having taught himself Latin with ‘classical enthusiasm’ as a young seaman.15 Indeed, Newton surrendered such ‘newly acquired riches’ for ‘the inestimable treasure hid in the field of holy scripture’: ‘life was too short’, he came to believe, ‘to admit of leisure for such elaborate trifling’, Classical literature being full of ‘false models and false maxims’ by contrast to the eternal truths of the Word.16 We can see why Cowper – who knew the story of John Newton’s spiritual past intimately – would be sensitive to any criticism in this respect and why he would go on to defend his translation of Homer as advantageous to ‘any person of a spiritual turn’ and as instructive to those ‘who will not learn from Scripture’ 13 See, for example, Guignon, On Authentic Being, pp. 14–24, 26–9; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 184, 286–9; Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 23–5; Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). 14 Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 6. 15 John Newton, An Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of *********, 9th edn (London, 1799), p. 91. 16 Ibid., pp. 100, 107.

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piety and prayerfulness: ‘if they please’, he wrote to Newton, they can learn them instead from Homer.17 Yet we can also begin to see why Cowper, whose earlier poem The Task had troubled Newton by taking a direction very different from his more straightforwardly Christian ‘Moral Satires’, is so careful to frame his role as a translator of the pagan Bard in the most Christian terms possible when justifying his Homeric labours to Newton in 1787.18 It is in the image of Cowper as the storm-beset ‘Christian mariner’ that we can espy an especially deliberate attempt to target Newton’s evangelical sympathies, given how central this concept is to Newton’s own authentic religious identity, wrought through conversion. In Newton’s spiritual autobiography, An Authentic Narrative (first published in 1764), we find an exemplary description of God’s mercy and salvation, with all of its ‘remarkable and interesting particulars’ (as the subtitle posits). This is an account of conversion, then, which is ‘authentic’ in being factually correct and ‘true’ and, to borrow Bishop Watson’s late eighteenth-century distinction, in being genuinely authored too (as opposed to fictional, first-person accounts of spiritual sea-change, such as one might find in the earlier eighteenthcentury examples of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders).19 It is also ‘authentic’ in being unique, Newton weaving his experiences of grace into the concurrent story of his early life as a sailor and slave trader, as well as with the ups and downs of a romantic affair with his wife-to-be. The result is a ‘three-layered narrative’, as D. Bruce Hindmarsh has described it, encompassing ‘Newton’s career, courtship and conversion’, all unified by ‘the central theme of a benign providence working out the salvation of the elect’.20 Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, III, 531. On Cowper’s ‘duplicitous’ dealings with Newton while composing The Task, see

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King, William Cowper, pp. 145–8; on Cowper and the translation of Homer, pp. 189–232. Whatever antipathy Newton may have felt towards the Classics, and by implication towards Cowper’s translation, by late 1785 he was, nevertheless, looking for early subscribers to it: see Letters and Prose Writings, II, 422, 437. 19 ‘A genuine book, is that which was written by the person whose name it bears, as the author of it. An authentic book, is that which relates matters of fact, as they really happened. A book may be genuine, without being authentic; and a book may be authentic, without being genuine’: An Apology for the Bible (London, 1796), pp. 33–4. Watson declares the epistles of Paul both genuine and authentic, while the fictions of Fielding and Richardson are otherwise (pp. 34, 311–16, 334). For further discussion of eighteenth-century debates about the authenticity of the Bible, see Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain, pp. 29–60. 20 D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 285–6. See also D. Bruce Hindmarsh, John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 13–48, and ‘The Olney Autobiographers: English Conversion Narrative in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 49 (1998), 61–84. Of particular relevance in relation to Newton is the later spiritual autobiography of Thomas Scott, The Force of Truth: An Authentic Narrative

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Yet it is specifically because Newton was himself a ‘Christian mariner’ that he can offer a narrative which follows the pattern of Calvinist conversion in ways that might be considered ‘authentic’ in a further sense. Whereas the common language of many early modern conversion accounts – especially of the Puritan or Nonconformist brand – is one that describes the tempest-tossed conscience floundering amidst inward storms at sea, with the ‘Soul’ being ‘like a broken Vessel, driven, as with the Winds, and tossed sometimes head-long into dispair’ and ‘broken, scattered, and rent’, as John Bunyan puts it in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), and while earlier collections of conversion stories such as Spiritual Experiences of Sundry Beleevers (1653) likewise recall the ways in which ‘flouds of temptation’ can easily ‘over-whelme the poore distressed, doubting, despairing and drowning soule’, by contrast John Newton’s account famously encompasses the sea in its natural, outward state: not as figure or metaphor, but as fact.21 For Newton’s conversion takes place not simply as if he were at sea but while he is at sea, during a storm that arose on 10 March 1748, the day ‘the Lord sent from on high, and delivered me out of the deep waters’.22 The stormy business of what Bunyan describes in Grace Abounding as the ‘castings down, and raisings up’ of the soul through conversion is, as a result, both laid bare and made literal in Newton’s Authentic Narrative by the fact that this quite familiar pattern of spiritual experience is mirrored authentically in his life as a mariner.23 Slipping between the spiritual and the practical language of maritime hazards, then, becomes one of the strongest stylistic weapons at Newton’s disposal, with the terminology of his ‘profession’ as a seaman merging seamlessly with his subsequent ‘profession’ of faith as a Christian. As Newton posits, the true ‘Christian experience’ (London, 1779); see Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, pp. 77–82, and ‘The Olney Autobiographers’, pp. 75–80. Newton’s account may also be compared to other less ‘spiritual’ but equally ‘authentic’ seafaring narratives, for example: William Webb, An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the Doddington Indiaman, and of the Adventures of Those on Board Who Survived the Shipwreck (London, 1756); William Ellis, An Authentic Narrative of a Voyage Performed by Captain Cook and Captain Clarke […] in Search of a North West Passage, 3rd edn (London, 1784); and the anonymously authored An Authentic and Interesting Narrative of the Late Expedition to Botany Bay, as Performed by Commodore Philips (London, 1789). 21 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 58; Vavasour Powell, preface, Spiritual Experiences of Sundry Beleevers (London, 1653), p. ii. Seventeenth-century conversion narratives and spiritual autobiography have been widely studied: see esp. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963); Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative. 22 Newton, Authentic Narrative, p. 68. 23 See Bunyan, Grace Abounding, pp. 1–4.

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can best be illustrated by analogy with the ‘circumstances of a voyage’ at sea, wherein no two spiritual sailors’ journeys are ever the same. Though ‘some set out in a prosperous gale’, he notes, ‘they are checked by adverse blasts’, and though facing ‘frequent expectation of shipwreck’ nevertheless they might just ‘reach the desired haven’ in the end, while others might ‘meet with little remarkable in their passage’ at all. ‘Is it not thus in the spiritual life?’, Newton asks, a question we can recognise as framed not just by his life-experience as a ‘Christian mariner’, but also by the traditional language of Protestant conversion and its seafaring metaphors: a language inherited not just from Bunyan, of course, but – in the English Protestant tradition – from Wyatt and Spenser, Donne and Milton.24 The vicissitudes of Newton’s Authentic Narrative – though, curiously, not as dramatic as one might expect of a sea-going adventure story, taking many more years to complete according to the ‘growing nature’ of such things, as Newton puts it – are thus embedded quite literally within his broader biography as a sailor.25 Yet for as much as this shared language guarantees the impress of authenticity when it comes to narrating conversion, John Newton’s sensible conclusion is one that recognises too the authenticity of difference when it comes to spiritual transformation. The fact remains that not all conversions can be as plain-sailing as Newton’s. ‘We must not […] make the experience of others, in all respects, a rule to ourselves’, Newton warns, having himself undergone a sea-change steady and slow, but in the end secure and unquestionable. While conversion for some is ‘effected in a secret way’, ‘gradually’ and through ‘a still small voice’, Newton attests, others might be ‘convinced, pardoned, and changed’ more suddenly, being plucked ‘as brands out of the fire’ in order to become ‘monuments’ of God’s ‘mercy, for the encouragement of others’.26

Newton, Authentic Narrative, pp. 85–6. On the uses of nautical imagery in English literary and religious writings, see, for example, Philip Edwards, Sea-Mark: The Metaphorical Voyage, Spenser to Milton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997). The language of spiritual seafaring can be traced back to Luther, in the Protestant tradition, and beyond that – though with different implications – to the medieval Church, which found its archetype in Noah’s ark: the ‘nave’ of a church (the space in which the congregation would gather) has its roots in the Latin word navis, i.e., ship. On this and other medieval associations with ships, sea-journeys, and the Church, see V.A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), pp. 297–358. I owe thanks to David Salter for drawing my attention to this helpful reference. 25 For Newton’s thoughts on conversion and grace, see esp. his Twenty Six Letters on Religious Subjects […] By Omicron (London, 1774), Letters IX–XII (p. 78). 26 Newton, Authentic Narrative, pp. 4–5, 86. 24

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*** ‘Is it not thus in the spiritual life?’ This is the question that Cowper seems to be returning to Newton in that letter of January 1787 when, explaining why he has turned to Homer rather than to Scripture for ‘refuge’ from despair, he brings forth the image of himself as a ‘Christian mariner’ still struggling in his ‘most turbulent voyage’. Unlike Newton, whose conversion has something of a onceand-for-all finality, Cowper would remain very much amid the ‘tempests’ of his own spiritual passage, as Cowper’s own ‘authentic narrative’ makes clear. Later entitled Adelphi and originally completed around 1767, Cowper’s conversion account charts waters very different from Newton’s.27 After being rescued providentially from depression, suicide and madness, ‘amazing grace’ arrives for Cowper, while recovering from a breakdown at Dr Cotton’s asylum in St Albans, in a spectacularly evangelical fashion. Having ‘flung’ himself ‘into a chair near the window seat’ one day during his confinement at St Albans, and ‘seeing a Bible there’, Cowper ‘ventured once more to apply to it for comfort and instruction’, with Romans 3.25 being ‘the first verse I saw’: Immediately I received strength to believe it. Immediately the full beams of the sun of righteousness shone upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the atonement He had made, my pardon sealed in His blood, and all the fullness and completeness of my justification. In a moment I believed and received the gospel. […] Unless the Almighty Arm had been under me I think I now should have died with gratitude and joy. My eyes filled with tears and my voice was choked with transport. I could only look up to Heaven in silence, overwhelmed with love and wonder!28

One can hear immediately in these words a clear echo of the kind of experience – almost visionary, almost ecstatic – largely and perhaps conspicuously absent from Newton’s studied and steadily reasoned Authentic Narrative, but abundant in Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. ‘Now did my chains fall off my legs’, Bunyan claims about his own conversion, ‘indeed, I was loosed from my affliction and irons’, just as Cowper recognises this moment as ‘the happy period that was to strike off my fetters and to afford me a clear opening into the free mercy of the Blessed God in Jesus’.29 When Cowper describes feeling, in his despair, ‘like a man borne away 27 As a Memoir, Cowper’s conversion account first appeared posthumously in two ‘rival editions’ of 1816, and in what seems to have been a censored form (passages having been excised, quite possibly by Newton). See Letters and Prose Writings, I, pp. xxiii–xxix; James King, ‘Cowper’s Adelphi Restored: The Excisions to Cowper’s Narrative’, Review of English Studies, 30 (1979), 291–305; Maurice J. Quinlan, ‘Memoir of William Cowper: An Autobiography’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 97 (1953), 359–82; Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, p. 263, n. 8. 28 Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, I, 12, 39–40. 29 Bunyan, Grace Abounding, pp. 40, 72; Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, I, 39.

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by a rapid torrent into a stormy sea from which he sees no possibility of returning, and where he knows he cannot subsist’, and then of feeling uplifted as if ‘the Almighty Arm had been under me’, it is of Bunyan’s ‘castings down, and raisings up’ that we might well be reminded, rather than of Newton’s more literally stormy but inwardly much calmer spiritual story. Cowper’s own ‘authentic narrative’ is all the more intense because, unlike Newton’s, Cowper’s conversion is clearly not finished when the account ends: the ‘ardour’ of his ‘first love’ is followed by further ravages.30 With Cowper still suffering the ‘Lamentable inconsistency of a convinced judgement with an unsanctified heart!’ it is in terms of the convert’s ongoing struggles, the ‘castings down, and raisings up’ that continue after conversion, that Cowper might re-frame Newton’s question: ‘Is it not thus in the spiritual life?’31 Yet Cowper’s most authentic rendition of evangelical conversion is, curiously, not to be found in his spiritual autobiography, Adelphi. For there is no articulation of conversion more succinct or more formidable than that offered by a single phrase to be found in Book V (‘The Winter Morning Walk’) of Cowper’s extraordinary poem, The Task: ‘Again he falls, / And fights again’ (ll. 623–4).32 The immediate context of these words is useful to recall. It is in Book V that Cowper, having addressed tyranny, injustice, and political ‘liberty’, deftly switches the focus to religious ‘freedom’, elaborating the conviction that spiritually too ‘Chains are the portion of revolted man’ (l. 581). What follows is a brief narrative familiar to anyone acquainted with Bunyan’s, Newton’s, or indeed Cowper’s own ‘castings down, and raisings up’: that of an ungodly wretch (an exemplary ‘revolted man’) who, trapped in ‘silly dotage on created things’ yet ‘Careless of their Creator’, and drawn by ‘sordid gravitation’ to become forgetful of ‘the center he should seek’, finds himself spiralling into despair (ll. 586–7, 588, 590). ‘All his hopes / Tend downward’ for this Everyman-of-sinners and indeed ‘his ambition is to sink’, Cowper states, ‘To reach a depth profounder still, and still / Profounder, in the fathomless abyss / Of folly, plunging in pursuit of death’ (ll. 591–5). Central to this most horrible of headlong falls is a particular kind of experience, the pattern or shape of which is authentic to that of evangelical conversion. Despite foreseeing both ‘Ages of hopeless misery’ and with ‘Future death, / And death still future’ lying ahead, Scripture does, it seems, prove ‘still a trumpet’ to this man’s ‘fears’, and for this reason, suddenly, a ‘scruple checks him’, we are told (ll. 607–8, 611, 614). Now ‘Riot is not loud / Nor drunk enough to drown’ this man’s fresh religious convictions, and it is in this new-found state that ‘Remorse’ Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, I, 40. Compare such descriptions with the pattern of conversion found in Cowper’s ‘The New Convert’, where the ‘new-born child of gospel grace’ still experiences ‘comforts sinking day by day’, like ‘a brook that glides away’: Olney Hymns, Book III, Hymn 63, in Poems, I, 197. 31 Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, p. 286; Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, I, 11. 32 For Book V of The Task, ‘The Winter Morning Walk’, see Poems, II, 209–34. 30

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suddenly ‘begets reform’ in him: ‘His master-lust / Falls first before his resolute rebuke’, and at last ‘Peace ensues’ (ll. 614–15, 618–20). These last two hopeful words can be held in suspense only momentarily, though, for the comma that follows them is nowhere near strong enough to withstand the pull of the next line. ‘Peace ensues’: ‘But’, the following line begins, it is ‘spurious and short liv’d’ (ll. 620–21). It is at this point that Cowper’s ‘revolted man’ suffers his most intense spiritual battle yet: ‘Again he falls / And fights again’, Cowper tells us (ll. 623–4). The ‘fight’, however, is soon over. For even his ‘best essay’ brings with it ‘Its own dishonor by a worse relapse’, and even ‘Reason now / Takes part with appetite’ in the further ‘service of debauch’ (ll. 624, 626, 629–30, 633). With ‘libidinous discourse / Exhausted’, and with the ‘moral-sense’ of the most smoothly moralising ‘philosopher’ impotent to ‘set him free’ (Cowper seems to have Shaftesbury in mind here), there comes a yet more harrowing description: of a desperate man who, having ‘harden’d his heart’s temper in the forge / Of lust, and on the anvil of despair […] / Slights the strokes of conscience’ (ll. 660–61, 673, 670, 664–6). ‘Nothing moves […] his constancy in ill’, we are told of this man who, from now on in life, ‘sleeps the sleep of death’ (ll. 666–7, 669). Cowper’s conclusion upon this awful case comes as simple yet sobering: ‘The still small voice is wanted’ (l. 685), he states, a clear and unmistakeable echo of Newton’s own words in An Authentic Narrative on the quietly transformative power of religious conversion (these being in themselves an echo of Scripture’s ‘trumpet’, 1 Kings 19.12). We can see in this poetry the shaping of that which Bunyan, Newton and Cowper would all acknowledge as authentic to ‘the spiritual life’. What remains breathtaking about this section of The Task, though, is not just the way that Cowper compresses such ‘castings down, and raisings up’ in so few lines, but also how he enjoins the reader to experience their turbulence first-hand. It is through the frightening energy of the poetry’s movements forwards and backwards, upwards and finally downwards, that Cowper pulls his reader into feeling with immediate force that which might otherwise seem merely conventional or worn out. Indeed, such writing is so compelling, so authentically alive, precisely because it ‘inhabits’ – both living within, and being vitally interior to – the very thing it describes.33 To borrow Vincent Newey’s apt observation, it is through ‘the peculiar honesty – the unpremeditated authenticity – of Cowper’s engagement with his subject’ in The Task, in this case through a language that returns continually upon itself, spiralling in an incantatory maelstrom of chiasmus and repetition – ‘profounder still, and still / profounder’; ‘still worse, / Far worse’; ‘Future death, / And death still

33 Michael O’Neill, ‘“The Death of Satan”: Stevens’s “Esthétique du Mal”, Evil and the Romantic Imagination’, in Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens, ed. Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 223–36 (p. 227). For detailed and insightful readings of this passage in The Task’s Book V, see Martin Priestman, Cowper’s Task: Structure and Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 138–44; Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, pp. 141–51.

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future’ – that Cowper conveys the nowness of ‘the spiritual life’ and its capacity ‘to sink’ and to ‘still’ anyone caught within its stalling circular drama.34 It is not just the prototypical shape of ‘castings down, and raisings up’, then, that the words ‘Again he falls, / And fights again’ encapsulate. Rather, this phrase becomes the signature for ‘the dark source’ of an ‘art’35 which turns on such experience so powerfully, simultaneously shaping and being shaped by the familiar pattern of falling and fighting ‘Again […] / And […] again’. With the second ‘again’ returning us so quickly to the first, the concluding word spinning us towards another beginning, Cowper’s six words – ‘Again he falls, / And fights again’ – form a spiral of certain uncertainty, a helter-skelter of ‘hopes’ that ultimately ‘tend downward’ to despair. None of this leads to the kind of spiritual agitation that might typically mark the Christian mariner’s ‘castings down, and raisings up’ either: it develops instead into a deathly spiritual stillness, with the ‘still, and still’, ‘still worse’, ‘still future’ of the previous lines turning into a ‘constancy in ill’, which ‘Nothing moves’. This situation is, moreover, paradoxical. For this figure, pulled ‘with such force / Resistless from the center he should seek’, is also deadeningly restless, ‘a wide-wand’ring soul’ left, like Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, to seek a ‘comfortless repose / […] In heav’n-renouncing exile’ (ll. 589–90, 684, 596–8).36 It is in the very movement of this poetry that we might identify something like ‘the marvellous generative force that our modern judgement assigns to authenticity’: one that locates ‘originative power’, as Lionel Trilling has put it, in ‘the downward movement through all cultural superstructures to some place where all movement ends, and begins’.37

*** Although this brief passage in The Task offers everything we might expect from a conversion narrative, compressing and intensifying the form’s style, structure and language with remarkable acuity, conspicuous in its absence is the saving conversion event. ‘The still small voice’ is wanted, we are told. Yet whether that voice, ‘Whose word leaps forth at once to its effect’ (ll. 685–6), does ‘speak’ in order to spark this ‘revolted man’ free of his ‘Chains’ is not revealed. The conclusion being indefinitely deferred, the narrative hangs in a state of suspense and of suspension. The tale Cowper tells at this point in The Task thus represents a radical departure from the usual pattern of evangelical conversion narrative, for unlike Newton, the anonymous libertine of ‘The Winter Morning Walk’ undergoes his fearful fighting and falling without finally being ‘chang’d’. The typical pattern of conversion – bringing a release from the ‘dungeon’ in which ‘all thoughts of 36 37 34

35

Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, p. 29. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 11. Priestman also sees a connection with Milton here: Cowper’s Task, pp. 139–40. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 12.

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mercy’ have become ‘lost’, as Cowper relates in his earlier poem, Hope (1782), where Hope itself suddenly offers ‘The sound of pardon’ so that the converting ‘felon’ now ‘drops’ both ‘his fetters and his fear’ in a ‘transport’ of ‘far superior joy’, with ‘all heav’n descending on the wings / Of the glad legions of the King of Kings’ – remains noticeably unfinished in Book V of The Task.38 Yet the sentence of despair in which we are left suspended at this point does serve as prelude to something more uplifting. For immediately following this passage is one of The Task’s most significant theological statements: about ‘Grace’. Having identified the ‘still small voice’ of the one ‘Who calls for things that are not, and they come’ (ll. 685–7), Cowper shifts the focus of the poem yet once more, as if attuning to the ‘effect’ of that voice’s salvific potential. ‘Grace makes the slave a freeman’, Cowper now positively asserts: ‘’Tis a change’ that alone can effect the ‘transformation of apostate man / From fool to wise, from earthly to divine’, ‘humanizing what is brute’ and ‘overpow’ring strength / By weakness, and hostility by love’ (ll. 688, 695–6, 700, 702–3). It is grace that enables the convert to ‘taste’ God’s works in Nature afresh, to ‘relish’ them ‘with divine delight’ (ll. 779, 783), and to resist oppression and tyranny in all its forms, because ‘to bind him is a vain attempt / Whom God delights in, and in whom he dwells’ (ll. 776–8). But this grace also bears a crucial function in helping the ‘desp’rate’ man – or woman – fathom the mazy paths of Providence. For ‘the mind that has been touch’d from heav’n’ also ‘receives sublimed / New faculties’ and ‘Discerns in all things’ the ‘unambiguous footsteps of […] God’ (ll. 796, 805, 808, 812). Indeed, ‘whoso sees’ by the ‘lamp of truth’, Cowper prophesies, ‘no longer wanders lost / With intellects bemazed in endless doubt, / But runs the road of wisdom’ itself (ll. 845, 847–9). By contrast, anyone ‘departing’ from the ‘eternal word!’, ‘the source and centre of all minds’, can only remain ‘lost’ (ll. 896–8): they must ‘rove / At random, without honor, hope, or peace’ (ll. 898–9) in ‘the pointless round’ of society’s ‘false pleasures’.39 So stands Cowper’s fitting conclusion to ‘The Winter Morning Walk’. But this is a conclusion which also returns us to that other ‘wide-wand’ring soul’ left in want of the ‘still small voice’ some two hundred lines earlier. For ‘’Till thou art heard’, we are informed, the ‘uninform’d and heedless souls of men’ must wander and rove aimlessly still (ll. 861, 864). But when it is heard, ‘Then we are free’, Cowper can proclaim, in a statement that ends – finally – the suspense of that restless yet unmoving despair we encountered earlier: ‘Then liberty like day / Breaks on the soul, and by a flash from heav’n / Fires all the faculties with glorious joy’ (ll. 883–5). In what is, perhaps without comparison, Cowper’s most inspired Cowper, Hope, ll. 712, 718, 722, 724–6, 728, 732–3, and see generally ll. 688–735; Poems, I, 334–5. 39 Bill Hutchings, The Poetry of William Cowper (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 226; for further comment on the centrality of motion and wandering, godly or otherwise, to the purpose and design of The Task, see pp. 226–30; also Priestman, Cowper’s Task, pp. 38–46; Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, pp. 27–8, 32–3, and passim. 38

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articulation of the liberation afforded by conversion, of the ‘liberty’ he sees offered by ‘Grace’, and with Paul’s conversion being invoked in that same momentous ‘flash from heav’n’, it is the ‘still small voice’ that rises triumphant here. For when conversion comes, Cowper states: ‘A voice is heard that mortal ears hear not / ’Till thou hast touch’d them’, and ‘In that blest moment’ it ‘discloses with a smile / The author of Nature’s beauties, who retired / Behind his own creation, works unseen’ (ll. 886–7, 891–4).

*** In Cowper’s Book V of The Task, poetry brings to life theology both as ‘a way of feeling’ and as an authentic ‘language of the self’ through what Brian Cummings has termed conversion’s ‘habits of syntax’.40 Because ‘Grace is an enigma, a grammar unto itself’ which, even while defying ‘ordinary usages of language to express it’, is able to communicate its own ‘authenticity’ through conversion, it possesses the power to invite the reader ‘to imitate the same faltering rhythm of ratiocination’ found in the convert’s progress and thereby to attune to the ‘still small voice’ in the very process of reading.41 As a result, the final sections of Cowper’s ‘The Winter Morning Walk’ embrace an experience of conversion that, as Cummings puts it, might serve ‘to guarantee the authenticity of religion itself’.42 Central to this authenticity, moreover, is Cowper’s sensitivity to the way in which conversion ‘is an action continually suspended’. For the ‘paradox of grace’ lies in the fact that the sinner ‘never has “justice” in the sense that he can stop still and lay hold of it’, and so ‘justification’ is ‘continually in motus’, ‘iustitia’ never becoming a stable ‘state, but always a process or flux’.43 Such is the point of the narrative of the ‘revolted man’ in Book V of The Task, and also of Cowper’s description of himself as a ‘Christian mariner’ to Newton in that letter of January 1787. It must remain one of the most perplexing of literary paradoxes that the Cowper who could write so authentically about grace and conversion, and who considered ‘Nature’ too as a medium of divine revelation, thereby ‘carrying the Puritan quest for evidences of election into the ordinary English countryside’, himself suffered for so long an incurable and periodically critical despair.44 40 Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 324–5. 41 Ibid., pp. 413–14, 327, 325. 42 Ibid., p. 365. 43 Ibid., p. 97. 44 Vincent Newey, ‘Cowper Prospects: Self, Nature, Society’, in Romanticism and Religion, ed. Hopps and Stabler, pp. 41–56 (p. 44). See also Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, pp. 127–64; Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Poetry of Vision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 165–206, esp. pp. 192–4; W. Gerald Marshall, ‘The Presence of “The Word” in Cowper’s The Task’, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 27 (1987), 475–87.

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Not so much the struggling ‘Christian mariner’, Cowper saw himself throughout most of his post-converted life, more horrifically because more certainly, as ‘damn’d below Judas’: awaiting divine justice as a sentence of ‘execution’ suspended yet inevitable.45 In this light, Cowper’s choice of allusion at the close of ‘The Winter Morning Walk’ – Paul’s resounding moment of conversion, which ‘Breaks on the soul’ in ‘a flash from heav’n’ – comes to us fraught with more difficulties than at first appears. For not only does the potential for such graceful transformation no longer apply, it seems, to the poem’s author, but the choice of Paul as prototype for religious conversion also becomes problematic in that it offers ‘the concept of conversion’ as a once-and-for-all ‘alteration in chemical state, an alchemy of person’ that can hardly be replicated by any other convert, and certainly not by Cowper himself.46 Paul’s road-to-Damascus experience invokes a ‘desire for emulation’ which can never be fulfilled, possessing ‘an unexpectedness not to be expected again’. As such, it is ‘as much anti-type as archetype’ of conversion, Paul’s remaining ‘the conversion which occurs to no other sinner’ and yet which ‘rebukes every sinner’ with an authenticity which can be glimpsed but never actually experienced.47 Yet in spite of this spiritual conundrum – or perhaps even because of it – The Task might still be considered Cowper’s most authentic version of spiritual autobiography. For much of the authenticity of The Task’s rendition of religious experience is rooted in the navigation of ongoing troubles, with Cowper, like the sailor Newton encounters at one point in his Authentic Narrative, remaining converted but not saved, ‘convinced, but not changed’.48 It is precisely because Cowper was ‘oneirically interior to the condition of restless confinement within a circuit of unprogressive being’, as Vincent Newey has noted, and no more so than during bouts of despair, that The Task can offer us something more sensitive and more painful, more imaginatively engaging and more emotionally affective, than anything we might find in the otherwise more straightforwardly ‘authentic narrative’, Adelphi.49 One has only to contrast the spectacular scenes and enthusiastic claims of the latter against the quietly understated and gently melancholic account of conversion in Book III of The Task (ll. 108–23), where Cowper becomes the ‘stricken deer’ found ‘by one who had himself / Been hurt by th’archers’ (ll. 108, 112–13), to recognise that a major shift in sensibility has occurred between the writing of these texts. It is Cowper’s version of himself as the 47 48

Cowper, ‘Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion’, ll. 2, 5; Poems, I, 209. Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation, p. 371. Ibid., pp. 370–71. Newton, Authentic Narrative, p. 111. In Cowper’s letter to Newton, 10 May 1780, he acknowledges his ‘Ænigmatical’ condition in precisely these terms: ‘That a Calvinist in principle, should know himself to have been Elected, and yet believe that he is lost, is indeed a Riddle, and so obscure that it […] may well bring the assertor of it under the Suspicion of Insanity’: Letters and Prose Writings, I, 341. 49 Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, pp. 135–6, 62–3. 45 46

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‘stricken deer’ that now remains ‘deep infixt’ (Book III, l. 109) in our imaginations, rather than anything we might find in his more convinced, though somehow less convincing conversion account, Adelphi.50 If Cowper’s ‘authentic’ voice is to be found ‘in expressions of longing, uncertainty, desperation, weakness’, and in ‘the struggles of a mind for which assured faith, and the repose that goes with it, are impossible’, then it is surely to be heard most clearly in the words that present Cowper to us as ‘the stricken deer’: an image that trembles before our eyes, being ‘Hunted’ both by and into a ‘terrible state of mind’, as Cowper elsewhere puts it.51 The letters Cowper wrote over his last 30 years, concurrently with The Task and his other poems and translations, invite us to recognise yet another, quite different kind of spiritual autobiography being written across his life. With despair abounding in Cowper’s correspondence, his letters are often bereft of the soterial buoyancy that typically marks the spiritual seafarer’s ups and downs. ‘If you are cast down’, Cowper wrote to Samuel Teedon in April 1793, ‘you are comforted and raised again’, but his own ‘experiences’ proceed ‘in one dull train, unvaried, unless by darker shades than usual’.52 Locked within evermore restrictive circles of ‘terror’ and ‘habitual melancholy’, like ‘a poor Fly entangled in a thousand webs’, Cowper’s letters tell a tale that effectively reverses – as well as refuses, point blank at times – the redemptive pattern of all those ‘castings down, and raisings up’ found in conversion narratives.53 Rather than the ‘Christian mariner’ buoying the crests and troughs of his spiritual ‘tempest’, like Bunyan or Newton, or surviving life’s vicissitudes like Defoe’s cunning Crusoe, Cowper more often resembles in his correspondence another, much less fortunate eighteenth-century sailor whose Authentic Relation of ‘sufferings’ on a desert island concludes not in salvation but in his lonely and dismally ‘declining Condition’. Like Cowper’s, the days of this stranded sailor are literally numbered: in the end he can do no more than list them hopelessly one after another – ‘all as before’, ‘all as before’ – as he waits ‘ditto’, without food or fuel or any prospect of rescue, to die.54 It is, of course, precisely this refusal to keep alive the commonplaces of the evangelical conversion narrative that makes Cowper’s last English poem, 50 Cowper’s ‘evangelical friends’, of course, ‘continued to believe, even when he could not, that the person described in his narrative Adelphi was his truest self’: Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, p. 285. 51 Ibid., p. 287; Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, IV, 459. 52 Ibid., IV, 327; for similar statements, see IV, 224, 237–8. 53 Ibid., IV, 469. 54 This sailor’s ‘authentic’ journal concludes thus: ‘October the 1st, 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th and 6th, all as before. […] 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th of October, all as before’: [Anonymous], An Authentic Relation of the Many Hardships and Sufferings of a Dutch Sailor, Who Was Put on Shore on the Uninhabited Isle of Ascension […]. Taken from the Original Journal Found […] in January 1725–26, 8th edn (London, 1728), pp. 21–2. By way of comparison, see Cowper’s letter to Harriet Hesketh (Aug. 1795), in which he regards ‘a solitary pillar of rock’ off the coast of Norfolk as ‘an emblem of myself. […] I stand alone and expect the storm that shall displace me’: Letters and Prose Writings, IV, 450–51.

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‘The Cast-Away’, work to such devastating effect. What leaves this poem so memorable and so resonant is the desperate point it so coolly makes – ‘with a hand that is not permitted to tremble!’ – amid the easy rolling of its sea-shanty rhythms and ballad-sheet rhymes: that the traditional shape of saving grace, and the authentic language of spiritual seafaring that goes along with it, no longer apply to the despairing Cowper, who rejects and dismantles such conventions here with dispassionate ease.55 Whereas a Pauline ‘flash from heav’n’ breaks upon the conclusion of The Task’s Book V, in ‘The Cast-Away’ such illumination is occulted by the calm hopelessness of the poem’s darkness, through which, we are told, ‘no light propitious shone’ (l. 62). In ‘The Cast-Away’ no ‘still small voice’ is heard and no Pauline words break forth from heaven: ‘No voice divine the storm allay’d’, we are informed simply and soberly (l. 61). In what is ‘an anti-hymn, an inversion of the narrative of saving or redemptive intervention’, and ‘a ritual break with the religion he had served and adapted but which had fed the currents of his despair’, ‘The Cast-Away’ appears to present a concerted effort by Cowper to place himself beyond the reach of Newton’s nautical language of salvation once and for all, as one already and for always ‘perish’d […] beneath a rougher sea’ (ll. 64–5).56 There would be no more struggling amid the waves for Cowper, only a drinking deep of them: no more fighting, but only falling, ‘whelm’d in deeper gulphs’ (l. 66) than any ‘Christian mariner’ could ever experience or indeed would ever communicate with such terrifying authenticity.

Ibid., IV, 470. Newey, ‘Cowper Prospects’, p. 53. ‘Perishing’ in ‘The Cast-Away’ relates to a

55 56

dream Cowper experienced during severe depression in February 1773, in which he heard the words, ‘Actum est de, periisti’ (‘It is all over with thee, thou hast perished’): see Letters and Prose Writings, I, 259–60; II, 385; IV, 285; Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, pp. 304–13.

Chapter 2

Is He ‘Well-Authenticated’? Robert Southey and Anna Seward Lynda Pratt

As writer and critic, Robert Southey was intimately concerned with notions of authenticity and acts of authentication. Given that he was born and grew up in Bristol, the home of the controversial poet-forger Thomas Chatterton, his preoccupations are not surprising. Southey defended the ‘authenticity’ of his narrative in his Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797); castigated Wordsworth’s failure to ‘well-authenticate’ ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ in his review of Lyrical Ballads (1798); and in Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1826) pronounced his intention to ‘vindicate and authenticate’ his hostile portrayal of Roman Catholicism.1 In addition, Southey’s lifelong concern with the process of authentication can be traced through the prefaces and annotations that form an integral part of his poetry and prose. Yet how do we authenticate Southey? His poetry and letters are only now attracting the attention of modern scholarly editors, with new editions of both in progress. Our knowledge of this most complex and irreducible of writers is, therefore, at present only partial and, certainly in comparison to that of his canonical contemporaries, profoundly inauthentic. This essay will use one correspondence to illustrate how new scholarship authenticates – and complicates – current views of Southey, his relationships with women writers, his concerns for his poetical magnum opus, Madoc (1805), and for his poetic career. In so doing, it will argue for the authenticity and significance of other, non-canonical Romantic period cultures and literary communities. *** Robert Southey has traditionally not been known for his sympathetic attitude to women writers. One of the anecdotes most frequently recounted of, and against, him is his advice to Charlotte Brontë that ‘Literature cannot be the business of

1 Robert Southey, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (Bristol, 1797), [v]; untitled review, Critical Review, 24 (1798), 197–204 (p. 200); Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (London, 1826), p. 56.

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a woman’s life: & it ought not to be’.2 Yet as is so often the case with Southey, the incidental and anecdotal can be used to overlook compelling and consistent, though contradictory, evidence. Southey was more supportive of female authors than is often credited. He openly admired the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and actively promoted the careers of a number of women, including Anna Eliza Bray, Caroline Bowles, Mary Colling, Lucretia Davidson and Amelia Opie. He also engaged in correspondence with an established female writer from an older generation – Anna Seward. Although born in 1742 and 1774 respectively, Seward and Southey had much in common. Ambitious and successful authors, they were both the products of flourishing provincial societies. Seward was born and lived all her life in Lichfield, whilst Southey was born in Bristol and spent most of his early adulthood in the southwest of England before moving to Keswick in 1803. Both were embedded in the complex social, cultural, religious, scientific and political networks generated by their local contexts. They thus provide important examples of the contributions made by regional writers, publishers, printers and artists to national cultures in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an aspect of Romanticism that is only now receiving attention.3 Yet although they had shared ambitions and regional identities, Southey first came to Seward’s attention in a way that highlighted their potential differences. In 1796, Seward was sent a copy of Southey’s recently published radical epic Joan of Arc.4 It was, she claimed, the work of ‘a savage boy of genius’, heir to the ‘ill-starred’ Chatterton.5 It was also a calumny both on the memory of Henry V ‘the bravest, wisest, most just and generous of our former monarchs’ and on ‘the English character and constitution’.6 Seward felt strongly enough to respond publicly, publishing a blank verse ‘Philippic on a Modern Epic’ in the London newspaper the Morning Chronicle in summer 1797: Base is the purport of this epic song, Baneful its powers; – but O, the poesy! (What can it less when sun-born Genius sings?) Wraps in reluctant ecstacy the soul Where poesy is felt […].7 2 Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Margaret Smith, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995–2004), I, 166–7. On Southey’s patronage of women writers, see Dennis Low, The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 3 For example, English Romantic Writers and the West Country, ed. Nicholas Roe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 4 Seward’s copy was a gift from Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby: see Anna Seward, Letters Written Between the Years 1784 and 1807, 6 vols (Edinburgh, 1811), IV, 290. 5 Ibid., IV, 328, 290. 6 Ibid., IV, 328. 7 Anna Seward, ‘Philippic on a Modern Epic’, ll. 1–5; Anna Seward: Poetical Works; with Extracts from Her Literary Correspondence, ed. Walter Scott, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1810), III, 67.

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An extravagant mixture of praise and denunciation, the poem was sent by a friend to Southey, who mockingly noted that it showed ‘an acquaintance with at least the language of poetry’.8 Seward continued to follow Southey’s career with some interest. In 1802 she wrote to the Poetical Register, lauding him as a ‘genuine Poet’, but cautioning the reader against adopting ‘his capricious systems’.9 The letter, like the earlier ‘Philippic’, was read by its subject, who laconically observed that it mingled ‘praise and censure equally extravagant – sugared bile, oil and vinegar’.10 Southey replied neither publicly nor privately to Seward’s poem or letter to the Poetical Register. It was her reaction to his poetic magnum opus, Madoc, published in 1805, that eventually galvanised him into a response. Seward read Madoc shortly after its publication. As she told Henry Cary, the translator of Dante, on 8 August 1805: Madoc bears a master-key to every bosom where but good common sense, and anything resembling a human heart, inhabit […] all its interests are British. Madoc has more for the understanding and the heart than any composition without the pale of Shakespeare and Richardson. Its heroes are not indebted to impossible feats and hyperbolic exaggeration for the grandeur of their characters.11

Her opinion was shared by others, including the anonymous reviewer in the Imperial Review, who described Madoc as ‘the second heroic production in the English language’, after Paradise Lost.12 Southey ‘heard from many quarters’ of Seward’s praise and in June 1807 received ‘proof’ of it in a letter she had sent to the poet Charles Lloyd, an important link between provincial cultures in the Midlands and the Lake District. On 30 June 1807 Southey wrote to Seward to thank her for her good opinion. ‘No man’, he assured her, ‘can be more indifferent to the censure of his contemporaries, nor more sensible to their praise’.13 His letter both initiated a correspondence that lasted until Seward’s death in 1809 and paved the way to their only meeting, in Lichfield in summer 1808. The lack of a collected edition of Southey’s letters has contributed to his correspondence with Seward being overlooked and their relationship marginalised. Southey to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn (22 Sep. 1797), The Collected Letters of Robert Southey: Part One, ed. Lynda Pratt, [accessed 29 July 2009]. 9 Seward, untitled letter, The Poetical Register, and Repository for Fugitive Poetry, for 1801 (London, 1802), 475–86 (p. 481). 10 Southey to Mary Barker (9 July 1802), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), I, 201. 11 Seward, Letters, VI, 228. 12 Anon., untitled review, Imperial Review, 5 (1805), 465–73; reprinted in Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lionel Madden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 104–5 (p. 105). 13 Southey to Seward (30 June 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. 8

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Eleven of the letters sent by Southey to Seward have survived, scattered in libraries in the United Kingdom and North America. Seven will be published for the first time in the new edition of Southey’s Collected Letters, alongside four that have previously appeared elsewhere.14 Two of Seward’s letters to Southey were included in the six-volume edition of her letters published in 1811.15 Their correspondence covers politics, contemporary events, family matters and literature, especially poetry. One of Southey’s letters contains a draft section of his then-unpublished Hindu romance The Curse of Kehama (1810) and it is likely that a second section of the poem was included in a further letter which has not yet come to light.16 Southey writes to Seward as an equal, a fellow poet whose opinion he both respects and courts. His letters are marked by ‘plain speaking & serious feeling’ and contain confidential information about his response to contemporaries, including Coleridge and Wordsworth.17 In reply to Seward’s enquiry ‘Is there any dissention between you and Mr Coleridge’, Southey observed there ‘is no variance between us, but […] we have no common friends, nor is it possible that two men so radically different should’.18 His relationship with Wordsworth emerges as equally complex. On 10 December 1807, Southey reported his reactions to Poems in Two Volumes. Although, he told Seward, it was ‘not possible to overrate’ Wordsworth’s ‘powers as a poet […]. It is the vice of his intellect to be always upon the stretch & strain; – to look at pileworts & daffydowndillies thro’ the same telescope which he applies to the Moon & Stars […]’.19 Southey’s letters to Seward did not just comment on poetic rivals, they also detailed his own writing life. On 25 July 1807, he described the political radicalism that had impelled his early career and as proof sent Seward a stanza of an unpublished ode, written ‘in allusion’ to his own Joan of Arc and begun ‘at the commencement of the war’, presumably the war with revolutionary France in 1793: O dear – dear – England! O my Mother-Isle! There was a time when, woe the while, In thy proud triumphs I partook no part; And even the tale of thy defeat

Two letters to Seward (10 Dec. 1807, 4 July 1808) were reprinted in Alfred Morrison, Catalogue of the Collection of Autograph Letters and Historical Documents Formed Between 1865 and 1882, 6 vols (London, 1883–92), VI, 162–5; two (18 Apr., 28 May 1808) appeared in New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols (London: Columbia University Press, 1965), I, 469–72, 475–7. 15 Seward, Letters, VI, 358–62, 374–9. 16 Southey to Seward (29 Dec. 1808), Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum, Lichfield. 17 Southey to Seward (30 June 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. 18 Seward to Southey (15 Aug. 1809) [misdated, correct date is 1807], Letters, VI, 359; Southey to Seward (25 Oct. 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. 19 Southey to Seward (10 Dec. 1807), McGill University Library. 14

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In those unhappy days was doom’d to meet Unnatural welcome in an English heart. For thou were leagued in an accursed cause O dear – dear – England! & thy holiest laws Were trampled under foot by insolent Power. Dear as my own life-blood were thou to me But even thou less dear than Liberty.20

The sentiments were, he assured Seward, ones he had ‘never yet repented’, evidence of continuity between the radical of the early to mid-1790s and the author of the mid- to late 1800s. Southey’s use of Seward as a confidante – and the implications of his confidences – emerges most clearly, though, in what he had to say about the catalyst for their correspondence, the controversial long poem, Madoc. *** Southey’s Welsh-American poem played a central role in his relationship with Seward. It both generated their epistolary relationship and was the subject of Southey’s earliest letters to her. By the time their correspondence began in summer 1807, Southey was at work on a second edition of Madoc, which appeared later that year. In a letter of 25 July 1807 he sought Seward’s opinion on the changes he was considering for it. These included altering the conclusion. In the first edition, Madoc ended with the destruction of Azteca civilisation by a volcanic eruption. The surviving Aztecas, led by their king Yuhidthiton, decide to seek out a new land, embarking on a journey which will eventually lead them to Mexico and, some four hundred years later, their fatal encounter with the Spanish conquistadors. Madoc as published in 1805 concludes thus: So in the land Madoc was left sole Lord; and far away Yuhidthiton led forth the Aztecas, To spread in other lands Mexitli’s name, And rear a mightier empire, and set up Again their foul idolatry; till Heaven, Making blind Zeal and bloody Avarice Its ministers of vengeance, sent among them The heroic Spaniard’s unrelenting sword.21

20 Southey to Seward (25 July 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. 21 Robert Southey, Madoc, Part 2, Book 27, ll. 387–95; Poetical Works, 1793–1810, ed. Lynda Pratt, 5 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), II, 273.

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Southey believed that this ending did not work: it suffered from the ‘great fault of […] [transferring] the [reader’s] feelings from the hero [Madoc] to Yuhidthiton [King of the defeated Aztecas]’.22 His way of remedying this was to give his hero more to do, transforming Madoc into a more active player in the decisive events taking place at the poem’s climax. He suggested to Seward the possibility of a more dramatic conclusion. Madoc would slay the treacherous Azteca priest Tezozomoc and heal himself of a potentially fatal wound. Yuhidthiton would emigrate and, as in the earlier version, Madoc would be left in charge of his new country.23 Southey’s plans were not restricted to the poem’s ending. He was also unhappy with an earlier section in which the female Welsh settlers, led by Goervyl, Madoc’s sister, are attacked by the treacherous native prince Amalahta and his followers. In the 1805 version, the women are saved through the bravery of Goervyl and her admirer, the Azteca prince Malinal, who is seriously wounded. When Southey came to revise the incident for the second edition, his initial thought was to have Erillyab, Amalahta’s mother, ‘arrive in time’ to kill ‘her son with her own hand’ and rescue Goervyl and Malinal. Filicide proved to be too much for Southey to stomach. So, he changed his plan. His new idea was to add human, or rather canine, interest to the scene by introducing a Welsh dog.24 The hound was to be the survivor of an earlier battle in Wales. He had been found by the dead body of his master and taken by Madoc and his followers to the Americas. Southey’s idea was that the dog would prove his loyalty to his new human friends by saving Goervyl when the wounded Malinal was unable to do any more to help her. Seward replied to Southey’s proposals on 15 August 1807. She did not say anything about the dog, though she approved his suggestions for adding ‘spirit and interest’ to Madoc’s ‘finale’. However, she cautioned him against altering for its own sake: on the grounds that ‘Madoc appears to me a work too beautiful and great to stand in the smallest need of any alteration’ and that the poem has ‘over-stept the Rubicon’ of publication and that any major changes may ‘give triumph to the envious foes of its speedy celebrity’.25 Southey took Seward’s advice. The only revisions he made to the second edition were very minor verbal ones. Indeed, Madoc changed little in all subsequent lifetime editions: the most drastic alterations were made in 1838 and comprised the addition of a few notes and a lengthy new preface.

22 Southey to Seward (25 July 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. Southey had considered including a dog in Madoc as early as 1801: Robert Southey, Common-Place Books, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 vols (London, 1849–1850), IV, 209. A dog was to play an important part in his final long poem: see Diego Saglia, ‘A Siege, a Dog, and Too Many Women: Refiguring the Epic in Roderick, the Last of the Goths’, Romanticism, 17 (2011), 52–62. 25 Seward, Letters, VI, 358–9.

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Southey did not just consult Seward about his projected, though unexecuted, alterations to Madoc. He also told her about those parts of it he did not intend to alter. As he explained to her on 25 July 1807, he would never marry off his hero: He [Madoc] is past the age at which love is necessary for a hero, & as it is to be taken for granted that he had loved at that age, it would have lowered my conception of his character to have made him marry politically. Otherwise Erillyab [widowed queen of the native indians] would have been his fit wife.

It seems rather strange that Southey should tell Seward what he was definitely not going to do. Why did he raise the subject of Madoc’s marriage at all? In fact Southey’s refusal to make a bridegroom of the Welsh prince was a long-standing one, longer standing than Seward probably realised. His notes for the 1797–1799 version of the poem indicate that he considered marrying his hero to Elen, the mistress of Madoc’s dead half-brother, Prince Hoel.26 This idea was abandoned, perhaps because it had connotations of incest or at least consanguinity. When Southey returned to the poem in 1801, the introduction of an entirely new character, the widowed indian queen Erillyab, offered the chance for a marriage that joined the Welsh settlers with the indigenous population of their newly colonised land and thus produced the ‘Welsh Indians’ of legend. Yet, as his letter to Seward of 25 July 1807 made clear, Southey refused to take advantage of this, citing the rather odd grounds that Madoc was too old and that a political marriage would be out of character and inappropriate. Seward disagreed, voicing her disapproval in a letter of 15 August 1807: You surprise me by saying that Madoc had passed the age in which love is necessary for an hero. Does not Cadwallen [sic] ask him, ‘Are there no better purposes design’d For that young arm, that heart of noble hope, Son of our kings, of old Cassibilan, Great Caradoc, immortal Arthur’s line?’ The epithet young fixes Madoc in the reader’s mind some years under thirty; say twenty-seven – two years for the voyage and his residence in America, another year for his repassing the seas and his stay in Wales, a fourth for his return to America and final conquest of Aztlan, and he is then only thirty-one. Is it at that age, at life’s high noon, that men lose the propensity to love and marriage? I thought it is the season at which men feel and inspire ardent passion. – Yes, indeed, if the poem had not been published, I should have persisted in imploring you for a wife for Madoc. You might easily have made one for him out of a rib or two of Coatel’s abundant virtues; as Deity is recorded to have formed Eve from actual flesh and blood out of the side of Adam.27

Southey, Common-Place Books, IV, 205. Seward, Letters, VI, 360–61.

26 27

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Seward’s objections are of the ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’ school of criticism, or rather, the ‘How old is Madoc and why is he not married?’ school of thought. Yet they highlight one of the oddities of Southey’s poem. As her allusion to Adam and Eve and her frequent comparisons of Madoc and Paradise Lost suggest, Southey had attempted a foundation epic. In itself this was not problematic. It was, indeed, somewhat fashionable.28 John Thelwall and Ann Yearsley, for example, had written foundation epic fragments on Brutus, the legendary first king of Britain, and Edwin, the Anglo-Saxon ruler of Northumbria, subjects with clear linkages to present-day British society.29 The difficulty with Madoc was that Southey’s subject – the legend of a Welsh prince who founded a new society in the Americas – was potentially a dead end. Although expeditions had been sent out in the 1790s to locate Madoc’s descendants, the Welsh-Indians of popular myth, it was becoming apparent by the time Southey’s poem was published that they did not exist.30 Southey’s use of copious annotations could neither disguise this nor prove the veracity of his tale. Madoc was therefore a foundation epic in which nothing lasting was founded, a highly political, revisionist poem that was unable to establish an authentic connection to contemporary society. Madoc’s heirs, biological, spiritual, cultural or political were not to be located. Seward’s awareness of this lack of ‘the authenticity of the fact’ as a serious problem for Southey was demonstrated not just in their private correspondence. It also shaped her public defence of poet and poem. In July 1808, the Gentleman’s Magazine published ‘A Letter written by Anna Seward to one of her Literary Friends, Feb 15, 1806, on the subject of Mr. Southey’s “Madoc”, and before she had any acquaintance, personal or by pen, with that gentleman’.31 The ‘Letter’ made the case for Madoc’s importance, arguing that it was ‘more original and more interesting’ than Paradise Lost.32 It also defended it against accusations of improbability. The ‘subject of the poem’ was, she asserted: the happiest which perhaps the stores of antient or modern history could yield to the British Muse; viz. the discovery of the Western world by a Prince of the Country’s antient lineage, nearly for [sic] centuries ere Columbus and his followers […] especially since there is resistless evidence of the authenticity of the fact […].33 28 On the epic revival, see Herbert Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 29 See Lynda Pratt, ‘Tea and National History: John Thelwall, Ann Yearsley and the Romantic National Epic’, in Peripheries of the Enlightenment, ed. Richard Butterwick, Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (special issue) (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008), 265–79. 30 See Gwyn Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 31 Seward, ‘A Letter’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 78 (1808), 577–81. 32 Ibid., p. 579. 33 Ibid., p. 578.

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Seward continued by citing ‘anti-fabulous’ authorities for Madoc’s discovery, including ‘Welsh Historians’, ‘English travellers’ and George Wharton’s Gestae Britannorum (1662), adding to the sources already cited in the notes to Southey’s poem. These, she claimed, demonstrated that: Mr. Southey’s spirited epic poem [is] built on no vague tradition, but on an ascertained adventure, which removes the glory of primal discovery from Columbus to a British Prince; and hence it has high claim upon the attention of every British reader – upon the feelings of every British heart.34

Seward’s arguments for the authenticity of Madoc and his discoveries are inextricably linked to patriotism. She makes the case for Madoc’s significance both as a modern epic and as a poem of national import: one that exposes the falsity of Spanish claims to the discovery and possession of the New World and that augments British pride. Yet her assertions, though responsive to a period of national and cultural crisis, did not help Southey. In October 1807 (months before she published her letter in the Gentleman’s Magazine), Seward sent the information it contained relating to Madoc’s ‘authenticity’ to Southey, assuring (or was it reassuring) him that the purpose of his poem was to ensure ‘an event, thus unaccountable obscured by time’ was ‘recovered and ascertained’.35 Southey in return thanked Seward for the information ‘concerning Madocs voyage’, reassuring her that there was indeed ‘a great mass of evidence to prove the existence of Welsh Indians in America’ and that he would prefix this ‘to some future edition’ of his poem.36 He did not. His – and indeed Seward’s – efforts to authenticate Madoc’s voyage and progeny came to nothing. In 1815 Southey added a footnote to the ‘Preface’ to the fourth edition clarifying that contemporary expeditions had found nothing, and ‘it is now certain that no Welsh Indians are to be found upon any branches of the Missouri’, or, for that matter, anywhere else.37 *** Seward did more than help Southey to ‘authenticate’ Madoc. Their letters reveal Southey’s ‘own sense of the imperfections of the poem’, annoyance at its poor sales,38 and consciousness of the impact it had had on his poetic career: ‘Since it was published I have written no poetry: disuse has now generated disinclination, Ibid., p. 578. Seward, Letters, VI, 378–9. 36 Southey to Seward (25 Oct. 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York 34 35

Public Library. 37 Robert Southey, Madoc, 2 vols (London, 1815), I, viii. 38 Southey to Seward (30 June 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library.

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& perhaps in a little time my hand may lose its cunning.’39 Southey’s poetic magnum opus was published at a difficult moment in his writing life, when the prolific poet of the 1790s and early 1800s was increasingly turning to prose. To us, with the benefit of hindsight, this change in career path seems to be an entirely normal aspect of Southey’s literary history. But to him it was not. Moreover, it was something to which his correspondence with Seward repeatedly returned. In summer 1807 he informed her that any time he could devote to ‘labours worthy of myself & of posterity’ was reserved for work on his long-planned ‘History of Portugal’ and that ‘history is a worthier pursuit than poetry’.40 Southey was well aware of the monetary ‘worth’ of history-writing. Part of the reasoning behind his move to prose was financial. A professional man of letters, who had abandoned possible careers in the law, medicine and the church, Southey and his growing family were dependent on what he could earn from his pen. Whilst prose such as Letters from England, published in 1807, brought in healthy amounts of cash, poetry did not. As Southey told Seward, Madoc had been a financial disaster, bringing him profits of only £3, 17s and 1d in the year after its publication.41 By 1808 he admitted that whilst everyone now asked him ‘Why do you not write more poetry[?]’, his answer was always ‘because I cannot afford it’.42 Poor sales were important, but in 1807 Southey’s disenchantment with poetry was also connected to his reaction to criticism. He feigned indifference to critics, on the grounds that ‘Nine tenths of the malignant criticisms which injure our literature and disgrace our age come from disappointed authors’.43 Yet Southey was extremely thin-skinned. His correspondence with Seward provided him with the praise of an admirer with a sympathetic ear to his complaints about an increasingly hostile critical climate, and with the means of authenticating his own poetic career, particularly as an epic poet. Southey showed little concern with false delicacy, using his letters to Seward personally to abuse critics he particularly detested. Charles Valentine Le Grice, author of an appraisal of Madoc in the Critical Review, was described as having a mind ‘thoroughly perverted & mischievous’ and a face ‘as white as a Ghosts’. He was lambasted as a corrupt parent to his wealthy stepchildren and ridiculed as a failed ‘Authorling’, writer of a strange little volume that everyone had laughed at.44 A particular Southeyan bête noire, Francis Jeffrey, editor of the influential Edinburgh Review, came in for his share Ibid. Southey to Seward (25 July 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York

39 40

Public Library; Southey to Seward (30 June 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. 41 Southey to Seward (30 June 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. 42 Southey to Seward (18 Apr. 1808), New Letters, I, 471. 43 Ibid. 44 Southey to Seward (25 Oct. 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library.

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of insults. As well as being a failed poet, he was short in physical, aesthetic and intellectual build: ‘up to my [Southey’s] elbow in stature, & in intellectual stature, as far as regards all matters of taste, up to my ancle [sic]’.45 Yet even as he condemned their literal shortcomings, Southey also had to concede the power of critics, their ability to influence sales and therefore an author’s profits, admitting to Seward that: if it had so happened that I had been a friend of Mr Jeffrays, & it had pleased him to say I was a great poet, the book-buying world (who are a different world from the book-reading one) would have believed him, & I should have been enabled to produce something better than Madoc, & more answerable to that power which I feel to be in me.46

If Jeffrey and other critics had the potential to constrain or even curtail Southey’s poetic career, Seward, as a fellow poet, could potentially serve another function. In spite of his claims about turning to prose and his constant laments about the unprofitability of poetry and the viciousness of criticism, Southey used his correspondence with Seward as a means of re-engaging with his virtually dormant poetic career. In this respect it was not unique. His friendship with Walter Savage Landor, which began a year later in 1808, also worked in a strikingly similar fashion.47 In the second decade of his career, Southey was, then, seeking out correspondents who would reanimate him as a poet and by so doing authenticate his own writing life. Seward became not merely the sounding board for revisions to extant poems, but also the recipient of Southey’s ‘poetical dreams’, the means by which his career could be taken forward: Your letter […] roused me […]. I have lying by me about the fourth part of a rhythmical romance, in the wild way of Thalaba […]. It was once my intention to have gone thro all the great mythologies in this manner […]. For a work of higher proof I am undecided about the story: sometimes that of the Deluge […] pleases me, sometimes Pelayo the restorer of the Spanish monarchy […]. – You know now as much of my poetical dreams as I do […] myself & could I talk them over with you, it is very possible that your advice might determine me in favour of one subject or the other, & stimulate me to begin. Allow me when I travel southward to halt a day at Lichfield and try the experiment.48

Southey to Seward (30 June 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. 46 Ibid. 47 Southey expressed his admiration of Landor to Seward: Southey to Seward (29 Apr. 1808), Berg Collection, New York Public Library; Southey to Seward [Aug. 1808], University of Rochester Library. 48 Southey to Seward (30 June 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. 45

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Southey did visit Seward in 1808 and two of his ‘poetical dreams’ came to fruition: The Curse of Kehama (1810) and Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814). His correspondence with Seward and the literary flights of fancy it provoked tells us a great deal about the significance Southey was prepared to invest in their relationship, of his opinion of Seward’s role as his fellow poet, and of his estimation of her as muse and as much-needed literary ally. She was a sympathiser with and authenticator of his future poetical career in the face of a critical climate that was often hostile towards poetry, in particular to the type of poetry produced by Southey and his friends.

*** Anna Seward died at Lichfield on 25 March 1809. In 1838, Southey provided his one public account of their relationship. Appropriately enough, this formed part of a new preface to Madoc, the poem about which he had once confided in her. Southey began with a description of meeting Seward at Lichfield in summer 1808. In a scene worthy of Trollope, he was ushered ‘into the [i.e., Seward’s] presence with jubilant but appalling solemnity’ by a ‘minor canon’ of Lichfield Cathedral: Miss Seward was seated at her desk. She had just finished some verses to be ‘Inscribed on the blank leaves of the Poem Madoc,’ and the first greeting was no sooner past, than she requested that I would permit her to read them to me. It was a mercy that she did not ask me to read them aloud. But she read them admirably herself. The situation, however, in which I found myself, was so ridiculous, and I was so apprehensive of catching the eye of one person in the room, who was equally afraid of meeting mine, that I never felt it more difficult to control my emotions, than while listening, or seeming to listen, to my own praise and glory. But, bending my head as if in a posture of attentiveness, and screening my face with my hand, and occasionally using some force to compress the risible muscles, I got through the scene without any misbehaviour, and expressed my thanks, if not in terms of such glowing admiration as she was accustomed to receive from others, and had bestowed upon my unworthy self, yet as well as I could.49

Although he had once courted Seward as his muse and literary ally, Southey’s retrospective account is full of his love of the absurd. It plays off against Seward’s posing as Southey’s patron and propagandist. Yet its comic qualities should not distract from its more serious, literary historical aspects. When read in the context of the confidences exchanged in their correspondence, his sketch is more ambivalent than its anecdotal humour suggests. Southey went on to assess Seward’s reputation:

Robert Southey, Poetical Works, 10 vols (London, 1837–1838), V, xv.

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[Seward was] not so much over-rated at one time, as she has since been unduly depreciated […]. Her epistolary style was distorted and disfigured by her admiration of Johnson; and in her poetry she set, rather than followed, the brocade fashion of Dr. Darwin. Still there are unquestionable proofs of extraordinary talents and great ability […]. Sir Walter [Scott] has estimated […] with characteristic skill, her powers of criticism, and her strong prepossessions upon literary points. And believing that the more she was known, the more she would have been esteemed and admired, I bear a willing testimony to her accomplishments and her genius, to her generous disposition, her frankness, and her sincerity and warmth of heart.50

Southey was a historian as well as a poet. His summation of Seward’s virtues and vices is an attempt to place her within literary history, or rather within his own particularised, personalised version of literary history. It is a cultural narrative in which admiration of Johnsonian prose and employment of Darwinian technique, or, rather, Sewardian technique, because Southey establishes Seward at the head of a ‘brocade’ school of poets, is something to be cautioned against and not imitated. By pairing Seward with Darwin, Southey is allying her with a poet he held in contempt, someone whose works should be avoided rather than imitated. Yet his account is also an attempt by Southey to stake his own claims as both literary historian and poet. It appeared in his own self-canonising Poetical Works, his attempt to fix his poetic oeuvre for posterity. As Southey was well aware, it was his and his contemporaries’ poetic innovations and tastes that had displaced or at least sought to displace those of Seward and her peers. In stating and defending that history, it was Southey’s reputation and literary posterity that were at stake here as much as Seward’s own. In 1838, Southey, therefore, authenticated his own career and made a case for his posthumous fame by placing himself against Seward. Authentication – of individual poems and of entire literary careers – played an important role in the relationship between Robert Southey and Anna Seward. Study of the letters he sent to the ‘Swan of Lichfield’ allows a more authentic Southey to emerge – one whose attitude to women writers, to his own poetic magnum opus and to his career was more complex than has previously been acknowledged. The exchanges between Seward and Southey also authenticate Romanticism in other ways. They highlight the role of regionality in the formation of culture and show the complex, often overlooked intersections between writers who first came to prominence in the 1790s and their immediate predecessors, the poets they sought to displace.

Ibid., V, xvii–xviii.

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Chapter 3

Undefinitive Keats Nicholas Roe

For the study of no English poet have we ampler material than for the life and art of John Keats […]. The material for the study of Keats’s biography is no less complete.

Authoritative, satisfied, conclusive, the beginning of Ernest de Selincourt’s lecture on the centenary of Keats’s death could not be more un-Keatsian. The materials have been gathered, the work completed, the harvest done. Sidney Colvin’s ‘full and definitive’ life of Keats has displayed the ‘fine taste’ and ‘acute judgement of a ripe scholar’ that signal the ‘book worthy of its noble subject’. It is time to call a halt. ‘In a sense there is no more to be said.’1 No more to be said? De Selincourt had another 55 minutes to fill, and in the ninety-odd years since his lecture Keats has not wanted for biographers with new things to add to Colvin’s account. First up was Amy Lowell, who published her big, two-volume John Keats in 1924, after an Amazonian campaign of research that hastened her death the following year. After Lowell, new lives of Keats were published on average every six years: Amy Lowell, John Keats (1924) Albert Erland, The Life of John Keats (1929) Dorothy Hewlett, Adonais: The Life of John Keats (1938) Betty Askwith, Keats (1941) Blanche Williams, Forever Young: A Life of John Keats (1943) Walter Wells, A Doctor’s Life of John Keats (1959) Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (1963) Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (1963) Douglas Bush, John Keats: His Life and Poetry (1966) Robert Gittings, John Keats (1967) Joanna Richardson, Life and Letters of John Keats (1981) Andrés Rodríguez, Book of the Heart: The Poetics, Letters, and Life of John Keats (1993) Stephen Coote, John Keats: A Life (1995) Andrew Motion, Keats (1997) 1 Ernest de Selincourt, ‘The Warton Lecture on Keats’, in The John Keats Memorial Volume, ed. G.C. Williamson (London: John Lane, 1921), pp. 1–21 (pp. 1–3).

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John Evangelist Walsh, Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats (1999) Stanley Plumley, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (2008) To these biographies can be added Claude Finney’s magnificent study, The Evolution of Keats’s Poetry (1936), and imaginative extrapolations from the life such as Jean Holdsworth’s Our Brightest Brother: A Novel of the Life of John Keats (1978), Tom Clark’s Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John Keats (2000), Janice Rogers’s Fled is that Music: A Reconstruction of the Life of John Keats (2000), Robert Cooperman’s Petitions for Immortality: Scenes from the Life of John Keats (2003), and Andrew Motion’s The Invention of Dr Cake (2003). At Harvard’s Houghton Library is the archive assembled over many years by Fred Holland Day, Louis Guiney and Louis A. Holman – a treasure trove of Keatsiana that Holman’s notebooks indexed as a quarry for a new biography of Keats. Hyder Rollins made extensive use of this material in The Keats Circle (1948; 1965) and The Letters of John Keats (1958), as did Walter Jackson Bate’s 1963 life of the poet. Why so many biographies of Keats? De Selincourt ventured that Keats is a compelling subject for biography in that ‘his life and character stand out in all their subtle and tragic beauty’, both ‘little Johnny Keats’ and a towering human spirit.2 Vincent Newey’s masterly essay ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’ found those doubled qualities of Keats conspiring to create the allegoric life of ‘To Autumn’ (1820), a poem that is ‘at once local and universal, geographically specified and unspecific, of its time and timeless’.3 Towards the end of his biography of Keats, Jackson Bate describes ‘To Autumn’ as a triumph of impersonality – universal, unspecific and timeless – although he allowed in passing that the ‘association of expectance, of waiting, with autumn’ is ‘nakedly biographical’.4 By Keats’s own reckoning, what Bate describes as ‘the most nearly perfect poem in English’ would be a figurative comment on a life of restless dissatisfaction, a life such as might be led by the fisticuffish, snuff-snorting, whiskey-supping, bawdy-touting tourist who on the evening of Monday 29 June 1818 could be found with Charles Brown in the bar of the Sun Inn at Ireby, Cumberland.5 Biographies of Keats divide across such extremes, or mediate between them: where nineteenth-century lives of Keats anticipated Bate by presenting a disembodied aesthete, those of the later twentieth century portrayed a material Keats combatively engaged with his times. Accordingly, the timelessly beautiful Ibid., p. 3. Vincent Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas

2 3

Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 165–93 (p. 189). 4 Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 584. 5 Ibid., p. 581. See also The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), II, 67.

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evocation of the season in ‘To Autumn’ was for the 1990s either an ‘evasion’ of, or an imaginative coming to terms with, the violence at Peterloo. At the start of the twenty-first century, a localised Keats is coming into view, responsive to place and environment: the ‘granary floor’, ‘brook’ and ‘cyder-press’6 will soon have a local habitation. The fascination with Keats started early: his friend Richard Woodhouse was quickly convinced that posterity would be interested in the smallest details pertaining to him: There is a great deal of reality about all that Keats writes: and there must be many allusions to particular Circumstances, in his poems: which would add to their beauty & Interest, if properly understood. – To arrest some few of these circumstances, & bring them to view in connexion with the poetic notice of them, is one of the objects of this Collection – and of the observations – as it is of the notes in the interleaved copies of his published Works.

Woodhouse initialled this manifesto, and then added a further thought: ‘How valuable would such notes be to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which teem with allusions to his life, & its circumstances, his age, his loves, his patrons &c’.7 Nearly 200 years since Woodhouse started his collection, and with the materials for the biography so ample and the bookshelf already richly loaded, it is surprising to find that there are still mysteries and lacunae in the ‘circumstances’ of Keats’s life. The ‘definitive’ Keats is as fortunately elusive as it was in 1921. Not the least significant of these gaps are the circumstances of his birth and death, the bookends of many biographical narratives. In this essay I explore some continuing ambiguities about the date of Keats’s birth and death, and reflect upon how Keats thought his own childhood had affected his personality and ideas about ‘annulling self’. After speculating that a ‘definitive’ life of Keats might be tentative and provisional rather than full of ‘facts’, I conclude by exploring a curious puzzle relating to Keats’s schooldays, by way of unsettling – and perhaps seeing anew – a phase of Keats’s life that has been more-or-less agreed since Charles Cowden Clarke wrote his classic essay ‘Recollections of Keats’ in 1860. A helpful account of the problems in dating Keats’s birth and death appears in an exchange between two American scholars published in PMLA (55:3; 56:2) in 1940 and 1941. James Pershing set the discussion going with his article ‘John Keats: When Was He Born and When Did He Die?’, to which H.E. Briggs responded with ‘The Birth and Death of John Keats: A Reply to Mr. Pershing’. It had long been known that there were different accounts of the date of Keats’s birthday. John Keats, ‘To Autumn’, ll. 14, 20, 21; The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Heinemann, 1978), p. 360. 7 Richard Woodhouse, Poems, Transcripts, Letters, &c. Facsimiles of Richard Woodhouse’s Scrapbook Materials in the Pierpont Morgan Library, in The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger, 7 vols (New York: Garland, 1985–1988), IV, 240. 6

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His friends Charles Cowden Clarke and Leigh Hunt agreed that the day was 29 October but placed it respectively in 1795 and 1796.8 Suspecting that something was amiss in Hunt’s dating, Charles Brown wrote to him: ‘Can Clarke tell me in what parish Keats was born? for I think you have given a wrong birth day, though you have his authority. I have written about this to London, but, for want of a clue to his parish, I am unanswered.’9 In his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats, Richard Monckton Milnes dated the birth to ‘29th of October, 1795’, on the authority of a statement in the Chancery proceedings of 1825 to the effect that Keats came of age (i.e., was 21) in October, 1816.10 The baptism register of St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, delays Keats’s birth by two days, to 31 October 1795, a date that James Pershing insisted carried the weight of an ‘official record’ – which is not to say that it is accurate. ‘This day is my Birth day’, Keats wrote as a postscript to a journal letter to the George Keatses dated 14, 16, 21, 24 and 31 October, but he does not indicate whether ‘this day’ refers to 29 or 31 October.11 Amy Lowell inclined to 29 October 1795, Dorothy Hewlett to 31 October 1795.12 Leigh Hunt observed that Keats had been a ‘seven months’ child’, hence Colvin’s idea that ‘JOHN KEATS, was born prematurely on either 29 or 31 October, 1795’ and the Shandean precision of Edmund Blunden’s dating: ‘In 1795, perhaps on 29 or 31 October (though conjecturally in June), John Keats was born in London.’13 Bate, Ward, Gittings and Motion opt for 31 October 1795, on the evidence of the baptism register, but are not equally convinced that the date is correct. Gittings dismisses Hunt’s ‘seven months’ child’ as ‘snatching at journalistic straws’; Ward is more cautious, and points to ‘some uncertainty about [Keats’s] exact birth date … and some reason for thinking it occurred only seven or eight months after [his parents’] marriage’.14 While a seven months’ child’s chances of survival were not strong in 1795, we should not rule out Hunt’s claim entirely; having written a biography of Hunt, I am aware that what he apparently says in an oblique or casual manner often turns out to have substance that is not immediately evident.15 Keats and his siblings 8 Charles Cowden Clarke, ‘Recollections of Keats’, Atlantic Monthly (Jan. 1861), 86; Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, 2 vols (London, 1828), I, 409. 9 Charles Brown to Leigh Hunt (1 June 1830), The Letters of Charles Armitage Brown, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 322. 10 John Keats, The Life and Letters of John Keats, A New Edition. In One Volume (London, 1867), p. 3. 11 See Letters of John Keats, I, 405. 12 Amy Lowell, John Keats, 2 vols (London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), I, 5; Dorothy Hewlett, Adonais: A Life of John Keats (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1938), p. 15. 13 Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, I. p. 408; Sidney Colvin, Keats (London, 1887), p. 2; Edmund Blunden, John Keats (London: Longmans, Green, 1950), p. 9. 14 Robert Gittings, John Keats (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 15; Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (London: Secker and Warburg, 1963), p. 4. 15 See Nicholas Roe, Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (London: Pimlico, 2005).

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were neither well-informed nor careful about keeping birthday anniversaries: their youngest brother Edward, who died as an infant, showed them that survival was what mattered. While the Jennings family noted births and baptisms in their family bible, the Keatses left no such record – a reticence that might reflect back upon the mysterious origins of their father Thomas Keates, whom Gittings came to suspect was illegitimate.16 The separation of the Keats children after they were orphaned meant that family knowledge was also lost. Keats’s sister Fanny gave her birthday as 5 June 1804, which was a year too late (she was born 3 June and baptised 17 June 1803); she had ‘no idea’ of George’s birthday, nor could she say ‘when [her] father and mother were born’.17 Comparable ambiguities gather around the moment of Keats’s death. From Joseph Severn’s contemporary letters and later reminiscences it seems clear that Keats died at around 11.00 p.m. on Friday 23 February 1821.18 However, the register of burials for the Non-Catholic cemetery at Rome tells a different story: John Keats, English Poet. Died the 24th of February, 1821. Buried the 25th ditto in the Morning at 15 o’clock. Aged 26.19

24 February? Aged 26? Much later in the nineteenth century, these details were repeated on the white marble slab placed on the wall of the house where Keats died at 26 Piazza di Spagna, where they can still be seen with the age altered by some later hand to read ‘25’. The peculiar hour of the burial, ‘in the Morning at 15 o’clock’, is based on the Roman way of reckoning the hours of the day from six o’clock the preceding evening. At 6.00 p.m. English time, 24 April became 25 April in Rome, so the burial that took place on the 25th at ‘15 o’clock’ Roman time was at 9.00 a.m. when reckoned on the English system. To add a further twist to the puzzle, the inscription with which Charles Brown prefaced Keats’s famous epitaph on his gravestone reads: This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who, on his death-bed, in bitter anguish at the neglect of his countrymen, desired these words to be engraven on his tomb-stone: ‘HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER.’20

Robert Gittings, ‘Lectures Essays Contributions on Keats c. 1964–1974’, Add Mss 42,137, Gittings Papers, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester. 17 Fanny Keats de Llanos to Harry Buxton Forman (18 Oct. 1883), K/MS/02/47, London Metropolitan Archive. 18 See, for example, Severn to John Taylor (6 Mar. 1821), in Letters of John Keats, II, 378. 19 James Pershing, ‘John Keats: When Was He Born and When Did He Die?’, PMLA, 55:3 (1940), 802–14 (p. 808). 20 Brown, The Letters of Charles Armitage Brown, p. 91. 16

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The date that follows, ‘Feb 24th 1821’, apparently refers to the day when Keats was ‘on his death-bed’ and ‘desired these words to be engraven’ – not to the date of his death. Severn later insisted that the gravestone was the ‘most reliable’ record of when Keats died,21 although his letters from early 1821 offer a different date: ‘on the 23rd […] at 11, when he gradually sunk into death’;22 ‘23rd … at 11 he died’.23 Directly contradicting the burial register – which must in all probability derive from Severn’s information – Severn went on in the same letter to tell Taylor that it was on ‘Monday 26th the funeral beasts came’.24 By then the burial register has Keats already in the earth. One would think that Severn’s repetition of 23 February to Keats’s friends shortly after the event had established the date of his death with considerable authority – after all, he was the one at the deathbed. But not a bit of it. Adducing Severn’s unsettled state of mind after the death; his report that Keats had ‘gradually sunk into death’25 and the fact that two years had elapsed before the gravestone with Brown’s inscription was erected, Pershing suggested that the date ‘Feb 24th’on the gravestone represents Severn’s long-term ‘careful consideration’ of the death date.26 Yet when Severn drafted a revised inscription for the stone in 1861, his first choice for the date of death was apparently 26 February – perhaps a hazy half-recollection of the mistaken ‘Aged 26’ in the burial register.27 All biographers from Sidney Colvin onwards date Keats’s death to 23 February, albeit with some variations: Aileen Ward has the death ‘Toward eleven o’clock’; Motion has it as ‘[a]s eleven o’clock approached’; Hewlett goes for ‘[b]efore midnight’;28 and Kelvin Everest, in the new Dictionary of National Biography, says that ‘Keats died at 11 pm on 23 February 1821’. Ambiguities about the bookends of life are a trouble to any biographer in quest of ‘full and definitive’ information, yet for Keats uncertainty and incompletion were intrinsic to a sense of lack that he felt in himself: ‘Mr. John Keats five feet hight [sic]’.29 Keats’s silence about his parents and early years has left considerable space for speculation. Robert Gittings conjectured that some ‘shattering knowledge’ about his mother, Frances Jennings, prevented Keats speaking of her, but he never Pershing, ‘John Keats’, pp. 810–11. Severn to Charles Brown (27 Feb. 1821), in The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers

21 22

1816–1878, ed. Hyder Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), II, 94. 23 Severn to John Taylor (6 Mar. 1821), in Joseph Severn: Letters and Memoirs, ed. Grant F. Scott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 136–7. 24 Ibid., pp. 138–9. 25 Ibid., p. 137. 26 Pershing, ‘John Keats’, pp. 810–11. 27 Ibid., p. 811, quoting a letter from Fred Edgecumbe (3 Dec. 1837). 28 Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (New York: Viking Press, 1963), p. 402; Andrew Motion, Keats (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 566; Hewlett, Adonais, p. 372. 29 Letters of John Keats, I, 342.

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came out and said what he thought this might be beyond the lurid suggestion that Abbey’s recollections made Frances ‘virtually a nymphomaniac’.30 While we can ascertain with some clarity Frances’s immediate family background and her parents John Jennings and Alice Whalley, no one has been able to explain where the poet’s father Thomas Keates came from. Some say he was a native of the West Country: from Dorset, Devonshire, or as far west as Land’s End. The Cornish villages of Madron and Sennen have been mentioned. Perhaps he was one of the mariner Keateses who plied between Penzance, Plymouth and London. Others have traced him to Corfe Castle and Poole, in Dorset; to Sparsholt near Winchester; and Stratfield Mortimer, by Reading.31 Even his name scatters into Keates, Keats, Keate, Keat, Keighte, Keyte, Keet, Keit, Kight, Kite, Kates, Kett, Cate and Cade. No wonder, then, that for the poet himself the name ‘Keats’ seemed elusive, mysteriously sung into being – ‘Enchanted […] the Lord knows where’32 – and then dissolved away as if ‘writ in Water’, to credit the words attributed to Keats on his deathbed.33 Or did Joseph Severn mishear the dying Keats’s words: ‘Here lies one whose name was written Water’? Certainly the word ‘writ’ does not appear frequently in Keats’s lexicon. He uses it only once, in Endymion (1818), in a suggestive reference to ‘mouldering scrolls’, or manuscripts, ‘Writ in the tongue of heaven’, that Endymion encounters in the ‘deep, deep water-world’ among the other wreckage, ‘[m]ore dead than Morpheus’ imaginings’, to which, in Severn’s version of the epitaph, Keats also desired to consign himself.34 For Keats, the origin of his name and by implication his paternal forebears were likewise beyond recall, a formative dislocation that would deepen irrevocably when he was orphaned. It is possible to recover fresh contextual information about Keats’s parents and childhood, yet what matters most is Keats’s own sense of betrayal in his earliest years: ‘I have a horrid Morbidity of Temperament’, he tells Haydon, and links these moods to the idea of ‘disappointment’ – as he does later, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey: ‘You must be charitable and put all this perversity to my being disappointed since Boyhood.’35 We need to hear the real damage in Keats’s word ‘disappointed’, speaking as it does of how he feels deprived, dispossessed and, perhaps almost being said, illegitimate. Underlying all of this is his awareness that since boyhood he had not grown to a full height (as his brother George had done), and this disappointment ramified in his anxieties about women. What Keats describes is a constitutional (even a physical) pessimism that at its darkest could Gittings, John Keats, pp. 14, 30. Ibid., pp. 441–5 gives a helpful summary; see also Lawrence M. Crutcher,

30 31

The Keats Family (Louisville, Kentucky: Butler Book Publishing, 2009), pp. 1–8. 32 Keats, ‘Give Me Your Patience, Sister’, l. 18; The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Heinemann, 1978), p. 199. 33 Hyder Rollins (ed.), Keats Circle, I, 273. 34 Keats, Endymion, Book III, ll. 101, 129–30, 122; Poems of John Keats, p. 115. 35 Letters of John Keats, I, 142, 341.

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produce feelings of ‘horrid Morbidity’, and in lighter moods a more buoyant scepticism that enabled him to live ‘for […] the present hour’36 while freeing his imagination to contemplate moments of responsive floating or hovering, ‘borne aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies’ (‘To Autumn’, ll. 28–9). If this is a Keats receptive to the music of the moment, there is also the tough prizefighting Keats who nerved himself to buffet with the world, ‘seeing […] how great things are to be gained’.37 And, tempering desire with thoughts of the earth, there is the self-annulling Keats accepting of great and small alike, who lives in reflections and shadows, on the ‘darkling’ boundary between light and shade, with the imperceptible turning of the seasons, upon the threshold of real and ideal. As a poet for whom the quality that ‘went to form a Man of Achievement’ was ‘Negative Capability’,38 perhaps Keats is captured most clearly when least definitively – a life seen moment by moment without an attempt to make sense of doubts and mysteries by reaching for what Vincent Newey calls ‘the rationalising stance’ exemplified by Oceanus in Hyperion.39 Do we need to explain the peculiar magnetism for Keats of the English south coast, an area extending from Chichester westward to Bedhampton, Southampton, the Isle of Wight and Winchester, to Teignmouth? Or why Keats was present on 25 January 1819 at the consecration of Lewis Way’s chapel dedicated to the conversion of the Jews, at Stansted Chapel? Was it merely curiosity roused by a glance at an advertisement in the Sussex Weekly Advertiser (18 January 1819) – ‘THE CONSECRATION of the CHAPEL in STANSTED PARK, will take place on Monday, the 25th instant, (being the holiday of the Conversion of St. Paul)’ (18 January 1819) – that induced Keats and Brown to make the five-mile uphill journey on a wet Monday morning, borne aloft ‘in a chaise behind a leaden horse’, to keep company with ‘the Right Rev. the LORD BISHOP of St. DAVID’s, or the Honourable and Right Rev. the LORD BISHOP of GLOUCESTER’?40 Perhaps this dreary scene does sink into ‘mere matter of the moment’ although, coming shortly after St Agnes’ Eve, 1819, and during the composition of The Eve of St Agnes in which details of the chapel were apparently included, such gatherings of circumstance also gave impetus to the greater purpose, or high calling, that Keats thought would place him ‘among the English Poets after [his] death’.41 And in that endeavour Shakespeare provided a name with which to associate the selfless, negatively capable capacities he already acknowledged in himself.42 38 39 40 36

Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p. 193. Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, p. 181. Letters of John Keats, II, 62. A similar advertisement appeared in the Hampshire Chronicle and Courier (18 Jan. 1819). 41 Letters of John Keats, I, 394. See also Robert Gittings, John Keats: The Living Year 21 September 1818 to 21 September 1819 (London: Heinemann, 1978), pp. 73–82. 42 Letters of John Keats, I, 142. 37

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Keats’s sense of a presiding ‘good Genius’ came in May 1817 as he embarked on the epic venture of Endymion.43 By the time he wrote the second preface his ambition for the poem as a ‘test’ and ‘trial’ of his imagination had receded out of his sense of its ‘mawkish’ immaturity, a quality he associates with the adolescent ‘space of life between’ boyhood and manhood.44 Yet Keats’s own adolescence around the age of 14 had not been like that: it coincided with a year when his life direction changed decisively, most likely as a result of decisions Keats took for himself. This was the time, 1810–1811, when he left Enfield school and commenced his apprenticeship with Thomas Hammond at Church Street, Edmonton. As with the confusions over Keats’s birth and death, there has been considerable argument about when exactly Keats left the school – was it at midsummer 1810, or 1811? The problem has usually been solved by working backwards from the requirements necessary for Keats to enrol for his training at Guy’s Hospital in October 1815. If Keats had completed the five-year apprenticeship necessary under the new Apothecaries’ Act for him to commence at Guy’s in October 1815, then he must have left the school at midsummer 1810. This was Robert Gittings’s view.45 Walter Jackson Bate concluded from his assessment of Cowden Clarke’s various recollections that Keats left school a year later at midsummer 1811, when he received his prize copy of John Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy ‘as a Reward of Merit […] at Mr. Clarke’s Enfield’. ‘So much continues to point to the four-year term’, Bate concludes, ‘that we are justified in accepting it’.46 A significant piece of evidence, overlooked by Gittings and rejected by Bate, may help to reconcile these differences. At midsummer of 1810 Keats was presented with a silver medal inscribed: ‘PRIZE MEDAL AWARDED TO Master J. KEATS’. On the reverse was the Latin motto, ‘Stadium doctrinæ arduum & difficile sit nihilominus Finis gloriosus erit’ (‘The race of scholarship may be steep and difficult, but nevertheless the End shall be glorious’), and the phrase: ‘AUDIVIT CLARKENEM’ (‘He listened to Clarke’). The medal eventually passed to George Keats’s grandson, John Gilmer Speed, and was later in Amy Lowell’s collection from whence it came to the Houghton Library. Despite that provenance, the medal’s authenticity has been doubted. While Amy Lowell thought it genuine, Bate concluded that it was a fake foisted on George Keats’s unsuspecting wife.47 In other biographies it is simply ignored. Genuine or a fake? Harry Williams-Bulkeley, Head of the Silver Department at Christie’s UK, has examined a photograph of the medal and describes it thus:

45 46 47 43

44

Ibid., p. 169. Keats, The Poems of John Keats, p. 102. Gittings, John Keats: The Living Year, p. 47. Bate, John Keats, pp. 30, 703–4. Ibid, p. 26.

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The medal is [sterling standard] silver and dates from 1810/11. The ‘P’ date letter which is struck under the ‘10’ of 1810 was used from May 1810 through until May 1811 so the engraving is period with the presentation of the medal. I would have thought the school would have commissioned the medals when needed and had the engraving done to order. Leaving aside the fact that the date letter clearly shows the medal to date from the year of the award I think it is very unlikely the school would have a stock of blanks in storage for many years. The medal would have cost a fair bit so they would have been bought when needed. I think all the engraving would have been done at once. The mixture of styles is quite usual for presentation inscriptions at this time.48

The hallmark on the medal identifies it as sterling standard silver from the year May 1810 to May 1811, and the inscription on it might reflect knowledge of Keats at that time. The Latin motto was routine, no doubt, but particularly apt for a pupil who in 1810 was ‘voluntarily’ translating Virgil’s Aeneid – and Cowden Clarke’s input as a teacher and adviser for Keats’s project is acknowledged. Only Amy Lowell has noticed the medal’s most puzzling aspect: it was apparently awarded at a school Keats did not attend, ‘Rev. William Thomas’s Academy Enfield 1810’.49 What school was this? Who was Reverend William Thomas? And how did he come to be involved in the story of John Keats? Answering those questions may help resolve the confusions over Keats’s last months at school and the date when he left it for Hammond’s. Lowell suggested that Thomas was a former proprietor of the school who had the medal struck as one of a job lot to be engraved later, an explanation that does not tally with the hallmark and the analysis of the medal above. Born at Bristol in 1767, Thomas was a long-term associate of John Ryland and John Clarke. Educated at Daventry Dissenting Academy, where Joseph Priestley studied, he served as a Pastor at Wellingborough, near Northampton. When Ryland moved from Northampton to Enfield in 1786, bringing Clarke as an assistant master, Thomas came as well to become minister of the Zion Chapel. 1792 saw Ryland’s death, and Thomas’s appointment as pastor at Chase Side Chapel where he remained until his death in 1827. All three men were linked by their dissent, and their joint move to Enfield suggests that Thomas was most likely involved with the school from an early date. Yet, oddly, memoirs of Ryland and Cowden Clarke’s ‘Recollections’ make no mention of him, even though the medal places both Clarke and Keats in ‘Rev. William Thomas’s Academy’ at Enfield in 1810. What explains this curious situation? Perhaps the independent views of Ryland, Clarke and Thomas did not coincide. While Thomas helped with occasional teaching at the school it was Clarke who took over in 1792 after Ryland’s death, and it was only when the Clarkes retired to Ramsgate at midsummer of 1810 that Thomas became the principal teacher of ‘Rev. William Thomas’s Academy Enfield’. Harry Williams-Bulkeley to Nicholas Roe (9 Mar. 2007; 17 July 2009). Amy Lowell, John Keats, I, 41.

48 49

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Cowden Clarke stayed on after 1810 as a tutor, hence the medal’s ‘AUDIVIT CLARKENEM’. As John and Isabella Clarke had known Keats’s parents and taken an interest in all three of the boys, their departure was a likely time for John and his brother George to make a move too (Tom stayed on). Dated 1810, the medal marks a summer full of changes for the Clarkes, for John and George Keats, and for Enfield school. While Reverend Thomas took over running of the school, and was still there in 1816, Cowden Clarke’s presence ensured that former associations lived on. An advertisement in The Times (23 July 1811) reads: ‘WANTED, for a Youth not quite sixteen years of age, brought up at Mr. Clark’s Academy, Enfield, a SITUATION.’ Another lad leaving the school at midsummer and looking for his first employment. The school evidently continued to be known as Clarke’s Academy, and Cowden Clarke remained there as a contact for Keats as he embarked on his new life. That continuity explains why Clarke should have dated Keats’s departure to 1810 and 1811. When Richard Monckton Milnes sent a letter enquiring, ‘When did he leave school?’, Clarke jotted alongside, ‘1811’. When he wrote his full reply to Milnes, however, he put ‘at fourteen […] in the summer of 1810’.50 Clarke had a ‘fatal memory’ for dates but was confident that, whenever Keats left, it was at the age of fourteen. Mistakenly thinking Keats was born in October 1796 Clarke’s first response was to date on 14 years to summer 1811 when Keats, if born in October 1796, would indeed have been 14. Yet he was troubled by a counter-memory that Keats had left in midsummer of 1810 – when he was in fact aged 14 – and offered that to Milnes in his formal reply. So Clarke’s ‘fatal memory’ can explain the mistake although another reason for his confusion also suggests itself. It is well known that whenever he left the school for Hammond, Keats remained in touch with Clarke and there would be further prizes awarded to him. Clarke’s undemanding timetable at the school gave him whole afternoons off, and Keats’s new career was equally generous with free time. Living close by each other, the two friends were in constant communication and met frequently to discuss poetry. As Clarke looked back, Keats’s continued presence and his prizes (Bonnycastle in 1811, an Ovid in 1812) made it difficult for him to choose between midsummer 1810 and midsummer 1811 – and possibly a still later date – as the moment Keats had actually ceased to be there. While changes at the school in summer 1810 make that the moment most likely for Keats to have gone over to Hammond, events towards the end of his apprenticeship give further emphasis to this. When Clarke told Milnes that ‘at 14 [Keats] went to Hammond’s in the summer of 1810’ he added a further comment, less often noted, to the effect that ‘Hammond had released him from his apprenticeship before his time; and I have some vague recollection that such was the Autograph letter pasted into Clarke’s copy of Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats, 2 vols (London, 1848), with this annotation: ‘The figures are in the handwriting of Charles Cowden Clarke. [signed] Mary Cowden Clarke’: The Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library. For the full reply, see Hyder Rollins (ed.), Keats Circle, II, 168–9. 50

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case, for they did not agree’.51 In other words, Keats’s differences with his master meant that his five-year apprenticeship was terminated earlier than it should have been, a matter that Keats’s friend Charles Wentworth Dilke corroborated when he annotated his copy of Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats. On page twenty, Dilke comments: ‘He removed to London before the termination of his apprenticeship. He quarrelled with Hammond who gave up his indentures.’52 Is there a suggestion here that Hammond ‘gave up’ Keats’s indentures to another apothecary, possibly in London, under whom Keats completed his apprenticeship? Keats’s relationship with his master was evidently rocky: in 1819 he recalled his hand ‘clench’d […] against Hammond’ and a like incident probably brought the apprenticeship to an end.53 This means that if Keats left school in summer 1810 he would have served something shy of his full term of five years when he enrolled at Guy’s in October 1815; had he gone to Hammond in midsummer 1811, he would have served less than four years – a term that under the Apothecaries’ Act would have prevented him enrolling at the Hospital. Looking again at the statements by Clarke, Dilke and others alongside Keats’s school medal unsettles and then enables a reconfiguring of understandings and arguments about a significant transitional moment in the poet’s early life. In summer 1810, Master John Keats’s award of a silver medal marked what seemed to be the ‘glorious End’ of his school career. It proved to be otherwise. By saluting his hard work at the Aeneid translation – ‘The race of scholarship may be steep and difficult, but nevertheless the End shall be glorious’ – the medal also showed Keats the onward ascent to achieve his ambition: ‘difficulties nerve the Spirit of a Man’, he tells Haydon in May 1817 and then, with an eye to the race to be won: ‘the Cliff of Poesy Towers above me’.54 We might think of the many biographies of Keats published since his lifetime as a continuation of the ‘race’ begun with Clarke at Enfield. Over two centuries those biographies have woven and unwoven the poet’s ‘posthumous life’,55 not in a single-minded pursuit of the ‘definitive’ Keats that leaves ‘no more to be said’, but through a cumulative process of collaboration across the years in which fresh understandings will continue to provoke new questions.

Hyder Rollins (ed.), Keats Circle, II, 169. Charles Wentworth Dilke, ‘Marginalia By Dilke from His Life, Letters, and Literary

51 52

Remains, of John Keats (1848)’, Keats 67m–163, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 53 Letters of John Keats, II, 208. 54 Ibid., I, 141. 55 Ibid., II, 359.

Chapter 4

‘A Kind of an Excuse’: Shelley and Wordsworth Revisited Michael O’Neill

On 8 May 1820, Shelley sent Maria Gisborne ‘An Exhortation’, a poem which he included in the 1820 volume Prometheus Unbound; with Other Poems. It is a lyric dependent on analogies of the kind that Shelley found in Calderon, and has a tripping, trochaic lightness as it suggests why poets may be chameleonic. The analogical trap of the poem is sprung in the second stanza: Where light is, chameleons change: Where love is not, poets do: Fame is love disguised: if few Find either, never think it strange That poets range.1

There is an arresting knot woven into the parallel strands. Chameleons thrive on light; poets on love. Therefore, one is lulled into thinking, both will respond in similar ways to positive stimuli. But the simple analogy allows itself to collapse. Love makes a poet true to himself; lack of love false. The chameleon is true to itself by changing; the poet is false by changing. And yet such is the elusive nature of fame that it seems almost inevitable that poets will ‘range’. By ‘range’ Shelley means ‘stray’, but he has also already complicated his argument; the chameleon’s changes are hard to view negatively, so the idea that a poet is the poorer for changing is itself being held up for inspection, itself changing, even as it is being affirmed. Shelley glossed the lyric as ‘a little thing about Poets […] a kind of an excuse for Wordsworth’,2 and its fleet-footed wit is characteristic of one aspect of the mature Shelley’s response to a precursor poet of great significance throughout his career, as in different ways critics such as Harold Bloom, G. Kim Blank, and Vincent Newey have established. G. Kim Blank inserts the very distinction that Shelley withholds in ‘An Exhortation’ when he writes that, for Shelley, ‘Wordsworth is […] a chameleon turned lizard – a turncoat. He has lost the power of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘An Exhortation’, ll. 14–18; The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 460. Unless indicated otherwise, Shelley is quoted from this edition. 2 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, 195. 1

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positive mutability’.3 The same critic returns to this passage later, arguing that ‘the ideal poet should be like a chameleon, capable of adapting not only to change, but also with change’, but that the ‘only changing Wordsworth performed was in his diminishing poetic and revolutionary zeal’.4 Yet, in relation to ‘An Exhortation’, this is to impute too much censorious zeal to Shelley; it is the strength of the poem that it sees the proximity between ‘positive mutability’ and less positive change as connected. Vincent Newey, in a significant discussion of Shelley’s interactions with Wordsworth and Byron, notes the presence of ‘ambivalence’ and underscores the ‘creative dimension of the relationship’.5 His nuanced sense of the ways in which Shelley enters into ‘relationship’ with other poets provides this essay with an inspirational spur as it seeks to reconsider Shelley’s intertextual relations with Wordsworth, mainly with regard to the poetry of the younger man’s years in Italy. Certainly these relations twine complex feelings of admiration and reproach, as ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine from England’ (1816) reveals. As various critics, notably Mary Quinn and Timothy Webb, have shown, the poem dwells on what Webb calls ‘the difference between then and now’, his parenthetical rider ‘(in itself a characteristic Wordsworthian subject)’ reminding us of the inward nature of even this poem, possibly the severest of Shelley’s ‘corrective tributes’ to the older poet.6 Its final vision of the withered celandine as emblematic of Wordsworth’s apostate decline, and thus of ‘Love sold, hope dead, and honour broken’ (l. 72), cannot eradicate the permanent value of ‘his divine and simple song’ (l. 59). Wordsworth has ‘overlived’ himself (l. 56), but he has lived and the best of his work will go on living. Satire, polemic and elegy tie an intricate knot in ‘Verses’, as its complicated ending bears witness: the ‘priest of Nature’s care’ (l. 67) must be Peacock who sent Shelley the celandine, and yet it must be Wordsworth, too, the reader senses, the Wordsworth addressed in an earlier elegising sonnet as ‘Poet of Nature’ (‘To Wordsworth’, l. 1; c. 1814–1815). Irony turns into belated praise; recollection of former greatness transforms itself into embittered irony. The rhetorical wheel spins round and round the poem’s nine eight-line stanzas, until it almost seems that Shelley addresses himself and his severed relationship with Wordsworth when he speaks to the celandine of ‘The stem whence thou wert disunited’ (l. 65). G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 76. 4 Ibid., p. 191. 5 Vincent Newey, ‘Shelley and the Poets: Alastor, “Julian and Maddalo”, Adonais’, in Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill, Durham University Journal (special issue), 85 (1993), 257–71 (p. 258). 6 Mary A. Quinn, ‘Shelley’s “Verses on the Celandine”: An Elegiac Parody of Wordsworth’s Early Lyrics’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 36 (1987), 88–109; Timothy Webb, ‘The Stiff Collar and the Mysteries of the Human Heart: The Younger Romantics and the Problem of Lyrical Ballads’, in ‘A Natural Delineation of Human Passions’: The Historic Moment of ‘Lyrical Ballads’, ed. C.C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 209–48 (pp. 216, 215). 3

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‘An Exhortation’ seeks to restage the debate. ‘Yet dare not stain with wealth or power / A poet’s free and heavenly mind’ (ll. 19–20): Shelley moves, in its third and final stanza, to the exhortation promised by his poem’s title. The addressee is more society than the poet; and the language of ‘staining’ aligns the exhortation with a number of suggestions in later Shelley that imply the almost inevitable way in which something of enduring value will suffer ‘staining’ in the sublunary sphere. One thinks of the image in Adonais (1821) of ‘Life’ as ‘a dome of manycoloured glass’ that ‘Stains the white radiance of Eternity’ (ll. 462–3), or of Rousseau’s protest in ‘The Triumph of Life’ (written 1822; pub. posthumously 1824) against the staining ‘disguise’ which he ‘still disdains’, Farinata-like, to ‘wear’ (ll. 204–5). Such staining imagery in Shelley is complexly at a remove from straightforward pessimism. It implies a disfiguring, but also the possibility of a pure, bright essence, as well as – this, a more subliminal suggestion – a tainted beauty of its own. As ‘An Exhortation’ rekindles belief in such an essence, it turns from society to poets, particularly Wordsworth, to conclude: ‘Children of a sunnier star, / Spirits from beyond the moon, / O, refuse the boon!’ (ll. 25–7). Shelley may allude, as Webb has suggested, to the fourth line of Wordsworth’s anti-commercial sonnet, ‘The world is too much with us’: ‘We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!’7 This likely allusion is characteristically angled to turn Wordsworth’s fire against himself. If in the sonnet Wordsworth laments that we betray what is best about ourselves, by embroiling our lives in ‘Getting and spending’ (l. 2), in the lyric Shelley exhorts Wordsworth not to accept the bribes of ‘wealth or power’. This tactic of the boomeranging allusion is one that Shelley has employed in relation to Wordsworth in earlier poems such as Alastor (1816), a poem ‘whose tacit transformation of Wordsworth’s story of Margaret [in Book I of The Excursion]’ was noted by Wasserman.8 That ‘transformation’ shows in the quotation from Wordsworth that concludes the Preface to Alastor: ‘The good die first, / And those whose hearts are dry as summer’s dust, / Burn to the socket!’9 Shelley applies to Wordsworth lines that Wordsworth’s Pedlar applies to Margaret, and his application of the allusion is complex, dividing Wordsworth into two poets: the ‘good’ poet who had died and the Tory Wordsworth whose heart is dry as dust and burning to the socket. Shelley’s Narrator in Alastor appears to spurn the consolations of elegy (see ll. 710–13), but, as Newey notes shrewdly, ‘the quality of the poetry of Alastor as a whole […] snatches plenitude from the 7 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poems and Prose, ed. Timothy Webb (London: Dent, 1995), p. 409. Unless indicated otherwise, Wordsworth is quoted from The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 8 Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), p. 21. 9 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poems and Prose, p. 16. For the original, which reads ‘they’ for ‘those’, see William Wordsworth, The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler and Michael C. Jaye, with the assistance of David García (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 531–3.

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jaws of negation’.10 Just as the poem shimmers between perspectives, so that the Poet is both guilty of ‘self-centred seclusion’11 and a ‘surpassing Spirit’ (l. 714), and just as its rhythms and music are unimaginable without the example of the older poet and yet entirely its own, its involvement with Wordsworthian poetry is simultaneously an act of homage and a form of critique. Alastor is no crude polemic. Rather, it recognises that the loss which is a central theme, the seemingly inevitable destruction of desire through frustrated quest or the limitations of mortality, is one which Wordsworth has addressed in poems such as ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807; 1815). Shelley’s poem concludes by framing its elegiac insights in terms that consciously acknowledge Wordsworth’s priority: ‘It is a woe too “deep for tears”’ (l. 713), asserts Shelley or his Narrator, alluding to the closing line of the Intimations Ode and confronting the fact that the Poet’s departure has left us what a deep and possibly cross-grained reading of Wordsworth tells us is always there even for the older poet: ‘Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things, / Birth and the grave, that are not as they were’ (ll. 719–20). This, the Wordsworthian cadences announce, is the fear at the back of Wordsworth’s poetry: that Nature is a ‘vast frame’, not a loving parent, that we are entangled in ‘the web of human things’ rather than sustained by ‘something far more deeply interfused’ (‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, l. 97; 1798), that we are always on the brink of unknowable origins and termini and of endless loss. With eerie empathy, Shelley seems to latch on to the Wordsworthian anxieties held at bay, but only just, in a poem such as ‘Tintern Abbey’, where affirmations about our capacity to ‘see into the life of things’ pass immediately into concern lest ‘this / Be but a vain belief’ (ll. 50–51). Worry about vain beliefs is central to Shelley’s work, and no belief is vainer to him than some supposed alliance between self and world. Such apprehensions of a one life or a near-pantheist unity recognise themselves as likely illusions in Shelley, or as emerging from ‘the human mind’s imaginings’ (l. 143), as he puts it in ‘Mont Blanc’ (version A; 1817). This poem, haunted by Wordsworthian diction, as when ‘the life of things’ turns into ‘the secret strength of things’ towards the close, strongly senses that Romantic metaphysics are inseparable from metaphorical ‘imaginings’. To that degree it serves as a rewriting of ‘Tintern Abbey’ that recognises the earlier poem’s achievement, but ousts Wordsworth’s trust in memory’s recuperative powers in favour of commitment to an ever-altering present tense, one in which the poet simultaneously presents and inspects his own ‘human mind’ engaged in ‘an unremitting interchange / With the clear universe of things around’ (version A, ll. 39–40). In ‘An Exhortation’, Shelley’s ‘excuse’ for Wordsworth accompanies the suggestion in ‘Children of a sunnier star’ that Wordsworth is in danger of forgetting his own view that ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting’, that ‘The Soul that rises with us, our life’s star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting, / And cometh from Newey, ‘Shelley and the Poets’, p. 260. Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poems and Prose, p. 16.

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afar’ (‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ll. 58–61). Yet Wordsworth’s ‘forgetting’ of his own best insights is a reminder of their value. When Shelley came to write the enigmatic and powerful lyric ‘The Two Spirits – An Allegory’ (c. 1820), Wordsworth’s lines from The Excursion, quoted at the close of the Preface to Alastor, returned to his mind. Above the poem’s title he wrote, ‘The good die first—’, then below those words the cancelled line, ‘Two genii stood before me in a dream’.12 Wordsworth was clearly in his thoughts, and the twinning that is a disjunction of the ‘Two genii’ again reprises the Shelleyan sense of a covert bond with as well as difference from the older poet. Wasserman takes the view that the line (‘The good die first’) ‘must have struck Shelley as an extraordinarily compressed formulation of man’s paradoxical involvement in both moral life and afterlife’.13 I read it more as indicating Shelley’s tragic awareness that, in Stuart Sperry’s words, ‘all are consumed by the fire of life within them’:14 arguably, Shelley, too, as much as Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s poetry haunts Shelley’s figurations and imaginings, but their author appear to him, on occasions, to be like the First Spirit as described by the Second Spirit, tied to ‘thy dull earth slumberbound’ (l. 30). The use of ‘thy’ shows that, for the Second Spirit, ‘earth’ may have an apparently objective reality, but such reality is a subjective impression, the product of a ‘slumberbound’ imagination. ‘Slumberbound’ in turn implies a deep sleep from which waking is nevertheless possible, and it seems distantly to recall Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ (c. 1798–1799), a poem in which the poet implicitly rebukes himself for having allowed such ‘slumber’ to ‘seal’ his ‘spirit’, and yet to regard it as a state in which he might have been vouchsafed a true vision of Lucy’s identity. To be ‘slumberbound’ is, therefore, not wholly a negative thing, even if the coda’s first stanza, depicting a circling chase involving ‘storm’ (l. 37) and ‘wingèd shape’ (l. 38), feels as though it is writing Wordsworth’s sense of Lucy as ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course’ (l. 7). Awakening from slumber occurs, or is imagined as occurring, at the close of ‘The Two Spirits’, when the intimation-vouchsafed traveller experiences a twinned sense of recovery and discovery: a shape like his early love doth pass Upborne by her wild and glittering hair, And when he awakes on the fragrant grass He finds night day. (ll. 45–8)

12 Shelley, The Homeric Hymns and ‘Prometheus’ Drafts Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 12, ed. Nancy Moore Goslee, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, ed. D.H. Reiman, 23 vols: vols 1–22 (New York: Garland, 1986–97); vol. 23 (London: Routledge, 2002), XVII, 14–15. It should be noted that any reading text of ‘The Two Spirits’ is speculative because of the condition of the manuscript. 13 Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, p. 42. 14 Stuart M. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 26.

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The poem can be read as concerned with the differences and affinities between Shelley and Byron. Charles Robinson stresses the former rather than the latter: ‘Because Shelley must have recognized the similarity between The Two Spirits and his long debate with Byron, the first four stanzas stand as an appropriate epilogue to the two poets’ antagonism in 1818.’15 But Shelley negotiates with Wordsworth, too, in the intertextual interstices of the poem, almost identifying the older poet with that ‘shape like his early love’, rediscovering his significance through a simplicity of diction that recalls the daring experiments of Lyrical Ballads. The passage alludes obliquely, too, to the Wanderer’s admonition of the Solitary in Book IV of Wordsworth’s The Excursion to take note how: Ambition reigns In the waste wilderness: the Soul ascends Towards her native firmament of heaven, When the fresh Eagle, in the month of May, Upborne, at evening, on replenished wing, This shady valley leaves (ll. 396–401)16

Wordsworth’s ‘Eagle’ gives way to Shelley’s ‘shape’; but Shelley, who clearly read this book of Wordsworth’s poem closely (there are evident echoes of it in Alastor),17 adapts Wordsworth’s understanding of the soul’s ascending ‘Ambition’ to his own lyric’s grappling with themes of desire and hope. Again, Wordsworth’s ‘Note to The Thorn’ anticipates Shelley’s practice of weighing repeating words such as ‘night’ and ‘day’ in ‘the balance of feeling’.18 To read Wordsworth as an admonitory First Spirit warning the exultant younger Shelley, ‘who plumed with strong desire / Would float above the Earth’ (ll. 1–2), is, in part, to respond to the suggestive invitation in the lyric’s subtitle, ‘An Allegory’. But it is also to acknowledge the force and generosity of Shelley’s response to the older poet, one with whom he ‘dosed’ Byron ‘even to nausea’.19 The First Spirit is a father-figure more than half in love with the daring rashness of the sonlike Second Spirit, and affects Judith Chernaik, for one, as speaking ‘like a good friend, reluctantly abandoning a position once held by both’:20 very much, one imagines, how Shelley might have wished to idealise so complex a poetic parent. For him, as for the Second Spirit, ‘It were delight to wander there’ (l. 7), and for the Second Spirit, the warning that ‘A shadow tracks thy flight of fire’ (l. 3) serves as stimulus Charles E. Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 111. 16 Wordsworth, The Excursion, p. 141. 17 Compare, for example, Alastor, ll. 350–51, and The Excursion, IV, ll. 512–13. 18 Wordsworth, The Major Works, p. 594. 19 Quoted in Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron (London: Colburn, 1824), p. 237. 20 Judith Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972), p. 142. 15

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and goad rather than as impediment or barrier. It would be reductive to suppose that Shelley wrote the lyric as a poeme à clef, but it takes a new and revitalised life when read in the light of his career-long engagement with Wordsworth. Wordsworth, in works such as ‘Resolution and Independence’ (1802), himself writes dialogic poems, albeit in that case implicitly so. In it he confronts and seeks to overcome the self that experiences chilling ‘thoughts’: ‘the fear that kills; / The hope that is unwilling to be fed; / Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills’ (ll. 120–22). The spondaic stress that opens the final line brings out Wordsworth’s deliberating strength of feeling and analytical insight into the psychic and material enemies of promise and achievement. Arguably Shelley recalls the phrase ‘all fleshly ills’ (itself an echo of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy) when in ‘The Triumph of Life’ his Rousseau tells the Poet that had he heard the music in the valley, ‘Thou wouldst forget thus vainly to deplore / Ills, which if ills, can find no cure from thee’ (ll. 327–8). Characteristically, Rousseau insinuates a Shelleyan uncertainty, memorably glossed by A.C. Bradley: The words may imply a doubt on Shelley’s own part about the ills that haunted him. Life, he may have felt, is so inexplicable, and so much ill seems to spring from what we once thought good and even superlatively good, that we can have no certainty as the ultimate ill of what seems, and even haunts us as, ill.21

Rousseau is unsure whether what seem ills really are ills; we are unsure whether the poem ratifies or disputes his message of forlorn hopelessness. Wordsworth, in his poem, will take courage from the indomitable courage and perseverance of the Leech Gatherer. In ‘The Two Spirits – An Allegory’, Shelley allows for genuine debate, but he keeps in play the possibility of transcendental hope. Wordsworth alludes to ‘A leading from above, a something given’ (l. 51) as a possible explanation for the Leech Gatherer’s appearance, and if he lays his emphasis squarely on the Leech Gatherer’s earthiness, he also implies the way in which his imaginings work transformatively on the earthly: of the famous slow dance of similes in which the Leech Gatherer participates, Wordsworth writes that ‘the aged Man’ is ‘divested of so much of the indications of life and motion as to bring him to the point where the two objects unite and coalesce in the comparison’.22 Both poets in these lyrics dramatise the resources and resourcefulness of the imagination. Wordsworth draws comfort from the example of the Leech Gatherer. But he is able to do so only after the Leech Gatherer’s being has elicited from him a process of imagining that displays what he will call the imagination’s ‘endowing or modifying power’.23 Vital in a not wholly fathomable way for the poet’s emergence from despondency is the way in which ‘the lonely place, / The Old 21 A.C. Bradley, ‘Notes on Shelley’s “Triumph of Life”’, Modern Language Review, 9 (1914), 441–56 (p. 453). For discussion, see Michael O’Neill, ‘A.C. Bradley’s View of Shelley’s Poetry and Poetics’, Romanticism, 14:1 (2008), 36–46 (p. 37). 22 Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Poems (1815)’, The Major Works, p. 633. 23 Ibid, p. 633.

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Man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me’ (ll. 134–5). Indeed he is so ‘troubled’ that in ensuing lines he perceives the Old Man as a spectral wanderer in what appears to be as much mindscape as landscape: ‘In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace / About the weary moors continually, / Wandering about alone and silently’ (ll. 136–8): lines where the adverbs and repetition of ‘about’, along with the drawn-out syntax, mimic a labyrinthine ‘Wandering’. Here, the ordinariness of the Old Man turns into something extraordinary through the operations of the poet’s troubled imagination. Wordsworth makes explicit these operations and their distance from a reality beyond them in the stanza’s final couplet – ‘While I these thoughts within myself pursued, / He, having made a pause, the same discourse renewed’ (ll. 139–40) – and it is part of the poem’s odd persuasiveness that it allows for the jolts and disconnections between inner and outer. In Chapter XXII of Biographia Literaria (1817), which may have contributed to Shelley’s maturing thought about Wordsworth, Coleridge regretted the poem’s ‘incongruity’,24 but it is among the poem’s merits that it allows for the overpowering force of internal feeling without therefore permitting the external to be simply overpowered. Wordsworth situates both these forms of awareness within the same consciousness; Shelley divides them between his two speakers, and the third voice which enters the poem in what appears to be the coda of the final two stanzas. In ‘The Two Spirits’, the Second Spirit may initially sound naively ardent: ‘Within my heart is the lamp of love / And that is day’ (ll. 11–12), as though the ‘lamp of love’ can dispel the First Spirit’s alarm-cry, ‘Night is coming!’ (l. 8). But Shelley’s lyric art devotes itself to the questioning of categories. Does ‘Night is coming!’ assert a fact or express a fear, or both? The Second Spirit’s very response would suggest that it does both; it refers to ‘the shade of night’ (l. 10) as though it were at least a likely or proximate reality, yet it asserts that ‘the lamp of love’ can convert ‘night’ to ‘day’. The replay of their positions in stanzas three and four intensifies the initial difference, much as Wordsworth’s ‘My former thoughts returned’ (l. 120) in ‘Resolution and Independence’ ‘returns’ to earlier despondent ‘blind thoughts’ (l. 28), but lends them a sharpened edge of near-unendurability. In stanza three, the First Spirit’s quickened anxiety finds expression through an unfinished ‘But if’ clause that passes into a moment of seeing that has its own visionary exaltation: ‘But if the whirlwinds of darkness waken / Eclipse and Lightning and stormy rain – / See, the bounds of the air are shaken, / Night is coming’ (ll. 17–20). The inflections here suggest comparisons and contrasts with the troubled gravity of Wordsworth’s sombre transitions: ‘But there’s a Tree, of many one, / A single Field which I have looked upon’ (‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ll. 51–2, for example). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Oxford Authors, ed. H.J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 390. Mary Shelley records Shelley reading and finishing ‘Coleridge’s Liteerary [sic] life’ on 8 December 1817: The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 186. 24

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Wordsworth locates the emotion in the objects of his contemplation and memory: tree and field ‘speak of something that is gone’ (l. 53); Shelley catches natural objects up in a pre-existing force-field of feeling. Wordsworth’s ‘emotions’ – Leavis was surely right – ‘seem to derive from what is presented’. Shelley’s emotions seem to precede the object and to exist in a complex relationship with ‘Eclipse and Lightning and stormy rain’. Leavis was wrong to assert that ‘Shelley, at his best and worst, offers the emotion in itself, unattached, in the void’.25 But his hostile observation brings us up sharply against the need to account for the interplay between subject, object and feeling in Shelley’s poetry. Arguably, it is part of his work’s impressive rapidity (his intellect and emotions in affecting, intelligent interplay) to sense the ways in which figures refuse solely to obey the dictates of the pre-linguistic or to serve as obedient objective correlatives. Such a sense is crucial to the poem: thus, the command to ‘See, the bounds of the air are shaken’ (l. 19) recognises that ‘seeing’, visionary apprehension, is central to the way in which perception constructs reality. It is half in love with the menace it officially deplores, because such menace speaks eloquently of the ways in which feeling acts as a shaping spirit. The Second Spirit’s retort – I see the glare and I hear the sound; I’ll sail on the flood of the tempest dark With the calm within and light around Which makes night day (ll. 25–8)

– positively glories in the shaping made possible by subjectivity. ‘I see’ decisively faces down the First Spirit’s command to ‘see’, while the reference to ‘the glare’ and ‘the tempest dark’ implies that the Second Spirit accepts the First Spirit’s account of the symbolic weather, but not its fear in the face of that weather system. Rather the commitment to the potentially dangerous – in ‘I’ll sail’ – not only anticipates the scorn and defiance of the closing stanza of Adonais, as Chernaik notes,26 but it also shows a joyous confidence in the capacity for transformation of the ‘calm within and the light around’. And yet even this confidence momentarily destabilises itself; ‘makes’ in line 28 (the manuscript’s probable reading) may be one of Shelley’s false agreements (one would expect ‘make’ following the two governing nouns, ‘calm’ and ‘light’). Yet it may also show the Spirit’s awareness that it cannot rely on inner calm; it depends, too, on ‘the light around’.

25 F.R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 200, 201. 26 Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley, p. 143.

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*** Such dialogic delicacy is at work within Shelley’s poetry and in its relations with Wordsworth. Harold Bloom, with ‘The Triumph of Life’ in mind, views Shelley’s relationship as conforming to one of the sombre scenarios dictated by his revisionary ratios: even in the midst of some of his finest writing, Shelley, for Bloom, comes close to rehearsing a Wordsworthian ur-plot: ‘Here, at his end’, writes Bloom, ‘Shelley is open again to the terror of Wordsworth’s “Intimations” ode, and yields to his precursor’s “light of common day”’.27 Such an example of apophrades, the return of the dead, is, for Bloom, ambivalent: evidence of poetic defeat or of the strength that lies in yielding, and though he seems to imply that Wordsworth’s return in ‘The Triumph of Life’ is an example of the former, he leaves the door ajar to the view (which his essay endorses) that it is evidence of the latter. As Bloom goes on to remark: ‘How [the dead] return is the decisive matter’.28 Shelley echoes ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ in his account of the ‘shape all light’ (l. 352) in ‘The Triumph of Life’ to haunting effect. If she comes trailing clouds of Wordsworthian allusion, associated as she initially is with ‘a gentle trace / Of light diviner than the common sun / Sheds on the common Earth’ (ll. 337–9), her role is not simply to show that all lights ‘fade into the light of common day’ (‘Ode’, l. 76), or can be retrieved only through memory, ‘the philosophic mind’ (‘Ode’, l. 189) and the suffering ‘human heart by which we live’ (‘Ode’, l. 203). It is to rehearse a scene of imaginative seduction and desire, the poet’s imagination conjuring an objective correlative of its dazzling capacity to shape scenarios of quest and encounter, even if the result is to take us into the peculiarly and purely Shelleyan realm where the object of poetic pursuit is ‘forever sought, forever lost’ (l. 431). To depict with such radiant menace so ultimately enigmatic a meeting between poet and implicit muse is to criss-cross one’s voice with a precursor’s to original and compelling effect. Wordsworth’s return in Shelley’s late poetry follows the swaying between mockery and reluctant admiration in Peter Bell the Third (1819), the fifth section of which drew from Leavis the concessionary praise that it bears witness to a ‘fine critical intelligence’. Leavis points out, too, that Shelley’s reflections on Wordsworth involved a sense that ‘the recognition of affinities is at the same time the realization of differences’.29 That ‘realization’ is more the poetry’s than the poet’s. Leaving to one side for a moment the poem’s ‘avowedly skittish’ nature, in Leavis’s phrase,30 it is fascinating to observe how Shelley, for all his sense of Peter’s limits – ‘as much imagination / As a pint-pot’ (ll. 298–9) – ascribes to his 27 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 140. 28 Ibid., p. 141. 29 Leavis, ‘Shelley’, pp. 182, 182–3. 30 Ibid., p. 181.

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satirical target a capacity for transcendental longing that seems more distinctive of the poem’s author. Peter, writes Shelley, would make songs on: the universal sky – And the wide earth’s bosom green; – And the sweet, strange mystery Of what beyond these things may lie And yet remain unseen. (ll. 408–12)

‘The “bosom” and the “sweet” there are not Wordsworth’, says Leavis sniffily.31 But what is perhaps even less Wordsworthian is the concern with what ‘may lie’ ‘beyond’ the natural ‘And yet remain unseen’. Wordsworth’s domain is the mind of man, or ‘that blessed mood, / In which the burthen of the mystery […] / Is lightened’, or ‘the mighty world / Of eye and ear’ (‘Tintern Abbey’, ll. 38–9, 42, 106–7). Shelley’s wish to portray Wordsworth as a poet of the ‘unseen’ suggests a desire to free him from the ‘matter-of-factness’ or ‘laborious minuteness and fidelity to the representations of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet’ to which Coleridge objects in Biographia Literaria.32 But it also involves an element of conscious projection, Wordsworth presented by Shelley as proleptically anticipating the thirst for the ‘unseen’ which is at work in the poetry of one of his major inheritors. Shelley’s ‘universal sky’ may take its cue from Wordsworth’s account of ‘Love, now an universal birth, / From heart to heart is stealing’ (ll. 21–2) in ‘Lines Written at a Small Distance from My House’ (1798). But the universality of ‘feeling’ (l. 24), which Wordsworth lyricises with such keenly displaced millennial feeling, involves movement ‘From earth to man, from man to earth’ (l. 23), as the chiastic phrasing has it. Shelley makes Peter an apostle of the ‘universal sky’, a phrase not without this-worldly or possibly pantheist implications, but one calculated to send the gaze soaring, much as Shelley’s skylark, ‘singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest’ (‘To a Skylark’ (1820); l. 10) fills the onlooker with a sense of ‘hidden want’ (l. 70). Wordsworth’s skylark certainly prompts the poet with admiration for the ‘madness about thee, and joy divine / In that song of thine’ (‘To a Sky-Lark’ (1805); ll. 12–13). But, for all his command to come ‘Up with me! up with me into the clouds’ (l. 1), a command that shows how any ascensions are on the poet’s terms, Wordsworth concludes the poem with his feet firmly on the ground: Hearing thee, or else some other, As merry a Brother, I on the earth will go plodding on, By myself, chearfully, till the day is done. (ll. 26–9)

Shelley, by contrast, does not suppose that, in any simple way, Wordsworth’s hope that ‘Joy and jollity be with us both!’ (l. 25) can be fulfilled. For all the poet’s desire to be inspired as the skylark is, Shelley’s lyric affects us most deeply as Ibid., p. 183. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Oxford Authors, p. 391.

31 32

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a confession of estrangement from and longing for the spirit-bird’s undivided rapture. Even if we could do away with negative emotions, a line such as ‘I know not how thy joy we ever should come near’ (l. 95), must be read as a pointed rejoinder to Wordsworth’s concluding trust in the fitness of things. And yet Shelley’s poem takes flight through the very acuteness of its desire. Wordsworth boisterously declines to compete with the bird it depicts as a ‘Happy, happy Liver! / With a soul as strong as a mountain River’ (ll. 22–3), the feminine rhyme delighting in the bird’s happiness and linking its ‘soul’ firmly with the strength of a ‘mountain river’. Shelley links the bird to his favourite image of idealistic ascent, once again adapting Wordsworth’s image from ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ to his less appeasable quest: ‘Like a star of Heaven, / In the broad daylight / Thou art unseen, – but yet I hear thy shrill delight’ (ll. 18–20). The simile works both to confirm the reality of that ‘star of Heaven’ (significantly given pride of place in the syntactical ordering) and its inability to make itself visible ‘In the broad daylight’. And the poet’s capacity to ‘hear thy shrill delight’ mixes up sense and intuition so that the skylark’s audibility warrants, through the not wholly logical sleights of argumentative hand at which Shelley’s poetry is adept, belief that the senses, though inadequate, can support the mind’s and heart’s best ‘imaginings’. The phrasing reveals how ‘scorn of the narrow good we can attain in our present state’ wins the upper hand towards the close of Shelley’s career. The letter of April 1822, from which those words are taken, views Wordsworth as a poet who has removed himself from ‘emotions’ (which evidently Shelley has experienced) ‘known only to few’ that ‘derive their sole charm from despair & a scorn of the narrow good we can attain in our present state’. Indeed, the letter goes on to present the rather remarkable spectacle of Shelley taking Wordsworth to task, not for his alleged political conservatism, but because of his insufficiently robust other-worldly longing: Perhaps all discontent with the less (to use a Platonic sophism) supposes the sense of a just claim to the greater, & that we admirers of Faust are in the right road to Paradise. – Such a supposition is not more absurd, and is certainly less demoniacal than that of Wordsworth – where he says – This earth, Which is the world of all of us, & where We find our happiness or not at all. As if after 60 years of suffering here, we were to be roasted alive for 60 million more in Hell, or charitably annihilated by a coup de grace of the bungler, who brought us into existence at first.33

33 Shelley, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, II, 406–7. See also my discussion in The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry Since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 110–11.

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Meditating on Faust’s impact on him, Shelley concedes the sophistical nature of the quasi-Platonic arguments that the imperfect presupposes the existence of the perfect, but he refuses to detach himself from the wish that such a presupposition should be the case. Wasserman describes how Shelley ‘succeeded, with the aid of “the intellectual philosophy”, in transforming scepticism into a probabilism’.34 But his ‘probabilism’ depends on no support from any ‘intellectual philosophy’, and seems, so the concluding sentence suggests, to have no truck with Christian dogma. It also decisively rejects Wordsworth’s complicated ventriloquising of this-world hope expressed in the lines that Shelley slightly misquotes from ‘The French Revolution, As It Appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement’, a section of The Prelude (1805; Book X, ll. 725–7), printed in the older poet’s collected Poems of 1815. In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley seems to see as ‘low-thoughted’ a view of ‘happiness’ that sees it as locatable only in this world.35 Again, he draws on Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ for confirmation that his precursor’s best works speak against their creator. The ‘Ode’ locates ‘Our destiny, our nature, and our home’ with ‘infinitude’, as indeed Wordsworth also does in The Prelude (Book VI. ll. 538–9). Shelley’s dealings with Wordsworth in his later poetry hold the older poet to that intuition in the belief that ‘it is the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity’36 and that his great predecessor is pre-eminent among those contemporary poets who ‘even whilst they deny and abjure, […] are yet compelled to serve, the Power which is seated on the throne of their own soul’.37 When Shelley writes of his hope that ‘we admirers of Faust are in the right road to Paradise’, he engages with what David Luke notes as ‘the motif of striving (Tätigkeit, Streben)’ evident in the so-called ‘“third phase” additions’ of Goethe’s work (Faust, Part One was published in 1808).38 Such striving, for Luke, represents ‘constantly renewed active endeavour’ and ‘is not in itself either moral or immoral’, removing ‘Goethe’s scheme still further from a Christian basis as traditionally understood’.39 Shelley reads Faust with a kind of hopeless hope that retains a sense that questing must have as its goal some notion of ‘Paradise’. What Shelley’s triangulation of himself, Goethe and Wordsworth bears witness to is a longing for affirmation borne out of near-desperation, a conjunction of impulses behind and at the heart of the final assertions of Adonais (1821). Vincent Newey has written memorably that ‘The true dynamis of Adonais in its later stages […] is its drive to outdistance Byron, not to replicate him’. But as he sets himself 36 37 38

Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, pp. 176–7. Quoted from Shelley, The Major Works, p. 700. Note to line 197 of Hellas; ibid., p. 585. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry; The Major Works, p. 701. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. xxxii. For valuable conversations about Shelley and Goethe, I am grateful to Stephanie Dumke. 39 Ibid., p. xxiii. 34 35

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to quest for ‘a more sublime and far-distant telos’40 than Byron articulates as a goal in the final canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Shelley summons as spur and stimulus to his voyage the figure of Wordsworth. Wordsworth appears in the draft as the likely prototype of one of the procession of mourners: And next came a spirit beautiful & strong Wrapt in the guise of an uncomely form He sometimes like a pedlar limped along With packs upon his back.41

Tellingly, the language used in the draft attaches itself in significantly revised form, in the final version, to the self-portrait of the poet himself who appears as ‘A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift’ (l. 280) and as ‘a Power / Girt round with weakness’ (ll. 281–2). Wordsworth as a Shelleyan shadow self oddly ghosts the self-portrait, though Shelley assumes a Dionysian ‘Power’ not developed in his draft account. Towards the poem’s end Shelley nerves himself for a final voyage in pursuit of ‘The soul of Adonais’ which ‘like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are’ (ll. 494–5); the stellar influences include Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ as well as the sestet of his sonnet to Milton (‘Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour’) in which he asserts, ‘Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart’ (l. 9).42 This is not to agree with the pessimism implicit in Harold Bloom’s severe judgement that Shelley had the greatness to recognise that ‘Wordsworth will legislate and go on legislating for your poem, no matter how you resist or evade or even unconsciously ignore him’.43 In his elegy for Keats, Shelley draws sustenance from Wordsworth, while retaining his own restless turbulent individuality, much as Adonais, in Newey’s fine insight ‘valorizes transcendence’ yet ‘nowhere cuts us off for life’.44 That Shelley does not cut us or himself off from life connects with the elegy’s belated discovery of life’s value, since the imagination demands that life must be more than material existence. Thus, physical death cannot prevail over Keats’s persistent poetic life. Asserting the reality of Keats’s post-mortal being, Shelley, as Jonathan Wordsworth has observed, invokes a ‘pantheism’ in stanza 42 that cannot but recall the rhythms and diction of ‘Tintern Abbey’. Newey, ‘Shelley and the Poets’, p. 266. Quoted (in cleaned-up form) from the transcription in Shelley’s ‘Devils’ Notebook:

40 41

Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 9, ed. P.M.S. Dawson and Timothy Webb, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, XIV, 22–3. 42 On this sonnet’s significance for Shelley’s sonnet ‘To Wordsworth’, see Graham Allen, ‘Transumption and/in History: Bloom, Shelley and the Figure of the Poet’, in Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill, Durham University Journal (special issue), 85 (1993), 247–56. 43 Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 111. 44 Newey, ‘Shelley and the Poets’, p. 268.

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Thus, as Jonathan Wordsworth notes, Wordsworth has ‘felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts’ (ll. 94–6), while ‘Adonais is himself a presence to be felt and known’ (emphases are Jonathan Wordsworth’s).45 Adonais, that is, is the name that Shelley has given to Wordsworth’s ‘something far more deeply interfused’. That a poet should emerge as an abiding presence is right for this poem that asserts the power and significance of poetry, and in doing so reminds us that A Defence of Poetry builds on the claims for poetry made by Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads. But Adonais asserts poetry’s significance and power with its eyes open. It explicitly notes the inadequacy of language, ‘words’ being among those frail material elements that ‘are weak / The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak’ (ll. 467–8). It implicitly disclaims the role of poetry as guide to philosophical or metaphysical knowledge, unashamedly conceding its metaphorical nature in its final stanza’s spirit-voyage and its readiness to draw clashing ideas together in its images and imaginings, the Platonic and Gnostic jostling with the humanist and pantheist. And yet in such concessions lies Shelley’s final refusal to allow Wordsworth to legislate for him. What legislates for Shelley is what legislated for Wordsworth: the poetic ‘Power’ ‘seated on the throne of [his] own soul’.46

45 Jonathan Wordsworth, Introduction, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Adonais 1821 (Oxford: Woodstock, 1992), pp. v–vi. 46 Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform; The Major Works, p. 646.

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Chapter 5

Authenticity Projected: Alexander Pope, Lord Byron and Cardinal Newman Bernard Beatty

Alexander Pope’s ‘Epistle to a Lady’ (1735) begins: ‘Nothing so true as what you once let fall, / “Most Women have no Characters at all”’.1 The words belong to Martha Blount, not Pope. His introductory ‘ARGUMENT’ to the poem insists that women’s characters are merely ‘yet more inconsistent and incomprehensible than those of Men’.2 Inconsistency is a human trait not a female one, for the ‘Epistle to Cobham’ (1734) tells us that ‘plain Characters we rarely find’ (l. 122). Hence, as he tells us some lines earlier in this ‘Epistle’, there is something fundamentally unknowable about shifting human interiors: ‘Our depths who fathoms, or our shallows finds, / Quick whirls, and shifting eddies, of our minds?’ (ll. 29–30). Pope applies this critique relentlessly to himself: But when no Prelate’s Lawn with Hair-shirt lin’d, Is half so incoherent as my Mind, When (each Opinion with the next at strife, One ebb and flow of follies all my Life) I plant, root up, I build, and then confound, Turn round to square, and square again to round.

(‘Imitations of Horace’ (1738): Epistle I, i, ll. 165–70).

In An Essay on Man (1733–1734), Pope universalises this ‘ebb and flow’. Man is: Chaos of Thought and Passion all confus’d; Still by himself abus’d or disabus’d; Created half to rise, and half to fall. (Epistle II, ll. 13–15)

Alexander Pope, ‘Epistle to a Lady’, ll. 1–2; The Poems of Alexander Pope: A OneVolume Edition of the Twickenham Text, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 560. All further quotations from Pope’s poetry refer to this edition. 2 Ibid., p. 559. Pope does find some consistency in the notion of a ‘master’ or ‘ruling Passion’ (Essay on Man, Epistle II, ll. 131, 138) but even here, he is at pains to stress the contradictory routings that it takes in different people (see ll. 181–202). 1

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The verses translate Horace’s sentiment, but Pope also stands with ‘downright Shippen’ and ‘old Montagne’ in his version of another Horatian poem (Satire II, i (1733), l. 52). William Shippen was a plain-spoken leader of the Jacobite faction. Both Montaigne and Shippen (and by implication Horace and Pope) are celebrated because: ‘In them, as certain to be lov’d as seen, / The Soul stood forth, nor kept a Thought within’ (ll. 53–4). Like these men, Pope loves ‘to pour out all myself’ (l. 51). He claims both loyalty to contradiction and yet a certain stability inherent in the adjective ‘downright’, without which he would have no ground from whence to critique characters such as Lord Hervey for being changeable. In Pope’s ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ (1735), ‘Sporus’ (i.e., Lord Hervey) is thus: ‘Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss, / And he himself one vile antithesis’ (ll. 324–5). It is clear that the contradictions in Pope do not imperil what we would call his ‘authenticity’, whereas those in Lord Hervey do. G. Wilson Knight suggested that Lord Hervey failed to ‘fuse the masculine and feminine elements in his personality’ and thus is a ‘vile antithesis’ opposed to ‘Pope’s philosophy of integration in the Essay on Man’.3 This fits Pope’s conclusion to the ‘Epistle to a Lady’, where he argues that Heaven ‘picks from each sex’ (l. 273) to make its ‘last best work’ which is ‘a softer Man’ (l. 272). But there is another answer to the question. In what sense can we say that ‘the Soul stood forth’ in Shippen and Montaigne? In the first instance, it means that nothing is hidden; but ‘stood forth’ implies action as well as unveiling. In Shippen’s case this is enacted through his Parliamentary speeches which are linked to political decisions. In the case of Montaigne, Pope, and Horace, their ‘Soul stood forth’ in their act of writing. Pope’s honesty exposes his contradictions. Hence ‘Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory’ (Satire II, i, l. 68). Pope, however, proves Wilson Knight to be right, for he claims that he is integrating opposites into ‘an honest Mean’ (Satire II, i, l. 66). How does a standing forth accomplish this? The soul’s standing forth is an action which unifies. Pope does not see his words as, like Hamlet’s, set over against action but as a form of it. Hamlet thinks, and he plays parts in the theatrical sense like Pope’s ‘Sporus’, but he does not act as himself, except when soliloquising for no one’s benefit except his own. Hamlet projects his self to his self in front of a theatrical audience which is off-stage, but he does not project this self to others on stage. Instead, he disguises it by playing a part. He is never therefore ‘downright’ Hamlet. If the authentic man is ‘one who does a thing himself’ (authentikós)4 then Hamlet is never authentic, for he does a thing always as someone else. When Pope claims ‘to pour out all myself, as plain / As downright Shippen or old Montagne’ (Satire II, i, ll. 51–2) he is the opposite of this in the very moment of writing, even though his own lines (which he ‘does 3 G. Wilson Knight, The Poetry of Alexander Pope: Laureate of Peace (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 68. 4 See the etymology of ‘authentic, a. (and n.)’, Oxford English Dictionary (1989); hereafter OED.

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himself’) still belong to Horace. Pope’s words are a form of standing forth as himself whereas ‘Sporus’ speaks ‘in florid Impotence’, for he is merely ‘acting either Part’ (‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, ll. 317, 326). The sexual undertow is apparent when Pope glosses his pouring out ‘all myself’ as ‘My Heart and Head thus flowing thro’ my Quill’ (Satire II, i, ll. 51, 63). The heart and head stand forth in the projection of writing the self as a form of moral action, public duty, and aesthetic form. In all three, it is a generative act. The word ‘author’ derives from ‘augere’ (to make to grow).5 The self thus written is the opposite of the self that contemplates its private and hoarded interior in the act of writing a diary, for the projected self loves to stand in the shadow of authorising predecessors, such as Horace, whose genetic energy is renewed in their progeny. Just so, Pope’s man of action – for example, John Kyrle – is never named except as ‘the MAN OF ROSS’ (‘Epistle to Bathurst’ (1733), ll. 250, 262, 264, 269), for though ‘His race, his form, his name’ are ‘almost unknown’ (l. 284) yet he lives both through what he did and in this projection of his actions in writing. Pope admitted making Kyrle ‘more beneficent than he really was’, but justified this by saying that it would help the ‘imitator’ to ‘emulate’ his actions.6 Both Kyrle and Pope are progenitors of action. The most magnificent example of such an aesthetic and moral projection in Pope’s poetry is the 25-line section of self-defence and promulgation in the ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ which rises out of the portrait of ‘Sporus’ as its antipodes: Not Fortune’s Worshipper, nor Fashion’s Fool, Not Lucre’s Madman, nor Ambition’s Tool, Not proud, nor servile, be one Poet’s praise That if he pleas’d, he pleas’d by manly ways; That Flattery ev’n to Kings, he held a shame, And thought a Lye in Verse or Prose the same: That not in Fancy’s Maze he wander’d long, But stoop’d to Truth, and moralized his song. (ll. 334–41)

Like John Kyrle, Alexander Pope has lost his name and become simply ‘one Poet’ (l. 336) because he lives through his actions. These are the proof of ‘manly ways’ in contrast to the ‘trips’ and struttings of that ‘Amphibious Thing!’ (ll. 329, 326), Lord Hervey. Anyone less obviously manly than the frail and diminutive Pope is hard to imagine. But Pope distinguishes between his ‘libel’d Person’ and ‘pictur’d Shape’ (‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, l. 353) on the one hand and, on the other, the See etymology of ‘author, n.’, OED. ‘If any man shall ever happen to endeavour to emulate the Man of Ross, ’twill be no

5 6

manner of harm if I make him think he was something more charitable and more beneficent than he really was, for so much more good it would put upon the imitator upon doing’, cited in Reuben Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 273–4.

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unquestionable vigour that flows through his quill and gives such astonishing authority to his voice when it needs it. The ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ opens with Pope’s humorous self-portrait as, besieged in his Twickenham villa, he reads other people’s rubbish ‘With honest anguish and an aking head’ (l. 38), but here ‘this Man’ (l. 369) speaks out as the unassailably authentic Poet who speaks as the conscience of his readers. Through this transformation, Pope is doing what Paul urges in I Corinthians 16.13: ‘viriliter agite’, or ‘act like men’.7 Pope’s largeness of voice is a form of action through which he becomes more himself rather than pretending to be another. There is no voice that, acting as itself, is itself on this scale until we get to Lord Byron, who fully acknowledged his homage to his darling predecessor, as Pope did to Horace. In both, writing is a form of action that is part and parcel of a projection of self which stands forth defiantly in defence of a threatened literary and ethical tradition whose voice it is. They are justified by their works. With Byron, however, there is a difference. His first attempt to imitate Pope in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) never projects his voice and stance as action.8 He seems ruefully aware of this: ‘E’en I must raise my voice, e’en I must feel / Such scenes, such men destroy the public weal’ (ll. 695–6). The weakness of the couplet is linked to the failure to raise a convincing voice. On the other hand, Byron is in the business of projection from the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) and the ‘Tales’ onwards. The projection consists in the evident closeness of voice to the extended characterisation of the Byronic heroes. Lara, for instance: stood a stranger in this breathing world, An erring spirit from another hurl’d; A thing of dark imaginings. (Lara (1814), Canto I, ll. 315–17)

But Lara, like Harold et al., does not have a voice of his own. Conrad’s longest speech is given when he is acting the part of the ‘Dervise’, not himself (The Corsair (1814), Canto II, ll. 81–98, 123–32). Yet, despite Byron’s repeated disavowal, early readers were right to read a version of Byron in these unvoiced characters. Edward Bostetter has explored the ‘ventriloquilism’ of Byron and his contemporaries9 but here Byron does the opposite; he projects personality but not voice.

7 Vulgate and New American Standard Bible translations of the single Greek word ‘andrizesqeээ’. 8 The last lines of the poem (ll. 1053–70) come closest to projecting a convincing voice, as in ‘I’ve learned to think, and sternly speak the truth’ (l. 1058): Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980– 1993), I, 262. All further quotations from Byron’s poems refer to this edition. 9 Edward E. Bostetter, Romantic Ventriloquists: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron (Washington: University of Washington Press, 1975).

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This separation of voice and projection found in the ‘Tales’ originated in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, but that is also the locus of its abandonment at the beginning of Canto III (1816). The displacement occurs in one of Byron’s most discussed stanzas (stanza 6): ’Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense, that we endow With form our fancy, gaining as we give The life we image, even as I do now. What am I? Nothing; but not so art thou, Soul of my thought! With whom I traverse earth, Invisible but gazing, as I glow Mix’d with thy spirit, blended with thy birth, And feeling still with thee in my crush’d feelings dearth. (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, ll. 46–54)

Vincent Newey nicely observes that here Byron ‘celebrates poetic creation as a becoming of the self’.10 Partly, though, it is a dying of one self that facilitates the birth of another in which, to return to Pope’s idea, ‘The Soul stood forth, nor kept a Thought within’ (Satire II, i, l. 54).11 This occurs exactly when the voiceless Harold, as projection, is more or less dropped from the poem that bears his name. Byron’s voice now becomes the medium of his own projection. This enlarged voice is a form of action rather than Hamletian acting. In this stanza, and others like it, Byron does what he could not do in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: he raises his voice. We now believe him when he says: And if my voice break forth, ’tis not that now I shrink from what is suffered […] […] But in this page a record will I seek. Not in the air shall these my words disperse, Though I be ashes; a far hour shall wreak The deep prophetic fulness of this verse. (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), ll. 1198–9, 1202–5)

Words here are a form of quasi-prophetic action as they are in Pope’s utterance as ‘one Poet’ (‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, l. 336). They are raised, enlarged, given away, promulgated: they stand forth but remain in some sense owned or, as Newey would put it, ‘authored’. ‘Owned’ is not perhaps quite right, and Newey is right as usual, for Byron puts it more subtly: ‘gaining as we give / The life we image’ Vincent Newey ‘Authoring the Self: Childe Harold III and IV’, in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), pp. 148–90 (p. 148). 11 The parallels between Byron’s stanza and the Pauline notion of ‘yet I live; yet no longer I’ (Galatians 2.20) are explored in Bernard Beatty, ‘The Glory and the Nothing of a Name’, Byron Journal, 36:2 (2008), 91–104. 10

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(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, ll. 48–9). We may author but do not own our actions. They create us and are part of the way the larger world comes into being because all actions have consequences. We become our selves through them. We grow (‘gaining’, in Byron’s terms) as we make to grow. Authenticity means that there is no gap between self and action, self and projection, the one who does a thing himself and the growth which results from his doing. Authors may be hors de texte but only in the sense that gardeners are not the same as what they cause to grow. But what, then, of the gap between Byron and the Byronic hero? Aristotle noted that lyric poetry is in the author’s voice, dramatic poetry is in created voices, and epic poetry is a mixture of the two.12 If, as we have been instructed, authors do not author their texts, then these distinctions are meaningless. The vexed but intelligible issue of Byron’s relation to Harold, Conrad, Lara and Manfred suggests otherwise. In Byron’s case, we might distinguish between poems in his own projected voice, such as ‘The Dream’ (1817); poems which have a central character who seems other than Byron in some ways but a projection of him (such as the ‘Oriental Tales’); poems where he dramatises his self deliberately within a larger poem (as with the narrator of Don Juan (1819–1824)); and poems where a world is presented without any projection of the author (as in the dramas and some of the later ‘Tales’). All but the second of these (the Byronic hero) corresponds to Aristotle though we would probably elide the third of them more with Dante, Langland or Bunyan (dramatised as characters within their visionary fictions) than with Homer. The problem of authenticity attaches most to this second case and this, in turn, depends upon two contrary weightings in the word ‘projection’. The OED gives, for our purposes, three significantly different usages of the word. First, ‘projection’ is, etymologically, a throwing forward or a sending out like Pope’s ‘stand forth’ or Byron’s ‘break forth’.13 It is thus used of a relief in a picture to make a figure stand out in the same way that Byron talks of ‘Leucadia’s far-projecting rock’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II, l. 362).14 Later (by 1889, according to the OED), it is used for voice projection (a Latinate phrase for a literal throwing of voice forward) such as Byron must have used (he had, naturally, a soft voice) in his orations at Harrow or in the House of Lords.15 Projection here may involve Mimesis is accomplished ‘partly by narration and partly by the assumption of a character other than one’s own, which is Homer’s way; or by speaking in one’s own person without any such change; or by representing the characters as performing all the actions dramatically’: Aristotle, ‘On the Art of Poetry’, in Classic Literary Criticism, trans. T.S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 29–76 (p. 34). 13 See the etymology of ‘project, v.’ and ‘projection, n.’, and see also ‘projection’, 1.c. gen., OED. 14 See ‘projection’ 3.b., OED. 15 See ‘projection’ 5.b., OED. There are countless witnesses to the softness (‘gentle and beautifully modulated’) of what Mary Shelley called Byron’s ‘peculiar voice’: His Very Self and Voice: Collected Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell (New York: Macmillan, 1954), pp. 51, 326. 12

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enlargement or outlining, but it is conscious and authentically represents its source. Desdemona, for instance, was not stupid to fall in love with Othello’s projection of himself as himself.16 Secondly, projection derives from alchemy its meaning as transformation or transmutation: both Hazlitt and Southey use it in this sense for a moment of change.17 Thirdly, ‘projection’ has the sense, now most associated with Freud, of transferring unacknowledged desires to another so that they can be expressed but disavowed. The OED instances Emerson as the originator (around 1883) of this deceptive sense of projection: ‘The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see that it is only a projection of his own soul which he admires’.18 It looks as though the Byronic hero is an instance of such a deceptive projection and therefore that he embodies an inauthenticity in his author. Byron’s own declaration of surprise that anyone could mistake him for his heroes seems to confirm it.19 It is difficult, nevertheless, to see Byron’s dark heroes as simply an unconscious expression of hidden desires since he calls Lara ‘a thing of dark imaginings’. Byron can scarcely be unconscious that the poem is itself a thing of his own dark imaginings, just as Mr Jekyll understands only too well that ‘my evil […] was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde’.20 Jekyll talks specifically of his ‘power of projecting’.21 I think that we could talk of Byron knowingly projecting an inauthenticity in the Byronic hero which involves the reader, too, for they are complicit in what Jonathon Shears has recently called ‘reading against the grain’.22 It would be difficult secretly to admire Peter Grimes, but the Byronic Hero with his ‘one virtue, and a thousand crimes’ (The Corsair, Canto III, l. 696) was both admired and imitated because, even in his most horrible form (Azo in Parisina), he ‘Intently thought – intensely felt’ (Parisina (1816), l. 552). But he never intensely spoke until, suddenly, at exactly the same time as Byron 16 William Shakespeare, Othello, The Complete Works, ed. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1.3.127–68. 17 See ‘projection’ 1.a. and 1.b., OED: 1.b. cites as examples Hazlitt (1820), ‘Public opinion was in a state of projection’, and Southey (1828), ‘The golden opportunity is arrived, they have reached […] the moment of projection’. 18 See ‘projection’, 6.a., OED. 19 In his prefatory letter to Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, ‘it was in vain that I had asserted, and imagined, that I had drawn, a distinction between the author and the pilgrim [Harold]’: Complete Poetical Works, II, 122. 20 R.L. Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (London: Longmans, Green, 1886), p. 115. 21 Ibid., p. 123. 22 Jonathon Shears, The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). Shears did not originate the phrase, which is also the title of Terry Eagleton’s Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London: Verso, 1986), but his examination of it in relation to Byron’s reading of Milton (pp. 121–38) is particularly helpful.

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abandons Harold and conducts Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in his own voice, he endows a hero with speech, creates his first drama, and more or less invents the dramatic monologue.23 Manfred (1817) lies at the centre of Byron’s work because in it he creates both the later possibility of his neoclassical dramas which stand, as in Aristotle’s understanding, wholly apart from their author (Marino Faliero (1821), Sardanapalus (1821), and The Two Foscari (1821)), and, in Don Juan (1819– 1824), the possibility of a self who can write in Horatian idiom as well as Pope but who is separated from the silent actions of his hero. Through this narrator, Byron can demonstrate his fidelity to the unknowable, consistently shifting contradictions of human interiors like his and Pope’s mentor, Montaigne,24 and yet stand forth out of the old tradition which newly operates in him as an authentic self in the action of writing. Manfred is a place of projection in something of the sense that Dr Jekyll projects Mr Hyde, for Manfred is as much a projection of Byron as any of the heroes of his ‘Tales’, but the play is a place of projection in the alchemical sense of transformation too, for it is where Byron’s art changes into gold.25 We can pinpoint this moment of projection exactly. It occurs in Manfred’s last words: ‘Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die’ (3.4.151). Byron said that these were the most important words in the play.26 They are so because they have an authenticity which none of his previous words have had, for they wholly coincide with an action which lets his self go in the act of standing forth as one who acts, rather than as an actor. The whole of the magnificent rhodomontade which makes up Manfred leads to this final modulation into the speech-act of his tranquil consummation in which Manfred for the first time attains Shippen’s downrightness. The contrast with the death of Lara, who maintains his operatic style in a death that takes nearly one hundred lines, is telling.27 We are somewhere else. Cardinal Newman was as acutely aware of minute changes in his self as Montaigne, Pope or Byron’s Manfred, who notes an ‘inexplicable stillness!’ and 23 Byron’s dramatic monologues are ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ (1816) and ‘The Lament of Tasso’ (1817), with which the framed narrative monologue of ‘Mazeppa’ (1818) should be associated. 24 See, for instance, Don Juan, Canto XV, ll. 695–6. 25 I don’t mean to discount Byron’s writings before 1816 by this image but there is a significant change. 26 Gifford cut the line but Byron protested: ‘You have destroyed the whole effect and moral of the poem, by omitting the last line of Manfred’s speaking.’ See The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, ed. Leslie Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–1994), V, 254–7. 27 Lara, Canto II, ll. 414–99. The closest parallel to Lara’s death is the similarly defiant demise of the last Byronic hero, Fletcher Christian, in The Island (Canto IV, ll. 323–50) which is ironised precisely by not being the end of the poem or its point. Manfred’s death is the point of turn between the two, though it is often misread as though he remains in the posture of defiance of the Promethean rhetoric that precedes it.

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instantly seeks to write it down (Manfred, 3.1.7, and see 3.1.6–18). Newman has Manfred’s writing compulsion and Byron’s habit of projection, despite his lack of respect for either Byron or Pope.28 Like Byron, Newman’s speaking voice was quiet even though, unlike Byron, he did not raise it in public oratory.29 But it is impossible to read his The Tamworth Reading Room (1841) without catching a remarkably projected voice with a bite and adversarial finesse which recalls eighteenth-century satire.30 It was originally addressed in seven letters to the Editor of The Times and is thus a public act, much as Byron responded to Bowles’s editorial undermining of Pope by authorising the publication of his letters to Murray on the subject.31 It is a response to a speech of Robert Peel’s which Peel turned into a pamphlet. Newman comments that Peel’s speech thus becomes important ‘both from the name and express act of its author’.32 One ‘express act’ is answered by another, for the two essays dramatise the gap between two different and wholly opposed ways of understanding what it is that makes people act and what makes them good. From Newman’s point of view, Peel offers and understands only a pseudo-authenticity which glosses over (as politics tends to do) the connection between action and desired outcome, which can be governed by rhetoric, and ignores the relation between action, springs of conduct and real consequence, which cannot. Charles Kingsley detested what he thought to be Newman’s effeteness which threatened the muscularity of Protestant Christianity.33 But Newman’s trouncing of Kingsley in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), like his demolition of Peel, is just that: a combat in which Newman, not Peel or Kingsley, gains the Lonsdale belt. Newman, in his essay ‘Poetry with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, included in volume I of his Essays, Critical and Historical, 2 vols (London, 1871), patronises Pope as ‘a tasteful cabinet-maker’ (p. 25), praises Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (p. 17) and has acute comments on Manfred and the Tales. He dismisses Don Juan as an ‘immoral composition’ (p. 12), and declares that ‘Byron had very little versatility or elasticity of genius’ (p. 20). Interesting, though not immediately helpful to my whole argument, is his insistence that ‘there was right and fine feeling in the poet’s mind, but that the central and consistent character was wanting’ (p. 22). 29 ‘[H]is speech was quick and his voice was low, and though it had a strangely musical quality, there was nothing obviously oratorical’: Sheridan Gilley, Newman and His Age (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990), p. 125. 30 Newman aligns The Tamworth Reading Room with eighteenth-century satire by quoting Johnson’s Rasselas. See Newman: Prose and Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957), p. 84. 31 The various materials making up the Bowles controversy are gathered together in Lord Byron, The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 120–83. 32 Newman: Prose and Poetry, p. 75. 33 A. Dwight Culler, in his introduction to Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), quotes several witnesses to Newman’s ‘peculiarly feminine kind of charm’ (p. ix). See also Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. Donald Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 28

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He is the better pugilist. It is certainly true that there is a markedly feminine modality in Newman – as there is in Pope and Byron who are more interested in their Eloisas and Haidees than they are in their Abelards or Juans – but in all three writers there is exactly that fusion of masculine and feminine resource in their action of writing as ‘a softer Man’ (‘Epistle to a Lady’, l. 272) that Pope’s ‘Sporus’ (‘now Master up, now Miss’: ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, l. 324) forever lacked. This wholeness structures the vitality which is their authenticity. All three pick fights with established adversaries (courts, senior politicians, laureates) but call on their larger sensibility to assure victory. Thus Newman’s Apologia puts one model of authenticity (fidelity to one’s interior) at the service of another. He sallies forth from his interior castle to do right in a public place. Like Dickens, he wrote standing up, and it is from this standing position that he pours forth his mind and heart.34 Again, like Pope and Byron, Newman’s lucid sustaining of a single direction in writing goes hand in hand with an acknowledgement of the inherent contradictions of the human mind: we may surely take it for granted, from the experience of facts, that the human mind is at best in a very unformed or disordered state; passions and conscience, likings and reason, conflicting, – might rising against right, with the prospect of things getting worse.35

Like Pope’s ‘Chaos of Thought and Passion all confus’d’ (An Essay on Man, l. 13), Newman applies this analysis to himself: ‘For who can know himself, and the multitude of subtle influences which act upon him?’36 he asks in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, which succeeds more than most books in knowing both. This is because, as he says in The Tamworth Reading Room, ‘Life is for action’.37 Hence Newman distrusts the kind of introspection that terminates in the self. He complains in an early sermon that ‘in labouring after a certain frame of mind, there is an habitual reflex action of the mind upon itself’.38 Newman sees this as a modern secular preference which is, he argues, rooted in the Protestant understanding of justification by faith and the resultant preoccupation with conversion experience, whereas: ‘He who aims at attaining sound doctrine or right practice, more or less looks out of himself.’39 The Apologia traces the steps by which Newman moves from a Protestant to a Catholic position here but does so by emphasising that the change is not an alteration of roots but a gradual discovery of how the Church of England’s Protestantism which formed him retains, buried but still operative, something of its anterior grounding in Catholicism. It has authored Newman’s growth. His personal, private task of unravelling a single authentic thread of life despite and because of ‘the subtle 36 37 38 39 34

35

Newman ‘wrote standing at his desk’: Gilley, Newman and His Age, p. 329. Newman: Prose and Poetry, pp. 81–2. Newman, Apologia, p. 103. Newman: Prose and Poetry, p. 102. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid.

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influences’ brought to bear on it is identical to the public task of unravelling a single authentic thread in historical Christianity. In this way, Newman’s greatest single idea – that Christian doctrine can develop into new territory but remain identical with what has generated it, provided that it has never separated itself from its fecund source (expounded in his An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, published in the year of his conversion, 1845) – is partly the explanation for his ability to track his own authentic development in the Apologia 20 years later.40 Authenticity shows itself in growth and change which are always the fruit of the original root that retains its genetic identity in both invisible private person and visible Church. Aidan Nichols comments that ‘the logic of the Essay is a logic of metaphor’.41 That is to say, Newman seeks out authentic connections across difference. Pope, of course, was a lifelong Catholic, and thus a member of what Newman ironically called ‘a most unEnglish communion’42 outside the thrust of his own contemporary culture: he admired many Anglican bishops, versified the metaphysical views of his deist friend Bolingbroke, and shared Erasmus’s scorn for Mediaeval Catholicism.43 Byron’s background was Anglican strongly influenced by Calvinism, deeply sceptical but always religious in a sense, who came to admire Catholicism and deliberately had his illegitimate daughter brought up as a Catholic.44 Goethe cast him as Euphorion, child of Faust and Helen of Troy, in part II of his Faust (1832) because Byron seemed to synthesise both male and female but also Protestant North and Aphrodite’s South. The writings of all three figures can be ‘the express act’ of their authors because of the largeness of what they allow to operate through them, which remains large because they fully acknowledge but never seek to master it. Authenticity is a possible word for us to apply to their writings because each does a thing himself and yet, though both the doing and the self are theirs, nevertheless they acknowledge and proclaim their rootedness in a living history which is anterior to them and acts in them.45 We can say of them what Illtyd Trethowan said of Maurice Blondel: ‘thought is a function of life, springing from it, returning to it and leading 40 Newman, as Nicholas Lash, observes ‘did not have a “theory” of development’ as such, rather he discovered it as a fact for which he offers an explanation: Nicholas Lash, ‘Literature and Theory: Did Newman Have a “Theory” of Development?’, in Newman and Gladstone: Centennial Essays, ed. James D. Bastable (Dublin: Veritas, 1978), pp. 161–73 (p. 161). Newman himself called it ‘an hypothesis to account for a difficulty’: An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), p. 30. 41 Aidan Nichols, From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Doctrinal Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council (London: T & T Clark, 1990), p. 58. 42 Newman, Apologia, p. 14. 43 See The Dunciad, Book III, ll. 113–22. 44 ‘I often regretted’, he said on one occasion at Pisa, ‘that I was not born a Catholic’: His Very Self and Voice, ed. Lovell, p. 274. 45 It might be argued that most writers do this. Wordsworth, for instance, places himself in relation to Milton, and could not have written The Prelude if Akenside, Thomson and Cowper had not preceded him. But Wordsworth seeks to place and bypass the tradition of Dryden and Pope, renewed by Churchill and Gifford: he wishes to vet tradition before

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it on. […] What we might call a “living contradiction” is always breaking out and demanding to be solved’.46 Byron makes this the mainspring of Don Juan: ‘For if a writer should be quite consistent, / How could he possibly show things existent?’ (Canto XV, ll. 695–6). And Manfred’s diagnosis – ‘Half dust, half deity, / Alike unfit to sink or soar’ (1.2.40–41) – reiterates Pope’s anthropology: ‘Created half to rise and half to fall’ (An Essay on Man, l. 15). Newman wrote in a letter (21 May 1840) that ‘I am more and more convinced that the business of all of us is to be honest […] – and to leave the course of things to itself, or rather to higher guidance’.47 Honesty here is the property of Pope’s ‘downright Shippen’ but also of ‘old Montagne’ (Satire II, i, l. 52). It may entail, as it does with Montaigne’s essays, Byron in Don Juan or Proust in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913–1927), or Pope in the ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, what Froude described as Newman’s ‘elaborate art, which is the more striking the more frequently we peruse it’.48 This elaborate art will be honest in that it is loyal both to contradiction and to more than it can express – Newman’s ‘the course of things’ and ‘a higher guidance’, Byron’s ‘things existent’, Pope’s ‘WHATEVER IS’ (An Essay on Man, Epistle IV, l. 394) – and it is prepared to stand and be counted in a public place. There is thus a relationship between a preparedness to accept reliance on a known but partly unknown anterior and the ability to take risks. All three are plucky writers. They have David’s lightness of step which topples the potency of the passing Goliaths that strut in present armour. Here, for instance, is how Newman ends a letter (a section in the published work) which demolishes the house of cards confidently set up by Brougham and Peel, simply by quoting them and then adding a short query in a separate paragraph which suddenly zooms out of the present moment, like Hardy in The Dynasts (1904–1908), and gives an astronaut’s view of it: And again, Lord Brougham considers that ‘the pleasures of science tend not only to make our lives more agreeable, but better;’ and Sir Robert responds, that ‘he entertains the hope that there will be afforded of useful occupation and rational recreation; that men will prefer the pleasures of knowledge above the indulgence of sensual appetite, and that there is a prospect of contributing to the intellectual and moral improvement of the neighbourhood’. Can the nineteenth century produce no more robust and creative philosophy than this?49 it acts in him, whereas Pope and Byron, in practice and theory, and Newman in practice, simply receive a multiple tradition for which they are grateful, and in which they stand. 46 See Illtyd Trethowan’s introduction to Maurice Blondel, The Letter of Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995), p. 84, n. 1. 47 Newman: Prose and Poetry, p. 795. 48 J.A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects, series I–IV, 4 vols (London, 1867– 1883), II, 84. 49 Newman: Prose and Poetry, p. 90.

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A question mark eradicates an era. Pope’s ability to instate the world of Colley Cibber and Queen Caroline into an Aeneid sweep of dismissive history, or Byron’s ability to excoriate the Napoleonic and Regency world by relating it to larger historical, as well as to biblical and classical, perspectives has the same effortless assurance. But what, we may ask as we near a conclusion, does the implication of these vast perspectives have to do with authenticity? The question seems real enough, for that marker of authenticity – ‘doing a thing himself’ – does not imply any context for self or action. Nevertheless it is not surprising that the modern foregrounding of the word derives from Heidegger’s Sien und Zeit (1927) where he distinguishes between the authentic self grounded in the potentiality for Being inherent in acknowledgement of its own ‘thrownness’ and the inauthentic self which does not trouble itself with Being or with that larger trouble which is Angst.50 You could not find a larger metaphysical frame for the authentic self than that, and the placing becomes a foundational trope of existentialism.51 I doubt whether any of these teutonisms would be understood by Pope, Byron or Newman. But that the self is thrown into a world anterior to it – unknowable, mysterious, yet ever present in our energies and our relation with death – and that such a realisation is threatened by common cliché (Heidegger’s ‘public way in which things have been interpreted’52), which it must pluckily resist, and the association of this with conscience which calls us from inauthenticity to authenticity, is something they would all heartily agree with, and it is something to which the action of their writings testifies.53 All of them are moral writers.54 50 ‘What we are seeking is an authentic potentiality-for-Being of Dasein’: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). Heidegger contrasts this with the ‘they’ who rob Dasein of its capacity to choose and thus Dasein ‘ensnares itself in inauthenticity’ (p. 312). 51 Thus Lionel Trilling, in Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), takes for granted that authenticity, in comparison with sincerity, involves ‘a wider reference to the universe and man’s place in it’ (p. 12). 52 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 213. 53 See Being and Time, ‘The Existential-ontological Foundations of Conscience’, p. 315 et seq. Conscience ‘summons Dasein’s self from its lostness in the “they”’ (p. 319), so one might say that it enables someone to ‘do a thing himself’. But conscience for Heidegger is more linked with a certain kind of right consciousness rather than a certain kind of right action, as the latter is in the thought of Pope, Byron, and Newman. See for example the following: ‘This light and darkness in our chaos join’d / Who shall divide? The God within the mind’: Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle II, ll. 203–4; ‘Man’s conscience is the oracle of God’: Byron The Island, Canto I, l. 124; and ‘Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ’: Newman, ‘Letter to the Duke of Norfolk’, in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1885), II, 248. 54 In the Bowles Controversy material, Byron writes that ‘In my mind the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry – as the highest of all objects must be moral truth’ and declares Pope to be ‘the moral poet of all Civilisation’: Complete Miscellaneous Prose, pp. 143, 150. In Don Juan he writes: ‘And as my object is morality / (Whatever people say)’: Canto XII, ll. 683–4.

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Adorno attacked the notion of ‘authenticity’ as an ahistorical turning away from present socio-economic realities to mumbo-jumbo,55 but this is certainly not the case for our three writers who were acutely aware of the changing conditions of their time. Newman set out seven ‘notes’ to distinguish authentic from inauthentic developments of doctrine.56 I will list the seven notes of an authenticity that, as I have suggested here, all three writers would recognise and commend. They are not separable but they can be distinguished. These are: the acknowledgement of an anterior mysterious encompassing largeness; the acknowledgement of a tradition renewed in the act of speaking out of it; and taking a risk by doing so; acknowledging contradiction in behaviour and mind (‘honesty’); a tendency to personal and cultural synthesis (male and female,57 Protestant and Catholic, thought and feeling); the primacy of action in life and of performative action in writing; and an ethics of conscience. Each one of these needs more development than I have time or ability for. Together (and they stand or fall together) they constitute a model of authenticity significantly different from Keats’s ‘the authenticity of the imagination’ which he links with ‘the holiness of the Heart’s affections’.58 These belong to what Newman disparagingly called ‘the province of self’,59 for neither imagination nor affections imply action. Yet Trilling’s assumption that authenticity has wholly to do with the province of the self and nothing to do with action (‘one who does a thing himself’) is axiomatic. Pope, Byron and Newman stand in opposition to this as they stand equally in proleptic opposition to postmodernism’s blundering assumption that the acknowledgement of ineluctable contradictions in human consciousness is a recent discovery that disallows ethical or aesthetic discrimination and religious awareness. As Robert Pattison observes, ‘The modern world constructed by liberalism is, as Newman foresaw, a network of inferences without a beginning’.60 Alexander Pope, Lord Byron and Cardinal Newman author an authenticity that suggests otherwise. 55 Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 56 Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), pp. 169–444. 57 It is striking, for instance, that the honing of a (male?) adversarial voice in Byron and Newman is related to giving birth. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron’s writes: ‘Mix’d with thy spirit, blended with thy birth’ (Canto III, l. 53). Newman writes to W.G. Ward: ‘It is one of my sayings (so continually do I feel it) that the composition of a volume is like gestation and child-birth’: Newman: Prose and Poetry, p. 12. Tillotson likens Newman’s process of writing to that of Pope (Newman: Prose and Poetry, p. 13). 58 John Keats to Benjamin Bailey (22 Nov. 1817), Letters of John Keats, ed. Frederic Page (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 48. 59 Newman, Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), p. 330. 60 Robert Pattison, The Great Dissent: John Henry Newman and the Liberal Heresy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 179.

Chapter 6

Byron, Candour and the Fear of Lying Philip W. Martin

This essay examines the subjects of candour, poetry and lying in a selection of Byron’s later writings. I have chosen as the focus of my attention passages from Canto XIV of Don Juan (1823) because it appears to me that there are some interesting revisions undertaken there to the poem’s predominating statements about its relation to the world, and its claims – however playful – about truth and falsehood. Those statements tend to repeat in one form or another Byron’s factual aesthetic, an aesthetic manifesting in the repeated claims in the early cantos that the poet is simply reflecting back to us a world unadulterated by the charms of ‘poesy’ or affectation.1 Later in the poem Byron seeks to modify this model: it is not that he wishes to retract claims for ‘truth’ but that he makes the very question of truth in poetry both problematic and increasingly sophisticated. I think that this has been missed by most of Byron’s commentators. Further, I will suggest that the exploration of truth and falsity in Canto XIV owes its depth of consideration to Byron’s participation in the ‘Bowles controversy’ in which there are two dimensions: the notion of the truly poetic, and the attribution – or otherwise – of moral worth and integrity to poets and their editors and commentators. Finally, I should note that my approach here, as is fitting, follows those Byron critics whose insights derive from the nuanced study of Byron’s use of language.2

1 This is well-attested by many Byron critics. For an interesting and relatively recent discussion of Byron’s factual aesthetic in relation to sincerity, developing out of Vincent Newey’s work cited below, see Michael O’Neill, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 100–107. See also Andrew Nicholson, ‘Byron’s Prose’, in The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 186–91. 2 Principally, I am thinking here of Vincent Newey’s own work on Byron, a good example of which is ‘Authoring the Self: Childe Harold III and IV’ in Vincent Newey, Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), pp. 178–210, an exacting and illuminating reading of Byron’s poetry first published in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), pp. 148–90. Newey’s argument about Byron’s making of selfhood in the earlier poem notes that truth is something constituted in the here and now of writing, an observation that resonates in my exploration of Don Juan.

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‘Truth’ was a keyword for the Romantics, carrying an almost unbearable weight at times, as in Keats’s vatic claims for the imagination and beauty,3 or in Shelley’s pious assertions of poetry’s veracity,4 or even Blake’s staunch denials of truth in his marginalia and other writings.5 Next to these heavily freighted and sententious declarations, Byron’s pronouncements on the subject might seem deceptively slight or even hackneyed. The famous passage at the end of Canto XIV in Don Juan which ponders the relation between truth and fiction provides an example: ’Tis strange – but true; for Truth is always strange, Stranger than Fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!6

The ease with which this has been appropriated and rendered a cliché disguises the complexity inherent within Byron’s neat reversal, a complexity which consists fundamentally of a sustained conceit. It is untrue (in the terms of common sense) to assert that ‘truth is always strange’, and therefore we know that this is metaphorical, not literal or ‘truthful’ in that crude sense. Even so, the possibility that truth is ‘always strange / Stranger than fiction’ proposes that fiction’s strangeness – its absurdity or its uncanny shadowing of the known world – is ironically short of its mimetic goal. Truth will always eerily outrun its imitation: it turns out to be more uncanny than that medium which aspires to catch it in its magical spell. And if this is not complicated enough, the poem goes on to add another layer in the notion that even if this elusive quality of truth could be captured or rendered (‘told’) then fiction would profit greatly by the ‘exchange’, suggesting that the thing which fiction has gained is something simultaneously lost by the world. Therefore, in this fine conceit, the truth is always stranger than fiction imagines, but if fiction were to gain the capacity to render this strangeness, then the world, or truth, would lose it: fiction could only reference a truth implicit in its own strangeness, which is then necessarily remote from the truth of the known world. That is one implication: another is that this capturing of quiddity, this hypothetically fine but impossible perception, would transform how the world is seen. For example, ‘What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth’: John Keats to Benjamin Bailey (22 Nov. 1817), The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), I, 184. 4 For example, ‘Poetry is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth’: Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 674–701 (p. 679). 5 For example, ‘A Lie!’, ‘Is not this a Manifest Lie?’, ‘This is False’, ‘True!’: William Blake, Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 448, 451, 454, 456. 6 Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIV, 101; The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). All quotations from Don Juan are taken from this edition. Canto and stanza numbers follow in brackets. 3

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This is not an atypical passage – even though it is a particularly complex example – in a poem which continually plays, in unresolving and unresolved ways, upon the notion of fictional truth and authenticity, from the early and selfconsciously impertinent claim in the first Canto that this poem is a better epic than those of Virgil and Homer (‘They so embellish that ’tis quite a bore’) because it is ‘actually true’ (I, 202). And critics have willingly attested to the ‘truth’, authenticity or sincerity of Don Juan, by noting what we could imperfectly cite here in shorthand as its ‘realism’: its unflinching recognition of the horrors of warfare, cannibalism or, more mundanely, human weakness (the poem’s antiheroic qualities). Be that as it may – and indeed it is an argument unexceptional in its way – Byron’s exploration of truth and falsity in Don Juan is a more capacious, extended and subtle journey than this simple assertion of the authentic can denote. One way into understanding this is to look beyond assertions of truthfulness, which might incidentally risk returning Byron to unprofitable comparison with his more sententious fellow Romantics, and look instead at what the poem has to say about untruth, a reluctance to tell the truth, and lying.7 Canto XIV is particularly rich in this regard, for one of its motifs is the fear of lying. This is a motif lightly engaged – as is to be expected of this poem, of course – but its effects are frequently as intricate as the witty reversal of truth and fiction, and equally often, they derive from the play on artifice and fact. This Canto can be read as a sustained exploration of the relations between truth, fiction and falsehood, as Byron revisits the question of his poem’s relation to the world so evident in the early cantos. There, his aesthetic was boldly asserted as an uncompromising assertion of the grotesque as a way of describing the horrors of war and desperation. Here, there is a new, and not entirely confident, aesthetic emerging in the context of the self-conscious search for an appropriate satiric mode capable of describing English high society, the new topic engaged in the poem’s final cantos. The Canto’s famous finale in which truth is mooted as stranger than fiction has a strong precedent some 20 stanzas earlier:

For a discussion of Byron, truth and sincerity, see Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Christensen opens with a succinct summary of the cultural significance of the espousal of Byron as a poet of sincerity and strength (by Arnold and Swinburne), noting the persistence of this view up until Lionel Trilling’s intervention in Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). Christensen (following Alasdair McIntyre) also asserts that ‘The Romantic poet is after virtue, not after truth’ (p. xix), and he develops this in a sophisticated reading of Byron’s ‘strength’ that tends to fortify the established (and pretty much incontrovertible) view of Byron as sceptic. The problem with this view is that it tends to overshadow Byron’s interest in exploring the relations of ‘truth’ to fact and fiction. Byron may not be ‘after truth’, but as I show in the following discussion, he may be after its virtue (and he is certainly after the virtue of Pope) as a means of aggressively assaulting what he identified as the cant of the day. 7

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Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900 I do declare, upon an affidavit, Romances I ne’er read like those I have seen; Nor, if unto the world I ever gave it, Would some believe that such a tale had been: But such intent I never had nor have it; Some truths are better kept behind a screen, Especially when they would look like lies; I therefore deal in generalities. (XIV, 80)

That life exceeds fiction is not simply a notion here, it is – despite the multiple ironies – asserted as a sworn truth. Further, if this truth were told, it would not be deemed credible: it is therefore preferable to obscure the truth (rather than be deemed a liar) and relate the tale in the most general terms. The implication is that the poem will screen rather than reveal the truth, and that this act of obfuscation comprises the dilution of detail into ‘generalities’. Byron does nothing if he does not play with his audience, and the game here is one which ultimately places that incredulous audience beyond the truth that Byron knows, that which he has actually witnessed. Because they do not share that witness, they cannot believe it: the poem cannot bridge the gap. Truth – the sketching of the world exactly as it goes, for so long the mantra of Don Juan – is surrendered here as a hopeless project, precisely because Byron states, even as an ironic pretence, that it would look like a lie. Although there is an irony here, there is little evidence to suggest that it works to imply an opposite. On the contrary, here and throughout this Canto, the veiled truth that Byron evokes in such passages is not necessarily wild or extravagant. Another implication, continuously played upon, is that it is mundane. Here, for example, the romances which we might imagine to be particularly exotic are described in the previous stanza as ‘reduced to practice and performed like dances’ (XIV, 79). ‘High life’, he states in the same stanza, ‘is oft a dreary void’. The truth that is stranger than fiction here is, quite simply, dull. Up until Canto XIV, the stock move of Don Juan, indulged with an irony that never completely undermines the assertion, is that facts are the raw material of this new form of poetry. The poem’s confrontation of a brutal and uncompromising world in the epic episodes is therefore oddly complemented by an empty, meaningless charade in the scenes of society. Such are Don Juan’s facts, and they are presented frequently in contradistinction to the preferences of other poets, most obviously those of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Yet Byron’s commonsensical world, promoted against those that are nominated as quaint, ‘mouthy’ or simply mad, is never quite as commonsensical as it seems. Facts are offered as virtuous and right, but then simultaneously withdrawn: Besides, my Muse by no means deals in fiction: She gathers a repertory of facts, Of course with some reserve and slight restriction, But mostly sings of human things and acts – And that’s one cause she meets with contradiction;

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For too much truth, at first sight, ne’er attracts; And were her object only what’s call’d glory, With more ease too she’d tell a different story. (XIV, 13)

What is at stake here in this part of the poem is Byron’s consideration of how to describe the high society he left behind in England. The poem’s subject in its latter stages seemingly requires a shift towards a more traditional form of social satire, and the adoption of this mode – as these quoted stanzas exemplify – is anxious about the fact that there may be nothing much to say or describe. Of this new world, Byron observes in stanza 15, there are no recent descriptions, and this, he admits, might be due to the fact that there is no variety here. The narrator observes ‘A dull and family likeness through all ages, / Of no great promise for poetic pages’ (XIV, 15), and then later confesses that ‘the real portrait of the highest tribe’ is likely to fail because ‘there’s little to describe’ (XIV, 20).8 Facts and truth, therefore, are not quite right: ‘too much truth’ here will not do, and the implication is that first the subject is not sufficiently poetic, and then – more subtly perhaps – that it is not appropriate to be revealed. Unusually, given what we have witnessed in the poem, Byron’s muse is in partial retreat, gathering a repertory of facts but ‘with some reserve and slight restriction’. The aesthetic of worldly truth backs off in this passage, which implies that truth, and therefore lying, are not absolutes but are on a relational scale, possibly a remarkable compromise for a poem which has, by and large, extolled the virtue of confronting the truth, or the world, bluntly, and without regard for niceties. In the subsequent stanzas of this Canto, the narrator repeatedly toys with how the poem will, or will not, engage with truth. Stanza 21 cleverly and ironically obscures what might be revealed and suggests that it is not for vulgar eyes. Here, Byron airily reverts to aristocratic type, while simultaneously suggesting that the truth cannot be told: it is first shrouded in Latin (thereby quite possibly – and pointedly – excluding women and some other readers), and then he hints of a personal motive in veiling the subject ‘For reasons which I choose to keep apart’ (XIV, 21). Much the same game is played in stanza 42, in the hesitation which interrupts the description of the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke: She was a fine and somewhat full-blown blonde, Desirable, distinguish’d, celebrated For several winters in the grand, grand Monde. I’d rather not say what might be related Of her exploits, for this were ticklish ground; Besides there might be falsehood in what’s stated. (XIV, 42)

It is another reversal around the notion of falsehood. At one level Byron is playing the coy narrator, embarrassed by the possibility of scandal and wary of making While Byron asserts the absence of recent descriptions, Jane Stabler has convincingly demonstrated that newspaper accounts, particularly those in Galignani’s Messenger, were a fertile source for Byron’s description of contemporary London society; see Byron, Poetics and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 136–47. 8

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libellous remarks. At another he is reiterating the fear of lying: the poem’s imperfect relation to the world might lead to its being untruthful. The nature of this ironic twist has further semantic implications, for of course by declining to say ‘what might be related’ the poem successfully, if vaguely, implies what this might be. This strong hint, the implication that the reader might imagine the exploits of the Duchess, is another example of one of Don Juan’s most characteristic moves: the suggestion that the reader must assume the role of arbitrator and judge what is right or wrong, or as here, true or false. The move is repeated in stanza 90, where, after discussing the different interpretations of the human quality of firmness as steadfastness or obstinacy, the poem tosses the question out to the readership, denying the poem’s responsibility to locate truth, and suggesting that the concept itself might be a sophistry: Had Bonaparte won at Waterloo, It had been firmness; now ’tis pertinacity: Must the event decide between the two? I leave it to your people of sagacity To draw the line between the false and true, If such can e’er be drawn by man’s capacity. (XIV, 90)

The wisdom that can identify truth in the interpretation of events is cleverly displaced here. The assumed scepticism will not admit it within the poem’s precincts, but suggests that only ‘your people of sagacity’ – a pointed ostracising there in the second person – might delusively decide upon it. Truth in Don Juan is often used to underpin the poem’s new aesthetic, which consists of an avoidance of cant and a confrontation of the ugly, the grotesque, the vicious and the hypocritical. This truth is set at variance with the rarefied truths of philosophy or metaphysics, Lakist or otherwise. Don Juan’s truth is antithetical in these ways and Byron sometimes uses the term to remind us of the difference between his poetry and that of Wordsworth, Coleridge or Southey. It is when he invokes falsehood alongside truth, or withheld knowledge alongside revealed knowledge, that things become more interesting, that the interchange between the concepts generate complex oppositions in witty poetical conceits. The poem does not seek to resolve these conflicts; perhaps it even seeks to perpetuate them. It is possible that the circumlocutions in Canto XIV are a consequence of Byron’s deeply serious deliberations on truth, circumstance and poetry in his famous letters on Bowles’s Pope (1821).9 This might reasonably account for the ways in which the Canto revises the poem’s earlier statements about poetry, truth and fact in the 9 Byron, Letter to [John Murray] Esqre, on the Rev. W.L. Bowles’s Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope (London, 1821). Byron wrote a second letter, Observations upon ‘Observations.’ A Second Letter to John Murray, Esq., on the Rev. W.L. Bowles’s Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope, dated 25 March 1821, not published until 1832 when it appeared in The Works of Lord Byron, ed. Thomas Moore, 17 vols (London, 1832–1833),

VI, 382–416.

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context of personal scandal, since that is what is at the heart of Byron’s defence of Pope’s character. Byron entered what has become known as the Pope-Bowles controversy in 1821, some two years after Bowles’s riposte to Thomas Campbell’s remarks in the ‘Essay on English Poetry’ which prefaced his seven-volume edition, Specimens of the British Poets (1819). The controversy originated in comments that Bowles had made about Pope in his 1806 edition of the poet’s work. It was sparked off by Bowles in 1819 when he took exception to Campbell’s prefatory essay, in which Campbell vigorously contested Bowles’s view that ‘Pope’s images are drawn from art more than from nature’.10 This is at the centre of the argument in Bowles’s reply of the same year.11 When Byron enters the controversy in 1821, however, he engages not only with the argument about nature and artifice, but also with that around Pope’s moral character, thereby reviving the focus of his attack on Bowles included in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). Bowles’s edition of Pope (1806) had criticised what he chose to represent as Pope’s sexual licentiousness, and this incurred Byron’s satiric response, a response which echoes that made by Campbell, not in his prefatory essay (as is sometimes supposed), but in the headnote to his anthologised extracts from Pope. Bowles’s response to Campbell ignores the dimension of sexual impropriety, and it is in Byron’s intervention that Campbell’s secondary quarrel with Bowles is revived.12 The nature of Byron’s interest here is particularly relevant to my consideration of sincerity, truth and falsehood, for the revival of his earlier attack on Bowles in English Bards in his first letter turns, as before but now with increased elaboration, on the semantics of the word ‘candid’: I must call things by their right names. I cannot call his edition of Pope a ‘candid’ work; and I still think there is an affectation of that quality not only in those volumes, but in the pamphlets lately published […] Mr B. says that he ‘has seen passages in his letters to Martha Blount which were never published by me, and I hope never will be by others; which are so gross as to imply the grossest licentiousness.’ Is this fair play?13

The affectation of candour was precisely Byron’s target in English Bards: Thomas Campbell, ‘An Essay on English Poetry’, Specimens of the British Poets, 7 vols (London, 1819), I, 1–272 (p. 262). 11 William Bowles, The Invariable Principles of Poetry, in a Letter Addressed to Thomas Campbell, Esq., Occasioned By Some Critical Observations in His ‘Specimens of British Poetry,’ Particularly Relating to the Poetical Character of Pope (London, 1819). 12 Jane Stabler’s work on Byron’s interests in Pope at this time is particularly relevant here, offering an illuminating contextual understanding of the Bowles controversy through the uncovering of previously unpublished correspondence between Murray and Byron, in which Murray urges the need for a revival of satire in the Augustan mode for the purposes of literary conservatism; see Byron, Poetics and History, pp. 73–105. 13 Byron, The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, 6 vols (London, 1898–1901), V, 536. 10

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Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900 Rake from each ancient dunghill ev’ry pearl, Consult Lord Fanny, and confide in CURLL; Let all the scandals of a former age, Perch on thy pen and flutter o’er thy page Affect a candour which thou can’st not feel, Clothe envy in a garb of honest zeal.14

For Byron, insincerity is not ‘fair play’: Bowles has it both ways by referring to scandalous evidence but claiming he is too honourable to reproduce it. To ‘Clothe envy in a garb of honest zeal’ is Byron’s early condemnation of hypocrisy, a precedent for the famous tirade on cant in the Bowles controversy that places an emphasis on the gross dishonesty of the honest façade. Bearing this in mind, it is feasible to assert that the complex equivocation – even the hesitant embarrassment – around the revelation of scandal in Don Juan, Canto XIV is haunted by Bowles’s affectation of honour, which serves as a witness to scandal while concurrently laying claim to a degree of delicacy that forbids the disclosure of evidence. The letters to Murray on Bowles’s Pope are not solely about cant, although the power of Byron’s splendid rhetorical attack is sufficiently compelling to overshadow the aesthetic discussion. It is important that the strenuous argument about the category of the poetic is not thus eclipsed because, albeit obliquely, it forms a fundamental part of Byron’s understanding of truth, or more correctly, truth in poetry, and indeed it is with the subjects of truth and falsehood that the first of Byron’s letters in the Bowles controversy ends. The argument focuses on Bowles’s insistence that natural objects are more intrinsically poetic than objects made by humankind, either decorative or practical in nature. It is an argument that derives, perhaps, from eighteenth-century notions of the sublime, combining with a version of romantic primitivism. Byron vigorously contests this assumption through numerous examples of the poetic quality inhering in the various forms of art and artifice, before contesting – as an intrinsic part of the refutation of the natural realm’s innate superiority as a poetic subject – Bowles’s endorsement of the classifications of poetry into orders or genres. Here, Byron reminds Bowles that if he ‘will contend for classifications of this kind, let him recollect that descriptive poetry has been ranked as among the lowest branches of the art, and description as a mere ornament’.15 Yet Byron’s main purpose is not to argue the niceties of the ordering of poetry by such classifications, but to stress two things: first, that execution is the prime criterion of great poetry, regardless of the genre, and then to explain how Bowles has mistakenly relegated satiric or moral poetry to a lower order: The depreciation of Pope is partly founded upon a false idea of the dignity of his order of poetry, to which he has partly contributed by the ingenious boast, ‘That not in fancy’s maze he wandered long, 14 Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, ll. 371–6; The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–1993), I, 240. 15 Byron, The Works of Lord Byron, V, 553.

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But stooped to Truth, and moralised his song.’ He should have written ‘rose to truth.’ In my mind the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly subjects must be moral truth.16

The use of Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735) is particularly pertinent, given that poem’s strong ethic of truth, expressed more amply in a slightly longer quotation than Byron offers: That Flatt’ry, ev’n to Kings, he held a shame, And thought a Lye in Verse or Prose the same: That not in Fancy’s Maze he wander’d long, But stoop’d to Truth, and moraliz’d his song: That not for Fame, but Virtue’s better end, He stood the furious Foe, the timid Friend.17

Pope’s poem is a powerful defence of Horace’s virtuous man, of a life untainted by dishonesty, and governed by truth, ‘the Language of the Heart’.18 It is this which draws Byron’s deepest admiration: Pope’s moral, he asserts in the letter, ‘is as pure as his poetry is glorious’.19 Byron’s first letter in the Bowles controversy is a startlingly resonant assertion of a moral aesthetic based on truth. His anger and frustration at the diminishing of Pope’s achievement by contemporary critics is sharpened by what he sees as a modish and delusory admiration of imagination.20 The letter contains one of his most excoriating attacks on what he sees as the decline of poetry in his time, of which, he claims, the denunciation of Pope is a prime indicator: I look upon this as the declining age of English poetry; no regard for others, no selfish feeling, can prevent me from seeing this, and expressing the truth. There can be no worse sign for the taste of the times than the depreciation of Pope. … If the essence of poetry must be a lie, throw it to the dogs, or banish it from your republic, as Plato would have done. He who can reconcile poetry with truth and wisdom, is the only true ‘poet’ in its real sense, ‘the maker,’ ‘the creator’ – why must this mean the ‘liar,’ the ‘feigner,’ the ‘tale teller’? A man may make and create better things than these.21

Ibid., p. 554. Alexander Pope, Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, ll. 338–43; The Poems of Alexander

16 17

Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1968), pp. 608–9. 18 Ibid., l. 399. 19 Byron, The Works of Lord Byron, V, 548. 20 ‘It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call “imagination” and “invention,” the two commonest of qualities: an Irish peasant with a little whisky in his head will imagine and invent more than would furnish forth a modern poem’; ibid., p. 554. 21 Ibid., pp. 559–60.

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In the letter, Byron makes it clear that he does not regard himself, to date, as a great poet of truth fighting the tide of degeneration. Far from it, he characterises his own work as contributing to this degeneration.22 How are we to read Byron’s letter to Murray on Bowles alongside Don Juan? It seems right to be cautious about an insistence on consistency, and to avoid a monologic solution that would provide us with a Byron defined by a single point of view, but at the same time, it is the case that the poem’s later ruminations on truth, falsehood and poetry are not inconsistent with the bold statements on truth and candour in the Letter. True, there is no neat coincidence here, but there may be a relationship in which the moral conviction of Byron’s defence of Pope resonates into the poem and metamorphoses there into more hesitant and cautious animadversions about facts, speculation (specifically around scandal) and poetry. This does not represent a departure for Don Juan so much as an inflection of its concerns, an emphasising of its antithetical relation to what Byron saw as the cant of the day, as evident in the unfairness of Bowles’s condemnation of Pope and his fallacious theory of the poetic as in his contemporaries’ espousal of imagination and metaphysics as the means of truth. The factual aesthetic of Don Juan, therefore, is not foresworn, but it is somewhat muted into a more complex, more resigned consideration of fiction’s limited possibilities. Canto XV opens with a meditation on life and fiction which recalls the crescendo of Byron’s defence of the ‘true poet’ in the Letter, not triumphantly, but resignedly: But all are better than the sigh supprest, Corroding in the cavern of the heart, Making the countenance a mask of rest, And turning human nature to an art. Few men dare show their thoughts of worst or best; Dissimulation always sets apart A corner for herself; and therefore Fiction Is that which passes with least contradiction. (XV, 3)

A modest, even cynical, claim for fiction is all that is ventured: fiction is that which can be easily believed, that which poses no paradox in life or art. The common mode of fiction is facility, Byron suggests, and behind this we might discern the echo of ‘A man may make and create better things than these’. The powerful anxiety of influence in Byron’s admiration for Pope produces a tremendous moral energy in the letters on Bowles’s Pope, but this energy cannot find its way into Don Juan directly: the mode of the poem, inevitably, prohibits that. Instead, the poem makes tentative manoeuvres around what it can say about the contemporary world and what it cannot, defamiliarises truth in strangeness and intensifies the ambivalence around poetry’s claims for authenticity.

22 On Byron, Murray, and the defence of taste, see Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History, pp. 82, 90.

Chapter 7

A ‘Gorgeous Fabric’: Authentic Images of India and the Orient in the Works of British Romantic Women Poets A.R. Kidwai

The tales these eastern writers feign Like facts to me appear.1

In representing, one is liable to err. This human limitation applies to writers of every region, religion and era. It is not therefore surprising to note that the history of Western literary Orientalism2 is shot through, in large measure, with religious and cultural prejudices, as well as what might be termed inauthenticities. As the quotation above indicates, when it comes to the Orient and its literary representation – as well as its reception – it could be difficult to distinguish between what is ‘feigned’ and what is ‘fact’: what is imaginary and exaggerated, and what is accurate and authentic. Ann Candler, who wrote the poem from which these lines are taken, ‘Reflections on My Own Situation, Written in Tattingstone House of Industry’ (1803), evidently turned to the ‘tales’ of ‘eastern writers’ to escape from the hard ‘facts’ of a harsh life in a workhouse for the poor, with their exotic stories of magic powers and enchanted towers set in faraway lands of the East. Such tales are valued precisely because they are fantastical rather than factual: audacious rather than authentic. The other women poets with whom this essay is concerned, however, are not just readers of ‘eastern’ tales, but writers of them. The aim of this essay is to address some of the works of Romantic women poets and their versions of the Orient – whether encountered through lived experience or through the literary imagination, or both – and to consider their perceptions, including their occasional misperceptions, of the Orient. How these writers strive to convey an 1 Ann Candler, ‘Reflections on My Own Situation, Written in Tattingstone House of Industry’, ll. 73–4; in British Women Poets of the Romanic Era: An Anthology, ed. Paula R. Feldman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 184. 2 Here, ‘Western literary Orientalism’ means Westerners’ representations of the Orient in literature down the ages. In discourse on Orientalism, the Orient is much more than a neutral geographical term, indicating the part of the world to the east of the Mediterranean, and stretching through Asia, mainly Arabia, Persia, and Turkey, China, Japan, India and North Africa.

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authenticity when writing about India and the Orient, and how this authenticity comes under strain when having to negotiate the conventions that often go with literary representations of the Orient, is what this essay will explore. To what extent the ‘gorgeous fabric’3 of their poetry offers an authentic reflection of an Orient, which is typically seen, in itself, as a ‘gorgeous fabric’ – opulent, exotic, sensual, rich and therefore ripe for imaginative exploitation – is what this essay will assess. It is important to realize from the outset that literary Orientalism, albeit largely unacknowledged, has consistently been part of English literary history, from twelfth-century Romances to the literary productions of our time.4 Literary Orientalism developed in a particularly prominent way during the Romantic period, however, and it is useful to place any study of Romantic women poets in the broader perspective offered by this context before addressing their works in more detail. Prior to the gradual British annexation of India in the later half of eighteenth century, for instance, the Orient had been largely peripheral to British experience, and so prior to this point it spelled, at best, merely exoticism as a land of luxury: an image confirmed by the reception of the Arabian Nights, which gained much popularity in England from the early eighteenth century onwards.5 3 Emma Roberts, ‘The Taaje Mahal’, l. 89; Oriental Scenes, Dramatic Sketches and Tales, with Other Poems (Calcutta: Norman Grant, 1830), p. 13. 4 Notable practitioners of literary Orientalism include: Addison, Arnold, Beckford, Butler, Byron, Chaucer, Coleridge, Conrad, Dryden, Eliot, Forster, Goldsmith, Hunt, Johnson, Kipling, Marlowe, Massinger, Moore, Scott, Shakespeare, Shelley, Southey, Tennyson, Yeats and, more recently, Doris Lessing. The following studies give a fair idea of the contours of literary Orientalism: Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937); Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); A.R. Kidwai, Literary Orientalism: A Companion (New Delhi: Viva, 2009); Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991); Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Naji B. Oueijan, The Progress of an Image: The East in English Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1996); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994); Byron P. Smith, Islam in English Literature (New York: Caravan, 1977); John Victor Tolan, Sons of Ishmael: Muslims Through European Eyes (New York: University Press of Florida, 2008); Louis Taylor Wann, ‘The Oriental in Elizabethan Drama’, Modern Philology, 12 (1915), 163–87; J.D. Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America: A 200-Year History (New York: Caravan, 1977). 5 On the reception of the Arabian Nights in the West, see Muhsin J. Ali, Scheherazade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-Century English Criticism of the Arabian Nights (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1981); Sheila G. Shaw, ‘Early English Editions of the Arabian Nights’, Muslim World, 49 (1959), 232–8; Peter Caracciolo, The Arabian Nights in English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1988); ‘The Arabian Nights in Modern Anglo-American Culture’, BRISMES Bulletin, 14:2 (1988), 61–70; Mia I. Gerhardt, The Art of Story Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights (Leiden: Brill, 1963).

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In this sense, the translation of literary Oriental texts did not leave such a marked imprint on British literary culture as the discovery of classical humanist texts had in the Renaissance period. This is hardly surprising: during the Renaissance, the Orient existed too far removed from Britain’s intellectual and religious domains, as well as from its sociopolitical realities and concerns. During the eighteenth century, however, increasing British involvement and rule in India, with its concomitant political, administrative and religious ramifications, compelled British public figures, writers included, to engage seriously with new situations, challenges and issues. It is therefore not surprising to note the varied reflections of this engagement in Romantic writings. Indeed, one could argue that the British expansion eastwards lies at the very heart of Romantic discourse.6 As a consequence, literary Orientalism in the Romantic period – as reflected in the works of Southey, Wordsworth, Byron, Moore, Hunt, Shelley and Coleridge – represents a significant advance in both the range and quality of attention to, and use of, Oriental material. In literary terms, the Orient is no longer tethered to narrow religious and theological concerns, as it was in pre-Romantic periods. Far from being merely exotic, or employed simply as a pretext for moralizing or satirizing, Romantic writing often reflects a genuine interest in the Orient, which is articulated creatively and imaginatively – even, authentically. Writers of the Romantic period appear on sure grounds about their knowledge of the Orient, partly owing to the availability of a larger body of authentic writings documenting life in places like India, and partly because of greater and easier, firsthand access to the Orient. This is especially true, for example, of Southey, Byron and Moore. Let us turn our attention, however, to some women poets of the period and to their Romantic engagement with these more authentic, but rarely less gorgeous, Oriental encounters. *** Of all the poets under discussion in this essay, Emma Roberts (1794–1840) deserves particular attention on several counts, of which the following are noteworthy: first, her visit to India, with her married sister and brother-in-law, at the age of 32 years, and secondly, her four years’ stay in various parts of India, culminating in the production of five volumes on Oriental and Indian tales, landscape and travel. She also contributed a very large number of articles on the Orient to periodicals in both England and India. Her second visit to India, in 1839, ended with her death there in See in particular the following works: Marilyn Butler, ‘Byron and the Empire in the East’, in Byron: Augustan and Romantic, ed. Andrew Rutherford (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), pp. 63–81, and ‘Plotting the Revolution: The Political Narratives of Romantic Poetry and Criticism’, in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 133–57; Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East; Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, trans. G. Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 6

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1840: her grave in the Indian city of Pune is a testament to her abiding interest in that land.7 As for her perception of the Orient, this is reflected sharply in several of her poems – ‘A Scene in the Dooab’, ‘The Bramin’, ‘The Taaje Mahal’, ‘The Dying Hindoo’, ‘The Rajah’s Obsequies’, ‘The Moosulman’s Grave’, ‘Nour Juffeir Khan’, ‘Night on the Ganges’ and ‘Stanzas Written on the Banks of the Ganges’8 – all of which demonstrate her observant nature and her flair for grasping and assimilating the local material. ‘Night on the Ganges’, for example, is soaked in deep serenity, sanctity and tranquility, which seems to underscore Roberts’s sensitivity to the local Hindu belief in the holiness of the river Ganges. The opening line can be taken as illustrative of her sensibility in this respect: ‘How calm, how lovely is the soft repose’ (l. 1). More remarkable and empathetic is her personification of the river as a mother. So doing, she, once again, rightly captures and articulates an authentic local Hindu belief. The currents of the Ganges are described as ‘lulling’ (l. 3) and her ‘breast’ (l. 39) offers a comforting site of ‘rest’ (l. 37) for the sinking ‘sun’ (l. 37) and for ‘the evening’s soft and tender shadows’ (l. 38). Roberts’s eye for interlacing her work with the local content and context is likewise reflected by her allusions to the ‘bulbul’s notes’ (l. 13), ‘the glossy peepul’ (l. 26) and ‘the broad-leaved lotus’ (l. 35). The setting is unmistakably – one might say, authentically – Oriental. Furthermore, her reference to the ‘bulbul’ (l. 13: a Persian word used in India for the nightingale) and to her melodious song reinforces the idyllic ambience of the night on the Ganges. The calmness of the night is accentuated by the whole landscape: the holy river and the equally sacred lotus flowers and peepul (banyan) tree, punctuated with the rapturous songs of the nightingale. Roberts’s association of religion with music and melody is breathtaking. She encapsulates the whole sacred range of nature, as revered by the local Indians. Equally startling, though, is her acute perception of the diversity of faith in India. Notwithstanding her engagement with paying a glowing tribute to the glory and beauty of the Ganges, idolized by Hindus, she also points to the reflection of ‘Mosques, pinnacled minarets and marble-domed pagodas’ (l. 8) on ‘her silvery surface’ (l. 6). However, Roberts appears to be following one of the key conventions of literary Orientalism in stressing the opulence of India in ‘Night on the Ganges’. This convention has its origins, of course, in John Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’ (1633) and Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (1681), in their respective allusions to ‘both the Indias of spice and mine’ (l. 17) and

7 On India and the Orient, Emma Roberts wrote: Oriental Scenes, Dramatic Sketches and Tales, with other Poems (Calcutta: Norman Grant, 1830); Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan, with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society, 2 vols (London: W.H. Allen, 1837); The East India Voyager, or Ten Minutes Advice to the Outward Bound (London: J. Madden, 1845); Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay (1841) (Charleston, SC: Bibliolife, 2008); Hindostan: Its Landscapes, Palaces, Temples, Tombs; […] and the Scenery of the Himalaya Mountains […] (1850) (London: British Library, 2010). 8 Roberts, Oriental Scenes, Dramatic Sketches and Tales, with Other Poems.

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‘Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side / Shouldst rubies find’ (ll. 5–6).9 Roberts’s poem abounds in the images which reinforce the exotic, fabulous and luxurious lifestyle of the Orient, as for example, ‘the ingot gems of heaven’ (l. 7), ‘perfume’ (l. 13), ‘silvery surface’ (l. 6), ‘balmy clime’ (l. 14), ‘resplendent beauty’ (l. 17), treasures of gleaming mines’ (l. 19), ‘diamond pomp’ (l. 24) and ‘sparkling stream’ (l. 24). Roberts’s ‘Stanzas Written on the Banks of the Ganges’ reiterates some of her observations already made in ‘Night on the Ganges’. However, her description of India’s exoticism and opulence tends to be much more pronounced in ‘Stanzas’, as she extols the ‘Ganges’ regal stream’ (l. 1), ‘the sun’s bright splendours’ (l. 2), the gorgeous ‘noon-tide’ (l. 3), ‘the forest bowers, exhaling their rich perfume’ (ll. 27–8), ‘the lotus’ (l. 33) on the ‘broad lake’ (l. 34), ‘stately palaces’ (l. 35) and ‘the splendid and the grand’ […] ‘tower and dome’ (ll. 38, 37). At another level, however, this glorified account of the luxurious life in India as a ‘gorgeous fabric’ for the senses has a functional value. For it also brings into sharper relief the poet’s yearning to return to her ‘cottage home’ (l. 39) in ‘a far, far distant vale’ (l. 31) in her ‘native land’ (l. 40) of England. Indeed, she holds her ‘narrow brook’ (l. 7) dearer than the regal Ganges. Composed in the distant, remote Indian town of Benares, this poem likewise expresses her fondness and affection for English birds, underscoring her wish for flight back home, perhaps. Equally significant are the recurrent motifs of light in the poem – ‘the fire fly’ (l. 17), ‘the shooting star’ (l. 21), and ‘the glow-worm’s lamp’ (l. 23) – symbolising a hope of freedom and of returning home. This implicit story of entrapment we find in Roberts’s ‘Stanzas’ may be comprehended better on reading the poem in conjunction with Roberts’s observations on the plight of a particular section of young English women of the day: Few young women who have accompanied their married sisters to India possess the means of returning home, however strong their dislike may be to the country, their lot is cast in it, and they must remain in a miserable dependence, with the danger of being left unprovided for before them until they shall be rescued […] by an offer of marriage.10

This British socioeconomic issue is addressed more directly in some of Roberts’s periodical articles, for example, ‘Feminine Employments, Amusements and Domestic Economy’11 and ‘Bengal Bridals and Bridal Candidates’.12 Another significant strand of her Orientalism, however, is her denunciation of the abhorrent Hindu practice of sutee (widow burning) in her poem, ‘The Rajah’s Obsequies’. 9 Seventeenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Robert Cummings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 47, 401. 10 Anne Katherine Elwood, Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England from the Commencement of the Last Century, 2 vols (Philadelphia: G.B. Zieser, 1845), II, 335. 11 Roberts, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan, I, 73–104. 12 Ibid., pp. 18–44.

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This brings to mind Robert Southey’s virulent attack on the ‘evil of the East’,13 particularly widow burning in The Curse of Kehama (1810) and polygamy in Thalaba (1801).14 Roberts’s concern for the sociopolitical issues of the Orient is not, however, so well-sustained, as in the case of Southey’s ambitious project. Given the political interest this poetry invites, it is surprising that so little notice has so far been taken of Roberts’s valiant efforts for redressing the sufferings of both English and Indian women in relation to the Orient, as is reflected in her numerous contributions to periodicals published in both England and India, or of her scheme for providing employment for Indian women in an attempt to empower them, which could not be implemented owing to her sudden death during her second visit to India in 1840. Another significant female poet to consider is Anna Maria Jones (1748–1829). Although her fame is largely eclipsed by the towering figure of her husband, Sir William Jones, one of the most distinguished Orientalists of all time, she happens to be another poet who, like Emma Roberts, had firsthand knowledge of the Orient, as a result of her ten years’ stay in India alongside her husband, who was posted as a judge there. She shared with her illustrious husband a keen interest in things Oriental. It is against this backdrop that her poem ‘Adieu to India’ becomes all the more relevant to this discussion. Published in Calcutta in 1793, just before her final return to England and a few months before her husband’s death in 1794, the poem, apart from being a tribute to the exotic Orient, proposes a sense of binary opposition between ‘India’s fertile plains’ and her own ‘Native shore’.15 Her message is loud and clear: her emotional attachment to her home country apart, England is a far superior country, standing out above the Orient. As for India, her perceptions are complex, as is indicated by the following statement of farewell in the poem: Adieu to India’s fertile plains, Where Brahma’s holy Doctrine reigns, Whose virtuous Principles still bind The Hindu’s meek untainted Mind […]. (ll. 19–22)

As an early nineteenth-century Westerner, Anna Jones may have been bewildered by the central position and public face of religion in India, in this particular instance Hinduism, and by the authority enjoyed and exercised by the clergy, as is evident 13 Robert Southey, Southey’s Common Place Book, ed. John Wood Warter, fourth series (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851), p. 212. 14 For a discussion of Robert Southey’s Orientalism, see Marilyn Butler, ‘The Orientalism of Byron’s Giaour’, in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), pp. 78–96; A.R. Kidwai, Orientalism in Lord Byron’s Turkish Tales (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1995), esp. pp. 198–232. 15 Anna Maria Jones, ‘Adieu to India’, ll. 19, 25; in Romantic Women Poets 1770– 1838, ed. Andrew Ashfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 111.

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from her allusion to the ‘Brahma’s holy Doctrine’ that ‘reigns’ (l. 20) supreme there. Amazement seems to be to the fore in her description of how the Brahma’s ‘principles’ – albeit ‘virtuous’ – still ‘bind / The Hindu’s meek untainted Mind’ (ll. 21–2). To her, one might deduce, only the gullible, ignorant (‘meek, untainted’) masses could lead such a regimented life under the yoke of such a faith and its irrational rituals. Her observations assume greater meaning and force, however, in view of the following two related facts. First, her husband’s, Sir William Jones’s, main assignment in India was the codification of Hindu law which would enable British state machinery to dispense justice according to local customs and traditions. Secondly, at a later stage in her life, Anna Jones had turned into an active Evangelist. Perhaps this accounts for her exclamatory remark about ‘the Hindu’s meek untainted mind’ (l. 22). Indeed, she might have sensed an opportunity here for carrying out missionary work among such seemingly unworldly people. Notwithstanding its title, ‘Adieu to India’ refers to India only, in fact, in passing. It celebrates at length and in triumphalist terms her home country, England: Where Art and Science blend their Lore, There Learning keeps her chosen Seat – A million votaries at her feet […]. (ll. 26–8)

Needless to add, this constitutes a stark contrast to the scene of India portrayed in the poem: a land inhabited by naïve people and ruled by priestly doctrines. Moreover, that during her decade-long stay in India, Anna Jones could not integrate in any degree is summed up thus: ‘Where oft I’ve strayed’ (l. 39) as a ‘solitary Maid’ (l. 40). The note of lonesomeness and outsiderness is offset only partially by her feeble compliments to India’s ‘sacred Haunts’ (l. 39) and to ‘Hougly’s tide’ (l. 41). The latter allusion is to the Hoogly river on the banks of which Kolkata (previously known as Calcutta) is located, where she and her husband had stayed. Since it was then capital of the rich India, it is designated by her as ‘the seat of Commerce’ (l. 42). This specific reference apart, the poem lacks almost entirely what we might call authentic local colour. Instead, we are given only some vague, general comments about ‘fond memory’ (l. 49), ‘Those hours of bliss’ (l. 51), and ‘Those scenes of soft Delight’ (l. 51) when it comes to India. The reference to the meek Hindu apart, significantly enough Anna Jones, unlike Shelley and Southey, does not endorse the Evangelical incursion into British India. In his The Revolt of Islam (1818) and Hellas (1822), Shelley projects both Islam and Hinduism as devoid of spirituality or indeed of any positive features. Islam is equated with darkness, in fact, Shelley being of the view that both Islam and Hinduism pose a threat to civilization. This explains why, despite his dismissal of Christianity in the context of England, he approved of the Evangelical mission being carried out in British India. He maintained that it would eventually prove there to be an effective instrument for bringing about gradual enlightenment

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and progress.16 He is thus found expressing the hope in his ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ (1820): ‘the zeal of the missionaries what is called the Christian faith, will produce beneficial innovation there [in India] even by the application of dogma and forms of what is here an outworn incumbrance’.17 Of a similar design is Robert Southey’s Orientalism. His long narrative poems, Thalaba and The Curse of Kehama present a patently negative picture of Muslim and Hindu societies, respectively. This, in turn, underscores his forceful plea for taking up the civilizing mission of Evangelism in those degenerate societies. The Curse of Kehama portrays Hinduism as an evil system, with pointed reference to the barbaric custom of widow burning. So doing, Southey, like Charles Grant, the author of Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain (1813), and the activists of the Clapham sect, appears to be mounting pressure on British Parliament to enact legislation, allowing for mission and conversion in British India.18 By contrast, and despite any uncertainty about ‘Brahma’s holy Doctrine’ (l. 20), Anna Jones stops short of advocating the redemptive role of Christianity in ‘Adieu to India.’ Although, unlike either Emma Roberts or Anna Jones, Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793–1835) did not travel to the Orient, her deep and wide familiarity with the tradition of Western literary Orientalism is borne out by two of her poems, especially in her adaptation of essentially Oriental material. Being one of the most widely read authors of the day, Hemans can be found trying her hand at composing an Oriental tale in her poem, ‘The Indian City’ (1828). In attempting so, she follows in the footsteps of such distinguished practitioners of this genre as Addison, Johnson, Goldsmith, Collins, Beckford, Ridley, Southey, Byron and Moore. The immense popularity of the English translation of the Arabian Nights had brought about the full blooming of this genre in eighteenth-century England, as is documented by Martha P. Conant.19 In the opening, authorial note to ‘The Indian City,’ Hemans clarifies that its material is taken from James Forbes’s Oriental Memoirs (1813).20 However, an equally important point to note of this poem is that – notwithstanding its distinctly Oriental setting, Oriental characters and sparse Oriental vocabulary – it recounts the general, perhaps even universal, imbroglio of a code of honour and revenge, For detailed discussions of Shelley’s Orientalism, see Michael Rossington, ‘Shelley and the Orient’, Keats-Shelley Review, 6 (1991), 18–36; Charles Issawi, ‘We Are All Greeks: Shelley and the Near East’, Encounter, 72 (May 1989), 54–7; Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East. 17 Shelley and His Circle 1773–1822: Being an Edition of the Manuscripts in The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, ed. K.N. Cameron, D.H. Reiman and D.D. Fischer, 10 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961–2002), VI, 987. 18 Butler, ‘Byron and the Empire in the East’, p. 6. 19 Martha P. Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908). 20 Felicia Dorothea Hemans, ‘The Indian City’, in Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 544, n. 1. 16

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and the resultant death and destruction that comes with it, as re-enacted down the ages and in practically all times and places in history. At one level, and especially at the poem’s starting point, its chief concern is the plight of a hapless woman: a grief-stricken Muslim mother, Maimuna, who on her way to pilgrimage to Makkah, together with her young son, passes through an Indian city. However, the son – a vivacious, adventurous youth – trespasses into a Hindu enclave, a place forbidden for non-Hindus, and is brutally killed for his trespassing, which is perceived as an act of sacrilege. Soon, the tale turns into a saga of the vindication of the centuries-old values of the patriarchal order, sustained by the dictates of religion and masculinity, and culminating in a blood bath. The opening part of the poem thus presents a somewhat gendered view of things. For Maimuna is at the heart of all the action in the poem. Indeed, she is the only character in this long poem with a name: others, be they Hindus or Muslims, appear only as part of a multitude. However, even while playing a seemingly leading role, Maimuna actually follows conventions laid down by the male order. The poem’s central conflict between obeying conventions and breaking boundaries reminds one of the same dilemma gripping Byron’s Oriental heroines in each of his ‘Turkish Tales’: Leila in The Giaour (1813), Zuleika in The Bride of Abydos (1813) and Gulnare in The Corsair (1814). In this sense, like Byron, Hemans seems to possess the urge to transgress boundaries but is acutely conscious, at the same time, of the ultimate force of convention.21 As the poem advances, however, Maimuna fails to retain the centrality she enjoyed initially and is relegated to a position of marginality. From being the cause and source of the action, she is reduced to the role of mute spectator of events over which she does not and cannot exercise any control. The centre stage is gradually overtaken, in fact, by the avenging ‘Tartar’ (l. 165), ‘the dark chief of Araby’ (l. 166), who appears with his spear and the din of a warrior throng amid the falling temples, as flames sweep the Indian city and ‘streams flowed red’ (l. 218), for the ‘sword of the Moslem’ was ‘let loose to slay’ (l. 219) Hindus in revenge for the murdered Muslim youth. In view of its treatment of such themes, including the role of woman in society and man’s proneness to violence when swayed by notions of honour and religious supremacy, Heman’s Oriental tale may be studied as a partly philosophic and a partly satiric poem. True to the convention of literary Orientalism, however, the locale of Hemans’s poem – an Indian city – remains outstanding due to its fabulous wealth, with ‘its crown of domes’ (l. 3), ‘glittering with leaves of gold’ (l. 9). This ‘stately city’ (l. 29) has ‘gorgeous wood’ (l. 31), ‘birds with starry plume’ (l. 32), and a ‘shining lake’ (l. 33). More significantly, being a ‘Bramin city’ (l. 60) it has an aura of holiness, which Hemans dexterously reinforces by her reference to the banyans, lotus flowers and the Bramin bowing in prayer on the holy ground which wears the scented air. Nonetheless, this ‘Bramin city’s glorious bowers’ (l. 60) are 21 Byron’s Oriental heroines are examined in some detail in Caroline Franklin, Byron’s Heroines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Kidwai, Orientalism in Lord Byron’s Turkish Tales.

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out of bounds for non-Hindus. The Muslim youth is attracted to the fatal charms of this forbidden town, though his incursion is deemed as sacrilegious by the locals who, driven by their religious zeal, kill him. Hemans’s account identifies forcefully the bigotry of these Hindus, as the youth suffers at their hands wrongs and scorn, And wounds from the children of Brahma born. This was the doom for a Moslem found With foot profane on their holy ground; This was for sullying the pure waves free Unto them alone – ’twas their God’s decree. (ll. 79–84)

It is with a sense of mission that Maimuna vows to exact revenge for her ‘slaughtered child’ (l. 141). She passes ‘from realm to realm’ (l. 161), pouring such words from ‘her pale lips’ (l. 163) which prompt ‘each one […] to unsheath the sword’ (l. 164). Eventually, Tartar, the Arab chief, and his wild archers lay siege around the Indian city. It results in another outburst of religious fanaticism, displayed this time by Muslims. As a result, temples are demolished: violence takes a heavy toll and the city is reduced to ruins. Hemans’s poem thus succeeds remarkably in re-enacting Indian history down the ages: the conquest of India by Muslims; the Hindus’ rigid code of untouchability and profanity; and the resultant Hindu-Muslim clashes at regular intervals. As in Byron’s ‘Turkish Tale’, The Siege of Corinth (1816), in Hemans’s poem religion fails to exercise any sobering, restraining influence. Rather, it is blatantly abused by zealots for their narrow, selfish ends. Hemans’s poem captures well, then, the hostility, the distrust and the cycle of killings that took place on a wide scale between the two religious communities. Notwithstanding its outward opulence, the ‘gorgeous fabric’ of life in India has its hideous – though no less authentic – underbelly which Hemans graphically reveals and describes. In Hemans’s ‘The Indian City’, Orientals – be they Hindus or Muslims – appear as fierce, irrational beings, given wholly to violence and bloodshed. On this particular count, Hemans retains, or rather resurrects, some deep-seated misperceptions about Orientals. The origins of this demonization may be traced back to the age of Crusades and even earlier, when Orientals, in general – and Muslims, in particular – were perceived by the West as a menace.22 22 On the Western image of the Orient in the medieval period see Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of An Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1962), and Heroes and Saracens: A Reinterpretation of the Chanson de Geste (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984); Islam and the Medieval West: Aspects of Inter-Cultural Relations, ed. Khalil I. Semaan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980); C.M. Jones, ‘The Conventional Saracen of the “Songs of Geste”’, Speculum, 17 (1942), 201–25; Benjamin Kedar, Crusade and Mission: European Approaches Toward the Muslims (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (London: Yale University Press, 1977); Dana C. Munro, ‘The Western Attitude Toward Islam During the Period of Crusades’, Speculum, 6 (1931), 329–43; R.W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

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For, regrettably, the Europe and the West learnt first about Islam and Muslims in terms of religious, political and military hostility. Their first face-to-face contact between the two major world faiths and civilizations – Christianity and Islam – was on the battleground, and both of them were driven to the battlefields having been long exposed to the rhetoric of hatred that laced the religious vocabulary of both Church and Muslim seminary. By the eighth century, within only 100 years of its birth, Islam had become firmly established in large parts of Asia and Africa and was knocking at the doors of Europe at many points: from the west through Muslim Spain; in the centre from Muslim Sicily; and in the east from the Muslim Balkans and southern Russia. The West, aided and abetted by Church, resolved to check this major threat by casting the enemy (i.e., Muslims) as unthinking monsters, given to violence and lust. The remnants of this medieval image are amply found in Southey’s Roderick: The Last of the Goths (1814). Hemans thus, in a sense, follows convention in depicting Muslims as ‘a warrior throng’ (l. 202), engaged relentlessly in killing and plunder.23 Hemans’s other poem with a markedly Oriental context is ‘The Traveller at the Source of the Nile’, which articulates the mixed feelings of joy and homesickness experienced by the explorer, James Bruce, as recounted by him in the preface to his travelogue.24 Bruce was the first to identify in the 1770s the course of the Blue Nile river from its source in Khartoum, Sudan. As in ‘The Indian City’, in this poem Hemans retains some misperceptions about the Orient, which form part of the legacy of Western literary Orientalism. First, throughout the poem one senses a marked distance, or rather an insurmountable divide, between the Western explorer and the site of his exploration: the Orient. He does not feel at all at home in the lands of Africa and Egypt visited by him. Although he is shown standing there ‘proudly’ (l. 2), being the first to have traced the source of the river, and though in the ‘triumph’s hour’ (l. 24), ‘the conqueror’s mood’ (l. 13) reverberates with ‘the song of victory’ (l. 12), nevertheless his heart and mind are in ‘his mountain land’ (l. 28), with its ‘wild, sweet voices’ (l. 30) calling him back. Standing ‘lone’ (l. 3), near the source of the river, he thinks only of ‘his father’s hills’ (l. 36). He does not belong, in any degree, to where he is stationed. Rather, he shudders at the ‘fearful vision, fraught with all that lay between’ (ll. 39–40) his present station and his home. What frightens him, though, is not just the geographical distance in being thousands of miles away from his home. Rather, he is gripped by the fear of death and destruction, as is conveyed by these images of his present situation, as he is faced with all that lay between The Arab’s lance, the desert’s gloom, The whirling sands, the red simoom […]. (ll. 40–42) University Press, 1978); Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam, ed. John Victor Tolan (New York: Garland, 1995). 23 Kidwai, Orientalism in Lord Byron’s Turkish Tales, pp. 221–32. 24 James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (London: Albion Press, 1812).

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Not only are the ‘Arab’s lance’, the desert ‘gloom’, and the ‘simoom’ alien to his experience, they also spell disaster. Devoid of life and tenderness, this Oriental landscape contrasts starkly with the ‘shade’ (l. 33), ‘waters’ (l. 34), and ‘sounding waves’ (l. 35) of home which readily bring to mind all the joys, comforts and vibrancy of life. Instead, we encounter something more deadly: Hemans’s use of the authentically Oriental image of the ‘simoom’ (l. 42), for example, refers to a phenomenon reported, perhaps for the first time, by James Bruce, the simoom being the devastating desert blast of Arabia. Byron makes dexterous use of it as a simile in The Giaour for describing the eponymous hero in that both the simoom and the Giaour stand for death and evoke awe and dread, abound in energy, and are capable of transforming all that comes in their way.25 Unlike Felicia Hemans, who composed the Oriental Tale ‘The Indian City’, Ann Candler (1740–1814) rests content with recording, more simply, her fascination with the ‘tales [of] eastern writers’, in her autobiographical poem ‘Reflections on My Own Situation, Written in Tattingstone House of Industry’. Born into a working-class family, Candler led a hard life, which was aggravated further by her marriage to an alcoholic, reckless husband. Faced with abject poverty, she turned to the Tattingstone workhouse in order to support herself and her six children. In recounting the catalogue of her heart-rending sufferings, she recalls joyfully ‘the unexpected blessings’ brought to her by her reading of Oriental tales, which helped raise ‘her drooping head’.26 She elaborates the point thus: In youth strange fairy tales I’ve read, Of magic skill and pow’r And mortals, in their sleep, convey’d To some enchanted tow’r. […] The tales these eastern writers feign Like facts to me appear […]. (ll. 49–52, 73–4)

Candler’s allusion is to the then popular stories of the Arabian Nights, which with their enthralling jinns, spirits, fairies, magicians, and talismans, provided escape and relief. Since some of the legends permeating these stories had their parallels in the Celtic, Teutonic, and Greek traditions, they appealed to a wide spectrum within the reading public of England. Her enchantment with these stories may not be brushed aside as a stray report either. John Keats shared the same fondness for the Arabian Nights, as is reflected in his poems Endymion (1818) and Hyperion (1820).27 Kidwai, Orientalism in Lord Byron’s Turkish Tales, p. 129. Ann Candler, ‘Reflections on My Own Situation, Written in Tattingstone House of

25 26

Industry’, ll. 47, 48; in British Women Poets of the Romanic Era: An Anthology, ed. Paula R. Feldman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 183. 27 Both Douglas Bush and Sidney Colvin identify the Arabian Nights as a possible source for some of the fables employed by Keats in these poems. See Douglas Bush,

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In contrast to Ann Candler’s autobiographical note about the power of ‘eastern writers’ to enchant, Mary Robinson (1758–1800) utilizes her Oriental material within a much broader frame. In her long poem ‘The Lascar’ (1800) she relates the plight of an Indian sailor taken as a slave by some ‘Christian Savage’.28 Since Robinson was an activist for the rights of women, her poem may be read as the denunciation of the oppressive order of the day. For she is seen championing the cause of the downtrodden whom she perceives to be forsaken by both God and fellow human beings. The slave’s agony is brought into sharper relief with refrainlike references to his sorrow, wretched condition, gloom, endless night, despair, and his being the target of scorn. Robinson’s identification with his plight is so intense that she grants him all the space in the poem: he is the first-person narrator of his own misery in the opening 80 lines, while the rest is the author’s account of his pain and grief, his deep wounds and his groaning. As for providing authentic local colour, the following nostalgic passage is perhaps representative: Oft I the stately Camel led, And sung the short-hour’d night away; And oft, upon the top mast’s head, Hail’d the red Eye of coming day. The Tanyan’s back my mother bore; And oft the wavy Ganges roar Lull’d her to rest […]. (ll. 60–67)

‘Mast’ and ‘Tanyan’ stand respectively for the elephant and the pony in the local Hindi language. What is more noteworthy, however, is Robinson’s parallelism between the Lascar’s mother and the mother Ganges river as idolized by the local Hindus. Robinson’s empathy here serves to remind us, then, not only of Emma Roberts’s treatment of her subject in ‘Night on the Ganges’, but also of Byron’s Orientalism. After all, Byron stands out above his predecessors and contemporaries in both the range and the accuracy of his use of authentic Oriental material in his poetry, and likewise in his imaginative sympathy when dealing with the Orient and Orientals in his works.29 In portraying the Lascar as an innocent victim, however, Mary Robinson seizes the opportunity to raise disturbing questions about the legitimacy enjoyed by the oppressive forces in her own society. Her note of protest reaches its Mythology and Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 116; Sidney Colvin, John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After Fame (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. 173. 28 Mary Robinson, ‘The Lascar’, l. 36; in British Women Poets of the Romantic Era, p. 615. 29 On Byron’s Orientalism see Byron and Orientalism, ed. Peter Cochran (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2006); Kidwai, Orientalism in Lord Byron’s Turkish Tales; Anahid Melikian, Byron and the East (Beirut: American University Press, 1977); Naji B. Oueijan, A Compendium of Eastern Elements in Byron’s Oriental Tales (New York: Peter Lang, 1992); Daniel P. Watkin, Social Relations in Byron’s Eastern Tales (London: Associated University Presses, 1987).

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crescendo in asking: ‘Is there a God in your dark Heav’n / And shall such monsters be forgiven?’ (ll. 251–2). In using the Oriental setting as the pretext for raising wider, deeper and even more challenging questions, Robinson may have taken her cue from Thomas Moore’s Orientalism, as featuring in his then highly popular Oriental tale, Lalla Rookh (1817).30 In two of the four stories comprising the Lalla Rookh – ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’ and ‘The Fire Worshippers’ – the heroes are rebels, taking up cudgels against the establishment. There is a striking similarity in this instance between the struggle of the ‘Fire Worshippers’ and the Catholic uprising in Ireland. Hafed and Hinda, Moore’s leading characters, have much in common, for example, with Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran, champions of the Irish cause. Mokkanna in ‘The Veiled Prophet’ is sketched after Daniel O’Connell, the Irish demagogue, in order to condemn a religious fanatic. Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran reappear in ‘The Veiled Prophet’ as Azim and Zelica: young, naïve lovers aflame with revolutionary ardour. The fierce struggle between Zoroastrianism and Islam in Persia, as described in ‘The Fire Worshippers’, thus re-enacts allegorically the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in Ireland. Like the native Fire Worshippers in Persia, persecuted by the followers of a new faith, Islam, the Catholic Irishmen are projected as suffering at the hands of Protestants. Likewise, the Fire Worshippers’ plight obliquely reworks the pathetic life of the Irishmen reeling under the British rule. Caroline Norton (1808–1877), by contrast, has to her credit a much less radical, and much more sentimental, poem of Oriental design entitled ‘The Arab’s Farewell to His Horse’ (1830). In this poem, the Arab is lured momentarily to sell his dear horse for gold. However, his attachment is strong enough to overcome temptation. The thought of parting company with his horse fills his heart with unbearable pain, which elicits this disclaimer from him: They tempted me, my beautiful! but I have loved too long. Who said that I had given thee up? Who said thou wert sold? ’Tis false – ’tis false, my Arab steed! I fling them back their gold!31

In portraying the Arab along the above lines, Norton appears to be under the influence of the Oriental travelogues of Henry Blount, George Sandys, William Lithgow and Eyles Irwin, who delineate Arabs or Bedouins as the remnant of a

30 On Thomas Moore’s Orientalism, see G.M. Wickens, ‘Lalla Rookh and the Romantic Tradition of Islamic Literature in English’, Year Book of Comparative and General Literature, 20 (1971), 61–6; Wallace C. Brown, ‘Thomas Moore and English Interest in the East’, Studies in Philology, 34 (1937), 576–88; Agnes Repplier, ‘When Lalla Rookh was Young’, Atlantic Monthly, 100 (1907), 807–12; Kidwai, Orientalism in Lord Byron’s Turkish Tales, pp. 232–45. 31 Caroline Norton, ‘The Arab’s Farewell to His Horse’, ll. 44–6; in British Women Poets of the Romantic Era, p. 516.

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primitive race, full of innocence and simplicity.32 The way of life of such a Noble Savage as this young Arab appears to be thus presents an instructive contrast to the artificialities and materialistic outlook of Westerners. *** It is, of course, impossible in the short space of this essay to trace every instance of literary Orientalism in the numerous works of Romantic women poets, though there are many more worth reading and exploring further. Maria Logan’s (fl. 1793) ‘To Opium’ (1793), for example, apart from celebrating the sedative quality of this indigenous ‘produce of Hindostan’s plain’,33 contains pointed reference to India’s opulence in a way characteristic of the conventions of literary representations of the Orient. She speaks in particular, for instance, of Golconda, a south Indian town, once famous for its diamonds. However, the Orient and things Oriental feature also in the poems of Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), Susanna Blamire (1747–1794), Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825) and Janet Little (1759–1813).34 As with the Romantic women poets discussed in more detail in this essay, what such writers and their Oriental poems demonstrate, overwhelmingly, is their familiarity, in varying degrees, with the Orient, including their fascination with its fabulous wealth. Their representation of the Orient is marked by sensitivity and tenderness, and, above all, by a concern for authenticity. In this sense, these writers succeed remarkably in weaving from the ‘gorgeous fabric’ of India and the Orient, for better or for worse, an equally ‘gorgeous fabric’ of the Romantic imagination.

32 On travel literature related to the Orient, see M.S. Abdel-Hamid, ‘Literature of Eastern Travel and the Romantic Movement’, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, University of Cairo, 19 (1957), 25–32; Wallace C. Brown, ‘Popularity of English Travel Books About the Near East’, Journal of English Literary History, 5 (1938), 218–24; Robin Fedden, English Travellers in the Near East (Virginia: Longmans, Green, 1958); Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud, ‘Orientals in Picaresque: A Chapter in the History of the Oriental Tale in England’, Cairo Studies in English (1961–1962), 145–88; Rashad Rushdy, ‘The English Travel Book (1780–1850): A Popular Literary Form’, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, University of Cairo, 15 (1953), 159–79; Judy Mabro, Veiled Half-Truths: Western Travellers’ Perceptions of Middle Eastern Women (London: I.B. Tauris, 1991). 33 Maria Logan, ‘To Opium’, ll. 11–12; in British Women Poets of the Romantic Era, p. 439. 34 See British Women Poets of the Romantic Era.

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Chapter 8

Becoming Ruskin: Travel Writing and Self-Representation in Praeterita Keith Hanley

I. The Secret Plan When John Ruskin came to assemble his ‘Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts Perhaps Worthy of Memory in My Past Life’ for the composition of his final work, Praeterita (1885–1889), motivated partly by seeking the causes of his mental collapse, the prevailing note was elegiac. The autobiography attempts to salvage a sense of coherence within his works despite contemplating a life he had come to view as one of largely defeated endeavours, both public and personal. For many years, and particularly since the untimely death in 1875 of the far younger woman whom he had intended to make his second bride, Rose La Touche, a sense of doom had invaded his mind and compounded the depression which had degenerated by the 1880s into increasingly severe bouts of insanity. At the core of his private frustrations lay a succession of unrealisable relationships. His first great passion, Adèle Domecq, the daughter of one of his father’s business partners, had been 15 when Ruskin fell in love with her, and his wife-to-be, Effie Gray, was 12 when they first met; their marriage was dissolved in 1854 on the grounds of non-consummation. Rose, who suffered from anorexia and who was to become the culminating obsession, was 10 years old on their first encounter, 18 when the 47-year-old writer proposed, and 27 when she died. From Adèle to Rose, with the conscious erasure of Effie, who is not acknowledged in this work, and a host of unmentioned epiphenomenal flirtations with pre- or early pubescent girls, a constant sequence of failed or impossible relationships had shaped the course of Ruskin’s personal life. Yet, as his extensive self-revelation clarifies, the same accumulative pattern of non-relations, loss and repetition and resilient persistence through difference reflects the processes of his creative imagination, the structure of his developing conception of art and history, and indeed represents what Proust referred to as the overall ‘secret plan’, more or less evidenced throughout all the 39 volumes of his collected writings: ‘He goes from one idea to another without apparent order. But in reality the fancy that leads him follows his profound affinities which in spite

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of himself impose on him a superior order’,1 culminating in the characteristically incomplete, and uncompletable, Praeterita itself. Unresolved identity becoming a stimulus to creation, and traumatic loss leading to repetition compulsion – he tells us in Praeterita of, as a child, ‘building, unbuilding […] and rebuilding’ his toy-bricks and his ‘contentment in doing, or reading, the same thing over and over again’2 – coupled with a highly problematic passage to maturity, invite Freudian and post-Freudian considerations of complications in Ruskin’s socialisation replaying his primary alienation in language and cultural representation. What is extraordinary in Ruskin’s case, however, is the rich versatility of his unending quest for self-representation which is the obverse: the way in which the myth of restoration that underlies both his personal and sociocultural projects takes the form of a cumulative replacement for a complex deficit. The fruit of that aspiration had first appealed to his ‘child-mind’ when reading Scott: ‘It seemed to me that Charles the Second’s Restoration had been, compared with the Restoration I wanted, much as that gilded oak-apple to a real apple’.3 Its political discourse was to lead to the attempt to reconstruct Scott’s feudalism in his own utopian Guild of St George in the 1870s, but it also resonated with the redemptive scheme of his Evangelical consciousness of the Fall which casts a gloom throughout his juvenile poetry and beyond, touched by hints of Byronism, as it enjoined the doctrine of work that extended into his tireless interpretative activity. Overtones of predestination were part of the mindset of a youth who was, as he writes, ‘bred in the very strictest principles of Calvinism’,4 and in whom his parents had fostered a firm sense of election. Yet he remained apprehensive of the genetic inheritance of mental instability and depression which his devoted parents foreboded from his youth: they were first cousins, and Ruskin’s paternal grandfather had cut his own throat. Ruskin was indeed to become deranged: at Matlock in 1871; at Venice in 1876; and thereafter, breakdown and madness, with their attendant fears and horrors, were ultimately to seize him on and off in 1878 and throughout the 1880s, before he entered the mysterious inner withdrawal of his last decade. Seeking a wholesome, even paradisal past led him to an idealised Middle Ages and the actual salvaging of the arts of pre-Renaissance Christendom, particularly his vehement advocacy for their material ‘restoration’,5 as well as to the anxious search to rediscover the original sites of Turner’s landscapes. Overall, his 1 Marcel Proust, On Reading Ruskin, trans. and ed. Jean Autret, William Burford and Phillip J. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 146. 2 John Ruskin, The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, ed. Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), XXXV, 58. All further page references to this volume are given in the body of the essay. 3 Ibid., XXVII, 171. 4 Ibid., XXXIII, 228. 5 See Keith Hanley, ‘Quest for Restoration’, in Journeys of a Lifetime: Ruskin’s Continental Tours, ed. Keith Hanley and Rachel Dickinson, exhibition catalogue (Lancaster: The Ruskin Library, Lancaster University, 2008), 52–5.

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sense of a finally recuperable benevolent design in nature and art that built on the rudimentary natural theology of the first volume of Modern Painters (1843) found more relaxed expression in the pious discipline of George Herbert’s The Temple (1633), especially his poem ‘Submission’ – ‘And both my eyes are Thine’ (p. 345) – and an intuition about ‘fortune, and fortune-telling’ that became the rationale of his ‘private philosophy’ (p. 391) in Fors Clavigera, the series of 96 ‘Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain’ (1871–1884). The chance or happy fate that seemed to bring heterogeneous experiences into correspondence, or that could be resolutely so arranged, consistently deepened the plot of an ultimately redemptive ‘nail-bearing fate’.6 II. The Brook Shore There are many moments described in his autobiography which Ruskin sees as having been crucial in determining his fate – moments of motivating loss which sum up his past and shape what comes after. Such moments are his first glimpse of the Alps in Schaffhausen – ‘the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful to us; not more awful, round heaven, the walls of sacred Death’ (p. 115) – and his becoming ‘un-converted’7 from Evangelical prejudices in the Waldensian chapel at Turin. But the first of the three volumes achieves an overall narrative shape which accounts for the emergent formation within these individual turning points that are his equivalents of Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’8 and which reaches clear definition by the summer of 1837, when, about for the first time to leave his childhood home at Herne Hill for college life (though his mother was to move into lodgings at Oxford, and his father to visit at weekends), he was both beginning to produce independently accomplished drawings and his first significant piece of sustained critical writing, the series of essays that made up The Poetry of Architecture (1837–1838).9 He defines it as the watershed of his youth, occurring aptly at Catterick Bridge, a culmination and, in some senses, a terminus: But so stubborn and chemically inalterable the laws of the prescription were, that now, looking back from 1886 to that brook shore of 1837, whence I could see the whole of my youth, I find myself in nothing whatsoever changed. Some of me is dead, more of me stronger. I have learned a few things, forgotten many; in the total of me, I am but the same youth, disappointed and rheumatic. (p. 220)

Works of John Ruskin, XXVIII, 106. Ibid., XXIX, 89. 8 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), Book 12, l. 208; The Prelude 1799, 6

7

1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 429. Though Ruskin owned the first two editions of the poem, he never referred to it in his writings. 9 For a full account of the context, see Keith Hanley, John Ruskin’s Romantic Tours 1837–1838: Travelling North (Lampeter: Mellen Press, 2007), pp. 1–71.

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In effect Ruskin was signalling a defining formation around this period, a new awareness of continuity within discontinuity which he affirms was not to pass away. From then on all progression would be marked by an accompanying sense of stasis, the chemistry of conservatism. In critical response to Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807; 1815), from which he perhaps derives the image of ‘the shore’ of ‘that immortal sea’, on which ‘the Children sport […] / And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore’, caught between the glory from which they have fallen and ‘the light of common day’,10 Ruskin registers the close of his own childhood: when I was eighteen, I felt, for the last time, the pure childish love of nature which Wordsworth so idly takes for an intimation of immortality. We went down by the North Road, as usual; and on the fourth day arrived at Catterick Bridge, where there is a clear pebble-bedded stream, and both west and east some rising of hills, foretelling the moorlands and dells of upland Yorkshire; and there the feeling came back to me – as it could never return more. (pp. 218–19)

Aspects of the ode’s depiction of the coaxed child must have looked peculiarly familiar to Ruskin: Behold the Child among his new-born blisses, A six-years’ Darling of a pigmy size! See, where ’mid work of his own hand he lies, Frettied by sallies of his mother’s kisses, With light upon him from his father’s eyes! See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, Some fragment from his dream of human life, Shaped by himself with newly-learned art. (ll. 86–93)

He knew just as intimately how ‘Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy’ (ll. 67–8), and that the programme of ‘endless imitation’ (l. 108) was in effect a way of provoking ‘The Years to bring the inevitable yoke’ (l. 125), that increasing acculturation served pari passu to open self-division. Though he relates the lost quality of life to scenes devoid of human traces – ‘In myself, it has always been quite exclusively confined to wild, that is to say, wholly natural places, and especially to scenery animated by streams or by the sea’ – and considers it rather a physical than a moral response – ‘It is a feeling only possible to youth, for all care, regret, or knowledge of evil destroys it; and it requires also the full sensibility of nerve and blood, the conscious strength of heart, and hope’ (pp. 218–19) – he nonetheless has come to characterise it as a highly personalised amalgam of Romantic literary influences, of ‘Wordsworth’s reverence, Shelley’s sensitiveness, Turner’s accuracy, all in one’ (p. 220). His evocation is in effect made 10 Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ll. 164, 167–8, 77; The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952–1959), IV, 284.

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up of representations that were already immanent but more or less unconscious, though it announces the conscious commencement of what was to constitute the ground of the increasingly perceived alienation, mediation itself. The Wordsworthian child-figure is an important identification for Ruskin: it is often, as Catherine Robson has explored, that of a conflicted self-idealisation, feminised and threatened, rather than a simple counter to his mother’s ‘resolute insistence on innate human depravity’ by ‘a vision […] of original innocence’.11 It marks a state of wistfulness, on the cusp between the innocence of natural unconsciousness and the fall into cultural otherness, including the post-Edenic consciousness of sexual difference and mortality. Girls in particular seem to attract Ruskin’s yearning for innocence while having helplessly already entered into his field of desire: to be objects of both regression and longing. This is the burden of the frustrated identification which Ruskin, echoing Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, expresses in a letter to his father written from Winnington Hall girls’ school: It is curious that I feel older and sadder very much, in now looking at these young children – it is especially the young ones between whom & me I now feel so infinite a distance, – and they are so beautiful and so good, and I am not good, considering the advantages I’ve had, by any means. The weary longing to begin life over again, and the sense of fate forever forbidding it – here or hereafter – is terrible. I daresay I shall get over it in a day or two, but I was out in the playground with them this afternoon, and the sun was on the grass, and on them – and the sense of loveliness in life, and of overbrooding death, like winter, was too strong.12

Another actual site which summarised and fixed the crux of his past youth that summer was the shore of the Wharfe above Bolton Bridge, where, as he remembered in Praeterita, he ‘could draw the choir of Bolton [Abbey] with its wild fresh grass over the altar, and the banks of the Wharfe seen through its traceriless window, in entire peace and pensiveness of mind and eye’ (p. 272). The scene had rich associations with both poetry and painting. Around 1825, Turner painted Bolton Abbey, which Ruskin acquired in 1851: ‘Those shores of the Wharfe, I believe, [Turner] could never revisit without tears’.13 Other painters popularised the scene, especially Landseer, whose Bolton Abbey in Olden Time was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1834, and Thomas Girtin, whose evening scene fixes its undertones of serene melancholy. Ruskin also etched part of Turner’s painting with brown ink, colouring in imitation of the style of the painter’s Liber Studiorum (1807–1809). Catherine Robson, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 114. 12 Ruskin, The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin’s Correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the Children at Winnington Hall, ed. Van Aikin Burd (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), pp. 439–40. 13 Works of John Ruskin, VI, 303. 11

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Turner engraved two before-and-after vignettes in 1834 to illustrate Samuel Rogers’s poem, ‘The Boy of Egremond’ (1819).14 The poem was based on the gifting of the rights of Bolton’s woods, waters, meadows and pastures to the Augustinian canons for the building of the priory by Alice de Romille around 1155 as a memorial for her son who was drowned in the nearby Strid, where the river races through a narrow gorge cut into the rocks: Blithe was his song, a song of yore; But where the rock is rent in two, And the river rushes through, His voice was heard no more! ’Twas but a step! the gulf he passed; But that step – it was his last!15

The historical presence of unseen violence – the ruinous dissolution in 1542 as well as the personal tragedy – is characteristically Turnerian, and the locality was also associated for Ruskin with Wordsworth’s use of the same legend in his ballad-like ‘The Force of Prayer; or, the Founding of Bolton Priory, A Tradition’, published in 1815 together with the long poem, The White Doe of Rylstone (both based on Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s Craven, A History of Richmonshire (1823), for which Turner’s drawings had originally been made): The Boy is in the arms of Wharf, And strangled by a merciless force; For never more was young Romilly seen Till he rose a lifeless corse.16

For Wordsworth, the architectural ruin speaks of more than the human devastation, which he further connects with the sacrificial death of a son in the internecine religious war of the northern Pilgrimage of Grace, and has become part of a scene of natural beauty which moves a deep catharsis. His reading of the legend traces the gradual transmutation of suffering into an enduring apprehension of spiritualised loveliness, embodied in a mythic white doe which haunts the spot: When Lady Aäliza mourned Her Son, and felt in her despair The pang of unavailing prayer; Her Son in Wharf’s abysses drowned, The noble Boy of Egremound. From which affliction – when the grace 14 See Samuel Rogers, The Poetical Works of Samuel Rogers, new edition (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1869), pp. 208, 210. 15 Ibid., p. 209. 16 Wordsworth, ‘The Force of Prayer’, ll. 33–6; Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, IV, 89–90.

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Of God had in her heart found place – A pious structure, fair to see, Rose up, this stately Priory! The Lady’s work; – but now laid low; To the grief of her soul that doth come and go, In the beautiful form of this innocent Doe.17

Rogers’s version, however, foregrounds a retributive pattern of historical violence which he draws from Whitaker’s account of the boy’s father’s deeds in the passage from Craven footnoted to his poem, beginning: ‘In the twelfth century William Fitz-Duncan laid waste the valleys of Craven with fire and sword; and was afterwards established there by his uncle, David King of Scotland. He was the last of the race.’18 In Rogers’s poem, the son’s fate is implicated in the parent’s guilty acquisition of the land itself: Ruthless Lord, Thou didst not shudder when the sword Here on the young its fury spent, The helpless and the innocent. Sit now and answer, groan for groan. The child before thee is thy own.19

Ruskin’s ‘pensiveness of mind and eye’ (p. 272) was surely informed by Turner’s vignettes,20 which provided the mirroring figuration of a boy who was both the victim of parental ambition and yet also a mythical origin of Christian architecture and the British landscape tradition. If the boy had to die in crossing the brook, the sacrifice would create a lasting monument on the other side. However, the implicit destiny of Ruskin’s own investment in the scene had as yet hardly come into view. III. The Unfolding Knot The narrative of Praeterita is contrapuntal, as Heather Henderson describes it, following ‘the traditional, end-oriented model of autobiographical narration […] based on Christian autobiographies of conversion and classical narratives of journeying, while on another level there is a pattern of repetition and return’.21 Diverse impulses of growth and memory produce what Elizabeth Helsinger Wordsworth, The White Doe of Rylstone, ll. 226–37; Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, III, 290. 18 Poetical Works of Samuel Rogers, p. 209. 19 Ibid., p. 209. 20 Ruskin had been steeped in the vignettes based on Turner’s drawings for Rogers’s Italy (1830) since receiving them as a thirteenth birthday present. 21 Heather Henderson, The Victorian Self: Autobiography and Biblical Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 68. 17

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describes as a ‘discontinuous mental geography’: ‘Ruskin’s constant traveling is never progress: it is the means by which he revisits the territory of a visually extended self’.22 Access to a vaster and richer cultural being was literally an eye-opening process, so that again and again he notes his first self-enhancing sights: ‘in the eastern light I well remember watching the line of the Black Forest hills enlarge and rise, as we crossed the plain of the Rhine. “Gates of the Hills” [Ruskin’s title for Turner’s Pass of Faido]; opening for me to a new life’ (p. 113); and the sensation of self-expansion over a widening visual field impels his nonstop mobility for more than 60 years. Catherine Robson comments that chronology ‘is replaced by topography’,23 creating a personalised atlas in which, journeying backwards and forwards at once, the same places and scenes become interpreted more deeply in the light of passing and cumulative experiences. In answer to his continuing but baffled quest for definitive representation, the end and purpose of his time-travelling turns out always to have been the expanding and deepening levels of representation themselves which load the names of places revisited as the most significant markers of his passage. However abstracted the textuality of the places became, its symbolic superstructure was amassed by constant revisiting of the real places, looking again at, or viewing from a different perspective, the originating scene or monument. Ruskin could attempt to look both forwards and backwards at once because seeing comes before language, and the visual field, on the border between sensation and thought, drew him to the underlying perception of what, because it was always still there as a constant guarantor of different interpretations, promised an unchanging past, in spite of everything. It was the insistence of this empiricist base which controlled the arbitrariness of his associative readings over time, authenticating both his persistent identity and its representations, and whenever the original closures between key scenes and what he had seen them signifying was disrupted he was badly traumatised. When, for example, he revisited Bolton Abbey in 1875, he was appalled by what he saw as the desecration of a place fixed for ever in his imagination by Wordsworth and Turner: If there is one spot in England, where human creatures pass or live, which one would expect to find, in spite of their foul existence, still clean – it is Bolton Park. But to my final and utter amazement, I had not taken two steps at the waterside at the loveliest bend of the river below the stepping-stones, before I found myself again among broken crockery, cinders, cockle-shells, and tinkers’ refuse; – a large old gridiron forming the principal point of effect and interest among the pebbles.24

22 Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘The Structure of Ruskin’s Praeterita’, in Approaches to Victorian Autobiography, ed. George P. Landow (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1979), pp. 87–108 (p. 88). 23 Robson, Men in Wonderland, p. 101. 24 Works of John Ruskin, XXVIII, 301.

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Yet in effect continuities between before and after depended on sustaining prevailing discourses. A chief influence, responsible for an unusually early experience of cultural alienation, was the indoctrination and moral discipline imposed especially by his mother’s daily Bible reading which ‘established his soul’, brought about the ‘installation of [his] mind’, and constituted ‘the one essential part, of all [his] education’.25 Writing to her absent husband from Oxford, his mother expressed her confidence in his retention of that formation: Our child has entered his nineteenth year without having by his conduct occasioned a moments serious uneasiness to either of us, and as we have the Divine assurance following the commandment, train up a child in the way he should go, & when he is old he will not depart from it, so I think I may venture to prophesy that his future conduct will not differ from the past.26

Ruskin himself looked back ambivalently, though he may have exaggerated it, on the disciplinary regime of his childhood, which included restrictions on his exposure to playmates as a boy and a scarcity of conventional playthings. And yet, on the other hand, as a result of his father’s enthusiasms, he had been freely admitted to the approved adult pleasures of the arts at an early age, so that his education was, as he wrote, a mixture: ‘at once too formal and too luxurious’ (p. 46). Certainly, the boy who at the age of seven in 1826 produced his first unsupervised notes, entitled ‘Incipient Action of Rain Molecules’, was already scripting an unusual fate with particular problems of progression, as his father later indicated, accounting for his not wanting Ruskin’s works to advertise his having previously won the Newdigate Prize for poetry at Oxford: ‘As we can no longer pass him off as The little phenomenon I am afraid of letting the Kindness of Friends, usher him into the world of Literature as any great phenomenon.’27 The pattern of consistency gradually attained was enabled by a chiastic passage from boy-man to man-boy which revolved around the condition of precocity, with its awkward paradox of one kind of cultural overdevelopment threatening to impose another kind of social underdevelopment. As R.H. Wilenski comments: ‘when he was over forty and a widower [Ruskin] took to romping with schoolgirls; but as a boy he never romped or rode or played outdoor games’.28 It is the lot of the kind of precocity which Ruskin attained and endured in his later childhood and early youth not to end in clearly resolved maturity, and that is why the period of his adolescence brings into crisis tensions and contradictions whose transformations were to become the conditions of his future career. Ruskin was in important ways to remain on a hinge between loss and gain-at-the-cost-of-loss, with premature advancement tempered awkwardly by reversion. The embarrassment is expressed, Ibid., pp. 101–2. Quoted by Wolfgang Kemp, The Desire of My Eyes: The Life and Work of John

25 26

Ruskin, trans. Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), pp. 52–3. 27 Ibid., p. 57. 28 R.H. Wilenski, John Ruskin (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), p. 43.

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for example, in the deferral of ageing implied in his chosen nom de plume for the first volume of Modern Painters, ‘a Graduate of Oxford’, in his assumption of the role of ardent middle-aged suitor for the teenage Rose, and in the maintenance of his childhood nursery at Herne Hill as his London study even after presenting the house to the Severns. G.K. Chesterton identifies a childish note in some of Ruskin’s rages, relating it to his unseasonable pashes: ‘And young fanaticism cultivated in old age, like young love cultivated in old age, turned sour and unwholesome.’29 Despite bouts of regression (the ultimate manoeuvre being the baby talk in which he corresponded with several members of his female circle, especially his much younger cousin-companion, Joan Severn), Ruskin was to remain most characteristically locked into a double bind: attempting to regain a past state through multiplying the moral and intellectual contents which seemed to bring it to expression but which had in fact signalled its termination. In this tradeoff, aesthetic representation, especially the visual arts, occupied an ambiguous boundary between a re-embodiment of experience and its estrangement, between fullness and void. If the dilemma led to the role of major social critic, with an unparalleled cultural productivity and interpretative versatility, it also produced the knowledge of unfulfilment which occasioned them. Symptomatic of this impasse is the recurrence of self-deprecatory images of delayed biological growth. Writing of his strict and petted childhood, he remarks: ‘I already disliked growing older, – never expected to be wiser, and formed no more plans for the future than a little black silkworm does in the middle of its first mulberry leaf’ (p. 103). He refers to himself in the early 1830s in similar terms: ‘I was simply a little floppy and soppy tadpole,­– little more than a stomach with a tail to it, flattening and wriggling itself up the crystal ripples and in the pure sands of the spring-head of youth’ (pp. 279–80); and tells how in the late 1830s family friends tried to bring him out socially and ‘somehow break the shell of me’ (p. 249). Otherwise, his final period as a student was a ‘codling or cocoon condition’ when his ‘mind was simply in the state of a squash before ’tis a peascod’ (p. 261). Indeed, he remained socially unsure of himself at Oxford, disliking to attend official dinners there even when he became a professor, attending one for the Princess of Wales ‘where [he] knew no more how to behave than a marmot pup!’ (p. 505). Yet despite a nagging sense of underdevelopment he was relieved to be able to acknowledge accompanying signs of artistic growth, as in the slowly transformative period which had begun with the articles for the Poetry of Architecture, finding that they ‘indicate a fairly progressive and rightly consolidated range of thought on these subjects, within the chrysalid torpor of me’ (p. 227). Often, he perceives that a particular phase referred to is one that would involve future development and deepening of more matured understanding. This is particularly the case with his early appreciation of Byron which was ‘made of course in that gosling 29 G.K. Chesterton, Introduction, John Ruskin, Poems by John Ruskin (London: George Routledge, 1908), p. xv.

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(or say cygnet) epoch of existence, without consciousness of the deeper instincts that prompted it’ (p. 144). Crucially, he credited Byron in particular with beginning to call out a cultural imagination from sites Ruskin had formerly simply responded to with his senses or was attempting to depict with literal exactitude in his early draughtsmanship, in marrying ‘plainly what he saw and knew’ with historical romance: I must pause here, in tracing the sources of his influence over me, lest the reader should mistake the analysis which I am now able to give them, for a description of the feelings possible to me at fifteen. Most of these, however, were assuredly within the knot of my unfolding mind – as the saffron of the crocus yet beneath the earth; and Byron – though he could not teach me to love mountains or sea more than I did in childhood, first animated them for me with the sense of real human nobleness and grief. He taught me the meaning of Chillon and of Meillerie, and bade me seek first in Venice – the ruined homes of Foscari and Falier. (p. 150)

Ruskin repeatedly attempts to nail down significant turning points in the emergence of other new enthusiasms and insights, especially when their unpredictable implications had only come to stand revealed over the course of time. On the 1840 tour, he was able to review the growth points in the development of his changing art historical enthusiasms. Writing of his first visit to Florence, he is aware of a subsequent, winding trajectory to his appreciation of Central Italian Renaissance art: ‘In the Accademia I studied the Angelicos only, Lippi and Botticelli being still far beyond me’ (pp. 359–60). He dates his great eye-opening to the truth of Turner’s art to an experience ‘on the road to Norwood’ in 1842, of which he writes: ‘it ended the chrysalid days’ (p. 311). Observing ‘a bit of ivy round a thorn stem’ impressed him with the perception that in Turner’s artifice ‘Nature herself was composing with him’ (p. 310). Having gained a degree at 22, he saw himself ‘with such and such powers, all second-rate except the analytic ones, which were as much in embryo as the rest’ (p. 311). Then, in the Louvre in 1844, he registers a major advance ‘in picture knowledge’, ‘progress which I see no ground for, and remember no steps of’ (p. 337), except some remarks of George Richmond in 1842 pointing out the truth of Veronese’s use of colour. At the later date he records: ‘I have had a change wrought I me, and a strong one […] and I know not how far it may go, chiefly in my full understanding of Titian, John Bellini, and Perugino, and being able to abandon everything for them’ (p. 338). But it was only in considering the development at the time of writing his autobiography that he can measure what had been happening in the intervening time when he: was so occupied with Modern Painters, degree-getting, and studies of foliage and foreground, that I cannot understand how I had reached, in picture knowledge, the point shown by these entries, of which indeed the first shows that the gain surprised me at the time, but foolishly regards it only as change coming to pass in the Louvre on the instant, and does not recognize it as the result of growth. (pp. 337–8)

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Within the impeded but unfolding narrative of Ruskin’s growth there is a counterDarwinian view of an evolutionary destiny which stemmed from his own scientific preoccupations with natural design in childhood and later informed his often idiosyncratic critique of the reductive procedures of scientific materialism. Accordingly, in Letter 5 of Fors (1871), he refuted John Tyndall’s Belfast Address by proposing that the plant exists to produce the flower, rather than seeing the flower reductively as simply a variant of the leaf. In Ethics of the Dust (1866), he was particularly interested in the laws of crystallisation, which transcend particular times and places, and are even independent of the existence of crystals, teasing out inherent quasi-metaphysical intimations, incompatible with the evolving universe of Darwinian flux. Whereas Darwin’s theory posited a developmental history entirely determined by external circumstances, Ruskin advocated the unfolding of an inner potential from within individual creatures and species, in line with the teleology of personality described from Aristotle to Aquinas: ‘entelechy’, the vital principle within the working and development of all natural and human organisation. This inner drive to self-realisation and fruition informs the pattern of growth in Praeterita, the ‘past things’, which had turned out to have become the media for Ruskin’s life. As that life had continuously unfolded, so it had become clearer and clearer, as Ruskin sees at the end of the final chapter, ‘How things bind and blend themselves together!’ (p. 561). Everything, after all, could be represented as a lived whole. The paradigm of formal growth – of stasis within flux – can be seen in the Ruskinian paradoxes of dogmatism and unashamed self-contradiction, and also of elitist standards and popular access in education and the arts for which he argues in ‘Of King’s Treasuries’ (1865). Henry James called him ‘a Chartered libertine’,30 and squaring the circle of Ruskin, the Tory communist’s political contradictions, amounts to one version of Aristotelian liberalism: of individual self-expression within an overall scheme of moral order. The vital form he explored within biological and vegetational design as it found expression in medieval ornamentation, where, for example, ‘a leaf might always be considered as a sudden expansion of the stem that bore it; an uncontrollable expression of delight, on the part of the twig’,31 was the same ‘soul’ which he yearned to draw out from the unalienated workman in ‘The Nature of the Gothic’ (1853). In his autobiography, Ruskin saw his way to offering his own life as a corrective to the death of the market society according to the gospel proclaimed in Unto This Last (1860): ‘THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE.’32

30 Henry James, The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts by Henry James, ed. John L. Sweeney (London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1956), p. 173. 31 Works of John Ruskin, V, 264. 32 Ibid., XVII, 105.

Chapter 9

Authorial, Antiquarian and Acting Authenticity in Henry Irving’s King Lear Richard Foulkes

In her essay ‘Varying Authenticities: Poel, Tree and Late-Victorian Shakespeare’, Jean Chothia contrasts William Poel’s ‘admittedly rather shaky, attempt to recreate Elizabethan performance style’1 with the prevailing taste for scenic spectacle, most sumptuously realised by Herbert Beerbohm Tree. She places this comparison in the context of recent advances in scholarship pioneered by the New Shakespeare Society (1873–1894) under the leadership of F.J. Furnivall and the discovery of the De Witt sketch of the Swan Theatre, the publication of which in 1888 ‘had shown […] quite how bare the Elizabethan stage could be’.2 It was of course incumbent on a leading actor to be aware of the growing, though by no means consistently accurate, state of knowledge about the actual conditions in which Shakespeare’s plays were performed, printed and published, but whether or not he applied this awareness to his stage work was another matter. The nature and extent of this process will be scrutinised with specific reference to Henry Irving’s King Lear, which ran at the Lyceum Theatre from 10 November 1892 for a ‘record run’ of 76 performances.3 As the intensive debate about the status of the quarto and folio texts of King Lear during the past 30 or so years has indicated, the issue of textual authenticity and authorial intention are particularly, indeed in the view of some scholars uniquely, contentious with this play. The loss, or excision, of 300 quarto lines from the folio in which some 100 new lines appear has led to theories of rewriting by Shakespeare.4 This inevitably poses a dilemma for any production of the play. In the decades prior to 1892 these had been few and not particularly distinguished (Charles Kean in 1858 and Samuel Phelps in 1861), so William Charles Macready’s 1838 revival still stood as the exemplar, not least because it was the Jean Chothia, ‘Varying Authenticities: Poel, Tree and Late-Victorian Shakespeare’, in Victorian Shakespeare, ed. Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole, 2 vols (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), I, 161–77 (p. 163). 2 Ibid., p. 165. 3 Jeffrey Richards, Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and his World (London: Hambledon, 2005), p. 136. 4 René Weis, Introduction, William Shakespeare, King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition, ed. René Weis (Harlow: Longman, 1993), p. 3. 1

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first in which the Fool had been seen since Nahum Tate’s adaptation (1681) had usurped Shakespeare’s original.5 In Irving’s opinion, the ‘period after the Restoration’ was ‘when the worst taste in dramatic literature prevailed’.6 He delivered this verdict in his chapter on ‘Shakespeare as a Playwright’ in the first volume (out of eight) of The Henry Irving Shakespeare, published in 1890, by which time Irving’s friend and co-editor Frank Marshall had died and Edward Dowden, Professor of English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin and author of the oft-reprinted Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), had stepped in, contributing the ‘Life of Shakespeare and General Introduction’. As Laurence Irving observed, Irving and Marshall ‘had conceived the idea of presenting to the public in a popular form the plays of Shakespeare with notes and commentaries based upon the recent researches of Furnivall and Furness [the American editor of the New Variorum]’.7 This reflected the intention of Irving, who was by then the leader of his profession, to show that it and he were au courant with the reputable world of scholarship through their common commitment to the national Bard. Nevertheless, in his contribution Irving wore such learning as he had lightly, rightly concerning himself principally with stage matters, such as cutting and re-arranging the text: In many plays of Shakespeare the omission of passages, the modification of certain words or phrases, and the transposition of some scenes, are all absolutely necessary before they can be acted; but the popular taste nowadays would not permit an actor to take such liberties with the text as were once thought not only pardonable but commendable; and indeed, the more the actor plays Shakespeare, the more he must be convinced that to attempt to improve the language of our greatest dramatist is a very hopeless task.8

Thus Irving set out his stall: Shakespeare’s words were virtually sacrosanct except presumably in cases of extreme obscurity or obvious indecency or profanity; cuts were essential and, though fewer than in the past, Victorian cuts were swingeing, not that a play of the length of King Lear can ever escape entirely; and transposition (changing the sequence) of scenes was also on occasions essential. The principal rationale for cuts and transpositions was of course scenery, the elaborateness of which, ‘dictated by the public taste of the day’, resulted in time-consuming changes:

Richard Foulkes, Performing Shakespeare in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 11–12. 6 Henry Irving, ‘Shakespeare as a Playwright’, The Henry Irving Shakespeare: The Works of Shakespeare, ed. Henry Irving and Frank A. Marshall, subscription edition, 8 vols (London: Blackie and Son, 1892), I, lxxxii. 7 Laurence Irving, Henry Irving: The Actor and His World (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 522. 8 The Henry Irving Shakespeare, I, lxxxiv. 5

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The stage has become not only a mirror of the passions, but also a nursery of the arts, for here students of the past learn the form and colour of the costumes and the decorations of distant ages. To all these there are clear limits. It is not always possible to reproduce an historic period with exactness. Macbeth, and Lear, and Hamlet belong to history too remote for fidelity to costume.9

In these sections on cutting the text and historical fidelity in scenery and costumes, Irving was addressing two conflicting forms of authenticity. Unlike Shakespeare’s original audiences their Victorian counterparts expected a feast for the eye as well as the ear, but this could only be provided at the expense of the authentic text. In King Lear the problem was exacerbated by the complexity of the texts and the uncertainty about the historical period in which the play is set. Appearing in volume VI of The Henry Irving Shakespeare, King Lear was introduced by Oscar Fay Adams and A. Wilson Verity. Adams and Verity outline the status of the texts of King Lear succinctly and clearly, concluding that of the many ‘critics and commentators’ by whom ‘the difference in the text has been much discussed’: ‘No two of them come to precisely the same conclusion’, adding prophetically, ‘and it is not likely that the question can ever be settled’. However: ‘The weight of authority is in favour of the view that the Folio gives us a later and revised form of the play, and that the omissions in that edition were probably made in the theatre for stage purposes.’10 Be that as it may, Adams and Verity provide a cue for one of the most striking features of the edition: TEXT – The author’s Text of both Plays and Poems is given entire, without garbling or mutilation, and in doubtful or corrupt passages the best readings have been adopted. Mr. IRVING has introduced an entirely new and interesting feature in the text, by showing what portions of each play may be easily or desirably omitted without break of continuity, in reading the play to public or private audiences, and in representing it on the stage.11

These expendable portions are denoted by a wavy line in the margin and/or bold square brackets. Footnotes provide a gloss on difficult words and endnotes fuller commentary and comparison between quarto and folio readings. The cuts fall quite predictably, as in Edmund’s ursa major speech in Act 1, scene 2 and the blinding of Gloucester, which Tate surprisingly had retained. The tally of lines cut amounts to something over 900, but when, two years after the publication of The Henry Irving Shakespeare, Irving came to prepare his acting edition for the Lyceum Theatre, it must have become apparent to him that he had to go much further. As was his custom, Irving published an acting edition of King Lear, which, together with the illustrated Souvenir of King Lear, provided attractive merchandise Ibid., p. lxxxiv. Ibid., VI, 321. 11 Ibid., I, 2. 9

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for Lyceum audiences.12 In his preface to the acting edition, Irving wrote of ‘the play being necessarily reduced to suit the exigencies of the present time, all superfluous horrors have been omitted’.13 In Alan Hughes’s calculation, Irving cut 1,507 lines out of 3,275, a staggering 46 percent.14 Further insight into the process is provided by the annotated copy in the British Library,15 which, though catalogued as a promptbook, in fact amounts to a proof of the acting edition with a further nearly 200 lines deleted. Clearly getting King Lear within manageable proportions was an extremely difficult task in which Irving progressively shed more and more of the original play. Recent scholarship has argued that Irving actively collaborated with the authors of new plays, but clearly dead ones were by no means spared his intervention.16 What, then, apart from sparing his audiences ‘superfluous horrors’, was the basis on which Irving made his cuts? The answer lies in Irving’s resolution of the problem of the remoteness of the period in which King Lear is set. Holinshed’s Chronicles, one of several sources used by Shakespeare, dates the action to 3105 AM (Anno Mundi);17 in The Henry Irving Shakespeare the ‘Historic Period’ is described as ‘Mythical, 841–791 BC’.18 The crucial letters here are ‘BC’: before Christ. In their introduction Adams and Verity relate the blinding of Gloucester to ‘a deliberate endeavour to conduct us into heathen and barbaric times, a purposeful study by Shakespeare of an unruly and turbulent age, in which passion was the lord of all’, going on to point out that ‘Shakespeare has carefully refrained in the play from all direct references to Christianity’.19 It is here that another form of faithfulness (in addition to authorial and antiquarian authenticity) enters the picture, for Irving was an avowed Christian, brought up as a Methodist in Cornwall by his devout Aunt Penberthy. By entering the theatrical profession, Irving rejected strong opposition to it amongst many Christians and almost by way of a riposte gave some of his greatest performances as stage clerics: Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Becket and Dr Primrose. Conversely he also gave compelling King Lear by William Shakespeare: A tragedy in five acts as arranged for the stage by Henry Irving and presented at the Lyceum Theatre on November 10 1892 (London: Nassau Steam Press, 1892); [Anonymous], Souvenir of Shakespeare’s Tragedy King Lear Presented at the Lyceum Theatre, 10 November, 1892 (London: Offices of Black and White, 1892). 13 Henry Irving, Preface, King Lear […] as arranged for the stage by Henry Irving, p. 5. 14 Alan Hughes, Henry Irving, Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 252. 15 Henry Irving, Promptbook for King Lear, Add MS 61995A, British Library. 16 See Richard Foulkes (ed.), Henry Irving: A Re-Evaluation of the Pre-Eminent Victorian Actor-Manager (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), esp. chaps 4 (for Hall Caine), 5 (for Comyns Carr) and 8 (for Sardou). 17 R. Holinshed, The Second Booke of the Historie of England (1587 edn.), in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–1975), VII, 316–19 (p. 316). 18 The Henry Irving Shakespeare, VI, p. 159. 19 Ibid., p. 334. 12

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portraits of evil (Macbeth) and remorse (Eugene Aram, Mathias in The Bells). Indeed a spiritual dimension of one sort or another was a characteristic of most of Irving’s performances. He steadfastly asserted his personal belief, as when visiting Tennyson (‘You know I don’t believe in eternal hell. […] I believe in the all-merciful God!’)20 and to his companion of later years, Mrs Aria (‘I believe in immortality, and my faith is strengthened with advancing years, without faith in things spiritual life would indeed be a weary waste’).21 Whereas in the 1960s Jan Kott, the Polish scholar and author of Shakespeare Our Contemporary, and Peter Brook, the theatre director, seized upon the godlessness of King Lear to enforce connections with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952),22 Irving’s personal disposition was to retrieve some elements of Christianity from the play for which a prerequisite was setting it in Christian times. The Henry Irving Shakespeare also contains illustrations by Gordon Browne, supplemented by the work of Messrs W.H. Margetson, Maynard Brown and Frank Dadd, but the recurrence of the surname Brown/Browne assumed greater eminence with the contribution of Ford Madox Brown to the Lyceum production. Born in 1821, Ford Madox Brown was (it turned out) in the penultimate year of his long life when Irving invited him to contribute designs for the 1892 Lyceum revival of King Lear. According to W. Graham Robertson, Irving had a print of Cordelia’s Portion (1865–1866, retouched 1872), ‘which he had always admired immensely’,23 hanging in his dressing-room. Just as Irving’s admiration for Brown was longstanding, so was the artist’s for King Lear. In Helen O. Borowitz’s words: ‘Brown became attracted early in his career to the ancient tragedy of King Lear and continued to create scenes from the play over a period spanning almost fifty years.’24 The most significant of these creations was his sequence of 18 drawings of scenes from the play (1844), Lear and Cordelia (also known as Cordelia at the Bedside of King Lear (1848–1849, retouched 1853–1854)), and Cordelia’s Portion. King Lear, like many of Shakespeare’s plays, had long appealed to artists, notably John Runciman, who painted King Lear in the Storm (1767) and the three huge canvasses for the Boydell Shakespeare.25 But of course Brown belonged to a very different school, or rather did not belong to it, for though his paintings exhibit many of the characteristics of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood he was not himself 20 Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 2 vols (London: William Heinemann, 1906), I, 219. 21 Mrs Aria, My Sentimental Self (London: Chapman and Hall, 1922), p. 142. 22 Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 101–37. 23 W. Graham Robertson, Time Was (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1931), p. 168. 24 Helen O. Borowitz, ‘King Lear in the Art of Ford Madox Brown’, Victorian Studies, 21 (1978), 309–30 (p. 310). 25 See W. Moelwyn Merchant, Shakespeare and the Artist (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), ch. 12; Stuart Sillars, Painting Shakespeare 1720–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 82–93.

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formally a member of it. The nature of the relationship is captured by the title of the 2008 exhibition at the Birmingham City Art Gallery: ‘Ford Madox Brown: The Unofficial Pre-Raphaelite’. Dante Gabriel Rossetti who ‘had always wanted Brown in the Brotherhood […] brought him into the enlarged circle gathering to compile The Germ’ and his contributions proved to be seminal to the movement and his own work.26 In the February 1850 issue, Brown addressed his article ‘On the Mechanism of a Historical Picture’ (perhaps a shade optimistically) to ‘all about to paint their first picture’, though the most striking aspect of his language is its recurrent use of theatrical terminology.27 Thus the artist is advised to give ‘the most prominent places to the most important actors’, ‘arrange the “grouping”’, ‘consider the colour, and disposition of light and dark masses’, and to ‘exert himself […] seeking to enter into the character of each actor […] searching for dramatic truth’.28 The similarities between Pre-Raphaelite paintings and stage design have not gone unnoticed.29 Though Borowitz found it ‘difficult to determine’ whether Brown saw Macready’s Lear,30 it is evident from his diary entry for 2 May 1848 that he did go ‘to see M’creadrey in Lear’,31 though this was a decade on from the ground-breaking 1838 production at Covent Garden and took place at the Marylebone Theatre. What also emerges clearly from his diaries is Brown’s fondness for the theatre and his recurrent absorption in his own work on King Lear; for instance, on 18 January 1849: ‘set to work again at 7 till 12 at the head of Lear’; and for 1 January 1856, ‘Eveng K Lear (8 hours)’.32 It must be doubtful whether even Macready or Irving immersed himself any more thoroughly in the play than did Brown. Central to Brown’s engagement with King Lear was the period in which the play should be set, about which he wrote with reference to Lear and Cordelia: Having its origin in the old ballad, Shakespeare’s King Lear is Roman-paganBritish nominally; medieval by external customs and habits, and again, in a marked degree, savage and remote by the moral side. With a fair excuse it might be treated in Roman-British costume, but then clashing with the medieval institutions and habits introduced; or as purely medieval. But I have rather 26 Teresa Newman and Ray Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle (London: Chatto and Windus, 1991), p. 52. 27 Ford Madox Brown, ‘On the Mechanism of a Historical Picture’, The Germ: Thoughts Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art (New York: AMS Press, 1965), pp. 70–73 (p. 70). Brown’s drawing of Cordelia and her sisters appeared in the March 1850 issue. 28 Ibid., p. 71. 29 Richard Foulkes, ‘Charles Kean’s Richard II: A Pre-Raphaelite Drama’, in Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage, ed. Richard Foulkes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 39–55. 30 Borowitz, ‘King Lear in the Art of Ford Madox Brown’, p. 319. 31 Ford Madox Brown, The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, ed. Virginia Surtees (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 40. 32 Ibid., pp. 56, 161.

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chosen to be in harmony with the mental characteristics of Shakespeare’s work, and have therefore adopted the costume prevalent in Europe about the sixth century, when paganism was still rife, and deeds were at their darkest.33

Of the rather later Cordelia’s Portion, Brown’s grandson and biographer Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford) pointed out: ‘The costume is once again that of the undefined semi-mythical period, in which, as I have said, Madox Brown delighted to place his characters. Lear might be a Druid; France, one of the Carlovingian kings; Cordelia, a slightly Byzantine medieval figure. The place is an old Roman villa.’34 The important point is that the period chosen by Brown, though it contained many disparate elements, accommodated Christianity. For Brown the attractions of such a setting seem to have been principally antiquarian and aesthetic, but crucially for Irving it admitted a Christian reading of the play. The influence of the German Nazarene school of painting is identified in Brown’s work as in that of the formal members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but whereas they had an influential advocate in John Ruskin, Ruskin was put off Brown by what he considered to be the artist’s ‘distasteful realism’.35 Yet it was what Kenneth Bendiner describes as ‘Brown’s attempts to revive the qualities of crude, early art’36 that made him so well suited to King Lear. It would have been unrealistic of Irving to have expected the octogenarian Brown to undertake the designs for the whole production, which was staged in five acts consisting of 16 scenes requiring 11 different sets. Instead, as the programme acknowledged: ‘The Scenes of Lear’s Palace and Gloster’s and Albany’s Castles are from designs by FORD MADOX BROWN.’37 In Martin Meisel’s estimation: ‘These were, surely not by chance, the locales of the three major sequences in the 1844 drawings.’38 Some insight into the process can be gleaned from Brown’s letter to Irving of 24 June 1892: ‘The large sketch for Lear’s castle is finished, if you would like to bring your scene modeler to come to see it. The other designs of Albany and Cornwall’s halls are not yet ready to show, but they will not take me so long.’39 The ‘scene modeler’, though it might Brown’s note to Lear and Cordelia and Lear from the catalogue for The Exhibition of WORK, and Other Paintings by Ford Madox Brown, at the Gallery Piccadilly A.D. MDCCLXV; reproduced in Kenneth Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p. 134. 34 Ford Madox Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of His Life and Work (London: Longmans, Green, 1896), p. 223. 35 Lucy Rabin, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite History-Picture (New York: Garland, 1978), p. 201. 36 Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown, p. 3. 37 Lyceum Theatre programme for King Lear, no page. 38 Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in NineteenthCentury England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 426. 39 Brown to Irving (7 July 1893), THM/37/7/18 (Ref. No. 477), Theatre Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum. 33

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not have been the term he used of himself, was Joseph Harker, who provides an account of the process presumably at a rather earlier stage: His [Irving’s] production of King Lear caused me some heartburnings on account of the scarcity of architectural records on which to base my design for the Palace Scene. The only existing example of ancient British architecture to which I could turn for inspiration is of course Stonehenge, and this, it is perhaps not necessary to say, leaves so much to the imagination. My conception of the scene was rather rugged, but it pleased Irving, and he insisted on driving me off in a cab to see Ford Madox Brown, who was assisting him in an advisory capacity in mounting the play. Madox Brown’s verdict on my design was not so flattering as Irving’s had been. He was ill in bed when we arrived – a venerable figure of a man, his white hair parted neatly in the middle and falling in a fringe over his ears. When I entered the room behind Irving with my model of the scene in my arms, he looked quite scared, and asked to be told what on earth I was carrying! ‘The model for the Palace Scene,’ Irving explained. ‘Good gracious!’ murmured Madox Brown. ‘It looks like the Palace of an Ojjibaway Indian’ – an expression of opinion that quite took the wind out of my sails!40

According to Harker, ‘absolute accuracy was an ideal from which he [Irving] never knowingly swerved’,41 so a good deal of work lay ahead to recreate on stage the settings for the three palaces/castles and indeed the other locations, of which ‘Tent in the French Camp’ (Act IV, scene 5), though not part of Brown’s brief, inevitably owed a great deal to his original painting. Brown’s involvement in the Lyceum production evidently prompted him to further work on his own account as he wrote to Irving: ‘I am just finishing a replica of my well-known picture of “Cordelia’s Portion” which I should like you to see before you leave for America.’42 Brown, who continued to work until days before his death on 6 October, appears, from the descriptions of Harker and of members of Brown’s family (‘His face looked intensely proud and lonely. […] His white hair was spread out on the pillow’; ‘The wind was howling outside but it was quiet inside the room’)43 to be modelling himself on his favourite artistic subject. If in his declining months and on his deathbed Ford Madox Brown’s life (and death) seemed to be imitating art in the form of Shakespeare’s King Lear the challenge for Henry Irving was to make art imitate nature not only in the scenic accoutrements of his production but also, indeed more so, in his realisation of the principal character. According to Bernard Shaw: ‘a prodigious deal of nonsense has been written about Sir Henry Irving’s conception of this, that, and the other Joseph Harker, Studio and Stage (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972), pp. 126–7. Ibid, p. 127. 42 Ford Madox Brown to Henry Irving (7 July 1893), THM/37/7/18 (Ref. No. 479), 40

41

Theatre Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum. 43 Newman and Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle, p. 196.

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Shakespearean character. The truth is that he has never in his life conceived or interpreted the characters of any author except himself’. As Shylock, when ‘his own creation came into conflict with Shakespear’s, as it did quite openly in the Trial scene, he simply played in flat contradiction to the lines, and positively acted Shakespear off the stage’, and when as Lear he ‘tried to interpolate a most singular and fantastic notion of an old man between the lines of a fearfully mutilated acting version of King Lear, he was smashed’.44 In terms of authenticity, therefore, such deference as Irving felt due to the author was subjugated to his own, often transcendently compelling, concept of the character he was playing. Shaw’s reference to the ‘fearfully mutilated acting version of King Lear’ indicates that one means by which Irving imposed his own reading on a play was by cuts. Cuts were, as we have noted, par for the course in the Victorian theatre, but there is a difference between cuts that facilitate numerous changes of elaborate scenery and cuts that assert a particular interpretation, or even distortion, of the author’s text. As the introduction to King Lear in The Henry Irving Shakespeare observed: ‘Shakespeare has carefully refrained in the play from all direct references to Christianity’.45 But the general introduction was written by Edward Dowden. In Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), Dowden divided the plays into four periods, which he sought to relate to Shakespeare’s life. King Lear is placed in the ‘Third Period’46 with other tragedies and what have since been dubbed ‘Problem Plays’. In The Henry Irving Shakespeare, Dowden returned to this theme, taking issue with one M. James Darmesteter who ‘names the period […] the Pessimist period’, continuing: ‘I cannot accept the name. […] As soon as Shakespeare set himself in the tragedies to a deeper study of the human heart and a more searching inquisition of evil, he made a fresh and higher discovery of human virtue.’47 In due course, Dowden’s interpretation fed through into A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, first published in 1904 and frequently reprinted, with its concept of ‘The Redemption of King Lear’ in which ‘the business of “the gods” with him was neither to torment him, nor to teach him a “noble anger”, but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless failure the very end and aim of life’.48 By setting his play in pre-Christian times, Shakespeare was able to present a wide spectrum of attitudes to God – or the gods – ranging from the implicit Christianity embodied by Albany, Cordelia and Edgar to the outright scepticism of Edmund, and from the despair of Gloucester’s ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; / They kill us for their sport’ to Kent’s fatalistic utterance, ‘It is the stars’, alongside the elementalism of Lear’s ‘Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks!’ 44 George Bernard Shaw, Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 75–6. 45 The Henry Irving Shakespeare, VI, p. 334. 46 Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London: Kegan Paul, 1875), p. xvii. 47 The Henry Irving Shakespeare, I, lv. 48 A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 235.

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As already noted, Irving banished the blinding of Gloucester from the stage, while other cuts fell on passages that perceived the deity negatively as malign or vengeful. Thus, though not bracketed for omission in The Henry Irving Shakespeare, the following is omitted from the 1892 acting edition: Lear:

Let the great gods, That keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads, Find out their enemies now. (3.2.49–51)

The same fate befell: Gloster:

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, – They kill us for their sport. (4.1.51–2)

Albany:

This shows you are above, You justicers, that these our nether crimes So speedily can venge! (4.2.78–80)

Kent:

It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our condition (4.3.33)

Edgar:

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us. (5.3.170–71)49

On the other hand, Gloucester’s ‘You ever-gentle gods’ (4.6.222) remained, as did sentiments such as Cordelia’s ‘O you kind gods’ (4.7.13); and, avoiding the dilemma of whether to give the final speech to Albany as in the quarto or to Edgar as in the folio, the acting edition ended with: Kent:

Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! He hates him, That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer. (5.2)50

Though these cuts fell on other characters, they were conducive, as they were designed to be, to Irving’s interpretation of the central role. Amongst the associations that reviewers evoked were Moses, Noah, a Druidic priest-king and General Booth of the Salvation Army.51 Following Ford Madox Brown’s lead in creating a ‘Roman-pagan-British’ setting for the play was crucial, with one critic, Augustin Filon, pinning the period down pretty precisely: ‘Possible date: between the definite retreat of the legions (418), and the first landing of the Saxons (449). We could bring the epoch of such men, who every instant speak of their “gods,” nearer to us’.52 In this vein, Clement Scott found ‘something of Tennyson’s Merlin’: 51 52

Quotations from The Henry Irving Shakespeare. King Lear […] as arranged for the stage by Henry Irving, p. 77. See reviews in volume X of the Percy Fitzgerald Collection, Garrick Club Library. [Anonymous], King Lear at the Lyceum Produced November 10, 1892: Some Extracts from the Press (London: Chiswick Press, 1893), p. 112. 49

50

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Shut your ears to the text, and, in scene after scene, it might be Merlin and Vivien, and not Lear and Cordelia. But these impressions are fitful and momentary. In its external aspect the comparison that at once suggests itself to the mind is one from sacred, and not profane, history. When the grand figure stands erect against a dark background, illumined with flashes of lightning how is it that Biblical, and not Shakespearean lore is uppermost in the thoughts? Henry Irving – not to speak it profanely, but in all reverence – in his character of Lear, might have stood for Moses on Mount Sinai, or Noah at the hour of the flood. His appearance is patriarchal, not theatrical.53

As with all Irving’s great performances his Lear was grounded in what Edward R. Russell called ‘the great inner conception’.54 Irving himself claimed that this was ‘a sudden idea’ on the first night that ‘revolutionised the impersonation and launched me into an experiment unattempted at rehearsal’, namely that ‘the decay of his intellect has begun before the opening of the play’.55 This seems somewhat disingenuous since in the introduction to the play in The Henry Irving Shakespeare, published two years before the Lyceum production, Adams and Verity sought to explain Lear’s ‘excess of rage’ at Cordelia’s ‘Nothing, my lord’ as follows: These [conditions] are undoubtedly as far as Lear is concerned, those of failing powers of restraint bordering upon madness, if, indeed, it may not be said that this borderline has been already crossed. On this point professionalism has some claim to speak, and at least three medical men, Dr. Brigham, Dr. Ray, and Dr. Bucknall, have certified the insanity of Lear from the very outset of the play.56

Whenever it was formulated, the conception that Lear was teetering into madness from the beginning of the play was the hallmark of Irving’s performance. The frequent insertion of ‘Ha!’57 in Lear’s early speeches was presumably intended to signal his condition, creating the impression described by Russell: ‘a fretfulness in his glances, a self-forcing in his striding gait, a carelessness as to his appearance, along with a peremptory assertion of dignity, a lapse into strange ways, as the using of his sword as a walking-stick’, which he perceived as the ‘fruits of observation and sound diagnosis’ and ‘long observation of a special type of brain disorder’. According to Russell: ‘Henry Irving, I believe, studies the words of his part last. He meditates on the play and the part. He gets to the heart of the personage’.58 Clement Scott, From ‘The Bells’ to ‘King Arthur’ (London: John Macqueen, 1896), p. 349. 54 Edward R. Russell, ‘Irving’s “King Lear”: A New Tradition’, Nineteenth Century (Jan. 1893), 44–51 (p. 44). 55 Henry Irving, ‘Four Favourite Parts’, Sir Henry Irving: Theatre, Culture and Society – Essays, Addresses and Lectures, ed. Jeffrey Richards (Keele: Ryburn, 1994), pp. 237–41 (pp. 240–41). 56 The Henry Irving Shakespeare, VI, 335. 57 Henry Irving promptbook for King Lear, Garrick Club Library. 58 Russell, ‘Henry Irving’s “King Lear”’, p. 46. 53

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In effect, Russell’s evaluation of Irving amounts to much the same as Shaw’s (‘he simply played in flat contradiction of the lines’), though expressed in positive terms. In his lengthy review Russell charts Irving’s performance through the play, but here constraints of space dictate advancing to the end, pausing only to observe that ‘the scene laid in a tent in the French camp’ with Lear ‘stretched out on a soft couch in a deep sleep’59 was clearly indebted to Brown’s painting and provided a setting conducive to the emotional force of the reunion with Cordelia. To his Cordelia, Ellen Terry: ‘H was just marvellous.’60 This emotional charge was reignited in the closing moments, in which, as we have noted, Irving made cuts of lines the significance of which far outweighed their length: ‘The end was beautiful. The feeble old man whose mind has been o’erthrown rather by indignation than grief – by the anger that is madness, as the sages say – and was partially restored by happiness and completely by chaste sorrow.’61 There is of course what René Weis calls ‘a tantalizing ambiguity’62 about Lear’s death. Is it caused by grief at Cordelia’s demise, or by the mistaken belief that she lives? In his 12 November 1892 review, Edward Dowden proclaimed that, although ‘Lear dies upon the rack’, nevertheless ‘he dies a believer in that which is best and most real in human life’, and that, Cordelia having ‘restored him to love’, it is ‘love that delivers over the afflicted old man to the great calm of death’.63 Implicit in Dowden’s words, and of course Irving’s performance, was the belief that father and daughter were, as Tennyson put it, crossing ‘the bar’ to a better world: ‘I hope to see my Pilot face to face / When I have crost the bar.’64 Irving’s King Lear confronts us with conflicting and yet interwoven authorial, antiquarian and acting authenticities. With cuts of over 40 per cent, authorial authenticity was undoubtedly severely compromised and with no attempt to observe what was then understood about the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage, no claim could be made for authenticity of that kind. Allowing that King Lear defies historical accuracy, antiquarian authenticity was achieved in large measure on the terms originating from Ford Madox Brown. But overall authorial and antiquarian authenticity were ceded to the service of Irving’s acting, which provided a compellingly authentic insight into the psychology and infirmity of old age, underpinned by a profound religious – specifically Christian – faith.

From the Dramatic Review, in Some Extracts from the Press, p. 90. Michael Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry,

59 60

Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families (London: Chatto and Windus, 2008), p. 232. 61 From the Pall Mall Budget, in Some Extracts from the Press, p. 75. 62 King Lear, ed. Weis, p. 307. 63 Edward Dowden, ‘King Lear’, Illustrated London News, 101 (July–Dec. 1892), 603. 64 Alfred Tennyson, ‘Crossing the Bar’, ll. 15–16; In Memoriam, Maud and Other Poems, ed. John D. Jump (London: Everyman, 1995), p. 215.

Chapter 10

The Authentic Voice of Elizabeth Gaskell Joanne Shattock

At the end of a long and characteristically news-filled letter to her friend Catherine Winkworth, written in October 1854 from the Nightingale family’s summer home, where she was in the midst of writing North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell concluded by saying: ‘I must go to my real writing now; but I hope I have earned a letter from you.’1 The question of what constitutes Gaskell’s ‘real writing’, and the relationship of her letters to that writing, is the subject of this essay. Gaskell was an inveterate letter writer. She wrote daily to her daughters when she was away from home, and also to her husband when they were apart, although few of her letters to him have survived. She had a wide circle of friends and associates, through her professional life, her philanthropic work, and her family connections. She sometimes enclosed packets of letters she had received in her letters to friends, for their further enjoyment. ‘Don’t you like reading letters?’ she wrote to the biographer John Forster in 1854. ‘I do, so much.’ And to reinforce her point she ‘pop[ped] in 2 clever letters from an old Parisian friend of mine \Madame Mohl/’ plus Charlotte Brontë’s announcement of her forthcoming marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls.2 She asked that the letters be returned. Gaskell’s own letter to Forster was full of literary gossip, including some unflattering recollections of Effie Ruskin, whom she had known from her school days, and a detailed account of the repercussions of Nicholls’s proposal at the Haworth parsonage. It was probably because of this that she added: ‘Oh, Mr. Forster if you don’t burn my own letters as you read them I will never forgive you!’ For many nineteenth-century letter writers, the burning of personal correspondence was automatic. It was linked to a regard for, if not obsession with, privacy, and the sense of a personal letter as an intimate document directed at one recipient. ‘Pray burn any letters’, Gaskell wrote to her eldest daughter, Marianne, in 1854. ‘I am always afraid of writing much to you, you are so careless about letters.’3 The irony of this particular instruction would emerge much later. Rosemarie Bodenheimer notes similar assumptions about women’s letter writing borne out in conduct books: the fear of invasion of privacy and the danger

1 Elizabeth Gaskell, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 310. 2 Ibid., pp. 289–90. 3 Ibid., p. 274.

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of letters falling into other hands. She quotes a letter from Charlotte Brontë to her friend Ellen Nussey shortly after her marriage: Men don’t seem to understand making letters a vehicle of communication, they always seem to think us incautious. I’m sure I don’t think I have said anything rash; however you must BURN it when read. Arthur says such letters as mine ought never to be kept, they are dangerous as Lucifer matches […].4

In another letter she repeated her husband’s instruction, adding: ‘He says women are most rash in letter-writing, they think only of the trustworthiness of their immediate friend, and do not look to contingencies; a letter may fall into any hand.’5 Gaskell no doubt had this last point in mind as she worried about her letters to George Smith, the publisher of her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), who kept an archive of his authors’ letters. ‘Now to business’, she wrote, ‘only please when I write a letter beginning with a star like this on its front [drawing of a star], you may treasure up my letter; otherwise please burn them & don’t send them to the terrible warehouse where the 20000 letters a year are kept. It is like a nightmare to think of it—’.6 The destruction of her letters – both during her lifetime and after – would pose a problem for readers and scholars. Gaskell regarded her letters as private documents. She would not agree to one she had written to the theologian F.D. Maurice being published in a newspaper as part of an organized gesture of support following his dismissal from Queen’s College. ‘I hope nobody but Mr and Mrs Maurice will see what I write, for the very same reason that would make you not talk about your feelings before many people’, she told F.J. Furnivall. She distinguished the privacy of letters from a more public voice she adopted in her fiction. ‘Do you think I cd say or write in a letter (except one that I was sure wd be regarded as private by some dear friend) what I have said both in M B & Ruth? It may seem strong & I can’t myself account for it, – but it is so—.’7 She also subscribed to the almost institutionalized distrust, if not fear, of biography that beset so many nineteenth-century writers, and women writers in particular. Like George Eliot, she disapproved of the various biographical directories that were in circulation at mid-century, replying to one editor: I disapprove so entirely of the plan of writing ‘notices’ or ‘memoirs’ of living people, that I must send you on the answer I have already sent to many others; namely an entire refusal to sanction what is to me so objectionable & indelicate

T.J. Wise (ed.), The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence, 4 vols (Oxford: Shakespeare Head, 1933), IV, 156–7, cited in Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 23–4. 5 Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans, p. 24. 6 Letters of Mrs Gaskell, p. 426. 7 Ibid., pp. 255–6. 4

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a practice, by furnishing a single fact with regard to myself. I do not see why the public have any more to do with me than to buy \or reject/ the wares I supply to them.8

She was adamant that no biography should be written after her death, instructing her daughters to this effect. Several of the obituaries written in 1865 commented on how little was known of her private life, and so it was to remain. Her unmarried daughters Meta and Julia upheld their mother’s wishes with a vengeance. Meta is thought to have destroyed the extensive correspondence with Catherine Winkworth, and possibly other letters, as early as the 1880s.9 Prior to her death in 1913, and still living in the family home in Manchester, she destroyed more letters and private papers, including, it is assumed, the letters between Elizabeth and William Gaskell. A house sale after her death saw the dispersal of the remaining contents of Plymouth Grove. Fortunately, Marianne, Gaskell’s one surviving married daughter, chose to disregard or perhaps forgot her mother’s injunction, thus providing future scholars with a valuable cache of correspondence. Certain favoured individuals were permitted by Meta and Julia to consult the letters and papers in their possession, notably A.W. Ward, later Professor Sir A.W. Ward, who had taken over William Gaskell’s lectures on appointment as Professor of History and English Language and Literature at Owens College, Manchester, in 1866, and who became a family friend. Ward wrote Elizabeth Gaskell’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, published in 1885, and relied on his privileged position to write the ‘Biographical Introduction’ to his eight-volume Knutsford edition of her works, published in 1906. Clement K. Shorter was contracted to write the volume on Gaskell for the second series of John Morley’s English Men of Letters in 1902,10 on the understanding that Meta Gaskell vetted what he had written. The biography was never completed, although the materials, which included typescripts of the letters, were used by Jane Coolidge Whitehill for a biography, which in turn was never published. One or two early biographers were permitted to read the letters but not to quote from them, an arrangement which invites comparison with modern wrangles over literary estates and intellectual copyright. One of these was Mrs Ellis H. Chadwick, who wrote Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes and Stories for the centenary of Gaskell’s birth in 1910, and wistfully recorded in her introduction:

Ibid., p. 761. See J.E.C. Weldon, ‘Miss Gaskell’, Cornhill Magazine (Jan. 1914), 32–5; Further

8 9

Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. John Chapple and Alan Shelston (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. xii. 10 Gaskell was to have been one of the first group of women writers to be included in this hitherto masculine series. The others were Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth and George Eliot.

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From a perusal of some of those letters which I have been privileged to read it is safe to say that the general impression of her noble character and gracious personality would not be materially altered. The same winsomeness shines through her letters which is to be found in her stories.11

In her review of the Knutsford edition, the novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie commented that Gaskell ‘put herself into her stories; her emotions, her amusements all poured out from a full heart’.12 That link between the self projected in the published writing and the self as projected not unproblematically in her letters, which was first spotted by Chadwick, was to prove crucial in the rereading and reinterpreting of Gaskell from the 1960s onward. The publication of her collected letters in 1966 proved to be the single most important event in the reassessment of Gaskell since Ward’s Knutsford edition of 1906. A volume of Further Letters was published in 2000.13 For all the gaps and absences in the collection, and the imperfect state of many of the extant letters, their effect on our reading of Gaskell has been remarkable. Winifred Gérin was the first biographer to make use of the letters, and she demonstrated persuasively how crucial they are, not only in facilitating the interiority that had been lacking in earlier biographies, but also in showing how much of the Gaskell revealed by the letters is reflected in her writing, particularly her short stories and her journalism. Gérin chose the example of Cranford to make her point: Strangely enough, the style of Cranford resembles far more the style of her letters than any of her other fictions; because in her letters she was herself – and it must be remembered that she was an educated woman expressing herself with ease and humour when writing to her friends – and not concerned with pleasing the public. Similarly in Cranford, written under no professional or personal pressures, she was herself in holiday mood.14

I agree with Gérin about the links between the voice of the letters and very often the voice in her articles, essays and stories, but I am sceptical of her easy assumption that in her letters Gaskell was ‘herself’ and never self-consciously concerned about her readers. The similarities between the voice of the narrator of many of her stories and the voice of the letters is striking. ‘You can hardly live in Manchester without having some idea of your personal appearance: the factory lads and lasses take Ellis H. Chadwick, Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes and Stories (London: Pitman, 1910), p. vii. 12 A.T. Ritchie, ‘Mrs Gaskell’, Cornhill Magazine, n. s. 21 (Dec. 1906), 757–66 (p. 762). 13 Gaskell, Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. John Chapple and Alan Shelston (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000; expanded edn 2003). 14 Winifred Gérin, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 124. 11

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good care of that; and if you meet them at the hours when they are pouring out of the mills, you are sure to hear a good number of truths’.15 That is a comment by the narrator of ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’ first published in Howitt’s Journal in June 1847. The early story, ‘Martha Preston’, published in Sartain’s Union Magazine in February 1850 begins, ‘Within the last few years I have been twice at the Lakes. There is a road leading to Grasmere, on the least known side of Loughrigg, which presents a number of striking and dissimilar views’, which can be compared with the opening of ‘Cumberland Sheep-Shearers’ in Household Words (22 January 1853): ‘Three or four years ago we spent part of a summer in one of the dales in the neighbourhood of Keswick. We lodged at the house of a small Statesman, who added to his occupation of a sheep-farmer that of a woollen manufacturer.’16 The extracts could be from Gaskell’s letters, or from a travel diary. ‘I do not know if you have ever noticed it’, the narrator of ‘Martha Preston’ interjects at one point, ‘but it strikes me that a very active mother does not always make a very active daughter’,17 which could be a comment from a letter. And there are other instances in which letters and articles blend: for example, in ‘Company Manners’ (Household Words, 22 May 1854), her review of a book by Victor Cousin on the seventeenth-century salon hostess Madame de Sablé, in which she regales her readers with stories of dinner parties gone wrong, and overly elaborate suppers prepared by anxious hosts. ‘No wonder I am old before my time’,18 she muses at the end of one such anecdote, reminiscent of similar occasions described in her letters. The argument about how much the ‘I’ of the letters is or was transparently ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’, in contrast to the consciously constructed narrators’ voices of the stories, takes us to some of the theoretical issues raised by the letter as a literary genre. For whom is a letter written? Is it an intimate document, intended for one recipient, or part of an exchange, ‘written speech’, a long-distance conversation? How candid and ‘natural’ can the letter writer be assumed to be? How much is the self as presented in a letter a construct, a fiction? As Charles Porter, a scholar of the letter as genre, has suggested: ‘Like the diary and the autobiography […] the “I” of the letter is to some extent a fabrication or “fiction”, not necessarily identical to its author.’ There is, he suggests, ‘an internal contradiction between the letter’s implied spontaneity, naturalness and originality, and the inevitable artifice of its form’.19 For writer and recipient, as Mireille Bossis observed in the same collection of essays, ‘the letter is above all an extension of daily life’. As such, an author’s correspondence is treated as ‘a gold mine of biographical information, taking on a fixed and univocal value’. The documents are used, she points out, ‘without having

15 Gaskell, ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’, The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, ed. Joanne Shattock, 10 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), I, 50. 16 Gaskell, ‘Cumberland Sheep-Shearers’, ibid., pp. 119, 251. 17 Ibid., p. 120. 18 Gaskell, ‘Company Manners’, ibid., p. 308. 19 Charles W. Porter, Foreword, Yale French Studies, 71 (1986), 1–14 (pp. 2, 4).

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passed through any critical filter; as such they are taken literally, “by the letter”. It is assumed that they “tell the truth” – unlike novels, which weave fictions’.20 Biographers of writers in particular tend to regard letters unproblematically as revelatory of the ‘real’ person behind the books. Hence, for example, Nina Kennard’s preface to her 1885 biography of the actress Rachel: ‘We fall back on her letters as the true key to this extraordinary woman’s character’; and Helen Zimmern’s confidence, in the preface to her biography of Maria Edgeworth (1883) in the same series, Eminent Women, that the availability of her subject’s letters would enable her to present an ‘authentic’ biography.21 Readers of Gaskell’s letters have made similar assumptions. Rosemarie Bodenheimer, in The Real Life of Mary Anne Evans, was one of the first to question this assumption, and to argue that in George Eliot’s case the representations of the self in her letters were as much a construct as her fictional heroines. Bodenheimer goes on to argue that Eliot’s letters should be read in tandem with her novels and that together they are revelatory of the author’s ‘real life’. The reading of Gaskell’s letters critically, and in tandem with her published work, particularly her shorter works, also poses new possibilities for interpretation. One of Gaskell’s first ‘publications’ was a letter, an account of a schoolgirl visit to Clopton Hall in Warwickshire, which she wrote to William Howitt, and which he published verbatim in his Visits to Remarkable Places (1840). Excerpts from other letters were published by Howitt in a subsequent edition of an earlier book, The Rural Life of England (1838). Jenny Uglow has compared the carefully composed, measured prose of the letter to Howitt, written as if consciously practising her writing, to the ‘slapdash tumble of news’ and the breathless versatility of her letters to her sister-in-law, written at the same time.22 In all of her writing, I would argue, Gaskell was conscious of the audience for whom she was writing, whether in her letters, in articles and reviews for Household Words and the Athenaeum, or in her later pieces in Fraser’s, Macmillan’s and the Cornhill in the 1860s. In a frequently quoted letter, written in 1850 to her friend, Tottie Fox, Gaskell commented that she had a great number of ‘Mes’: ‘One of my mes is, I do believe, a true Christian – (only people call her socialist and communist), another of my mes is a wife and mother […]. Now that’s my “social” self I suppose. Then again I’ve another self with a full taste for beauty and convenience whh [sic] is pleased on its own account. How am I to reconcile all these warring members?’23 Readers of Gaskell’s published letters, on the other hand, have sometimes seen only a ‘social’, rather carefully constructed self reflected in them. They note the Mireille Bossis, ‘Methodological Journeys Through Correspondences’, Yale French Studies, 71 (1986), 63–75 (pp. 64–5). 21 Mrs Arthur Kennard, Preface, Rachel (London, 1885), p. 1; Helen Zimmern, Preface, Maria Edgeworth (London, 1883), p. 1. 22 Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 121. 23 Letters of Mrs Gaskell, p. 108. 20

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busyness, the self-mockery, the irritations, the depressions and, occasionally, the anger. But they note, too, the absence of any glimpses of an interior intellectual life, or of the impact of her reading. And they note the absence of any revelation of her deeper and more private emotions, surrounding her relationship with her husband and children, of the kind exhibited so transparently in her diary written when her daughter Marianne was a baby. This is explicable, perhaps because so few of the family letters survive, but not entirely. The ‘me’ presented by the surviving Gaskell letters is, to many readers, a self-consciously constructed social persona. Gaskell’s writing can sometimes present a surprising hybridity, bringing into question what constitutes her ‘real’ writing, in her own mind, and in that of her readers. To illustrate my point I want to turn briefly to a three-part series of articles, with the title ‘French Life’, which she published in Fraser’s Magazine between April and June 1864. It was connected indirectly with an unfinished biography of the French intellectual and letter writer of the ancien régime, Madame de Sévigné, which she told George Smith she was working on in the spring of 1862. Gaskell made a special trip to Paris in May to locate manuscript collections, identify portraits, and to discuss the project with the French publisher Hachette, who was bringing out a collection of de Sévigné’s letters. Together with her daughter, Meta, and Meta’s friend Isabel Thompson, they went on to Chartres and then toured the area around Vitré, near Madame de Sévigné’s country estate, Les Rochers. Over a year later, in September 1863, she again wrote to George Smith about the book on de Sévigné: ‘more in my head than out of it; but I think it will be good’. In the same letter she mentioned another half-finished work: ‘“Notes of a Wanderer” – all sorts of odd bits, scenes, conversations \with rather famous people in Paris/, small adventures, descriptions &c &c met with during our two last journeys abroad in Brittany, Paris, Rome, Florence – 50 pages written – \I thought of sending this to Mr. Froude […].’24 It is an accurate description of the articles that comprise ‘French Life’. The first part begins very much in the style of one of her letters: ‘We went to-day along the Boulevard Sévastopol, Rive Gauche, to pay a call. I knew the district well about six years ago, when it was a network of narrow tortuous streets; the houses high, irregular, picturesque, historical, dirty, and unhealthy. I used to have much difficulty in winding my way to certain points in the Quartier Latin from the Faubourg St. Germain, where I was staying’.25 It then turns into a diary of two of her journeys, the May 1862 expedition in search of Madame de Sévigné, part travelogue, part autobiography, part fiction, and a second trip, made to Avignon and the south of France en route to Rome in the spring of 1863. Uglow suggests that the articles draw on memories or even lost diaries from earlier trips in 1855 and 1857.26 Ibid., p. 712. Gaskell, ‘French Life’, The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, I, 359. 26 Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 27. 24 25

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Gaskell disrupts the chronology of the two journeys, deliberately altering the dates of the fictional diary across the three parts. Meta and Isabel become the Mary and Irene of her narrative. And she writes amusingly about herself: worrying that circus lions might enter her hotel window from the nearby square; improvising lunches from a local charcuterie; dealing timorously with churlish hotel servants; wondering whether to tip an aristocratic guide fallen on hard times. The opening descriptions of Paris recall the area around her friend Mary Clarke Mohl’s apartment at 120 Rue du Bac, where she had often stayed. Descriptions of individual rooms and of the domestic life of ‘a French family of the middle class’ draw on the Mohl establishment, and those of some of their more exotic friends, like the ancient grand dame who tells the story of the levée of Voltaire’s adopted daughter, Madame de Villette. Parts of the travel narrative can be mapped against her letters, which describe the scenes in less detail – the visit to Madame de Sévigné’s country house, the meals and daily routine of life with Mary and Julius Mohl.27 The third part of ‘French Life’ is based on a journey made with Julia and Meta to Paris and Rome in the spring of 1863, following the completion of Sylvia’s Lovers (1863). The dates in this fictionalized travel diary are closer to the original journey, which was planned on the advice of the French historian Montalembert, whom Gaskell had met at the Mohls. Following his suggested route, they arrived in Avignon to see the Palace of the Popes, but then found themselves detained by a seasonal ‘mistral’. Their hostess, according to the narrative, provided them with a selection of books, some of which contained local history and legends, among them the ‘authorized report’ of the trial for the murder of the Marquise de Ganges. In the third part of ‘French Life’, Gaskell proceeds to retell the story of a famous crime, the murder of a beautiful Provençal heiress by her husband and his two brothers. J.G. Sharps suggests an eighteenth-century French collection, Causes Célèbres et Intéressantes (1734–1743), by François Gayot de Pitaval, as a possible source for her story. He also notes that Alexandre Dumas the elder includes the story in his Crimes Célèbres (1839–1840), which were in turn translated as Celebrated Crimes in Chapman and Hall’s Foreign Library series in 1843.28 The precise source for Gaskell’s narrative is unclear. As part of the fictionalized diary in part three, the narrator relates that she and her party visited a convent in nearby Ville-Neuve to see the Marquise’s portrait painted by Mignard, which was in fact true. Gaskell, Meta and Julia visited the convent before embarking for Rome. Dumas’s version of the murder of Madame de Ganges was continuously reprinted in the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Earlier the Marquis de Sade had also used the story for his 1813 novel La Marquise de Gange. Another popular version of the tale was published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine for May 1842, the year before the Dumas translation. ‘The Story of

See Letters of Mrs Gaskell, pp. 925–8. J.G. Sharps, Mrs Gaskell’s Observation and Invention (Fontwell: Linden Press,

27 28

1970), p. 467.

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the Marquise de Gange: A Real Tragedy of the “Good Old Times” in France’ was signed ‘V’, thought to be J.R. Chorley, one of the magazine’s regular contributors.29 Gaskell’s version of what must by then have been a familiar tale is less detailed than Chorley’s and her omissions are significant. She avoids any reference to the sexual predatoriness of the Marquise’s two brothers-in-law, a key feature of Chorley’s narrative. She glosses over the attraction of the young Louis XIV to the Marquise during her first marriage and the young woman’s possible indiscretion, which Chorley implies is a possible slur on her innocence. Uglow sees in Gaskell’s appropriation of the Marquise’s story the familiar dark themes of male power, female submission and entrapment, men’s physical and mental cruelty, women rendered helpless and denied speech, which are reminiscent of a later story, ‘The Grey Woman’ (1861).30 There is another incidental narrative in the third part of ‘French Life’, the story of an aristocratic family during the Revolution who find themselves in the power of their servants, which is reminiscent of the interpolated tale in My Lady Ludlow (1858). The hybridity of ‘French Life’ renders it unique. It is part autobiography, part travel diary and part fiction, but fiction in one instance retold, at second hand. Gaskell may have read the Marquise de Gange’s story from materials supplied by her Avignon landlady, as the narrative maintains, but she could have been drawing on earlier versions of the story, by Dumas or de Pitaval. Her adaption and Chorley’s, 22 years apart, are coincidental. The mixing of genres in ‘French Life’ was unprecedented and not repeated, at least in the journalism so far identified. The poise, subtlety and vitality of the series, on the other hand, present no surprises. The voice and the personality which preside are recognizably the ‘authentic voice’ of Elizabeth Gaskell, the voice of the letters, the author of the nonfictional articles in Household Words, in Fraser’s and Macmillan’s magazines, and the narrator of the novels and stories. She is ‘herself’, as Gérin said of Cranford and the letters. That self, however, is, as always, carefully constructed. A student of Elizabeth Gaskell the novelist would probably omit, ignore or underplay ‘French Life’, and indeed most studies to date have done so. A study of ‘Elizabeth Gaskell, Woman of Letters’ would give it the prominence in her oeuvre it deserves, connecting it with ‘The Grey Woman’, My Lady Ludlow, and with her letters, seeing it as part of the seamless writing career which began with ‘Clopton Hall’ (1840), and which was still going full tilt in her last 18 months, not only with Wives and Daughters (1866) but with articles, book reviews and yet another collection of her essays and stories which this tireless contributor to the literary marketplace had on the stocks. Just what constituted her ‘real’ writing, the reader must decide for him- or herself. For the identification of ‘V’, see The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900: Tables of Contents and Identification of Contributors with Bibliographies of Their Articles and Stories, ed. Walter E. Houghton, Esther Rhoads Houghton and Jean Slingerland, 5 vols (London: Routledge, 1966–1989), IV, 474. 30 Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 474. 29

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Chapter 11

Anthropology, Bestial Humour and the Communal Authentic in Cranford Nick Davis

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) has been compared by some recent commentators to anthropological field work.1 It had its origin in a periodical essay, written for an American audience, which purports to describe the fast disappearing ways of ‘the last generation of England’. The stories of the ‘Cranford’ pieces which appeared subsequently in Dickens’s Household Words (1851–1853) are largely concerned with the functioning of a small society made up of several of the town’s genteel unmarried women, spinster or widowed, and their immediate associates. The titles given to the pieces, perhaps by Dickens as editor, suggest a certain systematic approach: ‘A Love Affair at Cranford’, ‘Memory at Cranford’, ‘Visiting at Cranford’, and so on.2 But, if it becomes evident to modern hindsight that Cranford possesses some of the characteristics of anthropology, it is also worth recalling that the novel was written in an era when the study of anthropology itself, alongside associated forms of speculation and enquiry, was beginning to take definition. I’ll start by sketching some features of this context and Cranford’s relation to it. The era’s anthropological interests were stimulated in major part by accelerating commercial-military-colonial involvement with non-European societies, occurring against a background of weakening faith in dogmatic Christianity as well as its possible succedaneum, a dogmatic Utilitarianism.3 Extensive and intensive practical dealings with alien cultures tended to produce two main intellectual dilemmas. First, the aliens will often stake their well-being to concerns that 1 See Hilary M. Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 86–7, and Boris Knezevic, ‘An Ethnography of the Provincial: The Social Geography of Gentility in Elizabeth’s Gaskell’s Cranford’, Victorian Studies, 41:3 (1998), 400–426 (pp. 408–9). Knezevic treats Cranford culture primarily as offering a lens on ‘the national class culture of gentility’ (p. 412), and is therefore not much concerned with its individual properties. Cranford as depicted may well be representative of English small town life, but I am taking Cranford to be ethnographic in the different sense of investigating a particular community and its ways. 2 Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, ed. Patricia Ingham (London: Penguin, 2005). 3 See J.W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 66–89.

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Europeans don’t share, aren’t disposed to take seriously, and even find difficult to comprehend. Secondly, the aliens seldom embrace European mores without major coercion, despite full exposure to them, but generally prefer their own, which is clearly one in the eye for unreflexive European supremacism. Potential closure for the first dilemma was provided by the emergent concept of a given culture’s functional unity: its rules, norms, symbolisations and taboos, however seemingly bizarre or ‘irrational’, form an interdependent system which, considered as an ensemble, defines a society’s internal relationships and relationship with its world. If one element of such a system is removed the whole may well be threatened, and there will therefore be embedded resistance to such removal. At the same time, allegiance can be given to certain elements which have outlived their practical function, and remain valued purely as symbolising cultural unity or separateness. The second dilemma was felt to require more complex and dialectical resolution, producing in its course a reinstatement of European cultural supremacy. One possible response to a world made up of impressively varied and disparate human cultures (cf. Kipling’s ‘the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Kathmandhu’4) is a thoroughgoing cultural and moral relativism: perception of value depends on where one happens to be situated. But a more morally acceptable response in the Britain of Gaskell’s era was faith in the reality of cultural progress, widespread by the mid-century: it was a matter of scientific predictability that societies passed over the course of their history through well-defined stages of intellectual and cultural development, beginning with mistakes about nature which issue in weird, though explicable, practices and beliefs, and culminating in the modern West with its ostensibly firm grasp of science and proclaimed understanding of high moral imperatives. This last response is well formed in the evolutionary sociology of Herbert Spencer, whose doctrines were often (mistakenly) regarded as Darwinian. The more empirically attuned as well as systematic anthropology of Edward Tylor brings the idea of cultural cohesion to a sharp focus in the idea of a ‘survival’, a belief or practice which seems purposeless in its setting, and is a vestige of an earlier cultural formation where it had a recognisable function. Anticipating Tylor’s public formulations by a few years, Cranford is in certain respects an account of such ‘survivals’, practices which have had a manifest value or function but which are seemingly anachronistic for their actual cultural setting. Gaskell’s correspondent Harriet Martineau was, it is worth noting, the English translator and explainer of Comte,5 founder of a progressivist sociology, linked in with a purportedly scientific ethics, which was designed to address the issue of social authority. Martineau’s engagement with Comte seems to have been a response to loss of the Unitarian faith which Gaskell, with occasional doubts, retained. Like Unitarianism in several of its forms, Comte’s philosophy seeks to 4 Rudyard Kipling, ‘In the Neolithic Age’, l. 35; The Complete Verse (London: Kyle Cathie, 1992), p. 277. 5 Comte often recommended Martineau’s expositions of his thought, which he regarded not unreasonably as being clearer than his own.

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define and release an optimal potential for the individual considered primarily as a member of a community. I wish to suggest that Cranford’s dealings with anthropology, and the idea of it, problematise and critique the period’s two main responses to the question of cultural difference, which we might term ‘cohesivist’ and ‘progressivist’, as well as offering new perspectives of its own. In particular, through its examination of relations between individuals within a group sharing numerous cultural representations, Cranford takes issue with going conceptions of cultural homogeneity, often mixed in with presuppositions about race, which one might group under the heading of ‘culturalism’. Mid-nineteenthcentury practices of imperialism (like some of their contemporary successors) found ideological support in the notion that large cultural groups, nations, tribes, faith movements and the like were engaged in a ‘Darwinian’ zero-sum competitive struggle for survival, and that the groundwork for individual life was laid down by membership of such a group. A person could thus be imagined, for example, as going overseas as an Englishman, and then, within the horizons offered by that assumedly shared, corporatist experience of nation, as a particular kind of Englishman, an individual. The era saw the emergence of a very recognisable politics of identity, which has it that life’s project is the realisation of an authentic unitary selfhood, possessed at once by an individual and by an individual’s culture as enfolding and validating system. One of the era’s typical fascinations was with human beings who could be regarded as living representations of exotic cultures. Shows mounted in European capitals offer many instances of zoo anthropology, involving a subordination of the individual to the anthropological specimen.6 Cranford is, I would argue, highly critical of practices of culturalism, so understood, and also subversive of culturalism as an ideology. It is concerned both with the emergence of individual identity, valuable and unique, within a local, contingently formed yet no less authentic communal nexus, and at the same time with the heterogeneity or non–self-likeness of a culture’s organising representations. It is not by chance that the novel’s ending produces a fusion of the indigenous and the exotic in the person of the returning travelled brother, the ‘Aga Jenkyns’. This conclusion, literally farfetched,7 is justified by the preceding enquiries into the nature of the representations that any culture shares as a condition of being an association of individuals. 6 Nadja Durbach observes that, between ‘1830 and 1860, Londoners could have seen, among others, a variety of North American peoples (including Ojibbeways, Ioways, Hurons), three different groups of Khoisan [aka “Hottentots”, or Bushmen], several troupes of Zulus, a party of Australian aborigines, a Raratongan youth from the Cook Islands, a group of Inuit from the Cumberland Strait, some Fiji Islanders, an albino from Barbados, several indigenous inhabitants of the Torres Strait and a “Small-Footed Chinese Lady” whose bound “lotus” feet were the main attraction’: ‘London, Capital of Exotic Exhibitions from 1830 to 1860’, in Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires, trans. Teresa Bridgeman, ed. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Éric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire and Charles Forsdick (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), pp. 81–8 (p. 82). 7 I take it that Mary Smith’s comment on her reluctance in using ‘Indian-rubber rings, which are a sort of deification of string’ (p. 51) as distinct from the ordinary pieces of

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*** The periodical essay which offers the first presentation of ‘Cranford’ material is shadowed by the idea of inexorable progress towards an improved though also more uniform social and cultural world: ‘Even in small towns, scarcely removed from villages, the phases of society are rapidly changing; and much will appear strange, which yet occurred only in the generation immediately preceding ours.’8 The behaviour of the genteel women who were the dominant social force in the small town where the writer grew up is sardonically placed as the relic of a former era: The daughters [of the landed proprietors], if unmarried, retired to live in – on their annuities, and gave the ton to the society there; stately ladies they were, remembering etiquette and precedence in every occurrence of life, and having their genealogy at their tongue’s end. (pp. 189–90)

The essay’s argument is relatively straightforward. The highly stratified, immobile society which these ladies mentally inhabit and imperiously seek to preserve is, thankfully, on its way out – and yet at some human cost: ‘there was more individuality of character in those days’ (p. 190). Gaskell proceeds with the anecdotes about eccentric female behaviour, apparently based on personal experience, which will appear reworked and developed in the episodes of Cranford. Cranford’s handling of the idea of social progress is, however, considerably more layered and provocative than the essay’s. Gaskell gradually develops the characterisation of her narrator-figure, a young woman called Mary Smith who is amphibious between the very different worlds of Drumble (a name for Manchester) and Cranford (based on Knutsford in Cheshire). Although there is no direct description of Drumble, we gain revealing glimpses of Mary’s businessman father as a representative bearer of its mentality. Moreover, Cranford’s imagined reader is explicitly envisaged as living in London, the metropolis, and therefore as possessing de facto a perspective through which much of what is related will appear bizarre or foolish.9 Against a background of social-progressivist thinking Drumble and London historically supersede Cranford, the first because it gives full rein to manufacture and economic development, the second because of its cultural and commercial relations with a larger world, implying a capacity for advance and renewal in many forms. Many of Cranford’s first readers will, one assumes, have lately attended or otherwise taken an interest in the Great Exhibition string which she carries in her pockets, has metanarrative meaning, and refers forward to the extraordinariness of Cranford’s ‘Indian’ narrative ending. For discussion of the metanarrative significance of the pieces of string, see J. Hillis Miller, Reading Narrative (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), pp. 178–226. 8 Gaskell, ‘The Last Generation of England’, Appendix I, Cranford, p. 189. 9 In the early chapters, for example, note the narrator’s comments on clothing a cow in flannel and on spreading newspapers to preserve a new carpet as things that specifically wouldn’t happen in London (pp. 9–10, 20).

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of 1851, that gaudy and highly considered celebration of British manufacturing as an engine of world cultural progress. But here is a point, I would suggest, at which Cranford begins to subtilise its reader’s task. A good deal of what it puts forward does offer itself, potentially, to the ‘metropolitan’ kind of judgement. The mores of Cranford can be viewed with tolerance and sympathy on the understanding that they are provincial, cut off from society’s main routes of advance or endangered when connected with them (as in the concrete form of ‘them nasty cruel railways’ (p. 22)), as well as solipsistic, humanly restrictive and irredeemably quaint. And yet, important turns of the plot do not support this assessment, and we find that it does not cohere with the novel’s larger vision. To begin with some significant features of plot: Mary’s father, though moved to contempt by Cranford’s lack of a modern commercial mindset, is judging from his actions a kind and concerned man but one who cannot, since conditioned by Drumble ethics, account for the value of such qualities (see, for example, pp. 165–6). His calculating mental habits and hard economic wisdom also do not, as Mary coolly observes, prevent him from losing ‘upwards of a thousand pounds by roguery’ during the time span of the narrative (p. 170). As for the metropolis, it becomes obvious that the idea of being connected with it has exerted a malign influence on the father of the Jenkyns sisters: in his own estimation having one of his sermons published in London was ‘the culminating point – the event of his life’ (p. 56). The afflatus yielded by this experience impairs his emotional intelligence and consolidates the unexamined sense of masculine authority which entraps his daughters and drives his son from the family, precipitating his wife’s death through grief. Cranford considered as a whole prompts re-examination of the provincemetropolis relationship as conventionally defined. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu begins in what its narrator calls the small, closed world of Combray and, unlike Cranford, moves in due course into worlds that should, in the normative understanding, be considerably more capacious as well as more porous to what lies beyond them. This is not, however, what its narrator and central figure discovers: Combray’s restrictions of vision formally repeat themselves in the much more prestigious worlds of the military, the titled nobility, the high bourgeois salon, and their like.10 Like Proust, though by means differing from those of epic, Gaskell in Cranford offers a critical examination of self-understanding and the taking of action on the terms that a human culture, perhaps any human culture, makes available to its participants.11 The Jenkyns sisters and their circle, whose histories and mode of life yield most of the narrative material in Cranford, are less well connected and certainly less monied than the ‘stately ladies’ of the essay. The imitatively aristocratic culture which they scrupulously preserve and tend is thus more explicitly an 10 See esp. the comments of René Girard in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 193–228. 11 Proust, widely read in English novels, may well have drawn certain suggestions from Cranford.

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assertion of elevated status against a background of ‘general but unacknowledged poverty’ (p. 7). A main underlying purpose of the rules and regulations is plainly to create social difference under circumstances where it might not otherwise exist. The Jenkyns’s circle has numerous protocols of behaviour which can, if necessary, be spelt out to the uninitiated: Then there were rules and regulations for visiting and calls; and they were announced to any young people, who might be staying in the town, with all the solemnity with which the old Manx laws were read once a year on the Tinwald Mount. (p. 6)

In Cranford a regulatory culture of this kind is fairly consistently conceived on the model of a language endowed with a prescriptive grammar and recognised levels of style; most explosively at the point where the widowed Lady Glenmire perpetrates the major solecism of becoming engaged to marry the muddy-booted Mr Hoggins, a mere surgeon. Mary represents the circle’s reception of the news by means of a sentence whose structure begins itself to slip out of control: [T]o the best of my belief, not only Miss Matty and Mrs Forrester, but even Miss Pole herself, whom we looked on as a kind of prophetess from the knack she had of foreseeing things before they came to pass – although she did not like to disturb her friends by telling them her fore-knowledge – even Miss Pole herself was breathless with astonishment, when she came to tell us the astounding piece of news. But I must recover myself; the contemplation of it, even at this distance of time, has taken away my breath and my grammar, and unless I subdue my emotion, my spelling will go too. (p. 134)

The humour delivers a serious enough point about culture considered by analogy with a normatively regulated language: it is subordinated only to its own principles, and what violates it is formally absent from it, a thing which cannot be conveyed. Cranford’s scrutiny of a culture’s functioning where its mores have become disputed or problematic is often through seamless connection a scrutiny of linguistic practice. Let us return for a moment to the sermon of Jenkyns père in its trophied London publication. Matty Jenkyns’s reading of her parents’ old letters in the presence of Mary makes it evident that this capital event in the rector’s life impaired not only his self-awareness but also his ability to communicate: The worthy Rector seemed to be strung up by the occasion to a high literary pitch, for he could hardly write a letter to his wife without cropping out into Latin. I remember the end of one of his letters ran thus:– ‘I shall ever hold the virtuous qualities of my Molly in remembrance, dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus regit artus.’ […] But this was nothing to a fit of writing classical poetry, which soon seized him; in which Molly figured away as ‘Maria’. The letter containing the carmen was endorsed by her, ‘Hebrew verses sent me by my honoured husband. I thowt to have had a letter about killing the pig, but must wait’. (p. 56)

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Facility in Latin was of course a component of male elite culture and a token of belonging to it. In the larger perspective it also emblematises adroitness in the prescribed ways of a culture, since classical Latin based in the study of Roman texts counts as a fairly large-scale regulatory system for the establishment of relationships between ideas, people and things. Latin in its modern educational profile evidently produces group cohesion, and can claim some practical uses: for example, it offers models for the co-ordination of multi-clause sentences, or it accesses Roman political history, literature and thought. Gaskell herself had studied Latin, not part of a young woman’s ordinary school curriculum, with the encouragement of her father.12 But the claims made for Latin’s practical utility, as distinct from its importance in defining an elite, are open to doubt. The action of the first two chapters of Cranford pivots to a surprising extent on a dispute over the relative merits of Dr Johnson’s Latinised English and Dickens’s suppler one.13 Deborah Jenkyns, who was finally turned into a kind of letters secretary by her ageing father, cleaves firmly to Johnson and her father’s values: the dispute with Captain Brown often returns to her mind, as a result of which she produces in Mary’s hearing ‘many a rolling three-piled sentence’ (p. 22). Johnson’s style of writing and Deborah’s imitations of it recall an older European intellectual culture, that of the educated Enlightenment. In certain eighteenth-century contexts knowledge of Latin had no doubt facilitated communication and supported cosmopolitan mentalities. But Gaskell is keener to show us the obverse of Latinity, making it emblematic of cultural malaise. In Deborah’s letters, and Matty’s attemptedly respectful reading of them, dedication to Latinity produces a derangement of expression, tending towards unintelligibility and, finally, nonsense: Her hand was admirably calculated, together with her use of many-syllabled words, to fill up a sheet, and then came the pride and delight of crossing [i.e. of writing sideways as well as vertically]. Poor Miss Matty got sadly puzzled with this, for the words gathered size like snowballs, and towards the end of her letter, Miss Jenkyns used to become quite sesquipedalian. In one to her father, slightly theological and controversial in its tone, she had spoken of Herod, Tetrarch of Idumea. Miss Matty read it ‘Herod Petrach of Etruriae’, and was just as well pleased as if she had been right. (p. 59)

Culture considered by analogy with language as prescriptive system can never entirely distance itself from dedication to pure – that is, pointless – formalism. And much depends, of course, on who is hearing the language or, by analogy, brought into encounter with a given culture’s rule-guided behaviour. The Jenkyns sisters’ mother as recipient of the first-quoted letter cannot distinguish Latin from Hebrew, let alone savour the Virgilian reference, and is eager for counsel 12 See Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 41. 13 Captain Brown is even recalled by the aged Deborah Jenkyns as having died as a consequence of reading Dickens; see p. 29.

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on a practical issue from which her husband has evidently averted his mind. Later in the novel, Mary’s father speaks so adeptly and fluently in the Drumble language of business that Mary and Matty cannot remotely understand what he is saying, something that bears vitally on Matty’s financial affairs (p. 165). Cultures, in so far as they function as arbitrary and unnegotiable rule-systems, typically generate fetishisations of form at the levels of expression and behaviour, necessarily dysfunctional. They also produce crucial absences of awareness and knowledge, a phenomenon which Mary is particularly well placed to observe since she is both well versed in Cranford ways and ‘that Drumble girl’ (p. 99): someone capable, that is, of standing entirely outside them as a looker on. In the ninth chapter the town is thrown into great excitement by the impending visit of the magician Brunoni, ‘such a piece of gaiety […] as had not been seen or known of since Wombwell’s lions came, when one of them ate a little child’s arm’ (p. 97). The idea of magic produces divergent responses in the members of Matty’s circle. Mrs Forrester is a ready believer in the supernatural, ‘from ghosts to death-watches’ (p. 100), whereas Miss Pole declares for scientific scepticism. Miss Matty, wavering between the two, is troubled by the idea that Brunoni’s magic might be somehow improper, a disturbance of natural and social order. Miss Pole enlists an encyclopaedia explanation of sleight-ofhand tricks, with diagrams, to prove her point: Ah! I see; I comprehend perfectly. A represents the ball. Put A between B and D – no! between C and F, and turn the second joint of the third finger of your left hand over the wrist of your right H. Very clear indeed! My dear Mrs Forrester, conjuring and witchcraft is a mere affair of the alphabet. (p. 101)

When Brunoni performs Miss Pole is still reciting her technical explanations; but the other women are captivated nonetheless by what they experience as magically inexplicable. Here is deep play, since the functioning of the culturally normative as represented in Cranford pointedly resembles that of stage magic. It is intellectually reducible to a set of rules and enforced procedures, which are sometimes described as such by its adherents. But nevertheless, it ‘works’, it conditions perception, it makes certain things compelling for thought while causing the disappearance from it of certain other things heterogeneous examples of which the novel supplies, such as death, the pleasure of sucking oranges in private, and the Queen of Spain’s legs, all ‘facts which certainly existed, but the less said about the better’ (pp. 8, 34–5, 139). An actual ‘affair of the alphabet’ with binding microcultural force is the conviction of Mrs Forrester’s cousin, one ffoulkes, that names with capital letters denote inferior descent. She recalls that when he encountered a Miss ffaringdon he married her immediately; ‘and it was all owing to her two little ffs’ (p. 79). Hypnotic suggestion can make subjects not see an object that is there, let us say a table in a room, and also make them unaware that there is a gap in their field of vision. Intrigued by the phenomenon, Freud in the later nineteenth century used it to guide his developing ideas about psychic repression. The enforcible culture of Cranford, like hypnotic suggestion, can – as Mary describes it – produce both exaggerated

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awareness and its opposite: the negative hallucination, the removal of a real and perceptible object or category of object from consciousness. As the opening of the novel makes clear, the real objects most consistently excised from consciousness by Cranford culture are men, through what appears to be a mutual reinforcement of sexual anxiety and snobbery: ‘we had almost persuaded ourselves that to be a man was to be “vulgar”’ (p. 11). There are certainly men in the offing, and many of the genteel women have a direct economic and practical relation to them, but something operates in the culture which has a magical inexplicability: ‘If a married couple comes to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears’ (p. 5). A culture’s magic, the organisation of perception around its most powerful totems and taboos, holds an undoubted sway over mentalities, and numerous passages in Cranford revealingly describe such magic’s operation. In an important respect all human cultures are mechanisms which function to make certain things disappear. Neverthless, Gaskell’s narrative considered as informal but critically aware anthropology has another crucial dimension. A society whose male members were fully invisible to its female members would soon, needless to say, become extinct. And the novel makes us acquainted with a specific family history which has, atypically, cut the Jenkyns sisters off from marriage and from men. Pari passu, if a culture were an entirely efficient, closed and self-preserving regulatory system, a pure formalism, very little could actually happen. Part and parcel of any culture’s functioning is, therefore and paradoxically, its local regulatory blindness or failure, produced by abutment on a real that resists symbolisation. In a sacrificial meal and communing with the gods, for example, the eating of food has a clear symbolic meaning, but is also an opportunity to obtain nourishment. The alphabet considered as a basic resource of symbolisation crops up again in Cranford as a means of making distinctions between animals: when Mary visits Mr Holbrook, Matty’s lost love, with Matty and Miss Pole he is pleased to show her ‘his sixand-twenty cows, named after the different letters of the alphabet’ (p. 41). Let us reflect for a moment on Holbrook’s system, which also has a certain charm in the context of his fondness for reading. Individual cows presumably come and go as a result of death and slaughter, but Holbrook nevertheless knows as a matter of certainty that at any given moment he possesses a cow called A, a cow called B, and so on to the number of 26. This is one of the novel’s pointers to the oddness of the relation between culture-as-system and a culture’s contingent natural supports: a cow can stand in the place of a symbolisation, but it can’t be a symbolisation – its animal life and mortality take it elsewhere. Cranford culture is, we find, recurrently preoccupied with animality as its necessary complement. A good deal of the novel’s characteristic humour disturbs reciprocal conceptualisations of humanity and animality, recovering the non–rule-bound animal latent in the rulebound human being, and so in effect the non–self-consistency of culture. The final ‘Cranford’ piece, published ten years after the novel, devolves on the mistaking of a cage – a crinoline skirt’s hooped support which is an à la mode gift from Paris – for a birdcage, a new home for Miss Pole’s cherished cockatoo. Excited by the prospect of receiving the gift and by the recent purchase of a

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cap, she describes ‘dreaming of Polly with her new cap on his head, while she herself sat on a perch in the new cage and admired him’.14 Here the animal-human conceptual relationship has become thoroughly entangled, beginning with Miss Pole’s emotional-cum-sexual charging of relations with a caged bird, who seems to be at once an object of attraction and of identification. In Cranford, as the women relax a little nervously in the company of Lady Glenmire, to whom they have just been introduced, Mrs Forrester relates a story connected with ‘some fine old lace’ which she is wearing on her collar: once her cat swallowed the lace as she was soaking it in a saucer of milk, on which she resourcefully gave the cat an emetic to make her vomit it up, ‘very much as it had gone down’, ‘But now, your Ladyship would never guess that it had been in pussy’s insides’ (pp. 94–5). Evidently the animal can be imagined under certain circumstances as subsuming the human, so to speak, as well as vice-versa. The most complex animal anecdote, also related in the first periodical essay, concerns Betty Barker’s flannel-clad Alderney cow. The cow, which Miss Betty looks on ‘as a daughter’, loses most of her coat of hair as a result of falling into a lime pit. The solution found for her discomfort and ‘naked’ look is to clothe her and drive her to pasture in flannel waistcoat and drawers, mildly sexual in connotation since the second are an undergarment. This solution has arisen, moreover, through misunderstanding of a male’s exasperated joke. Captain Brown, a disruptive but somehow valued presence in Cranford society, has come up with, ‘Get her a flannel waistcoat and flannel drawers, ma’am, if you wish to keep her alive. But my advice is, kill the poor creature at once’ (pp. 9–10). The cow in underclothes, now by more obvious symbolisation a daughter, and as spectacle somewhat rude, like a sheep in suspenders, seems to have been re-assigned to an accepted place in Cranford society through the assumed upholding of proprieties. A culture in its normative functioning gets its own point while missing any larger one. In these instances it can manifest, though not quite engage with, its own animality, like the nobly descended but dull Mrs Jamieson who, to express approval of Betty Barker’s tea-table provision, eats ‘three large pieces of seed-cake, with a placid, ruminating expression of countenance, not unlike a cow’s’ (p. 81). To examine a culture, Cranford broadly contends, is to be concerned with its fissures and blindnesses as much as its overt principles of cohesion. One such fissure in the narrative’s representation of it is defined by the presence of Martha, the loyal servant to Matty who, responding to her kindness and not merely as a feudal reflex, insists on remaining with her and caring for her when her income disappears. Among the redoubtable Martha’s ‘animal’ moments are her unselfconscious statement of preference for ‘lads’, going against the instruction to serve ‘ladies’ first at table (p. 36), the door-penetrating noises of kissing which she and her young man at one point produce, stirring half-formed thoughts in Matty’s mind (p. 73), and her making, as a morale-raising gift for Matty, of a pudding in the form of ‘a lion couchant with […] currant eyes’ (p. 156): a suitable if caricatural image Gaskell, ‘The Cage at Cranford’, Appendix I, Cranford, p. 199.

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of her own fierce protectiveness. Prior to this last piece of self-assertion Martha emphatically sees through, and sees off, normative constructions of social wisdom as Mary urges on her the necessity of leaving Matty’s service: ‘Listen to reason – ’ ‘I’ll not listen to reason,’ she said – now in full possession of her voice, which had been rather choked with sobbing. ‘Reason always means what someone else has got to say. Now I think what I’ve got to say is good enough reason. But, reason or not, I’ll say it, and I’ll stick to it’. (p. 152)

Martha has been brought up on a farm, at a distance from the rentier comforts of genteel Cranford society. She is shown to play a crucial role in that society through her capacity not to be subordinated to its reasoning, which she defines with complete accuracy as imposing itself on the individual as the discourse of ‘someone else’. As Martha’s feistiness and the currents of bestial humour in Cranford remind us, any culture is linked in with realities which it cannot fully or consistently represent to itself, but which it must somehow accommodate as a condition of life. Among the more insistent of such realities are nature, history and death. The episode first issued as ‘The Great Cranford Panic’ (chapters 9 to 11 of the completed book) is concerned throughout with Cranford culture’s strategies of accommodation, more and less successful. It prepares the way logically for a conclusion in which this culture is somewhat altered, by the Glenmire-Hoggins marriage across strata, and by the absorption of Peter the lost brother, an upholder of partly different mores who is also male, and highly visible. A culture’s knowing encounter with its other, the real in a form that doesn’t mesh with its systems of thought, usually holds fear or fascination. Cranford culture has demarcated places and temporal spaces for such encounters, where the demarcation has the clear purpose of rendering them safe, that is, devoid of lasting effect. Examples are the temporary spectacles of Wombwell’s lions and Brunoni’s magic, evenings of ‘horrid stories of robbery and murder’ (p. 110), and of tales about ghosts, or even a grocer’s shop stocked with teas bearing exotic names. It transpires, however, that the demarcation is not necessarily successful: the lions remove a child’s arm, the stories of ghosts and violence work to increase and not allay terror, the oriental teas abut on, through narrative proximity, the real military-commercial empire where members of the Brown family have undergone intense suffering, and where Peter has disappeared. Even Matty’s fortunes become temporarily linked to the tea trade. Brunoni’s magic turns out to be the catalyst for the Great Panic itself, where Cranford falls into the grip of terrors produced by its own desperate attempts to ward off an imagined external threat. To all appearances Brunoni’s single magical performance before a paying audience in the town’s assembly rooms is fully cordoned off in space and time. But Matty’s apprehensions are correct. The idea of magic and of a Signor Brunoni who captivates audiences while wearing a turban mutates into an uncontrollable, self-fuelling fear of invasion from without, by robbers, armed desperados, or even

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possibly the French in force (according to Mrs Forrester who, taking the view that the French wear turbans, concludes that Brunoni is their spy (pp. 108–9)). The operation of sinister powers or persons is made evident in the death of Mrs Jamieson’s dog and in the rumoured robbery of Mr Hoggins, where the germ of reality is a cat’s theft of a piece of mutton. Cranford’s self-induced terrors allow those upon whom they seize to reaffirm certain themes of Cranford culture, including the unsatisfactoriness of men (Hoggins must be lying when he denies having been set upon and robbed) and the unthinkability of mere nature (the dog must have been poisoned; and Miss Pole ‘cannot believe that poor vamped-up story about a neck of lamb and a pussy’ (p. 126)). At the same time they acknowledge the force of better founded though now historically distant fears of incursion, since the Jenkyns family letters and the memories that they release in Matty recall the era of war with France when an invasion might actually have occurred. Cranford culture is not entirely removed from the currents of history and the play of forces that produce change. Cranford is concerned at the same time, however, with this culture’s multiform, erratic systems of ideological accommodation, which necessarily include large quotients of denial, counter-sense and fantasy. The thinking behind the Great Panic is, as it turns out, too unstable as a cluster of representations to be seriously pernicious, and the very Brunoni who has been at its centre becomes, in the person of the injured and hapless Mr Brown, the recipient of constructive kindnesses which show the Jenkyns circle at its best. Peter, the ‘Aga Jenkyns’, will be accepted and admired because and not in spite of his partial Indian acculturation. Some of the preparation for this characteristically takes the form of imagining him as the ‘great Lama of Thibet’, where the only matter for dispute is ‘whether llamas were carnivorous animals or not’. This is not a very grievous dispute, however, since Mrs Forrester finally acknowledges that ‘she always confused carnivorous and graminivorous together, just as she did horizontal and perpendicular’ (p. 133). As she explains, in her day the only use of polysyllabic words was for the teaching of spelling. Cranford is, then, primarily a comic novel about the functioning of culture, in a highly reflective conception, as lived in and through the relations of individuals in a given community. Much of what Cranford culture sanctions and much of the thinking on which it depends is bizarre, gratuitous and, in any imaginable perspective, irrational. But at the same time it supports the forming of authentic human connections and relationships, and stands as their necessary context. From the start, Mary Smith bids to chronicle ‘the use that was made of fragments and small opportunities in Cranford’, means of remedying loss or overcoming division, on the grounds that ‘[t]hings that many would despise, and actions which it seemed scarce worthwhile to perform, were all attended to in Cranford’ (p. 22). The novel affirms, in the face of Drumble economic individualism and of a metropolitan commercial-imperial dynamism which bids to promote ideological conformity and suppress cultural difference, that communal life, implying a locally shared culture, is important, and that human beings have inventive ways both of setting it

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in place and of preserving in it a certain adaptability. The authentic powers of the individual, seen in the novel’s perspective, are optimally released in and through communal association:15 Cranford’s vision of authenticity in life is not, one might say, that of The Pilgrim’s Progress’s first part but rather that of its complementary second part, concerned with the unfolding relations of a group of people who are partly differentiated from the larger society by the culture which they share. Miss Matty – sometimes uncertain of her own identity, prone to timidity and confusion – would not be a very impressive creature when considered outside the particular nexus of her relationships with others: but the giving to that recognition of its proper force is central to the novel’s design. ‘We all love Miss Matty’, writes Mary, providing Cranford’s precise, and earned, conclusion, ‘and I somehow think we are all of us better when she is near us’ (p. 187).

The moral stance of Cranford may therefore be said to be more communalist and less individualist than that of Dickens’s novels, for which see Vincent Newey’s discussion in The Scriptures of Charles Dickens: Novels of Ideology, Novels of the Self (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 15

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Chapter 12

Thoreau and Creeley: American Words and Things Geoff Ward

This is an essay about Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and about some poems by Robert Creeley (1926–2005). While their key works are separated by a century, there are certain affinities, or, to use a favourite word of Creeley’s, echoes, which continue to reverberate suggestively around the multi-aspected question of the situation of literary writing, of the physical, conceptual, familial, political and other spaces that it occupies. Both writers are associated historically with literary groupings: Thoreau with what became known, following a landmark study by F.O. Matthiessen of 1941, as the American Renaissance, linking him not only to his immediate neighbours in Concord, Massachusetts ­– Emerson and Hawthorne – but to Walt Whitman, whom he met later in life and admired, as well as the globe-circling Herman Melville and the reclusive Emily Dickinson.1 Robert Creeley is associated with the libertarian and jazz-inflected rebelliousness of the Beats, and even more with the artistic community sequestered at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and thriving under the loquacious ministrations of Charles Olson. But both men are, in a profound sense, solitary, inward and meditative philosopher-writers, whose posture in relation to their world is angular, and inveterately critical. Creeley writes of ‘the immense loneliness of this country’s people’, hearing in Thoreau and Whitman ‘the self’s cry de profundis for an annealing company’.2 And yet, writing about the continuity in American literature from settlement to modernism, so as to include influences as varied as Thoreau and William Carlos Williams, Creeley uncovers an ongoing Puritan commitment to autobiography and self-scrutiny, whereby any context ‘which makes one feel singular in life, a specific isolated consciousness in the universe, intensifies the attraction of this situation of statement’.3 It seems that while American loneliness cries for company, the pressures of society lead to a de profundis cry for solitude. F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). 2 Robert Creeley, ‘Preface to The Leafless America by Edward Dahlberg’, The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 354–5 (p. 354). 3 Creeley, ‘Inside Out: Notes on the Autobiographical Mode’, Collected Essays of Robert Creeley, pp. 554–64 (p. 562). 1

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Thoreau conceived his most influential book in a cabin in the woods which he built with his own hands; and yet his mother, who feared for the dietary consequences of his isolation, brought him doughnuts, and his cabin could be seen by commuters on the Fitchburg Railroad. This constant and somewhat paradoxical oscillation between the self-communion of an introspective authorship and the projection of that very isolation as a social and political stance is a deep stimulus to both writers. I want to go back in order to go forward. There follow two fateful moments, which although originating in England and its poetry and politics, affect profoundly the unfolding of America as a project for writing under Thoreau’s hand. The first, although it is rarely mentioned except by specialist scholars, is at least arguably among the most crucial incidents in the history of English literature: the issuing by Parliament, on 16 June 1660, of a warrant for the arrest of John Milton. Parliament also called for two of Milton’s books to be burned in public by the hangman. Milton, already in hiding following the Restoration of the monarchy in May of that year, fully expected that as a republican who had defended regicide he would very likely be arrested, and then hanged, drawn and quartered in public. He had refused to moderate his republicanism at a time when many of King Charles II’s erstwhile detractors were keeping their heads down, so as to keep them at all. In the event, his name was removed from the list, following, it would seem, a defence of the poet’s writing by another writer, Andrew Marvell. And so Milton, very nearly killed by his published words, was saved by the words of a fellow poet. When reading his epics, Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671), it is easy to forget that their author barely escaped execution, and could easily never have lived to write them. It is important to remember too that Milton turned to the composition of epic poetry partly as a way to escape the harsh terms of the Licensing Act of 1662, whereby the publication of a polemical prose treatise would once again have put his life in danger. The avowed aim of Paradise Lost, to ‘justify the ways of God to men’,4 while hardly lacking in scope and ambition, is founded at the same time (though one could hardly blame the poet or lament the consequences for poetry) in self-censorship and a massive political failure. We forget too easily just how massive was the failure, and how high the stakes, when England’s world turned upside down. My second fateful moment is textual, one of the greatest passages in English poetry, and one in which the representation of alienated subjectivity reaches an unprecedented level of confessional intensity. Here, William Wordsworth links poetry intimately to what it means to be human, while speaking eloquently, and yet in a new, fractured way, of a complete loss of shared meaning: How often in the overflowing streets Have I gone forwards with the crowd, and said Unto myself, ‘The face of every one That passes by me is a mystery.’ 4 John Milton, Paradise Lost, l. 26; Complete English Poems, Of Education, Areopagitica, ed. Gordon Campbell (London: Everyman, 1993), p. 150.

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Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed By thoughts of what, and whither, when and how, Until the shapes before my eyes became A second-sight procession, such as glides Over still mountains, or appears in dreams, And all the ballast of familiar life – The present, and the past, hope, fear, all stays, All laws of acting, thinking, speaking man – Went from me, neither knowing me, nor known. And once, far travelled in such mood, beyond The reach of common indications, lost Amid the moving pageant, ’twas my chance Abruptly to be smitten with the view Of a blind beggar, who, with upright face, Stood propped against a wall, upon his chest Wearing a written paper, to explain The story of the man, and who he was. My mind did at this spectacle turn round As with the might of waters, and it seemed To me that in this label was a type Or emblem of the utmost that we know Both of ourselves and of the universe, And on the shape of this unmoving man, His fixèd face and sightless eyes, I looked, As if admonished from another world.5

A further world’s worth of critical exegesis has been expended on this pivotal passage, and some swift parallels and contrasts must suffice, here. Milton, blind, believed that in a more encompassing sense he could see. Wordsworth’s sighting of the blind beggar triggers a rift between beholding and knowing, between seeing and being seen, between poverty-stricken disability and callous disregard, between parts of the broken self: a failure, then. And yet, in ways which go back to the central image of Christianity, the Crucifixion, failure is the beginning of resurrection. The breakage of the self spells its opening, the broaching of questions and possible new wholes. Blindness becomes the trigger to a revolutionary rethinking – ‘My mind did at this spectacle turn round / As with the might of waters’ – making unseen, mental movement the centre of poetic action, yet one that is both solitary and crying de profundis for, to resurrect Creeley’s phrase, an ‘annealing company’. To walk the line of metaphysical mysteries, ‘As if admonished from another world’, the poet must first stand, stunned, in this one. In what follows I want the political failure of the English Revolution, the failure of the French Revolution and alienation from the modern city in Wordsworth’s evolving imagination, and the epic and influential possibilities these failures 5 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Book 7, ll. 595–623; The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 258, 260.

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enabled, and still enable, to hang, like clouds shaped like question marks, around Walden Pond and the writers’ and artists’ colony at Black Mountain. In The Senses of Walden (1972), Stanley Cavell asks a profound question of Thoreau’s best-known book: ‘Where does the book begin[?]’ More specifically: ‘at what point do we realize that the “I” of the first paragraph, the second word of the book, has merged with the “I” the book is about?’6 Cavell never directly answers his question, though in another sense he never does anything else. My own answer is more dumbly literal. It is one of the many significant points in the text, the first such, when an axe is invoked. Much of Walden’s first section, ‘Economy’, is like an orchestra tuning up, or like John Coltrane putting off the arrival of the main melodic line in the first movement of A Love Supreme, or like one exhaling his own gloom before taking a gulp of fresh air, or like nothing but itself, save perhaps the irritable questionings of a writer who wants to erase the word ‘like’, to get closer to things-in-themselves. The first imaging of the book’s ‘I’, the book’s hero, occurs here: Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. […] The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. […] One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I staid there […] perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life.7

As with any excerpt from Walden, there is much that could be said here, not least about the co-existence of images of apples and serpents in an Edenic setting, but for now I focus on the image of the man with the axe, who ceases to act in order to observe, in order to philosophise. Although engaged in the practical business of hewing timber, he is fascinated by the motionless snake. And although that reptile is immediately allegorised in the kind of homily which, if you don’t like Walden, will see you close the book before it has hardly begun – because this book is going to tell you how to live – its hypnotised torpidity is itself hypnotic, a deceleration of meditative attention entirely characteristic of the book’s author. (Indeed, although he harboured tuberculosis without knowing it, or without knowing it consciously, Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 47. 7 Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: Walden, or Life in the Woods: The Maine Woods: Cape Cod (New York: The Library of America, 1985), pp. 354–5. 6

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because getting out into the woods was the best way to manage his condition, Thoreau’s final illness was triggered by standing still for too long in cold weather, counting the rings of felled trees.) In a later section of the book he tries to outstare an owl. However, since he shows no hesitation in rushing to allegorise, perhaps we should do the same. If his deceleration of attention is revolutionary and liberating, a turning away from the noise of life, capitalism and the Fitchburg Railroad towards nature and redemptive quiet, is it not also quietist, intent on building a solitary cabin in the ruins of a failed revolution? Or, more optimistically, was the American Revolution precisely the final putting away of old causes, so that precisely this kind of experimental living could begin? Thoreau takes up residence in his cabin on Independence Day, 4 July 1845, barely two miles south of Concord Bridge, where the first shots were fired in the American Revolution, causing Emerson’s grandfather to reach for his rifle, and where Ralph Waldo Emerson would in time write ‘Nature’ (1836). This is sacred ground, saturated with symbol, the birth of American Literature and the burial ground of its first authors, for between Concord Bridge and Walden sits Sleepy Hollow, a natural ‘kettle’ to use the geographer’s term, a deep waterless pond, home to the gravestones of the sundry Alcotts, Hawthorne’s Gothic tombstone, the huge multi-coloured meteorite which marks Emerson’s last resting place, and the small white headstone that simply reads ‘Henry’. Yet the revolution, which succeeded, also failed. The America of 1845, roughly contemporary with the Communist Manifesto (1848), was in many ways not politically dissimilar to the Great Britain from which it had cut ties. Thoreau notes that the condition of factory operatives ‘is becoming every day more like that of the English’ (p. 343). The Fitchburg Railroad was the real winner, its diminution of authentic, walkable distance and its usefulness to the market pushing Americans ever further into the torpor of their ‘present low and primitive condition’, ‘sleepers’ in a pun that Thoreau works into the ground: ‘We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you’ (p. 396). Thoreau could hear the trains clearly from his cabin, and a Bostonbound commuter could have looked over his newspaper and seen him. Walden was no wilderness, even at this point in the mid-nineteenth century, and there is a self-consciously performative element not only to Thoreau’s storied prose, but to his daily life in the woods. Yet his quietness is never solely the quietism of despair, just as it is never wholly utopian. Its revolutionary nature is bound up with acts of withdrawal, to a turning-away from the surface in order to see the real, as when, wonderfully, Thoreau conjures the invention of a ‘Realometer’ for measuring what’s ultimately real, for: Be it life or death, we crave only reality. […] Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish

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How blissfully and wilfully clueless he makes himself, as bereft of bearings as Wordsworth seeing himself as a blind itinerant in the moving pageant of the cosmos, but never despairing, at least in Walden. As so often, the vertigo and nightmarish qualities of European, and particularly English, Romanticism, are tamed and gain an optimistic inflection on the other side of the Atlantic. And so, comparing himself to the blind mole, he sniffs ‘the richest vein […] somewhere hereabouts’ – and so begins to ‘mine’ (p. 401). The mood is exploratory, adventurous, unshackled. Emerson, at least on the basis of his funeral eulogy for Thoreau, quoted below, came to lament the element of withdrawal and self-burial in Thoreau’s mole-like absorption in nature. If we can hear the distinctive sound of a pot calling a kettle black, the evident pain and certitude with which Emerson commits himself reminds us that the man with the axe was also a sometime activist, a conductor on the underground railroad, a dissident whose mind, by his own account, was murder to the state, and one who preferred the Concord jail to taxation without representation. Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great enterprise and for command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if at the end of years it is still only beans!8

It is of course this very literal-minded attention to the things, the beans of the world, that is part of Thoreau’s bequest to writers such as William Carlos Williams (and that was part-cause of the bafflement felt by early readers of Wordsworth, such as Byron). In a provocative new book, Enthusiast! (a sequence of essays on American writers from Thoreau and Melville to O’Hara and James Schuyler), David Herd praises Thoreau’s love of etymology as expressing a philosophical view about language and reality. Herd trusts to the thought that he believes ‘underpins all of Thoreau’s writing, that if you dig deep enough what you find at the root of words are things’; ‘What’s at issue is knowing, and as he presents it knowledge is a practical affair: planting, hoeing, harvesting, threshing. It is also an affair of the present tense, the immediacy of the present participle being, apparently, a factor in

8 R.W. Emerson, ‘Biographical Sketch’, in Henry D. Thoreau, Excursions (London: George A. Harrap, 1914), pp. 1–27 (p. 13).

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how Thoreau knows. I am hoeing, therefore I am knowing’.9 Herd’s twists on Kant and Descartes are valuable for their exposure of one side of Thoreau’s project, other aspects of which are illuminated by Stanley Cavell’s equally enthusiastic but more brooding interpretation. Using phrases that could just as easily be applied to Robert Creeley or Charles Olson, Cavell states that ‘what the writer means […] by a “field” of action or labour, is isomorphic with every other. This is why building a house and hoeing and writing and reading […] are allegories and measures of one another’.10 (As are, one might add, gathering huckleberries or guiding a runaway slave through the Underground Railroad.) It is Cavell’s reminder of the relationship between allegory and isomorph that does not so much undo a reading of Thoreau as seeking redemption through access to things-in-themselves, as restore it to its rightful measure; that is, one way only of reading his situation, only one driver to writing. Thoreau has to read the world, rewording it; the world is not a given. His very absorption in actual seasons and place is barely thinkable outside a tradition of topographical poetry; his real pond is, inter alia, Milton’s Eden: his human visitors are quite palpably reshaped as allegorical spokespersons, and he reads the world for signs as avidly as the Puritans, writing of ‘the fine print, the small type, of a meadow mouse’ or the snow’s publication of wanderers’ footsteps as ‘clear whitetype alto-relievo’, even stating that his beloved beans were not grown to eat, but because ‘some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day’ (p. 451). Thoreau writes that he was ‘determined to know beans’, but adds at once that this agricultural endeavour was ineluctably semantic, ‘making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass’ (p. 447). Words and things exhibit contrary relationships simultaneously as they bring each other to life. Thoreau loves etymology for its tracking of meaning back to things themselves, but that beaten track only exposes the types and imprint of words without which those things could never be evoked, and that circularity feeds his project. This circle with a twist of paradox at its centre, this double helix, is at the root of our distinctiveness among thinking creatures and must also be related to the failure of revolution, that paradoxically and hopefully restarts the revolutionary impulse, as well as to the symmetrical relationship of redemption and the fall, and the seasonal cycles of death and rebirth, winter to spring, that structure Thoreau’s Walden. The tropes are originally Christian and Western, but not statically, let alone fearfully so. On the evidence of his journals, Thoreau’s reaction to Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) was basically an unthreatened and interested ‘oh, so that’s what happened’. Emerson noted in his journal, preparing the funeral address, that no one was more Protestant a thinker than Thoreau, but one of the implications 9 David Herd, Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 38, 42. 10 Cavell, The Senses of Walden, p. 62.

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of Walden is that Protestantism, having rendered obsolete the supposed need for intercession between the individual mind and ultimate Reality, would have as one of its culminations its own supersedence by humanism, which humanism would itself be obliterated by a closer identification with Nature, this revolutionary moment being both Thoreau’s historical locus as inheritor of Wordsworth and father of environmentalism, and simultaneously an expression of the yearning to dissolve the distinction between words and things. But then no Western writer (with the possible exception of the Beats, who are his descendants) ever filled their writing with so much reference to Eastern philosophy as Thoreau. The reader’s inability to pin him down is one of the pleasures of reading him. *** I want to say almost didactically that there is no information that does not have an affective content even if it’s blinking lights or numbers in random series.11

‘I Know a Man’, from the mid-1950s, is still Robert Creeley’s most discussed poem: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, – John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness surrounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going.12

As with Milton, as with Wordsworth’s vision of the blind beggar, we are in and out of darkness and light, Creeley himself one-eyed following a childhood accident, a factor he alludes to regularly in interviews such as the tape-transcribed example at the head of this section. And as with Thoreau, the contextual history of the words is ineluctably Christian in its logocentrism – ‘John’, ‘goddamn’, ‘for / christ’s sake’, indeed ‘the darkness’ – and again we are warned against dangerous, careening modernity, in this case not the railroad but the automobile, the beguiling dream-emblem of the 1950s, but driven at speed by an unnamed ‘I’ who did Robert Creeley in interview with William V. Spanos, ‘Talking with Robert Creeley’, in Robert Creeley: A Gathering, ed. William V. Spanos, boundary 2 (special issue), 6:3/7:1 (1978), 11–74 (p. 27). 12 Creeley, ‘I Know a Man’, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1945–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 132. 11

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not even know that he was the driver, did not even know that this is life, that words are always late for the event, but that to be fully in the present might be to court unmanageable risk, a motto for the generation that Robert Creeley helped shape. ‘We’d all rather be there / than talk about it’, as fellow Black Mountaineer Ed Dorn’s metaphysical epic Gunslinger has it,13 though ‘being there’ is no simple occupation, but rather isomorphic with loving or dying or writing as allegories and measures of each other. This is not far from Thoreau – ‘to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line’ (p. 336) – nor is it far from Cavell, who says this of Thoreau, but who could be talking about the whole, loose group of which Creeley and Dorn were members, and whose toeing and breakage of the line, even of the word or syllable, was a shared experimental method: ‘Writing – heroic writing, the writing of a nation’s scripture – must assume the conditions of language as such; re-experience, as it were, the fact that there is such a thing as language at all and assume responsibility for it – find a way to acknowledge it – until the nation is capable of serious speech again.’14 This is almost a commentary on another Black Mountaineer, Robert Duncan, and his ‘A Poem Beginning With a Line By Pindar’ (1960), or a summary of what that whole generation took from Ezra Pound, as well as descriptive of part of the immense weight, the sheer difficulty of effortful self-consciousness that is a Creeley poem. Robert Creeley’s experiences as a young serviceman in the Second World War, as well as other aspects of who he was, put him in opposition to received notions of the political imperative. Nevertheless, his sexually candid hymning of love, intense relationships, heightened consciousness and the studied provocations of the alienated hipster would become highly influential in the emergence of Beat, 1960s and subsequent identity politics. Writing of fellow Black Mountaineer John Wieners, he notes: ‘In the brutal outrage of the late 1950s, when one could pick up a Government bulletin on the home manufacture of a bomb shelter at the post office, Mr Wieners’ painful survival in words became our own.’15 It is easy to forget, because the libertarian mores began to be so mass-marketable in the 1960s or ’70s, how lonely and beleaguered were the Beat/Black Mountain company, even in the run-up to that time. This account began with a contrasting of solitude and the group, but Creeley and Wieners give evidence as to how solitary the group, the avant-garde coterie, could be, just as their inheritance from Walt Whitman showed them how freely multiple the expressions of selfhood in poetry could, paradoxically, now aim to be. John Wieners’s friend Frank O’Hara, who had been brought to public attention with the rest of this grouping in Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry 1945–60 (1960), died in an accident in 1966. The words chiselled on his tombstone Edward Dorn, Gunslinger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 24. Cavell, The Senses of Walden, p. 33. 15 Creeley, Preface, John Wieners, Cultural Affairs in Boston: Poetry & Prose 1956– 13

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were drawn from one of the most Whitmanian sections of O’Hara’s great poem of 1954, ‘In Memory of My Feelings’: ‘Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible’.16 This celebratory line goes wider than, while including, O’Hara’s homosexuality, about which he, like Wieners, was riskily and bravely open, given the legal and cultural situation at that time. So the ‘painful survival’ Creeley saw in Wieners is there in O’Hara too, and finally in that whole generation. The tremulousness of the broken lines at which Creeley is so poetically adept is both an avant-garde device and the registration of psycho-motor tension, resistance, and social and psychological darkness. These qualities are there also in the recordings, Creeley’s voice, so nervous as to almost seem on the verge of choking, a painful survival itself, fraught, authentic in some sense that simultaneously requires artifice, every selva oscura going, to become itself. Creeley’s poems quite frequently do not know where they are going. They go. Improvisation, sanctioned ad libitum by the music he was listening to since the 1940s, together with the whole counter-cultural insistence on revolution in perception and politics (the first more than the second), gives his poetry a hit-andmiss quality. This is no simple matter of certain poems ‘working’, and others not. Rather, many of the poems seem to be intrinsically frustrated attempts to get near to something which cannot be articulated outside the unpredictable journey. It may well be that the failure to succeed wholly, let alone sweetly, is again a characteristic of that generation, so rarely does John Coltrane, for example, sound as if he had happily achieved what he set out to reach. And Coltrane is an apt parallel for Creeley, for whom poetry was a time-based art like jazz with an uncertain outcome and based in an action with very little investment in revision. But the dissatisfactions of both these artists can be deeply satisfactory, aesthetically. The attempt at the successful completion of the poem is in large part the poem. Conditions eased as Creeley aged, and if the price paid was a repetitive lament about advancing decrepitude and the loss of sexual or other kinds of energy, poems occurred that, by observing life less tensely, allow more of it in. This is from one of the later books, indeed a book called Later (1980), the poem titled ‘Beach’: Across bay’s loop of white caps, small seeming black figures at edge – one, the smallest, to the water goes. Others, behind, sit down.17

16 Frank O’Hara, ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 256. 17 Creeley, ‘Beach’, Later (London: Marion Boyars, 1980), p. 15.

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The poem can be read in the light of the preface to Later, in which Creeley, as so often, writes of love, not as sexual or personal but as a commonly applicable caritas: ‘the power to admit the existence of another, who is mortal and will therefore die as will we. It is love which brings us to acknowledge the fact of our living, and that all those others are here too’.18 The little ‘figures’ seen across the bay’s loop in ‘Beach’ are ‘those others’, perhaps a family who sit as the smallest member paddles in the sea. They are all small, adults and children, at this visual distance, but that very miniaturisation paradoxically enhances their ethical and aesthetic visibility, reminding the reader of his or her or the writer’s or anyone’s presence, our likeable capacity to run around, and paddle, write poems, live. The fields of action are isomorphic. But perhaps the poem goes further, while I have gone too far. Need they be people? Could they not be seabirds? And in fact coming to this poem, which I remembered liking when I read it first in a journal, I found I had misremembered it as a poem about stones in a river, and the odd capacity things have sometimes to behave like people, seeming to act independently when pressured by water or weather. Perhaps I blurred it with another poem, a possibility in which the poems themselves seem interested: the poem in the book on the opposite page to ‘Beach’ is called ‘Speech’. And so rhyme isn’t dead, after all, but spread across and within poems – and perceptual moments, and the actions of persons, and words, that are not things, though – and here I am finally where I want this essay to be – words that can never be the things they describe, paint, evoke, haunt, whatever, are also their own things; small hieroglyphic knots. And even if they don’t ever become coterminous with things, they can sit down fairly near the thing as it paddles in the mind, or build fairly close to things, their distance inclusive of a kind of tacit neighbourliness, as one might put up a cabin in the neighbourhood of a pond.

Creeley, Preface, Later, no page.

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Chapter 13

The Robust Way: ‘The Man Said, No’ Philip Davis

In 1869, Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy polemically characterised the two great traditions of Western thought and feeling in terms of Hebraism and of Hellenism: the way of the Jews, in their exclusive commitment to the struggle for righteous action, and the way of the Greeks, in their philosophic contemplation of the perfect and the beautiful. ‘As one passes from Hellenism to Hebraism, from Plato to St Paul’, Arnold wrote, ‘one feels inclined to rub one’s eyes and ask oneself whether man is indeed a gentle and simple being, showing the traces of a noble and divine nature; or an unhappy chained captive, labouring with groanings that cannot be uttered to free himself from the body of this death’.1 Where Hebraism is intensely single-minded and rigidly monotheistic in its painful response to the Fall, the Greeks favoured the many-sided development of all the rich potentialities in the human disposition. We inherit both, thought Arnold: they are each part of what might be called our cultural gene pool, and together both represent the Western search for perfection or salvation. But still they do so with different parts of human nature. Arnold would put it in many ways, speaking first on one side, then on the other, though often anxiously caught in between them. Hebraism versus Hellenism meant the Imperfect or the Beautiful; Conduct or Culture; Fire and Strength, or Sweetness and Light; the quest for the One or the development of the Many; the tension of intolerable Conflict or the possibility of calm and peaceable Harmony. Yet though Arnold argued that human nature always needed some sort of balance between these two great worldviews, manifestly he himself was swayed the Hellenistic way. For in Victorian England, it seemed to him that Hebraism had degenerated into puritanical narrowness, declined into philistine practicality, overtilting the human balance into a too-tenacious rigidity of mind and purpose. To Arnold, Hellenism’s ‘spontaneity of consciousness’ offered more than ‘strictness of conscience’;2 Culture could raise spirits above the set gloom of the Fall; the free flow of open-minded contemplation was greater than the narrow single-mindedness of practical action. In the tense prison of Puritanism some 1 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 131. 2 Ibid., p. 128.

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thoughts simply could not be thought; in its anxious seriousness they could not even be entertained – and that to Arnold was damagingly ugly. Hellenism on the other hand was less exclusive: ‘There is no unum necessarium, or one thing needful, which can free human nature from the obligation of trying to come to its best at all points’, Arnold wrote, adding: ‘The real unum necessarium for us is to come to our best at all points.’3 Though sharing some of Arnold’s anxieties about distortion and imbalance, this present essay speaks on behalf of the Hebraic as a necessary and prophetic reminder in the balance of our own times: the robust way of those who are not at home in the world. And so it begins with a man in flight, desperately seeking his way in life. A guide comes to him, pointing the sheerly narrow way to salvation. ‘Do you see yonder Wicket-gate?’ says Evangelist. In response are written four of the most simple and fundamental words in the language: ‘The Man said, No.’4 If you are a Hellenist, you will admire Keats’s famous account of ‘Negative Capability’ in his letter to George and Tom Keats (21, 27 December 1817): ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.5 But the Man confronted by Evangelist has only positive incapability to offer – the reluctant ‘No’ – even though he recognises that ‘Yes’ would be the apparently right and better answer. Evangelist seems to respect this negative honesty, even in its risk of self-condemnation. At any rate, he doesn’t give up on the Man, but offers him a second chance, saying: ‘Do you see yonder shining light?’ In others it might provoke the hallelujah response, ‘Yes, yes, I see the light’. But Bunyan’s Man manages just four more words: ‘I think I do.’6 It is robust, even in its felt weakness, but it is not in the least gung-ho. I think I do: however secondary that may feel, it is still a form of belief, perhaps the form of belief, in its very fear personally riskier than a maybe-yes, maybe-no agnosticism. This is of course the beginning of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Later, when Pliable turns round on this Man, who has become Christian, and asks him, in midst of his continuing trouble, where all this religion of his has got him, the response of the Man is similarly heart-deep: ‘I do not know.’ It is the all-too-knowing Mr Worldly-Wiseman who can always say: ‘I thought so’. When he asks Bunyan’s Man if he can see Mount Sinai, Christian is unconsciously infected by some of that worldly wisdom, answering, ‘Yes, very well’, instead of ‘I think I do’.7 It leads to near disaster. Those who suppose themselves healthy minded need only to be born Ibid., p. 142. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock

3 4

(London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 147. 5 John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 41. 6 Bunyan, Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 147. 7 Ibid., pp. 151, 154.

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once, but, says William James in the eighth of his Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion (1901–1902), there are other souls who must be twice-born in order to be saved, and such is John Bunyan even in those two responses to Evangelist: In the religion of the once-born the world is a sort of rectilinear or one-storied affair whose accounts are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which naturally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it all is by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance. […] It keeps us from our real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.8

In the normal economy of the world, it seems first-order good sense to cling to the natural life, even when it seems in deficit. Punters and investors cling on for fear there is no second life. They cannot know for certain or in advance if there is any different way, risking without guarantee of return the loss and ruin of their norm. That is what Kierkegaard was to call the ‘despair of despairing’:9 locked into the first life in doubt of a second (or, sometimes, for fear that there may be), the desperate continuance itself incrementally adds to the disbelief in anything other. It may take a massive personal disaster, a scandal, illness, bereavement, depression, to begin that total recalibration of life that James describes in the twice-born. Bunyan’s God seems to have great hidden respect and compassion for those who can only say ‘I think I do’, the tentative new beginnings of the second chance in response to His first testing challenges. So it is in Mark, when Christ says almost temptingly to the father of the epileptic child seeking the miracle of a cure for his son: ‘If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.’ To which the father ‘straightway […] cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief’ (9.23–4). It is the second half of that utterance – more than the first, but also impossible without it – which is the real language of belief, precisely for incorporating doubt within itself. Thus too George Herbert pleading to God at the end of ‘Affliction (1)’ (1633): ‘Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.’10 The robust way includes a fallen self-suspicion lest the turn to the second William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 166–7. 9 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. H.V. and E.H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 44–5. 10 George Herbert, ‘Affliction (1)’, l. 66; The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 43. 8

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life is no more than psychological compensation for the failure of the first one. Public figures brought down by scandal suddenly born again into charitable good works; repentance reached on the day of execution: beneath the omniscience of God, it is on a knife’s edge of plausibility as to how far these conversions are indeed authentic or inauthentic.11 Even the protagonist himself cannot be sure. In ‘To Heaven’ (1616), Ben Jonson says robustly in his sorrows, ‘I know my state, both full of shame, and scorn’, ‘I feel my griefs too’ – but also fears lest those prayers of his to God should be ‘For weariness of life, not love of thee’ (emphasis added).12 ‘Not’, ‘no’, ‘unbelief’: this is the language of positive incapability at the wits’ end of what is human, volunteering to what is almost shamefully but also involuntarily inadequate. It (whatever is to become its name) all begins, not ends, with No – as in Luther’s legendary Protestant declaration before the Diet at Worms: ‘Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen’ (‘Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir. Amen’).13 When I say such is the real language of belief, ‘real’ is a word I take from John Henry Newman, in particular from his sermon, ‘Unreal Words (Advent)’ (2 June 1839). There, Newman recalls how to the young man who lightly called Him ‘Good Master’ (‘Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?’), Christ replied, ‘Why callest thou me good?’ as though implicitly bidding him weigh his words (Mark 10.17–18). ‘Words have a meaning’, says Newman, ‘whether we mean that meaning or not; and they are imputed to us in their real meaning, when our not meaning it is our own fault. He who takes God’s Name in vain, is not counted guiltless because he means nothing by it’.14 To mean the meaning, to inhabit and take personal responsibility for one’s words as for oneself: that is the ‘real’ – in my judgment itself a far deeper word than ‘honest’ or ‘sincere’ or ‘authentic’ – because so riskily committed to its faltering language, even as ‘I think I do’ is. But the reality of such language does not rest merely in its vocabulary. The great Old Testament example in this respect comes from Job speaking, from the very midst of his suffering, of his paradoxical relation to God; thus: ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him’ (Job 13.15). It seems likely that this, taken from the Authorized King James Version, is a mistranslation. ‘Let him slay me’ it properly begins, but the second clause may be better rendered as the more easily compatible, ‘I have no hope’, though just possibly it may still be: ‘in him I will hope’. Even so, literal or not, See Geoffrey Hartman, Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (London: Palgrave, 2002), esp. pp. 27, 65. 12 Ben Jonson, ‘To Heaven’, ll. 17, 21, 26; The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 119. 13 See Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 294. 14 John Henry Newman, ‘Unreal Words (Advent)’, Parochial and Plain Sermons (1881–1884), 8 vols (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), V, 977–87 (p. 980). 11

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the Authorized Version retains its place through centuries of usage, in resonant memory of the Hebraic tradition of a loyal opposition to the Lord, of arguing with God precisely through a protesting faith in Him. Thus what is most powerfully real in Job’s saying is the syntax, the English connectives that enable it: ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him.’ It is important that the three clauses are in that order, and in no other more conventionally pious or apologetic version. It is also vital that they return still to ‘mine own ways’ (my own personal sense of justice however inadvertently flawed), rather than become religiously unreal. ‘Religion’ itself is a temptation; that is why the whole experiential shape of faith has to be self-checking: in that great phrase of Newman’s, ‘saying and unsaying to a positive result’.15 But it is even more important that, for all their contradictions and their conflict, somehow – the sentence says, because it is one sentence – somehow all three positions in Job can be held together, and passionately are so in a life. He slay me; I trust him; I maintain mine own ways. It is like a version of what Tertullian said of the Resurrection: ‘Certum est, quia impossibile’ (‘I am certain of the reality of this utterance precisely because it is well-nigh impossible’).16 It cannot be That I am he On whom thy tempest fell all night.17

It cannot be, but (the verse says in the silent aftermath of wonder) it is: George Herbert’s amazed recovery from the long dark night of depression in ‘The Flower’ (1633). ‘I am he’: you could not make it up, you could not reason it, unless you found and felt it on different lines from the normal ones of life and time. In its still unresolved movement through the midst of its own difficulties, still not yet anywhere near the point of Herbert’s recovery, Job’s ‘though, yet, but’ is profoundly robust, stumbling yet upright, faithful yet defiant with it. But it is certainly not quite beautiful. Not as Dame Julian of Norwich is beautiful, in a way that Matthew Arnold would have recognised, when she says: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well’18 (though it is that unbeautiful word ‘things’ in its mundanity that I love best). Job’s ‘though, yet, but’ is nonetheless in a deep sense greatly awkward. There is, says William James in 1890, ‘a feeling of and, and a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and

See John Coulson, Religion and Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 64. Tertullian, Tertullian’s Treatise on the Incarnation (De Christi Carne Liber), trans.

15

16

and ed. Ernest Evans (London: SPCK, 1956), pp. 18–19. The phrase is often misquoted as: ‘Credo quia impossibile est’ (‘I believe it because it is impossible’). 17 George Herbert, ‘The Flower’, ll. 40–42; The Complete English Poems, pp. 156–7. 18 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Elizabeth Spearing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 79.

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a feeling of by’ just as surely as there is ‘a feeling of cold’.19 Those feelings are the more real, and the less self-conscious, for being unnamed by the words they employ. That is what feelings should be like – agents, messengers, instruments. ‘Though, yet, but’ are doing something. They are feeling their thought in the act of its being made and used. They are the pilgrim’s progress. In an interview with Harold Hobson in 1956, Samuel Beckett pointed to some sentences from St Augustine on the crucifixion, which appeal to him, he says, not as a religious man but as a writer, a stylist: ‘Then were there two thieves crucified with him, one on the right hand, and another on the left’: I am interested in the shape of ideas, even if I do not believe in them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine: I wish I could remember the Latin. It is even finer in Latin than in English. ‘Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.’ That sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.20

So says the disinherited aesthete in Beckett. And indeed it is the silent space created in that to-and-fro balance between ‘Do not presume’ and ‘Do not despair’ which is indeed wonderful: somewhere and somehow between these two, according to their connected law, all mankind must work out their way, alone, in the dark of double negatives. But Job cannot inhabit such generalised silence, cannot do without the ungainly struggle for articulate connectives: he must speak out of his own predicament, in all its asymmetries. And that is a form of realism: when writers find, in the midst of formulation, the thought of what is resistant or unavoidable, of what is recalcitrant or unexpected, and not simply what they want it to be. I write in praise of something that is more awkward and less ostensibly perfect than the beautifully symmetrical. Here, for example, is Fulke Greville in what is his most famous (and deeply Hebraic) verse, the ‘Chorus Sacerdotum’, which concludes his play Mustapha (1609). He confronts what looks at first like symmetry: Oh wearisome Condition of humanity! Born under one Law, to another bound: Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity, Created sick, commanded to be sound […].21

19 William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols (New York: Dover, 1950), I, 245–6. 20 Quoted in Francis Doherty, Samuel Beckett (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 88, citing Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (London: John Calder, 1962), p. 100. Beckett’s statement was originally published in Harold Hobson, ‘Samuel Beckett: Dramatist of the Year’, International Theatre Annual, 1 (1956), 153–5 (pp. 153–4). 21 Fulke Greville, ‘Chorus Sacerdotum’, ll. 1–4; Selected Poems, ed. Thom Gunn (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 149.

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But though the syntax seems symmetrical, half line balanced against half line, it offers only the pain of an ironic symmetry – as in the paradoxes felt by Job, with light only to see the more his darkness: Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul; Which long for death, but it cometh not; […] Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in? (Job 3.20–21, 23)

Or felt by Paul, self-defeated and self-baffled, in Romans: ‘For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do’ (7.19). We can live in one half of Fulke Greville’s divided lines and we can live in the other – indeed we do so – but what we cannot do is either put them both together or keep them separate and apart. ‘What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws?’ Tyrant to others, to herself unjust, Only commands things difficult and hard, Forbids us all things, which it knows is lust, Makes easy pains, unpossible reward. 22

There is no syntax, no explanation, in the middle of the lines: even ‘but’ or ‘and yet’ are too easy to fill the gap. Our own fallen composition, like that of the verse, is such that these opposing things are united in us, in conflict; but any other way of uniting them is itself (in the name of that great negative word, new-created) ‘unpossible’. But what is this Chorus that speaks out of such corrosive disruption? It is a Job-like chorus of priests, of religious men themselves all too well aware of seeming either apostate or hypocritical: We that are bound by vows, and by promotion, With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites, To teach belief in good and still devotion, To preach of Heaven’s wonders, and delights: Yet when each of us, in his own heart looks, He finds the God there, far unlike his Books.23

The books are those of organised religion and theological apologetics. It is a quite different book in which Fulke Greville writes these lines, a book ‘of his own heart’, which shows itself through two great words here near the end of this Chorus. It is not the big words (‘holy sacrifice’, ‘Heaven’s wonders’ or even ‘God’), but the little awkward word ‘the’ (which must not be omitted, must not be ‘a’, but is definite and yet not familiarly known or merely conventional) and with it the word Ibid., p. 149, ll. 5, 13–16. Ibid., p. 150, ll. 19–24.

22 23

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‘unlike’: ‘the God there, far unlike’. Nobody ever uses the word ‘the’ or the prefix ‘un’ like these writers of the robust way do. I speak in praise, then, of the discovery of asymmetry, of the unlike, arising even like the individual suddenly in the midst of the mass assembly. Here again from the great Reformation, re-forming everything, is Lancelot Andrewes, one of the translators of the Authorized Version. He is examining some verses from John 20, in his ‘Sermon 14 Of the Resurrection, Easter 1620’, where Mary Magdalene stands alone weeping beside the tomb of Jesus. Andrewes, also a classical Hellenistic son of the Renaissance, is translating from the Latin, on the signs of her love: stabat juxta monumentum, that she stood by the grave. A place, where faint love loves not to stand. Bring Him to the grave, and lay Him in the grave, and there leave him: but come no more at it, nor stand not long by it. Stand by Him, while He is alive, So did many, stand, and goe, and sit by Him. But stans juxta monumentum, Stand by Him dead, Marie Magdalen, she did it, and she onely did it, and none but she.24

The dissenting asymmetry is born out of the persistent rhythmic symmetry, the sense of jolting difference and significant variation suddenly emergent out of the underlying sameness. Thus the shrewd formulation ‘love loves not’; or ‘Bring Him, lay Him, leave him’ with that quietly diminished final ‘h’; or the great oppositions ‘So did many […] But she onely’; and the rebuking negatives ‘bring, but come no more, stand not long’ and then finally, tersely against the many ‘she, she onely, and none but she’. What is more, this is unexpected, for this Mary was a sinner, a fallen woman, where the disciples should have been the more likely candidates for constancy: ‘But Peter is gone, and John too: all are gone, and we are left alone; then to stay, is love, and constant love.’25 It is not enough for love, says Andrewes, to look once: ‘To seeke, is one thing: not to give over seeking, is another.’26 It is that ‘another’ he is after, unlike or (marvellous original spelling) ‘onely’, as she stands weeping by the tomb. And Andrewes too will not go away from the text – such is the non-negating power of the negative in this tradition – but stays with the word, as though it were inexhaustibly real, keeping his sentences going in their own toughly continued seeking, until they generate the inner truth their perseverance has repeatedly aimed at getting out: Weeping without seeking, is but to small purpose. But her weeping hindered not her seeking; Her sorrow dulled not her diligence. And diligence is a character of love, comes from the same root, dilectio and diligentia from diligo, both. […] Her standing, her weeping, and seeking, wee may take some good by them. 24 Lancelot Andrewes, Selected Sermons and Lectures, ed. Peter McCullough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 228. 25 Ibid., p. 228. 26 Ibid., p. 229.

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I doubt, ours will fall short. Stay by Him alive, that we can, juxta mensam: but juxta monumentum, who takes up his standing there? And our love, it is dryeyed, it cannot weepe; it is stiff-joynted, it cannot stoupe to seeke. If it doe, and wee hit not on Him at first, away wee goe, with Peter and John; wee stay it not out with Mary Magdalen.27

Almost everything here exists, I would say, to culminate in that vernacular word ‘out’ for which in its lengthening effect there is no entirely Latinate equivalent. Stay, stay, stay until it is ‘staying it out’ (found from the midst of the negative again in ‘we stay it not out’), like Shakespeare’s ‘Love’ that ‘alters not’, ‘But bears it out even to the edge of doom’ in Sonnet 116 (ll. 11–12).28 ‘Out’ is not conventionally beautiful, but its tough vernacular extends the verb continuously beyond the general limits – as in meaning 4.a. of ‘out’ in the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) – possibly to completion or to exhaustion (as in meaning 6.a.), yet without knowing in advance which it will be. And ‘staying it out’ is placed there, determinedly and faithfully awkward, because there is nothing else than it, no response, no encouragement save from within itself and its own self-sustaining. This is the great biblical tradition in which, in the founding words of Tyndale, the literal is the spiritual.29 And it may be literally one small and ostensibly ill-fitting word that does the work. ‘Gods doings are many, and not all of one size’, wrote Andrewes in his 1606 sermon on the Gunpowder Plot: The Prophet Zacharie speaketh of a day of small things, and, even in those small, must we learne to see GOD, or we shall never see Him in greater. Yet, so dimme is our sight, that unlesse they be great, commonly we see Him not.30

See God in small, in the rough vernacular, in the tiny sudden difference. This, in these days of unreal words, we too often dismiss as mere ‘close reading’, when it is really a faithfulness both to and in the great texts. Lancelot Andrewes himself is diligent, not out of pedantry but love – love immersed in the act of passionately subdued attention to real words. Reading of equivalent intensity is a means of not forgetting that way. Saul Bellow’s Sammler, a Holocaust survivor, spends much of his later years reading the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart in the 42nd Street Library:

Ibid., p. 229. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116, ll. 11–12; The Complete Works, ed. John Jowett,

27 28

William Montgomery, Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 793. 29 William Tyndale, Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), The Work of William Tyndale, ed. G.E. Duffield (Appleford: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1964), pp. 331, 340. 30 Andrewes, Selected Sermons and Lectures, p. 150.

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Blessed are the poor in spirit. […] See to it that you are stripped of all creatures, of all consolation from creatures. For certainly as long as creatures comfort and are able to comfort you, you will never find true comfort. But if nothing can comfort you save God, truly God will console you.31

The difference between this modern man and those great founders such as Lancelot Andrewes who, in Bunyan’s phrase, have ‘the Root of the Matter’ in them, is of course that Mr Sammler ‘could not say that he literally believed what he was reading’.32 He cannot recognise himself as a believer, yet does not know if there is any way without belief. But Sammler can say that ‘he cared to read nothing but this’.33 Nothing but: again the negative way, a robust version of the via negativa. For even when the frameworks seem gone, the words still find such as Sammler, and seem to stand for something in Hebraic memory beyond the modern world and its formulae. The words do not simply pass him by. It is important what finds, what sticks, what stays. In a lecture ‘On Liberty and Necessity’ given in 1812, William Hazlitt described a world so spatially dense that it prevents any agent acting freely or individually without almost simultaneously also suffering amidst what it does. There is no separate space of unconditional freedom, no entirely self-starting or utterly independent characters. We are mainly like forces, says Hazlitt, either transmitters, picking up and passing on the pressures around us; or reactors who, as the external pressures bear in upon us, employ such inner resources as those pressures call forth, in order to modify them.34 The robust way asks what the world asks of those within it, namely: What have you in you? which are you – transmitter or reactor? Some in the world seem to be taken along by a succession of events passing through them. They do not say no. In others, something seems called out by the event – perhaps resistant, maybe interceding; but making that called-for part of them for once an element in the compound of existence, one of its natural forces. What the robust writers look for, even at the level of line or sentence, is the re-action amidst the transmission, some difference equivalent to the difference that an element in the individual can make or find or stand for in the world, slightly shifting its onward flow. It might only be a little mark like ‘the God there’ or ‘but I will maintaine’. Thus, so often going against the grain, this robust way must include Bunyan’s Christian, in all his weaknesses, not simply going forward in what would be unreal ‘progress’. For suddenly the Man finds himself without the book given him by Evangelist, the parchment roll which he has foolishly left behind after falling asleep in an enticing arbour of rest halfway up the mountain. The Pilgrim goes back, reluctantly and with all the distress of retracing footsteps and losing time, in order to get right again, to touch base: Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet (London: Penguin, 1977), pp. 203–4. Bunyan, Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 345; Bellow,

31

32

Mr Sammler’s Planet, p. 204. 33 Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet, p. 204. 34 William Hazlitt, Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J.M. Dent, 1932), II, 268–9.

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How many steps have I took in vain! […] I am made to tread those steps with sorrow, which I might have trod with delight, had it not been for this sinful sleep. How far might I have been on my way by this time! I am made to tread those steps thrice over, which I needed not to have trod but once […].35

In panic, out of time with himself and out of sync with the ideal way, as when misdirected earlier by Worldly-Wiseman, he can never think himself safe until he has got back into the road he left: ‘so he went on with haste, neither spake he to any man by the way; nor if any man asked him, would he vouchsafe them an answer’.36 It is not the rectilinear straightforward world of which William James spoke with its easy sum of plus and minus, but the recalibrated world of individual second efforts the long way round, amidst awkward jolts and obstacles, anomalies and unpredictable necessities. The syntax of ‘those steps which’ (‘made to tread those steps with sorrow, which I might have trod with delight’, ‘made to tread those steps thrice over, which I needed not to have trod but once’) insists on the joins, however awkward and uncomforting. It is perhaps too easy to assume that that world can be recalled simply by reading, by touching base with the world which, from Tyndale to Bunyan, has constituted in cultural memory. The way itself teaches that it must be tougher than that. But I conclude with a vital and neglected text which, within the prophetic and fallen tradition, still does hard work for us. Adam Ferguson dedicated his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) to the subject of what happens when a society becomes wealthy and polished, and its members no longer live a life of challenging difficulty. He was a friend of Walter Scott; later his work was much admired by Karl Marx: both relished Ferguson’s model of the processes of historical transition. ‘Man is not made for repose’, wrote Ferguson, ‘In him every amiable and respectable quality, is an active power, and every subject of commendation an effort’.37 Ferguson was a tough-minded Highlander, now living in the midst of an age of transition that was turning Scotland from an ancient to a modern world, substituting a world of money, of secondary concerns, of status and luxury, for something more direct, personal and primal. He uttered his warning in this book of his, robust in its search for a continuing robustness: When we only mean to learn what others have taught, it is probable, that even our knowledge will be less than that of our masters. Great names continue to be repeated with admiration, after we have ceased to examine the foundations of our praise: and new pretenders are rejected, not because they fall short of their predecessors, but because they do not excel them; or because, in reality, we have, without examination, taken for granted the merit of the first, and cannot judge of either.

Bunyan, Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress, pp. 174–5. Ibid., p. 158. 37 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes 35 36

(Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1966), p. 210.

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After libraries are furnished, and every path of ingenuity is occupied, we are, in proportion to our admiration of what is already done, prepossessed against farther attempts. We become students and admirers, instead of rivals; and substitute the knowledge of books, instead of the inquisitive or animated spirit in which they were written.38

What Ferguson was after was that ‘animated spirit’, the instinct that is still in touch with the real, the almost physically embedded memory of a former way still seeking fresh embodiments. Literature is the reminder of that original animated spirit, not the replacement for it, but calling it forth again, as does the prophet.

Ibid., p. 217.

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Chapter 14

From Cowper to Conrad: Authenticity at the End of the Century Ashley Chantler

My route to ‘The Heart of Darkness’1 lies briefly through an earlier familiar setting: He long survives who lives an hour In ocean, self-upheld, And so long he with unspent pow’r His destiny repell’d, And ever, as the minutes flew, Entreated help, or cried, Adieu! […] No voice divine the storm allay’d, No light propitious shone, When, snatch’d from all effectual aid, We perish’d, each, alone: But I, beneath a rougher sea, And whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he.2

‘The Cast-Away’ (1799) is, as Vincent Newey has written, ‘an anti-hymn, an inversion of the narrative of saving or redemptive intervention’, in which Cowper, ‘existentialist hero’, ‘authors’ a centred self ‘which can be held even as frameworks of faith disintegrate’.3 Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a work concerned with the disintegration of various kinds of faith and the concomitant ‘gulphs’, may well owe something to Cowper’s haunting seafaring tale, but our hold on it is tentative, in part because of Marlow, the framed narrative’s second narrator. As Conrad’s unnamed first narrator comments: Joseph Conrad, ‘The Heart of Darkness’, Blackwood’s Magazine (Feb., Mar., Apr., 1899); revised and retitled, as Heart of Darkness, for publication in Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1902). 2 William Cowper, ‘The Cast-Away’, ll. 37–42, 61–6; The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–1995), III, 215–16. 3 Vincent Newey, ‘Cowper Prospects: Self, Nature, Society’, in Romanticism and Religion, ed. Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 41–56 (pp. 53–4). See also Vincent Newey, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982), pp. 271–313; Michael Davies, ‘Authentic Narratives: Cowper and Conversion’, Chapter 1 of this volume. 1

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The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.4

In Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), Lionel Trilling asserts that this novel, perhaps above all others, offers ‘the paradigmatic literary expression of the modern concern with authenticity’,5 but he does not consider it at length. ‘The Cast-Away’ gives me, here, several ways into the ‘haze’ that will also broaden Trilling’s analysis. Further to the poem’s concern with the ‘gulphs’ into which one can fall, with being ‘self-upheld’, and self-authoring, ‘The Cast-Away’ touches crucially on silence: God’s and, eventually, the drowning man’s, but also Cowper’s. The ‘gulphs’ are not explained: absence in the final two lines of the poem echoes the ‘gulphs’ and the past ‘I’, and we are left with the possibility that silence, or moving towards silence, might be a more authentic expression than speaking. It also touches on when we might see clearly, authentically, free of habit and the persona of public life, as well as on questions of knowledge and the possibility that, to quote a poet with various literary connections to Cowper and Conrad, ‘ignorance is bliss’.6 I will begin with another ending: I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, or craven terror – of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath— ‘The horror! The horror!’ (p. 112)

In its simplicity and mutedness – ‘a cry that was no more than a breath’ – devoid of the public rhetoric, idealism and personal and political ambitions he is known for, lacking his ‘ability to talk’ (p. 79) that Marlow had become so intrigued by,

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness with The Congo Diary, ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 18. 5 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 106. See also Geoffrey Hartman, Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Ivo Vidan, ‘Conrad’s Legacy: The Concern with Authenticity in Modern Fiction’, Massachusetts Review, 11 (1970), 545–63. 6 Thomas Gray, ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’, l. 99; Selected Poems, ed. John Heath-Stubbs (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1986), p. 46. On Cowper and Gray, see Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, pp. 318–20. Conrad knew Gray’s work: see, for example, A Personal Record, ed. Zdzisław Najder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 201, n. 16.38. 4

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Kurtz’s deathbed statement seems to be uncomfortably raw and authentic. Indeed, Marlow refers to Kurtz’s ‘final burst of sincerity’ (pp. 107–8).7 What Kurtz means is, of course, ambiguous, not that that has stopped critics trying to nail down the statement. Peter Brooks, in Reading for the Plot (1984), suggests that ‘The horror! The horror!’ ‘stands on the verge of non-language, of non-sense’.8 The repetition is no doubt key. The second exclamation can be read as re-emphasis, but it is an empty echo, the assonance sounding the void, hinting at non-meaning, or at least indeterminacy. Narrative, according to Roland Barthes, allows us to transcend ‘the first form given man, namely repetition’; it is an emancipatory logic ‘which has vanquished repetition and instituted the model of a process of becoming’.9 Kurtz’s statement is non-progressive; it suggests degeneration, though not, here, to ‘savagery’, but to childhood, though still in a sense beneath the inauthentic ‘constructs of civilization’,10 more free from the ‘nets’ of ‘nationality, language, religion’ that were questioned by the modernists.11 Not that Conrad is reinforcing Rousseau’s dichotomy of child and adult. The ‘forgotten and brutal instincts’ awakened in Kurtz, which took him ‘beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations’ (p. 107), were innate12 – authentic, though troubling, expressions of self. If the ‘deathbed scene of the nineteenth-century novel eminently represents the moment of summing-up of a life’s meaning and a transmission of accumulated wisdom to succeeding generations’,13 then Kurtz’s secular, and perhaps for him 7 Marlow’s interpretation should not be fully relied on, though, as Cedric Watts has proved: see pp. 138–9, n. 112. See also Watts, A Preface to Conrad (Harlow: Pearson Education, 1993), pp. 136–7. On authenticity and ‘last words’ in Byron’s Manfred (1817), see Bernard Beatty, ‘Authenticity Projected: Alexander Pope, Lord Byron and Cardinal Newman’, Chapter 5 of this volume. 8 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 252. See also Ludwig Schnauder, Free Will and Determinism in Joseph Conrad’s Major Novels (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 141–7. 9 Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), p. 124. I am echoing Vincent Newey’s use of Barthes in relation to Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895): ‘Thomas Hardy and the Forms of Making’, Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), pp. 214–38 (pp. 222–3). 10 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 108. On degeneration, see William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); John W. Griffith, Joseph Conrad and the Anthropological Dilemma (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 11 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 171. 12 On Rousseau’s ‘naïve faith that human beings are naturally good’, see Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 104. On Conrad’s negative view of Rousseau, see Zdzisław Najder, Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 139–52. 13 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 246.

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private, deathbed epiphany is a fin-de-siècle anti-epiphany and a subversion of the conventional Victorian scene.14 In a ruminative letter to John Galsworthy on the ending of his as-yet-unpublished novel Fraternity (1909), Conrad refers to the ‘gratuitous atrocity’ of ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’ (1886), written shortly after Tolstoy’s religious conversion.15 The story ends with the deathbed redemption of Ilych: ‘What about death? Where is it?’ He was looking for his earlier, accustomed fear of death, but he couldn’t find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear whatsoever, because there was no death. Instead of death there was light. ‘So that’s it!’ he said suddenly, out loud. ‘Oh, bliss!’16

As Charles Guignon says: ‘All the ingredients of the religious interpretation of life’s aim are in place’ in Tolstoy’s story: ‘we turn inward in order to get in touch with God; the trajectory is inward and upward; it is by finding God that we are saved’.17 In Heart of Darkness, however, the trajectory is only inward, but not to the positive, regenerative depths of the self that Wordsworth claims to discover,18 rather to Cowper’s ‘gulphs’ and Urizen’s ‘void’.19 The novel reverberates with There is a similarly subversive and bleak scene earlier in the novel, when Marlow observes the death of the helmsman, who ‘died without uttering a sound […]. Only in the very last moment, as though in response to some sign we could not see, to some whisper we could not hear, he frowned, and that frown gave to his black death-mask an inconceivably sombre, brooding, and menacing expression’ (p. 78). On ‘The [Victorian] Deathbed: Consolation and Communication’, see Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 28–33. On the ambiguous deathbed scene in Jude the Obscure, see Newey, ‘Thomas Hardy and the Forms of Making’, pp. 232–4. 15 Conrad to John Galsworthy (1908), Life and Letters, ed. G. Jean-Aubry, 2 vols (London: William Heinemann, 1927), II, 77. 16 Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, trans. Ronald Wilks, Anthony Briggs and David McDuff (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 217. 17 Guignon, On Being Authentic, p. 86. 18 See, for example, M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973); Jean Hall, A Mind That Feeds Upon Infinity: The Deep Self in English Romantic Poetry (London: Associated University Presses, 1991); Andrea K. Henderson, Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Vincent Newey, ‘Romantic Subjects: Shaping the Self from 1789 to 1989’, in Reviewing Romanticism, ed. Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 134–53. On post-Romantic depths, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 672. 19 William Blake, The Book of Urizen, I, l. 4; Selected Poems, ed. Peter Butter (London: Everyman, 1994), p. 85. 14

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hollowness and holes. At the Company’s station, the chief accountant is like ‘a hairdresser’s dummy’ (p. 36); the general manager of the Central Station has ‘nothing within him’ (p. 42); Kurtz is ‘hollow at the core’ (p. 95) and is later buried ‘in a muddy hole’ (p. 112); Marlow sees a ‘vast’ manmade hole in the ground with no purpose (p. 34); similarly absurd is a bucket, being used to put out a fire, that has ‘a hole in the bottom’ (p. 44).20 What can keep the self ‘upheld’, to prevent a return to Sartre’s le néant, le visquex, are rivets: ‘Rivets […] – to stop the hole’; ‘rivets were what really Mr Kurtz wanted, if he had only known it’ (pp. 51–2). Rivets: formerly religion, morality, ‘beliefs’ (p. 71);21 grand narratives that, in Ford Madox Ford’s rendering, helped to create and to keep, however tenuously, ‘Ordered Life’ and the self above ‘the abysses of Chaos’.22 Narratives that became vulnerable throughout the nineteenth century, leaving the individual, Pater’s ‘solitary prisoner’, relying on himself for ontological and epistemological stability.23 Perhaps, then, ‘ignorance is bliss’; that living by unquestioned narratives, though authored by others, is more wise, and reflection best avoided. Conrad elsewhere writes: ‘It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dulness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.’24 As Hölderlin’s Hyperion notes: ‘a moment of reflection

20 The novel is, of course, quoted as an epigraph to T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men (1925) and before Ezra Pound’s intervention was going to be used for the epigraph of The Waste Land (1922). 21 ‘Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore’: Conrad to R.B. Cunninghame Graham (14 Jan. 1898), The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, 9 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), II, 17. 22 Ford Madox Ford, It Was the Nightingale (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2007), p. 49. 23 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Twickenham: Senate, 1998), p. 235; first published in 1873 as Studies in the History of the Renaissance. The Conclusion, quoted here, was first published as part of Pater’s essay, ‘Poems by William Morris’ (1868). See also Ford Madox Ford, Mightier Than the Sword (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938), p. 235: ‘it is characteristic of a confused world […] that along with the disappearance of Continence, Probity, and the belief in revealed religion, Truth should have developed the bewildering faculty of the chameleon and have taken like Janus, two faces. […] There is no longer any one Faith, no longer any one Cause, no longer any one anything for the reasoning of man’; H.G. Wells, What is Coming? A Forecast of Things After the War (London: Cassell, 1916), p. 161: ‘The nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented modification of social relationships; but great as these changes were, they were trivial in comparison with the changes in religious thought and the criticism of moral ideals.’ 24 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 143.

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hurls me down. I reflect, and I find myself as I was before, alone, with all the pains of mortality’.25 And T.S. Eliot: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.26

The dis-ease of consciousness, of awareness, of knowing, can lead, not necessarily to the grave, but to a desire for it or an equivalent: it is there, for example, albeit conflictingly, in Cowper’s ‘Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion’ (written c. 1774), in Tennyson’s unhappy shut-ins (‘Mariana’ (1830) and ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1832)), and of course throughout Hardy’s poetry: A time there was – as one may guess And as, indeed, earth’s testimonies tell – Before the birth of consciousness, When all went well. […] But the disease of feeling germed, And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong; Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed How long, how long?27

Marlow’s narrative ends with his lie to Kurtz’s fiancé, who has been in mourning for ‘more than a year since his death’: ‘The last word he pronounced was – your name. […] I could not tell her [the truth]. It would have been too dark – too dark altogether’ (pp. 118, 123). Marlow refrains from removing the rivet that is the pre-degenerative Kurtz from the woman’s sense of ‘Ordered Life’, and he was presumably right to do so, even if we ‘hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie’, sense that in lies there ‘is a taint of death’ (p. 49), as he prevents, perhaps, her suicide, or at least her further descent into despair.28 The authentic would be a gulph ‘too dark’; the inauthentic saves, and upholds.

25 Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, or, The Hermit in Greece, trans. Ross Benjamin (New York: Archipelago, 2008), p. 13. On Hyperion and ‘oneness’, see Guignon, On Being Authentic, pp. 51–5. 26 T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets; Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 178. 27 Thomas Hardy, ‘Before Life and After’, ll. 1–4, 13–16; The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 277. 28 On ‘the effect of speakers on listeners’ in the novel, see Thomas Dilworth, ‘Listeners and Lies in “Heart of Darkness”’, Review of English Studies, 38 (1987), 510–22.

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To an extent. Earlier, Marlow quotes his aunt as saying that ‘It is a glorious idea’ (p. 23) for him to go to Africa. She thinks this because of what she has read and heard about the European involvement in Africa; as Marlow says of her point of view: I was also one of the Workers, with a capital – you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about ‘weaning those horrible millions from their horrid ways,’ till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. (p. 28)

It would be easy to dismiss Marlow’s aunt and to distance ourselves from her ignorance, but she is ‘living right in the rush of all that humbug’: with ease we are swept along, do not question, especially since questioning, challenging, can be difficult and ‘uncomfortable’. Heart of Darkness was written partly to discomfort, to expose the ‘humbug’ that had influenced people like Marlow’s aunt and the conservative, imperialist readers of Blackwood’s Magazine. In many respects, Marlow’s lie to the ‘Intended’ is trivial, an act born of empathy for someone too centred on herself. His silence in the company of his aunt is more problematic. Her ignorance – she is, after all, a woman with connections to ‘the Administration’ and to ‘a man who has lots of influence’ (p. 23) – and the ignorance of the many others manipulated by the ‘humbug’ (false reports, propaganda, lies, the regurgitated) is dangerous. The inauthentic can harm; speaking what one really thinks might save. To adapt Barthes slightly, narrative has the potential to emancipate. It is a humanist rivet, Marlow’s story implies, which should be kept secure. Another important (fin-de-siècle) rivet for Conrad is work. As Lionel Trilling notes: ‘at the close of the century Conrad’s Marlow speaks of work […] as the great device for getting through life with fortitude and dignity, the only protection against the despair which threatens when we permit ourselves to contemplate the nature of our existence. […] Work is the sure means of keeping oneself sound and whole, worthy of one’s own respect, true to one’s own self’.29 For Marlow on the Congo, struggling towards Kurtz, trying to keep a ‘precarious grip on existence’ (p. 70), work was a way of keeping ‘hold on the redeeming facts of life’ (p. 43). Not that he likes work: I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work, – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means. (p. 52)

29 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 111. The allusion is to Polonius’s ‘to thine own self be true’: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Cyrus Hoy (New York: Norton, 1992), 1.3.78; discussed by Trilling on p. 3.

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‘Your own reality – for yourself, not for others’: self-constructing, self-authoring; the Paterian ‘solitary prisoner’ emancipated through the construction of an authentic centre. In opposition to this is Kurtz, who ‘stepped over the edge’ (p. 113). In the jungle, like a king or a god – presiding and damning – Kurtz removed, or let fall away, the rivet of work and along with it the mask of being civilised. Conrad is aware, however, that work can be problematic and he considers this through the use of several people Marlow encounters on his journey, and also in relation to the issues of education, construction, self-construction, masks and ‘the mere show’. On the boat, the ‘savage who was fireman’, for example, was: an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. […] He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful because he had been instructed; and what he knew was this – that should the water in that transparent thing disappear, the evil spirit inside the boiler would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take terrible vengeance. (pp. 63–4)

Marlow’s sense of humour – sometimes black, sometimes silly, often relying on irony, usually rooted in a sense of the absurd – underpins this passage.30 There is the rather easy comic undercutting in the quick shift from ‘an improved specimen’ to ‘he could fire up a vertical boiler’, the detail – ‘vertical’ – making the gag but also setting up the next image: the clearly unedifying vision of the man standing in front of the boiler. He has been edified – ‘improved’, ‘instructed’ – through an inauthentic narrative. This is exposed as problematic by a key word in the passage, which echoes beyond it, to the beginning of the novel, to Europe and ‘civilised man’ (p. 19): the archaic ‘thrall’. The man is ‘a thrall to strange witchcraft’. He is not ‘in thrall’. He is a slave. The word prompts two key questions: to what extent are the Europeans, home and abroad, ‘improved’ specimens? To what extent are they ‘civilised’? The ‘evil spirit inside the boiler’ is no different to the ‘humbug’ believed by Marlow’s aunt about ‘those horrible millions’ and their ‘horrid ways’ (p. 28). The novel is, in part, about the ‘the death […] of our authority as selves’,31 but the difference between the fireman’s and the aunt’s lack of authority is that he is not implicated in the ‘philanthropic pretence of the whole concern’ (p. 46). After seeing the dying slaves, ‘black shadows of disease and starvation’, in ‘the grove of death’ (pp. 35, 38), Marlow meets an image of the civilised: The passage is one of many in the novel misread by Chinua Achebe in his essay on Conrad’s supposed racism: ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ (1977), Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987 (Oxford: Heinemann, 1988), pp. 1–13. 31 Peter J. Glassman, Language and Being: Joseph Conrad and the Literature of Personality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 198. 30

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a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for some sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clear silk necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear. […] I respected the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His appearance was certainly that of a hairdresser’s dummy; but in the great demoralisation of the land he kept up his appearance. That’s backbone. His starched collars and got-up shirt-fronts were achievements of character. (p. 36)

This angel uses surface as a rivet, ‘appearance’ to keep ‘Ordered Life’ above ‘the abysses of Chaos’, and he presumably has to work hard to do so. However: I could not help asking him how he managed to sport such linen. He had just the faintest blush, and said modestly, ‘I’ve been teaching one of the native women about the station. It was difficult. She had a distaste for the work.’ Thus this man had verily accomplished something. And he was devoted to his books, which were in apple-pie order. (pp. 36–7)

We return, here, to the connection in the novel between education and thraldom, to knowledge not necessarily emancipating. The angel, it seems, is not so angelic after all, the clothes not ‘achievements of [civilised] character’. Work can be problematic, as revealed by the ‘faintest blush’, which is a crack in the man’s display; the authentic inner betraying the contrived outer. The blush is a slip rooted in the modern conception of the self: ‘The modern outlook brings to realization a split between the Real Me – the true inner self – and the persona (from the Greek work for “mask”) that one puts on for the external world.’32 To quote the tutor in ‘Night’ (1761), by Cowper’s friend Charles Churchill: Keep up appearances; there lies the test; The world will give thee credit for the rest. Outward be fair, however foul within; Sin if thou wilt, but then in secret sin.33

The fairness of the accountant is darkened further when Marlow, leaving him in his office to work on his books, to make ‘correct entries of perfectly correct transactions’, sees ‘the still tree-tops of the grove of death’ (p. 38). The accountant might not be directly responsible for the ‘disease and starvation’, his ‘big white’ hands might not have actual blood on them, but he is clearly implicated. On the boat after the station, Marlow’s helmsman is: Guignon, On Being Authentic, p. 35. Charles Churchill, ‘Night’, ll. 311–14; The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill:

32 33

In Three Volumes: With the Life of the Author, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1799), I, 101. On Churchill and Cowper, see Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, p. 41; K.E. Smith, William Cowper: A Reappraisal (Olney: The Cowper and Newton Museum, 2001), pp. 16, 43–4.

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Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900 An athletic black belonging to some coast tribe, and educated by my poor predecessor [Fresleven (p. 23)] […]. He sported a pair of brass earrings, wore a blue cloth wrapper from the waist to the ankles, and thought all the world of himself. He was the most unstable kind of fool I have ever seen. He steered with no end of a swagger while you were by; but if he lost sight of you, he became instantly the prey of an abject funk, and would let that cripple of a steamboat get the upper hand of him in a minute. (p. 75)

The helmsman does not just have earrings, he sports them, the ‘blue cloth wrapper’ is presumably also on display, and the allusion in ‘thought all the world of himself’ to ‘All the world’s a stage’34 underscores his performance. His vanity places him centre stage as lead, but he is also a ‘fool’. His ‘swagger’ is an act, but his anxiety when on his own reveals insecurity, a fallible self. The emergence of an ‘abject funk’ seems to be, like the ‘slightest blush’, the emergence of the more authentic inner self. Work for the helmsman is not about the ‘chance to find’ himself, to author his own inner ‘reality’; it is fraught with potential anxiety. For him, the ‘show’ is what matters. When the helmsman gets killed, Marlow says: I missed him even while his body was still lying in the pilot-house. Perhaps you will think it strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara. Well, don’t you see, he had done something, he had steered; for months I had him at my back – a help – an instrument. It was a kind of partnership. He steered for me – I had to look after him, I had worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory – like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment. (pp. 84–5)

This is, of course, an audacious thing for Marlow to say to his audience (and Conrad to his). The helmsman is not Other; the us/them, European/African dichotomies do not hold. Chinua Achebe, however, asserts that Marlow finds the man’s look ‘well-nigh intolerable’,35 but the tenderness of the scene undermines this. Furthermore, ‘And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory’ is, like the silent look and Marlow’s reciprocal silence, haunting and curiously beautiful, its authenticity far removed from Marlow’s irony and masculine bravado.36 It is significant that Marlow only becomes ‘aware’ of the ‘subtle bond’ ‘when it was suddenly broken’ and that the connection between them is ‘affirmed in a supreme moment’. For ‘months’ they worked together: ‘He steered’; ‘he had steered’; ‘I had to look after him, I had worried about his deficiencies’. 34 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Alan Brissenden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 2.7.139. 35 Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa’, p. 8. 36 On ‘certain silences’ being ‘more lucid than speeches’, see Conrad, Lord Jim, p. 304.

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The repetition emphasises the repetition of the everyday; their everyday eyes were blind to the ‘bond’. The rupture, however, reveals. It is a wondrous and enduring moment of clarity. What Percy Bysshe Shelley suggests about how the ‘mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being’, Pater formulates as ‘our failure is to form habits’, and Victor Shklovsky posits: ‘Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. […] And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it is exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.’37 Conrad, however, puts it another way: My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see! That – and no more: and it is everything! If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm – all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.38

The rupture gives a ‘glimpse of truth’, not just for Marlow but, hopefully, for anyone ‘living right in the rush’, be it of ‘humbug’, the inauthentic, or ‘the remorseless rush of time’.39 At the end of the eighteenth century, Cowper, in ‘The Cast-Away’, authored a centred self ‘which can be held even as frameworks of faith disintegrate’.40 In the middle of the nineteenth century, with the ebbing of the ‘Sea of Faith’, Matthew Arnold wrote ‘Dover Beach’ (1867), which concludes: Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.41

37 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘On Life’ (1819), Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 474–8 (pp. 474–5); Pater, The Renaissance, p. 236; Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 16–30 (p. 20). On ‘Varieties of the Modern Moment’, see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, pp. 418–27. 38 Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’’ (1897), The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 147. 39 Ibid., p. 147. 40 Newey, ‘Cowper Prospects’, p. 54. 41 Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, ll. 29–37; The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, Green, 1965), pp. 242–3.

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In 1904, in Ford Madox Ford’s ‘Grey Matter’, a woman asks her lover: Where shall I, The woman, where shall you take part, My poet? Where has either of us scope In this dead-dawning century that lacks all faith, All hope, all aim, and all the mystery That comforteth[?]

The man replies: ‘you and I remain, / The woman and the poet. And soft rain / Still falls and still the crocus flames, / The blackbird calls’.42 If a characteristic of the ‘modern’ is an eroded ‘sense of a whole, the feeling of a grand design’ and the concomitant result that ‘we are thrown more and more in upon ourselves for comprehension of that which is not understandable and for analysis of things of the spirit’,43 then so too is the drive to construct personal rivets, however vulnerable they may be in the emerging darkness; ‘fragments […] shored against [our] ruins’.44 Conrad suggests that the artist: Speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation; and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts: to that solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living, and the living to the unborn.45

A novel, a play, a poem can remind us of the ‘solidarity’ that ‘binds’ us; of the vital bonds of humanity that can make life worth living. Do we, then, ‘live, as we dream – alone’ (p. 50)? Not necessarily. We can each choose to author a different story: ‘create, and in creating live’.46 It is this idea that perhaps finds its most resonant and most authentic voice in Cowper’s ‘The Cast-Away’ and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Ford Madox Hueffer, ‘Grey Matter’; The Face of the Night: A Second Series of Poems for Pictures (London: John MacQueen, 1904), p. 31. 43 Ford Madox Hueffer, Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911), p. 62. 44 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, l. 431; Collected Poems 1909–1962, p. 69. 45 Conrad, ‘Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’’, pp. 145–6. 46 Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, l. 46; The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 105. 42

Afterword: The Authentic Vincent Newey ‘The echoes will again become the living voice.’ These words close Chapter 6 of Vincent Newey’s outstanding work, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool University Press, 1982: p. 207). His argument at this point, concerning Cowper’s otherwise settled conclusion to The Task, proposes that in spite of the poet’s putative desire for repose, his wish for life to ‘glide […] away’ ‘peaceful in its end’, we can sense ‘unhappy, desperate, isolated’ currents running through the poetry. Yet the chapter’s final sentence does more than simply restate the case. Accompanying the idea that Cowper’s authenticity as a poet emerges not from the certain and fixed but from the unsettled and unresolved, comes too an undeniable affirmation of life. Here, with ‘echoes’ promising to become ‘the living voice’ yet once more – the thing itself rather than its dying memory – the creative mind is assured of its rebirth, returning to existence through poetry: a marvellous process, for poet and reader alike, of mythopoeic resurrection and psychopoeic self-assertion. It will be clear why – aside from its own peculiar beauty – this particular sentence serves as the epigraph for this volume. ‘The echoes will again become the living voice’ strikes at the heart of what, on some level, ‘authenticity’ invokes as a philosophical concept and as a literary conceit: distinguishing ‘the living voice’ from its ‘echoes’ encapsulates how authenticity might, perhaps, be defined. Moreover, for a collection of essays in which the influence of Vincent Newey – as a critic, a teacher, a colleague and a friend – is so obvious, it seems appropriate to draw on his own words to describe a key critical and conversational process at work throughout this book, each contribution to which bears witness, in one way or another, to the important place of his work and writings – his ‘voice’ and its presence – in our own reading and thinking about English literature. While the authentic Vincent Newey, a literary critic renowned for sensitive readings of poetry and fiction through a liberal range of intellectual, historical and critical ideas, can be met in almost any of his books, essays and articles listed in the bibliography that follows this note, nevertheless we wanted to say something more personal here about Vince’s life and career. Born and raised in the West Midlands town of Dudley, at the heart of what is still known as the Black Country, Vince attended Dudley Grammar School before going up to New College, Oxford, to study English in 1962. Graduating with a First Class Honours degree in English Language and Literature in 1965, he accepted a Junior Lectureship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and won a postgraduate scholarship at New College, before taking the post of Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool in 1967. Vince remained at Liverpool for 22 years, being promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1982, and serving as Head of Department from 1985 to 1989.

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It was at Liverpool that he completed his BLitt (Oxon), ‘A Critical Examination of the Poetry of William Cowper’ (1971), and later his PhD, ‘Studies in the Literature of Selfhood and Subjective Experience’ (1985), based on work he had by then published. An effective administrator as well as a highly respected scholar, in 1989 Vince was appointed Professor of English at the University of Leicester, leading the Department as Head from 1991 to 2000, before taking early retirement in 2006. Vince is now Professor Emeritus in English at the University of Leicester. He lives in Cosby, Leicestershire, with Sue, his wife, with whom he has two grown-up sons, Nathan and Matthew. Along with many of the contributors to this volume, we first came to know and to work with Vince at Liverpool and at Leicester, initially as his students and later as his colleagues and friends. It was in a spirit of cooperation and collaboration, particularly between fellow academics from these universities, that this volume was conceived (basing this collection on the theme of ‘authenticity’ originated, for instance, in a conversation we had some years ago with Bernard Beatty). Yet it is also testimony to Vince’s influence as an inspirational lecturer as much as a brilliant critic that we have brought together this book of essays. As Vince has often averred (in our experience, at eventful, because always lively, lunches on the ‘Fifth Floor’ at the University of Leicester), the power of literary criticism lies in its capacity to redefine the way we think about a literary subject, be it a poem or a play, a novel or a writer. And, whether in an undergraduate essay or a scholarly monograph, the way forward in such matters is the calculated intellectual risk: that considered leap of faith into an idea or a way of reading that may well be radical and challenging, but which may also prove reinvigorating as well as sustaining. In this way, we further the subject. It is with these criteria in mind that Vince’s own body of criticism might be framed. Each of his writings – from the briefest of notes to lengthy articles, from edited collections to scholarly monographs – presents us with a new way of understanding English literature. As Vince himself puts it in the preface to Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy (Scolar, 1995), ‘reading’ can serve powerfully as ‘the grounds and dynamics of existence’ (p. xiv). For this reason, it is the ‘adventure’ of ‘literary engagement’ that Vince’s criticism, whether in the form of an early essay on ‘Wordsworth, Bunyan and the Puritan Mind’ or in his subsequent studies of writers ranging from Goldsmith to George Eliot, Keats to Mark Rutherford, pushes us ‘to undertake, uphold and encourage’ (p. xiv). Though the scope of his literary interests alone marks Vince’s enviable ability to take almost any writer comfortably within his critical compass, from seventeenth-century spiritual autobiographers to twentiethcentury novelists and filmmakers, what is also deeply enviable about Vince’s ‘mobility […] in the subtle and complex field of literature’ (p. xv) is his style: his authentic critical ‘voice’. One cannot fail to notice the delicacy with which Vince puts forward robust readings, each sentence, each phrase, being set down with a craftsman’s care and with the precision of an expert not only in literary perception but also in the rich and subtle workings of the English language.

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The effect of such writing – of, for example, considering ‘Vanity Fair’ in The Pilgrim’s Progress ‘a phantasmagoric festival of malice’, or of sensing the horrific combination of ‘pulsing physicality and hard, cold deathliness’ in Sikes’s awful vision of Nancy’s ghost in Oliver Twist – is not just to reveal how literature and its writers can provoke intense, often transformative reactions in readers. Vince’s way of writing also makes clear why we read literature in the first place, not by telling us simply how it ‘works’, but by conveying through experience the effects (as well as the affect) that poetry and fiction can produce, translating the words upon the page into something that suddenly comes to life: literature’s living voice. Vince’s style of criticism is more than instructive and intellectually expansive, though it is always both of these: it is, in the best sense, creative, enlivening and revivifying. With Vince, literature becomes both a living thing and a thing for living. In having that rare ability to communicate the value of literature in the kind of writing that in itself becomes an adventure to read, Vincent Newey, as a critic as well as a teacher and no less as a colleague and a friend, remains – to borrow his own description of Wordsworth – ‘audaciously original’. Taking Vince’s lead in so many ways – and especially from his sustained interest in the authentic self in literature, through an Existentialism that focuses on ‘the predicament of the individual, … living – gloriously or sadly – by fictions’ (Centring the Self, p. xiv), yet framed all the while by the forces of religion and politics, society and ideology – the essays in this volume, along with the bibliography of Vince’s writings, intend to do more than honour a life’s work. The aim, is – in a grander and perhaps even Wordsworthian sense – to uphold the past in the present for the future. Through our attentiveness to the echoes, may we return again and always to the living voice. Ashley Chantler Michael Davies Philip Shaw

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A Vincent Newey Bibliography Books Cross, James and Vincent Newey. British and American Poetry (Malmö: Hermods, 1970). The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and Historical Views, ed. Vincent Newey (Liverpool and Totowa, NJ: Liverpool University Press and Barnes and Noble, 1980). Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool and Totowa, NJ: Liverpool University Press and Barnes and Noble, 1982). Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool and Totowa, NJ: Liverpool University Press and Barnes and Noble, 1988). Literature and Nationalism, ed. Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (Liverpool and Maryland: Liverpool University Press and Savage, 1991). Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy (Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1995). Mortal Pages, Literary Lives: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Autobiography, ed. Vincent Newey and Philip Shaw (Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1996). The Scriptures of Charles Dickens: Novels of Ideology, Novels of the Self (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). Chapters and Sections in Books ‘The Eighteenth Century’ and ‘Poetry of the Twentieth Century’, in A Selective History of English Literature, ed. James Cross (Malmö: Hermods, 1974), pp. 79–104, 156–69. ‘The Steadfast Self: An Aspect of Wordsworth’, in Literature of the Romantic Period, ed. R.T. Davies and B.G. Beatty (Liverpool and Totowa, NJ: Liverpool University Press and Barnes and Noble, 1976), pp. 36–55. ‘Bunyan and the Confines of the Mind’, in The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and Historical Views, ed. Vincent Newey (Liverpool and Totowa, NJ: Liverpool University Press and Barnes and Noble, 1980), pp. 21–48. ‘The Shelleyan Psycho-Drama: “Julian and Maddalo”’, in Essays on Shelley, ed. Miriam Allott (Liverpool and Totowa, NJ: Liverpool University Press and Barnes and Noble, 1982), pp. 71–104. ‘Keats, Cowper, and Adam’s Dream’, in KM80, ed. Philip Edwards and Ann Thompson (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Department of English, 1987), pp. 106–7. Festschrift for Professor Kenneth Muir.

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‘Authoring the Self: Childe Harold III and IV’, in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool and Totowa, NJ: Liverpool University Press and Barnes and Noble, 1988), pp. 148–90. ‘“With the eyes of my understanding”: Bunyan, Experience and Acts of Interpretation’, in John Bunyan, Conventicle and Parnassus: Tercentenary Essays, ed. N.H. Keeble (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 189–216. ‘“Alternate uproar and sad peace”: Keats, Politics and the Idea of Revolution’, in The French Revolution in Literature and Art: The Yearbook of English Studies 19, ed. J.R. Watson (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1989), pp. 265–89. ‘Cowper, Wordsworth and Nature’ and ‘Cowper, Nature and God’, in PreRomanticism in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century: The Poetic Art and Significance of Thomson, Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, Cowper and Crabbe: A Casebook, ed. J.R. Watson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 159–62, 222–6; reprinted from Cowper’s Poetry, pp. 162–4, 157–61. ‘William Cowper’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 109: EighteenthCentury British Poets, Second Series, ed. John Sitter (Detroit: Gale Research, 1991), pp. 111–36. ‘William Cowper and the Condition of England’, in Literature and Nationalism, ed. Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (Liverpool and Maryland: Liverpool University Press and Savage, 1991), pp. 120–39. ‘Romantic Subjects: Shaping the Self from 1789 to 1989’, in Reviewing Romanticism, ed. Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 134–53. ‘Shelley’s “Dream of Youth”: Alastor, “Selving” and the Psychic Realm’, in Essays and Studies 45: Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Kelvin Everest (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer for The English Association, 1992), pp. 1–23. ‘The Selving of Thomas Gray’, in Thomas Gray: Contemporary Essays, ed. William Ruddick and W.B. Hutchings (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993), pp. 13–38. ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 165–93. Reprinted in paperback 2007. ‘Mark Rutherford’s Salvation and the Case of Catharine Furze’, in Mortal Pages, Literary Lives: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Autobiography, ed. Vincent Newey and Philip Shaw (Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 172–203. ‘Authoring the Self’, in Byron, ed. Jane Stabler (London and New York: Longman, 1998), pp. 152–65; first published in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey. ‘Goldsmith’s “Pensive Plain”: Re-viewing The Deserted Village’, in Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Woodman (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 93–116.

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‘Dickensian Decadents’, in Romancing Decay: Ideas of Decadence in European Culture, ed. Michael St John (Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 64–82. ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism 73, ed. Janet Witalec (Detroit: Gale Research, 1999), pp. 331–45; first publ. in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe. ‘Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s Epic Ambitions’, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 69–85. ‘Cowper Prospects: Self, Nature, Society’, in Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens, ed. Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 41–56. ‘Bunyan’s Afterlives: Case Studies’, in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: Reception, Appropriation, Recollection, ed. W.R. Owens and Stuart Sim (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 25–48. ‘Rival Cultures: Charles Dickens and the Byronic Legacy’, in Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era, ed. Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 67–83; first publ. in The Byron Journal, 32 (2004), 85–100. Articles ‘Robert Burns’, ‘Samuel Butler’, ‘William Cowper’, ‘English Literature 1660– 1800’ and other entries, Diccionario Enciclopedico Salvat (Barcelona: Salvat, 1969–1974). ‘Cowper and the Description of Nature’, Essays in Criticism, 23 (1973), 102–8. ‘Wordsworth, Bunyan and the Puritan Mind’, English Literary History, 41 (1974), 212–32. ‘Pope, Raymond Williams, and the Man of Ross’, Essays in Criticism, 27 (1977), 368–71. ‘Byron’s “Prisoner of Chillon”: The Poetry of Being and the Poetry of Belief’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 35 (1984), 54–70. ‘Dorothea’s Awakening: The Recall of Bunyan in Middlemarch’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 31:4 (1984), 497–99. ‘Jude the Obscure: Hardy and the Forms of Making’, Proceedings of The English Association North, 1 (1985), 29–52. ‘Indeterminacy of Meaning in Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner”’, Proceedings of The English Association North, 2 (1986), 78–86. ‘The Disinherited Pilgrim: Jude the Obscure and The Pilgrim’s Progress’, Durham University Journal, 80 (Dec. 1987), 59–61.

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‘Abolition of the Slave Trade’, ‘Cowper, William’ (with ‘The Task’ and ‘The Castaway’), ‘Greece and the Philhellenes’, ‘Warton, Joseph’, ‘Warton, Thomas’ and ‘Young, Edward’, A Handbook to English Romanticism, ed. Jean Raimond and J.R. Watson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 1–4, 130–33, 279–80, 280–81, 306–8. ‘Indeterminacy of Meaning in Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner”’, Aligarh Critical Miscellany, 5 (1992), 167–80; reprint from Proceedings of The English Association North, 2 (1986), 78–86. Kidwai, A.R., and Vincent Newey, ‘The Outline of Coleridge’s and Southey’s “Mohammed”’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 40:1 (1993), 38–9. Kidwai, A.R., and Vincent Newey, ‘“A Vulgar Error”: Byron on Women and Paradise’, Byron Journal, 21 (1993), 87–8. ‘Shelley and the Poets: Alastor, “Julian and Maddalo”, Adonais’, Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill, Durham University Journal (special issue), 85 (1993), 257–71. ‘Shelley and the Poets: Alastor, “Julian and Maddalo”, Adonais’, Aligarh Critical Miscellany, 8 (1995), 162–94; first publ. in Durham University Journal, 85 (1993), 257–71. Kidwai, A.R., and Vincent Newey, ‘Leigh Hunt’s “Abraham and the FireWorshipper”: A Possible Source’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 43:1 (1996), 44–5. Kidwai, A.R., and Vincent Newey, ‘The Burning Heart in Poe’s “Al Aaraaf”: Another Possible Source’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 44:3 (1997), 365–6. ‘A Roger Sharrock Item’, The Recorder: Newsletter of the International John Bunyan Society, 6 (Spring 2000), 1–2. ‘William Cowper and the Condition of England’, Aligarh Critical Miscellany, 14 (2001), 176–96; first publ. in Literature and Nationalism, ed. Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson. ‘Cowper’s Woodman Illustrated’, Cowper and Newton Bulletin, 1:1 (Spring 2002), 7. ‘A Bust of Cowper’, Cowper and Newton Bulletin, 1:2 (Summer 2002), 16. ‘Cowper’s Garden Progeny’, Cowper and Newton Bulletin, 1:3 (Autumn 2002), 12–21. ‘Cartogenic Cowper’, Cowper and Newton Bulletin, 2:1 (Spring 2003), 13–16. ‘The Olney Hymns’, Bulletin of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 17:3 (July 2003), 67–79. ‘The Olney Hymns’, Cowper and Newton Bulletin, 2:3 (Autumn 2003), 9–26 (reprint of essay in Bulletin of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 17:3 (July 2003), 67–79). ‘Rival Cultures: Charles Dickens and the Byronic Legacy’, Byron Journal, 32 (2004), 85–100. ‘Robinson, Henry Crabb (1775–1867)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23842.

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Newey, Vincent, and Sue Newey, ‘A Tune Called “Cowper”’, Cowper and Newton Bulletin, 4:2 (Summer 2005), 22. ‘Existing at the Margins: A Double Echo of Cowper in Clare’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 54:2 (June 2007), 148–9. ‘Mark Rutherford and John Bunyan: A Study in Relationship’, Mark Rutherford Society Newsletter (Sep. 2007), 8–18. ‘Among the Insurgents: William Hale White and George Eliot’, Mark Rutherford Society Newsletter (July 2009), 5–9. ‘Recalling Adam’s Dream: A Note on Keats and Cowper’, Cowper and Newton Bulletin, 8:3 (Spring 2010), 19–23. ‘“The Loop-Holes of Retreat”: Exploring Cowper’s Letters’, Cowper and Newton Journal, 1 (2011), 16–45. Inaugural Lecture Caged Birds and Captive Poets: A Study in Literary Meaning (Leicester: Leicester University, 1993). Text of Inaugural Lecture, delivered 20 February 1990. Review Articles ‘The Nineteenth Century: Romantic Verse and Drama’, in The Year’s Work in English Studies, vols. 60–65 (1979–1984). ‘The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana ScottKilvert’, Proceedings of The English Association North, 3 (1987), 65–8. ‘“Upright Ends”: The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 by Michael McKeon’, London Review of Books, 9:17 (1 Oct. 1987), 20–21. ‘Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 by Nigel Smith’, Renaissance Studies, 5 (1991), 464–9. ‘“Souls Troubled by Uncertain Election”: The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair by John Stachniewski’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 13 December 1991, 22. ‘Byron Manuscripts in Photofacsimile’, Byron Journal, 20 (1992), 96–8. ‘“On the Road to Recovery”: The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill by Miriam Bailin’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 10 June 1994, 28. ‘The Poems of John Dryden: Volume I, 1649–1681; Volume II, 1682–1685’, ed. Paul Hammond, Byron Journal, 24 (1996), 91–3.

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Bibliography Abdel-Hamid, M.S. ‘Literature of Eastern Travel and the Romantic Movement’, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, University of Cairo, 19 (1957), 25–32. Abrams, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973). Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987 (Oxford: Heinemann, 1988). Adorno, Theodor. The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973; London: Routledge, 2003). Agamben, Giorgio. The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Ali, Muhsin J. Scheherazade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-Century English Criticism of the Arabian Nights (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1981). Allen, Graham. ‘Transumption and/in History: Bloom, Shelley and the Figure of the Poet’, in Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill, Durham University Journal (special issue), 85 (1993), 247–56. Andrewes, Lancelot. Selected Sermons and Lectures, ed. Peter McCullough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). [Anonymous]. An Authentic Relation of the Many Hardships and Sufferings of a Dutch Sailor, Who Was Put on Shore on the Uninhabited Isle of Ascension […]. Taken from the Original Journal Found […] in January 1725–26, 8th edn (London, 1728). ———. An Authentic and Interesting Narrative of the Late Expedition to Botany Bay, as Performed by Commodore Philips (London, 1789). ———. Souvenir of Shakespeare’s Tragedy King Lear Presented at the Lyceum Theatre, 10 November, 1892 (London: Offices of Black and White, 1892). ———. King Lear at the Lyceum Produced November 10, 1892: Some Extracts from the Press (London: Chiswick Press, 1893). Aria, Mrs, My Sentimental Self (London: Chapman and Hall, 1922). Aristotle. ‘On the Art of Poetry’, in Classic Literary Criticism, trans. T.S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 29–76. Arnold, Matthew. The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, Green, 1965). ———. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Ashfield, Andrew, ed. Romantic Women Poets 1770–1838 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Baines, Paul. The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).

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Index Adams, Oscar Fay, 121, 122, 129 Agamben, Giorgio, 3, 4 Allen, Donald, 163 American Renaissance, 155 Andrewes, Lancelot, 174–6 anthropology, 141–3, 143n6 cultural progress, idea of, 142–3 Cranford as, 141–3 field of, and European involvement with non-Europeans, 141–2 and human being as specimen, 143, 143n6 Arabian Nights, 92, 98, 102–3 Aristotle, 3, 72 Arnold, Matthew, 2, 167–8, 189 ‘Below the surface stream’, 2 Culture and Anarchy, 167–8 ‘Dover Beach’, 189 Athenaeum, 136 authenticity; see also individual author entries art and literature, 3–7, 189 and the Bible, 13n19 and conscience, 79 and contradiction, 67n2, 68 and grace, 20–21 and identity, 1–2, 13, 108, 114, 143 and letter-writing, 133–7 and the real, 170 and the self, 4–7, 11–12, 68–80, 81, 134–6, 139, 163, 181, 183, 185–9, 193 and voice, 191–3 autobiography, spiritual see conversion, and narratives of Bailey, Benjamin, 45 Barthes, Roland, 181, 185 Bate, Walter Jackson, 40, 47 Beat writers, 155, 162, 163

Beckett, Samuel, 123, 172 Waiting for Godot, 123 Bellow, Saul, 175–6 Mr Sammler’s Planet, 176 Bendiner, Kenneth, 125 Bible, 13n19, 16, 22, 115, 162–3, 170–75; see also Christianity; sermons biography and biographers Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 58 Dictionary of National Biography, 44, 133 of Gaskell, 131–4, 133n10 of Keats, 39–42 and letters, as authentic/primary source materials, 133–7 of Madame de Sévigné (unfinished), 137 Black Mountain College; see also Creeley, Robert; Thoreau, Henry David and the Black Mountain artists’ colony, 155, 158, 163–4 Blackwood’s Magazine, 185 Blake, William, 82 The Book of Urizen, 182 Blank, G. Kim, 51 Bloom, Harold, 51, 60, 64 Blount, Martha, 67 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, 131–2, 136 Bonnycastle, John, 47 Borowitz, Helen O., 123, 124 Bossis, Mireille, 135 Bostetter, Edward, 70 Bowles, William, 75, 75n31, 79n54, 81, 86–90, 87n12 Bradley, A.C., 127 Briggs, H.E., 41 Britain and British expansionism into India, 92–3 Evangelical incursion into British India, 97–8

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Brontë, Charlotte, 132 Gaskell, Elizabeth, on, 132 Brook, Peter, 123 Brooks, Peter, 181 Brougham, Lord, 78–9 Brown, Charles, 43–4 Brown, Ford Madox, 123–6, 130 ‘On the Mechanism of a Historical Picture’, 124 The Germ, 124 and Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 124–6 Bruce, James, 101–2 Bunyan, John, 3, 6, 14–18, 23, 72, 192, 193 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 3, 14, 16 The Pilgrim’s Progress, 153, 168–9, 176–7, 193 Byron, George Gordon (Lord) authenticity and the Byronic hero, 72–4, 74n27 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 64, 70–72, 71n11, 74 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 70, 70n8, 71, 87–8 literary Orientalism, 103 ‘Oriental Tales’, 72 and projection, 70–72, 73–4 writing, in act of, 70–74, 77–80 Campbell, ‘Essay on English Poetry’, riposte, 87 Don Juan contradiction in, 72, 74, 78, 81–6, 88, 90 English society in, 84–5 and Pope-Bowles controversy, 86–90 self, dramatised in, 72 truth and authenticity, 83 truth and falsity, 82–90 Goethe, Johanne, Wolfgang von, on, 77 literary Orientalism, 99–103 Manfred, 74–5, 74n26–7 Marino Faliero, 74 Newey, Vincent, on, 63–4, 71–2, 81n2 Newman, John Henry, on, 75n28 Parisina, 73–4 on Pope-Bowles controversy, 75, 75n31, 79n54, 81, 86–90, 87n12 religious affiliations, 77

Ruskin, John, on, 108, 116–17 Sardanapalus, 74 and Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 56, 63–4 The Siege of Corinth, 99, 100 ‘Turkish Tales’ The Bride of Abydos, 99 The Corsair, 73, 99 The Giaour, 99, 102 The Two Foscari, 74 Calvinism, 14, 22, 77, 108 Campbell, Thomas, 87 Candler, Ann, 91, 102–3 ‘Reflections on My Own Situation’, 102–3 Catholicism, 26, 76–80, 104 Cavell, Stanley, 158, 161, 163 Chadwick, Mrs Ellis H., 133–4 Chatterton, Thomas, 25-6 Chernaik, Judith, 56, 59 Chesterton, G.K., 116 Chorley, J.R., 138–9 Chothia, Jean, 119 Christianity; see also Bible; Calvinism; Catholicism; Protestantism; Puritanism; sermons influence of in Irving’s King Lear, 122–3, 125, 128–9, 130; Churchill, Charles, 187 ‘Night’, 187 Clarke, Charles Cowden, 42, 47–9 Clarke, John, 48 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 28, 58, 61, 84, 86, 93, 111 Biographia Literaria, 58, 61 Colvin, Sidney, 39 Comte, Auguste, 142–3, 142n5 Conant, Martha P., 98 conduct books, 131–2 Conrad, Joseph; see also authenticity Heart of Darkness authenticity in, 7, 180–81, 187–9 deathbed scene, inversion, 181–2, 182n14 and Diderot, Neveu de Rameau, 7 frameworks, of faith/culture, disintegration, 179–80 hollowness, imagery, 182–3 Trilling, Lionel, on, 7

Index conversion, and narratives of; see also authenticity; Cowper, William; Newton, John; Ruskin, John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 3, 14, 16 Cowper, Adelphi, 16–17, 22–3, 23n50 Newton, An Authentic Narrative, 13–15, 16, 18, 22 pattern of, 14–15, 17–18, 17n30, 19–20, 23–4 Paul, anti-type of, 22 Ruskin, Praeterita, 113–14 Scott, The Force of Truth: An Authentic Narrative, 13n20 Spiritual Experiences of Sundry Beleevers, 14 and the twice-born, 169 Cousin, Victor, 135 Cowper, William; see also conversion, and narratives of; Newton, John authenticity beyond faith, 189 grace, 20–21 in letter to Newton, 9, 10–12 silence, 180 in The Task, 17–24 translating Homer, 10 ‘The Cast-Away’ authentic self beyond faith, 189–90 Christian mariner, imagery in, 10 ‘gulphs’, in, 179–80, 182 and inversion of redemption, 23–4, 179 Christian mariner, imagery, 9–16, 15n24, 23–4, 23n54 conversion narrative Adelphi, 16–17, 22–3, 23n50 grace, authenticity of, 20–21 pattern of, 17–18, 17n30, 19–20, 23–4 The Task; ‘The Winter Morning Walk’, 17–24 despair, 10–11, 16–17, 21–3, 22n48, 23–4, 24n56 and faith, in flux, 16–19, 21–3 ‘Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion’, 184 and Homer, translation of, 10–11, 16–17 Hope, 20

223

‘Moral Satires’, 13 Newey, Vincent, on, 18, 22, 179, 191–2 and Newton, John, letter to, 9–15, 16, 23 Olney Hymns, 10 Poems, 10 The Task; ‘The Winter Morning Walk’, 10, 13, 17–24, 20n39, 191 Creeley, Robert, 155–8, 162–5; see also Thoreau, Henry David and Beat writers, 155, 163 and the Black Mountain artists’ colony, 155, 163 breaking of the self, and opening, 156–8 broken line/word/symbol as shared experimental method, 163, 164 and Thoreau, 155–6 ‘I Know a Man’, 162–3 Later; ‘Beach’, 164–5 and logocentrism, 162–3 and solitude, 155–6 solitude, as sociopolitical stance, 155–6 Critical Review, 34 Cummings, Brian, 6, 21 Darmesteter, M. James, 127 Darwin, Charles, 118, 142, 143, 161 Darwin, Erasmus, 37 Daventry Dissenting Academy, 48 De Selincourt, Ernest, 39, 40 De Witt sketch of Swan Theatre, 119 Dickens, Charles, 2, 76, 141, 147 David Copperfield, 2 Household Words, edited by, 135, 136, 139, 141 Oliver Twist, 193 Dickinson, Emily, 155 Dictionary of National Biography, 44, 133 Diderot, Denis, 4, 7 Neveu de Rameau, 4, 7 Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 50 Donne, John, 94 ‘The Sun Rising’, 94 Dorn, Ed, 163 Gunslinger, 163 Dowden, Edward, 120, 127, 130 ‘Life of Shakespeare and General Introduction’, 120, 127 review of 12 November 1892, 130

224

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Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, 127 Dumas, Alexandre, 138, 139 Celebrated Crimes, 138 Duncan, Robert, 163 Eckhart, Meister, 175–6 Edinburgh Review, 34 Eliot, George, 132, 136 Eliot, T.S., 183n20, 184 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 155, 159, 160, 161 ‘Biographical Sketch’, 160 energeia, 3–7 Everest, Kelvin, 44 Ferguson, Adam, 177–8 Filon, Augustin, 128 Forbes, James, 98 Ford, Ford Madox, 125, 183, 189–90; see also Hueffer, Ford Madox ‘Grey Matter’, 189–90 Forster, John, 131 Fox, Tottie, 136 Fraser’s Magazine, 136, 137, 139 Furness, H.H.,120 Furnivall, F.J., 119, 120, 132 Galsworthy, John, 182 Fraternity, 182 Ganges, Marquise de, 138–9 Gaskell, Elizabeth biography and biographies biographers, 131–4, 133n10 and letters as authentic/primary source materials, 133–7 ‘Clopton Hall’, 139 ‘Company Manners’, 135 Cranford and animality, as complement, in, 149–50, 151 as anthropology, 141–4 cultural framework, in, 143–4, 146, 148–9, 151–3 ‘The Great Cranford Panic’, 151–2 Latin, in, 146–8 ‘A Love Affair at Cranford’, 141 ‘Memory at Cranford’, 141 men, excision from society, 148–9

provincial-metropolitan, relationship, in, 144–5, 144n9 selfhood, based on externals, 142–4, 145–6, 147–8, 151–3 ‘Visiting at Cranford’, 141 ‘Cumberland Sheep-Shearers’, 135 English Men of Letters, in, 133, 133n10 ‘French Life’, 137–9, 138–9 Further Letters, 134 ‘The Grey Woman’, 139 Household Words, contributor to, 135, 136, 139, 141 Knutsford edition of her work, 133, 134 and letter-writing authentic versus persona, 134, 135, 136–7, 139 and fiction of, comparison, 134–5, 137–8, 139 and letters as authentic/primary source materials, 133–7 as private, 131–2 ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’, 134 Life of Charlotte Brontë, 132 Madame de Sévigné, unfinished biography of, 137 ‘Martha Preston’, 135 Martineau, Harriet, 142 Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes and Stories, by Mrs Ellis Chadwick, 133–4 My Lady Ludlow, 139 North and South, 131 ‘Notes of a Wanderer’, 137 periodicals, published in, 135, 136, 139, 141 The Rural Life of England, by William Howitt, letters in, 136 Sylvia’s Lovers, 138 Visits to Remarkable Places, by William Howitt, letter in, 136 Wives and Daughters, 139 Gérin, Winifred, 134 The Germ, 124; see also Brown, Ford Madox Girtin, Thomas, 111 Gisborne, Maria, 49 Gittings, Robert, 44, 47 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1, 62, 63, 77

Index Grant, Charles, 98 Greville, Fulke, 172–4 Mustapha (‘Chorus Sacerdotum’), 172–4 Grice, Charles Valentine Le, 34 Guignon, Charles, 6, 182 Hardy, Thomas, 184 Harker, Joseph, 125–6 Hazlitt, William, 73, 176 Hebraism, 167–8, 169–70, 171, 172 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 79, 79n53 Hellenism, 167–8, 174 Helsinger, Elizabeth, 113–14 Hemans, Felicia Dorothea, 98–102; see also literary Orientalism ‘The Indian City’, 98–101 ‘The Traveller at the Source of the Nile’, 101–2 Henderson, Heather, 113 Herbert, George, 109, 169–70, 171 ‘Affliction’, 169 ‘The Flower’, 171 ‘Submission’, 109 Herd, David, 160–61 Hindmarsh, D. Bruce, 13 Hobson, Harold, 172 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 183–4 Hyperion, 183–4 Holinshed’s Chronicles, 122 Homer, translation of, 10–11, 16–17; see also Cowper, William Household Words, 135, 136, 139; see also Dickens, Charles; Gaskell, Elizabeth Howitt, William, 136 Howitt’s Journal, 135 Hueffer, Ford Madox, 125; see also Ford, Ford Madox Hughes, Alan, 122 Hunt, Leigh, 41, 42 identity authentic, 1–2, 11, 77, 143 literary, as constructed, and energeia, 6 politics, 143, 163 unresolved, as stimulus, 108

225

Imperial Review, 27 India and British expansionism into India, 92–3 Evangelical incursion into British India, 97–8 Irving, Laurence, 120 Irving, Sir Henry; see also Brown, Ford Madox; Shakespeare, William The Henry Irving Shakespeare, 121, 123, 127, 129 King Lear (text of) cuts and transpositions, 120–21 introduction, by Adams and Verity, 121, 122, 129 period, in which set, 122, 124–5 ‘Shakespeare as a Playwright’, 120 textual authenticity and authorial intention, 119–21 King Lear (acting edition/Lyceum theatre run) Christianity, Irving’s, influence of in, 122–3, 125, 128–9, 130 cuts and transpositions, 121–2, 127, 128, 130 Ford Madox Brown, designer, 122–6, 130 Joseph Harker, scene modeler, 125–6 Lyceum, 119, 121–2 Russell, Edward, on, 129–30 Souvenir of King Lear, 121–2 and textual authenticity and authorial intention, 126–30 as a performer, 122–3, 128–30 James, Henry, 2, 118 Washington Square, 2 James, William, 169–72, 177 The Varieties of Religious Experience, 169 The Principles of Psychology, 171–2 Jeffrey, Francis, 34–5 Jones, Anna Maria, 96–8; see also literary Orientalism Jones, William, 96, 97 Jonson, Ben, 170 ‘To Heaven’, 170

226

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900

Kean, Charles, 119 Keats, John; see also biography and biographers Arabian Nights, influence on, 102–3 archive, 40 authenticity, 80 Bailey, Benjamin, letter to, 45 Bate, Walter Jackson, on, 40, 47 biographies, 39–42 De Selincourt, Ernest, on, 39, 40 Endymion, 45, 47, 102 The Eve of St Agnes, 46 Hyperion, 46, 102 life of ambiguities of, 41–4, 47–50 apprenticeship, 47, 49–50 and family, 42–6 Milnes, Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats, 42, 50 ‘Negative Capability’, 46, 168 Newey, ‘Keats, History and the Poets’, 40 Romanticism and truth in poetry, 82 ‘To Autumn’, 40–41 Virgil, Aeneid, translation of, 48, 50 Woodhouse, Richard, on, 41 Kennard, Nina, 136 Kierkegaard, Søren, 169 Kingsley, Charles, 75 Knight, G. Wilson, 68 Kott, Jan, 123 Landor, Walter Savage, 35 Landseer, Edwin, 111 Bolton Abbey in Olden Time, 111 Leavis, F.R., 59, 60–61 letter-writing conduct books, 131–2 letters as authentic/primary source materials, 133–7 as literary genre, 135 Licensing Act of 1662, 156 literary Orientalism Arabian Nights, 92, 98, 102–3 and the authentic Orient, 91–3 and Byron, 103 Hemans, ‘The Indian City’, 98–101 Hemans, ‘The Traveller at the Source of the Nile’, 101–2

Hindus, Muslims, Western perceptions of, 100–101 Jones, ‘Adieu to India’, 96–7 Logan, ‘To Opium’, 105 Moore, Lalla Rookh, 104 Norton, ‘The Arab’s Farewell to His Horse’, 104–5 and Oriental travelogues, 105 Roberts, Indian poems, 94–6 Robinson, ‘The Lascar’, 103–4 Romantic women poets, 91–3, 105 Romanticism, 92–3 Southey, Roderick, the Last of the Goths, 101 term, 91n2 literature and authenticity, 4–7; see also authenticity Logan, Maria, 105; see also literary Orientalism Lowell, Amy, 39, 42, 47, 48 Luke, David, 63 Lyceum, King Lear at, 119, 121–2 Macmillan’s, 136, 139 Macready, William Charles, 119–20, 124 Marshall, Frank, 120 Martineau, Harriet, 142, 142n5 Marvell, Andrew, 94, 156 ‘To His Coy Mistress’, 94 Matthiessen, F.O., 155 Marx, Karl, 177 Communist Manifesto, 159 Maurice, F.D., 132 Meisel, Martin, 125 Melville, Herman, 155 Milnes, Richard Monckton, 42, 49, 50 Milton, John, 11, 156 Paradise Lost, 156 Paradise Regained, 156 Montaigne, Michel de, 68, 74, 78 Moore, Thomas, 104; see also literary Orientalism Lalla Rookh, 104 Morley, John, 133 Morning Chronicle, 26 New Shakespeare Society, 119 New Variorum, 120

Index Newey, Vincent and authenticity, 6, 18–19, 22, 52, 63–4, 81n2, 179, 191–3 on Byron, 71–2, 81n2 Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading …, 192, 193 on Cowper ‘The Cast-Away’, 179 The Task, 18–19, 22, 191 Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment, 191 ‘A Critical Examination of the Poetry of William Cowper’, 192 and energeia, 6, 7 and English Puritanism, 6 on Jude the Obscure, 181n9, 182n14 on Keats, 46 ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, 40 on Oliver Twist, 193 on The Pilgrim’s Progress, 193 The Scriptures of Charles Dickens, 153n15 on Shelley, 51, 52 Adonais, 63–4 Alastor, 53–4 ‘Studies in the Literature of Selfhood and Subjective Experience’, 192 voice, and authenticity, 191–3 on Wordsworth, 193 ‘Wordsworth, Bunyan and the Puritan Mind’, 192 Newman, John Henry; see also authenticity Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 75–7 authenticity in act of writing, 74–80 and Christianity, 76–7 seven notes to distinguish, 80 Brougham and Peel, in response, 78–9 on Byron, 75n28 An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 77, 77n40 faith, as self-checking, 171 Kingsley, Charles, on, 75 Protestantism, 76 The Tamworth Reading Room, 75, 76 ‘Unreal Words (Advent)’, 170

227

Newton, John; see also conversion, and narratives of; Cowper, William An Authentic Narrative, 13–15, 16, 18, 22 conversion narrative and abandonment of the Classics, 12–13, 13n18 on grace, 15n25 pattern of, 14–15 Cowper, William, letter to, 9–15, 16 Olney Hymns, 10 Norton, Caroline, 104–5; see also literary Orientalism O’Hara, Frank, 163–4 Pater, Walter, 183, 186, 189 Pattison, Robert, 80 Peel, Robert, 75, 78–9 Pershing, James, 41 Phelps, Samuel, 119 Pitaval, François Gayot de, 138 Poel, William, 119 Poetical Register, 27 poetry dialogic, 57, 60 epic, dramatic, lyric, styles, 72, 74 satiric, 83, 85, 88, 99 Pope, Alexander; see also authenticity authenticity and contradiction, 68 projection, 67–70, 72–4 and the soul’s standing forth, 68, 71, 72 translations, 10 writing, in act of, 68–70, 77–80 Catholicism, 77 ‘Epistle to a Lady’, 67, 68, 76 ‘Epistle to Cobham’, 67 ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, 68, 69–70, 71, 76, 78, 89 An Essay on Man, 67–8, 76, 78 ‘First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated’ (Satire II, i), 68–9, 71, 78 on Montaigne, 68 and projection, 69–74 authentic, 69–70

228

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900

Byron, 70–74 term, 72–3 on Shippen, 68 ‘Sporus’, 68–9, 76 Pope-Bowles controversy, 75, 75n31, 79n54, 81, 86–90, 87n12 Porter, Charles, 135 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 123–5 Priestley, Joseph, 48 Protestantism, 6, 15n24, 75-6, 77, 80, 104, 161–2, 170 Proust, Marcel, 78, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, 78, 145 Puritanism, 6, 14, 155, 167–8 Quinn, Mary, 52 Reformation, 6 Revolutions, American, English, French, 157, 159 Ritchie, Anne Thackeray, 134 Roberts, Emma, 93–6, 103; see also literary Orientalism ‘The Bramin’, 94 ‘The Dying Hindoo’, 94 ‘The Moosulman’s Grave’, 94 ‘Night on the Ganges’, 94–5 ‘Nour Juffeir Khan’, 94 ‘The Rajah’s Obsequies’, 94, 95–6 ‘A Scene in the Dooab’, 94 ‘Stanzas Written on the Banks of the Ganges’, 94, 95 ‘The Taaje Mahal’, 94 and women’s rights, 95–6 Robertson, W. Graham, 123 Robinson, Mary, 103–4; see also literary Orientalism Robson, Catherine, 111, 114 Rogers, Samuel, 112–13 ‘The Boy of Egremond’, 112–13 Romanticism, 26, 82, 92–3, 160 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 124 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 53, 57, 181 Runciman, John, 123 Ruskin, John; see also conversion, and narratives of and artistic awareness, 117 on Brown, Ford Madox, 125 depression and insanity, 107–8

early years, 108, 115 Fors Clavigera, 109, 118 ‘Incipient Action of Rain Molecules’, 115 Modern Painters, 109, 116 Newdigate Prize, 115 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, by Wordsworth, response to, 110 ‘Of King’s Treasuries’, 118 ‘The Nature of the Gothic’, 118 inner drive to self-realisation, 118 repetition and return, 107–8, 113–17 pivotal moments in, 109–10, 116–17 precocity, 115–16 ‘Submission’, 109 and Turner, 111–13, 113n20, 114, 117 Unto This Last, 118 Wordsworthian child-figure, 111 Russell, Edward R., 129–30 Ryland, John, 48 Sablé, Madame de, 135 Sade, Marquis de, 138 Sartre, John-Paul, 183 Sartain’s Union Magazine, 135 Scott, Clement, 128–9 Scott, Walter, 177 sermons; see also Bible; Christianity Andrewes, Gunpowder Plot sermon, 175 Andrewes, ‘Resurrection, Easter 1620’, 174 Newman, ‘Unreal Words (Advent)’, 170 Severn, Joseph, 43, 44, 45 Seward, Anna ‘Philippic on a Modern Epic’, 26 and Robert Southey, 26–37 authenticity of, 32–3 comments on in their correspondence, 30–32 commiseration and support, 33–5 defence of poet and poem, 32–3 Shakespeare, William; see also Irving, Sir Henry Bradley, A.C., Shakespearean Tragedy, 127 Dowden, Edward, on, 120, 127, 130 Holinshed’s Chronicles, source, 122 King Lear, 119–22, 123, 124–30

Index appeal to artists, 123 cuts and transpositions, 119–22, 128, 130 performances/productions, 119, 121–3, 125–6, 129 period in which set, 121, 122, 124–5 rewriting, 119 Kott, Jan, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 123 New Shakespeare Society, 119 Sharps, J.G., 138 Shaw, George Bernard, 126–7 Shears, Jonathon, 73 Shelley, Percy Bysshe; see also Wordsworth, William Bloom, Harold, on, 60, 64 and Byron Adonais, 63–4 ‘The Two Spirits – An Allegory’, 55–6 A Defence of Poetry, 65 dialogic poetry, 60 evangelical incursion into British India, 97–8 on familiarity, 189 on Faust, 63 Hellas, 97 and imagination, 57–8 Keats, elegy for, 64 ‘Mont Blanc’, 54 Newey, Vincent, on, 53–4, 63 ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’, 98 Prometheus Unbound; with Other Poems, 51 The Revolt of Islam, 97 Romanticism and truth in poetry, 82 ‘The Triumph of Life’, 60 ‘To Wordsworth’, 52 and Wordsworth, allusions to Adonais, 53, 59, 63–5 Alastor, 53–4, 55, 56 ‘An Exhortation,’ 51–2, 53–5 letter of April 1822, 62 Peter Bell the Third, 60–61 ‘To a Skylark’, 61–2 ‘The Two Spirits – An Allegory’, 55–9

229

‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine from England’, 52 and Wordsworth, comparisons between, 57–9, 61–2, 64, 65 Shippen, William, 68, 74, 78 Shklovsky, Victor, 189 Shorter, Clement K., 133 Sleepy Hollow (place), 159 Smith, George, 132, 137 sociology, evolutionary, 142 Southey, Robert; see also literary Orientalism and Anna Seward, 26–37 and Madoc, 27, 30–36 authenticity of, 32–3 comments on in their correspondence, 30–32 commiseration and support, 33–5 defence of poet and poem, 32–3 authenticity and authentication, 25, 27, 32–7 Collected Letters, 28 critics and career issues, 34–5 The Curse of Kehama, 28, 36, 96, 98 evangelical incursion into British India, 98 Joan of Arc, 26, 28–9 Landor, Walter Savage, friendship with, 35 Letters from England, 34 Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal, 25 Lyrical Ballads, review of, 25 Madoc, 25, 27–8, 29–36 on the Orient and Orientalism, 96, 98, 101 on Poems in Two Volumes, by William Wordsworth, 28 Poetical Works, 37 and political radicalism, 28–9 Roderick, the Last of the Goths, 30n24, 36, 101 Thalaba, 35, 96, 98 on William Wordsworth, 25, 28 and women writers, 25–6 Spencer, Herbert, 142

230

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900

Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 138–9 Tate, Nahum, 120 Tennyson, Alfred (Lord), 123, 128–9, 130, 184 ‘Crossing the Bar’, 130 ‘Mariana’, 184 ‘The Lady of Shallot’, 184 Thomas, William (Rev.), 48–9 Thoreau, Henry David; see also Black Mountain College; Creeley, Robert and the American Renaissance, 155 authentic life, and the pursuit of, 158–9 and Beat writers, 162 Cavell, Stanley, on, 158, 161, 163 Darwin, Origin of Species, reaction to, 161 and Emerson, Ralph Waldo, funeral address on, 160, 161 etymology and philosophy, 160–61 and the real, 159–60 and solitude, 155–6, 159 Walden, 155, 158–62, 163 The Times, 49, 75 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm, 119 Trethowan, Illtyd, 77–8 Trilling, Lionel, 4, 5, 7, 12n13, 19, 79n51, 80, 83n7, 180, 181, 185 Turner, J.M.W., 108, 110, 111–13, 114, 117 Bolton Abbey, 111 Liber Studiorum, 111 Pass of Faido, 114 Tylor, Edward, 142 Tyndall, John, 118 Uglow, Jenny, 136, 137, 139, 147n12 Verity, A. Wilson, 121, 122, 129 Ward, A.W., 133, 134 Wasserman, Earl, 53, 55, 63 Webb, Timothy, 52, 53 Weis, René, 130 Whitaker, Thomas Dunham, 112–13 Whitehill, Jane Coolidge, 133 Whitman, Walt, 155, 163 Wieners, John, 163–4

Wilenski, R.H., 115 Williams, William Carlos, 155, 160 Williams-Bulkeley, Harry, 47–8 Winkworth, Catherine, 131, 133 Woodhouse, Richard, 41 Wordsworth, Jonathan, 65 Wordsworth, William; see also Shelley, Percy Bysshe alienation, from the modern city, 157–8 The Excursion, 53, 55, 56 ‘The Force of Prayer; or, the Founding of Bolton Priory …’, 112 ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, 25 ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, 1, 54–5, 61, 64, 65 ‘Lines Written at a Small Distance from My House’, 61 Lyrical Ballads, 25, 56, 65 ‘Note to The Thorn’, 56 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, 5, 54–5, 58, 60, 62, 63, 110 Poems (1815), 63 Poems in Two Volumes, 28 ‘Poet of Nature’, 52 The Prelude, 1, 63, 77n45, 109, 156–7 ‘Resolution and Independence’, 57–8 and Shelley, allusions to Adonais, 53, 59, 63–5 Alastor, 53–4, 55, 56 ‘An Exhortation’, 51–2, 53–5 letter of April 1822, 62 Peter Bell the Third, 60–61 ‘Poet of Nature’, 52 ‘To a Skylark’, 61–2 ‘The Two Spirits – An Allegory’, 55–9 ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine from England’, 52 and Shelley, comparisons between, 57–9, 61–2, 64, 65 sonnet to Milton (‘London, 1802’), 64 The White Doe of Rylstone, 112–13 Zimmern, Helen, 136