Nature and the Victorian Imagination [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9780520340152

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Ford Madox Brown, An English Autumn Afternoon (1852), City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham.

NATURE A N D T H E VICTORIAN IMAGINATION

NATURE AND THE VICTORIAN IMAGINATION

E D I T E D BY

U. C. K N O E P F L M A C H E R AND G. B. T E N N Y S O N

University of California Press Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1977 by T h e Regents of the University of California ISBN 0-520-03229-2 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 76-7761 Printed in the United States of America Designed by Wolfgang Lederer

for E. D. H. Johnson . . . . scholar teacher friend

Contents List of Illustrations xi A Prefatory Note xv Introduction T H E EDITORS

xvii • THE MIND'S EYE • i. Images of Nature: A Photo-Essay CHARLES MILLARD

5 • THE TAMING OF SPACE • ii. Felicitous Space: T h e Cottage Controversy GEORGE H . FORD

29

iii. Imagination in the Suburb WALTER L. CREESE

49

iv. The Domestication of Nature: Five Houses in the Lake District ELLEN E. FRANK

68

- EXPLORATIONS • v. The Arctic Sublime CHAUNCEY C. LOOMIS

95

• Contents •

vi. Mid-Victorians amongst the Alps DAVID ROBERTSON

113 VII. High and Low: Ruskin and the Novelists GEORGE LEVINE

137 VIII. " A Surprising Transformation": Dickens and the Hearth ROBERT L. PATTEN

153 ix. T h e Interior Garden and John Stuart Mill ANDREW GRIFFIN

171 • SYSTEMS OF KNOWLEDGE • x. T h e Rich Economy of Nature: Chemistry in the Nineteenth Century TREVOR H. LEVERE

189 xi. Concepts of Physical Nature: John Herschel to Karl Pearson DAVID B. WILSON

201 XII. T h e Human Significance of Biology: Carpenter, Darwin, and the vera causa ROGER SMITH

216 XIII. T h e Humanist at Bay:

T h e Arnold-Huxley Debate R. H. SUPER

231

VLLL

• Contents •

xiv. A Science against Sciences: Ruskin's Floral Mythology FREDERICK KIRCHHOFF

246 xv. " T h e Perfection of Species" and Hardy's Tess BRUCE JOHNSON

259 • REDEFINITIONS • xvi. Victorian Landscape Painting: A Change in Outlook W.F.AXTON

281 xvii. "Half Sick of Shadows": The Aesthetic Dialogue in Pre-Raphaelite Painting MARTIN MEISEL

309 xviii. The Rainbow: A Problematic Image GEORGE P. LANDOW

341 xix. The Sacramental Imagination G. B. TENNYSON

370 xx. Mutations of the Wordsworthian Child of Nature U. C. KNOEPFLMACHER

391 xxi. Browning and the Altered Romantic Landscape LAWRENCE POSTON III

426

IX

• Contents •

xxii. Nature and the Linguistic Moment J. HILLIS MILLER

440 • TOWARD THE TWENTIETH CENTURY • XXIII. Lawrence's Vital Source: Nature and Character in Thomas Hardy JOHN PATERSON

455 xxiv. "That strange abstraction, 'Nature' ": T . S. Eliot's Victorian Inheritance A. WALTON LITZ

470 xxv. Afterglow and Aftermath THE EDITORS

489 Contributors 501 Index 505

X

List of Illustrations Ford Madox Brown, An English Autumn Afternoon (1852-54). Roger Fenton, Kew Ait. John Spiller and Dr. Percy, The New Mill, Near Lynton, North Devon. Francis Frith, Holy St. Mill, Chagford. Francis Bedford, untitled. Francis Bedford, Dolgelley, View in Torrent Walk. Francis Frith, Stennage Valley. Roger Fenton, The Valley of Nant-Frangen, North Wales. Francis Frith, The Prebend's Bridge, Durham. Frederick Evans, Durham Cathedral: From Banks of River Wear. W . H. Fox Talbot, Melrose Abbey. Roger Fenton, Tintem Abbey. Philip H. Delamotte and Joseph Cundall, Fountains Abbey. Philip H. Delamotte and Joseph Cundall, Rivaulx Abbey. Francis Frith, Knaresborough Castle. Francis Bedford, Llanberis, Dolbadam Castle and Pass. Ernest Edwards, Cleft in the Rock: Anchor Church, Derby. J. D. Llewelyn, PiscatorNo. 2. Major F. Gresley, untitled. Major F. Gresley, Shade. Francis Bedford, Cedar at Warwick Castle. Earl of Caithness and Bembridge of Windsor, Great Beech on Manor Hill. Frederick Evans, Crépuscule au Printemps: France. Frederick Evans, Near Shore. Henry Peach Robinson, Feeding the Calves. Labourer's Cottage. Birket Foster, The Old Chair Mender. Mrs. Helen Allingham, Cottage at Chiddingford, Surrey. Samuel Palmer, Farmyard Near Princes Risborough. J. C. Loudon, Villa. J. C. Loudon, Fountain, Napoleon Willow, and Arch Tent. John Nash, Park Village East, Regent's Park. Hayley and Brown, Hanover Square and Zoological Gardens, Broughton near Manchester. Sir Edwin Landseer, Victoria, Albert, and the Princess Royal at Windsor. G. G. Scott and W . H. Crossland, Akroydon Model Village, Halifax. John Nash, Blaise Hamlet, near Bristol. FRONTISPIECE:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 1. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 2 3. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

XI

• List of Illustrations •

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

Joseph Paxton, Birkenhead Park, near Liverpool. J. C. Dollman, The Avenue, Bedford Park. J. T . Carr, Tower House and Queen Anne's Grove, Bedford Park. Park and Unwin, Hampstead Garden Suburb from the Heath Extension. William Gilpin, Scaleby Castle. Scaleby Castle. Cottage. Brantwood. Brantwood. Interior: Brantwood. William Morris, wallpaper design. William Morris, wallpaper design. William Morris, wallpaper design. Papier mâché bed. M. H. Baillie Scott, "rose" bedstead. M. H. Baillie Scott, cabinet. M. H. Baillie Scott, window, Blackwell. M. H. Baillie Scott, stained glass, Blackwell. M. H. Baillie Scott, door at Blackwell. M. H. Baillie Scott, stenciled mountain ash, Blackwell. M. H. Baillie Scott, tree-colonettes, Blackwell. C. F. A. Voysey, Broadleys. M. H. Baillie Scott, interior landscape, Blackwell. C. F. A. Voysey, wallpaper frieze. C. F. A. Voysey, The Snake. W . Westall and Lt. Beechey, Ships in Winter Harbour. David Caspar Friedrich, Die Gescheiterte Hoffnung. Burford's Panorama of the Polar Regions. Sir Edwin Landseer, Man Proposes, God Disposes. J. M. W . Turner, The Alps at Daybreak. Elijah Walton, The Weisshom from the R i f f el. James Mahoney, Fog-Bow Seen from the Matterhorn. A. M. W . Adams Reilly, The Western Face of Mont Blanc. John Martin, Manfred on the fungfrau. J. D. Forbes, Mont Cervin. John Ruskin, The Aiguilles of Chamonix. Ernest Edwards, The Nesthom from the Ober Aletsch Glacier. Lucy Wills, Ascent of the Wetterhom. Elijah Walton, Alpirn Climbers. John Leech, Marley's Ghost. John Leech, The Spirit of Christmas Present. John Leech, Scrooge and Bob Cratchit.

Xll

• List of Illustrations •

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

"Lord, Keep My Memory Green" (The Haunted Man). Sir A. W . Callcott, Diana at the Chase. John Brett, Val d'Aosta. John Constable, Stoke-by-Nayland. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge. J. M. W . Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise. Edward Lear, Finale. Thomas Girtin, Kirkstall Abbey—Evening. John Sell Cotman, Chirk Aqueduct. Samuel Palmer, In a Shoreham Garden. William Holman Hunt, Hawthorn and Bird's Nest. Peter De Wint, Gloucester. William Dyce, Pegwell Bay, Kent. Miles Birket Foster, The Milkmaid. William Holman Hunt, The Hireling Shepherd. J. E. Millais, Ophelia. Arthur Hughes, The Long Engagement. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini! J. E. Millais, Mariana. Charles Allston Collins, Convent Thoughts. William Holman Hunt, Valentine Rescuing Sylvia. William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott. William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice. William Holman Hunt, The Awakened Conscience. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, study for Found. J. E. Millais, Mariana. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Lady of Shalott. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Palace of Art. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Palace of Art. Atkinson Grimshaw, The Seal of the Covenant. James Thomas Linnell, The Rainbow. Daniel Maclise, Noah's Sacrifice. Gustave Jäger, Noah's Sacrifice. Francis Danby, The Deluge. Gustave Doré, The World Destroyed by Water. Ford Madox Brown, Walton-on-the-Naze.

Xlll

• List of Illustrations •

117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131.

J. E. Millais, The Blind Girl. William Holman Hunt, The Scapegoat (first version). J. M. W . Turner, The Wreck Buoy. Fountain at Ampfield. Hursley Vicarage and Church. From Isaac Williams, The Altar. From Isaac Williams, The Altar. From Isaac Williams, The Altar. From Isaac Williams, The Baptistery. From Isaac Williams, The Baptistery. From Isaac Williams, The Baptistery. From Isaac Williams, The Baptistery. Sir Max Beerbohm, William Wordsworth. J. Gilbert, We Are Seven. Birket Foster, We Are Seven.

XIV

A Prefatory Note In shaping a collection as large and diverse as the present one the editors have incurred many debts of gratitude. Our first and most enduring indebtedness is expressed on the dedication page; the existence of this volume reflects the depth of that indebtedness. Next, we must thank all our contributors, both for their essays and for their exceptionally cooperative spirit in helping us bring those essays into an interlocking relation with each other. The idea for a volume like this one was first proposed by one contributor, Robert L. Patten; we are especially grateful to him. Another contributor, A. Walton Litz, gave us support and encouragement from the earliest stages of this undertaking; moreover, he helped us to keep always in mind the end toward which the work was directed. The enthusiasm for the project shown at the outset by William J. McClung at the University of California Press and his later aid and advice were invaluable in bringing the work to fruition. He has our sincerest thanks. W e are also grateful to Doris Kretschmer, Wolfgang Lederer, Susan H. Peters, and Linda Rageh for their interest and cooperation at different stages of production. The very considerable task of typing the entire manuscript in final form was ably carried out by Ellen Cole and the staff of the Central Stenographic Bureau at the University of California at Los Angeles. Both editors benefited from support from the Research Committees of the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles. W e are grateful to Her Majesty the Queen for permission to reproduce Sir Edwin Landseer's painting of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and the Princess Royal (illustration 33). W e also want to thank the following collectors, institutions, and museums for allowing us to reproduce works in their collections: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (illustrations 98 and 102); Sanford and Helen Berger (illustrations 46, 47, 48); City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham (frontispiece; illustrations 69, 71, 74, 94, 99, 103, 104, 105, 116, 117); Public Library and Art Museum, Bury (illustration 79); Sir Francis Cooper, Bt. (illustration 80); Chicago Art Institute (illustration 81); Terence Davis (illustration 35); George Eastman House, Rochester, New York (illustrations 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 16, 17, 18, 19); Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (illustration 88); Forbes Magazine Collection (illustration 111); Kunsthalle, Hamburg (illustration 62); City Art Gallery, Leeds (illustrations 110, 112); Liverpool Record Office (illustration 36); London Victorian Society (illustrations 41, 43, 53, 55, 56); City Art Gallery, Manchester (illustrations 32, 92, 118); Metropolitan Museum, New York (illustrations 12 and 13); Dr. Eva Reichmann (illustration 129); Royal British Institute of Architects, London (illustration 60); Collection Lord Sherfield,

XV

• A Prefatory Note •

Royal Academy (illustration 97); Tate Gallery, London (illustrations 82, 83, 90, 93, 95, 96, 114); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (illustrations 28, 49, 85, 86, 87, 89, and 91); Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut (illustration 100); Walker Gallery, Liverpool (illustration 119). Finally, for their cooperation and hospitality through many meetings and consultations, we express our thanks to our wives. U. C. K. G . B. T .

XVI

Introduction

. . . in speaking of the world without us as distinguished from ourselves, the aggregate of phenomena ponderable and imponderable, is called nature in the passive sense,—in the language of the old schools, natum naturata—while the sum or aggregate of the powers inferred as the sufficient causes of the forms (which by Aristotle and his followers were called the substantial forms) is nature in the active sense, or natura naturans. COLERIDGE

Philosophical

Lectures

In April 1837, a few months before Queen Victoria ascended the throne, a young Oxford undergraduate considering a career in geology met another would-be geologist who had recently returned from a five-year voyage around the globe. T h e two men "got together" famously and "talked all evening." Yet neither man would become noted for a contribution to geology and neither would follow the path of their eminent host, the Reverend William Buckland, twice president of the Geological Society and author of the recent "Bridgewater Treatise," in which the stratified "systems of animal and vegetable life" were held out as indisputable "proof of the existence and agency of One and the same all-wise and all-powerful Creator." T h e young undergraduate, John Ruskin, would turn to art and architecture, to aesthetic, social, and literary criticism; his acquaintance and elder by ten years, Charles Robert Darwin, would become the century's most influential interpreter of "Nature." Darwin and Ruskin continued their association long after the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) and Modern Painters (1843-60). Darwin occasionally visited Brantwood, Ruskin's country home in the Lake District, which Ruskin purchased in 1871. There, amid the landscape that a century earlier had shaped Wordsworth's imagination, biologist and aesthetician were stirred by the same XVLL

Introduction •

sights. In 1879, during a holiday at Brantwood, the scientist who perennially complained that his "aesthetic tastes had suffered a gradual decay" felt a revival of the same pleasurable overflow he had experienced on viewing the South American tropics more than forty years before: "even in returning he was full of the beauty of Rydal Water, though he would not allow that Grasmere at all equalled his beloved Coniston." Had the imaginations of the artist and the man of science, then, fused, as Wordsworth at the beginning of the century predicted they would? With sublime confidence, Wordsworth had anticipated the day when the "remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed." From Wordsworth's psychological perspective, the cooperation seemed easy. After all, were not poet and scientist common seekers of connections between "particular parts" and "general nature"? Did not both consider "man and Nature as essentially adapted to each other"? Both poet and scientist derived "pleasure" from this adaptation and interdependence. Hence, for Wordsworth, the day would come when the pleasurable natural knowledge found by the scientist "in solitude" would be interpreted and propagated by poets and painters in the language of Nature herself. So, too, it seemed to the young Ruskin who drew the epigraph for the first volume of Modern Painters from the older man's poetry: Accuse me not O f arrogance,. . . If having walked with Nature, And offered, far as frailty would allow, My heart a daily sacrifice to Truth, I now affirm of Nature and of Truth, Whom I have served, that their Divinity Revolts, offended at the ways of men, Philosophers, who, though the human soul Be of a thousand faculties composed, And twice ten thousand interests, do yet prize This soul, and the transcendent universe, No more than as a mirror that reflects T o proud Self-love her own intelligence. Still, if this epigraph from The Excursion suggests that Ruskin, like Wordsworth, had been tutored by Nature and offered his heart to its "Truth," it also turns against the subjectivism inherent in Romantic poetry. Coleridge had warned that the force regarded by Wordsworth as nurse, guide, and guardian of his moral being might be nothing more than a subjective distortion or self-reflection: "we XVlll

Introduction

receive but what we give / And in our life alone does Nature live." Younger Romantics like Shelley, whom Browning worshiped yet refused to follow, accepted this challenge by invoking the energy radiating out of Mont Blanc or raging in a West Wind and asking it to "be thou me." T o the Victorian imagination, however, such subjectivity was to be avoided. Nature had to be objectified. And yet the fusion between the artist and the objectifying man of science never came about. T h e gap between subject and object proved as unbridgeable as before. While Victorian artists continued to be haunted by the beauties and terrors of physical Nature, they shied away from the task of deducing its laws, as in the previous century poets like Pope and Young had tried to do. T o be sure, Tennyson tried to put some of Lyell's geology into verse in In Memoriam (1850), but by 1868 the poet laureate nervously asked Darwin, "Your theory of Evolution does not make against Christianity?"—and was pacified by Darwin's negative answer. George Eliot, too, displayed deep ambivalence about The Origin of Species-, after praising the book for its contribution to the world's progression "toward brave clearness and honesty," the former Evangelical conceded her deep-seated doubts about all explanations of natural processes that do away "with the mystery that lies away under the processes." In Middlemarch

( 1 8 7 2 - 7 3 ) , the Huxleian Lydgate's

search for "some common basis" from which all living structures start, a "primitive tissue," is treated as derisively as Mr. Casaubon's rationalistic attempts to find the common origin of all religions (chap. 15). By Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot upholds the poetic imagination that sees through the visible universe above "the strict measurer"—a science that also needs the "make-believe" of origins and beginnings. Thus the imagination of the scientist and the artist never coalesced. About "the Turners in Mr. Ruskin's bedroom" Darwin ruefully confessed "that he could make out absolutely nothing of what Mr. Ruskin saw in them." Ruskin in turn, looking at botanical specimens, clearly saw nothing of what Darwin and Huxley saw. In The Queen of the Air, a series of three lectures given in 1869, Ruskin first accused the "masters of modern science" of having "divided the elements, and united them," but of having forgotten in the process to remind us, "which is all that men need know,—that the Air is given to him for his life; and the Rain to his thirst, and for his baptism; and the Fire for warmth; and the Sun for sight; and the Earth for his meat—and his Rest." In his second lecture, on "the supposed, and actual relations of Athena to the vital force in material organism," Ruskin insisted that his botanical and zoological explorations "are in nowise antagonistic to the theories which Mr. Darwin's unwearied and unerring investigations are every day rendering more probable. T h e aesthetic relations of species are independent of their origin." Yet the mythical and spiritual dimensions Ruskin assigns to the same xix

• Introduction •

natural forms observed by Darwin and Huxley belie his protestation. His eagerness to restore mystery to empirical observation links him far more to a religious poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins than to the natural scientists. Like Hopkins, Ruskin is acutely concerned with the sudden illumination by which external forms yield an "inscape" or deeper pattern of meaning. Whereas to Hopkins these illuminations connect the beholder of Nature to God, for Ruskin they have a symbolically "distinct relation to the spirit of man": It is perfectly possible, and ultimately conceivable, that the crocodile and the lamb may have descended from the same ancestral atom of protoplasm; and that the physical laws of the operation of calcareous slime and of meadow grass, on that protoplasm, may in time have developed the opposite natures and aspects of the living frames; but the practically important fact for us is the existence of a power which creates the calcareous earth itself;—which creates that, separately, and quartz, separately, and gold, separately, and charcoal, separately; and then so directs the relations of these elements that the gold may destroy the souls of men by being yellow; and the charcoal destroy their souls by being hard and bright; and the quartz represent to them an ideal purity. What began as an account of "the distinctions of species" is transformed through Ruskin's powers of metaphor into a sermon on a Nature which, contrary to the scientist's belief, can still represent to the human mind "states of moral evil and of good." Ruskin's lecture can be profitably contrasted to the brilliant "lay sermon" given two years before by "Darwin's Bulldog," T . H. Huxley, reprinted in 1869. In his lecture "On the Physical Basis of Life," Huxley too is concerned with overcoming meaningless distinctions in a multitudinous Nature that, to the naked eye, seems devoid of connections: " W h a t community of faculty can there be between the bright-coloured lichen, which so nearly resembles a mere mineral incrustation of the bare rock on which it grows, and the painter, to whom it is instinct with beauty, or the botanist, whom it feeds with knowledge?" T h e distinctions, not only between vegetable and animal growth, but also between living organisms and nonliving matter, Huxley shows, are erased by an understanding of the "steps in molecular complication" that only physiology and molecular physics can illuminate. Huxley boldly challenges Victorian sensibilities: deliberately resorting to a blasphemous religious vocabulary, he asserts that the mutton he eats "will convert the dead protoplasm into living protoplasm, and transubstantiate sheep into man." He mocks the quasi-religious creeds of "work" that, for Carlyle and Ruskin, still separate man from beast: "All work implies waste, and the waste of life results, directly or indirectly, in the waste of protoplasm." Rejecting all attempts to invest xx

•

Introduction

Nature with the powers of some immanent W i l l , Huxley denies kinship with the orthodox theologian as well as with evolutionists like Herbert Spencer: "materialism" is not a power, but a system of "formulae" and "symbols" by which the scientist can represent "all the phaenomena of Nature." Even for those Victorians who accepted the scientist's rigorous definition of Nature, such an exclusiveness seemed deficient, as isolating and remote as Wordsworth had characterized the "truth" of the man of science to be. Thus, rationalists such as John Stuart Mill and Leslie Stephen and agnostics such as Matthew Arnold and George Eliot and "Mark Rutherford" still looked longingly to Wordsworth and to his pastoral bowers and mountains. In their own self-dialogues, Arnold and Ruskin and Hardy, though they denied Wordsworth's nurturing and beneficent Nature, nonetheless hailed the older poet's ability to assert, in Arnold's words, "the freshness of the early world." Victorian literature and art and architecture rely on retrospection to look back at that earlier world of Nature. Though partially discredited and bereft of some of its "mysteries," it would continue to be cherished for its symbolic representations and sacramental meanings in the face of the rapid advances of science into a very different natural order. Victorian biology, physics, and chemistry created systems that would affect all future thinking about the physical universe; yet the imagination of poets, novelists, painters, designers, and architects remained essentially conservative, clinging to the icons of the past, adapting and reshaping earlier modes of expression. In Section Four of this study, "Systems of Knowledge," the advances made by Victorian science are carefully assessed, but it is no coincidence that in the bulk of this volume there should be so very few allusions to the seminal work done by the man Ruskin had met in Oxford shortly before Queen Victoria's ascent. For most Victorians, "Nature" remained above all a repository of feeling, a sanctuary they were all too eager to retain. The arrangement of this volume needs little explanation. W e begin with the most immediate mode of perceiving Victorian Nature—the Victorian photograph. T h e very newness of the medium made the choice of subject and the arrangement of objects in themselves indicative of the Victorian attitude towards Nature, for the process of photography was then a lengthy one and required "placement" of objects much as the painter placed his subjects. Thus the setting, the placement, and the tones of the photographs show us Victorian Nature as it was perceived by contemporaries. The sections that follow the extensive gathering of Nature photography are designed to illuminate the Victorian response to Nature from a variety of viewpoints. In Section Two, " T h e Taming of Space," w e see Victorians responding to Nature in terms of architecture and arranged space. That they considered Nature xxi

• Introduction •

a central element in the way in which architecture was deployed is characteristic of their conviction that it was not wholly inert nor wholly external to the concerns of man. Nature was still to be included in any concept of living space. It could dictate the character and arrangement of dwellings or it could be brought inside them. It could not be ignored. In Section Three, "Explorations," we see that the Victorians still thought of the physical world as open to investigation and to cultivated response. If the men of the eighteenth century had viewed English Nature as out there waiting to be tamed, the Victorians viewed Nature in the world at large, outside Britain, as awaiting their exploration and discovery. T h e y found that Nature alternately threatening and sublime. T h e fact that they always returned to the essentially homelike and comforting Nature they knew in England is a measure of how indomitably English and Victorian they were, even in the face of relentless exposure to external Nature throughout the world. But their view of Nature was immeasurably enlarged over that of earlier centuries, and they brooded on the consequences of what they found. Just as external physical Nature came to include Alps and tundra, so its scientific dimensions were gradually expanded throughout the nineteenth century. Section Four, "Systems of Knowledge," sets forth the range of the burgeoning scientific awareness of what Nature was. That the tendency of Victorian science was towards reducing the mysterious goddess Natura to a series of physical phenomena, while at the same time vastly extending the physical arena in which such phenomena could be observed, was generally a matter of grave concern to the Victorians. For, while they wanted Nature to be as domestic as the home life of their beloved Queen, they also wanted Nature to continue to hold meanings and mysteries not accommodated within the narrow confines of the Victorian hearth or the soulless confines of science. T h e anxiety engendered by the enlargement of natural science without a corresponding enlargement of natural philosophy was one of the sources of tension in the Victorian imaginative response to Nature, a tension felt almost as often by scientists as by humanists. Section Five, "Redefinitions," is concerned to show how Victorian painters and writers retained and restated the conceptions of Nature that tradition seemed to dictate as still meaningful. Eager to preserve the harmony posited by a sacramental and humanistic conception of Nature, they nonetheless endeavored to accommodate the more fragmented views of Nature increasingly urged on them by scientific skepticism. As a result, they struck an uneasy balance between innovation and tradition, individualism and convention, new meanings and older forms. In such efforts the Victorians display most vividly their characteristic drive towards synthesis, yet reveal the divided mind that so often lay behind such undertakings. As Section Six, "Toward the Twentieth Century," makes clear, the delicate XXll

• Introduction •

balance between science and tradition was no longer viable by the end of the century and beyond. The multiplicity of individual views, all coherence gone, that marks the twentieth century was already upon the intellectual world. Signs of the breakup of the amalgamation of tradition, Romanticism, Darwinism, and scientific materialism were already evident in the writers of the end of the century and in their twentieth-century followers, especially by the time of the First World War. The Victorian response, however, remains an extraordinary and still exemplary effort to preserve Nature for the human imagination.

XXlll

Images of Nature: A Photo-Essay CHARLES MILLARD

1. Roger Fenton (1819-69), Kew Ait (ca. 1862)

3

CHARLES MILLARD •

2. John Spiller and Dr. Percy, The New Mill, Near Lynton, North Devon, from The Photographic Album (1857).

4

1. Images of

Nature

3. Francis Frith (1822-98), Holy St. Mill, Chagford (before 1886).

5

CHARLES MILLARD •

I. ¡mages of Nature •

5. Francis Bedford ( 1 8 1 6 - 9 4 ) , Dolgelley, View in Torrent Walk.

6. Francis Frith and Company, Stennage 1

Valley.

• CHARLES

MILLARD

7. Roger Fenton ( 1819-69), The Valley of Nant-Frangen, North Wales (before 1868).

8

I. Images of Nature •

8. Francis Frith ( 1 8 2 2 - 9 8 ) , The Prebend's Bridge, Durham, from Gems of Photographic Art, before 1867.

9

C H A R L E S MILLARD •

9. Frederick Evans (1853-1943), Durham Cathedral: From Banks of River Wear.

10. W . H. Fox Talbot (1800-1877), Melrose Abbey from Sun Pictures in Scotland (1845). 10

I. Images of Nature

•

11. Roger Fenton (1819-69), Tintern Abbey (before 1868).

11

CHARLES MILLARD •

12. Philip H. Delamotte ( 1 8 2 0 - 8 9 ) and Joseph Cundall ( 1 8 1 8 - 9 5 ) , Fountains Abbey, from A Photographic Tour among the Abbeys of Yorkshire (1856).

12

• /. Images of Nature •

13. Philip H . Delamotte ( 1 8 2 0 - 8 9 ) and Joseph Cundall ( 1 8 1 8 - 9 5 ) ,

Rivaulx Abbey, from A Photographic Tour among the A bbeys of Yorkshire (1856).

13

• C H A R L E S MILLARD

14. Francis Frith (1822-98), Knaresborough Castle, from Gems of Photographic Art (before 1867).

15. Francis Bedford (1816-94), Llanberis, Dolbadarn Castle and Pass. 14

1. Images of Nature

16. Ernest Edwards, Cleft in the Rock: Anchor Church, Derby.

15

• CHARLES

MILLARD

17. J. D. Llewelyn, PiscatorNo. 2, from The Photographic Album (1857).

16

I. Images of Nature

CHARLES

MILLARD

I. Images of Nature •

20. Francis Bedford (1816-94), Cedar at Warwick Castle, from Gems of Photographic Art (before 1867).

19

• CHARLES MILLARD •

•-W

J t

21. Earl of Caithness and Mr. Bembridge of Windsor, Great Beech on Manor Hill, from William Menzies, The History of Windsor Great Park and Windsor Forest (1864).

20

I. Images of Nature •

• C H A R L E S MILLARD

• I. Images of Nature •

24. Henry Peach Robinson ( 1 8 3 0 - 1 9 1 0 ) , Feeding the Calves ( 1 8 8 4 ) .

A Note on the Illustrations Victorian Nature photography occupies a stylistic and conceptual midpoint between French and American photography of the nineteenth century. In France, early photographers had been trained as painters (Daguerre), sculptors (AdamSalomon), or printmakers (Carjat), and their work was informed with all the pictorial strength of the French artistic tradition. In the United States, on the other hand, photographers had almost universally been scientists (Morse, Draper) or simple entrepreneurs; their work, accordingly, tended to be uncompromisingly factual, their compositions unmanipulated. Victorian photographers managed to 23

C H A R L E S MILLARD •

strike a compromise between these two extremes. Familiar with artistic principles of composition yet motivated by a desire to retain the purity of the scenes before their lenses, Victorian amateurs successfully managed to blend emotional evocation with an objective assertion of sheer physical fact. Working within an essentially literary tradition, the landscape photographers were eager to evoke the personalities of places through associational effects. U n tamed Nature, their prime subject, could still be as sublime or at least as strongly characterized as it was in Wordsworth's poetry and in late eighteenth-century pictorial renditions of landscape. Humanity and human constructs remain subordinate: when figures appear, they are dwarfed by rocks and overtowering trees; indigenous buildings are picturesque ruins at one with their natural surroundings. For the Victorians, Nature photography becomes a species of portraiture, inevitably revealing the spirit of place, an inviolable atmosphere. T h e supremacy of Nature is powerfully conveyed in Roger Fenton's Kew Ait (Fig. 1), with its boat slowly decaying on the forest floor, its lonely human figure subservient in size to both boat and trees. A similar assertion of the harmonious dominance of Nature over man's works (with the added suggestion of the eventual reincorporation of these works in Nature) forcefiilly emerges in photographs of mills that recall the "awe as at the presence of an uncontrollable force" felt by Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (Figs. 2, 3). T h e benign Waldeinsamkeit that suffuses scenes of forest interiors (Figs. 4, 5) emphasizes the Victorian photographic view of Nature as powerful without being hostile; the curving roads suggest a cooperation between the human and the natural: the somber highroad in Francis Bedford's untitled landscape (Fig. 4) displays an invitingly open gate, while the sunny lowroad leads more easily to the safety of the known. Moral meanings can emerge through delicate hints. It is certainly no accident that the figure at the beginning of the winding path in Francis Frith's Stennage Valley (Fig. 6) is an adolescent boy who gazes at the vast world all before him. Like the river in Roger Fenton's Valley of Nant-Frangen (Fig. 7), the path not only accents and stabilizes the composition but also identifies and characterizes the place represented—establishing its physiognomy, its essence. Francis Frith's mid-Victorian Prebend's Bridge, Durham (Fig. 8) and Frederick Evans's late-Victorian Durham Cathedral (Fig. 9) dramatize a change in attitude as well as the development of photographic vision. In Frith's photograph, the cathedral is a distant presence in a composition in which the architectural elements enhance, by contrast, the primacy of Nature. T h e whole is marked by strong forms—notably the bridge and the diagonal tree—and a wide tonal range dominated by darks. T h e features of Evans's scene are more gentle, the tonal range no less wide but more subtly modulated. If the personality of the place is less strongly 24

• I. Images of Nature

marked, the artistic effect is more pronounced and more carefully studied, dependent on visual devices—soft focus, half-light, etc. The Gothic subject matter of the Durham scenes also underlies a major subspecies of Victorian photography—that of ruins. Indebted to Gilpin and the taste for the picturesque (see Frank, Chapter Four), the representation of ruins satisfied the Victorian desire for strongly characterized subject matter and at the same time helped placate a fondness for poeticized and moralized effects. For example, the foreground of Fox Talbot's Melrose Abbey (Fig. 10) clearly acts to remind that "the paths of glory lead but to the grave," while Fenton's Tintem Abbey (Fig. 11) is obviously meant to speak of a Nature that can "impress / With quietness and beauty, and—feed / With lofty thoughts." The seated human figure in Cundall and Delamotte's Fountains Abbey (Fig. 12) emphasizes by contrast the immensity and power of both Nature and the past. While ruins sometimes gained the status of natural facts (Fig. IS) and Nature often suggested architectural forms (Fig. 16), animal and human figures were used for compositional accent and emotional overtone. The heron—presumably stuffed —in J. D. Llewellyn's Piscator (Fig. 17) acts merely to focus the composition; in other works the human figures (Figs. 18,19) not only focus and provide a means of entry into the composition, but they also help to establish a specific emotional cast, usually melancholic. Individual human identity is sacrified to the prevailing character of Nature. Trees—another major subspecies of Victorian Nature photography—possess idiosyncrasies that the figures near them totally lack. While trees are sometimes seen at close range, to emphasize the shapes of branches or the texture of bark (Fig. 20), they are more commonly viewed from a distance, usually in winter, to dramatize their salient configurations (Fig. 21). In either case, they are captured with a particularity that is totally lacking in any human figures nearby. By the end of the nineteenth century, photography, now mechanically simplified, had become available to everyone, and the traits that had once distinguished English, French, and American photography became homogenized; in response, the internationalist-pictorialist style attempted to protect itself and photography as an art against the legion of its popularizers. Contrasted with work done thirty or forty years earlier, the trees of Frederick Evans (Fig. 22) seem far less specifically English and less expressive of distinct natural fact. Indeed, his Crepuscule au Printemps not only bears a French title, but actually is a French scene; its gauzy effects could equally have been achieved by one of the major French pictorialists. If Evans's Near Shore (Fig. 23) seems more characteristic of the earlier mode, it is telling nonetheless that the title no longer evokes a particular place and that the viewer no longer is invited to detect nonvisual, symbolic meanings or associations. 25

• CHARLES MILLARD •

W h e n such meanings do intrude, as in Robinson's Feeding the Calves ( F i g . 2 4 ) , they are transferred from Nature to man and tend to be so trivial as to detract from the image rather than enhance it. T h e identifying traits of Victorian Nature photography, its tendency to seek moral and poetic associations in its subjects and to characterize those subjects in the manner of portraiture, had all but disappeared by the end of the century. T h e word "Victorian," then, speaks of English photography until the 1880s; as in all arts, a change in vision did not wait on the powerful, but instead obeyed its o w n irresistible laws.

26

# #

Felicitous Space: The Cottage Controversy G E O R G E H. F O R D

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. They are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility. GEORGE STEINER In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

One of the most universal of images of the past, according to Steiner, is the sense of a lost paradise, a sense that haunts all of us in all times and cultures. In our consciousness today, Steiner says, we locate our "imagined garden" of Eden in the hundred-year period from about 1820 to 1915—"that great summer" of the Victorian and Edwardian ages before the present cold set in in 1915. The following essay, however, is concerned, not with our present-day dream-image of a Victorian Golden Age—an evaluation that would have seemed absurdly laughable fifty years ago—but rather with the Victorians' own dream-image. For those seemingly confident and energetic generations, confronted with the alienations of what Freud called civilization and its discontents, also fell back on an inner vision of a Golden AgeWhen a Victorian closed his eyes to daydream, what did he see? I suspect that what flashed upon his inward eye was a blissful scene of a green valley in which was nestled a scattered group of thatch-roofed cottages, with lattice windows and winding paths lined with hollyhocks and roses, or, as Matthew Arnold has bedecked it in his pastoral "Thyrsis" (1866), Sweet-William with his homely cottage s m e l l . . . And open, jasmine-muffled lattices,... 29

• G E O R G E H. FORD •

George Sand, a French Victorian, noted that all of us can be divided into two types—those whose ideal dwelling-place is a palace and those whose ideal is a cottage. Most representative Victorians would have opted for the cottage over the palace, as did George Sand herself—although she happily contrived to make the best of both worlds by owning both a cottage and a chateau. In her delightful book about her cottage experiences, Promenades autour d'un village (1857), she notes that the ideal cottage must be thatch-covered—the substitution of slate roofs would be a desecration.1 Thus, in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), Tennyson has his speaker lament how his once-charming fishing village has been ruined by tasteless housing developments: Yonder lies our young sea village—Art and Grace are less and less: Science grows and Beauty dwindles—roofs of slated hideousness! In nineteenth-century England several writers, like George Sand, did live in cottages, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thomas Moore. But the idealization of cottage life was by no means confined to those writers who, inspired by a sense of alienation from urban civilization, actually took up residence in cottages. Tennyson's poems abound with references to cottages, but he himself did not choose to reside in one.2 Though the cottage is important as a real literary residence, for our purposes it is more important as it is visualized by the Victorian novelist or poet or essayist in terms of what we currently call a life-style. T h e governing image of the cottage persists, of course, into the twentieth century, as is evident in the writings of D. H. Lawrence, a post-Victorian rooted in Victorian issues about which his fiction is often helpfully illuminating. Lawrence did not grow up in a rustic cottage but in a housing development built by nineteenth-century coal mine owners which he calls, in Sons and Lovers (1913), " T h e Bottoms." Lawrence's miner ancestors, however—as he reminds us in the opening sentence of that novel—had once lived in thatched cottages scattered over a landscape of farmlands, before the progress of industrialization swept them away. 1. George Sand, Promenadesautmird'un Village (Paris, 1888), pp. 66-67. M y essay was originally presented as a paper in 1972 and 1973. Since then two books have been published that treat (with affection) the rural scene: Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973), and W . J. Keith, The Rural Tradition (Toronto, 1974). Happily there seems very little overlapping with my discussion—a sign of how large-scaled the topic is. 2. W h a t happened to Tennyson's residence seems to have been typical. William Howitt, who visited former residences of poets during a tour in the 1840s, amusingly recounts what had become of them: " T h e cottage inhabited by Coleridge [in Alfoxden] is now, according to the very common and odd fate of poets' cottages, a T o m and Jerry shop. Moore's native abode is a whisky-shop; Burns's native cottage is a little public-house; Shelley's house at Great Marlowe is a beer-shop; it is said that a public house has been built on the spot where Scott was born . . . . Coleridge's house here is a beer-shop . . . . It stands close to the road, and has nothing now to distinguish it from any other ordinary pot-house" (Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets [ N e w York, 1847], 11:113).

30

• II. Felicitous Space •

Lawrence's lifework is a record of how this transformation affected both the landscape and the human spirit. More evocatively than in Sons and Lovers, the opening chapter of The Rainbow portrays the dramatic invasion of the old Brangwen world of farm and cottage by the new world of mine and factory, with the "red, crude houses plastered on the valley in masses," the "sulphurous smell of pit-refuse burning," "the whistle of the trains," the noise of shunting coal cars and the overall mechanical rhythms of machinery so different from the traditional rhythms experienced by the Brangwen ancestors before 1830.

# In his vivid record of that industrial invasion of a green countryside Lawrence was retelling a tale long told by his Victorian predecessors, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and other writers. And, as so often in his work, he shows himself as not only a major novelist but also as a perceptive social historian. In the period Lawrence looks back on, around the 1830s, there were many thousands of cottages in England, some inhabited by miners, such as Lawrence's ancestors, some by weavers, such as Silas Marner, some by fishermen, such as Enoch Arden, but most commonly, of course, by farm workers. For, as William Cobbett reminded his readers—with perhaps pardonable exaggeration— four-fifths of England's population were still engaged in agricultural pursuits, despite the much-heralded industrial revolution.5 O f course, there are still thousands of cottages to be seen in England today, for the cottage, unlike the stagecoach, has not turned out to be one of the world's dodos or passenger pigeons; however, in 1830, there were many signs that the traditional cottage was a declining species, if not a doomed one. An assortment of causes contributed to this situation. From the late eighteenth century on, landowners and parish taxpayers found that instead of repairing cottages, let alone building new ones, they could save money by simply knocking them down. Hardy's novel The Woodlanders (1887) describes one of these bulldozing operations in which the ancient "brown-thatched" cottages are systematically demolished. Enclosure, the fencing of the commons, played a large part to the same end; and most important was the lure of industrial employment, which removed the farm laborer from his cottage for life.4 Novels and poems with such titles as " T h e Ruined Cottage" are elegies to abandoned habitations. 3. William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1830; reprint ed., London, 1853), p. 649. For a summary of studies of shifts of English population see John Raleigh, " T h e Novel and the City," Victorian Studies XI (March 1968): 302-4. 4. O n landlords and cottagers, see J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Toronto, 1965), pp. 158-59, 988 ff. O n enclosures see William Barnes, Eclogue: Two Farms in Woone (1879): "In thease here pleace there used to be / Eight farms avore they were a-drow'd together, / A n ' eight farm-housen. N o w how many be there? / W h y after this, you know, there'll be but dree."

31

• GEORGE H. FORD •

One of the more memorable of these laments was an attack on the industrial system written by poet laureate Robert Southey in 1829. T o establish his point, Southey contrasted the new row houses being built for industrial workers with the traditional cottages in which farm laborers had lived. H e is viewing these from a hilltop: W e remained a while in silence looking upon the assemblage of dwellings below. . . . T h e old cottages are such as the poet and the painter equally delight in beholding. Substantially built of the native stone . . . the materials could not have adjusted themselves more beautifully in accord with the surrounding scene; and time has still further harmonized them with weather stains, lichens and moss. . . . T h e rose bushes round the door . . . the tall hollyhocks in front . . . the beehives, and the orchard . . . indicate in the owners some portion of ease and leisure . . . some sense of innocent and healthful enjoyment. T h e new cottages of the manufacturers are upon the manufacturing pattern—naked, and in a row. . . . Time will not mellow them; nature will neither clothe nor conceal them; and they will remain always as offensive to the eye as to the mind. 5 As we might expect, the poet laureate's enthusiasm for the old and dislike of the new were not shared by all his readers, and his pastoral idyll evoked a savagely sarcastic reply from Thomas Babington Macaulay that has become an anthology-piece: Here is wisdom. Here are the principles on which nations are to be governed. Rosebushes and poor rates, rather than steam engines and independence. Mortality and cottages with weather stains, rather than health and long life with edifices which time cannot m e l l o w . . . . Mr. Southey has found out a way, he tells us, in which the effects of manufacturers and agriculture may be compared. And what is this way? T o stand on a hill, to look at a cottage and a factory, and to see which is the prettier. Does Mr. Southey think that the body of the English peasantry . . . ever lived, in substantial or ornamented cottages, with boxhedges, flower gradens . . . and orchards? If not, what is his parallel worth? 6 What might be called the "cottage controversy," joined between Southey and Macaulay, continued to reverberate through the literature of the Victorian age, and is still with us in various guises. T h e dispute centered on two points that Macaulay attempts to ram home in his steam-engine style. O n e is that if a cottager 5. Robert Southey, Colloquies (London, 1829), 1:173-74. Gillian Beer comments that industrialism, "instead of undermining the literary image of the countryside . . . gave it rather the added intensity of a vanishing world" ("Charles Kingsley and the Countryside," Victorian Studies VIII [March 1965]: 244). 6. Thomas Macaulay, "Southey's Colloquies" (January 1830), Works of Thomas Macaulay (London, 1897), V-.342. 32

II. Felicitous Space •

migrates to a manufacturing or commercial city, he will be better off, better housed, healthier, and so on. T h e second is that the poet's picture of the cottage scene is fatuously unrealistic and untrue or unrepresentative—a pastoral myth with no basis in reality. T h e second assertion is our principal concern, for it is here that the novelists and poets have most to contribute. L e t us first, however, consider the housing conditions in Victorian London or Manchester, especially in the earlier decades—conditions that, in Macaulay's view, were vastly superior to the cottage economy. A recent study by an architectural historian, J. N . T a r n , of Victorian working-class housing sums up what happened in the cities during the great migration from countryside to urban centers: T h e industrial revolution irresistibly attracted people to the towns [where] . . . the pressure for accommodation around the centres of industry was therefore extreme. A s towns became industrialized and the older inhabitants moved out to more salubrious areas, their [former] houses became tenements, over-occupied and therefore underprovided with water and drainage. Speculative builders seized their opportunity, too, and rushed up houses at the gates of the mills and factories. . . . T h e y built cheaply, and . . . they ignored even the most basic commonsense rules of building and sanitation, so the new were often quite as bad as the tenemented houses of the old town. 7 T o appreciate more vividly what happened in the wake of these developments, w e could consult the grim report supplied by Friedrich Engels in his description of factory slum-housing in the city of Manchester in 1844: Heaps of refuse, offal and sickening filth are everywhere interspersed with pools of stagnant liquid. T h e atmosphere is polluted by the stench and is darkened by the thick smoke of a dozen factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and children swarm about the streets and they are just as dirty as the pigs which wallow happily on the heaps of garbage and pools of filth.8 Engels's gruesome account can readily be supplemented with those of other eyewitnesses. T h a t country-loving poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, reports in the 1870s and 1880s how depressing he found his life as a priest in Liverpool and Glasgow, with their mean red houses, "the stench of sulphuretted h y d r o g e n " and the all-present "dirt, squalor and the ill-shapen degraded physical . . . type of so many of the people, with the . . . unbearable thought that by degrees almost all our population will become a town-population, and a puny, unhealthy and cowardly one." 9 7. J . N . Tarn, Working-Class Housing in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Architectural Association Papers Series no. 7 (London, 1971), pp. 4 - 5 . 8. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England ( N e w York, 1958), p. 71. 9. Quoted by John Pick, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Priest and Poet (Oxford, 1971), pp. 7 4 - 7 5 .

33

G E O R G E H. F O R D •

T o offset these urban horrors, one point made by T a r n in his history of housing needs to be stressed. There was a difference in urban housing for those he calls the artisan class, the workman with a special trade, and those at lower economic levels like Jo, the crossing-sweeper in Dickens's Bleak House. T h e artisan's housing might be crowded, ill-smelling, and dreary, but it was bearable. In Dickens's Hard Times, for example, Stephen Blackpool's ill housing is not stressed; it is the dreariness of the red-brick town that is central. It was usually not the artisan but the lower ranks of workers and the nonworkers who were packed into the damp and rat-infested cellars of Tom-All-Alone's. As to Macaulay's second point attacking woolly-minded pastoralism, an anonymous pamphlet of 1840 may be cited. It is addressed to village girls and warns them to stay in their country cottages: O, ye happy village girls! whom a wise and bountiful Providence has set at a distance from these suffocating towns and cities which are the cemeteries of nature. . . . Cling to your country homes as the nearest representation this world affords of the paradise recorded in your Bible.10 There is our image of a Golden Age. But was life in a rural cottage a golden experience, as Southey says, or tinsel, as Macaulay implies? I am tempted to play the game that one historian, W . L. Burn, has wittily called "selective Victorianisms," and show either that it was, in fact, all golden, or, as some reputable scholars have lately affirmed, all tinsel." But alas, the more one investigates the reality behind the cottage image, the more one becomes aware of the trite answer: the reality was something of both.

#

One of our best witnesses to this duality is George Eliot, in whose novels variations of the pastoral are prominently featured. And they are variations. In the introduc10. Quoted by H. J. Dyos, " T h e Slums of Victorian London," Victorian Studies XI (September 1967): 14. O n the idealization of the village in Victorian theater, see Michael Booth, " T h e Metropolis on Stage," in The Victorian City, ed. H . J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London, 1973), 11:211-24. 11. For example, Richard Altick, Victorian People and Ideas (New York, 1973),pp. 35-36.Coral Lansbury comments: " T h e vine-covered cottage of the yeoman farmer . . . was an image of country life as appealing and artificial as Marie Antoinette's farm at Trianon" (Arcady in Australia [Melbourne, 1970], p. 36). On the other hand, a statement by Enid Gauldie that "all farm workers were living in damp hovels" is dismissed by F. M. L. Thompson as "totally unsupported" (Times Literary Supplement, 2 August 1974, p. 823). And Thompson adds: "All that is really known is that some farm cottages were wretched affairs" (p. 823). It would seem that such contrasting generalizations may depend, in part, on the region in which the cottage was located. A cottage in Kent was different from a chimneyless hut in the Hebrides; for the latter, see the fair-minded account by the poet, Alexander Smith, A Summer in Skye (1865), 11:36-40. " O n e portion of the hut," Smith notes, "is not unfrequently a byre, and the breath of the cow is mixed with the odour of peat-reek." This was in 1860, and thus altogether unchanged from the conditions memorably described in 1773, some ninety years earlier, in James Boswell's Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (New York, 1936), pp. 99-101, 219-20. See also Alexander Somerville, The Autobiography of a Working Man (1848; reprint ed., London, 1951), p. 7. 34

II. Felicitous Space •

tion to Felix Holt (1866), for example, which like almost all her writings is set back in the time of her childhood—the time in which Macaulay and Southey were conducting their debate—she describes a coach ride through the countryside during which the traveler has a chance to see two contrasting types of hamlets. T h e first is essentially a rural slum: T h e labourers' cottages dotted along the lanes, or clustered into a small hamlet, their little dingy windows telling, like thick-filmed eyes, of nothing but the darkness within. Such a hamlet, she adds, "probably turned its back on the road, and seemed to lie away from everything but its own patch of earth and sky. . . . If its face could be seen, it was most likely dirty." As the journey progresses, however, a different kind of cottage is seen: But there were trim cheerful villages too . . . here and there a cottage with bright transparent windows showing pots full of blooming balsams or geraniums, and little gardens in front all double daisies . . . ; at the well, clean and comely women carrying yoked buckets. And, consonant with the light and the clear windows, she mentions that in this community is a flourishing school. A similar contrast occurs in Middlemarch (1871), in which Dorothea Brooke is painfully aware of the difference between the cottages on her husband's estate, which are ideal, and those on the estate of her uncle, Mr. Brooke, which are in a deplorable state of disrepair and which she calls "pig-sty cottages." H o w did such rural slums develop? Sometimes it was owing to pinch-penny landlords like M r . Brooke. At other times the cottager himself was more immediately responsible. As a series of articles written in the 1850s illustrates, it had long been the custom for some cottagers to try to save money by subletting most of the rooms in their cottage to single men and to crowd all the rest of their own family into one room, usually the kitchen. 12 In summer this was bad enough, but in winter, with doors and windows and crevices stuffed shut to save warmth, a pigsty would be an improvement. T h e Southeys praise the clean air of country life, and the praise was generally appropriate when a cottager was out-of-doors and beyond the vicinity of his dwellings, but indoors, if he lived in a rural slum, he might cite the Scotch proverb: " T h e clartier the cosier," i.e., the dirtier and smellier a place is, the warmer it is." T h e impact not only on one's nostrils but on one's views of sexual relations may be imagined. In 1851, Dickens and one of his assistant editors of 12. See Household Words, 15 February 1851, p. 482. 13. Cited in Household Words, 28 February 1852, p. 559, as an example of how proverbs derive "from the daily experience of the vulgar." A different account of cottage smells is given by Richard Jefferies in Hodge and his Masters (London, 1880), 11:151: "It is not that they [cottages] are dirty inside—... it is from the outside that all noisome exhalations taint the b r e e z e . . . . T h e cleanest

35

• G E O R G E H. FORD

Household Words prepared a study of crime and violence in rural districts, which they attributed to such overcrowding in cottages. T h e y cannot be specific in their account, but they hint darkly enough at something more than the squeaky bedspring: Into the secrets of cottage life, where there is no possibility of decent and natural separation, it is not for the journal like this to enter. It is enough to say that the domestic histories arising out of them are too often repellant to every human v i r t u e . . . . H o w long have w e heard . . . of huts where the families of English laborers are so huddled together, that from childhood they become inured to what would shock the South Sea savages. 1 4 It is instructive to keep Dickens's comments in mind when w e read the fine chapter in Eliot's Middlemarch in which Mr. Brooke visits one of the cottages on his estate—called, with a nice twist of social history, "Freeman's E n d . " It is inhabited by the family of Dagley, a semiliterate rustic who is on this occasion drunk, and most of the scene involves a hilarious exchange between landlord and tenant that takes place in the yard fronting the cottage. G e o r g e Eliot describes the dwelling as follows: It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine arts which makes other people's hardships picturesque, might have been de-

woman indoors thinks nothing disgusting out of doors, and hardly goes a step from her threshold to cast away indescribable filth." See also Charles Kingsley's Yeast ( 1 8 5 1 ) , in which the hero comments on the "foul black streams" surrounding a cottage. T h e inhabitant says they have no time to clean them up. " T h e y must just lie in the road, smell or none, till the rain carries it a w a y . " For other accounts of damp discomforts and lack o f sanitation, see Mrs. H u m p h r y W a r d ' s Robert Elsmere ( 1 8 8 8 ) , UI:xix; Arthur Redford, The Economic History of England: 1760-1860 (London, 1957), p. 59; W . J . Reader, Life in Victorian England (New York, 1967), chap. III. Such conditions play an interesting role in a poem by T o m T a y l o r that was written to accompany Birket Foster's Pictures of English Landscape (London, 1862). T a y l o r is generally in agreement with Southey and revels in the beauty of cottages (as Foster does in his Pictures), but late in the poem T a y l o r switches sides and joins Macaulay when he considers "the foul miasma of their crowded r o o m s " and the fevers deriving from "the rank ditch that stagnates by the door." A n d then 1 wish the picturesqueness less, And welcome the utilitarian hand T h a t from such foulness plucks its masquing dress, And bids the well-aired, well-drained cottage stand, All bare of weather-stain, right-angled t r u e B y sketchers shunned, but shunned by fevers too. 1 am indebted to Anthony Burton for bringing this passage to m y attention. 14. Charles Dickens, Uncollected Writings from Household Words, ed. H a r r y Stone (Bloomington, Ind., 1968), 1:282-83. C f . Household Words, 3 July 1852, p. 357. Dickens earlier alluded to these conditions in The Chimes ( 1 8 4 5 ) , when W i l l Ferns comments on the cottage in which he grew up, which used to be sketched by ladies. " I t looks well in a picter . . . but there an't weather in picters." And he adds: " ' T i s harder than you think . . . to grown up decent . . . in such a place. T h a t I growed up a man and not a brute, says something for m e . " 36

• II. Felicitous Space •

lighted with this homestead called Freeman's End: the old house had dormer-windows in the dark-red roof, two of the chimneys were choked with ivy . . . and half the windows were closed with grey worm-eaten shutters about which the jasmine-boughs grew in wild luxuriance. . . . T h e mossy thatch of the cow-shed, the broken grey barn-doors, the pauper labourers in ragged breeches who had nearly finished unloading a waggon . . . ; the very pigs and white ducks [wandering] . . . about the neglected yard as if in low spirits from feeding on a too meagre quality of rinsings . . . all these objects under the quiet light of a sky marbled with high clouds would have made a sort of picture which we have all paused over as a 'charming bit,' touching other sensibilities than those which are stirred by the depression of the agricultural interest, with the sad lack of farming capital, as seen constantly in the newspapers of that time. (Chapter X X X I X ) Nowhere in this seemingly idyllic passage are we given any specific account of what life indoors in the Dagley cottage must be like. W e know from Dorothea, however, that "they live in the back kitchen and leave the other rooms to the rate," and, during the scene when Dagley's tired wife appears at "the back-kitchen door," Eliot mentions that it is "the only entrance ever used, and one always open except in bad weather." T h e reader is thus left to reconstruct a rural slum from these glimpses. Eliot has combined two versions of the pastoral and antipastoral: Dagley's cottage is beautiful (Southey is right); it is also a human pigsty (Macaulay is right). George Eliot's double perspective is not hard to account for in terms of her background and experience; indeed it is the combination that is at the heart of her distinctive achievement as a novelist. With her Midlands background she can view the cottager's life from the inside, with warmth and affection; with her experience as one of the most learned writers of her generation, a translator of Strauss and contributor to the Westminster Review, she can view it from a different perspective. As an intellectual, she is especially aware of the sometimes stagnant mentality of the rural scene. T h e candle-lit cottage is picturesque but largely in darkness. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles

(1891) emphasizes the darkness. In

the Durbeyfield household, where the mother keeps a fortune-telling book under the thatch and life has been unchanged for two hundred years, the daughter, Tess, occasionally feels a sense of oppression, for she had some modern training at school. She finds the cottage parlor at night, "this one-candled spectacle," a dreary setting, an impression reinforced by her stumbling in the darkness of a village lane at night, which was totally unlit. One of the chief lures of the Victorian city for the villager, we must recall, was its gaslight. London, the first city in history to be equipped with full-blazing illumination, dazzled the country visitor. Country life was lacking in light in more senses than one. 37

• GEORGE H. FORD •

f r o m Illustrated London News, 5 S e p t e m b e r 1846.

Another witness to this darker side of Eliot's perspective was Charles Kingsley, whose encounters in his rural parish obviously appalled him. In Kingsley's problem novel Yeast (1847), the hero visits a rural slum cottage and is o v e r w h e l m e d b y its stinks and smells, but he is m u c h more dismayed w h e n he tries to talk to rustics at a country fair and finds that their unintelligible g r u n t i n g and growling speech—all vowels—reminds him of a herd of beasts. 15 A f t e r reading such a passage, w e m a y be inclined to endorse the sentiment of the hero of Kingsley Amis's novel The Green Man, w h o remarks: " I have never understood w h y a n y b o d y agreed to go o n b e i n g a rustic after about 1400." G e o r g e Eliot, as w e have seen, might to some e x t e n t agree, but despite her awareness of the darkness of Dagley's world, she is m o r e often aware of its virtues—especially its pace. "Ingenious philosophers tell y o u that the great w o r k of the steam engine is to create leisure for mankind. D o not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Leisure is gone—gone 15. For a similar response see Robert Browning's The Inn Album (1875), lines 969 ff. T h e wife of a village clergyman describes the housing as "ugliness at best and filthiness at worst." T h e children of the poor she tries to teach speak "brute language, cheery grunts / And kindly duckings." T h e sick poor she is supposed to nurse make her feel "Sickened myself at pig-perversity / Cat-craft, dog-snarling—maybe snapping." See also Keith, The Rural Tradition, pp. 92-93, which contrasts Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village (1824-32) with such writers as John Britton and George Crabbe.

38

• II. Felicitous Space •

where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow waggons, and the pedlars who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons." This learned intellectual responds to change by looking back to a cottage economy as a lost Eden, which she lovingly recreates in scene and in commentary. She writes of the dairy at the Poyser's farm in Adam Bede (1859): "it was a scene to sicken for . . . in hot and dusty streets—such coolness, such purity, such fresh fragrance." U. C. Knoepflmacher argues that in Adam Bede in particular, Eliot has cast her "reinterpretations of a rural English past" as a retelling of Paradise Lost, and, as Basil Willey notes, she is in this vein representatively Victorian. 16 T h e practical Victorians would approve of modern advances "while their affections were still with things past or passing." Willey cites as an example Eliot's comments in Amos Barton (1858), prompted by the remodeling of a village church: Immense improvement! says the well-regulated mind, which rejoices in . . . all guarantees of human advancement, and . . . has no m o m e n t s . . . in regret that dear, old, brown . . . picturesque inefficiency is . . . giving place to spick-and-span . . . new-varnished efficiency, which will yield endless diagrams . . . b u t . . . no picture. Mine, I fear, is not a well-regulated mind: . . . it lingers with a certain fondness over the days of [the past]. (Chapter I) This passage forecasts Thomas Hardy's angry comments in Jude the Obscure (1895) about changes in the ancient thatched-cottage hamlet of Marygreen. In his previous novel, Tess, Hardy represents technological advance as an alien intrusion. O f a railway engine in the green world of the country, he writes: "a fitful white streak of steam at intervals upon the dark green background denoted intermittent moments of contact between their secluded world and modern life. Modern life stretched out its steam feeler and quickly withdrew again, as if what it touched had been uncongenial." This anticipates Lawrence's account of technological change with which we began our discussion, but the situations in north and south were, of course, vastly different. Hardy's southern counties might be invaded by ideas, but technology, during the span of his novels, remained more a threat than a revolution. T h e changeless world of the homes and occupations of Hardy's Wessex rustics is pervasively pastoral, although J. Hillis Miller is right in his complaint that too many readers miss the note of irony that undercuts Hardy's pastoralism. 17 If old Wessex was an Eden, it was a flawed one, and its rusticities are reported with affection as well as amusement. Moreover, what Hardy chiefly values in his cottage scenes is not beauty. H e can sketch a cottage with the best of them when he wants to, as for example Tranter Reuben's home in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872): 16. U. C. Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, 1965), p. 120; Basil Willey, Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians (New York, 1966), pp. 43-44. 17. See Miller's book review in Novel (Spring 1969): 275.

39

• G E O R G E H. F O R D •

26. Birket Foster, The Old Chair Mender, from Pictures of English Landscape (London, 1862)

40

• II. Felicitous

Space

•

"It was a long low cottage with a hipped roof of thatch, having dormer windows breaking up into the eaves." But Hardy's cottages are not merely sketched; they are lived in, and the reader comes to know a way of life that is neither the brutish animal cottage-world of Kingsley nor the idealized world of Southey. What Hardy treasures in these structures is not beauty but age and the associations of age. There is a big difference between an American of any period who, when evoking in his inner vision a felicitous space, sees a log cabin, and the Victorian Englishman who saw a thatched cottage. The log cabin usually has no past; it is without associations of previous inhabitants. The English cottage had been lived in for centuries; it was a symbol of continuity.

#

If pace was the principal value of the cottage world for George Eliot, and age-old associations for Hardy, for another novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell, and for Tennyson, the emphasis is, instead, on its beauty. But in what did the beauty of a cottage consist—beauty, that is, as perceived by the spectator? A nineteenth-century architect who cared little for rustic cottages, Richard Elsam, contended that they achieved their effect on the spectator by a kind of fluke: the aging process coloring the native materials from which they were constructed, together with the accident of their felicitous location in a landscape, produced, he admitted, extraordinary aesthetic effects18—the effects of which Wordsworth writes in "Tintern Abbey": the cottages connect with landscape and with sky. One hundred years later, an American architect, P. H. Ditchfield, argued instead that the beauty of English cottages derived from their functionalism: "Frank and simple and direct," he writes, "built for use, not the exploiting of empirical theory, they possess in the highest degree perfect adaptation to function, and therefore absolute beauty."19 Here he puts his finger on one of the features of cottage architecture that drew the admiration of Victorians. Not only were cottages free from the taint of industrialism, they were also free from the taint of neoclassicism. Unlike large country houses, whose styles changed in each century, the cottage of 1750 was essentially the same as its model of 1550. The antineoclassical tastes of the nineteenth century found pleasure in this; the cottage's irregularities were the antithesis of both the Coketown row house and of Versailles or Blenheim Palace. In any event, the beauty of the rural cottages was not—peace to Macaulay—a mere legend. One of the most moving tributes to its effect on the spectator occurs in the writings of the tough-minded farmer and journalist William 18. Richard Elsam, An Essay on Rural Architecture (1805), p. 5. 19. P. H . Ditchfield, introduction to Picturesque English Cottages (Philadelphia, 1905). See also John Gloag, The Englishman's Castle (London, 1944), p. 13 3. 41

GEORGE H. FORD

27. M r s . H e l e n Allingham, R . W . S . , Cottage at Chiddingford, Surrey, Victoria and Albert M u s e u m , London. Cobbett, the author of Cottage Economy.

C o b b e t t ' s classic Rural Rides

(1830)

reports his impressions of the scenes in various shires he rode through. In Suffolk, for example, every cottage had glass w i n d o w s intact; he never saw paper or rags stuffed in the casement, and never, he says, did he see " o n e miserable hovel in which a labourer resided." H i s favorite shires w e r e H a m p s h i r e , Sussex, a n d K e n t , with their "ornamental gardening": " t h e walks, and the flower borders, and the honey-suckles, and roses, trained over the doors, or over arched sticks. . ." so 42

• //. Felicitous Space •

impressed him, "that I have many a time sitten upon my horse to look at them so long and so often, as greatly to retard me on my journey." 20 In the best of cottage communities all these aesthetic qualities were united, as in the hamlet of Helstone featured in Elizabeth Gaskell's fine novel, North and South (18S5). The heroine, Margaret Hale, grows up in a small parsonage in the N e w Forest surrounded by picturesque cottages. W h e n she tries to describe this perfect rustic retreat to her friends in London, they are incredulous. O n e young man makes fun of her account by pointing out that cottages are not covered with roses all year round. H e apologizes yet insists that she had made her home "sound like a village in a tale rather than real life." "And so it is," replies Margaret eagerly. "Helstone is like a village in a poem—in one of Tennyson's poems." In this conversation we have a nice confrontation of literary legend and reality. But what was a cottage "in a tale" or in a poem by Tennyson like? T h e poems Tennyson called English Idyls were, in his day, his most popular productions; the least read of his writings today, they nonetheless excel in pictures of cottage beauty. In Aylmer's Field (1864), the heroine is a friendly visitor to cottages, and under her guidance each acquires a different "robe" of flowers having "its own charm." Tennyson's association of the cottage with purity and innocence is as important to him as its beauty. This association, however, may not have been based on fact. It is sometimes asserted that virginity was a rare commodity among unmarried cottage-girls in Victorian times and that marriage was normally promoted by a pregnancy (as Hardy's Jude was trapped by Arabella, the pig-farmer's daughter). 21 Still, no factual investigation is required to recognize that Tennyson's usual assumption of the cottager's unspoiled innocence was an accepted pastoralism of long standing. T h e city streets are corrupt, the manor hall is corrupt, but not the cottage. Christina Rossetti, another writer of English idylls, offers a typical account of a cottage-girl's seduction in "Cousin Kate" (1862): I was a cottage-maiden Hardened by sun and air, Contented with my cottage mates . . . W h y did a great lord find me out, And praise my flaxen h a i r ? . . . . H e lured me to his palace home . . . . T o lead a shameless shameful life. 20. Cobbett, Rural Rides, pp. 556-66. 21. Some examples are cited in John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (Boston, 1969), p. 270. See also Mcrryn Williams, " T h e T h e m e of Seduction," Thomas Hardy and Rural England (London, 1972).

43

• GEORGE H. FORD

As a character in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley (1849) remarked, the assumption was that virtue grew under a thatch roof and vice under a tile roof. These associations with unspoiled innocence can also make the cottage into an image of purification. In Tennyson's "Palace of Art" (1842), the speaker, after her three years' debauch, takes a vow to purge her guilt: " 'Make me a cottage in the vale,' she said, / 'Where I may mourn and pray.' " For John Ruskin, a cottage is associated with clear running water—an image of purification. In his Praeterita (1885) Ruskin remarked on his life-long love of cottages: "While I never to this day pass a lattice-windowed cottage without wishing to be its cottager, I never yet saw the castle which I envied its lord." Ruskin recalls his childhood visits to stream-side cottages and his memories of "things modest, humble, and pure in peace, under the low red roofs at Croydon." This conjunction of pure stream and cottage scenery reappears in The Two Paths (1859), in a striking passage attacking the pollution and ugliness of the industrial world. Like Southey before him, Ruskin employs a contrast of past and present. On the outskirts of an industrial town he had encountered the ruins of an abandoned cottage, which inspired him to compare the scene with what he imagined it was like in the golden age of earlier times: I came upon an old English cottage . . . beside the river . . . with mullioned windows and a low arched porch; round which, in the little triangular garden, one can imagine the family as they used to sit in old summer times, the ripple of the river heard faintly through the sweetbriar hedge, and the sheep of the far-off wolds shining in the evening sunlight. There, uninhabited for many and many a year, it had been left in unregarded havoc of ruin, the garden-gate still swung loose to its latch; the garden, blighted utterly into afieldof ashes, not even a weed taking root there; the roof torn into shapeless rents; the shutters hanging about the windows in rags of rotten wood; before its gate, the stream which had gladdened it now soaking slowly by, black as ebony and thick with curdling scum; and bank above it trodden into unctuous, sooty slime: far in front of it, between it and the old hills, the furnaces of the city foaming forth perpetual plague of sulphurous darkness; the volumes of their storm clouds coiling low over a waste of grassland fields, fenced from each other, not by hedges, but by slabs of square stone, like gravestones, riveted together with iron.22 It is tempting to use Ruskin's denunciation to conclude this discussion. Written more than a century ago, in 1859, it serves as a salutary corrective to the all-toocommon notion today that ecological problems were first discovered in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet Ruskin does not quite satisfactorily serve to round out the account 22. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T . Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London and New York, 1903-12), XVI:338-39.

44

II. Felicitous Space •

of the conflicting response to old and new we have been tracing. In his warm panegyrics of the cottage and cottagers, he is typical of his age, but in his total repudiation of change Ruskin is untypical. Most Victorians, however devoted they may have been to an image of ideal cottage life, also tried to come to terms with industrial and other changes. Elizabeth Gaskell's heroine in North and South had been intensely devoted to an idyllic Tennysonian cottage world in the south of England, but was forced by circumstance to move to an ugly and bustling industrial town in the north. She is appalled by the shift in perspective forced on her, but she survives the shock, and ends by marrying an industrial manager from the north who woos her with a cottage rose he has plucked after visiting her native hamlet in the south. Like many Victorians, Margaret Hale has to accept the fact that the seemingly changeless cottage way of life was doomed to be modified. She does not

28. Samuel Palmer, Farmyard Near Princes Risborough, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 45

• GEORGE H. FORD •

rejoice in the change, as Macaulay did, but she comes to live with it. And what sustains her, as many Victorians were sustained, is her recollection of cottage scenes that flash upon that inward eye that is the bliss of solitude.

#

The final author whose observations are of value to us is Charles Dickens, a seemingly incongruous example. Our first impression of Dickens (as Robert L. Patten points out in Chapter Eight) is that he is a novelist of the city and of change. 2 ' In fact, Ruskin called him "a pure modernist—a leader of the steamwhistle party par excellence,"24 that is, Macaulay's party. A more recent critic, Herbert Sussman, in his book Victorians and the Machine, offers an exactly opposite opinion: "This myth of pastoral England, the organic society shattered by industrialism, remains the standard of value throughout [Dickens's] novels."25 Ruskin and Sussman are both right, but Sussman is a little more so. A representative Victorian, Dickens sometimes rejoices in change and scornfully repudiates the past; at other times he is appalled by the industrial invasion and evokes a cottage scene to exorcise the machine-made evil spirits, as for example in a passage from one of his sketches in The Uncommercial Traveller (1860). In his forties, Dickens traveled by train to revisit places in Kent where he had lived as a child. Dickens reminds us that his childhood had been passed in the days of stagecoaches, a preindustrial age and setting, and this fact profoundly influenced the whole cast of his fiction and its values. The first place he sought to revisit was a hayfield and garden that had been his childhood playground, only to find that it had been entirely "swallowed up" by a railway station: It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn-trees, the hedge, the turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the stoniest of jolting roads: while, beyond the Station, an ugly dark monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them and were ravenous for more destruction. The coach that had carried me away, was melodiously called Timpson's Blue-eyed Maid, and belonged to Timpson, at the coach-office up-street; the locomotive engine that had brought me back was called severely No. 97, and belonged to S.E.R., and was spitting ashes and hot water over the blighted ground . . . a wilderness of rusty iron.26 Leo Marx, the critic and historian who has written of the machine in the garden, would surely enjoy this passage. But here, the machine is not just in the garden; it has devoured the garden—how brilliantly effective is that characteristic touch of Dickensian animism—the tunnel with its open jaws! 23. See Raleigh, "The Novel and the City," pp. 291-328, and Alexander Welsh, The City of Dickens (Oxford, 1971). 24. Ruskin, Works, XVll:31n. 25. Herbert Sussman, Victorians and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 43. 26. "Associations of Childhood," All the Year Round, 30 June 1860, p. 274. 46

• II. Felicitous Space •

Ruskin, too, would have enjoyed the passage, but the difference in outlook between the two writers remains. Despite his fears and hatred, Dickens does not really believe, as Ruskin did, that we can get that machine out of the garden; it is there to stay. W e can make strenuous efforts to modify its ill effects, toil on committees (as Dickens himself did) to improve housing and to correct pollution. But the basic change has to be accepted. W e cannot literally go back to a pastoral world. W e can, however, find sustaining images of that lost Eden to keep the soul alive, landscapes of the mind, if not the actual retreat. "The memories which peaceful country scenes call up," Dickens writes, "are not of this world." For the "pain-worn dweller . . . in crowded pent-up streets," such scenes function as the vision seen by Wordsworth's Susan in London streets when she hears a bird singing: Green pastures she views in the mist of the dale Down which she so often has tripped with her pail; And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's The one only dwelling on earth that she loves. This is the way the cottage is generally used in Dickens's novels. It is a governing image whose function is consolatory and restorative. Through daydream and memory we "rather find / Strength in what remains behind." One other passage, from Little Dorrit (1857), may serve as a concluding example. It is much less solemn than passages that might be cited from Oliver Twist or The Old Curiosity Shop, for although the opportunity for pastoral sentiment is equally present here, it is consistently undercut by Dickensian jocularity and by the incongruity of having a thatch-roofed cottage appear in the heart of London. Mrs. Plornish is married to a workman, a poor plasterer. They live in one of those working-class semislums of London described earlier, this one named Bleeding Heart Yard. Mrs. Plornish decides to make part of their living-quarters into a shop and, in the course of the alterations, she discloses that she has always had a passion to live in a thatch-roofed cottage. She cannot very well migrate to George Eliot's Warwickshire or to Hardy's Wessex, so instead she hires a scene-painter to paint a crude mural over the whole wall leading from the shop into her parlor. It is her "little fiction," a "poetical heightening" in which Mrs. Plornish rejoices. This fantastic wall-painting depicts the exterior of a cottage surrounded by a luxuriant growth of hollyhocks and sunflowers, and a quantity of dense smoke issuing from the chimney indicated good cheer within. . . . A faithful dog was represented . . . and a circular pigeon-house, enveloped in a cloud of pigeons, arose from behind the garden-paling. On the door [a real door leading from the shop to the parlour] appeared the semblance of a brass plate, presenting the inscription, Happy Cottage, T . and M. Plornish. (Book II, chap. XIII) 47

GEORGE H. FORD •

Dickens comments: " N o Poetry and no Art ever charmed the imagination more than the union of the two in the counterfeit cottage charmed Mrs. Plornish. . . . T o Mrs. Plornish it was . . . a most wonderful deception, . . . a perfect Pastoral, . . . the Golden Age revived." 27 T h e fun of this passage may conceal how much it tells us about ourselves, for although Mrs. Plornish's "wonderful deception" may be amusingly vulgar, it vividly represents what Macaulay overlooked in his attack on Southey's ideal thatched cottages. O f course, Macaulay was not alone. W e can imagine how the Plornish mural would strike Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. M'Choakhumchild as even more offensive than pictures of horses on carpets or wallpaper. And later moralists and psychiatrists could point out that daydreaming and such pictorial myth-making are bad for us in terms of the reality principle, a disapproval that would have to include not only Mrs. Plornish but also her contemporaries, George Eliot and Charles Dickens, her successor D. H. Lawrence, and many another. Happily there is one philosopher who would approve of Mrs. Plornish's "little fiction"—Gaston Bachelard, whose Poetics of Space explores the function in our lives of the "hut dream," as he calls it, of which the thatched cottage dream is a more civilized version, with its "felicitous space" both inside and out. And as Alan Gussow's recent book on American landscapes makes clear, there is a difference between environment and place. " W e must save the environment," says Gussow, "for the environment sustains our bodies. But as human [ beings] we also require support for our spirits, and this is what certain kinds of places provide. . . . A place is a piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by feelings." 28 "Houses," as the late Henri Talon reminds us, "are natural metaphors for their inhabitants of whom they are but one particular expression." 29 Cottages served in Victorian times as metaphors not only for their inhabitants but also for all those who dreamed of them as felicitous spaces, spaces claimed by feelings. 27. See R. D. McMaster's comments on this passage in " T h e Dandy and the Savage," Studies in the Novel I (Summer 1969): 143-44. As he notes, the image is one "with which a Marxist or existentialist critic could have a field day." 28. Alan Gussow, A Sense of Place (San Francisco, 1972), p. 27. As an example of the prevalence of such feelings among Victorians, a recently published letter written to Dickens in 1840 by John Overs, a London workman, is worth noting. Rejecting Carlyle's proposals favoring emigration, Overs comments: " W e like to listen o' wintry nights to the drip of the eaves which wet us through in boyhood, and, when all is done, to lay our bones down among the dust of our fathers." As a Londoner who had migrated to the metropolis from the countryside, Overs's chances of having his bones so laid to rest would surely have been slim; but his evocation of the dripping eaves of his boyhood is a prosaic version of Wordsworth's Susan and her vision of "the one only dwelling on earth that she loves." See Sheila M. Smith, "John Overs to Charles Dickens: A W o r k i n g - M a n ' s Letter," Victorian Studies XVIII (December 1974): 209. 29. Henri Talon, "Dombey and Son," Dickens Studies Annual (1970), 1:149. See also Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City (Toronto, 1969), pp. 25-26.

48

# falling botan to file granité aid !. " If they two art' in heiiven i!' TIip little Maiil™ iliil reply, " 1 I muster ' arc 'V?!." 43

130. J. Gilbert, We Are Seven, from Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Robert Aris Willmott (1859).

399

U. C . K N O E P F L M A C H E R •

the same stiffness. Like the discomfited narrator of Wordsworth's " W e Are Seven," he winds up dissociating himself from the child who has elicited his attention. In " W e Are Seven," however, this dissociation is intentional: the speaker who belabors the uncomprehending girl ironically exposes his own, far greater incomprehension. In Arnold's poem, the poet's verbose detachment from the mute child remains unintentionally ironic; his "real," non-Wordsworthian child is but a literary device, an adjunct in a rhetorical effort to discredit Wordsworth's precedent. The "dramatic ventriloquism" that Coleridge found in some of Wordsworth's poems is nowhere more evident than in the young Arnold's use of the gipsy child as a puppet. In his 1879 selection of Wordsworth's poetry, Arnold pointedly omitted all of the Isle of Man sonnets, although he did reprint " W e Are Seven" (which had remained popular and had been illustrated by several Victorian engravers) (Figs. 130 and 131) and included "Anecdote for Fathers." Yet he deliberately placed the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" together with poems such as "Laodamia," "Dion," "Ode to Lycoris," and "Ode to Duty" in a section entitled "Poems Akin to the Antique, and Odes," thereby directly and knowingly contravening Wordsworth's express desire to have his ode stand as a separate selection in any edition of his poems. Arnold's introductory essay indirectly explains his motives: Even the 'intimations of of the famous Ode, those cornerstones of the supposed philosophic system of Wordsworth,—the idea of the high instincts and affections coming out in childhood, testifying of a divine home recently left, and fading away as our life proceeds,—this idea, of undeniable beauty as a play of fancy, has itself not the character of poetic truth of the best kind; it has no real solidity. The instinct of delight in Nature and her beauty had no doubt an extraordinary strength in Wordsworth himself as a child. But to say that universally this instinct is mighty in childhood, and tends to die afterwards, is to say what is extremely doubtful. In many people, perhaps with the majority of educated persons, the love of nature is nearly imperceptible at ten years old, but strong and operative at thirty. 14 As in the poem he had published exactly thirty years before he wrote these remarks, Arnold persists in opposing an adult and "educated" Victorian consciousness to Wordsworth's regressive cult of the child in Nature. Matthew Arnold's dissociation from what he caustically dubs "the high instincts of early childhood" was characteristic of other Victorian poets who likewise chose to dramatize the gap between the educated adult and the child tutored by Nature. Despite their frequently sentimental, even saccharine, portraits of divine and innocent children, the Victorians tended to look skeptically at the Wordsworthian 14. " P r e f a c e , " Poems of Wordsworth, p. xx (italics added).

400

XX. Wordsworthian Child of Nature •

WE

ARK

SJiVK-V,

And «fti*n » i t e r gurnet. * V i l e « i t ia ii;4it ami t 1 t i k e my l i t t l e |tiai3fi. Attd Bat tuy n ^ c r UM

131. Birket Foster, We Are Seven, from The Poetical Works of Wordsworth (1858).

401

• U. C. K N O E P F L M A C H E R

child. If "To A Gipsy Child" unconsciously imitates the distance between child and adult that Wordsworth had ironically handled in " W e Are Seven" and "Anecdote for Fathers," other poets resorted to deliberate parody to widen the rift. Charles Stuart Calverley's delightful "The Schoolmaster Abroad With His Son" is one such piece. In "Anecdote for Fathers," Wordsworth had favorably contrasted "little Edward's" illogic to the need for logic of his adult companion; in his parody, Calverley cleverly reverses the emphasis. In his poem, the Edward who rambles with his father on a jaunt through Nature is not the "dearest, dearest boy" apostrophized by Wordsworth, but, quite to the contrary, a boy who proves a nuisance to his learned parent. The poem begins auspiciously enough with a seeming paean to the natural surroundings:15 O what harper could worthily harp it, Mine Edward! this wide-stretching wold (Look out wold) with its wonderful carpet Of emerald, purple, and gold! Look well at it—also look sharp, it Is getting so cold. (Lines 1-6) Soon, however, the schoolmasterish habits displayed by the speaker turn into an exasperating botany lecture unheeded by his pupil. The purple is heather (erica); The yellow, gorse—call'd sometimes "whin." Cruel boys on its prickles might spike a Green beetle as if on a pin. You may roll in it, if you would like a Few holes in your skin. You wouldn't? Then think of how kind you Should be to the insects who crave Your compassion—and then, look behind you At yon barley-ears! Don't they look brave As they undulate (undulate, mind you, From unda, a wave). (Lines 7-18) As the poem continues, it becomes increasingly evident that the speaker is as distanced from the child as both are from a landscape that is being used as a backdrop for a lesson better delivered in a classroom. The "educated" speaker is 15. Quotations are taken from The Complete (London, 1902), pp. 85-87.

Works of C. S. Calverley,

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overeducated; the unconscious child is so unconscious that it promptly falls asleep: " H o w it interests e'en a beginner / ( O r tiro) like dear little Ned! / Is he listening? As I am a sinner / He's asleep—he is wagging his head. / W a k e up! I'll go home to my dinner, / And you to your bed." T h e poem capitalizes on the same lack of communion and reciprocity dramatized in Calverley's " W a n d e r e r s , " almost as superb a parody of "Resolution and Independence" as " T h e W h i t e Knight's Song" by Calverley's friend and correspondent, Lewis Carroll. It ends with the schoolmaster's abject recognition that his is, after all, not the Wordsworthian mode: T h e splendour of mountain and lake W i t h their hues that seem ever to vary; T h e mighty pine-forests which shake In the wind, and in which the unwary May tread on a snake; And this wold with its heathery garment Are themes undeniably great. But—although there is not any harm in't— It's perhaps little good to dilate O n their charms to a dull little varmint O f seven or eight. (Lines 38-48) In a penetrating essay on Calverley, written in 1901, Francis Thompson argued that it was Calverley's Arnoldian reverence for the classics that converted him into "the first of parodists": "his parodies are likewise criticisms, and very keen criticisms, of a poet's weaker side." 16 T h e remark is just. Yet Calverley not only pokes fun at Wordsworth's deification of all those little Edwards untouched by thought who wander through Nature's heathery garments, but also acknowledges what Wordsworth himself had stressed: thought and language embody our alienation from the simplicity shared by Nature and the child. Thompson himself in the early 1890s demonstrated the truth of Calverley's insight. T w o poems in the section he entitled "Poems on Children"—"The Poppy" and "Daisy"—make a similar point, albeit seriously. Both render the familiar situation: adult and girl walk together through a lush landscape; both 16. Francis Thompson, "Calverley," Literary Criticisms by Francis Thompson, Newly Discovered and Collected, ed. Rev. Terence L. Connolly (New York, 1948), p. 268. In an essay entitled "Sober and Substantial," Thompson criticizes Frederic {Harrison for holding it "no loss" that "Arnold, unlike his beloved preceptor, Wordsworth, halts at the ethical lesson of nature, is insensitive to the spirit within and behind nature which was the solemnly convinced burthen of Wordsworth's song" (p. 13 3).

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contrast the painfully self-conscious and time-obsessed adult to the child immersed in Nature. In " T h e Poppy," the flower of sleep ironically startles the speaker. H e has viewed the poppy erotically "as a swinked gipsy" and a "mouth wide a-pout for a sultry kiss." 17 But the child's gift of the flower mocks him and her and their association: "I am but, my sweet, your foster-lover, / Knowing well when certain years are over / You vanish from me to another" (lines 51-53). In "Daisy," too, the "tokens" given to the speaker by the little girl painfully remind him of the impossibility of regressing to her sexually innocent world. Deliberately echoing Wordsworth's "She Dwelt Among Untrodden W a y s , " Thompson bemoans the difference to him: She went her unremembering way, She went and left in me T h e pang of all the partings gone, And partings yet to be. (Lines 4 5 - 4 8 ) " T h e Daisy" concludes on a note of melancholy that is all the more moving because the little girl, unlike Arnold's thoughtful gipsy child, is so oblivious to mutability and pain. T h e conclusion, too, contains a denial of W o r d s w o r t h ' s yearned-for return to happier origins in Nature: Nothing begins, and nothing ends, That is not paid with moan; For we are born in other's pain, And perish in our own. (Lines 57-60) But the most consummate treatment in Victorian poetry of the Wordsworthian triad of Nature, child, and adult observer does not come in Thompson's mournful poetry of despair, but rather in that of his fellow-Catholic, Gerard Manley H o p kins. T h e young girl addressed in "Spring and Fall: to a young child" is neither as innocent as Thompson's child-companion nor as all-knowing as Arnold's gipsy child. Hopkins empathizes with the child's intimations, not of immortality, but of impermanence, the process of decay she witnesses during her first experience of autumn; the season becomes proleptic of the child's own impending egress from the Eden of Goldengrove into a fallen world: 18 17. All quotations are taken from The Poems of Francis Thompson (London, 1946), pp. 5-9. "Daisy" and "Poppy" were first published in Merry England in March 1890 and August 1891, respectively, and reprinted in the 1893 edition of Poems. 18. Quotations are taken from The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W . H . Gardner and N . H. Mackenzie, 4th ed., (London, 1967), pp. 88-89.

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Márgarét, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leáves like the things of man, you With your fresh thought care for, can you? Ah! ás the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you will weep and know why. (Lines 1 - 9 ) Moved by the child's spontaneous grief, her instinctive ability to care for the fallen leaves of the "unleaving" forest, the speaker knows, as she, not yet leaving ("unleaving") her childhood paradise, cannot know, that she too is subject to this cyclical process of natural decay. Although other adults may not "spare a sigh" over Nature's relentless decomposition, she will weep and, like the speaker, will then know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow's springs áre the same. (Lines 10-11) Although Hopkins here denies Wordsworth's fiction of the joyful child in Nature, he retains the older poet's faith in the spring or "fountainhead" located in the child's more intense capacity to feel. Unlike Arnold, Calverley, or Thompson, Hopkins imposes no adult emotions on the child; he is content to name and to interpret emotions he shares and understands: It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for. (Lines 14-15) The child first addressed as "Márgarét" (the accent-marks recalling margantes, a pearl, as well as a Wordsworthian daisy) becomes, in the last line of the poem, an ordinary "Margaret" (recalling now, through the removed accent-marks, the words "mar" and "regret"). She has become like Margaret in Wordsworth's "The Ruined Cottage" (or like Arnold's Marguerite), an adult destined to become consumed by the flux of the natural world. But her powers of sympathy can survive and be retained by a poet who shares Wordsworth's own acute concern with those "obstinate questionings / Of sense and outward things, / Fallings from us, vanishings" ("Ode," lines 142-44). In his letters Hopkins derisively lashes out at Swinburne's celebration of infants (in poems such as "A Child's Laughter," 405

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"Children," "Child and Poet," "Étude Réaliste") as "roi about babies, a blathery bathos" that almost "make a Herodian of me"; yet his attitude towards Wordsworth and the Wordsworthian child is always reverential: he speaks of his own poem " T h e Brothers," another adult observation of children, as "something in Wordsworth's manner" and elsewhere warmly identifies with those Wordsworthians who prize the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" without any of Arnold's condescension.19 In longer verse narratives, the child of Nature is also invoked, less as an object of contemplation in itself than as an antithesis to stories about adult experience. For Victorian narrative poetry seldom lingers on the youthful spots of time in Nature that arrest Wordsworth in The Prelude. In an essay on Browning's poetry, Francis Thompson maintained that "Nature—meaning thereby the external universehas for the present day a preponderating poetic importance which is to our thinking quite undue"; Thompson lauds Browning for making Nature nothing more than a "background—a sentient and significant background—for the drama of humanity." 20 Thompson's remark can be applied to Browning's use of a Victorianized Lucy Gray in his poetic drama Pippa Passes ( 1841 ). If Lucy's solitary song can only be heard at "the break of day" by an equally solitary poet in Nature, the songs of the "little black-eyed pretty Felippa" act as a connecting device to enlighten the lives of Browning's worldly men and women. T h e speaker of "Lucy Gray" cannot, or does not want to, reproduce the words of her eerie song. By way of contrast, Pippa's songs are carefully reproduced, even if their essence is presumably nonverbal: Overhead the tree-tops meet, Flowers and grass spring 'neath one's feet; There was naught above me, naught below, My childhood had not learned to know: For what are the voices of birds —Ay, and of beasts,—but words, words, Only so much more sweet? (iv. 174-80) 19. Claude Colleer Abbott, ed., The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges (Oxford, 195 5), pp. 304, 86. In defending the ode against Canon Dixon, Hopkins asserts that Wordsworth, like Plato, was one of a few men in history to whom something happened that "does not happen to other men"; thus, when he wrote the ode, "human nature got another of these shocks, and the tremble of its spreading. This opinion I do strongly share; 1 am, ever since I knew the ode, in that tremble" (Claude Colleer Abbott, ed., The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon [Oxford, 1955], pp. 147-48). 20. Thompson, "Browning Re-Considered," Literary Criticisms by Francis Thompson, p. 154. According to Thompson, Browning's use of Nature (examined in greater detail by Lawrence Poston in Chapter Twenty-One) merely reflects a "primal interest in man" (p. 156).

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Despite this insistence on a primordial world of treetops, flowers, and grass, Pippa's importance lies in her effect on her listeners in the poem. It is their corruption, rather than her inviolable innocence, that gives the poem its dramatic interest. To most Victorian poets, the Wordsworthian child of Nature could at best act as a reference point for their ambivalence about social order. In Idylls of the King, the unspoiled "maiden babe" called "Nestling" is invoked at the opening of "The Last Tournament" (1871). When the knights vie over the ruby carcanet of the child who died after being touched by Guinevere, the Tournament of Innocence degenerates into a bloody Darwinian contest in which men have "grown wild beast." Even in In Memoriam (which, in 1850, had overshadowed the appearance of The Prelude) Tennyson invokes the child only to identify with the precariousness of its strivings for security and certainty. Seen through the "freezing" glare of reason, the world of Nature yields no unified "He, They, One, All." Relief can come through regression, not because a lapse into childishness permits a glimpse of some immortal sea, but, quite to the contrary, because such a relapse at least constitutes an acknowledgment of man's utter helplessness and dependence (cxxiv). Tennyson's child is no mighty prophet or seer blessed: No, like a child in doubt and fear: But that blind clamor made me wise; Then was I as a child that cries, But, crying, knows his father wise; And what I am beheld again What is, and no man understands; And out of darkness came the hands That reach thro' nature, moulding man. (Lines 17-24) Like Arnold's gipsy child or Calverley's Edward or Thompson's girl-companion or Browning's Pippa or even Hopkins's Margaret, this figure remains an adult in miniature. Not until Yeats's "Among Schoolchildren" would English poets attempt to recover the bonds and the vital sense of unity with Nature that the child had betokened for Wordsworth. For Victorian prose writers and novelists, however, who were able psychologically to probe into the recesses of the child's mind and more minutely analyze its natural environment, the options were manifold.

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depreciate that great poet" Wordsworth, Ruskin vowed that such derogations would "never be successful." 21 T h e anti-Wordsworthian "efforts" to which Ruskin so obscurely alluded may well have been his very own. Ruskin openly joined the ranks of Wordsworth's derogators in the fifth volume of Modern Painters.22 There, he rejected the fostering Nature that earlier had for him been the essence of all "purist" art and, simultaneously, withdrew the assent he had formerly given to the Wordsworthian ideal of a childhood enriched by that benign Nature. T w o decades later, in Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880-81), where not only Wordsworth's fictions but also those of Dickens and George Eliot are under severe attack, Ruskin's disenchantment reached an almost vituperative intensity. Apparently stung by "Mr. Matthew Arnold's arrangements" and "high estimate" of W o r d s worth's poems, Ruskin seeks to restore a proper perspective: "though it is very proper that Silver [sir!] How should clearly understand and brightly praise its fraternal Rydal Mount, we must not forget that, over yonder, are the Andes all the while" (Works, XXXIV:318). Contrasted to true artists poised on Parnassian peaks, Wordsworth seems but a "pleasant fingerer of his pastoral flute," simply "a Westmorland peasant, with considerable less shrewdness than most border Englishmen or Scotsmen inherit" (p. 318). Like Arnold, Ruskin maintained throughout his life a proprietary interest in Wordsworth, and he returned, significantly enough, to the Wordsworthian mode of retrospection in his Praeterita, the truncated autobiography he began in 1885. T h e young Ruskin, however, clung to Wordsworth most steadfastly (and far less critically than the young Arnold of Fox How). Wordsworth happened to witness the tremulous Oxford undergraduate's recitation of his prize poem in 1839; he is in evidence, too, in " T h e Gipsies," a poem that Ruskin had unsuccessfully submitted for the same prize in 1837. In that poem, far more Wordsworthian in its allegiances than Arnold's " T o A Gipsy Child," Ruskin does not shy away from entering the persona of a solitary adolescent, a "gentle boy, who shunned his playmates rude, / T o seek the silver voice of solitude, / And, by some stream, amidst the shadows grey / Of arching boughs, to muse the hours away, / Smiled" (lines 118-22). Even before his Oxford years, as an eleven-year-old in 1830, Ruskin had modeled his "Iteriad; or, Three Weeks Among the Lakes" on The Excursion, the same poem from which he chose an epigraph for the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), a choice noted and approved by Wordsworth, who even 21. John Ruskin, " T h e Study of Art," reported in Building News, 23 April 1958; transcribed in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T . Cook and Alexander W e d d e r b u r n , 39 vols. (London, 1903-12), XVI:459. Hereafter, references to this edition are given in the text. 22. See, for instance, John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius ( N e w York and London, 1961), pp. 23 ff, and George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton, 1971), pp. 232-36.

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bought a copy of the book. In the "Iteriad," a series of verse-letters written to his parents, the boy recorded his impressions of all the hallowed Wordsworthian sites—Grasmere, Helvellyn, Keswick, Buttermere, Coniston, and Mount Skiddaw. T h e incomplete childish effusions were to have ended with the crowning sight of "old Mr. Wordsworth at the chapel of Rydal, / W h o m we had the honour of seeing beside all" (Works, 11:315). Ruskin's rejection of his own youthful Wordsworthianism began, as Francis G. Townsend has recognized, 23 in Modern Painters, III, where in a chapter entitled " T h e Moral Landscape" he methodically discredits Wordsworth's notion that "the intense delight which he himself felt, and which he supposes other men feel, in nature, during their thoughtless youth" was nothing less than an "intimation of their immortality" (Works, V:363-64). Like the Arnold of the 1879 "Preface," Ruskin doubts whether a youth could feel "so strongly as the man, because the man knows more, and must have more ideas" (p. 364). But unlike Arnold, and very much like a novelist, Ruskin also is willing to conduct a scrupulous psychological "self-examination" to determine whether "this strange delight in nature" deserves Wordsworth's claims. A scrutiny of his own recollections as a child in Nature, Ruskin insists, is undertaken not out of egotism, but because of his own special qualifications. He, too, he suggests, was once a Wordsworthian child: "whatever other faculties I may or may not possess, this gift of taking pleasure in landscape I assuredly possess, in a greater degree than most men" (p. 365). Ruskin hints that, like the "babe in arms" of The Prelude, he too has had fair seed-time for his soul: T h e first thing which I remember, as an event in life, was being taken by my nurse to the brow of Friar's Crag on Derwent Water; the intense joy, mingled with awe, that I had in looking through the hollows of the mossy roots, over the crag, into the dark lake, has associated itself with all twining roots of trees ever since. After recounting two other early memories, Ruskin analyzes their import: In such journeyings, whenever they brought me near the hills, and in all the mountain ground and scenery, I had a pleasure, as early as I can remember, and continuing till I was eighteen or twenty, infinitely greater than any which has since been possible to me in anything. (V:365) Though sensing in his experiences the same process described by Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey," Ruskin does not undertake this recreation of his early feelings in Nature for its own sake; instead, he calculatedly enlists his memories in 23. Francis G . T o w n s e n d , Ruskin and the Landscape Feeling, Illinois Studies in Literature and Language, X X X V , no. 3 (Urbana, 1951), p. 73.

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a polemic directed against Wordsworth's separation of the child's mystic feelings from the adult's sobered thoughts. T o him, the child brings to Nature the readymade associations and thoughts of his early reasoning self. There is no immanence in Nature, no definite "religious feeling" to be extracted from mountains and glens. Ruskin insists that it was his own reading of books (particularly Scott's novels) that made the scenery seem "enchanted" to him; it was his birth in London, with "no other prospect than that of brick walls," that conferred on the landscape an unusual charm "which a country-bred child would not have felt" (p. 366). Children bring to Nature the constituent elements of their personality. The pleasure of "pure landscape-instinct" may be safe and good; yet it may also be seductive and evil, a "joy only to the inactive and the visionary, incompatible with the duties of life" (p. 354). Even the element of novelty and surprise, those "interventions" that are akin to the divine for Wordsworth, may be nothing more than "a suspicious or evanescent element": I think that what Wordsworth speaks of as a glory to the child, because it has come fresh from God's hands, is in reality nothing more than the freshness of all things to newly opened sight. I find that by keeping long away from the hills, I can in great part still restore the old childish feeling about them; and the more I live and work among them, the more it vanishes.24 (V:369) This new insistence on an empirical "reality" is in full evidence in Modem Painters, V, where, as John Rosenberg and George P. Landow have shown, Ruskin continuously stresses the "insufficiency of the Wordsworthian view of nature." 25 As Landow points out, Ruskin opposes the quietism of a "Scotch clergyman" who had described a "scene in the Highlands to show (he said) the goodness of God." In reexamining the scene from his new Turnerian perspective Ruskin beholds a far more gruesome landscape. The observer of such misery, Ruskin implies, can no longer be a complacent Wordsworthian: "Truly, this Highland and English scenery is fair enough; but it has shadows; and deeper colouring, here and there, than that of heath and rose" ( Works, VII:270-71). In Modern Painters, V, however, Ruskin's most devastating subversion of Wordsworth is directed against the child of Nature whose early mind is "peopled" by "forms sublime and fair" (The Prelude, I. 466). It occurs in a chapter in which Wordsworth is never directly mentioned, the celebrated "The Two Boyhoods." In that chapter, Ruskin's Turner is reared among the "booths of a darksome 24. That Ruskin had little need for the surrounding hills while he lived and worked among them is demonstrated by the layout of his study at Brantwood, the country house in the Lake District he purchased in 1871, discussed by Ellen Frank in Chapter Four. 25. See Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass, p. 23, and Landow, Aesthetic and Critical Theories of Ruskin, p. 232.

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Vanity Fair, busily base" ( Works, VII.385). Turner's childhood environment thus is not only palpably at odds with that of Giorgione's boyhood, so lavishly described, but also pointedly unlike the self-enclosed basin that sequestered Wordsworth's most precious spots of time. Ruskin portrays Giorgione's golden Venice through images of water, breeze, and mountain that are suspiciously Wordsworthian; indeed, his prose can almost be scanned as stately blank verse: the Venetian world from which "all ignoble care and petty thoughts were banished" becomes, in Ruskin's ringing description, an airy construct with "winds and fiery clouds ranging at their will;—brightness out of the north, and balm from the south, and the stars of evening and morning clear in the limitless light of arched heaven and circling sea" (p. 375). If the setting of Giorgione's childhood is clear and undisturbed, a city bright and glittering, open to the sky, the cityscape into which Ruskin places the boy Turner is like that "sordor" which, twenty years later, he would claim only Byron saw: "None of these things very glorious; the best, however, that England, it seems, was then able to provide for a boy of gift" (p. 376). T h e slight is intended. W e are invited to recall not only Giorgione but also that other "boy of gift" who roamed the Lake Country—"then," at the same time that the boy Turner makes his way through the cluttered dark city and beholds the Thames, "with its stranded barges and glidings of red sail, dearer to us than Lucerne lake or Venetian lagoon" (pp. 376-77). Or, we may well ask, dearer also now "to us" than that lake Windermere that another boy of gift had celebrated in his "Iteriad" so very long ago? In " T h e T w o Boyhoods," Ruskin relies on indirection to attack what, in Fiction, Fair and Foul, he would eventually brand as Wordsworth's "lacustrine seclusion." Unlike Wordsworth, Ruskin's boy Turner does not escape the "meanness, aimlessness, unsightliness of the city," but instead accepts the harder burden of a quest for a visible unity. This quest does not lead the boy into hidden valleys of repose such as those in The Excursion : " N o gentle processions to churchyards among the fields, the bronze crests bossed deep on memorial tablets, and the skylark singing above them from among the corn. But the life trampled out in the slime of the street, crushed to dust amidst the roaring of the wheel, tossed countlessly into howling winter wind along five hundred leagues of rock-fanged shore" (p. 387). This same contrast between pastoralism and a dynamic, dusty, and changeful city-reality informs the opening of Fiction, Fair and Foul. Pretending to yield to a reverie about his "young days" in a green Dulwich, Ruskin begins by alluding to Wordsworth's " T o My Sister" and its fantasy of perennial spring: " O n the first mild—or, at least, the first bright—day of March, in this year, I walked through what was once a country lane" (Works, XXXIV:265). W i t h consummate deception, Ruskin makes the reader believe that he has completely yielded to a 411

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reverie about his boyhood in Nature: "A slender rivulet, boasting little of its brightness, for there are no springs at Dulwich, yet fed purely enough by the rain and morning dew, here trickled—there loitered—through the long grass between the hedges, and expanded itself into moderately clear and deep pools, in which under their veils of duck-weeds, a fresh-water shell or two, sundry curious little skipping shrimps, any quantity of tadpoles, and even sometimes a tittle-bat, offered themselves to my boyhood's pleased, and not inaccurate observation" (pp. 267-68). But Ruskin loiters in this lane only to shock his readers. T h e paths where he and his mother "used to gather the first buds of the hawthorn" have become obliterated: "grassless" and "deep-rutted," the lane is now covered by "mixed dust of every unclean thing that can crumble in drought, and mildew of every unclean thing that can rot or rust in damp: ashes and rags, beer-bottles and old shoes, battered pans, smashed crockery, shreds of nameless clothes, door-sweepings, floor-sweepings, kitchen garbage, back-garden sewage, old iron, rotten timber with jagged out-torn nails, cigar-ends, pipe-bowls, cinders, bones, and ordure, indescribable" (p. 266). Confronted with this chaos, Ruskin asks whether his childhood paradise has ever really existed. And how can the "children of to-day," accustomed to "the sight of this infinite nastiness," find "food" or "stimulus" for their own youthful pilgrimages? In Fiction, Fair and Foul Ruskin not only attacks Dickens for his delight in disorder and violence and George Eliot for reproducing only "blotches, burrs, and pimples," but he also inveighs against the delusive comforts he himself once found in Wordsworth's pastoral bowers. Arnold, who according to Ruskin had been unduly "sticking [Wordsworth] up—out of all bounds," preferred Wordsworth's serenity over Byron's discontent as an antidote to the loss of feeling in a mechanical age. But to Ruskin, Scott's presumed religious resistance to natural depravity and Byron's acute awareness of universal pain and evil are superior to the "innocent, unrepentant" mind of a poet who can be helpful only to "sinless creatures and scatheless, such of the flock as do not stray" (p. 320). Like the Ruskin who interpreted Sunday sermons to the little girls at Winnington school,26 Ruskin's Scott is aware of the child's potential sinfulness, a schoolmaster who dispenses "lessons to his children in Bible history." Ruskin's identification with Byron's 26. After his unsuccessful attachments to figures of ideal girlhood in Adele Domecq, Effie Gray, and Rose LaTouche, Ruskin sought to erect a collective image of an unaging Wordsworthian child; to his "little birds" at Winnington Hall, he wrote: " H o w would you like to be all alike—though you were ever so pretty—ever so good! Fancy coming down in the morning and nobody knowing which was which—nor themselves in the looking glass—having to sew numbers on your sleeves—or tie your hair in different knots—and you know—(there could be only one ideal knot—)—so even that would be unallowable on ideal principles" (letter of March 1859, The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin's Correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the Children at Winnington Hall, ed. Van Akin Burd [London, 1969], p. 131).

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"volcanic instinct" is even stronger: "In Byron the indignation, the sorrow, and the effort are joined to death"; they are the parts of his nature "from which the piously sentimental public, offering daily the pure oblation of divine tranquility, shrink with anathema" (p. 344). In the fourth essay of Fiction, Fair and Foul, Ruskin satirized those "bucolic friends" who had chided his preference of Byron over Wordsworth. He excoriates the sentimentalists, the "amiable persons" who, as he once did, "call themselves Wordsworthians," believers who "have read—usually a long time ago—'Lucy Gray,' 'The April Mornings,' a picked sonnet or two, and the 'Ode on Intimations' " (p. 349). Earlier, he mockingly contrasted Wordsworth's sonnet on Westminster Bridge to some lines from Byron's Island. Byron is adult; Wordsworth remains a child: "while Mr. Wordsworth in irrepressible rapture, calls God to witness that the houses seem asleep, Byron, lame demon as he was, flying smoke-drifted, unroofs the houses at a glance, and sees what the mighty cockney heart of them contains in the still lying of it, and will stir up to purpose in the waking business of it, 'The sordor of civilization, mixed / W i t h all the passions which Man's fall hath fixed' " (p. 342). Although by 1884, in The Art of England, Ruskin would again become a tentative ally of "Mr. Matthew Arnold and the Wordsworth Society," the man who returned to the Satanic "track of Byron" against which his father had warned him in 183 7 27 could no longer abide in Wordsworth's childhood paradise. If Ruskin's outraged sense of pain and evil made that paradise an impossibility, Walter Pater welcomed the nostalgic process of retrospection by which the adult mind lingers on the child's first world. Pater, too, regards Wordsworth as a quietist who resembled "early Italian or Flemish painters," a purist "tethered down to a world, refined and peaceful indeed, but with no broad outlook." 28 Yet Pater's 1874 essay on Wordsworth delights in those regressive journeys that Ruskin had so ironically rejected: "It was in this mood that [Wordsworth] conceived those oft-reiterated regrets for a half-ideal childhood, when the relics of Paradise still clung about the soul—a childhood, as it seemed, full of the fruits of old age, lost for all, in a degree, in the passing away of the youth of the world, lost for each one, over again, in the passing away of actual youth" (p. 55). Pater can thus allow what Ruskin so vehemently denies—the value in everyone's life of remembered childhood Edens, some static "abiding-place." Demanding action, Ruskin had thrust his boy Turner into a hectic and mutable present; contending that "the end of life is 27. Ibid., p. 78; to Ruskin's father, his son's "evil Genius" was derived from Byron, but John James Ruskin never says whether the "steady and useful light" of John's "good Genius" emanates from Wordsworth. 28. Walter Pater, "Wordsworth," Appreciations, with an Essay an Style (London, 1920), pp. 44, 54. 413

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not action but contemplation—being as distinct from doing," Pater welcomes Wordsworth's "impassioned contemplation" of an imagined childhood past. Whereas Ruskin's "The T w o Boyhoods" is both moralistic and reality oriented in its exaltation of Turner's sordid London over the more beautiful, secluded world of Giorgione's (and Wordsworth's) youth, Pater's "The Child in the House" (1878), like the early chapters of Marius the Epicurean (1885), resorts to a Wordsworthian exploration of the interaction between outward setting and the child's mind. Yet the environment that stamps the selves of Florian Deleal and of the young Marius is a country house rather than a desolate mountain or lake. Interested in process, rather than in a definable moral influence, Pater admits any external setting: "For it is false to suppose that a child's sense of beauty is dependent on any choiceness or special fineness, in the objects which present themselves to it, though this indeed comes to be the rule with most of us in a later life; earlier, in some degree, we see inwardly; and the child finds for itself, and with unstinted delight, a difference for the sense, in those whites and reds through the smoke on very homely buildings, and in the gold of dandelion at the road-side, just beyond the houses."29 Ruskin's sharp distinction between an urban world of smoke and dust and a golden world in touch with Nature, Pater seems to say, is meaningless: any external object can serve to help differentiate our childhood selves from the not-self. Thus it is that Pater feels no self-consciousness in Marius the Epicurean whenever he connects an imaginary Roman boy to the Cumberland peasants whom Wordsworth actually met. 30 For Pater, then, who openly acknowledges Wordsworth in his evocations of Florian's and Marius's childhoods, Wordsworth remains a myth-maker whose enduring concerns and archetypes can be of value to all those interested in the formation of character. Pater's insight serves as a helpful bridge for our consideration of the uses of the Wordsworthian child by those bona fide fiction-makers, George Eliot and Dickens, whom Ruskin had attacked, together with Wordsworth, in Fiction, Fair and Foul. Helpful, too, is Pater's own practice as a novelist. Near the conclusion of Marius the Epicurean, Pater has his protagonist revisit his birthplace in the country, an old villa "half-hidden by poplar trees." Unlike Ruskin's treatment of his return to Dulwich, Marius's revisitation is regarded by Pater as a solemn ritual: soon to die himself, the adult Roman beholds near his mother's funeral urn, the "protruding baby hand" of a boy, long dead, a friend who, like Wordsworth's boy from Winander, "had descended hither, from the lightsome world of childhood, almost at the same time with her." T o the 29. Walter Pater, "The Child in the House," Miscellaneous Studies (London, 1920), p. 175. 30. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (London, 1920), 1:5. 414

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brooding Marius, it seems "as if this boy of his own age had taken filial place beside her there, in his stead." 31 Victorian fiction is full of such revisitations—though not all so lugubrious. At the beginning of The Mill on the Floss (1860), the narrator becomes arrested by the "same unresting wheel" that hypnotizes the motionless little girl who stands poised "at the edge of the water." 32 Near the end of Great Expectations (1860-61), after an eleven-year absence from the forge in the marshes, the adult Pip returns to see a replica of his former self: "there, fenced into the corner with Joe's leg, and sitting on my own little stool looking at the fire, was—I again!" 33 In the second book of The Prelude Wordsworth had explained that a vacancy between his adult thinking self and his childhood in Nature created a double consciousness: T h e vacancy between me and those days Which yet have such self-presence in my mind, That musing on them, often do 1 seem T w o consciousnesses, conscious of myself And of some other being . . . . (ii. 29-33) T h e Victorian novel in general, and Dickens and George Eliot in particular, exploit this selfsame double vision of an adult self beholding its earlier incarnation. In Great Expectations, Pip's "first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things" among the "marsh country, down by the river" is recreated by a remembering adult mind that has painfully travelled far beyond that early state which Wordsworth calls "the eagerness of infantine desire" (II. 26). Unlike Arnold or Thompson or Ruskin, both George Eliot and Dickens celebrate the sources of energy that lie in the river-children they observe. Yet they too sadly depict what Wordsworth had called the "union that cannot be" (II. 24). For Wordsworth, "the fairest of all rivers" could irrigate and replenish the channels of his imagination and become "the river of my mind": Oh, many a time have I, a five year's child In a small millrace severed from his stream Made one long bathing of a summer' day; Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again. (i. 288-92) 31. Ibid., 11:205-6. 32. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston, 1961), p. 8. Future references to this edition are given in the text. 33. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Earle Davis ( N e w York, 1959), p. 489. Future references to this edition are given in the text. 415

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T h e "bright blue river" that passes along the "margins of our terrace walk" in The Prelude remains a therapeutic connection between past and present. For Dickens and George Eliot, however, the dark rivers that connect Pip to Magwitch and reunite Maggie with T o m are laden with far more ominous connotations. The "peacefulness" of the scene described in the opening of The Mill on the Floss is highly deceptive: the little rivulet with its "dark, changing wavelets" flows into the mighty Floss that will engulf the Tulliver children; Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. Although Great Expectations, too, is set in an earlier and more tranquil time, Dickens's imagination never reconstructs a lush pastoral setting such as that which George Eliot uses to lure the reader into sharing little Maggie's obliviousness to time and change. In two successive installments of " T h e U n commercial Traveller" written shortly before he began Great Expectations, Dickens returned to "scenes among which my earliest days were passed; scenes from which I departed when I was a child, and which I did not revisit until I was a man." 34 Like Ruskin, Dickens finds "Dullborough" (Chatham) an irrevocably altered enclave: "the beautiful hawthorn-trees, the hedge, the turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, have given place to the stoniest of roads." In Great Expectations this same stony reality invades Pip's life in the country. W e find ourselves in a graveyard, among tombstones that record thwarted expectations. If the narrator and reader of The Mill on the Floss must be gently startled to forgo their "love with moistness" on a distant February afternoon, Pip and the reader of Great Expectations are far more violently jolted. Behind the tombstone springs a "man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars." In The Prelude, Wordsworth had also resorted to terrifying out-of-doors encounters to define Nature's hold on his young imagination; he is startled by shepherds the size of giants "stalking through thick fog" (VIII. 266) and arrested by the sudden appearance of the "uncouth shape" of the soldier: a more meagre man W a s never seen before by night or day. Long were his arms, pallid his hands; his mouth Looked ghastly in the moonlight: from behind A mile-stone propped him. . . . (iv. 393-97) Both Dickens and George Eliot appropriated the Wordsworthian child of Nature to an extent not possible for most of the writers we have so far examined. T h e George Eliot who wrote Silas Marner to offset the grim ending of The Mill on 34. Charles Dickens, "Associations of Childhood," All the Year Round, 30 June 1860, p. 274.

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the Floss chose to stress the more beneficent aspects of the Wordsworthian vision; Dickens, on the other hand, adapts for his purposes the terror that plays such an important role in The Prelude. That George Eliot was even a more confirmed Wordsworthian than Arnold and Ruskin is easily documented; her incorporation of Wordsworth's private mythology in her own pastoral fictions suggests a sympathetic identification perhaps unique among the Victorians. Dickens, on the other hand, left little record of any overt indebtedness to the poet who shunned London as a "monstrous ant-hill" of "modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows, / All out-o'-the-way, far fetched perverted things, / All freaks of Nature" (VI. 713-15). But Wordsworth was hardly uninterested in such freakish mutations. And, as we shall see, the city novelist who promptly bought The Prelude on its appearance in 185035 had keen affinities of his own with the bard of Nature.

# O n October 19, 1860, Wordsworth's contemporary and friend, the eighty-fiveyear-old Henry Crabb Robinson, recorded the particulars of an "agreeable" meeting with "Miss Evans": "She has quite won on me. . . . I began a course of instruction on Wordsworth's poetry, repeated to her what I could by heart, and . . . devoted several hours to the making out of a list of those of Wordsworth's poems which I thought a beginner ought to read. She will buy his works." 36 Miss Evans, whose identity as George Eliot had become public knowledge around this time, may not yet have owned her own copy of Wordsworth's collected poems; still, she most assuredly was not the "beginner" Robinson innocently took her to be. T w o decades earlier, Marian Evans had entreated her brother Isaac, on his honeymoon in the Lake District, to bring back "some rose-leaves from Wordsworth's garden," 37 and thereafter Wordsworth's impact was to endure throughout her literary career. It is manifest in Adam Bede (1859), where Arthur Donnithorne's underestimation of a "volume of poems" called Lyrical Ballads is ironically exploited by the novelist who adopts the Pastor's words in The Excursion as a motto for her own pastoral intentions: "So that ye may [shall] have / Clear images before your gladdened eyes / Of nature's unambitious underwood / And flowers that prosper in the shade" (VI. 651-54). It is seen again in those eleven sonnets "on the childhood of a brother and sister" and the "mutual influences in their small lives" which George Eliot penned in 1869 (GEL, V:403). It is evident in 35. Dickens owned an 1836 copy of Wordsworth's Poetical Works and an 1850 copy of The Prelude (reprint of the Catalogue of the Library of Charles Dickens from Gadshill, ed. J. H . Stonehouse [London, 1935], p. 119). Professor Kathleen Tillotson kindly informs me that it was on August 12, 1850, that Dickens bought The Prelude from Bradbury and Evans. 36. H . C. Robinson, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley (London, 1938), 11:799. 37. George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight ( N e w Haven, 1954-5 5), 1:99. Hereafter, this edition is referred to as GEL in the text.

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George Eliot's delight in Modern Painters as an equivalent to "the sublimest parts in Wordsworth" and in her regret that Arnold's 1879 selections had omitted some of the "precious lines" she valued as personal touchstones (GEL, 11:423; VII:262). Yet Wordsworth's influence remains most prominent in the childhood portions of The Mill on the Floss, which Crabb Robinson had read six months before his meeting with Miss Evans, and in Silas Mamer (1861), which less than a year later he pronounced to be "a powerful production." T o the octogenarian Robinson The Mill on the Floss recalled the humor of Jane Austen and the melodrama of Bulwer Lytton, but not the rural scene of childhood in Wordsworth's poetry. He was only slightly more discerning in his choice of analogues for the story of Silas—a story of which George Eliot had said that she expected no one to be "interested in it but myself (since William Wordsworth is dead)" (GEL, 111:382). T o be sure, Robinson duly noted the novel's epigraph from "Michael" ("A child more than all other gifts / That earth can offer to declining man, / Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts"); yet the "motto" only made him ponder about the novel's "great affinity to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.... A little child, its mother having frozen to death at his solitary hovel, is taken in by Silas.... it is to him what the blessing of the animals is to the Ancient Mariner." 38 Robinson's locus is correct, even if his particulars remain hazy. Both The Mill and Silas Mamer hark back to those poems of severance, loss, and expiation that had haunted the imaginations of Coleridge and Wordsworth at the turn of the century. I have elsewhere suggested that George Eliot wanted to recall Coleridge's Mariner by giving the name "Marner" to the pale, bent, epileptic exile, the gaze of whose "large brown protuberant eyes" terrifies both the adults who accuse him of the "old demon worship" and the young boys who have left off "their nutting and birds'-nesting."39 Some Gothic touches also exist in The Mill, where the darkhaired little demonist who mutilates her dolls and can expound on the shapes of the Devil goes far beyond her superstitious father's own "rampant Manichaeism." Yet to depict the loss of wholeness and unity, George Eliot preferred to resort to the metaphors of a Wordsworth who never abandoned the safer realm of the real: "These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a short of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows—such things as these are the mother-tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them" (The Mill, p. 38). 38. Robinson, Henry Crabb Robinson, 11:800-801. 39. George Eliot, Silas Marner, The Weaver of Raveloe, ed. Jerome Thale ( N e w York, 1962), p. 3. Future references to this edition are given in the text.

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In The Mill on the Floss George Eliot depicts the loss of such a fleeting childhood Eden; in its emphasis on the irreversible destruction that accompanies all change and growth, the novel recalls Wordsworth's own elegiac treatment of the adult's alienation from childhood in Nature. In Silas Marner, on the other hand, George Eliot attempts to recover a more child-like existence closer to the forms of Nature. Maggie Tulliver not only bears the name of her grandmother, Margaret Beaton, and of her struggling aunt and godmother, Gritty Moss, but also of the protagonist of " T h e Ruined Cottage." In telling Maggie's story, George Eliot's narrator hopes to produce the same effect that the Wanderer induces through his tale of Margaret's suffering and death. Like the Wanderer's listener, the reader of The Mill is asked to recover out of a panorama of decay That secret spirit of humanity Which, 'mid the calm oblivious tendencies Of nature, 'mid her plants and weeds, and flowers, And silent overgrowings, still survived. (The Excursion, i. 927-30) In Silas Mamer, however, George Eliot retreats to a more restorative world of vegetation, she rescues the Paradise lost by the Tullivers. And, like the sick Susan Gale in " T h e Idiot Boy," the paralyzed Silas Marner is healed through the agency of a child: "There was love between him and the child that blent them into one and there was love between the child and the world—from men and women with parental looks and tones, to the red lady-birds and the round pebbles" (Silas Marner, p. 165). Both The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner are strongly indebted to "Michael," the poem from which George Eliot drew the "motto" for the latter work. The Mill follows the outlines of Wordsworth's story of decay—a secluded pastoral world in which parents and child are briefly at one gives way to separation, exile, and ruin. Silas Marner, on the other hand, reverses this progress. Silas and the reader are taken back to the fusion that existed between Nature, adult, and child when the manly Michael did "female service" for little Luke and "rocked / His cradle as with a woman's gentle hand" (lines 154-58). In The Mill on the Floss, Mr. Tulliver's oneness with the "little u n " who takes after his "side" also betokens his identification with a feminine Nature represented by darkness, water, and the moon. Similarly, Maggie's rare moments of oneness with the masculine brother who will replace her father come only when both children can forget their sexual differences and merge into a primordial and undifferentiated natural world such as the quasi-magical Round Pool ("no one knew how deep it was; and it was mysterious, too, that it should be almost a perfect 419

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round, framed with willows and tall reeds"). Yet, as in "Michael," these cherished moments of harmony give way to discordant intrusions of social demands, which George Eliot, like Wordsworth, identifies with the ways of the "dissolute city," with legal forfeitures, demeaning work. As in "Michael," a natural world of female nurture is broken by the demands of a social system of proprietorship that calls for male aggression: if Wordsworth's Luke slackens in the city and seeks a "hidingplace" from his father, T o m Tulliver thrives in St. Ogg's; yet in his obsessive attempts to recover his father's mill, he only manages to widen the gap between himself and his sister and to remove both from the natural world in which she thrived. The Mill on the Floss shows George Eliot's penetration of the imagery to which Wordsworth habitually resorted to convey the natural child's dispossession. T h e nutting-crook given by an adult to the little boy who so mercilessly violates "the green and mossy bower" in "Nutting," the raised "hook" with which Lucy Gray's father snaps "a faggot-band" before sending the child on her ill-fated mission, like the "sickle, flail, or scythe" that Michael and Luke try to repair, are male tools of work that become emblems of destruction. T h e Clipping T r e e seen again at the end of "Michael" symbolizes the severance between father and son and their joint severance from the "feelings and emanations" that united them to each other and to the surrounding natural world. In The Mill on the Floss, as Eleanor O'Neal has pointed out, there is a similar clash between the natural, feminine images of water and trees associated with Maggie and the recurrent images of knives, scissors, swords, shears, and machinery associated with the representatives of a male order such as Tom, Lawyer Wakem, Stephen Guest, and Mr. Deane. The "unfinished sheepfold" that Wordsworth places beside the "boisterous brook of Greenhead Ghyll" stresses the vulnerability of all social structures in the face of an inviolable Nature: " Y e t the oak is left / That grew beside their door." In The Mill on the Floss, however, Nature in the shape of the swollen river hurls "fragments" of some "wooden machinery" at T o m and Maggie. T h e devastation is complete; there is no emblem for Nature's continutiy: " T h e uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred: if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old" ( T h e Mill, "Conclusion," p. 457). Unable to end on the serene note with which "Michael" ends, George Eliot seizes on the Wordsworthian myth of childhood at the moment of Maggie's and Tom's violent death. There is a desperation in the narrator's assertion that the drowning brother and sister lived "through again in one supreme moment the days in which they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together." In Silas Maimer these daisied fields are allowed to permeate the entire novel. If 420

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Mr. Tulliver and his children are destroyed by the city across the river from the ancestral mill, Silas Marner abandons the acquisitive city-ethic he has carried into Raveloe as soon as his hoarded gold is replaced by the golden-haired foundling deposited at his door. "Feyther" Marner can reenter the nurturing pastoral world lost to the Tullivers as well as to Michael, and his reentry is made possible by his transformation into a male mother who does "female service" to the natural child of a man who, like Tom, is too obsessed by the need to maintain his social possessions. Eppie reawakens in Silas those same natural feelings which Michael so movingly recalls in Wordsworth's poem: "Never to living ear came sweeter sounds / Than when I heard thee by our fireside / First uttering, without words, a natural tune" (lines 345-47). The feelings that linked Michael both to his child and to Nature are at odds with the "endless industry" for which his and Isabel's household is proverbial—an industry Wordsworth represents early in the poem by the two spinning wheels of "antique form." In Silas Marner, the weaver's loom acts even more prominently as an emblem for an excessive devotion to mechanical and alienating work. Eppie, however, rescues Silas from "the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web"; as she toddles out of the cottage "to pluck the flowers" or turn her "ear to some sudden bird-notes," Silas, "called away from his weaving," finds his senses reawakening with "her fresh life" and warming him into joy "because she had joy." Gradually, Silas remembers his own early childhood in Nature: "Silas began to look for the once familiar herbs again; and as the leaves, with their unchanged outline and markings, lay on his palms, there was a sense of crowding remembrances from which he turned away timidly, taking refuge in Eppie's little world" (Silas Marner, p. 159). Like Wordsworth's "Michael," Silas Marner ends with a glimpse of a broken stone barrier. But the emphasis is on an open access to the natural forms that bind the identity of parents and children: "The garden was fenced with stones on two sides, but in front there was an open fence, through which the flowers shone with answering gladness" ("Conclusion," p. 227). This gladness is neither forced nor unreal. Silas's redemption by the child Hepzibah remains a masterly reactivation of Wordsworth's cherished belief in the healing intercourse among adult, child, and Nature. In an essay written two years before she published her first work of fiction George Eliot praised Wordsworth, among others, for the powerful sympathies stimulated by his poems; turning to the "one great novelist" also capable of infusing ordinary reality with such intense emotions, she professed to be disappointed by Dickens's "unreality"; only his rich humor, she asserts, can act "as a corrective to his false' psychology, his preternaturally poor children and artisans, 421

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his melodramatic boatmen and courtezans."40 George Eliot and Dickens eventually came to respect each other's work highly, but it is most doubtful whether she ever recognized how much her "incomparable Wordsworth" had contributed to Great Expectations, a novel never mentioned in her letters. Victorian reviewers, however, were fond of comparing Dickens to Wordsworth. An anonymous reviewer of The Cricket cm the Hearth (1845), welcomed the book's attention to "humble life, contemplated in its poetic aspects, and its more romantic crises"—an attention which, to the reviewer, showed Dickens's ambition "of becoming the Wordsworth of prose fiction."41 Dickens's own contention in the preface to Bleak House (1852-53) of having "purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things" does indeed seem to echo Coleridge's famous explanation of Wordsworth's objective "to give the charm of novelty to things of every day."42 Yet the key connection between poet and novelist unquestionably lies in the importance each ascribes to children. Philip Collins rightly begins his Dickens and Education by emphasizing that "Charles Dickens was the first English novelist in whose stories children are frequent and central instead of sustaining merely minor roles in the background."43 Dickens's few direct references to Wordsworth always occur when he speaks of the shades of the prison house that begin to close on the growing boy. In a speech delivered in 18 5 7 at the Warehousemen and Clerks' Schools, Dickens attacked the sort of schools "where the bright childish imagination is utterly discouraged, and where those bright childish faces, which it is so very good for the wisest to remember in after life, when the world is too much with us early and late, are gloomily and grimly scared out of countenance." 44 And, in another speech given at the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution, Dickens held that "if such institutions had existed in times gone by . . . even Wordsworth might have been drawn from the dust of those shelves where until late he had lain unnoticed." 45 The work that Dickens himself seems to have drawn from those dusty shelves was The Prelude. Before the posthumous appearance of Wordsworth's poem, the only true Wordsworthian figure in Dickens' fiction is, as Philip Collins has noticed, the titular hero of Barnaby Rudge (1841). Like Wordsworth's Idiot Boy, 40. George Eliot, " T h e Natural History of German Life," Westminster Review L X V I (July 1856): 51-79; reprinted in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London, 1963), pp. 270-72. 41. Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, 17 January 1846, p. 44; reprinted in Philip Collins, ed., Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London, 1971), p. 174. 42. Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (Cambridge, 1956), p. xxxii; Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. 169. 43. Philip Collins, Dickens and Education (London, 1965), p. 1. 44. Charles Dickens, The Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. K. J. Fielding (Oxford, 1960), p. 241. 45. Ibid., p. 5.

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Barnaby lives in a permanent childhood in Nature; at the end of the novel he regains his "love of freedom and interest in all that moved or grew, or had its being in the elements" and can never again be persuaded "to set foot in the streets" of London. 46 Yet in the novels written after 1850, from Bleak House to Edwin Drood, Dickens introduces echoes from The Prelude. Thus, Esther Summerson's epiphany at the garden gate before she meets Jo is described as a feeling she "ever since" connects "with that spot and that time, and with everything associated with that spot and that time" (p. 326). Again, as P. D. den Hartog has pointed out to me, in Little Dorrit (1855-57), the imprisoned Clennam, barred from the golden autumn fields outside, hears through little Dorrit's voice "all that great Nature was doing" and remembers "the harvests of tenderness and humility that lie hidden in the early-fostered seeds of the imagination." 47 But in Great Expectations Dickens dispenses with this sentimentalized Mother Nature and invokes instead those "anxious visitations" that beset the child's mind, the "terrors, pains, and early miseries, / Regrets, vexations, lassitudes" that Wordsworth deemed a "needful part" in the formation of his self ( T h e Prelude: I. 345-46). Like Wordsworth, Dickens insists on the shaping power of fear: "Since that time, which is far away now, I have often thought that few people know what secrecy there is in the young, under terror. N o matter how unreasonable the terror, so that it be terror" (Great Expectations, p. 13). If the child in The Prelude hears "Low breathings coming after me, and sounds / O f undistinguishable motion" after he has offended Nature by snaring birds and stealing the "captive of another's toil" (I. 323-25, 320), the boy Pip finds that after stealing the food for the convict "everything seemed to run at me": a dead hare appears to wink, "gates and dikes and banks [come] bursting at [him] through the mist," a black ox stares at him in "an accusatory manner" (p. 15). In Great Expectations the most vivid of these moments of childhood fear comes at the end of the first chapter and corresponds to the key passage in Book XII of The Prelude, in which Wordsworth isolates the two most memorable "spots of time" from his "first childhood." Pip looks at the marshes into which Magwitch disappears: " O n the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon by which the sailors steered—like an unhooped cask upon a pole—an ugly thing when you were near it; the other a gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate" (p. 5). As John P. McWilliams has shown, these two images pattern the entire novel: the "landscape has established symbols that 46. Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge ( N e w York, 1872), p. 257. 47. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. John Holloway (London, 1971), p. 884.

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engross Pip's imagination, but that he cannot explain." 48 Only after the novel's conclusion can we and the adult Pip grasp the significance of these symbols: the illusive light that beckons Pip to his great expectations in London will turn out to be linked to the black gibbet he associates with the disappearing convict. In Book XII of The Prelude the boy Wordsworth, separated from an adult companion, finds himself alone on "the rough and stony moor." H e stumbles on the "gibbet mast" where "in former times / A murderer had been hung in iron chains" (XII. 233, 235-37); fleeing in terror, "faltering and faint," he sees a naked pool and a "beacon on the summit" and is seized by "the visionary dreariness" of the entire scene (lines 249-50, 256). Although Wordsworth does his best to invest this remembrance with a "sublime" radiance, it is significant that he should follow this event by a "memorial" that stresses the unreasonable guilt which haunted his childish imagination. T o him, the spot on which he fixed his "expectation" of a carriage that would lead him to his father's house becomes, after his father's sudden death, forever associated with his anxieties. Guiltily, he regards his father's death as a "chastisement." Pip, too, is consumed by irrational guilt. Yet his aggressive wishes become realized when his sister is maimed by a blow from Magwitch's iron manacle. T h e growing Pip tries to ignore the chains that, as a child, bound him to the convict; he chooses to forget the bond established in the marshes. If Wordsworth tries to harmonize the "inward agitations" he felt as a child, Dickens relentlessly confronts Pip with the "spot of time" he has repressed. T h e gibbet will reassert its powers when Pip forsakes the country for the city. Wordsworth beholds with some amusement his own "migration strange" and the conversion of a stripling "villager" into a dandified young man in "gentleman's array": "As if the change / Had waited on some fairy's wand, at once / Behold me rich in moneys, and attired / In splendid garb" (III. 34-38). For Dickens, however, Pip's transformation into a well-dressed young gentleman is integral to a darker parable and fairy tale. T h e "plebeian cards" that in The Prelude are treated as "cheap matter" dignified by "boyish wit" (I. 522, 529) introduce, in Great Expectations, a "labouring boy's" discontent with his identity. Pip, whose name signifies—among other things—the figure on a playing card, is stung by Estella's disdain: " H e calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!" (p. 60). Like Wordsworth, Dickens bemoans the growth that removes the adult man's reason from the more powerful imagination of the child. And like Wordsworth, Dickens is fascinated by the "dark / Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles / Discordant elements" in the self (The Prelude, 1.341-43). But if in The Prelude the 48. John P. Mc Williams, "Great Expectations: The Beacon, the Gibbet and the Ship," Studies Annual (1972); 11:257.

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Child of Nature •

child reared in Nature can as an adult draw himself up on Mount Snowden and be consecrated as a prophet, no such integration is possible in Great Expectations. Pip the man remains distanced from both the child-man Joe and the new Pip who has replaced him. In the last chapter of Great Expectations Pip can at best hope to borrow Joe's and Biddy's child: "you must give Pip to me, one of these days; or lend him, at all events" (p. 489). In the novel's original conclusion, he silently holds up that child to Estella. #> The Wordsworthian child of Nature surfaces in later Victorian fiction, as well. In Meredith's The Egoist (1879), for example, the boy Crossjay directs Clara and Vernon to the renovating boughs of the double-blossomed wild cherry tree. By the 1890s, however, this figure appears in more startling shapes. In his two Jungle Books (1894, 189S) Kipling literalizes Wordsworth's metaphor in The Prelude of a bronzed child who stands alone, Beneath the sky, as if [he] had been born On Indian plains, and from [his] mother's hut Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport A naked savage . . . . (i. 297-300) Free from the constraints of civilization, Mowgli the wolf-boy can sing his Song Against People: "I will let loose against you the fleet-footed vines— / I will call in the jungle to stamp out your lines!" In Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) it is civilization that stamps out the line of the Fawleys. As a boy in Marygreen, Jude vainly wished for an arrested life in Nature: "If he only could prevent himself from growing up! He did not want to be a man." 49 Yet when manhood (and fatherhood) arrives, Jude finds no Eppie to redeem him. Instead, he is undone by a child that seems as aged and spectral as the ghost of Wordsworth which Hardy, like Mrs. Ward's daughter Dorothy, claimed to have seen "lingering and wandering on somewhere alone in the fan-traceried vaulting" of King's Chapel at Cambridge. 50 By the end of the nineteenth century, that earlier child of fire and dew had assumed its last and strangest mutation. 49. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. F. R. Southerington (Indianapolis and N e w York 1972), p. 25. 50. Florence Emily Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy: 1840-1891 p. 184.

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Browning and the Altered Romantic Landscape LAWRENCE P O S T O N III

Ernest Hartley Coleridge's remark that Browning was "a dweller in the suburbs, not among the mountains," was so unanimously echoed by the first generation of Browning critics that the issues it raises have seldom been reexamined. 1 W e tend to think of Browning as a preeminently urban poet, to hear him plain in the accents of the Italian speaker who extols town over country in " U p at a Villa—Down in the City." Browning, it is usually stated, was unable to assert confidently the Romantic vision of the indissoluble oneness of man and Nature, and excelled only when he turned his back on the external world and probed the psychological complexity of individual human beings. Although there is some truth in this view, the problem is more involved. It is assuredly true that in a Browning poem, Nature and the poet's observing eye do not interpenetrate as they do in "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" or "Mont Blanc." Perhaps Browning's poetry reflects a larger sense of growing separation between man and Nature, but Browning, at least in his own I. Coleridge's remark appears in "Browning and Wordsworth on 'Intimations of Immortality,' " in The Robert Browning Centenary Celebration at Westminster Abbey, May 7, 1912, ed. William Knight (London, 1912), pp. 34-35. Characteristic early treatments include Emma Endicott Marean, " T h e Nature Element in Browning's Poetry," in Boston Browning Society Papers, Selected to Represent the Work of the Society from 1SS6 to 1897 ( N e w York and London, 1897), pp. 471-87; Stopford A. Brooke, " T h e Treatment of Nature," The Poetry of Robert Browning (London, 1902), pp. 57-114; H e n r y Jones, "Wordsworth and Browning," Idealism as a Practical Creed (Glasgow, 1909), pp. 139-92; Harry Christopher Minchin, "Browning and W o r d s w o r t h , " Fortnightly Review, n.s., XCI (1912): 813-24; Henri Léon Hovelaque, La jeunesse de Robert Browning (Paris, 1932), pp. 121 and passim. More recently, in Victorian Poetry and the Romantic Religion (Albany, 1970), Derek Colville has arrived, in a more sophisticated manner, at similar conclusions; see "Browning," pp. 123-64. Editions used in this paper are: for Robert Browning, The Works of Robert Browning, ed. F. G . Kenyon (London, 1912); for William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1959). 426

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voice, does not seem to lament that disjunction in the same way that Arnold does. For when we speak of Browning's attitude toward Nature—indeed, of his attitude toward anything—we are perpetually in danger of sliding over a prior question, namely that in many if not most instances in Browning's poetry we are viewing a particular landscape, or human relationship, through the consciousness of a dramatic character. Thus, as is the case with treating any other aspect of Browning's art, we must piece together what we can of the poet's vision of Nature without any confidence that a particular poem can be a touchstone for our understanding. In the Browning canon, there is no "Tintern Abbey" or "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" to which we can turn first.2 T h e speaker of the characteristic Browning poem, whether he views a landscape as tempting or ominous, seldom looks to it for direct guidance. T h e earlier Wordsworthian emphasis on the truths to be gained from Nature has been displaced by a concentration on how a given person responds to it. In the last book of The Prelude, Wordsworth's famous description of the ascent of Snowdon turns on the sudden appearance of the moon in a cloudless sky, illuminating the hills that upheave their "dusky backs" over the "still ocean" of mist. T h e vision of the moon partly dissolves, but from it the poet derives "the emblem of a mind / That feeds upon infinity," "a mind sustained / By recognitions of transcendent power." T h e experience itself does not last forever, but it endures long enough to induce a reflective calm from which the poet extrapolates a sense of permanence, a recognition that there are minds whose "consciousness of W h o m they are" is "habitually infused / Through every image and through every thought." By contrast, Browning's technique for dwelling on such moments of illumination is to stress not only their transience but the uncertainties associated with the individual consciousness that registers them. In a poem of the middle 1860s, written to accompany Woolner's statuary of the deaf and dumb children, Browning claimed—here, apparently, in his own voice—that Only the prism's obstruction shows aright T h e secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light Into the jewelled bow from blankest white. (Lines 1-3) Browning's own view of his poetry as a prismatic obstruction is a deliberate reversal, it would seem, of that impatience with which Shelley, in " Adonais," sees 2. In his defense of the artistic quest for beauty in the everyday and commonplace, Fra Lippo comes as close as any of Browning's characters to voicing Wordsworth's idea that poetry can shed "a certain coloring of the imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect," but it is tempting to overlook in the portrayal of Lippo himself those ambiguities that color his own aesthetic theory and our response to it.

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life as "a dome of many-coloured glass" which "stains the white radiance of Eternity." T h e choice of an imaginary speaker, a calculated avoidance of the direct vision, precludes confident philosophical affirmation; at the most, there is a fleeting recognition of "transcendent power." In "Christmas-Eve" (1850), the speaker sees the moon only with "shifting tints" through the fissures of the clouds; even when the sky receives "the full fruition / O f the moon's consummate apparition," the speaker's attention is focused not on the landscape below but on the rainbow, which, after the precedent of a long iconographic tradition (see Chapter Eighteen, above), heralds the manifestation of Christ. T h e companion-piece "Easter-Day," with its imagery of the Last Judgment, depicts a violent but brief lightning-storm immediately preceding the pronouncement of judgment on the speaker; and in The Ring

and the Book, the Pope sees hope for Guido

only in that "suddenness of fate" emblemized by his memory of the night storm that for one magnificent moment illuminated Naples: "So may the truth be flashed out by one blow, / And Guido see, one instant, and be saved." In the apocalyptic manner of conversion literature, natural forces seem to become the outward expression of a Deity bringing a sinner to his knees.3 But at the end of "EasterDay" we are left not with a fully developed "philosophy of Nature," but with a simple, undoctrinal belief in Christ's mercy, which, according to the speaker, helps us endure the difficulties of being a Christian. In Browning as in Wordsworth, the recollection of a moment in the past, woven into the fabric of memory, provides a stimulus for the embodiment of the experience in poetry. But again, the role played by Nature is rather different. At the end of "Easter-Day," the speaker recalls how, following the visionary experience in which "the whole God . . . / Embraced me," he awakened at daybreak to find "the grey plain / . . . silvered thick with dew." T h e ending of "Saul" (1855) expands on this suggestion that the landscape has shared in the speaker's transfiguration. T h e noiseless, oppressive desert heat is shattered by David's vision of the Incarnate Christ, and the landscape, with its "sudden wind-thrills," partakes of his own awakening: "E'en the serpent that slid away silent,—he felt the new law." David's vision and his memory of it are celebrated in his autobiographical poem, an act of recollection in tranquillity. In the opening of The

Prelude,

motion in

Nature—in the wind, in the River Derwent—prefaces the awakening of poetic 3. Colville perceptively points out that "in its loose narrative point o f view, in its account of worldly incident leading to vision, and in its inferred didactic conclusion, ["Christmas-Eve"] seems to be the sort of Nature-religious, anecdotal affirmation so often met in Wordsworth's Prelude" (Victorian Poetry and the Romantic Religion, p. 131), but surely goes too far in assuming that the poem, as a direct statement of Browning's, offers merely "impersonal wonders, like a divine firework-display, at which [Browning] stands open-mouthed with the reader to see what will happen next" (p. 159).

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inspiration, "a correspondent breeze," which the poem as a whole finally embodies. In both poems, a bond of mutual sympathy exists between man and Nature; the difference is that in "Saul," Nature is not a teacher but a fellow-student, arrayed on David's side as, in "Christmas-Eve" and "Easter-Day," she is arrayed on God's. If no absolute value is assigned to Nature, then she may become a sympathetic but uninstructed companion. T o the extent that Browning seems less receptive to the idea of an interrelationship between man and Nature (though he is often alert to individual details, even minutiae, of the landscape), his view may derive from a more insistent attempt to pierce through to the divine reality behind natural details, to render dramatically the instantaneous vision, the bolt of lightning that makes it possible for us to see, clearly but momentarily. Nature is no longer an all-wise and pervasive educator, but is realized at most in brief flashes as a medium for God's power and grace or as a mirror for a change in ourselves. This tendency is particularly pronounced in some of Browning's late lyrics, in which the poet tends increasingly to speak in his own voice.4 More illuminating, however, are his attempts in his middle years to portray Nature through the individual perceptions of his many different characters. From this period, the two poems that best define the range of Browning's vision are "By the Fireside" and " 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.' "

# In "By the Fireside," Browning dramatizes a moment of decisive interplay with Nature that results in a human decision, indeed in a permanent alteration of two lives. The poet's conception of that critical moment "one and infinite," in which our worth as human beings is measured, bears some resemblance to Wordsworth's "spots of time / That with distinct pre-eminence retain / A renovating virtue." Furthermore, the opening of "By the Fireside," like that of Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight," suggests a mood of vacancy in which a memory of the past comes to sustain the speaker in the present and to promise a renovation in the future. But Browning's focus on the decisive moment implies a heightened interest in the conscious moral decision that follows; the speaker of "By the Fireside" sees the landscape as instrumental to his development, but not as an independent and instructive moral agency. T h e ambiguity is one of personality, not of setting. The structure of "By the Fireside" illustrates the interfusion of past and present 4. See, for example, the o p e n i n g poem of Jocoseria ( 1 8 8 3 ) , " W a n t i n g i s — W h a t ? " in w h i c h , without the presence of h u m a n beings and human love, N a t u r e is but " f r a m e w o r k w h i c h waits for a picture to f r a m e . " In the " P r o l o g u e " to Asolando ( 1 8 8 9 ) , the W o r d s w o r t h i a n sense of crisis inherent in the recognition that a glory has passed away f r o m the earth is resolved not t h r o u g h those "shadowy recollections" that lend significance to the " m e a n e s t flower that b l o w s , " b u t r a t h e r in a resolute discarding of the past: " A t N a t u r e dost thou shrink amazed? / G o d is it w h o t r a n s c e n d s . " Cf. " R e v e r i e " in the same volume.

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that is crucial to its theme. Like the Romantic poem of meditation, it manifests a circular movement—verbally in its opening and closing, and structurally in its progress from present to past, then back to present and future—which Robert Langbaum has described so brilliantly in his analysis of " T i n t e r n A b b e y " and "Frost at Midnight" as dramatic lyrics. 5 In stanzas I-XX, the speaker remembers the setting in which love was declared, without clarifying the role that setting played. In stanzas XXI-XXX, he appears to move from thought to speech—the borderline between the two is blurred in the poem—while he attempts, largely for his own self-understanding, to extract a meaning from the setting. Stanzas XXXI-XLVIII return to that setting, this time describing the significance of the event, and in the last five stanzas the significance is restated and amplified. In essence, the poem leads us twice through the same process, as if to imply that a full understanding of the experience is not easily accessible. T h e landscape, first seen objectively and without reference to the speaker and his wife, is then invested with a special significance through the processes of assocation. And as in "Frost at Midnight" and " T i n t e r n Abbey," the associative process leads the speaker to a deeper and more intuitive sympathy through which he returns to everyday life, as the calculatedly prosaic ending shows: And the whole is well worth thinking o'er W h e n autumn comes; which I mean to do O n e day, as I said before. (Lines 2 6 3 - 6 5 ) T h e speaker thus looks forward to a repetition of the processes of memory, the continual reenactment of a moment that saw the birth of human love. Past, present, and future are both confirmed and controlled by the memory that gives a shape and meaning to what otherwise would be mere disjointed associations. T h e complex time scheme of "By the Fireside" reminds us from its inception of the device by which, in " T i n t e r n Abbey," W o r d s w o r t h imagines himself in the future looking back on what is already, in this moment, past. At the beginning, Browning's speaker visualizes himself at some distant point in the future immersed in the study of Greek, with his attention wandering " b y green degrees" to Italy and his youth. As we return to the past, the details stand out in bold relief—the ruined chapel, wood, lake, and the path along the gorge—but the narrator does not as yet invest them with significance. W h a t meaning we can infer derives from the implied analogies between lovers and landscape. T h e time is autumn, and the 5. Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern

Literary

Tradition ( N e w York, 1963), pp. 43-47. T h e landscape is reminiscent of Shelley's " T o Jane: T h e Recollection" and its variant, " T h e Pine Forest of the Cascine near Pisa."

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woodlandiruit has begun to fall; this seasonal turning point underlines the position of the speaker who, at this remembered point in the past, must seize the moment now or never. The metaphor of the fruit is pressed home by his assertion that the soul "declares i t s e l f . . . / By its fruit, the thing it does!" T h e chapel is reached by a bridge over a "stagnant pond" at which an occasional stray sheep drinks. Separated as the chapel is from the main path, it seems to confirm the irrelevance of inherited custom and ceremony to the understanding the lovers must reach; like the landscape of "Love among the Ruins," it suggests a remote past beyond the perception or the human memory of the actors, only to dismiss it. T h e fresco over the door, portraying St. John in the desert, seems at best a faint reminder of the slender historical link between Christ and the present. If the Divine is approachable, it is so only through the medium of human love: You must be just before, in fine, See and make me see, for your part, New depths of the divine. (Lines 138-40) T h e description of the "thread of water single and slim," which comes through the ravage into the inmost "heart of things," and the path between gorge and the "straight-up rock" hint at the obstacles to human fulfillment, the rarity of a true marriage of souls. Such a union of spirits is compared to a stream that flows on, "wherever rocks obstruct." Through such images as these, the landscape of the poem gradually acquires a metaphorical significance and becomes a mute commentator on the human situation. At the center of the poem, as it is at the center of the landscape, is the dim wood that is the place of revelation. Here, not in the chapel, the lovers reach their understanding, a union in which, like the lovers at the end of "Epipsychidion," they are "mixed at last" But there is no suggestion that the woods independently exercise a kindly moral power. The poem does seem to echo W o r d s worth's idea of the educative force in "one impulse from a vernal wood," but in "By the Fireside," Nature is not a perpetual teacher, only a momentary contributor to the lovers' union, and sharply separated from them: The forests had done it; there they stood; W e caught for a moment the powers at play: They had mingled us so, for once and for good, Their work was done—we might go or stay, They relapsed to their ancient mood. (Lines 2 3 6 - 4 0 ) 431

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T h e poem then moves outward to reflect on the relationship between the private life and society at large, the "life of the race" that is the sum of the motions of individual men and women. T h e woods remain in the memory, but a physical return to them seems unnecessary. 6 T h e success of the lovers of "By the Fireside" is perhaps more striking w h e n the poem is placed next to " T w o in the Campagna," a work of the same period. For " T w o in the Campagna"—along with such other works as " A Serenade at the Villa," " T h e Lost Mistress," " A Lover's Quarrel," and " G a r d e n

Fancies

I"—shows Browning employing N a t u r e to heighten the ironies of the human situation. In " T w o in the Campagna," details from the external world—the fennel run to seed, the five blind and green beetles groping among the honeymeal, the thistleball at the mercy of the winds—are perceived by the speaker as a confirmation of the human failure, his own thought a mere spiderweb that eludes his attempt to grasp it. Nature herself is independent; her careless, even random, occupations become in his own mind a kind of mockery: Such life here, through such lengths of hours, Such miracles performed in play, Such primal naked forms of flowers, Such letting nature have her way W h i l e heaven looks from its towers! (Lines 3 1 - 3 5 ) A more direct reversal of " B y the Fireside" occurs in "Dis Aliter V i s u m , " a poem published almost ten years later in Dramatis Personae (1864). T h e r e a w o m a n recollects the failure of her male listener to have read the signs N a t u r e might have been interpreted as offering ten years before. T h e N o r m a n church with its votive frigate then seemed a sad symbol of aloofness from human fellowship and of the frailty of human hopes, rather than of potential union; and the man, letting the moment slip from his grasp, allowed the view of sea and sky to dwindle to a mere tourist attraction. N o w she confronts him " b y a window-seat for that cliff-brow, / O n carpet stripes for those sand-paths" to indict him as a fool: W h a t was the sea for? W h a t , the grey Sad church, that solitary day, Crosses and graves and swallows' call? (Lines 113-15) 6. Browning here repeats a pattern apparent in Book III of Sordello, in which Nature dramatically asserts herself as an instructress through the flooding of the marsh by the Mincio. T h e incident reminds Sordello of his own littleness, his inability to imitate Nature's infinite power of selfreparation. T h e effect is to precipitate him from the "drowsy copse" into the political arena; and Verona and Ferrara, rather than the woods around Goito, are his stage henceforth. 432

• XXI. Browning and the Romantic Landscape •

Here Nature has yielded to a fashionable salon in which, we come to realize, it is not only the man and the woman but their respective spouses who have suffered from that earlier failure. T h e simple, stark setting of ten years before, unlike that of " B y the Fireside," has become not a sheltered retreat but an invitation to endurance, a wiser understanding of how love can go wrong. In the opening poem of the same volume, "James Lee's W i f e , " Mrs. Lee derives from the "good gigantic smile o the brown old earth" a "simple, ancient, true" doctrine that life is a probation, and for her the wind seems to speak only of impending change and of the limits on earthly bliss; "we moan in acquiescence" with the wind's message that "nothing endures." In the bleaker, more attenuated vision of human relationships that dominates the awareness of the speakers in Dramatis Personae, Nature, rather than offering the solace of beauty, underlines and confirms in her stark simplicity the speaker's prevailing consciousness of human limitations.

#

Well before 1864, however, Browning had in fact staked out a more extreme position. If " B y the Fireside" represents the outermost possibility of a beneficent interaction between man and Nature, the speaker o f " 'Childe Roland' " seems to testify to a natural order that is both a horrifying and a grimly comic inversion of the Wordsworthian view. Despite the tendency of some Browning scholars to treat the landscape of " 'Childe Roland' " as sui generis, not only in the poet's own work but in nineteenth-century poetry generally, that landscape had been many years in the making. Critics have already examined Browning's wide, if miscellaneous, reading for possible source material, and the results show a remarkable blending of Christian and Romantic traditions, even while Browning advances beyond both. T o Arthurian legend, Dante, de Lairesse, Shakespeare, fairy-tale lore, and the Bible, we can, I believe, safely add Francis Quarles's Emblems (a book in the library of Browning's father) and Pilgrim's Progress. In Book II, Emblem 6, Quarles versifies on Matthew 7:14 ("Narrow is the way that leadeth into life, and few be there that find it") by describing a difficult journey to heaven through hell. T h e "emblem" opens with an address to the fool who is taking the wrong way (one might compare to this Browning's cripple and his crutch), and the ending, like that of " 'Childe Roland,' " is a call to battle: he who would conquer Heaven, declares Quarles, must be ready for combat.7 As for Bunyan, Browning's reference to "the great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend" (stanza X X V I I I ) , in addition to echoing Revelations 9, seems to emphasize ironically the difference between Christian's journey in a world clearly defined by an overarching Providence, and the ambiguous goal of this narrator as he wanders over an unmapped terrain. T h e older iconographical associations seem to have been sifted through the medium of the 7. Charles Bennett and W . Harry Rogers, illustrators, Quarles's Emblems 433

(London, 1861).

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III

seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch landscape painters whose landscapes are divested of Christian and mythological content. At the Dulwich Gallery, the youthful Browning may well have viewed some of the landscapes of Pieter Wouwerman, who worked within the Dutch pictorial tradition of dunes and country roads in which an isolated figure or two often appear. Mystery is reintroduced to such landscapes by the Romantic poets, but in a new way; a purely Christian frame of reference no longer sustains the burden of poetic intention. Thus, if one examines " 'Childe Roland' " in the light of Browning's Romantic predecessors, one finds a general, if not close, group of resemblances to Book II of Hyperion, strewn with images of past defeat in its description of the fallen Titans; a very close resemblance, as Harold Bloom has pointed out in a suggestive study, 8 to "Julian and Maddalo," where the madhouse and belfry tower elicit from Maddalo a discussion of the soul and the final enigma of death; and some echoes of those sections of " T h e Sensitive Plant" that describe the decay of the garden after the death of the graceful Lady who once ruled over it. Similar landscapes elsewhere in Browning's poetry reflect further alterations in the Romantic perspective. In " T h e Flight of the Duchess," the threatening, ambiguous scene—that "one vast red drear burnt-up plain" that lies beyond the rich and fertile fields—becomes associated with the difficult pilgrimage through which the Duchess ultimately finds her liberation. In " T h e Englishman in Italy," a poem that in its landscape and political drift bears more than a passing resemblance to.Shelley's "Lines Written among the Euganean Hills," the speaker gazing at the panoramic view from the top of Calvano is troubled by intimations that remain unclear to himself. T h e landscape is suggestive but its implications are unspecified. It is characterized by piles of rock "like the loose broken teeth / O f some monster that climbed there to die / From the ocean beneath," an allusion vaguely reminiscent of the story of Hippolytus in "Artemis Prologuizes." T h e speaker feels, like the speaker of " 'Childe Roland,' " that the mountains are thrusting themselves into view to observe him. T h e Englishman thinks also of the isles of the Sirens and is tempted to risk the trip over the unseen rocks in the water to "explore . . . the strange square black turret" where he will hear the birds singing the secret Ulysses heard. W h a t Ulysses learned, presumably, was the necessity of action, of overcoming the temptation to slothful ease, a theme appropriate to " 'Childe Roland.' " T h e ending of " T h e Englishman in Italy," however, diverges both from Shelley and from the later " 'Childe Roland.' " In Shelley's "Lines," the sight of the "hoary tower" leads to a vision of an Eden, "a windless bower . . . I Far from passion, pain, and guilt" where the earth will "grow young again." But as the sun breaks from the clouds in " T h e Englishman in 8. Harold Bloom, "Browning's 'Childe Roland': All Things Deformed and Broken," The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago, 1971), pp. 157-67.

434

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and the Romantic Landscape

•

Italy," the speaker leaves the mountain and returns to the world of firecrackers, religious festivals, and debates over the Corn Laws. T h e vision of lost souls is reserved for " 'Childe Roland,' " in which we end our journey at the turret itself. " 'Childe Roland' " obviously is more than the sum of its proven or possible sources, but reference to its predecessors does sharpen our sense of its range of implications. T h e central device is, of course, that of the journey or pilgrimage. In Book XIII of The Prelude, Wordsworth recalls the boyhood pleasure of letting one's eye follow "the windings of a public way" which, crossing a remote summit, "was like an invitation into space / Boundless, or guide into eternity." In Browning's poem this has been converted into a march away from the main road, a journey into fear rather than promise. 9 Again, when the speaker of " 'Childe Roland' " senses that he is, in a manner of speaking, discovered by the place he seeks—the mountains, "mere ugly heights and heaps," have "stolen into view" as if to entrap him—it is as if he were reenacting not only the experience of the Englishman in Italy, but also the famous boat-stealing scene in Book I of The Prelude, in which "a huge peak, black and huge / As if with voluntary power instinct" lifts its head and strides after the boy "with purpose of its own." But in Browning's poem, the moral of the landscape remains deliberately obscure, partly because the narrator's perceptions of it are also obscure and uncertain. W h a t the narrator stresses is the brooding malevolence of the landscape and, paradoxically, its almost comic inadequacy ("mere ugly heights and heaps"). This is a journey without maps, for " 'Childe Roland' " does not celebrate medieval chivalry, or the journey of the believer to the Heavenly City, or the wearied Byronic sensualist seeking self-renewal among the departed glories of history, or the growth of a poet's mind. Rather, the speaker faces in its stark reality an age without apparent chivalry, heroism, health, or belief, in which even the past is obliterated, the highway lost. His pilgrimage seems, both in its process and in the obscurity of its final intention and destination, to dramatize Teufelsdrockh's assertion that "our Wilderness is the wide World in an Atheistic Century; our Forty Days are long years of suffering and fasting: nevertheless, to these also comes an end." 1 0 As readers of the poem, we have the double burden of understanding the landscape and the consciousness through which it is filtered to us. Not only are Nature's features sinister, but on a deeper level she seems to share the incapacity of the narrator to affect events: 9. In his " 'Swim or Drown': Carlyle's World of Shipwrecks, Castaways and Stranded Voyagers" (Studies in English Literature XV [1975]: 641-55), George P. Landow points to a passage in On Heroes, Hero- Worship, and the Heroic in History, in which Carlyle likens formulas of belief to "beaten Highways, leading towards some sacred or high object"; "we will forsake the Highway," claims Carlyle, only when the "City or Shrine" at the end has vanished. It is at least possible that Carlyle's metaphor had lodged in Browning's mind. 10. Thomas Carlyle, SartorResartus, ed. C. F. Harrold (New York, 1937), p. 184. 435

LAWRENCE P O S T O N III

N o ! penury, inertness and grimace, In some strange sort, were the land's portion. " S e e " O r shut your eyes," said N a t u r e peevishly, "It nothing skills: I cannot help m y case: " ' T i s the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place "Calcine its clods and set m y prisoners free." (Lines 6 1 - 6 6 ) If there is a Providence here, it is confined to the enactment of justice. T h e imagery of punitive fire runs throughout the poem: the " r e d leer" of the sunset, the river that might have bathed "the fiend's glowing hoof," the cirque like a "red-hot iron c a g e " where wildcats fight, even the small detail of the steed's red gaunt neck, the steed that has outlived its usefulness in the "devil's stud." T h e landscape seems already to have passed through fire, just as the narrator's "heart's new fire" of friendship burned itself out in the distant past after Cuthbert's disgrace; but the fire has destroyed without cleansing. T h e sudden kindling of the sunset at the end, however, marks the narrator's arrival at some sort of understanding; it lights up "the lost adventurers" his peers in a "sheet of flame" and reveals his own destiny, the moment in which he himself is to be judged. T h e words "penury, inertness and grimace" characterize Nature's " p o r t i o n " ; they suggest a judgment already confirmed, a punishment already meted out. N o t only is Nature passive and inert, but it is also peevish, impoverished, sharing the disgrace that has overtaken the lost peers. " G r i m a c e " becomes associated with words that suggest varieties of torture; the countenance of the land is contorted with pain, and images of torment, punishment, and disease run throughout the entire poem. T h e thistle-stalk loses its head if it dares to push above its " m a t e s , " an implication, perhaps, of the near-futility of individual effort and one that may define obliquely the position of the speaker vis-à-vis his lost peers. T h e "stiff blind horse," the grass that grows " a s scant as hair in leprosy," are merely features of a landscape with . . . blotches rankling, coloured gray and grim, . . . patches where some leanness of the soil's Broke into moss or substances like boils; T h e n came some palsied oak. (Lines 1 5 1 - 5 4 ) T h e river has committed some unknown wrong; the trees along it have, as it were, attempted suicide. W e are a long way from the Derwent, and the " m e r e ugly heights and heaps" in their turn bear scant resemblance to the Alps. In stanzas X X I I I - X X I V the narrator's eye is met by the sinister residue of battle and torture. T h e "fell cirque" that appears to have been the scene of a fight excites the wonder of the narrator over those "whose savage trample thus could pad the dank / Soil to 436

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and the Romantic Landscape •

a plash," and who are compared to "toads in a poisoned tank, / . . . wild cats in a red-hot iron cage." Browning insistently heaps up harsh monosyllables—pad, dank, soil, plash, toads, tank, cats, cage—which suggest a process by which a more complex form of life is reduced first to the bestial and then to the level of excrement. T h e same technique is employed in the succeeding stanzas to suggest a world like that at the beginning of Bleak House, a world in the process of reverting to its primal, undifferentiated elements: T h e n came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a r o o d Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth. (Lines 1 4 5 - 5 0 ) In illustrating the idea of a physical regression in which bodily functions are blurred, Browning several times transposes functions and parts: the horse's bones are '"a-stare," the cleft in the "palsied oak" is like a "distorted mouth" that "dies while it recoils," and the turret is "blind as the fool's heart." "Blind as the fool's heart." It is a comparison that, coming at the end of the poem, both summarizes and illuminates. For in large measure, " 'Childe Roland' " is a poem about the seeing heart. Browning's well-known rejoinder to the inquiry as to whether it illustrated the text, " H e that endureth to the end shall be saved" ("Yes, just about that")," perhaps helps to underline what is essentially traditional in this highly untraditional poem. There is a sense, surely, in which the landscape is interior, the journey a mental voyage; thus a stunted and deformed Nature becomes the emblem of a private quest rather than an attempt to render an actual place. 12 In that sense, we accept it as a kind of topography of the moral imagination, divested of the allegorical resonances of the worlds of Dante and Bunyan, but still suggestive of what M e y e r Abrams, speaking of Pilgrim's Progress, has called "the immortal allegory of the pedestrian quest."" But on the older allegory of pilgrimage Browning has, I think, superimposed the Romantic poem of meditation, the dramatic lyric. And this, too, has implications for the poem's reader. It is not only the object of this quest that remains uncertain but also the validity of the narrator's point of view. There is no indication of an audience or of any 11. Quoted in W i l l i a m C l y d e DeVane, A Browning Handbook, 2d ed. ( N e w York, 1955), p. 231. 12. Perhaps, as Bloom suggests in "Browning's 'Childe Roland,' " the speaker is "being punished . . . for having quested after knowledge rather than love," and hence Browning echoes Wordsworth's belief that "to see without love, to see by knowing, is to deform and break" (p. 167). 13. M e y e r Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature ( N e w York, 1971), p. 168; cf. Clarice Short, "Childe Roland, Pedestrian," Victorian Poetry V I (1968): 175. 437

• LAWRENCE POSTON III •

strategies of self-defense characteristic of the dramatic monologue; rather we have a narrator describing past events. It is worth noting that in " O n e W o r d More," which originally concluded the two volumes of Men and Women (1855) in which " 'Childe Roland' " appeared, Browning expressly disavowed the identification of himself with the speaker: "Let me speak this once in my true person, / N o t as Lippo, Roland or Andrea." But " O n e W o r d M o r e " is an afterpiece written some three years later, and something of Browning's own "true person" is implicit in all the monologues. T h e last words of " 'Childe Roland' " are its title, and the title itself is within quotation marks (a fact often ignored by critics), as if it were less an allusion to the actual narrative of the poem than to a similar story from the past. Furthermore, the speaker, far from being a "childe," is a disillusioned man of experience. W o u l d Childe Roland himself utter the title of a song which embodies an experience that is only about to take place? T o pose the answer in terms of the dramatic monologue is to imply an absurd lapse in dramatic technique. If we look at the poem as a meditative piece in the manner of " T i n t e r n A b b e y " or "Frost at Midnight," as a poem in which the past is recollected in a moment of tranquillity, the question of the speaker's identity is nearer resolution. Browning's own well-known testimony was to the effect that " 'Childe Roland' " came to him as "a kind of dream." 1 4 W e cannot argue that the " I " of the poem is Browning, but neither is it clear that it is Childe Roland as opposed to some other speaker. O n some subconscious level, the poem may include Browning but also involve a larger collective voice, much as, according to his son, Tennyson said of In Memoriam that " T is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking through him." 15 If the poet is himself the persona, in some measure speaking from personal experience and yet subject to challenge as to the objective truth of his impressions, then the circularity of the poem, ending with its own title, may well confirm a convention of Romantic crisis-autobiography. Abrams points out that The Prelude is "an involuted poem which is about its own genesis—a prelude to itself. It structural end is its own beginning; and its temporal beginning . . . is Wordsworth's entrance upon the stage of his life at which it ends." 1 6 " 'Childe Roland,' " too, resolves itself on one level into a poem about the poetic process. Event and retrospection fuse in an imaginative reenactment of the experience in art. T h e narrator's single decisive gesture is the raising of the "slughorn" to his lips to sound the challenge. 17 Impelled by events too great to be forestalled by the unaided individual will, the artist who leaves the "safe road," the 14. DeVane, A Browning Handbook., p. 229. 15. Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir, by His Son ( N e w York and London, 1897), 1:305. 16. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 79. 17. Cf. Teufelsdrockh's words: "Yes, to me also was given, if not Victory, yet the consciousness of Battle, and the resolve to persevere therein while life or faculty is left" (Sartor Resartus, p. 184). 438

XXI. Browning and the Romantic Landscape •

"dusty thoroughfare" trodden before him, can still confront the challenge laid down by his own artistic conscience. The limitations of all humanity are confirmed by the failure of the "lost adventurers my peers"—one thinks, perhaps, of the Wordsworth of "The Lost Leader"—but the dream-quest embodies the artistic triumph of the poet himself, who translates dream into speech. In his statement that the lost adventurers are at hand "to view the last of me, a living frame / For one more picture," the narrator seems to imply that his experience is about to be converted into art. As the horn blows, the dream ends, the narrator awakes, and, with the quotation from Shakespeare, begins his poem. As in Coleridge's "Dejection," failure is transcended in the poet's recollective vision; the poem itself resolves the crisis that it adumbrates. And as in "By the Fireside," a circularity of structure confirms the perpetual reenactment of the experience that is made possible by the poet's art. Paradoxically, the intensity and power with which the alien landscape of " 'Childe Roland' " is realized substantiate the persistent attraction of the Romantic vision in which man and Nature are one. T h e heroic possibilities of the human spirit dramatized by the poem suggest Shelley, but Browning's more skeptical view leads him to keep a deliberate silence as to the outcome. In another poem published in the 1855 volumes, "An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician," the speaker—who has been threatened by wild beasts and beaten by robbers—travels again over a "flinty" landscape, crossing "a ridge of short sharp broken hills / Like an old lion's cheekteeth." But the symbolic value of his destination is plain, though his relationship to it remains an open question. That destination is Jerusalem, which he expects to reach in the morning, there to "set in order" his experiences. There is no Shelleyan vision of a better society to be, but the pilgrimage itself, even when almost inadvertently embarked on, is a source of potential moral growth. For Browning the process is all; he offers no final philosophical resolution, no clear framework of belief within which a redefined, revitalized iconograph of landscape can emerge for his generation. That process is continually relived in our experience of the poem; in " 'Childe Roland,' " the sunset, the tower, the faces of the lost peers, the narrative voice all offer us a range of greater and lesser possibilities within which we move as readers. The journey is ours, the experience a shared one; but for each of us as individuals that experience has a private resonance, a shape finally realized in that shadowy area in which what the poem brings to us intersects with what we, as individuals, bring to it. The narrator's troubled vision of Nature in " 'Childe Roland' " seems finally to reflect a sense that Romantic humanism and Christian belief alike required redefinition if they were to survive as sources of value for the errant pilgrim.

439

Nature and the Linguistic Moment J. H I L L I S M I L L E R *

It may seem churlish, in a book that investigates so many aspects of the Victorian response to Nature, to argue that the Victorian imagination was almost always indirect in its response, at least in literature. M y hypothesis, nevertheless, is that for many of the most important Victorian writers, in spite of their apparent interest in observing Nature and in reproducing it exactly, Nature is not the primary interest. In some writers, concern for Nature is displaced by a concern for subjectivity as it may be described in metaphors drawn from the natural world1—since there is no literal language of consciousness, the self being itself a figure or an effect of language. In others, a direct confrontation with Nature is turned aside even more radically to a primary focus on language, to the words by which Nature is named and its "system" created or revealed. In Victorian literature, alongside mimetic theories and practices, there exists a theory and practice more properly allegorical, intraliterary, or intralinguistic. The mimetic or "realistic" paradigm is well exemplified by a passage in Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi": . . . Don't object [says Lippo], "His works Are here already; nature is complete: Suppose you reproduce her—(which you can't) There's no advantage! you must beat her, then." For, don't you mark? we're made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; And so they are better, painted—better to us, * Copyright, 1977, J. Hillis Miller 1. See, in this connection, John Paterson's description of H a r d y ' s characterization of persons through natural images in Chapter T w e n t y - T h r e e .

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Moment

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Which is the same thing. Art was given for that; God uses us to help each other so, Lending our minds out.2 (Lines 2 9 6 - 3 0 6 ) A theory of art like that of Fra Lippo is of course pervasive in the Victorian period, as it is in Western tradition generally since Plato, Aristotle, and before. It appears in the "realistic" theory of the novel that is standard for the Victorians, as well as in representational theories of poetry, for example in one dimension of Ruskin's aesthetics. T h e mimetic paradigm always involves, covertly or overtly, just those elements present in Fra Lippo Lippi's defense of realistic art: the goal (however unattainable) of an exact reproduction of the appearances of reality; an appeal to "truth" as the correspondence between things as they are and things as they are in their imitative copies; some reference to a transcendent deity or ideal spirit as the guarantee of that truth, the Truth behind all specific mimetic truths; an apparently contradictory, but actually consistent, introduction of the notion of art as revelation, aletheia, truth as uncovering rather than truth as adequation or as scrupulously accurate replica. Truth as reproduction leads to truth as revelation, for we see things in their imitations that we have passed in reality a hundred times without seeing. Mimetic art removes the veil of familiarity from the world. Against such a paradigm and present as underthought or counterthought to this more official thought, are all those modes of art among the Victorians that use the name of natural things figuratively to speak of some aspect of consciousness, or that focus on the words themselves in their interrelation. It is not possible here to give more than a few tentative examples as indications of a possible line of investigation that I intend to pursue in greater detail in a fuller study. T h e notions of "example" and of "line of investigation," moreover, are not unequivocal or logically transparent concepts on which my enterprise can be solidly based. Both are, in fact, figures, with all the uncertainty or equivocation that always attends any effort of thought based on figure. T h e methodological problem is not unrelated to the topic of my essay. An "example" is a synecdoche, part for whole, and accompanied by the special ambiguities associated with synecdoche, as the range of meanings for "example" and "exemplary" in the O.E.D. will attest.3 Synecdoche always hovers uneasily between metaphor, with its implications of substantial and intrinsic similarity, and metonymy, with its suggestions of mere contiguity or contingency. Is the example a fair sample of a homogeneous whole, containing all its elements and features, as each cell contains the genetic pattern of 2. Robert Browning, "Fra Lippo Lippi," The Works of Robert Browning, ed. F. G . Kenyon, 10 vols. (London, 1912), IV:113. 3. Glenn Most, in an unpublished paper on George Eliot, has called my attention to the problems of exemplification.

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the whole organism? Or is the example only a part that happens to be there, perhaps an atypical part? How would one go about deciding, without analyzing all the parts in detail, that a given example is in fact typical? The problem is "exemplified" by the parable of Pooh and the honey pot: "So he put his tongue in, and took a large lick. 'Yes,' he said, 'it is. No doubt about that. And honey, I should say, right down to the bottom of the jar. Unless, of course,' he said, 'somebody put cheese in at the bottom just for a joke. Perhaps I had better go a little further . . . just in case.' " 4 In a work of literature every "example" is to some degree different from all the others, though how much this matters in a given case may be difficult to decide. Literary study is therefore based on the extremely problematic assumption of the validity of synecdoche. The problem is only made more difficult when the scope of interpretation is widened from a single long work like Middlemarch or Idylls of the King to the literature of a whole period, "Victorian fiction" or "Victorian poetry," or even, as in the title of this book, "the Victorian Imagination." The notion of following a "line of investigation" also remains a figure, as dubious as that of the "example." The image of a "line" implies that writing a piece of critical discourse is like following a road already there, or perhaps like carving out a course or track in a pathless wilderness. In either case, the image evokes a linear sequence that has a beginning (some starting place or hypothesis), follows a continuous sequence of development, without gaps or illogical leaps, and reaches a definite goal. In fact, of course, matters are not so straightforward in most essays, certainly not with this one. The present essay (like the entire volume of which it is a part) might better be thought of as the bringing together, with some teasing out of implications, of a series of citations, passages, places of passage through which, in each case, the current of meaning found in longer works momentarily pauses or traverses. The work of several novelists, as well as of Gerard Manley Hopkins, will stand by synecdoche for many other possible illustrations. Nature as such, in the Wordsworthian sense of trees, mountains, and daffodils, "one impulse from a vernal wood," does not count for much in nineteenth-century novels as a primary source of value and meaning. It may function, as in Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, as a measure of the economic or social worth of the person who owns the fields, parks, and woodlands of an estate, or it may be present, as sometimes in George Eliot and Henry James, in an entirely negative way, as an expression of the impossibility of life in solitude, outside society. In Adam Bede (18S9), in the climax of the extraordinary sequence describing Hetty Sorrel's wanderings, Hetty cannot bring herself to commit suicide. She looks across the 4. A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

(New York, 1950), p. 60.

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cold waters of the pool toward her memories of community life with the Poysers. In spite of the strong Wordsworthian influence on Eliot, in Adam Bede especially, this passage at least, in its refusal to imagine any value in a direct relation to Nature, seems the antithesis of Wordsworth's rejection of human society for the greater authenticity of an unmediated relation, in solitude, to the things of Nature: Oh how long the time was in that darkness! T h e bright hearth and the warmth and the voices of home,—the secure uprising and lying down,—the familiar fields, the familiar people, the Sundays and holidays with their simple joys of dress and feasting,—all the sweets of her young life rushed before her now, and she seemed to be stretching her arms towards them across a great gulf. . . . T h e horror of this cold, and darkness, and solitude —out of all human reach—became greater every long minute: it was almost as if she were dead already, and knew that she was dead, and longed to get back to life again. But no: she was alive still; she had not taken the dreadful leap.' Here the solitary relation to Nature is death. Life is belonging to a community. Society collectively humanizes Nature and gives it a meaning in a shared social efforts, as the "familiar fields" are part of Hetty's memories of life at the Hall Farm. A similar negative attitude toward Nature is expressed in a climactic scene of Henry James's Washington Square (1880). Dr. Sloper takes his daughter Catherine to a desolate spot in the Alps to show her how forlorn she will be if she sticks to her lover Morris Townsend. T h e scene is a parody of the crossing of the Simplon Pass in Book V I of The Prelude. It contains many of the same elements, but with the values reversed at least from the most usual reading of this episode in The Prelude. In Washington Square there is no Nature "like workings of one mind, the features / O f the same face, blossoms upon one tree / Characters of the great Apocalypse." 6 James's Nature expresses only the absence of human relationship in a negative wilderness, not even the positive discovery of the autonomous power of the human imagination that is the true theme of the Simplon passage in Wordsworth, as it is ultimately, in fact, of Washington

Square:

They followed this devious way, and finally lost the path; the valley proved very wild and rough, and their walk became rather a scramble. T h e y were good walkers, however, and they took their adventure easily; from time to time they stopped, that Catherine might rest; and then she sat upon a stone and looked about her at the hard-featured rocks and the glowing sky. It was late in the afternoon, in the last of August; night was coming on, and 5. George Eliot, Adam Bede, Works of George Eliot, Cabinet Edition (Edinburgh and London, n.d.), pp. 147-48. 6. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2d ed. revised by Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1959), p. 211.

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as they had reached a great elevation, the air was cold and sharp. In the west there was a great suffusion of cold red light, which made the sides of the little valley look only the more rugged and dusky. During one of their pauses her father left her and wandered away to some high place, at a distance, to get a view. He was out of sight; she sat there alone in the stillness, which was just touched by the vague murmur somewhere of a mountain brook. She thought of Morris Townsend, and the place was so desolate and lonely that he seemed very far away. . . . T h e Doctor looked round him too. "Should you like to be left in such a place as this, to starve?" "What do you mean?" cried the girl. "That will be your fate—that's how he will leave you." 7 The great scene in the opening chapter of Book Third of The Wings of the Dove (1902) is a more complex permutation of the elements in the scene above from Washington Square. T h e later scene echoes not only Wordsworth's crossing of the Simplon, but, behind Wordsworth, the temptation of Christ in Paradise

Regained.

T o Mrs. Stringham's sharp observation, Milly Theale poised on a rock at the edge of an Alpine abyss seems not to be contemplating suicide, and by no means to be enjoying "a sense sublime / O f something far more deeply interfused," 8 but rather to be "looking down on the kingdoms of the earth, and though indeed that of itself might well go to the brain, it wouldn't be with a view of renouncing them. Was she choosing among them or did she want them all?" 9 Once more, Nature has been transformed into a purely human sign, or even into a sign that draws its meaning from ironic or incongruous allusions to previous literary signs. For Milly there is to be no renunciation of the magnificence of worldly power, and her allegiance at this moment in her life seems to be to Satan rather than to Christ, which perhaps only measures the scope of her ultimate renunciation (or is it her ultimate affirmation of power?). It might seem that Wuthering Heights (1847) is the great exception to my claim that Nature plays a neutral role in Victorian fiction, or a role merely as the sign of some human meaning, often a negative meaning at that. Surely, it might be argued, here is a Victorian novel in which Nature is taken seriously, as a positive force, perhaps even as the fundamental ground, agent, or theme of the tale. Here seemingly is one Victorian novel in which vivid and circumstantial descriptions of natural features are incorporated for their own sake, as part of the primary material of the novel. In fact, however, Lord David Cecil, in his well-known essay on 7. Henry James, Washington Square (New York, 1950), pp. 193, 195 8. William Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey," The Poetical Works, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1944), 11:262.

9. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York

Edition (New York, 1909), X I X : 124.

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Wuthering Heights in Early Victorian Novelists (1934), has the priorities just backwards in arguing that the relations among Catherine, Heathcliff, and the rest dramatize a struggle between two great cosmic natural forces of storm and calm. The focus of Wuthering Heights, like that of other Victorian novels, is on relations between persons and on the problems of representing these verbally and interpreting them. Nature is no more than a major resource of figurative language by means of which the quality of the people and of their relations is defined. Nature is not confronted for itself but is transmuted into a set of figurative signs by means of which the narrators and the reader may interpret the characters and their enigmatic fates, as when Cathy says, " M y love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. M y love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary." A full reading of the novel would be necessary to explore this emblematic use of Nature in Wuthering Heights, but one further striking example may be given. The second Catherine tells how she came near to quarreling with her cousin, Linton Heathcliff, on one of her visits to the Heights. Each preferred a different kind of weather, Linton a day without wind, "with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom," Catherine a windy, cloudy day, "great swells of long grass undulating in waves to the breeze; and woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy." 10 This description of two kinds of Yorkshire weather functions entirely as a figurative means of describing the personalities of the two characters in their clashing incompatibility, outside serving splendidly, as it does throughout Wuthering Heights, as a means of naming the otherwise inaccessible inside.

# George Meredith and Thomas Hardy are two other Victorian writers who might seem to treat Nature directly, for its own sake. Yet their work, too, displays a sublimation of Nature into signs for subjective states that could exist without Nature, though not without the figuratively used signs of things in Nature. Meredith and Hardy knew, each in his own way, that the self and its states are linguistically generated and sustained. Meredith's admirably difficult "Nature" poetry moves toward the act of personification as its chief concern, and, beyond that, through an elaborate interplay with earlier poetry, Romantic as well as classical, explores the function of figurative language as generating a mythological vision. Poems of this sort include "The South-Wester," "The Day of the Daughter of Hades," "Hard Weather," " H y m n to Color," and "Night of Frost in May." In Meredith's novels the same operation 10. T h e quotations from Wuthering Heights are from the Norton Critical Edition, ed. W i l l i a m M . Sale, Jr. ( N e w York, 1972), pp. 74, 198-99. 445

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occurs in reverse. In his fiction the names of things in Nature are borrowed to denote subtle and otherwise unnameable movements of the mind, as in chapter XXI of The Egoist (1887), "Clara's Meditations." Whereas, in the poetry, Nature is figured as a person, in Meredith's novels the person is figured by natural images. In either case, the exchanges of figuration are essential to his linguistic practices. These figurative exchanges, and their base in a nonequivalence, are overtly commented on in crucial passages of interpretation proposed by the Meredithian narrator, as when he says, in chapter XVIII of One of Our Conquerors (1891), "It is the excelling merit of similes and metaphors to spring us to vault over gaps and thickets and dreary places. But, as with the visits of Immortals, we must be ready to receive them. Beware, moreover, of examining them too scrupulously: they have a trick of wearing to vapour if closely scanned." 11 In Hardy's novels and even in his poetry, as in the work of George Eliot, Nature seldom is in itself a source of value or meaning. Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), for example, contains a running commentary that sardonically rejects what Hardy understands as Wordsworthian pantheism or spiritualization of Nature. "Some people," says the narrator, "would like to know whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his song is breezy and pure gets his authority for speaking of 'Nature's holy plan.' " It seems to Tess, as she goes through the night toward the fatal convergence of the twain that will end poor Prince's life, that "the occasional heave of the wind" is "the sigh of some immense sad soul, conterminous with the universe in space, and with history in time." In a bitter parody of the Romantic union of subject and object, each of Tess's drunken companions, on the moonlit night of her violation, feels that he or she is the center of a harmonized universe: . . . as they went there moved onward with them, around the shadow of each one's hand, a circle of opalized light, formed by the moon's rays upon the glistering sheet of dew. Each pedestrian could see no halo but his or her own, which never deserted the head-shadow, whatever its vulgar unsteadiness might be; but adhered to it, and persistently beautified it; till the erratic motions seemed an inherent part of the irradiation, and the fumes of their breathing a component of the night's mist; and the spirit of the scene, and of the moonlight, and of Nature, seemed harmoniously to mingle with the spirit of wine. 12 In these passages, moonlight and the "correspondent breeze," two of the major Romantic symbols for the harmony of man and Nature, are mocked, ironically 11. George Meredith, Works, Memorial Edition (London, 1910), XVII: 189. 12. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Writings of Thomas Hardy, Anniversary Edition (New York and London, [1920]), 1:24, 34, 84. "Nature's holy plan" is from Wordsworth's "Lines Written in Early Spring," line 22.

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reduced to sleepy illusions or to drunken self-deceptions. Rather than being of value in itself, Nature for Hardy has meaning and use only when it has been marked by man's living in it and so has become a repository of signs preserving individual and collective history. 13 The shift from Nature to subjective or intersubjective life to language is enacted, for Hardy, not only in the concern with spoken or written language as such, but also in the shift of interest to the embodied signs of himself that man imprints on Nature in his passage through life. "An object or mark raised or made by man on a scene," says Hardy in his autobiography, "is worth ten times any such formed by unconscious Nature. Hence clouds, mists, and mountains are unimportant beside the wear on a threshold, or the print of a hand." 14

#

In a letter to A. W . M. Baillie written January 14, 1883, Hopkins develops the theory that in classical literature, the overt narrative meaning may be matched by a covert sequence of figures and allusions constituting what he calls an "underthought," an "echo or shadow of the overthought, something like canons and repetitions in music," . . . "an undercurrent of thought governing the choice of images used." " M y thought," Hopkins confides, "is that in any lyric passage of the tragic poets . . . there are—usually; I will not say always, it is not likely—two strains of thought running together and like counterpointed; the overthought that which everybody, editors, see . . . and which might for instance [can] be abridged or paraphrased . . . ; the other, the underthought, conveyed chiefly in the choice of metaphors etc used and often only half realised by the poet himself." 15 It might be possible to extend Hopkins's insight hypothetically to all literary texts, including his own poetry, and to suppose that each text may have its underthought, a submerged counterpoint to its manifest meaning. The religious thought of Gerard Manley Hopkins is centered on an ultimately acentering analogy: the parallelism between the structure of language and the structure of the creation in relation to the creator. The most obvious way in which this analogy appears is in the systematic and wholly orthodox use of a metaphor drawn from language to describe the relation of the natural world to God. Christ, the second person of the Trinity, is the Logos, the word or utterance of God. The world of Nature with all its multitudes of creatures, including man, is created in the name of Christ, modeled on Christ, just as all the multiplicity of words in a language might be considered as the product of an increasingly elaborate differ13. See Bruce Johnson's discussion of Tess in Chapter Fifteen. 14. Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy: 184-0-1928 (London and New York, 1965), p. 116. 15. Claude Colleer Abbott, ed., Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London, 1956), pp. 253, 252.

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entiation of a primary word, an ur-word. T h e structure of language thus becomes the metaphoric vehicle, the irreplaceable means by which Hopkins expresses his conception of God's relation to the creation. If Hopkins's theological terminology is logocentric, it is also true that language itself is a primary theme in his writings. The theme of language is not only developed in the brilliant etymological speculations in the early diaries or in the early essay on words, but also in the mature poetry itself, for example, in "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection" and in " I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day." The most elaborate treatment, however, occurs in Hopkins's masterpiece, " T h e Wreck of the Deutschland," where his concern with language displaces the focus of the poem from the relations among the self and Nature and God to linguistic puzzles that become the indispensable yet ultimately subversive model by which these relations can be expressed. If the overthought of " T h e W r e c k " is the salvation of the tall nun and the poet's corresponding experience, in madrigal echo, of a renewed inspiration or awareness of God's grace breathing in the natural world, the underthought of the poem is language itself. Like so many Romantic and post-Romantic poems, " T h e W r e c k " has as one of its themes its own possibility of being. T h e center around which Hopkins's linguistic speculations revolve, the unsettling intuition toward which they approach and withdraw is the exact opposite of his theological insight. It is the notion that there is no primal word, that the divisions of language have always already occurred as soon as there is language at all. If this is so, there is no word for the Word, only displaced metaphors of it. In the word lists that Hopkins compiled at the time of his early onomatopoeic etymological speculations each list goes back to an ur-gesture, action, or sound. In each case this is an act of division, marking, striking, or cutting. Here are examples of these lists: "grind, gride, gird, grit, great, grate, greet"; "flick, fleck, flake"; "skim, scum, squama, scale, keel"; "shear, shred, potsherd, shard." O f the first list Hopkins says, "Original meaning to strike, rub, particularly together." O f the second list, "Flick means to touch or strike lightly as with the end of a whip, a finger etc. T o fleck is the next tone above flick, still meaning to touch or strike lightly (and leave a mark of the touch or stroke) but in a broader less slight manner. Hence substantively a fleck is a piece of light, colour, substance etc. looking as though shaped or produced by such touches. Flake is a broad and decided fleck, a thin plate of something, the tone above it. Their connection is more clearly seen in the applications of the words to natural objects than in explanations." T h e third list involves the notion of "the topmost flake what [nf] may be skimmed from the surface of a thing," and the fourth list is of words playing variations on the act of division, as " T h e ploughshare [is] that which divides the soil." For Hopkins, "the 448

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onomatopoetic theory has not had a fair chance," and all these words lists lead back to an original sound or sound-producing act of differentiation. For Hopkins, as for modern linguistics, the beginning is diacritical. T h e dramatic climax of " T h e W r e c k of the Deutschland" is also the climax of its treatment of the theme of language. Its dramatic climax is the tall nun's saying the name of Christ and thereby being saved, transformed into Christ at the moment of her death. T h e linguistic climax is the implicit recognition, in stanzas 22 and 28, that there is no way of speaking of this theological mystery except in a cascade of metaphors whose proliferation confesses to the fact that there is no literal word for the Word. Stanza 22 presents a chain of words for the act of sign-making, the marking of the nun with the stigmata that sign her with the seal of sacrifice, of "resignation": Five! the finding and sake And cipher of suffering Christ. Mar, the mark is of man's make And the word of it Sacrificed. But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken, Before-time-taken, dearest prized and p r i c e d Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token For lettering of the lamb's fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake. In stanza 28 the poet's syntactical control breaks down, as well as his ability to find a single adequate literal name for "it," the apparition of Christ to the nun, walking towards her on the water in the moment of her salvation: But how shall I . . . make me room there: Reach me a . . . Fancy, come f a s t e r Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there Thing that she . . . there then! the Master Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head . . . . Rather than being in happy correspondence, Hopkins's theological thought and its linguistic underthought are at cross-purposes. T h e y have a structure of chiasmus. T h e theological thought depends on the notion of an initial unity that has been divided or fragmented and so could conceivably be reunified. T h e linguistic underthought depends on the notion of an initial bifurcation that could not by any conceivable series of linguistic transformation, such as those that make up the basic poetic strategies of Hopkins's verse, reach back to any primal word. T h e r e is no such word. Hopkins's linguistic underthought subverts his Catholic overthought.

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Though not published until 1889, Walter Pater's essay "Aesthetic Poetry" was written in 1868, six years before Hopkins composed " T h e Wreck of the Deutschland." In his essay, Pater argued that "Greek poetry, medieval or modern poetry, projects above the realities of its time, a world in which the forms of things are transfigured." For Pater, all poetry is an idealization, a transfiguration of the raw material of sensation: " O f that transfigured world this new poetry takes possession, and sublimates beyond it another still fainter or more spectral, which is literally an artificial or 'earthly paradise.' " 1 6 Although Pater's remarks are meant to describe Pre-Raphaelite poetry, or, more narrowly, the poetry of William Morris, they apply also to the "examples" cited above in this essay. The Victorian writers tended to be strongly committed to one version or other of a mimetic doctrine of literature, whether the imitation in question involved a copying of Nature or a copying of subjective "realities." Yet despite this commitment, their works also tend to contain a version of what might be called the linguistic moment: the moment when language as such, the means of representation in literature, becomes problematic, something to be interrogated, explored, or thematized in itself. In the work of many prominent Victorian writers, for example, in Ruskin, in Meredith, in Hopkins, or in Pater, this linguistic moment becomes explicit enough and prolonged enough so that it can displace Nature or human nature as the primary focus of imaginative activity. The linguistic moment tends to involve a recognition of the irreducibly figurative nature of language, a seeing of language not as a mere instrument for expressing something that could exist without it—a state of mind or an element of Nature—but as in one way or another creative, inaugurating, constitutive (but constitutive of what?). Also of moment in the linguistic moment is a more or less explicit rejection of unitary origin. Single sources are replaced by some self-generating diacritical structure of repetition with a difference. This mode of repetition exists in three planes or dimensions. Nature or "reality" itself is seen, as by Ruskin, according to the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Each leaf, wave, stone, flower, or bird is different from all others. Their similarity to one another arises against the ground of this basic dissimilarity. In a similar way, language is related to what it names across the gap of its incorrigible difference from its referent. Within language itself, the relation of sign to sign, of a literary work to the precursor work that it brings to a strange new flowering after date, is, once again, a similarity based on discontinuity and difference. The appearance in the Victorian writers of a momentum toward concern with the medium of literature rather than with its subject matter suggests that for the Victorians too, as for all writers generally in the Western tradition, literature is 16. Walter Pater, Appreciations

(London, 1889), pp. 213-14.

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distinguished from other uses of language by the explicitness of its orientation toward language rather than by thematic concerns for Nature or for selfhood. This orientation, however, can only be expressed in language that invites its thematic misreading. T h e shift from Nature and self to language can only be expressed in terms drawn figuratively from Nature and the self, therefore always liable to be taken literally. T h e study of literature should certainly cease to take the mimetic referentiality of literature for granted. Such a properly literary discipline would cease to be exclusively a repertoire of ideas, of themes, and of the varieties of human psychology. It would become once more philology, rhetoric, an investigation of the epistemology of tropes. This shift, however, would not lead to some happy purification making the study of literature a branch of "the human sciences" without tears. It would only put the philologist, lover of words, more painfully within the baffling shifts between referentiality and the refusals of referentiality that make up the intimate life of any literary text.

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#TOWARD # THE TWENTIETH # CENTURY #

Lawrence's Vital Source: Nature and Character in Thomas Hardy JOHN PATERSON

No wonder Lawrence went, in his emergence as man and artist, to the fiction of Thomas Hardy. Who among his contemporaries offered a conception of life and art more satisfactory to his sense of the world as a "religious" place, an abiding miracle and mystery? For James and Conrad, for Ford and Joyce, reality was comprehended by the human, by the merely social and moral, and constituted, as such, the only proper province of the novelist. "Fiction," as Conrad put it, "is history, human history, or it is nothing."1 For Lawrence, however, neither life nor art was supportable on such meager terms. Man was not after all the chief environment of man.2 Man was "related to the universe in some 'religious' way, even prior to his relation to his fellow man."3 It was not enough that the novelist be "a writer of books of manners."4 He had "to realise the tremendous non-human quality of life,"5 the existence of a natural cosmos that had more to offer of glory and of glamour than the vulgar world of men and things. "I am tired of life being so ugly and cruel," Lawrence wrote. "How I long for it to turn pleasant. It makes my soul heave with distaste to see it so harsh and brutal."6 If Lawrence felt a special kinship with Hardy, it was because he discovered in 1. Joseph Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters (London, 1949), p. 17. 2. D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (London, 1923), p. 386. 3. D. H. Lawrence, The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T . Moore, 2 vols. (New York, 1962), 11:993. 4. Lawrence, Collected Letters, 1:226. 5. Ibid., p. 291. 6. Ibid., p. 77. 455

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Hardy his own divine dissatisfaction with life and art. It did not suffice for either o f them to be " a writer o f novels proper."' " H e took no interest in m a n n e r s , " H a r d y said o f himself, "but in the substance o f life o n l y . " 8 For him as for L a w r e n c e , it was not enough to register the merely human or material facts: " t h e material world is so uninteresting, human life is so miserably bounded, circumscribed, cabin'd, cribb'd, confined. I want another domain for the imagination to expatiate i n . " 9 And, for him as for Lawrence, that other domain was the domain o f Nature. T o define reality as a function o f the merely human and social was to define it as ordinary and commonplace. But to define it as a function o f a natural universe independent o f and infinitely greater than the human creature and his cities and societies was to define it as the continuing repository o f marvel and magic. D a r w i n may have demolished Wordsworth's kindly Nature as a fit and friendly habitation for mankind, but in the process he had also established a Nature whose terrifying integrity, whose terrifying independence o f man, had made it a stranger and more miraculous place than W o r d s w o r t h dreamed of. " N a t u r e [was] played out as a Beauty," as Hardy put it, " b u t not as a M y s t e r y . " 1 0 H e n c e H a r d y ' s special importance for Lawrence. B y reinstating the natural cosmos as a real existence and man as a part o f that existence, by creating concepts o f life and character left unacknowledged by James and J o y c e , by Conrad and Ford, H a r d y in effect restored the possibility o f the wonder and and miracle o f things.

#

T o Hardy, Nature was its own excuse for being. It was what his A n g e l Clare would call "actualized poetry," 1 1 a poetry whose beauty and splendor w e r e e x pressions not o f an eccentric art or a socialized imagination but o f natural objects in themselves. Like Lawrence's Gudrun, unwilling to have natural objects " r e f e r r e d away to some detestable social principle," H a r d y gives life to Nature in and for itself. Lawrence justly valued Hardy for the preternatural acuteness o f his eye and ear, for the precision and particularity with which he registered the sights and sounds o f Nature. Nevertheless, H a r d y never accepted the novelist as realist, never accepted himself as a novelist in this sense, and hence his novels, like Lawrence's, are ultimately less remarkable for their representational force, for their equality with the rude substance o f Nature, than for their imaginative force, for their transformations o f that rude substance. In keeping with his dictum that 7. Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy (Hamden, Conn., 1970), p. 291. 8. Ibid., p. 104. 9. See William Archer, Real Conversations (London, 1904), p. 45. 10. Hardy, Life, p. 185. 11. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Anniversary Edition (New York and London, 1920), p. 210. Hereafter, all page references will be to this edition of Hardy's novels and will be incorporated in the text.

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"the seer should watch that pattern among general things which his idiosyncrasy moves him to observe,"12 Hardy's habit was to observe in Nature precisely what his idiosyncrasy, what his predilection for the weird and the wonderful, moved him to observe. Indeed, the same idiosyncrasy that made him single out what was unusual and surprising for the actions of his plots also made him single out what was surprising and unusual for the data of his natural scenes and settings. Hence, to begin with, his fascination with the extrahuman realms of outer space. It is not alone in Two on a Tower that "the stupendous background of the stellar universe" is acknowledged.13 Attesting as it does to the nonhuman, to something that by virtue of its sheer disconnection from the world of man and things seems weird and wondrous, the same stupendous background is acknowledged elsewhere in Hardy's novels. In Far From the Madding Crowd, for example, Hardy recites with Miltonic pleasure the majestic names of stars and constellations: The Dog-Star and Aldebaran, pointing to the restless Pleiades, were halfway up the Southern Sky, and between them hung Orion, which gorgeous constellation never burnt more vividly than now, as it soared forth above the rim of the landscape. Castor and Pollux with their quiet shine were almost on the meridian: the barren and gloomy Square of Pegasus was creeping round to the north-west. (P. 13) In The Return of the Native he names the geography of a moon surely never before in fiction rendered more closely and fantastically, Clym's eye traveling over the length and breadth of that distant country—over the Bay of Rainbows, the sombre Sea of Crises, the Ocean of Storms, the Lake of Dreams, the vast Walled Plains, and the wondrous Ring Mountains—till he almost felt himself to be voyaging bodily through its wild scenes, standing on its hollow hills, traversing its deserts, descending its vales and old sea bottoms, or mounting to the edges of its craters. (P. 230) Even those skies placed in a closer and more human relation to the earth are no ordinary skies. They are heightened or sublimed in a way that makes them as magical and unearthly as Gabriel's strange stars and Clym's even stranger moon. In The Woodlanders, Giles and Grace see far into the recesses of heaven . . . the eye journeying on under a species of golden arcades, and past fiery obstructions, fancied cairns, logan-stones, stalactites and stalagmites of topaz. Deeper than this their gaze passed thin flakes of incandescence, till it plunged into a bottomless medium of soft green fire. (P. 248). 12. Hardy, Life, p. 1S3. 13. Harold Orel, ed., Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings (Lawrence, Kansas, 1966), p. 16.

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The same partiality for the exotic and the extraordinary governs Hardy's selections from the sublunary, more familiar world of earth below. It is indeed a world of birds, beasts, and flowers, but they are birds, beasts, and flowers of no common garden variety. The wasteland of Flintcomb-Ash in Tess is dreadful enough, but it becomes dreadful in a more spectacular way by the apparition of strange birds from the north that have no community whatsoever with a cozy English Nature or with any experience remotely human: . . . gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes—eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived . . . which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous distortions . . . [and] of all they had seen which humanity would never see, they brought no account. (P. 367) The world of Egdon Heath too is remarkable enough in itself, but it becomes even more remarkable with the apparition of a Mephistophelean visitant from "regions unknown to man" who brings with him "an amplitude of Northern knowledge": "Glacial catastrophes, snow-storm episodes, glittering auroral effects, Polaris in this zenith, Franklin underfoot,—the category of his commonplaces was wonderful" (pp. 100-101). Even the creatures native to the Heath are rare enough and otherwise wonderful, so that the common flies are "huge flies . . . quite in a savage state," the grasshoppers are "tribes of emerald-green grasshoppers," and the butterflies, "which Egdon produced, and which were never seen elsewhere," are called "strange amber-coloured butterflies (p. 298). Such is the glamor of Hardy's natural universe that when a thing or creature is not in itself something rich and strange, it is likely to be so converted by some cause or freak in Nature. In Under the Greenwood Tree fuschsias and dahlias are laden "with small drops and dashes of water, changing the colour of their sparkle at every movement of the air" (p. 134), and in Far from the Madding Crowd "the creeping plants . . . [are] bowed with rows of heavy water drops, which had upon objects behind them the effect of minute lenses of high magnifying power" (p. 269). It is in the light of sun or moon or star, however, that natural objects in Hardy achieve their strangest transmutations. At times the effect, as in the case of the waterdrops, is to bring the human eye abnormally close to the natural object, so that in The Return of the Native otherwise ordinary rabbits are altered in the sun, "the hot beams blazing through the delicate tissue of each thin-fleshed ear, and firing it to a blood-red transparency in which the veins could be seen" (pp. 298-99). More usually, however, the effect is to bring the human eye far from the object and to 458

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produce less a distortion than a transformation. In The Return of the Native, the wings and thighs and breasts of a heron are "so caught by the bright sunbeams that he appeared as if formed of burnished silver" (p. 343). In Tess, gnats wandering across the shimmer of the morning sun are "irradiated as if they bore fire within them" (p. 256), and "the huge pool of blood" that spills from the body of Tess's slain work-horse is amazingly transformed by the same natural agency: "when the sun rose a hundred prismatic hues were reflected from it" (p. 36). In Wordsworth or Tennyson, in Scott or George Eliot, Nature and the objects of Nature seem to be regarded from the same angle and from the same distancethat is, from a human angle and a human distance. In Hardy, however, they are regarded from an angle or a distance either more or less than human, from an angle or a distance so near or so far as to make them unfamiliar and surprising. Hardy was not content with such "natural" alterations as were worked on things by sunlight and moonlight. In his idiosyncratic regard for the odd and the grotesque, he delighted in selecting from Nature what was paradoxically "unnatural," in catching her in those freakish moments when she inverted or reversed or otherwise contravened her own "natural" order. In the opening page of The Return of the Native, the heath at twilight grows incongruously darker than the sky itself: "darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky" (p. 3). In Far from the Madding Crowd, "the pale sheen [of the moon] had that reversed direction which snow gives, coming upward and lighting up his ceiling in an unnatural way, casting shadows in strange places, and putting lights where shadows had used to be" (p. 114). These preternatural inversions of Nature, as Hardy would have called them, occur most frequently and most variously in Tess when Hardy celebrates the "nonhuman hours" (p. 168) of dawn in the Valley of the Great Dairies. H e r e the yellow gleam of the buttercups gives the shaded faces of the dairy workers "an elfish, moonlit aspect, though the sun was pouring upon their backs in all the strength of noon" (p. 178). Here, too, the lovers see "tiny blue fogs in the shadows of trees and hedges, all the time that there was bright sunshine elsewhere" (p. 247) and again, "the reflected sun glared up from the river, under a bridge . . . though the sun itself was hidden by the bridge" (pp. 248-49). N o wonder that words like "strange," "peculiar" and "preternatural," and figures of speech like "aqueous dawn," "luminous gloom," "vast pool of odour," and "pollen of radiance" recur in Hardy's pages Such words and such figures could alone define the incongruities and strange anomalies of a world that was other than human and at times even other than natural. Hardy's habit was not only to select from the matter of Nature those things that 459

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in themselves were rich and strange. Consistent with his dictum that art was not just "the thing" itself but "a view of the thing," 14 he transmuted the matter of Nature in the crucible of his art or imagination. In his earlier novels he was excessively fond of anthropomorphizing the natural world, of rendering its appearance and behavior in the most melodramatic human terms. Trees writhe "like miserable men"; boughs are "beaded with the mist to the greyness of aged men"; a pool glitters "like a dead man's eye." Under the spell of a hectic imagination, Nature in Hardy becomes at times positively Gothic, as in the storm scene in Far from the Madding Crowd: "A hot breeze, as if breathed from the parted lips of some dragon about to swallow the globe, fanned him from the south, while directly opposite in the north rose a grim misshapen body of cloud" (p. 281). Later, lightning flashes "with the spring of a serpent and the shout of a fiend" (p. 28 5) and "the forms of skeletons [appear] in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones" (p. 287). Even in the later novels, Hardy's imagination will betray him. In The Woodlanders, trees have "spreading roots whose mossed rinds make them like hands wearing green gloves" (p. 58); in Tess, when seen against the moon, "the pollard willows, tortured out of their natural shape by incessant choppings, [become] spiny-haired monsters" (p. 229). This is not to say that Hardy's anthropomorphizing never achieves its effect. T o describe fungi in Farfrom the Madding Crowd as "marked with great splotches, red as arterial blood" (p. 348) or, in The Woodlanders, as "huge lobes" growing "like lungs" (p. 59) may be extravagant but it contributes to the strangeness of the natural object without compromising the integrity, the otherness, that is also the condition of its strangeness. There are many moments in Hardy's novels when the dramatic situation calls not for the magic enhancement of Nature but for the realistic definition and even for the realistic reduction of it. This is certainly the case when natural phenomena are compared with human artifacts and manufactures. So, in Far from the Madding Crowd, "withered grass-bents, encased in icicles," suggest "the twisted and curved shapes of old Venetian glass" (p. 115), and in Tess the face of a "tarnished moon" can suggest "the outworn gold-leaf halo of some worm-eaten Tuscan saint" (p. 116). So, too, in these same novels, "a wasting moon" hangs in the west "like tarnished brass" (p. 115) and a "reflected sun" glares up from a river "with a molten-metallic glow" (p. 248). In imagery even more modern and industrial, the sun sinks in Tess "with the aspect of a great forge in the heavens" (p. 229), while in The Woodlanders the western sky glows "like some vast foundry wherein new worlds were being cast" (p. 79), and inside the trees of the forest the sap begins "to heave with the force of hydraulic lifts" (p. 296). 14. Ibid., p. 124.

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In the main, however, Hardy is at his best when he can make the ordinary in Nature extraordinary in ways that do not draw attention to themselves, in ways that heighten and intensify without extravagantly rearranging it and thus increase rather than decrease the glamour of it. Just so, the natural in his novels is often beautifully changed to precious stones and jewels. In the enchanted country of Tess, the mist gives off "minute diamonds of moisture" (p. 168), the air of the fore-dawn is "pearly" (p. 378), and boughs are seen against "the pale opalescence of the lower sky" (p. 443). In the enchanted country of The Woodlanders, the heavens are hung with "stalagmites of topaz" (p. 248) and the bark of a tree after rain is "coated with a lichenous wash as green as emerald" (p. 236). In the even more ravishing cider country, the air is as "blue as sapphire" (p. 164) and the apple trees are "bossed, nay encrusted, with scarlet and gold fruit" (p. 208). Indeed, if things in Hardy are more than merely things and creatures more than merely creatures, it is because they are so highly or so strangely coloured, so that in The Woodlanders mist becomes "lavender mist" (p. 208) and fire "green fire" (p. 248) and in Tess the dawns become "violet or pink" dawns (p. 166) and the fogs "blue fogs" (p. 247). For Hardy as for Lawrence, as for post-impressionists like Van Gogh and Gauguin, the natural world was not at all that the eye saw. It was what the imagination saw. Natural phenomena seldom appear lovelier or stranger in Hardy than when they are juxtaposed with phenomena not outside Nature but, more curiously, inside Nature itself. The results are eccentric and surprising but without the shock and violence of "arterial blood" or "hydraulic lifts." So, in Hardy, flower bells can become as craters, showers as grain; a star can be compared to a flower, meadows to seas, and trees to rocks. In The Return of the Native, "each of the tiny trumpets [of the mummified heath-bells] was seized on, entered, scoured and emerged from by the wind as thoroughly as if it were as vast as a crater" (p. 61) and in The Woodlanders "little showers had scattered themselves like grain against the walls and windowpanes" (p. 236). In the summer fog of Tess, "the meadows lay like a white sea, out of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous rocks" (p. 168) and later in the evening sky the star Jupiter hangs "like a full-blown jonquil" (p. 443). In Hardy's extraordinary cosmos, even the sun undergoes peculiar alterations. In the dark dense world of The Woodlanders, the sun is never seen whole but only "in the form of numerous little stars staring through the leaves" (p. 170) and later, as Giles and his man return from their cider-making, one of the sun's stray beams will alight now and then "like a star on the blades of the pomace-shovels" (p. 246). In Tess a pasture can seem like a sea and sunshine like moonshine in one remarkable stroke, so that when Tess and Angel look one morning "over the damp sod in the direction of the sun, a glistening ripple of gossamer webs was visible to their eyes under the 461

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luminary, like the track of moonlight on the sea" (p. 256). For Hardy as for Lawrence, man and his society might not be magical and marvelous enough but the natural cosmos and its figures and forms most certainly were. For him as for Lawrence, the merely human world may not have sufficed for his imagination to expatiate in, but the nonhuman world of sun and moon, of sky and sea, of bird and beast, most certainly did.

#

If Hardy was dear to Lawrence, it was because he rehabilitated not only Nature as a source of mystery and miracle, but Man himself. By restoring the ancient heavenly connection between the human creature and the natural world around it, by establishing what Lawrence called "the true correspondence between the material cosmos and the human soul,"15 Hardy sought, like Lawrence after him, to make the human character more wondrous and surprising than traditionally realistic novelists had dreamed of in their philosophies. T o make people in novels the functions of their merely social values and conditions, to make them participants in a merely human drama, was to condemn them at once to the ordinary and the predictable. But to make them functions of wholly natural values and conditions, to make them participants in some larger nonhuman drama, was to create fascinating creatures too amazing to be understood, too mysterious to be predicted. "That which is physic—non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me," as Lawrence put it in the most famous of his statements, "than the old-fashioned human element." 16 "If one is to do fiction now," he liked to think, "one must cross the threshold of the human people." 17 Hardy was not of course free, any more than Lawrence was, to cross this threshold on a permanent basis. His Clyms, his Henchards, his Tesses, belong after all to the category of the human, of perfectly ordinary people with their roots in the substance of human and social history. But they are remarkable, too, and they achieve at moments a transcendent power. As creatures rooted in the strange substance of Nature, persistently compared with natural forms and phenomena, they assume at times a magic, a majesty, that makes them more than human. This is first of all because what they are or do or feel invites comparison with the immensities and intensities of the universe, with the elemental forms and forces of sun and moon, of sky and sea, of wind and fire and water. Eustacia's form is "soft to the touch as a cloud" (p. 75); Clym's influence penetrates her "like summer sun" (p. 146); indignation spreads through her "like subterranean heat" (p. 72); when "the calm fixity of her features sublimefs] itself to an expression of refinement and 15. D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix (London, 1968), 11:227. 16. Lawrence, Collected Letters, 1:281. 17. Ibid., p. 566. 462

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warmth," it is "like garish noon rising to the dignity of sunset (pp. 216-17). It is not otherwise with Michael Henchard. A powerful psalm tune can make his "blood ebb and flow like the sea" (p. 268); the "strong, warm gaze" he fixes on Lucetta is, in comparison with Farfrae's, "like the sun beside the moon" (p. 201); he is governed by "the volcanic fires of his nature" (p. 270); in his distress he moves "like a great tree in a wind" (p. 141) and when he and Farfrae wrestle together, they are described as "rocking and writhing like trees in a gale" (p. 314). W h e n Hardy's people are not made larger than life by being placed in the same continuum with the spectacular Nature of suns and seas and gales, they are made stranger than life by being placed in the same continuum with the sublunary Nature of birds and beasts and flowers. The rapidity of Bathsheba's movement is "that of a kingfisher—its noiselessness that of a hawk" (p. 18). "All similes and allegories concerning her began and ended with birds," Hardy writes of Thomasin Yeobright. " W h e n she was musing she was a kestrel, which hangs in the air by an invisible motion of its wings. W h e n she was in a high wind her light body was blown against trees and banks like a heron's. W h e n she was frightened she darted noiselessly like a kingfisher" (p. 249). Elsewhere, and more remarkably, their similes begin and end with trees and plants; in death, Eustacia's loose black hair "surrounded her brow like a forest" (p. 448), and in the presence of Angel Clare's relentless love, Tess flinches "like a plant in too burning a sun" (p. 218). Indeed, there often is no disparity in Hardy's world of wonder between human psychology and natural physiology, a "fevered hope" growing up in Boldwood "like a grain of mustard-seed" (p. 381), Grace Melbury's heart rising from its sadness "like a released bough" (p. 247) and a new spirit mounting in Tess "as the sap in the twigs" (p. 127). Hardy's men and women can be marvels, can be mysteries, because they rehearse the marvels and mysteries of the natural process itself. W h e n they are not made stranger than life by their community with birds and trees and plants, they are made lovelier and more glamorous by their community with flower and fruit. In Farfrom the Madding Crowd, the heroine's face is "red and moist from her exertions, like a peony petal before the sun dries off the dew" (p. 30), and in Tess the heroine's mouth is a "flower-like mouth" (p. 114), her lips parting, as she sleeps with her recovered husband "like a half-opened flower near his cheek" (p. 499). Indeed, if figures like Gabriel Oak and Giles Winterborne suggest Nature-gods or wood-gods, if they become at moments larger than life and more beautiful, it is because their human bodies and even their human clothing become so stuck and starred with the magic flowers and fruit of the earth, that they are, as it were, transhumanized. Giles "looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit-stains" (p. 246). So, too, with Michael 463

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Henchard; in the days of his youth and innocence, before the crime that parted him from Nature and made him a gentleman, he had worn "leggings yellow as marigolds, corduroys immaculate as new flax, and a neckerchief like a flowergarden" (p. 264). While all similes in Hardy begin with birds, beasts, and flowers, they do not end with them. The same instinct for the grotesque that governed his selection of natural objects governed his selection of natural similes. His woodland folk attack the bark of trees "like locusts" (p. 160), and Sue Bridehead enters a room "like the flitting in of a moth" (p. 300). But everywhere his people evoke analogies with things in Nature even stranger to the human imagination, with dead herons and tiger-beetles, seaweed and mushrooms, toads and snakes. When the hitherto wholly comic Uncle Benjy dies in The Trumpet-Major, he leaves behind him a carcass "dry and fleshless as that of a dead heron found on a moor in January" (p. 369), and when Eustacia appears in her winter clothing, she is "like the tigerbeetle, which when observed in dull situations, seems to be of the quietest neutral colour but under a full illumination blazes with dazzling splendour" (p. 104). In the rain Tess's hair becomes no "better than seaweed" (p. 238) and when her cheeks are kissed by her betrayer, they seem "damp and smoothly chill as the skin of the mushrooms in the field around" (p. 99). When she bends forward on the terrible night of her marriage, "each diamond on her neck gave a sinister wink like a toad's" (p. 287) and when she yawns in the morning she discloses "the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake's (p. 217). Even Marty South, that least remarkable of human creatures, is transposed into something at once marvelous and sinister: as one of the crew stripping the bark off the trees, "she stood encaged amid the mass of twigs and buds like a great bird, running her ripping-tool into the smallest branches" (p. 160). If otherwise ordinary men and women in Hardy are magically metamorphosed, it is not only because they are like the marvelous and mysterious presences of Nature, but also because, in the natural environment, they themselves are or become such presences. In the sylvan setting of The Woodlanders, the normally commonplace heroine can become "a sylph-like greenish-white creature, as toned by the sunlight and leafage" (p. 102) and the hero, for all his mildness and meekness, can become "the fruit-god and the wood-god in alternation; sometimes leafy and smeared with green lichen . . . sometimes cider-stained and starred with apple-pips" (p. 335). In Tess, too, the humblest folk are actualized into poetry by the Nature they inhabit, so that when the dairymaids walk to Sunday church, their gauzy skirts [brush] up from the grass innumerable flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in the transparent tissue as in an aviary" (p. 183), and when the dairy workers creep along the pasture in the 464

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•

morning in search of the garlic plant, "a soft yellow gleam [is] reflected from the buttercups into their shaded faces, giving them an elfish, moonlit aspect" (p. 178). Like other objects in Nature, they undergo, in the solar or lunar lights, remarkable transfigurations. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, the sun warms Farfrae's head and face "to a complexion of flame-colour" (p. 312) and in The Trumpet-Major, the sad young hero "blazefs] in the rays [of the sun] like a very god of war" (p. 101). In Tess, the "plump neck, shoulders, and arms" of the lowly and vulgar Car appear touchingly in the moonshine "as luminous and beautiful as some Praxitelean creation" (p. 82), and as, on the same occasion, the intoxicated folk move homeward, there moves with them, "around the shadow of each one's head, a circle of opalized light, formed by the moon's rays upon the glistening sheet of dew" (p. 84). In effect, Hardy dehumanizes his characters. Like the Cézanne Lawrence loved, Hardy paints out of them "the so-called humanness, the personality, the 'likeness,' the physical cliché." 18 This is in part so because the human figure becomes, in the light of sun or moon, head or a face, a mouth or an eye, a nostril or a lip, it is even more because in the same strange light, that feature of head or face, of lip or mouth, is surprisingly changed into the nonhuman, into an aspect of Nature eerily and incongruously other than human. Susan Henchard's lips become fire: "the strongly-coloured sun . . . made transparencies of her eyelids and nostrils and set fire on her lips" (p. 2). Eustacia's mouth becomes a tulip scarlet with fire: "the sun shone into her mouth as into a tulip, and lent it a similar scarlet fire" (p. 104). In the case of Elizabeth-Jane, a woman's hair becomes a hazel copse ("the rays [of the sun] streamed into its depths as into a hazel copse") (p. 28), and in that of Grace Melbury it becomes a brake (the firelight shone "through the loose hair about her temples as sunlight through a brake") (p. 51). Elsewhere, the features of the human figure, like the features of any natural object, are variously metamorphosed into precious metals or jewels to produce the same effect of the nonhuman. The fog rests on the lashes of Tess's eyes "like crystals" (p. 249) and drops of moisture hang upon her hair "like seedpearls" (p. 168). In Far from the Madding Crowd, Boldwood's "Roman features . . . [glow] in the sun with a bronze-like richness of tone" (p. 104); the faces and hands of Tess's pursuers at Stonehenge appear, in the growing light of the dawn, "as if they were silvered" (p. 505); and in The Return of the Native, Clym's face shows its shape in the light of the eclipsed moon, "as if it were cut out in gold" (p. 23 5). Hardy chooses the human eye, however, to register most astonishingly the strange unity and continuity of man and Nature. The same fantastical imagination that turned lips into fire, mouths into tulips, and faces into silver and gold, also turns 18. Lawrence, "Introduction to These Paintings," Phoenix (New York, 1936), p. 579.

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• JOHN PATERSON •

eyes into the mysterious shapes and weird colorations of the natural universe. When Hardy says of Boldwood that "the impending night appeared to concentrate in his eye" (p. 236) or of Grace Melbury that her eyes were "deep and mysterious as interstellar space" (p. 232), at a single stroke he translates the human creature into something more or other than the merely human. Indeed, Hardy does more. The human eye is not just like something vast or strange in Nature; it is something vast or strange in Nature. So it is when Marty South is visualized in The Woodlanders "with the vermilion light of the sun in the pupils of her eyes" (p. 79), or when Ann Garland is visualized in The Trumpet-Major, "each of her eyes having a little sun in it, which gave her glance a peculiar golden fire" (p. 102). So is it, too, when Clym flings himself "down upon the barrow, his face towards the moon, which depicted a small image of herself in each of his eyes" (pp. 229-30) or when, with Tess, "the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye-pupils shone like a diamond" (p. 120). The eye that is the human expression and is the human being is suddenly no longer human. It—the eye, the expression, the being— is a moon or a diamond, a vermilion light or a golden fire. Only that and nothing more. Indeed, the image so bedazzles the human imagination that for the moment everything stops. The character is the eye, the eye is the image, and the image is arrestingly nonhuman. Only the astonishing is beautiful, the surrealists would eventually declare. And, in fact, if Hardy's characters are often astonishingly beautiful, it is because they are like figures in a surrealist dream. This is partly for the reason that their look or situation is in itself manifestly surreal, as when Clym appears with the moon in each of his eyes or Marty South with the vermilion light of the sun in hers. Elsewhere, however, the surreal is a function not of what is seen but of the way it is seen, not of the human features or objects observed but of the uncanny nonhuman similes and metaphors they inspire. So, Diggory's eye is "keen as that of a bird of prey, and blue as autumn mist" (p. 9) and Clym's face appears in the light of the moon "as if it were cut out in gold." In such cases as these what the human thing is like, what the head or face or eye is compared with, is so powerfully and dramatically different that it totally transfigures the human thing itself. Diggory's eye is obliterated as an eye by the startling images of bird of prey and blue autumn mist; Clym's face is obliterated as a face by the even more startling image of a shape cut out in gold. The merely human creature is changed, changed utterly, into a terrible beauty or beauty otherwise strange and surreal. The effect is even stranger and more surreal when the relationship between the human subject and the image it suggests is not logically explained—as it often is in the simile—but is left mysteriously unexplained. It is wonderful that Henchard 466

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wears "leggings yellow as marigolds," but even more wonderful that he should wear " a neckerchief like a flower-garden"; where the logical resemblance between "leggings" and "marigolds" is specified by the term " y e l l o w , " the logical resemblance between " n e c k e r c h i e f and "flower-garden" is not specified at all, but is left entirely to the better magic and mystery o f the imagination. Indeed, if the surrealist characteristically replaces the logical order with a dynamic flow o f images, then he best achieves his effect when he expresses the association between the human subject and the image not as a simile but as a metaphor, when the human subject is not just like but is the image it evokes. It is wonder-working that Bathsheba's face should be "like a peony petal," but it is even more so that T e s s ' s mouth should be a "peony mouth" (p. 12). T o say that a face is "like a peony petal" is still to insist on the logical distinction between face and flower, between the human and the nonhuman, and to create a picture that draws on the visual distinction between them. But to say that a mouth is a "peony mouth" makes it difficult to discriminate, either logically or pictorially, between " m o u t h " and "peony," between the human and the nonhuman. T h e y compose in the visual picture not two images but one image, and that image more o f flower than o f mouth. Hardy's pictures and portraits are most remarkable when their surrealism derives neither from the thing itself nor from the simile or metaphor it generates, but from both. T h e effect on such occasions is that of images logically divorced from each other but imaginatively joined in a highly charged and almost unconscious association. T h a t the sun shines into Eustacia's mouth is astonishing, but that it should shine into her mouth "as into a tulip, and lenfd] it a similar scarlet fire" is to add the astonishing to the astonishing and to produce in sun, mouth, tulip, and fire one dynamic composition of logically dissociated images. Again, that Tess's yawn should reveal to Angel Clare "the red interior o f her mouth" or that "the miniature of candle-flame [should appear] inverted in her eye-pupils" is sufficiently grotesque, but that "the red interior o f her mouth" should show itself "as if it had been a snake's" or that "the candle-flame inverted in her eye-pupils" should shine "like a diamond" adds one grotesque image to another and creates, in red interior and mouth and snake, in candle-flame and eye-pupils and diamond, one inspired series of otherwise disconnected images. It would be rash to claim that Hardy saw human creatures in the same astounding ways that Cézanne and Picasso and Chagall would come to see them. H e was a novelist after all and had to "think" in sentences as well as " s e e " in pictures. But it is a measure of the originality o f his imagination that he should suggest comparison with them on any terms. Like them, he would behold the human character not as the eye but as 467

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the imagination beheld it. Like them, he would dehumanize the human character not to make it less human, but only to make it more vividly and more remarkably so.

#

T o Henry James, Thomas Hardy was "the good little Thomas Hardy." But not to Lawrence. As a poet and novelist who would help to change this century's sense of life and character, Lawrence was able to recognize, as James was not, the originality of Hardy's provincial genius, the brilliant eccentricity of his art and imagination. The writer who witnessed strange stars and constellations, the crash of icebergs and the slide of snowhills, things altered to bronze in the sun or to gold in the moon, creatures with fire on their lips, forests round their brows, or diamonds for eyes: such an artist was surely something more than "the good little Thomas Hardy." For all his faults and failures, Hardy had entered states of life and being stranger by far and more mysterious than anything James and his friends knew existed. Reality was not after all exhausted by the human; it was conterminous with a natural cosmos that remained uncomprehended and incomprehensible. Nor was the human exhausted by the social; it was a part of the same nonhuman mystery by which it was surrounded, by the same natural cosmos out of which it came and into which it disappeared. It was just such truths as these that Lawrence himself would try to embody in the pages of his fictions. When Gertrude Morel melts in the moonlight "like scent into the shiny, pale air," when Will Brangwen's eyes are described as "quick, steady eyes, like a bird's, like a hawk's" and Strebensky's as "quite still, like a washed sky after rain," when Rupert Birkin's face appears to Ursula "gleaming like fire" and Gerald Crich's flesh and hair glisten "like sunlight refracted through crystals of ice," it is clear that Lawrence is seeking and achieving the same nonhuman effects that Hardy before him had sought and achieved. Like Hardy, indeed, Lawrence would dehumanize or transhumanize his people. "I know, from the Egyptian and Assyrian sculpture, what we are after," he wrote. " W e want to realise the tremendous nonhuman quality of life." 19 Still, what was possible for Hardy was not possible for Lawrence. The diminished and constantly diminishing landscape of modern Derbyshire scarcely provided him with those magical atmospheres in which a Clym or Eustacia, a Marty South or a Tess Durbeyfield, could be miraculously transmogrified. Accordingly, if Lawrence entered the great fantasia of the unconscious in The Rainbow and Women in Love, it was to discover inside human beings the same natural wonders he had hitherto sought outside them. The nonhuman aspects that were manifest in the external world of bird, beast, and flower now also manifested themselves 19. Lawrence, Collected Letters, 1:291.

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in the internal world of unconscious or "allotropic" states of being. T o this extent, Lawrence's characters, particularly as they appear in The Rainbow and Women in Love, are unusual in a more radical sense than Hardy's. A Tess or Eustacia may be momentarily or intermittently transfigured by her contact with a weird external Nature, but a Will Brangwen or a Gerald Crich is persistently or pervasively transfigured by his contact with a weird internal Nature. Hardy's people may be occasionally amazing but Lawrence's are seldom anything else. It is hard, nevertheless, to conceive the one without the other. It may be too much to say that without Hardy Lawrence would never have discovered a world fit for the imagination to expatiate in. But it is not too much to say that no other novelist before Lawrence was even ready to admit the possibility of its existence.

469

"That strange abstraction, f Nature'": T. S. Eliot's Victorian Inheritance A. W A L T O N L I T Z

When in "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931" the aging William Butler Yeats proclaims himself one of "the last romantics," we are touched by the plain truth of the phrase. From the beginning of his poetic life Yeats had sought to align himself with the great masters of vision and symbol who dominated the century in which he was born, and "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931" is an emblem of this continuity: it stands squarely in the ninteenth-century elegiac tradition, enshrining privileges of mind and spirit that have been overwhelmed by the "darkening flood" of contemporary change. In contrast to Yeats, however, those writers who came to maturity in the years immediately after 1900—especially Pound and Eliot—cultivated an uneasy relationship with the century of their birth. It was part of the theology of modernism that a "quantum jump" in sensibility and technique had marked the beginnings of twentieth-century literature, and that the nineteenth century—with the exception of a few carefully chosen writers—offered a negative model for the modern artist. This selective view of the recent past, put forward most aggressively in the early poems and essays of Pound and Eliot, has colored most of the criticism directed at their works, and it is only in the last few years that we have come to see both writers as natural inheritors of the major nineteenthcentury literary traditions. As long as they were read as contemporary poets, Pound and Eliot imposed on their critics those specialized versions of the past which they had developed to support their literary experiments. The most sensitive of Eliot's early critics, F. O. Matthiessen, is a perfect example of the reader whose own view of literary history has been so profoundly affected by Eliot's early 470

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criticism that he cannot relate the poet to any traditions not sanctified by The Sacred Wood or Homage to John Dryden. If he were writing today Matthiessen would surely give less emphasis to Eliot the innovator and more to Eliot as an heir of the nineteenth century, one of the "last Victorians." Now that Eliot and Pound have ceased to be our contemporaries, in their special sense of that term, the excitement of discovering their modernity, their differences from the past, has given way to the pleasure of discovering their affinities with many writers who did not satisfy their early pedagogical ideals. Eliot is especially intriguing, since unlike Pound he built a recognition of these long-suppressed connections into his late poetry and criticism. Starting with The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism and the landscape poetry of the early 1930s—that is with the Jamesian impact of his return to America in 1932—Eliot began a gradual rapprochement with many of the literary figures and conventions he had deliberately rejected in his earlier criticism, and this process of reconciliation culminated in the Four Quartets, where voices long out of fashion merge harmoniously with the more "modern" voices of The Waste Land and " T h e Hollow Men." Dame Helen Gardner, whose recent work presents a new view of Eliot's literary inheritance, sums up these lessons of the later poetry and criticism: Eliot went consciously to school to the French poets of the nineteenth century and to the English poets of the seventeenth and he early found a master in Baudelaire, the poet of the city. But I have come to feel that the deep roots of his poetry are elsewhere, in his inheritance as an American child at the turn of the century, reading and re-reading the poetry of the nineteenth century. He re-created and enormously extended the poetry of place, transformed that most characteristic nineteenth-century form, the dramatic monologue, and succeeded, where his immediate predecessors failed, in bringing poetry back to the stage.1 The Eliot of Prufrock, Poems (1920), and The Waste Land, of The Sacred Wood and Homage to John Dryden, will always remain a distinct and powerful personality, whose influence on his immediate time was more dramatic than that of any other English poet-critic. Yet it is a partial personality, a carefully constructed persona, and if we are to do justice to all of Eliot's poetry, especially the Quartets, we must uncover a more complex and private poetic life. Any satisfactory understanding of Eliot's deep affinities with his nineteenthcentury predecessors will have to wait upon more thorough studies of his life and total literary production, some of which are already under way. But it is possible even now to sketch a brief history of Eliot's relationship to the great Victorians that 1. Helen Gardner, T. S. Eliot and the English Poetic Tradition, Byron Foundation Lecture (Nottingham, 1965), p. 25. 471

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modifies the dogmatic opinions derived from his early essays, and one revealing point of focus is his changing attitudes toward nineteenth-century poetry of the natural world. Like Wallace Stevens, who preceded him at Harvard by less than a decade, Eliot began to write as an undergraduate in a conventional style that might be called "academic romanticism": the chief and predictable influences were Tennyson and Swinburne, as filtered through the more fragile sensibilities of the 1890s. The lyric "Before Morning," published in the Harvard Advocate of November 13, 1908, gives the flavor of Eliot's apprentice verse: While all the East was weaving red with gray, The flowers at the window turned toward dawn, Petal on petal, waiting for the day, Fresh flowers, withered flowers, flowers of dawn. This morning's flowers and flowers of yesterday Their fragrance drifts across the room at dawn, Fragrance of bloom and fragrance of decay, Fresh flowers, withered flowers, flowers of dawn. 2 The images and sentiments of "Before Morning" may be stock responses, "such as a College easily supplies," but from time to time the youthful Eliot could infuse this inherited style with a sense of fresh and direct observation. T h e opening stanza of "Song," another poem of 1908-9, is more than an exercise in imitation. The moonflower opens to the moth, The mist crawls in from sea; A great white bird, a snowy owl, Slips from the alder tree.3 These lines reveal a genuine talent for the picturesque, for nineteenth-century landscape poetry; but at the same time that Eliot was writing "Before Morning" and "Song" he was discovering Laforgue and Baudelaire, beginning the process of self-examination and self-transformation that led Pound to declare in 1914, when he first read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," that Eliot alone among the young Americans had "trained himself and modernized himself on his own."4 In late 1908 Eliot discovered Arthur Symons's Symbolist Movement in Literature, an event that he later declared "affected the course of my life." 5 Symons introduced him to the poetry of Laforgue, in which he found the ironic techniques that would 2. T . S. Eliot, Poems Written in Early Youth ( N e w York, 1967), p. 19. 3. Ibid., p. 22. 4. Ezra Pound, Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Paige ( N e w York, 1950), p. 40. 5. T . S. Eliot, review of Peter Quennell's Baudelaire and the Symbolists, The Criterion IX (January 1930): 357.

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enable him to speak of his own frustrations and anxieties with distancing irony. Through Laforgue and Baudelaire, whom he had already begun to read, Eliot learned how to convert the experiences of the modern city into a poetic landscape of the modern mind. I think that from Baudelaire I learned first, a precedent for the poetical possibilities, never developed by any poet writing in my own language, of the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis, of the possibility of fusion between the sordidly realistic and the phantasmagoric, the possibility of the juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact and the fantastic. From him, as from Laforgue, I learned that the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience that an adolescent had had, in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry, and that the source of new poetry might be found in what had been regarded hitherto as the impossible, the sterile, the intractably unpoetic. That, in fact, the business of the poet was to make poetry out of the unexplored resources of the unpoetical; that the poet, in fact, was committed by his profession to turn the unpoetical into poetry. A great poet can give a younger poet everything that he has to give, in a very few lines. It may be that I am indebted to Baudelaire chiefly for half a dozen lines out of the whole of Fleurs du Mal-, and that his significance for me is summed up in the lines: Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le

passant....

I knew what that meant, because I had lived it before I knew that I wanted to turn it into verse on my own account. 6 Eliot's comment on the opening lines of Baudelaire's "Les Sept Vieillards," which were one of the chief inspirations for the vision of the Unreal City in The Waste Land, shows how little his early poetry of the modern city was an "escape from personality." Beginning with the first city "Preludes" of 1909-10 and continuing through "Gerontion" and The Waste Land, Eliot constructed a poetry of the urban landscape that was a secret map of his own spiritual history and personal frustrations. Beneath the apparently "objective" surface created by the various personae and dramatic voices, beneath the cultural overlay of literary and historical allusions, we can discern a nineteenth-century poetry of religious doubt and personal anxiety quite reminiscent of The City of Dreadful Night. W h a t Eliot did in effect was to suppress half of his most moving childhood and adolescent memories—his deep responses to the natural world of the Mississippi River and the N e w England coast—and convert his experiences of the anonymous city, of St. 6. T . S. Eliot, "What Dante Means to Me" (1950), To Criticize the Critic (New York: 1965), pp. 126-27.

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Louis and Boston, Paris and London, into the famous images and symbols of urban isolation. Following the examples of those French poets who had first explored it, Eliot could to a certain extent objectify and "distance" the life of the modern city; whereas in treating the natural world he would have had to adopt the only techniques at hand, the direct and personal responses of post-Romantic English Nature poetry. But a desire to distance and objectify his own emotions was not the only reason why the young Eliot of 1909-10 turned away from the models he had followed in his apprentice verse. A rejection of popular nineteenth-century attitudes toward Nature, and of the poets who promoted them, was part of the intellectual and critical program that Eliot developed in tandem with the characteristic early poetry. From his most powerful early teachers, Baudelaire and Irving Babbitt, he learned to distrust any benevolent or optimistic notions based on a Rousseauistic view of Nature's affinities with man. If he had been asked for some "nature poetry" by an editor devoted to Edwardian or Georgian verse, Eliot might well have replied as Baudelaire did in 18 5 5 : Vous me demandez des vers pour votre petit volume, des vers sur la Nature, n'est-ce pas? sur les bois, les grands chenes, la verdure, les insectes—le soleil, sans doute? Mais, vous savez bien que je suis incapable de m'attendrir sur les végétaux et que mon ame est rebelle à cette singulière religion nouvelle, qui aura toujours, ce me semble, pour etre spirituel je ne sais quoi de shocking. Je ne croirai jamais que l'ame des Dieux habite dans les plantes, et quand meme elle y habiterait, je m'en soucierais médiocrement, et considérerais le mienne comme d'un bien plus haut prix que celle des légumes sanctifies. J'ai meme toujours pensé qu'il y avait dans la Nature, florissante et rajeunie, quelque chose d'impudent et d'affligeant. . . . Dans le fond de bois, enfermé sous ces voûtes semblables à celle des sacristies et des cathédrales, je pense à nos étonnantes villes, et la prodigieuse musique qui roule sur les sommets me semble la traduction des lamentations humaines.'

„

#

Following the arguments of Baudelaire, Babbitt, and T . E. Hulme, Eliot saw ninteenth-century sentimentalism and realism as both springing from the "romanticist" attitudes of Rousseau. W h e n he delivered his first Oxford University extension lectures in late 1916 at Ilkley in Yorkshire, Eliot opened his discussion of "Modern French Literature" with an outline of the Rousseauistic tendencies against which recent French writers had reacted. 7. C.-F. Baudelaire, Letters to F. Desnovers, Correspondance Générale, 1:321-23. Quoted in Modem French Poets cm Poetry, ed. Robert Gibson (Cambridge, 1961 ), p. 71.

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LECTURE I THE ORIGINS: WHAT IS ROMANTICISM?

Contemporary intellectual movements in France must be understood as in large measure a reaction against the 'romanticist' attitude of the nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century several conflicting tendencies were manifested, but they may all be traced to a common source. T h e germs of all these tendencies are found in Rousseau. . . . His main tendencies were (1) Exaltation of the personal and individual above the

typical.

(2) Emphasis upon feeling rather than thought. (3) Humanitarianism: belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature (4) Depreciation o f f o r m in art, and glorification of

spontaneity.

His great faults were (1) Intense egotism. (2) Insincerity. Romanticism stands for excess in any direction. It splits up into two directions: escape from the world of fact, and devotion to brute fact. T h e two great currents of the nineteenth century—vague emotionality and the apotheosis of science (realism) alike spring from Rousseau. LECTURE II THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM

T h e beginning of the twentieth century has witnessed a return to the ideals of classicism. These may roughly be characterized as form and restraint in a r t , discipline

a n d authority

i n r e l i g i o n , centralization

i n g o v e r n m e n t ( e i t h e r as

socialism or monarchy). T h e classicist point of view has been defined as essentially a belief in Original Sin—the necessity for austere discipline. T h e present-day movement is partly a return to the ideals of the seventeenth century. . . . Movement away from both realism and purely personal expression of emotion. Growing devotion to form, finding expression in new forms. Disapproval of dilettantism and aestheticism. Expression of the new political and religious attitudes in literature. 8 So as part of his self-conscious effort to follow French models and rid himself of those twin nineteenth-century fallacies, "realism and purely personal expression of 8. Ronald Schuchard, " T . S. Eliot as an Extension Lecturer, 1916-1919," Review of English Studies, n.s., XXV (May and August 1974): 165—66. For discussion of the intellectual background to these lectures see Ronald Schuchard, "Eliot and Hulme in 1916: Toward a Revaluation of Eliot's Critical and Spiritual Development," PMLA LXXXV11I (October 1973): 1083-94, and John D. Margolis, T. S. Eliot's Intellectual Development, 1922-1939 (Chicago, 1972), pp. 4-12.

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emotion," Eliot reacted against the nineteenth-century English and American poets of Nature who had inspired his youthful verse. But there were related aesthetic as well as philosophical reasons for rejecting the nineteenth-century poets of the natural world. " G o in fear of abstractions" was one of the slogans of Imagism,9 and Eliot responded by condemning that grandest and most elusive of nineteenth-century abstractions, "Nature." Thus as late as his In Memoriam essay of 1936, when he was already coming to terms with Tennyson as a poet of the picturesque, Eliot could dismiss section LVI of the poem on "Nature, red in tooth and claw" with this comment: That strange abstraction, "Nature," becomes a real god or goddess, perhaps more real, at moments, to Tennyson than God ("Are God and Nature then at strife?"). The hope of immortality is confused (typically of the period) with the hope of the gradual and steady improvement of this world. 10 In the making of his early poetry and early critical canon, the two mirrors of each other, Eliot was forced by conviction and emotional need to reject his nineteenth-century masters as poets of undisciplined feelings and vitiating abstractions, who could only deal with the natural world as a pathetic reflection of individual emotions or as "la Nature." Gradually he devised the selective view of literary history expressed in his essays on "Andrew Marvell" and " T h e Metaphysical Poets" (1920), where the unified sensibilities of the seventeenthcentury English poets of wit and the nineteenth-century French poets of controlled irony are contrasted with the coarse and sentimental poetic talents of most nineteenth-century English poets. The history of English verse is seen as a long falling-off from the "internal equilibrium," the fusion of opposites, exemplified by the Metaphysicals. . . . the best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country Churchyard (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the Coy Mistress. The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed from the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation. The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley's Triumph 9. Ezra Pound, " A Few Don'ts," in Literary Essays, ed. T . S. Eliot (London, 1954), p. 5. First published in Poetry, March 1913. 10. T . S. Eliot, Selected Essays, N e w Edition (New York, 1950), pp. 292-93.

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•

of Life, in the second Hyperion, there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated. 11 This dogmatic deformation of English poetic history, a view "invented" to justify the exclusions and new departures of modernist poetry, is most forcefully put forward in an unreprinted essay, "The Lesson of Baudelaire," which appeared in The Tyro just before Eliot began his final work on The Waste Land. Here, in the coterie atmosphere of Wyndham Lewis's little magazine, Eliot sheds his academic justifications and speaks directly to the moral and aesthetic issues. What gives the French Seventeenth Century literature its solidity is the fact that it had its Morals, that it had a coherent point of view. Romanticism endeavoured to form another Morals—Rousseau, Byron, Goethe, Poe were moralists. But they have not sufficient coherence; not only was the foundation of Rousseau rotten, his structure was chaotic and inconsistent. Baudelaire, a deformed Dante . . . aimed, with more intellect plus intensity, and without much help from his predecessors, to arrive at a point of view toward good and evil. English poetry, all the while, either evaded the responsibility, or assumed it with too little seriousness. . . . This it is that makes some of the most distinguished English poets so trifling. Is anyone seriously interested in Milton's view of good and evil? Tennyson decorated the morality he found in vogue; Browning really approached the problem but with too little seriousness, with too much complacency. . . . As for the verse of the present time, the lack of curiosity in technical matters, of the academic poets of to-day (Georgian et caetera) is only an indication of their lack of curiosity in moral matters. On the other hand, the poets who consider themselves most opposed to Georgianism, and who know a little French, are mostly such as could imagine the Last Judgment only as a lavish display of Bengal lights, Roman candles, Catherine wheels, and inflammable fire-balloons. Vous, hypocrite lecteur.12 This passage, which prepares the way for the fusion of Dante and Baudelaire in Eliot's vision of the Unreal City, sums up the view of literary history Eliot bequeathed to his early critics. Given the poetry and criticism of 1909-25, it is not surprising that Matthiessen and his followers should have accepted Eliot's dismissal of the Victorians at face value, or that Joseph Warren Beach, writing in the mid-1930s, should have chosen Eliot's poetry as marking "The Vanishing Point" in his study of The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry. 11. Ibid., pp. 247-48. 12. T. S. Eliot, "The Lesson of Baudelaire," The Tyro, no. 1 (Spring 1921): 4. 477

• A. W A L T O N LITZ •

Neither the word nor the concept of nature survives in him. The word is naturally ruled out by his poetic creed, which abjures abstractions and philosophical statements. That the concept of nature is not present even implicitly is perhaps partly owing to his (apparent) insensibility to the beauty of the world, and this may well be an accident of personal organization. He is seemingly so constituted as to derive little pleasure from the impression of eye, ear and touch, except such pleasure as he takes in the imaginative rendering of certain effects. If one can judge from his poetry, no sounding cataract ever haunted him like a passion; he was never moved to exclaim, "O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!" But, more than this, it gives him no pleasure to contemplate the stars in their courses, nor to consider the order brought by science into the ways of the universe. In his, at bottom, highly philosophical poetry, there is an intense and aching void, an eloquent vacuum, where science might be looked for. The ways of the universe are for him simply and solely the ways of man; and the ways of man are mainly symbolized by the obscenities, the meannesses and treacheries of our sex-life, by the futilities and half-heartedness of our sentiment and culture. That Love so much celebrated by the poets is represented in him by the beastly drummer, Apeneck Sweeney, by the anemic gold-diggers, Doris and Dusty, by the classic violation of Philomela and the jaded indifference of the ravished typist in "The Waste Land." Modern society in its commercial aspect is represented by Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant. Contemporary culture and sentiment are represented by J. Alfred Prufrock and the lady of the "Portrait," who discourses so affectedly of friendship and her lost youth. Death is for Eliot "end of the endless journey to no end." 13 Although they violate our present sense of Eliot's poetic temperament, Beach's conclusions are understandable if we remember that they were based exclusively on the early poetry. The line quoted from Ash Wednesday, "End of the endless / Journey to no end," is attributed by Beach to its original publication in 1929 as part of a separate poem, "Salutation"; and clearly Beach knows nothing of the radically new "Landscape" poems first published in 1934-3 5. 14 His assessment of Eliot's attitudes toward Nature is, however, ironic in retrospect, since "Burnt Norton" was published in the same year as The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry. Today, with the advantage of a longer perspective, we can see the suppressed "Nature poet" lurking in the early verse, just as we can trace the origins of Eliot's spiritual decisions in the late 1920s to his earliest poetry and criticism. The repression of sexual energies, a dominant theme in Eliot's early 13. Joseph Warren Beach, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (New York, 1936), pp. 554-55. 14. T . S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York, 1952), pp. 93-95. 478

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poetry, was partly responsible, one suspects, for the suppression of the "Nature poet" within, and such scenes as the hyacinth garden in The Waste Land— in spite of their careful literary and symbolic "framing"—now stand out clearly as part of the nineteenth-century inheritance. Even the scrupulous topography of The Waste Land and the detailed dream landscapes can be viewed in hindsight as displaced products of a latent sympathy for natural things that was released in the later poetry. Similarly, Eliot's dogmatic rejection of the Victorian poets in his most famous essays becomes more ambiguous as our knowledge of his early life and works increases. Like most of his critical attitudes, it was part of a tactical decision made with the health of contemporary English verse—and his own immediate poetic needs—foremost in mind. A distinction must be made between Eliot's personal involvement with the great Victorians, which never disappeared, and his professional attitudes as a spokesman for the modernist cause (for a perfect example of this division see the ending of "Swinburne as Poet," where Eliot draws a contrast between the "singular" vitality of Swinburne's verse and the contemporary energy in the prose of Conrad and Joyce). The syllabi of Eliot's extension lectures from 1916-19, which have recently been published in full,15 give a nice sense of this contrast. At the same time Eliot was lecturing on "Modern French Literature" and "Elizabethan Literature," rehearsing the arguments of his major early criticism, he was also lecturing on "Modern English Literature" from Tennyson through the nineties. It may be true that the lectures on the Victorians did not reflect his immediate professional concerns, and he certainly undertook them in part out of a sense of duty and a need for cash; but Eliot would scarcely have devised such elaborate and responsible syllabi if he were not still absorbed in the world of the nineteenth-century poets and novelists. The syllabi, far too long to be reproduced here, display an extensive interest in the Victorian novelists (especially Dickens) which helps us to understand Eliot's preoccupation with grotesque characterization; but the central figures in the lectures are poets, especially Tennyson, Browning, and Emerson. Eliot's concern with the Victorians in these lectures is essentially academic; he wishes to "place" them in the literary, cultural, and intellectual contexts of their times, and he specifically rejects the idea of "dealing with living authors." In treating the modern French writers, on the other hand, he is concerned with their contemporary significance and their relevance to his own developing thought: the approach is much more inventive than with the Victorians, and the last lecture deals with the present-day, the "influence of the war" and a "forecast of French thought after the war." But in spite of his attempts to hold the Victorians at arm's length as part of a vanished period in literary 15. See note 8.

479

• A. W A L T O N L I T Z •

history, Eliot's extension lectures reveal his profound and continuing knowledge of their works. T h e lengthy lists of "Supplementary Reading," full and up-to-date, are more than perfunctory, although they obviously contain some of the "bogus scholarship" that Eliot later found in the notes to The Waste Land.16 G. K. Chesterton's The Victorian Age in Literature, which heads one list, certainly colored Eliot's view of the entire period; although he would refer disparagingly in his 1918 James essay to "such a Lord Mayor's show as Mr. Chesterton's procession of Victorian literature," 17 his late essays on Tennyson (1936 and 1942) are filled with echoes of Chesterton. Eliot constantly uses Chesterton's leading term, " T h e Victorian Compromise," and he finally came to agree with Chesterton that Tennyson was a provincial or suburban Virgil who "could not think up to the height of his own towering style" but was nevertheless the only modern poet laureate "who was not ludicrous." 18 In their curious ambivalence, Eliot's extension lectures testify to both his deliberate eclipse of the Victorians and their continuing power over his imagination. Eliot's rapprochement with the Victorians in the 1930s and 1940s was mainly a result of a changed sense of his poetic self: as he moved from the role of self-conscious cosmopolitan poet to that of a self-conscious "local" poet of the English and American scenes, Eliot found room for household gods other than Baudelaire and Dante. It is not that they were displaced, but rather supplemented, by other and less awesome voices, especially those of Tennyson and Virgil: Tennyson, the poet of personal loss and frustration as imaged in the natural world, and Virgil, the poet of far less scope than Dante who nonetheless set a "classic" standard through his devotion to the history of one place and one people. T h e austere early criticism, based on rigorous exclusions and discriminations, was replaced by a more generous sense of tradition; and one of the major catalysts in this transformation was Eliot's growing concern with the local and the national. In his 1918 essay in memory of Henry James, Eliot said that the "fact of being everywhere a foreigner was probably an assistance to his native wit," and went on to discuss, only half ironically, the advantages "in coming from a large flat country which no one wants to visit." 19 Fourteen years later he was to make a pilgrimage to that "large flat country"—like the aging James or his fictional alter ego, Spencer Brydon of " T h e Jolly Corner"—a pilgrimage in search of the other self he had left "on a distant shore." 20 In 1928, in his preface to Edgar Ansel Mowrer's This 16. For Eliot's comments on the notes to The Waste Land, see " T h e Frontiers of Criticism," in his On Poetry and Poets ( N e w York, 1961), p. 121. 17. T . S. Eliot, " H e n r y James," in The Shock of Recognition, ed. Edmund Wilson ( N e w York, 1955), p. 854. 18. G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature ( N e w York, 1913), pp. 161-65. T h e introductory chapter of Chesterton's book is entitled " T h e Victorian Compromise." 19. Wilson, The Shock of Recognition, p. 857. 20. Eliot, "Little Gidding," Part II, Complete Poems, p. 141.

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XXIV. T. S. Eliot's Victorian Inheritance •

American World, Eliot had mused on the problems of national and racial identity, and had recalled (as he was to recall in several later essays) the natural landscapes of his divided youth. In N e w England I missed the long dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming cardinal birds, the high limestone bluffs where we searched for fossil shellfish; in Missouri I missed the fir trees, the bay and goldenrod, the songsparrows, the red granite and the blue sea of Massachusetts. 21 All these remembered images would later be fused in the opening to the most personal of the Quartets, " T h e Dry Salvages," under the pressure of Eliot's return to his native country. In the Page-Barbour lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933 and later published as After Strange Gods, Eliot—finding himself in sympathetic, conservative, agrarian surroundings—spoke freely of the local feelings stirred in him by the American landscape; and even in the more guarded and academic Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, delivered earlier at Harvard and published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, there is an atmosphere of personal transformation. Not only is the pantheon of writers more catholic —including Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth—but the language is frequently that of a man lost in the middle way, seeking new directions. As C. K. Stead has pointed out. Eliot always held to a Romantic view of the workings of the poetic imagination, 22 and in the Charles Eliot Norton lecture "Wordsworth and Coleridge" there is a revealing passage where he covertly weaves a childhood memory from New England into a discussion of Lowes's Road to Xanadu and the relations between memory and imagination in Coleridge's poetry. There might be the experience of a child of ten, a small boy peering through sea-water in a rock-pool, and finding a sea-anemone for the first time: the simple experience (not so simple, for an exceptional child, as it looks) might lie dormant in his mind for twenty years, and re-appear transformed in some verse-context charged with great imaginative pressure. 2 ' This charged memory from childhood, already used as an example in Eliot's doctoral thesis on F. H . Bradley 24 and associated (as Eliot implies in his "twenty years") with the sea-changes of The Waste Land, eventually found its proper imaginative home in " T h e Dry Salvages," Part One, where it joins other early memories to express the sea-rhythms of eternity. By the time Eliot had reached this point in the making of the Quartets he was no longer "everywhere a foreigner," and no longer saw—as at the close of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism—the sad ghost of the older Coleridge beckoning from the shadows. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Edgar Ansel Mowrer, This American World (London, 1928), p. xiv. See C. K. Stead, The New Poetic (London, 1964), chap. six. T . S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London, 1933), pp. 78-79. This use has been noted by Bernard Bergonzi, in T. S. Eliot ( N e w York, 1972), p. 3.

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As Helen Gardner sums it up, Eliot remade himself as a poet in middle life, "with great courage, discipline, and pain." H e did so by going back to his original foundations—to his childhood and youth—and attempted in his last great poem to include and bring into a pattern all his experience as child, young man, American, and European, refusing nothing that had happened to him as man and artist. H e brought back into his poetry what he had earlier repudiated, his nineteenth-century heritage, and developed a new style all his own, expressive in its variety and remarkable for its accent of personal truth. This new style could accommodate the brilliant images, and the haunting phrases—for Eliot is one of the great masters of the unforgettable poetic phrase—that marked his poetry from the beginning; but it also allowed him to modulate from personal reflection to philosophic exploration of ideas and meanings, and to include in his poetry general statements. 25 In this painful process of remaking his poetic self, which incidentally led him to a new appreciation of Yeats as a poet of self-transformation, Eliot came to terms with many of the Victorians who had overshadowed his youth, but most of all with Tennyson, the pervasive influence on his apprentice verse. H e had never lost his admiration for Tennyson's command of language and rhythm, but in the famous In Memoriam essay of 1936 this auditory gift ( " H e had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton") is but one of many topics: Eliot is equally concerned with Tennyson's mastery of descriptive verse, of the long poem constructed out of shorter lyrics, and of the ambiguous moods of his time. Although he still feels that In Memoriam is flawed by the "Victorian compromise," by the desire to maintain religious attitudes while believing in human perfectibility, Eliot now finds a deeper strain in the poem: it is a record of personal and religious despair, "the concentrated diary of a man confessing himself." 26 Eliot took unusual care with the 1936 In Memoriam essay. It began as an introduction to the Nelson Classics selection of Tennyson's poetry, was substantially revised for Essays Ancient and Modern in the same year, and was then retouched sometime before inclusion in the revised Selected Essays of 1950. T h i s process of careful refinement and reassessment, which is not characteristic of Eliot's later critical writing, shows that by the mid-1930s the problems of T e n nyson's poetry had become living issues in his mind. N o longer is T e n n y s o n the convenient symbol for Victorian poetic vices, to be used in ritual contrast with the poets of wit and irony. Some of the problems T e n n y s o n faced—the construction of a long poem without narrative structure, the fusing of personal 25. Helen Gardner, T. S. Eliot, Harvard English Studies no. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 40-41. 26. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 291. 482

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•

emotions with a local landscape—had become Eliot's challenges as well, and in writing and rewriting the 1936 In Memoriam essay Eliot the poet-critic was confessing himself. 27 W e should not be surprised that Eliot chose section VII of In Memoriam as exemplary of Tennyson's greatness, since it combines two major qualities of his own early poetry: a desolate urban landscape and a tone of loss, frustration, and anxiety, "mixing / Memory with desire," that Arthur J. Carr has rightly identified as one sign of Tennyson's "modernity." 2 8 Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasp'd no m o r e Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door. He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain, On the bald street breaks the blank day. Eliot had this to say of these stanzas in the first (1936) versions of the In Memoriam essay: This is great poetry, economical of words, a universal emotion in what could only be an English town: and it gives me a shudder that I fail to get from anything in Maud. But such a passage, by itself, is not In Memoriam: In Memoriam is the whole poem. It is unique: it is a long poem made by putting together lyrics, which have only the unity and continuity of a diary, the concentrated diary of a man confessing himself. It is a diary of which we have to read every word. 29 T h e observation that Tennyson presents "a universal emotion in what could only be an English town" is curious, since—in spite of the ingenious case made by one 27. For some general comments on the affinities between Tennyson and Eliot, and citations of parallel passages, see S. Musgrove, "Eliot and Tennyson," in T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Hugh Kenner (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), pp. 7 3 - 8 5 (an excerpt from Musgrove's book, T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman), and J. C. C. Mays, "In Memoriam-. A n Aspect of Form," University of Toronto Quarterly X X X V (October 1965): 2 2 - 4 6 . 28. Arthur J. Carr, "Tennyson as a Modern Poet," in Victorian Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Austin W r i g h t (New York, 1961), pp. 3 1 1 - 3 3 . 29. T . S. Eliot, Essays Ancient and Modem (London, 1936), p. 183.

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• A. WALTON LITZ •

critic30—there is nothing in the stanzas that would distinguish the landscape as specifically English, any more than the setting of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" can be distinguished as urban St. Louis rather than Boston or Paris or London. If we make such identification it is usually because we know the biographical circumstances, just as Eliot must have known from A. C. Bradley's Commentary on Tennyson's 7« Memoriam (a book he had assigned as supplementary reading for his extension students in 1916) that the "long unlovely street" was Wimpole Street, where Hallam had lived. This gratuitous identification of the scene as "what could only be an English town" reflects Eliot's concern with the poetic transformation of local scenes. It may also reflect his lingering doubts about Tennyson's powers of transformation, just as his remark on the unity of In Memoriam ("only the unity and continuity of a diary") shows doubt about the ability of a lyric and confessional poet to achieve major form in a long poem. All these doubts were to be allayed as Eliot drove the Quartets toward completion, learning from his own work-in-progress the deeper harmonies of Tennyson's poem. When the In Memoriam essay was reprinted in 1950 the comment on section VII was revised to read: "This is great poetry, economical of words, a universal emotion related to a particular place . . . ." So in 1936, at the beginning of his labors on the Quartets, Eliot retained some of his early reservations about a talent which is "always descriptive, and always picturesque." 31 As in the 1929 Dante essay, he felt compelled to contrast the narrative vigor of Canto XXVI of the Inferno with Tennyson's two-dimensional, descriptive retelling in "Ulysses"; and at the end of the In Memoriam essay he draws an invidious comparison between Baudelaire, the nineteenth-century poet of metaphysical despair (a "deformed Dante"), and Tennyson as Chesterton had seen him, a "suburban Virgil" whose "gloomier end" involved a willing surrender to the Victorian compromise. Tennyson is not only a minor Virgil, he is also with Virgil as Dante saw him, a Virgil among the Shades, the saddest of all English poets, among the Great in Limbo, the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the most perfect conformist. 32 Six years later, while at work on the last of the Quartets, Eliot delivered a BBC radio broadcast on Tennyson called " T h e Voice of His Time." 3 3 The occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of Tennyson's death, but the tone of the piece suggests 30. Helen Gardner, " T h e Landscapes of Eliot's Poetry," The Critical Quarterly X ( W i n t e r 1968): 315-16, 321. 31. Eliot, Selected Essays, pp. 288-89. 32. Ibid., p. 295. 33. T . S. Eliot, The Listener, 12 February 1942, pp. 2 1 1 - 1 2 . 1 am indebted to David T o b i n who first called this essay to my attention, and pointed out its significant bearing on the writing of the Quartets.

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that Eliot, for once, was not responding to an official demand on England's unofficial poet laureate: he was paying a debt to a poet now vitally involved in his own art. H e repeats many of his earlier reservations about Tennyson's ambivalent role as Victorian sage, but his attitude is one of sympathetic understanding; and in his unqualified appreciation of In Memoriam as a unified structure he marks out new ground. Tennyson took a long time over the poem: perhaps there were superfluous passages, or stretches below his sustained level—if so, he eliminated and improved. T h e structure is designed with great care. Each section (some are very short and some longer) is a complete poem in itself—that is to say, represents a particular mood realised in its appropriate imagery: but the moods represented by the sections follow according to a logic of the emotions to form a continuous meditation on life and d e a t h . . . . Every season and every place brings another aspect of grief. . It is easy to translate this description of the evolution and structure of In Memoriam into a comment on the Four Quartets. As Eliot said in another essay of 1942, " T h e Music of Poetry," the poetic-critic "is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to write." 35 In the process of composing a long poem about the poet's social and private lives, about the past recaptured and reformed, Eliot finally came to terms with the master of his youthful verse and the victim of his critical dogmatism. One aspect of this reconciliation with Tennyson, and with the Victorians in general, has to do with Eliot's gradual assumption of a public role not unlike that of the Victorian sage. In the 1930s, as editor of The Criterion, he found himself increasingly a spokesman for the Establishment, and in the making of the last three Quartets he explored the dangers and responsibilities of this role. "Burnt Norton" focuses on those private and privileged moments that are the foundations of spiritual development, but the succeeding poems examine the poet's responsibilities to his racial, historical, literary, and religious heritages. T h e threat to his two native countries posed by the Second World W a r seems to have crystallized Eliot's sense of his public life, and in the Blitz canto of "Little Gidding" (Part II, sec. ii) the expatriate poet finds himself no longer the perpetual foreigner but a spokesman for "two worlds become much like each other." It is this newfound accommodation between past and present, private and public, that makes the Eliot of 1941-42 so generous in his descriptions of the compromised artistic lives of Tennyson and Kipling. 36 34. Ibid., p. 212. 35. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, p. 17. 36. See the introduction to A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1941), reprinted in On Poetry and Poets, pp. 265-94. 485

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Another and deeper aspect of this reconciliation may be found in the scenic styles of the Quartets. Those critics who were dismayed by Eliot's sudden praise of Kipling should have realized that his comments on Kipling's historical imagination were a covert justification for the form and themes of "East Coker," where a vanished rural England is revivified through the historical imagination of the expatriate poet: [Kipling] aims I think to give at once a sense of the antiquity of England, of the number of generations and peoples who have laboured the soil and in turn been buried beneath it, and of the contemporaneity of the p a s t . . . he brings to his work the freshness of a mind and a sensibility developed and matured in a quite different environment: he is discovering and reclaiming a lost inheritance. 37 Kipling's "exceptional sensitiveness to environment," 3 8 which Eliot so admires, is related to Tennyson's feeling for Nature, but until Eliot began work on the Quartets he was suspicious of Tennyson's emotional landscapes, fearing that they were dependent on the merely picturesque or pathetic. T h u s his strictures on Tennyson's lack of narrative and dramatic talent, so reminiscent of Arnold's 1853 Preface, or his reservations in the 1936 In Memoriam essay about poetry that is "always descriptive, and always picturesque." Tennyson himself, speaking late in life of the "passion of the past," said that "it is the distance that charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not the immediate to-day in which 1 move." 39 This is certainly true of much of his poetry, and of some passages in the Four Quartets. Several critics have suggested that Eliot's landscape poetry, like that of the great Victorians, can be explained by his early theory of the "objective correlative": the eye and ear select from Nature those events and images that provide a formula for man's inner feelings. 40 Such a process, implying a separation between man and Nature, may be true of a poem like Arnold's "Dover Beach," but we should remember that Arnold's verse—as distinct from his criticism—never quickened Eliot's imagination. W h e n Eliot is at his best in the Quartets a less mechanical process is at work, and the natural scene is infused with emotions that it in turn has generated. This is the higher sense of the "picturesque" that Hallam used in his 1831 review of Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, when he spoke of "his vivid, 37. Ibid., pp. 290-91. 38. Ibid., p. 282. 39. Carr, "Tennyson as a Modern Poet," in Victorian Literature, pp. 314-15. 40. See Gardner, "The Landscapes of Eliot's Poetry," p. 314, and T. S. Eliot and the English Poetic Tradition, p. 24; also H. M. McLuhan, "Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry," in Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John Killham (London, 1960), pp. 69-70. 486

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picturesque delineation of objects, and the peculiar skill with which he holds all of them fused, to borrow a metaphor from science, in a medium of strong emotion." 41 The term "fused," which is the key to Coleridge's famous description of the shaping imagination at the end of chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria, and which Eliot associates in his criticism with the unifying powers of wit and irony, also applies to Tennyson's gift of relating a "universal emotion" to a "particular place." At the end of his poetic career Eliot established a kinship with nineteenth-century Nature poetry that has nothing to do with "that strange abstraction, 'Nature,' " and is anything but decorative. In the following passage from "The Dry Salvages" the symbolist moment, really a tiny Imagist poem ("The salt is on the briar rose, / The fog is in the fir trees"), is introduced by a verse-movement of lesser intensity that is unashamedly "ruminative" and contains a steady emotional power that Tennyson (or Arnold) would have admired. The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land's edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the hermit crab, the whale's backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices, Many gods and many voices. The salt is on the briar rose, The fog is in the fir trees. Eliot's final reconciliation with the nineteenth century is nowhere more evident than in the hallucinated scene after an air-raid in "Little Gidding." 42 The scene is adapted from Dante, an imitation in mock terza rima of a canto from the Inferno or Purgatorio, but it is alive with reminders of other writers: Shelley, Kipling, Tourneur, James, Mallarmé, Ford, Johnson, Milton, Swift, and Shakespeare have all been noted by the critics, and the list could stretch much further. With one or two exceptions, however, these echoes from the literary tradition do not obtrude like the allusions in The Waste Land, and the entire passage moves with the narrative energy Eliot admired in Canto XXVI of the Inferno. The literary echoes scarcely 4 1 . Arthur Hallam, The Writings of Arthur p. 192.

Hallam, ed. T . H. Vail Motter ( N e w York, 1 9 4 3 ) ,

42. For Eliot's account of his aims in this imitation of a canto from the Divine Criticize the Critic, pp. 1 2 8 - 2 9 .

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touch the conscious mind, acting as subliminal hints of a literary heritage so completely absorbed that it needs no insistent exposition or defense. A f t e r Dante, the most commanding presences in the canto are Tennyson and Baudelaire, although neither poet makes a direct appearance. Like the felt presence of T e n nyson's "Ulysses" in " T h e D r y Salvages," these relationships are not a matter of specific allusions or echoes, but derive from a more pervasive and less definable similarity of tone and feeling. T h e hallucinated cityscape of In Memoriam

VII

merges in the background with Baudelaire's "Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, / Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant." Eliot's scene, like Tennyson's, is a deserted city street at the "uncertain hour before the morning," reminding us of the mysterious opening to Hamlet (Eliot's "faded on the blowing of the horn," Tennyson's "like a guilty thing I creep"). In this last and most moving dramatization of Eliot's primal theme, the meeting with a ghostly other self, all the divisions of his early criticism and poetry are put aside, and T e n n y s o n joins Baudelaire as one of the dead masters of Eliot's art, " a familiar compound ghost / Both intimate and unidentifiable."

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Afterglow and Aftermath THE EDITORS

W h a t pitfalls are there in that word Nature. MATTHEW ARNOLD

Literature and Dogma In 1914, William Henry Hudson, already renowned for The Naturalist in La Plata (1892), Nature in Downland (1900), and Birds and Man (1901), chose to assess the great "interpreter of nature" who had been his precursor. In his reverential conclusion to William Wordsworth and His Poetry, Hudson stressed Wordsworth's unique ability to tap "the power which we have latent within us to lift ourselves by resolute effort above the entanglement of human circumstances and to live at peace with ourselves." 1 His tribute to the poet who had also soothed such eminent Victorians as Arnold, Ruskin, Mill, Meredith, George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, and Hardy seems, in retrospect, somehow ill-timed. For the effort to rise above the entanglement of human circumstances had become decidedly difficult in the fall of 1914. The Great W a r that so radically altered the geographical contours of Europe affected just as radically the mental landscapes of an entire generation still born and raised in the placid dusk of Queen Victoria's reign. Could these men and women be expected to retain the ontological assurances that previous thinkers, artists, and writers had tried to extract from that alluring but elusive abstraction, "Nature"? T h e incongruity on which the Goethean Thomas Mann would seize at the conclusion of The Magic Mountain (1925) could not have gone unperceived in 1914 by English men and women as deeply stepped in Naturgefuhl and Naturauffassung. Hans Castorp's "loving words" about Schubert's linden tree ("Its waving branches whi—spered / A mess—age in my ear—") clash with the surrounding carnage of the trenches ("mud, fire, iron, molten metal, scattered fragments of 1. W . H. Hudson, William Wordsworth and His Poetry (Fort Washington and London, 1970), pp. 1 9 2 - 9 3 .

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humanity"). 2 W h a t message could be drawn from that deathscape? Could Nature still be moralized? It would be elegant (and most poetical) to assume that, with the first lurid flashes of the guns of August, the hues of that older, message-laden Nature paled instantly in the minds of the survivors of the Victorian Age. Yet earlier attitudes persisted, unconsumed, or, if cast off, they reemerged in new combinations and new growths. Hardy (himself a stubborn relic who would live until 1928) and Hudson and Conrad's friend R. B. Cunninghame Graham continued to cling to an almost fetishistic belief in the mysterious connections between the lives of trees and the lives of human beings; in their writings, Carlyle's Idgrasil, the Norse "Ash-tree of Existence," assumes the shapes, still mythic, still metaphoric, of felled elms, ombu-trees, exotic banyans. 3 Conrad, too, whose Victory was concluded in "the times of peace" but published in 1915 during the war, could fitfully return to memories of "the smooth hazy spaces of a dreamy sea"—that estranging sea of his earlier fictions—in the "deserted Rescue."* There were other survivors. W i t h something of the old certitude in "the force behind evolution," Shaw and Wells confidently advanced vitalist creeds that could command a greater respect than that which had been accorded the late Victorian Lamarckian extravaganzas of Samuel Butler, now more widely republished and reread. Even the Kipling of the Jungle Books, though rather spent after The New Army in Training (1914), France at War (1915), and Sea Warfare (1916), managed to return to a tamer Nature in Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923) and Thy Servant a Dog (19 30). And Richard Jefferies's Nature appreciations and William Barnes's pastoral poetry retained a measure of their former popularity. There were, moreover, strange lines of continuity, of retrogression. Although one may quibble with F. R. Leavis's contention that the post-World W a r I "time, in literature, may fairly be called the age of D. H . Lawrence and T . S. Eliot," 5 it is nonetheless highly significant that these two particular writers, each in his way so eager to preserve a religious sentiment in a mechanized and unfeeling world, should be driven to recombine and amalgamate systems of belief drawn from Victorians who had similarly feared the encroachment of an erratic natural order. Lawrence the irrationalist, who had once admired Carlyle's and Whitman's heroic man in Nature and who claimed that the smooth branches of beech trees reminded him of the bare arms of George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver, began his reconstructionist "Study of Thomas Hardy" (never published in his lifetime) in the same 2. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (New York, 1958), p. 715. 3. Thomas Carlyle, "The Hero as Divinity," On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (London, 1928), p. 20. 4. Joseph Conrad, preface to The Rescue, Conrad's Prefaces to His Works, with an introductory essay by David Garnett (London, 1937), p. 188. 5. F. R. Leavis, "Mr. Eliot and Lawrence," D. H. Lawrence Novelist (New York, 1956),p. 383.

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fateful 1914 in which Hudson published his study of Wordsworth. Eliot, whose Prufrock was written in 1915, had early learned from the late-Victorian philosopher F. H. Bradley "the fact that all Nature, as such, is an untrue appearance." 6 After mixing the landscapes of unbelief of Tennyson and James Thomson with the totemic religion of Nature found in that other tree-centered book, The Golden Bough (1896), he was gradually led to assert the existence of a sacramental order not wholly unlike that which Keble and the Tractarians had upheld a full century before. Lawrence's deification of Hardy's Egdon Heath provides a significant gloss for the aggrandizement of natural setting in his own novels. T h e Heath—like the Marsh in the opening pages of The Rainbow (1915), a novel that derives its title from a venerable Victorian icon—becomes, in Lawrence's handling, a type of this-worldly eternity, the palpable investment of a "raw instinct" that is far more enduring than any "one year's accidental crop" of anemic human beings. These ephemeral men and women are mocked, and the permanence of the Heath is asserted, in a style as heightened and rhetorical as that which earlier sages had employed to assert the sanctity of the unsullied oneness of an organic nature: What matters if some are drowned or dead, and others preaching or married: what matter, any more than the withering heath, the reddening berries, the seedy furze, and the dead fern of one autumn afternoon of Egdon? T h e Heath persists. Its body is strong and fecund, it will bear many more crops beside this. Here is the sombre, latent power that will go on producing, no matter what happens to the product. Here is the deep, black source from whence all these little contents of lives are drawn. And the contents of the small lives are spilled and wasted. There is savage satisfaction in it: for so much more remains to come, such a black, powerful fecundity is working there that what does it matter?7 What does it matter, indeed? Superficially, the passage reads like the earlier tracts. But a new note has crept in. Beneath the Carlylean cadences lurk doubt and insecurity. The confused gender (is that dark, deep source a female or a male fecundity, or both or neither? the question would haunt Lawrence) betrays the truth of Carlyle's old insight that the "world of Nature, for every man, is the Phantasy of Himself." 8 Lawrence would continue to seek his self-reflection in Nature. If the Victorians had tried to find their identity in alien and exotic climates, Lawrence, too, explored Sicily, Ceylon, Australia, Mexico, and the American Southwest in quest of that 6. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (London, 1906), p. 291. 7. D. H. Lawrence, "Study of Thomas Hardy," D. H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (New York, 1956), p. 172. 8. Carlyle, On Heroes, p. 27.

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"sombre, latent power" whose mysterious ways he would alternately proclaim and despair of. Nor was this quest confined to novels and short stories. T h e poet of Birds, Beasts, and Flowers— freed from the burden of depicting human lives ("I wish I was a blackbird . . . I hate men")—could indulge in Rupert Birkin's most un-Victorian, though quite Wordsworthian, fantasy of a "world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up." Unlike the fiction, Lawrence's Nature poems move, with stark directness, in a nonhuman, even antihuman, natural order that has no real Victorian precedents. In a poem like "Snake," the alternating feelings of repulsion and attraction felt by the overcivilized observer may dramatize a self-division similar to that which led Lawrence to parcel himself out into feuding Ursula-Birkin and Gudrun-Gerald selves. But these talkative selves cannot themselves go beyond the dumb, sentient moments that Lawrence can so well convey: the reptile slithering into the "black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall front" can ultimately have a more complex impact than Birkin's allusions to African fetishes, Isis, or "knowledge such as beetles have." Still, like the yea-sayers and nay-sayers before him, Lawrence masked his ambivalences and preferred to pose as an allegorist who might, as Ruskin had done, reclaim and revivify the symbols of Nature: "the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist." 9 And so the asocial poet continued, in his novels and tracts, to practice older roles and older forms. Though Women in Love (1919) "took its final shape in the midst of the period of war" and was as much "a record of the profoundest experiences in the self" as the more alienated Nature poems, the novel still clings to previous conventions when it opposes the safe and fecund valleys of Italy to the icescapes in which Gerald Critch is petrified into a statue. 10 Like the Victorian novelists who shunned the mountain summit, Lawrence ostensibly recoils from its bad eminence: to him, it would seem, the mountain is the type of the asocial Loerke, that modern, unorganic sculptor of brass and granite, and of self-destructive women like Gudrun or the crazed Dollie Urquhart in " T h e Princess." Yet whereas the eminently social Victorians had upheld the beneficent aspects of the hearth found in farmhouses, manors, granges, lowland and valley bowers, Lawrence cannot really endorse society-in-Nature. T h e pastoral ending of so many Victorian novels is impossible for one who, like Birkin, can no longer be "very much interested any more in personalities and people," for whom marriage and offspring no longer provide a happy closure. Birkin wants to "leave the dead man in the Alps, near the snow," and his wish conveys his own psychic mutilation. He, too, has left a portion 9. Lawrence, " 'The Dragon of the Apocalypse,' " Selected Literary Criticism, p. 162. 10. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (New York, 1950), pp. vii, viii. 492

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of his self in the mountain snow. H e cannot be reclaimed, in Victorian fashion, by Ursula in a cottage in the vale. Despite his understanding of the older, benignant Nature, Birkin remains as incomplete a figure as that other mountain-exile, Mann's Hans Castorp. T . S. Eliot, as the other half of Leavis's dominant pairing for the post-War era, might seem to have moved in quite other directions from Lawrence, and, of course, he ultimately did. But the early Eliot was as little content with the Victorian certainties or would-be certainties about Nature as Lawrence, and equally unable to ignore them. Later, in 1939, Eliot would remark of Lawrence's response to the modern dilemma: " T h e struggle to recover the sense of relation to nature and to God, the recognition that even the most primitive feelings should be part of our heritage, seems to me the explanation and justification of the life of D. H . Lawrence, and the excuse for his aberrations." But when Eliot wrote those words he was speaking from the security of the Christian vantage point that he had attained more than a decade earlier, for he goes on to say: "But we need not only to learn how to look at the world with the eyes of a Mexican Indian—and I hardly think that Lawrence succeeded—and we certainly cannot afford to stop there. W e need to know how to see the world as the Christian Fathers saw it; and the purpose of reascending to origins is that we should be able to return, with greater spiritual knowledge, to our own situation." 11 These remarks constitute almost a capsule version of Eliot's own development as thinker, poet, and inheritor of the Victorian response to Nature. For we can now see in even the early Eliot the struggle to "recover the sense of relation to nature and to God" that first readers saw mainly as a repudiation of the Victorian inheritance. Both Prufrock and The Waste Land are of course urban poems—but not exclusively. Both are also lamentations for the death of a relationship to Nature that seems no longer possible. Prufrock has "heard the mermaids singing, each to each," but he does not think that they will sing to him. In The Waste Land the setting is not only that of the Unreal City, a contemporary city of dreadful day, but of desert and wasted landscapes of desolation, death, corruption, and infertility. Even the seascapes bring despair (Oed' und leer das Meer), and the riverscapes of a blighted Nature are ironically hymned by the song of the Thames maidens. If Lawrence's novels increasingly reflect a less morally certain Victorian Nature and if his poetry shows that Nature unmoralized, Eliot's early poetry shows a Nature demoralized, indeed, immoralized. But it is only against the Victorian background of a hoped-for harmony between man and Nature that the horror of The Waste Land can achieve full impact. Initial readers saw only " T h e horror! T h e 11. T . S. Eliot, " T h e Idea of a Christian Society," Christianity and Culture ( N e w York, 1949), p. 49.

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horror!" (Ezra Pound dissuaded Eliot from using the citation from Heart of Darkness as a epigraph for the poem). Although Eliot's later poetry reflects the more positive aspects of Nature that are only hinted at in The Waste Land, the early Eliot who became a spokesman for the despair of a generation was as unable as Lawrence to make the traditional Victorian response to Nature. W . H. Hudson's contention in 1914 that the worship of Nature could continue unabated and would always help lift humans "above the entanglement of human circumstances" thus seems, after all, belied by the course of history. Paradoxically enough, a belief in civilization, in the social values of community, in spoken and written intercourse amoung human beings, was required for a belief in "that word Nature." When the already precarious Victorian faith in society eroded as a result of weariness or pessimism or a Lawrence-like alienation from "personalities and people," a corresponding erosion of the (equally precarious) Victorian belief in Nature-as-Meaning ensued. The two had always been intertwined. The Great War thus merely ratified a subtle change in attitude that had already become manifest in the first decade of the twentieth century. Perhaps Thomas Hardy, after all, always aware of obsolescence, always symbol conscious, had been the first to perceive the change. In "The Darkling Thrush," which he with ominous deliberation dated "December 31, 1900," originally titled "By the Century's Death-bed," Hardy had lamented the simultaneous passing of a century and the death of a once-animate Nature: The land's sharp features seemed to be The Century's corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervorless as I. In The Poetry of Earth, E. D. H. Johnson suggests that the "treatment of natural history as a branch of literature" had died out by the beginning of the twentieth century; he remarks that even "so perceptive a work" as Hudson's Nature in Downland—ixom which, by the way, Hardy quite possibly drew his description of the missel-thrush in "The Darkling Thrush"—already seems outdated, marred by a "quality of artifice wholly alien to the author's predecessors, who wrote untroubled by forebodings of the doom in store for the open spaces they loved."12 His observation applies even more aptly to Hudson's nostalgic Far Away and Long 12. E. D . H . Johnson, The Poetry of Earth: A Collection of English Nature 1966), pp. vii, viii.

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Ago, which appeared in 1918, the year in which Strachey published his decidedly unnostalgic Eminent Victorians and in which the First World War finally came to an end. There is an archaic quality to Hudson's account of his boyhood in the South American pampas in Far Away and Long Ago—the book's very title recalls Max Beerbohm's exaggeration that "anything that happened in the bland old days before the war does seem to be a hundred more years ago than it actually is." u Despite their undeniable charm, Hudson's evocations of his childhood and adolescence in Nature seem tired, derivative: even though the birds whose eggs the boy wants to rob are exotic caranchos, though the old rustics he encounters are gauchos rather than Westmorland peasants, and though the tyrant who falls is the Caudillo Rosas rather than Robespierre, the book is too obviously modeled on the plan of The Prelude. The adult man strains to recall the animistic sense he claims to have possessed in his youth. The "sense of the supernatural in nature," he concludes wearily, "was lost to him on his becoming an evolutionist—" an evolutionist, albeit never wholly satisfied with natural selection as the only and sufficient explanation in the forms of life."14 The protestation seems feeble, outdated, more suited to the 1860s and 1870s with their polemical debates about The Origin of Species than to the year 1918 and the relief from Zeppelin raids and poison gas. At one point, Hudson tries to recollect "the ballad or tale of the Bien-te-veo—a species of tyrantbird quite common in the country," told to him by "our gaucho neighbors." But the ballad of Bien-te-veo, whose name "means I-can-see-you," is now "gone out," "hopelessly lost," and its author unknown; like Nature herself, the poem can at best be dimly recovered through a blurred haze.15 Hudson's recollections can be contrasted to a more sharply edged passage in another 1918 publication, Strachey's "The End of General Gordon" in Eminent Victorians. Here, too, there is a retrospective throwback to an earlier age of belief, but the narrator is not a Victorian dreamer but "the inquirer of to-day" who observes with amused detachment the beleaguered Gordon's own "cynical sympathy" with the animal world that provides his last contact before the fall of Khartoum: He made friends with a mouse who "judging from her swelled-out appearance," was a lady , and came and ate out of his plate. The cranes that flew over Khartoum in their thousands and with their curious cry, put him in mind of the poems of Schiller, which few ever read, but which he admired highly, though he only knew them in Bulwer's translation. He wrote little 13. Max Beerbohm, "Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton," Seven Men (London, 1919), p. 51. 14. W . H. Hudson,- Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life (New York, 1924), pp.233, 330. 15. Ibid., p. 129. 495

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disquisitions on Plutarch and purgatory, on the fear of death and on the sixteenth chapter of the Koran. Then the turkey-cock strutting with "every feather on end, and all the colours of the rainbow on his neck," attracted him once more, and he filled several pages with his opinions upon the immortality of animals, drifting on to a discussion of man's position in the universe, and the infinite knowledge of God. It was all clear to him. And yet—16 The mockery in this passage is unmistakable. T o be sure, Strachey, who at the age of seven had earnestly composed "Songs of Animals, Fishes, and Birds," is by no means mocking Gordon's attraction to beasts impervious to Maxim-Nordenfeldt guns or Downing Street machinations; indeed, Gordon is even granted omniscience when he correctly predicts that the desert hawks will circle around his corpse. What Strachey does satirize, however, are Gordon's repeated attempts to invest these animals with grander properties. The cranes Gordon sees and hears must be converted into Schiller's prophetic Kraniche-, the peacock's iridescent rainbow (that hallowed Victorian emblem once more!) must be regarded symbolically and lead into metaphysical disquisitions. For Strachey, the endeavor—still undertaken by Hudson—to rise from a bird's plumage to a consideration of man's position in the universe is impossibly quaint, archaic, Victorian. After reading "The End of General Gordon," Virginia Woolf wrote Strachey that she could not see how skill could be carried further. 17 Though more compassionate, she would show a similar skill in her relentless depiction of another outmoded Victorian whose belief in an organic world is belied by a very different order. In To the Lighthouse (1927), Mrs. Ramsay clings to the same animism that Hudson sought to recover and that led Strachey's Gordon to the infinite knowledge of God: It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.18 But when Mrs. Ramsay dies, she does not become incorporated into the natural order that expresses her—or that she thought could express her. Instead, her death is reported in a subordinate clause, within a bracketed, matter-of-fact sentence: [Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.] 16. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians ( N e w York, n.d.), pp. 3 33-34. 17. Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography ( N e w York, 1961), 11:2 51. 18. Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse ( N e w York, 1955), pp. 97-98.

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The ironic echo of In Memoriam (Tennyson is Mr. Ramsay's favorite) is obvious. In Tennyson's poem, the empty arms, the yearned-for clasp, the dark house, become gradually filled by a soothing temporal Nature. Not so in To the Lighthouse. Restoration is impossible. The woman who had identified with Nature, who was herself an animating natural force, is immediately likened to a shed garment —"a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes—those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated." 19 To the Lighthouse is, among other things, a moving tribute to Julia Stephen, the author's Victorian mother. But despite the novel's reconciliatory final movement, Virginia Woolf makes it clear that the Nature that her parents once filled and animated with meaning had become reduced into mere process. Time passes. In the years that followed, it would become increasingly difficult to conceptualize the post-Darwinian nature of twentieth-century science. D. H. Lawrence, to be sure, could still dubiously assert that he liked relativity and quantum theories "because I don't understand them / and they make me feel as if space shifted / about like a swan that can't settle." 20 But Max Beerbohm may have been closer to the mark when he whimsically deplored "the huge cold shoulder turned on the living Einstein"; Newton and the apple, Copernicus and the whipping top, James Watt and the steam kettle, Beerbohm suggests (he omits Darwin and his monkey), could all capture the popular imagination. "But Einstein and—?" he asks.21 Without the aid of an objective correlative, the imagination felt thwarted. From Strachey's swelled-out mouse to Woolf's divested articles of clothing, the once plump Dame Nature seemed to have dwindled into a dash. Yet "for all this, nature is never spent," Hopkins claimed, and from a postmodern vantage point his words seem as much prophetic as descriptive. A good deal of what the Victorians found in Nature does seem indeed spent; and certainly by the time of the end of the First World W a r it appeared so. Where Dickens had found ways of transferring Nature into symbols of domestic virtue, Hardy saw transformation in Nature as the fertilization of trees and grass by the decaying bodies of previous generations: "Portion of this yew / Is a man my grandsire knew. . . . These grasses must be made / O f her who often prayed." When T . S. Eliot in The Four Quartets reclaims his Victorian inheritance he can write such un-Victorian lines as "Garlics and sapphires in the mud / Clot the bedded axle-tree." But im19. Ibid., p. 194. 20. D. H. Lawrence, "Relativity," The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (New York, 1964), I, 524. 21. Max Beerbohm, " A Note on Einstein's Theory" (192 3), Mainly on the Air (London, 1946), p. 74.

497

XXV.

Afterglow

and Aftermath

•

mediately after, he can also assert notions of cosmic harmony that, mutatis mutandis, might commend themselves to many a Victorian Nature lover, affirming as he does that patterns in Nature are "reconcil'd among the stars."22 Indeed, The Four Quartets contains much Nature poetry of a high order. Each quartet is named after a place—a rural place. The "strong brown god" that is the river, the sea off Cape Ann, the rural Huntingdonshire church in "midwinter spring"—these are some of the aspects of place that dominate the work; the cycle of the seasons, the four elements, the rose, the briar, and the yew—these are some of the aspects of Nature that constitute the texture of the work. One could almost compose a gift-book collection of Nature passages from The Four Quartets. The selection, to be sure, would have to be more judicious than the sort so easily made from In Memoriam, for of course The Four Quartets is not Victorian Nature or landscape poetry; neither, however, is it early modern anti-Nature or antilandscape poetry. Instead, it is Nature poetry in a new key, absorbing both Victorian and post-Victorian attitudes, informed by Eliot's recovery of the sense of religious fear overcome by religious hope. Eliot has reascended to origins, some of them in Nature, some in the Victorian age, in order to return to our own situation with renewed spiritual knowledge. Perhaps a similar renovation is underway in other areas of knowledge. The early twentieth-century conviction that Darwin was right and God, so to speak, was wrong has met new challenges and undergone some transformations. In Father and Son (1907), Edmund Gosse could still speak with a mixture of pity and exasperation of his naturalist father's vain effort to head off the evolutionary hypothesis by the preemptive stroke of publishing his own explanation of the story of the rocks before The Origin of Species appeared. A confirmed, even fanatical, believer in a vera causa, the elder Gosse consulted with W . B. Carpenter when word of Darwin's theory first reached him. His own theory, as his son explains it, "coarsely enough, and to my Father's great indignation, was defined by a hasty press as being this—that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity." The theory was rejected and ridiculed, and by the "act of wilfulness" of advancing it, Edmund Gosse claims, his father "closed the doors upon himself forever."23 By the time of Father and Son such a fate seemed inevitable for those who dissented from scientific orthodoxy; other scientists who sought to evade Darwinism more prudently kept their reservations out of sight.24 W e have already seen how W . H. Hudson, in an echo of earlier turmoils, confessed his 22. T . S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," The Complete Poems and Plays (New York, 1952), p. 118. 23. Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (New York, 1963), pp. 86-88. 24. See Frank Miller Turner, Between Science and Religion (New Haven, 1974), passim.

498

• XXV. Afterglow

and Aftermath

•

appreciation of Nature to have been permanently altered by evolution. E. D. H. Johnson credits Darwinism with having delivered a direct blow to Victorian Nature feelings: "The bleak implications of this theory permanently destroyed the spiritual consolation which men had hitherto derived from the exploration of natural phenomena, by discrediting its basic premises." The struggle for survival seemed "wholly incompatible with the older belief that natural order and harmony prevail throughout creation," while the notion of chance variation threatened to deprive life of a meaningful design. 25 Yet the reintroduction of teleological order into modern ecological thought suggests that scientists still seek the reconciliations that T . H. Huxley deemed impossible. The increasing conviction—even among professed Darwinians—that natural selection fulfills the "teleonomy" of a wise Nature who promotes and conserves the adaptedness of organisms to changing environments, seems to lend support to the holistic philosophy of thinkers such as Owen Barfield, for whom the hypothesis of chance variation equals, "in fact, no hypothesis," and cannot restore the ultimate reality it tried to replace. 26 Modern science is as unlikely to take up Philip Henry Gosse's explanation for evolution as modern literature is unlikely to embrace W . H. Hudson's diluted Wordsworthianism. In T . S. Eliot's words, "we cannot restore the old policies / Or follow an antique drum." 27 But for that very reason modern science seems unlikely to remain satisfied with the Darwinian challenge to intelligible orderliness or modern literature with the anti-Victorian nihilism that followed the First World W a r . The Victorian response to Nature, scientific, literary, and spiritual, will never return in its old form. It endures, however, as a source and origin to which we can reascend and which we can continue to explore. And at the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. 28 25. Johnson, The Poetry of Earth, p. xiv. 26. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (New York, [1965]), p. 64; see also Tom Bethell, "Darwin's Mistake," Harper's Magazine, February 1976, pp. 70-75. 27. Eliot, "Little Gidding," Complete Poems, p. 143. 28. Ibid., p. 145.

499

Contributors W I L L I A M F. A X T O N is professor of English and chairman of the department at the University of Louisville. He is a graduate of Yale and Princeton and has taught at Miami University, Brown, and the University of Kentucky. The author of Circle of Fire: Dickens' Vision and Style and the Popular Theatre (1966) and Tobacco and Kentucky (1975), he is completing a study of Ford Brown's illustrations of King Lear. W A L T E R C R E E S E is head of Architectural History in the Department of Architecture at the University of Illinois. He is the author of Search for Environment (1966), a history of the English garden city, and The Legacy of Raymond Unwin (1967). He is a past president of the American Society of Architectural Historians. G E O R G E H. FORD is Joseph A . Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester. He holds the Ph.D. from Yale and has taught at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of Keats and the Victorians (1944), Dickens and His Readers (1955), Double Measure: D. H. Lawrence's Novels and Stories (1965), and coauthor of The Dickens Critics (1961). He is one of the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. E L L E N E. FRANK is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She has completed a study entitled Literary Architecture: Essays Towards a Tradition and is currently engaged in a study of perceptual patterning in time and space. She is a graduate of UCLA and Stanford. A N D R E W G R I F F I N is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds the Ph.D. from Harvard and is currently working on a book-length study of the place of narrative in Wordsworth's poetry. BRUCE M. JOHNSON is professor of English at the University of Rochester. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Northwestern, he is the author of Conrad's Models of Mind (1971). He was an N E H Fellow in 1974-75 and is completing a study of Hardy's fiction. FREDERICK K I R C H H O F F is assistant professor in the Department of English and Linguistics at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. He holds the Ph.D. from Harvard. He is currently working on a study of William Morris's literary career during the period 1870-96.

U. C. K N O E P F L M A C H E R is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a graduate of Berkeley and Princeton. He is the author of Religious Humanism in the Victorian Novel (1965), George Eliot's Early Novels (1968), and Laughter and Despair (1971), and has edited F. W . Newman's Phases 501

• Contributors •

of Faith (1970). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an N E H Fellow, and a visiting professor at Harvard and Princeton. G E O R G E P. L A N D O W is associate professor of English at Brown University. He is a graduate of Princeton where he did his doctoral work under E. D. H . Johnson. His Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (1971) won the Gustav Arlt Award. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow. T R E V O R H . LEVERE is associate professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. G E O R G E L E V I N E is professor of English, Livingston College, Rutgers University. He is the author of Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman (1968), editor of The Emergence of Victorian Consciousness (1967), and coeditor of The Art of Victorian Prose (1968). From 1959 to 1969, he was an editor of Victorian Studies.

A. W A L T O N L I T Z is professor of English and chairman of the Department of English at Princeton University. A recipient of the E. Harris Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1973, Mr. Litz has published The Art of James Joyce (1961), Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development (1965), James Joyce (1966), and Introspective Voyager: The Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens (1972). He has edited Modern American Fiction: Essays in Criticism (196 3), EliotinHis Time (1973), and Major American Short Stories (1975). H e has written articles on, or prepared editions of, Jane Austen, Hardy, Joyce, Williams, and Eliot. C H A U N C E Y C . LOOMIS is chairman of the Department of English at Dartmouth College. He has written articles on Thackeray, Joyce, Twain, and Stephen Crane. His biography of the nineteenth-century American Arctic explorer Charles Francis Hall, Weird and Tragic Shores, was published in 1971. H e has traveled extensively in the Arctic. M A R T I N M E I S E L is professor of English and chairman of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. H e is a graduate of Queens College, Cornell, and Princeton. He has taught at Rutgers, Dartmouth, and the University of Wisconsin, and he has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the author of Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theatre (1963). C H A R L E S MILLARD is chief curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. He is art editor of the Hudson Review, to which he contributes regularly. He has written on Julia Margaret Cameron's photographically illustrated Idylls of the King for the Harvard Library Bulletin, and he has published in the Art Bulletin, Master Drawings, and other periodicals. His book, The Sculpture of Edgar Degas, was published in 1976.

502

• Contributors •

J. H I L L I S M I L L E R is professor of English and chairman of the department at Yale University. He holds the Ph.D. from Harvard. He formerly taught at Johns Hopkins and at Williams College, and was visiting professor at various schools, including Harvard, University of Virginia, Zurich, and Princeton. He is the author of Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958), The Disappearance of God (1963), Poets of Reality (1965), and Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (1971). From 1953 to 1961 he was editor of Modern Language Notes, and he is an editor of ELH. Mr. Miller is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. J O H N PATERSON is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He studied at McGill University and the University of Michigan. He formerly taught at Princeton. He is the author of The Making o f u The Return of the Native" (1973) and The Novel as Faith (1973) and the editor of the Riverside edition of Adam Bede (1968). R O B E R T L. P A T T E N is associate professor of English and secretary of the faculty of Rice University. Author of Charles Dickens and His Publishers (1976), he has also edited The Pickwick Papers and a collection of essays on George Cruikshank. He serves as an editor of Dickens Studies Annual. In 1976 he was president of the Dickens Society. L A W R E N C E POSTON III is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle and has taught at the University of Nebraska and the University of Tulsa. He is the author of a monograph, Loss and Gain: An Essay an Browning's uDramatis Personae" (1974), and of articles in PMLA, ELH, and other journals. D A V I D A. R O B E R T S O N is Mcintosh Professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University, where he has also served as chairman of the department. He holds the A.B. and the Ph.D. from Princeton University. He is the author of George Mallory (1969) and a recent study of the Eastlakes. R O G E R S M I T H is a lecturer in the History of Science, Department of History, University of Lancaster, England. He teaches a course in the history of materialism and psychology and is the author of articles on the history of the biological sciences.

R. H. S U P E R is professor of English at the University of Michigan. He has written a biography of Walter Savage Landor (1954) and a volume of essays, The Time-Spirit of Matthew Arnold (1970). He has edited Arnold's Complete Prose Works in eleven volumes (1960-76). G . B . T E N N Y S O N is professor of English at UCLA. He holds the P h . D . from Princeton University, and he formerly taught at the University of North Carolina. He is the author of Sartor Called Resartus (1965) and An Introduction to Drama (1967), and the editor ofA Carlyle Reader (1969). He is coeditor of Religion 503

• Contributors •

and Modern Literature (1975) and of Victorian Literature: Prose and Poetry (1976). From 1971 to 1974 he was the editor of Nineteenth-Century Fiction. D A V I D W I L S O N is a member of the faculty at the University of Iowa. H e was formerly archivist at the Cambridge University Library. H e holds the Ph.D. in the history of science from Johns Hopkins University. H e has taught at the University of Oklahoma and at Cambridge. Mr. Wilson has published extensively on the history of science and is currently preparing a biography of George Gabriel Stokes, the Victorian natural philosopher. He is also assembling a catalogue of the archives of Stokes and Lord Kelvin in the Cambridge University Library.

504

Index Abbey. Edwin, 62 Abrams, M. H , 372-373, 4 3 7 , 4 3 8 Adam-Salomon, Antony Samuel, 2 3 Adamson, J. W . , 234n, 239n Agassiz, Louis, 225, 291 Airy, George Biddell, 202 Akroyd, Colonel Edward: builds Akroydon model village, 56-58 Albert, Prince Consort, 55, 56 Allbutt, Clifford, 122, 123 Allingham, Helen, ILLUSTRATIONS: Cottage at Chiddingford (fig. 27), 42 Allott, Kenneth, 395n Allott, Miriam, 356n Alpine Club, 114, 120-126 passim Alpine Journal, The, 113n; its editors, 123 Alps, xxii, 113-136 passim, 146, 436; and the Arctic, 97-99, 119; early expeditions, 114, 116; expeditions by Victorians, 119-120, 129, 130, 147, 150-152; in fiction, 125, 137, 443-444; and God's presence, 125-126, 141; in poetry, 174; Ruskin on, 113-1 14, 125, 129, 139-140. See also Mont Blanc; mountains Altick, Richard, 34n, 95n Amis, Kingsley, 3 8 Ampère, André, 203, 204 Anderegg, Melchior, 130 animals, 495-496; in Hardy's fiction, 458-459; and the Sublime, 5 5 Annan, Lord Noel, 120n, 121, 13 3n Ansted, D. T . , 131 Appleman, Philip. 95n Archer, William, 456n architecture, 30-48 passim, 49-67 passim, 68-92 passim, 306; reconciled with Nature, 41, 50, 52-54, 66, 71, 73; rupture with Nature, 89, 90-92; used in Nature photography, 24. See also cottages; country houses; suburb Arctic, the: early expeditions, 97, 99-104; Franklin expedition, 104-110; as image of the Sublime, 96-98, 102-103, 110-112; and Victorian nationalism, 95-96, 105 Arnold, Jane, 122

241, 243-245; and Ruskin, 408, 409, 412, 413; and Wordsworth, 172, 391, 394-400, 403n, 409,412 WORKS:

Culture and Anarchy, 241 n "Dover Beach," 486 Friendship's Garland, 234, 235 "Function of Criticism," 237 " T o a Gipsy Child," 395, 396-400, 402 "Heinrich Heine," 239 "Lines W r i t t e n in Kensington Gardens," 173-175, 176 Literature and Dogma, 238-239 "Literature and Science," 23 In, 237, 238, 241, 243, 244 "Liverpool Address," 2 3 8 " A Psychological Parallel," 244 "Preface" (1853), 243 "Saint-Beuve," 239 Schools and Universities, 241, 245 "Spinoza and the Bible," 236 "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," 243 "Thyrsis," 29, 136 " W o r d s w o r t h , " xxi, 394-395, 408 Arnold, Dr. Thomas, 234, 391 Arnold, Thomas, 395 astronomy, 201, 202, 208, 213; and Hardy, 457 atomic theory, 189-190,199, 205, 211, 213 Augustine, Saint, 345, 35 1 Austen, Jane, 442. WORKS: Emma, 137; Northanger Abbey, 139

Babbage, Charles, 116 Babbitt, Irving, 474 Bachelard, Gaston, 48 Back, George, 100, 102 Bacon, Sir Francis, 195, 232, 247 Bagehot, Walter, 239 Bain Alexander, 200n, 222, 228, 229n Balmat, Jacques, 119 Barfield, Owen, 499 Barnes, William, 3 In, 490 Barnett, Dame Henrietta: and Hampstead Garden Suburb, 64-67 Barnett, Canon Samuel A., 65 Barrow, Admiral John, 9 5 - 9 6

Arnold, Matthew, xxi, 29, 122, 185, 231, 238-239, 242-245, 269-270, 391, 394-400, 405, 412, 413, 415, 418, 427, 486, 487, 489; on education, 242-245; and Huxley, 237-238, 505

• Index •

Baudelaire, Pierre Charles, 472-474, 477,480, 484, 488; and T . S. Eliot, 471-474 passim Beach, Joseph Warren, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century Poetry, 477-478 Beaufoy, Mark, 116 Beaumont, Sir George, 296 Bedford, Francis, 2, 24; photographs by: (fig. 4), 6; (fig. 5), 7; (fig. 15), 14; (fig. 20), 19 Bedford Park, 60-64, 67; illustrations: (fig. 37), 62; (fig. 38), 63 Beechey, Lieutenant, 101 Beer, Gillian, 32n Beerbohm, Sir Max, 398, 495, 497. ILLUSTRATIONS: "William Wordsworth" (fig. 129), 398 Bennett, C. S., 120n Bennett, Mary, 364n, 369n Bentham, George, 180-181 Bentham, Jeremy, 178, 179, 238 Bentham, Samuel, 178, 179 Bergman, Torbern, 197 Bergonzi, Bernard, 481 n Berthelot, Marcellin, 200 Berzelius, J. J., 197 Bewick, Thomas: History of British Birds, 103 Bible, the: 2 3 5, 2 3 5 n, 2 3 6, 3 31, 3 51; references to: Genesis, 344-345; Leviticus, 23 5; Matthew, 433; Proverbs, 334; Psalms, 329; Revelations, 3 56n, 43 3 .See also Flood; rainbow biology, xix, xxi, 216-230, 252, 356; and Victorian psychology, 218, 219—22Iff Birkenhead Park, 58-60, 67; illustration: (fig. 36), 59 Birmingham, 193; Science College at, 235, 237 Bisley School, 380 Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold von, 5 5 Black, Joseph, 204 Blackwood's Magazine, 104, 109 Blake, William, 247, 251, 294, 344 Blakeney, T . S„ 120n Bloom, Harold, 434,437n Boase, T . S. R., 281n Boime, Albert, 28In Bonington, Richard Parkes, 288 Bonney, Reverend T . G., 135 Booth, Michael, 34n Borsch-Supan, Helmut, 366-367 Bosverts, Gerald de, 382 Boswell, James, 34n botany, xviii, 402; and Mill, 180; Ruskin on, xix, 247-258 Bowler, H. A., 330 Boyce, G. P., 300 Bradford, William, 111 Bradley, A. C., 484 Bradley, F. H., 481, 491 Brannan, Robert Louis, 107n Brantwood (Ruskin's home), xvii, 69, 75-76,

247,410n; illustrations of (fig. 43), 75; (fig. 44), 76; (fig. 45), 77 Brett, John, 284, 300. ILLUSTRATIONS: Val d'Aosta (fig. 80), 285 Brightfield, Myron F., 50n, 52n Bristol, 52, 55 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 206, 234 Britton, John, 38n Brock, W . H . , 189n, 198n Bronté, Anne, 103 Bronte, Charlotte, 139, 145, 148, 174, 175, 176-177, 306, 391. WORKS: fane Eyre, 103, 163n, 178; Shirley, 44; Villette, 171-174 passim, 177 Bronte, Emily, 103, 170, 306; Wuthering Heights, 145, 148, 172, 393,444-445 Brooke, J. H., 190n, 200n Brooke, Stopford A., 426n Brougham, Lord Henry Peter, 193 Brown, Ford Madox, 199, 301, 315, 330, 362; ILLUSTRATIONS: An English Autumn Afternoon (frontis); WalUm-on-the-Naze (fig. 116), 363 Brown, James, 55; illustration of Hanover Square (fig. 32), 54 Brown, T . Graham, 116n, 119n Browning, Oscar, 122, 129 Browning, Robert, xix, 38n, 126, 306, 369, 406-407, 426-439, 477,479; and Nature, 406n, 426-439; and Wordsworth, 406, 427, 428-429,430,435 WORKS:

" 'Childe Roland,' " 256, 429, 433-439 "Christmas Eve," 428 "Dis Aliter Visum," 432 "Easter-Day," 428 "Englishman in Italy," 434-435 "By The Fireside," 429-433, 439 "Fra Lippo Lippi," 292, 427n, 440-441 "James Lee's Wife," 43 3 "Karshish," 439 Pippa Passes, 406-407 "Saul," 240, 428-429 "Two in the Campagna," 432 Bruce, C. G., 123 Brush, Stephen G„ 205n, 209n Buchan, John, 6In Buck, Richard D„ 282n Buckland, William, xvii, 193n Bunyan, John, 43 3, 437 Burke, Edmund: on the Sublime, 55, 102 Burn, W . L., 34 Burrow, J. W., 223n Burton, Anthony, 36n Butler, Agnata Frances, 122 Butler, Henry Montagu, 122

506

• Index '

Butler, Bishop Joseph, Analogy of Religion, 374 Butler, Samuel, 490; The Way of All Flesh, 125 Butt, John, 157n Butterfield, William, 306 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 116, 124, 142, 355, 368, 383n; Ruskin on, 412-413 Caithness, Earl of: photograph by: (fig. 21), 20 Callcott, Sir A. W . , 282. ILLUSTRATIONS: Diana at the Chase (fig. 79), 283 Calverley, Charles Stuart, 402-403, 405; " T h e Schoolmaster," 402-403 Calvert, Edward, 288 Campbell, Thomas: " T o the Rainbow," 347 Cannon, Walter F. 195n, 201n Capek, Karel, 61 Carjat, Etienne, 23 Carlyle, Thomas, 48n, 139, 141, 142, 145, 247, 312, 324, 376, 435, 435n,438n, 490; on Nature, 491 Carpenter, William Benjamin, 218-230 passim, 498; and Darwin, 224-227; efforts to relate mind and Nature, 220, 223-224; on God in Nature, 225, 228 WORKS:

"Address," 229-230 "Darwin and the Origin of Species," 224n, 225 Nature and Man, 219n, 221, 223, 224, 227 Principles of General Physiology, 219n, 221 n Principles of Human Physiology, 219n, 221 n, 223n Principles of Mental Physiology, 227, 228 Carpenter, J. Estlin, 219n Carr, Arthur J., 483,486n Carroll, Lewis, 394, 403 Cecil, Lord David, 444-445 Cézanne, Paul, 465, 467 Chagall, Marc, 467 Champa, Kermit S., 361-362 chemist: Sir Humphry Davy on, 191; Wordsworth on, xviii chemistry, xxi, 189-200, 217, 219, 231; organic, 190, 198, 199-200; and poetry, 192; used to prove unity of Nature, 197, 200 Chesterton, G. K., 49, 61, 484, 480 Church, Frederick E., I l l , 366 city: and country, 37, 41, 48n, 158, 165, 170, 392,420, 424; in T . S. Eliot's poetry, 474, 4 7 7 , 4 8 4 , 488, 493; and landscape painting, 306; and mountain, 152; parks in, 60, 67, 171; 173; Ruskin on, 68, 69; in Victorian literature, 68, 69, 473, 483-484, 488. See also Birmingham; Bristol; London; Liverpool; Manchester; suburb Clare, John, 164-165 Clark, Sir Kenneth, 28In

Clark, Ronald, 13 3 Claude Lorrain, 138, 282, 286 Clifford, W . K„ 215, 230 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 234 Cobbett, William, Rural Rides, 31, 42-43 Coleman, W . , 217n Colenso, Bishop John William, 235 Coleridge, Ernest Hartley, 426 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 30, 96, 116, 362n, 375, 396, 3 9 7 , 4 0 0 , 4 1 8 , 422, 481; on Nature, xvii, xix, 192; and Wordsworth, xviii-xix, 396, 397, 400, 422 WORKS:

Anima Poetae, 3 70 Biographia Literaria, 396, 422,487 "Dejection: an Ode," xvii-xix, 184, 439 The Friend, 192 "Frost at Midnight," 429, 438 "Hymn Before Sunrise," 116 Philosophical Lectures, xvii "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," 98-99, 184,418 Colley, Curtis G., 282n Collie, Norman, 122 Collingwood, R. G., 114n Collins, Charles Allston, 314, 328-330. ILLUSTRATIONS: Convent Thoughts (fig. 98), 319 Collins, Philip, 148n, 154n, I57n, 161n,422 Collins, Wilkie, 306. WORKS: The Frozen Deep, 108; Hide-and-Seek, 52; " N o Thoroughfare," 152n Colville, Derek, 426n, 427n Combe, Thomas, 327 Comte, Auguste, 272 Conrad, Joseph, 274, 455, 479, 494; on Franklin expedition, 106; retrospection in Victory, 490 Constable, John, 284, 288, 294, 296, 342. ILLUSTRATIONS: Stoke-by-Nayland

(fig. 8 1 ) , 2 8 7

Conway, Martin, 12 3 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 497 correlation, principle of, 220, 223, 227 Cotman, John Sell, 288, 291, 298. ILLUSTRATIONS: Chirk Aqueduct (fig. 86), 295 cottages: allusions in novels, 34-41, 43, 47-48; allusions in poems, 29, 30, 36n, 38n, 4 3 - 4 4 , 4 7 ; destruction of, 31; illustrations: (fig. 25), 38; (fig. 26), 40; (fig. 27), 42; (fig. 28), 45; (fig. 42), 72; Macaulay on, 32ff; as pastoral emblem, 29-30, 33, 34, 65, 71, 73; Ruskin on, 44, 149; George Sand on, 30; Southey on, 32ff country houses: in Lake District, 68-92 Couttet, Joseph-Marie, 114 Couture, Thomas, 286 Cowell, J . J., 122n Cox, David, 288, 291, 294, 298 Cozens, John Robert, 286, 294 Crabbe, George, 38n

507

• Index •

Dick, Thomas, 197n Dickens, Charles, 31, 35-36, 4 6 - 4 8 , 108-109, 145, 150-152, 153-170, 3 0 6 , 4 0 8 , 4 1 2 , 4 1 4 - 4 1 7 , 417n, 4 2 2 - 4 2 5 , 479; and George Eliot, 421 - 4 2 2 ; and Nature, 15 3-15 7 et passim, 169-170, 497; and Ruskin, 46, 47, 138, 148n, 412, 414; and Wordsworth, 156, 163, 416-417,422-425

Crane, Stephen, 274 Creese, Walter H., 66n Crombie, A. C., 251 Crome, John 288 Cromwell, Oliver, 69 Crookes, Sir William, 190n, 198 Crossland, W . H . , 57 • Crowley, Aleister, 129 Croz, Michel, 113 Cruikshank, George, 163n Cummings, Frederick, 2 8 I n Cundall, Joseph, 25; photographs by: (fig. 12), 12; (fig. 13), 13

WORKS:

Daguerrë, Louis Jacques Mandé, 2 3 Dalton, John, 189, 190, 198, 199 Danby, Francis, 288, 294, 351-353, 356, 367-368. I L L U S T R A T I O N S : The Deluge, (fig. 114), 352 Danby, Thomas, 288, 294 Dangar, D. F. O., 120n Dante, 150, 3 1 7 - 3 1 8 , 4 7 7 , 4 8 0 , 4 8 1 , 4 8 7 - 4 8 8 Darwin, Charles Robert, 122, 2 1 7 - 2 1 8 , 222, 224, 225, 226, 261, 262, 2 6 9 , 4 9 7 , 4 9 8 - 4 9 9 ; and W . B. Carpenter, 2 2 4 - 2 2 7 ; and Hardy, 261, 266, 269, 2 7 2 - 2 7 7 ; and Ruskin, xvii-xviii, xix, 2 5 2 - 2 5 4 ; and Tennyson, xix; his theory of natural selection, 206, 217, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229, 248, 257n, 4 9 8 - 4 9 9 ; on Turner, xix WORKS:

The Descent of Man, 222 The Origin of Species, xvii, xix, 2 1 7 - 2 1 8 , 222, 235, 237, 244, 261, 275, 456, 495; assessed by George Eliot, xix Daubeny, Charles Giles Bridle, 196n Daubigny, Charles François, 63 Davies, Emily, 122n Davies, J. Llewelyn, 122, 126, 131 da Vinci, Leonardo, 150 Davis, Terence, 5 8n Davis, William, 300, 362n Davy, Sir Humphry, 190-192, 193, 197, 198, 200n, 203n; on Nature, 190-192; on science and religion, 196 de Beer, Sir Gavin, 116n Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Eugène, 55, 361 Delamotte, Philip H., 25; photographs by: (fig. 12), 12; (fig. 13), 13 Delaroche, Paul, 286 DeLaura, David J., 2 6 9 , 2 7 0 de Kosky, R. K „ 190n DeQuincey, Thomas: on Dove cottage, 71-73 De Vane, William Clyde, 43 7n de Veer, Gerrit, 96 De Wint, Peter, 288, 291, 294, 295. ILLUSTRAT I O N S ; Gloucester (fig. 89), 295 Dewey, John, 197n

All The Year Round, articles in, 46, 416 Barnaby Rudge, 4 2 2 - 4 2 3 The Battle of Life, 165-167 Bleak House, 34, 170, 422, 423, 437 The Chimes, 36n, 155, 162-163, 164 A Christmas Carol, 154, 155, 158-162; illustrations in: (fig. 75), 159; (fig. 76), 160; (fig. 77), 162 The Cricket on the Hearth, 156, 163-165, 170, 422 David Copperfield, 148, 234 Dombey and Son, 154 Great Expectations, 153-154, 155, 4 1 5 , 4 1 6 ; and The Prelude, 4 2 3 - 4 2 5 Hard Times, 34, 48 The Haunted Man, 167-168; illustration in: (fig. 78), 169 Household Words, articles in, 35 n, 36, 108-109 Little Dorrit, 4 7 - 4 8 , 148, 1 5 0 - 1 5 2 , 4 2 3 Martin Chuzzlewit, 170 Master Humphry's Clock, 148n The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 42 3 Nicholas Nickleby, 157 The Old Curiosity Shop, 4 7 , 1 5 3 Oliver Twist, 47, 153 Our Mutual Friend, 154 Pictures from Italy, 141 Diggs, Zephaniah, 23 5 Dingle, Herbert, 240 Disraeli, Benjamin, 5 5 Ditchfield, P. H. 41 Dolben, Digby Mackworth, 387 Dollman, J. C „ 62 Dore, Gustave, 353, 355. ILLUSTRATIONS: The World Destroyed by Water (fig. 115), 354 Douglas, Lord Frances, 113 Dove cottage, 69; DeQuincey on, 71-72. See also Wordsworth Downing, A. J., 58 Draper, Henry, 2 3 Drummond, Henry, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 239 Diibi, Heinrich, 116n Dumas, Jean Baptiste, 198 Dumont, Pierre Etienne Louis, 181 Dupin, Amandine Aurore Lucie, see George Sand Durant, S „ 79n Diirer, Albrecht, 281, 291

508

• Index

Dyce, William, 296. ILLUSTRATIONS: Pegwell Bay, Kent (fig. 90), 301 dynamics, 201, 202 Dyos, H . J., The Victorian City, 34n

Eastlake, C. L., 296n education: and Arnold, 242-245; and Huxley, 195-196, 241-242; and science, 194, 233-235, 237-241 Edwards, Ernest: photograph by (fig. 72), 132 electricity, 201, 203-304, 210; corpuscular theories, 202; electromagnetic theories, 208, 210-211; fluid theories, 203 elements, 189, 190, 196-198 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans), xxi, 31, 34, 47,48, 137, 142-145. 149, 161, 271,408,412, 414, 415, 416, 417-420; and Dickens, 421-422; on Origin of Species, xix; and Ruskin, 138, 143-145, 255, 412, 414, 418; and Nature, 442-443, 446, 459; and Wordsworth. 415-421, 443 WORKS:

Adam Bede, 39, 95, 142, 417, 442-443 "Brother and Sister" sonnets, 417 Daniel Deronda, xix Felix Holt, 35 Middlemarch, xix, 35, 36-37, 122 The Mill an the Floss, 24, 143, 351,415,416, 417-421; Ruskin on, 138 " T h e Natural History of German Life," 42.1-422 Scenes of Clerical Life, 39 Silas Marner, 31,416, 420-421 Eliot, T . S„ 470-488, 491, 493-494, 499; and Baudelaire, 471, 472-474; as Nature poet, 474, 478-479, 487, 493-494, 497-498; and T e n n y son, 476, 482-485,488 WORKS:

"Before Morning," 472 "Burnt Norton," 478, 485, 497-498 " D r y Salvages," 481, 487, 488 "East Coker," 486 Four Quartets, 471, 481, 484, 48 5, 497-498. See also Burnt Norton"; " D r y Salvages"; "East Coker"; "Little Gidding" "Idea of a Christian Society," 493 "Little Gidding," 485 "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," 471, 472,493 The Wasteland, 471, 473, 479, 481, 493-494 " W h a t Dante Means to Me," 473 Elizabeth 1, Queen, 97 Ellegard, Alvar, 222n Elliot, Sir Gilbert (Earl of Minto), 119 Elliot, William Hugh, 119 Elsam, Richard, 41

•

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 479; "Nature," 312 energy, 208-209, 210, 211 Engel, Claire-Eliane, 119n Engel, Monroe, 154 Engels, Friedrich, WORKS: The Condition of the Working Class in England, 3 3; The Housing Question, 57 ether theory, 203, 207, 210-213, 215 Etty, William, 296 Euclid, 243 Evans, Frederick, 2, 24, 25; photographs by: (fig. 9), 10; (fig. 22), 21; (fig. 23), 22 Evans, lssac, 417 Evans, Joan, 247 Evans, Mary Ann. See George Elliot Everdingen, Allaert van, 362 evolution, theory of, 198-199, 217-218, 225-226, 236; and God, 225; and religion, xix, 226, 495, 498. See also Darwin; Huxley

Faber, Frederick William, 387 Fairbairn, Patrick, 345-346, 369 Faraday, Michael, 121, 192n, 194, 195n, 198, 199, 203, 206, 207, 210, 211; on God in Nature, 196, 205,208 Farrar, Dean F. W „ 130, 234 Fenton, Roger, 24, 25; photographs by: (fig. 1), 3; (fig. 7), 8; (fig. 11), 11 Ferebee, A., 78n Fetridge, W . Pembroke, 129 Fielding, Copley, 288 Fischer, Emil, 190 Flood, the, 345, 351-354, 367; in art, 351-354; in poetry, 355, 356, 358 Foote, G. A., 193 Forbes, James David, 1 19, 121, 123, 133; illustrations: Mont Cervin (fig. 70), 127 Ford, Ford Madôx, 455 Forster, John, 156, 164n Forster, W . E„ 122 Foster, Miles Birket, 36n, 298, 299. ILLUSTRA-

509

TIONS: The Milkmaid

(fig. 9 1 ) , 302; The

Old

Chair Mender (fig. 26), 40; We Are Seven (fig. 131), 401 Fourier, François Marie Charles, 5 5 Fowles, John, 43n Franklin, Benjamin, 143 Franklin, Sir John, 100, 102, 104-108, 122, 458; reactions to his death, 109-111 Frazer, James George, 261, 262, 272, 276. WORKS: Darwin and Modem Science, 275-276; The Golden Bough, 259, 491; Totemism, 273 French, R . D . , 217n Freshfield, Douglas, 122, 123 Fresnel, Augustin, 202, 203 Freud, Sigmund, 173,261,271, 372

• Index •

Friedrich, Caspar David, 105-105, 344, 367. ILLUSTRATIONS: Die Gescheiterte Hoffnung (fig. 62), 105 Frith, Francis, 24; photographs by: (fig. 3), 5; (fig. 6), 7; (fig. 8), 9; (fig. 14), 14 Frith, William, 67 Frobisher, Martin, 97 Froude, James Anthony, 352 Frye, Northrop, 142

Gose, Elliot B., Jr., 272-273 Gosse, Edmund, 498 Gosse, Philip Henry, 498-499 Graham, R. B. Cunninghame, 490 Gray, Asa, 226 Great Exhibition (1851), 196n, 240 Gresley, Major F.: photographs by: (fig. 18), 17; (fig. 19), 18 Grimshaw, Atkinson, 300, 341-344, 346, 349, 3 5 0 , 3 5 1 , 3 5 7 , 3 6 2 , 3 6 9 . ILLUSTRATIONS:

Gage, John, 369n Gainsborough, Thomas, 284 Galton, Francis, 122 Gardner, Helen, 471, 482, 486n Garrigan, Kristine O., 74n Gascoigne, George, 347 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 31, 306; North and South, 43, 45-46 Gauguin, Paul, 461 Gauldie, Enid, 34n Gaunt, William, 282n Geddes, Patrick, 64 Geison, G. L., 217n Geological Society, xvii geology, xvii, xviii, 189n, 193, 236n, 247n, 356, 498; and Hardy's fiction, 259, 260, 264 George, Reverend H. B„ 123, 128-129, 132 Gere, J. A., 282n, 330n Géricault, Jean Louis André Théodore, 5 5 Germ, The, 309, 319, 322 Gilbert, Elliot L„ 157n Gilbert, J., ILLUSTRATIONS: We Are Seven (fig. 130), 399 Gillispie, C. C., 193n Gilpin, William, 25, 73, 74, 179; Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, 69, 71 Giorgone, il, 411 Giotto, 361 Girdlestone, Reverend A. G., 126n Girtin, Thomas, 288, 294, 296, 362n. ILLUSTRAT I O N S : Kirkstall Abbey—Evening (fig. 85), 293 Gleyre, Charles Gabriel, 286 Gloag, John, 61 n, 79n God, 238, 3 1 1, 331; and evolution, 225; at odds with Nature, 313, 353-354, 361, 476; present in Nature, xvii, xx, 115, 125-126, 141, 193, 205-206, 214, 215, 223, 229-230, 374, 376-379, 447, 448, 493, 496; Providence of, 105, 193, 373, 375; rainbow as emblem of, 344-346, 358; and United States, 364 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 142, 239 Gombrich, E. H., 341 Goodall, Edward, 115 Goodhart-Rendell, H. S., 79n Gore, Catherine: Cecil: or the Adventures of a Coxcomby 52

The

Seal of the Covenant (fig. 110), 342 Gruber, H. E„ 222n Gussow, Alan, 48 Haber, L. F., 196n Hadow, Douglas, 113 Halifax; Akroydon model village, 56-58 Hall, Mrs. S. C„ 359 Hallam, Arthur, 486-487 Hamel, Dr., 129 Hamilton, Thomas, Earl of Haddington, 96 Hampstead Garden Suburb, 64-67; illustrations: (fig. 39), 65 Hampstead Heath and village, 52-53 Hardie, Martin, 28In, 296 Harding, D. J., 288 Hardman, William, 122, 129 Hardy, Thomas, xxi, 31, 41, 47, 161, 259-277, 396,455-469, 489,490; and Darwin, 261, 266, 269, 272-277; and geology, 259, 260, 264; imagery in, 460-46Iff.; and Lawrence, 268, 455-456, 461, 462, 468-469, 491; and Nature, 261-267, 445-446,456-468, 494, 497; and Wordsworth, 425,446 WORKS:

"The Darkling Thrush," 494 The Dynasts, 272 Far From the Madding Crowd, 457-463 passim Jude the Obscure, 39, 43, 270, 425, 464 The Mayor of Casterbridge, 463-468 passim The Return of the Native, 261,457, 458-459, 461-464 Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 37, 39, 259-277,446, 458-461 passim, 463-465 passim The Trumpet-Major, 464, 465 Two on a Tower, 457 Under the Greenwood Tree, 39,41, 458 The Woodlanders, 31,457, 460-466 passim Harrison, Frederic, 122, 403n Hartley, H., 190n Hartog, P. D. Den, 423 Hawkins, Francis Vaughan, 122n Hayley, William H., 55 ; illustration of Hanover Square (fig. 32), 54 Hazlitt, William, 31 In hearth: as image, 139, 149, 157ff heat, 201, 207-210; material theory of, 204-205

510

• Index •

Heimann, P. M., 205n, 206n Herrmann, Luke, 28In Herschel, Sir John, 116, 201-205 passim, 207, 208, 212, 213, 215, 228; on God in Nature, 205, 214-215. WORKS: Astronomy, 208; "Light," 202; A Preliminary Discourse on The Study of Natural Philosophy, 201-205 passim, 211 Hiebert, Erwin N., 209n Hill, Octavia, 66 Hillers, Delbert R., 345n Hinchcliff, T . W., 119, 120 Holbein, Hans, 281 Holland, Sir Henry, 189, 192n, 194, 222n Holland, James, 291,298 Holmes, F. L„ 190n Holroyd, Michael, 496n Hood, Thomas, 52 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, xx, 33, 156, 299, 348, 387, 390, 404-406, 447-449, 450, 497; and Naure, 405, 448-449; and Wordsworth, 404-406. WORKS: "The Caged Skylark," 348, 358; "Spring and Fall," 404-405; "The Wreck of the Deutschland," 448-449 Hornby, J. J., 122, 126 Hort, F.J. A., 120, 122 House, Humphry, 63-64 Hovelaque, Henri Léon, 426n Howard, Ebenezer, 64 Howitt, William, 30n Hudson, Charles, 113, 131 Hudson, William Henry, 489, 490, 494, 496, 498, 499. WORKS: William Wordsworth and His Poetry, 489; Far Away and Long Ago, 495 Hughes, Arthur, 300, 301, 304, 305. ILLUSTRATIONS: The Long Engagement (fig. 94), 307 Hughes, Ted, 27 5 Hull, D. L„ 222n Hulme, T . E„ 474 Humboldt, Alexander von, 194, 195 Hume, David, 178 Hunt A. W „ 300, 362n Hunt, Leigh: on Hampstead village, 53, 66 Hunt, Robert, 192 Hunt, Thomas Sterry, 199 Hunt, William Holman, 288, 291, 296, 298, 299-300, 306, 309, 312, 313-314, 319, 325-326, 328, 3 30-3 36, 340, 362-364; his representation of Nature, 33 1, 333-334; and religion, 331, 364 ILLUSTRATIONS:

The Awakened Conscience (fig. 104), 3 32 Hawthorn and Bird's Nest (fig. 88), 298 The Hireling Shepherd (fig. 92), 303 The Lady of Shalott (fig. 100), 321 The Lady of Shabtt (fig. 101), 322 The Scapegoat (fig. 118), 366

Valentine Rescuing Sylvia (fig. 99), 320 WORKS:

"The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood," 313, 31 Jn Pre-Raphaelitism, 312, 331, 3 35 Hunter, John, 238 Hunter, Sir Robert, 66 Huntingdon, David C., 364n Huxley, Thomas Henry, xix, xx-xxi, 121-122, 194, 222, 226, 227, 230, 232-234, 235, 237, 239-245, 269, 393, 499; and Arnold, 237-245 passim-, and education, 195-196, 242-245; on protoplasm, xx WORKS:

"Agnosticism," 235 "On the Advisability of Improving Natural Knowledge," 239 "A Liberal Education," 195, 240 Man's Place in Nature, 240n "Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe," 195 "On the Physical Basis of Life," xx-xxi "Science," 232-23 3, 236n, 240, 244 "Science and Culture," 237, 241-242, 243 Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 273, 275 Inchbold, John William, 300 Industrial Revolution, 31,33; pollution of landscape, 44, 412 Inness, George, 366 Irenaeus, St., 3 74 Ironside, Robin, 282n, 330n Jäger, Gustave, 349, 350, 351, 357. ILLUSTRATIONS: Noah's Sacrifice (fig. 113), 350 James, Henry, 442, 443-444, 455, 468, 480: WORKS: "The Jolly Corner," 480; Washington Square, 443-44; The Wings of the Dove, 444 James, Louis, 163n James, William, 133,216-217 Jefferies, Richard, 35n-36n, 490 Jekyl, Gertrude: Home and Garden, 78n-79n; illustration from:(fig. 42), 72 Johnson, Bruce, 2 74n Johnson, E. D. H „ 170, 312; The Poetry of Earth, 362n, 390n, 494, 499 Johnson, Samuel, 374 Jones, H. Bence, 196n Jones, Henry, 426n Jones, O. W., 380 Jorpes, J. E., 197n Joule, James Prescott, 205, 208, 211 Joyce, James, 455, 479 Jung, Carl Gustav, 393, 394 Keats, John, 172, 257, 356, 477, 481; Lamia, 356-357 Keble, John, 347-348, 355, 371-383, 387, 388, 511

Index •

manticism, 286, 288; and Ruskin, 282, 284, 291-292; and science, 291 landscape photography, 23-26; and literature, 24; and painting, xxi, 25 Landseer, Sir Edwin Henry, 288; and Franklin

Keble, John, (continued) 390, 491; his aesthetics, 372-374, 375; his subordination of Nature to religion, 371, 374-376 WORKS:

Ampfield Fountain verse, 379 The Christian Year, 371, 372, 373, 376-379 Lectures on Poetry, 372, 373, 376 Lyra lnnocentium, 378, 379 "Quinquagesima Sunday," 347, 348 Occasional Papers, 374 "Tract Eighty-Nine," 374, 378, 379 Keith, W . J. : The Rural Tradition, 30n, 38n Kelvin, Lord, see William Thompson Kennedy, E. S., 119, 120, 131 Kepler, Johannes, 213 Kerenyi, C., 393, 394 Kilvert, Francis, 362n, 388-390 Kingsley, Charles, 41; Yeast, 36n, 38 Kipling, Rudyard, 425, 485-486, 490; and Words worthian child of Nature, 425 Knight, D. M„ 189n, 198n Knoepflmacher, U.C., 39, 355 Knox, Monsignor Ronald, 237n Kuhn, Thomas, 233n, 239n

e x p e d i t i o n , 1 1 0 - 1 1 1 . ILLUSTRATIONS: Man

Proposes, God Disposes (fig. 64), 111; Victoria, Albert and the Princess Royal (fig. 33), 56 Lansbury, Coral, 34n Larmor, Joseph, 211 Lavoisier, Antoine, 189, 190, 196 Lawrence, D. H., 30-31, 48, 455-456, 465, 490-493, 494,497; and Hardy, 268,455-456, 461,462, 468-469, 491 ; and Nature, 455, 468-469,492, 494 WORKS:

Laforgue, Jules, 472-473 Lake District, xvii-xviii, 52, 66, 68-92 passim, 146, 391-394, 411; country houses at, 68-92; Ruskin at, xviii, 408-409 (see also Brantwood); sites mentioned, xviii, 68, 71, 75, 89, 391-392, 408, 409, 436; and Mrs. W a r d , 391-394. See also Wordsworth: Guide Lamarck, Jean Baptiste P. A., 490 Lamb, Charles, 356n Lamb, Horace, 213-214 Landow, George P., 364n, 367n, 408n, 410, 435n Langbaum, Robert, 430 landscape: Alpine, 125-126, 138-140ff; and architecture, 69-75ff; artic, 102, 105, 107, 111-112; in Browning's poetry, 430-431, 43 3-439; and chemistry, 191; and Dickens, 141, 148, 150-152, 156; in Hardy's Tess, 264-267; and interior design, 81-91; and Mill, 179, 184-185; and pollution, 44, 412; preserved by Natural Trust, 66; and representation of children, 394, 402-403, 410ff„ 481; and Ruskin, 66,75-76, 138, 139-141, 144, 409-412; and suburban planning, 50, 58 61-63, 66-67. See also landscape painting; landscape photography landscape painting, 281-308, 341-344; in America, 364, 366; its breakdown as genre, 288, 291, and Pre-Raphaelites, 296, 300-308; and Ro-

The Rainbow, 31, 468-469, 491 "Snake," 492 Sons and Lovers, 30, 468 "Study of Thomas Hardy," 490, 491 Women in Love, 137, 140, 468-469, 492-493 Laycock, Thomas, 222n Lay ton, David, 194n Lear, Edward, 286, 299. ILLUSTRATIONS: Finale (fig. 84), 292 Leavis, F. R., 490 Leech, John: illustrations for A Christmas Carol, discussed, 160-161; reproduced: (fig. 75), 159; (fig. 76), 160; (fig. 77), 162 Leon, Derrick, 142n, 148n Levere, T . H., 190n, 194n Lewes, George Henry, 222n Lewis, John Frederick, 286, 298, 299 Lewis, Wyndham, 477 Liebig, Justus von, 195 light, wave theory of, 202ff Lightfoot, J. B., 122, 126 Lindley, John, 60 'Jndsay, Jack, 369n iJnnell, John, 288, 291, 298, 343-344, 349, 351, 3 5 7 , 3 6 1 , 3 6 2 , 3 6 9 . ILLUSTRATIONS:

The

Rainbow (fig. I l l ) , 343 Liverpool, 33, 55, 56, 58; Medical School, 235, 238 Livy, Titus, 13 In Llewelyn, J. D., 25; photograph by: (fig. 17), 16 Lodge, David, 269 Lodge, Oliver, 215 London, 33, 55, 60, 137; its allurement, 37; its growth, 50, 51. See also Bedford Park; city; Hampstead Garden Suburb London Religious Tract Society, 346 Longman, William, 120 Lorrain, Claude. See Claude Loudon, J. C.: The Suburban Gardener and Villa

512

• Index

Companion, 50, 60; illustrations from: (fig. 29), (fig. 30), 51 Loutherbourg, Philip James de, 288, 293 Lowance, Mason I., 364n Lowes, John Livingston, 96, 98, 481 Lucretius, 237-238, 373, 375 Lutyens, Sir Edwin, 64-65 Lyell, Sir Charles, xix, 261 Maas, Jeremy, 282n Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 32, 34, 35, 37, 41, 46,48, 232 MacBeth, George, 328n MacDonald, George: The Golden Key, 358-359 Mack, Maynard, 48n Maclise, Daniel, 293, 350, 351. ILLUSTRATIONS: Noah's Sacrifice (fig. 112), 349 Macmillan, John Duncan, 3 3 On Macnaghten, Hugh, 125 Macpherson, James, 97n Madden, William, 95n magnetism, 201, 203-204, 207, 210 Mahoney, James, ILLUSTRATIONS: Fog-Bow (fig. 67), 118 Mallett, David, 97 Manchester, 33, 54-55, 56 Mann, Thomas: The Magic Mountain, 489-490, 493 Marcus, M. F., 79n Marean, Emma Endicott, 426n Margolis, John D., 475n Marlow, James E., 153n, 157n Marmontel, J. François, 18 3 Martin, John, 124, 288. ILLUSTRATIONS: Manfred on the Jimgfrau (fig. 69), 124 Martineau, James, 229 Maser, E. A., 349 Mason, A. E. W . , 122n, 129 Mason, Sir Josiah, 235, 237 Massey, Gerald, 359-360 materialism, 194, 196, 218, 223, 226, 236 Mathews, C. E., 120, 129n Matthews, William, 120 Matthiessen, F. O., 470-471, 477 Maudsley, Henry, 220 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 186 Maxwell,-James Clerk 203 n, 206, 207-208, 210-211, 214, 215; his "demon," 209-210. WORKS: "Address to . . . the British Association," 208; "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field," 210; " O n Physical Lines of Force," 210 Mays, J. C. C.,483n McClintock, Leopold, 95, 109 McKillop, Alan Dugald, 97n

513

•

McLuhan, H. M., 486n McMaster, R. D., 48n McWilliams, John P., 423-424 mechanism, 219, 22 3 medicine, 218, 219 Meisel, Perry, 26In Melville, Herman, 353 Mendeleev, Dmitri Ivanovich, 190 Mendelsohn, E., 200n Menzies, William, 20 Meredith, George, 240, 489; and Nature, 445-446. WORKS: Beauchamp's Career, 122; The Egoist, 122, 425, 446, 450; One of Our Conquerors, 446; " T h e Woods of Westermain," 154 Merz, J. T „ 218n microscope, 224 Mill, Anna Jean, 18 In Mill, James, 176, 177-182 passim, 228n Mill, John Stuart, xxi, 167, 175-186, 228,230, 238, 312, 326, 372, 489; and Carpenter, 228; and landscape, 179, 184-185; metaphors from Nature, 176ff; on Nature, 15 3, 228, 3 1 1; and Wordsworth, 183, 184-185 WORKS:

Autobiography, 176, 177, 178-186 On Liberty, 179 "Nature," 153, 228, 3 1 1 Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, 228n " W h a t Is Poetry?," 184 Millais, Sir John Everett, 291, 298, 299, 300, 309, 312, 319, 325, 326-328, 336-338, 340, 362-364; and religious symbolism, 327, 364; and Tennyson, 326-327, 337 ILLUSTRATIONS:

The Blind Girl {fig. 117), 365 Mariana [painting] (fig. 97), 318 Mariana [drawing] (fig. 106), 336 Ophelia (fig. 93), 305 Miller, J. Hillis, 39 Milne, A. A., 442 Milton, John, 172, 251, 444; Paradise Lost, 39, 173, 346-347 Minchin, Harry Christopher, 426n Mitford, Mary Russell: Our Village, 38n Monet, Claude, 63, 362 Montagnier, H. F., 116n Mont Blanc, 113, 116, 119, 129, 130, 137;drawn by Reilly, 121 Moore, A. W . , 130 Moore, Thomas, 30 Morell, J. D.: "Modern English Psychology," 219-220 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 97n Morris, Edward, 369n

• Index •

Morris, William, 61, 69, 76-80, 450; and Baillie Scott, 83. ILLUSTRATIONS: wallpaper designs, (fig. 46), 78; (fig. 47), 79; (fig. 48), 80 Morse, Samuel F. B „ 23, 366 Most, Glenn, 4 4 I n mountaineering, 113-114, 128-136, 186; and religiosity, 125-126, 149; and science, 119, 123 mountains, xxi, 97, 113-136 passim, 137-152 passim, 389-390; and Arctic, 9 7 - 9 8 , 110; as image of isolation, 137, 4 9 2 - 4 9 3 ; Mill on, 179; and Ruskin, 148-150, 410; Leslie Stephen on, 134-136; opposed to valley, 116, 138, 142-143, 384n, 492; Wordsworth on, 73n. See also Alpine Club; Alps; Mont Blanc; mountaineering Mudie's Lending Library, 95 Müller, Max, 2 5 5 - 2 5 6 Mulready, William, 288, 291, 296 Mumm, A. L., 114n, 120n, 129n Mummery, A. F., 123 Murray, John, 129 Musgrove, S., 48 3 n Napoleon III, 55 Nash, John, 53-55, 58. ILLUSTRATIONS: Park Village East (fig. 31), 53; Blaise Hamlet (fig. 35), 59 natural selection, theory of, see Darwin natural theology, 205, 214, 215, 239 Nature: see entries under individual names. See also God; landscape; mountains; sacramentalism; science; trees, etc. Nature (journal), 190n, 195 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 194, 2 3 6 - 2 3 7 , 347, 355, 374-375. WORKS: Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 374; "Hope," 347; " M y Lady Nature and Her Daughters," 347 Newton, Sir Isaac, 197, 201, 208, 213, 228, 243, 356, 497; laws of motion, 2 0 1 - 2 0 2 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope: Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 9 7 - 9 8 , 106-107, 114, 116;

Newton Demands the Muse, 3 5 7n

Oersted, Hans Christian, 194, 203, 207, 211 Olmsted, F. L., 60 O'Neal, Eleanor, 420 Oppé, A. P., 28In, 298 optics, 201, 256 Orchard, John, 310 Origen, 374 Othenin, Bernard, 2 31 n Overs, John, 48 n Owen, Richard, 235 Owen, Robert, 5 5 Owens, John, 235

Paccard, Dr., 119 Packe, Charles, 123 Paden, W . D., 282n, 296n Page, Blanche, 280, 500 Paget, Sir James, 224 Paley, William, 205 Palmer, Samuel, 288, 291, 293, 298. ILLUSTRATIONS: Farmyard (fig. 28), 45; In a Shoreham

Garden (fig. 87), 297

Parker, R. B „ 66 Parry, William Edward, 100-102, 103-104 passim; and Friedrich, 103, 104; illustration from

Journal, (fig. 61), 101

Partington, J. R., 189n, 190n, 198n pastoralism, xxi, 29, 39, 47, 375; cottages as emblem of, 2 9 - 3 0 , 33, 34, 65, 71, 73; in landscape painting, 282, 293 Pater, Walter Horatio, 4 1 3 - 4 1 5 , 450; contrasted to Ruskin, 4 1 3 - 4 1 4 . WORKS: "Aesthetic Poetry," 450; " T h e Child in the House," 414; Marius the Epicurean, 4 1 4 - 4 1 5 ; "Wordsworth," 4 1 3 - 4 1 4 Patmore, Coventry, 387 Patten, Robert L., 157n Paxton, Joseph, 60, 67; designs Birkenhead Park, 58-60. ILLUSTRATIONS: Birkenhead Park (fig. 36), 59 Pearson, Egon Sharpe, 2 0 I n Pearson, Karl, 201, 121-214; his "ether-squirt" theory, 2 1 1 - 2 1 2 , 2 1 3 ; contrasted to Herschel, 215. WORKS: The Grammar of Science, 2 0 1 , 2 1 1 , 213, 214; " T h e Prostitution of Science," 214 Peel, J. D. Y., 223n Penny, N., 74n Pevsner, Sir Nikolaus, 6 I n , 79n photography. See landscape photography physics, xx, xxi, 2 0 1 - 2 1 5 , 217, 219, 2.31; and theology, 2 1 4 - 2 1 5 physiology, xx, 217, 218, 2 1 9 - 2 2 4 , 228 Picasso, Pablo, 467 picturesque, the, 25, 36, 36n, 71, 139, 179 Pissarro, Camille, 6 3 Playfair, Lyon, 194, 196n Poe, Edgar Allan, 323 Pope, Alexander, xix Porter, H . E. L., 120 Pound, Ezra, 470, 472, 494 Poussin, Gaspard, 282 Poussin, Nicholas, 138, 282 P o y n t i n g J . H., 213 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the, 63, 286, 291, 296, 300-308, 309-340; and the conflict between " A r t " and "Nature," 310-314ff., 340; and landscape painting, 296, 300-308; and Ruskin, 312; and Tennyson's poetry, 326-328, 335-336, 3 3 9 - 3 4 0

514

• Index •

protoplasm: Carpenter on, 225; Huxley on, xx; Ruskin on, xx Prout, Samuel, 288 Prout, William, 198 psychology: and Victorian biology, 218, 219—221ff Punch, 329-3 30

Quarles, Francis: Emblems, 433

Rae, Dr. John, 107-108 railway, 52, 119n, 141, 232, 244; as despoiler of Nature, 31, 38, 46; Dickens on, 46 rainbow: as image, 341-369, 496; in art, 341-343, 349; in fairytales, 358-359; in fiction, 170, 491; in poetry, 346-348, 355-357, 358-361; religious significance of, 344-348, 357, 362, 364, 428; and shipwrecks, 367-369. See also Flood Raleigh, John Henry, 31 n, 46n Ramsay, Sir James, 122 Rawnsley, Canon H . D., 66 Rayleigh, Lord, 215 Reilly, A. M. W . Adams, 121. ILLUSTRATIONS: The Western Face of Mont Blanc (fig. 68), 121 religion: and evolution, xix, 226, 495, 498; and Nature, 345, 370-390 passim-, and science, 196, 215, 216-217, 233-235, 237-241, 356, 375, 395. See also God: rainbow; sacramentalism Renan, Ernest, 231, 232, 233n, 238 Reynolds, Graham, 282n Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 284-286 Ricardo, David, 178 Richards, Sir James, 50 Ricks, Christopher, 360n Ripa, Cesare, 349 Ritchie, Andrew CundifFe, 282n Ritchie, Richmond, 122 Robbins, Michael, 49, 64n Roberts, David, 288 Robertson, David, 116n, 122n Robertson, J. M., 239 Robespierre, M. F. M. 1. de, 495 Robinson, H e n r y Crabb: on George Eliot, 417-418 Robinson, H e n r y Peach, 26; photograph by: (fig. 24), 23 Robinson, William, 61 Rogers, Samuel, 115 Romanticism, xxiii, 52, 63, 137, 142, 418, 434, 446; and the Alps, 116, 124, 146; and Arctic, 97-99; T . S. Eliot on, 475; and landscape painting, 286, 288; and Nature, xviii-xix, 63;

its view of Nature theologized by Tractarians, 372, 373, 375-376, 378, 390. See also Byron; Coleridge; Scott, Sir Walter; Shelley, Mary; Shelley, Percy Bysshe; Sublime; Wordsworth; Wordsworthian child Rosa, Salvator, 282 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 495 Rosenberg, John, 246, 247, 408n, 410 Rosenblum, Robert, 28In, 282n, 304 Ross, James Clark, 100 Ross, John, 100, 102, 103 Rossetti, Christina: "Cousin Kate," 43 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 291, 304, 309, 313, 3 14-325, 326, 328, 332, 335, 338, 340; and H u n t , 323, 325; his gradual repudiation of Nature, 3 17, 321, 338. WORKS: " H a n d a n d Soul," 319-322 ILLUSTRATIONS:

EcceAncilla Domini! (fig. 96), 316 First Anniversary of Beatrice's Death [watercolor] (fig. 102), 323 First Anniversary of Beatrice's Death [pen and ink] (fig. 103), 324 Girlhood of Mary Virgin (fig. 95), 315 Lady of Shalott, (fig. 107), 337 King Arthur and the Weeping Queens (fig. 109), 339 St. Cecilia (fig. 108), 338 Study for Found (fig. 105), 3 3 3 Rossetti, William Michael, 310, 325n Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 474-47 5 Royal Academy of Art, 283, 294 Royal Geographic Society, 119n Rubens, Peter Paul, 281, 362 ruins, 25, 69, 71 Ruisdael, Jacob van, 286, 362-363 Ruskin, John, xvii-xix, 44-45, 74-76, 82, 127, 136, 138-142, 148-150, 246-258, 282, 284, 3 12, 348, 353, 362n, 407-413, 441, 450, 489, 492; and Alps, 113-114, 125, 129, 139-140; on architecture, 74ff; and Arnold, 408, 409, 412, 413; on city, 68; and Darwin, xvii-xviii, xix, 251-254; and Dickens, 46, 47, 138, 148n, 412, 414; and George Eliot, 138, 143-145, 255, 412, 414, 418; on Holman H u n t , 306, 330, 33 1; and Lake District, xviii, 408-409; and landscape, 66, 75-76, 133, 138, 139-141, 144, 409-412; and landscape painting, 282, 284, 291-292; and mountains, 148-150, 410; on Nature, 113, 247-258 passim, 312, 348n, 409, 450; contrasted to Pater, 413-414; and Pre-Raphaelites, 312; on science, xix-xx, 74, 246-258 passim, 357; on T u r n e r , 115, 138, 410-411; and Wordsworth, xviii, 407-414. See also Brantwood. ILLUSTRATIONS: The Aguilles of Chamonix (fig. 71), 128

515

• Index •

Ruskin, John, (continued)

235-236, 236n, 237, 239, 356, 357, 395. See also atomic theory; biology, botany; chemistry; electricity; evolution; geology; physics; physiology scientist, xviii, xix, xxi, 23; and Dickens' Redlaw, 168; and George Eliot's Lydgate, xix Scott, Sir George Gilbert, 57, 306 Scott, M. H . Baillie, 69, 80-88; his design of Blackwell, 68, 84-88; on interior design, 81-85; and Morris, 83

WORKS:

" O n Architecture and Painting," 75-76 The Art of England, 413 Deucalion, 125n, 246, 247n The Eagle's Nest, 2 51 Firtiow, Fair and Foul, 138,408,411-413,414 Fors Clavigera, 362n " T h e Gipsies," 408 T t e Iteriad, 408-409 Modern Painters. I, xviii, 76, 115, 125, 129, 142, 408 Modern Painters. II, 141 Modern Painters. Ill, 139, 140, 246, 357, 409-410 Modem Painters. IV, 128, 144, 148-149 Modem Painters. V, 348, 408, 410-411, 414 The Poetry of Architecture, 75-76 Praeterita, 44, 408 Pre-Raphaelitism, 246, 250, 312 Proserpina, 246, 247-258 The Queen of the Air, xix-xx, 252, 254, 256 "Recent Progress in Design," 74 Sesame and Lilies, 113, 114 The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 75, 140, 148n The Stones of Venice, 74, 75, 348n The Two Paths, 44 Unto This Last, 246 Russell, E. S„ 224n Rutland, William R„ 26In

ILLUSTRATIONS:

sacramentalism, xx, xxii, 346-348, 375ff, 491. See also God, in Nature; rainbow; Tractarianism St. James Gazette, 62 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 231, 232, 239; on science, 2 31 Sand, George: Promenades autour d'un Village, 30 Sandby, Paul, 294; The Rainbow, 343 Saussure, H . -B. de, 116 Savage, Richard, 97 Scaleby Castle: Gilpin on, 69, 71; illustrations of: (fig. 40), 70; (fig. 41), 70 Schiller, J. C. Friedrich von, 495, 496 Schoenbein, C. F., 193n, 199 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 261, 272, 273 Schuchard, Ronald, 47 5n science, xix-xx, 74, 109, 189-200 passim, 201 - 2 1 5 passim, 216-230 passim, 2 31 •-2 3 3 ff, 247; and Alpine travel, 119, 123-124; and education in nineteenth century, 194, 233-235, 237-241; George Eliot on, xix; and humanities, 233, 238, 243-245; Huxley on, 232-233, 239-242, 244; and industry, 194, 232, 233n, 244; its method, 233, 238-239; and religion, xix, 196, 215, 216-217, 230, 516

bedstead (fig. 50), 82 cabinet (fig. 51), 83 The Decoration of A Small Bedroom, (fig. 58), 89 stained glass, Blackwell (fig. 5 3), 84 tree-colonettes, Blackwell (fig. 56), 87 wallpaper, Blackwell (fig. 55), 86 wallpaper and door, Blackwell (fig. 54), 85 window and wallpaper, Blackwell (fig. 52), 84 Scott, Thomas, 346 Scott, Sir Walter, 138, 145-146, 147,410,412, 459; Waverley, 145-146 Scott, William Bell, 300 Seddon, Thomas, 300 Sellwood, Anne, 122 Shaftesbury, Anthony, Earl of, 97 Shakespeare, William, 192. WORKS: Hamlet, 488; King Lear, 3 30, 439; Measure for Measure, 96; Midsummer Night's Dream, 329 Shaw, George Bernard, 490 Shaw, R. Norman, 64, 67 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 99, 104, 13 7, 146-147, 175n Shelley, Percy Bysshe, xix, 30n, 1 16, 357, 383, 434,439, 477,481 WORKS:

"Adonais," 427 " H y m n to Intellectual Beauty," 355 "Julian and Maddalo," 434 "Mont Blanc," xix, 13 7, 426 " O d e to the W e s t W i n d , " xix Queen Mab, 356, 361 " W h e n the Lamp is Shattered," 355 Short, Clarice, 43 7n Silliman, Robert, 211 n Sipe, Samuel M., 153n Sisley, Samuel, 63 Slater, Michael, 157n Smiles, Samuel, 131 Smith, Albert, 113, 119; The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury, 50 Smith, Alexander, 34n Smith, George Adam, 122n Smith, Roger, 201 n, 217n, 218n Smith, Sheila M., 48n

• Index '

Socrates, 23 3 Somerville, Alexander, 34n Southey, Robert, 32, 34, 35,37, 41, 44, 48 spectroscopy, 198 Spencer, Herbert, xxi, 195, 22-223, 226, 228, 269, 273; The Principles of Psychology, 223 Spiller, John: photograph by: (fig. 2), 4 Spinoza, Baruch, 235-236 Staley, Allen, 281n, 282n, 306, 329 Starifield, Clarkson, 156, 288, 293 Stead, C. K„ 481 Steiner, George, 29 Stephen, Julia, 497 Stephen, Sir Leslie, xxi, 120, 122-125, 122n, 126, 128, 130-136 passim, 489; on Alpine Club, 123; on mountaineering, 126, 128, 130, 134, 136; and John Ruskin, 114, 125. WORKS: The Playground of Europe, 125, 130; " T h e Regrets of a Mountaineer," 134-136; Studies of a Biographer, 114 Stevens, Wallace, 472 Stewart, Balfour, 206 Stillingfleet, Benjamin, 116 Stokes, George Gabriel, 203-207 passim, 211, 214,215 Strachey, Lytton: " T h e End of General Gordon," 495-496 Strauss, David Friedrich, 37, 236 Streatfeild, R. A., 125n Street, George Edmund, 306 Strong, August, 120 Strong, J. H., 120n Stubbs, George, 5 5 Sublime, the, 139; absence in Victorian fiction, 142; Burke on, 55; and images of the Arctic, 96-98; and mountains, 113, 141; and painting, 138; reaction against, 141, 142, 145, 149; Ruskin on, 125, 140 suburb, the: allusions in novels, 49, 50, 52, 137; allusions in poems, 53; as enclave of Nature, 49-50, 52, 55-58; ideological underpinnings, 52, 55, 65; and landscaping, 58, 61, 64; main nineteenth-century developments, 53-55, 56-57, 58, 6 0 - 6 3 , 6 4 - 6 7 Summerson, John, 58n Surtees, Virginia, 318n Sussman, Herbet L.: Victorians and the Machine, 46 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 472; Hopkins on, 405-406 Symonds, John Addington, 125 Symons, Arthur, 472 Tait, Peter Guthrie, 206, 214, 215 Talbot, W . H. Fox, 2, 25; photograph by: (fig. 10), 10

Talon, Henri, 48 Tarn, J. N., Working Class Housing in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 3 3, 34 Taylor, Reverend Charles, 13 3 Taylor, Harriet, 185, 186 Taylor, Helen, 185 Taylor, Tom, 36n Taylor, W . B. Sarsfield, 296n Temple, Frederick, 234 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 30, 31, 43, 44, 109-110, 122, 173, 235, 311-312, 314, 360-361, 369, 4 0 7 , 4 3 8 , 472, 476, 479-482 passim, 491; and Darwin, xix; and T . S. Eliot, 476, 482-486; and Nature, 327, 360-361, 476; and PreRaphaelites, 326-328, 335-336, 339-440 WORKS:

"Alymer's Field," 43 Becket, 356 English Idyls, 43 Enoch Arden, 31 Idylls of the King, 95, 312, 3 57, 360. See also " T h e Last Tournament" In Memoriam A. H. H., ix, 235, 360, 407, 438, 482-486, 497, 498 " T h e Lady of Shalott," 173, 174, 3 1 1-312, 314, 326; and Hunt's illustration, 3 35-3 36 " T h e Last Tournament," 407 "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," 30 "Mariana," 154, 314; and Millais's Mariana, 326-328 " T h e Palace of Art," 44, 311, 314, 3 38-340 "Sir John Franklin," 110 " T h e Two Voices," 126, 358 "Ulysses," 484, 488 " T h e Voyage of Maeldune," 360 Thackeray, Anne, 122 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 145, 161, 306; Vanity Fair, 148 theory of natural selection: see Darwin, Charles thermodynamics, laws, 208-210, 211 Thiselton-Dyer, W . T . , 224n Thompson, F. M. L., 34n Thompson, Francis, 403-406 passim, 415. WORKS: "Browning Re-considered," 406; "Calverley," 403; "Daisy," 403-404; " T h e Poppy," 403-404 Thompson, William (Lord Kelvin), 203n, 206-211 passim, 215 Thomson, J. J., 215 Thomson, James, 97, 491 Tillotson, Geoffrey, 395n Tillotson, Kathleen, 154, 157n,417n Tobin, David, 484n Todd, Ruthven, 124 Townsend, Francis G., 409 Toynbee, Arnold, 272 517

• Index •

Tractarianism, 372-390 passim, 491; reserve in description of Nature, 373, 373n, 375-376, 386, 387, 388; and sacramental view of Nature, 374-375, 388, 390 Trautschold, M., 63 trees, 185, 2 4 8 , 4 6 3 , 4 9 0 ; as architectural ornament, 68, 85, 86, 87; anthropomorphized by Hardy, 460, 490, 497; in landscape photography, 25; in suburban planning, 58, 60, 63 Tucket, F. F„ 123, 125n Tupper, J., 3 lOn Turner, Frank Miller, 215n, 217n Turner, J. M. W „ 144, 155, 284, 288, 291, 294, 296, 342, 362, 368-369, 410-411; Darwin on, xix; Ruskinon, 115, 138,410-411 ILLUSTRATIONS:

Alps at Daybreak (fig. 65), 115 Norham Castle (fig. 83), 290 The Wreck Buoy (fig. 119), 368 Twain, Mark, 125n Tylor, Sir Edward Burnett, 261, 262, 272, 276; Primitive Culture, 273 Tyndall, John, 121-122, 209n, 215, 222, 230; on mountaineering, 1 17, 126, 128, 131 WORKS:

" T h e Belfast Address," 216-217 Glaciers in the Alps, 123 Hours of Exercise in the Alps, 123 Mountaineering in 1861, 117, 126, 131 Tyrwhytt, Rev. St. John, 114 Unwin, Sir Raymond, 66; illustration from Town Planning (fig. 39), 65 Valenciennes, Achille, 286 Valsecchi, Marco, 28In Van Dyck, Anthony, 281 Van Ghent, Dorothy, 156, 269n, 271 Van Gogh, Vincent, 461 Van Leyden, Lucas, 291 Van Loon, Hendrik, 107n Varley, John, 288, 291, 294, 298 Vaughan, Henry: " T h e Rainbow," 346, 347 Victoria, Queen, xvii, xxi, xxii, 56, 63; monument at Akroydon, 5 7 Virgil, 373, 375, 377, 480 vitalism, 199-200 Voysey, Charles F. Annesley, 69, 88-92; his conception of Broadleys, 88; and Wordsworth, 90 ILLUSTRATIONS:

Broadleys (fig. 57), 88 design for a frieze (fig. 59), 90 "Snake" fabric (fig. 60), 91

WagstafF, Samuel, 3 34 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 226, 25 3 Walton, Elijah; ILLUSTRATIONS: The Weisshorn (fig. 66), 117; Alpine Climbers (fig. 74), 135 Walton, Paul H., 139n Ward, Dorothy, 393 Ward, Mary Augusta Arnold (Mrs. Humphry), 391-394; and Wordsworth, 392-393. WORKS: Milly and Oily, 392, 393; Robert Elsmere, 36n Ward, T . Humphry, 232, 23 3n Warkinson, Raymond, 282n Watt, James, 497 Weld, C . R . , 122 Wells, H. G „ 490 Welsh, Alexander, 46n, 163 Wherry, G. E., 122n Whewell, William, 225, 226; History of the Inductive Sciences, 202-203 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 284. ILLUSTRATIONS: Nocturne in Blue and Gold (fig. 82), 289 White, John, 96 White, John P., 82,83 White, Reverend L. B„ 347 White, Stanford, 60 White, William Hale ("Mark Rutherford"), xxi Whitman, Walt, 490 Whitridge, F. W . , 122n Whymper, Edward, 113, 117, 118, 123, 129; Scrambles amongst the A Ips, 113 n, 131 n Wilde, Oscar, 122 Wilkie, David, 296 Willey, Basil, 39 Williams, Isaac, 380-382; illustrations from The Altar: (fig. 122), 383; (fig. 123), 384; (fig. 124), 385; illustrations from The Baptistery: (fig. 125), 386; (fig. 126), 387; (fig. 127), 388; (fig. 128), 398 Williams, L. Pearce, 194n, 205n, 207n Williams, Mervyn, 43 n Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City, 3 On, 156, 165n Wills, Alfred, 119, 122, 134; Wanderings, 126 Wills, Lucy; ILLUSTRATIONS: Ascent of the Wetterhorn, 134 Wilson, David B., 207n Wilson, Richard, 284, 294 Windham, William, 116 Windus, William, 300 Wolf, F. A., 238 Wolff, Michael, 95n; The Victorian City, 34n Woodward, John, 282n Woolf, Virginia, 122n; To The Lighthouse and Nature, 496-497

518

• Index •

Wordsworth, Dorothy, 393 Wordsworth, William, xviii, xxi, 24, 30, 53, 69, 71, 73-74, 82, 137, 143, 155, 176, 183, 184-185, 251, 270, 288, 354-355, 361, 370-3 72, 391-425 passim, 427-430passim, 440, 456, 481, 489, 492, 495; and Arnold, 172, 391, 394-399, 403n, 409; and Browning, 406, 427-430 passim, 435; changes conception of Nature, 370-371; and Coleridge, xviii-xix, 396, 397, 399, 422; and Dickens, 156, 163, 416-417, 417n, 422-425; and George Eliot, 415-421, 443; and Hardy, 423, 446; and Mill, 18 3, 184-18 5; and Pater, 413 -414; and Ruskin, xviii, 407-414; and Voysey, 90; and Mrs. W a r d , 392-393. See also Dove cottage, Wordsworthian child

Victorian fiction, 415 -417, 42 3 - 4 2 5 "Resolution and Independence," 173 " T h e Reverie of Poor Susan," 47 " T h e Ruined Cottage," 31, 405, 419 " T o My Sister," 404 "She Dwelt Among Untrodden Ways," 404 "Tintern Abbey, Lines Composed Few Miles Above," 25, 41, 140, 409, 426, 427, 430 " W e Are Seven," 392, 399, 402; Victorian illustrations of: (fig. 130), 399; (fig. 131), 401 Wordsworthian child of Nature, the, 392-394fF, 403; altered in Victorian representations, 394-425 passim, 481 Wouwerman, Pieter, 434 Wright, Joseph, 3 62n

WORKS:

"Anecdote for Fathers," 392, 399, 402 "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," 313 Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 370-371, 378 The Excursion, xix, 58, 355,408,411,417,419 "Gipsies," 396 Guide through the Lake District, 71, 73, 392 "It Is a Beauteous Evening," 392, 396 "Laodamia," 399 "Lucy Gray," 392, 394, 406, 413 "Michael," 418, 419-421 " O d e to Duty," 394, 395, 399 "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," 47, 355, 395, 396-397, 399, 406, 413, 427; Hopkins on, 406n "Poems . . . During a Tour in 183 3," 395-396 The Prelude, 74, 172, 406, 409, 410, 415-416, 422-425, 428, 435, 438, 443, 444, 495; and

Yeats, William Butler, 3 36, 470, 482; on Bedford Park, 61. WORKS: "Among School Children," 185,407; "Coole Park," 470 Yonge, Charlotte Mary, 379n, 382-387; illustrations from John Keble's Parishes• fountain at Ampfield (fig. 120), 380; Hursley Vicarage (fig. 121), 381 Yorkshire, 12, 13 Young, Edward, xix Young, Sir George, 129 Young, R. M., 217n, 218n, 22n Young, Thomas, 202, 203 Younghusband, Francis, 12 3 Zambrano, Ana Laura, 161 n zoological gardens, 55

519