THE VICTORIAN AGE--Blamires

THE VICTORIAN AGE

 Blamires

M. Phil English, Bharathiar University--Blamiers—

Approaches--Unit III

Summary by Dr. S. Sreekumar

Syllabus for Unit III

The Romantic Age (Blamires, pp 217-380)

The Victorian Age

The Twentieth Century I: The Early Decades

The Twentieth Century II: Post-war Developments

Introduction

The Victorian Age was a period of consolidation in terms of peace and prosperity, in terms of wealth and power and in terms of artistic productivity. The rule of Queen Victoria began with the stage coach and ended with a network of railways. It was comparatively an age of peace though the Crimean War (1853-56) and the Indian Mutiny (1857-58) can be cited as exceptions. On the Origin of Species  by Darwin opened up debate in the intellectual circles. The Oxford movement by Newman created much confusion in religion. Though there were many doubts and uncertainties in the Victorian Age, these can never be compared to the tumultuous and catastrophic events of the twentieth century. Thus the twentieth century looks back at the Victorian Period as a stable era.  

Literature

In the field of literature the age was one of consolidation as it built upon the innovations of Wordsworth and Byron, Shelley and Keats. The novel became the most popular form of literature in the Age. The novels of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot succeeded in bringing out the virtues and vices of the Age. The conflict between passion and convention, idealism and materialism were the stock themes of the Victorian Novel.

I. The Aftermath of Romanticism

Thomas Carlyle

Carlyle is one of the greatest names of the age. He considered literature as a branch of religion. He did not consider the conscious mind as the spring of health and vitality. On the other hand the unconscious is the source of dynamism, for it is in touch with the mysterious depths that lie below the level of conscious argument and discourse.

Carlyle’s views on Sir Walter Scott

Carlyle’s views on Scott were contradictory. He considered Scott as worldly and ambitious. Scott conveyed no elevating message, his words were addressed to everyday mind and for any other mind there was no nourishment in them. There were no opinions, emotions, principles, doubts or beliefs ‘beyond what the intelligent country gentleman can carry along with him. ‘There is nothing in them to heal the sick heart or guide the struggling heart’. Where Shakespeare ‘fashions his characters from the heart outwards’, Scott ‘fashions them from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them’. He never scaled the heights. Thus Carlyle denies to Scott the title ‘great’.

However, dwelling on the positive aspects,  Carlyle’s pen runs into superlatives of a different kind. Scott was essentially a healthy soul who had nothing to do with the bogus and the alien, with cant and pretentiousness. Scott’s inward spiritual strength rendered him ultimately independent on outward circumstances. Moreover his novels reveal what historians had failed to reveal, ‘that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies and abstractions of men’.

Carlyle’ half- grudging, half-hearted estimate of Scott is itself a disturbing utterance from a disturbed mind.

J.S. Mill

Founded the Utilitarian society in 1823. In his Autobiography Mill speaks of his early despair. His love of the poetry of Wordsworth saved him from that. He was moved to write an essay. “What is Poetry?’. He took as a starting point Wordsworth’s argument that the opposite of poetry is not prose but science.

The truth of fiction is to give a true picture of life; the truth of poetry is to paint the human soul truly. The great poet may be ignorant of life, but he has explored his own nature as a human specimen in whom the ‘laws of emotion’ are boldly inscribed. The novelist’s external knowledge of mankind is not needed for the poet.

John Ruskin

Ruskin shared Carlyle’s horror of the damaging effects of materialism. It led him into demands of social reform. It also led him to concerns of the relationship between art and morality and to dissatisfaction with purely aesthetic ideals.

Ruskin coined the term pathetic fallacy to define what poets do when they attribute human characteristics to other objects. He quotes Kingsley’s “The cruel, crawling foam” as an example. The foam is not cruel and does not crawl.

Ruskin was against contrived poetic fancy. His concern was with ‘truth’. In so far as the attribution of human feelings to other objects was false it was questionable. In so far as the attribution involved feelings inappropriate to the given context it was doubly questionable.

Ruskin’s love of truth led him to criticize the novels of George Eliot. He called them ‘railway novels’. He called The Mill on the Floss a waste of printer’s ink.

Again Ruskin was ambiguous in his views on Dickens. He was worried about the element of caricature in the novels of Dickens.

II. MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822- 1888)

His Critical Works

    Arnold had written some poetry before he turned to criticism. His criticism is the criticism of a man who had personal experience of what he was writing about.

Arnold’s critical Works—Preface to the Poems of 1853, On Translating Homer, The Study of Celtic Literature, Essays in Criticism I & II

His Views on Poetry

1. Classicism

There was a group of poets in the Victorian Age who came to be called Spasmodics. The more prominent among them were P.J. Bailey, Sydney Dobell, and Alexander Smith. They believed that poetry was the ‘expression of the state of one’s own mind’. This led to extravagance of thought and emotion and to use of excess metaphor. It was to combat the spasmodic tendency that Arnold wrote the Preface to the Poems of 1853. He omitted his poem ‘Empedocles on Aetna’ from the collection as he thought that the poem was Spasmodic. Empedocles suffers and ends his life by jumping into the volcano Aetna. He does nothing but suffer. Arnold thought that the theme was not suitable for poetry. All art must be dedicated to Joy. Even the suffering in tragedy brings joy.

What are the subjects of great poetry?

The Spasmodics believed that the ancient subjects had lost their importance and the poet must concentrate on new subjects. Arnold thought otherwise. The business of the poet is not to praise their Age, but to afford greatest pleasure to the men who live in it.

Passing actions have only passing value and the Greeks left them to be treated by the comic poet. For tragedy, which Greeks considered the highest form of poetry, they chose actions that please always and please all. Arnold argued that the subject of poetry whether they are ancient or modern must satisfy this test that they must please the reader. Poetry aims higher—it is cathartic.

The Spasmodics believed that they could make for the inferiority of their subjects by their superior treatment of them. That was why they pressed metaphor and simile into their service. No amount of make up can for long hide the ugliness of the substance beneath. With the Greeks the poetical character of the action was more important than the treatment. The action must be one in which part is coordinated with part to form a single, unified whole.

Arnold was dissatisfied with the poetry of his age. He turned to models like Shakespeare—‘a name never to be mentioned without reverence’. Shakespeare chose excellent subjects. He had such an unbridled expression, a gift of happy phrase that he was unable to say anything plainly in the ‘directest’ language. Arnold did not consider this a ‘safe model’ for the Victorian poet, whose weakness was the same. To undo this ‘mischief’ there was no other way than to turn to the ancients—to the ‘admirable treatise of Aristotle and the unrivalled works of their poets’. This therefore is his criterion of great poetry: that it gives joy even when the situation is painful, that it treats of action rather than thought, that it pleases as a whole and not merely in parts, and that its highest models are the ancient classics.

2. The Grand Style

Arnold believed that the grand style of the Greeks was superior to the colourful style of the English. He said that the grand style of Homer ennobles poetry and ennobles life. Arnold explains the grand style thus: ‘it arises in poetry when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or severity a serious subject’. Arnold finds only three masters of the grand style, Homer, Milton and Dante. The utterance of these poets is sublime and sublimity of utterance comes only with sublimity of soul. Their subjects were for all ages. 

3. Criticism of Life

Arnold considered poetry as a serious occupation like the art of living itself. What is said was of as much consequence as how it is said . In English poetry he found more shape than substance, more style than matter. Modern poetry can only subsist by its contents: by becoming complete ‘magister vitae’ (director of life) like the poetry of the ancients.

ON CRITICISM

1. Creative and Critical Faculties

Arnold admits that the critical faculty is lower than the creative. The exercise of creative power is the highest function of man. Creative power should coincide with a creative epoch to produce great works of literature. Unless a poet finds himself in a creative epoch, he would end up as a failure. Gray is a case in point. With all his poetical gifts, he could not flower ‘because a spiritual east wind was at that time blowing’. He belonged to an age of prose not of poetry.

The word ‘disinterestedness’ is the key in Arnold’s criticism. Arnold considered criticism as the handmaid of culture—personal, social, and literary. Criticism should remain above all party considerations or sectarian point of views. Personal considerations hindered ‘a free disinterested play of mind’. Unless a critic freed his mind from all such considerations, he could not discharge his duty truly, which is ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’.

2. The Touchstone Method

Arnold considers judgement of literature as the time-honoured function of criticism. In order to find out whether a poem belongs to the class of the truly excellent, it is advised to compare it with the great lines and expressions from the great masters. These lines from the great are used as touchstones to measure the quality of poetry. Arnold keeps a few widely different passages from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton as truly excellent.

Arnold gives no reason as to why he considers the selected lines as great. But he hints elsewhere that the lines are noted for higher truth and higher seriousness.

3. False Standards of Judgement

The personal estimate and the historic estimate are considered to be two false kinds of estimates.

Our personal affinities, likings, and circumstances have great power to control our estimate of this or that poet’s work, and to make us attach more importance to it as poetry than in itself it really possesses. Much of Burn’s poetry is praised for Scotch drink, Scotch religion, Scotch manners. These are elements of personal estimate.

The historic estimate lays more emphasis on the circumstances in which the author wrote—the state of life and literature in his day, his opportunities and limitations, the labour needed by the work, and so on. Such historic estimate is also misleading.

The Value of his Criticism

è Arnold is an over -praised critic. Neither in his observations on poetry nor in those on the critical art can he be said to say anything of his own. He just reminds his age of the ideas of Aristotle and Longinus.

è In some of his observations he follows the classical line. His ‘touchstone method’ is but a modified version of Longinus’s test of poetic greatness.

è Arnold is also an ‘interested’ critic like those he condemns. There is a strong moral bias in his critical utterances.

è Arnold rescued criticism from the disorganised state into which it had fallen. He offered it a system in critical judgement. This he found in the rules of the Ancients which had stood the test of time.

è He also waged a relentless battle against the intrusion of personal, religious, or political considerations in the judgement of authors and works.

è Lastly, he raised criticism to a higher level than was ever thought of by making it the care-taker of literature in epochs unfavourable to its growth.

III Victorian reviewers

George Henry Lewes

Contributed thoughtful essays to Edinburgh and the Fortnightly.  He was a consistent critic of Dickens. Lewis appreciated Thackeray for the strong sense of reality present in his works.

Walter Bagehot

He and R. H. Hutton became joint editors of National Review in 1855. He was also a critic of Dickens. Hutton was deeply appreciative of the works of George Eliot.

Mark Pattison

His work as a critic included a study of Milton. The work is intelligent but not distinctive.  He passed judgement on Meredith’s poetry asserting that Meredith was ‘a poet in prose’.

Leslie Stephen

He was the editor of Cornhill Magazine. He was a critic of Scott’s novels. Stephen defended Scott’s novels against the charge that Scott had no gospel to deliver. Stephen argued that the same was the case with Shakespeare also. He was full of appreciation for George Eliot.

IV Laughter and Glory

George Meredith

Meredith entered the critical arena with a lecture ‘On the Ideal of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit’. He considered the true comic spirit intellectual than sentimental. Meredith cites Fielding, Goldsmith and Jane Austen as ‘delightful comic writers’. In his eyes, an excellent test of a country’s civilisation is ‘the flourishing of the comic idea and comedy’, while the test of true comedy ‘is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter’.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins added to the concepts and terminology of criticism.

a. Sprung Rhythm

Hopkins experimented with metre and formulated what he called ‘Sprung Rhythm’ as against the traditional ‘Running Rhythm’ of English poetry.

In Sprung Rhythm there is one stressed syllable in each foot, but the foot may contain anything from one to four unstressed syllables. The system allows two stressed syllables in succession, or two stressed syllables may be separated by one, two, or three unaccented ones. Hopkins believed that it is the rhythm of common speech and of written prose.

b. Inscape

This is another critical term added by Hopkins.  He wrote in a letter to Robert Bridges, ‘...air, melody, is what strikes us most of all in music’.  Similarly design strikes us in painting. The pattern and design is called inscape by Hopkins.

As a picture that makes a single whole thing out of a stretch of country is called ‘landscape’, so the distinctive individual structure of a thing, revealed through the senses in a moment of illumination is its ‘inscape’.

‘The force which preserves inscape, enabling a thing to cohere in its individualness is called ‘instress’’. ‘Instess’ provides the energy which holds the inscape together. This energy carries its wholeness to the observer.

V. Aestheticism and Walter Pater

WALTER PATER (1839-1894)

The Nature of his Work

Pater’s literary criticism is extremely small in bulk. His critical works are—

Appreciations, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Marius the Epicurean, Plato and Platonism, Essays from ‘The Guardian’

He considered experience as the end of art. This experience can occur to a mind freed itself from all pre-conceived notions, theories, and dogmas, and is therefore open to impressions of all kinds.

To maintain ecstasy is the success of life. Each moment of life is to be lived intensely and fully. This is the true function of art: ‘to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake. What practical purpose such ecstatic moments serve in life or literature is not Pater’s concern. That they enrich the soul is their sufficient justification. Art is its own reward, it beholds the great spectacle of life ‘for the mere joy of beholding’ and for no other purpose.

On Literature

Pater views literature as a delightful experience in itself. He draws a distinction between two forms of literature—imaginative and unimaginative.

The unimaginative literature consists of works of science, history, and other branches of knowledge in which the primary object of the writer is to transcribe fact.

Imaginative literature does not deal with facts as such. In it bare fact emerges transformed into ‘soul-fact’—fact as the soul conceives it. Its object is not utility but pleasure.

On Style

In his definition of style Pater echoes Longinus. The writer’s means of style are three—diction, design, and personality. The writer must not use obsolete or worn out expressions. He has to exercise a skilful economy of expression.  Paying close attention to his medium, the writer provides ‘a pleasurable stimulus’ to the reader to put in the same amount of labour to arrive at his meaning.

The next requirement of style is the combination of words into a unified whole. It is not just a series of sentences held together by their common purpose, but an architectural design.

But with all the care for words and their unity of design style may still be wanting in warmth and colour. Here arises the necessity of the third factor—personality or soul in style. It is the very breath of the writer in his work.

On criticism

Criticism should be done systematically. To feel the virtue of the poet or the painter, to disengage it, to set if forth, these are the three stages of the critic’s duty. No preconceived theory can help him in this work. A ‘true student of aesthetics, his business is to look for what is really beautiful or delightful in an author, irrespective of the school to which he belongs.

The Value of his Criticism

è Pater has little original to offer. There is nothing new in his critical method, which is basically the Romantic impressionistic—— judging by the impression rather than by the rule.

è Pater is more lucid than Coleridge, more precise than Arnold, and quite a scientist in his definition of style.

è He stresses the pleasure-giving quality of literature.

                            

Swinburne

He was not a critical theorist. He was an enthusiastic reader whose fervour flowed over into appreciative commentary on what he read. His historical importance is that he helped to form opinions on the writers of his own century and did much to revive interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

Swinburne paid tributes to Browning and defended him against the charges of obscurity. According to Swinburne ‘random’ writing creates obscurity. There is no such thing in Browning. His thinking is decisive and incisive. He thinks at full speed and demands a comparable alertness in the reader.  

Oscar Wilde

The aesthetic doctrine propagated by Pater was taken up by Wilde. His collection of essays, Intentions, contained two dialogues on the relationship between art and life. Wilde wrote in paradoxes and it is doubtful whether his utterances on others can be taken seriously. ‘Witty paradox was for him the ‘fatal Cleopatra’’. Some of his paradoxical statements are given below:

Truth to Nature is the death of Art

Art does not make us love Nature, but reveals her crudities.

Facts must not be allowed to usurp the domain of Fancy

Far from art imitating life, it is life that imitates art.

Life is the mirror and art is the reality.

As a method Realism is a complete failure.

What is called sin is an essential element of progress.

These are some of the sample aphoristic statements that we come across in his critical writings. One does not know how many of them can be taken seriously.

VI. Critics of the last decade of the Nineteenth century

Arthur Symons

Symons was a poet and critic. He encouraged the recognition in England of the work of the French symbolist poets, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarme. Both Yeats and Eliot were to acknowledge their indebtedness to him in this respect.

In his essay ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, Symons defines the representative literature of the day as possessing the qualities that belong to the ‘end of great periods……an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity’.

Decadence is the fit umbrella term covering ‘impressionism’ and ‘symbolism’.  There is no attempt ‘to see life steadily and to see it whole’. Symons saw Symbolism as a movement to liberate literature from decadence. Symbolist Movement is seen as an attempt to spiritualize literature. It is a revolt against the materialistic tradition.

The most productive aspect of Symons’s critical thinking was the way in which he recognized the need for poets to adapt to the new scientific, urban culture.

The Victorian Age gave us a number of books which blended biography and descriptive criticism. John Morley edited ‘English Men of Letters’ series to which a wide range of distinguished writers contributed. Henry James, Leslie Stephen, Mark Pattison, George Saintsbury, A. C. Benson, G. K. Chesterton, Edmund Gosse, and Edward Dowden were some of the notable critics who combined biography with descriptive criticism.

Study materials for the guidance of M.Phil scholars and teachers

Dr. S. Sreekumar