ENTC 311, Literature in Britain 1890-1945
Professor Sally Greene, Spring 1996
Copyright (c) 1996
Another important legacy of the nineteenth century that plays itself out in the literature of our period is the conflict between religion and science brought about by such discoveries as Lyell's investigations into geology (which proved that the earth was much older than the Bible literally claimed), Darwin's theories of evolution, the work of certain astronomers to determine the ages of the stars, and numerous other scientific breakthroughs. While these kinds of discoveries had the effect of shaking faith in the literal truth of the Bible, in areas other than religion the scientific revolution was having a different effect. For example, the followers of Jeremy Bentham turned scientific rigor to social ends to proclaim that every element of society was answerable to a standard of "usefulness." These "Utilitarians" measured everything by its contribution of "the greatest good to the greatest number." Such generalizing was considered dangerous by the Romantic writers (for example Samuel Taylor Coleridge), who were much more willing to allow that some activities that are not strictly "useful" might still not be entirely useless.
The situation of women in the period just prior to the twentieth century was preoccupied with what the Victorians called the "Woman Question," which lingered (and still lingers) with respect to political, economic, and social equality. Women in England could not vote until 1918 (and even then, the vote was restricted to women over 30--as Vera Brittain's memoir Testament of Youth points out, the Parliament refused to make the voting age lower because in the aftermath of World War I, in which England had lost so many young men, the women's vote would have outnumbered the men's!). Women could not own or manage their own property until the passage of the Married Women's Property Acts (1870-1908). They could not enter the law or any other "civil profession or vocation" until the passage of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Bill of 1919 (see Brittain 504). Virginia Woolf's depiction in A Room of One's Own (1929) of a library full of "angry professors" who were bent on defining women in the narrowest possible terms is no exaggeration. (By the way, that's one book you should all read--not for this course, just for yourself.) For further exploration of the status of women in the nineteenth century, click here--and note especially the items within the "Gender Matters" page that fall under the heading "literature."
Another social issue that has much bearing on the literature of our period is the question of Irish nationhood, in the wake of the death of the Irish leader Parnell (more about that later). Centuries of political subordination by England came to a violent head in 1916, with the Easter Rebellion in the streets of Dublin (memorialized in one of Yeats' most famous poems). A significant part of the Irish Nationalist movement involved a reclaiming of the culture's roots through rediscovery of native folklore, language, and music; Yeats was a major figure in these activities. But as a poet and playwright he was a student of Pater's aesthetic--thus his work presents an interesting study in the tension between aesthetics and ethics (or politics); the same can be said for Synge, although he is not so major a figure.
Thus, despite what Pater might say about art for art's sake, it's obvious that the literature of this period is intimately connected to issues and events of deep moral significance--and that's even before we get to the first world war. What we'll see in the first part of the semester is the struggle that these artists go through in their attempt to hold the line between the two.
For further background on this period in Britain, browse through the Victorian Web site at Brown University (it's where the links I've give you above are coming from too). You might also want to browse a modernism time line.
An introduction to Darwin and other scientific writings at Oxford prompted Pater's loss of faith. But for a time, he considered becoming a priest anyway! He wrote to a friend that he thought it would be fun to participate in this system while not believing in it at all. The friend was scandalized, and Pater dropped the idea. He simply redirected his spiritual impulse into art.
According to Dennis Donoghue, who has just published an excellent biography of Pater, "Pater acquired a sense of spirituality on easy terms. He was free to merge it with any current notion of mind, consciousness, or sensibility." His "sense of sin," Donoghue continues, was "soon consigned . . . to a more comprehensive sense of the lack, the empty necessity in life, for which he was not responsible. . . . His interest in religious ritual and ceremony was keen but entirely picturesque" (28).
One of Pater's most famous ideas (actually one that he merely popularized, he didn't invent) was "art for art's sake." You will not see this phrase in the readings, but you'll see his revision of it at the end of the "Conclusion," where he has changed it in this later version to "art for its own sake." Another influential idea of his was that all art should "aspire to the condition of music." That view survives today--an example of it came out in a letter to the editor in The New York Times in the fall of 1995. In response to a story about Beethoven that apparently had a political edge, Bruce Adolphe wrote on October 1,
"Richard Taruskin's article `A Beethoven Season? Like Last Season, the One Before . . .' [Sept. 10] reveals, as did his attack last season on Prokofiev, the author's inability to understand music from anything but a narrow political perspective.
"At least in the Prokofiev article, readers could expect to read about Stalin, but obviously Mr. Taruskin also needs Stalin to write about Beethoven. He derides Beethoven as a `father figure,' again revealing his obsession with dictators and politics rather than art. The author mocks as `myth' the idea that Beethoven's music is `transcendent' and `universal.'
. . .
"Music is never mere information. Music takes us past nationalism, past politics, past words to a universal mystery. This is why we need music and why we will always need Beethoven."
What do you think? Do you think that music, or literature, can "take us past nationalism, past politics, past words to a universal mystery"? Meanwhile, back to Pater.
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. We are reading the preface and the conclusion to Pater's most famous work. There is no definitive text of the book because Pater published it four times, revising it significantly each time. The original title (1873) was Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Someone pointed out to him, however, that his study was not really very historical at all--as a result, he tamed the title down in later editions. The book, in one sense, is an enactment of his theories of subjective criticism--it tells us what the Renaissance means to him. Thus it is not a great starting-point for a true historical study of the Renaissance. But it is certainly valuable for a study of Pater. (If you want to read more of it, you can find the chapter on Leonardo da Vinci in the Norton edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray.)
When the book(s) came out, they were received with mostly praise from critics and contemporaries, although there was some concern among the pious that Pater had gotten carried away with "paganism." Within the art community, though, he was mostly hailed for ushering in a reaction against Ruskin's moralizing. According to Donald Hill, who has edited a critical edition of Pater's book, "For better or for worse, educated people were becoming familiar with the idea that art might take the place of religion as the most serious interest in life, that one might aspire, if not to salvation, at least to fulfillment, through `the ministration of the arts.' Aestheticism was in the air, and The Renaissance would be its sacred book" (289).
"Preface." The "attempts . . . to define beauty in the abstract" had been made by John Ruskin as well as by other critics (mostly in Germany, beginning in the eighteenth century). When Pater turns the table to emphasize the subjectivity involved in such a project, he is not saying something that had not ever been said before. John Stuart Mill, for example, wrote in 1865 that "our knowledge of objects, and even our fancies about objects, consist of nothing but the sensations which they excite, or which we imagine them exciting, in ourselves" (An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, qtd. in Donald L. Hill's critical edition of The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry at 294). And in France, Baudelaire had written in 1846, "Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction skimmed from the general surface of various beauties" (qtd. in Hill 295). What Pater did was to place special emphasis on these ideas and to bring them together in such a way, and in such a time, that they were revolutionary.
The passage from Arnold to which Pater alludes is this: "Of the literature of France and Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is" ("The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" [1864], qtd. in Hill 296). Note the difference. Arnold wants to rescue the object of critical attention (the painting, the poem, etc.) from impressionism, whereas Pater embraces the impression. What is the "object . . . in itself"? That is the question Pater poses to his teacher.
But then what is the aesthetic critic's method, according to Pater? How is science implicated in the comparison to "a chemist not[ing] some natural element"? Is this really a valid comparison?
"Conclusion." Incredible though it might seem, this short piece of writing was considered scandalous--even Pater had his doubts about publishing it. He omitted it from the second edition, although he had another change of heart about it for subsequent editions (see Pater's own note on the bottom of p. 310 of your copy, in the Norton Critical Edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray).
Here is what one critic had to say about it:
"It is a Hedonism--a philosophy of refined pleasure--which is derived from many sources; from modern science and the doctrine of relativity; from Goethe, from Heine, Gautier, and the modern French theorists of art for art; from the sense of life's flux and instability and the precious things which life may yield notwithstanding--from all these well transfused into a personal medium of temperament and reflection, well purged from technicalities, and cast into a literary language of faultless lucidity and fitness. But to go with the writer when he analyzes and discriminates exquisite impressions is not to go with him when he makes the research of exquisite impressions the true business of a wise man's life. By all means, let the people whose bent is art follow art, by all means refine the pleasures of as many people as possible; but do not tell everybody that refined pleasure is the one end of life. By refined, they will understand the most refined they know, and the most refined they know are gross; and the result will not be general refinement but general indulgence." (Sidney Colvin, Pall Mall Gazette, March 1, 1873, qtd. in Hill 445.)
But there's a slight issue here, isn't there? How do you tell the difference between these two kinds of people?
The influence of Wordsworth and the main currents of Romanticism are apparent in the "Conclusion." Consider the sentence "Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world." Compare Wordsworth's "Ode" as a representative example of Romanticism.
But look at the swerve Pater makes, bring him out from under Wordsworth: "Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, it the end."
Another idea with rather startling implications is Pater's avoidance of "habit" and all of the systematizing that that seems to represent to him. He says, "we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch," because we'll be so busy focusing one "new impression" after another onto our visual palates. But what does the statement that "The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us" do to any possibility of social critique, for example gender or race criticism? Is there not something "hedonistic" or at least infantile about this approach after all?
Pater writes, "Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among `the children of this world,' in art and song." Woolf wrote a review of a book that purported to show how Shakespeare could be used to indoctrinate young people into good citizens who would give to the poor and help the needy. To this, she said, Nonsense: Shakespeare can "claim . . . the title of reformer" not because of heroic personal achievements but because, "as every scribbler knows, each sentence wins its way to existence through a crowd of temptations or dies at their hands." The true roots of social change "lie not so much in Acts of Parliament as in a song or two" (see 2 Essays of Virginia Woolf 196-98).
T. S. Eliot said: Pater's "view of art, as expressed in The Renaissance, impressed itself upon a number of writers in the nineties, and propagated some confusion between life and art which is not wholly irresponsible for some untidy lives." (For a preview of Eliot, click here.)
Wilde grew up in Dublin, where his father was a surgeon. After majoring in classics at Trinity College, Dublin, he won a scholarship to Oxford, where he studied with Ruskin and Pater. Of Pater's The Renaissance, he said to Yeats, "It is my golden book; I never travel anywhere without it. But it is the very flower of decadence; the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written" (see Yeats' Autobiography).
As your Norton "Preface" points out, he had great success with a lecture tour in America, during which he preached the gospel of aestheticism. The aesthetic movement, as we have discussed, arose in the specific context of Victorian moralism: hence Wilde's assertion, during his American tour, that "to disagree with three fourths of all England on all points of view is one of the first elements of sanity." In addition to The Picture of Dorian Gray he wrote some poetry, as well as some justly famous plays including The Importance of Being Earnest.
His successful career ended in criminal prosecution for sodomy, with a sentence of two years of hard labor, as a result of a series of trials. In 1891, shortly after publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, he fell in love with a young aristocrat named Lord Alfred Douglas (Wilde at this time was married and had two sons). Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, publicly accused Wilde of homosexuality. Wilde sued him for libel, lost, and left himself open to criminal prosecution. (The Picture of Dorian Gray was used as evidence against him.) His prison conditions were truly severe--one of Britain's periodic prison reform initiatives was launched just after his time was served. After the two years, he went to France, where he lived for three more years, mostly under an assumed name, constantly depending on others for support. His family had abandoned him--his wife changed her name and that of their sons to Holland. He is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
To get an idea of the context within which The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared, let's think a little further about Victorian culture. As David Perkins describes it (in his introduction to modern poetry), "the mainstream of mid-Victorian thought assumed the rational character of the human mind and its capability not only to find out truth but also to govern emotion and behavior. With this basic faith in human nature there was naturally a tendency to optimism: intellectual, moral, and social progress had been and would be taking place. This optimism did not maintain itself without challenge and debate . . . But on the whole trust and optimism prevailed. They underlay the liberal ideal of open, responsible discussion with tolerance for diverse points of view, a tolerance that served, as [John Stuart] Mill argued, the further discovery of truth and right. Along with this went ethical idealism and purposefulness, the sense of duty that survived even when religious faith had been shaken" (30-31).
But of course, as we know, the world did not perfect itself by the end of the nineteenth century. Toward the end of the century "there was a tendency toward more austere and tragic modes of thought: pessimistic interpretations of life and history; an emphasis on the pull of the unconscious as opposed to the control of the conscious mind; skepticism and nihilism or, alternatively, dogmatic belief and authority; a quest for irrational and supernatural modes of knowledge and truth." Further, the Victorians in mid-century "could easily become hypocritical and smug, deserving the satire directed at them" (Perkins 31).
Thus, the next generation of artists decided that the Victorian values deserved worse than abandonment. They should be "offended, deliberately" by an attitude not post- but anti-Victorian (31). "Art for art's sake" was premised on "hostility to the middle class, its way of life and its values." In literature "it was directed against the Realists or Naturalists, against those writers, chiefly novelists, who held that the purpose of art is a faithful and detailed representation of contemporary and ordinary life." As part of this movement, Wilde argued for aesthetic formality and stylization. "Art, says Wilde, keeps between itself and life `the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment'" (Perkins 34). Art should not even pretend to stake a stand on social issues. Its purpose is beauty; and beauty is a function of style.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). A revision of the version published the year before in Philadelphia, where it didn't cause much of a fuss, but in London it was considered immoral. So he revised it to remove some of the more overt homosexuality; he also expanded the plot a bit.
What's the influence of Pater? . . . What do you think it means when some people call this a fin de siecle novel? something to do with the malaise that seems to strike at the end of every century? Is there a link between aesthetic "decadence" and cultural decay? A real link or just a potential link?
If "Oscar Wilde" is the person who wrote the preface, which character sounds the most like the author? Lord Henry? Or Basil? What about Dorian himself? Aren't there a lot of contradictions? (such as on the issue of "influence"). Could it be that as Charlesworth says the three characters are "masks" that Wilde wears? Is there anything behind the mask? Lots of shimmering wit . . . excellent for signature lines . . . is it really all surface? (Is "style" everything?)
Recent critics think not: they line up with allegorical takes, beginning with biographer Ellmann. The "tragedy of aestheticism." Dorian as aestheticism's first martyr. Or Joyce Carol Oates: A parable, a commentary on his aesthetic beliefs.
Does the novel completely subvert or deconstruct itself? does it belie its surface belief in aestheticism?
Pater's review (reprinted in your Norton edition) is, naturally, an aesthetic judgment--his complaints are that the novel does not entirely succeed as art. He distinguishes between the "moral" and the "story" (but wrongly predicts that readers will care less about the moral than about the story).
Some critics think Wilde has good reason to say that his novel, as an aesthetic production, is, if not "perfect" (as he says), pretty close to perfect. He begins it with an appealing premise--who hasn't at some time or another wished for eternal youth and beauty?--and he spins a well-told tale around it. By "well-told" I mean that it has a structural conciseness and integrity. From that observation, some critics might even say that this novel, despite its subject-matter, is "beautiful."
Now, does one view cancel out the other? Do we have to take an absolute stand on whether The Picture of Dorian Gray is either a cautionary moral tale or a beautiful work of art? Could it be that the contrast between the elegance of the narrative and the hopelessness of the story beneath it is what constitutes the real experience of reading it? Or would Wilde still say to us, beauty really is only skin deep? And if so, can we trust the teller? (Henry James, the American novelist who advised readers to "trust the tale, not the teller," was also influenced by Pater and Wilde. He said he wanted to be (as an artist) "one on whom nothing is lost.")
One last question about the novel: how well does it fit within the larger group of "aesthetes and decadents" that were setting themselves loose on Europe and England at about this time?
About "The Critic as Artist" and "The Decay of Lying," I don't think there's much I need to tell you--it's self-explanatory, to the extent that it can be explained. I am particularly fond of his claim that sunsets were "invented" by the art of J. M. W. Turner. Can you think of other examples in which our preconceptions color the reality? What do you get out of these essays?