Summer 2011 - British Literature 1832-1867
FAU divides its Victorian literature into two courses: 1832-1867, and 1867-1914. I took the former one, ENL 4251, in the late June to early August summer term in 2011. (I'd like to have taken the 1867-1914 class, the period to which Jerome K. Jerome, pictured in this entry's icon, belongs, but it seems not to have been taught too often. Oh well.) I took it at the Davie campus, which shares its grounds with the main campus of Broward Community College, my purgatory for 2003-2007. This meant a long drive for me two nights a week, but I didn't mind, as it allowed me to start hanging out with Travis again, and eat at one of my favorite places in south Florida, Char-Hut. At the time, in the second week or so, I gave my first impressions of the professor, who was unlike any I recall having, in this alliterative assault, from which my username derives. The rest of the course did little to challenge this assessment. He was simply a hapless and befuddled man, whose lectures repeatedly bogged down in historical and biographical background which, while interesting, took needless time away from the text itself. While personally likable, and fairly knowledgeable about certain things, he nonetheless had a hard time gaining our respect, which was not helped by him getting to class egregiously late (20 minutes or more) several times near the end of the term. Apparently he's been teaching for awhile, but he struck me as amateurish. I don't mean to be too hard on him though. Who knows what he may have been going through in his own life during those weeks?
Now the class itself: like most six-week summer terms, a lot of material was on the agenda. The authors we read included Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, John Henry Newman (aka Cardinal Newman), Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, John Ruskin, William Morris, George Meredith, Dante and Christina Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Walter Pater (whose works were after 1867 but who was a good and relevant inclusion anyway). Anthony Trollope's novel The Warden was on the syllabus too, but due to time constraints it was eventually made optional for a short extra credit paper. I did not read it. Still, that list cuts a pretty wide swath. Just about the only major figures it omits from the period are the Brontës, George Eliot, and William Makepeace Thackeray. (Lewis Carroll is on the borderline, being more of a late Victorian figure, as is Thomas Hardy). I had occasional trouble keeping up with all the reading, making it only about halfway or so through Oliver Twist and Tennyson's In Memoriam, and barely touching Gaskell's Cranford or Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market." But, owing to the professor's aforementioned shortcomings as a lecturer (as well as the class's often raucous distractibility), many of these works only got the most perfunctory discussion in class anyway. It may also be that there was simply way too much to cover. I still have the anthology we used for everything but the novels though, so perhaps one day I'll go back and see what I missed. I'm fairly sure I'll be able to draw my last breath without having read Cranford, however.
Thankfully, we had no homework other than reading, or quizzes on the material. We just had a midterm, a final, and a long paper. The exam questions had specific prompts, which I no longer have. For the midterm, I wrote an essay comparing Mill and Cardinal Newman, and another discussing Oliver Twist in connection with Darwinism and Utilitarianism. They're okay for what I was asked to do, though I don't feel I really had a deep understanding of what Newman was about, and my treatment of Dickens suffered both from my not having finished the novel, and from being unsure how to work in Utilitarianism. For my paper, I wrote about Matthew Arnold, and I think that was one of my better papers, aided by a few outside sources and by my possession of a volume of Arnold's selected prose in addition to what was in our anthology. On the final exam, I wrote on Victorian literature's connection to Modernism in the first essay, giving some attention to as many writers as I could, and on the Victorian period's concern with the arts in the second essay. Considering these were written in class, I'm very happy with them, especially compared to my thin midterm essays. Continuing the good streak I began at the start of the year, I got an A in the class.
Since my intro was so long, I'll put all of these behind cuts:
ENL 4251 - British Literature 1832-1867
7/19/2011 - Midterm Exam
Essay 1
John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman, despite opposed views on religion and other matters, shared much common ground in other ways. Both essentially advocated a kind of pluralism and liberal humanism in their respective philosophies. The emphasis of Mill’s On Liberty and Newman’s The Idea of a University differed, but the main substance is much the same.
Mill’s concern was for the best possible and practicable (rather than ideal, for he was, though progressive, not utopian except in perhaps a diffuse sense) ordering of society. Of special importance for him was the individual’s place in society, and Mill strongly believed in the primacy of individuals, insofar as their rights were to be considered inviolable. This individualism may have been radical for the time, but it was moderated by an equal concern for these rights not infringing on those of others. As long as this latter condition was met, Mill reasoned, the best mode of human life would be that which fostered the maximum of individual freedom, for it would produce a varied and vivid life-world in which humanity could experiment and pursue its aspirations. One might object, however, that conflicts will inevitably arise between one person’s rights and aspirations and those of another. His compromise solution was the basic principle of Utilitarianism: the greatest good for the greatest number. What is meant by good, and who should number amongst the greatest number, are problems inherent in this conception. Generally, though, Mill valued diversity of opinion, the questioning of authority and received wisdom, and tolerance and benevolence on social questions.
Newman, in The Idea of a University, made the case for a liberal (as opposed to merely practical, vocational) education, for knowledge as an end in itself. He thought this best achieved by exposing students to diverse disciplines and currents of thought, enlarging their intellectual horizons and aesthetic sensibilities, and thus making them more whole human beings.
The parallels with Mill are readily apparent. Both Mill, the secular atheist or agnostic, socially radical man of reason and scientific philosophy, and Newman, firmly religious (Catholic, even) and socially more conservative, agree that differences of temperament and opinion, vocation and way of life, are to be cherished.
Essay 2
Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist is not an especially strong critique of Utilitarianism, but it is quite ferociously opposed to Darwinism, or rather to “social Darwinism.” As Dickens seems to understand Utilitarianism, the greatest good means that many get very little, just enough to survive, while a select few get the rest, materially speaking. This may have been the actual state of affairs, but it conforms more closely to what is in a way its opposite: social Darwinism. Darwin’s idea of natural selection, applied to human society, can be used to justify the worst atrocities and abominations. In this view, those born poor, or weak, or otherwise disadvantaged, do not deserve help, for that would counter the course of nature. This attitude is exemplified again and again in the abuse Oliver receives because of his poverty and physical frailty. Social Darwinism is logically circular (those who prosper deserve to, and those who deserve to prosper, in fact do) and, more gravely, morally pernicious. It supposes that human qualities and behavior are all innate and unchangeable. Thus the low-born Oliver is deemed destined for a life of crime, and given no better opportunities at first, nearly falls into it. But neither is he entirely determined by his environment, or else he would indeed have become a wretched person.
The truth, as it so often does, lies somewhere in between. Dickens himself seems to vacillate on the issue, falling now on one side (Oliver’s innate goodness immunizes him from corruption), now on the other (Bill Sikes is a lifelong criminal under Fagin’s tutelage, Nancy is doomed by her circumstances, the prosperous Brownlow is a kind man, etc.). But the question of what shapes human character, and to what extent, is still very much with us, and Oliver Twist deserves great credit for raising such questions.
8/4/2011
Matthew Arnold, England’s Unacknowledged Legislator
(parenthetical citations removed)
“My vivacity is but the last sparkle of flame before we are all in the dark, the last glimpse of colour before we all go into drab, - the drab of the earnest, prosaic, practical, austerely literal future. Yes, the world soon will be the Philistines’! and then, with every voice, not of thunder, silenced and the whole earth filled and ennobled every morning by the magnificent roaring of the young lions of the Daily Telegraph, we shall all yawn in one another’s faces with the dismallest, the most unimpeachable gravity.” - Matthew Arnold, in the preface to Essays in Criticism
“Thinking too has a time for ploughing and a time for gathering the harvest.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
In his 1821 essay “A Defence of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelley famously declared that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Matthew Arnold
was perhaps one of the first poets to acknowledge himself as such, and very publicly. He saw himself as a poet battling against the vulgarizing, stupefying aspects of the
increasingly democratic and industrialized society of Victorian England. What a recent article by Richard Wolin in Hedgehog Review observed of Renaissance Europe’s
“Republic of Letters” could equally be claimed of Arnold’s concerns about his own milieu: “At stake was the question whether cultural and civic life would be suffused with higher ideals of virtue or whether it would instead be allowed to languish in a type of indigent and uneventful immediacy - a condition aptly described by Hegel as “the prose
of the world.” Arnold, if he had read Hegel, may indeed have approved of his phrase. Yet he also saw his contemporary England as being amidst this “prose of the world.”
Deeming creative activity to be inherently higher or nobler than critical activity, and judging poetry in particular to be the best form of creative or imaginative literature, he
nonetheless suggested that with respect to creative periods in literature, there were “epochs of concentration” and “epochs of expansion." Arnold thought the former sort of epoch characterized the “long benumbing period of blight and suppression. . . which followed the French Revolution.” Epochs of expansion, he argued, followed epochs of concentration “in the due course of things.” They alternated naturally, one might say, as do night and day. Thus, Arnold’s endeavor may be said to have been that of aiding the coming of an epoch of expansion, that it may bring a richer and more joyful cultural life to his nation. This in turn would lead to the creation of genuinely new and worthy works of imaginative literature (again, for Arnold, usually poetry). Yet he felt, somewhat sadly, that the England of his immediate present was incapable of producing anything of true poetic genius on par with the ancients, like Homer, whom he venerated more highly than perhaps any other poet. Therefore, he sought to encourage an intellectual and cultural climate hospitable to the composition of great works, and a society of people with noble thoughts and sentiments. His chosen means to this end, the promotion of “the best that is known and thought in the world,” was criticism. Finally, then, Arnold’s chosen task was to uphold and advance culture by way of such criticism. It is in this sense that, without ever holding political office, he appointed himself a legislator, in Shelley’s sense, of England.
This sort of well-intentioned, if somewhat presumptuous assumption of the mantle of cultural arbiter was not new. Arnold may be thought of as the successor to
Thomas Carlyle, the “Sage of Chelsea,” whose works of the 1830s and 1840s Arnold admired. But his opinion later changed. In P. J. Keating’s introduction to his volume of
Arnold’s Selected Prose he makes this development explicit: “In his lecture on Emerson (published in Discourses on America) Arnold regretfully drew a comparison between the voice of the Carlyle he remembered from his youth (‘fresh, comparatively sound and reaching our hearts with true pathetic eloquence’) and that of the later Carlyle (‘so sorely strained, over-used, and mis-used’) and decided that Carlyle could not ‘well support a return upon him.’ Arnold must have been fully aware that he himself had taken over Carlyle’s role as official Victorian prophet. The qualities that had made Carlyle so influential in the 1830s and 40s (the prophetic tone and the courage to stand alone in order to berate, guide, advise, and insult the emerging democratic society) were outmoded and ineffectual by the 1860s. For Arnold, Carlyle had committed the unforgivable sin - he had lost touch with the spirit of the age." It may be suggested, then, that Arnold saw his own activity as a correction or extension of Carlyle’s. Where Carlyle desired that society’s business be to create and exalt great men, or geniuses, Arnold saw a more interdependent relationship between society and the individual than that implied by Carlyle’s one-sided, authoritarian “hero-worship.” As Arnold wrote, “The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations - making beautiful works with them, in short. But it must have the atmosphere, it must find itself amidst the order of ideas, in order to work freely; and these it is not so easy to command. This is why there is so much that is unsatisfactory in the productions of many men of real genius; because, for the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment; the creative power has, for its happy exercise, appointed elements, and those elements are not in its own control." (Emphasis added)
Arnold had earlier touched on a related theme, in his inaugural lecture for the Poetry Chair at Oxford in 1857, entitled “On the Modern Element in Literature.” Here Arnold spoke briefly of “moral deliverance,” that is, “deliverance from the pride, the sloth, the anger, the selfishness, which impair the moral activity of man - a deliverance which is demanded of all individuals and in all ages." But then he went on to contrast this with deliverance of a lesser-known sort, namely, intellectual deliverance. He considered it “hardly less important, indeed,” than moral deliverance, explaining that “in the enjoyment of both united consists man’s true freedom - but
demanded far less universally, and even more rarely and imperfectly obtained; a deliverance neglected, apparently hardly conceived, in some ages, while it has been pursued with earnestness in others, which derive from that very pursuit their peculiar character. . . An intellectual deliverance is the peculiar demand of those ages which are called modern. . . Such a deliverance is emphatically, whether we will or no, the demand of the age in which we ourselves live." After hinting that the literature of ancient Greece, despite its chronological remoteness from the mid-19th century is a “mighty agent of intellectual deliverance” and “therefore an object of indestructible interest,” he went on to examine why such a need would arise in his own age. “The demand arises,” Arnold offered, “because our present age has around it a copious and complex present, and behind it a copious and complex past; it arises, because the present age exhibits to the individual man who contemplates it the spectacle of a vast multitude of facts awaiting and inviting his comprehension. The deliverance consists in man’s comprehension of this present and past. . . It is perfect when we have acquired that harmonious acquiescence of mind which we feel in contemplating a grand spectacle that is intelligible to us; when we have lost the impatient irritation of mind which we feel in presence of an immense, moving, confused spectacle which, while it perpetually excites our curiosity, perpetually baffles our comprehension." For Arnold and many others, religion had lost its power for moral deliverance, and science, for all its excitement and utility, did not suffice for an intellectual deliverance. The only option left, as Arnold saw it, for either of these two kinds of deliverance lay in high culture, in great literature, in “the best that is known and thought in the world.”
Though he privileged poetry highest in the hierarchy of literary genres, Arnold gave ample respect to criticism and history as well. Criticism, he thought, could be a creative outlet in itself for those who lacked the poetic gift (as he himself may have acknowledged personally, by turning to criticism more exclusively and ceasing to write
much poetry by the 1860s). He gave unusual attention and importance to a historical work in the lecture just discussed, “On the Modern Element in Literature.” Having earlier
alluded to ancient Greek literature’s importance for modern times, he went on to examine Thucydides and his principal work, the History of the Peleponnesian War. In this work, written during a major war between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta in the late fifth century B.C., Thucydides chronicled in detail the events of the
war as they happened, from his own perspective as a participant. Arnold praised Thucydides’ introduction to the work, in which the latter discussed the Trojan war of
centuries earlier. Arnold asked, “What is his effort in the first twenty-three chapters of his history? To place in their correct point of view all the facts which had brought
Grecian society to the point at which that dominant event found it; to strip these facts of their exaggeration, to examine them critically." He then quoted Thucydides approvingly: “’So little a matter of care to most men,’ he says, ‘is the search for truth, and so inclined are they to take up any story which is ready to their hand’ ‘He himself,’ he continues, ‘has endeavoured to give a true picture, and believes that in the main he has done so. For some readers his history may want the charm of the uncritical, half-fabulous narratives of earlier writers; but for such as desire to gain a clear knowledge of the past, and thereby of the future also. . . if such shall judge my work to be profitable, I shall be well content." Arnold praised the language and attitude of Thucydides as modern, “the language of a thoughtful philosophic man of our own days." In contrast he saw Sir Walter Raleigh and his History of the World, written some 2,000 years later, as antiquated, filled as it was with digression and metaphysical speculation and uncritical medieval Scholasticism. In Arnold’s view, the modernness and relevance of a work or period did not depend on its chronological proximity to the present or its state of material and technological advance.
In sum, Matthew Arnold, as a tireless exponent of the value of high culture and learning, as a prime spokesman for a critical and rational, yet cultivated and sensitive
society, endeavored to interpret and improve his age, and set the stage for greater things to come. With the example of his fine poetry (which I have regrettably lacked the space to discuss) and his vigorous and discerning criticism, he has doubtless succeeded in this aim. While he is in some respects a remote figure for the present (in connection with his many ephemeral, topical writings on social, political, and religious controversies of his day), in other respects he is still quite vital. An advocate of sanity and clarity, of “sweetness and light,” he has undoubtedly earned his place as a legislator in the greater body politic of human thought, culture, and literature.
8/4/2011 - Final exam
Essay 1
Much Victorian literature anticipates trends, themes, and concerns that would become even more prominent in early 20th century Modernism. To name only a handful of these, there were experimentalism in poetry, a growing autonomy of criticism as both genre of literature and force in culture, and a marked anxiety and uncertainty in religious matters.
Victorian poetry was highly experimental, one is tempted to say, to an unprecedented degree for the time. Where poets of past ages like Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton, while all innovators in their own right, also to a great extent worked within and perfected established forms, Victorian poets seemed more intent on altering or dispensing with these forms. Perhaps in line with the spirit of the age, which was highly individualistic and worshiped the isolated artist-genius, poets at this time developed their own distinct styles and signatures. George Meredith, in his sonnet cycle Modern Love, reinvented the sonnet, making his sonnets 16 rather than 14 lines, and chose what was for the time scandalous subject matter, a mutually unfaithful married couple. Algernon Charles Swinburne combined Tennysonian musicality with uncommon or untried rhyme schemes. Dante Rossetti wrote highly sensual verse with medieval and Renaissance subjects, also at times in unusual meter. Gerard Manley Hopkins, with his “sprung rhythm” poetry, hearkened back to old Ango-Saxon sound patterns little used for centuries. Thus these poets created for themselves distinctive voices, in ways that would be influential for Modernist poets like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, and Fernando Pessoa.
The Victorian age also saw a proliferation of nonfictional literary prose. Aside from all the journalism, political and religious pamphlets, there was a growing concern with the interpretation and judgment of culture, a desire, in Matthew Arnold’s words, to “see the object as in itself it really is.” As Emerson wrote at the beginning of his essay “Nature,” it was an age of history and biography, a “retrospective age.” Writers like Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, William Morris, and Walter Pater were keenly attentive to the state of contemporary art and culture, its history, and its future prospects. These concerns became amplified in Modernism and afterward in the rise of literary theory and “cultural studies,” and the study of literature as an autonomous academic discipline, distinct from the “Classics.”
Finally, the Victorian period evidenced many signs of widespread unease about religious and theological matters. Christian doctrine was coming under fire and scrutiny due to the rise of Darwinism and a more pronounced scientific, empirical bent in popular attitudes. Robert Browning’s poem “Porphyria’s Lover” ends with a murder, and the astonishment of the culprit at God’s seeming indifference. Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam” questions whether a divine order exists beyond nature’s caprice. Swinburne sighs out the vanity of existence in poems like “The Triumph of Time,” where he almost sounds like Ecclesiastes. Meredith’s “Modern Love” scandalizes the holiness of matrimony. In prose writers, Arnold proposes that high culture take the place of ailing religion, and Carlyle sputters out his vehement imprecations against a soul-deadened society. The crisis of religious belief, already long underway during this time, would only escalate with the advent of Modernism and two world wars.
It is clear, then, that Victorian writers in myriad ways prophesied and shaped the new freedoms and terrors of Modernism. They are our contemporaries to a much greater degree than we are inclined to suspect.
Essay 2
In Victorian England much ink was spilled over the status of the arts. There was perhaps anxiety that the rapid progress of industrialism and mass production would lead to a soulless, mechanized humanity. This all-too prescient concern was taken up especially conspicuously by Ruskin, Arnold, Morris, and Pater. Despite certain differences of outlook, all agreed that the arts were crucial, indeed essential, to preserving civilization as they knew it.
Of the four, Ruskin was probably the most directly concerned with the status of the material arts and their relation to human labor and production. He felt that factory production and other means of enforcing the uniformity of created objects was a force for the alienation and division of man. In fact, he said the real result of the division of labor was the division of man. Instead, he advocated a kind of reversion to pre-industrial modes of production, in which products were made entirely by a single person. Only by such means, he thought, could the soul of labor, and thus the soul of humanity, be preserved. William Morris, strongly influenced by such ideas, put them into practice by becoming a most versatile craftsman himself, as well as a poet and prose writer.
Arnold’s ideas about art focused more on literature, especially poetry. He believed great poetry came from the confluence of great men with fertile and active cultural climates, and that criticism could help create such conditions, as well as determine what great poetry was. In turn he was convinced of the power of literature to stir and elevate people’s thoughts and emotions, even to the extent that it might make an adequate substitute for waning religion.
Finally, Pater privileged art in a way none of the others did, or at least not to his extent. He believed in “art for art’s sake.” What mattered most for Pater was not the form an art work took, nor its social or cultural or moral effects, but rather its capacity for producing intense pleasure and liveliness. If Arnold thought one of the ends of art was joy, Pater thought it to be art’s only end. In Pater’s view, the brevity of life and the uniqueness of human experience made aesthetic experience the only thing that truly mattered. Individual responses to art could vary widely, because people and works of art varied widely. Aesthetic criticism, therefore, should focus not on abstract principles but on a work’s own qualities, which suggest an approach specially suited to it.
Curiously, none of the above writers seems to concern himself much with music, or certainly not in a crucial way. Pater comes closest when he says all art should aspire to the condition of music. It may have been that music was simply less important to Victorian culture, though this seems very strange. But that is matter for another essay. In any case, the fact that so many writers of this time engaged so closely with the arts attests to the era’s material prosperity, which both enabled and threatened their growth and survival.
Only two more of these to go, both from fall 2011: 20th Century British Literature, and Greek and Roman Classics. I'll have those up fairly soon.
Now the class itself: like most six-week summer terms, a lot of material was on the agenda. The authors we read included Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, John Henry Newman (aka Cardinal Newman), Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, John Ruskin, William Morris, George Meredith, Dante and Christina Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Walter Pater (whose works were after 1867 but who was a good and relevant inclusion anyway). Anthony Trollope's novel The Warden was on the syllabus too, but due to time constraints it was eventually made optional for a short extra credit paper. I did not read it. Still, that list cuts a pretty wide swath. Just about the only major figures it omits from the period are the Brontës, George Eliot, and William Makepeace Thackeray. (Lewis Carroll is on the borderline, being more of a late Victorian figure, as is Thomas Hardy). I had occasional trouble keeping up with all the reading, making it only about halfway or so through Oliver Twist and Tennyson's In Memoriam, and barely touching Gaskell's Cranford or Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market." But, owing to the professor's aforementioned shortcomings as a lecturer (as well as the class's often raucous distractibility), many of these works only got the most perfunctory discussion in class anyway. It may also be that there was simply way too much to cover. I still have the anthology we used for everything but the novels though, so perhaps one day I'll go back and see what I missed. I'm fairly sure I'll be able to draw my last breath without having read Cranford, however.
Thankfully, we had no homework other than reading, or quizzes on the material. We just had a midterm, a final, and a long paper. The exam questions had specific prompts, which I no longer have. For the midterm, I wrote an essay comparing Mill and Cardinal Newman, and another discussing Oliver Twist in connection with Darwinism and Utilitarianism. They're okay for what I was asked to do, though I don't feel I really had a deep understanding of what Newman was about, and my treatment of Dickens suffered both from my not having finished the novel, and from being unsure how to work in Utilitarianism. For my paper, I wrote about Matthew Arnold, and I think that was one of my better papers, aided by a few outside sources and by my possession of a volume of Arnold's selected prose in addition to what was in our anthology. On the final exam, I wrote on Victorian literature's connection to Modernism in the first essay, giving some attention to as many writers as I could, and on the Victorian period's concern with the arts in the second essay. Considering these were written in class, I'm very happy with them, especially compared to my thin midterm essays. Continuing the good streak I began at the start of the year, I got an A in the class.
Since my intro was so long, I'll put all of these behind cuts:
ENL 4251 - British Literature 1832-1867
7/19/2011 - Midterm Exam
Essay 1
John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman, despite opposed views on religion and other matters, shared much common ground in other ways. Both essentially advocated a kind of pluralism and liberal humanism in their respective philosophies. The emphasis of Mill’s On Liberty and Newman’s The Idea of a University differed, but the main substance is much the same.
Mill’s concern was for the best possible and practicable (rather than ideal, for he was, though progressive, not utopian except in perhaps a diffuse sense) ordering of society. Of special importance for him was the individual’s place in society, and Mill strongly believed in the primacy of individuals, insofar as their rights were to be considered inviolable. This individualism may have been radical for the time, but it was moderated by an equal concern for these rights not infringing on those of others. As long as this latter condition was met, Mill reasoned, the best mode of human life would be that which fostered the maximum of individual freedom, for it would produce a varied and vivid life-world in which humanity could experiment and pursue its aspirations. One might object, however, that conflicts will inevitably arise between one person’s rights and aspirations and those of another. His compromise solution was the basic principle of Utilitarianism: the greatest good for the greatest number. What is meant by good, and who should number amongst the greatest number, are problems inherent in this conception. Generally, though, Mill valued diversity of opinion, the questioning of authority and received wisdom, and tolerance and benevolence on social questions.
Newman, in The Idea of a University, made the case for a liberal (as opposed to merely practical, vocational) education, for knowledge as an end in itself. He thought this best achieved by exposing students to diverse disciplines and currents of thought, enlarging their intellectual horizons and aesthetic sensibilities, and thus making them more whole human beings.
The parallels with Mill are readily apparent. Both Mill, the secular atheist or agnostic, socially radical man of reason and scientific philosophy, and Newman, firmly religious (Catholic, even) and socially more conservative, agree that differences of temperament and opinion, vocation and way of life, are to be cherished.
Essay 2
Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist is not an especially strong critique of Utilitarianism, but it is quite ferociously opposed to Darwinism, or rather to “social Darwinism.” As Dickens seems to understand Utilitarianism, the greatest good means that many get very little, just enough to survive, while a select few get the rest, materially speaking. This may have been the actual state of affairs, but it conforms more closely to what is in a way its opposite: social Darwinism. Darwin’s idea of natural selection, applied to human society, can be used to justify the worst atrocities and abominations. In this view, those born poor, or weak, or otherwise disadvantaged, do not deserve help, for that would counter the course of nature. This attitude is exemplified again and again in the abuse Oliver receives because of his poverty and physical frailty. Social Darwinism is logically circular (those who prosper deserve to, and those who deserve to prosper, in fact do) and, more gravely, morally pernicious. It supposes that human qualities and behavior are all innate and unchangeable. Thus the low-born Oliver is deemed destined for a life of crime, and given no better opportunities at first, nearly falls into it. But neither is he entirely determined by his environment, or else he would indeed have become a wretched person.
The truth, as it so often does, lies somewhere in between. Dickens himself seems to vacillate on the issue, falling now on one side (Oliver’s innate goodness immunizes him from corruption), now on the other (Bill Sikes is a lifelong criminal under Fagin’s tutelage, Nancy is doomed by her circumstances, the prosperous Brownlow is a kind man, etc.). But the question of what shapes human character, and to what extent, is still very much with us, and Oliver Twist deserves great credit for raising such questions.
8/4/2011
Matthew Arnold, England’s Unacknowledged Legislator
(parenthetical citations removed)
“My vivacity is but the last sparkle of flame before we are all in the dark, the last glimpse of colour before we all go into drab, - the drab of the earnest, prosaic, practical, austerely literal future. Yes, the world soon will be the Philistines’! and then, with every voice, not of thunder, silenced and the whole earth filled and ennobled every morning by the magnificent roaring of the young lions of the Daily Telegraph, we shall all yawn in one another’s faces with the dismallest, the most unimpeachable gravity.” - Matthew Arnold, in the preface to Essays in Criticism
“Thinking too has a time for ploughing and a time for gathering the harvest.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
In his 1821 essay “A Defence of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelley famously declared that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Matthew Arnold
was perhaps one of the first poets to acknowledge himself as such, and very publicly. He saw himself as a poet battling against the vulgarizing, stupefying aspects of the
increasingly democratic and industrialized society of Victorian England. What a recent article by Richard Wolin in Hedgehog Review observed of Renaissance Europe’s
“Republic of Letters” could equally be claimed of Arnold’s concerns about his own milieu: “At stake was the question whether cultural and civic life would be suffused with higher ideals of virtue or whether it would instead be allowed to languish in a type of indigent and uneventful immediacy - a condition aptly described by Hegel as “the prose
of the world.” Arnold, if he had read Hegel, may indeed have approved of his phrase. Yet he also saw his contemporary England as being amidst this “prose of the world.”
Deeming creative activity to be inherently higher or nobler than critical activity, and judging poetry in particular to be the best form of creative or imaginative literature, he
nonetheless suggested that with respect to creative periods in literature, there were “epochs of concentration” and “epochs of expansion." Arnold thought the former sort of epoch characterized the “long benumbing period of blight and suppression. . . which followed the French Revolution.” Epochs of expansion, he argued, followed epochs of concentration “in the due course of things.” They alternated naturally, one might say, as do night and day. Thus, Arnold’s endeavor may be said to have been that of aiding the coming of an epoch of expansion, that it may bring a richer and more joyful cultural life to his nation. This in turn would lead to the creation of genuinely new and worthy works of imaginative literature (again, for Arnold, usually poetry). Yet he felt, somewhat sadly, that the England of his immediate present was incapable of producing anything of true poetic genius on par with the ancients, like Homer, whom he venerated more highly than perhaps any other poet. Therefore, he sought to encourage an intellectual and cultural climate hospitable to the composition of great works, and a society of people with noble thoughts and sentiments. His chosen means to this end, the promotion of “the best that is known and thought in the world,” was criticism. Finally, then, Arnold’s chosen task was to uphold and advance culture by way of such criticism. It is in this sense that, without ever holding political office, he appointed himself a legislator, in Shelley’s sense, of England.
This sort of well-intentioned, if somewhat presumptuous assumption of the mantle of cultural arbiter was not new. Arnold may be thought of as the successor to
Thomas Carlyle, the “Sage of Chelsea,” whose works of the 1830s and 1840s Arnold admired. But his opinion later changed. In P. J. Keating’s introduction to his volume of
Arnold’s Selected Prose he makes this development explicit: “In his lecture on Emerson (published in Discourses on America) Arnold regretfully drew a comparison between the voice of the Carlyle he remembered from his youth (‘fresh, comparatively sound and reaching our hearts with true pathetic eloquence’) and that of the later Carlyle (‘so sorely strained, over-used, and mis-used’) and decided that Carlyle could not ‘well support a return upon him.’ Arnold must have been fully aware that he himself had taken over Carlyle’s role as official Victorian prophet. The qualities that had made Carlyle so influential in the 1830s and 40s (the prophetic tone and the courage to stand alone in order to berate, guide, advise, and insult the emerging democratic society) were outmoded and ineffectual by the 1860s. For Arnold, Carlyle had committed the unforgivable sin - he had lost touch with the spirit of the age." It may be suggested, then, that Arnold saw his own activity as a correction or extension of Carlyle’s. Where Carlyle desired that society’s business be to create and exalt great men, or geniuses, Arnold saw a more interdependent relationship between society and the individual than that implied by Carlyle’s one-sided, authoritarian “hero-worship.” As Arnold wrote, “The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations - making beautiful works with them, in short. But it must have the atmosphere, it must find itself amidst the order of ideas, in order to work freely; and these it is not so easy to command. This is why there is so much that is unsatisfactory in the productions of many men of real genius; because, for the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment; the creative power has, for its happy exercise, appointed elements, and those elements are not in its own control." (Emphasis added)
Arnold had earlier touched on a related theme, in his inaugural lecture for the Poetry Chair at Oxford in 1857, entitled “On the Modern Element in Literature.” Here Arnold spoke briefly of “moral deliverance,” that is, “deliverance from the pride, the sloth, the anger, the selfishness, which impair the moral activity of man - a deliverance which is demanded of all individuals and in all ages." But then he went on to contrast this with deliverance of a lesser-known sort, namely, intellectual deliverance. He considered it “hardly less important, indeed,” than moral deliverance, explaining that “in the enjoyment of both united consists man’s true freedom - but
demanded far less universally, and even more rarely and imperfectly obtained; a deliverance neglected, apparently hardly conceived, in some ages, while it has been pursued with earnestness in others, which derive from that very pursuit their peculiar character. . . An intellectual deliverance is the peculiar demand of those ages which are called modern. . . Such a deliverance is emphatically, whether we will or no, the demand of the age in which we ourselves live." After hinting that the literature of ancient Greece, despite its chronological remoteness from the mid-19th century is a “mighty agent of intellectual deliverance” and “therefore an object of indestructible interest,” he went on to examine why such a need would arise in his own age. “The demand arises,” Arnold offered, “because our present age has around it a copious and complex present, and behind it a copious and complex past; it arises, because the present age exhibits to the individual man who contemplates it the spectacle of a vast multitude of facts awaiting and inviting his comprehension. The deliverance consists in man’s comprehension of this present and past. . . It is perfect when we have acquired that harmonious acquiescence of mind which we feel in contemplating a grand spectacle that is intelligible to us; when we have lost the impatient irritation of mind which we feel in presence of an immense, moving, confused spectacle which, while it perpetually excites our curiosity, perpetually baffles our comprehension." For Arnold and many others, religion had lost its power for moral deliverance, and science, for all its excitement and utility, did not suffice for an intellectual deliverance. The only option left, as Arnold saw it, for either of these two kinds of deliverance lay in high culture, in great literature, in “the best that is known and thought in the world.”
Though he privileged poetry highest in the hierarchy of literary genres, Arnold gave ample respect to criticism and history as well. Criticism, he thought, could be a creative outlet in itself for those who lacked the poetic gift (as he himself may have acknowledged personally, by turning to criticism more exclusively and ceasing to write
much poetry by the 1860s). He gave unusual attention and importance to a historical work in the lecture just discussed, “On the Modern Element in Literature.” Having earlier
alluded to ancient Greek literature’s importance for modern times, he went on to examine Thucydides and his principal work, the History of the Peleponnesian War. In this work, written during a major war between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta in the late fifth century B.C., Thucydides chronicled in detail the events of the
war as they happened, from his own perspective as a participant. Arnold praised Thucydides’ introduction to the work, in which the latter discussed the Trojan war of
centuries earlier. Arnold asked, “What is his effort in the first twenty-three chapters of his history? To place in their correct point of view all the facts which had brought
Grecian society to the point at which that dominant event found it; to strip these facts of their exaggeration, to examine them critically." He then quoted Thucydides approvingly: “’So little a matter of care to most men,’ he says, ‘is the search for truth, and so inclined are they to take up any story which is ready to their hand’ ‘He himself,’ he continues, ‘has endeavoured to give a true picture, and believes that in the main he has done so. For some readers his history may want the charm of the uncritical, half-fabulous narratives of earlier writers; but for such as desire to gain a clear knowledge of the past, and thereby of the future also. . . if such shall judge my work to be profitable, I shall be well content." Arnold praised the language and attitude of Thucydides as modern, “the language of a thoughtful philosophic man of our own days." In contrast he saw Sir Walter Raleigh and his History of the World, written some 2,000 years later, as antiquated, filled as it was with digression and metaphysical speculation and uncritical medieval Scholasticism. In Arnold’s view, the modernness and relevance of a work or period did not depend on its chronological proximity to the present or its state of material and technological advance.
In sum, Matthew Arnold, as a tireless exponent of the value of high culture and learning, as a prime spokesman for a critical and rational, yet cultivated and sensitive
society, endeavored to interpret and improve his age, and set the stage for greater things to come. With the example of his fine poetry (which I have regrettably lacked the space to discuss) and his vigorous and discerning criticism, he has doubtless succeeded in this aim. While he is in some respects a remote figure for the present (in connection with his many ephemeral, topical writings on social, political, and religious controversies of his day), in other respects he is still quite vital. An advocate of sanity and clarity, of “sweetness and light,” he has undoubtedly earned his place as a legislator in the greater body politic of human thought, culture, and literature.
8/4/2011 - Final exam
Essay 1
Much Victorian literature anticipates trends, themes, and concerns that would become even more prominent in early 20th century Modernism. To name only a handful of these, there were experimentalism in poetry, a growing autonomy of criticism as both genre of literature and force in culture, and a marked anxiety and uncertainty in religious matters.
Victorian poetry was highly experimental, one is tempted to say, to an unprecedented degree for the time. Where poets of past ages like Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton, while all innovators in their own right, also to a great extent worked within and perfected established forms, Victorian poets seemed more intent on altering or dispensing with these forms. Perhaps in line with the spirit of the age, which was highly individualistic and worshiped the isolated artist-genius, poets at this time developed their own distinct styles and signatures. George Meredith, in his sonnet cycle Modern Love, reinvented the sonnet, making his sonnets 16 rather than 14 lines, and chose what was for the time scandalous subject matter, a mutually unfaithful married couple. Algernon Charles Swinburne combined Tennysonian musicality with uncommon or untried rhyme schemes. Dante Rossetti wrote highly sensual verse with medieval and Renaissance subjects, also at times in unusual meter. Gerard Manley Hopkins, with his “sprung rhythm” poetry, hearkened back to old Ango-Saxon sound patterns little used for centuries. Thus these poets created for themselves distinctive voices, in ways that would be influential for Modernist poets like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, and Fernando Pessoa.
The Victorian age also saw a proliferation of nonfictional literary prose. Aside from all the journalism, political and religious pamphlets, there was a growing concern with the interpretation and judgment of culture, a desire, in Matthew Arnold’s words, to “see the object as in itself it really is.” As Emerson wrote at the beginning of his essay “Nature,” it was an age of history and biography, a “retrospective age.” Writers like Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, William Morris, and Walter Pater were keenly attentive to the state of contemporary art and culture, its history, and its future prospects. These concerns became amplified in Modernism and afterward in the rise of literary theory and “cultural studies,” and the study of literature as an autonomous academic discipline, distinct from the “Classics.”
Finally, the Victorian period evidenced many signs of widespread unease about religious and theological matters. Christian doctrine was coming under fire and scrutiny due to the rise of Darwinism and a more pronounced scientific, empirical bent in popular attitudes. Robert Browning’s poem “Porphyria’s Lover” ends with a murder, and the astonishment of the culprit at God’s seeming indifference. Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam” questions whether a divine order exists beyond nature’s caprice. Swinburne sighs out the vanity of existence in poems like “The Triumph of Time,” where he almost sounds like Ecclesiastes. Meredith’s “Modern Love” scandalizes the holiness of matrimony. In prose writers, Arnold proposes that high culture take the place of ailing religion, and Carlyle sputters out his vehement imprecations against a soul-deadened society. The crisis of religious belief, already long underway during this time, would only escalate with the advent of Modernism and two world wars.
It is clear, then, that Victorian writers in myriad ways prophesied and shaped the new freedoms and terrors of Modernism. They are our contemporaries to a much greater degree than we are inclined to suspect.
Essay 2
In Victorian England much ink was spilled over the status of the arts. There was perhaps anxiety that the rapid progress of industrialism and mass production would lead to a soulless, mechanized humanity. This all-too prescient concern was taken up especially conspicuously by Ruskin, Arnold, Morris, and Pater. Despite certain differences of outlook, all agreed that the arts were crucial, indeed essential, to preserving civilization as they knew it.
Of the four, Ruskin was probably the most directly concerned with the status of the material arts and their relation to human labor and production. He felt that factory production and other means of enforcing the uniformity of created objects was a force for the alienation and division of man. In fact, he said the real result of the division of labor was the division of man. Instead, he advocated a kind of reversion to pre-industrial modes of production, in which products were made entirely by a single person. Only by such means, he thought, could the soul of labor, and thus the soul of humanity, be preserved. William Morris, strongly influenced by such ideas, put them into practice by becoming a most versatile craftsman himself, as well as a poet and prose writer.
Arnold’s ideas about art focused more on literature, especially poetry. He believed great poetry came from the confluence of great men with fertile and active cultural climates, and that criticism could help create such conditions, as well as determine what great poetry was. In turn he was convinced of the power of literature to stir and elevate people’s thoughts and emotions, even to the extent that it might make an adequate substitute for waning religion.
Finally, Pater privileged art in a way none of the others did, or at least not to his extent. He believed in “art for art’s sake.” What mattered most for Pater was not the form an art work took, nor its social or cultural or moral effects, but rather its capacity for producing intense pleasure and liveliness. If Arnold thought one of the ends of art was joy, Pater thought it to be art’s only end. In Pater’s view, the brevity of life and the uniqueness of human experience made aesthetic experience the only thing that truly mattered. Individual responses to art could vary widely, because people and works of art varied widely. Aesthetic criticism, therefore, should focus not on abstract principles but on a work’s own qualities, which suggest an approach specially suited to it.
Curiously, none of the above writers seems to concern himself much with music, or certainly not in a crucial way. Pater comes closest when he says all art should aspire to the condition of music. It may have been that music was simply less important to Victorian culture, though this seems very strange. But that is matter for another essay. In any case, the fact that so many writers of this time engaged so closely with the arts attests to the era’s material prosperity, which both enabled and threatened their growth and survival.
Only two more of these to go, both from fall 2011: 20th Century British Literature, and Greek and Roman Classics. I'll have those up fairly soon.