Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic (The Nineteenth Century Series)

STYLE AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH CRITIC

For Cory, Oscar and Nava

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic Sincere Mannerisms

JASON CAMLOT Concordia University

 Jason Camlot 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Jason Camlot has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hants GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Camlot, Jason, 1967– Style and the nineteenth-century British critic : sincere mannerisms. – (The nineteenth century series) 1. English prose literature – 19th century – History and criticism 2. Criticism – Great Britain – History – 19th century 3. Periodicals – Publishing – Great Britain – History – 19th century 4. English language – 19th century – Rhetoric 5. English language – 19th century – Style I. Title 820.9'008 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Camlot, Jason, 1967– Style and the nineteenth-century British critic : sincere mannerisms / Jason Camlot. p. cm. —(The nineteenth century series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-5311-0 (alk. paper) 1. English prose literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Criticism—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Periodicals—Publishing—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. English language—19th century—Rhetoric. 5. English language—19th century—Style. 6. Style, Literary—History—19th century. 7. Mannerism (Literature) I. Title. II. Title: Style and the 19th-century British critic. PR778.C93C36 2008 828'.80809—dc22 2007020026 ISBN 978-0-7546-5311-0 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents General Editors’ Preface Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: Sincere Mannerisms

vii ix xi 1

1

The Character of the Periodical Press

13

2

The Origins of Modern Earnest

27

3

The Downfall of Authority and The New Magazine

53

4

Thomas De Quincey’s Periodical Rhetoric

73

5

The Political Economy of Style: John Ruskin and Critical Truth

91

6

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent

109

7

The Style is the Man: Style Theory in the 1890s

137

Conclusion

167

Bibliography Index

171 185

This page intentionally left blank

The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender and noncanonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape.

Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgements This book began as a doctoral dissertation written at Stanford University and it has been shaped by the ideas, advice and support of many colleagues and friends from and since that time. Regenia Gagnier and Barbara Gelpi were excellent and kind supervisors to whom I will be forever grateful. Michael Tratner, Joss Marsh, Ben Robinson, William Donoghue, Caroline Taran, Ardel Thomas, Richard Menke, Kenneth Brewer, Helen Blythe, Stephanie Kuduk, Ryan Johnson, Paul SaintAmour, Diana Maltz, and Tim Wandling all provided challenging and insightful feedback at early stages in this work’s composition. My colleagues at Concordia University have been consistently supportive, wise, and fun to work with. Conversations with Robert Allen, Terry Byrnes, Jill Didur, Mary Esteve, Marcie Frank, Bina Freiwald, Andre Furlani, Judith Herz, David McGimpsey, John Miller, Nicola Nixon, Kevin Pask, Jonathan Sachs, Eve Sanders, Kate Sterns and David Wright, have contributed in important ways to my writing of this work. A crew of excellent graduate students—Veronica Tunzi, Erin Churchill, Joleen Kraft, Jonathan Filipovic, Rachel Lebowitz, Alex Dodd, David Fiore and Jack Illingworth—have helped me to organize into a user-friendly database the plethora of materials from nineteenth-century periodicals that I have had to consult to write this book. Emily Evans has provided a useful editorial eye at a late stage in the writing process. Bonnie-Jean Campbell has been a great help in a variety of practical matters. I would also like to thank two terrific representatives at Ashgate. Erika Gaffney convinced me to submit this work to Ashgate in the first place, and Ann Donahue has been extremely helpful throughout the process of shaping, revising and preparing the manuscript. Research for this project was supported by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada graduate fellowship, doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships from Stanford University, and Faculty Research and Development funds from Concordia University. Portions of Chapter 2 appeared in NineteenthCentury Prose and Victorian Periodicals Review. An earlier version of Chapter 6 appeared in ELH. I am especially indebted to my “greater” family for their endless love and understanding. My parents, Sylvia and Irving Camlot, and my parents-in-law, Gayle and Robert Garfinkle, have approached this particular work as they approach everything I do, with boundless support and pride. Cory Garfinkle has been the ultimate soul mate and friend. What I owe to her is in its detail, infinite.

This page intentionally left blank

Abbreviations DCW

Thomas De Quincey, Collected Writings. 14 Vols. Ed. David Masson. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1889–90.

MCW

John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. 21 Vols. Ed. John M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991.

Noctes

John Wilson, Noctes Ambrosianae. 5 Vols. Ed. Shelton Mackenzie. New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1863.

Pen

Oscar Wilde, “Pen Pencil and Poison: A Study in Green.” 1891. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 320–340.

RW

John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin. Library Edition. 39 Vols. Ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1903–12.

R

Matthew Harrison, The Rise, Progress, and Present Structure of the English Language. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848.

S

Walter Pater, “Style.” 1888. Appreciations, with An Essay on Style. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

Sincere Mannerisms No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.1 —Oscar Wilde

The critic who addressed his reader in all sincerity faced an unprecedented identity crisis with the emergence of wide-scale publishing in Britain at the start of the nineteenth century. By the time Oscar Wilde could formulate and publish his aphorism about “ethical sympathies” in 1891, the moral claim of any single mode of discourse to sincerity, or ethical sympathy, in published writing, was obsolete. Wilde would underscore that the previously dominant motive to sincerity—one that sought for “a perfect literality of expression, and the achievement of a style from which every element of rhetorical artifice had been expunged”2—was no more natural than was the green carnation in his lapel. For Wilde, the artist represented the ideal figure that struggled with the status quo, and defeated it, by choosing not to express himself in the tired, and, according to him, ethically dangerous phrases of Victorian earnestness and sincerity. The aphorism cited above does not admonish the artist who hopes to convey something meaningful, but only the artist who wrongly believes, even in spite of a language-distorting mass press, that meaning can be conveyed by establishing a sincere, sympathetic relationship with his reader. This particular model for the mechanism and function of sympathy goes back at least as far as Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). According to Smith’s theory, sympathy is a natural, social attribute, the glue that allows humans to interact (to truck, barter and trade) without tearing each other to shreds. Another person’s feelings are not available to our own experience, but we, as humans (as Europeans, Smith would say) are able “by the imagination” to “place ourselves in his situation.”3 Smith goes on to remark that “nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast; nor are we ever so much shocked as by the appearance of the contrary.”4 Indeed, Wilde’s work often seemed (and seems) shocking precisely because he most often chose to reflect back to his public phrases and philosophies that worked against the habitual expectation of sympathy. Further, he chose to recode Smith’s “natural” intent to “fellow feeling” in aesthetic terms as an artistic error, a bad stylistic decision. The degree to which Wilde’s challenge to the idea of sincerity as a natural discursive mode was perceived to be a threat at the end of the nineteenth century can be observed in the transcripts of his three trials. One might say that Wilde’s separation of art and morality—or his conflation of ethical

2

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

sympathy with aesthetics—led to a late Victorian, public legislation of the rule of sincerity against him. Seymour Chatman has described style as “the trace that the artist’s way of working leaves in his artifact.”5 The “trace” is here understood as an act of agency, a sign of choice made among a series of possible artistic alternatives. Using Chatman’s terms one might say that Wilde chose not to enact his agency in a manner that signified sincerity to the Victorian public. To do so, according to Wilde, would have been an unpardonable mannerism of style. But at the beginning of the period under consideration in this book, Britain in the 1830s, one concern was not how to subvert this “unpardonable” discourse of sincerity, but to develop arguments and theories about how it might continue to function successfully to convey a coherent, sympathetic “fellow” in spite of a growing periodicals market that seemed, both in its magnitude and in the materialization of new formats for the medium, to threaten the very possibility of knowing for sure anyone in print. One broad purpose of this book is to trace the gradual end of sincerity as a selfconsciously cultivated mode of discourse, by presenting a selective cultural history of conceptions of style in writing from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century. In Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic, I approach prescriptive and theoretical essays on style as attempts to formulate the possibilities for authentic communication in response to specific, historical conditions for writing and publication. These changing conditions are described in a broad manner in discussions, usually at the beginning of chapters, about periods that I identify as key moments of change in the history of nineteenth-century publishing and rhetorical theory, such as (a) the shift from pragmatic to romantic conceptions of rhetoric in the early decades of the century, (b) the rise of new kinds of literary magazines, resulting in new models of the critic, and new conceptions of literature from the 1820s–40s, (c) the articulation of new rhetorical prescriptions for a disciplined and disinterested criticism at mid-century, (d) the impact of the emerging disciplines of philology and psychology upon conceptions of readership and writing from the 1850s on, (e) the significance for ideas of authorship of the development of quantitative stylistics, and the rise of the New Journalism at the fin-de-siècle. I then proceed in each chapter to locate the oppositional theory or problem of a single author within these larger style contexts. This method has allowed me to create a vision of the publishing market alongside a general discursive norm that keeps shifting, and then to present the drama of individual authors in relation to that shifting norm. Most nineteenth-century theories of style hinge upon the formulation of a scene of writing that serves to legitimize the literary or critical production as authentic in spite of its subsequent fate of publication. In answering the key question that asks how to communicate effectively, I identify two major schools of thought in the nineteenth century. One school advocates a positivist approach, beginning with Herbert Spencer in 1850 and leading to the “scientific” work of critics such as Emile Hennequin and T. C. Mendenhall, and of turn-of-the-century academic style critic Lucius Sherman. The other school of thought—in which I include John

Introduction

3

Stuart Mill, Thomas De Quincey, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde (who are some of the protagonists of this study)—attempts to reconcile romantic conceptions of language with contemporary problems of audience and the media of verbal communication.6 Where the positivist tradition posits a fixed psychological model of reception and then builds a system of stylistics upon it, the post-romantic tradition is primarily concerned with the matter of reception itself. Throughout this book I juxtapose these two traditions with the intention of exploring their respective motives, effects and critical fates, and present the latter tradition, because of its concern with the ethical issues of reception, as one of cultural critique. In terms provided by Lionel Trilling, the trajectory of nineteenth-century rhetoric and critical theory moves from a socially implicated, rhetorically informed discourse of sincerity, towards the idea of an immediately transparent, self-evident being, manifest as autonomous and authentic. Again, Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy is useful for understanding the trajectory posited by Trilling. Smith’s idea of sympathy depends upon the spectator’s judgment of sincerity of the affective spectacle he encounters. The judgment of the spectator (in an encounter with someone who is grief-stricken, for example) will be based not only upon a belief that the grief is felt truly by the mourner, but, further, that it is deemed justifiable according to a rational judgment of the circumstances that incited the affective spectacle in the first place, and, even further, that the grieving affect is tastefully presented (with “propriety”, Smith says) by the mourner, so that it achieves the greatest effect upon the spectator, and results in the most concordant sympathetic exchange.7 The mourner (to continue with this example), according to Smith, can only obtain this [consolation in sympathy] by lowering his passion to that pitch, in which the spectators are capable of going along with him. He must flatten…the sharpness of its natural tone, in order to reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about him.8

According to Smith’s theory, the correspondence of sentiment between two individuals is always dependent upon an individual’s public performance of his affect. “Unisons” of sentimental experience between two individuals are an impossibility, for they would entail the elimination of all performative elements of the sympathetic exchange, as Smith understands it. In lieu of unmediated “unisons” Smith describes sympathetic encounters as “concords” of sentiment that are realized by a public performance in the workings of the inner self.9 Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is, from one perspective, an extended treatise on the mechanisms by which sincerity functions as a dutiful and proper public performance of the self for the benefit of society as a whole. Now, to return to Trilling’s idea of a trajectory away from sincerity towards something else: Trilling uses Wordsworth’s poems “Michael” and “The Idiot Boy” to illustrate a distinction between sincerity—the speculations, judgments and doubts of which these poems transcend, according to Trilling—and authenticity. In the case of

4

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

sincerity, the reader or listener is placed in a position to judge the manner in which an affected self is expressed, to determine the sincerity of that manner of expression, and the veracity of the affective experience that incites it. In the language of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, we make use of standards of taste and decorum—standards informing our judgment of a stylistic presentation of individual experience—“when we are determining the degree of blame or applause” to confer upon the affective spectacle towards which we will respond with either sympathy or antipathy.10 Trilling distinguishes sincerity from authenticity by rescuing the latter concept from an expressive scenario that would keep it subject to public scrutiny and evaluation. When it comes to a poem like Wordsworth’s “Michael”, Trilling states, “[i]t would be absurd to undertake an assessment of the sincerity of the protagonist.”11 To approach the affect as expressed in this poem in the public, theatrical terms of Smith is deemed incontrovertibly wrong: It would go beyond absurdity, it would be a kind of indecency, to raise the question of the sincerity of this grief even in order to affirm it. Indeed, the impossibility of our raising such a question is of the essence of our experience of the poem. Michael says nothing; he expresses nothing. It is not the case with him as it is with Hamlet that he has ‘that within which passeth show’. There is no within and without: he and his grief are one. We may not, then, speak of sincerity. But our sense of Michael’s being, of—so to speak—his being-in-grief, comes to us as a surprise, as if it were exceptional in its actuality, and valuable. And we are impelled to use some word which denotes the nature of this being and which accounts for the high value we put upon it. The word we employ for this purpose is ‘authenticity’.12

Trilling’s distinction between sincerity and authenticity indicates two modes of self-presentation. One mode, sincerity, is based upon an artful, theatrical, rhetorical presentation of the inner self with a marked awareness of, and a strategic eye upon, the public to which the self-presentation is aimed, and by which it may be calibrated and shaped. The other mode, authenticity, is defined by its resistance to the external social and historical forces that might compromise, infiltrate, and dislodge the “centere[d]”, “impenetrable” and “autonomous” manifest self.13 Amanda Anderson and Lynn M. Voskuil have both noted how Trilling’s concept of sincerity is “linked to that which we designate as society and the public”, that, in this concept, “self-awareness and public duty are inextricably related.”14 Further, even as Anderson and Voskuil recognize Trilling’s conception of sincerity as being subject to inherent artificiality (Anderson), or, implicit theatricality (Voskuil)15 as compared to his conception of authenticity as a kind of self-evidence that transcends socially-implicated expression, they both, in different ways, work to defend sincerity from readings that misconstrue it as a naïve and normative “understanding of stable selfhood” that presupposes the possibility of “transparent self-presentation.”16 From Anderson’s perspective sincerity is reinvigorated when we see it “more as a form of critical integrity rather than an absolute achievement of selfhood.”17 For Voskuil, the theatricality that is already implied by the category of sincerity is mapped back onto Trilling’s more

Introduction

5

impervious concept of authenticity so that theatricality and authenticity may be reconceived as integral rather than antithetical. In her application of the phrase “natural acting” (borrowed from George Henry Lewes’ theater criticism), Voskuil attempts to resurrect the highly theatricalized conception of authenticity that functioned as an unperturbing nineteenth-century explanation for many “mysterious operations” ranging from “the workings of inner subjectivity” to “the mechanisms of commodity culture.”18 Within the frame of nineteenth-century rhetorical theory that I focus on in this book, I am arguing for a similar kind of conception—that of a critically mannered sincerity—as useful and necessary for understanding how the vocabulary of nineteenth-century literary criticism can resonate in ways that may seem counterintuitive to us today. From Mill’s pragmatically-informed conception of romantic poetry, De Quincey’s declamatory notion of interiority and subjectivity, Ruskin’s ekphrastically-conceived model of critical truth, Pater’s arduous stylistic method of critical naturalization, to Wilde’s idea of the truthful critical mask, many of the most powerful nineteenth-century critical theories proceed by implicating an ideal of immediate truth with a model of rhetorical artfulness. To cite just one clear example of this kind of implication of the natural with the rhetorically artful, taken from a figure who will figure prominently in the early chapters of my book: In John Stuart Mill’s earliest polemic on art, a debating speech from around the time of his first mental crisis, Mill states as an accepted rhetorical tenet the notion that “the chief excellence of stile is to express the meaning exactly, and without any appearance of effort...as a man of sense and education, filled with his subject and quite indifferent to display, might be supposed to express it spontaneously.” Mill then goes on to remind us in the same speech “how much more art it requires to speak naturally than to speak affectedly.”19 Mill is using the word art, here, in the sense of the “ars celandi artem”, meaning “art concealing art”. The orator performs his indifference to “display” in order to communicate in a manner that will be supposed spontaneous. A theater review Mill wrote for the Examiner in the early 1830s—a notice on a performance by the French actress Mlle. Leotine Fay—conveys a similar idea of natural artfulness, and provides a thorough description of how Mill conceived of a successful dramatic enactment of sympathy. If the actor, writes Mill, possesses sufficient sensibility and imagination to conceive vividly the character and the situation, this vivid conception will of itself suggest to him the very thoughts and feelings which he himself would have if he were such a character, and were placed in such a situation. He will think them and feel them, not indeed in so lively a manner as if the case really were his own, but vividly enough to represent them in the true colors of nature. This is the secret of great histrionic as well as of great dramatic genius; and we suspect that the other fine arts might equally be included in the assertion. (MCW, 12.311)

In terms likely borrowed directly from Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Mill sketches out a performative theory of histrionics that he suspects might be applicable in a general way to “the other fine arts.”

6

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

As Mill goes on to test this suspicion in the critical essays he will soon write for a periodical, the Monthly Repository, he finds himself questioning the appropriateness of this theatrical model (the sincerity-model, we might call it) for one fine art in particular, the art of poetry. Indeed, Mill’s distinction between eloquence and poetry, which purportedly rescues poetry from being categorized in terms of the artful display of spontaneity found in successful oratory, is quite typical of early nineteenth-century attempts to theorize the possibility of a mode of verbal expression that can transcend the material factors defining language and its dissemination. The idea of poetry as a potentially unique kind of discourse is important for early nineteenth-century critical attempts to identify the possible locus of discursive authenticity within the market for new kinds of narrative and critical writing in periodical publications. For Trilling to use Wordsworth’s poetry as illustration for his distinction between a rhetoricized or theatricalized sincerity, on the one hand, and a self-evident authenticity, on the other, attests to the persistence of Mill’s own rhetorical distinctions, and of the discursive concerns that informed them. In The Ends of Rhetoric, John Bender and David Wellbery have argued that the traditional practice and doctrine of rhetoric as an art of using language persuasively with an identifiable body of rules to be observed by a speaker or writer was rendered obsolete in the nineteenth century because the following cultural presuppositions, or “conditions of impossibility of rhetoric” arose: (i) the emergence of transparency, neutrality and objectivity as the leading values of theoretical and practical discourse, (ii) the identification of expression as individual and the anchoring of imaginative discourse in subjectivity (rather than in learned rhetorical practices), (iii) the replacement of the oratorical model of communication by print and publishing, (iv) the emergence of Liberal political discourse as the language of communal exchange, and (v) the standardization of national languages.20 In lieu of Bender and Wellbery’s pronunciation of the death of rhetoric in the nineteenth-century, Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic promotes a continuous history of rhetoric and an analysis of its changing, rather than disappearing, significance. In my opening chapters I argue that the two primary factors informing conceptions of style and critical identity in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century are the apparent defeat of a continuous pragmatic rhetorical tradition by romantic conceptions of discourse and communication, and the significance of the fast-growing periodicals market to ideas of writing and readership. These two fields—rhetoric on the one hand, and periodicals on the other—cannot be separated if they are to be understood properly. It is my contention that what histories of English rhetoric like M. H. Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp and David Bartine’s Early English Reading Theory identify as the coherent tradition of pragmatic rhetoric does not so much disappear as it becomes scattered piecemeal in the essays of the burgeoning nineteenth-century literary magazines and reviews. The opening chapters of my book show how romantic and early Victorian critics identify the tenets of pragmatic rhetoric with periodical writing, and how these writers either promote or critique romantic

Introduction

7

conceptions of writing and communication in relation to this vision of a “prejudiced” and “rhetorical” marketplace of letters. To be more specific: Chapter 1 focuses on the perceived dangers of the fast growing periodical press and how these anxieties were conceived in terms of the character of the periodical reader, on the one hand, and the character of the periodical critic as he is made manifest in his written work, on the other. In the 1830s, as the periodical market in Britain grew, a common concern articulated by critics and authors about the “characteristic malady of the periodical press” was that this blossoming, competitive market increasingly demanded “novelty” at the expense of “quality” in writing. Critics like W. J. Fox, Thomas Carlyle, James Mill, and later his son, John Stuart would argue that the dangerous motives underlying any periodical article will be to produce an immediate effect, to achieve “unpostponed popularity” at the expense of a thorough consideration of the position it expresses.21 Further, the very commercial and perceived sensational nature of the new magazine market has significant consequences for rhetorical thinking concerned with how a serious author is to communicate something pressing in a manner that avoids the corrupting impact of this structure of publication. The next chapter (Chapter 2) turns its attention from early nineteenth-century discussions of the periodical market to some of the rhetorical concepts that informed the vocabulary of these discussions. I sketch out the pragmatic rhetorician’s understanding of perspicuity, truth and sincerity as technical modes of verbal communication and highlight the oral and elocutionary approach to language implicit in pragmatic theory. One important point of this chapter is to show how key elements of pragmatic rhetoric are strategically assimilated into the so-called romantic or expressive theories that are being consolidated at this time. Pragmatic concepts of discourse as adaptive and persuasive are integrated into romantic rhetorical theory so that certain kinds of poetry and criticism can be understood as both resistant and relevant to the new market for literature. This chapter then proceeds to ground my previous discussions of periodicals and rhetoric in the particular case of John Stuart Mill’s apprenticeship as a periodical critic in the 1830s. Mill’s concern with the matter of “character” in writing at this time focuses on how to signify in words a self-regulating identity in relation to a public. Mill explored the possibilities of the author’s relationship to a public body of readers in the more private, individual relationships he established with other periodical writers such as Thomas Carlyle (who first “discovered” Mill in a periodical, the Examiner, in 1831) and William Bridges Adams, whom Mill knew only through Adams’ magazine contributions published under the pseudonym, Junius Redivivus. I read Mill’s correspondence with Carlyle, and two of Mill’s early contributions to the Monthly Repository on this “unknown” periodical writer Junius Redivivus as documents revealing Mill’s particular exploration of authorial identity in the marketplace of letters. In formulating his theory of character in relation to particular individuals, Mill attempts to imagine himself into a republic of truthful words in which a “lasting utterance” is still possible, and intellectual

8

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

coherency still salvageable, even at a time when “portable form”—as William Hazlitt put it in 1823—was increasingly becoming the norm.22 Chapter 3 focuses on the more positive and implicated interpretations of the impact of the popular monthly magazine upon literature. The sensational and commercial qualities that seemed dangerous to Mill were lauded by many magazine writers as signs of transformation, progress and improvement both for literature and a new kind of readership. The periodical’s ephemerality represented a practical way to challenge political and literary dogmatisms. Mill’s desire to develop an identifiable and consistent character for a journal such as the Monthly Repository is absent in this praise of the “new” magazine, which advocates the power of magazine prose over the prestige of poetry. Subsequent portions of the chapter continue this discussion in a more specific way by analyzing the work of two different magazine critics’ writing between the 1820s and the 1830s. Here, I examine John Wilson’s Noctes Ambrosianae column, published in Blackwood’s, and Thomas Charles Morgan’s contributions to the New Monthly and Metropolitan magazines as a means of tracing the width of the continuum between pragmatic and romantic conceptions of rhetoric in late romantic and early Victorian magazine discussions of literature. T. C. Morgan was a materialist philosopher, medical doctor, and a prolific contributor of literary essays to a variety of monthly magazines from the 1820s to 40s. My survey of his periodical contributions to the New Monthly and Metropolitan around the time of the First Reform Bill (1832) reveals an approach to the periodical press that is progressive in its politics and irreverent in its view of literature. John Wilson’s collaborative critical column Noctes Ambrosianae (published in Blackwood’s Magazine from 1822–1835) represents a dialogical and theatrical approach to criticism that stages its critical discussions with an explicit awareness of the periodical medium that not only disseminates its content, but also shapes its form. By stressing the literary value of generic play that is so well suited to magazine publication, the Noctes challenges the discursive preeminence of poetry, and explores the potential of a selfconsciously ephemeral and market-conscious approach to literature. Chapter 4 focuses on Thomas De Quincey’s first writings for the London Magazine, and his subsequent essays on style and rhetoric published in Blackwood’s. De Quincey’s magazine criticism represents an example of the professional writer’s attempt to protect romantic ideals of writing from the realties of periodical authorship. In an article about the relationship of the monthly magazine to writing of merit, De Quincey develops a particularly literary conception of magazine writing. By contrast, De Quincey’s long essay on style serialized in Blackwood’s in the early 1840s is the product of an experienced journalist attempting to reconcile romantic ideals of poetic expression with the context of professional, periodical writing. De Quincey’s theory of style highlights the fact of publication as a rhetorical issue, key to the establishment of a worthwhile “culture of style.”23 Due to his extensive experience as a journalist, De Quincey develops a rhetorical theory that elaborates a psychology of literary production.

Introduction

9

Together, the first four chapters of my study provide a picture of the early nineteenth-century attempt to reconcile romantic and pragmatic conceptions of expression as a means of imagining how to address a new, growing middle-class reading audience. At mid-century, the serious writer’s foray into the domain of literary periodicals becomes increasingly fraught with the need to obey generic boundaries and rules of discursive protocol. Chapter 5 focuses on debates about truth and sincerity in writing during the 1850s and early 1860s, an important moment of transition for British criticism. By discussing the critical reception of John Ruskin’s shift from publishing books on art to essays on political economy in such magazines as the Cornhill and Fraser’s, I present an account of the new rules for criticism that are articulated at this time. While Ruskin’s argument for the truth of his own writing is unwavering, his writing style comes to be associated with the emotional, adjectival prose of the periodical critics of the 1850s, and ultimately is condemned according to the new precepts of “discipline” (David Masson) and “disinterestedness” (Matthew Arnold) that prevail into the next decade. These new precepts of rigor are articulated in highly gendered terms that pit the truly critical against the hysterical. The tenets of critical rigor articulated at this moment consolidate the link between sincerity and objectivity, and associate both categories with a “masculine” and exclusively “English” critical identity. These new rules for criticism come to dominate a certain branch of critical identity for the rest of the century by identifying literary criticism as a scientific discipline, and as an institutional profession. Pursuing the question of why Ruskin’s prose was perceived to be ineffective as a critical discourse, the next chapter considers the impact of developing activities in English philology upon prescriptions for communication. In Chapter 6 I argue that late Victorian stylistic theory invests the individual critic with the power to construct a desirable national character specifically by his ability to naturalize in style the linguistically manifest, multitudinous forces of modernity. I explain how Victorian principles of harmony and good taste in writing come to represent a solution to the disturbing, racially hybrid specter of language raised by philology, and to a social formation that is growing ethnically and culturally global in scope. Working in opposition to Teutonist rhetoricians, the cosmopolitan fin-de-siècle style-theorists I examine ascribe universalizing agency to the individual stylist, and approach the refined taste of such an aesthetic individual as a power to enact, formally, a new cultural unity. These concerns are then pursued further in a focused reading of Walter Pater’s theory of style and criticism. Pater is presented in opposition to contemporary, positivistic approaches to language that are concerned with the influence of “foreign”-rooted words upon the English language. I show how Pater positions himself against a climate of linguistic xenophobia and intellectual professionalization by analyzing his theorization of the scene of writing as one of a laborious assimilation of eclectic cultural influence. The problem of the relation of style to conceptions of community and the public is discussed in Chapter 7 where I treat the difficulties posed to a prose stylist by the implications of a mass audience. The 1890s represent a time when critics

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

10

were furiously in search of what Berel Lang has called “the styleme”, that is, the smallest unit of expression in which the particularity, the essence of an individual can be detected.24 In statistical stylistics and popular journalism—two emerging fields of fin-de-siècle culture explored in this chapter—I find an abundance of claims to the discovery of the individual (often called “soul” or “personality”) in style. These two distinct late Victorian domains of criticism (the academic and the journalistic) share an interest in the typological personality of the author at the expense of a conception of language as a substantive mediating factor in expression. I then go on to argue that Oscar Wilde opposes such typological claims by integrating Pater’s lesson about language as a mediating factor of culture and identity into his own theory of self-development and expression. Wilde’s message to his public is initially one of playful chastisement. He manipulates the discourse of his nemesis “public opinion” in order to reveal something new about a language that is, according to him, dangerously old. His best artistic criticisms, such as those published in Intentions, function as sophisticated explorations of the loopholes of his contemporary media as far as self-expression is concerned. Where his critical heritage has most often portrayed him as a brilliant enemy of Victorian earnestness, my reading of Wilde places him within the same post-romantic tradition as Mill, Ruskin, and other defenders of sincerity. This is not to say that Wilde did not manipulate the new media into unprecedented forms of travesty. But this fact, I believe, is not antithetical to a reading that suggests the underlying motive of his writing is toward a conception of critical truth born of a rich understanding of rhetoric and modern print media. As Wittgenstein wrote in his Recollections: “If you are unwilling to know who you are, your writing is a form of deceit.”25 Trilling explores the same problem in his reading, very early on in Sincerity and Authenticity, of Polonius’ dictum in Hamlet, “to thine own self be true.”26 Wilde’s position at the end of the nineteenth-century represents the culmination of some seventy years of anxiety for the nineteenth-century British critic about the widespread publication of critical identity. In the end, Wilde, much like Hamlet, claims that he knows who he is, but nobody else ever will, because under the present circumstances writing must always be a form of deceit. Notes 1

2

3 4

Oscar Wilde, “Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1891), in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 236. Hayden White, “The Problem of Style in Realistic Representation: Marx and Flaubert,” in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), p. 213. White’s description of the new motives of realism in the nineteenth century perfectly applies to many romantic and Victorian theories of style as well. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; New York: Prometheus Books, 2000), p. 4. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 10.

Introduction 5 6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22

23

24 25 26

11

Seymour Chatman, “The Styles of Narrative Codes,” in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), p. 169. These two schools of thought can be seen to run parallel in interesting ways to the “two moral horizons that came to serve late Victorians in Britain and America as alternative to belief in God”, referred to by Linda Dowling in The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 51. Dowling sets a “scientistic ethic” against “the Romantic ideal of self completion through art” followed by Morris, Pater and Wilde (p. 51). Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 14. For Smith’s extended discussion of the elements that go into the achievement of a sympathetic encounter see the entire section, “Of the Propriety of Action”, pp. 14–90. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 23. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 23. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 29. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 92. Trilling, p. 93. Trilling, p. 99. Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in Cultures of Theory (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 163; Lynn M. Voskuil, Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2004), p. 5. Anderson, The Way We Argue Now, p. 163; Voskuil, p. 5. Anderson, The Way We Argue Now, p. 167. Anderson, The Way We Argue Now, p. 167. Voskuil, p. 11. John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 21 vols., ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991), vol. 26, p. 414, my emphasis. Further references to volume and page numbers from Mill’s Collected Works shall be cited in my text as MCW, volume/page. John Bender and David E. Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric,” The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, eds Bender and Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 22. James Mill, “Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review,” Westminster Review 1 (1824): 209. William Hazlitt, “The Periodical Press,” The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols., ed. P. P. Howe (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1933), vol. 16, p. 221. This essay was originally published in the Edinburgh Review in 1823. Thomas De Quincey, Collected Writings, 14 vols., ed. David Masson (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1889–1890), vol. 10, p. 226. Henceforth to be cited as DCW, volume/page, in my text. Berel Lang, “Looking for the Styleme,” Critical Inquiry 9 (1982): 410. Cited in Charles Altieri, Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-person Expressivity and its Social Implications (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1994), p. 58. See Trilling, pp. 2–6.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

The Character of the Periodical Press A Society Without Spectacle England in the early 1830s is perceived by its contemporaries as an age of transition and manifests an awareness of some new difficulties for the expressive individual, some of which might be described in terms of “personal authenticity.”1 Think of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (1833) which marks the true beginning of the end of the “Life and Opinions” mode of criticism. Carlyle’s cranky editor diligently pieces together Professor Teufelsdröckh’s philosophy and identity from the scraps of enigmatic paper bags. Obvious questions that arise from Carlyle’s satire of critical biography are: What are the limits of the individual? Where does one publish the individual and his philosophy? (The editor considers Fraser’s Magazine, but hesitates because it would “insure both of entire misapprehension.”)2 How can we know the meaning of a statement that has been torn from its context? At what point in the editorial reconstruction does an authorial presence emerge; one that would allow us to say with confidence, upon reading a statement that has been removed from its context, “That’s not Teufelsdröckh!” or, “That’s not Teufelsdröckh! That’s Carlyle!” We might cite, with Michel Foucault, Saint Jerome’s four criteria for defining “an author-function”—and certainly such matters of constant value, theoretical coherence, stylistic unity, and manifest knowledge of historical incidents are at work in most attributions of identity to text—but I am more interested in attempting what Foucault says he is not doing in his important essay, that is to describe the kind of “system of valorization” an author was involved in at the beginning of the nineteenth century.3 To pursue such a question, two problems must be addressed: First, that of the representation of the periodical press, and of the stage of culture in which it thrives as an age of invention, elaboration, but not of “genius”, and second, the “autonomous” writer’s response to this idea, the anxieties inherent in this response, and how it leads to new ways of justifying the man of letters as distinctive in spite of his participation in a literary marketplace that contains a wide spectrum of undistinguished writing. The perception of a new kind of audience is key to both of these problems. For instance, James Eli Adams notes that the primary problem in Carlyle’s selfidentification as a writer was his concern with writing as an audience-directed practice. The identity of the writer is complicated by not knowing how he will be perceived by his readership, the hypothetical image of which is ambiguous to him.

14

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

In the case of Carlyle in particular, it is the problem of a hero of letters in an age which no longer assures the transcendent surveillance of the “great Taskmaster’s eye” which stamps the solitary act of writing as legitimately heroic. Without such assurance, “the aspiring hero’s court of appeal becomes the eye of the British public. And that self-conscious appeal to an earthly audience, Carlyle insists, brings the sure ruin of the hero’s mission.”4 Self-consciousness is dangerous for Carlyle because it signals an author’s awareness of an audience that undermines his autonomy, and thus, potentially, the authenticity of his expression. A recurrent protagonist of the next chapter, John Stuart Mill, is subject to a similar problem, and, at certain (later) stages in his life, he imagined his own intellectual work out of the present altogether, figuring communication, not as writers speaking to contemporaries, but as voices of the past speaking to those who will live in the future. Imagining a future audience that will be capable of understanding one’s utterance is one justification for continuing to speak in spite of a presently inadequate audience.5 But at the earliest point in his career as a public writer, Mill seriously considered the possibilities of communicating to an audience in the present. Mill’s tactics for establishing a solid authorial identity involved the creation of categories external to the logic of the literary marketplace and its sphere of prejudiced discourse, even as he was confident in the potential effect of a public and direct appeal to the understanding. Such categories, for Mill, describe communication by pitting truth against rhetoric, or, to use terms from the historyof-reading theory, his categories are primarily romantic rather than pragmatic. What I will consider in these opening chapters is how writers like Mill hoped to avoid making spectacles of themselves by rendering the “general effect” of their criticism into a purposeful, utilitarian prose. In doing so, such critics set a precedent for future criticism, one that is often invoked in attacks against the century’s other notorious prose writers, against the later Carlyle, and against Ruskin, for instance. My argument states that discursive categories of truth, for the rest of the century, find an origin in a “utilitarian” reading of poetry as a discourse of truth, analogous to (yet categorically different from) analytic philosophy. While poetry will not be a primary object of my analysis, I am interested in how critical discussions of poetic discourse contribute to new ways of describing the possibilities and powers of critical discourse. In its broadest formulation, these early chapters explore the psychology of the liberal author at a moment of great change and expansion in the English periodical market. The early 1830s in England mark the moment when a previously coherent tradition of pragmatic rhetoric is shattered and redistributed into the diverse localized sites of individual periodicals. This expanded publishing market represents a challenge to the public intellectual who hopes to be identified as a coherent individual. It is the logic of such an intellectual’s hope for a congruous and identifiable character that will be explored here.

The Character of the Periodical Press

15

Periodical Style and Character Carlyle called it “The Society for the Confusion of Useful Knowledge.”6 Mill chose to keep the original word, “Diffusion”, but replaced “Useful” with another in his statement that the grand achievement of the age was “the diffusion of superficial knowledge” (MCW, 12.232). Whether sarcastic or enthusiastic, all considerations of the expanding periodical press had to take into account its new and massive effect. As Richard Altick sums up the change in scope of the publishing industry during this period: “Between 1827 and 1832...London and Edinburgh publishers behaved as if they stood on a peak in Darien, beholding for the first time a vast sea of common readers.”7 The question, to state it in utilitarian terms, was whether or not the periodical press could be at all useful in the pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number, that is, for “educating” a large new reading class to be proper citizens.8 For a political intellectual, the press was a precarious but unavoidable platform, or as Mill called it in a letter to Carlyle, it was “your pulpit and mine, the Periodical Press” (MCW, 12.145). From this pulpit words could potentially transform readers into individuals. The optimistic view of how this occurs is presented by Edinburgh reviewer Henry Brougham who believes that periodicals are never slanderous or scurrilous, and that “nothing to excite the passions, to influence or corrupt—finds its way into their pages.9 These widely circulated periodicals (such as the Penny and Saturday magazines, and the Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, all of which are cited as exemplary in this regard) are especially important in cultivating and reflecting “the popular feeling”. Newspapers, the writer concedes, may also be said to accomplish this, however, “they sometimes try to excite and guide” the popular feeling, rather than serve and mirror it.10 The successful magazines such as those just mentioned are thus assigned the role of informing and representing a public. In this case, non-controversial periodical literature distributed on a wide scale—the literature of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, for instance—is depicted as the technology that can best serve to inform “the community” and keep it from falling under “such undue influence” as that of the newspapers which want forcefully to bring its readers to a certain point of view. The possibility of the most common objection tabled against cheap literature, namely that it interferes “with the production of works of a higher description”, Brougham denies, except in the case of cheap periodicals plagiarizing “productions of genius”. Thus, only “by interfering with the rights of property” might cheap literature hurt the cause of higher literature.11 As for the corrupting effects on the reading public, the Edinburgh reviewer sees no such thing coming from cheap periodicals; only from the newspapers. Such optimism is not typical of most accounts of the effects of widely distributed periodical publications on the quality of the literature it contains, and on the readers who consume it. Even the very structure of Brougham’s argument belies the need to defend the press against an array of serious criticisms. Showing a consistent awareness of the association of the wide diffusion of useful knowledge with “confusion” and “superficiality”, we find in essays and editorials of the 1820s

16

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

and 30s arguments against the nostalgia for an age without periodicals and the more substantive literary production that is associated with it. For example, as William Hazlitt argues in 1823, pitting the general critical bent of periodical writing against a nostalgia for genius: “We complain that this is a Critical age; and that no great works of Genius appear, because so much is said and written about them; while we ought to reverse the argument, and say, that it is because so many works of genius have appeared, and they have left us with little or nothing to do, but to think and talk about them—that if we did not do that, we should do nothing so good—and if we do this well, we cannot be said to do amiss!”12 Hazlitt’s essay functions primarily as a defense of periodical literature from attacks which, Hazlitt argues, are based upon nostalgic accounts of what literature had been in the past. He does not disagree that there have been superior periods of literary production in the past, in the age of Shakespeare, say, but argues that this represents no strike against the contemporary scene of writing which is almost completely dominated by critical essays composed for the periodical press. And by the early 1830s many magazine writers would go even further, using the present periodical context to debunk altogether the binary Hazlitt is still invested in. Thomas Charles Morgan, a regular contributor to the New Monthly and Metropolitan magazines from the 1820s to the 1840s, for example, praises the periodical as the medium that results in the progressive defeat of an outdated belief in literary immortality: [T]he doings and doers of this ‘literary world’ will not reach posterity…This, to be sure, is good comfort for us periodicals. Each of our monthly appearances may be considered as a death-blow to the one which preceded it. We lay no claims on posterity.13

The new magazine, as I will show in a later chapter, will assert that a sincere language, or, “Twaddle”—to use a favorite magazine-synonym for sincerity—will no longer need to prevail as the stylistic norm of essay writing, “and solemn plausibility will not confer the requisite lunation of immortality on a leading article.”14 The desire for immortality, however, dies hard. Barring the optimistic selfrepresentations planted by editors in order to sell the novelty and importance of periodicals, the periodical’s capacity for mediocrity is recognized by periodical critics to be at least as common an attribute as its novelty, and from this perspective periodicals come to personify life after the possibility of genius by those who cling to the concept, and who see themselves as writing against the odds of a leveling literary marketplace.15 This concern with genius is perhaps the key motivation for discussions of the effects of periodical literature upon contemporary writing and conceptions of authorship.16 Debates about the status of the “man of letters” were mostly absent from the cheaper serials like the Penny and Saturday magazines, but preoccupied the more expensive magazines and reviews of the period—journals like the Edinburgh Review, London Magazine, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country and The New Monthly Magazine—as these vehicles were themselves subject to the authorial categories used to describe and evaluate their contributors. That is to say, such

The Character of the Periodical Press

17

journals could (or should) have as much character as an author. The important magazines of the 1820s and 30s included the London, which carried much of Lamb and De Quincey, but was discontinued in 1829, Blackwood’s which displayed a most brilliant self-consciousness about itself as a medium of culture, and teetered within individual numbers between critical irreverence and literary seriousness, and Fraser’s, established in 1830 to capitalize on a continuation of the exuberance of the early Blackwood’s. These magazines served many functions at once: “meddlesome journal in the affairs of the moment, political monitor, philosophical and critical review, and amusement supplement”17, and they were integral in establishing new conceptions of literature, and new images for the man of letters. Some of the recurrent features by which these new images were generated include, Fraser’s “gallery” of portraits which appeared regularly throughout the 1830s (including one of Carlyle in 1833),18 the Athenaeum’s “Weekly Gossip on Literature and Arts” which reported on the public appearances, pronouncements and rivalries of the best known authors of the day,19 and, in a more general way, Blackwood’s presentation of books and writers “as it were with a kind of theatrical costume, with orchestra and stage-lights”, as Carlyle explained it to Mill, advising him on how he might spice up his own periodical, the London and Westminster Review, which Mill edited between the years 1835 and 1840.20 Mill was unable to provide the necessary mise en scène, but perhaps this was appropriate, he being the editor, not of a magazine, but of a review. Reviews generally appeared less often than the magazines and consisted of longer articles on serious subjects, usually without the satirical play that characterized many of the causeries that appeared in magazines. Originating in the eighteenth century as encyclopedic appraisers of contemporary literature, the nineteenth-century reviews presented themselves as prestigious and uncompromising, but not without some manifest anxiousness in those who wished to believe in these qualities the most.21 Joanne Shattock discusses the “mild schizophrenia” in review editors between the devotion and pride in their craft as a viable form of art on the one hand, and the fear that their trade was perhaps not the most respectable, on the other. “The taint of journalism”, writes Shattock, “and the threat it might pose to a professional career were a constant source of worry for potential reviewers.”22 But as a rule during this period, the importance of the reviews, and of the Edinburgh Review in particular, was recognized and accepted to be as “remote from caricature and fashionable portrait” as the Athenaeum may have wished itself to be. In short, the reviews were understood to be the primary route into the world of “serious” literature for young writers.23 To return, then, to the issue of the new magazine’s effect upon conceptions of authorship, I would suggest that the questions of sincerity and genius became especially important when antithetical categories, and the media disseminating these antitheses, seemed truly threatening. Positions opposing the devaluation of such concepts as solemnity and immortality are still strongly alive in all of the publications just surveyed, even the most self-consciously irreverent of them. However, the manner of critiquing the devaluing impact of periodicals varies widely, depending upon the political position from which it is mobilized. A basic

18

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

definition of morality lies at the core of any argument concerning what is worthy of solemn treatment, what ideas and values are lasting, and, ultimately, which authors embody such enduring principles in their writing. Consider, for a moment the following passage from a lecture entitled “On the Moral Fame of Authors” reprinted in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1831. This lecture argues that “there exists in every case a connection between the durability of works of genius, and the sincerity and soundness of the moral and religious principles which are displayed in them.”24 This argument about the relationship between morality and genius, formulated here in a notably archaic journal, underlies both liberal and conservative accounts of the value of literature and the power of authorship in an age of periodical writing. I should note that by liberal and conservative I mean, in this instance, the different stances held and vocabularies used by members of the educated classes in relation to what was still often referred to as “the people”, a blanket term that might refer to the working classes as well as the new middle class that was growing in size and power.25 Liberal and conservative attitudes towards “the people”, towards the relative value or danger of their enfranchisement, towards reform, democracy and the overall structure of British society, inform in marked ways debates about sincerity, authority, and the significance of periodical print vehicles that enable writers to address themselves to more readers than ever before. The basic difficulty that arises when one bases a conception of sincerity upon an expression of “sound moral principles” as is done in the Gentleman’s Magazine article, is that such principles are not obviously universal. Consequently, both conservative and liberal perspectives will employ the concept of sincerity against periodical writing, but will not agree on the moral underpinnings of such a concept. The conservative view of the growing influence of the press was that it functioned dangerously by superficial means to undercut the established order of a hierarchy founded on the ownership of property. As Archibald Alison stated his case in Blackwood’s in 1834, the influence of the press is undeniable and unstoppable, “it has effected a greater change in human affairs, than either gunpowder or the compass”, and the only means of turning back the democratic tide that the press represented at this time, was to call for an Established Press, modeled on the Established Church of England.26 From both sides (liberal and conservative) we find a distinction made between the offerings of the press and true, lasting literature, but from the conservative side it is the predominantly liberal message itself which marks the productions of the press as second rate: “The features by which the press,—meaning...those lighter productions which attract and are alone read by the multitude...—is now distinguished, are a general democratic, and an increasingly licentious character.”27 “[T]he inherent depravity of our nature” has shown itself in the fact that the liberal press sells more than the conservative, a comment, perhaps, on the wide circulation of the new Penny Magazine, or a reference to Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, with a circulation of about 50,000 in 1832, as compared to that of Blackwood’s (about 8,000 in 1831).28 This is proof enough that the audience of the press can not be left to choose their own literature: “children” when left to the choice of their food “will choose what is

The Character of the Periodical Press

19

sweet, in preference to what is salutary.”29 The conservative position admits that you cannot destroy the press, therefore it must be controlled, bought, or brought over to the advocacy of “stability” by whatever means possible. The liberal rebuttal to the Blackwood’s position, appearing in the Westminster Review, attributes to it a complete misunderstanding of the press, for “the character of the press” lies not in “enforcing opinion” but in sounding “the thunderous shouts” of “the multitudes assembled.”30 This optimistic position figures the popular press not as propaganda produced with the intention of “filling” the otherwise benign minds of “the numbers” (the recurrent expression used by Alison in the Blackwood’s article in reference to the liberal’s preferred term “Individuals”), but rather as a mirror of their cause. This image of the press is used to field a strong warning against the intentions of conservatives who want to organize a coup that would put the power of the press back in their hands. If the popular press is an organic extension of the majority of the population, then the intentions of any attempt to found an Established Press can only be a sinister means of keeping “certain classes of men...in bondage to some others.”31 This version of the character of the press, however hopeful, was never without its problems, even for the Westminster Review. The conservative question about how “the many” are “to be induced to read works or journals which cease to flatter their vanity, and discard those which do”32 is asked by both sides alike. This question underlies James Mill’s description of the “characteristic malady of the periodical press” in his article on the subject published in the Westminster in 1824, where he argues that “[p]eriodical literature depends upon immediate success” and “must, therefore, patronize the opinions which are now in vogue, the opinions of those who are now in power.”33 For James Mill the reigning power is the Edinburgh Review, which he believes is in service of an aristocratic conception of parliament. James Mill’s argument ultimately locates the problem of the press in its status as a commodity with a very short shelf life. The motives underlying any periodical production will be to produce an immediate effect, to achieve “unpostponed popularity” at the expense of a thorough consideration of the position that is being expressed. Thus the character of the periodical press is found lacking in a true motive toward virtue, in an ability to withstand the logic of the market, and in the coherent, self-regulated identity required to achieve such control.34 In other words, the periodical press is found to be lacking in character. The image that arises in the absence of a motive toward virtue and character is that of a banalizing dialectic between a superficial readership (children who only want sweets), and a corps of authors equally superficial in their persistent desire to win the applause and subscription of such a readership. The direction of this relationship is seen as regressive, leading away from the promotion and development of individuals capable of making unprejudiced moral choices. The concern of a public intellectual, such as John Stuart Mill, with “character” in writing, is partly a concern with the problem of how effectively to signify in words a self-regulating identity publicly. Mill’s most famous statement on character

20

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

appears in On Liberty and will be helpful to the completion this initial discussion. He writes: A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own has no character, no more than a steam engine has character.35

The question of character framed in the context of writing for a public becomes: How does one’s style convey that one is not merely a “steam engine”—fully determined by external circumstance—and also be, certainly, an expression of one’s own nature, and not a mimicked rendition of someone else’s? Another way of phrasing the question: How is subjective agency conveyed in language? For Mill—as I will argue shortly—rhetorical explanations of communication are not satisfactory. What must be communicated—in the sense that the expression of thought will lead to a community of independently thinking individuals—is the internal process of thought itself.36 This is what makes poetry an important mode of communication for Mill, and an exemplary mode, because it proceeds without a purposive conception of audience, in “utter unconsciousness of a listener.”37 Mill views writing that attempts to express internal culture through outward signs as determined by the prejudiced ideas of what such an internal culture is supposed to look like. A rhetorical expression of emotion thus demonstrates, for Mill, the weakness of that person’s character. True character is located in a process of original thought, and manifests itself in the written expression of such thought. But precisely how such truth and originality manifests itself in writing is a complicated matter. Janice Carlisle has argued that for Mill “writing and character are one and the same.”38 During the 1830s Mill was especially concerned with the quality of “character” that could be accomplished within the marketplace of periodical literature. There were basically three possibilities in writing within this sphere— three different writing characters—two of which were demarcated by their own publicly recognizable stylistic traits, and a third that was identifiable by its supposed transcendence of such traits. Briefly, the three categories might be named: 1) the false or disingenuous, 2) the radical or primitive, and 3) the true, sincere and earnest.39 The first of these is what most detractors of periodical writing claim has emerged as a result of the new literary marketplace. This is the superficial style according to James and J. S. Mill. It is founded upon ulterior motives, is hasty, written for attention and asserts itself, or an idea, only to capture a large portion of the market. Proponents of this mode of periodical writing—writers like Thomas Charles Morgan, whom I will discuss at greater length in a later chapter—praise the effects that the new conditions of publication have had on the modern author and his writing style, arguing that:

The Character of the Periodical Press

21

The competition, which has arisen between the authors of modern times, has had the further advantage of quickening all their movements. Compare the cumbrous periods and floundering verbiage of the very best writers of King James’s day, with the snipsnap epigram style of newspaper penny-a-line men. It is the difference between a broad wheel wagon and a railway steam-carriage. The great business of the modern author is to seize his opportunity.40

Such a definition of style divorces writing from character altogether. From Mill’s perspective, the “penny-a-line men” have no impulses or desires of their own. Their desires are those of the literary marketplace, and their snip snapping conveys their opportunism. The second category, that of the “primitive” style, is largely associated with the radical, working men’s publications (“the unstamped press”). The manner of writing in these sources is described in a review of London’s unstamped press from 1834 in the following terms: The style in which these feelings and opinions of the Unstamped find expression, is equally strong and awkward, racy and irregular, sincere—and unwashed. Short sentences, like right and left blows; long ones, wherein no time is given to breathe, and as though they had been written by a hand used to the flail; sometimes uncouth and hardly intelligible, and suddenly merging into an irregular blank verse; epithet crowding upon epithet, simile intervolved with simile and dis-simile; bad grammar, and ludicrous false figures of rhetoric:—such are the natural characteristics of these productions.41

According to the definition of character found in On Liberty, such writing, which manifests an amalgam of rhetorical influence, would be representative of a character that has been only partially “developed and modified by its own culture.” But it, at least, demonstrates a sincere expression of inherent impulses that are separable from an exclusive desire to sell numbers. This is the style of “the new lower-class readers” who were the object of religious and utilitarian educational publishing missions, and who had the potential to develop true character, if the new publishing technology was employed effectively.42 This position sounds (and is) patronizing, but public intellectuals like Mill took it very seriously. The style itself, especially its “unwashed” quality, is extremely threatening to the classes in power, and was the specific target of legislation in the Stamp Act of 1819, and in subsequent trials of the editors of radical pamphlets and magazines.43 While Mill supported the removal of all taxes upon ideas, and in this way supported the unstamped press, his support was ultimately based upon a vision of the slow transformation of the primitive style into that of cultivated sincerity. The third manner of writing makes claims to transparency. As a style it prefers to describe itself in moral categories, rather than formalistic ones. Thus, it is earnest, truthful and cultivated. These, as we shall see, are Mill’s discourses of poetry and philosophy as he discusses them in some of his early Monthly Repository essays; discourses which communicate with invisibility and an oblivion to audience and interlocutor. This third manner of writing presents itself as devoid of any stylistic tricks or mannerisms that might be learned from a handbook on

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

22

style. It aims to conceive writing in terms other than those of pragmatic rhetoric by stressing the importance of discourse as a verbally manifest ethos; by stressing what Wilde would (nearly) call the importance of being earnest. The next chapter explores the development of this category of expression as a mode that denotes critical truth and authority. In the first instance I will consider the emergence of this “style-less” style in the context of earlier rhetorical theories—and those of pragmatic rhetorician Benjamin Humphrey Smart, in particular—which approached it not as transcendent of discourse, or as a transparent discourse, but as one among a number of identifiable stylistic categories and tactics to be deployed in artful verbal communication. In the next instance, my discussion of John Stuart Mill’s early work as a literary critic for a monthly periodical, and the assumptions about poetry, criticism, author and audience that informed his early experience, will serve to explain in greater detail what I mean when I say that modern earnest criticism conflates discourse with character and style with ethos.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6 7 8

As I have already noted in my “Introduction”, for Lionel Trilling, the “story” of this period is about how an expression of “the sentiment of being” which is the goal of romantic art, and which contrives that the artist holds his status as an “integer, impenetrable, perdurable, and autonomous”, is increasingly subsumed under “the conception of personal authenticity” (Trilling, p. 99). Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Times of Herr Teufelsdröckh [1833] (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1937), p. 11. Sartor, of course, did appear in Fraser’s. For a discussion of Sartor as a “perfect fit” for this venue, and as a “culmination” of political prose in romantic literary magazines, see Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 157–181. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” trans. Josué V. Harari, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 101. James Eli Adams, “The Hero as Spectacle: Carlyle and the Persistence of Dandyism,” Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 219. Janice Carlisle, John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1991), pp. 12–13. Thomas Carlyle, Letters of Thomas Carlyle to John Stuart Mill, John Sterling and Robert Browning, ed. Alexander Carlyle, (New York: Haskel House, 1970), p. 118. Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 274. Interesting as a concern parallel to that of the press “representing” or shaping the people, is the historical fact that the political effect of petition and thus of popular sentiment between the years 1815 and 1833 was enormous. It was in great part responsible for the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 and the abolition of slavery in 1833. And yet, by the time of Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837, the vast majority of Britons were still not citizens. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 362–363.

The Character of the Periodical Press 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19

20 21

22

23 24 25

23

Henry Brougham, “Progress of the People—The Periodical Press,” Edinburgh Review 57 (1833): 239. Brougham, pp. 247, 248. Brougham, p. 248. William Hazlitt, “The Periodical Press”, p. 212. Thomas Charles Morgan [M.], “The Literary World,” New Monthly Magazine 10 (April 1824): 368. Thomas Charles Morgan [M.], “Literature of the Day:—The New Magazine,” The Metropolitan: Monthly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts 1 (1831): 22. On Mill’s self-distancing from, yet strategic use of the periodical press, see Stefan Collini, Public Moralists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp.124–129. For an interesting discussion of periodical essays about genius—especially essays of the 1830s in Blackwood’s, Fraser’s and the Monthly Repository—see David Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 12–45. Miriam H. Thrall, Rebellious Fraser’s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), p. 13. See William Maginn, “Thomas Carlyle,” Fraser’s Magazine 7 (1833): 706, and adjacent plate by Daniel Maclise. Maclise’s visual portrait is accompanied by Maginn’s stylistic portrait of Carlyle in exaggerated Carlylese: “Here hast thou, O Reader! the-from stone-printed effigies of Thomas Carlyle, the thunderwordoversetter of Herr Johann Wolfgang von Goethe”, etc. The weekly Athenaeum consisted of short reviews of the latest books, an “Original Papers” section that included poetry, essays and profiles of contemporary authors and artists, “Our Weekly Gossip on Literature and Art” which also served as a brief survey of other literary periodicals, and then reports on recent developments in science, fine arts, music and theater. It prided itself on being a vehicle for impartial criticism—”the only independent literary paper of the day”—by exhibiting a fair “picture of the literature of the day, equally remote from caricature and the fashionable portrait” (“To the Reader,” Athenaeum [February 27, 1830]: 127), and boasted that its impartiality worked to expose “the mystery of trade criticism and broad sheet paragraphs” (“Address,” Athenaeum [February 7, 1832]: 1). For more on this important weekly see Leslie Alexis Marchand, The Athenaeum: A Mirror of Victorian Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941). Cited in John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800 (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1991), p. 49. For the encyclopedic nature of the eighteenth-century review journal and its function as repository of the ideas of the age see Derek Roper, Reviewing before the Edinburgh, 1788–1802, (London: Methuen, 1978). Roper notes that “[a]ll the researches, speculations, discoveries, and achievements of that age of progress were recorded in these journals by means of a systematic review of as many new publications as possible—ideally, of all” (37). Joanne Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the Early Victorian Age (London, Leicester and New York: Leicester University Press, 1989), p. 5. Shattock, p. 18. Prince Esq. M. R. S. L Hoare, “On the Moral Fame of Authors,” The Gentleman’s Magazine 101 (1831): 628. For a discussion of the language used to describe the wider populace at the beginning of the Victorian period, see Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England

24

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37

38 39

40 41

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and especially Chapter 2, “The Languages of Popular Politics: From Radicalism to Liberalism”, pp. 27–55. Archibald Alison, “The Influence of the Press,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 36 (1834): 373. Alison, p. 373. For circulation figures, see Altick, p. 393. Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, an eclectic miscellany that appeared each Saturday and similar in intent to the Penny Magazine, described itself as a cheap journal aimed to inform everyone of something. At the cost of three halfpence in 1832, William Chambers argued it “must suit the convenience of every man in the British Dominions.” And in its content, it hoped “to be of extensive service to mankind at large,” and to be “of value to readers of all grades of society” (William Chambers, “The Editor’s Address to His Readers,” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 1 [1832]: 1). Alison, p. 383. “The Influence of the Press,” Westminster Review 21 (1834): 500. “Influence of the Press”, pp. 504–505. Alison, p. 379. James Mill, “Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review”, p. 209. This formulation of the problem, and the discussion that follows is indebted to Amanda Anderson’s Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 22–65; and Janice Carlisle’s John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character, pp. 127–167, both concerned with John Stuart Mill’s negotiation of Utilitarian and Idealist conceptions of character. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859; New York: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 124. The gendered nature of this problem becomes clear when one sees rational/internal self-regulation as a manly character, and influence from externals as generally associated with the more impressionable feminine character. As Amanda Anderson has argued in Tainted Souls and Painted Faces, the ‘fallen woman’ in Victorian culture is one who was understood to be incapable of cultivating a character strong enough to resist external influence, and who thus makes detrimental moral decisions. John Stuart Mill, “What is Poetry?” Literary Essays, ed. Edward Alexander, (Indianapolis & New York: The Bobbs-Merril Company, 1967), p. 56. I have chosen to use Alexander’s edition for the purposes of citing from Mill’s essays “What is Poetry?” and “The Two Kinds of Poetry”. Alexander reprints them as they appeared in the Monthly Repository and not (as Mill’s Collected Works does) in the combined version entitled “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties” which Mill included in his 1859 collection Dissertations and Discussions. Carlisle, p. 6. These three categories find analogs, to a certain extent, in the “three great audiences that fully emerge in the nineteenth century” according to Jon Klancher, the three being, “a nascent mass audience” toward whom the “false” style was directed, “an insurgent radical readership” identified by the radical/primitive style, and “a newly self-conscious middle-class,” trying its best to be earnest. Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1833 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 15. Morgan [M.], “Literature of the Day”, p. 19. R. H. Horne, “The ‘Unstamped Press’ in London,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine n.s. 1 (1834): 614–615.

The Character of the Periodical Press 42 43

25

Altick, p. 138. For a useful, brief account of the circumstances leading up to the Stamp Act of 1819 and the reemergence of the unstamped press in the 1830s see Altick, pp. 322–332, and for a longer discussion of the situation in the 1830s see Joel H. Wiener, The War of The Unstamped; The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–1836 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969). An interesting primary source on the topic is “The ‘Unstamped Press’ in London” from which I have cited above.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 2

The Origins of Modern Earnest Outsmarting Benjamin Humphrey Smart In an essay entitled “Style” appearing in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1833, an anonymous author spends some ink admonishing the “uncouth and obscure tortuosities of phrase” used by his contemporaries. The author wonders what could “induce Bentham to exhibit his barbarous jargon”, what could prevail upon a professional writer to write “in a style of which Hume would have been ashamed.”1 The assumed reason for these “vulgar and barbarous” manifestations is “the affectation of singularity”, that is, the desire to assert a notable and noticeable identity within the sea of published competition by employing a conspicuous manner of expression. The basic argument from which this author draws his authority to call a tortuosity a tortuosity is that which defines style as perspicuity: “No style can be called excellent which does not possess the qualities of perspicuity, correctness, elegance, harmony, and force.”2 Perspicuous writing is writing that would make Hume proud, and this definition of style is largely of Hume’s century. A very brief survey of influential rhetoric manuals supplies the perspicuity book of quotations: Joseph Priestley in The Rudiments of English Grammar (1761) opens his observations on style with the remark, “The use of writing, as of speaking, is to express our thoughts with certainty and perspicuity”;3 George Campbell explains in his Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) that of the five simple and original qualities of style, “the first and most essential is perspicuity”4; in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters (1783), Hugh Blair writes, “Perspicuity, it will be readily admitted, is the fundamental quality of style; a quality so essential to every kind of writing, that, for the want of it, nothing can atone”5; and Richard Whately in his Elements of Rhetoric (1828) writes, “It is sufficiently evident (though the maxim is often practically disregarded) that the first requisite of Style, not only in rhetorical, but in all compositions, is Perspicuity.”6 The argument of perspicuity is based upon the adaptation of a means to an end. Style is perfect, writes Priestley “when it adequately expresses the whole of what is intended”, and discourse of this kind is always purposive.7 This, according to George Campbell, is the nature and foundation of eloquence: “In speaking there is always some end proposed, or some effect in which the speaker intends to produce on the hearer. The word eloquence in its greatest latitude denotes “‘That art or talent by which the discourse is adapted to its end.’”8 The quotation in the passage from Campbell is taken from Quintillian, an important ancient proponent of

28

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Cicero’s orator perfectus, “the good man skilled in speaking” who combines oratory, philosophy and statesmanship.9 The matter of adapting one’s discourse to its end becomes fraught in rhetorical theory when the issue of reception is raised. Thomas Sheridan’s Course Lectures on Elocution (1762) provides an early distinction in English rhetorical theory between silent reading and reading aloud. For Sheridan, the successful expression of emotion was linked exclusively to the spoken form of language, rendering the activity of silent reading suspect as a result of the absence of so many markers of emphasis, which served to guarantee the expresser’s intention.10 Sheridan’s goal in his lectures is to counteract the “unnatural manner of reading and speaking” and to teach one how to deliver oneself “in the manner which is always used by persons who speak in earnest”, to have one’s “words pass for truth” and to bear “its stamp.”11 Here the bearer of truth is emphasis. And yet, once emphasis is identified as the main vehicle of truth, the expression of emotion loses its inherent truthvalue, its immediate link to nature. A convincing delivery does not necessarily entail a truthful one, and the spontaneity of expression becomes a matter of skill, both for the reader and the writer. Further, spontaneous expression is mediated by the capacity of the reader to recapture the tones of immediacy within a written text. Even if immediacy and earnestness were not rooted in art, its conveyance through the medium of the written text would require the skill of the reader. As Benjamin Humphrey Smart—arguably the last in a long, coherent tradition of pragmatic rhetoricians—explains in The Practice of Elocution (1832), when it comes to reading, the feeling that “the tones, and other signs...are real” must be taught. The work of education, he argues, “is to open to the pupil the stores of other minds—the master spirits of our species—and make him think and feel as they have thought and felt: and the best proof he can give of the reality of every impression, is the delivery of their language with the expression that belongs to it.”12 The solution to the difficulties inherent in a written expression of emotion is, according to Smart’s book, the re-insertion of voice, the practice of elocution. In each of these cases expression is tied to a rhetorical art of vocal performance for the achievement of sincerity. But with the increase of cheaper periodical publications, and the vision of a widespread and diverse popular readership that came with it, the reliance of successful, sincere expression upon vocal emphasis loses its allure as a viable model of communication for many theorists of style. In lieu of a rhetoric that defines reading in terms of the re-enactment of voice, we find the attribution of non-emphatic qualities to certain modes of discourse, and especially to the discourse of poetry. Much poetry criticism found in periodicals of the 1830s is occupied with the problem of what distinguishes poetry from other modes of discourse. Often the claim for poetry’s difference relies upon a notion of poetry as somehow surpassing the quotidian materiality of language. Through what S. Alexander Smith calls “the soul of poetry” (in a Blackwood’s essay of 1835 entitled “The Philosophy of Poetry”) “we experience a peculiar delight which no words conveying mere information could create.”13 In an 1834 survey of modern and contemporary poets, Egyrton Brydges remarks upon recent “compositions which at a distance look very

The Origins of Modern Earnest

29

much like poetry to the eye; but when they are approached, it is found to be all on the surface—there is no life beneath.” Poetry exists not in requisite “full dress and due form”, but somewhere deeper, beyond the medium of language. As he continues in this Fraser’s Magazine article, “sound and original thoughts will always shine through any language and shape.”14 Similarly, James Montgomery, in an 1833 essay, “The Sources of Poetry”, appearing in the Metropolitan Magazine, asserts that “[w]e cannot subjugate the immaterial breathings of poetry under the harsh code of common-place facts.”15 This last idea of “immaterial breathings” captures nicely the underlying intent of such discussions to conceive of poetic inspiration and power outside the material media of human breath, voice, and vocal emphasis. The idea of a non-emphatic discourse represented a solution to Smart’s focus on delivery because a rhetoric that asserts emphasis as the key expressive element of language renders the written or printed text suspect as a source of the author’s meaning.16 The force of meaning becomes transferred from the emphatic author’s voice to the reader who emphasizes otherwise emphatically dead letters. In the history of rhetoric, Sheridan’s theory leads to the development of the conceptual differentiation between reading to comprehend, and reading critically.17 As a way of compensating for the absence of the author’s voice in printed expression, nineteenth-century rhetorical theory comes to present writing as the depiction of the author’s mind. M. H. Abrams notes this transition in the history of aesthetics and rhetorical theory, remarking that “[t]he exploitation of literature as an index to personality first manifests itself in the early nineteenth century” as an “inevitable consequence of the expressive point of view”, by which he means the critical point of view of Wordsworth, and then of his more radical “followers of the 1830s”, including J. S. Mill.18 Early in this moment of critical transition, essayists like Joseph Priestley begin to employ the vocabulary of linguistics as a means of tracing the author’s mind in his work. As Murray Cohen puts it in his Sensible Words, “[o]nce syntactic features become the distinctive aspects of speech in this new way, then mental habits can easily be characterized by stylistic traits.”19 All of what I have presented thus far is appropriate to a discussion of eloquence, to the adaptation of the discourse towards its end. But when Mill posits the famous distinction in “What is Poetry?” between eloquence and poetry— keeping eloquence very much where it had been in rhetorical theory since Quintillian, at least, but aligning poetry with soliloquy, with expression born in “utter unconsciousness of a listener”—he introduces a scene of expression in which spontaneity, although still possibly the result of art, is not so for the purposes of being “supposed” spontaneous. The art or work of spontaneity in this case is only for the sake of better expressing one’s feelings to oneself. As one part of Mill’s definition runs: “Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind.”20 Such a definition conflates earlier theories of rhetoric which figure all modes of expression as purposive—as being directed toward someone

30

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

(“confessing itself to”)—with the more recent, romantic turn to expression as the symbolic representation of an author’s mind. In the first case, Mill’s model for poetry responds to the problem of emphatic expression by making the object and subject of poetic expression one and the same. Thus it has the form of instrumental communication without the truth-gap represented by the problem of emphasis, precisely because an audience outside of the subject does not factor into the first moment of expression. Insofar as “soliloquy” remains one means of describing the moment of poetic expression, Mill’s definition stays within the bounds of elocution, a delivery on-stage, but for nobody else.21 And yet, the contrast suggested between poetry and eloquence is ultimately a contrast of the spoken with the written, for a written account can best convey a truly solitary moment of expression, which Mill argues cannot be compromised by subsequent publication.22 A new conception of “reading well” emerges, similar in motive to Smart’s “delivery of [the author’s] language with the expression that belongs to it”, but with the significant difference that a mental reenactment of the associative process conveyed by a text is wanted, rather than a reproduction of tonal expression. This is the ability that Mill claims for the critic in the course of his essays on poetry, and which he hopes to instill in his reader. Reading becomes the practice of a non-emphatic and unprejudiced connection to the thought processes of the author, as they are manifest in language. Poetry—that special, discursive thing Mill prefers to define by antithesis—will cultivate this procedure of reading, and protect against the prejudicial rhetoric of wide-scale publishing.

Pragmatic Romanticism In “The Two Kinds of Poetry” (1833) Mill spells out this antidotal mode of reading by describing in the language of James Martineau’s associationist philosophy the effects of two significantly distinct kinds of poets.23 He links the poet of Culture to the successive mode of association, and the poet of Feeling to the synchronous mode. The primary difference between the two modes of association is that the synchronous mode shifts attention of the mind from the interlocutor to the moment and matter of expression that is in the process of unfolding. Mill describes the language of this kind of expression as being qualitatively different from a purposive rhetoric. It is “peculiarly appropriated to itself”, not filled with the concerns of social intercourse but rather “kept sacred from the contact of more vulgar objects of contemplation.”24 The following passage, which attempts to illustrate the poet of Feeling’s mode of expression, stands as a serious attempt to define a mode of discourse categorically different from other rhetorical modes associated with the expression of emotion: In listening to an oration, or reading a written discourse not professedly poetical, when do we begin to feel that the speaker or author is putting off the character of the orator or the prose writer, and is passing into the poet? Not when he begins to show strong

The Origins of Modern Earnest

31

feelings; then we merely say, he is earnest, he feels what he says; still less when he expresses himself in imagery; then, unless illustration be manifestly his sole object, we are apt to say, this is affectation. It is when the feeling (instead of passing away, or, if it continue, letting the train of thoughts run on exactly as they would have done if there were no influence at work but the mere intellect) becomes itself the originator of another train of association, which expels or blends with the former; when (for example) either his words, or the mode of their arrangement, are such as we spontaneously use only when in a state of excitement, proving that the mind is at least as much occupied by a passive state of its own feelings, as by the desire of attaining the premeditated end which the discourse has in view.25

Two points need to be stressed here. The first is how Mill makes the poet of Feeling immune to the descriptive categories of the rhetorician. Words and phrases such as, “to show strong feelings”, “earnest”, “imagery”, and “affectation”, have nothing to do with him. Even “character” becomes that which is merely put on by an orator or prose writer. One does not pass into the character of the poet, one passes into the poet. The second point, argued at length by W. David Shaw and Patrick Creevy, is that Mill is using Martineau’s associationist philosophy to make a case for the facticity inherent in the expression of feeling, importantly challenging Bentham (against whom Martineau was consciously writing) and his Platonic presentation of poetry as false mimesis.26 As Shaw puts it, Mill “believes there is a poetic way of arriving at truth, just as there is a scientific and a philosophic way.”27 Mill pushes the notion that poetry shares in the potential descriptive truth that one can find in a rigorous philosophical discourse, and acquires the associative freedom inherent in a non-analytical mode of the association of experience, without giving in to Bentham and James Mill’s account of poetry as having no grounding in nature. This step is crucial to Mill’s position as it allows him to stress the importance of an emotive discourse for the cultivation of moral responsibility while maintaining a stance against affected emotive expression. Poetry becomes the expression without ulterior motives which extends the capacity for feeling (for non-analytical associations) to “the material out of which all motives are made; the motives, consequently, which lead human beings to the pursuit of truth.”28 In this way, Mill attacks the Platonism of Bentham in order to further an attack on the oratorical character of much contemporary periodical writing. Up to this point, Mill is very much within a romantic tradition of rhetoric that separates the discourse of poetry from other discourses. As Bartine explains, the difference between pragmatic and romantic reading theory lies in a difference of opinion about figuration. Pragmatic theory highlights the importance of training readers to understand and employ linguistic structures and techniques, including figuration, by learning to identify and practice rhetorical techniques that constitute the tools of discourse’s power. Figurative language is not an enemy to truth, but the only possible means of communicating truth. Romantic reading theory, on the other hand, treats reading as a passive activity modeled after the taking of Biblical truth.29 Further, it compartmentalizes language into discourses of truth that attempt to rid themselves of figuration, and discourses of imagination and the passions (of

32

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

“literature”) that admit figuration “insofar as figuration expresse[s] ‘natural’ emotions.”30 For the romantic theory, in both categories of discourse, figuration is seen as primarily decorative, and not instrumental to expression. Many nineteenth-century critics, as we shall see, are at the crossroads of these two traditions, and, like Mill, find ingenious ways to reconcile what, from our contemporary perspective, seem irreconcilable theories of expression. In a manner reminiscent of Lynn Voskuil’s idea of “natural acting”—the mode by which Victorians “authenticated the [theatrical] spectacles they made of themselves”— Mill’s position is consistently anti-rhetorical, and thus romantic, but his conception of reading is not simply passive in the manner that Bartine presents romantic reading theory.31 Mill wants to imagine poetry as a discourse that has an unmitigated impact upon its reader, but he also understands that the reader must choose to read poetry in a way that will allow for the achievement of such an impact, and consequently he must grant some agency to the reader. In short, Mill is torn in his description of what occurs when one reads. As a means of illustrating this ambiguity, and suggesting a possible source for it, I will consider a text that brought the pragmatic version of eighteenth-century rhetoric and reading theory into the 1830s and that Mill certainly read (he wrote about it on two separate occasions in 1832), that is, Benjamin Humphrey Smart’s An Outline of Sematology (1831). Smart’s argument begins with a theory of language that suggests “all words are originally tropes” and leads into a theory of truth that is, at the same time, an extended defense of the virtues of figuration.32 Communication never results from “the power of so mingling essences that the two have a common intelligence” but rather “each mind can gain knowledge only by comparing and judging”33 by analogical or figurative thinking. The process of reading is thus one of active interpretation, as Smart develops “an instrumental theory of contextual meaning.”34 Smart states that “no communication can be made from one mind to another, but by means of knowledge which the other mind possesses” through the mediation of figurative language by which truth is conveyed.35 Shared knowledge, in this sense, becomes the tool-box needed to construct comparisons, and Smart, in naming and describing the many tropes by which such comparisons are made, saw himself as filling the common reader’s box up, as “it is something to a workman to have a name for his tools; for this implies that he can find them handily.”36 Mill’s description of the reception of poetry is similar to Smart’s model insofar as poetry is said to be interesting “only to those to whom it recalls [sic] what they have felt, or whose imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they might have been able to feel, had their outward circumstances been different”, yet, poetry is simultaneously defined by Mill as “the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion” suggesting that it conveys thought or feeling itself, without being subject to the corruptive attributes of figurative language.37 Mill understood language to be subject to abuse, and consequently he maintained an essentially Lockean opinion of figuration. Smart cites Locke’s polemic on the “abuse of words” which states that “all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented”—as

The Origins of Modern Earnest

33

opposed to an expression of “dry truth and real knowledge”—”are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment.”38 Against this position, Smart defends the various tropes and figures that make up the orator’s discourse, arguing that although “like all useful things” they may be abused, “to consider them by their nature as instruments of deception, only proves that the objector utterly misconceives the relation between thought and language”, for “[i]t is only by expedients that mind can unfold itself to mind;— language is made up of them; there is no such thing as an express and direct image of thought.”39 In his review of Smart’s book, Mill finds this idea that “we are not to confound the instrument with the intelligence that uses it” “perfectly right”, yet, in his essays on poetry he requires the separation of poetry from eloquence in order to preserve the possibility of a discourse that is not subject to abuse (MCW, 23.433). When speaking of eloquence, Smart does not differentiate in his examples between poetry and other discourses. In fact, most of his examples come from poems, and the core of his theory of how all language is used (including the language of poetry) is precisely what Mill is attempting to deny in his own conception of poetry. The following passage from Smart’s An Outline of Sematology stands as the antithesis to Mill’s notion of poetry as a communication overheard, and uttered in “utter unconsciousness of a listener”: “as a rhetorical instrument, language is, in truth, much more used to explore the minds of those who are addressed, than to represent, by an expression of correspondent unity, the thought of the speaker;— rather to put other minds into a certain posture or train of thinking, than pretending to convey at once what the speaker thinks.”40 For Smart, all communication is adaptive and persuasive; the utter unconsciousness of a listener could result only in silence. At the core of these different theories of communication are differing conceptions of language in relation to an audience, a readership, or, as Smart often imagines it, a crowd. Indeed, Smart justifies his entire project by referring to precisely the same problem that so preoccupies Mill, that is, “how the rapid communication of knowledge from mind to mind moulds and forms public opinion.” That this be the underlying concern of his theory of language and rhetoric is “too obvious not to have occurred to our reader” so he closes his remarks (ends his book) without discussing it further.41 Smart explicitly aligns the effects of obscurity in poetry with a haranguer speaking before “the rabble of a political party” and stringing together, plausibly, but not logically, any number of “the accustomed slang words of the party.”42 The effect is visceral, but not attached to the conveyance of meaning. Equally, a graceful speech before a pious congregation that interweaves “with unceasing repetitions...the sacred name, accompanied by varied epithets of, blessed, holy, and divine” is depicted as employing rhetorical techniques adapted to a persuasive end.43 The use of language in this way, whether in poetry or propaganda, is never judged negatively by Smart, as he assures us that “this effect, which is apt to be attributed to hypocrisy because the ordinary notions of language suggest no cause for it, our theory explains with no heavy scandal to the parties.”44 This is where Mill draws the line, for it is precisely according to the logic of hypocrisy ignored by Smart here that he

34

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

criticizes the press. The language of the press is hollow jargon, and its effect is not by truth, but by trope, Mill says. So is all expression, Smart argues, thus eliminating the categories of discourse crucial to the romantic ideology as it is carried into mid-century. Mill’s resistance to Smart’s conception of language and reading is emblematic not only of the canonization of a particular understanding of poetry, but of how discourse in a more general sense would come to be categorized throughout the century. The non-rhetorical (or non-tropological) status of poetry can subsequently be employed as a category of authenticity against expression that more obviously calls attention to the expedients of language. Such categories will be used against authors as a means of demonstrating their artifice, their effeminacy, and their rhetorical nature. In order to enforce a separation between the external manifestation of emotion in discourse, and poetry, Mill allows what rhetorical theory would label obscurity as a mode of expression with potentially parallel truth-value to perspicuous philosophical analysis.45 But as he pursues his exploration, the language of feeling is described as having an ultimate structure and purpose, and thus becomes an alternate mode of purposive discourse, which is judged according to how well it lives up to the expression of procedure accomplished by the discourse of rational argument. He can appreciate and explain obscurity in his own perspicuous style, a style better adapted to the diffusion of knowledge in the present state of society. Smart’s “adaptive” and persuasive model for poetry partially makes its way back as a result of Mill’s wish to address his audience. This recuperation of pragmatic elements into a romantic model emerges in Mill’s 1835 essay on Tennyson that is both a review of the practices of other reviewers, and a philosophical lesson on how to read poetry. Such a lesson is needed because there is a large class of readers who do not approach poetry with the necessary willingness “to feel it first and examine it afterwards.” Instead these readers “haggle about the details” thus losing the “general effect” of the poem (MCW, 1.403). At the heart of the lesson is Mill’s desire to convey the necessity of feeling poetry before analyzing it, and in this sense it is indicative of what Abrams would identify as an “expressive” theory of poetry.46 Smart’s rhetorical toolbox must first be hidden from readers, for they “will never enter into the spirit” of a poem “unless they surrender their imagination to the guidance of the poet” (MCW, 1.403), before they begin to take it apart. Mill’s conception of reading manifests itself in his spatial treatment of the materials. For instance, when Mill cites the whole of “The Legend of the Lady of Shalott” the poem is not interrupted by commentary, but there are asterisk marks at certain points in the poem, present, not to provide analysis—for one assumes that the reader has benefited from Mill’s warning against approaching a poem first with the intention of understanding it critically—but to read other critics’ poor readings of Tennyson. The poem is thus presented as an emotional experience for the reader, and the footnotes are present to establish the proper way of experiencing language as emotion by citing examples of the other critics who so appallingly failed to do so themselves. This use of the annotative apparatus to keep the commentary apart from the poetry emblemizes Mill’s impulse to compartmentalize discourses.

The Origins of Modern Earnest

35

Mill’s recuperation of Smart’s adaptive and persuasive model for poetry becomes apparent when, alongside this separation of discourses, a description of poetry that sounds increasingly like a description of philosophical prose appears: “Every great poet,” Mill goes on to say, “has been a great thinker;—has had a philosophy, though perhaps he did not call it by that name.” The poet of Feeling, with his “vivid representations of states of passive and dreamy emotion” is losing ground to the poet of Culture because his work is less likely to be sympathized with, and is “scarcely conducing at all to the noblest end of poetry as an intellectual pursuit, that of acting upon the desires and characters of mankind through their emotions, to raise them towards the perfection of their nature” (MCW, 1.413–414). Poetry now has a cultural raison d’être, an ethical, affective reason. As Mill continues in this passage: “This, like every other adaptation of means to ends, is the work of cultivated reason; and the poet’s success in it will be in proportion to the intrinsic value of his thoughts, and to the command which he has acquired over the materials of his imagination, for placing those thoughts in a strong light before the intellect, and impressing them on the feelings” (MCW, 1.414, my emphasis). Poetry becomes as purposive a discourse as philosophy when the poet is able to command the materials of his imagination so that his thoughts make a powerful impression upon the feelings of his reader. While Voskuil’s concept of natural acting is not directly applicable to the discursive categories in question—as it is not theatricalized affect but purposive rational argument that is here being absorbed as authentic emotion—the basic premise that an explicitly expository (in Voskuil’s context, performative) mode of expression be received as natural feeling is a useful way of framing Mill’s adaptation of a pragmatic rhetorical tenet into his own predominantly romantic model. In the polemical final paragraphs of the “Tennyson” essay, Mill advises the poet to define truth in his work “by the strongest evidence” and not by “poetical appearance” (MCW, 1.417). So, even as Mill seems to reject Benjamin Humphrey Smart’s pragmatic rhetorical model by advocating a discourse of “impartial reason” over one of ornamental persuasion and “poetical appearance”, he simultaneously integrates Smart’s key concept of discourse as adaptive and persuasive, here, by describing poetry as yet another mode of rational persuasion. In this sense, Mill outsmarts Smart. Armed with this hybrid rhetorical model, he is able to stand and speak to the crowd in the most up-to-date manner available, that is, by writing for a magazine. Mill’s early magazine essays present both poetry and philosophy as essentially non-rhetorical, non-tropological, yet still highly persuasive modes of discourse, effective in cultivating the character of the reader. These modes of communication function as the ideal antithesis to what is identified as the norm of periodical criticism. Mill’s “superior” models of communication also imply a developed character for the speaker, one that maintains its integrity despite the piecemeal nature by which his work is disseminated, and the increasingly enigmatic identity of his readership, both factors resulting from mechanisms of widespread publication. The question of how to ensure that what seems like sincere discourse is indeed so in the context of periodical publishing occupied Mill during his early

36

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

activities writing critical essays for The Monthly Repository. During this period of magazine apprenticeship Mill engages in two very different ways with an individual writer as a means of thinking through the implications of periodical writing for authorial character. In the first instance, Mill and Carlyle “meet” in the press and then develop a private, intimate correspondence about the significance of such a meeting in public. In the second instance, Mill imagines a public collaboration with a fellow contributor to the Monthly Repository whom Mill knows only by his pseudonym, “Junius Redivivus”.

Private Communion in a Periodical Public: Mill and Carlyle How to sustain a coherent and substantial critical voice and identity within widely disseminated newspaper and magazine venues informs the correspondence of Mill and Carlyle just as both writers were making forays into the wilderness of periodical publication. Carlyle became aware of Mill through his series of essays written for the Examiner in 1831 that appeared under the title “The Spirit of the Age”. Upon reading these papers Carlyle sought out the author as a “New Mystic” (MCW, 12.85–86). Thus, it can be said that their relationship began as a result of Mill’s having transcended the print medium in which his writing appeared. To convey the identity of an original thinker in one’s newspaper writings must have seemed extremely exceptional. Someone exceptional is, in any case, what Carlyle hoped to find. To pursue a journalist as a New Mystic was to believe in that author’s account of the kinds of knowledge being produced in this “transitional age” and the manner in which they were being produced. “The grand achievement of the present age”, Mill writes in the first of these essays, “is the diffusion of superficial knowledge”, and this, Mill states, is no small achievement as it allows for the distribution of ideas on a much wider scale than even a generation before. However, the general assumption that this increase in the distribution of certain kinds of knowledge has resulted in an age without prejudice is a point with which Mill does not agree. There is nothing, he remarks, “likely to render [the English reading public] much less accessible to the influence of imposture and charlatanerie than there ever was” (MCW, 12.232). The problem to be faced as a writer of periodical literature was how not to be confused with the charlatans by an audience that stood as a frightening enigma before the author pondering problems of self-representation. An important role fulfilled by Mill and Carlyle, each for the other, through their correspondence was that of providing a solid, identifiable audience within the obscure sea of readers that surrounded them. In the midst of seeking the anonymous faces to whom they addressed their reviews and essays of the 1830s, they imagined in each other, and for the other, a truly sympathetic and present reader. Much of the correspondence between Mill and Carlyle consists of the notification of their most recent or forthcoming publications, and notification that they have been written especially for each other’s eyes. In the first letter of Carlyle to Mill, Carlyle remarks that “A little paper entitled ‘Death of Goethe,’ in Bulwer’s

The Origins of Modern Earnest

37

next Magazine, is addressed to you among others; perhaps to Mrs. Austin and you more than others.”47 And as the correspondence proceeds, and its importance grows, the problems of knowing one’s audience that are often raised and complained about in the letters, give way to a sense that that unknown audience is secondary to this known one. The assurance of an authentic presence is the comfort that this correspondence provides, and this presence—”that I am here”, as Carlyle writes in the same letter—becomes increasingly a matter of judging what has been transmitted “in black on white.”48 The overall sense one gets from this period of the Mill/Carlyle correspondence is that it signifies for the correspondents the meeting of two authentic souls, the sense that it is not the particulars of daily existence that concerns them, but rather, a shared understanding of where they stood in their time. Sometimes in tension with this general purpose, of which both writers were aware, is the persistent request made by Carlyle for Mill to furnish gossip from the city as so little biographical news made its way to Craigenputtock, the small Scottish town where Carlyle would pass his summers. This request was an extension of the primary purpose of the correspondence, that is to give the writer a sense of a living and sympathetic community. Mill did more for Carlyle in this regard by sending him books, and especially periodicals that he otherwise would not have seen. So for certain stretches of time, Mill could be said to have provided Carlyle with a community into which he could imagine himself present. Mill obliged in furnishing such information as Carlyle requested so as to feed Carlyle’s imagination of a community (so that he could “make” a community for himself on the moors), but would ultimately back away from this role, as it threatened the significance of their more intimate, and more important community of two: I do not think I have any more facts to tell you; and I have filled my letter with nothing else. Another time I shall not wait for such an accumulation of what, after all, is very secondary material for a letter—especially between you and me, so little of whose conversation used ever to turn upon mere incidents. (MCW, 12.107)

This distinction between a language of “mere incidents” and a more important and serious discourse void of such matter is figured again in the ubiquitous distinctions and comparisons made between the larger audience of published writing and the true audience of one that each becomes for the other. Most often a response to a particular article is the springboard for the exposition of such a comparison. To take but one instance from a longer sequence of this sort of mirroring, in a letter dated 16 June 1832, Carlyle writes to Mill: Your approval of that Paper on Johnson, credible as it was to me on your word, gratified me more than a Stoic philosopher should be willing to confess. Very precious to me is such testimony. Tho’ a thousand voices cry out, “It is clever, let us praise it”; this is still nothing or very little; only a shade more than if they cried, “It is stupid, let us blame it.” But if one sincere voice say deliberately, “It is true, let me do it”; this is much; it is the highest encouragement that man can give to man. So I will fancy you one of my Scholars and Teachers, and rejoice in this relation, and hope from it.49

38

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Here Carlyle’s characterization of Mill as one of his Scholars and Teachers initiates the long series of modifications of modes of address that runs through these letters. There are constant adjustments to their respective conceptions of just who they should be for each other. Carlyle, as I have noted, hoped to have found another “Mystic” and generally stresses the similarities that exist between them. Even as Mill increasingly responds to such gestures by stressing their differences, Carlyle persists with appeals to the underlying trait that they have in common, which allows for a most sincere communication “of the sort the most precious for both parties, that man can bear for man” and argues that despite their apparent differences, their relation “rests on a true basis, and is a relation between two Somethings, and not between two Nothings.”50 For Carlyle, and especially in the context of publishing, all relationships become subject to this logic. They are either authentic (between two Somethings) or not. Carlyle put much effort into maintaining the sense of an authentic connection with Mill. The attribution of the presence of “Something” to a certain kind of earnest prose is the leitmotiv of Carlyle’s letters to Mill: “Your letters are honest genuine letters”; “‘Speech,’ is the answer. Speech, however; not Cackle.”51 Mill did not simply correspond with Carlyle on this issue; sometimes he found himself responding to it in his published prose. Mill’s essay “On Genius” (1832) seems an interesting example of his need to explore this idea of “true speech” at an early stage in his magazine writing career. The article is significant as the first essay in which Mill becomes conscious of his own stylistic character emerging in his prose. The essay written just prior to this one, “Periodical Literature: The Edinburgh Review” still bears the stamp of his father upon it, and functioned to identify him both politically and methodologically with the philosophic radicals. In “On Genius” Mill is consciously developing a Carlylean style contrary to the analytical style of Bentham and James Mill. Mill wrote to Carlyle concerning the amount of “character” that is present in the essay: “As for this article of mine, those who best know me will see more character in it than in anything I have ever published; other people will never guess it to be mine. You, I hope, will find all three articles true,52 the only praise I covet, & certainly rarer than any other in our times” (MCW, 12.118). The distinction between identifiable “character” in the manner of writing, and the essay’s “truth” (which is the ineffable glue that binds these two men of letters at this time) raises the problem of how to detect an author in his style. It is not clear that Mill understood the distinction between authorial character and style at the time of the composition of this essay. At this stage Mill is still enthusiastic about the idea of an intellectual communion53 with Carlyle, and the sign of Mill’s debt to Carlyle manifests itself in Carlyle’s presence, not only in the ideas of the essay, but in the character of the prose itself. Mill here attempts to embody Carlyle’s voice in order to convey the kind of truth he has found in Carlyle’s work, in order to see and understand with Carlyle’s language. To express accurately what Mill has only recently learned (seen clearly) from the writing of Carlyle, he must enact Carlyle’s genius as manifest in his manner of expression.54 It thus would be false to say that Mill was simply imitating Carlyle’s style at this stage, although it was not long before this would be precisely how it felt to Mill

The Origins of Modern Earnest

39

himself. Mill’s dismissal of the “On Genius” article in an 1840 letter to George Henry Lewes is a late censure of his flirtation with Carlylean English: “The ‘Genius’ paper is no favorite with me, especially in its boyish stile. It was written in the height of my Carlylism, a vice of style which I have since carefully striven to correct...I think Carlyle’s costume should be left to Carlyle whom alone it becomes & in whom it would soon become unpleasant if it were made common—& I have seen as you must have done, grievous symptoms of it being taken up by the lowest of the low” (MCW, 12.449).55 If Carlyle’s style no longer distinguishes Carlyle as a unique thinker, it loses its charm. At this later date Mill sees Carlyle’s language more than he sees with it. And even in 1832, the beginnings of the distancing that is apparent here begin to surface. As the correspondence between Mill and Carlyle goes on Mill increasingly identifies for Carlyle the important differences that exist between them. Even within the “On Genius” article itself we find Mill thinking like Mill in spite of his sounding like Carlyle. The basic argument of the essay is that genius is not inherent and spontaneously manifest in any particular object, manner of writing, or literary production. It is, instead, identified as an act of thinking, as Mill calls genius “nothing but a mind with capacity to know” (MCW, 1.334). Mill’s approach to defining the term necessarily leads him to develop a theory of reading that is antithetical to one modeled on a passive taking of Truth.56 There is a language very generally current in the world, which implies that knowledge can be vicarious; that when a truth has become known to any one, all who follow have nothing to do but passively to receive it; as if one man, by reading or listening, could transport another man’s knowledge ready manufactured into his own skull. As well might he try the experiment upon another man’s eyesight. Those who have no eyesight of their own, or who are so placed that they cannot conveniently use it, must believe upon trust; they cannot know. A man who knows may tell me what he knows, as far as words go, and I may learn to parrot it after him; but if I would know it, I must place my mind in the same state in which he has placed his; I must make the thought my own thought; I must verify the fact by my own observation, or by interrogating my own consciousness. (MCW, 1.331)

This model for genuine knowledge is very similar to one aspect of Mill’s model for the proper reading of poetry, and is what makes such an act of reading simultaneously a potentially transformative act of thinking. Mill does set up a hierarchy of intellectual activity. Yet, even as he gives the artist, the creative genius his due, he also asserts the role of the sensitive and analytical reader of that artist’s creation, the role of the critic, in other words, to be equally important. As Mill stresses this point: Do we not accordingly see that as much genius is often displayed in explaining the design and bringing out the hidden significance of the work of art, as in creating it? I have sometimes thought that conceptive genius is, in certain cases, even a higher faculty than creative. (MCW, 1.333)

40

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

What is significant here in the distinction made between conceptive and creative genius is the persistent preference for the faculty of self-consciousness. One sees the admiration for a Carlylean spirit of “unself-consciousness” by which one may live freely, and with which the creative mode of genius is perhaps compared. But, however debilitating an analytical consciousness may be from Carlyle’s perspective, as articulated in essays such as “Signs of the Times” (1829) and “Characteristics” (1831), for instance, it is perceived by Mill as a most worthy capacity.57 It is arguably this line of reasoning which led Mill away from Carlyle’s association of their sympathetic bond with certain heroic affinities that were exclusive to them. Carlyle insisted on finding in Mill a fellow Mystic. It is following a comment in a letter dated May 1, 1833—in which Carlyle claims to have recognized Mill as the “Mystic in England” in a local newspaper’s quotation of the Monthly Repository—that Mill feels compelled to confront his periodical soul-mate about their differences. The differences come down to the form that their respective modes of thinking take. In response to Carlyle’s description of him as a Mystic, Mill replies, “I am rather fitted to be a logical expounder...You I look upon as an artist”; and Mill continues by remarking that “it is the artist alone in whose hands Truth becomes impressive, and a living principle of action” (MCW, 12.113). Art is referred to here as a description of a particular manner in which Truth may appear, and be communicated. Logic is another manner in which it may appear, but is, at this moment in Mill’s thinking, of a lesser quality because it is a less “impressive” manifestation of Truth. It may be less impressive, yet, in this utilitarian age, it is perhaps more useful as a means of communicating to the quickly expanding reading public. “Impressive” has both positive and negative connotations in Mill’s vocabulary. For the proper readership (to Mill “and several others”) it is the most exceptional mode of discourse possible, having the most powerful effect. And yet, the same poetical discourse appearing in the sea of periodical literature, and surrounded by instances of feigned impressiveness, is sapped of some of its usefulness, if not its inherent value that is assured by a closed circle of intimate correspondents. In assuming the role of logician, and skirting that of poet (which he bestows upon Carlyle) Mill rescues himself from the risks of the poetic signature. A truly poetic discourse is easily misunderstood when it appears in the pages of a widely distributed periodical.58 It may come off as simply ornamental and artificial, and, although there is only the audience to blame for this misapprehension, the fact remains that its effect is diminished “in an age in which the understanding is more cultivated and developed than any of the other faculties” (MCW, 12.113). Mill’s flirtation with Carlyle’s style in the “On Genius” essay is short lived because it quickly feels inauthentic and carries the risk of being perceived so by the public. His energies are turned instead to a series of accounts of the relationship between analytical and poetic discourse, with the ultimate conclusion being that they are both very similar, mirroring parallel truths in different ways. This said, the significance to Mill of Carlyle’s model for an authentic, sympathetic communion (of two) that stands in opposition to the marketplace

The Origins of Modern Earnest

41

audience remains important for Mill. Such a relationship gives meaning to the terms “truth” and “character” and informs Mill’s formulation of authorial identity. Certainly during the period prior to the Monthly Repository essays on poetry, Mill was thinking about what it meant to connect, as a reader, with another author. When Carlyle would write, typically, to Mill, “there is something in your honest fellow-feeling, and klare Theilnahme, that I could not afford to part with. Man is infinitely precious to man! This truth one should know; and along with it the other truth, which I for many years too exclusively insisted on, that man is sufficient for himself”59— Mill might not have responded so effusively, but the implications of such a statement were certainly deemed worthy of his attention and thought. For “honest fellow-feeling” between author and reader was understood to be in peril due to a new writing market characterized by hasty literary production for hasty profit. A solution to the problem of how man might continue to be precious to man within this new publishing context was needed. Mill’s essays on “Junius Redivivus” represent an attempt to sketch out such a solution and to explain how the powerful sympathy identified with an intimate, private correspondence might be applied to the larger marketplace of letters. Junius, Antiquus and The Monthly Repository EPIGRAM TO JUNIUS REDIVIVUS ‘Stat nominis umbra’ Behold! how new and strange to mortal sight Where’er ‘tis seen, a shadow beaming light; Shine on—thy name will own no deeper shade Than that which is by its own brightness made.60

Mill chose to publish many of his earliest “serious” essays in the Monthly Repository.61 His choice of that journal had as much to do with its Unitarian affiliations as with its new political identifications,62 for although the radical stance that the journal had taken under the new editorship of William Johnson Fox was an obvious attraction to Mill, the quality of the readership that came with the journal appealed deeply to Mill’s sense of what could be accomplished by writing for a monthly.63 As he explained his choice of publication venue to Carlyle: I think that the M.R. is read by persons with open improvable minds, & that ideas thrown among them will find soil in which to germinate; especially as they read their own magazines for doctrine, & others only for amusement. You see I adhere to my system, which is to be as particular in the choice of my vehicles, as you are indiscriminate, & I think we are both right. (MCW, 12.118)

Mill chose his audience strategically and hoped by this choice to control the reception of his early explorations in criticism. Carlyle on the other hand stated his manner of dealing with the enigma of the reading public by employing his “hydraheaded method of publishing” in “so many monstrous Periodicals all at once.”64

42

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

The problem of audience informed Carlyle’s manner of address as well. When Mill questioned Carlyle about the persistent use of his technique of shifting between irony or sarcasm and earnestness, Carlyle replied, “I never know nor can even guess what or who my audience is, or whether I have any audience: thus too naturally I adjust myself on the Devil-may-care principle.”65 In choosing the Monthly Repository Mill chose a journal that was only beginning to shed its primarily sectarian identity, and that explicitly figured itself as distinct from the more showy and superficial English periodicals. It was thus perfect for keeping one safe in one’s earnestness. The Repository under Fox also stressed the importance of combining “movement” articles on specific political issues with serious essays on art topics. This was not merely accidental, but coherent with the journal’s philosophy, which was to approach the arts as a means of improving the character of its readership, thus buttressing the overtly political writings which attempted to improve their institutions.66 This last characterization of the journal is also a paraphrase of Mill’s perception of one regular contributor to the Repository, William Bridges Adams, who wrote under the pseudonym, Junius Redivivus.67 Although “unknown,” J. R. stood as an example of “a popular writer” with integrity. His relationship to the Monthly Repository was initiated by a letter he wrote concerning how the journal might “increase its power of utility” by sprucing up its exterior, without compromising its “valuable contents”.68 And once a regular contributor, he used the pages of the Repository to call for “[a] new standard of public writers” based upon a commitment to “[i]nflexible honesty, severe study, rigid self-denial, philosophic reasoning, and constant earnestness.” Nothing less “would change the face of a nation from evil to good.”69 Tastefully combining the seemingly antithetical ingredients of popularity and earnestness, this was a man to warm Mill’s heart. But who was he? It is beyond the scope and purpose of this section to explore the broad significance of the pseudonym in the periodical writing of this period, which, as Oscar Maurer has shown, predates the substantial movement towards signature in periodical journalism by thirty years.70 Some of the basic effects of anonymous and pseudonymous publication on conceptions of authorship should, however, be noted. First among them would be what Hazlitt refers to as the “portable form” that literature takes in an age of periodicals, noting how “booksellers will often refuse to purchase in volume, what they will give a handsome price for, if divided piecemeal, and fitted for occasional insertion in a newspaper or magazine; so that the only authors who, as a class, are not starving, are periodical essayists, as almost the only writers who can keep their reputation above water are anonymous critics.”71 A marketplace in which periodicals thrive does not reward a coherent, accountable authorial identity. The matter of anonymity Hazlitt mentions is related to this first problem when the work of a single author appears above an array of different names, or when a journal would cut and paste information from a variety of different authors without acknowledging (and sometimes without paying) any of them, thus erasing the power of “authorship” and threatening the rights of personal property. The Penny

The Origins of Modern Earnest

43

Magazine was accused of such questionable business practices, and of leveling-off a great variety of writing on numerous topics into that magazine’s even, “information” style.72 The result of anonymity may have been “the production of a corporate voice and corporate responsibility, with the editor ultimately assuming responsibility for unanimity or the illusion of it”,73 but it did not eliminate the strong impulse to see behind the editorial we, leading to speculation about identity (based mostly on field of reference, political position, and style), mis-attribution, and at times the shrouding of a recurring pseudonym in a powerful aura of mystery. As one (so called) Don Roll. de L. S. de la Manch comments in an 1832 article concerned with the complex effects of publication upon identity: “A dexterous half concealment of oneself—or even an entire mystery, so as to cause a universal inquest, as to ‘who is he I wonder?’ has been no idle charlanterie: and has been, more than almost anything else, ancillary to publication. Hence half the fame of Junius and three-fourths of that of Walter Scott.”74 Indeed, the question, “Who is Junius?” was asked persistently at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Between 1800 and 1828 there were at least nine booklength studies devoted to the subject, as well as discussions in articles and correspondence to magazines concerning the validity of the evidence upon which these studies based their assertions of identification.75 The problem of Junius’ true identity had not been convincingly solved, that is, with evidence that was not merely internal or based upon mere similarities in style and content between the writings that were collected under the name Junius, and those of, say, John Donning, or Richard Glover, or Charles Lloyd, or Lord George Sackville, or Lord Chatham, to name some of the possible candidates. In this context, Adams’ choice of “Junius Redivivus” (that is, “Junius ‘That Lives Again’”, or more interesting to the language of print culture, “Junius ‘Reissued’”) as his pseudonym displays a certain canniness in issues of authorial identity and anonymity. By 1833 Mill was thoroughly intrigued by the idea of the “person” who published under this name. He asked Carlyle if he was familiar with J. R.’s writings, complaining that he “takes too much pains to conceal his name and properties”, but assuring Carlyle that he “should know him...as far as he can be known from his writings” (MCW, 12.140). The matter of who lay behind the pseudonym was only a fraction of the intellectual intrigue; it was how a solid authorial identity could be conveyed in writing without a personal acquaintance of the author, and especially an author appearing in periodicals, that interested Mill. Mill’s first essay on Junius Redivivus begins with the argument that a text composed in sincerity can capture and express the identity of an individual, and that this quality in itself makes a text worthy of attention, that “we learn from it to know one human soul” (MCW, 1.369–70). Here we find a model of reading by which a sympathetic encounter with another human being in writing hinges on the faith of his sincerity, the key question being, how can one know an author one encounters exclusively in text, and further, in text that is attached to the elusive figure of the periodical pseudonym? Mill begins an answer to this question by “alluding” to a statement that Carlyle had recently made in one of his private letters to Mill: “‘Man is infinitely precious

44

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

to man,’...because in all of us...the beginning of all nobleness and strength is the faith that such nobleness and strength have existed and do exist in others, few soever and how scattered.”76 To allude to a private correspondence in a public essay (on the topic of “publishing” identity), to signify that one is making an allusion (by putting the passage between quotation marks) that only those with access to Mill’s private correspondence will be able to place, functions as a comment on the difficulty of marking an audience as a periodical writer. In this sense, Mill eludes the problem of a public audience by adding to it a personal gesture that helps limit his audience to that of a single correspondent, Carlyle himself, even as he will continue with an argument for the possibility of an equally “precious” encounter in a public text. One way of dealing with the anxiety of audience, then, is to present in one’s text an inside discourse that can function in the public sphere, but which also reserves its place within the more intimate relationship of an individual correspondence. When the essay is published, it can then be forwarded to the correspondent who has been quoted—perhaps the sole reader who will catch the allusion—in order to reinforce the feeling that man is infinitely precious to man. Beyond this idea of a known or inside audience, though, is the added sense that a writer sending his work out to an unknown public can do so with a faith that he will reach sympathetic and receptive readers, “few soever and how scattered.” Mill’s position concerning how this kind of sympathy can best be transported into the field of periodical publishing is unequivocal. The idea is to convey the effect of an individual mind and character, a real presence across a wide body of “scattered” published pieces. This will create space for the emergence of “faith” in the possibility of “nobleness and strength” in others: It is one of the evils of modern periodical writings, that we rarely learn from them to know their author. In those sibylline leaves wherein men scatter abroad their thoughts, or what seem their thoughts, we have little means of identifying the productions of the same sibyl; and no one particular oracle affords by itself sufficient materials for judging whether the prophet be a real soothsayer. It is so easy in a single article to pass off adopted ideas and feelings for the genuine produce of the writer’s mind; it is so difficult on one trial to detect him who, aiming only at the plausible, finds and converts to that meaner purpose the same arguments which occur to him who is earnestly seeking for the true. Would that everybody who writes anonymously adopt, like Junius Redivivus, a uniform signature, whereby all the emanations of one individual mind might have their common origin attested, great would be the advantage to upright and truthful writing, and great the increase of difficulties to imposture in all its kinds and degrees. (MCW, 1.370)

The greatest danger to the possibility of truthful writing is the fragmentation of authorial identity that anonymous periodical writing encourages by making possible the impersonation of earnestness. Grateful that he has found in this author a character he can trust, Mill stresses that J. R.’s writings are precious not “for what they are, but for what they show him to be: in so far as it is possible for inanimate letter-press, they give the word, once more, assurance of a man” (MCW,

The Origins of Modern Earnest

45

1.371). Mill goes on in this, the first of two articles on “The Writings of Junius Redivivus”, to thank J. R. for allowing his identity to emerge coherently, stating that he is grateful “that he has not cut up his literary identity into separate and small fragments, each of which might have belonged to an entire being so far inferior to what (it is impossible not to believe) HE is” (MCW, 1.371). Mill figures writing as a repository of identity, each small in itself, but if yoked by a unifying act of nomenclature, potentially large and substantial. In line with this solution to the possibility of feigned presence is Mill’s own consideration of the pseudonymous identity to be attached to his first Repository essays. For the essay, “On Genius” (1832), and the first essay on poetry (“What is Poetry?”[1833]) he used the name “Antiquus”, meaning “of that which was before in time”, or, simply that which is ancient. This pseudonym is quickly dropped with the appearance of the first Junius essay. When Antiquus appears again beneath “The Two Kinds of Poetry”, Mill attaches a note explaining that “[t]his signature is only used to identify the present article with that of a paper headed “What is Poetry?” in a former number of the ‘Repository’”, thus enacting his conception of grouping literary productions so that an authorial unity can be attributed to them, in spite of his already having decided that Antiquus was no longer appropriate to the authorial identity he hoped to convey. As he goes on to explain: “The writer had a reason for the title [Antiquus] when he first adopted it; but he has discarded it in his later articles, as giving a partial, and so far a false, notion of the spirit by which he would wish his thoughts and writings to be characterized.” The problem with Antiquus is that it marks him as an antiquarian, one who looks only backwards, and this is “unsuitable to a writer who attempts to look both ways.”77 Once content with a pseudonym that captured the critical character he hoped to convey, the idea was that he would use it regularly and in this way unify his disparate serial contributions. The last point to be made about Mill and J. R. is one that I have left largely unmentioned up to this point, although it could have been traced ad nauseam through Mill’s earliest letters to Carlyle, that is, Mill’s search following his first mental crisis, for the sentimental or poetic culture that he believed to be absent in himself.78 This is what Mill largely sought in his friendship with Carlyle, and it is what he ultimately “found” in his lifelong relationship with Harriet Taylor. In a letter Mill wrote to Adams, Mill again figures another person as the potential other-half to his own cold logic. The letter might be read as written from the perspective of an inadequate, dry Utilitarian seeking to wed with another in order to complete his character for the ultimate purpose of making possible a discourse that is simultaneously moving and true: We two possess what, next to community of purpose, is the greatest source of friendship between minds of any capacity; this is, not equality, for nothing can be so little interesting to a man as his own double; but, reciprocal superiority. Each of us knows many things which the other knows not, & can do many things which the other values but cannot himself do, or not so well. There is also just that difference of character between us which renders us highly valuable to each other in another way for I required

46

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic to be warmed, you perhaps occasionally to be calmed. We are almost as much a natural complement of one another as man and woman are: we are far stronger together than separately, & whatever both of us agree in, has a very good chance, I think, of being true. We are therefore made to encourage and assist one another. Our intimacy is its own reward, & we have only to consider in what way it may be made most useful to both of us. (MCW, 12.123–4)

The statement stands as a proposition to share an authorial identity that Mill feels he could participate in, and that he esteems as having enormous potential “for effecting unspeakable good” (MCW, 124). This idea would better Carlyle’s “man being precious to man”, for it would be a means of turning the detrimental effects of periodical publishing into an opportunity for creating even more powerful presences, beneath the guise of a recognizable pseudonym. As Hazlitt imagined a figure who would make less noise and do more good than any other public speaker by saying, “Cobbett and Junius together would have made a Cavanagh”,79 perhaps Mill imagined that he (Antiquus) and Junius Redivivus together could make a periodical persona whose effect would be sincerely powerful within the growing sphere of periodical communication that was available to a newly reformed populace. This, however, is ultimately hypothesis. It is clear from the remainder of the letter that Mill hopes to have some intellectual influence over a writer he sees as possessing a manner of writing that is extremely effective publicly because it is of the kind (not purely analytical) that instills the desire needed to inform a political motive even after the reasons for that motive have been understood.80 In Junius Redivivus, Mill found a “passionate” writer who could also be identified as a sincere authorial presence. Mill’s hope to tap into J. R.’s character raises important questions about the political effectiveness of different kinds of discourse within the specific circumstances of their dissemination. The hope is important, not only as a contribution to the endless narrative being written about the author-function we know as John Stuart Mill, but because it represents an exploration of the discursive boundaries for the attribution of such moral categories as earnestness, sincerity, and truthfulness. The case of Mill and the Monthly Repository is somewhat exceptional in that this particular periodical maintained a very coherent political and aesthetic vision at this time, and developed an equally coherent position on the serious dangers and pitfalls that widespread periodical publication might entail. Other monthlies of the same period, while equally outspoken in critiquing their magazine competitors, did not possess the same coherency in their critical rationale. Periodicals like Blackwood’s, Fraser’s, the New Monthly, the Metropolitan, etc., sometimes ranted against the degrading evils of periodical literature in the name of some more transcendent idea of Literature, and sometimes praised the quality of hastily produced magazine writing as a valuable alternative and challenge to antiquated aesthetic tenets that unjustifiably defend the capital L at all cost. If the present chapter has explored some of the argumentative and stylistic maneuvers of the precautionary position, the next chapter will consider magazine arguments that

The Origins of Modern Earnest

47

praise the periodical, and the magazine in particular, as a medium that helps to debunk superannuated ideologies and invigorate literary production.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

“Style,” Gentleman’s Magazine 103 (1833): 215. “Style”, Gentleman’s Magazine, p. 216. Joseph Priestley, The Rudiments of English Grammar (1761; Menston, England: The Scholar Press Limited, 1969), p. 45. George Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 216. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 2 vols (1783; V Basil: James Decker, 1801), vol. 1, p. 211. Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, ed. Douglas Ehninger (1828; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), p. 258. Priestley, p. 46. Campbell, p. 1. For a discussion of Cicero and Quintillian see Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 34–46. These skills are virtues that Mill was certainly taught to honor, and which he tried to enact in his own role as a public moralist. See, Collini, Public Moralists, pp. 121–169. David Bartine, Early English Reading Theory (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), p. 81. Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution (London: W. Strahan, 1762), p. 5. Benjamin Humphrey Smart, The Practice of Elocution (London: John Richardson, 1832), p. x. My emphasis. S. Alexander Smith, “The Philosophy of Poetry,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 38 (1835): 830. Egyrton Brydges, “Poetry—The Modern Poets,” Fraser’s Magazine 10 (1834): 436. James Montgomery, “The Sources of Poetry,” Metropolitan Magazine 8 (1833): 288. This point is made by Bartine in Early English Reading Theory, p. 83. The three thinkers most important to this development are Robert Lowth, Joseph Priestley and George Campbell, each of these author’s supporting a new conception of style as a manifestation of the author’s mind, and leading them “to explore in detail patterns of syntax and the patterns of figuration, and to see these patterns as essential manifestations of thought” (Bartine, Early English Reading Theory, p. 91). See also Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England 1640–1785 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 78–136 and Conley, pp. 213–225. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and Critical Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1958), pp. 23, 22. Cohen, p. 103. John Stuart Mill, Literary Essays, p. 56. Mill, Literary Essays, p. 56. Mill, Literary Essays, pp. 56–57.

48 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic James Martineau, “On the Life, Character and Writings of Dr. Priestley,” The Monthly Repository n.s. (April, 1833): 237–241. Mill, Literary Essays, p. 75n. Mill, Literary Essays, pp. 74–75. Throughout his essays on poetry, Mill seems to agree with Martineau who states that “[t]he imaginative emotion which an idea when vividly conceived excites in us, is not an illusion but a fact, as real as any other qualities of objects; and far from implying anything erroneous and delusive in our mental apprehension of the object, is quite consistent with the most accurate knowledge and most perfect practical recognition of all its physical and intellectual laws and relations.” Cited in Patrick Creevy, “J. S. Mill and James Martineau: Possibilities and Limitations of an Associationist Aesthetic,” Victorian Poetry 24 (1986): 125. W. David Shaw, The Lucid Veil: Poetic Truth in the Victorian Age (London: The Athlone Press, 1987), p. 20. Mill, Literary Essays, pp. 76–77. This is what David Bartine calls the romantic theory of reading. He identifies it as being based upon a passive relationship to a powerful text of Truth (such as the bible), and traces a genealogy of this theory from John Dennis’ eighteenth-century Longinian reading plan in which “a properly receptive reader, one gifted with taste, would humble himself or herself before works of genius and await moments of transport”, through Isaac Watts, Joseph Priestley and Thomas Sheridan, and then to Coleridge and Matthew Arnold and Mill. (David Bartine, Reading Criticism and Culture, [Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1991], pp. 10–11). Bartine’s inclusion of Mill in this genealogy seems to me incorrect for reasons I explain in this chapter. Bartine, Reading Criticism and Culture, pp. 13–14. Voskuil, p. 3. Benjamin Humphrey Smart, An Outline of Sematology, or an Essay Towards Establishing a New Theory of Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric (London: John Richardson, 1831), p. 214. Smart, An Outline of Sematology, p. 20. Bartine, Early English Reading Theory, p. 137. For a lengthy citation from Smart’s theory of tropes see Smart, An Outline of Sematology, pp. 210–214. Smart, An Outline of Sematology, p. 211. Mill, Literary Essays, p. 53. To cite a more explicit statement of this view of the relationship between language and feeling: “There is no generic distinction between the imagery which is the expression of feeling and the imagery which is felt to harmonize with feeling. They are identical. The imagery in which feeling utters itself forth from within, is also that in which it delights when presented to it from without” (Mill, Literary Essays, p. 63). Smart, An Outline of Sematology, pp. 208–209n. Smart, An Outline of Sematology, p. 210. Smart, An Outline of Sematology, p. 184. Smart, An Outline of Sematology, p. 250. Mill’s On Liberty represents a brilliant critical statement of the obvious, in this regard. Smart, An Outline of Sematology, p. 217. Smart, An Outline of Sematology, p. 219. Smart, An Outline of Sematology, p. 219.

The Origins of Modern Earnest 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

49

According to the terms of rhetorical theory, much of what Mill is describing to be characteristic of poetry would fall under the heading of obscure writing. In eighteenthcentury rhetorical theory, where there is a notion of perspicuity, there is generally a description of its opposite. Briefly, at one pole, rhetorical theory defines obscurity as failed perspicuity, and the rhetorician’s task in this case is to catalogue all the possible causes of such a failure, so that it can be avoided (topics of discussion in Whatley’s Elements of Rhetoric, for example, being “Danger from diffuseness, Danger from excess conciseness,” etc., pp. 257–259). At the other pole we find the (generally uncomfortable) question, “When is Obscurity Apposite, if ever it be Apposite, and what kind?” (This, from Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, p. 273). The response to this question locates obscurity as a successful way to affect the passions. Sophists use it to spread falsehood; poets use it to achieve a sublime effect. Edmund Burke’s conception of poetry as the superior medium by which the sublime effect can be achieved would be one example of poetry as an affecting discourse of obscurity. When confronted with a properly conveyed, obscure passage of writing, Burke says, “[t]he mind is hurried out of itself, by a crowd of great confused images; which affect because they are crowded and confused.” Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; Notre Dame, London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), pp. 60–62. And of all expressive media, language (especially poetry) works best to affect the imagination, because it is the least illustrational of the arts. To locate Mill in the context of this problem is to observe the concept of obscurity analyzed in psychological terms, such as those of James Martineau. Obscurity is no longer failed perspicuity, but another means of representing perception organized by non-analytical associations. It is similar to Burke’s “crowd of great confused images”, but ultimately is sanctioned as a discourse of truth by association theory. It is in this sense that I approach Mill’s definition of poetry as an un-rhetorical discourse of truthful and purposive obscurity. Abrams, The Mirror and The Lamp, pp. 21–26. Carlyle, Letters, p. 6. Carlyle, Letters, p. 4. Carlyle, Letters, pp. 8–9. Carlyle, Letters, p. 12. Carlyle, Letters, pp. 11, 37. The other two articles Mill refers to are “Corporation and Church Property” and “Austin on Jurisprudence”. The term is Carlyle’s in a letter dated 12 January 1833, where he writes to Mill: “Besides the comfortable, available intelligence your letters bring, there is a most wholesome feeling of communion comes over me in your neighbourhood; the agreeable momento: Thou art not alone, then!” (Carlyle, Letters, p. 37). Mill’s essay, “Comparison of the Tendencies of French and English Intellect” is another interesting example from this period of his needing to use a different style in order to convey a different manner of thinking and being. It was first composed in 1833 as the opening article of a proposed series for the Saint-Simonian paper Le Globe in Paris, but remained the only article written on the subject as the French paper folded soon after the article appeared. The primary purpose of the series was to promote a better understanding of these nations (England and France) one for the other. The essay was also published in the Monthly Repository (November 1833) with an interesting opening paragraph concerning the “egotistical style” in which Mill claims the piece had been written, explaining that “the tone of French composition is naturally egotistical, and it is hardly possible not, after much mixing with Frenchmen,

50

55

56 57 58

59 60 61

62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic to assume the externals of egotism in discussing with them, whether orally, or in writing” (MCW, 12.442). It is interesting to note that the article had been composed by Mill in English and only translated afterwards, so the externals of egotism which inform the style of his text are not language-bound, rather he is playing the Frenchman in English. Exactly who Mill is referring to as having “taken up” Carlyle is not clear, although by 1840 Carlyle’s style has become a more common object of parody than it had been through the 1830s. For a survey of nineteenth-century parodies of Carlyle’s manner of writing, see G. B. Tennyson, “Parody as Style: Carlyle and his Parodists,” in Carlyle and His Contemporaries: Essays in Honor of Charles Richard Sanders, ed. John Clubbe (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1976), pp. 298–316. I have already noted the first known parody of Carlyle’s style, written by Maginn and published in Fraser’s in 1833 (just before Sartor Resartus appeared). As discussed above, this is what David Bartine calls the romantic theory of reading (Reading Criticism and Culture, pp. 10–11). Carlyle’s “Signs of the Times” and “Characteristics” both appeared, originally, in the Edinburgh Review. Mill makes this point again in the breakup letter of 1 May 1833, soon after the publication of “What is Poetry?”: “[M]y word again is partly intelligible to many more persons than yours is, because mine is presented in the logical and mechanical form which partakes most of this age and country, yours is the artistical and poetical (at least in one sense of those words though not the sense I have been recently giving them) which finds least entrance into any minds now, except when it comes before them as mere dilettantism and pretends not to make any serious call upon them to change their lives” (MCW, 12.155–6). Carlyle, Letters, pp. 30–31. This anonymous epigram appeared just below an installment of Mill’s essay “Junius Redivivus” in the Monthly Repository, n.s. 6 (1833): 270. As opposed to the great amount of journalistic articles he published in the Examiner during the same period. Between 1830 and 1834 he had written more than 200 newspaper pieces, most of them commissioned leaders on topics concerning France. In the political articles it contained, Monthly Repository adhered to a list of radical demands which included: the extension of suffrage, the establishment of a national system of education, the repeal of all taxes on the press, the reform of abuses in the Church, revision of the Poor Laws, the abolition of monopolies, especially those maintained through the Corn Laws, and the abolition of all slavery. See Francis Edward Mineka, The Dissidence of Dissent: The Monthly Repository, 1806–1838 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), p. 261. Another attraction was the opportunity to associate more with Harriet Taylor in a nonjudgmental context. See Mineka, pp. 271–276. Carlyle, Letters, p. 21. Carlyle, Letters, p. 74. Mineka, pp. 297–298. Henceforth referred to as J. R. in this chapter. William Bridges Adams [Junius Redivivus], “Junius Redivivus on the Conduct of The Monthly Repository,” Monthly Repository n.s. 6 (1832): 793–794. William Bridges Adams, “On the Morality of Authors,” Monthly Repository n.s. 7 (1833): 309. Oscar Maurer, Jr., “Anonymity vs. Signature in Victorian Reviewing,” Studies in English 28 (1948): 2–7.

The Origins of Modern Earnest 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79

80

51

William Hazlitt, “The Periodical Press”, p. 221. Altick, p. 272. Shattock, p. 15. [Don Roll. de L. S De la Manch], “Character or Spirit, or Mystery, of the Art of Publishing Oneself, or Anything,” The Diamond Magazine 8 (1832): 105–106. For a list of these studies see Alvar Ellegärd, Who Was Junius? (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1962), pp. 151–152. Carlyle, Letters, p. 370. My emphasis. Mill, Literary Essays, p. 78. The notorious crisis in Mill’s mental history is narrated in his Autobiography (1873). Reflection upon his state of despair led Mill to theorize that “the habit of analysis” so encouraged by his utilitarian education had worn his feelings away, leaving him emotionally barren. As he puts it: “Analytic habits may…strengthen the association between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeling (MCW, 1.141–142). Beginning in a first emotional encounter with a passage from Marmontel’s “Mémoires” (a passage in which Marmontel relates the death of his father), to a more extensive reading of Wordsworth and other Romantic poets, Mill began his process of rehabilitation. According to his narrative of the crisis, the reading of poetry extended the field of associations he could experience, thus allowing him to feel the good in what he logically knew was right. Cited in Mary Jacobus, “The Art of Managing Books: Romantic Prose and the Writing of the Past,” Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 242. Or, as Mill points out, J. R. avoids “the error of expecting that the regeneration of mankind, if practicable at all, is to be brought about exclusively by the cultivation of what they somewhat loosely term the reasoning faculty; forgetting that reasoning must be supplied with premises, complete as well as correct, if it is to arrive at any conclusions, and that it cannot furnish any test of the principles or facts from which it sets out; forgetting too that, even supposing perfect knowledge to be attained, no good will come of it, unless the ends, to which the means have been pointed out, are first desired” (MCW, 1.375–376).

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 3

The Downfall of Authority and The New Magazine Under W. J. Fox’s editorship, the Monthly Repository figured itself as a journal that hoped “to produce, from time to time, articles which deserve better than the hasty perusal bestowed on what is hired from a circulating library.”1 An editorial comment about periodical literature published in the second series Monthly Repository in 1827 spells out the general opinion about most contemporary monthly magazines held by Mill, Fox, and other intellectuals who, at this time, were hoping to reach a wider audience without succumbing to the tactics they associated with periodical writers of sensational novelty: The fear of not being sufficiently stimulant is the curse of English periodical literature,—the reason why, with few exceptions, it is the most vapid and frivolous of the sort in Europe. Those who want stimulants may read (if they can) the New Monthly Magazine, or the last new novel.—But those who wish to give a journal a durable and respectable character, to place it on a footing even with some of those of France, (which we are apt to suppose a land opposed to dullness,) must follow at a humbler distance the sterling value of some of the foreign works of a similar class. Let the Conductors choose their subjects for their real importance, not their accordance with the vanities of the day; and if they are not strong enough to lead in a good cause, at least let them not follow in a bad one by giving way to the frivolous tastes which disgrace both the public and those who cater for it.2

The relative merits and dangers of frivolous stimulation were aggressively debated in the various monthly magazines’ reports upon each other throughout the 1820s and 30s. Blackwood’s (1817) would decry the “frivolity…revolting to a sound masculine taste” of the New Monthly Magazine (1814/1821), The Metropolitan Magazine (1831/1833) in its editorial prospectus of 1831 would attack all of its monthly competitors of “diffusing false impressions…to such an extent as to injure seriously the cause of literature”, and Fraser’s Magazine (1830) would rebut that those behind the Metropolitan Magazine (Thomas Campbell, Cyrus Redding, and James Cochrane, in particular) were claiming sound principles for themselves that they “had violated, or disregarded” throughout their lives in periodical publishing.3 On one level, these mêlées over “respectability” (a vernacular term for “gentility”) were representative of the professional, middle-class writer’s aspirations to rise from his station into something imitative of the aristocracy and of a periodical magazine’s aspiration to be literature.4 And yet, behind such

54

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

reciprocal attacks was also the implicit sense that they were staged for the stimulation of the public, some of them even written under the cover of different periodicals by the same hand. Of William Maginn, the author of that last attack on the Metropolitan, for example, it was said that he “would write a leader in The Standard one evening, answer it in The True Sun the following day and abuse both in John Bull on the ensuing Sunday.”5 For Mill and his Monthly Repository cohorts, this was one of the most dangerous implications of the market’s demand for novelty, that it encouraged an author to adopt a variety of (potentially opposing and false) positions, arguments and styles, in a sense, submitting authorial identity to the prescriptions of the market, and diluting any motive to set truthful ideas in print. On the other hand, many magazine writers defended these commercially driven qualities as the harbingers of demystifying and even revolutionary improvements upon literature and the minds of its readers. Mark Parker explores this connection in Literary Magazines and British Romanticism, arguing that, “[a]s the new industrial order rationalizes older modes of production and recasts older social attitudes, so too does the magazine, and as such it represents the middle-class revolution that characterizes this stage of capitalism.”6 Blackwood’s writer William Stevenson linked the booming industry of middle-class monthly magazines to revolutionary change and intellectual progress in an 1824 article where he argues that “[t]he stirring up of the mind which took place during the French revolution…gave rise to the demand for more numerous and various publications”, leading in turn to the improvement of the “Monthly Magazine” to such an extent that “those who had always been Magazine-readers, though perhaps at first they did not understand and relish the contents of the new one, gradually entered into its spirit: their attention was excited; their minds were set a working; and attentive and active minds must rise and expand.”7 What was “new” about magazines like Blackwood’s, Fraser’s, the London Magazine, and especially (for my purposes in this chapter) the New Monthly and Metropolitan magazines, was their increasing stress upon the magazine’s status as a venue for original, market-savvy works in a variety of (primarily prose) genres, as opposed to the magazines modeled on those predating 1800, which were miscellanies of all kinds of materials, including lists (births, deaths, preferments, etc.) of a more parochial or specifically communal use, without the same stress on the originality of the contents.8 The new magazine’s sense of novelty did have its historical precedents, though. Samuel Johnson’s Rambler (1750) essays provided one of the primary models for the kind of writing that was revived as a novel mode of literary composition in literary magazines of the 1820s and 30s. As Walter Graham has noted, the contents of the Rambler essays “made all things new” again, in particular, by developing a range of subjects “pertaining to the personal concerns of the man of letters, the miseries and dangers of literary ambition, the relations of authors with the public in the years when declining patronage made the profession of writing a hazardous one.”9 In these essays, Johnson developed an ongoing discussion about the relative merits and dangers of novelty in writing. In the

The Downfall of Authority and The New Magazine

55

Rambler 154, for instance, he makes bold claims for the significance of invention in writing if an author is to establish a legacy for himself: “Whatever hopes for the veneration of mankind must have invention in the design or execution; either the effect itself must be new or the means by which it is produced…That which hopes to resist the blast of malignity, and stand firm against the attacks of time, must contain some original principle of growth.”10 And yet even as Johnson claims that “nothing can strongly strike or affect us but what is rare or sudden”, in another Rambler essay (“The Power of Novelty”, Rambler 78), he tempers his praise for the new by remarking that, although “it is the business of wisdom and virtue to select among numberless objects striving for our notice”, the best choice is not made by considering the relative “rareness or frequency” of a piece, “for nothing is valuable [simply] because it is either rare or common.”11 While Jean Hagstrum has argued that “a union of familiarity and novelty” is at the very core of Johnson’s theory of literary pleasure, James Engell qualifies this concept of “familiarity”, suggesting “Johnson was not advocating that writers base their works on allusion” or “show off their learning”, but rather, he “makes originality itself dependent on an earned, direct knowledge of life and manners, not on a literary education.”12 In a sense, the magazine writers I am discussing abide by one half of Johnson’s aesthetic principle of writing which demanded that an author strike a balance between “truth and novelty”, stressing, as they did, the value of novelty as an end in itself, and praising, in their own semi-serious way, and through explicit discussion of the magazine and its contents as commodities subject to the market, the literary and artistic effects of this contemporary authorial circumstance. To cite one typical example of the new magazine’s praise of the new, Isaac D’Israeli, in his report “On the Present State of Our Literature” for New Monthly Magazine in 1832 (soon after Edward Bulwer Lytton took over the editorship), disproves the repeated claims “that our Literature is not in a sound and healthy state” by pointing first to the inevitable dependence of literature upon the tastes of the market, and then to the innovative genre of writing that the present market has spawned: Have you not had several ingenious writers who have provided you with the title, and written without a subject? Have they not discovered a new art of writing?—the Art of writing on Nothing! Delightful art! unencumbered by knowledge, and never delayed by the pause of meditation! How unreasonable the complaint that our metropolitan authors, under the guise of Literature, have long ceased to be literary! Why should you look for any literature in productions where authors do not pretend to be men of letters, but simply prosperous artists in their new-found Art, who are eloquent when arguing in jest,—original from their elevating absurdity,—and, with such chimerical excellencies, display their adroitness in doing things the wrong way, like walking backwards, or dancing topsy-turvy?13

D’Israeli goes on to trace the origin of this kind of writing to Johnson’s Rambler and Addison’s Spectator, identifying Johnson’s era as “[t]he first age of taste and novelty in our popular literature” and noting that this was also the first time that writers recognized the patronage of literature by booksellers, and that new kinds of writing resulted, mainly from the governing tastes of the market.14 In other words,

56

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

the present age of novelty characterized by the “Art of writing on Nothing” represents a significant development of a venerable tradition of market-driven novelty writing, and the main aspect of the advance it represents is manifest in the present literature’s resistance to older ways of judging literature by its intrinsic value. There is nothing intrinsic to this kind of writing, which D’Israeli says, “is living among shadows where it would be hopeless to look for anything tangible or permanent.” As a result of its emptiness, “the intrinsic value [of the present literature] can receive no increase, and suffer no diminution by its fashion.”15 Not all accounts of the magazine’s effects upon literature were so gleefully cynical. In the draft for an article concerned with the implications of the monthly magazine for “literature” of merit, Thomas De Quincey (in 1821)16 claims a special status for a particular kind of writing as literature and argues that the role of the magazine is not so much to reflect its readership and merely comment upon art, as to shape the attitudes of the public by pursuing an open policy of innovation and experimentation.17 Like Mill, De Quincey pits the magazine against the review, but draws very different conclusions from this opposition. The program De Quincey describes for the London Magazine runs counter to a review’s dogmatic editorial presence and unified political character and imagines, in its stead, “the absence of any one presiding mind studiously impressing its own stamp upon the whole body of articles.”18 In the name of freedom of expression, and of the production of the finest art, such a necessarily “false” stamp of identity should be avoided because, as he argues, “[s]uch an over-ruling predominance of any individual mind cannot but be an injury with relation to literature, by cramping and distorting the natural movements of energetic thinkers.”19 Samuel Carter Hall (who became editor of the New Monthly in 1830) endorsed this same idea of the magazine as a reflection of “the free thoughts of its contributors”, stating, “that the tastes and opinions of one person should never form the limit of a periodical work.” This claim to open diversity was general among most of the monthly magazines at this time.20 The desire we witnessed in Mill to develop an identifiable character for a journal is absent, and in its place is a sense that the new market for the “variety of shorter prose forms” that Lee Erickson (in The Economy of Literary Form)21 claims took over the poetry audience at this time, might also be an opportunity for these new prose forms to acquire the cultural prestige associated with verse. The novelty inherent in this kind of magazine prose drew upon the essay as a mode that would enliven print with the ephemeral newness of dialogue or conversation in progress. The essay does not teach, it relates (“I do not teach, I tell”, says Montaigne22) and when an essayist quotes from another text, it is not done for the sake of authorizing his own opinions, but to introduce an element of dialogue into his personal account of the object under consideration. As Graham Good remarks in his account of the essay as genre: “Instead of imposing a discursive order on experience, the essay lets its discourse take the shape of experience. Judgments may result, but…[t]hey are provisional, and cannot be detached from their occasion.”23 This understanding of the essay as a discursive mode that is emergent in the author’s experience of composition, and self-

The Downfall of Authority and The New Magazine

57

consciously grounded in the occasion of its production, helps to explain the idea of novelty according to which the early nineteenth-century magazine was defining itself. The essay as a generic mode allows the writer the freedom to develop a shape for his writing according to the object or experience he is communicating, and with a persistent awareness of his writing as one emergent voice among a field of discourses delivered in widely divergent registers. The generic advantages of what I am calling the periodical essay or sketch lie in the license it provides for the periodical writer to develop a distinct discursive form from his chosen place of utterance in relation to the numerous forms of print media that surround him, and with a specifically articulated dialogical awareness. Robert Morrison has argued correctly that, as the single most important writer for Blackwood’s during its first twenty-five years, John Wilson was well suited to magazine writing “because it allowed him to write prolifically but in short bursts, and in a format that prized novelty, paradox and variety” and allowed him to capitalize “on the fragmented and contradictory nature of his knowledge to produce a kind of rhapsodic intellectual play in which he ranged broadly over myriad topics, fictionalized friendships and animosities, blurred boundaries and conventions, and poured forth an endless series of parodies, diatribes, caricatures, and squibs.”24 The “new magazine” writer developed the essay as a genre that could subsume other popular forms of verbal communication (like advertising copy, the after dinner speech, the news brief, etc.) and in doing so underscored the relationship between writer and reader as one of both dialogical and especially of commercial exchange with a deadpan approach that defends the progressive and literary value of writing as this kind of ephemeral commodity. The idea of ephemerality itself takes on a new, positive meaning. Rather than signify the undesirable antithesis to that which is lasting and eternal (written for the ages), it comes to signify a writerly stance that works with great awareness of temporal and social context, and finds its import from within its own contextual particularities. The generically integrative kind of essay ubiquitous in the new magazine enables the writer to function as a filter for the most quotidian ideas and opinions, and to treat them simultaneously as transient and of lasting import. While the essay of this kind largely resists abstraction and general assertion, and— as T. W. Adorno remarks in “The Essay as Form”—is such that it actively works against totalizing impulses due to its essential reliance upon “[l]uck and play” and its stress upon the thinking process as opposed to the product of thought, this form cannot resist totalizing gestures altogether.25 As Adorno notes, “the desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.”26 In the context of the “new magazine” essay, a fastidious treatment of the latest literary gossip, fad or happening functions as an assertion of that material’s inherent importance at this particular moment. The transitory is rendered eternal, as Adorno puts it, only insofar as the essayist is committed to rendering the details of his topic to the point that they accumulate into a complete commodity worth consuming at the present time. Indeed, the selfconscious sense of historicity that informs Arnold’s essay of the 1860s on the function of criticism, written for the sake of great literature past and future, is in

58

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

play here in these essays of the 1820s and 30s as well, but it is alive with a different motive. An essay acquires the authority of a totalizing assertion about a given topic only to the extent that the assertion is embedded in the material specificity of the essay’s subject matter, and the particular stance of the essayist on his subject. The essayist’s take on his topic is all-important, until the next month’s issue. The fact that a periodical essay was implicitly short-lived represented a practical solution both to political dogmatism and to the reverential idealization of literature as a transcendent mode of expression, and this valuation of magazine writing is articulated in a variety of ways. Horace Smith commenting upon the weakness of poetry in 1828, and defending the general literature of the day against the “grumbling critics” who claim that “everything we now write, is light, trivial, and ephemeral”, argues in response that the revival of literature rests upon the shoulders of the magazines because “the incessant demand for novelty will ultimately necessitate a change, and the improvement will be sudden and great.”27 John Wilson in one flowery encomium to periodical publications likens the ephemerality of periodicals to the ephemeral beauty of nature’s plants: “The flowers are the periodicals of the earth”, he says, “[s]ome of them are ephemeral, and their contents are exhaled between the rising and the setting of the sun”, and they are ever young for their periodical renewal, the transience of their numbers analogous to the exfoliation of dead skin: “Only look at Maga! One hundred and forty-eight months old! and yet lovely as maiden between frock and gown—even as sweet sixteen! Not a wrinkle on cheek or forehead!”28 In short, ephemerality is praised as that which allows for the persistence of novelty. The dialogical and generally hybrid nature of this manner of periodical essay I am describing worked to posit the literary value of ephemerality as a force that shed antiquated dogmatic values, and tumbled generic hierarchies that were aimed at preserving the integrity of specific discourses (such as poetry) against the material conditions of periodical publication. The rest of this chapter explores in greater detail two cases of this kind of venue-conscious critique. First, in the periodical criticism of T. C. Morgan we will see a barrage of piecemeal challenges to the assumed benefits of a consolidated conception of authorship, and to the idea of literary posterity. My second example will be the case of some early episodes of the Blackwood’s recurrent critical series Noctes Ambrosianae which used polyvocal and generically diverse criticism, and imitative satire, to ground poetry in its material surroundings by dramatizing its effusions, narrativizing its conceits, and ventriloquizing its authoritative voice. These two figures present a different vision of periodical writing from that of John Stuart Mill. Thomas Charles Morgan’s deflating and decentering stance on authorship stands in strong antithesis to Mill’s desire for control over authorial identity in the periodical sphere, and his unswerving materialist approach to literature contrasts starkly with Mill’s early desire to secure a consistently identifiable soul in magazine ink, as was manifest in Mill’s pursuit of a periodical soul mate in William Bridges Adams. From another angle, but in a similar vein, John Wilson’s treatment of poetry as a discourse to be satirized, rewritten and

The Downfall of Authority and The New Magazine

59

interrupted with debunking critical observations poses a challenge to Mill’s desire to cordon off poetry from other discourses and to assert critical prose as a discursive mode equal in integrity and power to that of poetry. Morgan and Mill shared some common ground from a political standpoint as both articulated strong libertarian views. What is especially interesting about Morgan’s stance in comparison with Mill’s, then, is how Morgan embraces certain aspects of marketdriven magazine writing as potentially progressive, where Mill eschews those same qualities as either superfluous or dangerous. Wilson’s Noctes Ambrosianae put poetic discourse under a scrutinizing spotlight and figured poetry as soliloquy within a dialogical context, spoken before a reading audience on an ephemeral magazine stage. The Noctes highlighted the magazine venue as stage both in the sense of dramatic locale—as it is literally written like a play script, complete with stage directions for its cast of characters who are dubbed the council of “Magazinity”29—and in the temporal sense of that word, suggesting a provisional, historical moment.30 Together, Morgan and Wilson present an interesting and entertaining critique of romantic rhetoric’s attempt to rescue certain modes of writing from the material motives of magazine publishing.

The Unromantic Journalist: M. At the core of this section is an essay that appeared in the inaugural issue of the Metropolitan: A Monthly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, a magazine begun by its publisher James Cochrane in May 1831, named by Cochrane and Cyrus Redding, with Thomas Campbell as its first (puppet) editor, and Captain Frederick Marryat, A. J. Valpy, and one identified as Mr. M., as investors.31 The possible import of this magazine for my exploration of the significance of magazine writing for ideas of literature in the 1830s depended, in part, upon the correct authorial attribution for the essay entitled, “Literature of the Day—The New Magazine”, and signed, simply, “M.”32 Possible candidates, it seemed to me, were: Captain Marryat, James Morgan and Charles Mackenzie, all of whom contributed to the first two issues of the magazine, or possibly even Cyrus Redding, also an early contributor, perhaps writing under the initial of the title that he came up with for this new monthly. That was the short list. The main issue was to determine the relative “seriousness” of the essay in question. Was it a true manifesto about the implications of the magazine for literature (not likely, but if so then probably written by James Montgomery)? Was it an early justification for the serialization of fiction that would give the Metropolitan, under the editorship of Marryat in the mid-1830s, a literary historical significance?33 Or was it a parody instilled with truthfulness, in the mode of William Hazlitt, by some proto-Hazlittian who wrote under this letter. I will spare you the process leading up to my conclusion that M., the proto-Hazlittian in question is none other than Thomas Charles Morgan. Morgan wrote for the New Monthly under that initial during Campbell’s tenure as editor, and then (according to Cyrus Redding’s

60

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

memoirs) moved with Campbell (along with his better-known wife, Mrs. Sidney [Owenson] Morgan) to Campbell’s new periodical abode, the Metropolitan.34 The libertarian argument of Morgan’s writings—even his most ironic ones— were very much in line with the initial conception of this new vehicle, the Metropolitan, as a platform for the unflinching advocacy “of a Reform in State and Church”, and of an interest “in the freedom of every nation, and in the downfal [sic] of every despotism.”35 The Metropolitan was conceived as a libertarian journal, and Morgan was a libertarian contributor, but it is Morgan’s own pragmatic (meaning, anti-romantic) vision of authorship and of the social significance of the periodical press that will interest me here. A survey of his periodical contributions to the New Monthly Magazine, culminating (for my purposes) in his first essay for the Metropolitan about the cultural significance of “The New Magazine”, in 1831, the year before the First Reform Bill (1832), and (according to textbook periodization36) the end of the Romantic period, reveals a pragmatic description of the periodical press that is notable in its lack of anxiety about the implications of ephemeral writing for “Literature” (with a capital L), on the one hand, and for progressive, yet socially responsible thinking, on the other. Thomas Charles Morgan is identified in the Dictionary of National Biography, but upon reading the entry, one senses that it might have been kinder to his memory if he had been spared the honor.37 He is there described as “an extremely minute philosopher” who started off studying medicine, then published in the years just proceeding his career as a journalist, two philosophical works which were “unsparingly attacked” for their materialism, and which so damaged his reputation that he was forced to retire from medical practice. The latter of the two philosophical works, the DNB notes “fell almost stillborn from the press”, and henceforth, after marrying Sidney Owenson, he devoted himself to contributing “trifles” (again, the language of the DNB) to various periodicals from their residence in Dublin. To site one last anecdote from the entry (authored by Boccaccio translator, and astonishingly prolific DNB contributor, James MacMullen Rigg): The minuteness of his “mental Calibre” is evinced when Morgan exclaims in response to a friend’s quotation of Kant’s apophthegm about the ‘starry heavens’ and the ‘moral law’, that this idea is mere “German sentiment”, and that “The starry heavens, philosophically considered, are no more objects of admiration than a basin of water.”38 My interest is piqued by this antagonism to Morgan’s materialism, for, not only does it indicate the prevalence in the late Victorian period (from which this DNB entry dates) of what Jerome McGann has called “the romantic ideology” in evaluating literature and literary authors, but also because it is in line with a common liberal and late romantic anxiety about the effects of “trifling”, ephemeral, periodical writing. For Morgan, the demand for novelty by the periodicals and the transitory status of that writing together represented a powerful antidote to dogmatic and habitual thinking. This was not a position often taken even by those most fervently positioned against the dangers of custom, habit and prejudice.

The Downfall of Authority and The New Magazine

61

Morgan’s opinions, materialist as opposed to idealist, are the equivalent of the rhetorical theories of the pragmatic rhetoricians of the early nineteenth century who identified writing, not as an expression of a writer’s interiority (of his “character” for Mill, or, as I will discuss shortly, of his “inner feelings” for De Quincey), but as an arrangement of tropes (from a vast, pre-existent repertoire) for whatever immediate purpose might be at hand. By applying a pragmatic conception of writing and communication to a vast array of subjects in his periodical essays, and ultimately to the idea of the new magazine itself, Morgan identified as an antidote to the political and literary concerns of Mill that I rehearsed above, the quick, unpretentious, and ephemeral elements of magazine prose. Morgan approached the ephemerality of the periodical essay as an opportunity for the critique of false idealizations of literature. In his playful manifesto upon “The Literature of the Day”, Morgan critiques in hyperbolically materialist terms the idea of romantic genius that presumes a great individual produces literature of transcendent merit. Against such an idea he argues instead that a “signal advantage gained by the modern state of [publishing]” is “the downfall of authority”, meaning the undermining of reverence for a single author to such a degree that his historically-specific ideas and writings establish themselves as a prescriptive model beyond their immediate, temporal context. As Morgan elaborates upon this position: “The hot-bed growth and rapid succession of authors allow no time for any one of them to be erected into an infallible standard, to which his successors in all future generations shall be obliged to conform. Had Aristotle written for Messrs. Longman, or Murray, there would have been no danger of his ruling philosophy despotically for fourteen hundred years.”39 Obviously this is a satirical piece, and yet, it is precisely Morgan’s chosen mode of satire, founded upon the pragmatic de-bunking of idealist positions, that gives to the one hundred, or so, essays he wrote over the period of a decade for the New Monthly Magazine, and leading up to this meditation upon the new magazine in the Metropolitan, a cumulative, and, perhaps in spite of himself, impressive, anti-romantic (yet not reactionary) critical impact. His mode of essay and critique is consistent throughout his career. One of his first pieces for the New Monthly was a reading of newspaper advertisements as historical and cultural artifacts (à la Roland Barthes, who also theorized the downfall of authority).40 Among the essays composed in the two or three years leading up to his move to the Metropolitan, we find essays on what he calls “The ‘Bubble Reputation’” in which he de-mystifies concepts of genius and literary eminence (and argues that “Johnson was enabled by siding with prevailing opinions, and flattering prejudices of a powerful party, to hold the first place in literature of his day” 41), a meditation upon political pragmatism (“Circumstances change, and he who will not bend to circumstances must break under their impetus”42), a parody of an aristocratic parliamentary speech against “the dogma [a phrase here loaded with ironic reversal] that Birmingham ought to be represented”43, a first lesson on reading in which it is concluded that “the value of any book rests upon the intelligence of the reader”,44 an article upon the process of writing an article for the New Monthly Magazine,45

62

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

and, repeatedly, essays upon the virtue of tropes and catch phrases, and the absurdity of hopes for literary grandeur.46 On this last subject as discussed in an article on “The Literary World”, for example, Morgan declares his literary atheism, proclaiming his lack of faith “in the hereafter of a posthumous reputation” and “the immortality of the great mass of writers preserved in libraries” to be no more than “the immortality of the tomb,— dust and worms[.]”47 With such an atheistic position, one need not be afraid of the banalizing effect that the rise of periodicals was said to have. In terms of the manner of writing that is supported by the new age of periodicals, Morgan echoes Hazlitt’s 1823 essay on the periodical press, in which Hazlitt remarks that since we no longer succeed in folio, we should “excel in light duodecimo”, and “[i]f we cannot be profound, let us at least be popular.”48 Morgan’s version of the same argument against a reverential nostalgia for the literature of the past suggests that “[t]he older structures, both literary and architectural, might have possessed more grandeur, magnificence, and elaboration of detail; but the modern are lighter, more commodious, and are better adapted to the wants and habits of the consumer.”49 It is clear only from his insertion of a “but” after the semi-colon that the determination of the form of the product by the wants of the reader is considered a desirable situation. The new magazine is itself figured as a means of progressing beyond the old forms of the past. But even if this is an illusion, Morgan adds, at least the readers will perceive it as a truth.50 The logic of a consumer-determined market is identified and exploited by this publishing venture. It says: we are new because the consumer needs novelty, but even if we are not new, we may succeed because the consumer believes he needs novelty. Does the author believe what he writes, or is all argument a means to rationalizing a speculation in publishing? Morgan asks this question, rhetorically. His reply amounts to the assertion that even such discursive distinctions have grown obsolete. It is in this vein that Morgan, speaking on behalf of “the contributors” to this newly established periodical, persists in his attack on the association of stylistic solemnity (which, as I have already said, Morgan calls “Twaddle”) with sincerity, authenticity, and long-term literary significance. There is an implicit irony in my act of resurrecting Morgan and giving him a posthumous life, however humble, beyond the tomb in a scholarly monograph. The irony raises an interesting question about the enterprise of the literary historian. If much of our work is motivated by the need to assert the importance of our subjects of research, to prove that they deserve a second life, then what does one do with a figure such as Morgan whose literary conceit is consistently that he has no real importance, and who seems quite content with the literary life-span of a firefly? Again, to use his own words, the words of a periodical “trifler”: “Our kingdom is altogether earthly, and with it we must rest contented, sufficiently happy that while dogs have only their day, we have our month of fame.”51 At a time when, in Morgan’s own words “everything in life and literature is undergoing a revolution”, we find two contrasting critical projects at work.52 One asserts that “only a poet and his works can transcend a corrupting appropriation by ‘the world’ of politics and money” and theorizes poetry as a kind of discourse of

The Downfall of Authority and The New Magazine

63

immunity from such worldly corruption.53 Another approaches such critical assertions about poetry, and poetry itself, from the perspective of the pragmatic rhetoricians. It mobilizes pragmatic satire and a materialist parsing of the abstract claims of romantic poets and critics in order to open an avenue of escape from what are, from this perspective, idly cherished illusions. The next section of this chapter examines one strong example of the second kind of critical project. The dominant aim of the poetry criticism found in John Wilson’s Noctes Ambrosianae is to pilot the descent of romantic abstractions, and to land them with comic turbulence on solid ground. Noctes Ambrosianae and the Materialization of Poetry John Wilson’s serialized and collaborative work of critical fiction, Noctes Ambrosianae (published in Blackwood’s Magazine from 1822–1835) raises important questions about the changing status of the romantic lyric within the context of a monthly periodical that was aware of how ephemerality and novelty now informed the production and conceptualization of literature. The Noctes was begun in the eleventh volume of Blackwood’s by John Wilson (pen name Christopher North), John Gibson Lockhart, William Maginn, and others, and was continued mainly by these three until 1826 when Lockhart left for London to conduct the Quarterly Review, after which the column became slightly less caustic, and the notorious attacks on The Cockney School of Literature somewhat less common. The series introduced an array of fictitious characters, including Timothy Tickler (the incisive wit), The Ettrick Shepherd (modeled after James Hogg and sometimes written by him), Morgan Odoherty (the Irishman), The Opium Eater (loosely ventriloquizing De Quincey), and occasional real-life characters like Byron and Dr. Scott “The Odontist”, the latter a fictional dentist-poet for which they used the name of an actual Glasgow dentist. The Noctes is perhaps best characterized as a dialogical, literary gossip column that tries to keep track of the vanities of the day. It discusses the contents of rival periodicals, reviews recent poetry and fiction publications, debates the present role of the poet, and renders lyric poetry novel and material in a variety of ways. For one, the column has its recurrent fictional characters cite and discuss examples of meditative lyric poetry and then develop stimulating narratives either about the author of the citation or out of some incident from the poem in question. The source of this use of meditative lyric (the transformation of the meditative poetspeaker into a materially situated, appetitive versifier) can be found in the preNoctes, Blackwood’s attacks launched by Lockhart, Maginn and Wilson upon the Cockney poets, these attacks characterized (as Emily De Montluzin has shown) by their depiction of Hunt, Hazlitt and Keats in grotesque, physical terms, as loathsome animals or vermin, and by their employment of medical and scatological humor.54 But even in the less explicitly scathing discussions of lyric poetry, even in discussions of the poetry of Wordsworth or Byron, for example, we find a similar

64

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

impulse to find the living poet in the poem, and turn the discussion of his poetry into a bit of sensational “news” about the man who wrote it. In this sense, the Noctes works to translate (to borrow a distinction from Mill’s “What is Poetry?”) “representations of feeling…or states of human sensibility” into “series of states of mere outward circumstances.”55 By stressing the literary value of novelty born from a periodical situation, and by translating lyric meditations into incidental fictions (I will give some specific examples of this in a moment), the Noctes develops a novel conception of poetry which predicts an interactive fusion of genres wherein poetry, snappy periodical criticism or the genre of the periodical causerie, and narrative prose collaborate to redefine and modernize the genre of poetry in the more market-savvy terms of magazine prose. In the previous sections of this chapter I noted two points that contribute to the usurpation of poetry by a more materializing genre of magazine prose. I made a broad claim about the rejuvenating, novelizing power associated with periodicity (and even with the ephemerality of periodical writing), and I discussed the sought after downfall of authority that new periodical contexts enabled. I will now discuss each point in its turn, specifically as it relates to the treatment of lyric poetry in the Noctes. As J. H. Alexander has shown, while Blackwood’s prided itself on political consistency (on upholding its “pure” Tory principles), “in literary matters, it made a point of being inconsistent.”56 Wilson started out as a disciple of Wordsworth and generally, in his criticism, used Wordsworth and Scott as his poetic measuring sticks. He, along with Lockhart and Maginn waged famous war against The Cockney’s. Yet, throughout his eclectic series of contributions to Blackwood’s, Wilson might praise Wordsworth, Scott or Coleridge, and then, in the same number, under another signature, attack the very same poet.57 He might even let Keats or Hazlitt off the hook from time to time.58 Wilson, and Blackwood’s writers in general took pride in the magazine’s literary non-partisanship as opposed to the partisanship of the authoritative review journals. As the Irish character Odoherty says to Byron (fictionalized) in Noctes Number 4, July 1822 (this imaginary dialogue written by Maginn), by “doing all that ever these folks [i.e. Jeffrey and Edinburgh review writers] could do in one Number and then undoing it in the next,—puffing, sneering, jeering, prosing, piping, and so forth, [Kit North] has really taken the thing into his own hands, and convinced the Brutum Pecus that ‘tis all quackery and humbug.”59 This elusive play of critical positions, combined with an approach to criticism that Wilson understood as a literary endeavor governed (to use his words) by “a warm, enthusiastic, imaginative, and…philosophical spirit”—the criticism often taking the form of actual versifying and poetic parody—resulted in a powerful re-evaluation of abstract literary categories, and of the conceit of the transcendental, lyric self, and consequently of the critical character that allied itself with the discourse of poetry. It is not uncommon to find articulated in Blackwood’s criticism from this period the romantic conception of poetry as a textual reenactment of the author’s associative processes of thought and feeling, poetry as feeling “embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact

The Downfall of Authority and The New Magazine

65

shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind,” to cite again Mill’s version of this idea.60 An article in Blackwood’s from 1819 makes a clear link between the poem and the mind of the poet, stating that “the study of the form [of a poem] by which the mind is to express itself, is at the same time the study of that mind which is to find expression in such a form.”61 But in the Noctes, such a conception of poetry must ultimately be qualified due to the fallacy of permanence it seems to assert. A poem may capture some kind of eternal truth but it will never capture the soul of the poet eternally because the poets, like all of the personalities in the Noctes, are temporally bound and likely to change from month to month. In this sense, the question of the shifting critical positions taken concerning the work of living poets in the Noctes, the question (as Christopher North puts it to Timothy Tickler in Noctes No. 12) of “our gross inconsistency, in raising a mortal one day to the skies, and another pulling him an angel down”, can be defended by the assertion of human nature’s ephemeral constitution. As Tickler explains, “The fault is not with us, but it lies in the constitution of human nature. For, to-day, a given man is acute, sensible, enlightened, eloquent, and so forth…The very next day we see the same given man in a totally different predicament, that is to say, utterly senseless, worse than senseless, raving” (Noctes, 1.368).62 For this reason, Wilson’s character Christopher North, the one most likely to claim the lasting significance of Wordsworth, is made to say more than once across the series that “Wordsworth often writes like an idiot” (Noctes, 2.101).63 Beyond such shifting evaluative assertions, verse parody is one obvious way by which the meditative lyric is rendered pragmatic and material in the Noctes. Wilson, Maginn and Lockhart were all competent versifiers and almost every installment of the Noctes contains some poetic tour-de-force, whether it is an experiment in rhyming prose, a ballad listing and satirizing literary personalities of the day, or some quotidian adaptation of a Milton poem (Noctes, 2.289, 1.218– 225).64 The Noctes contributors used this skill at every turn to challenge the association of the poet-genius with his work. Just to cite a few examples of verse parody in the Noctes: we find a prose letter from Byron to publisher John Murray is “translated” into Byronic verse stanzas (1.139–140), a verse dialogue between Willison Glass (liquor vendor and amateur poet) and Jeremy Bentham complete with a “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”-style gloss so that Bentham’s torturous neologisms can be understood (1.148–150), and a recasting of Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” as “Ode on the Distant Prospect of a Good Dinner” (3.60–62).65 Even this short list of examples reveals how parody was used to exaggerate the connection between poetry and personality to such an extent that to become trapped in one’s poetic style seemed more of a sentence to eternal ridicule than a gratifying assurance that one would be preserved for eternity in one’s work. “I hardly understand the desire for posthumous fame”, Timothy Ticker states about a page before the following exchange on the subject of what it is that an author expresses in his work: North. The power of the soul is as the expression of the countenance—the one is strong in faculties, and the other beautiful in features, you cannot tell how—but so it is, and so

66

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic it is felt to be, and let those not thus endowed by nature, either try to make souls or make faces, and they only become ridiculous, and laughing stocks to the world. This is especially the case with poets, who must be made of finer clay. Tickler. Generally cracked— Shepherd. But transpawrent— Tickler. Yea, an urn of light. Shepherd. I’m beginnin’ to get verra hungry just for a particular thing that I think you’ll baith join me in—pickled sawmont… (3.250)66

Typically for the Noctes, a discussion that begins in literary philosophy ends in eating and drinking, in an indulgence of the body’s appetites. The power of the soul of an author as expressed in his work is not denied outright here, but it is qualified, not only by Tickler’s wisecrack and The Ettrick Shepherd’s blindenthusiasm, but especially by North’s warning against a poetaster’s attempt to make a soul or a face despite his not being endowed by nature to do so. Such attempts result in humiliation, and are equivalent to the verse parodies performed throughout the Noctes. There is a kind of liberating consolation in the assertion that the names of poets debated vigorously in the Noctes will eventually expire as the next number of the magazine arrives. “Who remembers anything but the bare names—and these indistinctly”, North says to Tickler when the latter makes claims for the continued effect of his ephemeral attacks on poets. They’re just “[s]oap-bubbles all—blown, burst, vanished, and forgotten!”—North corrects him, in a phrase that anticipates Morgan’s idea of the bubble reputation (Noctes, 2.108–109).67 The fictional characters of the Noctes, generally consistent in their rhetorical quirks and phrases despite their not always being penned by the same author, represented yet one more challenge to the argument that an author’s personality is eternally available in his work. The development of the recurrent character Dr. Scott (the “Odontist” I mentioned earlier) stands as an extreme example in this regard. Dr. James Scott, 7 Miller Street (as he was usually introduced in a column) was in fact a real Glasgow dentist who possessed “no more pretensions to literary or poetic skill than a street porter” (in the words of Wilson’s first memoirist).68 In the Noctes, however, he was introduced as one of its most valuable contributors, and as the author of a series of very clever verses. Blackwood’s ran advertisements for an imaginary collection of his works that was supposedly “in press”, the publisher John Ballantyne sought him out as a potential author for his own stable of poets, and the poor dentist received invitations to be a guest speaker from various literary societies in Britain. This exercise in fabricated literary celebrity does not debunk poetry as such, but attempts to purge the poetic enterprise from worldly motives and aspirations, in this case by building a false literary identity around an unwitting, real person. To cite one last example of how the Noctes works to reveal the rift between a living poet and his attempted lyric self-construction: In Noctes No. 11 (August 1823), Christopher North delivers an extensive lecture on Leigh Hunt’s new poem, “A Thought or Two on Reading Pomfret’s ‘The Choice.’” Interestingly, the poetic countenance of Hunt is not defaced exclusively by verse parody here, as it was in

The Downfall of Authority and The New Magazine

67

the 1819 parody “Sonnet on Myself” (probably by Lockhart) which satirized as brazenly artificial Hunt’s praise of his Hampstead locale, his love of nature, his Italianate imagery, his use of excessive description, and his view of himself as a poet (the closing couplet runs, “Then my all-encompassing mind tells me—as now, / And as it usually does—that I am foremost of men!”).69 Instead, in this lecture, Wilson both builds upon Hunt’s poem adding further sections to it, and pursues a close analysis of the poem (which is part actual Hunt, part Wilson’s Hunt), denuding the ideal lyric self “Hunt” hopes to project in verse by juxtaposing that ideal self and scene (“my ideal homestead”) with matters of material practicality. Hunt attempts to construct his earthly paradise in lines of his own, like, [A]ll the ground I had should keep a look Of nature still, have birds’-nests and a brook; One spot for flowers, the rest all turf and trees: For I’d not grow my own bad lettuces.

As Hunt works to build this ideal paradise in verse, Wilson works, line by line, to burden the poetic ideal with niggling, practical concerns, in statements like: “what a most idiotical style of farming you here chalk out for yourself! ‘One spot for flowers, the rest all turf and trees.’ That would never pay. Do you intend to sell the birds’-nests at Covent-Garden market—eggs, or broods and all? If so, you must study nidification” (Noctes, 1.350).70 This line by line badgering with practicalities continues for about eleven pages, during the course of which Wilson corporealizes the lyric self by giving him a nasty cold, raising the objection that he did not include a proper outhouse among the edifices of his imaginary estate, and, finally, by burying him in London. Wilson builds upon a lyric identity already developed by Hunt (with some plausible Huntian verse of his own) only to tear that identity down (both the actual lyric-Hunt, and the Wilson-lyric-Hunt) by tar and feathering the poetic persona with the prosaic concerns of a practical man. The recurrent debate in the Noctes about the relationship between the public and private persona of the poet can usefully be understood as having contributed to the conditions leading to the emergence of what Isobel Armstrong calls the double poem of Victorian poetry, a poem that simultaneously speaks through the conceit of a unified authentic lyric ‘I’, and is self-conscious of such a coherent subjective effusion as a rhetorical conceit. Armstrong describes the double poem as a deeply skeptical form. It draws attention to the limits of knowledge that govern the construction of the self and its relationships of communication, and to the cultural conditions in which those relationships are situated. The Noctes, with its dramatization of lyric expression self-consciously set on the magazine stage, and with its vacillation between bold arguments made in defense of the transcendent powers of lyric poetry, on the one hand, and its deflation of specimens of such lyric expression (by stressing the material underpinnings of such a transcendent pose), on the other, represents a relentless performance of the doubleness of late romantic lyric poetry, and invites us to consider the possibility that literary

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

68

immortality is a conceit that has had its day. Or, at least, that has had its day in verse. The conceit is renewed in a new mode of lyrical prose.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

W. J. Fox, “Conduct of the Monthly Repository,” Monthly Repository n.s. 6 (1832): 796. Cited in Mineka, p. 204. [L.], “The New Monthly Magazine and the Margravine of Anspach,” Blackwood’s 19 (April 1826): 470. “L.” in this instance may be Alexander Lang, as he published an article in Blackwood’s under that letter just a year before, but the Blackwood’s account books gives the source as “Anonymous” (Walter E. Houghton, ed., The Wellesley Index To Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, 5 vols. [Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1966–1989], vol. 1, p. 18). William Maginn, “The Metropolitan: A ‘Prospect’-ive Puff of a New Periodical,” Fraser’s 3 (May 1831): 495. Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism, pp. 16–29. Cited from Dennis Griffiths’ “The Early Management of The Standard,” in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 122. My citation of this passage has been taken from Patrick Leary, “Fraser’s Magazine and the Literary Life, 1830–1847,” Victorian Periodicals Review 27 (1994): 105. Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism, pp. 15–16. William Stevenson, “On the Reciprocal Influence of the Periodical Publications, and the Intellectual Progress of this Country,” Blackwood’s 16 (November 1824): 523. For example, The Metropolitan published and paginated the original essays and their society information separately, highlighting the former. Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1930), pp. 120–121. Cited in James Engell, “Johnson on Novelty and Originality,” Modern Philology 75.3 (1978): 273. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1953), pp.147–148. Jean H. Hagstrum, Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1953), p. 173. Engell, pp. 275, 277–278. Isaac D’Israeli, “On the Present State of Our Literature,” New Monthly Magazine 35 (1832): 340. D’Israeli, p. 341. D’Israeli, p. 313. Tim Chilcott, “De Quincey and The London Magazine,” Charles Lamb Bulletin 1 (1973): 9–19. Between 1821 and 1824 De Quincey published 23 articles for the London Magazine, and used it in various ways to explore the possibilities of a professional, authorial identity. Chilcott, p. 14. Chilcott, p. 16. Chilcott, p. 16. Samuel Carter Hall, “A Word or Two with the Public,” New Monthly Magazine 31 (1831): ii.

The Downfall of Authority and The New Magazine 21

22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29

30

31 32

33

34

35 36

69

Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 47–48. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 612. Graham Good, Observing the Self: Rediscovering the Essay (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 7. Robert Morrison, “Blackwood’s Berserker: John Wilson and the Language of Extremity.” Romanticism on the Net 20 (November 2000) [24 January 2006]. T. W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” trans. Bob Hullott-Kentor, New German Critique 32 (1984): 152–153. Adorno, p. 159. Horace Smith, “Evils of Measurement in Literature,” New Monthly Magazine 23 (1828): 204, 208. John Wilson, “Monologue, or Soliloquy on the Annuals,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 26 (1829): 948, 949. John Wilson, Noctes Ambrosianae, 5 vols., ed. Shelton Mackenzie, (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1863), vol. 1, p. 256. Noctes 6 (December 1822). All Noctes references are to the Mackenzie edition. Further citations will appear in parentheses in my text as Noctes, volume/page. The original dates of specific numbers of the Noctes cited shall appear in footnotes. This double valence of the word “stage” is usefully explored in the context of eighteenth-century criticism by Marcie Frank in Gender, Theatre and the Origins of Criticism: From Dryden to Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See especially the introduction, pp. 1–14. Cyrus Redding, Literary Reminiscences and Memoirs of Thomas Campbell, 2 vols., (London: C. J. Skeet, 1860), vol. 1, pp. 283–287. Thomas Charles Morgan [M.], “Literature of the Day:—The New Magazine,” The Metropolitan: Monthly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts 1 (1831): 17– 22. Marryat is considered the first British author to serialize a novel in a magazine in a manner that anticipated the widespread serialization of fiction in the Victorian period. See, Lance Schacterle, “Oliver Twist and Its Serial Predecessors,” Dickens Studies Annual 3 (1974): 1–13; and Alvin Sullivan, British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913 (Westport, Connecticut and London, England: Greenwood Press, 1984), pp. 304–308. The description of Morgan’s style in the Wellesley Index runs as follows: “his known arts almost always have an opening epigraph in English, French, Latin, and occasionally Greek or Italian, and phrases of quotations in these languages scattered throughout his work; his contributions are generally light, but with learned quotations and references...this signature seems to have been used exclusively by him from Jan. 1823 until Nov. 1830 at which time there was an editorial change; in Oct. 1836 he returned to NMM using the Greek” (Houghton, vol. 3, p. 177). “To the Reader,” The Metropolitan: Monthly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts 1 (1831): iv. M. H. Abrams, “The Romantic Period: 1798–1832,” Norton Anthology of English Literature, 2 vols., ed. M. H. Abrams, et al. (New York: Norton, 1986), vol. 2, pp.13– 16.

70 37

38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58

59 60

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic A more generous account of Morgan is found in Cyrus Redding’s Literary Reminiscences: “Sir Charles Morgan was one of the poet’s [Thomas Campbell’s] circle. His talents were solid rather than showy. Campbell said he never sat down with Sir Charles that he did not gain some new view of an argument. Whenever Sir Charles came to town from Dublin he was certain to be at one of the poet’s symposia.” Redding, vol. 1, p. 197. James MacMullan Rigg, “Morgan, Sir Thomas Charles, M.D. (1783–1843),” Dictionary of National Biography, 66 vols., ed. Leslie Stephen (New York: Macmillan, 1885–1901), vol. 39, p. 36. Morgan [M.], “Literature of the Day”, p. 18. Morgan [X.], “Morality of Newspapers,” New Monthly Magazine 1 (1821): 631. Morgan [M.], “The ‘Bubble Reputation,’” New Monthly Magazine 25 (1829): 446. Morgan [M.], “Moderation and Ratting,” New Monthly Magazine 29 (1830): 359. Morgan [M.], “Birmingham and Representation,” New Monthly Magazine 29 (1830): 235. Morgan [M.], “A First Lesson in Reading,” New Monthly Magazine 22 (1828): 364. Morgan [M.], “An Article for the New Monthly,” New Monthly Magazine 25 (1829): 421–427. In this essay we find such typical Morganisms as: “The great difference between writers lies far less in their degree of originality, than in the art with which they dress their common-places for the public taste.” Or, “[T]he most original writers are, after all, but those who have most successfully disguised their plagiarism, and passed off their tinsel for gold.” Or, tackling the distinction between “originality” and “artfulness” head on: “The question between the Romantists [sic] and the Classicists turns altogether upon common-place, and resolves itself into the number of times one idea may be repeated without producing nausea and disgust.” Morgan [M.], “Common-Places,” New Monthly Magazine 28 (1830): 514. Morgan [M.], “The Literary World”, pp. 368, 367. Hazlitt, “The Periodical Press”, p. 219. Morgan [M.], “Literature of the Day”, p. 18. Morgan [M.], “Literature of the Day”, p. 22. Morgan [M.], “The Literary World”, p. 368. Morgan [M.], “Literature of the Day”, p. 21. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 13. Emily Lorraine De Montluzin, “Killing the Cockneys: Blackwood’s Weapons of Choice against Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats,” Keats-Shelley Journal 47 (1998): 87–107. John Stuart Mill, Literary Essays, pp. 51–52. J. H. Alexander, “Blackwood’s Magazine as Romantic Form,” Wordsworth Circle 15 (1984): 60. For a list of such critical inversions see Alexander, “Blackwood’s Magazine”, p. 61. See also Alan Lang Strout’s compendium of contradictory positions taken by Wilson on P. G. Patmore’s Letters on England in various numbers of Blackwood’s in 1823. Alan Lang Strout, “Hunt, Hazlitt, and Maga,” ELH 4 (1937): 152–154. And so could William Blackwood, himself, as when he allowed P. G. Patmore (a friend of Hazlitt) to report on Hazlitt’s lectures on English poetry, instead of “Z” who was originally announced to have received the assignment. See Strout, “Hunt, Hazlitt, and Maga”, pp. 154–155. Noctes 4 (July 1822). Mill, Literary Essays, p. 56.

The Downfall of Authority and The New Magazine 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71

“On the Study of Language, as Essential to the Successful Cultivation of Literature,” Blackwood’s 5 (1819): 58. Noctes 12 (October 1823). Noctes 21 (September 1825). “Rhyming Prose,” Noctes 7 (March 1823); “Metricum Symposium Ambrosianum,” Noctes 4 (July 1822). The first two examples are from Noctes 1 (March 1822), and the third from Noctes 36 (May 1828). Noctes 51 (March 1829). Noctes 21 (September 1825). Mary Wilson Gordon, Christopher North: A Memoir of John Wilson (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1863), pp. 272–273. Cited in its entirety in De Montluzin, pp. 93–94. Noctes 11 (August 1823).

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 4

Thomas De Quincey’s Periodical Rhetoric The generic diversity of the Noctes Ambrosianae, its status as a serial collection of intermixed drama, criticism, poetry and a whole medley of additional popular, professional and literary modes of discourse, is emblematic of the multiplicity of styles and discourses that characterize what I have been calling the new magazine. The way the Noctes approaches poetry, despite its satirical nature, suggests a new kind of critical investment and creative involvement in the literary materials it is critiquing. Rather than allow the poetry to stand alone, quoted at length and unaltered on the page as an illustration of a discursively distinct critical commentary, the hands of the Noctes critics are all over the poetry it examines, interrupting it and rewriting it with creative irreverence. Wilson’s imagined dialogue with the persona of Hunt’s poem represents a pragmatic manifestation of the critic’s implication in the literary materials he is critiquing. That is to say, the Noctes critics get into the heads of the poets they critique to such a degree that the boundary between critic and poet is playfully blurred. But the blurring occurs primarily by way of generic parody or disruption. There are no claims in the Noctes that expository prose itself has been poeticized as a result of this kind of critical implication. The critical stance remains dryly intact throughout the series. This chapter will explore another kind of implicated criticism that emerges in the new magazine, parallel to, and yet qualitatively different from the pragmatic mode of the Noctes. It is arguably at this early point in the century—when Wilson gets in the head of Hunt, Mill becomes a critic of poetry, and Thomas De Quincey a journalist of his own addiction—that the aesthetic critic is born, that is, the critic who not only presents an account of the work itself, but also provides a lyrical account of his own feelings upon experiencing the work, in prose.1 In a very general formulation of this change, the eighteenth-century critic could function as an arbiter of taste, suggest what deserves to be read and what does not, based on a shared, class-based system of etiquette, but now, with the matter of art rendered subjective, the scholar-critic’s discourse is no less internal than that of the poet. A similar distinction in the history of criticism is that between ‘sketches on life and character’ and ‘critical sketches’. The second consists of a discourse of interiority that attempts to “share in the realm of affectivity” made available by a certain kind of literature (what De Quincey would call the Literature of Power).2 Wordsworth had claimed the general possibility of such an encounter with his work in his first “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads (1800); all men could have such

74

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

an experience if they judged by their “own feelings genuinely”. As a means of protecting himself against “false criticism” Wordsworth felt he could request “that the reader would abide independently by his own feelings, and that if he finds himself affected he would not suffer such conjectures to interfere with his pleasure.”3 However, by 1815, in the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface”, Wordsworth conceived of his audience to be less capable of judging between a true and a superficial piece of writing. A hierarchy of different “classes of readers” is introduced, a distinction between the “public” and the “people” is made, and the entire notion of successfully bringing “grand thoughts” into the public sphere on any large scale is now supposed impossible: “as they [the grand thoughts] are most naturally and most fitly conceived in solitude, so can they not be brought forth in the midst of plaudits without some violation of their sanctity.”4 It is in the space of the distance between these two perceptions of audience that the emergence of criticism as an interior process of connection with a literary text emerged. This distinction was a locus of critical contention in the 1820s and 30s, and recent histories of poetry criticism have documented debates about the internalization of poetry at this time, the triumph of Tennyson and the advocates of his early poetry experiments, for example, resulting in a new problem of identity, not only for the poet, but for the critic, as well.5 In his 1831 discussion in the Englishman’s Magazine of the characteristics of modern poetry, Arthur Hallam continues the work of Wordsworth’s prefaces by considering how “that hydra, the Reading Public” will be effected by the new “Poetry of Sensation” that he finds in Tennyson, and certain earlier romantic poets, such as Shelley and Keats (but not Wordsworth).6 During the course of his discussion, Hallam introduces such critical terms as “sublimation”, “subjective power”, “sensation” and “aesthetic poetry”, all of which will complicate the critic’s relationship to and discussion of the art object in the future. Alexander Smith’s 1835 Blackwood’s article “The Philosophy of Poetry” sums up elements of concern for many essays from this period—including a Mill-like consideration of the difference between poetry and eloquence—his entire definition of “poetry” hinging upon the fact of the writer “creating a sympathetic participation of [his emotion] in the mind of the hearer.”7 The matter of the average reader’s capacity for a sympathetic encounter with a poet’s work is always raised, which, in turn, invokes questions about the critic’s capacity, and role. In most of these discussions, the categories of sincerity and genius, previously applied to poets and artists—who are still often considered a separate species of person—are now equally applicable to the critics themselves. De Quincey’s career as a magazine critic stands as a rich embodiment of the issues of this debate, of the new mode of criticism, and the new kind of critical identity it was introducing. The example of De Quincey will reveal just how much this emerging critical character was formed in reaction to the professional demands of the periodicals, and to the audiences that were imagined for them.

Thomas De Quincey’s Periodical Rhetoric

75

De Quincey’s Published Interior De Quincey’s first written contributions to a magazine, the London Magazine, in 1821, were autobiographical in nature, and this fact alone can be taken as emblematic of his predicament, that is, the predicament of identity for one who had hoped to arrive at coherence and unity but was forced into fragments by the generic demands of the periodicals market. Unlike Mill’s highly linear and systematic autobiographical account, De Quincey’s autobiographical writings are piecemeal and sensational, yet not necessarily absent of a desire for coherence. De Quincey’s first wish to compose a unifying text is often found elsewhere in his work, and is recognized by many of his critics to be at odds with his final vocation. As Alina Clej remarks, “the disparity between De Quincey’s professed allegiance to truth and his means of communication (journalism) may cast his work in a tragic light.”8 This disparity has caused critics to pay great attention to his dream-like autobiographical texts, either in the hope that a unifying map might be found to underlie the apparent chaos, or with an interest in how De Quincey’s autobiographical writings might be in dialogue with their medium of dissemination. For instance, Josephine McDonagh’s study of the many intellectual and generic disciplines to which De Quincey applied himself opens with the anecdote of De Quincey’s “writing tub”, a great bath tub filled with scraps of correspondence, articles, bills, unfinished ideas, etc., which De Quincey would dip into, quite randomly, to begin his day’s writing. The anecdote captures brilliantly the natural conflation commonly made in considerations of De Quincey between the fragmentary (romantic) elements of his “imagination”, and the literary marketplace that was accommodating such haphazard methods of composition. With McDonagh, we can wonder why “De Quincey wished to represent himself as an author lost in a bath.”9 The pursuit of an answer to this question would consider the “writing tub” to be emblematic, simultaneously, of De Quincey’s unconscious and of the randomness of the periodicals market to which he was subject as a writer. With a similar attention to the diversity of De Quincey’s writing, and remarking upon the fact that most of De Quincey’s best known works “were never completed”, Michael Thron has asserted the importance of De Quincey’s role as a journalist to any consideration of his status as an author because his work “within a system of literary journalism...demanded his life in pieces.”10 Thron goes on to argue that the autobiographical opium writings, and the exploration of the inner self that they entail, stand as concerted attempts on the part of De Quincey to unify the disjointed nature of composition imposed by periodical writing.11 John C. Whale develops a similar thesis, remarking that the notable “clash of interests between the demands of an autobiographical narrative and a serialized form of publication” results in “an ambivalent conception of publicity” in De Quincey’s work.12 This ambivalence is based upon conflicting claims to knowledge in De Quincey’s self-definition as a writer, upon the conflict between knowledge based upon study (scholarship) and knowledge based upon personal experience (autobiography—sensationalism). Whale argues that this tension between personal

76

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

experience and scholarship emerges when De Quincey presents himself in his writing as “a gentleman-scholar figure who assumes the respectability of his readership on the subject of his own experience.”13 De Quincey embodies a rare combination of reverence (for Wordsworthian romanticism) and cynicism (resulting from his experience as a professional writer), which, I believe, can reveal much about subsequent evaluative hierarchies applied to literature, and about distinctions between lasting and transitory writing that I have been discussing up to now. De Quincey’s conception of literature in the context of the magazine is imbued with the changing state of the book and periodicals market from the 1820s to the 1840s. The book market in Britain in the early 1820s was divided between primarily expensive volumes of “copyright works” of contemporary literature, on the one hand, and cheaper number-publications and classic reprints, on the other. Some of the reasons that might explain this split include the possibility that there were strategic pricing-alliances arranged between publishers to keep book prices high, that lending libraries had the role of disseminating books more widely and so publishers focused on supplying the libraries with expensive books rather than the public with cheaper ones, that by issuing expensive books in small runs publishers were guaranteed greater financial security, and, finally, that the costs of book production, and of paper in particular, were high, which required smaller print runs and higher prices if the publishers were to profit from their investment in a new title.14 Following a rather stringently materialist reading of literary genre during this period, Lee Erickson develops an intriguing argument about the significance of the poetry monographs and literary annuals and albums that dominated the English book market in the mid-1820s. Erickson argues that poetry—a dense mode of writing that bore re-reading—represented a solid investment in a publishing market characterized by books that were extremely expensive due, in great part, to high paper prices.15 By the end of that decade, as paper and book production costs dropped significantly, poetry was less dominant as a genre in the overall market for books.16 While my inclination is to temper a direct causal argument about the impact of new technologies and changing material conditions upon literary form, it is clear that through the second quarter of the nineteenth-century new publishing ventures which capitalized on the widespread introduction of such technologies as Fourdrinier paper making and stereotyping did emerge, resulting in such things as affordable cloth-bound novels written by contemporary authors, and cheap magazines (like the Penny Magazine) with thick columns of prose and impressive graphics throughout.17 Material changes in the manner and cost of book production resulting from these new technologies certainly had an impact upon the forms that writing would take and the printed venues in which the new kinds of writing would appear. As Erickson argues: Once the materials and means of printing became cheaper, diffuse prose was no longer at a comparative economic disadvantage with compressed poetry. The periodical format, in particular, gave rise to a variety of shorter prose forms that competed and largely won over the audience for poetry. The literary Annuals of the 1820s and 30s further divided

Thomas De Quincey’s Periodical Rhetoric

77

the market for poetry into a large one for light lyrics and a small one for self-consciously serious art.18

As the large, expensive poetry monograph lost its readers, it gained a new aura of prestige that stood in opposition to the more popular periodicals, which published mostly prose. The distinction between the two parts of this divided market becomes important in the process of literary evaluation and canonization. For instance, in a review of Tennyson’s poetry, John Wilson approaches the matter of how poets become recognized as a question of playing one market against the other. The account pits the fancy poetry Album against the periodical, the former being the sign of literary importance, the latter being the medium in which such importance is garishly asserted: Now and then, by some felicity of fortune, a versifier enjoys a temporary revenge on stepdame Nature, and for a while is seen fluttering like a butterfly among birds; or rather heard cheeping like a mouse among a choir of nightingales. People take it into their heads to insist upon it that he is a poet. They solicit subscriptions, get him into print and make interest with newspaper editors to allow him to review himself twice a-week through the season. These newspapers he files; and binds the folio. He abuses Blackwood, and is crowned King of all the Albums.19

The policy of anonymous authorship in the periodicals allows for the practice of “puffing”. The poet can, in fact, puff himself in the periodicals as the author of an excellent, fancy book of verse, without his ever being associated with this inherently “lighter” periodical medium. In Wilson’s cynical account, the reviews themselves are ultimately bound by the author, in folio, as if their true value and importance will only be realized once set in book form. As the visibility and influence of the periodical rises, the expensively bound book comes to be attributed with special values that it did not possess before. Richard Altick and Mary Jacobus have both discussed the sentimentalization of the book, during the 1820s, by men such as Charles Lamb, and Leigh Hunt, for whom “books (especially old ones) aroused emotions almost as fervent as those with which Wordsworth regarded nature.”20 The book came to be associated, not only with the genre of poetry as a repository of emotion, but also with feeling in a more general sense, as a locus of personal memory. As Walter Benjamin has stated so neatly in a sentimental, personal essay of his own: “for a collector...ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects.”21 The statement is appropriate to the period in question where we find, accompanying a sense of the cheapening of literature by its wider availability in periodicals, a sentimentalization of the book as a highly valued, collectible artifact. De Quincey’s first experience in periodical writing was with a magazine that hoped to challenge the discourse that valued the high-priced monograph over the more affordable magazine, associating the former with lasting literature and the latter with ephemeral and superficial writing. The editorial policies of the London Magazine suggest an attempt to imbue a periodical with the cultural and sentimental value then attributed to expensive books. Between 1821 and 1824 he

78

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

published 23 articles for the London Magazine, and used this magazine in various ways to explore the possibilities of a professional, authorial identity. Most interesting in this regard is the draft for an article entitled “On the London Magazine” that De Quincey wrote in 1821.22 De Quincey’s publication manifesto, written for the December issue of the London, but not published, probably because it was submitted too late, claims a special status for a particular kind of writing as literature and argues that the magazine as opposed to the politically oriented review is best suited to the pursuit of such literature. Reviews, he writes, insofar as they are always “the organs of a party”, do not promote literature, properly defined as “one (and the most important) of the Fine Arts.”23 Here the role of the magazine is to shape the sensibility of its readers by producing innovative writing that is identifiable as genuine literature. Thus, an important distinction between reviews and magazines, as De Quincey states it, is that magazines are to be “[c]onsidered as themselves part of the literature, whilst Reviews analyse and criticise but are themselves scarcely parts of the literature.” Magazines, he writes, “contribute to the joint stock of the literature by examples in every department of composition.”24 De Quincey employs the concept of literature as a means of advocating what he calls “our liberal curiosity”, not to be confused with political liberalism. He describes the short prose forms typical of magazine writing as diverse, powerful and communicative of subjectivity, in short, as poetical. According to De Quincey’s definition of the magazine, magazine prose can achieve the status of powerful literature. To a certain extent, De Quincey’s vision of the magazine had a basis in reality. The London Magazine contained a great variety of short, innovative prose pieces that were not subject to the strict editorial stamp applied to reviews. When in 1823, P. G. Patmore published his report on the state of English letters under the pseudonym Victoire Count de Soligny, one got the sense that his praise for the variety and excellence of the English periodical writing was written largely with the London Magazine (to which Patmore contributed) in mind. As he saw it, some of the very best prose writers of the day in England, and her poets also, seem, from what I can learn on this subject, to take particular pleasure in now and then dissipating their minds on this kind of writing. It affords a scope and offers a temptation that cannot be resisted. They can do this when they can do nothing else. Two or three pages may be written on any text or subject, and in any mood of mind; and for this space any style may be borne—perhaps the more informal and extravagant, the better suited to the altogether desultory nature of the vehicle in which it is to appear, and the company it is to keep. Nothing can be more piquant and attractive than the mélange formed by this infinite variety of style and matter. It makes readers where it does not find them; incipient readers it strengthens and confirms; and confirmed ones, and even those whose appetites are sated by over-indulgence, it rouses anew.25

Other early nineteenth-century periodicals that are notable for stylistic variety were the Fortnightly Review and the Athenaeum, whereas the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviews had identifiable stylistic and political personalities that were attributable to their editors.26 While diverse in its contents, the diversity of a magazine like

Thomas De Quincey’s Periodical Rhetoric

79

Blackwood’s was controlled by the host at the table. To use Wilson’s Noctes as a synecdoche of the magazine’s overall procedure: even when the Noctes stages a diversity of personae, it is staging their relationship to North, their host, and beyond that, to their editor, the stage manager in the wings who has ultimate censorial control. Blackwood’s self-consciously stages the problem of the house ideology and house style but does not do away with it. The London was exceptional in its output and in its self-identification as an eclectic art magazine, and is probably less reflective of general trends to come in high-Victorian periodicals, as it is revealing about the goals of smaller art magazines that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, such as the aestheticist Yellow Book. Indeed, as I will discuss in a later chapter, Oscar Wilde would look to the eclecticism of the London as an imagined antidote to a homogenizing mass journalism. However, if the London Magazine’s claim for “literary” status seems defensible according to its own criteria, De Quincey’s vision of the London as having a wide-reaching influence upon public taste seems less likely. The London may have tried to make readers where it did not find them, but ultimately it did not make enough of them. Circulation of the London Magazine never once reached 2,500 copies, compared with the 17,000 copies of Blackwood’s or the 14,000 of the Quarterly, and the London did not survive into the 1830s.27 In “Letters to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neglected” published in the London in 1823, De Quincey first develops his “philosophical use of the word, Literature”, and presents his distinction between writing that communicates knowledge and literature that communicates power (DCW, 10.47). “All that is literature”, he writes, “seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge” (48). This distinction between informative and emotive writing marks the appearance of yet another Wordsworthian critical term—De Quincey dates the emergence of this meaning for the term “power” to Wordsworth’s use of it—in the context of periodical writing.28 De Quincey’s explanation of his critical term runs as follows: Now, if it be asked what is meant by communicating power, I, in my turn, would ask by what name a man would designate the case in which I should be made to feel vividly, and with a vital consciousness, emotions which ordinary life rarely or never supplies occasions for exciting, and which had previously lain unawakened, and hardly within the dawn of consciousness—as myriads of modes of feeling are at this moment in every human mind for want of a poet to organize them? I say, when these inert and sleeping forms are organized, when these possibilities are actualized, is this conscious and living possession of mine power, or what is it? (DCW, 10.48)

Power is defined as emotion organized, a formal arrangement of the inchoate, a task initially associated with the figure of the poet, but ultimately feasible for any writer of the “previously unawakened”, regardless of his chosen generic form. This category might include some writing by De Quincey, such as his prose accounts of the “modes of feeling” associated with his use of opium, and some of his less obviously subjective texts as well. In De Quincey’s philosophical foray the binary of criticism/literature is often displaced by that of knowledge/power. The result of

80

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

this displacement is that the critic of the literature of power in much of De Quincey’s writing—most obviously in his autobiographical texts—is allowed to become indistinguishable from the producer of that kind of literature. De Quincey’s critic is more concerned with communicating power than knowledge. Often, the “unawakened” elements that his autobiographical writing communicates consist of scenarios concerned with the possibility of accessing an other’s interiority. Similarly, in his magazine criticism, we find that De Quincey explores the interiority of the writer he is examining by imitating the text he is criticizing.29 Rather than describe in his “own” words, the literary production of another, he actually becomes the literary production of another, by practically replicating it, with small but significant adjustments. This is perhaps why so much of De Quincey’s work consists of a generous integration of source materials, of other people’s words. Along with facilitating the task of the professional critic by increasing his page output without much “independent” effort, De Quincey’s tendency to “borrow” represents a breakdown of the binary that separates the critic from his object of study. Albert Goldman’s work on the sources for De Quincey’s writings depicts De Quincey as interestingly excessive in his derivativeness. “So extensive are his borrowings”, says Goldman, “that the question becomes finally not so much what has De Quincey derived, but rather, where is he really original.” Goldman goes on to say that the only works that are wholly original “are those works of a personal nature in which he has drawn on his own experience” and “a number of lengthy papers on questions of style, language, and rhetoric.” 30 The texts that Goldman cites as the least derivative all have in common an elaborate treatment of the problem of the writer or communicator in relation to a public. In the autobiographical writings we find a repeated concern with the possibility of establishing a sympathetic encounter with another (with Ann, or with the Malay, for instance). In the essays on style, a similar problem is approached in the more philosophical treatment of the idea of publication. In both cases the matter of how the connection between writer and reader (or speaker and listener) occurs is of primary interest, and arguably results in a new genre in which De Quincey’s distinction between knowledge and power is rendered ambiguous. As Josephine McDonagh remarks: Between Coleridge and De Quincey of the 1840s, the magnificent powers of the creative imagination had been removed from the work and the writer, and now resided, in diluted form, in the critic’s ability to discern the hidden traces of literary power; for it was now the critic who possessed the capacity to lift the veil of textuality that occluded that power.31

The critic’s ability to discern the hidden traces of literary power is at odds with his role as a disseminator of knowledge about an object (the writing of another) that resides outside him. The special ability “to discern the hidden traces of literary power” means that he has crossed the barrier of mediation and has had access to something beyond useful knowledge. Literary power is no longer exclusively the

Thomas De Quincey’s Periodical Rhetoric

81

property of the artist but can be claimed by the critic who asserts his discerning abilities. This is a critical claim that will appear repeatedly throughout the century, in Ruskin’s argument from the eye, in the “self-evident” examples of Arnold’s touchstones, in Pater’s “sense of fact”, in the Wildean Artist’s taste. In the case of Ruskin and Arnold especially, the critic’s ability is believed to be of pedagogical value. De Quincey’s application of this ability is less explicitly directed toward a public for the purposes of acculturation. Unlike these mid-Victorian critics, De Quincey did not lecture; he put his self-analysis on display. For instance, in his autobiographical writings, the distinction between his power as a critic and that of the text he reads is collapsed as he becomes his own text to analyze. And, in his writings on style and rhetoric, De Quincey theorizes an idea of the “subjective critic” as it relates to the concepts of style (and publicity), writing (and solitude) and reading (and sympathy).

De Quincey’s Theory of Style William Covino has described De Quincey’s theory of style as a combination of romantic concerns for the “presentation of a subjective mind in process” and a more pragmatic implementation of rhetorical tactics of display or “declamatory practice” for the achievement of such a presentation.32 More recently, Lawrence Needham has argued that, in response to a scene of writing greatly defined by the proliferation of printed matter, De Quincey developed a theory of rhetoric and an actual rhetorical practice which exploited “elements of surprise and novelty— especially paradox—to ‘fix the readers attention’ on his prose and his genius.”33 There is no doubt that De Quincey’s long essay on style, published in four installments in Blackwood’s, between 1840 and 1841, is the work of a seasoned periodical writer who had spent much time thinking about how the romantic project of communicating poetically (in the sense of organizing emotion for public consumption) could be adapted to the new reality of a growing commercial market for periodicals. Unlike earlier manuals and dissertations on style, De Quincey’s essay puts the definition of the concept of publication at the center of his discussion, depicting it as crucial to an understanding of the nineteenth-century pursuit of what he calls a “culture of style” (DCW, 10.226). To understand the term style, De Quincey argues, one must understand the effects of the contemporary technologies of publication upon the taste and capacity of the British reader, and the effects, in turn, of this taste and capacity upon the writing that is produced and disseminated. De Quincey’s essay stands as an explicit attempt to articulate, not only a philosophical definition of the concept of style, but a psychology of the scene of its production. In keeping with this latter aspect of his project, the psychological issues of shame and shyness pervade the opening of De Quincey’s theorization of a distinctly British style. In the opening section of his essay on style, in which he considers the problem of “British Character”, De Quincey locates the origins of the “shy” and “sincere” English character in the accusation, from southern peoples, of

82

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

once having been just the opposite. As he puts it: “to the deep sincerity of British nature, and to that shyness and principle of reserve which is inseparable from selfrespect, must be traced philosophically the churlishness and unsocial bearing for which, at one time, we were so angrily arraigned by the smooth south of Europe” (DCW, 10.134). The present state of British character, De Quincey argues, has its origin in a primal scene of shame, a moment at which, through the eyes of the less vulgar, southern nations, the English came to see their own vulgarity, and from that point on turned inward. As De Quincey proceeds to list what he sets out as the three primary flaws of British character, the matter of shame continues to figure prominently. For instance, in stating the first flaw he remarks that “we writhe with shame” at the British who embrace all other nations but renounce (are ashamed of?) “the very land through which they themselves have risen into consideration” (135). Here it is a shame of “the semi-delirious lords and ladies, sometimes theatrically costumed in caftans and turbans—Lord Byrons, for instance”, those who adorn themselves in the Eastern garb, and praise all nations but abjure their own. Next he remarks that we (the British) “feel ashamed for the obstinate obtuseness of our country in regard to one and the most effective of the Fine arts...Music” (135). It is not so much the obtuseness that is shaming, as the obstinate manner in which this obtuseness is clung to, the way in which the Briton will revel in his own mediocrity, and glory in the fact that he sincerely prefers a regional song to Mozart, the person’s sincerity being the main source of pride and self-righteousness. We should feel shame, De Quincey is saying, in the fact that the Briton “will glory in his shame” (136), will take pride in his own British sincerity (qua provincialism). The third, and most important, flaw in the British character is its tendency to set “the matter above manner, the substance above the external show” (137). In regard to this last point it is important to note that this is “a principle noble in itself, but inevitably wrong whenever the manner blends inseparably with the substance” (137). De Quincey’s idea of good style is based upon the inseparable blending of manner with substance (or matter). He is critical of the fact that in its demand always for “sincerity and directness” British taste often throws the baby out with the bath water when it comes to an appreciation of style in writing. This is not to say that there is not a valuable history and tradition of stylistic innovation and masterpiece in Briton. De Quincey asserts the vast stylistic merits of British oratory, referring to a canon which he first sketched out in his 1829 essay “Rhetoric”, which includes Donne, Burton, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, Edmund Burke, Junius and Mr. Canning (DCW, 10.101–120). But all this indigenous history, and the continual exemplification of style “have not availed to win sufficient practical respect in England for the arts of composition essential to authorship” (DCW, 10.141). One specific reason that De Quincey gives for this lack of respect is that speech differs from writing, and the fact that the Englishman’s exposure to style being primarily oral, has kept him from appreciating written style (141).34 In a broader sense, De Quincey suggests that the British disregard for “style” has its origin “in the manliness of the British character; in the sincerity and directness of the British taste” (141), that is, in the

Thomas De Quincey’s Periodical Rhetoric

83

shame-driven elements of the British character just discussed. The ironic result of this “sincerity and directness” is that the British have lost touch with their own native idiom that is necessary for the production of graceful expression. Professional writers have nothing to do with the great tradition of oratory and writing that De Quincey sketches out at length in his essay on “Rhetoric” and in a more concise manner in the “Style” essay. In “Rhetoric”, contemporary errors in style are seen to fall less on the side of idioms and more on the side of mechanical antiquarianism because, “since Dr. Johnson’s time the freshness of the idiomatic style has been too frequently abandoned for the lifeless mechanism of a style purely bookish and artificial” (DCW, 10.128). Johnson represents for De Quincey the beginning of a professional mode of writing subject to the strictures of the journal market.35 This historical shift towards market professionalism marks, for De Quincey, the demise of “natural idiom” and the rise of artificial, bookish language. However, even as he asserts the overall demise of idiomatic style, De Quincey suggests that the oratorical tradition persists still in one small quarter of the nation: “the idiom of our language, the mother tongue, survives only amongst our women and children; not, Heaven knows, among women who write books—they are often painfully conspicuous for all that disfigures authorship—but amongst welleducated women not professionally given up to literature” (DCW, 10.142). The best idiomatic style is preserved by the English gentlewoman. Professional writers, on the other hand, pose a threat to the use of language because too few of them are “prompted to authorship...by the nobler craving for sympathy”, but instead seek “distinction through novelties of diction”, and the coarse love of reputation (144). The desire for fame and its companion desire for novelty are the stylistic dangers to which De Quincey’s gentlewoman writer is immune. By gentlewoman, De Quincey means the unmarried woman, over the age of twenty-five, who is not a professional writer. She possesses “a fidelity to the idiom” (144) that secures the perfect confluence of matter and manner, a quality De Quincey identifies as the cornerstone of pure “female English” (145). At the heart of De Quincey’s point about “female English” is the fact that it manifests a living—present tense— relevance in a field separate from that of professional publication. In short, the purest examples of the natural balance between matter and manner are to be found, according to De Quincey, in “the mail-bags” in “all the letters in female handwriting” (145), written by England’s “well-educated women not too closely connected to books” (148). The gentlewoman’s minimal connection with “books” is another key point, suggesting, in effect, the corrupting effects of newspapers and periodicals and other forms of popular ephemeral writing. The destruction of pure English idiom by the periodical press is represented by De Quincey as a mature woman reading a journal: “every old woman in the nation now reads daily a vast miscellany in one volume royal octavo. The evil of this, as regards the quality of knowledge communicated admits of no remedy” (DCW, 10.149). The press destroys the fluid, natural idiom of its readers, and installs “a dire monotony of bookish idiom” in its stead.

84

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

In response to this prevalence of bookish dialect resulting from widely published miscellaneous materials, De Quincey splits the meaning of the word style in two, arguing, in a manner akin to Carlyle, that style may be viewed as either organic or mechanic. As he explains the difference: “the use of words is an organic thing, insofar as language is connected with thoughts, and modified by thoughts. It is a mechanic thing, insofar as words in combination determine or modify each other” (DCW, 10.164). Both traditions of rhetoric available to the early nineteenth century are presented as equally legitimate for De Quincey, even as he simultaneously hopes to protect the organic incarnation from the mechanic one. While De Quincey stresses the need to keep these two functions of style as distinct from one another, this twofold definition is ultimately untenable because each meaning of style is based upon a radically different theory of language. The former (organic style) sees words and thoughts as inseparable, and is very close to the romantic theory of language that Mill inherited from Wordsworth. The latter (mechanic style) is much closer to Benjamin Humphrey Smart’s pragmatic vision of language, which depicts all communication as emerging from a rhetorical toolbox. Still, at the crux of De Quincey’s rhetorical theory is the fear that the organic and mechanic modes of style will be confused or elided, resulting in (as Mary Jacobus puts it) “a fatal accident in which the feminine (the language of feeling) is the casualty.”36 De Quincey’s assertion of the organic as a distinct rhetorical mode represents one strategy by which to protect language from the discursive jargon of periodical prose. An even more formidable strategy that he develops is evident in his theory of the writer’s scene of production. De Quincey protects organic style from the context of periodical publishing by attending to the “great agencies” that must be present “unconsciously moulding” the writer into an achievement of stylistic excellence. The most favorable scene of writing allows for the development of a “subjective” state of being in the writer. The conditions favorable to the subjective mode of existence which will in turn result in the best stylistic writing, writing whose manner is confluent with its matter, are listed as: 1) a condition of intellect under revolutionary excitement, 2) a penury of books, 3) gloom and ennui resulting from the absence of female charities, and 4) enthusiasm and elevation from participating in a great movement, both for the glory of nation and for a more general, spiritual good (DCW, 10.222). De Quincey lists these four conditions and then remarks that men living permanently under such influences must, of mere necessity, resort to that order of intellectual pursuits which requires little aid ab extra,—that order, in fact, which philosophically is called “subjective,” as drawing much from our own proper selves or little (if anything) from extraneous objects. Such pursuits are favorable to a culture of style. In fact, they force that culture. (226)

The problem before the writer is the project of his own inner mind, to convey interiority, not only at the exclusion of exterior concerns, but in spite of them. Historical precedents are provided as a means of illustrating the ideal conditions

Thomas De Quincey’s Periodical Rhetoric

85

for “subjective” intellectual pursuits. The medieval scholastic philosophers are presented, for instance, as men “shut up in solitude, with the education oftentimes of scholars, with a life of leisure, but with hardly any books” (DCW, 10.220). The purest culture of style is again presented as being directly antithetical to bookishness; it is dependent on nothing but the mind of the author, and his own ability, as a “scholar” of his own interior “to bring out consciously what yet lurks by involution in many unanalysed feelings” (226). This is what De Quincey means when he states that “[m]etaphysics...arose entirely out of...solitude, scholarship, and no books” (221). Scholarship is not associated with knowledge gathered from books, but rather with the ability to organize and project the inner mind.37 Walter Pater will develop this conception of scholarship as a stylistic principal of organizing subjective experience further, at the end of the nineteenth century. De Quincey’s essay on style does not function as a manual of style—such as Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric, which De Quincey was supposed to have reviewed in his own “Rhetoric”—but as a history of style with the purpose of explaining the actual conditions under which the best kind of un-mechanical prose style can arise. If we recall Wordsworth’s 1815 “Essay” supplementary to the preface, we may find De Quincey’s conception of style to be in dialogue with Wordsworth’s statement that grand thoughts conceived in solitude cannot be published “without some violation to their sanctity.”38 Where for Wordsworth, the problem was not in the conception of the grand thoughts, but in their publication and reception, for De Quincey, all three problems are substantial, and the establishment of the best conditions under which grand thoughts can arise is especially pressing. Although his own particular historical period is not seen to be especially conducive to this mode of writing—and his profuse amount of derivative writing is, in this sense, an illustration of the poor conditions for contemporary writers—De Quincey’s autobiographical writings often present examples of how these historical conditions, the four conditions favorable to subjective pursuits, can be manipulated and re-created on a very personal level, so that they result in writing in which manner is confluent with matter. In the Confessions and Suspiria de Profundis, for example, De Quincey manipulates his personal relationship to the book market, thwarting the factual proliferation of printing matter by fabricating a personal dearth of reading matter or depressing his own appetite for reading.39 In this way he is able to become a scholastic of the twelfth century, or a schoolman during the time of Pericles, in spite of being a nineteenth-century periodical writer, and in spite of an audience that has grown detached from its natural idiom, and intellectually exhausted by periodical prose. De Quincey’s artificial contrivance of a scene of production that is favorable to the best stylistic writing is dependent upon a consciousness of publication and a theorization of the reception of a text. De Quincey compares the present age of printing on a large scale to earlier periods in the history of publication, when “woolen garments and not linen rags” were worn, that is, before the materials for making paper were known (DCW, 10.238). In ancient Greece, without the possibility of making paper, metal coins, shells, the petals of shrubs and bull’s hides were used as materials for receiving the record of thoughts (239), but the real

86

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

“press of Athens” was the theater and the forum (237). De Quincey discloses his sense of the word publication when he notes that the Athenians, having only the stage and the bar as means of publication still had the advantage over contemporary periodical writers because these means enabled “every male citizen capable of attending, from the age of twenty to sixty, together with many thousands of domiciled aliens, to read the drama, with fullest understanding of its sense and poetic force” (243–4). By contrast, in England today, “[a] thousand copies of a book may be brought into public libraries, and not one of them opened”, let alone read or understood (244). The increase in the number of copies of texts printed does not imply an increase in their publication. De Quincey defines publication only as that which is “made known publicly to the understanding as well as the eye” (234). A text being printed and read only ensures that “it is made known to the eyes”, not that it has been published (234). According to De Quincey’s theory, the most largely disseminated style of writing has managed to weaken the link between the British people and their own, natural idiom. It is only by creating the circumstances under which “subjective” writing becomes possible that the reading habits of his audience can be changed. The reading habits of the contemporary British public emerge directly from the faults in British style. If sentences are interminable, and exhausting to read, then the reader develops a method of coping with this by employing “shorthand reading” (DCW, 10.162). “An evil of modern growth is met by a modern remedy”, De Quincey points out (162). The reader learns the art of catching key words, of skimming, “he forms an incorrigible habit of desultory reading.” The newspapers are read with injury to the mind, and “[t]he same style of reading, once largely practiced, is applied universally” (167). The only remedy for the modern habit of “desultory reading” is for writers to participate in subjective intellectual pursuits.40 The communication of such pursuits, De Quincey believes, will help develop a culture of style, which will in turn allow for the more widespread occurrence of true publication—of sympathy between writers and readers. What is most at odds in De Quincey—and this is what makes him so useful to the larger narrative I am constructing—is his romantic understanding of solitude, which he employs against the alienating prospect of a large periodicals audience, and the practical solitude and isolation imposed by a developing print culture upon a professional writer. De Quincey was aware of the impossibility of being an expert in many different fields at once. As a twenty year old he had hoped to pursue and complete some great intellectual project. He spent years filing away notes on philosophical texts from Plato to Kant, becoming especially well read in scholastic philosophy. This first project was to be named De Emendatione Humani Intellectus, after an unfinished work by Spinoza. Later, when it became clear that this philosophical study would not be accomplished, and after reading Ricardo for the first time, De Quincey drew up a plan for a second, humbler, life’s-work, entitled “Prolegomena to all Future Systems of Political Economy”. But by 1821, at the age of thirty-six, “his vague and various projects had come to nothing” and he was compelled by a need for money to begin a career as a magazine writer.41 From this point on De Quincey always wrote for money. Instead of a lengthy

Thomas De Quincey’s Periodical Rhetoric

87

treatise such as Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, De Quincey produced a quirky series of writings on political economy, the first taking the form of a dialogue on the topic of Ricardo’s theory of value, and the others being equally dependent upon Ricardo for their substance, and highly unsystematic in their format.42 De Quincey’s various essays on poets and lengthy treatises on style and rhetoric were written sporadically over a twenty-year period. Any semblance of unity to De Quincey’s work has emerged in retrospect and has been fabricated primarily by his editors.43 While he continued to profess in his magazine writing on such increasingly specialized fields as moral philosophy, political economy, political science, applied science, rhetoric, etc., he also attempted to unify these fields, and thus to make himself an authority upon all subjects. He attempted this in his autobiographical writings, where he presents himself as the expert on the subject of his own life, which in turn embodies elements of all the new specialized discourses, and in his periodical essays on style and rhetoric where he theorizes the psychological conditions necessary for true publication to occur. De Quincey’s awareness of the effects of the growing publishing industry upon the British reading audience, and his conception of style not only as an aesthetic category but as a matter of psychological and social significance, mark the parameters of discussions and debates about style in writing as a manifestation of the modern individual for the rest of the century.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10

11

I paraphrase Josephine McDonagh’s remark that from the 1820s on, “literary criticism would provide not an account of the poem itself, but that of the critic’s feelings on reading the poem.” Josephine McDonagh, De Quincey’s Disciplines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 84. McDonagh, p. 88. William Wordsworth, Wordsworth: Poetry and Prose, ed. W. M. Merchant (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955), pp. 232–233. Wordsworth, Wordsworth: Poetry and Prose, pp. 256, 278, 279. See, especially, Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 41–111. Arthur Henry Hallam, “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry,” Victorian Poetry and Poetics, eds Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 803. Smith, “The Philosophy of Poetry”, p. 829. Alina Clej, A Genealogy of the Modern Self (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 41. McDonagh, p. 1. Michael Thron, “Thomas De Quincey and the Fall of Literature,” in Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), p. 7. Thron, p. 14.

88 12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic John C Whale, “‘In a Stranger’s Ear’: De Quincey’s Polite Magazine Context,” in Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), p. 36. Whale, p. 51. See Altick, pp. 260–267, and Erickson, pp. 3–48. Erickson, p. 20. Again, Erickson’s explanation for this shift in the status of poetry among other genres in the market is staunchly materialist. Once the costs of paper making and printing were brought down in the mid-1820s by the more general use of the Fourdrinier paper-making machine, and by stereotyping, poetry was no longer necessary in the same way for its textual density. Causal arguments about literary form aside, the effect of the Fourdrinier continuous paper making machine upon the cost of paper was considerable, the cost of demy dropping from thirty-two shillings a ream in 1810, to twenty shillings a ream in 1835. Erickson, p. 27. For an account of some of these ventures that revolutionized English publishing between 1833–1850, see Altick, pp. 277–293. Erickson, pp. 47–48. John Wilson, “Tennyson’s Poems,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 31 (1832): 723. Altick, p. 139. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), p. 67. This is an article I have already discussed briefly in Chapter 3. Tim Chilcott, who edited the manuscript of the essay and published it, remarks that “[i]ts interest lies not only in the fact that it may be interpreted as a firm statement of the specific editorial policy Taylor intended to follow in the magazine, but also in the fact that, during the course of the article, De Quincey attempts a significant analysis of the general influence of periodical literature in Regency England” (Chilcott, p. 10). The manuscript is in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. It was written in November or December 1821, probably as an intended preface to the December edition of the magazine. Chilcott, pp. 14, 16. Chilcott, p. 14. Peter George Patmore [Count de Soligny Victoire], Letters on England, 2 vols., (London, H. Colburn and Co., 1823), vol. 2, pp. 230–231. See Laurel Brake, “Literary Criticism and the Victorian Periodicals,” The Yearbook of English Studies 16 (1986): 98–101. Chilcott, p. 12. In this reference to Wordsworth, De Quincey is presumably thinking of the 1800/1802 preface to the Lyrical Ballads, where Wordsworth says that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and where he speaks of the poet’s “power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.” William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, eds R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 256, 266. One fun example of this method—similar in some ways to the methods used by Wilson in the Noctes—is a little known review De Quincey wrote of Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Library Companion, the Young Man’s Guide and the Old Man’s Comfort in

Thomas De Quincey’s Periodical Rhetoric

30

31 32 33

34

35 36 37

38 39

89

the Choice of a Library (1823)—in which De Quincey replicates literatim the text of a long passage from Dibdin’s work, and replaces all of Dibdin’s references to books with terms that relate to the field of footwear. So, for example, where Dibdin’s work opens with the sentence, “From the beginning to the end, I have never lost sight of what I considered to be the MOST MATERIAL OBJECT to be gained from a publication of this nature; namely, the imparting of a moral feeling to the gratification of a literary taste, De Quincey’s opening is almost exactly the same, except “the gratification of a literary taste” is changed to “the gratification arising from a taste in leather” (73). The five page article goes on in this vein, citing the names of “the authorities of ancient and modern writers” on his topic and then proclaiming that “callous must be the toes, or hardened the feet, of that YOUNG MAN upon whom such authorities make no impression.” Thomas De Quincey, “The Street Companion; or The Young Man’s Guide and the Old Man’s Comfort in the Choice of Shoes,” London Magazine (January 1825): 73. Albert Goldman, The Mine and the Mint: Sources for the Writings of Thomas De Quincey (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), pp. 159–160. McDonagh, p. 78. William Covino, “Thomas De Quincey in a Revisionist History of Rhetoric,” PRE/TEXT 4 (1983): 131. Lawrence D. Needham, “De Quincey’s Rhetoric of Display and Confessions of an Opium Eater,” Rhetorical Traditions and British Romantic Literature, eds Don H. Bialostosky and Lawrence D. Needham (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 49. David Bartine offers a context for the split between oral and written traditions that organizes De Quincey’s essay on style: “Partly because inherited rhetorical doctrines were closely associated with oral communication, and partly because reading aloud was considered by some the consummate achievement of an art of reading, another question arose: What relationships hold or do not hold between principles of intelligent and artistic oral reading and reading silently for comprehension and judgment? This inquiry led to heated debates about what spoken and written language can and cannot convey” (Bartine, Early English Reading Theory, p. 7). See, D. D. Devlin, De Quincey, Wordsworth and the Art of Prose (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 7–10. Jacobus, p. 223. Alina Clej’s discussion of the influence of German philosophy upon English writers at this time suggests an important reason why De Quincey would define scholarship in this way. This trend in intellectual history also suggests a reason why De Quincey chose to write a confession, and not a poem or an article about opium: “The Wordsworthian ideal of poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ is clearly colored in De Quincey’s case by a German-inspired vogue for introspection that set in around 1820 in the general atmosphere of political listlessness and conservative animus that dominated in England” (Clej, p. 38). According to Clej, The London Magazine embodied this animus. Wordsworth, Wordsworth: Poetry and Prose, p. 278. For example, De Quincey writes at one point that as a result of heavy opium use, “For nearly two years, I believe that I read no book but one.” Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 64.

90 40

41

42

43

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic In “Suspiria De Profundis” De Quincey makes a direct link between self-imposed periods of solitude and the production of a literature of power: “No man ever will unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least chequer his life with solitude. How much solitude, so much power” (De Quincey, Confessions, p. 88). Relevant to this matter, see Devlin’s discussion of De Quincey’s preference for Burke, who did not have to earn a living from magazines, over Johnson and Addison, who were required to compose essays according to the 1200 word format of the Spectator and Rambler. Devlin, pp. 5–9. A consideration of Mill’s opinion of De Quincey’s contribution to the science of political economy is found in James G. Murray, “Mill on De Quincey: Esprit Critique Revoked,” Victorian Newsletter 37 (1970): 7–12. For an account of the editorial consolidation of De Quincey’s essays on language, style and rhetoric, see Larry Steven Ferrario, “The Pariah in the Marketplace: The Audience Centered Rhetoric of Thomas De Quincey,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, 1989), pp. 15–19.

Chapter 5

The Political Economy of Style John Ruskin and Critical Truth

Up to now I have considered what I feel are the two primary factors informing conceptions of style in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century, these two factors being the apparent defeat of a pragmatic rhetorical tradition by romantic conceptions of discourse and communication, and the significance of the growing periodicals market to conceptions of writing and readership. Each one of the diverse range of arguments about rhetoric and the marketplace for letters I have examined negotiates in its own way the opposing domains of the solitary (“authentic”) articulation of feelings and ideas, on the one hand, and the public communication of them, on the other. All of the critical positions I have rehearsed grapple with and resolve to varying extents the conflicting rhetorical tenets of pragmatic and romantic (or expressive) theories of communication. While the desire to establish a rhetorical solution to the problem of securing an authentically unprejudiced, truthful discourse is most explicitly prevalent in my examples of Mill and Carlyle, this motive is strongly present in De Quincey’s rhetorical theory of publication, and even in the parodic satire of the Noctes which, with all its pragmatically executed debunking of what is false and superficially partisan about poetry and literary culture, ultimately suggests truth and authenticity as a rhetorical ideal. The categories of inauthenticity and partisanship re-emerge from the late 1850s on when new prescriptions for criticism as an “unprejudiced” or “disinterested” discourse are forwarded in opposition to the more caustic tone that had recently prevailed. It is important to state here what I hope has become evident from the range of rhetorical thinking I have discussed in previous chapters. That is, while the nineteenth century does seem to initiate a dominance of romantic over pragmatic conceptions of rhetoric, and subsequently a temporary dissolution of pragmatic rhetoric as a coherent discipline, the “tool-box” approach to communication that was formally defended by Benjamin Humphrey Smart on the philosophical grounds that all thought is inextricably linked to the medium of language, is still present in an ad hoc manner by the ubiquitous tendency of writers for the periodical press to articulate an awareness of their own rhetorical tools, conventions and strategies, and by their willingness to deploy them. From the mid1830s on we find a proliferation of essays dealing with how to write in the variety of styles that were published in journals with wide circulation. One exemplary cluster of such essays would be an 1835 series penned by James White and published in Blackwood’s detailing the prerequisites for writing a “critical”,

92

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

“facetious”, or “philosophical” article.1 Edgar Allen Poe’s well known, “How to Write a Blackwood Article”, which catalogues the method of composing in the various categories of discourse identified with that magazine, is another example. During the 1850s, journals like the British Conversationalist and Literary Magazine (founded in 1850) devote themselves entirely to the question of how to write appropriately in distinct disciplines such as religion, philosophy, history, politics, social economy and the periodical essay.2 Recurrent columns entitled, “Hints To Authors” or “Hints to Our Contributors” explaining how to succeed in diverse modes of writing and rhetoric ranging from the literary to the commercial are a common feature of many magazines aimed at general readers, as in the columns from Chambers’ Journal called “The Literary Aspirant” and “Puff and Push”, the latter providing advice on the proper usage and performance of salestalk.3 Articles such as these suggest a faint boundary between magazine author and magazine reader, and invited readers to imagine themselves as potential contributors to the pages they perused on a weekly and monthly basis. Columns such as the Leisure Hour’s “New Curiosities of Literature” continued this discussion and display of the various styles of periodical writing in the late 1850s by creating a typological catalogue of authors (“Slow Writers”, “Penitent Authors”, “Great Readers and Non-Readers”) and defining the kinds of writing they produce.4 In addition to articles explicitly codifying periodical discourses, the differences between the journals themselves were increasingly identified with articles of a specific “subject...length...style and tone.”5 Genre literacy, as we now call it, was a regular item on the menu of these magazines, and the periodical reader was encouraged to approach the journal he read as a reflection not only of his opinions, but also of his own stylistic potential as a magazine critic. Literary criticism during the 1850s consisted in large part of the kind of writing that Mill objected to. As John Woolford has remarked, critics of this period had for the most part arrived at a firm belief that successful art reflected the desires of the public, and that the critic was a spokesperson for these desires. The critic functioned as a representative for the reader “by foaming and gesticulating and grimacing and straining after hyperbolic extravagance” in his denunciation of works which apparently failed to fulfill these desires.6 That is, the voice of the critic speaking the public’s opinion was notoriously splenetic and emphatic. An ornate criticism of severity without measure prevailed, characterized by one journalist, in retrospect of the period, as “that slashing style which produces the greatest amount of effect with the least amount of trouble to [the writer].”7 Woolford characterizes the criticism between 1855 and 1864 as an “‘adjectival’ criticism—a criticism in which performance has usurped the place of principle.”8 John Ruskin’s position as a critic within Woolford’s account is somewhat paradoxical, for although his writing arguably shared this “hyperbolic extravagance” and would thus come to be associated with the tendency of “the reviewer” to “overrate...the powers of the graphic and picturesque” it functioned, according to Ruskin, as a perspicuous discourse of truth; and although this kind of writing was presented as reflective of the public opinion, Ruskin’s writing was

The Political Economy of Style

93

clearly aimed not at reflecting the public’s aesthetic and moral understanding, but at changing it.9 Changing the ideas of his readership was arguably the primary reason that Ruskin turned to writing articles for some of the most widely circulated periodicals of the late 1850s—the Cornhill Magazine and Fraser’s Magazine—after having published the first four volumes of Modern Painters, and although one can make a compelling case (as Brian Maidment has done) for Ruskin’s agency as a writer within this popular medium, the ultimate success of Ruskin’s attempt “to create kinds of readerships not available even to the periodical market” by “alienat[ing] and offend[ing] the propriety of serious mass-circulation journalism” is debatable.10 What interests me here are the factors that might have made Ruskin’s attempt to alter his public by circulating his critical prose in popular magazines unsuccessful, for although Ruskin was not the typical “gesticulating” critic of the 1850s, it seems to me that he came to be judged by the same criteria that were held up against the “adjectival” critics of this period. As new standards for a more judicious “discipline” of criticism came to be prescribed in the early 1860s, Ruskin’s apparent similarities to the popular adjectival critics did not work to his advantage. By the late 1850s the identification of Ruskin with this style of periodical criticism already began to take hold. For instance, W. Forsyth, in his 1857 essay on “Literary Style”—the purpose of which is to point out contemporary specimens of “good” style, and to expose “false and vicious modes of style”— argues that Ruskin’s writing “indulges too much in rhetorical pomp” and sometimes “is betrayed into a conceit” because of the “too great exuberance of imagery, and too lavish a profusion of epithets” in his writing.11 Thus, what was to become a more general shift at the beginning of the 1860s away from what might be called emotionally emphatic criticism, toward a critical practice that presented itself as more judicious and less implicated in the public temperament, worked to undercut the authority of Ruskin’s writing in spite of his having little to do, in substance, with these critics of popular opinion. In other words, Ruskin understood himself to be a principled writer who, in great part because of his manner of writing, was judged as merely performative by a developing movement in nineteenth-century criticism that saw these two categories as mutually exclusive. Before telling the story of the rise of a stylistically judicious criticism, though, it will be worth describing how Ruskin understood his own mode of writing. What were Ruskin’s principles of criticism? Ruskin scholarship often focuses on the ethical significance of the faculty of vision. Ruskin himself in the opening chapters of Praeterita provides the cue for this focus where he gives an account of the factors in his early life that led to his development of an especially sensitive eye. 12 Perhaps equally important to the practice of seeing for Ruskin, and by no means separable from it, is the fact of his having been, very early on “bred for ‘the Church’”, and again, the early chapters of Praeterita provide telling images of the young John Ruskin mimicking the oratory of a pulpit preacher, or reading the Bible with his mother, as in a loop, “which never ceased till [he] went to Oxford.”13 These two foundational faculties for Ruskin’s eventual, critical practice are described as one in Ruskin’s best known statement about the importance of

94

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

vision to a life’s work, when, in Modern Painters III, he writes: “To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,—all in one.”14 The ability to see, and to tell what has been seen, are inseparable, and according to this passage, Ruskin’s prose, which aspires to communicate his sight, aspires to “poetry” and religious prophecy, at once. Seeing, and a powerful faith in the faculty of vision are key ingredients in the development of any philosophical or moral position for Ruskin, and in saying so I only restate what has become a truism for Ruskin scholars.15 The powerful expression of accurate vision should be understood as only the first stage in Ruskin’s larger motive to move his readers into action, and to achieve social change. As G. Robert Stange has put it, the object of Ruskin’s dazzling paragraphs of descriptive art criticism, for example, is not necessarily an account of the physical properties of a work of plastic art, “but the evocation of an aesthetic and emotional experience, deriving from a painting, but originating in Ruskin’s prose.”16 The prose carries the reader into a new domain of sight, and ultimately into an altered state of aesthetic and ethical perception. And yet, while this is an accurate (albeit concise) description of the intended procedure of Ruskin’s critical practice, the effect of his prose did not always successfully meet the mark of his intentions. As the century wore on, and as Ruskin moved from writing about art to writing about a variety of social issues, we find that Ruskin’s situation as a critic comes to raise significant questions about how a writer’s manner, or mode, of expressing something (an idea, for example) is perceived to be related to the truth of that idea, on the one hand, and to the truthfulness of the individual who is communicating that idea, on the other. These questions about the relationship between style and sincerity are especially pronounced if one considers the context surrounding Ruskin’s early publications on political economy, the reception of these writings, and his defense of his chosen critical mode in the face of widespread attacks both on his right to profess within this particular discipline of knowledge, and on his manner of presenting his arguments. Ruskin’s prose style—and specifically his tactic of substituting the sonorous elements of language for the complexity of visual experience—often resulted in an effect opposite to that which Ruskin intended. Instead of focusing attention on the truth of the aesthetic experience, Ruskin’s readers often focused on the elements of the stylistic tactic itself, at the expense of the referent the writing hoped to convey. Ruskin’s critics tended to discuss him as an adept stylist within a specific mode of writing. Ekphrasis becomes one important rhetorical category that aligns Ruskin’s writing with that of the sentimental, pictorial aesthetic of the literary annuals and albums, on the one hand, and the extravagant prose of periodical reviewers, on the other.17 Ruskin had many associations to shed as he moved from art criticism to social criticism. As Dinah Birch has noted, Ruskin’s initial role in teaching the appreciation of art was analogous to that of a governess, which seemed to preclude his participation in other, more “manly” kinds of discourse.18 Further, the didactic anger that so strongly dominates the tone of Ruskin’s social criticism, and which was meant to work as a “most powerful remedy to apathy”, served as fodder for his critics who identified his dramatic style with the ravings of an hysterical woman.19 According to Ruskin, though, the power of his own words resides in the universal

The Political Economy of Style

95

truth of what they refer to, which is often the Bible, and sometimes nature. Ruskin’s knowledge of the scripture, and use of it in Unto This Last, for example, may be seen to fulfill this axiom of force in style.20 However, because he chose as his congregation the readership of a popular magazine (the Cornhill Magazine which had at times reached a circulation above 100,000)21 and not a smaller, religious group who would be impressed by the scriptural truth of his re-definition of the key terms from political economy, his particular mode of sage-writing was generally received as an extravagant mis-application of biblical discourse in the domain of science.22 The rhetorical techniques employed in his art criticism were understood by Ruskin to be the most “natural” way of communicating the knowledge implicit in his ability to see, and thus as an organic communication of truth. As Jeffrey Spear has noted, “Ruskin’s concern with words almost invariably turns to the Word.”23 Contemporary descriptions of his style as Euphuistic, ornate and artificial were thus especially distressing to Ruskin because they challenged the integrity of his earnest pedagogical project. Ruskin’s claim to a communication of truth that did not strictly adhere to “syllogistic demonstration”, and his technique of re-defining the principal terms of the discipline he was investigating, became especially controversial when he turned from writing about art (and defining such terms as “color” and “chiaroscuro”) to defining the key terms of political economy, such as “Wealth”, “Value” and “Utility” in Unto This Last, and most explicitly in the first chapter of “Essays on Political Economy” (1862) which, when republished as Munera Pulveris (1872), was entitled “Definitions”.24 Ruskin’s move from writing monographs about painting to publishing periodical articles about a wide range of social and aesthetic issues in well-circulated magazines and periodicals resulted in significantly different discursive expectations by which his writing would be judged. This shift in venue meant an altered set of rhetorical and generic prescriptions and assumptions that had some small influence on Ruskin’s mode of expression, but a large impact upon the reception of his writings, and on their consequent effect. Suddenly, Ruskin could be perceived as a periodical critic writing venomously, and outside his area of expertise. And indeed, his writings on political economy were attacked from a variety of fronts. An important factor in the dismissal of Ruskin’s mode of criticism was the perceived inappropriateness of his ekphrastic style used so effectively in Modern Painters (where he repeatedly walks you though the details of a landscape as they appear, either in nature, or on canvas) when applied to the increasingly “scientific” discipline of political economy, in essays later collected under such titles as The Political Economy of Art, Unto This Last, and Sesame and Lilies. While the beauty of Ruskin’s style in these writings is often acknowledged even by his harshest critics, Ruskin’s talent, along with his emphatic expression of moral indignation, and his disregard for the etiquette of scientific argumentation, is most often forwarded as proof of his inability to address economic issues with an appropriate, manly calm. As new rules for the discipline of criticism are consolidated, the gendered nature of the distinctions between serious critical prose, and mere irrational emotionality, becomes explicit.

96

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

During this period, critics attempted to discredit and effeminize Ruskin by referring to his “weeping and howling”, his “voice choked with tears”, his “female virulence” and his “feminine nonsense”, all of which was fine “[s]o long as Mr. Ruskin confined himself to art” but which was identified as “dangerous” when he applied this manner of writing to social critique.25 A review in Fraser’s Magazine discussing Unto This Last argues with ironic condescension that “English literature has got a tolerably good philosophical style...[T]he received scientific style—such, for instance, as Mr. Mill’s...—besides being lucid, or always aiming at lucidity, has the additional vice of being calm and good-tempered, which makes it still more unfit for the uses of a genius like Mr. Ruskin’s, who is generally in a passion as well as in the clouds.”26 Genius and its visible manifestation in prose style—a preoccupation of so much early nineteenth-century criticism—now becomes a critical code word for un-judicious and unnecessarily obscure writing. Similarly, the literary critic Henry Morley identifies Ruskinian prose with a newly rediscovered tradition of ornate prose in English, and labels this tradition affected and untruthful. The revival of Euphuism as a working concept with F. W. Fairholt’s 1858 reissue (the first in over a century) of John Lyly’s Euphues (circa 1580), led to the identification of this work as an originary text of affected English writing.27 The identification of Ruskin’s prose with this tradition led to the association of its two primary traits—its elaborate descriptiveness, and its overt display of emotion—with insincerity. Morley sets up the opposition between ornate (Ruskinian) prose, and a proper critical style by pitting writing for “display” against a more “[d]irect, manly presentment...quietly told...with no paltry playing upon words, and no more stir of fancy or appeal to the emotions than arises naturally from the working of a mind intent upon its thought.”28 For Morley, the effeminate is both that which is showy and ornate, and that which is un-English (leading to the implicit identification of Mill as English man, and Ruskin as foreign woman). Thus while Ruskin was being extremely descriptive and emphatic in his writing because he desperately hoped to convey what he saw as the true injustices of the prevailing theories of political economy, the heavy description and emphasis he used to communicate his critique were often perceived to be signs of irrational, and disingenuous expression. New Critical Regulations of the 1860s The harsh response to Ruskin’s ekphrastic style in these new contexts reveals the development of an identifiable series of rules for criticism. Two key essays from the period that address this problem of sincerity and excessive affect in prose indicate these new rules by prescribing what criticism should be. The first of these is an essay entitled “Genius and Discipline in Literature” published as the lead article for December 1862 in Macmillan’s Magazine by the editor of that monthly, David Masson. Its appearance in Macmillan’s in this way suggests that Masson’s article will function as a manifesto, of sorts, defining the true nature of critical discourse that should appear in a literary magazine, and positioning the disciplined

The Political Economy of Style

97

magazine against other periodicals that might fail to meet the newly stated standards. It is significant and worth noting that Macmillan’s, under this period of Masson’s editorship (beginning in 1859), is generally acknowledged as the journal that initiated a more general move in Victorian periodical journalism and criticism away from anonymity, towards signature. That is to say, in addition to setting out new stylistic prescriptions for a variety of critical disciplines, Masson’s Macmillan’s made the authors he published explicitly accountable for their own critical characters by “putting the author’s name conspicuously at the head of every important article.”29 Signed articles published in issues of subsequent months such as Max Müller’s “Introductory Lecture on the Science of Language” (March 1863), and William T. Thornton’s “History, and Its Scientific Pretensions” (May 1863) play a role similar to that of Masson’s article by defining the present methods and methodological pretensions of critical study in other disciplines.30 In “Genius and Discipline in Literature” Masson describes the problem of style as one of striking a balance between “the natural powers” of the writer, and “the discipline to which he subjects these powers.”31 Employing an extended military metaphor, Masson argues that very few writers of the day can be said to manifest an overarching strategy in their literary production, or to employ “the same noble self-discipline on a large scale...exercised on different material.”32 Rather, because most writing is done for the periodical press, a literary life is now “morselled out into a series of small or not very extensive efforts”, and an author employs “tactics...brought into a given situation” rather than a strategy which sees each tactical situation (or journal article) as part of a larger authorial plan. Because of the non-strategic nature of most literary careers, Masson feels it is time to enunciate some principles of the “art of literary self-regulation.”33 Among the principles of “intellectual self-discipline” are a series of statements that sum up the concerns of the various critical responses to Ruskin’s writings between 1858 and 1865. The principle of “negative Truth”, for instance, states that one should never write what one does not really think, nor pretend to know what one does not know (a common judgment made of Ruskin in reviews of his essays on Political Economy).34 The principle of “temperance, or Suspension of Judgment” suggests that one should not use big words (of critical attack), when little ones will suffice, and one should keep one’s literary genius in check by determining that “the words spoken shall be not only words of truth but also words of soberness.”35 Further, under the heading of this principle falls the matter of professing knowledge that one does not have. Because of the present, fast pace of the publishing industry, and the competition among publications for readers and attention, “public writers” are especially liable to express opinions for which they have no factual basis. Against this error in judgment, Masson argues that writers must respect the general principles of the disciplines about which they write: [T]here are such things as general principles of human nature, of political economy, of politics, &c., on the faith of which those who are in the possession of them may proceed to argue, in an a priori or deductive manner, on questions suddenly brought before them. Perhaps all the most valid argumentation on social subjects is of this kind.36

98

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Many of the attacks against Ruskin’s writings on political economy tag him as an author who has launched “in a rage...a hurricane of superlatives” against a discipline whose general principles he has not learned.37 He is judged harshly as an interdisciplinary and undisciplined writer.38 The second article from this period that attempts to define the rules of composing a critical essay is Samuel Reynolds’ “The Critical Character”, published in the Westminster Review in 1863. Not an editorial but (loosely) a review of three books (Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture and Modern Painters, Arnold’s Lectures) and one periodical (The Cornhill Magazine, June and August, 1863), Reynolds does not hesitate to make general assertions as he identifies “[t]he special taste and knowledge which the critic requires” by drafting a comparative study of the respective faults and excellences of Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. 39 Reynolds considers Arnold to be “the very best critic we possess”, and Ruskin “one of the most deficient in true critical character.” He depicts Ruskin as a genius who writes “carelessly, recklessly even, and sometimes with a knowledge of his subject so slight as to be hardly distinguishable from total ignorance.” Further, Ruskin’s “sympathies and antipathies” are seen to appear “in ludicrous extremes” and his “whims and fancies” to be “more than feminine in their number and absurdity.”40 Arnold, on the other hand, is depicted as “a genuine critic” because he is “above all, always fair, always ready to see the utmost possible good in that which his nature does not lead him to sympathize.”41 His ability to write biography is noted as a sign of his great “width of sympathy”, but most important is the calm and judicious manner in which this critical sympathy is employed and conveyed. 42 Arnold himself had much to do with this perception of his own critical character by developing, in the first edition of Essays in Criticism (1865), his idea of a criticism that rises above a tactical, “practical” view of matters, and strives toward a more “universal” outlook, based upon a critical “disinterestedness”. In “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”, in particular, Arnold argues that what is needed is a “language innocent enough” to make “the spotless purity of our intentions evident” to practical-minded citizens, and this could not be accomplished by meeting them on their own terms.43 As Chris Baldick has put it, Arnold “was to create a new kind of critical discourse which could, by its display of careful extrication from controversy, speak from a privileged standpoint, all other discourses being in some way compromised by partial or partisan considerations.”44 Precisely opposite to this kind of critical discourse, according to Arnold, were the approaches of the “smoke blackened” Cobbett, the “furious” Carlyle, and the “pugnacious” Ruskin, whose recent forays into political economy smacked too much “of immediate practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere.”45 Arnold was not wrong to categorize Ruskin’s recent writings as practical and strategic. Unlike much of his art criticism, which appeared in volume format from the start, all of Ruskin’s writings on political economy were deployed strategically in the periodical press.46 Regardless of the ultimate success or failure of this strategy, it is clear that the discursive choices Ruskin made during this period raised many questions about how an engaged, critical discourse should sound. In

The Political Economy of Style

99

their discussions of Ruskin’s manner of writing about social issues, Ruskin’s critics generally conclude that while Mill’s style is appropriate to its purpose, and Arnold’s is judicious and “disinterested” in a way that makes criticism effective, Ruskin’s style, when removed from the task of art criticism, is either benignly pleasing and ridiculous, or, anachronistic and dangerous. It is dangerous not only because it challenges the rules of newly established discursive categories, but because of its popularity among less talented imitators and followers. In a passage that foreshadows future accusations of the corruption of the young that will be made against Ruskin’s pupil, Oscar Wilde, Ruskin’s manner of writing is described by Henry Fothergill Chorley as “mischievous to art, mischievous to literature, but mischievous above all to those young and eager minds, animated by the love of art and literature, which may mistake this declamatory trash for stimulating food.”47 Such a criticism takes Henry Morley’s identification of Ruskinian prose with pulpit declamation and Euphuism to its extreme, utterly denying the possible motive to truth inherent in Ruskin’s prose. The Political Economy of Literature Ruskin was to become familiar with Henry Morley’s complaint regarding ornate style, that it had become “poor entertainment for the English people” as opposed to a mode of discourse that might bear truth. Rather than drastically adjust his manner of writing during this period, however, Ruskin defended his own style and attacked the contemporary state of reading, which failed to recognize the potential truthvalue of such a style. In The Political Economy of Art (1857) we find a statement of his concern with the source of this failure. Here Ruskin locates the problem of the misunderstanding of his writing in the poor reading habits of a public that has access to too much literature, and thus does not give the proper amount of time, attention and thought to those works that deserve careful reading: “[T]he amount of pleasure that you can receive from any great work”, he says, “depends wholly on the quantity of attention and energy of mind you can bring to bear upon it” (RW, 16.57). It is this same problem that moved Herbert Spencer to propose a theory of style based on the need to make reading as easy as possible for the reader. According to Spencer’s thesis, a reader (the 1850 English reader) has a limited amount of mental power available to him, and so the goal in style is to use up as little of that power as possible, or, as Spencer puts it, “the economizing of the reader’s or hearer’s attention.”48 Ruskin’s application of economic principles to this problem is very different from Spencer’s proposed economy of mental energy. To remedy the problem of the contemporary reader’s poor attention span Ruskin proposes that rather than cater to the needs of this easily exhausted public, authors and publishers should attempt to improve reading habits by applying the political economic principles of supply and demand to the market of books. Readers do not read well, Ruskin argues, because they have too much to chose from and thus lack the incentive to cherish any particular written work, and give it an ample amount of attention. His solution is to limit the number of books

100

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

available by making them more expensive, except for those who could not afford to buy books under the new pricing system (RW, 16.59–60). This is how Ruskin’s political economy of literature would function, with the purpose of increasing the capacity for concentration of his reading public by giving them less to read, so that they would learn to read their limited supply more slowly and carefully. Only this “patient” kind of reader would properly understand Ruskin’s own writing which he felt was often misunderstood, and increasingly so from 1857 on. Ruskin develops the reasons for his brief proposal of a political economy of literature in an appendix to The Political Economy of Art, from which I quote at length: I have been much impressed lately by one of the results of our quantity of books; namely, the stern impossibility of getting anything understood that requires patience to understand. I observe always, in the case of my own writings, that if ever I state anything that has cost me any trouble to ascertain, and which, therefore, will probably require a minute or two of reflection from the reader before it can be accepted,—that statement will not only be misunderstood, but in all probability be taken to mean something very nearly the reverse of what it does mean. Now, whatever faults there may be in my modes of expression, I know that the words I use will always be found, by Johnson’s dictionary, to bear, first of all, the sense I use them in; and that the sentences, whether awkwardly turned or not, will, by the ordinary rules of grammar, bear no other interpretation than that I mean them to bear; so that the misunderstanding of them must result, ultimately, from the mere fact that their matter sometimes requires a little patience... I was at first a little despondent about this; but, on the whole, I believe it will have a good effect upon our literature for some time to come; and then, perhaps, the public may recover its patience again. For certainly it is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than anything else. And, though I often hear moral people complaining of the base effects of the want of thought, for my part, it seems to me that one of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease of thinking. If it would only just look at a thing, instead of thinking what it must be like, or do a thing, instead of thinking it cannot be done, we should all get on far better. (RW, 16.125–6)

Remarkably, in this passage, Ruskin is agreeing with almost all of the critical rules that have been wielded against his own writing style. He finds solace from his despondency over the general laziness of his readership in the fact that it offers the great challenge of “discipline” to the contemporary writer. He agrees with the rule of “compression” (use of the “fewest possible words”), and in the need for “facts” told “in a plain way”. However, in spite of what his critics might say, Ruskin claims to have been practicing these stylistic rules all along. Thus, although he recognizes the potential value of an economizing philosophy of style such as Spencer’s, Ruskin broadens the concept of perspicuous writing to include his own writing, and finally locates the problem of any misunderstanding of his sense, or a failure to see the transparency of his prose, in a faulty and impatient readership. In

The Political Economy of Style

101

this way, Ruskin promoted the importance and value of seemingly complex and ornate styles of writing and art. A philosophy of style such as Herbert Spencer’s that called for a persistent use of the simplest words arranged according to the simplest syntax was ultimately unsatisfactory to Ruskin because it limited the kinds of reality that could be represented in language, and detracted from the moral responsibility of the writer to represent the world as accurately as possible. Rather than prescribe a stylistic norm as that which best represents reality in all cases, Ruskin advocated a free range of styles, so long as they were rooted in “Nature”, that is, so long as they would bear the purpose of a superior mimesis and were not ornate and abstract for their own sake, without loyalty to an originary referent. This belief underlies the point made in the final sentence of the long passage just cited, where Ruskin asserts the moral priority of looking over thinking. Ruskin asserts that social change is best enacted by presenting a verbal image of unequivocal truth. Criticism as it was coming to be defined by the likes of Masson, Morley and even Arnold, was perceived by Ruskin to inhibit rather than encourage action. To counteract this new enforcement of disciplinary proprieties and the fragmented (scientific) method of social criticism that came with it, Ruskin attempted to communicate key scenes and terms that could be grasped as sites of coherent knowledge, allowing one to see one’s role in the broader social structure.49 Thus, the most politically expedient writing according to Ruskin would not be a narrow discipline identifiable as philosophical criticism, but a writing that instilled visions of social reality in the mind of the reader, visions that would in turn lead to appropriate action based upon this acquired, self-evident knowledge. To suggest that Ruskin’s writing was merely beautiful and dazzling (on the complimentary side), or obscure and Euphuistic (on the negative) was to threaten the underlying political and pedagogical motives of his work. To protect his own prose from accusations of a prettiness that was irrelevant to the matters it was addressing, or from being conceptually “in the clouds” when it should have been more judiciously grounded, Ruskin asserted his own definitions of the concepts of “Truth” and linguistic “accuracy”. Ruskin’s Argument for Critical Truth Ruskin’s conception of “Truth” is familiar from Modern Painters where Turner’s methods of representing “Nature” are championed over those of the Old Masters.50 Turner is understood by Ruskin to be more persistently interrogative of his own methods of representing nature, combining an accurate recording of his impressions, and a skeptical review of the means of representing them.51 As a result, his work best exemplified for Ruskin the successful presentation of “distinct impressions” of nature, rather than a mere imitation of nature’s surfaces, and enacted Ruskin’s paradoxical but crucial idea “that [true] representation might be mysterious without being vague, and precise without being entirely clear.”52 “Imitation”, Ruskin tells us, “can only be of something material”, whereas truth

102

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

“has reference to statements both of the qualities of material things, and of emotions, impressions, and thoughts” (RW, 3.104). The primary message of Ruskin’s distinction between imitation and truth is that the latter is morally superior because of its “universal application” and its communication of the mysterious element of nature that the semblance of likeness offered by imitation does not provide. Truthful representation must still respect a serious observance of nature, and be derived “straight from the natural scenery” (as Ruskin puts it in The Two Paths); but attempting to imitate the surface of the natural scenery is not enough.53 Ruskin’s argument about proper reading and accurate writing, most explicitly stated in Sesame and Lilies (1865), works from a similar conception of representation, save that the rootedness of visual representation in “the natural scenery” is replaced by a conception of the etymological rootedness of language in its own past. Working from the new models of the organic history of individual words found in Richard Chenevix Trench’s On the Study of Words (1851) and Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language (1864), Ruskin argues that linguistic accuracy is dependent upon learnedness in “the peerage of words” (RW, 18.65). The proper English reader, according to Ruskin, “knows the words of true descent and ancient blood, at a glance, from words of modern canaille; remembers all their ancestry—their inter-marriages, distantest relationships, and the extent to which they were admitted and offices they held, among the national noblesse of words at any time, and in any country” (18.65). Ruskin gives an example of how this awareness of the ancestry of words would function practically in a specific reading, the result being his famous, detailed reading of twenty-two lines from Milton’s “Lycidas” in which he scrutinizes almost every word, and reads the poem as an etymological allegory.54 Thus Ruskin defines “reading” as a “word-by-word examination of your author”, rendering the activity of reading equivalent to biblical exegesis (RW, 18.75). The ideas about language borrowed from Trench and Müller suited Ruskin’s purposes well for they allowed him to locate the truth of words in their originary manifestations and to skirt accusations that he was attributing his own personal and idiosyncratic senses to the words he used in his own writing. According to Trench, words were “fossils” of the natural order of man, including his art (“fossil poetry”), his moral structures (“fossil ethics”) and his actions up to the present (“fossil history”). While the human’s agency over the development of his language was not denied, this agency was ultimately scripted by a transcendent order: “Man makes his own language...as the bee makes its cells, as the bird makes its nest; he cannot do otherwise.”55 For Trench, a presentation of the true meanings of words could be equivalent to a revelation of the much larger meaning of existence within a natural order. Thus, language according to Trench was extremely instructive about the natural order, and the human’s place within it: “it should yield us so much, when we come to analyse and probe it; and yield us the more, the more deeply and accurately we do so.”56 From this perspective Ruskin’s re-definition of the key terms of political economy—such as “Wealth”, “Value” and “Utility” in Unto This Last—represent, not his own personal understanding of them, but their “true”

The Political Economy of Style

103

meanings, rediscovered and asserted through careful consideration, in opposition to their misapplication by the recent “investigation of some accidental phenomena of modern commercial operations” mistakenly called the science of political economy (RW, 17.147). As Hans Aarsleff has remarked, the replacement of a pragmatic approach to discourse with the evocation of the true, deeper meaning of words, was a favorite tactic of the Victorian sage, for it allowed him to assume a position of knowledge, to suggest that the natural, deeper meaning was potentially available to all thoughtful readers, and to attribute a sense of depth to his own writing.57 While critics like Spencer were formulating theories of style which explained how readers could consume great amounts of material quickly, Ruskin’s fastidious conception of reading allowed him to define literacy against the growing marketplace of books and journals, to argue that one “might read all the books in the British Museum...and remain an utterly ‘illiterate,’ uneducated person”, or “read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter,—that is to say, with real accuracy” and be measured an educated person (RW, 18.65). Just how effective Ruskin’s conception of reading was, however, can be gauged, not only by its critical reception, but by the increased popularity of smart and snappy journalism in the last decades of the nineteenth century. If we accept George Gissing’s account of it, as presented in New Grub Street (1891), it is the careful and dedicated Edwin Reardons and Harold Biffens who die out, and the cynically opportunistic Jasper Milvains who succeed by dashing off quick bits of gossip for easy consumption on the commuter trains. In retrospect, it might be argued that Ruskin’s exegetical program of reading was applied with the most fidelity by his own followers, to his own works. For instance, during the 1880s and 1890s Ruskin Reading Groups emerged, as well as “Ruskin extension courses with detailed exegetical handbooks, Ruskin magazines, and books interpreting Ruskin’s works line by line.”58 The Cook and Wedderburn Library Edition of Ruskin’s collected works, an incredible example of devoted and fastidious scholarship, stands as testament to the motivation of Ruskinites to engage in the careful kinds of reading that he advocated. Ruskin himself “was an obsessive cross-referencer, and his scholars individually and collectively weave intricate webs of rich meaning, taking on some of the lost and labyrinthine wealth of their author.”59 A key question raised by this chapter, however, has been why Ruskin’s argument from Truth was ineffective on a broad scale when it came to the reception of his own writings. To answer this question we must explore further the new “disinterested” critical discourse that took hold from the 1860s on as it was developed alongside the general trend toward the professionalization of the critic’s discourse during the final decades of the nineteenth century. An important part of the establishment of a discourse that is perceived as un-affected (meaning both “un-emotional” and “sincere”) as the critical norm, was the nationalist argument about language and style which worked to define, and depict a particularly “English” language as a superior, “scientific” medium of expression. The rise of philology as an important science, and the nationalist assumptions implicit in many

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

104

of the arguments of this science, worked to discredit the more sage-like deployment of some of these same philological assumptions. What I propose now is to examine the different ways in which style and nation were addressed by writers of Ruskin’s time. The next chapter will consider the great significance for Victorian rhetorical theory of the philological and nationalist vocabularies that informed style-debate in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century, and then will proceed to a more focused reading of Walter Pater within that rhetorical context. Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

7 8 9

See the following columns, all written by James White: “On the Facetious,” Blackwood’s 39 (1836): 166–168; “On the Genteel,” Blackwood’s 38 (1835): 439– 440; “On the Historical,” Blackwood’s 39 (1836): 365–366; “On the Natural,” Blackwood’s 38 (1836): 172–173; “On the Pathetic,” Blackwood’s 38 (1835): 431– 438; and “On the Critical,” Blackwood’s 39 (1836): 607–612. This last essay provides a guide to two styles of writing reviews for periodicals, one being “The Accurate” style, the other being “The Gossiping” style. The British Conversationalist was a journal of “self-culture”, and the ability to perform in various styles of writing was of primary importance to the program it offered. See, for instance, “The Art of Writing,” British Conversationalist and Literary Journal (1855): 121–128, or, “Poetic Critique,” British Conversationalist and Literary Magazine (1854): 27–31; or simply examine the first ten volumes of the journal, with its feature columns, “The Essayist” and “The Young Student and Writer’s Assistant”. “Hints to Our Contributors,” Leisure Hour 3 (1854): 316–318; “The Literary Aspirant,” Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal 18 (1852): 371–373; “Puff and Push,” Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal 17 (1852): 257–259. See the essays: “Penitent Authors,” Leisure Hour 8 (1859): 718–19; “Slow Writers,” Leisure Hour 8 (1859): 414–415; “Authors at Work,” Leisure Hour 8 (1859): 620– 622; “Great Readers and Non-Readers,” Leisure Hour 8 (1859): 395–396. Brake, “Literary Criticism”, p. 9. John Woolford, “Periodicals and the Practice of Literary Criticism, 1855–64,” in The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 116. “The Cutting Style of Writing,” Dublin University Magazine 79 (1872): 421. Woolford, pp. 111–112. The description of an innovative, hyperbolic and graphically over-determined criticism cited in this sentence is actually from an article published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1838 (a year after Poe ceased editorship of that periodical), and is describing the critical prose of Carlyle, not Ruskin (“Innovations in Style,” Southern Literary Messenger 4 [1838]: 326). Ruskin distances himself from the generally accepted role of the critic as the voice of public opinion in the preface to the second edition of Modern Painters I, where he writes: “I do not consider myself in any way addressing, or having to do with the ordinary critics of the press. Their writings are not the guide, but the expression, of public opinion” (cited in Brian Maidment, “Readers Fair and Foul: John Ruskin and the Periodical Press,” The

The Political Economy of Style

10 11 12 13 14

15

16

17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24

105

Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, p. 41). The Waterloo Directory estimates that the circulation of Cornhill in 1860 to have been about 110,000 copies per issue. The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800– 1900, series 2 (Waterloo, Ontario: North Waterloo Academic Press, 2001), (31 July 2006). Maidment, “Readers Fair and Foul”, pp. 39, 53. W. Forsyth, “Literary Style,” Fraser’s Magazine 55 (1857): 428. John Ruskin, Praeterita (1889; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 12. Ruskin, Praeterita, pp. 16, 30–31. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, library edition, 39 vols., ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–12), vol. 5, p. 333. Further citations from this edition shall be cited as RW, volume/page, in my text. Much Ruskin scholarship focuses on the significance of the visual sense to Ruskin’s critical identity. For instance, Robert Hewison’s John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), Wolfgang Kemp’s biography The Desire of My Eyes: The Life and Work of John Ruskin (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), and Elizabeth K. Helsinger’s Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982). Regenia Gagnier has called Ruskin’s autobiography “first and foremost” a “description of the things he has seen from the viewpoint of a privileged seer”, and has also remarked upon the “specular approach” of much Ruskin scholarship. Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 240; 306, fn. 24. G. Robert Stange, “Art Criticism as a Prose Genre,” The Art of Victorian Prose, eds George Levine and William Madden, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 46–47. Erickson, p. 41. Dinah Birch, “Ruskin’s ‘Womanly Mind,’” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism 38 (1988): 313. Mary Ann Caws, “Ruskin’s Rage and Ours: The Dramatic Style,” Browning Institute Studies 18 (1990): 39, 45. For Ruskin’s use of the scripture in his political economic writings, see Michael Wheeler’s Ruskin’s God (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 155–179. Sullivan, p. 83. Russel Edward Kacher argues that Ruskin dropped the scriptural references of Unto This Last in his next series, “Essays on Political Economy” (later reworked and published as Munera Pulveris) because he saw that they prevented his work from being taken seriously. See, Russel Edward Kacher, “Ruskin and the Reviewers: Studies in the Social and Economic Criticism, 1857–1866” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland, 1974), pp. 93–99. However, the tactic of definition common in religious oratory is employed as aggressively as ever in the sequel to Unto This Last. For a useful account of the genre of Victorian sage writing, see George P. Landow, “Elegant Jeremiahs: The Genre of the Victorian Sage,” in Victorian Perspectives: Six Essays, ed. John Clubbe and Jerome Meckier (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), pp. 21–41. Jeffrey L. Spear, Dreams of an English Eden: Ruskin and his Tradition in Social Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 88. See RW, 17.147–63. As Jeffrey Spear has noted in Dreams of an English Eden, Ruskin’s approach to political economy, which entailed a definition of the first

106

25 26 27

28 29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic principles of the discipline by seeking the root meanings of an economic vocabulary also had precedents in the discipline; but this approach was notably archaic by the 1850s. As Spear writes: Early in the nineteenth century Ruskin’s approach would have seemed less retrograde. Adam Smith quotes at least fourteen classical authors for illustrative material in the Wealth of Nations, and McCulloch actually opens his Principles of Political Economy by defining his subject in terms of the roots of economy from the Greek for house or family and law...[However,] the process that prevailed as far as the traditional terms of economic analysis are concerned was a gradual wearing away in economic contexts of the other connotations of such words as value. Then, as the study grew more and more technical, the historical terms found in modern textbooks were coined, and the blessedly neutral language of mathematics came to the fore. (Spear, pp. 150–151) George Bernard Shaw ranks Ruskin as one of the great economists “because he knocked the first great hole in classical economics by showing that its value basis was an inhuman and unreal basis, and could not without ruin to civilization be accepted as a basis for society at all.” George Bernard Shaw, Ruskin’s Politics (Oxford University Press: The Ruskin Centenary Council, 1921), pp. 17–18. Review of Ruskin, Saturday Review 10 (1860): 583. J. M. Capes, “Political Economy in the Clouds,” Fraser’s Magazine 62 (1860): 656. Nineteenth-century accounts of Lyly’s writing—including those of William Gifford (1816), Nathan Drake (1817), Walter Scott (1820), John Payne Collier (1831), Henry Hallam (1839), Charles Kingsley (1855), George Marsh (1860), and Henry Morley (1861)—describe Euphues as an example of “affected” writing, meaning, writing that displays emotion excessively, and thus unconvincingly, in an overly “decorated” manner. For a brief history of critical opinion about Lyly up to 1868, see Edward Arbor, ed., John Lyly: Euphues. The Anatomy of Wit, Euphues and his England (London: Murray, 1868), pp. 11–27. Henry Morley, “Euphuism,” The Quarterly Review 109 (1861): 382. Maurer, p. 4. Under the initiative of Masson, Macmillan’s published signed articles without calling attention to that practice in its editorials. Soon after, John Morley’s Fortnightly Review made signature a publicly declared editorial position. Maurer’s article on signed versus anonymous Victorian journalism is still indispensable. For more recent accounts of the meaning of this move to signature in the 1860s see Dallas Liddle, “Salesmen, Sportsmen, Mentors: Anonymity and Mid-Victorian Theories of Journalism,” Victorian Studies 41 (1997): 31–68, and, Mary Poovey, “Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field,” ELH 71 (2004): 433–453. Max Müller, “Introductory Lecture on The Science of Language,” Macmillan’s Magazine 7 (1863): 337–349; William T. Thornton, “History, and Its Scientific Pretensions,” Macmillan’s Magazine 8 (1863): 25–35. David Masson, “Genius and Discipline in Literature,” Macmillan’s Magazine 7 (1862): 81. Masson, p. 85. Masson, pp. 85–86. Masson, pp. 86–87. Masson, pp. 88, 89. Masson, p. 89. Masson, p. 88.

The Political Economy of Style 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

49

50

51

107

True to Masson’s judgment, a Macmillan’s article of November 1863 written by J. E. Cairnes seethes with sarcasm as it mockingly attempts to ascertain what Ruskin has said recently about the gold controversy: Mr. Ruskin has spoken. On the remote sides of Mont Blanc the echoes of the gold controversy reached him, and he hastens, ere it closes, to interpose the decisive word. Henceforth the problem for economists will be, not what are the effects of the gold discoveries, but what is the purport of Mr. Ruskin’s revelation. Let me attempt, with reverent humility, to expound the pregnant words. (J. E. Cairnes [J. E. C.], “Mr. Ruskin on the Gold Question,” Macmillan’s Magazine 9 [November 1863]: 67.) The remainder of the article demonstrates, in consistent tone, Ruskin’s gross misunderstanding of such basic political economic terms and concepts as lodging money, investing money and documentary currency. Samuel Reynolds, “The Critical Character,” Westminster Review 80 (1863): 469. Reynolds, p. 469. Reynolds, p. 478. Reynolds, p. 479. See Matthew Arnold, “Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism (London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1865), p. 26. Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 25. Arnold, “Function”, p. 26. See Maidment, “Readers Fair and Foul”, pp. 43–57. J. L. Bradley, ed., Ruskin: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 240–250. This unsigned review by Henry Fothergill Chorley was originally published in the Edinburgh Review 103 (1856): 535–557. Herbert Spencer, “The Philosophy of Style,” Literary Style and Music (1852; New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), pp. 2–3. I will discuss Spencer’s work at greater length in the next chapter. Spencer’s essay appeared in the Westminster Review in 1852 (which had recently come under the editorship of John Chapman, with George Eliot as assistant editor), and then was reprinted in the journalism trade magazine Writer: A Monthly Magazine for Literary Workers in 1900. Ruskin’s aversion to the “human creature’s...disease of thinking” comes straight from Carlyle who had made a similar analogy between critical inquiry and inaction some thirty years earlier. As Carlyle put it in his essay “Characteristics” (1831): “The Beginning of Inquiry is Disease: all science, if we consider well, as it must have originated in the feeling of something being wrong, so it is and continues to be but Division, Dismemberment, and partial healing of wrong.” Thomas Carlyle, “Characteristics,” Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 5 vols., ed. Henry Duff Traill, (1831; New York: AMS Press, 1969), vol. 3, p. 2. For an extended discussion of Ruskin’s empiricist rhetoric in his definition of the “Truth of Chiaroscuro” and “Space”, see Jules David Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception From Locke to I. A. Richards (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 204–233. Law depicts Ruskin as one who has taken the English empirical tradition (in which he includes, among others, Locke, Burke and Hazlitt) to its limits by consistently attempting to balance the issue of perception and representation, rather than stressing the importance of one over the other. See Law, pp. 209–214.

108 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic Law, p. 216. John Ruskin, The Two Paths (1858; New York: Chelsea House, 1983), p. 20. I say “etymological allegory” because the true, moral “sense” of the poem emerges as individual words are unpacked. For example, in his reading of the expression “Blind mouths”, Ruskin argues that what might seem a careless, broken metaphor, only appears so to a careless reader. As he explains: Not so: its [the expression’s] very audacity and pithiness are intended to make us look close at the phrase and remember it. Those two monosyllables express the precisely accurate contraries of right character, in the two great offices of the Church—the bishop and the pastor. A bishop means a person who sees. A pastor means one who feeds. The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to be Blind. The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed,—to be a Mouth. Take the two reverses together, and you have ‘blind mouths’. (RW, 18.72) Richard Chenevix Trench, On the Study of Words (1851; London: Macmillan and Co., 1882), pp. 5, 15. Trench, On the Study of Words, p. 27. See Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 31–41. Brian Maidment, “Reading Ruskin and Ruskin Readers,” PN Review 14 (1988): 50. Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832– 1920 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 307.

Chapter 6

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent In “The Literary Influence of Academies” (1864), Matthew Arnold tells us what is wrong with Edmund Burke’s prose style: I say that is extravagant prose; prose too much suffered to indulge its caprices; prose at too great a distance from the centre of good taste; prose, in short, with the note of provinciality. People may reply, it is rich and imaginative; yes, that is just it, it is Asiatic prose, as the ancient critics would have said; prose somewhat barbarously rich and overloaded. But the true prose is Attic prose.1

Arnold is quite specific about what he requires from the prose writer. The prescription for “the true prose” aligns good taste with the avoidance of the conspicuous manifestation of provinciality, on the one hand, and Asiatic qualities, on the other. It is a curious pair of prescriptive faux pas, provinciality suggesting an insular refusal of foreign influence, and Asiaticism just the opposite, the willing imitation of exotic, foreign models and language. I believe Arnold’s ultimate endorsement of the laconic qualities associated with Attic prose does not represent a discreet, third position in relation to these figures of linguistic influence so much as a formal method for handling and absorbing the other two extremes which might ultimately be seen as two sides of the same coin. Provincialism elsewhere in Arnold means an unbecoming narrowness of ideas asserted in absence of “a high [i.e. cosmopolitan] standard at hand by which to try them”, and is understood as a position of internal resistance to a larger conception of nation, representing a native threat paralleling that of an invasion from the outside.2 In this sense, provinciality and Asiaticism are adjectives used to describe forces remote from an imagined cultural center (“from the centre of good taste”). This said, each of these qualities in moderation might contribute to the very substance of such an idea of the center. While Arnold was not known to wax nostalgic about the irreplaceable concreteness, color and specificity of the local words and phrases of “[o]ur old Anglo-Saxon breed” (recall his remark that “a touch of grossness in our race…is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names,—Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg”),3 stylistically and lexically speaking, provinciality may contribute to the expressive strength and concision in prose so valued by Arnold, to “[t]hat…laconic dignity, which is the good side of the English peasants’ character”, as Charles Kingsley put it.4 Similarly, it is well known that for Arnold

110

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

foreign literary influence is an important element of any national literature; “the English critic”, he states near the end of “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”, “must dwell much on foreign thought”, and “should try and possess one great literature, at least, besides his own; and the more unlike his own, the better.”5 Stylistically speaking, certain qualities of each of these two extremes can be valuable so long as the classicist model of prose assures that such qualities and influences be absorbed discreetly, “in good taste”. The same standards Arnold applies to writing here inform his association of culture with “harmonious perfection”,6 and his (almost apologetic) exclusion of Chaucer from his canon of “the best” authors because this otherwise excellent poet “lacks the high seriousness of the great classics.”7 Arnold’s critical category of “high seriousness” is forwarded as a means of identifying, without actually describing, the ineffable qualities of great literature. The prescriptive terms that do emerge around his touchstones of great literature— such as “taste” and “harmony”—are descriptively vague and reveal very little about why particular works are to be considered superior to others. It is mainly in his negative examples, in his discussions of Chaucer, or of Burke, that we gain a sense of the underlying concern in Arnold’s aesthetic for the intrusion of the “foreign” elements found by the developing field of philology to be constitutive of all language. While the influence upon Chaucer of medieval French Romance literature is not identified as the key reason for his lacking in high seriousness, Arnold does make a point of describing Chaucer as “an Englishman nourished on this poetry, taught his trade by this poetry, getting words, rhyme, metre from this poetry”, implying at least that Chaucer could not be considered of “the best” because he wrote in an English that bore the marks of too much un-naturalized French.8 Linda Dowling has noted that Arnold perceived the philological lectures of Max Müller and G. P. Marsh in the 1860s as haunting signs of the decay of a literary tradition that might successfully embody English values.9 As Marsh conveyed the truism that “the national history and the national language begin to be studied only in their decay”, Arnold was overwhelmed with depression at the thought of where “the guardians of civilization might turn in any hopeful attempt to arrest cultural decline.”10 In the second half of the nineteenth century, prescriptive stylistics becomes an important discipline to which the guardians of civilization turn. Working from the underlying assumption of much nineteenthcentury ethnological inquiry “that linguistic relations were evidence of racial affinity”, and responding to models of linguistic development that conceived of linguistic change as the historical corruption of an originally pure and unified language, late Victorian principles of harmony and good taste in writing come to function as a solution to the disturbing, racially hybrid specter of language raised by philology and to a social formation that is growing ethnically and culturally global in scope.11 The keywords shared by the discourses of British nationality-law and literary stylistics reveal the degree to which matters of style have been loaded with the concerns of national self-definition since at least the sixteenth century. The OED’s

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent

111

first cited example for usage of the verb “To Naturalize”—meaning specifically the adoption of a word or phrase into a language or into common use—comes from George Peele’s The Honour of the Garter (1593) and makes an explicit analogy to the investment of a foreign immigrant with the privileges of a native-born citizen.12 In this passage Peele speaks of fellow Tudor poet John Harington, who had adapted in loose translation Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso into English in 1591, as one “That hath so purely naturalized / Strange words, and made them all free denizens.”13 Under the Tudors, the king acted alone to make denizens under his prerogative.14 Thus, the power over language attributed to Harington by Peele here is equivalent to the power of the King to make foreigners English subjects. The two significant acts dealing with civic naturalization in the nineteenth century—the Aliens Act (1844) and the Naturalization Act (1870)—mark the gradual move toward administrative discretion in naturalization procedure.15 Following the Aliens Act it was no longer necessary to grant letters of denization or special acts of Parliament in order for an alien to become naturalized.16 By the late nineteenth century the Home Secretary had complete discretion to grant or withhold naturalization certificates “as he thought ‘most conducive to the public good.’”17 In short, during the nineteenth century the power of civic naturalization moves from a more private form of personal allegiance to a public, administrative set of procedures. It is taken out of the province of individual allegiance to a monarch into what John Stuart Mill called “the province of morality or law”, the racial (what we would now call “ethnic”) identity of the English nation coming under the jurisdiction of the state which was to act in the interest of English society.18 As we know from Arnold’s discussion of “the State” as governing party in Culture and Anarchy, he felt it could not be relied upon as a “center of light and authority...as a working power” because “we only conceive of the State as something equivalent to the class in occupation of the executive government, and are all afraid of that class abusing power to its own purposes.”19 To avoid granting the authority over society to a specific, partisan group, on the one hand, and to avoid the dangers of anarchy, on the other, Arnold calls for the pursuit and affirmation of “our best self”, for it is “[b]ut by our best self we are united, impersonal, at harmony.” This idea of the “best self” is the most trustworthy locus of authority during a time of great change, the source of “right reason” that will keep in check the “risk of tumult and disorder”, the “multitudinous processions” and the “multitudinous meetings” that inevitably come with revolutionary change. In introducing his idea of the best self, Arnold is suggesting the cultured individual as a microcosmic equivalent to the ideal state “or organ of our collective best self, of our national right reason.”20 My argument in this chapter is that the stylistically endowed critic, the critic of taste and stylistic discretion described in late Victorian theories of style, represents another version of Arnold’s politically explicit “best self”, another means of endowing the individual with the power to construct a desirable national character, in this case, by naturalizing in style the linguistically manifest, multitudinous forces of modernity. Amanda Anderson’s recent argument that Arnold sought “to give critical reason an ethical dimension...by casting it as an ideal temperament or

112

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

character” realized in such “key attributes” as “impartiality, tact, moderation, measure, balance, flexibility, detachment, objectivity [and] composure” stands as a most useful way to describe the motives behind much late Victorian rhetorical theory and its relation to state jurisdiction over matters of culture, national identity, and the sake of public benefit.21 The universalizing motives and refined aesthetic of the individual stylist work as analogues to an enlightened individual’s capacity to determine what is most conducive to the public good. One of the most familiar arguments forwarded by Victorian theorists of style and rhetoric was that writing made available to the English public should work to unite all of its readers and thus consolidate the English as a people. From this perspective—familiar to us from Wordsworth’s second preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802)—a language common to all men should be the guiding force of written communication. The critic T. C. Horsfall summed up neatly in 1880 the idea of a common culture realized by the power of the written word: Nothing perhaps except an invasion would do so much to bring people of different classes nearer together than they now are in England, as the possession by many persons in every class of familiar knowledge of even one great book. From it would spring the thought in common, the feeling in common, which make classes into one people.22

This fantasy of a “familiar knowledge” also informed a great variety of Victorian prescriptive essays about writing, many of them tabled with an urgency that links the establishment of guidelines for usage and form with the protection of a mode of communication, a method of using language that would be shared equally by all native speakers and render critical truth universally intelligible. As in the debates surrounding the contents of the New English Dictionary, qualifications of English style are largely concerned with the status of foreign, and foreign-rooted words, versus words of Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon origin, the main question being about what kind of balance between the two, if it be a balance at all, will allow for the achievement of a language in common, a language whose meaning is universally significant.23 I identify two main positions of thought upon this question in the Victorian period, one cosmopolitan and individualistic in its vision, the other nationalistically insular and more socially prescriptive in its approach.24 The first position, characteristic of a cosmopolitan tradition of criticism and rhetoric in Britain (especially in the last two decades of the nineteenth century), provides us with the image I have just mentioned of the individual critic unifying difference by a subjective absorption and technical formalization of the diverse racial content of language. The stylistic tenet of balance comes to imply, in this tradition—which includes such critics as Arnold, Pater, George Saintsbury, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Addington Symonds, and Wilde—the proper naturalization of the foreign influences that work upon the author for the ultimate sake of expression with universal import. These theories of style are inclusive, welcoming influences from foreign languages and integrating passages from other writers, but also naturalizing them so that the influences are effectively absorbed by the greater structure of the

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent

113

author’s text. Pater, my focus later in the chapter, welcomes diverse literary influence. He asserts that “eclecticism” is a hallmark of his age, and a “good quality” at that, but argues further that eclecticism in itself is only an initial opportunity for modern writers. The ultimate goal of style in writing is “always to aim at the combination of as many excellences as possible.”25 This idea that a writer’s style must successfully combine literary influences, absorb them so that they are present but not conspicuous, would become the primary means of judging prose style in the 1880s and 1890s. Of course, the concept of balance in style does not emerge for the first time at this point in history, but the idea of balance at this time does come to imply more specifically than it previously had the proper naturalization of language’s inherent hybridity by the modern, stylistically sophisticated critic. In this regard, these late-Victorian authorities on the problem of style who discuss at length in seemingly benign terms the need for an elegant structure and symmetrical modulation in prose, with an emphasis on ordonnance and the silent assumption of phrases and sentences from earlier writers are also participating in a larger, nationalist, and racialist debate about the proper status of foreign influences upon (or within) the English language, the English nation, and about the preferred social structure by which these two matters could best be cultivated.26 For instance, Saintsbury warns against identifying style with “gaudy vocabulary”, and suggests that “no competent critic will advocate a grisâtre style.” Yet, his solution is not to banish foreign terms but to advocate a style that creates a perfect harmony between the phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, establishing a perfect syntactical feudalism, so to speak, so that “[e]ach holds its own proper place and dignity while contributing duly to the dignity and place of its superior in the hierarchy.”27 Saintsbury defends the “esoteric, fastidious” and “fine” elements of language that “Briton resents” in his advocacy of “harmony” as a primary quality of superior prose, and of which Pater’s writing stands as the best contemporary example (according to Saintsbury).28 Similarly, Stevenson’s statement—that the “web” or “pattern” of prose, “a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture...a compactor fitting of the parts”, defines style —is implicitly about the structural naturalization of linguistic foreignness.29 The linguistic subtext of debates about “balance” and “organization” in prose is brought to the fore in Symonds’ argument that the language with “the highest capacity for style...combines conservative respect for its native genius with plasticity, becoming by each phrase of growth a more perfect instrument of unimpeded utterance, more receptive of ideas, and more assimilative without loss of character.”30 This last point made by Symonds, that the language of style should be “assimilative without loss of character”, raises the important issue of the relationship between the achievement of an objectively “harmonious” prose style, on the one hand, and the expression of the individual, on the other. Late Victorian discussions of the modern critic as a naturalizer of an increasingly complex and multifarious field of linguistic matter apply terms from the discourse of Victorian psychology (developed by the likes of Herbert Spencer, Alexander Bain, James Sulley, and at the end of the century, Grant Allen) to the

114

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

fields of literature and aesthetics and develop an argument about “The Aesthetics of Human Character” (the title of an 1871 article by Sulley) that approaches issues of beauty and critical truth as “the objective side of the purely pleasurable.” As Sulley frames it, the main question concerning the beautiful is how the individual “emotional mind” can come to be “in harmony with other minds.”31 His solution to this question arises in his figuration of an aesthetic character that acts as an agent capable of unifying and harmonizing difference. Sulley’s aesthetic character is but one example of what Regenia Gagnier has identified as the emergence of a particular model for “the critic, Man of Taste, or ‘personality’” as “Aesthetic Man” at the Victorian fin-de-siècle, a model characterized by its “promotion of subjectivism, individualism, consumption, and ultimately formalism.”32 “For a character to be a picturesque whole”, Sulley writes, “there must be a rich diversity” manifest within it, but that diversity must, in turn, be harmonized by the character’s attributes of “moderation” and “subtle charm.”33 “The happy mean” prevails over “extremes of excess” which consist of the “rarity of individual development” on the one hand, and the “rich diversity” of external matter, on the other.34 In similar terms, Pater tries to reconcile the categories of objectivity and individuality by asserting that a careful expression of the author’s particular “sense of fact” will result in an impersonal mode of criticism.35 In this attempt, Pater reformulates the character of the most promising guardian of civilization from the Arnoldian “best self”—”united, impersonal, at harmony”—into the figure of the critic as formalizing literary stylist. The logic behind a faith in “style” as the guardian of civilization is based upon a combination of the revelations of philology with new psychological conceptions of criticism that accommodate the fact of the critic’s particular, subjective experience. This logic can best be explained by looking ahead to Wilde who had already absorbed, in his own ingenious fashion, many of the discourses and ideas that I will be sketching out in a more patient manner in this chapter. In “The Critic as Artist” (1890), Gilbert explains to Ernest that “culture” is essentially the “transmission of racial experiences...made perfect by the critical spirit.”36 This is so because “the imagination is the result of heredity”; it consists of the vast racial experiences implicit in the history of language. This idea of an imagination pregnant with the associations of all of the national languages that make up a thinking being leads Gilbert to conclude that the act of “[c]riticism”, which is responsible for the most fastidious use and organization of language, “will annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms.”37 Wilde’s understanding of the value of Arnold’s cosmopolitan conception of critical disinterestedness and of Pater’s subjective mode of criticism may claim for critical practice a grander role than either Arnold or Pater would have allowed, and yet the cue was certainly there for Wilde to take. By focusing on the critic’s “individual attitude or character” (Arnold), and the writer’s particular “sense of fact” (Pater), the cosmopolitan, late-Victorian critic integrates the philological categories of linguistic assimilation and naturalization into his depiction of the scene of writing and attempts to reclaim for the critic an agency over the culturally diverse scene of modernity in and through which he

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent

115

writes, much as T. S. Eliot’s individual talent becomes a “finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations” as he absorbs and refracts tradition through himself.38 The other (more insular and prescriptive) tradition of Victorian rhetoric that I have noted is characterized to varying degrees by the racial nationalism typical of what Frederic E. Faverty has dubbed Victorian “Teutomania”, that is, by “the strong pro-German and anti-French” sentiment articulated in the work of many nineteenth-century philologists and historians.39 Proceeding from an assumption of the common Teutonic origin of all Englishmen, the Saxonist theory of style calls for the reversal of foreign influence upon the English language so that the common racial characteristics and national identity held in common by the English might be restored.40 Only a widespread implementation of a Saxon-based English would result in a unity of the English people and a truly transparent means of communication between Englishmen. Rather than focus on the naturalizing agency of the culturally voracious individual critic, the Saxonist position develops a model for a “national” character that is manly and virile in its renunciation of effeminizing foreign influence, and a more explicit program for the implementation of proper English usage. This position revives the gendered terms found in seventeenth-century attacks upon the Ciceronian excesses of English Renaissance prose (resulting in the articulation of new rules for what has been called “Virile Style”), but stresses a stronger affiliation between the foreign and the effeminate than Francis Bacon and Ben Jonson did in their promotion of English plain style.41 As Patricia Parker has shown, Jonson’s “appeals to manliness and excoriations of the effeminate in style” echo the contrast of virility to effeminacy found in his Roman models, Horace and Seneca. His national model for celebrating a sinewy, muscular, hard, and manly style against a “preposterous” (meaning in the period both unnatural and homosexual) effeminate deformation of style is that of a martially dominant Rome.42 In the late nineteenth century, by contrast, effeminacy in style is attributed to the historical corruption by Greek, Roman, and Gallic influence upon a Northern, manly literature that had previously flourished in isolation from European sources. W. P. Ker’s fin-de-siècle account of how the “independent strong Teutonic national powers” manifest in epic poetry were “thwarted and interfered with” by the romance genres of “more or less Romanised and blended nationalities” stands as a typical example of the geographic vision informing this position.43 As Lee Paterson has noted, when Ker celebrates “the hardness of the Sagas”, he is simultaneously critiquing the stylistic and “sexual lability” of Oscar Wilde, and when he describes the “pernicious effect of classical studies” upon Teutonic literature, “his target is the classicist Pater.”44 Debates about style in the period, loaded as they are with sexual metaphors and insinuations about class identification, are especially colored by matters of national and racial influence.45 Stylistic accusations of effeminacy or rudeness generally refer, in the end, to a writer’s chosen manner of handling the racial substance of language. The next two sections of this chapter address the relationship between stylistics and the concerns of philology by considering how such a nationalist, linguistic protectionism prevailed upon nineteenth-century attempts to define an

116

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

English prose style. In the context of this Anglocentric line of style-theory, I will then read Pater’s 1888 essay “Style” as an apotheosis of the cosmopolitan position which forwards a marked challenge to English assumptions about “common sense” communication and the inherent force of a consolidated, Saxonized discourse. Against these assumptions, and with an approach to philology’s revelations of linguistic hybridism as a necessary opportunity for the individual, modern critic, these cosmopolitan critics propose—in lieu of a Saxon revival—the subjective naturalization of linguistic eclecticism.

Saxon Transparency and Problems of Mediation The most extreme version of the argument about writing that advocates a total exclusion of foreign influences upon the English language was made repeatedly over a period of forty years by the self-educated schoolteacher, Dorset poet, and philologist, William Barnes.46 From his first humble effort written to this purpose in the form of a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1830 to his 1878 schoolbook entitled Outline of English Speech-Craft, Barnes argued for the replacement of words rooted in Latin or Romance languages with those of Germanic origin. His argument rests consistently on the idea of a language that may easily be grasped by Englishmen of all classes for the purpose of a common understanding. In the letter of 1830 Barnes forwards this argument with the sincere hope that writers will heed it as a means of stopping the perceived corruption of contemporary letters by an influx of foreign terms. This first letter proposes a simple program by which foreign words might be replaced by an innovative use of Saxon ones, for instance, the replacement of “animalstead” for “menagerie”, “mendstead” for “penitentiary”, “governlore” for “political economy”, “painlore” for “pathology”, and, in reference to the science of words with which he is especially concerned, he suggests it be known as “wordlore” rather than “philology”.47 While Barnes clings to the basic tenets of his program throughout his career, and the employment of his innovative Saxon-equivalents in his own writing suggests his continued belief in the importance and possibility of his method, the hope that it might actually take hold and have a general impact is tempered by the time he writes Speech-Craft. In this book the English language is surveyed as a domain in which the damage has already been done, perhaps irreparably, because, “English has become a more mongrel speech by the needless inbringing of words from Latin, Greek, and French, instead of words which might have been found in its older form, or in the speech of landfolk over all England, or might have been formed from its own roots and stems, as wanting words have been formed in German and other purer tongues.”48 The consequence of this corruption, according to Barnes, is that English has become so very difficult to learn “in its foreignworded fulness” and has practically become a foreign language “to unschooled men.”49 Barnes’ concern for a shared language easily accessible to all Englishmen is implicit in many subsequent Victorian theories of style, although the most common argument advocating a Saxon-dominated English is that it is expressively

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent

117

superior (because loaded with a familiar, native significance for the English speaker) and more concise. In the philological section of Matthew Harrison’s Rise, Progress, and Present Structure of the English Language (1848)—an important precursor to Herbert Spencer’s Saxonist theory of English style—for example, Harrison initiates an argument for the greater effectiveness of a Saxon-based English style by explaining how the “monosyllabic character of the English language” is due to the character and environment of England’s continental forefathers who were “cut off from foreign intercourse” and “conversant only with gloomy forests and stormy seas.”50 This resulted in the development of a language that was extremely concentrated syllabically, leading Harrison to remark that “in the name of certain things constantly before us, or in common use [basic terms for body parts, infirmities, domestic animals, and the elements], the Latin language requires 146 syllables to express that, which is expressed in English by 63” (R, 67). Harrison also observes a principle of economy “in the formation of our very monosyllables themselves” (R, 78), as words of a completely different meaning are produced by the simple change of single vowels (for example, bag, beg, big, bog [R, 79]). And further still, as a result of the comparative absence of inflexion and variation in the cases, genders, and number of English nouns, foreign terms are quite easily adapted into English, enabling it “to adopt, with perfect ease, terms which do not easily amalgamate with languages of more complexity” (R, 83). This noted plasticity of English is both a blessing and a curse, according to Harrison, for while there are a number of foreign influences that have been beneficial to the development of modern English—specifically those arising from “the judicious introduction of classical terms” (R, 90) which have served to temper the harsh character of the English by assimilating linguistic elements from the “children of softer climes and gentler aspect” (R, 92)—many of the more recent adoptions are understood to be corrupting. In describing the sources of corruption that have resulted from the introduction of foreign terms, phrases, and idioms into English, Harrison begins to formulate a series of prescriptive rules for English style that are founded upon the national and racial identity of the language and a fantasy that aligns national coherency with a shared, transparent medium of expression based upon an archaic model of usage. Opening his account of the origins of the corruption of English like a true narrative of invasion—(“In the time of Chaucer, the French language flowed in copiously upon the Anglo-Saxon” [R, 94])—Harrison asserts that foreign terms should be allowed into English only if they indicate an object that has no English equivalent, such as the French guillotine or bayonet, or the Chinese gong (R, 95). Outside of these instances, he says, the use of foreign words effeminizes “the manly form of our language”, and the “silly pedantic affectation of interlarding our language with foreign terms” only hides the dignity of simple English “under a load of foreign frippery” (R, 95). Foreign phrases and idioms are equally deplorable to Harrison, as they are seen to “derange and interfere with the natural order of the language” (R, 96).

118

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Working from Harrison’s assumptions about the efficacy of a “pure” English for communication, Herbert Spencer (in “The Philosophy of Style” [1852]) bases his theory of style upon “the importance of economizing the reader’s or hearer’s attention” and stresses the need for using Saxon words in order to achieve the greatest simplicity for his model of the reader’s mind as an engine with only a limited amount of mental fuel to expend. Saxon words are preferred because they carry the earliest associative resonance and thus signify meaning with the least mental resistance.51 “[T]he shortness of Saxon words”, he writes, “becomes a reason for their greater force”, and they are more “specific”, more closely linked to the concrete artifacts they signify.52 The logic that applies to vocabulary extends to grammatical structure as well. For instance, Spencer provides the example of the superiority of saying “the black horse” over “le cheval noir”, and notes that the English grammatical arrangement is the more economical: “If ‘a horse black’ be the arrangement, then immediately on the utterance of the word ‘horse’ there arises, or tends to arise, in the mind an idea answering to that word; and as there has been nothing to indicate what kind of horse, any image of a horse suggests itself.”53 In the English grammatical arrangement, on the other hand, the kind of horse is established before the word horse appears, thus saving unnecessary mental energy that might have been spent considering just what kind of horse was being suggested before the appearance of the adjective. Spencer’s “scientific” argument linking Saxonized English and an economy of communication had its advocates throughout the century in critics like T. H. Wright and Alfred Owen Legge.54 However, while both Wright and Legge assume that Spencer is correct in aligning Saxon with perspicuity, they each assert their own significant qualifications to Spencer’s leveling, mechanical model of the individual mind by citing the complexity of a modern culture that must take into account the discourse of science, the realities of globalization, and, as Legge puts it, the “composite nationality” of English.55 Wright’s key point of departure from Spencer lies in his contestation of Spencer’s idea that an economical use of Saxon English will eliminate all mediating elements of the author’s personality during the process of communication. Spencer’s ideal of style as a “perfectly dispassionate” algebraic expression fabricates the impossible ideal of a being “without personality.”56 Contrary to this model Wright suggests that the motivation to write is based upon the author’s “gradual deposit of life’s experiences”, and style is the “unconscious revelation of the hidden self” of the author.57 Wright’s qualification introduces a real problem for a Saxonist theory of immediacy, and it is this very problem of the author’s “hidden self” that will be exploited by cosmopolitan critics as a locus of authorial agency when they argue that the “compromises and expedients” of language are naturalized and rendered impersonal through the critic’s discovery of his expressive self. Equally important as a challenge to Spencer’s theory of style is Legge’s acknowledgment of the “composite nationality” of the English language. Up to this point, the Saxonist theories of style I have considered have mainly abhorred the reality of the English language’s massive integration of foreign terms, a reality that is gradually disclosed through the century by the increased interest in comparative

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent

119

philology.58 This work in philology had a great effect upon how an author’s style would be judged. It would allow Symonds to base a chapter about “National Style” in 1890 on the claim that it is possible “to trace the biography of a people in the development of its mother tongue, and the assimilation through speech of mental qualities derived from other races.”59 It would also be explored by Pater, in combination with Wright’s point about the necessary expression of the individual in style, as a means of challenging theoretical attempts to identify a Saxon-based prose as naturally objective or transparently scientific. However, before I turn to these alternative theories of prose style, it is necessary to explain how philological models of linguistic development informed them.

Philology and Linguistic Assimilation In English: Past and Present (1855) Richard Chenevix Trench proposes a model of linguistic development that figures the historical moment of a foreign word’s adoption as the key to its likely assimilation into English. Trench’s argument states that foreign words introduced into a language “at an early period, when as yet writing is rare, and books are few or none” assimilate best and become “quite indistinguishable from natives.” Once a mature literate culture has developed, however, assimilation is more difficult. In a culture with “a much written language and a full formed literature”, an adopted foreign word is more likely to continue to wear “the appearance of a foreigner and stranger.” Unlike Barnes’ extreme position which demands that even early assimilated terms be translated back into Saxon, Trench allows for the presence of foreign-rooted terms in English; however, the allowance comes with a handy proviso, a way to distinguish between a word which has “entirely assimilated” due to its having long lived “orally on the lips of men,” versus “the foreign word...which can no longer undergo a thorough transformation” in the present.60 Such distinctions would in turn be used by some critics to argue that a writer who employs neologisms and foreign words without discrimination corrupts pure English with unnatural foreignness. The application of the history of language to the practice of literary criticism results in a new means of judging a writer and his character according to the kinds of words he chooses, to his “taste” for words. As A. C. Fraser put it in his essay “Modern Style” (1857) which explores the possibilities for criticism of this new philologically-informed discipline of literary criticism: “[N]othing but natural taste can direct us how to select. The man who writes as he thinks will choose the Saxon element naturally, in preference to the classical, wherever it is feasible. He will choose the commonest, best known words, and his style will be stronger, broader, and strike more home.”61 The writer who chooses words that do not “strike home” can subsequently be judged as one who lacks taste, or, even more seriously, he can be seen to possess a taste that is both un-English and un-manly. Such criticisms were leveled, at various points, against the writing of Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold and Pater, and most famously at the end of the century, against Wilde.

120

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

This last kind of judgment, the hetero-Saxonist ruling that identifies the foreign effeminacies of a writer, is often phrased in the binary terms of sincerity and affectation, naturalness and artificiality. We find this mode of critique in Henry Morley’s account of Euphuism, which locates the origins of literary affectation in “the action upon our literature, of Italian books and manners”, and in W. Forsyth’s essay “Literary Style” (1857), in which he warns—echoing Spenser’s praise of Chaucer’s linguistic purity, a phrase also cited by Arnold in his discussion of Chaucer—that authors must “not pollute the pure well of English undefiled, with the rubbish of affectation and conceit.”62 This new kind of critique employs the historical paradigm of philology to support a narrative that describes a linguistic movement from natural English idiom toward an unnatural, foreign-influenced manner of expression. The presence of identifiable foreign terms in a writer’s prose subsequently signals the corruption of a purer, historically anterior model. As one reviewer of the New English Dictionary expressed this assumption in 1889, “there is no surer or more fatal sign of the decay of a language than the interpolation of barbarous terms and foreign words.”63 Even in Arnold’s description of Burke’s prose as “barbarously rich” cited at the start of this chapter there is the sub-textual sense of a linguistic boundary crossed, and of a kingdom of (in Arnold’s case) pure Occidentalism having been invaded.64 Writing from a similar assumption about the degenerated state of English in his 1888 essay, “English Slang and French Argot: Fashionable and Unfashionable”, Charles Mackay argues that the English language finds itself in its third stage of development; having passed through its infancy, and a stage of maturity, it now finds itself in decay.65 In addition to the negative influence upon English of recently integrated foreign words,66 Mackay notes that the negative effects of “the slang of recent years” is “in many of its components...of greater antiquity than Anglo-Saxon and literary English.” Mackay is concerned with the recent influence upon modern English of a “cant” or slang, that has its origins in the Gaelic and Kymeric-rooted language of the Irish laborers who emigrated to England before the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, on the one hand, and in the language “used by the gypsy hordes that first commenced to invade the British Isles...in the fifteenth century”, on the other.67 While, according to Trench’s model, these linguistic influences should have been well assimilated because of their early encounter with the English language, the topicality of this potentially antiquarian matter arises from the observation that some of the words “of these classes and congeners” have obtained favor and currency “among the imperfectly educated vulgar of the middle and upper classes, and have lately been raised to the distinction of print and publicity in newspapers and inferior novels that assume to depict the manners and talk of modern society.” The effect of this literature upon a population that is increasingly unable to use the tool of reading “to mental advantage”, Mackay argues (again, echoing the phrase used by Forsyth, who echoes Arnold, who echoes Spenser) “is not conducive to the prolonged purity of the ‘well of English undefiled’” as it has been passed on in the best English literature.68 Thus, the historical argument of corruption can look far backwards as well as to the recent past for its sources, but will always have immediate relevance as regards the class

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent

121

and taste of the language user in the present. Only the discriminating writer will prevent corrupting vulgarisms from creeping into the language and thus perform Trench’s “effectual check” against “barbarizing and defacing” foreign importations. While this defensive and accusatory use of the idea of English’s “composite nationality” will be prominent in criticism through the remainder of the century, not all accounts of this composite nationality revealed by comparative philology were negative and protectionist in attitude. As early as 1833 Edward BulwerLytton argued, “[e]very great literary age with us has been that in which the language has the most largely borrowed from the spirit of some foreign tongue” and “every great writer of a nation a little corrupts its tongue.”69 Similarly, G. C. Swayne’s 1862 essay “Characteristics of Language” asserts that English is a great language precisely because “it is not a dainty feeder, but derives its words and phrases from all sources.”70 Swayne sums up this idea with the observation that “[w]e know not how many elements of race—added to the Anglo-Saxon—may have gone to form the grand composite called Shakespeare.”71 From this perspective, the composite nature of the English language is seen as its primary asset, and arguments for the protection against alien influence or the reSaxonization of English are perceived as regressive attempts to strip the language of its great expressive properties. Symonds remarks how “English is the most composite of modern languages, including as it does Teutonic, Celtic, Latin, and French elements in the body of the idiom”, and Fitzedward Hall (in Modern English [1873]) takes great pride in the fact that “[o]ur linguistic hybridism is ineradicable”, arguing that “Latin is a composite, Greek is a composite, Sanskrit is a composite. So is English; and, solely from being the completest mongrel of all, it is the most expressive of all.”72 These advocates of the positive elements of English hybridism provide a gateway into my discussion of Pater’s theory of style, which not only welcomes the composite nationality of English but actually proposes a model for writing that is based upon the philological idea of linguistic naturalization. For Pater, as I will argue next, the individual stylist’s difficult act of writing represents the process by which a rich linguistic hybridism and chaotic cultural inheritance is filtered through a particular subjectivity into a refined, “impersonal” critical discourse.

Walter Pater and Stylistic Scholarship In his essay “Style”, which appeared as a kind of manifesto at the head of his collection Appreciations in 1889, Pater defies contemporary theories subscribing to the efficacious qualities of Saxon-rooted words over those that have come from foreign languages. Yet, his advocacy for the inclusion of foreign terms in writing is not generally explicit but primarily assimilative. His theory of style is developed to allow for the inclusion of foreign influence without being overly threatening or offensive to more insular, nationalistic positions. This cautious mode of cosmopolitanism was characteristic of Pater throughout his career.73 Pater works to

122

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

accomplish his veiled attack upon a hegemonic position that links literature with an insular, nationally defined morality by devising a conception of style that gives the power of “naturalization” (as he puts it) to the contemporary writer. What is targeted as foreign and effeminate by public standards of cultural salvation can be absorbed and rendered publicly tasteful again by the power of Pater’s stylist. Where Trench and his followers located the proper assimilation of foreign terms in an oral past and depicted subsequent importation as awkward and false, Pater devises a plan by which the naturalization of a foreign terminology is not subject to the historical narrative of comparative philology but is an achievable goal by the literary critic, in the present.74 Like the revolutionary writer Flavian in Marius the Epicurean (1885), the modern writer is located by Pater at a moment “in which the literary conscience has been awakened to forgotten duties towards language, towards the instrument of expression.”75 The key term used by Pater to describe the process by which these duties are fulfilled and this naturalization of language accomplished is “scholarship.”76 Pater defines scholarship in its broadest sense as that ability to select the best word or passage at the exclusion of others not as fine. So, in a review of Saintsbury’s anthology, Specimens of English Prose Style, Pater remarks, “it takes a scholar indeed to make a good literary selection.”77 Pater’s approach to style in the writing of criticism might be described as that of a fine shopper making choices based upon his “human preference” from a diverse inventory of words (S, 7).78 He stresses the importance of using Saxon and Latinate terms, arguing that the literary artist will allow “[r]acy Saxon monosyllables, close to us as touch and sight” to “intermix readily with those long, savoursome, Latin words, rich in ‘second intention’” (S, 13). He points out the value to the prose writer of the infiltration into English of a diverse body of vocabularies, citing the recent assimilation of the phraseology of pictorial art, German metaphysics, and mystical theology, stating that “none but pedants will regret a great consequent increase of its resources” (S, 12). Further, he even welcomes the vocabulary of science as an artistic opportunity. Johnson’s dictionary (Pater’s favorite) included the specialized scientific terms that lexicographers argued had no business in an English dictionary, and, according to Pater (and the discursive contents of a piece like the “Conclusion” to the Renaissance, for instance), it is just such a specialized terminology that can contribute to an artistic rendering of the complexity of the modern mind.79 This belief leads Pater to remark that the great enterprise of the English language in the coming years “will lie in the naturalization” of this vocabulary of science (S, 12). A version of Pater’s idea for a scholarly criticism based upon refined taste of choice and arrangement was defended by advocates of new Arnoldian standards for criticism, such as John Morley, the editor and critic who (along with George Henry Lewes) made open signature public policy at the Fortnightly Review, for the sake of greater individualism in journalism, but also because he felt the obligation of signing one’s name to an article “impresses [the journalist] with the necessity of self-control.”80 In his 1873 review of Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Morley comprehensively outlines in a series of oppositional terms the

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent

123

characteristics of a new newly emerging “learned, vigorous” school of criticism. This new English criticism manages to be both learned and vigorous, to combine order and power, by fusing “German excellence of research and power of historic vision with French excellence of presentation and skill in grouping.”81 Thus, Morley depicts an English criticism that is studied and forceful at the same time because it subsumes the characters of the two primary languages it is made of.82 Morley understands Pater’s “fresh and inner criticism” to be exemplary of the fusion of literary power with true critical order and detachment. His account of Pater’s prose style is notable for its acceptance of Pater’s notorious exquisiteness as a sign of this scholarly vigor and disinterestedness. Pater skirts “[t]he peril...of effeminate and flaccid mannerism” first “by virtue of his artistic sense”, and secondly “by virtue of a strain of clear, vigorous, and ordered thought, which underlies and compacts his analysis of sensuous impressions.”83 It is a pervading “literary conscience...scrupulosity, and...reserve” that apparently provides an underlying order to Pater’s analysis of the diversity of human impressions, and rescues him from being dubbed, as Ruskin was at mid-century, a flaccid, hysterical sage.84 Morley is re-imagining the model of the virile stylist here as one who can shape exquisite foreignness and sensuousness into clarity and vigor by his manner of ordering and compacting his diverse source-materials. Not surprisingly, the one fault in Pater’s style noted by Morley is that he quotes too much in foreign languages, for instance, French and German terms such as intimité and Heiterkeit.85 The very principle that allows for the conceptual fusion of power and reserve—the invisible linguistic absorption in English of the French and German characters—is seen to be contradicted by this stylistic tendency in Pater’s writing. For reasons with which we are already familiar—namely, because a linguistic conception of national identity is a stake—Morley’s statement of this rule is extremely harsh. As he writes: “It seems just now to be particularly the duty of the writer who respects his own language, and has the honorable aspiration of maintaining its purity, strength, and comprehensiveness, carefully to resist every temptation to introduce a single foreign word into his prose upon any pretext whatsoever.”86 The foreign is good only if naturalized into invisibility by the writer. Up to this point I have noted the stress on word-choice in Pater’s definition of scholarship. But, according to Pater, the choice of terms is only the first step in the practice of scholarship. Subsequently the terms and phrases, the “instrument for...adequate expression”, must be integrated by the writer into his own work to such a degree that he can be said to “beget” a vocabulary that is “in the strictest sense original” (S, 11). This second aspect of Pater’s concept of scholarship attributes the agency of naturalization—an agency which philology had located in the slow historical process of linguistic development—to the writer himself. With this second process Pater answers John Morley’s protectionist call to duty cited above and avoids (more often than one would think) the accusation of stylistic decadence. Paul Bourget’s definition of decadent prose (translated and published in English by Havelock Ellis in 1889) describes the decadent style as “one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed to give place to the phrase, and the phrase to give

124

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

place to the independence of the word.”87 A developed sense of what Pater means by scholarship suggests a movement in the opposite direction of such a decomposition from unified book, to page, to phrase, to independent word. It suggests, rather, a means of assimilating the independence of the word back into a new totality manifest in the unified character and vision of the individual critic. For Pater language is always a preformed material the “[p]roduct of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association” bearing “its own abundant and often recondite laws” within it (S, 9). The inherent wealth and diversity of language can be turned into a tool of precise expression by the stylist’s employment of what Pater refers to at various points in his essay as “ascêsis” (S, 14) or “refined usage”, that is, by his ability to perform “the exclusions, or rejections, which nature demands” (S, 9). The practice of these strategic, naturalizing rejections, which results in the elimination of all “surplusage” from the translation of thought into language (“all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage” [S, 16]), constitutes the second important aspect of Pater’s sense of scholarship.88 Terminological eclecticism is valued by Pater only if used with what he calls “sensitive” and “fastidious scholarship” (S, 12, 13), which is the recognition of the opacity of language and of its inevitable allusive quality, of “all that latent color and imagery which language as such carries in it” (S, 16– 17). One must be aware of the ulterior significations of language so that one can contain them, so that the unwanted resonance can be excluded and rejected. Pater’s concept of scholarship, then, entails not only an act of tasteful selection, not simply shopping and decoration, but a scrupulous selection that serves to contain the intertextual resonance of language so that it does not interfere with the present transcription of the author’s perception of the artifact he describes. As the author pursues an “absolutely sincere apprehension of what is most real to him”, he realizes the singularity of the means of expression; there is, “for every lineament of the vision within, the one word, the one acceptable word” (S, 34). The writer “begets a vocabulary” by juxtaposing and arranging his chosen words so that their previous associations and unwanted significations are adapted to their immediate purpose (S, 11). Only by such a fastidious “placement” of the word in the new text will the writer achieve a communication “absolutely proper to the single mental presentation or vision within” (S, 27). While Pater’s critics sometimes would argue that he offers stylistic delicacy in lieu of real critical labor, Pater’s own account of his conception of writing asserts that the writer’s fidelity to expressing the singularity of his impression is the most laborious of all critical tasks.89 The great exertion of the stylist is conveyed in Pater’s discussion of the protagonist of his theory of style, Gustave Flaubert, who is dubbed “the martyr of literary style” because of his relentless and often painful search for le mot juste, which amounted to a life-long struggle of literary labor, a “battle” against “facile” writing (S, 24, 29). In a brief 1888 review of Flaubert’s letters, Pater notes the “disinterestedness” of Flaubert’s service “to prose as a fine art”, thus displacing the association of the term with Arnoldian detachment and aligning it instead with the process of writing Pater advocates.90 The self-promoted lore surrounding Pater’s own method of composition often parallels the account of Flaubert’s fastidious

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent

125

work and revision he provides in “Style”. As the story goes, Pater would compose on ruled paper in double-spaced sentences and gradually insert parenthetical clauses, adjectives and adverbs until an initial draft was complete. He would then copy out the whole again, still leaving each alternate line blank, and continue the process in the same manner, sometimes through numerous drafts. (Pater is supposed to have said to a contemporary, “I never publish anything until I have written it out seven times.”) Edmund Gosse remarks that he had never known a writer “to whom the act of composition was such a travail and agony as it was to Pater.”91 This work is defined as scholarship because it always begins in the collection of quotations, references to, and phrases from writers that he has researched (what Gosse called the “memoria technica”), and then moves toward the complete naturalization of these materials according to the particular vision he attempts to convey, through the process of revision and integration just described.92 This method of criticism is especially appropriate to an act of critical appreciation, a tendency in Pater’s critical mode that led critics to accuse Pater of showing in his writing an “excess of sympathy, at the expense of the important ability to judge critically.”93 The Paterian response to a criticism such as this asserts that the association of critical distance with a more sound “application of critical law” misses the universalizing potential of a criticism that is seemingly immersed in the mere particulars of an individual mind.94 Through the process of scholarly naturalization Pater renders the subjective idea, the writer’s particular “sense of fact” universal (S, 35). As Pater phrases this point: “If the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a veritable apprehension, it will be in a real sense ‘impersonal’” (S, 35).95 Pater’s model for “scholarly” composition—based upon a careful attention to vocabulary and a subsequent insertion of this vocabulary into a stylistic or syntactical structure that will contain the intertextual resonance of individual words—stands as an alternative to arguments that identify set modes of discourse with unmediated communication. It denies Spencer’s association of economical, Saxon-based style with a subjectless, algebraic expression of thought. It denies the attribution of truth-value to any one designated prose style. The correction to such simplistic conceptions of discourse comes in Pater’s emphasis upon the uniqueness of the writer’s “sense of fact” that must be conveyed with precision in language.96 As Wolfgang Iser remarks, the object can no longer function for Pater as an organizing agent. Instead, the concept of style comes to function as “a formalistic circumscription” of the “chaotic variety and complexity...of the present time” (S, 38), as this complexity manifests itself in the writer’s impression of the object.97 Such a circumscription, no longer dependent upon the object, finds its organizing principles in the formal arrangement of the words chosen to represent the writer’s impression. In Pater’s sympathetic criticism we often find that his most notable verbal descriptions of his perception of another artist’s work are mediated by a text that has no apparent relation to the object he is describing. Iser remarks that Pater’s descriptions of artifacts work from the principle that “[s]eeing is no longer perceiving, but is projecting.”98 One might add that it is often projecting via disparate textual sources. As Billie Andrew Inman’s

126

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

account of Pater’s reading shows, whole paragraphs from Pater’s “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, for example, seem to have been modeled directly upon passages from David Hume, or else to have been translations from Johann Gottlieb Fichte.99 The famous description of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, the passage that begins, “She is older than the rocks among which she sits” —a passage William Butler Yeats lineated and presented as the opening poem of his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1937)—is essentially a translation of a passage from Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine.100 This last example represents the naturalization of a foreign influence into English in several senses. Pater’s description of the painting is rather chaste compared to Flaubert’s far racier description of Eunoia. Eunoia is said to have enjoyed adultery, idolatry, lies, and foolishness and to have prostituted herself to all races of people. Further, Flaubert’s statement that Eunoia was the mistress of thieves in Tyre, that she drank with them at night and hid assassins among the rabble (or vermin) of her warm bed, is all but absent in Pater’s account; unless it is found in the idea that Mona Lisa “trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants.” In one sense, then, the translation of Eunoia into a critical appreciation of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa represents another “crafty, cheeky, slight of hand”, as Laurel Brake puts it, by which Pater naturalizes a racy foreign source into English so that it slips under the radar of the pervading moral institutions of censorship and public taste.101 In a more general sense, though, this transmutation of Flaubert’s Eunoia in Pater’s vision of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa represents a basic example of Pater’s idea of naturalization and of what it means to beget an original language from linguistic material that is already loaded with ulterior expressive import, “compact of obscure and minute association” and “abundant of its own laws” (S, 9). Pater borrows the syntactical arrangement of the passage from Flaubert, as well as a few of the descriptive phrases, but alters these borrowings to serve the purpose of conveying his individual sense of da Vinci’s painting. Thus, the answer to the expression of his perception of one artist’s painting is found in the passage of an author who is historically unrelated, but who, according to Pater’s subjective mode of scholarship, is absolutely indispensable to a sincere expression of “what is most real to him” (S, 34). To the generation that followed, texts like The Renaissance and Appreciations came to represent the kind of pure criticism that distills an entire tradition of thought and emotion into something simultaneously personal and universally perfect. Lionel Johnson conveyed this image of Pater’s criticism in his 1894 essay “The Work of Walter Pater”: “There is a strange purity of effect, the result of a refiner’s fire, through which it has passed....In the finer portions of Mr. Pater’s work, there is a ‘whiteness,’ a ‘candour,’ indescribably felt, through this purity and cleanliness of it, as though there were a ‘sort of moral purity’ in art of so scrupulous and dainty a distinction.”102 Johnson’s comment upon the effect of Pater’s prose cautiously locates the moral element of literature in the scrupulousness of Pater’s style, remarking (as Anderson puts it) how “Pater elevates stance itself as a value.”103 It is as though the whole range of debate concerning the national status of the English language, the diverse racial histories it

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent

127

contains and the implications of such linguistic hybridity for the definition of the modern English subject, has become refracted by Pater’s stylistic measure into the “whiteness” and “cleanliness” of his prose. The inherent diversity of language is still present, but, as a result of Pater’s “strange purity of effect”, it now is only “indescribably felt”, because it has been formally resolved, cleaned away by acts of stylistic scholarship. Wilde was, for a time, equally optimistic about the integrating and harmonizing potential of such a cosmopolitan, Paterian mode of criticism. As he wrote in his 1890 review of Appreciations: “The legacies of heredity may make us alter our views of moral responsibility, but they cannot but intensify our sense of the value of Criticism; for the true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.”104 Wilde’s insistence upon the truth of his critical definitions of key terms of critical evaluation in opposition to their “misuse” which he attributes to “the natural inability of a community corrupted by authority [read, the mass press] to understand or appreciate Individualism”, represents an adaptation for a mass cultural sphere of the agency over one’s begotten vocabulary that Pater attributed to the aesthetic critic.105 Wilde performed his own refraction of Pater’s theory of style but without forcing a split that many of his contemporaries promoted between the individual, on the one hand, and the racial resonance implicit in all language, on the other. Because the individual critic becomes the refracting medium of all previously “alien” thought and emotion, the means by which the “myriad generations” inherent in the history of language are to be absorbed and coherently communicated, the concept of the individual stylist or artist becomes increasingly important for Wilde’s own “sense of the value of Criticism.” Arnold and Pater articulated what the literary critic could hope to accomplish in the discursively complex modern age. It was up to an heir like Wilde to try and implement the theory, in an attempt to preserve some sense of critical and artistic authority over the idea of an English, or Western, culture at the dawn of a new, global, mass culture.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6

Matthew Arnold, “The Literary Influence of Academies,” Essays in Criticism (London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1865), p. 62. Arnold, “Literary Influence”, p. 65. Arnold, “Function”, p. 23. Further, as Frederic E. Faverty demonstrates, Arnold based his idea of the cultural Philistine on qualities he associated with the Saxon or Teutonic racial character, those qualities being, “vulgarity, coarseness, unintelligence.” Frederic E. Faverty, Matthew Arnold, The Ethnologist (New York: AMS, 1968), p. 45. From Kingsley’s novel, Alton Locke (1850), cited in the OED, “laconic. a. and n.”, definition A. 2. Arnold, “Function”, pp. 37, 39. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931), pp. 44–45.

128 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic Arnold, “The Study of Poetry” (1880/1888), Four Essays on Life and Letters, ed. E. K. Brown (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1947), pp. 64, 80. Arnold, “Study of Poetry”, p. 76. As I have already noted, Müller’s introductory lecture appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine, March 1863. The last article in the previous month’s number of Macmillan’s was as a piece by Arnold on Dr. Stanley and religion in which Arnold discusses the great difficulty of making “new intellectual ideas harmonise truly with the religious life.” Matthew Arnold, “Dr. Stanley’s Lectures on The Jewish Church,” Macmillan’s Magazine 7 (1863): 329. Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 108–109. George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), pp. 57–58. See “naturalize. v.”, definition I.2.b. in the OED. George Peele, The Works of George Peele, 2 vols., ed. A. H. Bullen (London: John C. Nimmo, 1888), vol. 2, p. 318. See J. Mervyn Jones, British Nationality Law and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 39; Ann Dummett and Andrew Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), p. 29; and John Cutler, The Law of Naturalization as Amended by the Naturalization Acts, 1870 (London: Butterworths, 1871), pp. 5–6. The other way to become naturalized was by a special act of Parliament, but still with the basic understanding of citizenship as personal allegiance to the monarch. As Dummett and Nicol remark, it was only in 1886 that the court determined (in Isaacson v. Durant) that allegiance was to the Crown, not to the person of the monarch, and still, even then, “although the monarch in a politic capacity, not the monarch in person, was held to be the object of allegiance in law, the doctrine of personal allegiance to the monarch remained of prime political importance throughout the first half of the twentieth century” (p. 91). Dummett and Nicol, p. 85. Jones, pp. 74–77. Dummett and Nicol, p. 85. Jones, p. 77. For a more detailed account of the various sections of the 1844 Aliens Act and 1870 Naturalization Act, see Jones, pp. 74–107. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, p. 149. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 92. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, pp. 92–93, 94, 95. Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 115. T. C. Horsfall, “Painting and Popular Culture,” Fraser’s Magazine n.s. 21 (1880): 855–856. On the wings of this faith in the nationalizing force of language, Trench properly initiated the modern debate about what a dictionary of the English language should be in his long critical essay, On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries (London: J. W. Parker, 1860), first published in 1857 in the Transactions of the Philological Society. Trench’s essay and J. H. Mardsen’s 1859 critique of Trench (“Dr. Trench on English Dictionaries,” Edinburgh Review 109 [1859]: 365–386) both reveal how close the language of a concern with the compilation of a national dictionary was to the language of immigration policy. While I will not pursue a consideration of the racial and nationalist assumptions implicit in English dictionary projects to the end of the century, it is important to note that much of the defensive zeal found in Trench’s and

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent

24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31

32

33 34 35

36 37 38

129

Mardsen’s visions of the dictionary carried over into debates about the compilation of the early volumes of the New English Dictionary (what would become the Oxford English Dictionary) albeit under the guise of greater professionalism and scientific principle. John Willinsky’s study of the OED is useful for its focus on the dictionary as the creator of a literary canon, or as he puts it, “the construction of a usable past” (Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994], p. 5). Dowling’s thesis that the inclusive source-policy initiated under James Murray’s editorship suggested “the darker possibility of cultural decline” (Dowling, Language and Decadence, pp. 98–99), while not completely accurate—because the OED may just as easily be read as an historical chronicle of English ascendancy in language—is still representative of one influential ideal of the dictionary as a conservative representation of Englishness. I use the term “cosmopolitanism” with Anderson’s examination of its historical significance in mind, to mean both an openness to the influence of diverse forms of culture, expression, and thought, and, most importantly, as “the expression of the need above all to enact or embody universalism, to transform it into a characterological achievement” (Anderson, Powers of Distance, p. 31). Walter Pater, “English Literature” (1886), in Essays from ‘The Guardian’ (London: Macmillan and Co., 1910), p. 15. On the stylistic category of “ordonnance” see Dowling, Language and Decadence, p. 190. Saintsbury, “English Prose Style” (1885), in The Collected Essays and Papers of George Saintsbury, 1875–1920, 4 vols (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1923), vol. 3, p. 117. Saintsbury, “Modern English Prose” (1876), in Collected Essays and Papers, vol. 3, p. 83. Saintsbury, “Modern English Prose”, p. 73. Robert Louis Stevenson, “On Style in Literature: Its Technical Elements,” Contemporary Review (1885): 551–553. John Addington Symonds, Essays Speculative and Suggestive (1890; London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1907), p. 176. James Sulley, “The Aesthetics of Human Character,” Fortnightly Review 9 (1871): 505. For a discussion of Pater’s use of key terms from Victorian psychology, see Ian Small, “The Vocabulary of Pater’s Criticism and the Psychology of Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics 18 (1978): 81–87. Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 54, 91. Gagnier’s study traces the convergence of the late Victorian disciplines of aesthetics and economics (embodied by figures like Pater and economist Stanley Jevons) in their promotion of subjectivist and formalist approaches to their respective fields. Sulley, pp. 519, 520. Sulley, p. 530. Pater, “Style” (1888), in Appreciations, with An Essay on Style (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906), p. 35, hereafter abbreviated S and cited parenthetically by page number. Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” (1891), in The Artist as Critic, p. 384. Wilde, “Critic as Artist”, p. 405. Anderson, Powers of Distance, p. 112. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen and Co., 1950), pp. 53–54. Michael Tratner’s account of Eliot’s idea of cultural disintegration proves nineteenth-century stylistic theory to be a significant prototype

130

39 40 41 42 43 44

45

46 47 48 49 50

51

52 53

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic for modernist notions concerning how to unify the increasingly culturally diverse and divided strata of society. As Tratner writes: “Eliot had left the United States...to escape a culture that seemed to him undergoing irreparable disintegration as a result of mixed immigration…Eliot’s prime goal was to have the cultural activities of the upper group [i.e. the cultural elite] become forces for unifying the strata.” Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 167– 168. Faverty, p. 13. For Stocking’s discussion of Anglo-Saxon racialism and how it worked to define English national identity at mid-century, see Stocking, pp. 62–69. See Patricia Parker, “Virile Style,” in Premodern Sexualities, eds Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 201–222. Parker, “Virile Style”, pp. 207–208. W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance (1896; New York: Dover, 1956), p. 49. Lee Patterson, “The Heroic Laconic Style: Reticence and Meaning from Beowulf to the Edwardians,” in Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall, ed. David Aers (Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2000), p. 155. The terms “race” and “nation” are used here with the more flexible meanings they held in the nineteenth century to indicate points of cultural affinity between groups of people established “on the basis of similarities of physical type, religion, political institutions, customs, and above all, language” (Stocking, p. 51). See Richard W. Bailey, Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 192–193. William Barnes [‘Dilettante’], “Corruptions of the English Language,” Gentleman’s Magazine 100 (1830): 503. Barnes, An Outline of English Speech-Craft (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1878), p. 101. Barnes, An Outline, p. 101. Matthew Harrison, The Rise, Progress, and Present Structure of the English Language (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman’s, 1848), pp. 64, 65. Harrison’s text will hereafter be abbreviated R and cited parenthetically by page number. Significantly, by 1850 arguments counter to Harrison’s isolationist vision of English purity were being developed and voiced at the meetings of the Philological Society of London (founded in 1842). For example, in his paper “On the Probable Future Position of the English Language” (delivered 22 February 1850), Thomas Watts presented a vision of English not as a pure, foundational language but rather as “essentially a medium language” which unites “as no other language unites, the Romanic and the Teutonic stocks”, and which would thus likely make English the most widely used language on earth. Watts is cited in Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 222. For Aarsleff’s account of the Philological Society of London and the origins of the OED project, see Study of Language, pp. 211–263. Spencer, pp. 2–3, 4. In opposition to Spencer’s belief of the effect of these early associations with Anglo-Saxon words, George Henry Lewes argues in his The Principles of Success in Literature (1865) that “their very homeliness excludes them from certain places where their power of suggestion is a disturbance of the general effect.” Lewes, The Principles of Success in Literature (1865; New York and Melbourne: Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1942), pp. 134–135. On most other matters, Lewes is in agreement with Spencer’s approach. Spencer, pp. 6–7. Spencer, p. 9.

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent 54

55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62

63 64

65

66

67 68 69

131

T. H. Wright’s essay “Style” is essentially a summary of Spencer’s theory, in which Wright underscores the point that “the canon which prefers words of Saxon to words of Latin origin is justified” (“Style,” Macmillan’s Magazine 37 [1877]: 78–79). Similarly, Alfred Owen Legge’s essay “Concerning Style” cites Spencer’s thesis of the economy of mental power and ultimately agrees with the idea that Saxon-rooted words best achieve these goals of style in spite of the parallel observation that the principles outlined by Spencer are less and less observed by modern writers (“Concerning Style,” Manchester Quarterly 2 [1883]: 42–43). Legge, p. 42. Wright, p. 81. Wright, p. 84. For the problem of foreign influence upon the English language, see H. Marmaduke Hewitt’s A Manual of Our Mother Tongue (London: Joseph Hughes, 1887). The third part of Hewitt’s book attempts a history of the English language in order to answer the question, “What is the Proportion of Foreign words in English?” (p. 319). Symonds, p. 175. All quotes in this paragraph are from Trench, English: Past and Present (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1855), pp. 12–13. A. C. Fraser, “Modern Style,” North British Review 26 (1857): 187. Henry Morley, “Euphuism”, p. 354. Forsyth, p. 437. The remark from Spenser in praise of Chaucer is from The Faerie Queene, book four, canto two, stanza 32, and is cited by Arnold in “The Study of Poetry”, p. 77. Henry Reeve, “The Literature and Language of the Age,” Edinburgh Review 169 (1889): 348. As Anderson notes in Powers of Distance, Arnold’s vision of a larger civilization does not really include the Asiatic, and “usually reaches no further than the boundaries of Western Europe” (p. 94). Charles Mackay, “English Slang and French Argot: Fashionable and Unfashionable,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 143 (1888): 690–704. In an earlier work, Lost Beauties of the English Language (1874), Mackay is more optimistic about the stage of historical development at which the English Language finds itself: “English…is yet in its vigorous youth, and cannot be accused of exhibiting any symptoms of decay” (Lost Beauties of the English Language [London: Chatto and Windus, 1874], p. iv). Yet, Lost Beauties is essentially a glossary of Anglo-Saxon words that have not been assimilated into English, so the youthful potentiality of English is qualified by this tome of missed expressive opportunities. Another of Mackay’s publications serving the same function as Lost Beauties is A glossary of obscure words and phrases in the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: traced etymologically to the ancient language of the British people as spoken before the irruption of the Danes and Saxons (1887) which archives words from Shakespeare’s time that had failed to be assimilated into modern English usage. The following phrase from Samuel Johnson’s prose is cited as one example of how the foreign additions were not always beneficial: “The vile phrase, a ‘post-prandial perambulation’...would have been far better and more elegantly expressed by an ‘after dinner walk’” (Mackay, “English Slang”, p. 691). Mackay, “English Slang”, pp. 692, 693. Mackay, “English Slang”, p. 695. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and The English (1833; London: George Routledge and Sons, 1874), pp. 261, 262.

132 70 71 72 73

74

75 76

77

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic G. C. Swayne, “Characteristics of Language,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 91 (1862): 368. Swayne, p. 374. Symonds, p. 206. Fitzedward Hall, Modern English (New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Company, 1873), p. 327. The desire not to offend his readers was a general concern of Pater’s at this time. Laurel Brake remarks how Pater was extremely cautious in choosing for inclusion in Appreciations only those essays that he was sure would not be received as controversial, as the “Conclusion” to the Renaissance had been. The one essay in Appreciations that did provoke extreme criticism, “Aesthetic Poetry” was withdrawn from the 1890 edition. As Brake sums up Pater’s position among the prominent critics during this period: “If Oscar Wilde at this time sought to be provocative, exploiting the spectrum of latitude in the press, and Arnold was also, even as an elder critic, willing to reprint the [controversial] Shelley and Tolstoy reviews, Pater emerges in his criticism of the period as the most sensitive to the prevailing morality of the readers of his books, most anxious to construct a reputation of rectitude to survive him.” Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 73–74. Elsewhere Brake argues that the meaning of Pater’s particular advocacy of style “may be enlarged to comprise not only formalist ends which establish the autonomy of art from culture” but may be understood further “as an intervention in the literary politics of the day which allies itself with an alternative culture to the hegemonic culture.” Brake, “Aesthetics in the Affray: Pater’s Appreciations, with an Essay on Style,” in The Politics of Pleasure: Aesthetics and Cultural Theory, ed. Stephan Regan, (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992), p. 69. Pater’s theory of style can also be understood as an answer to Müller’s idea that linguistic disease originates in the historical process by which metaphorical language becomes unhinged from its original meaning. Müller argued that when a word “first used metaphorically, is used without a clear conception of the steps that lead from its original to its metaphorical meaning...we have diseased language” (quoted in Stocking, p. 60). As Pater’s stylist “begets a vocabulary” (S, 11) en route to accurately expressing his “sense of fact” (S, 5), he arguably revitalizes language’s status as a concretely grounded system of signification. Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, 2 vols (1885; London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1910), vol. 1, p. 97. In Language and Decadence, Dowling discusses Marius the Epicurean in terms of Pater’s “familiarity with the contemporary revolution in philological science, and the complex linguistic reality that that science had taken as its object of inquiry” (p. 117). While she stresses Pater’s attempts to integrate elements of Latin syntax into his English prose, I will stress Pater’s motive of naturalizing a more disparate range of foreign linguistic elements. For Dowling’s discussion of Pater, see Language and Decadence, pp. 110–140. Pater, “English Literature”, pp. 3–4. The very word “scholarship” carried an important resonance of its own at the time Pater was employing it in this rather specific manner. Small argues that Pater’s critical writings emerged in opposition to the more “scholarly” works that the English academic establishment began to produce in the 1880s. See Small’s Conditions for Criticism: Authority, Knowledge, and Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 1–30. As Small remarks in Conditions for Criticism, “most reviewers, when they discussed Pater’s scholarship, noted his ignorance of contemporary research” (p. 105). But

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent

78

79

80 81 82

133

Pater’s “ignorance” or, rather, his refusal of a definition of scholarship that is based upon standards of evidence and guidelines for citation is challenged by his own personal definition of that term, which, from its earliest conception was articulated not as the proper performance of an institutionally sanctioned activity but as an internal process of self-culture. Pater’s earliest formulation of the relationship between the writer and the scholar may have appeared in a paper he delivered in 1864 to the Old Mortality Society on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “Ideal Student.” According to Billie Andrew Inman in Walter Pater’s Reading: A Bibliography of His Library Borrowings and Literary References, 1858–1873 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1981), pp. 68–72, Pater read Fichte’s Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation, which stresses the idea of self-culture, that is, the cultivation of the scholar’s “sensibility” for the purpose of achieving his “ultimate and supreme goal” which is “complete harmony with himself and—so that he can be in harmony with himself—the harmony of all external things with his own necessary, practical concepts of them.” Fichte, Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 150. Fichte explains this process as the scholar’s progress towards becoming an artist. In The Insatiability of Human Wants, Gagnier notes this connection between Pater’s model for the aesthetic critic and the Jevonsonian model of man in consumer society: “Just as economic man chooses between scarce commodities, so aesthetic man discriminates between pleasures” (p. 55). As Pater writes: “Any writer worth translating at all has winnowed and searched through his vocabulary, is conscious of the words he would select in systematic reading of a dictionary, and still more of the words he would reject were the dictionary other than Johnson’s” (S, 11). Pater’s advocacy of Johnson’s dictionary over more recent ones may be due to its notable inclusiveness both of foreign-rooted terms and of technical words from the sciences. Both Mardsen and Trench are against the inclusion of neologisms and the nomenclature of science. These words Mardsen calls “un-English”, and he familiarly cites Johnson as the negative example, remarking that “[t]here is scarcely a page in Johnson which does not contain some word that has no business there [because it is a scientific term]” (Mardsen, p. 380). John Morley, “Anonymous Journalism,” Fortnightly Review n.s. 2 (1867): 290. Cited in Liddle, p. 45. John Morley, “Mr. Pater’s Essays,” Fortnightly Review n.s. 13 (1873): 469, 470. A historical version of this argument was forwarded in more explicitly nationalistic philology essays, where claims for the predominance of the English language in the future were based upon the idea that English had assimilated the best of other languages into itself and had thus ascended to the status of a universal medium of expression. Two notable examples of this argument from the period are William Axon’s English: The Dominant Language of the Future (London, I. Pitman and Sons, 1889) and A. Melville Bell’s “The Claims of the English Language to Universality,” Science 12 (1888): 291–293. But here, John Morley is applying this historical assertion as a new category of modern criticism, one that “disengage[s] itself from the futile hubbub” of earlier, more strictly provincial, English criticism (John Morley, “Mr. Pater’s Essays”, p. 470). Morley’s description of this higher criticism is clearly derived from Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”, as he labels it “genuine and wholly disinterested”, standing “aloof from the agitation of the present”, and helping to create “a literary atmosphere which is not choked with the acrid fumes of battle” (pp. 470, 471), this last phrase echoing Arnold’s description of Cobbett as

134

83 84

85 86 87

88

89

90

91

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic “blackened...with the smoke of a life-long conflict in the field of political practice” (Arnold, “Function”, p. 26). John Morley, “Mr. Pater’s Essays”, pp. 471–472. John Morley, “Mr. Pater’s Essays”, p. 472. As I noted in Chapter 5, ten years earlier a different Morley, Henry Morley, in his 1861 essay on Euphuism, set up an opposition between ornate (Ruskinian) prose and a proper communicative style by pitting writing for “display” against a more “[d]irect, manly presentment...quietly told” (Henry Morley, “Euphuism”, p. 382). See John Morley, “Mr. Pater’s Essays”, p. 473. John Morley, “Mr. Pater’s Essays”, p. 474. Paul Bourget, quoted in Lene Ostermark-Johansen, “The Death of Euphues: Euphuism and Decadence in Late-Victorian Literature,” English Literature in Transition 45 (2002): 19. Pater’s conception of writing as the strategic rejection “of the facile, the otiose” and as the elimination of all “surplusage” is derived in great part not only from his reading of Flaubert but from John Henry Newman’s 1858 lecture entitled “Literature”, where the excellent writer is described as one who is “too serious to be otiose” and who “always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much” (“Literature,” in The Idea of a University, ed. Martin J. Svaglic [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986], p. 220). For an extended discussion of Newman’s influence upon Pater’s theory of style, see David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), pp. 329–338. DeLaura claims Newman as the primary source for Pater’s ideas that matter and manner are inseparable, that writing is the representation of a specific personality, and for his stress upon “the artist’s power of shaping and transforming language for his own special purposes” (p. 335). Some examples of this view of Pater’s mode of criticism from reviews of his work: William James Stillman suggests that Pater “is more interested in the perfection of his own style than in the mysteries of the art on which his studies are based”, thus pitting style against scholarly responsibility (“The Renaissance,” Nation 17 [1873]: 243). Margaret Oliphant argues that Pater’s criticism is based upon “the single word” that, worked up to mechanically, can move the reader to rapture, and is dismissed by this critic to be “as nearly pure nonsense as it is possible” (“The Old Saloon,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 147 [1890]: 141). And C. L. Graves remarks that Pater’s writing is “not the work of a man of letters, but a ‘stylist,’—to use a base coinage which has at least the merit of suggesting artificiality and affectation” (“Mr. Pater’s Essays,” Spectator 63 [1889]: 888). Pater, Uncollected Essays (Folcroft, PA: The Folcroft Press. Norwood Editions, 1976), p. 51. This review of Flaubert is often seen as the kernel of his expanded essay on style. See, for instance, Edmund Chandler, Pater on Style (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1958), pp. 9–11. This information on Pater’s procedure of writing and quotations from Gosse on Pater’s act of composition are cited from Gerald Monsman and Samuel Wright, “Walter Pater: Style and Text,” South Atlantic Quarterly 71 (1972): 110–111. The extent of Pater’s meticulous attention to the details of his prose in the form of revision is noted recently by Ostermark-Johansen: “The impressive collation of the first (1885) and third (1892) edition of Marius, carried out by Edmund Chandler some forty years ago, established Pater’s obsession with ‘refinement’ [i.e. revision]; no fewer than 6,085 textual variations exist between the two editions, all of them minor ones such as punctuation and substitution of individual words. In most cases the syntax has been

The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent

135

kept, Chandler observes, thus proving Pater’s great attention to the individual word” (Ostermark-Johansen, p. 11). 92 Gosse, quoted in Monsman and Wright, p. 110. 93 W. J. Courthope, “Appreciations,” Nineteenth Century 27 (1890): 662. David Bromwich suggests that this “excess of sympathy” represents Pater’s conscious replacement of Arnold’s disinterestedness with a critical interestedness as the groundwork of culture. As Bromwich puts it, “Pater restores value to the personal and subjective impulses that animate even the effort to be disinterested” (“The Genealogy of Disinterestedness,” Raritan 1 [1982]: 77–78). This does not mean, however, that Pater discards the possibility of an objective criticism outright. (Nor, I think, does Arnold completely jettison the personal and subjective in his formulation of critical disinterestedness.) Rather, Pater attempts to correct overly simplistic conceptions of critical discourse by identifying the process of personal selection with critical veracity. Wolfgang Iser articulates this position succinctly when he remarks that Pater qualifies “the adequate translation of inwardness into language as truth” (Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment, trans. David Henry Wilson, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], p. 49). 94 Courthope, p. 662. 95 Again, T. S. Eliot’s ideas of the individual talent’s “process of depersonalization” (p. 53), and his dictum that “the emotion of art is impersonal” (p. 59), are usefully understood in Paterian terms. 96 Wendell V. Harris, “Arnold, Pater, Wilde and the Object as in Themselves They See It,” Studies in English Literature 11 (1971): 740. 97 Iser, p. 45. 98 Iser, p. 45. 99 See Inman, p. 137–138. 100 Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (1893; Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA; London, UK: University of California Press, 1980), p. 99. The source of this passage was first noted in Warwick Gould, “Pater’s Mona Lisa and Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine,” Notes and Queries 31 (1984): 500–501. Translations of passages from Flaubert’s text in my essay are my own. The two passages, beginning with Pater’s, run as follows: She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all of this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. (Pater, The Renaissance, p. 99) Elle a été L’Hélène des Troyens, dont le poète Strésichore a maudit la mémoire. Elle a été Lucrèce, la patricienne violée par les rios. Elle a été Dalila, qui coupait les cheveux de Samson. Elle a été cette fille d’Israël qui s’abbondonnait aux boucs. Elle a aimé l’adultère, l’idolâtrie, le mensonge et la sottise. Elle s’est prostituée à tous les peuples. Elle a chanté dans les carrefours. Elle a baisé tous les visages. A Tyr, la Syrienne, elle était la maîtresse des voleurs. Elle buvait avec eux pendant les nuits, et elle cachait les assassins dans la vermine de son lit tiède. (Gustave Flaubert, La Tentation de Saint Antoine [1874; Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1983], p. 136)

136

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

101 Brake, “Aesthetics in the Affray”, p. 74. 102 Lionel Johnson, quoted in Denis Donoghue, Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 79. 103 Anderson, Powers of Distance, p. 116. 104 Wilde, “Mr. Pater’s Last Volume” (1890), in The Artist as Critic, p. 230. 105 Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891), in The Artist as Critic, p. 275.

Chapter 7

The Style is the Man Style Theory in the 1890s

One consequence of the racial theory of culture implicit in Pater’s conception of style is the writer’s loss of agency. If a writer’s medium of expression is so charged with its own historical significance and with the associations of past generations and cultures, then the assertion of an authorial identity in writing becomes problematic. Pater held this problem in check by defining style in terms of the writer’s control over his cultural inheritance that is alive in the language he uses. Pater approaches the complexity of the medium as an undeniable fact that must be turned into an artistic opportunity. If the 1870s and 80s represent decades of debate about the substance of this racial inheritance implicit in the English language, the style critics of the 90s are mainly concerned with reclaiming the integrity of the individual, quite often in spite of this inheritance. Pater’s gesture toward the reconciliation of a national culture and history, and the selfacculturation of the individual is subsumed by an anxious sense that the two sides are irreconcilable. In light of this conclusion, the critics of the 1890s choose to preserve the self at the expense of the nation. This can best be explained again in the terms provided in Pater’s essay on style. One important concept in that essay that I did not stress in the previous chapter is that of “soul” in writing. For Pater, “soul” appears when language is absorbed with such a degree of subtlety that it “makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration” (S, 25, my emphasis). The qualifying word “seem” in this sentence is crucial for its stress on the result as effect and not unmediated fact. The fact of language as an inevitably complex material, and the craft and labor required for an artistic expression of the author’s impressions are always, for Pater, the unavoidable step between the particular impressions of the author and the manifestation of “soul” in his style. Most style critics of the 1890s will skip this step. John Addington Symonds’ long essay on style represents an elaboration of both the nationalist and subjectivist aspects of Pater’s theory. Working from the idea of the pregnant cultural significance of language, he argues that the history of the English character is implicit in the samples of their literature, going so far as to say that a chapter from Ruskin’s Modern Painters would furnish enough material “for a lecture on comparative ethnology and the historical evolution of the English people.”1 For Symonds, the second important element in the formation of style, after the qualities of national character embodied in national speech, is the

138

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

particular set of circumstances that inform a writer’s use of language. This leads him to explain the importance of the “personal” in any consideration of prose style: We cannot conceive two men born with the same physical, mental, and moral nature, at the same moment, under precisely the same conditions, and using the same language. They would be identical; and everything they uttered would be clothed with exactly the same words. The absurdity of this conception brings home to us the second aspect of style. Style is not merely a sign of those national qualities which are generic to national languages, and which constitute the so-called genius of the race. It is also the sign of personal qualities, specific to individuals, which constitute the genius of a man. Whatever a man utters from his heart and head is the index of his character. The more remarkable a person is, the more strongly he is differentiated from the average of human beings, the more salient will be the characteristic notes of his expression. But even the commonest people have, each of them, a specific style. The marks of difference become microscopical as we descend from Dante or Shakespeare to the drudges of the clerk’s desk in one of our great cities. Yet these marks exist, and are no less significant of individuality than the variations between leaf and leaf upon the lime trees of an avenue.2

With the idea of a shared culture that shapes the character of every citizen as he or she grows into the mother tongue, style critics of the late Victorian period stress the physical, mental, moral and consequently stylistic uniqueness of each individual. In Symonds’ account here, every person possesses what amounts to his expressive indexicality, his own stylistic identity-print. The markedness of the print depends upon the greatness of the personality that is expressing itself, but, as Symonds says, the marks are undeniable whether one is speaking of Shakespeare, or of Shakespeare’s accountant. This passage illustrates the shift in attention from the nation to the individual that becomes the keynote of fin-de-siècle theories of style. Without Pater’s concepts of language and craft, the identity of the prose writer becomes the fetishized manifestation of personality or “soul” in style. Wrenched from the context of language as a medium of communication, this fascination with the personality of the author was promoted both by the emerging disciplines of aesthetic psychology and quantifying stylistics, and by the tactics of the New Journalism.3 In the former case, psychological and quantitative theories of style proposed methods by which the personalities of authors could be scientifically calculated and graphed as data. In popular science journals, like Science, and in obscure academic venues (such as University Studies), academicians found the unique author in his style and published stylistic charts of personality to prove it. In the latter case, in popular venues such as the Pall Mall Gazette, market savvy editors gave contour to the literary soul through sensational author profiles and interviews. Here, in the popular press, we find the seemingly contradictory gestures of pitting a corporate style against artistic individualism on the one hand, and of encouraging democratic pluralism, on the other. But both gestures work together to sell an idea of authorial uniqueness without positing a developed theory of expression. The concept of style as a verbal index of an individual’s “personality” or “soul” dominates essays on rhetoric at the very end of the century.

The Style is the Man

139

The Soul of Man as Quantifiable Fact For example, in 1890 George Bainton addressed a series of letters to almost every living writer, distinguished and obscure, in England and America, asking each to set forth his opinion on the subject of style. As one reviewer in the Spectator observed, the majority of the authors ended up paraphrasing in one way or another Buffon’s dictum that the style is the man.4 Novelists, essayists, preachers, and scribblers all responded with a uniform recommendation of the unstudied transmission of self for the achievement of the best style. A précis of Bainton’s anthology, for our purposes, runs as follows (the introductory tags are derived from Bainton’s own prefaces): The spiritual essayist Augustine Birrell states, “The style is the man, and imitation of any body’s style is as much to be avoided as the cock of his hat or his way of swinging his umbrella.”5 Arminius Vambéry, the Hungarian writer of adventure stories: “The fundamental law, ‘Le style c’est l’homme,’ makes all theories and speculations illusory.”6 Nature lover Hugh Macmillan: “Every human being is unique; has some quality in which he is singular; and if he succeeds in impressing his own individuality...he will have done...a service which no amount of imitation or conventional writing can impart.”7 Skilled realist and character painter Thomas Hardy: “A writer’s style is according to his temperament,…if he has anything to say,...the style will come of itself.”8 A survey of periodical essays devoted to the question of style in writing produces similar kinds of definitions. From 1890 to 1900 we find a series of concise declarations of the ultimate law of style: “[T]he essence of style is individuality”9; “‘Le style c’est l’homme’”10; “Style, in fact, is the vehicle of character”11; “[A] distinctive style is...almost as inevitable as a distinctive handwriting”12; “All pure literature is the revelation of the man.”13 The process by which the writer makes his identity available to the reader is further described as something that occurs beyond the writer’s conscious effort, and results in a paradox. As these critics of style hope to establish the indisputable uniqueness of each individual, they remove from the author any conscious agency in establishing such uniqueness. An additional problem is the degree to which the biological or inherited influence upon a writer’s uniqueness is to be stressed or denied, as the distinctive personality is demanded in the democratizing popular press. If the locus of an inherited culture shifts away from a shared language then the most obvious place for it to reappear is in the newly validated idea of the unique individual. Culture, in this sense, is no longer contained within the pages of a national dictionary, but within the particular inheritance of an exceptional person. Yet, this particularization of the idea of a racial inheritance of culture is at odds with mass conceptions of “personality” as the sign of a democratic proliferation of literary products. Consequently, the origins of an author’s distinctiveness are often deemed untraceable by critics of this period. Walter Raleigh’s influential 1897 monograph Style (another elaboration of ideas articulated in Pater’s essay) enacts this separation of cultural inheritance and identity by presenting a dramatic subversion of the idea of a dictionary as an

140

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

historical record of a nation. The idea of a unifying, public dictionary, such as the New English Dictionary was supposed to be, is replaced by the image of a highly idiosyncratic process of language-acquisition. The associations inherent in the language approached by Pater’s stylist as an artistic/scholarly opportunity become accidental, personal associations that contribute to the development of a particular writer’s eloquence and function as proof of the willy-nilly origins of all verbal cultivation: For every living person, if the material were attainable, a separate historical dictionary might be compiled, recording where each word was first heard or seen, where and how it was first used. The references are utterly beyond recovery; but such a register would throw a strange light on individual styles. The eloquent trifler, whose stock of words has been accumulated by a pair of light fingers, would stand denuded of his plausible pretenses as soon as it were seen how roguishly he came by his eloquence.14

Raleigh stresses the importance of the particular social circumstances by which a writer acquires his language-culture, and lays very little importance on the common elements within the language that serve to homogenize a body of language users. His idea of myriad personal dictionaries in place of a single, standard dictionary common to a republic of language-users enacts a very literal application of Pater’s attribution of the power of linguistic assimilation to the prose writer. For Raleigh, the homey associations referred to by Lewes and Spencer are no longer common to the point that one might venture to formulate a general science of style. Nor do the foreign associations of non-Saxon rooted words present any real threat or problem. The only linguistic associations to speak of are particular and idiosyncratic. In Raleigh’s republic of words, every citizen has his own dictionary and no two dictionaries are ever alike. The dictionaries are, of course, purely hypothetical. As Raleigh puts it, “the references are utterly beyond recovery”, and the origins of an individual’s eloquence are thus impervious to what might otherwise have been a personalized mode of philology, a complete genealogy of an individual’s personal lexicon. The complete inaccessibility of this personal genealogy serves to reinforce the idea that what really constitutes style is the author’s soul, the author as in himself he really is. For Raleigh, the problem of how the individual becomes manifest in language— the solution to which would lay bare “the secrets of religion and life”—is beyond the limits of reason and analysis, “beyond human competence”, and is simply accepted as an undeniable fact that is proved every time one reads something truly great and original.15 Thus, even as the stylistic rules of harmony and taste are acknowledged as significant in the cultivation of an excellent style, it is an altered version of Pater’s conception of “soul” in writing that prevails over his more elaborate theory of style as linguistic assimilation. It has been altered because the word “seem” has been excised from Pater’s stylistic idea of soul. Soul in style arises, according to Pater, when the actual results of an author’s prose are made to “seem like some inexplicable inspiration” (S, 25). That is, for Pater, soul is still a rhetorical effect. In most subsequent theories, that “inexplicable inspiration” is

The Style is the Man

141

approached as a real-life mystery. As the unique individual becomes the solution to the problem of style, the enigma of the relationship between the individual and his means of expression grows. Raleigh nominates Pater’s idea that “as a quality of style, soul is fact” to be the final word on what makes for a superior style in writing: “The soul is able to inform language by some strange means other than the choice and arrangement of words and phrases. Real novelty of vocabulary is impossible; in the matter of language we lead a parasitical existence, and are always quoting.”16 Pater also acknowledged the parasitical existence of any writer, but set up a model by which a kind of novelty was bestowed upon the writer’s chosen language as it was filtered through his particular subjectivity. For Pater, all of the racial associations inherent in the English language are transformed (but not annihilated) according to the writer’s fidelity to the task of expressing his own impressions. This is what Pater meant when he suggested that the writer “beget an original vocabulary” with his prose. In Raleigh, the necessarily “used” nature of language and the author’s particular subjectivity are set against each other so that a piece of writing might have “soul” in spite of language, but not in collaboration with it or through an arduous manipulation of it. Once you have attained a basic competence in writing, “you write yourself down whether you will or no. There is no vice, however unconscious, no virtue, however shy, no touch of meanness or of generosity in your character, that will not pass onto the paper.”17 Raleigh’s declaration that “[a]ll style is gesture, the gesture of the mind and of the soul”, suggests that language disappears as a factor in communication, and is replaced by a concept of style as the immediate signification of identity.18 Consequently, a new question that preoccupies criticism asks what can be detected about the author from his manner of writing. John Addington Symonds suggests that “distinctions of moral and emotional temperament may undoubtedly be detected in literary style” as well as the author’s “mental temperament”, “physical and aesthetical qualities”, and his “faculties and habits.”19 The theory of the underlying psychological elements of style is not yet scientifically grounded— ”[t]he exact psychology is wanting which would render our intuitions regarding the indissoluble link between style and personal character irrefutable”—but there is a general faith in the imminent development of a scientific approach by which this will be proven. Symonds cites French critic Emile Hennequin’s La Critique Scientifique (1888) as an important step in this direction.20 Identified by René Wellek in A History of Modern Criticism as a minor French critic with a “torturous writing style full of archaisms and neologisms, scientific terms and far-fetched adjectives”, Hennequin’s approach is representative of an attempt at this time to bring the increasingly important science of psychology to bear upon matters of aesthetics.21 Hennequin begins by noting the inadequacies of biographical criticism which is to date the closest criticism has come to a psychological analysis of art, remarking that “the psychological clues that they extract by a superficial examination of literary works are too general and not sufficiently precise to be granted scientific status.”22 As an improvement upon this unscientific approach, Hennequin proposes “la méthode esthopsychologique”23—

142

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

the aesthetico-psychological method—which proceeds from the assumption that aesthetic principles of organization allow one to read art for the presence of “une certaine organisation psychologique”, a kind of psychological matrix that reveals the artist as an organism of spirit, sense, imagination, thought, expression, will, etc.24 For Hennequin, as for Raleigh, style is a manifestation of the author’s soul. As Hennequin writes: “Il y a des formes d’âmes qui correspondent à chacune des préférences que l’artiste marque en ces matières.”25 The primary difference between the two style theorists lies in Hennequin’s confidence that scientific conclusions can be derived from a reading of these soul-forms (“formes d’âmes”) that are present in the work, in his assertion that “l’oeuvre d’un artiste est le signe compréhensible de son esprit”; that the work of the artist is the comprehensible (decipherable) sign of his spirit.26 What the critic hopes to decipher is the typology of the artist as compared to that of the average person. All humans consist of the same general psychological mechanisms, so the question becomes, “What are the marks that distinguish the artist from others?”27 What are the qualities of the artistic personality? To turn this intuition that the style is the man into legitimate knowledge, Hennequin’s aesthetico-psychological method becomes analogous to that of the psychology of personality disorders.28 Through his reading of art he must seek to determine the personality type of an artist, just as Max Nordau, another practitioner of this method, would read the works of Ibsen, Zola and Wilde, among others, as a means of illustrating the elements of the decadent personality.29 Of course, Hennequin’s confidence could not hide the fact that “la methode esthopsychologique” lacked one very important element: a methodology. It was characteristic of this kind of work to assert its conclusions regarding the types of artistic personalities that existed, without actually explaining how such typologies were decipherable in the psychological mechanisms manifest in art.30 Some studies did exist in English that were devoted to the calculation of the reception of art, most notably Grant Allen’s Physiological Aesthetics (1877) and Francis Ysidro Edgeworth’s Mathematical Psychics (1881),31 and later Vernon Lee’s The Handling of Words (1923), but it would take the newborn discipline of stylistics— established independently by Lucius Sherman and T. C. Mendenhall—to propose a clearly defined, quantitative method by which the different personalities of authors could be calculated scientifically, presented as data, and subsequently graphed. Mendenhall’s essay “The Characteristic Curves of Composition” published in Science (1887) was the first attempt to define a quantitative method of analysis that would allow one to prove the presence of the author in his writing style. He proposes, simply, an analysis of the mean word-length of an author, that is, a calculation of the number of words of the various possible lengths (measured in letters) used by any given author in a series of text-samples deemed large enough to determine the findings conclusive. Mendenhall was convinced from the initial results of his experiments that his method would prove useful in the “identification or discrimination of authorship.”32 The method was attractive because it allowed one to test the consistency of an author’s identity in his writing as one tests the

The Style is the Man

143

consistent properties of natural elements. As Mendenhall explains the challenge: “[I]t is proposed to analyze a composition by forming what might be called a ‘word-spectrum,’ or ‘characteristic curve,’ which shall be a graphic representation of an arrangement of words according to their length and to the relative frequency of their occurrence. If, now, it shall be found that with every author as with every element, this spectrum persists in its form and appearance, the value of the method will be at once conceded” and the style of an author will prove to be a reliable, and undeniable mark of his identity.33 Lucius Sherman’s work, initiated in the University Studies of Nebraska in 1888, proposes a similar method, but is based upon the measure of sentence-length rather than word-length. Sherman argues that each author has an identifiable “sentence-sense” or an “instinct of sentence thought” that can be measured by counting the number of words in each sentence and then determining the average from an adequate sample.34 “Three hundred sentences will generally reveal the sentence-rhythm of any writer who has achieved a style”, Sherman says, after having presented his findings which demonstrate that the “approximate aggregate of Matthew Arnold is 37...and of Walter Pater, 36.5.”35 From this first study, and then from the many elaborations of the research that would follow, Sherman finds evidence for “some kind of sentence-sense, some conception or ideal of form which, if it could have its will, would reduce all sentences to procrustean regularity.”36 Critics like Sherman used this idea “that sentence rhythm was a universal law” to assert a scientific basis for the history of literature (by tracing the changing length of sentences over time), and to calculate the more subtle, psychological differences between authors contemporary to each other.37 The work of Edgeworth and Allen represents a move in the last part of the nineteenth century toward the quantification of the consumer’s desire for and pleasure derived from texts, and allows for an easy leap from the analysis of the reader or viewer’s aesthetic experience to the strategic manipulation of the consumer by tactical advertising.38 The stylistic interest in the constitution of an artist’s psyche is the other side of this, an attempt to identify basic elements of the personalities that are most likely to distinguish themselves in the widening field of products and be received as desirable and consumable, because they are unique. Style analysis which focuses on style as personality in this sense represents a form of product analysis, a scientific means of authenticating an author’s presence within his writing that is impervious to counterfeit or imitation, and even to an author’s own attempt to escape himself by experimenting with different kinds of writing. As Mendenhall remarks, an author’s conscious attempt to avoid his own particularities of style will not alter the graphic diagram of the author as determined by an analysis of his writing.39 The problem was solved then, one was what one was, whether criminal, poet or clerk, and consequently prescriptive stylistics almost completely abandons the idea of learning to write by imitation (except in the very earliest stages of composition), or through a systematic study of the principles of rhetoric, in favor of the notion that an author should simply be himself. As one writer put it in 1896, “the study of rhetoric seems to have ceased from among us.”40 The effective abandonment in the

144

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

late nineteenth century of a rational system of rhetoric by which written ideas can be shared according to set principles of communication and reception, combined with a positional distancing from theories of communication that posit language as the racially inherited repository of a common culture eliminates the possibility of English criticism as an authoritative praxis except in the form of a scientific, formal stylistics.41 Ironically, formal stylistics works according to the same principles of more racially motivated sciences but without grounding the distinctive traces of an author’s psychology in racial explanation. The evidence is purely statistical and nothing is asserted beyond a link between the graphic representation of the quantified results and a particular author’s name. Where the idea of racial inheritance does persist, it takes the far more localized form of family lineage. This is the motivating factor of the work of Cesare Lombroso and Francis Galton, whose explanations for the extraordinary abilities of particular individuals (geniuses) largely consist of pedigree tables.42 Galton’s argument in Hereditary Genius (1869/1892) for the inherited natural gifts of great men, and his objection “to pretensions of natural equality”43 have an odd kind of equivalency with the way a popular journal like the Pall Mall Gazette treats its newsworthy characters as natural worthies, despite the journal’s overtly democratic stance. Up-close-and-personal interviews with the likes of John Ruskin and Mdme. Blavatsky, and profile articles on such things as “The Youthful Troubles of Heinrich Heine” run alongside an anonymous working man’s “account of his own experience as to the effect of poetry on his own life” in a manner that both preserves a Galtonian conception of hereditary genius, and suggests that such inherited gifts are available to everyone.44

The Soul of Man as Saleable Sensation The sensational human-interest story—the importance of which was signaled by the newly invented headline—the correspondence column and the interview are, by now, well documented tactics introduced by the New Journalism to sell the idea of an organic connection between the mass press and a diverse public of unique individuals.45 Papers with massive circulation such as the Times, The Pall Mall Gazette, and the Star sold the idea, through these and other features, that the press was a living reflection of the people. As an editor of the Daily Chronicle put it: “A newspaper, like society, is an organism that has a soul as well as a body.”46 The soul of the newspaper consisted of the multiplicity of stories about the exploits of distinctive individuals, the more sensational the better, a tactic that George Moore shrewdly absorbed in the writing of his Confessions of a Young Man (1886) which opens with the gripping line, “My soul, so far as I understand it, has very kindly taken colour and form from the many various modes of life that self-will and impetuous temperament have forced me to indulge in.”47 The souls of the New Journalism’s news stories were similarly comprised of their “various modes of life” and impetuous temperaments, and these qualities in turn became the evidence that critics of style hoped to find in their reading of literature.

The Style is the Man

145

As I have already mentioned, the Pall Mall Gazette approached its newsworthy subjects with an eye to the private details that allowed for a more personal look at a remarkable or successful personality. Whether by publishing passages from the love letters of famous historical figures (like Benjamin Franklin, Cicero and Mary Wollstonecraft) or by having contemporary figures such as Emile Zola and Albert Pulitzer explain the sources of their achievements in a recurrent “Topics of the Day by Heroes of the Hour” column, this mode of journalism focused on the quotidian concerns of historical luminaries, and treated contemporary heroes as sources to be interviewed for their secrets to success.48 The opening line of a Pall Mall review of the Hugh Conway (Frederick John Fargus) novel Called Back indicates the possible fate promised to any Pall Mall reader with literary aspirations: “One morning a few months ago Mr. Hugh Conway awoke and found himself famous.”49 Literary success and greatness, far from being impossible and in decay, are depicted as sound expectations in a modern literary field teeming with individual talent. As “An Optimistic Critic” notes in an 1884 leader article entitled “The Prospects of English Literature”, while “the literary papers” frequently point to the deaths of Dickens, Carlyle, Mill, Eliot, etc., as factual evidence that “the age of giants is yielding place to the age of pygmies”50: The real fact seems to be that instead of first-rate literary ability being rare at the present moment, first-rate literary ability was, on the contrary, never more abundant. It is the very plethora of good men shouldering one another in England to-day that prevents each individual good man from coming more prominently into the foreground of public appreciation.51

Fortunately for the formidable late-century reading public, a journal like the Pall Mall can provide telling stories about these individual heroes on a daily (if not an hourly) basis. In a similar vein, and partly as a result of the emergence for the first time of an infrastructure through which cultural products, news and narratives of this kind could be delivered to a mass audience, the majority of Pater’s heirs chose to stress multiplicity in expression and identity at the expense of stylistic elements that might be used in support of a thesis about the aesthetic development of the individual. Pater’s attempt to salvage Flaubert’s idea of impersonality (by aligning it with the complete subjective naturalization of linguistic inheritance) is easily discarded as both untenable and undesirable. In place of Flaubert’s “Impersonality”, the ideal of a transcendent, universal style is now addressed in terms of the styles associated with popular journals or newspapers. That is, the solution to the problem of style is discussed purely in terms of the individual, and the ideal of impersonality becomes an assumed manner of writing appropriate to a certain branch of the publishing industry.52 Exceptions to the argument that style is equivalent to personality are found in the institutional styles of certain kinds of newspapers “where the writer is writing, not on behalf of himself, but of an institution.”53 As journalists become self-conscious about their work as a distinct profession, demands that a stylistic norm be established within this profession

146

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

become more prevalent. As one journalist argues, because of its role in popular education, the newspapers should aspire to “a pure, virile, and perspicuous style of composition.”54 From this position it would be desirable to erase all distinctive qualities within the field of the popular press by eliminating the “individual” styles of particular newspapers and establishing in its place a standard journalistic style. The newspaper writer is expected to repress his most heated enthusiasms and “consents to write with an air of indifference and impartiality which falls far short of his genuine convictions.”55 Journalists may choose the paper they write for based on their own agreement with the general character of that vehicle, but their contributions will subsequently be edited into coherence with the house style and position of their paper, erasing whatever particularities and divergences of opinion that do not fit with its general character. In 1890 John Earle observes, “this family Style which a great newspaper gets has something about it which differs from the style of an author. The fact seems to be that it is a corporate and not a personal style. To those, then, who urge that Style should be impersonal, I assent so far as the corporate Style is concerned, and no further. This is the general case of the best newspaper Styles.”56 Individuality in writing is seen as antithetical to the normative aspects of this component of the journalistic press, and is largely compensated for by the pursuit of interesting personality subjects in the more popular journalistic venues. In this sense, to write within the genre of a certain kind of (party) newspaper is to sacrifice one’s own stylistic or critical identity to the house ideology one is promoting. The journalist writing in the corporate style of his paper is not the same as the literary writer because he lacks an identifiable style, and consequently a distinctive self. One critic suggests as much when he observes that an individual author who employs a corporate style may provide a good model for journalism, but not for literature, because his prose is impersonal and can be imitated. Macaulay stands as an example of such an author: “He is for us almost as impersonal as the ‘Times;’ he is a name, associated with a group of beliefs and a certain propaganda, a storehouse of information, but not a living human being.”57 The quantitative stylistic methodology of Lucius Sherman would prove this observation wrong by demonstrating that Macaulay had the unique characteristic of averaging 23 words per sentence.58 But Sherman’s observations only underscore the fact that no style is truly objective, that the best a journalist can do is establish a corporate style that seems devoid of personality. For Mill in the 1830s, at the dawn of an era of publishing on a wide scale, the identification of a set of coherent opinions and prejudices with a single author would have been enough to determine his character, and to approach him as an actual person. Articles on the newspaper journalist in the years between the 1832 and 1867 reform bills praise the ability of the informed leader writer, the man “of scholar-like attainments” and “gentlemanly notions and associations”59 to absorb opinions about an affair from “men actively engaged or interested in their management” and then filter “these opinions into a precise, connected, and attractive form”60 so that the article may “give a tone, and a color, and a direction to the thoughts and passions, and creeds of many thousands amongst the partially

The Style is the Man

147

educated.”61 This notion of the educated journalist with an ability to engage the interest and thus shape the growing reading public with sound information and opinion is in line with Mill’s vision of the great potential that lay in a writer like William Bridges Adams. Moving later into the century, the issue of the journalist’s relationship to his reading audience grows complicated as different categories of journals and journalism are identified (party journalism, independent journalism, popular or reflective journalism), as the role of the newspaper writer in relation to his paper, the paper’s staff and the paper’s editor is scrutinized in detail, as the relative merit of journalistic anonymity becomes a matter of serious discussion (beginning in the 1860s), and as the commercial considerations surrounding the newspaper as a mass industry become an obvious concern.62 An 1873 Cornhill Magazine article by D. C. Lathbury entitled “The Casuistry of Journalism” demonstrates a growing awareness of the changing status and workings of journalism in a manner sometimes prescient of the more famous proclamations about The New Journalism made by William T. Stead in the mid-1880s. Lathbury recognizes the corporate or house journalist who functions as a “mere hired swordsman” for the ideological stance of his paper as a race that is “dying out.”63 He discusses journalistic anonymity and the adoption of a corporate rather than personal style as tactical necessities that can be used to a greater or lesser extent depending on the aims of the journalist, and the journal he writes for. The journal contributor according to Lathbury must first decide what kind of newspaper he is willing to work for, and then negotiate the degree of personal expression he will deploy in relation to the character of his chosen journal. Lathbury identifies three main kinds of journalism, the first being party journalism, where the newspaper exists “for the purpose of supporting the views of a political party”, the second, independent journalism, where the political character of the journal is determined by the opinions of the editor rather than an explicit party line, and the third being reflective journalism, where the newspaper aims “at giving expression to the public opinion of the moment” and exists “not so much to influence public opinion as to reflect it.”64 In the instance that a journalist has chosen one of the first two types of journalism, the writer either releases or withholds his personal enthusiasm in an article depending on whether such selfmotivated advocacy will serve the more general goals of the paper, whose overall purpose he agrees with. If he works as a purely reflective journalist, such a model of negotiation between the private, particular opinions of the writer, and the more general position of the newspaper is irrelevant since his goal is not to weigh the merits of a position but to present what he believes is an accurate reflection of general, public opinion. I have rehearsed these categories from the Lathbury article to set up the paradoxical complexity of Stead’s statements about the function of the journalist in relation to his readership. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette from 1883 to 1889, envisioned the journalist as both shaper and voice of popular opinion. From the perspective of the various statements about journalism I have just cited, he is figuring the journalist as one who is a well-informed leader writer of the old style, and a deeply connected reflective journalist, of the new. More significantly, in

148

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

reference to Lathbury’s three categories of journalism, Stead’s vision ultimately collapses the independent journalist and the reflective journalist into one. He asserts that the power of the press is unparalleled (“the editorial pen is a sceptre of power, compared with which the sceptre of many a monarch is but a gilded lath”) and, at the same time, that “[t]he press is at once the eye ear and tongue of the people.”65 This vision of the press as simultaneously an agent of influence upon public opinion, and a voice of the public, is ultimately focused by Stead in a particular vision of the editor/journalist as an individualized voice of the masses. Translated into stylistic terms this means that journalistic impersonality succumbs to articulated personality. “The old idea of a jealously shrouded impersonality”, Stead writes, “has given way to its exact antithesis.”66 Now, in lieu of adopting the corporate style of his paper, Stead advises the journalist that “[e]verything depends upon the individual—the person. Impersonal journalism is effete.”67 With this approach to news, Stead aims to communicate individuality as a means of engaging the interest if his readers, and as a method of projecting this ideal of the individual upon them. Proceeding with the idea of the newspaper as an open field for “establishing personal relations between” the individuals who make up the mass readership, and with the faith that “[d]emocracy has not diminished in the least the power of individuals”, he individualized the mass readership by engaging in a more colloquial tone of engagement with its perceived opinions and interests, asking the questions he assumes it would want to ask, and shaping his arguments in the form of sensational narratives about individuals.68 As articles in trade journals like The Writer (founded in 1887) advised repeatedly to those entering the writing profession at this time, “character, or rather individuality, is the most essential point in journalism”69, and such individuality is achieved by “a newspaper worker” when he writes his news story “in a ‘telling,’ or a ‘striking,’ or a ‘sensational’…way.”70 In the approach of Stead and the New Journalism, the ideal of a standardized corporate and impersonal style is replaced by the idea—deemed most appealing to the consumer—of a multiplicity of style products signaling through a personalized method of news-story telling and “striking” subject matter, the diversity of the new mass readership. A new kind of “athletic style” (as one writer in the Academy called it) arises from the fact that “[t]he critics, no less than the people love marked characteristics, which they can note while they run.”71 Within this context of a large commuter readership, critical character is replaced by the evocation of marked characteristics. The critic in the popular journal has relinquished his authority as a pre-eminent arbiter of taste and influential judge of art, and he has established a new role for himself in modern culture as a chronicler of the “countless variety of styles...[the] multiplicity of individualities, each speaking its own language and telling its own tale.”72

Fin-de-Siècle Rhetorics Where the style scientists and the popular journalists focus on “personality” without much considering language as an expedient of cultural mediation,

The Style is the Man

149

rhetorics, in the traditional or pragmatic sense of the word, are not completely absent from the fin-de-siècle. The primary concern of late Victorian rhetorical theory is with the import for writing of the widespread democratization of culture, and the nascent mass audience for literature that was seen to be emerging at this time. For example, in his account of the origins of preciosity published in the Yellow Book (1897), John M. Robertson decides that this over-refined, quirky and idiosyncratic mode of discourse deemed typical of aesthetic and decadent prose is beneficial as a means of challenging the norms of linguistic expression. What is preciosity? “Scientifically speaking, it is an attempt to deviate widely and willfully, waywardly, from the normal forms of phrase in a given language...Ethically, then, preciosity is an assertion of individual or special personality as against the common usage of talk; in other words, it is an expression either of egoism or of cliqueism in conversation or literature.”73 Preciosity, Robertson argues, has an important function in a culture that places great value on the expression of a multiplicity of personalities. According to Robertson, the young, headstrong writers who are the most ardent participants in this eccentric mode of precious discourse are actually performing a great service to civilization, as their exploration of new ways of verbalizing subjectivity is a means “of preparing the way for the angels.”74 As a specialized discourse of eccentric argot and usage, preciosity establishes exclusionary discursive communities and this works in antithesis to misleading, falsely inclusive modes of popular writing like those introduced by the popular press. Preciosity represents a means in style of establishing alternative and diverse publics. This is an optimistic argument that does not make a facile link between style and identity but rather foregrounds the importance of linguistic experimentation as a means of asserting new possibilities for identity precisely because the “angels” have not yet arrived. Robertson’s argument about the value of preciosity naturally extends into a theory of the state of the contemporary reading audience. The diversity of prose styles at this time is considered appropriate to the exceedingly diverse readingpublic of the 1890s, which Robertson describes as “a loose mass of ever-varying units, in which even the dullards have no solidarity.”75 Any attempt by a writer to address his audience as a homogeneous body is doomed to failure. The Carlylean manner of “personifying the multitude as one lumpish hostile entity, or organised body of similar entities” misses the reality of the free scope for literary idiosyncrasy that has developed in “the democratic age”.76 From Robertson’s perspective, this proliferation of individual styles represents the effective socialization of language, and the preciosity that accompanies this socialization is mild and inoffensive, because democratic. As he explains the logic of this argument: “The preciosity of democratic half-culture, in an age of knowledge, is at the worst a much less extravagant thing than the preciosities of the upper-class culture of ages in which all culture was narrow. So that the so-called process of ‘levelling-down,’ here as in other matters turns out to give the best securities for a general levelling-up.”77 Robertson’s theory of style is radical when compared with the hope that George Saintsbury invested in a certain brand of criticism as a means

150

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

of preserving style in spite of the democratization—for him, the leveling down—of culture. Back in 1876 Saintsbury divided the contemporary reading public into classes, remarking that the attention of the public has gradually become concentrated “almost wholly upon subject-matter” to the exclusion of style. The lowest class of readers (“intellectually speaking”) read only novels, newspapers and books of information; they show an exclusive desire for literature that is “about something.”78 “The (intellectually) middle classes” do not confine themselves to adventure stories and books of facts, but will read “the better class of magazine articles”, biographies, travels, and even poetry “if the poet’s name be known.” Lastly, “the highest class of all” consists of those in possession of “taste, culture, and intellect”, and yet, the majority of this class has become “alienated from pure literature” and is devoted to other disciplines.79 Journalism is familiarly noted to have popularized a kind of stereotyped writing, and Saintsbury remarks that “there is nothing more fatal to the attainment of a good style than the habit of using such stereotyped phrases and forms.”80 Journalism, he argues, has contributed to the decay of style.81 As I noted in the previous chapter, Saintsbury saw criticism as the last hope for the cultivation of English prose style and thought Pater’s prose provided the best contemporary example, the reason being that Pater’s writing preserves a “subordinate and yet independent beauty of the sentences when taken separately from the paragraph.” Between Pater’s phrases, sentences and paragraphs, Saintsbury found a perfect harmony. In other words, Pater’s “perfection of modulation” manifests the well defined hierarchy that Saintsbury could only wish to find in the social sphere, and which was more explicitly deteriorated by the time Robertson could forward an argument in celebration of the great diversity of a leveled democratic, popular culture.82 Oscar Wilde’s conception of audience falls somewhere between that of Robertson and Saintsbury, for Wilde’s social vision certainly favored a nurtured, diverse and autodidactic public but was at the same time wary of the homogenizing force of the press upon the public. Two unpublished epigrams convey the opposite poles of Wilde’s attitude toward the public and the popular press. On the positive side he suggests that “[t]here are as many publics as there are personalities”, an idea that is very close to Robertson’s vision of a rich, multifarious democracy that favors diverse linguistic experimentation. From this perspective, the singularity of the artist functions as a reassuring sign of the individuals that make up a mass audience. On the other hand, Wilde is adamant in his separation of this ideal, highly-individuated public from the institutions of public relations that are so loud and overbearing, and that potentially destroy the first vision by representing a falsely diverse and liberated image of the public to itself which actually works in the opposite direction to homogenize that public: “The public are quite charming. The only offensive thing about them is their brass-band. Journalists are the brass band of the public.”83 Wilde would concur that every individual is born unique and with his own set of racially inherited aesthetic and creative abilities. Wilde’s definition of “soul” in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” employs contemporary evolutionary and

The Style is the Man

151

ethnological theory as a means of defining a stance against institutions of authority.84 This stance is founded upon the belief that the fact of an inherited culture makes an institutional-cultural authority destructive to the natural development of the culture of the individual. As Helfand and Smith II explain: “Because he assumed the biological origins of culture, Wilde asserted that the perfection of personality required a freedom to develop according to ‘its own laws.’”85 In this way, Wilde adapts Pater’s theory of style to a mass media context, without sacrificing a rich conception of language to a facile assertion of personality. An important difference between Wilde and contemporary critics who celebrated style as a manifestation of the writer’s individuality is that Wilde felt such a celebration must wait for a future when corrupting institutions of authority such as all present modes of journalism would no longer exist. Until that time, an assertion that style is the man will be naive and insensitive to the institutional barriers that exist to prevent “the man” from truly realizing his soul.86 Ian Small has argued that “[g]iving up popular journalism (principally reviewing) was not, for Wilde, the precondition for more serious work: the socalled serious or politically engaged writing overlaps, and for a number of years, with the apparently more commercial and therefore more orthodox work for the popular press.”87 The explosion of writings published by Wilde in 1891 stands as testament to an intense exploration of the means by which the complex impressions evoked by a work of art might be conveyed, but they do so in great part by exploring, inverting and revealing the inherent constraints for aesthetic perception imposed upon the individual by the language typically used in more commercial and orthodox journalism. The essays in Intentions present one answer to Pater’s challenge of subjectivism by communicating as much through style as through content, or, as Wilde expressed it in a letter to Arthur Conan-Doyle, by reveling in the mist, rather than in the Truth of words.88 But in migrating toward the form of the epigram at the expense of a more readily identifiable moral position which might be conveyed in less playful maxims, Wilde is not relinquishing a claim to the importance of semantics. Rather he is presenting one manner in which a viable subjective meaning might be achieved at a time when an awareness of the individuating effect of language is denied by the growing authority of the public media. Wilde’s sense that the public press is debilitating to proper individuation is made clear in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”—an essay that Wilde had hoped to include among the other essays in Intentions—by Wilde’s careful attentions to the meanings of particular words.89 In this essay, in a manner reminiscent of Ruskin’s treatment of the keywords of political economy, Wilde distances himself from newspaper writing by focusing on the misuse in the public (journalistic) sphere of an array of words such as “immoral”, “unintelligible”, “exotic” and “unhealthy”. The public’s misuse of these words, Wilde says, “comes from the natural inability of a community corrupted by authority to understand or appreciate Individualism.”90 Wilde, on the other hand, does understand individualism, or at least this is how he positions himself in Intentions, so it becomes clear he does not share a language in common with the public sphere.

152

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

From the position of the artistic critic, Wilde states with confidence that the definitions of the words expounded by the public press are in fact the opposite of the words’ true meanings. The actual meanings are available only to the developed Individual who has an understanding that has not been saturated by the corrupting discourse of the popular press. A keen awareness of the effects of the instruments of mass communication upon the process of individuation separates Wilde from the majority of the period’s style theorists. The idea that style is the man is untenable in the context of a culture that inhibits even the man from being what he might become because he is subject to corrupt authority. Under the circumstances, Wilde chooses to promote a paradoxical claim about his own identity which states that it is at once fully realized and utterly unavailable. The next section explores in particular Wilde’s creative mode of performing this thesis.

Oscar Wilde’s Community of Masks Wilde’s critical study of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, an early nineteenthcentury dandy, man of letters, and poisoner, provides a complex answer to the problem of mass readership and the public praxis of the fin-de-siècle critic. Wainewright appeals to Wilde as a subject not only because his story can handily undermine a facile mode of assessing art according to a pervading moral doxa, but because he was at the center of a literary community in the 1820s that had only rare analogues in the 1890s, with the reality of a new, mass culture and its public. In Wilde’s essay, the tactics of the New Journalism are employed, not to reflect a figure of human interest in the striking, sensational language of journalism, but to explore the underlying moral authority of this supposed discourse of diversity and unique personalities. In his presentation of Wainewright, Wilde is rewriting the London Magazine of the 1820s as the intellectual and sexual community which was so important to him as an alternative public, and as an antidote to the false sense of diversity promoted by late Victorian popular journalism. Already in his more mainstream journalism of the late 1880s, Wilde was honing his antibourgeois critical stance, which associated the perfectibility of one’s soul or self with the expansion of one’s life experience in the form of a broad spectrum of both sexual and intellectual liaisons. Wilde’s performance of “aristocratic” disdain for the popular press enacts a stubborn denial of any separation between selfcultivation and sexual pleasure. To deny such a division between the realization of the soul, and the pursuit of the desires of the body, was strikingly antithetical to the consumerist cult of “personality” aggressively promoted by the New Journalism. In his critical writings that explicitly address the problem of the popular press (in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”, for example), Wilde consistently reminds his public that the idea of personality sold by the New Journalism lacked ethical substance, because it lacked an accurate and humane conception of the body. Wainewright is the ideal subject of focus for a pastiche of modern, popular journalism. He is a sensational personality, and would thus make for excellent

The Style is the Man

153

newspaper copy in the present, and a man of letters whom Wilde identifies as an originator of the worst elements of journalistic prose. On the other hand, the community of writers along with the writerly personae developed by Wainewright and his London Magazine contemporaries is appealing to Wilde as a model of how to “create an audience of intimates through publication.”91 Together these elements allow Wilde to employ aspects of the popular late Victorian human interest genre in order to conceptualize his own sympathetic audience within the context of a larger, potentially unsympathetic public. In his writings for the London Magazine, Wainewright employed three pseudonyms: Janus Weathercock, Cornelius Van Vinkbooms, and Egomet Bonmot. Janus functioned as the clown of the magazine and was crucial to its coherence and identity as a community of diverse writers in the early 1820s. This persona provided the magazine’s other characters with a target for playful jibes and teasing, and served as the imaginary star around which a system of fictional satellite identities could orbit. As Josephine Bauer puts it, “through him anything could be turned to fun.”92 And if he seemed to be losing his satirical pull because the other writers’ characters (Lamb’s Elia, for instance) eased off from their Janus jokes, Wainewright’s other two personae could always keep the running circus in motion. Conversely, he could be accused of pranks he did not commit, such as when Lamb truly decided to eliminate his own famous persona, Elia, from the pages of the magazine, and then, after changing his mind, deemed the death of Elia a fictitious ploy of Janus, who wrote the “false” obituary.93 With such playful sparring and pseudonymical alchemy, Wainewright and the London Magazine provided an excellent example for Wilde of the creative employment of a literary mask, or pseudonym, for the sake of establishing an underlying sense of artistic community. Wilde approaches the world of the London in the 1820s as a community in which the mask is only truly ambiguous to the unfamiliar audience. To the inside community, the ornaments of fictitious character were seen past, thus further strengthening the solidarity of a community of readers in the know. Wilde’s apprenticeship as a magazine reviewer and drama critic during the years just preceding his publication (in magazines) of the essays that would eventually be collected under the title Intentions entailed an involvement in some formations analogous to the magazine coteries of the 1820s and 30s. As a contributor to The Dramatic Review, for instance—a journal for which Wilde wrote more than a handful of articles in the mid 1880s—Wilde would have witnessed the occasional swapping or sharing (between Oxbridge-educated incrowd drama critics) of the authentic “facsimile signatures” that appeared beneath this journal’s published articles.94 John Stokes notes Wilde-the-journalist’s “talent for combining private jokes with public advertisement”, and especially for using “the conventions of regular journalism which required that he pronounce anonymously upon a catholic range of topics, yet allowed personal emphasis”, to his own private purposes.95 This “personal emphasis” in Wilde’s journalism— detectable to some extent in the seventy or so anonymous pieces on fashion and books that he wrote for Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette, and more explicitly in his contributions to littler magazines like the Century Guild Hobby Horse and the

154

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Chameleon—often took the form of an elision of the text with the author under review, the appreciation of the former articulated as studious praise for the profile, face or physical “form” of the latter.96 The extent to which Wilde deploys this mode of appreciation in the case of the essay on Wainewright may have had something to do with the fact that it was appearing in Frank Harris’ Fortnightly Review, a liberal verging on radical-liberal journal in which Wilde was clearly among friends and intimates. For example, “Pen, Pencil and Poison: A Study”, as the essay was originally titled when it appeared in the Fortnightly in January 1889, was positioned between an essay by Swinburne on Victor Hugo, and one by John Addington Symonds on Elizabethan and Victorian poetry.97 In pursuing his aesthetic profile of Wainewright, Wilde notes two sources, the first being two ironical pieces written by Thomas De Quincey, originally published in Blackwood’s (in 1827 and 1839) and finally collected, with an additional essay in the same vein under the title On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1854), and the second being W. Carew Hazlitt’s more earnest biographical account of Wainewright, published as an introduction to the 1880 edition of Wainewright’s Essays and Criticisms.98 Hazlitt suggests that Wainewright’s dandy-persona—”the Janus Weathercock of 1820—the perfumed and jewelled exquisite, in his richly flowered dressing-gown, with his chibouque, his choice liqueurs,…his rare prints…his pet cat, [etc.]”—must be considered as a separate entity from the Wainewright who accomplished his murders in a discreet fashion.99 The heroes of De Quincey’s essays, on the other hand, were not artists in addition to being murderers. On the contrary, De Quincey approaches murder as an aesthetic and not a moral concern and considers his subjects to be artists precisely because they were skilled assassins. In relation to these two sources, it might be said that in “Pen, Pencil and Poison” Wilde collapses Hazlitt’s attempted separation of the dandy-artist from the gentleman-criminal by preserving De Quincey’s separation of art and morality. Wilde establishes a continuum between all of Wainewright’s artistic endeavors, poisoning included, as he writes: “painting was the first art that fascinated him. It was not until much later that he sought to find expression by pen or poison.”100 He treats the subject of murder with the same baiting irony that De Quincey employs in his trilogy, and, more importantly, he will not tolerate a separation of Wainewright’s crimes from his art, or from his dandyish persona. Wilde spends much of the essay in consideration of this latter aspect of Wainewright and of how his external signs of difference might be linked to his anticipatory taste, and to his modernity. But in his concentration on Wainewright’s eclectic taste in art and dress, Wilde seems also to be engaging in a reading of Wainewright that has yet to be done. Wilde looks beyond the magazine persona that brings superficial literary distinctiveness, to the body of the writer himself. As Wilde remarks upon Wainewright’s “style”: Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner in literature:

The Style is the Man

155

while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others. (Pen, 323)

While noting Hazlitt’s association of a literary modernity with Weathercock’s “richly flowered” tastes in fashion, Wilde surpasses the limits of Hazlitt’s association of startling ornament with literary innovation by eliding any distinction between Weathercock and Wainewright, by appreciating the actual body that is present beneath the dandiacal accoutrements—the “exquisite white hands” which appear from underneath the “lemon-coloured kid gloves”—and by remarking that it is this element of Wainewright, less than the conspicuous signs that appear in his dress, that gives him a “dangerous and delightful distinction.” Danger and delight are located in the gaze that turns to the body as a result of its conspicuous attire. These affective responses come into play when the trained eye looks past the outward signs, past the beautiful rings, to the white hands beneath them. Wilde’s manner of reading Wainewright idealizes the moment of artistic community signified by the London Magazine and attempts to replicate it in spite of the new context of mass publishing. Behind the playful masks and pseudonyms of the magazine lay the foundation of understanding required for satire to function as play, rather than as a discourse that is hurtful (a misunderstanding from within the community) or immoral (a defensive misunderstanding from without). As Wilde states of Wainewright, “To his fellow contributors in the London Magazine he was always most generous, and praises…[them]…without anything of the malice of a friend” (Pen, 331). It is in this playful, insinuating, paradoxical sense that one might read Wilde’s comment concerning Wainewright (and particularly about his use of pseudonyms) that “a mask tells us more than a face. These disguises intensified his personality” (323). A disguise functions to intensify and not to veil a personality if there exists an audience that can read it properly by taking pleasure in it. I am thinking here of Nick Frankel’s observation that Wilde’s later criticisms instilled hermeneutic confusion in his readers, “a confusion that Wilde exploited in order to gather around himself intimates” like Richard Le Gallienne and Robert Ross. To these intimates, “Wilde’s Intentions flaunted a materiality to be relished—the work demanded to be read with the body (i.e. phenomenologically) in terms of a ‘pleasure of the text.’ To other, more [say] serious readers, the work remains a site of confusion”, but not necessarily one of moral outrage.101 Up to the moment that the Marquis of Queensberry called Wilde’s bluff by addressing him in a card as a “posing Somdomite [sic]”102, Wilde quite successfully exploited the hermeneutic confusion that a certain mode of signifying practice in speech, dress, bodily gesture, and writing had for a bifurcated public. For instance, in her discussion of Wilde’s ability “to pose and pass, and consequently to get the best of both worlds”, Regenia Gagnier describes the complex uses to which Wilde put the “little green flower” when he had his friends distribute them to unwitting audience members at the public première of Lady Windermere’s Fan.103 Wilde and others of the same “coterie” network would have been aware that the green carnation was the emblem worn by homosexuals in

156

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Paris.104 So, as Gagnier concludes, “by encouraging members of the audience to wear the flower, Wilde not only made them part of the performance, forcing them to regard themselves, but he also created an amusing drama for his own entertainment. If he was compelled to double as heterosexual, he had the pleasure at the premiere of watching straight men unwittingly bearing the emblem of homosexuality.”105 This stands as just one instance in a complex, cultivated identity through which Wilde was able to flaunt “his sexual activities under cover of a clever, transgressive reinscription of the bourgeois male.”106 In this light, Wilde’s portrait of Wainewright might be viewed as yet another exercise in the crafty presentation of a double message to a double public. The point here is not to prove that Wilde found in Wainewright a true homosexual predecessor, but rather to notice how Wilde takes elements of Wainewright’s life and literary persona, elements that were present in Hazlitt’s (comically “straight”) account as well, and presents them in such a way that they become aligned with the iconography of sexual desire between men, and further allows for the playful recreation of a small community of peers, within the more black and white reality of a larger audience of readers. Wilde’s treatment of Wainewright revives for the present the ideal aesthetic circumstances of a literary vehicle, identified here with the London Magazine, by translating the early nineteenth-century persona into the late Victorian sexually coded mask. Wainewright’s own writing is not important. In fact, Wilde finds it banal, at best. At worst, he finds in Wainewright’s prose the origins of the modern journalistic style—(“modern journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man” [Pen, 332])—and according to the logic of Wilde’s essay, this origination is his real crime. On the other hand, the crime for which Wainewright was convicted, the murders, are not deplorable in Wilde’s essay, but rather are acts that partly redeem Wainewright’s prose. Where Hazlitt argues for the complete separation of art and morality in his discussion of Wainewright by pointing out that Wainewright’s acts of poisoning commenced only after he penned his last article for the London Magazine in 1823, Wilde denies the distinction by asserting the existence of a continuum between his work as a magazine writer and his work as a poisoner, and by arguing that it is his skill in poisoning that ultimately compensates for his rather mediocre writing: “His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work certainly lacked” (338). His “early work” refers to his writing, his later work to his poisoning. Thus, Wainewright’s writing only gained personality after he ceased to write, and began to poison. The argument Wilde presents does not actually acquit Wainewright of having invented journalistic prose, but rather convicts him of the crime by presenting him as a sensational personality. It is a fitting sentence. In the process of having his fun with Wainewright, Wilde is able to scandalize the sensibility of the reader of such sensational stories by foregrounding his attraction to the dangerous dandymurderer with an apparent indifference to the moral transgression of such an attraction. The explicitly moral purpose that framed many of Stead’s sensational personality stories—the most famous example being the “Maiden Tribute of

The Style is the Man

157

Modern Babylon” stories about child prostitution, published in 1885—is thus elegantly turned inside out by Wilde’s critical stance.107 The logic behind this tactic is best understood in terms of Gilbert’s “antinomian” theory of culture as it is explained in the final pages of another work of criticism collected in the volume Intentions, “The Critic as Artist”. Here, Gilbert suggests that the true aim of culture is the perfection of the individual resulting from the ascension of aesthetics and sexual selection over ethics and natural selection. While it is the latter two that “make existence possible”, it is the former pair that “make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.”108 When this ascension is accomplished, Gilbert goes on to say, we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought, acts or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile.109

For Wilde, the realization of the individual, the soul, cannot occur if it is separated from a realization of the desires of the body, the separation that is the goal of asceticism and bourgeois morality as voiced in the language of the mainstream press. According to this morality, Wilde’s motives represent (as the poet Richard Le Gallienne put it) the dream of a new sin, “[a]n incest twixt the body and the soul.”110 But Wilde sees it differently. When such a separation between the body (“the heart”) and the soul is forced—cut out with a “little knife that had a handle of green viper skin,” as Wilde’s moral fable “The Fisherman and his Soul” depicts it—the soul will inevitably become a vile, wandering rogue.111 As the “Soul” in that same fable asks after it has been dismissed by its own body, “Should I not love also?” Wilde answers that the soul should love also. Similarly, in “Pen, Pencil and Poison”, Wilde sees the aesthetic and sexual elements of Wainewright/ Weathercock at the expense of the ethical and natural. This undermines the general approach of the popular press. For the Pall Mall Gazette, Wainewright might be useful as a sensational anomaly signifying a deplorable perversion of the true kinds of individuality that still thrive under democracy. For Wilde, Wainewright functions as a sensational example of how to read between the lines of such anomalies. For Wilde’s purposes, what is presented to be chiefly artistic about Wainewright—the embodiment of a persona—is his eclectic taste, his “amateur’s boudoir” filled with disparate bric-à-brac and gemmed things (Pen, 325). Wilde presents Wainewright as one of the first to have recognized “the very keynote of aesthetic eclecticism”, “the true harmony of all really beautiful things irrespective of age or place, of school or manner” which stands as a Wildean formulation of the modern (325). Where for Pater (especially in his essay “Style”) eclecticism was recognized as the first step toward an ultimately “naturalized” result, for Wilde, the notion of

158

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

assimilation by the art and skill of the critic is replaced by the integrating power of the desiring gaze. The objects themselves remain as anachronistic as ever, but the desiring viewer makes sense of the anachronism—sees the lovely unity in discord.112 One interesting contradiction concerning Wainewright’s aesthetic vision is worth noting vis-à-vis this idea of anachronism. In his description of Wainewright’s interest in the theatre, Wilde praises the fact that Wainewright “upheld the necessity for archeological accuracy in costume and scene-painting” as well as his idea that “once we allow the intrusion of anachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where the line is to be drawn” (Pen, 330–331). A bit earlier in the essay, though, Wilde appreciates the fact that Wainewright “saw that in decorating a room...we should never aim at any archaeological reconstruction of the past, nor burden ourselves with any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy” (325). This contradiction strategically allows anachronism to intrude upon Wilde’s character study of Wainewright, and consequently draws an ambiguous line that only some readers will discern as pleasurable. The essay closes with the historical qualification that Wainewright “is far too close to our time for us to be able to form any purely artistic judgment about him” (Pen, 339). In other words, we cannot appreciate this artist murderer with the same “fine spirit of disinterested curiosity” we might show in relation to the “great criminals of the Italian Renaissance because, being of the nineteenth century, Wainewright might have poisoned Tennyson or Gladstone (“one’s own grandmother” in the original essay113), and so we naturally feel “a strong prejudice” against him (340). Of course, it is precisely such a spirit of disinterested curiosity that Wilde has performed throughout the essay, and he raises the qualification here only to allow himself one last assertion in favor of the aesthetic over the moral and the historically accurate: “Nobody with the true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or Tiberius…[t]hey have passed into the sphere of art and science and neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval” (339–340). The recognition of a harmony in objects without a notion of time to order them according to a logic of progression introduces a new method of organization, one based upon subjective meaning, that is, the realization of a particular aesthetic sense, the realization of one’s own soul. Versions of this concept of aesthetic experience appear in Wilde’s call for a “New Hellenism”, in his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”, and in his use of Christ and Dante in De Profundis. In “Pen, Pencil, and Poison” it appears as a hint for those lacking the ability to make sense of the apparently disparate field of signs of which the dandy’s identity consists. Eclecticism indicates an artistic sensibility only to one who sees the timeless element of beauty in an array of objects from various periods. To one who does not recognize the “true harmony” of which Wilde speaks, the dandy’s boudoir will appear only as a gaudy collection of objects that clash, either incomprehensibly (to the more passive viewer), or unforgivingly (to the moral viewer with a strong need for a certain kind of comprehension). Wainewright’s eclectically decorated rooms, like his eclectically dressed body, and his inherently

The Style is the Man

159

contradictory aesthetic positions on the subject of “eclecticism” itself, would remain incomprehensible (and thus, not beautiful) to those who lacked the aesthetic disposition required to take pleasure in them. For Wilde, style was never simply the man—as most style theorists and new journalists of the 1890s claimed it was—but rather a process of exploring an opaque signification of identity within the parallel contexts of an audience of intimates who take pleasure in it, and a broader public that tries to understand it.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

Symonds, p. 176. Symonds, pp. 217–218. For relevant works in the tradition of aesthetic psychology see Grant Allen’s Physiological Aesthetics (London: H. S. King, 1877); Francis Ysidro Edgeworth’s Mathematical Psychics (London: C. K. Paul, 1881); Emile Hennequin’s La Critique Scientific (Paris: Perrin et cie, 1888); and Vernon Lee’s The Handling of Words (New York: John Lane, 1923). Among the earliest examples of scientific stylistics that I have found are the following: T. C. Mendenhall, “The Characteristic Curves of Composition,” Science 9 (1887): 237–249, and “A Mechanical Solution to a Literary Problem,” Popular Science Monthly 60 (1901): 97–105; Lucius Sherman, “Some Observations upon the Sentence-Length in English Prose,” University Studies 1 (1888): 119–130, “On Certain Facts and Principles in the Development of Form in Literature,” University Studies 1 (1892): 337–366, and The Analytics of Literature (Boston: Ginn, 1893); G. W. Gerwig, “On the Decrease of Predication and of Sentence Weight in English Prose,” University Studies 2 (1894): 17–44; and Edwin Herbert Lewis, The History of the English Paragraph (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1894). “The Art of Authorship,” Spectator 64 (1890): 689. George Bainton, The Art of Authorship (New York: Appleton; London: J. Clarke and Co., 1890), p. 296. Bainton, p. 305. Bainton, p. 317. Bainton, pp. 320–321. While Pater is allowed his word on Buffon’s dictum in Bainton’s anthology, Pater’s explication of the dictum is different from most others cited in that he stresses language as the medium by which the author comes to understand his own meaning, rather than language as a simple reflection of the man. As “[t]he scholarly and expressive Walter Pater” is quoted as saying: “True and good elaboration of style would...come to be...the articulation to oneself of one’s own meaning...I suppose this is the true significance of that oft quoted saying, that style is the man” (Bainton, p. 293). John Earle, English Prose: Its Elements, History and Usage (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1890), p. 347. Symonds, p. 218. W. H. Mallock, “Le Style C’est L’Homme,” New Review 6 (1892): 447. “Literary Style,” Spectator (October 1, 1892): 445. John Burroughs, “The Vital Touch in Literature,” Atlantic Monthly 83 (1899): 400. Walter Raleigh, Style (London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1897), pp. 120–121.

160 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic Raleigh, p. 107. Raleigh, p. 116. Raleigh, p. 128. Raleigh, p. 127. Symonds, pp. 219–220. Symonds, pp. 221, 223. René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, 5 vols (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1965, 1977), vol. 4, p. 92. Hennequin, pp. 64–65. My translation. The original passage runs as follows: “les indications psychologiques qu’ils extraient de l’examen superficiel d’oeuvres littéraires sont trop générales et trop peu précises pour être considérées comme scientifiques.” Hennequin, p. 71. Hennequin, p. 68. Hennequin, pp. 74–75. Hennequin, p. 85. Hennequin, p. 85. Hennequin, p. 70. Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton, 1895). This was characteristic of many early works in psychology, such as Nordau’s Degeneration and Paradoxes (London: William Heinneman, 1896), in which Nordau argued that creative distinction was a sign of madness. Nordau’s work influenced the later work of Francis Galton to move in the same direction (see Galton, Finger Prints, [London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1892], p. ix). Other aesthetic psychologists include Herbert Spencer (Principles of Psychology [London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman’s, 1855], Alexander Bain (The Emotions and The Will [London: Parker, 1859]) and Cesare Lombroso, whose The Man of Genius (London: W. Scott; New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1891) was an important influence on Nordau. Allen’s work is close to that of Hennequin in that it attempts to deal with the subject of “Aesthetic Feelings” (or “Aestho-Physiology”), terms that Allen borrowed from Spencer’s Principles of Psychology and Bain’s Emotions and the Will. Edgeworth’s book, which proposes to perform a “calculus of Feeling” (Edgeworth, p. 1), represents an attempt to apply “the science of quantity” to human emotions. The primary difference between these works and that of Hennequin, is that they are concerned with the effects of the reception of a work of art, and not with the work of art as a manifestation of the artist’s calculable personality. For discussions of Allen and Edgeworth, and their links to fin-de-siècle economic theory, see Lawrence Birken, Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of a Culture of Abundance, 1871–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988); Gagnier, Insatiability, pp. 103–104, 136–139; and Small, Conditions, pp. 31–88. Mendenhall, “Characteristic Curves”, p. 237. Mendenhall, “Characteristic Curves”, p. 238. Sherman, “Some Observations”, pp. 119, 127. Sherman, “Some Observations”, p. 130. Sherman, “On Certain Facts”, p. 353. Sherman, “On Certain Facts”, p. 349. See Birken, and Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990). Mendenhall, “A Mechanical Solution”, pp. 99–100.

The Style is the Man 40 41

42

43 44

45

46 47 48

161

Frederic M. Bird, “Paralyzers of Style,” Lippincott’s Magazine 57 (1896): 282. I specify this absence of a rational rhetoric that pertains to the written word because there were numerous books from the period purporting to offer coherent rhetorical systems as far as the spoken word was concern. These were elocutionary handbooks mostly published by educators, many of them American, such as Alexander Melville Bell, Sammuel Silas Curry and Genevieve Stebbins (both adaptors of Delsartean ideas), Charles Wesley Emerson, William B. Chamberlain and S. H. Clarke. For the history of elocution systems at the end of the nineteenth century see Mary Margaret Robb, Oral Interpretation of Literature in American Colleges and Universities (New York: W. H. Wilson Co., 1941), pp. 165–186; Eugene Bahn and Margaret L. Bahn, A History of Oral Interpretation (Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Co., 1970), pp. 139– 165; and Paul Edwards, “Unstoried: Teaching Literature in the Age of Performance Studies,” Theatre Annual 52 (1999): 1–147. See Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (1869/1892; London: Macmillan & Co., 1914). One interesting example of this idea in action is the society of well pedigreed wits and intellectuals that crystallized as a group around the mid 1880s known as “The Souls.” The name for this anti-philistine group of intellectual Lords and Ladies came from Lord Curzin’s comment that, in order to become one of the coterie, “it was essential to possess a soul above the ordinary” (Jane Abdy and Charlotte Gere, The Souls [London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1984], p. 10). Although most of the members were of distinctive pedigree, this qualification was not absolutely compulsory; more important was a shared ability in witty repartee, and interest in pencil games that allowed for the manifestation of extreme verbal excellence (Abdy and Gere, p. 12). The Soul was manifested through a particularly fine use of language, and the games played by the group served to keep their wits sharpened. In one intellectual game in particular, known as “Styles”, the participants were given thirty minutes to compose an essay in the manner of Meredith or Carlyle (or some other distinctive writer), much as one would have to do in a home university course (p. 145). Wilde and Henry James were “occasional Souls”, and both were pursued by the society for permanent participation (pp. 12, 160). The very idea of “The Souls” as a society provides a useful sense of the term as an anti-bourgeois conception of self-cultivation that shunned the debasement of language by the popular press and was aristocratic in its attitude, if not always (although most often) by blood. Galton, p. 12. “Conversation With Mr. Ruskin,” Pall Mall Gazette (April 21, 1884): 11–12; “More About The Theosophists: An Interview with Mdme. Blavatsky,” Pall Mall Gazette (April 26, 1884): 2–4; “The Youthful Troubles of Heinrich Heine,” Pall Mall Gazette (April 25, 1884): 6; “The Influence of Poetry on Life,” Pall Mall Gazette (October 17, 1883): 4. See John Stokes, In the Nineties (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 2–31; Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 2–10; and Brake, Subjugated Knowledges, pp. 63–103. Cited in Stokes, In the Nineties, p. 21. George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (1886; New York: Boni and Liveright Inc., 1917), p. 1. “Some Remarkable Love Letters,” Pall Mall Gazette (May 29, 1884): 11–12; “Topics of the Day by Heroes of the Hour: My New Novel, by M. Zola,” Pall Mall Gazette (May 3, 1884): 6; “Topics of the Day XVII: The Secret of Success in Journalism by one who Succeeded,” Pall Mall Gazette (May 23, 1884): 11–12.

162 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic “Called Back,” Pall Mall Gazette (May 21, 1884): 4. [An Optimistic Critic], “The Prospects of English Literature,” Pall Mall Gazette (April 22, 1884): 1. [An Optimistic Critic], p. 2. One ironic result of the new identification of style exclusively with the personality of the author was an increasing neglect of the technical elements of composition, so that the hoards of quasi-writers forced the development of a new class of sub-writers, “the readers of copy and proof”, in order to correct the niceties of style, the very basics of composition (Bird, p. 280). Thus, the market that demanded personality developed a class of workers whose role it was to make another writer’s style not only readable, but also identifiably unique. Mallock, p. 452. L. A. Lamb, “A Standard Newspaper Style,” The Writer 3 (1889): 13. D. C. Lathbury, “The Casuistry of Journalism,” Cornhill Magazine 28 (1873): 200. Earle, p. 350. Stephen Gwynn, “Some Tendencies of Prose Style,” Edinburgh Review 190 (1899): 363. Sherman, “On Certain Facts”, p. 341. “English Journalism,” Fraser’s Magazine 34 (1846): 634. James Fitzjames Stephen, “Journalism,” Cornhill Magazine 6 (1862): 56. “English Journalism”, p. 632. For an excellent discussion of the changing structure of and ideas about journalism in nineteenth-century Britain, including the specific professional identifications of a journalist like James Fitzjames Stephen (cited above), see Brake, Subjugated Knowledges, pp. 83–103. Lathbury, p. 199. Lathbury, pp. 201, 202. William T. Stead, “Government by Journalism,” Contemporary Review 49 (1886): 656, 661. Stead, “The Future of Journalism,” Contemporary Review 50 (November 1886): 668. Stead, “The Future of Journalism”, p. 663. Stead, “The Future of Journalism”, p. 671. William J. Fowler, “Character in Journalism,” The Writer 2 (1888): 6. H. L. Richards, Jr., “The Importance of Style in Newspaper Work,” The Writer 2 (1888): 242. “The Athletic Style,” Academy 60 (1901): 231. Wright, p. 84. John M. Robertson, “Concerning Preciosity,” Yellow Book 13 (1897): 81–82. Robertson, p. 95. Robertson, p. 103. Robertson, p. 105. Robertson, p. 105–106. Saintsbury, “Modern English”, p. 68. Saintsbury, “Modern English”, p. 69. Saintsbury, “Modern English”, p. 70. Saintsbury, “Modern English”, pp. 71–72. All quotations in the paragraph are from Saintsbury, “Modern English”, p. 83. Cited in Ian Small, Oscar Wilde Revalued (Greensboro, North Carolina: ELT Press, 1993), p. 129.

The Style is the Man 84

85

86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94

95

163

Michael Helfand and Philip E. Smith II demonstrate the influence upon Wilde’s thought of Darwin, Mommsen, Renan, Herbert Spencer, and his familiarity with a host of others. See Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 78–86. For the influence of Renan on Wilde’s theory of machinery as a replacement for human slavery, see Brian Nicholas, “Two Nineteenth-Century Utopias: The Influence of Renan’s ‘L’Avenir de la Science’ on Wilde’s ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Modern Language Review 59 (1964): 361–370. Helfand and Smith II, “Anarchy and Culture: The Evolutionary Turn of Cultural Criticism in the Work of Oscar Wilde,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 20 (1978): 209. Wilde, “The Soul of Man”, The Artist as Critic, p. 266. Josephine Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (with Josephine M. Guy; Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 20. These two positions run parallel to each other throughout Wilde’s career but are most obviously asserted during the period of his most unique artistic criticism, a period that overlaps with his work as a professional reviewer and before he was a convicted sexual type. In his essay which describes Wilde’s Intentions as an early modernist manifesto, R. J. Green traces Wilde’s development as a critic from one who produced a copious number of journalistic reviews written from a stance of critical distance to a subjective brand of criticism which demands, not a contiguity to any realm of the “real”, but to its own internal logic of harmony. Green argues, “between 1885 and 1890 Wilde renounced the possibility of playing the part of a nineteenth-century critic and realized that a new critical voice and stance had to be found to project his revolt. Intentions is Wilde’s answer, couched in his own personal, highly idiosyncratic terms.” Green, “Oscar Wilde’s Intentions: An Early Modernist Manifesto,” British Journal of Aesthetics 13 (1973): 400. Wilde, Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 95. Lawrence Dansen, Wilde’s Intentions (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1997), pp. 8–9. Wilde, “The Soul of Man”, The Artist as Critic, p. 275. Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 46. Josephine Bauer, The London Magazine 1820–29 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1953), p. 174. Bauer, pp. 167–174. Stokes, “Wilde’s World: Oscar Wilde and Theatrical Journalism on the 1880s,” in Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 46–48. Stokes, “Wilde the Journalist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 70. Arthur Nethercot notes that “Wilde’s choice of Wainewright as the subject of his remarkable little memoir, ‘Pen, Pencil, and Poison,’ was indubitably dictated by his recognition of various bonds between himself and this eccentric.” Nethercot highlights in particular the passage in which Wilde notes that Wainewright was himself a theatre critic, and “strongly upheld the necessity for archeological accuracy in costume and scenepainting”, precisely the position Wilde took in his articles for the Dramatic Review. Arthur H. Nethercot, “Oscar Wilde and The Devil’s Advocate,” PMLA 59 (1944): 836.

164 96

97 98

99

100 101

102 103 104

105 106

107

108

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic As Stokes comments on this point: “[Wilde] never makes explicit references to his sexuality, but he does return to topics that have a long homoerotic history: Keats and Chatterton, the beautiful face. He is hostile to biography, but interested in the details of other people’s lives.” Stokes, “Wilde the Journalist”, pp. 77–78. The phrase ‘A study in green’ appears only in the Intentions version of the essay. A third, unmentioned source was Swinburne’s William Blake: A Critical Essay (1866/68), which contains a five page account of Wainewright. According to Dansen, Swinburne’s depiction of Wainewright “out-deadpans” Wilde’s (Dansen, p. 93). William Carew Hazlitt, “Introduction,” in Essays and Criticisms of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, ed. William Carew Hazlitt, (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880), p. lxxix. Wilde, “Pen Pencil and Poison: A Study in Green,” in The Artist as Critic, p. 322. All further references to this essay will be cited in my text. Nick Frankel, “Wilde’s Intentions and the Simulation of Meaning,” Victorian Literature and Culture 24 (1996): 133. Frankel’s idea is that for Wilde’s especially implied readers (like Richard Le Gallienne) the pleasures alluded to in Wilde’s texts are “distinctly erotic acts” and the meaning of such texts resides in the pleasure of reading them. The pleasure is the meaning, but not for those who are unable to take the same kind of pleasure in it (Frankel, p. 131). Alan Sinfield claims that the sexual significance of Wilde’s pose was unimaginable even to some of his closest friends. Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and The Queer Moment (London: Cassell, 1994), pp. 2–4. Dansen suggests reasons why Sinfield’s claim might be “too absolute”, but, even with Dansen’s qualifications, I believe Sinfield is basically correct (Dansen, p. 32). Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 412. Gagnier, Idylls, p. 163. Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain From the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet, 1977), p. 111; H. Montgomery Hyde, ed., The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York: University Books, 1956), p. 370. Gagnier, Idylls, p. 164. Moe Meyer, “Under the Sign of Wilde: An Archeology of Posing,” in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 91. Jeffrey Weeks offers other examples of such half-secret codes. Weeks notes, for instance, the emergence of a specific homosexual slang, known as palare, which he describes as a manifestation of the concern that the male-homosexual in late nineteenth-century England had for the way he appeared before a straight public: “Derived from theatrical and circus slang, it was language for evaluating appearances and mannerisms and in which to gossip. It was not so much concerned with sex, what people did in bed, as with how to behave in public.” Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London and New York: Longman, 1989), p. 111. Recall also the “Gang” language of The Souls in this context. In both cases a new language from the motive of a community to resist the hegemonic discourses of mainstream culture. For Stead and “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette, see Ann Robson, “The Significance of the ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,’” Victorian Periodicals Review 11 (1978): 50–57; and Owen Mulpetre, “The ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’”: W. T. Stead and the Making of a Scandal,” The W.T. Stead Resource Site, Wilde, The Artist as Critic, p. 406.

The Style is the Man

165

109 Wilde, The Artist as Critic, p. 407. 110 Richard Le Gallienne, “The Decadent to His Soul,” English Poems (London: E. Mathews and J. Lane at the Bodley Head; New York: Cassell Pub. Co., 1892), p. 108. 111 Wilde, “The Fisherman and His Soul,” in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Oscar Wilde, ed. Isobel Murray (1891; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 214. 112 This vision with desire is a powerful extension of Pater’s conception of the artist’s individuality into the realm of the public. Only a viewer who has developed according to the laws of aesthetic and sexual selection (i.e. only a true individual, an artist) can accomplish the assimilation of an eclectic array of objects according to such a desiring gaze. 113 Wilde, “Pen, Pencil, and Poison: A Study,” Fortnightly Review 51 (January 1889): 54.

This page intentionally left blank

Conclusion By the end of the nineteenth century, the uncomplicated identification of style with identity served to reassure a growing sector of writers and readers confronted with a uniform body of sensational publications that the world really was more diverse than ever. The move toward individualism in style is identified by its advocates as being part of a broader cultural trend, and the goal of the author becomes the proof of his own existence as an original voice of particular, personal impressions, because this is what the temporally self-conscious culture of the 1890s demands. As Stephen Gwynn wrote in 1899, “the change in style...is part of a general alteration in our attitude towards art. The world has become enamored of individuality, of the vivacity of personal impressions. It is anxious that an artist should see things in a way unmistakably his own, and should represent them in a manner that is admired for its unlikeness to that of his predecessors.”1 Marked difference is sought as the salvation of the individual. But in order for this logic to work it must be the individual himself and not merely his manner of expression that is markedly different. This conflation of style with person isolates only one element of Pater’s theory of style and simplifies it so that the writer’s style in effect becomes synonymous with his personality. Pater’s stress on selection and arrangement in writing (for the sake of an ultimate disinterestedness in prose) is dismissed in one easy gesture. Skill becomes irrelevant to the production of great prose. In the words of W. H. Mallock: “The foundation of style, its essence, its colouring, its principle, is not the writer’s skill as a writer, but his character as a man; and this shows itself in ways with which technical skill, or even technical genius, has not essentially anything at all to do.”2 The style of the writer should be distinguishable as literary for one reason only, “that it has more life, not less, in it than language as employed ordinarily.”3 In this regard, the writer should attempt to manifest himself, not as a writer, but as a man. As Mallock phrases this last point: “The style is the man; but it ought not to be the man of letters.”4 The man of letters is no longer desirable for several reasons. One reason is due to a kind of reverse snobbism emerging from the popular sphere in which any explicit manifestation of learnedness in language becomes immediately distasteful and unappealing to the consumer of language-entertainment. One destination of the romantic disdain for bookishness and the parallel valorization of colloquial language that we found in De Quincey’s theory of style, for instance, becomes the popular association of a learned style with the absence of vitality and personality. Stylistically speaking, the consumer does not want to read the fuddyduddy any more than he would like to dress like him. Another reason for this ascendancy of “the man” over the “man of letters” becomes apparent when one recognizes the perceived magnitude of the public sphere—and the extensive influence of its media instruments—in the 1890s as

168

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

compared to the idea of the public in the early nineteenth century. The reading public grew exponentially between 1800 and 1900, the number of readers increasing from an estimated five million to more than thirty million. The bulk of this dramatic increase in literacy occurred between 1860 and the late 1890s.5 In the 1830s Mill could still hope to address his public as a body of individuals. And even if the emergence of the Victorian sage represents an early rift between author and public, literature and the people, the belief in the transformative powers of the publicly disseminated word is still an important motivating factor for Carlyle and Ruskin. By 1892, however, the identity of the man of letters—of the nineteenthcentury British critic—has become bifurcated to such a degree that he must be reduced to a unique, indivisible man, or else perish in the sea of black and white print. The bifurcation of the critic’s identity is well expressed by Terry Eagleton in one of his concise histories of criticism: “either criticism strives to justify itself at the bar of public opinion by maintaining a general humanistic responsibility for the culture as a whole, the amateurism of which will prove increasingly incapacitating as bourgeois society develops; or it converts into a species of technological expertise, thereby establishing its professional legitimacy at the cost of renouncing any wider social relevance.”6 Already by the 1890s both possibilities have developed to the point of clear, if not always intentional, self-parody. On the one side we have the “Mainly About People” column of the Star or the gossipy reiteration of the human interest news in a magazine like Tit-Bits, and on the other we have Lucius Sherman and his dedicated Masters students counting the ifs, ands, and buts in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. In the context of this new continuum that develops between the poles of “the man” and “the man of letters”, Pater and Wilde occupy different but equally precarious positions. Wilde, far more than Pater, actively flirts with “the man” of the popular press, but neither Wilde nor Pater becomes a straightforwardly sensational writer any more than either can be said to have retreated into the professional literary identity that now compensated for the sense that authority over culture, in the Arnoldian sense, had been lost. The most important position that they share is their persistent assertion of the complex nature of language as a medium of communication. This position opposes the late Victorian argument that style is the author incarnate, and that “the man who imitates another wears a mask, as does the man who writes in a language to which he was not born.”7 According to this last assertion, which comes from John Burroughs’ 1899 essay “The Vital Touch in Literature”, the concept of sincerity is now based upon communicating the self without consciousness of language. As the editor of Harper’s put it just after the turn of the century: “[i]t is in getting away from himself that the writer is most himself”, that is, it is when he is the least conscious of communicating his personality that he distinguishes himself the most.8 For the critics I have highlighted in this study, however, the scenario is inverted. Only through the writer’s constant awareness of the veil of language, and through the writer’s practice of making the reader aware of language as the medium of identity, is a kind of truthful communication possible. My purpose throughout this book has been to reveal the rhetorical consciousness of nineteenth-

Conclusion

169

century critics who continued to make claims for the possibility of critical truth in the face of new print media, and new arguments about what their most basic material for communication—namely, language—consisted of, and how it worked. While the stylistic arguments for the possibility of critical truth that I have followed varied greatly in motive and approach, nineteenth-century British critics were consistent in their reliance upon a conception of sincerity as an ever-useful critical stance or rhetorical mode, that is to say, as a most powerful manner of speaking about what meant the most to them. Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8

Gwynn, p. 369. Mallock, p. 443. Mallock, p. 454. Mallock, p. 454. Raymond Williams, Writing in Society (London and New York: Verso, 1983), p. 69; David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 26–27; David F. Mitch, The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private Choice and Public Policy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 188. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London and New York: Verso, 1996), pp. 56–57. Burroughs, p. 401. [The Editor], “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 110 (1904): 164. The author of this piece is most likely W. D. Howells.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography Aarsleff, Hans. From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. —— The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Abdy, Jane and Charlotte Gere. The Souls. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1984. Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and Critical Tradition. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1958. —— “The Romantic Period: 1798–1832.” Norton Anthology of English Literature. 2 vols Ed. M. H. Abrams, et al. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1986. Vol. 2. 13–16. Adams, James Eli. “The Hero as Spectacle: Carlyle and the Persitence of Dandyism.” Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination. Ed. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 213–232. Adams, William Bridges [Junius Redivivus]. “Junius Redivivus on the Conduct of The Monthly Repository.” Monthly Repository n.s. 6 (1832): 793–797. —— “On the Morality of Authors.” Monthly Repository n.s. 7 (1833): 305–313. “Address.” Athenaeum (February 7, 1832): 1. Adorno, T. W. “The Essay as Form.” Trans. Bob Hullott-Kentor. New German Critique 32 (1984): 151–171. Alexander, J. H. “Blackwood’s Magazine as Romantic Form.” Wordsworth Circle 15 (1984): 57–68. Alison, Archibald. “Influence of the Press.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 36 (1834): 373–391. Allen, Grant. Physiological Aesthetics. London: H. S. King, 1877. Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Altieri, Charles. Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-Person Expressivity and its Social Implications. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1994. Anderson, Amanda. Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. —— The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. —— The Way We Argue Now: A Study in Cultures of Theory. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. [An Optimistic Critic]. “The Prospects of English Literature.” Pall Mall Gazette (April 22, 1884): 1–2. Arber, Edward, ed. John Lyly. London: Murray, 1868. Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Arnold, Matthew. “Dr. Stanley’s Lectures on The Jewish Church.” Macmillan’s Magazine 7 (1863): 327–336. —— “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Essays in Criticism. London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1865. 1–47.

172

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

—— “The Literary Influence of Academies.” Essays in Criticism. London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1865. 48–91. —— Culture and Anarchy. 1869. New York: Macmillan, 1931. —— “The Study of Poetry.” 1880/1888. Four Essays on Life and Letters. Ed. E. K. Brown. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1947. 62–92. “The Art of Authorship.” Spectator 64 (1890): 670–689. “The Art of Writing.” British Conversationalist and Literary Journal (1855): 121–128. “The Athletic Style.” Academy 60 (1901): 231–232. “Authors at Work.” Leisure Hour 8 (1859): 620–622. Axon, William E. A. English: The Dominant Language of the Future. London: I. Pitman and Sons, 1889. Bahn, Eugene and Margaret L. Bahn. A History of Oral Interpretation. Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Co., 1970. Bailey, Richard W. Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1991. Bain, Alexander. The Emotions and The Will. London: Parker, 1859. Bainton, George. The Art of Authorship. New York: Appleton; London: J. Clarke and Co., 1890. Baldick, Chris. The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848–1932. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Barnes, William [‘Dillettante’]. “Corruptions of the English Language.” Gentleman’s Magazine 100 (1830): 501–503. —— An Outline of English Speech-Craft. London: C. Kegan Paul, 1878. Bartine, David. Early English Reading Theory. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. —— Reading Criticism and Culture. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Bauer, Josephine. The London Magazine 1820–29. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1953. Bell, A. Melville. “The Claims of the English Language to Universality.” Science 12 (1888): 291–293. Bender, John and David E. Wellbery. “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric.” The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice. Eds Bender and Wellbery. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990. 3–39. Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting.” Trans. Harry Zohn. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. 59–67. Birch, Dinah. “Ruskin’s ‘Womanly Mind.’” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism 38 (1988): 308–324. Bird, Frederic M. “Paralyzers of Style.” Lippincott’s Magazine 57 (1896): 280–284. Birken, Lawrence. Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of a Culture of Abundance, 1871–1914. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988. Blair, Hugh. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. 1783. 2 vols. Basil: James Decker, 1801. Bowlby, Rachel. Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola. New York and London: Methuen, 1985. Bradley, J. L., ed. Ruskin: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Brake, Laurel. “Literary Criticism and the Victorian Periodicals.” The Yearbook of English Studies 16 (1986): 92–116.

Bibliography

173

—— “Aesthetics in the Affray: Pater’s Appreciations, with an Essay on Style.” The Politics of Pleasure: Aesthetics and Cultural Theory. Ed. Stephan Regan. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992. 59–83. —— Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Brake, Laurel, ed. Investigating Victorian Journalism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Brougham, Henry. “Progress of the People—The Periodical Press.” Edinburgh Review 57 (1833): 239–248. Browmwich, David. “The Genealogy of Disinterestedness.” Raritan 1 (1982): 62–92. Brydges, Egyrton. “Poetry—The Modern Poets.” Fraser’s Magazine 10 (1834): 423–436. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. England and The English. 1833. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1874. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986. Burroughs, John. “The Vital Touch in Literature.” Atlantic Monthly 83 (1899): 399–406. Cairnes, J. E. [J. E. C.]. “Mr. Ruskin on the Gold Question.” Macmillan’s Magazine 9 (1863): 67–69. “Called Back.” Pall Mall Gazette (May 21, 1884): 4–5. Campbell, George. Philosophy of Rhetoric. 1776. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. Capes, J. M. “Political Economy in the Clouds.” Fraser’s Magazine 62 (1860): 651–659. Carlisle, Janice. John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Carlyle, Thomas. “Characteristics.” 1831. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. 5 vols. Ed. Henry Duff Traill. New York: AMS Press, 1969. Vol. 3. 1–43. —— Letters of Thomas Carlyle to John Stuart Mill, John Sterling and Robert Browning. Ed. Alexander Carlyle. New York: Haskel House, 1970. —— Sartor Resartus: The Life and Times of Herr Teufelsdröckh. 1833. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1937. —— “Signs of the Times.” Edinburgh Review 49 (1829): 439–459. Caws, Mary Ann. “Ruskin’s Rage and Ours: The Dramatic Style.” Browning Institute Studies 18 (1990): 33–53. Chambers, William. “The Editor’s Address to His Readers.” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 1 (1832): 1. Chandler, Edmund. Pater on Style. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1958. Chatman, Seymour. “The Styles of Narrative Codes.” The Concept of Style. Ed. Berel Lang. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979. 169–181. Chilcott, Tim. “De Quincey and The London Magazine.” Charles Lamb Bulletin 1 (1973): 9–19. Clej, Alina. A Genealogy of the Modern Self. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995. Cohen, Murray. Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England 1640–1785. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Collini, Stefan. Public Moralists. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Conley, Thomas M. Rhetoric in the European Tradition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. “Conversation With Mr. Ruskin.” Pall Mall Gazette (April 21, 1884): 11–12. Courthope, W. J. “Appreciations.” Nineteenth Century 27 (1890): 658–662.

174

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Covino, William. “Thomas De Quincey in a Revisionist History of Rhetoric.” PRE/TEXT 4 (1983): 121–136. Creevy, Patrick. “J. S. Mill and James Martineau: Possibilities and Limitations of an Associationist Aesthetic.” Victorian Poetry 24 (1986): 115–129. Cutler, John. The Law of Naturalization as Amended by the Naturalization Acts, 1870. London: Butterworths, 1871. “The Cutting Style of Writing.” Dublin University Magazine 79 (1872): 415–425. Dansen, Lawrence. Wilde’s Intentions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. DeLaura, David J. Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1969. De Montluzin, Emily Lorraine. “Killing the Cockneys: Blackwood’s Weapons of Choice against Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats.” Keats-Shelley Journal 47 (1998): 87–107. De Quincey, Thomas. Collected Writings. Ed. David Masson. 14 vols. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1889–1890. —— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. —— “The Street Companion; or The Young Man’s Guide and the Old Man’s Comfort in the Choice of Shoes.” London Magazine (1825): 73–77. Devlin, D. D. De Quincey, Wordsworth and the Art of Prose. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983. D’Israeli, Isaac. “On the Present State of Our Literature.” New Monthly Magazine 35 (1832): 340–343. Donoghue, Denis. Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. [Don Roll. de L. S. De la Manche]. “Character or Spirit, or Mystery, of the Art of Publishing Oneself, or Anything.” Diamond Magazine 8 (1832): 54–57, 105–110. Dowling, Linda. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986. —— The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Dummett Ann and Andrew Nicol, eds. Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990. Eagleton, Terry. The Function of Criticism. London and New York: Verso, 1996. Earle, John. English Prose: Its Elements, History and Usage. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1890. Edgeworth, Francis Ysidro. Mathematical Psychics. London: C. K. Paul, 1881. [The Editor]. “Editor’s Study.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 110 (1904): 162–164. Edwards, Paul. “Unstoried: Teaching Literature in the Age of Performance Studies.” Theatre Annual 52 (1999): 1–147. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen and Co., 1950. 47–59. Ellegärd, Alvar. Who Was Junius? Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1962. Ellman, Richard. Oscar Wilde. London: Penguin, 1988. Engell, James. “Johnson on Novelty and Originality.” Modern Philology 75 (1978): 273– 279. “English Journalism.” Fraser’s Magazine 34 (1846): 631–640. “Epigram to Junius Redivivus.” Monthly Repository n.s. 6 (1833): 270. Erickson, Lee. The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Faverty, Frederic E. Matthew Arnold, The Ethnologist. New York: AMS, 1968.

Bibliography

175

Ferrario, Larry Steven. “The Pariah in the Marketplace: The Audience Centered Rhetoric of Thomas De Quincey.” Ph.D. Diss., University of California, 1989. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings. Ed. and Trans. Daniel Breazeale. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988. Flaubert, Gustave. La Tentation de Saint Antoine. 1874. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1983. Forsyth, W. “Literary Style.” Fraser’s Magazine 55 (1857): 249–264, 424–437. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” Trans. Josué V. Harari. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 101–120. Fowler, William J. “Character in Journalism.” The Writer 2 (1888): 6–8. Fox, W. J. “Conduct of the Monthly Repository.” Monthly Repository n.s. 6 (1832) 796. Frank, Marcie. Gender, Theatre and the Origins of Criticism: From Dryden to Manley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Frankel, Nick. “Wilde’s Intentions and the Simulation of Meaning.” Victorian Literature and Culture 24 (1996): 115–137. Fraser, A. C. “Modern Style.” North British Review 26 (1857): 182–202. Gagnier, Regenia. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1986. —— Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. —— The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Galton, Francis. Finger Prints. London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1892. —— Hereditary Genius. 1869/1892. London: Macmillan & Co., 1914. Gerwig, G. W. “On the Decrease of Predication and of Sentence Weight in English Prose.” University Studies 2 (1894): 17–44. Goldman, Albert. The Mine and the Mint: Sources for the Writings of Thomas De Quincey. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. Good, Graham. Observing the Self: Rediscovering the Essay. London: Routledge, 1988. Gordon. Mary Wilson. Christopher North: A Memoir of John Wilson. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1863. Gould, Warwick. “Pater’s Mona Lisa and Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine.” Notes and Queries 31 (1984): 500–501. Graves, C. L. “Mr. Pater’s Essays.” Spectator 63 (1889): 887–889. “Great Readers and Non-Readers.” Leisure Hour 8 (1859): 395–396. Green, R. J. “Oscar Wilde’s Intentions: An Early Modernist Manifesto.” British Journal of Aesthetics 13 (1973): 397–404. Griffiths, Dennis. “The Early Management of The Standard.” Investigating Victorian Journalism. Ed. Laurel Brake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. 120–132. Gross John. The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life Since 1800. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1991. Guy, Josephine, and Ian Small. Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gwynn, Stephen. “Some Tendencies of Prose Style.” Edinburgh Review 190 (1899): 356– 376. Hagstrum, Jean H. Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1952. Hall, Fitzedward. Modern English. New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Company, 1873. Hall, Samuel Carter. “A Word or Two with the Public.” New Monthly Magazine 31 (1831): i-iv.

176

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Hallam, Aurthur Henry. “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry.” 1831. Victorian Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. 848–860. Harris, Wendell V. “Arnold, Pater, Wilde and the Object as in Themselves They See It.” Studies in English Literature 11 (1971): 733–747. Harrison, Matthew. The Rise, Progress, and Present Structure of the English Language. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman’s, 1848. Hazlitt, William. “The Periodical Press.” 1823. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. 21 Vols. Ed. P. P. Howe. London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1933. Vol. 16. 211–239. Hazlitt, William Carew. “Introduction.” Essays and Criticisms of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Ed. William Carew Hazlitt. London: Reeves and Turner, 1880. Helfand, Michael S. and Philip E. Smith II. “Anarchy and Culture: The Evolutionary Turn of Cultural Criticism in the Work of Oscar Wilde.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 20 (1978): 199–215. —— Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Helsinger, Elizabeth K. Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982. Hennequin, Emile. La Critique Scientifique. Paris: Perrin et cie, 1888. Hewison, Robert. John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye. London: Thames & Hudson, 1976. Hewitt, H. Marmaduke. A Manual of Our Mother Tongue. London: Joseph Hughes, 1887. Higgins, David. Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. “Hints to Our Contributors.” Leisure Hour 3 (1854): 316–318. Hoare, Prince Esq. M. R. S. L. “On the Moral Fame of Authors.” The Gentleman’s Magazine 101 (1831): 628. Horne, R. H. “The ‘Unstamped Press’ in London.” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine n.s. 1 (1834): 614–625. Horsfall, T. C. “Painting and Popular Culture.” Fraser’s Magazine n.s. 21 (1880): 849–856. Houghton, Walter E., Ed. The Wellesley Index To Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900. 5 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1966–1989. Hyde, H. Montgomery, Ed. The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. New York: University Books, 1956. “Influence of the Press.” Westminster Review 21 (1834): 498–505. “Influence of Poetry on Life.” Pall Mall Gazette (October 17, 1883): 4. Inman, Billie Andrew. Walter Pater’s Reading: A Bibliography of His Library Borrowings and Literary References, 1858–1873. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1981. “Innovations in Style.” Southern Literary Messenger 4 (1838): 322–327. Iser, Wolfgang. Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment. Trans. David Henry Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Jacobus, Mary. “The Art of Managing Books: Romantic Prose and the Writing of the Past.” Romanticism and Language. Ed. Arden Reed. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1984. 215–246. Jones, J. Mervyn. British Nationality Law and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947. Joyce, Patrick. Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848– 1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Bibliography

177

Kacher, Russel Edward. “Ruskin and the Reviewers: Studies in the Social and Economic Criticism, 1857–1866.” Ph.D Diss., University of Maryland, 1974. Kemp, Wolfgang. The Desire of My Eyes: The Life and Work of John Ruskin. New York: Farrar, Staus & Giroux, 1990. Ker, W. P. Epic and Romance. 1896. New York: Dover, 1956. Klancher, Jon. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1833. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. [L.]. “The New Monthly Magazine and the Margravine of Anspach.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 19 (1826): 470–473. Lamb, L. A. “A Standard Newspaper Style.” The Writer 3 (1889): 13–14. Lang, Berel. “Looking for the Styleme.” Critical Inquiry 9 (1982): 405–413. Lathbury, D. C. “The Casuistry of Journalism.” Cornhill Magazine 28 (1873): 198–206. Law, Jules David. The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception From Locke to I. A. Richards. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Leary, Patrick. “Fraser’s Magazine and the Literary Life, 1830–1847.” Victorian Periodicals Review 27 (1994): 105–126. Lee, Vernon. The Handling of Words. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1923. Le Gallienne, Richard. “The Decadent to His Soul.” English Poems. London: E. Mathews and J. Lane at the Bodley Head; New York: Cassell Pub. Co., 1892. 106–109. Legge, Alfred Owen. “Concerning Style.” Manchester Quarterly 2 (1883): 37–65. Lewes, George Henry. The Principles of Success in Literature. 1865. London and Melbourne: Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1942. Lewis, Edwin Herbert. The History of the English Paragraph. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1894. Liddle, Dallas. “Salesmen, Sportsmen, Mentors: Anonymity and Mid-Victorian Theories of Journalism.” Victorian Studies 41 (1997): 31–68. “The Literary Aspirant.” Chambers’s Journal 18 (1852): 371–373. “Literary Style.” Spectator (October 1, 1892): 445–446. Lombroso, Cesar. The Man of Genius. London: W. Scott; New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1891. Mackay, Charles. Lost Beauties of the English Language. London: Chatto and Windus, 1874. —— A Glossary of Obscure Words and Phrases in the Writings of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Traced Etymologically to the Ancient Language of the British People as Spoken Before the Irruption of the Danes and Saxons. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1887. —— “English Slang and French Argot: Fashionable and Unfashionable.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 143 (1888): 690–704. Maginn, William. “Thomas Carlyle.” Fraser’s Magazine 7 (1833): 706. Maidment, Brian. “Readers Fair and Foul: John Ruskin and the Periodical Press.” The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings. Ed. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1982. 29–58. —— “Reading Ruskin and Ruskin Readers.” PN Review 14 (1988): 50–53. Mallock, W. H. “Le Style C’est L’Homme.” New Review 6 (1892): 441–454. Marchand, Leslie Alexis. The Athenaeum: A Mirror of Victorian Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941. Mardsen, J. H. “Dr. Trench on English Dictionaries.” Edinburgh Review 109 (1859): 365– 386. Martineau, James. “On the Life, Character and Writings of Dr. Priestley.” Monthly Repository n.s. (April 1833): 237–241.

178

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Masson, David. “Genius and Discipline in Literature.” Macmillan’s Magazine 7 (1862): 81– 94. Maurer Jr., Oscar, “Anonymity vs. Signature in Victorian Reviewing.” Studies in English 28 (1948): 1–27. McDonagh, Josephine. De Quincey’s Disciplines. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. Mendenhall, T. C. “A Mechanical Solution to a Literary Problem.” Popular Science Monthly 60 (1901): 97–105. —— “The Characteristic Curves of Composition.” Science 9 (1887): 237–249. Meyer, Moe. “Under the Sign of Wilde: An Archeology of Posing.” The Politics and Poetics of Camp. Ed. Moe Meyer. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. 75–109. Mill, James. “Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review.” Westminster Review 1 (1824): 206– 268. Mill, John Stuart. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. 21 vols. Ed. John M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991. —— Literary Essays. Ed. Edward Alexander. Indianapolis and New York: The BobbsMerril Company, 1967. —— On Liberty. 1859. New York: Penguin Books, 1974. Mineka, Francis Edward. The Dissidence of Dissent: The Monthly Repository, 1806–1838. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Mitch, David F. The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private Choice and Public Policy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Monsman, Gerald and Samuel Wright. “Walter Pater: Style and Text.” South Atlantic Quarterly 71 (1972): 106–123. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works of Montaigne. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1957. Montgomery, James. “The Sources of Poetry.” Metropolitan Magazine 8 (1833): 283–288. Moore, George. Confessions of a Young Man. 1886. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1917. “More About The Theosophists: An Interview with Mdme. Blavatsky.” Pall Mall Gazette (April 26, 1884): 2–4. Morgan, Thomas Charles [M.]. “Literature of the Day:—The New Magazine.” Metropolitan: Monthly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts 1 (1831): 17– 22. —— [M.]. “The ‘Bubble Reputation.’” New Monthly Magazine 25 (1829): 446–451. —— [M.]. “Moderation and Ratting.” New Monthly Magazine 29 (1830): 354–359. —— “Birmingham and Representation.” New Monthly Magazine 29 (1830): 235–240. —— “A First Lesson in Reading.” New Monthly Magazine 22 (1828): 359–364. —— “An Article for the New Monthly.” New Monthly Magazine 25 (1829): 421–427. —— “Common-Places.” New Monthly Magazine 28 (1830): 512–518. —— “The Literary World.” New Monthly Magazine 10 (1824): 364–368. —— [X.]. “Morality of Newspapers.” New Monthly Magazine 1 (June 1821): 630–636. Morley, Henry. “Euphuism.” Quarterly Review 109 (1861): 350–383, 354. Morley, John. “Anonymous Journalism.” Fortnightly Review n.s. 2 (1867): 287–292. —— “Mr. Pater’s Essays.” Fortnightly Review n.s. 13 (1873): 469–477. Morrison, Robert. “Blackwood’s Berserker: John Wilson and the Language of Extremity.” Romanticism on the Net 20 (November 2000 (24 January 2006). Müller, Max. “Introductory Lecture on The Science of Language.” Macmillan’s Magazine 7 (1863): 337–349.

Bibliography

179

Mulpetre, Owen. “The ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’: W. T. Stead and the Making of a Scandal,” The W. T. Stead Resource Site (2001) (20 July 2006). Murray, James G. “Mill on De Quincey: Esprit Critique Revoked.” Victorian Newsletter 37 (1970): 7–12. Needham, Lawrence D. “De Quincey’s Rhetoric of Display and Confessions of an Opium Eater.” Rhetorical Traditions and British Romantic Literature. Ed. Don H. Bialostosky and Lawrence D. Needham. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. Nethercot, Arthur H. “Oscar Wilde and The Devil’s Advocate.” PMLA 59 (1944): 833–850. Newman, John Henry. “Literature.” 1858. The Idea of a University. Ed. Martin J. Svaglic. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986. 201–221. Nicholas, Brian. “Two Nineteenth-Century Utopias: The Influence of Renan’s ‘L’Avenir de la Science’ on Wilde’s ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism.’” Modern Language Review 59 (1964): 361–70. Nordau, Max. Degeneration. New York: D. Appleton, 1895. —— Paradoxes. London: William Heinneman, 1896. Oliphant, Margaret Wilson. “The Old Saloon.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 147 (1890): 131–151. “On the Study of Language, As Essential to the Successful Cultivation of Literature.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 5 (1819): 55–59. Ostermark-Johansen, Lene. “The Death of Euphues: Euphuism and Decadence in LateVictorian Literature.” English Literature in Transition 45 (2002): 4–25. Parker, Mark. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Parker, Patricia. “Virile Style.” Premodern Sexualities. Ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. 201–222. Pater, Walter. Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas. 1885. 2 Vols. London: Macmillan, 1910. —— “English Literature.” 1886. Essays from ‘The Guardian’. London: Macmillan, 1910. 3–16. —— “Style.” 1888. Appreciations, with An Essay on Style. New York: Macmillan, 1906. 1– 36. —— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. 1893. Ed. Donald L. Hill. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA; London, UK: University of California Press, 1980. —— Uncollected Essays. Folcroft, Pennsylvania: Folcroft, Norwood Editions, 1976. Patmore, Peter George [Count de Soligny Victoire]. Letters on England. 2 Vols. London: H. Colburn and Co., 1823. Patterson, Lee. “The Heroic Laconic Style: Reticence and Meaning from Beowulf to the Edwardians.” Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall. Ed. David Aers. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2000. 133–157. Peele, George. The Works of George Peele. 2 Vols. Ed. A. H. Bullen. London: John C. Nimmo, 1888. “Penitent Authors.” Leisure Hour 8 (1859): 718–719. “Poetic Critique.” British Conversationalist and Literary Magazine (1854): 27–31. Poovey, Mary. “Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the NineteenthCentury Transformation of the British Literary Field.” ELH 71 (2004): 433–453. Priestley, Joseph. The Rudiments of English Grammar. 1761. Menston, England: Scholar Press, 1969. “Puff and Push.” Chambers’s Journal 17 (1852): 257–259.

180

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Raleigh,Walter. Style. London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1897. Redding, Cyrus. Literary Reminiscences and Memoirs of Thomas Campbell. 2 Vols. London: C. J. Skeet, 1860. Reeve, Henry. “The Literature and Language of the Age.” Edinburgh Review 169 (1889): 328–350. Review of Ruskin. Saturday Review 10 (1860): 582–584. Reynolds, Samuel. “The Critical Character.” Westminster Review 80 (1863): 468–482. Richards, Jr., H. L. “The Importance of Style in Newspaper Work.” The Writer 2 (1888): 242–243. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990. Rigg, James MacMullen. “Morgan, Sir Thomas Charles, M.D. (1783–1843).” Dictionary of National Biography. 66 Vols. Ed. Leslie Stephen. New York: Macmillan, 1885–1901. Robb, Mary Margaret. Oral Interpretation of Literature in American Colleges and Universities. New York: W. H. Wilson Co., 1941. Robertson, John M. “Concerning Preciosity.” Yellow Book 13 (1897): 79–106. Robson, Ann. “The Significance of the ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.’” Victorian Periodicals Review 11 (1978): 50–57. Roper, Derek. Reviewing Before the Edinburgh, 1788–1802. London: Methuen, 1978. Ruskin, John. Praeterita. 1889. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. —— The Two Paths. 1858. New York: Chelsea House, 1983. —— The Works of John Ruskin. Library Edition. 39 Vols. Ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1903–12. Saintsbury, George. “Modern English Prose.” 1876. The Collected Essays and Papers of George Saintsbury, 1875–1920. 4 Vols. London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1923. Vol. 3. 62–87. —— “English Prose Style.” 1885. The Collected Essays and Papers of George Saintsbury, 1875–1920. 4 Vols. London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1923. Vol. 3. 88–119. Schacterle, Lance. “Oliver Twist and Its Serial Predecessors.” Dickens Studies Annual 3 (1974): 1–13. Shattock, Joanne. Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the Early Victorian Age. London, Leicester and New York: Leicester University Press, 1989. Sheridan, Thomas. A Course of Lectures on Elocution. London, 1762. Sherman, Lucius Adelno. “Some Observations upon the Sentence-Length in English Prose.” University Studies 1 (1888): 119–130. —— “On Certain Facts and Principles in the Development of Form in Literature.” University Studies 1 (1892): 337–366. —— Analytics of Literature. Boston: Ginn, 1893. Sinfield, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and The Queer Moment. London: Cassell, 1994. “Slow Writers.” Leisure Hour 8 (1859): 414–415. Small, Ian. “The Vocabulary of Pater’s Criticism and the Psychology of Aesthetics.” British Journal of Aesthetics 18 (1978): 81–87. —— The Conditions of Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 —— Oscar Wilde Revalued. Greensboro, North Carolina: ELT Press, 1993. Smart, Benjamin Humphrey. An Outline of Sematology, or an Essay Towards Establishing a New Theory of Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric. London: John Richardson, 1831. —— The Practice of Elocution. London: John Richardson, 1832. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759. New York: Prometheus Books, 2000.

Bibliography

181

Smith, S. Alexander. “The Philosophy of Poetry.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 38 (1835): 827–839. Smith, Horace. “Evils of Measurement in Literature.” New Monthly Magazine 23 (1828): 204–208. “Some Remarkable Love Letters.” Pall Mall Gazette (May 29, 1884): 11–12. Spear, Jeffrey L. Dreams of English Eden: Ruskin and His Tradition in Social Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Spencer, Herbert. “The Philosophy of Style.” 1852. Literary Style and Music. New York: Philosophical Library, 1951. 1–44. —— The Principles of Psychology. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman’s, 1855. Stead, Willam T. “The Future of Journalism.” Contemporary Review 50 (1886): 663–679. —— “Government by Journalism.” Contemporary Review 49 (1886): 653–674. Stephen, James Fitzjames. “Journalism.” Cornhill Magazine 6 (1862): 52–63. Stevenson, Robert Louis. “On Style in Literature: Its Technical Elements.” Contemporary Review (1885): 548–561. Stevenson, William. “On the Reciprocal Influence of the Periodical Publications, and the Intellectual Progress of this Country.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 16 (1824): 518–528. Stillman, William James. “The Renaissance.” Nation 17 (1873): 243–244. Stokes, John. In the Nineties. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. —— “Wilde the Journalist.” The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Ed. Peter Raby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 69–79. —— “Wilde’s World: Oscar Wilde and Theatrical Journalism on the 1880s.” Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions. Ed. Joseph Bristow. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. 41–58. Stocking, Jr., George W. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1987. “Style.” The Gentleman’s Magazine 103 (1833): 215–218. Sulley, James. “The Aesthetics of Human Character.” Fortnightly Review 9 (1871): 505– 520. Sullivan, Alvin. British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913. Westport, Connecticut and London, England: Greenwood Press, 1984. Swayne, G. C. “Characteristics of Language.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 91 (1862): 360–375. Symonds, John Addington. Essays Speculative and Suggestive. 1890. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1907. Tennyson, G. B. “Parody as Style: Carlyle and his Parodists.” Carlyle and His Contemporaries: Essays in Honor of Charles Richard Sanders. Ed. John Clubbe. Durham, North Caroline: Duke University Press, 1976. 298–316. Thornton, William T. “History, and Its Scientific Pretensions.” Macmillan’s Magazine 8 (1863): 25–35. Thrall, Miriam M. H. Rebellious Fraser’s. New York: Columbia University Press, 1934. Thron, E. Michael. “Thomas De Quincey and the Fall of Literature.” Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies. Ed. Robert Lance Snyder. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. 3–19. “Topics of the Day by Heroes of the Hour: My New Novel, by M. Zola.” Pall mall Gazette (May 3, 1884): 6. “Topics of the Day XVII: The Secret of Success in Journalism by One Who Succeeded.” Pall Mall Gazette (May 23, 1884): 11–12. “To the Reader.” Athenaeum (February 27, 1830): 127.

182

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

“To the Reader.” The Metropolitan: Monthly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts 1 (1831): iv. Tratner, Michael. Modernism and Mass Politics. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995. Trench, Richard Chenevix. On the Study of Words. 1851. London: Macmillan and Co., 1882. —— English: Past and Present. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1855. —— On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries. London: J. W. Parker, 1860. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972. Vincent, David. Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Voskuil, Lynn M. Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2004. The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900. Series 2. Waterloo, Ontario: North Waterloo Academic Press, 2001. (31 July 2006) Weeks, Jeffrey. Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain From the Nineteenth Century to the Present. London: Quartet, 1977. —— Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800. London and New York: Longman, 1989. Wellek, René. A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950. 5 Vols. The Later Nineteenth Century. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1965, 1977. Whale, John C. “‘In a Stranger’s Ear’: De Quincey’s Polite Magazine Context.” Thomas De Quicey: Bicentenary Studies. Ed. Robert Lance Snyder. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. 35–53. Whately, Richard. Elements of Rhetoric. 1828. Ed. Douglas Ehninger. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963. Wheeler, Michael. Ruskin’s God. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. White, Hayden. “The Problem of Style in Realistic Representation: Marx and Flaubert.” The Concept of Style. Ed. Berel Lang. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979. 213–229. White, James. “On the Critical.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 39 (1836): 607–612. —— “On the Facetious.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 39 (1836): 166–168. —— “On the Genteel.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 38 (1835): 439–440. —— “On the Historical.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 39 (1836): 365–366. —— “On the Natural.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 38 (1836): 172–173. —— “On the Pathetic.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 38 (1835): 431–438. Wiener, Joel H. The War of The Unstamped: The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–1836. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969. Wilde, Oscar. “Pen, Pencil, and Poison: A Study.” Fortnightly Review 51 (1889): 41–54. —— “Mr. Pater’s Last Volume.” 1890. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 229–234. —— “The Critic as Artist.” 1891. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 340–408. —— “The Fisherman and His Soul.” 1891. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Isobel Murray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. 203–236.

Bibliography

183

—— “Pen Pencil and Poison: A Study in Green.” 1891. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 320–340. —— “Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray.” 1891. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 235– 236. —— “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” 1891. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 255– 289. —— The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellman. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. —— Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1989. Williams, Raymond. Writing in Society. London and New York: Verso, 1983. Willinsky, John. Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994. Wilson, John. “Monologue, or Soliloquy on the Annuals.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 26 (1829): 948–976. —— Noctes Ambrosianae. 5 Vols. Ed. Shelton Mackenzie. New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1863. —— “Tennyson’s Poems.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 31 (1832): 721– 741. Woolford, John. “Periodicals and the Practice of Literary Criticism, 1855–64.” The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings. Ed. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1982. 109–142. Wordsworth, William. Wordsworth: Poetry and Prose. Ed. W. M. Merchant. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955. Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. Ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones. London and New York: Routlege, 1991. Wright, T. H. “Style.” Macmillan’s Magazine 37 (1877): 78–84. “Youthful Troubles of Heinrich Heine.” Pall Mall Gazette (April 25, 1884): 6.

This page intentionally left blank

Index Aarsleff, Hans 103 Abrams, M.H. 29 The Mirror and the Lamp 6 Academy 148 Adams, James Eli 13 Adams, William Bridges (Junius Redivivus) 7, 147 Mill, shared authorial identity 45–6 Adorno, T.W., “The Essay as Form” 57 Alexander, J.H. 64 Alison, Archibald 18 Allen, Grant 113 Physiological Aesthetics 142 Altick, Richard 15, 77 Anderson, Amanda 4, 24fn36, 111–12 anonymous/pseudonymous writing and authorial identity 42–4 and puffing 77 and signature 97, 106fn29, 122 “Antiquus” pseudonym, Mill 45 Armstrong, Isobel 67 Arnold, Matthew 3 on Burke’s style 109, 120 on criticism 57 on style 109–10 style, praised 98 works Culture and Anarchy 111 Essays in Criticism 98 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” 110 Lectures 98 “The Literary Influence of Academies” 109 art criticism, Ruskin’s 94 associationism, Martineau 30, 31 Athenaeum 17, 23fn19 authenticity sincerity, distinction 3–4 Trilling on 4 author

identity, and style 142–3 reader, dialogue 57 reader perception of 13 undermining of 61 authorial identity and anonymous/pseudonymous writing 42–4 Carlyle 13–14 Mill 14, 44–5 shared, Adams/Mill 45–6 and style 38, 137 Bain, Alexander 113 Bainton, George 139 Baldick, Chris 98 Ballantyne, John 66 Barnes, William Outline of English Speech-Craft 116 Saxonist proposals 116 Bartine, David 6, 31 Early English Reading Theory 6 Bauer, Josephine 153 Bender, John, and David Wellbery, The Ends of Rhetoric 6 Benjamin, Walter 77 Bentham, Jeremy 31 biblical discourse, Ruskin’s use of 95 Birch, Dinah 94 Birrell, Augustine 139 Blackwood’s 8, 17, 154 circulation 18, 79 Blair, Hugh Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres 27 on style 27 book market, 1820s 76 poetry, association 77 production, 1820s 76–7 vs periodical 77 Bourget, Paul, on decadent style 123–4

186

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Brake, Laurel 126, 132fn73 British Conversationalist and Literary Magazine 92, 104fn2 Brougham, Henry 15 Brydges, Egyrton, on poetry 28–9 Buffon, Georges, on style 139 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 55, 121 Burke, Edmund 49fn45 Burroughs, John, “The Vital Touch in Literature” 168 Campbell, George Philosophy of Rhetoric 27 on style 27 Campbell, Thomas 59, 60 Carlisle, Janice 20 Carlyle, Thomas 7 authorial identity 13–14 Mill correspondence 36–41 differences 40 works “Characteristics” 40, 107fn49 Sartor Resartus 13 “Signs of the Times” 40 celebrity, literary 66 Century Guild Hobby Horse 153 Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal 15, 24fn28, 92 circulation 18 Chameleon 154 Chatman, Seymour, on style 2 Chorley, Henry Fothergill 99 circulation Blackwood’s 18, 79 Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal 18 Cornhill Magazine 95 London Magazine 79 Quarterly Review 79 civilization, and style 114 Clej, Alina 75 Cochrane, James 59 Cockney School of Literature 63 Cohen, Murray, Sensible Words 29 common culture and language 144 and style 112

communication, Smart on 33 Cornhill Magazine 9, 147 circulation 95 Covino, William 81 Creevy, Patrick 31 critic aesthetic 73, 114 late Victorian model 113–15 literary power, discernment 80–81 role, Mill on 39 criticism Arnold on 57 cosmopolitanism vs nationalism 112–13 as disinterested discourse 91, 93 as interior discourse 73–4 John Morley on 122–3 literary 92 Pater on 114 Ruskin’s 92–3 see also periodical criticism culture see common culture Daily Chronicle 144 De Quincey, Thomas 3 autobiographical writings 75, 85 on British character 81–3 on communicating power 79–80 as gentleman-scholar 75–6 intellectual projects 86 knowledge/power distinction 79–80 London Magazine contributions 77–8 periodical criticism 8, 78 on publication 85–6 on receptivity of texts 85–6 on reviews/magazines distinction 78 on scholarship 85, 89fn37 style, theory of 8, 81–7 works Confessions 85 “Letters to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neglected” 79–80 “On the London Magazine” 78 On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts 154 Principles of Political Economy 87

Index “Rhetoric” 85–6 “The Street Companion” 88fn29 “Style” 81–5 Suspiria de Profundis 85 on writing conditions for 84–5 novelty in 56 writing, derivativeness 80 “writing tub” 75 D’Israeli, Isaac, on novelty in writing 55–6 Dowling, Linda 110 The Dramatic Review, Wilde’s contributions 153 Eagleton, Terry 168 Earle, John 146 eclecticism, Pater on 113, 157 Edgeworth, Francis Y., Mathematical Psychics 142 Edinburgh Review 17 ekphrasis, Ruskin’s style 94–6 Eliot, T.S. 115 elocution, Smart on 28 eloquence definition 27 poetry, distinction 6, 30, 33 Smart on 32–3 Engell, James 55 English language hybridism 121 linguistic assimilation 119–21 and masculinity 115, 117 and national identity 115, 117 Pater on 122 Saxonist proposals Barnes 116 Spencer 118 science vocabulary, naturalization 122 Englishman’s Magazine 74 ephemerality see periodical press epigram, Wildean 151 Erickson, Lee book production 76–7 The Economy of Literary Form 56 the essay development, by periodical writers 57

187 ephemerality of 57–8 as genre 56–7 Good on 56 Euphuism 96, 99, 120 Examiner 5, 7, 36 Faverty, Frederic E. 115 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 126 figuration 31–2, 114 Flaubert, Gustave 124–5 La Tentation de Saint Antoine 126 Pater, influence on 124–5, 126, 135fn100 Forsyth, W. “Literary Style” 120 on Ruskin 93 Fortnightly Review 154 signed articles 122 Foucault, Michel 13 Fox, William Johnson, editor, Monthly Repository 7, 41, 53 Frankel, Nick 155 Fraser, A.C., “Modern Style” 119 Fraser’s Magazine 9, 13, 17, 29, 96 Gagnier, Regenia 114, 155, 156 Galton, Francis, Hereditary Genius 144 Gentleman’s Magazine 18 Gissing, George, New Grub Street 103 Goldman, Albert 80 Good, Graham, on the essay 56 Gosse, Edmund 125 Graham, Walter 54 Gwynn, Stephen 167 Hagstrum, Jean 55 Hall, Fitzedward 121 Hall, Samuel Carter 56 Hallam, Arthur, on poetry 74 Hardy, Thomas, on style 139 Harington, John, Orlando Furioso, translation 111 Harris, Frank 154 Harrison, Matthew Rise, Progress...of the English Language 117 on style 117

188

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Hazlitt, William 8 on the periodical press 16, 62 Hennequin, Emile 2 La Critique Scientifique 141 on style 142 Horsfall, T.C. 112 Hume, David 126 Hunt, Leigh 77 parody of 66–7 identity see national identity individualism, in style 138, 141, 145–6, 167 Inman, Billie Andrew 125–6 Iser, Wolfgang 125 Jacobus, Mary 77 Johnson, Lionel, “The Work of Walter Pater” 126 Johnson, Samuel on novelty in writing 54–5 Rambler essays 54–5 journalism 17 independent 147 and mass audiences 145 partisan 147 reflective 147 Stead on 147–8 see also New Journalism Junius, identification 43 Junius Redivivus see Adams, William Bridges Ker, W.P. 115 Klancher, Jon 24fn39 knowledge, power, distinction 79–80 Lamb, Charles 77 Lang, Berel 10 language and common culture 144 Pater on 124 Lathbury, D.C. journalism, kinds of 147–8 “The Casuistry of Journalism” 147 Law, Jules David, The Rhetoric of Empiricism 107fn50

Lee, Vernon, The Handling of Words 142 Le Gallienne, Richard 155, 157 Legge, Alfred Owen 118 Leisure Hour 92 Lewes, George Henry 39, 122 linguistic assimilation, English language 119–21 literary power, discernment by critic 80– 81 Literature of Power 73 Lockhart, John Gibson 63 London Magazine 56, 152 circulation 79 De Quincey’s contributions 77–8 Wainewright’s contributions 153 Wilde and 152, 154, 156 London and Westminster Review 17 Lyly, John, Euphues 96 lyric poetry, transformations, in Noctes Ambrosianae 63–4, 73 “M.” identification 59 “Literature of the Day-The New Magazine” 59, 61 “The Literary World” 62 see also Morgan, Thomas Charles McDonagh, Josephine 75, 80 McGann, Jerome 60 Mackay, Charles 120 Mackenzie, Charles 59 Macmillan, Hugh 139 Macmillan’s Magazine 96 signed articles, examples 97 magazines, reviews, distinction 78 see also periodical press Maginn, William 54, 63 Maidment, Brian 93 Mallock, W.H., on style 167 Marryat, Capt Frederick 59 Marsh, G.P. 110 Martineau, James, associationism 30, 31 masculinity, and the English language 115, 117 Masson, David “Genius and Discipline in Literature” 96, 97

Index on style 97 Mendenhall, T.C. 2 stylistics 142–3 “The Characteristic Curves of Composition” 142–3 Metropolitan 8, 16, 54, 59 libertarianism 60 Mill, James 7, 19, 38 Mill, John Stuart 3, 146 Adams, shared authorial identity 45–6 “Antiquus” pseudonym 45 authorial identity 14, 44–5 Carlyle correspondence 36–41 differences 40 style imitation 38–9, 40 on critic’s role 39 editor, London and Westminster Review 17 eloquence/poetry distinction 6 Monthly Repository, contributions 41–2, 45, 46 periodical criticism 7, 33–4 writing 35–6 on poetry 29–31, 32 reading 34–5 reading, theory of 39 on style 5 on sympathy 5 on Tennyson 34–5 works Autobiography 51fn78 “Comparison of the Tendencies of French and English Intellect” 49fn54 “On Genius” 38, 39, 40, 45 On Liberty 21 “Junius Redivivus” 41, 43 “Periodical Literature: The Edinburgh Review” 38 “The Two Kinds of Poetry” 30 “What is Poetry?” 45 on writing character 19–20, 21 Mona Lisa, Pater’s description 126, 135fn100 Montgomery, James, on poetry 29

189 Monthly Repository 6, 7, 8, 21 Adams’s contributions 42 Mill’s contributions 41–2, 45, 46 topics 42 Moore, George, Confessions of a Young Man 144 Morgan, James 59 Morgan, Thomas Charles (“M.”) 8, 58 anti-romanticism 61 genius, demystification of 61 hostility to, in DNB 60 materialism 60–61 New Monthly Magazine contributions 61 on the periodical press 16, 62 style 69fn34 writing, pragmatic approach 61 on writing character 20–21 Morley, Henry 96, 99 Morley, John on criticism 122–3 on Pater’s style 123 on signature 122 Morrison, Robert, on John Wilson 57 Müller, Max 110 “Introductory Lecture on the Science of Language” 97 Lectures on the Science of Language 102 national identity and the English language 115, 117 and the New English Dictionary 112, 120, 128fn23, 140 and style 110–12, 117 naturalization civic 111, 128fn14 of foreign terminology 122 “naturalize”, etymology 111 Needham, Lawrence 81 New English Dictionary, and national identity 112, 120, 128fn23, 140 New Journalism 2, 144–5, 147 New Monthly Magazine 8, 16, 54, 55 T.C. Morgan’s contributions 61 Noctes Ambrosianae see under Wilson, John

190

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

North, Christopher see Wilson, John novelty in writing see periodical press obscurity, and perspicuity 49fn45 Pall Mall Gazette 138, 144, 145, 147, 153, 157 Parker, Mark, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism 54 Parker, Patricia 115 Pater, Walter 3, 9, 85 cosmopolitanism 121–2 on criticism 114 on eclecticism 113, 157 on the English Language 122 Flaubert, influence of 124–5, 126, 135fn100 on Johnson’s dictionary 133fn79 on language 124 Mona Lisa, description 126, 135fn100 on scholarship 122, 123, 124, 125, 132fn77 on style 121–2, 132fn74 soul in 137, 140 style Morley on 123 naturalization, example 126 working methods 125, 134fn91 works Appreciations 121, 126 Wilde’s review 127 Marius the Epicurean 122 The Renaissance 122, 126 “Style” 116, 121 Paterson, Lee 115 Patmore, P.G., periodical criticism 78 Peele, George, The Honour of the Garter 111 Penny Magazine 16, 18, 42–3, 76 periodical, vs book 77 periodical criticism De Quincey 8, 78 Mill 7, 33–4 Patmore 78 Ruskin 93 periodical press

anonymous/pseudonymous contributions 42–4 contemporary views 15–16 effect 15 ephemerality of writing 61–3 frivolity, fear of 53 Hazlitt on 16, 62 intellectual progress, sign of 54 marketplace 42, 62 T.C. Morgan on 16, 62 novelty in writing 54, 60–63 praise of 58 role 15 stylistic variety 78–9 perspicuity and obscurity 49fn45 and Saxonist English 118 style as 27 Poe, Edgar Allen, “How to Write a Blackwood Article” 92 poet, mind of, and poetry 64–5 poetry Alexander Smith on 28, 74 book, association 77 Brydges on 28–9 eloquence, distinction 6, 30, 33 Hallam on 74 Horace Smith on 58 market, 1820s 76, 77, 88fn16 Mill on 29–31, 32 Montgomery on 29 Noctes Ambrosianae 63–8 and the poet’s mind 64–5 “puffing” 77 reading, Mill on 34–5 uniqueness, assertion of 28–9, 62–3 Wilson on 58–9, 77 Wordsworth on 88fn28 positivism 2 power, knowledge, distinction 79–80 preciosity definition 149 value of 149 Priestly, Joseph on style 27 The Rudiments of English Grammar 27 publication history, De Quincey on 85–6

Index Quarterly Review 63 circulation 79 Quintilian 28 Raleigh, Walter Style 139 on style 139–41 Rambler 54–5 readers hierarchy of 74 increase in numbers 168 Saintsbury’s classification of 150 variety of 149 reading critically vs reading to comprehend 29, 47fn17 Ruskin on 103 skimming 86 Smart on 32 reading theory Mill 30, 39 romantic 31–2, 48fn29 receptivity of texts, De Quincey on 85–6 Redding, Cyrus 59 Reform Bill (1832) 8 reviews 17, 36, 63 magazines, distinction 78 Reynolds, Samuel, “The Critical Character” 98 rhetoric abandonment of 143–4 fin-de-Siècle 148–52 nineteenth-century developments 6 pragmatic concepts 7–9, 14, 31–3 Ricardo, David 86, 87 Robertson, John on style 149 Yellow Book 149 romanticism, pragmatic 30–36 Ross, Robert 155 Ruskin, John 3, 9 art criticism 94, 98 biblical discourse, use of 95, 105fn22 critical prose 92–3 development 93–4

191 on critical truth 101–3 periodical criticism 93 political economy criticism 95, 98, 105fn24 of literature 99–101 redefinition of key terms 95, 102–3 on reading 103 style, criticism of 94–6, 97–8, 99 on Turner’s representation of nature 101 on word etymology 102, 108fn54 works Modern Painters 93, 94, 95, 98, 101, 137 Munera Pulveris 95 The Political Economy of Art 95, 99 Praeterita 93 Sesame and Lilies 95, 102 The Seven Lamps of Architecture 98 The Two Paths 102 Unto this Last 95, 96, 102 Ruskin Reading Groups 103 Saintsbury, George 112 on readers 150 Specimens of English Prose Style 122 on style 113, 150 scholarship De Quincey on 85, 89fn37 definition 122 Pater on 122, 123, 124, 125, 132fn77 Science 138, 142 SDUK (Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge) 15 Shattock, Joanne 17 Shaw, W. David 31 Sheridan, Thomas, Course Lectures on Elocution 28 Sherman, Lucius 2, 146 stylistics 142, 143 sincerity 168 authenticity, distinction 3–4 and style 94, 96 theatricality 4–5

192

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Trilling on 4 Wilde’s challenge to 1, 10 Small, Ian 151 Smart, Benjamin Humphrey 22, 84, 91 on communication 33 on elocution 28 on eloquence 32–3 on reading 32 works An Outline of Sematology 32, 33 The Practice of Elocution 28 Smith, Adam on sympathy 1, 3 Theory of Moral Sentiments 1, 3, 4, 5 Smith, Alexander, on poetry 28, 74 Smith, Horace, on poetry 58 soul in style 137, 138, 140, 141, 142 Wilde on 150–51, 157 Spear, Jeffrey 95, 105fn24 Spectator 55 Spencer, Herbert 2, 99, 101, 103, 113 Saxonist proposals 118 on style 118 “The Philosophy of Style” 118 Spinoza, Baruch 86 Stamp Act (1819) 21 Stange, G. Robert 94 Stead, William T. 156–7 editor, Pall Mall Gazette 147, 153 on journalism 147–8 Stevenson, Robert Louis 112 on style 113 Stevenson, William 54 Stokes, John 153 style Arnold on 109–10 Arnold’s, praise of 98 and authorial identity 38, 137 and author’s identity 142–3 Blair on 27 Buffon on 139 Campbell on 27 Chatman on 2 and civilization 114 and common culture 112 De Quincey’s theory of 8, 81–7

decadent, Bourget on 123–4 definitions 139 effeminacy in 115 Hardy on 139 Harrison on 117 Hennequin on 142 individualism in 138, 141, 145–6, 167 journalistic 146–8 Mallock on 167 Masson on 97 Mill on 5, 8 T. C. Morgan’s 69fn34 and national identity 110–12, 117 organic/mechanic 84 Pater on 121–2, 132fn74 as perspicuity 27 Priestly on 27 Raleigh on 139–41 Robertson on 149 Ruskin’s, criticism of 94–6, 97–8, 99 Saintsbury on 113, 150 Saxonist theories 116–19 and sincerity 94, 96 soul in 137, 138, 140, 141, 142 Spencer on 118 Stevenson on 113 and stylistics 142–3 Symonds on 113, 121, 137–8 theories, 1890s 137–59 Whately on 27 Wright on 118 writers on 27, 139 see also English language; writing character styleme 10 stylistic variety, periodical press 78–9 stylistics Mendenhall 142–3 Sherman 142, 143 and style 142–3 Sulley, James 113 “The Aesthetics of Human Character” 114 Swayne, G.C., “Characteristics of Language” 121 Symonds, John Addington 112

Index on English language 121 on style 113, 137–8 sympathy Mill on 5 Smith on 1, 3 Taylor, Harriet 45 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, Mill on 34–5 “Teutomania” 115 Thornton, William T., “History, and Its Scientific Pretensions” 97 Thron, Michael 75 Tratner, Michael 129fn38 Trench, Richard Chevenix English: Past and Present 119 On the Study of Words 102 Trilling, Lionel 3–4 on authenticity 4 on sincerity 4 Sincerity and Authenticity 10 Turner, J.M.W., nature representation, Ruskin on 101 University Studies 138, 143 Valpy, A.J. 59 Vambéry, Arminius 139 Voskuil, Lynn M. 4, 32, 35 Wainewright, Thomas G. Essays and Criticisms 154 Hazlitt on 154 London Magazine contributions 153 persona, adoption by Wilde 156, 163fn95 pseudonyms 153 Wilde’s critical study of 152–3, 154– 5, 157–8 Wellbery, David see Bender, John Wellek, René, A History of Modern Criticism 141 Whale, John C. 75–6 Whately, Richard Elements of Rhetoric 27, 85 on style 27 White, James, writing guide 91–2 Wilde, Oscar

193 epigram, use of 151 on ethical sympathies 1 journalism, personal emphasis 153– 4, 163fn87 and London Magazine 152, 154, 156 on misuse of words 151–2 sexuality 156 sincerity, challenge to 1, 10 on soul 150–51, 157 The Dramatic Review, contributions 153 Thomas G. Wainewright critical study of 152–3, 154–5, 157– 8 persona, adoption of 156, 163fn95 works “The Critic as Artist” 114, 157 De Profundis 158 Intentions 10, 151, 153, 155 Lady Windermere’s Fan 155 “Mr. Pater’s Last Volume” 127 “Pen, Pencil and Poison: A Study” 154, 157, 158 “The Fisherman and his Soul” 157 “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” 150, 151, 152, 158 Wilson, John (Christopher North) Blackwood’s contributions 57 Noctes Ambrosianae 8, 59, 63–8, 73, 91 fictional characters 66 lyric poetry, transformations of 63–4, 73 poets, shifting critical positions on 65 verse parodies 65–6, 66–7 periodical press, praise of 58 on poetry 58–9, 77 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Recollections 10 Woolford, John 92 Wordsworth, William on poetry 88fn28 works “Michael” 3, 4 “Prefaces”, Lyrical Ballads 74, 85, 112 “The Idiot Boy” 3

194

Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Wright, T.H., on style 118 The Writer 148 writers, on style 27, 139 writing conditions for, De Quincey on 84–5 derivativeness, De Quincey’s 80 guides 91–2 novelty in De Quincey on 56 D’Israeli on 55–6 Johnson on 54–5

writing character categories 20–22 Mill on 19–20, 21 Morgan on 20–21 primitive 21 sincere 21–22 superficial 20–21 “writing tub”, De Quincey’s 75 Yellow Book 149