SOURCE: Parrinder, Patrick. “Victorian Criticism: The Republic of Letters.” In Authors and Authority: English and American Criticism 1750-1990, pp. 117-206. London: Macmillan, 1991.

[In the following excerpt, originally published in 1977, Parrinder examines the writings of several major Victorian literary critics.]

THE DEFINITION OF LITERARY CULTURE

In Shelley's poem ‘Julian and Maddalo’, the poet's friendship with Byron is recaptured at certain moments with supreme naturalness. Arriving before Maddalo is up one morning, Julian observes the Count's baby daughter, whose eyes gleam

With such deep meaning, as we never see
But in the human countenance:

He then starts to play with the child, and so

                    after her first shyness was worn out
We sate there, rolling billiard balls about,
When the Count entered …

In romantic criticism, as well as poetry, we are able to meet the creative genius face to face. Romantic egotism, even while it exalts the poet and puts him on a pedestal, can include this interest in personality and in the everyday life of oneself and one's friends. Hazlitt, Lamb and de Quincey were the intimates of great poets; but they also felt themselves their equals, and cherished their own experience as Shelley does in these lines. The early Victorian critics inherited the romantic beliefs about genius, but these beliefs had now solidified; they were becoming a teaching, a body of doctrine.

‘Julian and Maddalo’ is set in Venice. Whether in Italy or the Lakes, the community of poets was best able to flourish far from the metropolitan centre of culture. Meanwhile, Londoners such as Hazlitt and Lamb resorted to bookmanship, a deliberate, make-believe isolation of the self from the sense of a present cultural context. To be immured in the library was to be taken out of time and into permanence. The early Victorian generation of intellectuals—Carlyle, Newman, Macaulay, Lewes, J. S. Mill—had no time for such escapism. Instead, when they looked at poetry at all they were concerned with locating it within a cultural framework. The notion of romantic genius had to find its place amid the institutions of society and the general body of concepts ordering intellectual life. One thing that happened was that the intellectuals themselves became ‘sages’, taking it as their mission to pronounce upon the totality of social life in the prophetic manner exemplified by Wordsworth.

The sages were opposed to many features of nineteenth-century society, yet they arose in response to a demand which that society had created. The industrial revolution brought about the spread of literacy and education, and the dissemination of more intellectual modes of consciousness, in many areas of life. George Eliot records such a process, the ‘bringing to consciousness’ of a small market town, in Felix Holt. This is an elusive concept, but is clearly related to the disturbance of settled religious faith and political quiescence. ‘Consciousness’, then, means receptivity to new ideas propagated from the metropolis; the most certain evidence for it lies in the spread of reading-rooms and libraries and in the existence, popularity and influence of the sages themselves. The mode in which the sages write is that of the lay sermon, an instructive and edifying discourse which, however dogmatic in content, must exploit the questionable authority of the book rather than the customary authority of the pulpit. The nineteenth-century reader of the sages could not but be aware of disagreement and the necessity of choice among them, and he turned increasingly to this choice as a substitute for, or at least a supplement to, religious orthodoxy.

The sages wrote for a mass audience, not for their peers; for this reason they used a far more strident rhetoric than their predecessors, even those with propagandist aims such as Burke. They were writing to be heard at a time of social change, and they combined an appeal to traditional sanctities or absolute values with an expression of the new historical awareness that came in with the romantics. Change was visibly taking place, but it was frequently attributed to unthinking forces—the machinery in the factories, the iron laws of supply and demand, or the unpredictable risings of the people. The sages unanimously insisted that the decisions of men determined their own history. Carlyle's idea of ‘Hero-worship’ and Mill's concept of the ‘collective mind’ are attempts to determine the agency through which historical development is made. This agency could be seen in terms of politics, but the sages tended to locate it outside the directly political realm, in the field of what Arnold was to call ‘culture’. It was in defining culture that they took over the prophetic mantle of the romantic poets.

When Mill discusses Bentham, and when Carlyle and Marx denounce the ‘cash-nexus’, they are insisting that men and not the machine must be the measure of social relationships. In their attacks on rival ideologies, the sages upheld the ideal of a balanced culture in which society's general spiritual welfare was held to overrule all merely sectional interests. Carlyle's attacks on utilitarianism, Ruskin's denunciation of political economy, and Arnold's defences of culture against the nonconformists, the working-class activists and the natural scientists, may all be read as protests against the attempts of the champions of particular sectors of culture to dictate to the whole. The idea of a general culture in which all social and intellectual institutions have their appointed place became an increasingly conscious one; and this idea formed the basis of a critique of the materialism and spiritual anarchy of current society. In one tradition of thought carried forward into the twentieth century, literary criticism came to dominate the ideal of culture. The early Victorian prophets were not primarily literary critics, however, and they did not follow the romantics in looking upon poetry as a source of the highest wisdom or an end in itself. None the less, literature in the broad sense was felt by most writers to be central to the cultural ideal. The older associations of the word remained important in this context: ‘literature’ could be used to indicate the humane education imparted at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as the reviews and other media of contemporary debate.

Looking back, it seems clear that the Victorian intellectual world was far more ‘literary’ in its bias than the intellectual world of today. One of the signs of this is the extent to which literary interests and values were taken for granted. After the deaths of Byron, Keats and Shelley, poetry virtually dropped out of public controversy. Carlyle argued in ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829) that the way in which thought was now propagated was by ‘machinery’, by the formation of societies and the holding of public dinners. In fact, the range of Victorian learned societies and pressure-groups provides an excellent indication of the broadening of culture, and the discovery of controversial new matters of social and intellectual concern. Very few of these societies were literary. They were predominantly concerned with new scientific and social-scientific fields, religion, ethics and politics, and architecture and the visual arts. In the field of imaginative literature the societies were concerned with writers' conditions (the Society of Authors was founded in 1884), with Old English (the Early English Text Society, 1864) and with the study of single authors. The single-author societies suggest that in literature it was a writer's ‘oeuvre’ which constituted a field of study equivalent to one of the new disciplines such as sociology or anthropology. As it happens, they were almost entirely the creations of one man, F. J. Furnivall, who founded the Chaucer, Wycliffe, New Shakspere, Browning and Shelley societies, all within a period of twenty years. General literary societies were not needed, except on an urban and regional basis. Literature—outside the new industrial towns—was still held to be the preserve of all educated men.

There was one group of nineteenth-century intellectuals, however, who did wish to see literature deprived of its privileged status. These were the utilitarians of the Westminster Review. Various writers in the early volumes of the Westminster (founded in 1824) set out to unmask literature as part of the façade of social reaction. Literature, they argued, was the preserve of the aristocracy, the occupation of a leisure class. Its benefits for the individual were greatly exaggerated, and its privileged place in education served to bolster conservatism and repression. Literary ability was the gateway to posts in the civil service and the Excise (even a poet could be made a Distributor of Stamps). The study of the humanities was the one indispensable qualification for political advancement. No wonder that reform was so slow and industrial progress so hampered, for, as one writer put it, ‘woe be to the state whose statesmen write verses, and whose lawyers read more in Tom Moore than in Bracton.’¹

The immediate target of these attacks was the classical curriculum. The reviewers were prepared to countenance the study of English and modern languages for utilitarian purposes. (It is notable that Mill, Arnold and Newman all went out of their way to defend classical studies in the university. Training in classical literature was essential to their conception of culture; the status of modern literature was not so clear.) The early Benthamite reviewers seem also to have encountered the ideology of the romantic movement, and show hostility and prejudice against literature as such. ‘Literature, we have said it before, is a cant word of the age; and, to be literary, to be a litterateur (we want a word), a bel esprit, or a blue stocking, is the disease of the age. The world is to be stormed by poetry, and to be occupied by reviews and albums’, proclaimed the Westminster Review in 1825. The reviewers' identification of literature with aristocratic values was at best a half-truth (though one not lost on Arnold); yet it was to be through the classical education provided by the public schools, and the study of the humanities in the universities, that the merger between the old aristocracy and the new industrial plutocracy in nineteenth-century England was cemented. The late Victorian statesman or administrator did not merely know Greek, he had probably passed numerous examinations in it. But when the Westminster reviewer spoke of literature as the preserve of gentlemen of leisure, he seems to have mistaken the image for the reality. I have argued that the idle, unworldly bookman of the 1820s was the fiction of busy and harassed literary journalists. Byron apart, the romantics are not notable for their aristocratic connections. In the next generation, the image of the bookman virtually disappeared; the new intellectuals were missionary and restless. A dilettante like Leigh Hunt, whose Imagination and Fancy was published in 1844, was an anachronistic survival in the Victorian world. It was only much later, in the wake of the Aesthetic Movement, that the languid bookman came back. Pater spoke of Lamb's Specimens as the ‘quintessence of criticism’, and their author was belatedly canonised as the choicest spirit of the early nineteenth century.

The hostility of the utilitarians raises the question, what were the class affiliations of Victorian literary culture? There can of course be no simple answer to this. Not only were there differences between writers, but the leading writers, above all Dickens, were divided in themselves. Frequently Dickens reflects the values of the commercial bourgeoisie. Acquiring culture and becoming a writer are portrayed in his works as among the means of self-help. Mr Brownlow with his book-lined study represents the ideal of the good life in Oliver Twist, but when Oliver, asked if he would like to be an author, replies that it would be a much better thing to be a bookseller, he is felt to have said something preternaturally smart. Authorship for Dickens was a fundamentally entrepreneurial activity. In this he was at the opposite pole from Matthew Arnold, whose advocacy of literary values is inseparable from his advocacy of a corporate ideology which would take the place of laissez-faire. Despite the aristocratic associations of Arnold's ‘grand style’, he was really the prophet of the new ethic of service to the state, which was elicited by the growth of the middle-class professions and of the civil service both at home and in the colonies. Arnold envisages an international culture which, however, seeks to ratify rather than to deny the unique characteristics and individual spheres of interest of its constituent nation-states. And though they lacked Arnold's far-sightedness, many other Victorian critics saw themselves as middlemen in an essentially corporate process of production and consumption. Critics discussed such ‘administrative’ questions as those of anonymity, the relation between specialist and general reviewing, and the right choice of manner and tone. Men of letters such as Macaulay, Bagehot, Lewes and Stephen were superlatively competent reviewers, able to give a trenchant and searching account of almost any book that came to hand. The pace of Victorian reviewing at its most frenetic may be seen in one of George Eliot's surveys of ‘Arts and Belles Lettres’, which appeared in the Westminster Review for April 1856. The article begins with a review of volume three of Ruskin's Modern Painters—a crucial influence on Eliot's theory of literary realism. It continues with notices of fiction including Meredith, Wilkie Collins and Kingsley, foreign-language books by Stendhal, de Nerval and some German writers, Francis Newman's version of the Iliad, four volumes of Bohn's classics, and a batch of new poetry concluding with Leaves of Grass—a total of twenty-nine volumes in all.

The reviews themselves in the mid-nineteenth century—the Fortnightly, the Cornhill, the Saturday, the Nineteenth Century—were far more professional, open and objective than the old Edinburgh and Quarterly. The increasingly complex mechanism of publishing and reviewing itself affected the attitude of the critics. At least one anonymous mid-century reviewer felt that the machine had taken over:

The manufacture of novels goes on with increasing activity. For the last two months novelists have been at work ‘full blast.’ We have, in consequence, some thirty volumes before us. Now, as each volume contains on the average about three hundred pages, and as we cannot possibly read more than one page a minute, especially when we have to cut the pages, it would take us, reading and cutting for five hours a day, a month to get through the pile. If, however, novelists write their tales by machinery, critics must review them by the same means.²

Mill's essay on ‘Civilization’ (1836) is a classic study of the process of ‘massification’ in advanced societies; and in it he denounces the commercialisation of literary values and suggests the formation of an authors' ‘collective guild’ to bypass the apparatus of booksellers and publishers. The apotheosis of the middleman is satirised in Gissing's New Grub Street (1891), where the prosperous journalist and literary agent are contrasted with the starving novelist and scholar.

What has become of literature, in this mechanised, corporate world of letters? The early Victorian critics were in two minds about the industrialisation of the press. On the one hand, it gave the literary journalist a feeling of power, importance and cultural centrality. On the other hand its characteristic products seemed ephemeral, meretricious and crude. One way of expressing this ambivalent feeling was to have two alternating definitions of the term ‘literature’. Carlyle is the main exponent of the idea of literary culture before Arnold, and he supplies his readers with such definitions. There is the expansive definition, by which Carlyle conjures up the whole empire of the written word:

Could ambition always choose its own path, and were will in human undertakings synonymous with faculty, all truly ambitious men would be men of letters … all other arenas of ambition, compared with this rich and boundless one of Literature, meaning thereby whatever respects the promulgation of Thought, are poor, limited and ineffectual.

(1829)³

The alternative is the evaluative definition, strongly resembling de Quincey's ‘literature of power’:

for that finer portion of our nature, that portion of it which belongs essentially to Literature strictly so called, where our highest feelings, our best joys and keenest sorrows, our Doubt, our Love, our Religion reside, [Johnson] has no word to utter;

(1828)⁴

Keeping a refined and intensified definition of literature in reserve is a typical strategy of the literary apologist; what it does is to insist that literature has its appointed place in the realm of values, while not for a moment relinquishing its control over culture as a whole. In the work of Newman and Mill, as well as Carlyle, there are proposals for repairing the division between fact and value, by bringing the conditions of intellectual and spiritual debate closer to the desired ideal. Yet these two critics, though deeply sensitive to the power of poetry, differ from Carlyle in the equivocal value they assign to literature.

Mill's early Benthamism was modified by the spiritual crisis in which he discovered Wordsworth and the place of the poetic ‘culture of the feelings’ in human life. A by-product of the crisis was his attempt (which will be discussed below) to take the romantic view of poetry to its logical extremes. Yet even in those of Mill's essays which stress the importance of poetry for men of intellectual culture, there is an undercurrent stressing what intellectual culture can do for poets. An entry in the diary he kept for 1854 rejects Carlyle's use of the term ‘Artist’ to express ‘the highest order of moral and intellectual greatness’; this honour, Mill says, belongs to the philosopher.⁵ It is unlikely that he had ever thought otherwise. His public views on literary culture and education are expounded in the essay on ‘Civilization’ and in his ‘Inaugural Address’, delivered at St Andrew's University in 1867. In ‘Civilization’ he is concerned with the threat to ‘individual character’ posed by the trend towards a corporate society in which power is in the hands of masses. The erosion of literary values by ‘quackery’ and ‘puffing’ makes a graphic illustration of the pressures of the age. But Mill's assertions about falling standards are backed up by very little evidence. The causes of his anxiety seem to be the growth of the periodical press and the adverse terms of the market for serious publishing. Mill, in fact, was the first post-romantic critic to write in defence of literary culture in the urgent, prophetic tone we now associate with F. R. Leavis. He had two concrete proposals to make: the first was to change the economic basis of publishing, while the second—far more significantly—was for the reform of the universities. In universities, freed from religious tests and thrown open to competitive entry, the pursuit of truth could continue untouched by commercial pressures, and so the moral and intellectual character of the middle classes would be restored. Events were to show this as a highly practical vision; Mill's fears were unfounded, and his ‘higher classes’ emerged from the first century of mass advance with all their privileges intact.

Mill sketched a curriculum that would include classics, history, philosophy and the sciences. Although modern literature is granted a place, it appears as part of history. He enlarged upon the content of school and university education much later, in the three-hour ‘Inaugural Address’ that he delivered as Rector of St Andrew's. Here he distinguishes between the two main branches of education—those of intellectual and moral instruction—and adds almost as an afterthought that there is a third branch, the aesthetic, which deserves to be regarded far more seriously than it is. The arts serve to ‘keep up the tone of our minds’.⁶ Clearly this was only lip-service; Mill would seem to have thought that the ‘culture of the feelings’ was too private an affair to be assigned any more definite a place in academic studies. Classical languages and literature continued to occupy the central place in Mill's educational ideas, but then he himself had been taught Greek from the age of three.

John Henry Newman also paid his tribute to the imagination in the form of a youthful essay, ‘Poetry with reference to Aristotle's Poetics’ (1829), which expresses romantic and aesthetic sympathies while never quite contradicting the beliefs of the author's maturity. There are important parallels between the two men's discussions of university education, as well. Newman's starting-point, once again, was that the universities had largely lost their intellectual authority to the new institutions of periodical literature. His defence of liberal education was an attempt to restore the position. Both he and Mill see the branches of knowledge as related to one another by considerations of intellectual utility, and ask for liberal education to be judged by the effect it produces on the student. Thus, for Newman

A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom; or what in a former discourse I have ventured to call a philosophical habit.⁷

Here he is defining culture in intellectual terms, and in a way that is calculated to favour classical studies. ‘Wisdom’ is almost inevitably that of the ancients, ‘moderation’ is in all things Greek and ‘calmness’ is all too easily attained in the study of dead civilisations. Newman uses the term ‘literature’ to mean the humanities as a whole, as opposed to the faculties of science and theology. Each branch of study in his idea of a university has to justify itself as an intellectual discipline. The central discipline in his view is theology. Poetry does not constitute an authentic discipline, though a place is reserved for philological study. A strict follower of Newman could, no doubt, find a place for literature by seeing it as the heir of the classics; Arnold, with more temerity, was to suggest it as the heir of theology.

Both Mill and Newman foresaw something like the modern division of intellectual life. Their direct influence has counted against the university study of literature, rather than in its favour. They are prophets of specialisation, lamenting the decline of learning in the face of the periodical press with its continuous diet of instruction and commentary. Newman became a university Rector in Dublin, and a Cardinal of the Church of Rome; but Mill, notwithstanding his brief term at St Andrew's, remained an independent man of letters. At the time when ‘Civilization’ appeared, he was editing the London and Westminster Review. His early career, as much as any Victorian's, evinces the literary bias of the reviews and periodicals which became the focus of Victorian intellectual life. The seat of culture, as Arnold later saw, lay not in the universities but in the metropolitan world of letters. While Mill and Newman viewed this with distaste, their contemporary Thomas Carlyle wrote of it with unabashed enthusiasm. The man of letters, he announced, was the modern Hero.

THOMAS CARLYLE

Like so much else, Carlyle's view of literary heroism can be traced back to German romanticism. In a discussion of the ‘State of German Literature’ (1827), he cited Fichte's view of the artist as the interpreter of the Divine Idea to mankind:

Literary Men are the appointed interpreters of this Divine Idea; a perpetual priesthood, we might say, standing forth, generation after generation, as the dispensers and living types of God's everlasting wisdom, to show it in their writings and actions, in such particular form as their own particular times require it in.

The elevation of the artist was also the elevation of the critic, who stood ‘like an interpreter between the inspired and the uninspired’. Carlyle's essay might have been entitled ‘State of German Criticism’; he reports that criticism has taken a new form in Germany, concerning itself not with externals such as biography and craftsmanship, but with the ‘essence and peculiar life of the poetry itself’. Its method, moreover, is not impressionistic, but scientific and systematic, appealing to principles deduced from the ‘highest and calmest regions of philosophy’. And it is into those regions, and not into the peculiar life of poetry, that Carlyle, like the later Coleridge, is ultimately anxious to lead us. However, the heroes of his early essays—Burns, Novalis, Jean Paul and above all Goethe—belong to that romantic notion of literature in which poetry and philosophy are as one.

Or is it that all forms of human greatness are ultimately as one? This is the underlying proposition of the lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840). Though perhaps his most influential performance, they are something of a mixed bag. Carlyle tells the stories of his heroes superbly, especially when they are slightly unfamiliar; he is much more memorable on Thor and Odin, Mahomet, Dante, Knox and Cromwell than on Shakespeare, Johnson and Burns. It is easy to enjoy his narrative gifts without taking the underlying mystical belief in the Hero as participator in the ‘open secret’ of the universe too seriously. Moreover, Carlyle was expounding an evolutionary history of human society, as well as a redemptive saga of the universe. Each form of society, he argued, generates its own particular mode of heroism. Hence the historical series: God, Prophet, Poet, Priest, Man of Letters and King or Dictator. Such a series, which ends up with Johnson, Burns and Napoleon as legitimate successors of Odin and Mahomet (Carlyle tactfully does not mention Jesus), might well suggest a historical decline, but Carlyle argues that the case is not so simple. Instead of our reverence for the hero diminishing, it is that the standards we exact of our gods and heroes are constantly rising. The result is that the story of modern heroism is invariably a story of failure. This lesson is seen in the histories of Cromwell and Napoleon, who laid claim to the divine rights of kingship, and also in the modern Men of Letters who are the successors of the great poets such as Dante and Shakespeare.

The view of history in On Heroes was not particularly new, and in many ways the book is a culmination of the romantic age. The idea of the modern author overshadowed by the burden of the past had been familiar at least since Gray and Collins. Carlyle's selection of heroes must have struck some as archaic and literary in the 1840s, since he failed to celebrate such new types as the scientist, the statesman and the captain of industry. His view of literature as a power in the state echoes the truculence of the romantic poets:

‘Literature will take care of itself,’ answered Mr Pitt, when applied-to for some help for Burns. ‘Yes,’ adds Mr Southey, ‘it will take care of itself; and of you too, if you do not look to it!’

(‘The Hero as Man of Letters’)

Yet the conclusion that Carlyle draws from this anecdote is a new one:

The result to individual Men of Letters is not the momentous one; they are but individuals, an infinitesimal fraction of the great body; they can struggle on, and live or else die, as they have been wont. But it deeply concerns the whole society, … I call this anomaly of a disorganic Literary Class the heart of all other anomalies, at once product and parent; some good arrangement for that would be as the punctum saliens of a new vitality and just arrangement for all.

This is a crucial modification of romantic individualism. Carlyle is not concerned with the rights and privileges of ‘mighty poets’, but with a whole literary class and its place in the social organism. He is looking towards the organisation of that class in the corporate state at the very moment of celebrating the role of individual genius in history. Carlyle believes that ‘it is the spiritual always that determines the material’,⁸ and that it is men of genius who originate social developments, acting as interpreters of the ‘sacred mystery of the Universe’ for ordinary mortals. Modern society has generated in the Men of Letters a whole class of such seekers after the light. The Man of Letters, in effect, is a phenomenon for the cultural critic rather than for the epic storyteller, and it is as a cultural critic that Carlyle speaks in his lecture on Johnson, Rousseau and Burns.

Books, says Carlyle—‘that huge froth-ocean of Printed Speech we loosely call Literature’—are the university, church and parliament of the modern spirit. The literary world is the central cultural institution. But the man of letters is not recognised in the state, at least in the British state; he is an ‘unrecognised unregulated Ishmaelite’, living in a garret, ruling ‘from his grave, after death’ whole generations who would not have given him bread while living. This ‘curious spectacle’ is symptomatic of a wider cultural disability, reflected in the fate of the other modern hero, the political revolutionary adulated during his lifetime only to have his reputation blackened for posterity. Such a disability is reflected, too, in the shortcomings that Carlyle discovers in Johnson, Rousseau and Burns, the products of an enlightened and sceptical age who never found the spiritual truths they sought. This essay, like all Carlyle's work, is a programme for the moral regeneration of society. But it is also a defence of his own class, expounding at once a vision of a time when the failing and unrecognised Man of Letters will exude ‘palpably articulated, universally visible power’, and a view of history which makes him the legitimate heir of the ages.

Carlyle, then, is the representative literary prophet before Arnold, and the romantic idealism and archaism of his view of society are representative too. Yet, it might be asked, has any writer talked more about literature, and given us less literary criticism? He is concerned with the state of soul revealed by his men of letters, but hardly at all with their prose and verse. In his essay on Burns in the Edinburgh Review, he says somewhat breezily that ‘True and genial as his poetry must appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that he interests and affects us’;⁹ and for criticism in the modern sense on Burns we turn straight to Matthew Arnold. This is evidence more of a difference of interest, however, than of any more fundamental incompatibility. Arnold and the other Victorian critics may have had more respect for the literary text, but they all regard the task of criticism as being to arrive at a series of responses to individual authors. Invariably the author was seen ‘as a man’ and the response was framed in moral terms. Carlyle as well as Johnson stood behind the monumental English Men of Letters series of critical monographs, founded by John Morley in 1877. While Johnson pioneered the brief critical Life, Carlyle's influence suggested that those so honoured should be a carefully chosen gallery of writers from the past whose personalities stood out against their times. The contributors to the English Men of Letters included R. H. Hutton, Leslie Stephen, Henry James, Mark Pattison, T. H. Huxley, George Saintsbury and Frederick Harrison. Perhaps it is not too much to claim that Carlyle's discovery of the identity of the modern hero indicated the course of critical work for the next two generations. His conclusions about particular authors, too, have often been echoed by more determinedly ‘literary’ critics.

TENNYSON AND MILL

Nevertheless, it is one thing to proclaim the poet as a great man, and another to show an informed interest in his poetry. The major irony of the Carlylean view of culture, half exultation over the ‘huge froth-ocean of Printed Speech’ and half celebration of the poetic heroes of the past, is that it may be the contemporary poet who feels most excluded from it. The private, daydream world of the romantics and the bookmen was a more natural habitat for poets than for the energetic Victorian critics, and it was the poets, after all, who were closer to the realities of Carlyle's garret. There is a fine expression of the poet's helplessness in the new literary world in one of the lyrics of In Memoriam:

What hope is here for modern rhyme
          To him, who turns a musing eye
          On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie
Foreshorten'd in the tract of time?
These mortal lullabies of pain
          May bind a book, may line a box,
          May serve to curl a maiden's locks; …
But what of that? My darken'd ways
          Shall ring with music all the same;
          To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise.

(LXXVI)

The ‘mortal lullabies of pain’ are materialised as an artefact and set adrift in the public world where they become waste paper or at best something idly glanced at on a secondhand bookstall. We remember Johnson's contemplation of the futility of human effort as enshrined in libraries. It would not suit Tennyson's case to admit that he can be in any way affected by neglect and oblivion, however; as a modern lyric poet, it was his fate and duty to go on ringing with music regardless of whether anyone heard him. The ‘darken'd ways’ are at once ways unillumined by heavenly light (the contrast is with the beatified Hallam of the preceding poem) and the pages of an unopened book. A sturdy private faith is invoked to bolster the poet against neglect. We may suspect a certain posturing in this, when we remember the enormous success of In Memoriam, and the public standing it gave its author. Tennyson inherited the romantic duality of public exhortation and private daydream, but the emotions of his poetry are so generalised that any number of people besides poets could draw sustenance from its pious resolutions and inward sorrows.

Tennyson's poetry was felt to epitomise ‘modern rhyme’ by its earliest admirers. The lesson in ‘pure poetry’ which critics such as A. H. Hallam and Mill found in ‘Mariana’ and ‘The Lady of Shalott’ forms a convincing link between the aims of the romantics and those of the aesthetes and symbolists later in the century. Yeats, for example, acknowledged a debt to Hallam's review of Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), and this review, though necessarily immature, is one of the most important attempts to establish and clarify the definition of poetry inherited from the romantics. Hallam distinguishes between pure poetry, which is unpopular because it demands an active response, and fashionable verse which beguiles the reader with ‘mere rhetoric’. Poetry is losing ground in the present age, since its ‘subjective power’ is overshadowed by the increase in social activity with its ‘continual absorption of the higher feelings into the palpable interests of ordinary life’.¹⁰ Modern poetry must expect to become, not a popular art-form, but an affair of votaries and sects. So far Hallam is giving a highly intelligent restatement of themes from Wordsworth's prefaces. But he accuses Wordsworth's poetry of too often resorting to mere rhetoric, and argues that the highest poetic mode is not that of reflectiveness but of sensation, as represented by Keats and Shelley. Tennyson, clearly, is in the Keatsian tradition.

Hallam did not live to elaborate a complete theory of ‘pure poetry’, but such a theory is to be found in Mill's two essays ‘What is Poetry?’ and ‘The Two Kinds of Poetry’ (1833). These essays are, in effect, an attempt to give philosophical substance to the romantic use of the word ‘poetry’ to denote a quality common to all the arts. Thus Mill is committed to ‘pure poetry’, though he does not seem interested in ‘poetry for poetry's sake’. He investigates it as a psychological phenomenon (it was, of course, as a psychological phenomenon or anti-depressant that he had first taken up poetry). The questions he asks are, what kind of mind produces poetry, what sort of communication does it constitute, and how do we respond to it? The discursive content of the communication is of little moment.

Mill's view of poetry appears when he asks the question, how does a poet describe a lion? The answer is that he does so by imagery. He must try to suggest the likenesses and contrasts which belong to the emotional state which the spectacle of the lion would excite. What is described, then, is the state of excitement in the spectator, and the description must be judged not by its representation of the lion itself, but by its truth to the emotion aroused. Thus Mill distinguishes between poetry, a purely subjective utterance, and narrative fiction, which he speaks of somewhat contemptuously. Poetry is a higher form than narrative, a ‘delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of the human heart.’ But it is also a more esoteric form, appealing only to those whose imagination is more highly developed. And just as poetry is more subjective than narrative, it is more private than ‘eloquence’ or rhetoric, so that all poetry is of the nature of soliloquy:

eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and bodying itself forth in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind.¹¹

This translation of feeling into symbols and imagery is reversed in the process of poetic response.

In ‘What is Poetry?’ Mill outlines the definition of poetry and suggests how it may be applied to the arts of music, painting and architecture. In ‘The Two Kinds of Poetry’ he distinguishes pure from didactic poetry, and argues that pure poetry issues from a specifically poetic cast of mind. The born poet is the ‘poet of nature’; his counterpart, who uses verse as a vehicle for thoughts which could have been expressed in prose, is the ‘poet of culture’. Shelley is the example of the first. Wordsworth of the second. Shelley's lyricism is a spontaneous product, an inspired and exuberant stream of images controlled only by the poet's dominant state of feeling and his natural ‘fineness of organization’. The result is poetry ‘in a far higher sense than any other’. Wordsworth's attempts in the lyrical mode are ‘cold and spiritless’, however, and he remains distressingly earth-bound:

Wordsworth's poetry is never bounding, never ebullient; has little even of the appearance of spontaneousness: the well is never so full that it overflows. There is an air of calm deliberateness about all he writes, which is not characteristic of the poetic temperament; his poetry seems one thing, himself another; he seems to be poetical because he wills to be so, not because he cannot help it: did he will to dismiss poetry, he need never again, it might almost seem, have a poetical thought.¹²

Written at the age of twenty-seven, ‘The Two Kinds of Poetry’ is a brilliantly precocious theoretical exercise. If it falls short of total clarity, this is probably because Mill remains tied to the Wordsworthian psychological vocabulary of ‘feelings’, ‘associations’, ‘states of excitement’ and so on. Yet the essay is also a notable example of biting the hand that has fed one. Mill's determination to expose the contradictions of Wordsworth's theory and practice seems coldly wilful in the passage quoted above. In view of the admiring tone in which he reported his first meeting with Wordsworth in 1831, and the role later ascribed to Wordsworth's influence in his Autobiography, it is impossible not to suspect him of unconscious dishonesty in the 1833 essays. In any case, though he denies Wordsworth a place among the born poets, he never suggests that Shelley attained creative maturity. A philosopher may not be able to become a poet, he writes, but ‘a poet may always, by culture, make himself a philosopher’. Poets, providing that they are indeed poets, can only benefit by acquiring some intellectual culture. Here Mill betrays his underlying concern with education and the constitution of the well-balanced mind. He mentions two poets who possessed a ‘logical and scientific culture’, Milton and Coleridge; and thence we may trace the line leading to his later work through the magnificent essays on Coleridge and Bentham. There are two other pieces closely linked to the essays of 1833, those on Tennyson (1835) and Alfred de Vigny (1838). In his review of Tennyson's first two collections, Mill shows how the theory of pure poetry as the expression of subjective emotions may be applied to poems such as ‘Mariana’. But he also speaks of Tennyson's growing ‘maturity of intellect’, the advancing ‘intellectual culture’ that was enabling him to ripen into a true artist. A poem such as ‘The Palace of Art’ was not merely a rendering of sensations but a symbolic representation of spiritual truths. In welcoming this aspect of Tennyson's work, Mill does not seem at all far from Victorian orthodoxy.

Mill's theoretical insight is great, but his critical judgments are not quite to be trusted. A wider question poses itself. What are we to make of a utilitarian philosopher whose poetic theory comes so close to that of the aesthetes? Mill is a psychologist adapting the theory of ‘pure poetry’ to his own uses, very much as I. A. Richards, ninety years later, was to construct a psychological theory of poetic communication under the influence of Clive Bell's notion of ‘significant form’. Both Principles of Literary Criticism and Mill's early essays reveal a hidden compatibility between apparently opposing doctrines. Aesthete and utilitarian are united by their opposition to the belief that poetry has a rational content and must therefore be treated on a level with other forms of discourse. The aesthete's religion of art serves to disguise a retreat from the romantic poet's claims for the moral and cognitive value of the poetic activity. Poetry for the aesthete is largely self-validating; too proud to compete in the intellectual market-place, he claims privileged access to a mode of reality which can only be embodied in poetical forms. The utilitarian is only too glad to assign to the poet a unique psychological function, so long as this esoteric, purely emotive function disqualifies any claims he might have as a philosopher and social reformer. Both Mill and Richards write eloquently about the pure poet whom they confine, in effect, to uttering ‘pseudostatements’.¹³ Poetry for the aesthete is a solipsistic, for the utilitarian simply a specialist, pursuit. Either emphasis is a denial of the romantic ideal of the poet as a man speaking to men—speaking to our whole being, with as much claim to our full and general attention as any other man can have. Nothing in Mill's work contradicts the idea that the highest offices of art are, first, to give moving expression to pre-existent truths, and second, to act as a therapy or cure for depression.

Although the doctrine of art for art's sake was familiar from the time of Gautier's preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), it was not until the time of Pater and Swinburne that aestheticism emerged as a coherent force in England. The particular forms of English aestheticism will thus be dealt with in the final section of this chapter. The debate between romantic and utilitarian views of art is, however, one which has cropped up in varying forms since its inception in the 1820s. It is surprising, perhaps, that it was not taken further by the early Victorians, and that there is not more to refute George Saintsbury's observation of the ‘general critical poverty’ of the period 1830-60.¹⁴ The advocates of ‘pure poetry’ were virtually unread in their own time. At the other extreme, Victorian positivism did not address itself to the development of a science of criticism; the nearest approach to this comes in two books by E. S. Dallas, Poetics (1852) and The Gay Science (1866). The Gay Science undertakes a psychological analysis of the faculty of imagination, but Dallas, a journalist on the London Times, completed only the first two volumes, which were not well received.¹⁵ The better-known mid-Victorian reviewers such as Bagehot, G. H. Lewes and R. H. Hutton were all opposed to the idea of criticism as science; they failed, however, to put anything very much in its place. The reason why literature was felt to elude scientific codification was, broadly, that it was a medium of individual, idiosyncratic expression. This suggests that the true alternative to the aesthetic and the utilitarian positions would be found in the moralistic doctrine of art which received its most decisive critical formulation in the work of Arnold in the 1860s. Arnold's immediate predecessors here were Carlyle, Emerson and Ruskin. …

RUSKIN AND MORRIS

Mill, Carlyle, Emerson and even Poe provide us with critical texts which are clearly distinct from the rest of their intellectual enterprise. In Ruskin's case there is no such convenience, and anthologies of the Literary Criticism of John Ruskin, like other selections from his works, have a somewhat haphazard air. A prophetic conviction of the unity of culture is fundamental in his thought; yet the place of literature in this, though a central one, is never that assigned to it by Victorian cultural orthodoxy. He is nearest to orthodoxy in the concern with the morality of great art and with the ranking of geniuses that he shares with Arnold. Poetry for Ruskin is an evaluative term, applying to all the arts and defined as ‘the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions’.¹⁶ The best poetry, this seems to imply, is that which most closely expresses the divine plan of the universe. But any idea that he is returning to the eighteenth-century Sublime is undercut by his sharp disagreement with Reynolds over the nature of the grand style. Ruskin's text in his discussion ‘Of the received Opinions touching the “Grand Style”’ is a quatrain from Byron's ‘Prisoner of Chillon’. Great poetry, he argues, inheres not in generalities but in the vivid presentation of minute particulars. Ruskin's conception of genius, however, is brought out in his discussions of Turner and Tintoretto rather than of his literary heroes, and it is the minute particulars of visual representation that he hunts out and dissects throughout the five volumes of Modern Painters. None the less, the literary sections of the book involve a kind of direct dealing with poetic imagery and statement, exemplified in his analyses of Byron, Wordsworth and Scott, which is exceedingly rare in Victorian criticism. Only Arnold, among the merely literary critics, even began to take the object to pieces and to look at the parts as they really were. Ruskin did this time and again. His inspiration, as with his exhaustive analyses of natural forms, was, like Coleridge's, a kind of natural theology. Modern Painters ends on an apocalyptic note, as Ruskin affirms his ever-growing reverence for Turner's genius and portrays the act of criticism as a frail human counterpart to God's task on the Day of Judgment. In his later work his mode of analysis became an excessively literal iconography, based on the interpretation of sacred texts. The ‘objective’ interpretation of ‘Lycidas’ that he offers in Sesame and Lilies, for instance, has what Joyce's Buck Mulligan would call the true scholastic stink. Ruskin's evolution from a Wordsworthian concern with natural representation to a mode of myth or archetypal criticism has found an outspoken modern defender, however, in Harold Bloom.¹⁷

Ruskin could be a more forthright critic of contemporary literature than almost any of his rivals, though his power of harnessing contemporary criticism to cultural diagnosis was best exercised in architecture and the visual arts. Throughout his criticism he is concerned with art as the expression of man's history, which he traces in its social, psychological, religious and topographical aspects. His overall design is so grand that it is only too easily misrepresented in isolated (and frequently eccentric or dogmatic) extracts. What are we to make of the astonishing discussion of Shakespeare, for example, in the ‘Mountain Glory’ chapter of Modern Painters Volume Four? Bred on the ‘plains of Stratford’, Shakespeare, Ruskin tells us, was on a level with his race; yet this is cited as proof, not as negation, of his thesis of the ‘mountain power over human intellect’. May it not be that certain hills around Stratford, or even a fleeting glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover, were essential to the development of the Shakespearean genius? And in any case, he lacks the ‘ascending sight’ of a great visionary such as Dante, who could look up in the mornings towards Fiesole! Taken in isolation, this mode of argument seems weirdly ramshackle, but the conclusion does bring into focus an aspect of Shakespeare's sensibility which had not often been seen so sharply. And set in the whole context of Modern Painters, such a confrontation with Shakespeare is an almost inevitable product of Ruskin's systematic exploration of the nature and principles of creative imagination, and of his fervent, Wordsworthian awareness of the influence on mankind of the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.

Ruskin, in fact, was the one Victorian who inherited the ambitions of the major romantic critics. The conclusion of Modern Painters is an elegy for the romantic genius of Scott, Keats, Byron, Shelley and Turner, condemned by a godless society to ‘die without hope’. Homer, Dante and Milton, as well as the romantics, were among his formative influences; but his deep understanding of poetry usually comes across in passing references, instead of being explored for its own sake. The literary text is just one of the subjects of his massive project of cultural analysis. This is why Ruskin seems distinct from the merely literary world of so much Victorian criticism, with its restricted discussions of individual works in relation to the author's personality, his literary milieu and the reader's responses. The effect of Ruskin's criticism was to set up alternatives to Victorian bookishness, rather than to broaden its scope. In later books like Sesame and Lilies, he expresses a view of culture which is essentially religious and constitutes a subordination of the imaginative spirit to doctrinal and iconological concerns. (He had, however, abandoned the sectarian Evangelicalism of his youth.) In the earlier work his vision is of a culture centred not upon literature but upon man's relation to nature as expressed in the visual arts, especially painting and architecture. At all times, however, he was moving away from the individuality of literary expression to more communal notions of culture. He was anticipated in his stress on the visual arts by Pugin, whose condemnation of modern building in Contrasts (1836) was part of an explicit programme to restore the Catholic faith. Ruskin in turn decisively influenced William Morris, who became the propagandist of a radically socialist idea of culture in which literature as the nineteenth century knew it would cease to exist.

Ruskin describes his basic approach to art criticism in the ‘Nature of Gothic’ chapter in The Stones of Venice. He speaks of the necessity of ‘reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante’. His own method of ‘reading’, however, was almost unprecedented; it involved relating architectural style, not merely to the spirit of a culture, but to its material base. Gothic architecture for Ruskin is the direct expression of the religious beliefs and the social and economic organisation of the medieval community. It is also an expression of the eternal romantic spirit, engaged, as the German romantics had suggested, in a perpetual conflict with the principles of classicism. Ruskin ranges dialectically from level to level of sociological, technological, cultural and religious discussion, at the same time as he lays down rules for restoring freedom of expression to the contemporary arts and crafts. Architecture and the decorative arts, he implies, have a more genuinely communal basis in the skills and traditions of the people than literary culture has ever had. At the same time, architecture no less than poetry is illuminated by the ‘Seven Lamps’ of Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory and Obedience. It has—or should have—no deficiency in expressive power.

The implications of this were drawn by Morris, whose vision of a civilisation based on the practice of the handicrafts was a deliberate rejection of literary culture. Morris believed that worthwhile art was the expression of a whole people, and not of the individual or of a coterie. As a poet, he stood for the revival of the primitive, oral forms of legend and saga, but in his lectures and essays he expounded a definition of culture as based on the arts of building and ornamentation, and not of literary expression. It was here that he combined the stress on architecture as the truly communal art, inherited from Ruskin and Pugin, with a socialist critique of the distortions of culture under capitalism. Marx and Engels had described the exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals as a ‘consequence of division of labour’.¹⁸ Morris in Hopes and Fears for Art denounced the ‘hierarchy of intellect in the arts’.¹⁹ He was attacking the individualism of the artist, the cultural snobbery which placed the artist above the craftsman, and the coterie attitude of aestheticism. To speak of the ‘hierarchy of intellect’ was to link high art, with its academic standards and traditions of exclusion, to the whole existence of intellectuals as a class and the prevalence of ‘ranking’ and ‘grading’ attitudes in society. (George Eliot's novels, for example, are full of processes of assessment of the characters by the author and by one another, and show how the critical attitudes of high culture reflected the habits of ordinary life.) Morris's view of art was an openly revolutionary one; he was prepared to see art die, if it was not already dead, to compel the birth of a new tradition.

Morris, as has often been pointed out, was a prophet of desirable rather than of possible worlds. His conception of a new art seems to have been dogged by triviality; we can find this in his own very diffuse creative work, in the ‘epoch of rest’ portrayed in News from Nowhere and in the sense that his lectures give of ignoring the highest potentialities of art (Beethoven, Rembrandt, Tolstoy), not to mention its capacity to revolutionise itself from within.²⁰ The Nowherians are penetrating critics of nineteenth-century fiction, although they have no impulse or need to construct artistic works which go beyond the texture of their everyday lives.²¹ Morris's value for criticism, in fact, lies in the light he can shed on an inherited literary ideology. The idea of the man of letters as hero was an attempt to assert the cultural authority of the intellectual class. Morris links this to the privileged status of intellectuals and the need for an army of workers to process their ideas for transmission to the public. In his exposure of the luxury status of contemporary art he anticipates the doctrine of ‘commodity fetishism’ in a twentieth-century Marxist such as Christopher Caudwell. As for the actual cultural policies of socialist states, these have been far closer to the letter of Matthew Arnold than to the spirit of William Morris. …

THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY

Matthew Arnold bore the brunt of propagandising for literary culture in the Victorian age. He saw literature as embodying the spiritual life of modern society and taking over the edifying and consoling functions of religion. Whether or not his contemporaries agreed with this, he expressed for them the idea of literature as an institution seeking to elevate their society and to legitimise it at the spiritual level; through literature a people could become vicarious participants in a power and perfection absent from their everyday lives. Literature and criticism might be the central source of spiritual authority, as Arnold himself maintained, or merely one such source; but his writings did much to reclaim for them the dignity and social respect whose loss had been lamented by poets and critics since Wordsworth. How deeply was his influence felt? The actual social effect of a writer like Arnold is almost impossible to determine. Perhaps all that we can say is that he wrote with a new urgency, that he found his audience and that his impact was widely acknowledged. His writings decisively named the enemy—middle-class Philistinism—but were aimed to uncover latent disaffection with it as well as preaching to the already converted. A fellow-critic like Leslie Stephen might wonder ruefully whether he was not one of the ‘Philistines’, but the majority of Arnold's readers must have found the label an apt one for their neighbours rather than themselves. The gospel of culture made a subtle appeal to the emotions of self-esteem, desire for self-improvement, and snobbery.

There were other, quite unconnected factors working to give the ‘republic of letters’ a semblance of reality: the growth of the Press, the rise of the novel (for so long cold-shouldered by criticism) and its public, and the spread of literacy and elementary education. Before the development of television and radio it must indeed have seemed that literature, and not just literacy, was becoming the staple of mass communication. Of more lasting relevance to criticism, however, was the growth of education. Arnold became a school inspector, and in a later age he would probably have become far more deeply engrossed in educational reform. His emphasis on literary awareness as a ‘pursuit of perfection’ adds the moral concern that is missing from Mill's, Newman's and Huxley's more purely intellectualist views of the curriculum. And Arnold's view of culture as part of the apparatus of the state coincided with the first of the Education Acts which asserted governmental control and responsibility over the schools. Since the teaching of linguistic skills was the most essential task of elementary education, this necessitated a supply of English teachers who were trained by the colleges and, increasingly, by the universities. In England, the emergence of university English studies must be traced back to the 1820s and to the debate between the utilitarians and their opponents; the first Chairs of English were founded at University College, London in 1828, and at King's College, its Anglican rival, in 1835. The civic universities that were founded in the last quarter of the nineteenth century included English literature on the syllabus from the beginning. By the end of the century, English was being taught at the four Scottish universities and at Oxford, London, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. Outside Great Britain, the study of English literature was dictated by the needs of teacher training throughout the English-speaking world. The foundations of the modern literary-critical institution in the United States were already being laid, and—to take merely one milestone—in 1895 what is claimed to have been the world's first course in contemporary English fiction was offered at Yale.²²

The late nineteenth century, unlike the early Victorian period, has often been seen as an age of criticism. Partly this was due to the growing educational demand for reprints, editions, scholarly surveys, school textbooks and school prizes. The English Men of Letters and other series piled up, and the high level of criticism continued in the intellectual reviews, the finest practitioners being Leslie Stephen and Henry James. But the most conspicuous new source of critical writing was the aesthetic movement, from Swinburne and Pater through to Symons and Yeats. The aesthetes, as much as the professors and the reviewers, were the beneficiaries of Arnold's work and the inhabitants of the area of culture that he had defined. At the same time, all three groups look back past Arnold toward the bookish and world-renouncing attitudes of the later romantics such as Hazlitt and Lamb. The aesthetes in particular tended to deny that culture had any edifying or instructive function for the middle class. Culture was not for society's sake, but a mode of enriching the self.

WALTER PATER

Walter Pater is the major intellectual representative of English aestheticism, and the most closely connected to Arnold. T. S. Eliot, in his essay on ‘Arnold and Pater’, spoke of the ‘direction from Arnold, through Pater, to the “nineties”’. The two had earlier been less flatteringly linked by W. H. Mallock in his country-house dialogue, The New Republic (1877). Here Mr Luke (Arnold) and Mr Rose (Pater) are somewhat reluctant allies as spokesmen for culture against Huxley, Spencer, Jowett, Ruskin and other contemporary figures. The names indicate the difference between them; Mr Luke is more Hebraic, and—in aesthetic matters—lukewarm. Mallock credits Pater with all the languor and exoticism of the aesthete, which Arnold conspicuously lacks. Public suspicions about the morality of aestheticism had been aroused by the poet Robert Buchanan's attack on the ‘Fleshly School’ of Rossetti and Swinburne in the Contemporary Review in 1871. Mr Rose, though outwardly a gentleman, has a way of making the ladies feel as if they had no clothes on, and he is last seen bargaining with his host over a pornographic volume of the Cultes secrets des Dames Romaines. This caricature goes some way to explain why Pater felt it necessary to delete the Conclusion from the second edition of The Renaissance in 1877, though it seems very far from the real Pater, with his military moustache (one of his pupils was General Haig) and his withdrawn and fastidious life in Brasenose, his Oxford college.

Pater, indeed, could more fairly be seen as the apotheosis of the ‘disinterested’ critic; though his sort of disinterestedness undeniably leads to narcissism. He is a much more subtle and fastidious writer than Arnold, but his subtleties tend to seem calculated and self-protective. His debt to his predecessor may be judged from the Preface to The Renaissance (1873). He begins by stating the uselessness of abstract definitions, endorsing Arnold's view of the aim of criticism as being ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’. But he adds that ‘in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's impression as it really is.’ It is not clear whether this is a refinement or a travesty of Arnold's position; what it does, however, is to separate the critical act itself from all the considerations of cultural responsibility on which Arnold had insisted. These considerations are not necessarily denied; they are merely indefinitely postponed. Pater's concern is with the subjective impression or effect produced on the critic himself. His terminology, however, is scientific; he speaks not of ‘concern’ but of ‘primary data’, and adds that the critic must isolate the particular virtue of a work of art and note it ‘as a chemist notes some natural element’. But the critic as Pater sees him is not only a chemist but a connoisseur, the possessor of a ‘certain kind of temperament’ which enables him to realise the virtues of ‘the picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book’ as he would of a herb, a wine or a gem. Here we meet the idea, so fundamental in aesthetic criticism, of the work of art as a luxury product, demanding prolonged and leisurely tasting. In the mass of Wordsworth's poetry, for instance, the critic has to discover ‘the action of his unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things’; in other words, his natural magic. To do so, Pater writes, is to distinguish the ‘virtue’ in a body of poetry; the scientific imagery of the Preface culminates in a metaphor taken (like Arnold's ‘touchstone’) from alchemy. The Renaissance, however, is a series of historical studies, based on the Arnoldian themes of Hellenism and modernity. The famous Conclusion states the dilemma of the modern, ‘relative’ spirit, giving it a far more abstract and philosophical formulation than Arnold had done. Pater's answer to relativism is that you must ‘give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake’. And the ‘moments’ he celebrates are moments in the art or thought of Europe, from the middle ages to the time of Goethe, when the Greek spirit was most amply recaptured and reinterpreted. His purpose is not to draw didactic parallels with Victorian culture in the Arnoldian manner. Instead, his interest centres on the creative act of interpretation itself both in the artist and the reader or spectator.

Pater discussed the nature of artistic creation in his fine early essay on ‘Coleridge's Writings’ (1866; a much abridged version was later included in Appreciations).²³ He sees Coleridge as a metaphysical system-builder, struggling forlornly to give a fixed account of the laws of art in the face of the sceptical and relativistic attitude of modern scientific thought. Art, according to Pater, emerges from a gradual, intellectual process, and not from any single, all-embracing act of imagination. His account of the artist at work is intended to challenge the ‘blind’ and ‘mechanical’ picture that Coleridge had given of the secondary imagination:

By exquisite analysis the artist attains clearness of idea, then, by many stages of refining, clearness of expression. He moves slowly over his work, calculating the tenderest tone, and restraining the subtlest curve, never letting his hand or fancy move at large, gradually refining flaccid spaces to the higher degree of expressiveness. Culture, at least, values even in transcendent works of art the power of the understanding in them, their logical process of construction, the spectacle of supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.

We might say that Pater is no longer afraid to acknowledge the ‘work’ involved in artistic creation, because that work is so specialised that none could confuse it with ordinary social processes of labour. It is the latter which are mechanical; the artist's technique is clearly a craft, and as a result of industrialism the handicrafts themselves have come to seem distinguished and unusual, the repositories of a lost mode of consciousness. There is a parallel between Pater's attitude and that of his contemporaries who spoke of the ‘Arts and Crafts’. Moreover, Pater's language is calculated to suggest the particular crafts of sculptor and painter, whose practice, he implies, is at once intensely physical and intensely intellectual. As so often, he is deepening the mystique of poetic creation by subtle analogies with the visual arts and with science.

Further analogies between writing and the visual arts are found in his essays on ‘The School of Giorgione’, where he compares the effect of lyrical poetry to that of music, and on ‘Style’ where he compares the creation of prose to architecture. Whether it is a harmony or a logical structure that the writer produces, such analogies inevitably suggest that his task is one of working in a material rather than of working on a meaning. Pater's prose as a whole notoriously possesses the air of being rather than meaning. The explicit material is language. Beneath this, however, is the material of personality. Most critics of Pater have noticed that the critical essay in his hands becomes a mode of self-portrayal. He himself provided an indirect commentary on this when he discussed the dialectical method (‘this continuous discourse with one's self’) in Plato and Platonism (1893). When the air of solipsistic intensity is lacking, his writing becomes slack and belle-lettristic. Several of the essays in Appreciations (1889) do nothing to redeem their conventionally bookish choice of subject; Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Lamb and Sir Thomas Browne all induce much the same level of pious reverence.

It is true that Pater distinguishes between mere style, that in which writing resembles music or painting or architecture, and ‘great art’. Great art, he says in the final paragraph of the essay on ‘Style’, depends upon subject-matter; he might almost have defined it as a criticism of life. But perhaps his most influential criticism was that which insists on the ideal harmony of content and form. This harmony could be achieved in prose and in drama, but it was most characteristically found in lyrical poetry where there was ‘a certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reached us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding’. This prescription, from the essay on Giorgione in The Renaissance, is backed up by the account that Pater gives of the historical sequence of the arts in his essay on Winckelmann. The progress of art, he argues, is toward increasing complexity and individuality of expression; hence architecture, the first of the arts, was succeeded by sculpture, and later by painting, poetry and music. The idea that painting, poetry and music are more adequate vehicles of modern expression is close to Hazlitt:

painting, music, and poetry, with their endless power of complexity, are the special arts of the romantic and modern ages. Into these, with the utmost attenuation of detail, may be translated every delicacy of thought and feeling, incidental to a consciousness brooding with delight over itself. Through their gradations of shade, their exquisite intervals, they project in an external form that which is most inward in humour, passion, sentiment.

Does the difference lie in an increased narcissism? In a tone that is self-congratulatory rather than merely wistful? Certainly there is a touch of Mr Rose in this, as there is when Pater speaks of du Bellay as the poet of a ‘refined and comely decadence’.²⁴ Like every major critic after Hazlitt, Pater had to struggle with the problem of classical and romantic. Perhaps he did not intend the formula for ‘musical’ poetry in ‘The School of Giorgione’ to be construed, together with other features of The Renaissance, as an aesthete's charter for a poetry of private associations or ‘pure’ and meaningless sounds. There are various signs that he came to regret the anti-intellectualism of this essay. Marius the Epicurean (1885) is the story of its hero's growing realisation that the luxuriant religion of art must be absorbed in a wider and more mature philosophy. In Plato and Platonism, the poetic language of Wordsworth and Tennyson is praised for its philosophical power, and Pater names the essay, the vehicle of sceptical rationalism, as the characteristic modern literary form. The solipsism of this last point is particularly striking, giving his own unique combination of prose-poetry and rational dialectic. But there is a single theme underlying Pater's enthusiasms for lyrical poetry in The Renaissance, for a vaguely Christian humanism in Marius and for the dialectical method in Plato and Platonism. Each is a plausible mode of response to the modern, ‘relative’ predicament.²⁵

Pater's first definition of modernity comes in his review of ‘Poems by William Morris’ (1868). He is defending the escapist impulses of Morris's poetry. Modern empirical philosophy, Pater argues, leads us to an all-embracing sense of relativism and flux (this argument later became the Conclusion to The Renaissance). The necessary response to a world in transition is to cultivate the passing moment, burning with a hard, gem-like flame. This is the justification of the poetry of the earthly paradise, which turns away from contemporary experience toward a beauty which embodies the real fulfilment of our needs. Pater takes Morris as the acme of the ‘aesthetic’ poet, describing his achievement both as a decadence and a thirst for the exotic:

Greek poetry, mediaeval or modern poetry, projects above the realities of its time a world in which the forms of things are transfigured. Of that world this new poetry takes possession, and sublimates beyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificial or ‘earthly paradise’. It is a finer ideal, extracted from what in relation to any actual world is already an ideal. Like some strange second flowering after date, it renews on a more delicate type the poetry of a past age, but must not be confounded with it.²⁶

This is a statement about historicism in poetry: Morris, as the author of ‘Guenevere’ and ‘Jason’, has captured the essence of Greek and medieval poetry, producing a sublimation of a sublimation. It is also, it seems to me, a statement about nostalgia. The earthly paradise glimpsed beyond and through an earlier period of history is another Eden—though an artificial, poetic one. The process that Pater discovers in Morris does much to illuminate his own intentions in The Renaissance.

‘Renaissance’ itself means for Pater not so much a rebirth as a successive recapturing of the Greek spirit. Thus the nostalgia for Greece is his subject, and this gives to his view of the historical Renaissance a plangent and unfulfilled cast. The grandeur, sensual satisfaction and cruelty of Renaissance life and art are wholly absent from his book. The process of turning away from contemporary life to the Greek ideal, which is Pater's theme, in fact confesses the modernity of the Renaissance. Pater himself is, like Morris, producing a sublimation of a sublimation; he is nostalgically grasping the nostalgia of the Renaissance at a higher degree of consciousness. He was in close contact with the Oxford Hegelians, and his book embodies a deeply Hegelian view of the relation of history and the intellect.²⁷ It is the boldness of this embodiment which is Pater's originality as critic and cultural historian. The tradition that he surveys is both internal and external, subjective and objective. It is internal in the sense of being a sequence of spiritual epiphanies, of engaging personalities and exquisite works of art chosen idiosyncratically by a critic who was so little committed to the necessity of their historical existence that he could follow up The Renaissance with the Imaginary Portraits, which are fictional vignettes on precisely the same themes.²⁸ But Pater's tradition has an external existence, both symbolic and real. The symbolic existence is present, above all, in the passage on La Gioconda.

Pater's impression of Mona Lisa is certainly fanciful, but given the enigmatic quality of the work itself, it does not seem an ill-judged or inappropriate fancy. His description has simply added itself to the complex of meanings that Leonardo's picture today possesses. But this passage also testifies more directly to the reality of the cultural tradition that Pater is surveying. His theme is the modernity of Mona Lisa, a modernity which in her is unconscious and ‘but as the sound of lyres and flutes’:

The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the ideal of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

Whether or not we can credit Mona Lisa's knowledge of the whole of history, such knowledge is presupposed by the relativism and universalism of modern culture. We can and do respond to ‘art’ from all times and places, ranging it in a Musée Imaginaire. Pater is one of the earliest writers to celebrate this phenomenon,²⁹ which is fundamental in twentieth-century aesthetics and may even be seen as the essence of ‘modernity’ as it relates specifically to the arts. In twentieth-century criticism there is a crucial division (say that between I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis) between those who accept a total relativism among modes and styles of art, and those who erect a standard of values derived from a specific, and limited, tradition. It is in keeping with his dialectical evasiveness that Pater's sanction can be found for either point of view. If in the Gioconda passage he is the spokesman of relativism, in the essay on Winckelmann he defines the European tradition in terms which, because they are more specific than Arnold's, again look forward to Eliot. What he says here of the standard of taste and its derivation in classical Greece is not precisely new. But The Renaissance gives to the tradition of ‘conscious Hellenism’ a peculiar stress on the element of consciousness, and this is taken up by the image of a series of beacons passing on the light:

There is thus an element of change in art; criticism must never for a moment forget that ‘the artist is the child of his time.’ But besides these conditions of time and place, and independent of them, there is also an element of permanence, a standard of taste, which genius confesses. This standard is maintained in a purely intellectual tradition … The supreme artistic products of succeeding generations thus form a series of elevated points, taking each from each the reflexion of a strange light, the source of which is not in the atmosphere around and above them, but in a stage of society remote from ours. The standard of taste, then, was fixed in Greece, at a definite historical period.

Pater's purpose is to suggest how a society can support a tradition of art which is autonomous; above it, beyond it and irradiating it. He does so in tones combining romantic idealism with classical serenity. But the tradition defined here, it ought to be remembered, is not so much a fixed ‘standard of taste’ as the idiosyncratic sequence of artists commemorated in Pater's book. It is the individual critic rather than a remote ‘stage of society’ who is the source of the ‘strange light’.

The Preface to The Renaissance puts forward the ideal of a ‘unity of spirit’ occurring only in certain fortunate periods of culture. Such unity is composed of individual thinkers and artists coming together. Whatever the ambiguities of his notion of culture, Pater never came near to the outlook of Pugin, Ruskin and William Morris. History for him was the setting from which individuals emerged, and the tradition, seen as a ‘series of elevated points’, had a metaphorical rather than a real existence. For Morris, tradition was the literal process of handing-down, mediated through the systems of apprenticeship in the various arts and crafts; modern high art was necessarily sundered from this. But Pater's approach to cultural history is one that barely distinguishes between the results of the Renaissance studio-system, and the spiritual elective affinities that brought Winckelmann to Rome or Goethe to Winckelmann. The sense of deepening nostalgia obscures any perception of real discontinuity. Pater was never more himself than in his serene acceptance—which was thereby also a deflection—of the burden of ‘modernity’.

SWINBURNE'S CRITICISM

Swinburne, beside Pater, is aestheticism vulgarised. His output as a critic was enormous. Some of it was undoubtedly influential in its time, and his work on the Jacobean dramatists also made its mark on Eliot. Swinburne's early essays complement his poetry; the ‘fleshly school of poetry’, as Buchanan called it, goes with the romantic school of criticism. Later on, he produced a series of critical books as part of his rather frantic bid for social and academic respectability; the best known is his Study of Shakespeare (1879). But none of these do anything to justify his recent editor's contention that ‘Swinburne belongs among the great critics’.³⁰ The most notable aspect of the early criticism up to Essays and Studies (1875) is the style, yet this is not charismatic, like Pater's, but merely ostentatious. Swinburne makes deliberate use of ornate metaphor to insist on the unity of the literary work with the other arts and with the natural world. ‘Appreciation’ thus consists in building up the thickest set of analogies for the work that the critic can muster. Such a critical language quickly runs to cliché. Among Swinburne's specialities are ‘painterly’ terms (‘brilliance of point and sharpness of stroke’, ‘delicacy and affluence of colour’) and musical terms (‘weighty and sonorous harmony’). Another constant resource in his work is sea imagery. Shakespeare, predictably enough, is oceanic in his inexhaustibility and profundity, but Swinburne is also reminded of the sea by the rhythms of Don Juan and of Blake's ‘Songs of Experience’, while to enter the ‘Prophetic Books’ is to ‘take a blind header into the midst of the whirling foam and rolling weed of this sea of words’.³¹ In the midst of such whirling metalanguage it is not surprising that Swinburne cannot define anything properly. Beside his attempts to explain Arnold's ‘clearness’ as a poet, for example, Arnold's own definition of the grand style appears a model of precision:

I have used this word already more than once or twice; it comes nearest of all I can find to the thing I desire to express; that natural light of mind, that power of reception and reflection of things and thoughts, which I most admire in so much of Mr Arnold's work. I mean by it much more than mere facility or transparency; more than brilliance, more than ease or excellence of style. It is a quality begotten by instinct upon culture; one which all artists of equal rank possess in equal measure.³²

In the last sentence he is relying on the reader's snobbishness or sheepishness to give him a hearing; it is meaningless but is meant to sound impressive. The tendency of his impressionism is to suggest that art is at once the product of ineffable skills, and a cherishable, luxury possession. Rossetti's ‘Blessed Damozel’ is a ‘mystic rose’, ‘a pure first sunrise’, ‘a thing too dear and fair for promise or price’.³³ This is no longer something which compensates us for worldly poverty and drudgery as it would have been for Hazlitt and Keats; it is the refined luxury of the aesthete who shares the wealth of the bourgeoisie, has probably been to Oxford and lives on a private income. With Swinburne, commodity-fetishism, as Christopher Caudwell and others would later define it, makes its most tangible entry into criticism.

It would be unfair to judge his review of ‘Matthew Arnold's New Poems’ solely by its more dandified aspects, however. Swinburne uses the device of a fictitious ‘French critic’ to say the sharp and abrasive things about Arnold which he does not wish to say in his own person. None the less, he does permit himself a telling assault on Arnold's view of France. The idea that you can take the Academy and the Revue des Deux Mondes at their own valuation, Swinburne asserts, is ‘nothing short of pathetic’. He was the only one of Arnold's contemporaries who had earned the right to say this. Unhappily, Swinburne's invective became increasingly violent as he grew older, and it was rarely employed as accurately as it was here. He seems to have taken his poetic achievement as a licence to set up as a one-man academy, handing down judgments far more bluntly and pompously than Arnold himself had done. The literary league-table became Swinburne's obsession. Of the Jacobeans, for example, we learn that Marston is to Webster as Webster is to Shakespeare, while Tourneur stands halfway between Marston and Webster, but is no closer to Webster than Webster is to Shakespeare.³⁴ It is all very prep-schoolish.

The essay from which this is taken, ‘John Webster’ (1886), contains a typically paranoid attack on critics who accuse Webster of horror-mongering. Swinburne delights in the cruelties of Iago, Flamineo, Bosola and their like, and anyone who objects to the sadism of these characters comes in for a good critical caning. He accomplished some important revaluations, such as his championship of Blake, Dickens and Emily Brontë; he also persistently overrates second-rank writers such as Herrick and Lamb. But the way in which he goes about it is almost uniformly off-putting. Once he had discarded the raptures of aestheticism, Swinburne settled for a neurotic literary pomposity. ‘The very greatest poets’ … ‘Webster's crowning masterpiece’ … ‘his other and wellnigh co-equally consummate poem’ … ‘Here again, and finally and supremely here, the purifying and exalting power of Webster's noble and magnanimous imagination is gloriously unmistakable by all and any who have eyes to read and hearts to recognise.’³⁵ So the phrases roll off—in this case, all within the same brief paragraph. The Study of Shakespeare has pages of turgid and muscle-bound rhetoric like this. Swinburne's pretence to authority as a critic, in fact, is usually the worst kind of imposture. As for his relation to earlier nineteenth-century criticism, his own sense of this is summed up in his final ‘consecration’ (‘The time is wellnigh come …’) of his book on Shakespeare to the memory of the ‘three who have written of Shakespeare as never man wrote, nor ever man may write again’: Coleridge, Landor and Lamb. The three, after all the flummery, are named in the same breath, but for Swinburne himself, as is seen in his dedication of The Age of Shakespeare (1908), the greatest of the three was Lamb.

Swinburne, then, began as an idolater of romantic genius and ended as the Ancient Pistol of Victorian bookmanship. If there was a school of aesthetic criticism, it took on new life at the end of the 1890s in the work of Symons and Yeats, which will be discussed below. In the meantime, the dialectics of aesthetic criticism were converted into neatly turned paradoxes by Oscar Wilde in his dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891). This is a manifesto for a catholic, hedonistic attitude of seeking for beauty ‘in every age and in each school’, ‘ever curious of new sensations and fresh points of view’.³⁶ Such a critic will avoid the narrow-mindedness that Wilde attributes to creative genius, but is likely to be defenceless against the unending changes of fashion. Wilde's blithe assertions that it is the manner not the matter which counts in aesthetic criticism are quite close to the mark, however:

Who cares whether Mr Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? … Who, again, cares whether Mr Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something that Leonardo never dreamed of?

The logical outcome of this was realised by Yeats, when he chopped up Pater's passage on the Mona Lisa and put it at the beginning of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). But perhaps the result was no more than a companion-piece to Rossetti's ‘Sonnets for Pictures’, which date from the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, and look back in turn to Keats. Throughout the romantic tradition, in fact, we can find examples of criticism taking possession of works of art and exploiting them as objective symbolisations of the mysterious something in the critic's own soul. When Wilde pointed out the limited scope of creation in his own day, declaring that ‘it is to criticism that the future belongs’,³⁷ he was indicating the process of literature feeding on itself that is fundamental to aestheticism. Despite their stress on the esoteric and non-intellectual nature of poetry, the aesthetes' religion of art in fact committed them to criticism as never before. Critical impressionism was their basic mode of experience. It is often surprising how literary this was; how Pater, for instance, shows his visual artists as individual personalities seeking self-expression rather than craftsmen working in a common discipline, and to what extent he puts them in the verbal context provided by thought like that of Pico and poetry like that of Michelangelo and du Bellay. It is this literary cherishing of experience that links The Renaissance to the conventional belle-lettrism of Appreciations, and even to the frenetic academicism of late Swinburne. The aesthetes continued to pursue the duality initiated by the early romantics, of criticism as public discourse and private daydream.

HARRISON AND SAINTSBURY

In The Renaissance, Pater presents the neoclassical tradition of rediscovery of the ‘ancients’, and especially of Greek civilisation, in an explicitly romantic light. In Appreciations, he even gives qualified approval to Stendhal's opinion that all good art was romantic in its day.³⁸ Thus he continued the process of assimilation of the achievements and doctrines of the romantic movement into the literary tradition, which had preoccupied Arnold, Carlyle and Mill. This labour of incorporation went on into the late nineteenth century, but alongside it there was a consolidation of work on Augustan literature, culminating in the criticism of Leslie Stephen and the scholarship of Saintsbury and Birkbeck Hill. With the rise of English studies, criticism and scholarship were becoming a professional routine, and no century could expect to remain uncovered; but there were other reasons for the rehabilitation of the eighteenth century. It was the period which the conservative bookman found most congenial. Nearly half of the volumes in the original English Men of Letters series were devoted to Augustan authors. This movement, typified by the apotheosis of Boswell and of Boswell's Johnson (which had begun with Carlyle and Macaulay), was one outlet for hostility to the fashionable aesthetic attitudes of the 1870s. Another outlet lay in the criticism of the novel, which at last began on a more than occasional basis.

Among the more extreme of the anti-aesthetes was Arnold's antagonist Frederic Harrison. The leader of the English Positivists, his artistic heroes were Ruskin and George Eliot. His essay ‘The Choice of Books’ (1879) is an attack on the frivolity and dandyism of the literary world. Choosing a book was a heavy and weighty responsibility; better that it should be Hume, Gibbon or Adam Smith than a ‘kind-hearted play-book’ of the kind rescued from the dung-heap by Lamb.³⁹ For a writer such as George Eliot, he wrote in 1885, science, philosophy and social ideals were the ‘substance’ of culture, while the ‘graceful form and the critical judgment’ were merely the ‘instrument by which it speaks’.⁴⁰ Harrison, however, remained within literary culture (as George Eliot and Lewes had done), mingling historical and philosophical studies with collections of critical essays with titles like Among my Books (1912). A less austere kind of bookmanship is exemplified by George Saintsbury, the most prolific of the new professors of English. Saintsbury's only diversions from literary scholarship were in the direction of wine and food. Though remembered for his breadth of learning and his synoptic literary histories, he was also a spokesman for scholarly minuteness, defending the study of the ‘variations of the position of a pronoun’ against both the Arnoldian ‘criticism of life’ and the impressionism of the aesthetes.⁴¹ His study of Dryden (1881) attempts to restore the idea of literature as a craft, hard work for the writer and still harder work for the critic, who is obliged to toil through everything, regardless of its established reputation, in order to develop a sufficiently catholic view of poetry. Once he had that, however, he could rest on his intellectual laurels, and feel obliged to go no further. It is all summed up in the title of his last, elegiac critical book, The Peace of the Augustans: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature as a Place of Rest and Retirement (1916). Saintsbury's notion of catholic taste is so clearly aimed at the academic with time on his hands that he became the symbol of the relaxed, traditionalist attitude of early twentieth-century English studies; English as a soft option, a place of sporting refreshment in which the student, though he might be threatened by a surfeit of books, would at least never have to think. Though it is not true that Saintsbury never thought, he was a bookman of the old school in that he made the thinking look fatally easy. …

Notes

1. ‘Present System of Education’, in Westminster Review, IV (1825), p. 166. See also II (1824), pp. 334ff.

2. ‘Belles Lettres’, in Westminster Review, XXXIV (1968), p. 259.

3. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Voltaire’, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (London, 1899), II.

4. Carlyle, ‘Goethe’, in ibid., I.

5. Quoted in Mill's Essays on Literature and Society, ed. J. B. Schneewind (New York, 1965), pp. 351-2.

6. Ibid., p. 407.

7. J. H. Newman, On the Scope and Nature of University Education, Everyman edn (London, 1915), p. 82.

8. Carlyle, ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, in Sartor Resartus and on Heroes, Everyman edn (London, 1908), p. 384.

9. Carlyle, ‘Burns’, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, II.

10. Arthur Hallam, review in the Englishman's Magazine (1831), reprinted in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. John D. Jump (London, 1967), p. 41.

11. J. S. Mill, ‘What is Poetry?’ in Essays on Literature and Society, p. 109.

12. Ibid., p. 122.

13. I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry (London, 1926), p. 59.

14. George Saintsbury, A History of English Criticism (Edinburgh, 1936), p. 452.

15. On Dallas, see Alba H. Warren, Jr, English Poetic Theory 1825-1865 (Princeton, 1950), pp. 129ff.; and Jenny Taylor, ‘The Gay Science: The “Hidden Soul” of Victorian Criticism’, Literature and History, X. no. 2 (1984), pp. 189-202.

16. John Ruskin, ‘Of the received Opinions touching the “Grand Style”’, in Modern Painters, III.

17. See Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower (Chicago, 1971), p. 174; and Chapter 6 below.

18. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, quoted in On Literature and Art, ed. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski (New York, 1974), p. 71.

19. William Morris, Collected Works, ed. May Morris (London, 1914), XXII, p. 132.

20. Cf. E. P. Thompson, William Morris: From Romantic to Revolutionary (London, 1955), p. 768.

21. See the discussions by Patrick Brantlinger, ‘News from Nowhere: Morris's Socialist Anti-Novel’, in Victorian Studies, XIX (1975), pp. 35ff.; and Patrick Parrinder, ‘News from Nowhere, The Time Machine and the Break-Up of Classical Realism’, in Science-Fiction Studies, X (1976).

22. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago and London, 1987), p. 124. For English studies in Britain see D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies; for the United States see Graff's Professing Literature.

23. Quotations from Pater's essays ‘Coleridge's Writings’ are from the text reprinted in English Critical Essays: Nineteenth Century, ed. Edmund D. Jones (London, 1971), pp. 421ff.

24. Pater, Preface to The Renaissance.

25. On this point see Anthony Ward, Walter Pater: The Idea in Nature (London, 1966), p. 194.

26. ‘Poems by William Morris’, in Westminster Review, XXXIV (1868), pp. 300-1.

27. On Pater and the Hegelians see Ward, Walter Pater, pp. 43ff.

28. Cf. Ian Fletcher, Walter Pater (London, 1971), p. 29.

29. Cf. Bernard Bergonzi, The Turn of a Century (London, 1973), p. 21.

30. Clyde K. Hyder, Swinburne as Critic (London, 1972), p. xi.

31. Ibid., p. 115.

32. Ibid., p. 75.

33. Reprinted in Pre-Raphaelite Writing, ed. Derek Stanford (London, 1973), p. 163.

34. A. C. Swinburne, ‘John Webster’, in Hyder, Swinburne as Critic, pp. 286ff.

35. Ibid., p. 308.

36. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in Intentions (London, 1945), p. 111.

37. Ibid., p. 160.

38. Walter Pater, Postscript to Appreciations (London, 1927), p. 271.

39. Harrison, The Choice of Books, p. 6.

40. Ibid., p. 212.

41. George Saintsbury, Dryden (London, 1912), p. 31.