An Analysis of Aesthetic Surface in Three Victorian Autobiographies

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ANALYSIS OF AESTHETIC SURFACE IH THREE TICTGRIAK AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

by Helen Xennetta Sampson

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Department of English in the Graduate College of The State University of Iowa

February 1950

ProQuest Number: 10902195

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uest ProQuest 10902195 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). C opyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C o d e M icroform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346

Vvqfao w K *•

ACKNOY/LEDGMMTS The writer wishes to express her gratitude to the members of her committee for their help­ ful criticisms.

Especial appreciation goes to

the director of the study, Dr, Joseph Baker, for his careful, stimulating, and creative guidance, which consistently demands and secures from his

G«77.

students better work than they ar© capable of!

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter I, CARLYLE'S SARTOR RFSARTU3............... 1

Chapter II, HUSKIN'S PRAETIRITA ................

.56

Chapter III, NEWAH'S A P O L O G I A ................. 117

Chapter IV, S P E C U LATIONS ....................... 174

B I B L I O G R A P H Y ................................... 207

Hi

TABLE OF COKTBIJTS

Chapter I, CARLYLE’S SARTOR RFSARTBS............... 1

Chapter II, RUSEtH'S PRAFTiRITA................. .56

Chapter III, NEKM/ffl’S A P O L O G I A ................. 117

Chapter TV, SPBCTJLATIOHS....................... 174

BIBLIOGRAPHY

.................................

111

307

1

Chapter X CAttLYLt1S SAfiTOH HB&AfiTUS Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the Torch of Science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or less effect, for five thousand years and upwards; how, In these times especially, not only the Torch still burns, and perhaps more fiercely than ever, but innumerable Rush-1ights, and Sulphur-matches, kindled thereat, are also glancing In every direction, so that not only the smallest cranny or dog-hole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated,— it might strike the reflective mind with some surprise that hitherto little or nothing of a fundamental character, whether in the way of Philosophy or History, has been written on the subject of Clothes**1 This is the first sentence (and the first paragraph) of Carlyle*s Sartor Hesartus*

Harrold has written of iti

"Certainly few great literary works have had a more unfortunate opening paragraph*”*

Xt is unfortunate to one reading the

book for the first time; but to the student making an analysis of the book it is surprising how much of the whole is contained in the beginning* Suppose we were to read this paragraph to some student of literary history and say, "Whom does this sound like?" If he were a good student of literary history, of course he would reply, ”1 know it*s Carlyle*a Sartor*”

Both typical

style and content are to be found in this first sentence*

1* Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p*3* 2* Ibid*, p« xxxii*

2 We know that we have here a study of clothes; and we recognize many feature a of the Carlyle stylet

the long involved sentence

pattern# the rhetoric# the humor* But suppose we were to pm*sue the subject further# and ask the student whether there were anything in the passage not precisely covered either by the style or the content which would make him label the book not only Carlyle but specifically this particular book of his# Sartor Hesartus* His first reply might be general but not unenlightenlngs "It has the flavor of Sartor«*

what would he mean by this

statements? Is it possible that a particular autobiography bears a certain stamp# a quality which 1b peculiar to it? It might be harder to define than content# and more difficult to describe than style# but does it exist? Joseph Baker has stirred up a similar question with regard to fiction*

In an essay entitled "Aesthetic Surface

in the Hovel** he has described a common reading experience, our satisfaction in "a great art which in critical discussions has often got lost somewhere between (style* and *significance*fW

(He uses the term differently# it will be

noted# than does Brail in his Aesthetic Analysis*) The surface of a novel is made up of items concretely represented and temporally arranged (the temporal arrangement includes plot and other kinds of pattern)# enabling us to perceive the immediately felt qualities of a human "world#"

3 experiences In the Imagination, not through any one sense, But tt Is surface still, and should not be con­ fused with subject matter, content, real life, or even the full Implications of some *lntSntional reality44# * * We know that the Dickensian aesthetic surface does not go very deep and Is not a copy of reality*3 Baker1a definition places great importance on a "world44; aesthetic surface In the novel functions to enable us 41to perceive the Immediately felt qualities of a human 'world#'14 A novel, he states, could not properly be called a novel if It dealt with only one human personality#

He means by

"world,44 he says, not any physical entity, but he is using it rather as in the words and phrases "underworld," "One World," "worldly," "demimonde," 44il mondo lltterario#"^

The

novel creates for us a new world, which may or may not represent realistically the type of society it purports to describe#

Main Street may or may not be an accurate picture

of American life in the 20*s in the Middle West, but it does present a "world." "aesthetic surface."

This feature of the novel he calls His purpose is to "direct attention

to an experience which readers certainly do have."-* Such an experience is not to be defined as content; neither is it the complete aesthetic experience; it does not

3# Joseph B# Baker, "Aesthetic Surface in the Hovel," p. 100. Ibid., p. 99, 5* Ibid., p. 91.

include our total awareness of style# for example#

It

Is not based on sense appeal; for we still have what we call Crime and Punish* meat when ©very impression on tSe "sense oi hearing has'1 "'been changed by translating every Hussian word into English# Or sound may be dropped entirely# and in a silent movie it Is still Crime and Punishment so far as it reproduced raitHf1 uilyr^Ke ."scenes and motivations of the original text;® This concept of aesthetic surface# he goes on to say# need not be restricted to the novel alone# It is employed also in any vivid biography or history# The correlation between the surface and what it represents may be at a maximum; then it is mo more fictitious than a realistic portrait# Biography and history move in a medium of facts# but their aesthetic surface is the ’same as that of the novel# • • The crucial distinction between biography (or history) and the novel Ilea not in the nature of the aesthetic surface but in the relation of the surface to facts# Conceivable there could be all degrees of accuraoy# from pure fact to pure fancy* ' But few if any literary masterpieces in either genre stand at either extreme.7 We judge a biography or history differently than we do a novel#

They too create a world which we experience

as an imaginative whole# rather than a world which we perceive through any one sense# 6* Ibid## p* 92# 7. Ibid## p. 103*

When we read a life of

5 Buskin, wo accept at least temporarily the world which th© biographer has created, and In which we see Ruskin and hia family and friends moving* finish, we cannot help askings

But when we

Is this true?

Is it

consistent with the facts about Ruskin1s life as we know them?

Is it "right*?

How close is it to "reality**

truth as well as we are able to get at it concerning Ruskin*8 personality? Suppose we are not reading a novel or a biography, but an autobiography, in which Ruskin or Newman says to us, "Here is the way I lived; here is the man I was, as nearly as I can remember**

Is there a reading experi­

ence which is similar to that experienced by the reader of novels?

The purpose of this study will be to examine

three autobiographic#, all taken from the same period* jgngllsh, Victorian* concerning them*

and to ask certain questions

If there is a unified impression, an

imaginative whole which may be had by the reader, neither style nor content precisely, how may this experi­ ence be described?

Is this impression similar to that

created in the novel, or different because the focus is on one personality? Let us define aesthetic surfrace in autobiography by saying that it is made up of various items which enable

6 us to perceive this personality*

hia telling of the facts;

his arrangement of facts; his suppression of facts; his distortion of facts; his ability to get underneath the facts, to interpret them for us; his revelation of himself, not only in factual details, but in describing his dislikes, his opinion of himself, his intellectual progress*

A man*a

world is to be seen in many ways; It is a complicated universe*

Aesthetic surface In autobiography is the

distillation, not of a group, but of one man, who may or may not spend a conslderaole amount of effort to show himself in a setting*

Of course, we shall be interested

to see to what extent the three authors do portray social setting; to what extent aesthetic surface is similar in the novel and in autobiography*

Does social setting

disappear entirely in any of those autobiographies? Having summarised the aesthetic surface of each autobiography, we shall then need to ask;

How close is

this distillation to the facts as we know them about Carlyle, Ruskin, and Hewraan? wander from th© truth?

Does it matter if they

Of what importance is truth

telling to the establishment of aesthetic surface in autobiography?

Will an autobiography lack surface if the

surface gives the impression of reality, but contradicts

7 the truth?

Would such contradiction neoessarily cause

a lack of surface? The reader of Dickens oan says

I know Victorian

England d i d n H look like the Pickwick Papers* hut after all* Dickens did not sdt out to describe England realistically.

But Buskin states In prasterlta that he

Is going to telluus th© truth about himself* as plainly as he can*

Does It matter that* having read The Order

of Belease. we know what a very unplain* subtle process it is to find truth in Praeterita?

or is an autobiography

a story to be treated in the same way as fiction? We have seen that even the first paragraph of Bartor Beaartua has a flavor all its own which makes us remember it and say* "Here is Carlyle.*

What is such surface like?

Sartor has a basis of fact; for example* Carlyle was tormented as a schoolboy and he did suffer frors unrequited love*

However* the primary emphasis of the book is phil­

osophic* only in the most haphazard and negligent way does it tell a story of a group or even of one man. Carlyle continually complains of the disorder of the autobiographical documents and the disquisitions of Teufelsdrookh*

nevertheless* it is autobiographical—

especially th© middle third— and we shall attempt to describe the aesthetic surface created* and to see how

8 closely this surface is related to th© facts we know about Carlyle's life*

Valuable light may be secured

from the study of Carlyle's unfinished novel, ffotton HeInfred, where w© can see a first attempt to create "an aesthetic surface" over autobiographical material* We shall thus have at hand an Instance of two genres, the novel and the autobiography, to see what aesthetic surface looks like in each, how important it is in each, and in which case it is the more successful, 1 One might expect that the central section of the book, made up of th© so-called nbiographical documents," would be the richest in the details of social existence; but even here a human world is merely sketched.

The

earlier chapter on t,HeminiscencesH illustrates how vaguely and lightly that world is drawn in, and how quickly it seems to fade away like smoke before the reader's eyes.

We are presented with a vivid des­

cription of th© professor enjoying his Gukguli at Zur Grunen Gana and proposing a toast "Pie Sachs der Armen in Gottes und Teufela Hamen*"^

But we go on to learn that

Diogenes Teufeladrockh (whose name means God-born Devil's

8, Carlyle, Sartor Reaartus. p, 15*

9 dung!)

professor of things in general at a university

of nowhere#

From a house on Illusion-Street, he looks

down on th© busy metropolis#

One thinks what Dickons

would have made of such a passage with his exceptionally strong perceptions of city life.

3?he turn Carlyle gives

the description is Important for an understanding of the social setting in sartor# *1 look down into all that wasp-neat or bee­ hive have we heard him say, *and witness their waxlaying and honey-making and poison-brewing, and choking by sulphur# From the Palace esplanade, where music plays while Serene Highness is pleased to eat his victuals, down to the low land, where in her doorsill the aged widow, knitting for a thin livelihood, sits to feel the afternoon sun, I see It all; for, except the Schloskireh© weather-* cock, no biped stands so high# Couriers arrive bestrapped and bebooted, bearing Joy and Sorrow bagged-up in pouches of leather; there, topladen, and with four swift horses, rolls- In the country Baron and his household; here, on timberleg, the lamed Soldier hops painfully along, begging alms; a thousand carriages, and wains, and cars, come tumbling-ln with Food, with young Rusticity, and other Raw Produce, inaralnat© or animate, and go tumbling out again with Produce manufactured**9 Here is a papier-mache* world with interesting puppets for inhabitants#

From even this world he is withdrawn; he

looks down into it*

He compares thorn to Han Egyptian

pitcher of tamed vipers, each struggling to got its head above the others*; while such work goes on, Teufelsdrockh

10 ait® above it all; ha 1® alone with the Stars#"*®

The

lively world of men is described as a drama which one may enjoy from the security of a comfortable seat*

"We

looked out on Life," he writes* "with its strange scaffolding* where all at once harlequins dance* and men are beheaded and quarteredt

motley* not unterrific was

the aspect; but we looked on it like brave youths•

A

traveller like Teufelsdrockh may see a town in his wander­ ings; but it lies far below him* "embosomed among its groves and green natural bulwarks* and all diminished to a toy box***1^ Many descriptive details are naturally cut away altogether; just when the novelist would be most specific* Carlyle is vaguest# Of good society Teufelsdrockh appears to have seen little, or has mostly forgotten what he saw# He speaks out with a strange plainness; calls many things by their mere dictionary names# To him the Upholsterer is no Pontiff, neither is any Drawingroom a Temple* were it never so begilt and over-hung; 1a whole immensity of Brussels carpets, and pier-glasses* and or-molu** as he himself expresses it* *cannot hide from me that such Drawing-room is simply a section of infinite Space* where so many Oo^-created Souls do for the time meet together#*1*

10* Ibid*, p#23< 11* Ibid., p. 116. 12, K i d ., p. 148. 13. Ibid., p. 29.

11 Carlyle does not bother to explain how th© young Teufelsdroekb meets the fair Blumin©» vr© seem to gather that she was young* haael* eyed* beautiful* and some on©*s Cousin; highborn, and of high spirit; but unhappily dependent and insolvent; living* perhaps, on the not too gracious bounty of moneyed relatives* But how came »the Wanderer1 into her circle? Was it by the humid vehicle of Aesthetic Tea* for by the arid on© of mar© Business? Was it on the hand of Herr Towgood; or of th© Gnadlg© Frau, who, as an ornamental Artist* might sometimes like to promote flirtation* ©specially for young cynical Nondescripts? To all appearance, it was chiefly by Accident* and th© grace of Nature *14* Even such a world»*look©d down on* artificial, some** times vague* Carlyle proceeds to dissolve* as if with a wave of a magician*s wand*

Mankind is "a living Flood*

pouring throu;^h these streets** | but the end of their journey is not an earthly or material one* from eternity* and move onwards to eternity* Apparitionsi

what else?

They com© **These are

Are they not Souls rendered

visible?* * * Their solid pavement is a picture of the Sense; they walk on the bosom of Nothing* blank Time is behind them and before them*w This dream-like dissolution of the human fabrio and the human world may be noted throughout the whole of Sartor*

^

In the first chapter Carlyle asks:

Ibid*, p* 136*

13* Ibid*, p. 21*

12 l Row, then, comes It, may th© reflective mind repeat, that the grand Tissue of all TIsaueaf the only real Tissue, should have been quite overlooked by Science,--the vestural Tissue, namely, of woollen or other cloth; which Man's &oul wears as Its outmost wrappage and over-all; wherein hi© whole other Tissues are Included and screened; his whole Faculties work, his whole self lives, moves, and has its beingf*® The world of men, of houses, streets, food, drink, sky and sea Is the tissue in which man's soul is wrapped* Some attention must be given to this outer coating in order to show that it

just a coating*

The professor

is created; Carlyle did not present his Ideas directly, but through a thin fictional character*

Teufelsdrockh

is brought in a basket to th© Futteral home:

he is

a precociously solemn little boy in yellow serge; he is badly educated, falls in love, sorrows greatly, finally achieves spiritual satisfaction*

Only just

enough of a social setting la created to show that man grows and attains inward strength in such a setting* The most Important constituent of the universe Is the naked soul of man, the thing that can say WI,W a spirit. Part of the fundamental pattern of the book is this continual lifting of the veil for which the veil exists. There must be something to see beneath*

16* Ibid.* p*$.

13 The following description of the professor illustrates this necessary ambiguity: Here, perch©d-up in his high Wahngass© watch* tower, and often, in solitude, out*watchlng th© Bear, it was that the indomitable Inquirer fought all his battles with Dulnees and Darkness; here, in all probability, that he wrote this surprising Volume on Clothes* Additional part* icularss of his age,’ 1'which was that of standing middle sort you could only guess at; of his wide surtout; the colour of his trousers, fashion of his broad-brimmed atteple-hat, and so forth, we might report, but do not, • * His Life, Fortunes, and Bodily Presence, are as yet hidden from u», or matter only of faint con* ecture, But, on the other hand, does not his oul lie enclosed in this remarkable Volume, much more truly than Pedro Garcia*a did in the buried Bag of Doubloons?*7

J

The gossamer quality of the professor and his world is very olear here; one abrupt movement and question and they would be gone,

Carlyle is more interested in the

neverywhere and forever* than in the *where" and "when," But that same WHERE, with its brother WEEK, are from the first th© mas ter-colours of our Proam*gro11oj say rather, the Canvas (the warp and woof thereof) whereon all our Dreams and Life-visions are painted, nevertheless, has not a deeper meditation taught certain of every climate and age, that the WHERE and WHEN, so mysteriously ineeparable from all our thoughts, are but superficial terrestrial adhesions to thought; that the Seer may discern them where they mount up out of the celestial EVERYWHERE AND FOREVER* have not all nations conceived

17. Ibid,. p. $5.

i4 their God as Omnipresent and Eternal; as existing in a universal HERE* an ever-lasting How? Think well* thou too wilt find that Space is but a mode of our human Sense* so likewise Time; there JLs no Space and no Timet WE are— we know not whatlight-sparkles floating In the aether of Deity. But the "where* and the "when* are not lightly dismissed as of no value or consequence#

The title

Sartor Resartue means the tailor done over* or th© tailor patched; the book was written* not to show that men should discard the patterns of their religious* philosophic* polltisal thinking* but that they should re-do, re-make them* Hlghtly viewed no meanest object is In­ significant; all objects are as windows, , through which the philosophic eye looks into Infinitude Itself# All visible things are emblems; what thou seest Is not there on its own account; strictly taken* is not there at all; Matter exists only spiritually* and to represent some Idea* and body it forth# Hence Clothes* as despicable ajg we think them* are so unspeakably significant# y Does a book like Sartor then possess aesthetic surface?

We have seen that it does not present a

vivid soolal world in the sense that the novel does.

18* Ibid.. p# 19. Ibid.. p. 72#

15 Such a world is reduced to a puppet stage; and even that stage Is whisked away by the information that the tiny figures, so full of struggle, are but spirits, moving from timelessneas to tlmelessnees« remember a social "world" from Sartor#

We do not

A world such as

w© see in the novel is not suggested in the first para­ graph of the book, but a definite context is* an imprint, a flavor which sayss

a stamp,

her© is the man Carlyle

and the world that was his personality# A passage from "The World Out of Clothes11 explains what the autobiographer ia trying to do and suggests what the aesthetic surface of autobiography may be like# *Wifch men of a speculative turn,* writes Teufelsdroekh, *there come seasons, meditative, sweet, yet awful hours, when in wonder and fear you ask yourself that unanswerable questions Who am I; th© thing that can say *1" (das Wesen das alch XCH nennt)? The world, W t h it's lowt"traff'icSi'ng, retires into the distance; and, through the paper-hangings, and stone­ walls, and thick-plied tissues of Commerce and Polity, and all the living and lifeless Integuments (of Society and a Body), wherewith your Existence aits surrounded,— the sight reaches forth into the void Deep, and you are alone with the Universe, and silently commune with it, aa on® mysterious Presence with another*1 "The world# * • retires into the distance* • •

20* Carlyle, Sartor Resartua* p* 53#

16 you are alone with the universe," graphic attempts

This Is the autobio­

to withdraw yourself In some measure

from the society of men and to ask yourself, Who am II What has my life been like? bear to my parents? Church?

What relationship did I

Why did I join the Catholic

How did 1 feel when I fell in love?

The

aesthetic surface of autobiography is bound to be different from that of the novel beeause less importance is attached to the social setting and much more to the individual*

It is the individual who becomes the world—

we have not a Dickens world, or the world of Main Street* or Moby Dick* but the realm of one man’s personality* In that we live and move and have our being.

As far

as that personality is vividly and convincingly pre­ sented, we are carried away with it* II Thin, easily broken, and finally broken as is the social world created in Sartor Resartua * it seems very rich and sturdy in comparison with that of Wotton Re infred*

One of the crucial failures of the novel

is Its almost complete inability to establish aesthetic surface*

The people are from nowhere living in nowhere

without bodies* is by his periods

Our only way of nailing Wotton to reality his despair Is Byronlc.

But Wotton

17 and his friends are neither German nor Scotch; their journeys seem made on paper, not on earth; there is no social setting whioh comes to life, as an occasional one will do in Sartor--the group at Zur Grunen Gans, for example.

But it is a

"first statement" of Sartor in

several ways, and as such is worth examination, Wotton Reinfred, a young man of twenty-two, is absorbed In melancholy.

He was unable to make a lawyer

of himself; he has been sent away by the woman he loves, Jane Montagu; he has lost nearly all his religious faith, and wonders whether any force back of the universe will listen to him or not.

His cousin, an old doctor,

persuades him to visit a friend named Mosely, who may be able to give Wotton new spiritual courage.

On the

journey Wotton meets a mysterious stranger who takes them to the House on the Wold,

Here long and often very

dull conversations are conducted on philosophic issues. One day while riding through wild mountain country Wotton meets Jane; the novel ends as she is giving him a detailed account of her life story. The "where" and "when" of the novel are often left very vague; the flavor of no particular time or country or social group id established.

Back of the aesthetlo

18 surface of a ftiokens novel 1® a wealth of carefully planned and executed concrete details; w© know exactly what the bar look® like where Tom Smart of Pickwick Papers enjoyed his hot punch*

There is a very clean

white cloth on the table; the bottles are green and have gold labels; we can see pic!lea and preserves, cheeses and. boiled haras, roxinds of beef arranged on the shelves. We get th© feeling of being snugly housed-i the food, the drink, the fire roaring up the chimney, the \

agreeable waitress, th© buxom widow. social group.

It is a very cozy

In contrast the world of Wotton Heinfred

has only the most feeble of existences. Wotton’s preparations for th© journey are described as follows? As he rode along through th© bright morning to his lawyer, that he might finish, after long loitering, some acts of business relating to his little property, and some acts of beneficence to one or two poor peasants dependent on him, he almost felt as If he were in very deed ceasing to be an alien from th© commonwealth of men, as if he too had some duties to perform in his own sphere, barren and humble though it was,21 Carlyle gets them started on the Journey with, "Well mounted, wrapped and equipped for travelling, our friends 22 were on horseback at an early hour.” (Compare this

21. Carlyle, Wotton Reinfred. pp. 16-17* 22* Ifrld.. p. £7.

19 with th© wonderfully detailed and exciting Journeys In Pickwick or David Copperfleld.) We never get the feeling that these are Scotchmen or Englishmen, or that they exist at any particular time or any particular place. Only the faintest of social groups is created at the House on the Wold) their discussions of Kant seem interminable , being broken only by young women who play sad songs on their harps and occasionally suggest that meals be eaten.

The failure of Wotton a© a novel

is its failure to have aesthetic surface. shows us men in groups.

The novel

If the characters are to come

to life, we must see them in a setting, and must see the relationships of th© individuals within the group.

Th©

characters of the hovel are not mere talkative spirits, but human beings, in time, and in space. Its importance for us lies in the fact that Carlyle does sketch in many autobiographical details used later in Sartor with much, greater effectiveness.

Wotton is

deeply influenced by his mother; he is tormented as a school child and badly taught; he suffers great religious doubt; he Is crossed in love.

Th© novel shows Carlyle

molding the material for the first time; Sartor shows It glowingly alive in a world sufficiently characterized

20 to bo convincing, but not too rich to detract from the central philosophic ideas* Important In both Wotton and Sartor is th© des­ cription of Carlyle*s parents, especially his mother* Proude explains that she learned to write so that she might have "the pleasure offcomnranieating with her son, between whom and herself there existed a special and passionate attachment of a quite peculiar kind.”^ She watched with careful anxiety over the welfare of all her children, but with special attention to her eldest boy*sj she hoped to see him a minister.

Proude

believes that "the strongest personal passion which he experienced through all his life was his affection for his mother.

She was proud and wilful, as he.1* ^

She

was hard-working, faithful, ever-loving, deeply devout, capable of a wry humor which unfortunately does not come through in either Wotton or Sartor. To Agg Jyers, a neighbor, she once said, ttfWeel, Agg, lass, i ’ve never spoken t*y© sin ye stole our coals. advice:

I ’ll gie ye an

never steal ime more*” ^

cutt& & < n • «» 23#* vJames A. First for

21*.. Ibid.. p. 188. 25* Ibid.* p. k$»

mv~raas Carlyle. A History of the

21 Mcttoa1* father dies young, and his mother assumes the complete responsibility for his training.

She was In

all respects • a true^atlnded woman,* hut In some ways she was not able adequately to Instruct him,

"She

trained his heart to the lows of all truth and virtue; but of his other faculties she took little heed, and could take little proper charge,"

fo her this world

was "but a vision and a show,* which was carrying men through "a sea of dreams to the solemn shore of Eternity.*26 Wotton' e mother comes to worry about his religious convictions, but she can do nothing about them except to trust In Providence.

She Is separated from him at the

beginning of the story, living far apart for her health. A much warmer Picture of her Is given in garter, more loving, less withdrawn, more richly human. Let me not quarrel with my upbringing. It was rlgoroue, too frugal, oompressively secluded, everyway unscientific; yet In that very strictness and domestic solitude might there not lie the root of deeper earnestness, of the stem from which all noble fruit must grow?. . . Ny kind Mother. . • did me «ne altogether invaluable service: she taught me, less indeed by word than by act and dally reverent look and habitude, her own simple version of the Christian faith. . • fhe highest whom I knew on Earth I here saw bowed down,

26. Oarlyls, Mutton Relnfrofl. pp. 19-20

22 with awe unspeakable, before a Higher in Heaven: eueb things, especially in infancy, reach inwards to the very cere of your being; mysteriously does a Holy of Holies build itself into visibility in the mysterious undying from ite mean development of Pear. ' Carlyle1e emotions about hie father were very different; he loved him, but he alec feared him*

Froude

quotee him ae saying: We had all to complain (Carlyle says) that we dared not freely love our father* Hie heart seemed as if walled in* My mother has owned to me that she could never understand him, and that her affection and'admiration of him were obstructed* It seemed as If an atmosphere of fear repelled us from him, me espectally. * . He had the most entire and open contempt for Idle tat tie*'*what he called clatter. Any talk that had meaning In It he could listen to; what had no meaning in it, above all what seemed false, he absolutely oould not and would not hear, but abruptly turned from it* long may we remember hie "I donft believe thee"; hie tongue-par&lye ing cold indifferent •Hsh«*z® Wotton* e father died when the boy was very young, leaving a "vague unpleasant impression" of "restraint and ave."

He is explained as "a man of an equal but stern

and indignant temper, soured also by disappointments and treacheries, whloh had driven him at middle age from the commerce of the world.

The father in Wotton seems to

2?. Carlyle, fartor Mfi&rtM, P. 99. 28, Froude, jg. olt., pp. 15-16* 29. Carlyle, Wotton Relnfred. p. 18.

23 blend the sternness of the elder Carlyle with the melancholy misanthropy of the young Carlyle. Andreas Futteral, the functioned as a father to the young ©iogenee, is a Shadowy character in Sartor fteaartus. be know only hie external life:

that he had served in the

army of Frederick the Croats

that he now lived by

cultivating a snail orchards

that he smoked and talked

in the evenings, telling familiar etories of hie military exploits.

The paternal severity is suggested in a later

chapters la an orderly house, where the litter of children1s sports is hateful enough, your training is too stdeals rather to hear and forbear than to make and do. X was forbid muchs wishes in any measure bold X had to renounces everywhere a strait bond of Obedience inflexibly held me down. Thus already Freewill often came in painful collision with Necessity: so that my tears flowed, and at seasons the Ghlld Itself might taste that root of bitterness, wherewith the wholeflfruitage of our life is mingled and tampered. **u The boy tastes even more the root of bitterness when he proceeds to school.

Wotton had been taught to read and

write by hie mother; •he oould not recollect his ever having wanted it or learned it.*31

When he is sent to

the local day school, he is miserable.

30. O.rtyle, Sartor Raaartug. p. 98. 31. Carlyle, MStiiJm SS3ME&&* P* *1*

*His progress wae

zk the boast of his teachers,*3% hat he was tormented by the other pupils.

Wotton did not fit into this *brawling,

club-law commonwealth, * and here he had no friends; and if he m s occasionally pitied, 9it was only for a moment, and his usual purgatory, perhaps aggravated by hie late patron, returned upon him with but greater bitterness. 0 3 He is nicknamed 9Weeping Wotton,9 but at times he deuld turn mi hie tormentors with great vigor.

Then his wrath

would be great! 9his little face gleamed like a thunderbtt, and no fear mf earthly or unearthly thing eould hold him from the heart of hie enemy. *3^ Wotton therefore lives only for the moments when he can be at home.

Here in a dream world he fancies himself

great and honored; he remembers happier years when hie older sister was etlll alive.

Oarlylc* e actual schooling

followed a very similar pattern.

He learned to read from

hie mother 9too early for distinct remembranee.935

He

made such good progress in the Seolefechan schools that

32. j£bj£., pp. 21-22. 33* Ibid.. pp. 22-23. Ibid.. p. 23. 35. Froude, op. pit.. p. ?.

2J he wae sent to the Annan Grammar School, which he entered in 2.805 et the age of ten* of thoee school days. he wrotet

*Thi*

Carlyle never forgot the terror

Of the following passage from Sartor

ie true, and not halfthe truth,

’Well do J etill remember the red sunny Whitsuntide morning* when, trotting full of hope by the side of father Andreas, 1 entered the main street of the place, and sawits ateeoleeloek (then etrlklng Btg&t) and Sohttldtharw (Jail), and the aproned or dtsaproned Burghers moving-in to breakfastt a little dog, in mad terror, wee rushing past! for some human imps had tied a tin-kettle to its tails thus did the agonised ereature, loud- jingling f oareer through the whole length of the Borough, and become notable enough. Bit emblem. . ♦. of mueh that awaited myself, in that mischievous Bent as in the World, whereof it was a portion and epitome S ’Alas, the kind beeeh-rowe of tntepfuhl were hidden in the distance! t was among strangers, harshly, at beet indifferently, disposed towards me; the young heart felt, for the first time, quite orphaned and alone.1 Hie schoolfellows, as Is usual, persecuted him! ’they were Boys,1 he says,1mostly rude Boys, and obeyed the impulse of rude Mature, which bide the deer-herd fall upon any etrieken hart, the duek*fleek put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and on all hands the strong tyrannise over the weak,13/ Carlyle’s life was made unbearable because he had promised his mother never to return a blow.

When he

finally broke his promise and battled the biggest bully

36. Ibid.. p. 12. 37. Carlyle, Sartor Beeartae. pp. 103-104

26 In school, tit fared better*

He

was

no longer tormented,

but hie memories remained very bitter ones, *n B ^ p r the language Instruction is described; We find moreover, that hie Greek and were “mechanically" taught; Hebrew scarce mechanically; much else which they called Cosmography, Philosophy, and so forth, no than not at all,36

Latin even History, better

Carlyle comments that *• Sartor1 is not to be trusted In details •" and no Hebrew.

As a boy he learned only the Greek alphabet Sartor, is, however *mythically true":

Mythically true is what fSartor* eays of my schoolfellows, and not half the truth. Un­ speakable is the damage and defilement I got out of those coarse unguided tyrannous cubs, especially till 1 revolted against them and gave them stroke for stroke.39 By "mythically true* Carlyle seems to mean true in the essentials*— true to the spirit of what actually happened to him as a schoolboy,

the account of Wotton*e

education is also accurate, but in a much less vivid and less dramatically realised way,

ffotton Relnfred

tells of things happening, but very seldom fhowp them happening.

Zt is so lacking in vitality (and humor)

that it is hard to see It as Carlyle’s. Wotton goes on to university training, which leaves

3®«

lOJ*

39* Froude, jgj), olt.. p. !**

2? hi* perplexed with doubts.

The principle of the university

Is “spiritual liberty11} the young scholars are thrown without guidance into a new country of the mind. What a wild world rose before him as he read, and felt, and saw, with as yet unworn avidity S Young Nature was combining with this strange education to unfold the universe to him in its most chaotic aspect. What with history and fiction, what with philosophy and feeling, it was a wondrous Nowhere that his spirit dwelt ini all stood before him in Indistinct detached gigantic masses; a country of desire and terror; baseless, boundless; overspread with duelcy or bleak shadows, yet glowing here and there in maddening light.1*0 Wotton learns little of languages, and finds no satisfaction in Metaphysics.

He comes to believe that he

may find the essential truth In mathematics, but discovers that it will “enlighten one small forecourt of his mind.-**! The great questions remain unanswered, and he endures “agonies of doubt.“^2 Proude describes the life of the university boys In Gariyle1s time*

The passion for education was so strong

in Scotland thst even comparatively poor families like his believed in sending their brightest eons on for more education.

They walked the distance to Edinburgh or

Glasgow; they lived on oatmeal, potatoes, and salt butter

^0. Carlyle, Wotton Re Infred, p. 28. *!• I S M - * P* 31. *2. ISifi't P- 32.

23 which was sent from their hones by carriers,

For such

heroic effort they were not well rewarded; there were not euffie lent funds to hire enough teachers, and the resulting elaeses were so large that the students got little Individual attention,

Oarlyle made hie best

progrees in mathematics; but even here he carried off no prises, because he was too shy to do well In competition. He read Homer in the original, "with difficulty," Aeschylus and Sophocles in translation, devoted himself to Tacitus and Virgil.

He did not care for Cicero or

Horace. froude believes the descriptions from Sartor are the beet account of what Carlyle himself experienced, 1Sartor Hesartus1 1 have already said, must not be followed too literally as a biographical authority. It is mythic, not historical. Nevertheless, as mythic it may be trusted for general outlines,*3 Sartor describes the instruction as "the blind leading the blindft^

"the small, ill-chosen library"

its professors "who lived with ease, with safety, by a mere Heputatlon, constructed in past times, and then too with no great effort*"^

^ars^of^sfs^^ilf

*I

4b. Oarlyle, .ga^feor £ e s a p .

45. Ibid.. p. 109. 46. «Ibid.. p. 111. H?NMMawWS—

JEiSgS I.9J& 109.

29 Besides all this, we boasted ourselves a National University; in the highest degree hostile to Mysticism; thus was the young vacant mind furnished with much talk about Progress of the Species, bark ages, Prejudice, and the like; so that all were quickly enough blown out into a state of windy argumentativeness; whereby the better sort had soon to end in sick, impotent Scepticisms the worser sort explode (oreolrsn) in finished Self-conceit, and to all eplSsiluai Intents become dead, ' In this environment the young Teufeledrockh felt ill at eaee,

Like the rest of the ^hungry young,* he looked

to his spiritual nurses; for food, he was bidden to eat the east-wind,

*Among eleven-hundred Christian youths,

there will not be wanting some eleven eager to learn* By collision with such, a certain warmth, a certain polish was communicated. *

Teufelsdrockh took more to reading

than to rioting, and *flshed-up* from the library more books than the librarians had known existed,**® Both bottom and Sartor are thus very close to the facte and to the internal realities of Carlylele edueatfetal experiences.

Neither account Is rich in eoelal setting;

the novel hae practically none,

A vividly pictured

Oerman university life would differ considerably from the simple Scotch life pictured by Froude, but we do not perceive any sharp dissimilarity.

b?, ibid., p. 112, 46, jXbid.| p. H 3 *

Both Wotton and Jfartfljf

30 arc thin in social Betting* hut

It ruins the novel;

remain© a great work of art* a great auto­

biographical *myth.*

fhe profound difference between

the two genres of fiction and autobiography stands out when we consider this aspect*

Xou ©an have a good

autobiography without a vividly realised social setting* because you are dealing with only one personality; but the novel requires ue to see men in action* in a human* social setting* m We have examined evidence to see how close the novel and the autobiography are to the truth when they describe Carlyle1b educational experiences* tut a much more In£ volved problem arises when we attempt to see how closely the love affairs of Wotton resemble those of feufelsdrdbkh, and both la turn resemble those of Carlyle,

fhey

both fall violently in love with a beautiful and much sought after maiden; both are delirious with happiness until the girl reluctantly send® them away at the insistence of her guardian.

Wotton1e Jane Montagu is

described as follows: Jane Montagu was. a name well known to him; far and wide its fair owner was celebrated for her grace and gifts; herself also he had seen and noted; her slim daintiest form, her soft sylphlike movement, her black tresses shading a face

31 so gentle yet 00 ardent; but all this be bad noted only ae a beautiful vision which he himself had scarcely right to look at, for her sphere was far from hi*.1*" Re Infred is In turmoil, but he Is able to keep control of himself, and in faet to talk very brilliantly* With *oae or two Sooratio questions11 he is able to alien©e a vain young sophist who has been annoying them; in return he wine an approving smile from Jane# To Wotton the hours seemed moments; he had never been as now; the words from those sweetest lips came over him like dew on thirsty grass; his whole soul waa as if lapped in richest melodies, and all better feelings within him seemed to whisper, ♦It is good for us to be here.1 At parting the fair one’s hand m e in his; in the balmy twilight with the kind stare above them he spoke something of meeting again which was not contradicted; he pressed gently those email soft fingers, and it seemed ae if they were not hastily or angrily withdrawn.** Wotton lives in heaven for a while.

Jane sings to

him; they talk together; *aever had Wotton such an audience; never was fine thought or noble sentiment so rewarded as by the glance of those dark eyes.*5* The heaven of loving and being loved ie broken by •an ancient maiden aunt* who was *her hostess and

*9. Oarlyle, jjaSSaa M S & S i >

50. Ibia.. p. >*?. 51. ibia.. p, *9 . 52. Ibid.. p. 50

M>.

procteotress.*$2

0no morning Jane sends Wotton away,

telling him that he oust never visit her again.

The

young man’s melancholy is boundless; he hardly eares to live.

When we actually meet his beloved in the final

chapters of foltsa M M S M *

*• are at a loss to under­

stand hie overwhelming enthusiasm; such divine females are hatter left vague than given opportunity to he so doggedly autobiographical. Much of Jane was used again in Sartor fteeartpe to create the girl Illumines but the latter seems even more remote, more ideal, the blue flower for which one might search a lifetime, a soul mate.

Oarlyle does not make

the mistake of having her talk; she merely moves like a beautiful angel briefly into the existence of Teufelsdroekh. Blumine. * . means simply doddess of Flowers. • . Was her real name Flora, thenf But what was her surname, or had she nonet Of what station in Life was she; of what parentage, fortune, aspect*. . « ’It was appointed,1 saye cur Philosopher, ’that the high celestial orbit of Blumine should intersect the low sublunary one of our Forlorn; that he, looking in her empyrean eyes, should fancy the upper Sphere of Light was come down into this nether sphere of Shadows; and finding himself mis taken, make noise enough.15**

53. O.rlyl., g.rfag: 22S&S$2&> P* 135*

33 TeufelsAroekh had beard of Bluminej "far and wide was the fair one heard of for her gifts, hey graces, her »2.

35 Of tho snung lover Is that he learns to believe in himself end In the possibility of hie own happiness; he le lifted to this heaven, end then abruptly dropped. "Thick curtains of Night rushed over hie soul, as rose the Inaneasurable Crash of Doom; and through the ruins as of a shivered Universe was he falling, falling, towards the A b y s s . N o t to be neglected la the previously quoted sentence from Wotton HeInfred? "that he had never had such an audience."

In the ease

of both Jane and Blumine, the young man seems in love with love, with the possibility of response; his ego is exalted to the seventh heaven.

One is reminded of

the early presentation of Borneo mooning about and relishing the melancholy of love for love#s sake.

In

both Wotton Beinfred and Sartor Resartus the romance is broken by a worldly and practical guardian* as happened in the case of Margaret (Jordon. The most perplexing problem 1st

how much of

Blumine is Jane Welsh, whom he married?

(The repetition

of her name in Jane Montagu may be significant.) Carlyle learned late in their friendship that she had been passionately in love with his friend Edward Irving.

60. Ibid., pp. ll|.5*lU.6

To

36 win Jane *s heart he must have known was as impossible as for poor Teufeladroekh to gain that of Blumine. Mrs. Welsh had alao found Carlyle unprepossessing, both socially and financially. Fpoude give* the following analysis of the marriages To his mother Carlyle was so loving That he might not betaem the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly. This was love indeed— love that is lost in its object, and thinks first and only how to guard and foster it* Bis wife he would expect to rise to his own level of disinterested self­ surrender, and be content and happy in assisting him in the development of his own destiny; and this was selfishness— selfishness of a rare and elevated kind, but selfishness still; and it followed him throughout his married life. He awoke only to the consciousness of what he had been, when the knowledge would bring no more than unavailing remorse. He admired Miss Welsh; he loved her in a certain senses but, like her, he was not in love.03. The Blumine affair in Sartor Hesartus— undeniably a deeply autobiographical book— might be interpreted as an indictment of the marriage; love was unattainable; happiness was profoundly elusive*

Jane*s own dis­

satisfaction in the marriage ran very deep; when an elderly woman, she said, WI married for ambition. Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever

61. Froude. Thoaaa Carlyle, AJH.tnry at ifca ELeafc Saetf. of his hire.vol. I. pp. 232-2337

31 imagined of him— and X a® miserable.* file most deeply autobiographical strain of Wotton teintna 1* probably the sense of melancholy which is its foundation; the novel ends without Wotton* e having made much progress out of it.

At the beginning of the

novel he cries to the doctor: If He BO HOT hear me? If there jyi no ear to hear me; and the voice of my sorrow peale unre turned through the grim wilderness, and only the eeho of the dead rooks replies to me in the gloom I 0 heaven and earth, what am I or where am 1? Alone I Alone I They are dead, all dead, burled beneath the ground or faithless above it, and for me there Is no soul that careth I& Mosely believes thgt there Is hope for Wotton be­ cause although “hie state Is painful,0 eventually “it yields peaceable fruits.

It must at some time be the db state of all men who are destined to be men .0 Wotton,

however, finds his state of mind almost insupportable. By degrees a dreary stagnancy overspread his soul: he was without fear and without hope; In this world isolated, poor, and helpless; had tasted little satisfaction, and expected little, and in the next he had now no pert or lot. . • Pride alone supported him, a deep-hid satanic pride; and It was a harsh and s t e m supoort. Gloomy mockery was in his once kind and gentle heart; mockery of the world, of himself, of

*2 .

P* 23?.

63. Oarlyle, W o U o o £&&£££§. P. 3 Ibid.. p. Ik.

30 all things yet bitterest sadness lay within it, and though his soowl there often glistened a Here Is the melancholy romantic hero; the self-pity is much stronger in Wotton ReInfred than in Sartor Resartus; the mood of one chapter of the latter is the mood of the entire novel, which contains no neverlasting yea**

Teufelsdroefch does not go mad, or begin writing

Satanic poetry, or blow out his brains*

He bears his

sufferings with more dignity and manliness than Wotton* He quietly lifts his pilgrim-*taff and begins wandering restlessly over Kurope • He consumes his own smoke by strong self-restraint* fA nameless Unrest, * says he, *urged me forward; to which the outward motion was some momentary lying solace* Whither should 1 go? My Lodestars were blotted out; in that canopy of grim fire shone no star* Yet forward mast I; the ground burnt under me; there was no rest for the sole of my foot* X was alone, alone! Ever too the strong Inward longing shaped Fantasms for Itself; toward these, one after the other, mast I fruitlessly wander* • • The winds and the streams, and all Nature sounded to me. Forwards! Ach Qott*-I was even, once and for all, a Son oF^flme*66 Wotton and Teufelsdrockh wander through wild and primitive mountain country which seems a fitting

65. Ibid.. pp. 33 -3I4.. 66 . Carlyle, Sartor Reeartm. pp. 15i|.-155.

39 accompaniment for their spiritual struggles; but the actual Oarlyle wandered lonely in Edinburgh*

The period

of sorrows In both the novel and in Sartor gives a different impression from the account we get of it in Froude or Wilson, where the actual grief is shown as miserable rather than grandly Impressive*

Carlyle

realised that he could never become a minister or a lawyer and he did not know how he could earn his living; he had lost his faith in traditional Christianity, and had found as yet no new "clothes” for the old truths* He was unhappy tutoring or teaching; the hack work of translations barely kept him going*

He suffered from

dyspepsia and insomnia and much more from the realisation that he was suffering*

He was alone and tormented*

I was entirely unknown in Edinburgh circles, solitary, eating my own heart, fast losing my health too, a prey to nameless struggles and miseries, which have yet a kind of horror in them to my thoughts, three weeks without any kind of sleep from the impossibility to be free of noise*®7 To Carlyle in June, 1521, came the spiritual release which he described in Sartor in the chapters "The Everlasting Ho” and "The Everlasting Yea*”

Discord is

hushed; man's soul is full of light; his energies are

6?* Froude, op* ©it*, p. 51*

ho devoted to creative production.

He has been baptised

with fire, and begins to be a man* Thus in reading Sartor one is never far from its primary emphasist

the philosophic, the ideas which

Carlyle wants to express*

Carlyle himself caught the

perfect figure for the book*

He says of the professor’s

volume t It is Indeed an ’extensive Volume,* of boundless, almost formless contents, a very Sea of Thought; neither calm nor clear, if you will, yet wherein the toughest pearl diver may dive to his utmost depth, and return not only with sea-wreck but with true orients*®6 IV We have seen that Sartor Is “mythically true,** not only in what it says about Carlyle’s school days, but also in many ways In the description of his parents, his spiritual discouragement, his disappointment in love*

We

have noted how thin the social setting is, and how It exists to be broken*

nevertheless, equally we have seen

that it does create convincingly the realm of one human personality; that the book does have a quality which marks it the product of Carlyle’s life and personality. We do not object to Carlyle being represented as Diogenes, although factually this is not "true.”

68* Carlyle, Sartor Hesartus * p* 10*

ia Aesthetic surface In autobiography thus seems to bear not one but several subtle relations to the real world, the actual context in which Carlyle lived.

On the most

obvious level, fact does not seem to be of paramount importance; that is, we do not care that Carlyle is now living in Germany instead of Scotland or England, and that we are not sure which woman or women he is talking about in the figure of "Blumine •'* Pact does seem to matter very much in the sense that the fundamental re­ lationships are "true,"

We can read about Carlyle*s

boyhood equally well in Sartor or in a good biography} for understanding of his spiritual struggles, we would turn first to Sartor* The student of aesthetic surface in Sartor is con~ tinually teased and fascinated by the faot that Carlyle is also dealing with a problem of surface and its relation to reality*

Our whole thinking is enriched and stirred

up by this parallel#

It is therefore worthwhile to examine

some of Carlyle*s philosophic conclusions in so far as they touch on the importance or unimportance of Hthe clothes” which man and society wear* At times in the book Carlyle places very small importance on clothes.

He describes the Professor as a

**speculative Radical” who acknowledges, "for most part,

4a in the solemnities and paraphernalia of civilised life, which we make so much of, nothing but so many Cloth-rags, turkey-poles, and *bladders with dried

p e a s *

**69 ge

quotes Goethe fs statement, "The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes* « • till they become transparent*w?0

"All visible things are emblems; what

thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly taken, is not there at all*M

Man himself is reduced to

an emblem; Men are properly said to be clothed with Authority, clothed with Beauty, with Curses, and the like* Hay, if you consider it, what is Man himself, and his whole terrestrial Life, but an Emblem; a Clothing or visible Garment for that divine ME of his, cast hither, like a lightparticle, down from Heaven^ Thus is he said also to be clothed with a Body*^1, At times Carlyle seems to be dismissing surface because we do not realise how silly it may be— "clothrags and turkey-polea"; more importantly, we too often hang on to ceremonies, to clothes, long after they do not fit us or answer our needs*

"Thus have 1 seen

Solemnities linger as Ceremonies, sacred Symbols as idle Pageants, to the extent of three-hundred years and more

69* Ibid*1 p* 63* 70* Ibid*, p • 67# 7 U Sbia* * pp* 72-73*

to

after all life and sacredness had evaporated out of them#"^

But one ahould also notice how much importance

Carlyle attaches to "clothes#"

It may be true that "all

objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into Infinitude Itself"; nevertheless, windows do exist, and do function#

A good deal of the book

(including of course Its main thesis) is based on the assumption that clothes are valuable, worth study, worth re-doing, re-tailoring# In the first chapter, "Preliminary," Carlyle askst How, then, comes it, may the reflective mind repeat, that the grand Tissue of all Tissues, the only real Tissue, should have been quite overlooked by Science— the vestural Tissue, namely, of woolen or other Clothj which Men's Soul wears as its outmost wrappage and overall; wherein his whole other Tissues are included and screened, his whole Faculties work, his whole Self lives, moves,and has its being?"73 Carlyle is seeing man here as overlaid with several layers of vestments;

his flesh Itself Is a ooverlng

for his spirit; and that flesh is covered with various kinds of cloth#

Clothing is surface upon surface; and

it Is amaaing how much of Sartor is devoted to humorous accounts of the kinds of clothing man has worn In various centuries and in various parts of the world*

Much of

the aesthetic surface of Sartor* is created by such

72. Ibid#* p. 237* 73# Ibid., P. 65.

lilt playfulness; here we see Carlyle as a lover of whimsy, sometimes heavy-handed and pedantic whimsy# In another passage he uses the figure of a books "May, what is your Montesquieu himself but a clever infant spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic Book, the lexicon of which lies in Eternity, in Heaven?"^

The

idea of nature as hieroglyphic, of the world as Cod’s book, raises some new questions about surface*

It cannot

be called valueless; more, it cannot be said to be transparent*

Mature thus exists to be read5 although at

times the characters may be cryptic and somewhat illegible* A hieroglyphic may be a symbol, as, for example, the ostrich feather may stand for truth* Does aesthetic surface In the novel or autobiography ever function in a similar way?

When we think of Dickens

hand, for example, we think of a frosty morning! coaches* delightful inn at the end of the stage* portly landlord} smiling barmaid; brandy by the fireside; smoking joints; good time for all * * * (while) the first thing to notice in the popular conception of what ♦Dickens* means is that it contains so little that is typical of the years in which most of Charles Dickens* work was done* The England for which he wrote was the country of the early railways, ruled by the Ten-Pound Hofese-

7k* Ibid*. p* 36.

ks holders of th© first Beform Bill. * * Ho consciously created "Dickon* Land*"75 Why did ho create this pleasant universe?

Because

he 'saw* not that life was that way {th© vision of the later "dark novels" would certainly preclude that possibility), but that it might boa as a social critic, Dickens preached that what England needed in her society was more men like Mr* Pickwick*

The spirit of Christmas

would be her only salvation; in other words, the Pick* wlckian setting may be said to be a symbol, a hieroglyphic of the good society*

Aesthetic surface may also function

negatively; the society pictured in B eltt Fair is a foolish, cruelly stupid world which gives no satis­ faction to any of its frantic participants; it is a society to be avoided, a fair which the wise man does not enter* The surface of Sartor functions in a similar way; it is beautiful, whimsical, continually pointing, not to itself, but to the truths which Carlyle wishes to bring out in the book*

We learn by being charmed, as the

young Gneschem

75* Quoted by Joseph E* Baker, "Aesthetic Surface in the Hovel," from Humphrey House, The Dickens World, pp. lo*19♦

ij.6 •Thus encircled by the mystery of Existence* , * did the Child sit and leam* These things were Alphabet, whereby In aftertime he was to syllable and partly read the grand Volume of the Worldt what matters It? whether sueh Alphabet be in large gilt letters or In small ungilt ones, so you have an eye to read It? For Gneschen, eager to learn, the very act of looking thereon was a blessedness that glided alii his existence was a bright, soft element of Joy; out ot which, as in Froppero’s Island, wonder after wonder bodied itself forth, to teaeh by charming.*7o To understand man requires both logic— which will reveal the surface— and imaginative insight, which will enable us to see beneath that surface* •To the. eye of vulgar Logic,1 says he,*what is man? An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye of Bure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition* Hound his mysterious ME, there lies, under all those woolrags, a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses), eontextured in the Loom of Heaven* * • Beep-hidden is he under that strange Garment; amid Sounds and Colours and Forms, as it were swathed-in, and inextricably over-shroudedi yet it is skywoven, and worthy of a God*77 Man’s garment of the senses is also a heavenly creation, even as his spirit; and "what is there that we cannot love; since all was created by God?"7®

Such a

garment is sacred, because in it, or because of it, man’s

76* Carlyle, Sartor Reaartus* p* 97# 77 *

i p» 6$*

78. Ibid.. p* 67*

k7 spirit ean live.

This relationship is stated most

closely In the paragraph Shioh begins Book Third? Striking it was, amid all M s perverse cloudiness, with what fores of vision and of heart he pierced into the mystery of the World; recognising In the highest sensible phenomena, ao far as Sense went, only fresh or faded Raiment; yet ever, under this, a celestial Essence thereby rendered visible**? Phenomena render the essence of the world visible, or itt.-scHfce way knowable, readable* very great value*

Thus surface has

One Is struck by the Importance of

surfaee in Sartor by reading a summary of its principal ideas in a book like Casaml&n1* Carlyle *

The total

Impression you get from one and from the other is very different; Sartor * reduced to its thesis, is not Sartor* This Is true of all three sections of the book, theo~ rl

retleal first and third as well as the middle section which is more coneentratedly autobiographical* The entire chapter "Natural Superncturallsm" is a statement of how wonderful the surfaee of the world is* *We speak of the Volume of Natures and truly a Volume it is,*— whose Author and Writer is God* To read it I Dost thou, does man, so much as well know the Alphabet thereof?* * * It is a Volume written in celestial hieroglyphs, in the true Sacred-writing; of which even Prophets are happy that they can read here a line and there a line**®®

79* E M * P* 207* 80. Ibid. p. 258.

1*8 If the glory of God beams through every star, and every grass-blade, then the universe Itself may be a gigantic symbol, a metaphor, which cryptically reveals the author of that universe* be*

Our next question would then

does aesthetic) surfaoe function also as metaphor? V A little handbook called "Metaphor and Myth" might

be drawn up In connection with Carlyle's Sartor*

The

book is of course organised around one large comparison* man's body, his society, his beliefs are compared to "clothes*"

This figure Is carried throughout the book,

and is used in a variety of ways, sometimes seriously, sometimes lightly, sometimes in a bewildering mixture of moods, with lightning change from profound to frivolous*

Carlyle proposes to tell about himself under

a different name and in a different country*

In a book

so organised it is interesting to examine statements which are made about symbols and to see what they have to suggest about aesthetic surfaee* Carlyle believes metaphors to be the very stuff of language * 'Language is called the Garment of Thought; however, it should rather be, Language is the Flesh*Garment, the Body, of Thought* I said that Imagination wove this Fleah-Garraent; and does not she? Metaphors are her stuff* examine

k9 language; what, if you except some few primitive element® (of natural sound), whet is it all but Metaphors, recognized as such, or no longer recognised; still fluid end. florid, or now solid-grown and colourless? , * * An unmetaphorical atyle you shall in vain seek fori la not your very Attention a Stretchlng-to? »3* A metaphor Is thus not something tacked on, or a rich tid-bit thrown into a poem or a book; it is the very essence of the created work#

Thus Sartor does

not use an autobiographical myth but la actually embodied in that myth*

ft© shall notice in the Newman

chapter that the richest and most significant parts of the Apologia are those in which we see him too living in a great myth;

that he is being guided by

God*s hand into on unknown country# The Importance of the name, of the figurative stamp, is emphasised In another passages 'For indeed, as Walter Shandy often in­ sisted, there is much, nay almost all, in Names# The Name is the earliest Garment you wrap around the earth-visiting MS; to which it thenceforth cleaves, more tenaciously (for there are Names that have lasted nigh thirty centuries) than the very skin# # • Could I unfold the influence of Names, which are the most Important of all Clothings, X were a second greater Trlsmeglstus* Not only all common Speech, but Science, Poetry itself is no other, if thou consider it, than a right Naming#ttJ2

61* Ibid## p# ?3. 82* Ibid# * pp# 8?-88*

So "names* are Important because frequently they are metaphorical, as "attention**

Furthermore, the name has

influences on the creature which receives it*

"'In

a very plain sense the Proverb says, Call one a thief, and he will steal] in an almost similar sense may we not perhaps say, Call one Diogenes Teuf©lsdrockh, and he will open the Philosophy of Clothes?*®^ Many of Carlyle*s own metaphors are illustrative of what he is saying here*

In "flatting Cinder Way* he

describes the young man as a colt* A young man of high talent, and high though still temper, like a young mettled colt, 'breaks* off M s necfahalter,* and bounds forth, from his peculiar manger, into the wide world] which, alas, he finds all rigorously fenced-!*. Richest clover-fields tempt his eyej but to him they are forbidden pastures either pining in progress­ ive starvation, he must stand] or, in mad exasperation, must rush to and fro, leaping against sheer sfcone-walls, which he cannot leap over, which only lacerate and lame him; till at last, after thousand attempts and endurances, he, as If by miracle, clears his way; not indeed into luxuriant and luxurious clover, yet into a certain bosky wilderness where existence Is still possible, and Freedom, though, waited on by Scarcity, is not without sweetness.6**Ho better description could be formulated for Carlyle's difficult days of finding himself, conscious of great talent but not knowing how to use It*

83. Ibid*. p. 88.

$1 In a later chapter Carlyle deals with the "wondrous

agency of Symbols. In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation*

here therefore, by Silence and by

Speeoh acting together, comes a double significance.” An effective symbol underlines the Idea or makes iis see it for the first time.

"Thus In feany a painted

Device, or simple Seal-emblem, the commonest Truth stands out to us proclaimed with quite new emphasis. •for it Is here that Fantasy with her mystic wonderland plays Into the small prose domain of Sense, and becomes incorporated therewith. In the Symbol,proper, what we can call ft Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the infinite is made to blend Itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as It were, attain­ able there. By Symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched. *00 Thus it Is that many objects, not very valuable In themselves, take on such Immense significance for mankind: a cross, a flag, a coat of arms.

Soldiers die for a

worthless piece of cloth which has come to have un­ limited importance for them.

Such symbols of course are

not transparent, or purely pitchers to be filled; a flag or cross has aesthetic design which is a port of its

65* Ibid.. P. 219. 86 . Ibid., p. 220.

52 force*

that is, the arrangement of color and design

In the flag may carry an artistic force which influences the beholder, in addition to the cluster of emotional associations which he has built up around it*

The

Utilitarians, whom Carlyle describes here as "Motive* Millwrights," cannot explain man or his appetites*

It

is absurd for a human being to "fancy himself a dead Iron~Balanee for weighing Pains and Pleasures on*"®? Would such an iron~balanee ever explain Christianity or the Marseillaise?

Our imaginations rule us, not our

sense of logic* Such

a symbol mayhave almost no value in Itself, as

the iron

crown, aboutthe else of a horseshoe, for which

the Hungarian nation rose*

On the other hand, a certain

symbol may have intrinsic meaning, may be "of Itself fit that men should unite round it*"®®

In such a category

Carlyle places works of art* "•Of this latter sort are all true Works of Art* in them (ifthou know a Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice)wiltthou discern Eternity looking through Times the Godlike rendered visible*"**

67 . Carlyle, Sartor Hesartus* p. 221*

IMS*# P• 223* 89 #

| p* 223*

53 Thus Carlyle admits that a work of art is more than a window to be seen through; it Is not completely transparent,

A book is valuable in a way that an Iron

crown could never be.

In a similar way the surface of

a novel or an autobiography or a lyric poem may make the meaning of the whole visible*

We have seen that the

Dickensian world did not copy reality, but rather pictured a good kind of life whleh might be posslbld in England,

How much of this conviction is carried

through the setting and how much through contentf Is a subtle question not easily answered.

This

If Pickwick

is to exist and to utter the kind of sayings he does, then he must have the proper setting to express them in. The surface of Sartor certainly functions brilliantly to furnish forth the principal ideas and to tell the story of Carlyle** life* The great climax of Sartor, the conclusion of the chapter on "Hatural Supernaturalism," reveals the im­ portance of surface in the book.

Here w© have set forth

the Sartar world— the context in which we can observe Carlyle a Teufelsdrockh living and thinking. world peopled with ghosts,

He sees a

"There are nigh a thousand-

million walking the earth openly at noon-tide; some half­ hundred have vanished from it, some half-hundred have

arisen In It, are thy watoh tick* onca*n^ 'Thus, like some wild*flaming- wild* thundering train of Heaven** Artillery* dees thia mysterious NaXKXKD thunder end flame, In long* drawn, qttiek»«ufte#w4ing grandeur, through the unknown Deep# Thus, like a God-created, fire* breathing Bplrlt-hoat , we emerge from the Inane| haste stormfully across the astonished Eartht then plunge again Into the Inane • Kartft’e mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up. In our passage; can the Earth, which Is but dead and a vision, reslet spirits which have reality and are allvet On the hardest adamant some foot* print of us la stamped*!!!;; the last Hear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van* But whenceT--0 Heaven, whitherf Sense know* not; faith knowe not; only that It is through Mystery to 8£y«t*ry, from God and to God, We are such stuff la dreams are mdaTo?,* an3to3rTit^le life I* rounded with a sleep*1”1 Both aspects of surface are brought out In this passage*

its importance end. lack of importance#

Man ie

a spirit, proceeding from mystery to mystery; but while he is here, he takes on solid flesh*

the Earth cannot

resist spirits which are alive and are capable of leaving their footprint* even in the hardest adamant# Man may be a* the shadow of smoke, but he ie capable of creating great myths which last for centuries, perhaps forever#

90* Ibid,* p, 865, S>1. Ibid.. p. 266-867.

55 Carlyle’* philosophy of ^clothe*" is thus fertile In suggeetiveness to the student of aesthetle surface . The book ha* a thin layer of social setting; if we were judging it on the same basis as we might a novel, we would say that the aesthetic surfaee was very poor.

But

it is rich if we consider that surfaee in autobiography functions to reveal the world of one man; we have re­ ceived valuable insight into the personality involved. The study of this autobiography would suggest that surface bears a very close relationship to the value of the entire autobiographic attempt; that the writer must not only tell us the facts about his life and Interpret those facts, but do it in sueh a way that we feel we have

re­

ceived a distillation of the man’s spirit; that we see the context of his personality.

This generalisation Is

borne out by examining two other and very different account®, those of Hewman and Buskin.

56 Chapter IX R0SKIN'S FRAETERITA When John Ruskln was a little boy he once received a Punch and Judy for a birthday gift#

His aunt knew John**

Mother did not approve of toys, but she hoped that the very splendor of the gift would persuade Mrs. Buskin'to make an exception In this case.

As an old nan Ruskln

wrote that It was "as big as a real Punch and Judy, all dressed In soarlet and gold, and that would dance, tied to the leg of a chair.*

But Mrs. Buskin put the gift

away, and he never saw the dancers again.

For toys he

had abuatih of keys, a cart, a ball, and "two boxes of well-out wooden blocks."* As a man of fifty-five, with both parents dead and In love with a girl thirty years younger than himself, he spent much time in London going to the theater, cir­ cuses and pantomimes.

In Humber 39 of Fors Clavlgera

he describes how he felt after he had seen Kate Vaughan In "Cinderella* and Violet Cameron In "Jack in the Box* over and over again. Which is the reality, and which the pan­ tomime? Hay, it appears to me not much moment which we choose to call Reality. Both are

1 . John Ruskln, Praeterlta, p. 19.

57 equally real; and the only question la wheth­ er the cheerful state of things which the spec­ tators, especially the youngest and wisest, entirely applaud and approve at Hengler's and Drury Dane, must necessarily be interrupted by the woeful interlude of the outside world* • * • There have been dear little Cinderella and her Frlnce, and all the pretty children beautifully dressed, taught thoroughly how to behave, and how to dance, and how to sit still, and giving everybody delight that looks at them; whereas the instant I come outside the door, I find all the children about the streets ill-dressed, and ill-taught, and illbehaved and nobody cares to look at them** This passage might have been written as an analysis of Practerltat

in the autobiography also we have a

very strong attempt to present a consistently "cheer­ ful state of things"; but the "woeful interlude of the outside world" keeps interrupting and breaking through* Huskin certainly aimed to make Herne Bill— scented with almond blossoms— thoroughly charming and delight­ ful; but horror remains*

At times when you read you

see how clearly the old man was keeping the pantomime and reality apart; but In devastating flashes, in all sorts of oblique ways, the truth comes through*

Be can­

not keep us In the world of pretty pantomime* Aesthetic surface— the world of Ruskln— la thus very poorly handled*

If we were to evaluate autobi­

ographies on some sort of scale, on this point, we

2* Edward T# Cook, Life of jrohn Ruskln, Vol* II, pp* 242-243* Quoted from ffors devisers * Ho* 39*

58

would place Praeterlta at the bottom*

Ruskln does not

come close to the world In which he actually lived, but neither does he auccefcd In creating a fictional one, In which he and hie parents and a few shadows with other people*s names might move about* pattern something like thlss

What we get is a

a certain amount of honest

revelation} followed by pages upon pages of Alpine his­ tory or descriptions of clouds; followed by pages in which he Is distorting the facts in order to present a charming picture of himself or his parents; followed by pages in which you have a bewildering blend of all of these, in any order*

We skip the pages on Italian

landscape and keep hoping to learn more about Buskin himself, but we seldom do*

The very poor aesthetic sur­

face is one reason the book is so dull, difficult, and not particularly rewarding to the modern reader*

To the

student of Buskin's personality it takes on a fascinating value, because he told much more truth about himself, about Papa and Mamma, than he ever intended, or wanted to tell* To the student of aesthetic surface, the book raises interesting problems*

First, the question may be asked,

supposing he is not telling the truth; does Praeterita (or a similar autobiography) lack surface if the sur­ face gives impression of reality but Is contradicting

69 the truth?

It should he said first that Praeterlta

does not give an impression of reality.

What might he

called the decorated or prettied up section of the hook is so interlaced with irony, sly criticism, concealed resentment, that we are not taken in.

(Examples of this

misture will be given in a later section of the chapter.) If we were dealing with an autobiography which did give a consistent impression of reality, and contradicted the truth, w© should then have a different problem.

We

could say, "Here is the world of the author as he pro­ posed to tell me about it."

One might speculate wheth­

er an autobiographer would be completely successful, however, in such an attempt, and whether the truth would not come through in small but powerful items which would make the reader suspicious of the whole. We might also ask, would contradicting the truth cause a lack of surface?

That is, would a determined

effort to present a false report about oneself make im­ possible the creation of a context, a realm?

It might

be extremely difficult to create a new context that would be good.

The problem would be something like this:

enough of the facts must be presented (although of course- they may frequently be distorted) to convince the reader; and the very presence of some element, with

60 the flavor of truth which the autobiographer knows, would certainly tend to cripple the whole imaginative effort in the first place« In examining aesthetic surface in Fraetsrlta* let us ask firsti

did Huskln create any social settings?

We have seen that although Sartor has aome~more than Wotton Reinfred— still it would not rank very high in comparison with novels on this point*

The reader is

almost immediately aware in Praeterlta of a thinness of context , an absence of revelation! he often has the curious feeling that he is moving in a vacuum*

Ruskln

la obviously trying to give us the flavor of H e m e Hill, of Denmark Hill, of Oxford* of various places on the continent! but almost nothing comes through*

The funda*»

mental difficulty was his unwillingness to aocept or acknowledge the whole of a setting or a relationships he continually tried to shut his eyes to parts of life which he did not like*

A comment on the "world11 of Shakespeare

is deeply revealingI I cannot feel that it has been anywise wholesome for me to have the world represented as a place where, for the best sort of people, everything always goes wrong! or to have my conceptions of that best sort of people so much confused by images of the worst • . . Why must the perone of lag© and Xaehlmo, of Tybalt and Edmund, of Isabel’s brother and Helena’s lord, pollute, or wither with their shadows,

61 every happy scene In the loveliest plays# « « end all ao inextricably and mysteriously that the writer himself is not only unknowable, but inconceivable#3 Ruskln was never willing; to admit that good and evil might be "inextricably and mysteriously" woven together* In his analysis of Ruskin*s aesthetic theory, Ladd points out: Ruskin was psychologically Incapable of looking at all natural truths as they are seen today represented in literature and painting* * * in 1870, in a passage which he never changed, he declared openly that though the function of art is to give faets, it must have beautiful facts to represent and this necessitates a clean country#**The thinness of social setting in Praeterlta is clearly seen by contrasting the picture of Oxford pre­ sented in It and in Hewman*s Apologia*

In spite.of

Hewmanfs statement that there are only two persons in his world— -his soul and that of his Creator— over and over he creates for us a social setting In which he is a living fighting member*

We can see and almost hear

the Oriel common room, which "stank of logic*"*> Ruskln*s Oxford is almost unbelievably sfeow^; one wo .Id

3* Raskin, op* cit*, pp. 297-298* 4* Henry Ladd, The Victorian Morality of Art, p* 7^* 5* John Hewman, Apologia, p* 177.

62 flay that the author had never been there#

When Froude

read Ruskln*fl notes, he complained! *And is there to be no more Oxford?n asks Froude, a little reproachfully, in a recent letter concerning these memoranda; for he was at Oriel while I was at Christ Church, and does not think I have given an exhaustive view either of the studies or manner of the University in our day#6 Ruekin attempts to account for this by saying, *The whole time X was there, my mind was simply in the state of a squash before ftis a peaacod#*

Jowett said of him!

"He never rubbed his mind against others’1 ; and Cook also realized Ruskln*a fundamental Isolation from all human beings except his parentss Ruskln1s dealings with persons were of comparatively little moment# Be had, indeed, many distinguished friends, among artists and men of letters, and the story of his friend­ ships will be found, X hope, to be among the more interesting threads in this biography; but the interest oentres largely around Ruskln himself#9 j Ruskln was aware that "friendship* was something he did not understand#

He once wrote to his father that

pictures were his friends, and that he had no others# He explained this situation by saying, "I am never long

6 # Huakln, op# olt#, p# 210*

7# Ibid., p# 210# 8 # Cook, op# P i t *, p# 605# 9 « Ibid#, p» Sfcvili•

63 enough with wen to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment 1 have are to material things In Fraeterlta he extends the range of his attachments

a littlet s "I get, distinctively, attached to places, to pictures, to dogs, cats, and girls*1* He has known people who have been of ”boundless help and good* to him— that is, useful— *nor I quite helpless to them” ; but he must admit that for none of these has he ever obeyed George Herbert’s mandate, * ’Thy friend put in thy bosom; wear his eyes; still In thy heart, th&tjha may see what’s there; if cause require, thou art his sacrifice*’*11 The easy give and take of friendship— liking people and being liked by them whether there Is an element of usefulness involved or not— were unknown to Ruskln. Towards many people, his tutors for example, hia attitude was necessarily patronizing, because he had been brought up to believe that one must be able to look down on people, or one could not easily associate with them.

Buskin

either submitted to people— as he did to Norton— or man­ aged them, as he did Burne-Jones.

Such a pattern of

relationships makes it very difficult for an author to create effectively a social setting in his autobiography;

1.0. Oook, og* oit*. p. 31. 11* Ruskln, frraeterlta, p. 344#

6i|. Aft

Cook almost ©aya, In a way there was no setting, ever,

only Ruskln, and thus when he came to write his autobi­ ography, he could not describe what he had never known* The only context in which we definitely see Kuakin is one whioh he consistently does try to describe! walled~ln circle of his family*

the

Here we have aesthetic

surface to some extent as the novelist might use it; Huskin is attempting to create a social unit and show it functioning*

But primarily we have aesthetic surface as

we have defined it In autobiography*

Ruskln is sayings

not, see the Rusklns, but see me as a member of this family*

Two problems then confront uai

to see what the

aesthetic surface looks like, what kind of context he creates} and secondly, to see how close this surfaee is to reality, to the facts about Buskin and his parents* We shall also be interested to see what descriptions he gives of himself as an individual, and what relevance his theories of aesthetic truth may have* II In the first chapter of Fraeterlta Ruskln strongly identifies himself as a member of his family group*

He

was a child anxious for peaoe at any price, who learned how to be serene and comfortable*

He was obliged to be

content with quiet blocks Instead of puppets that could

6$ dance; he learned not to weep and not to be clumsyi "being always summarily whipped," he writes, "if I cried, or did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs#" Such treatment led him to attain "serene and secure methoda of life and motion,"

A placid absence of emotion,

a negative kind of success*-! did not fall down today, I did not get whipped— took on charm# Suoh treatment protected him "from the snares and disturbances of the outer world," even though the severity was "monastic#"

"The routine of my childish days became

fixed, as of the sunrise and sunset to a nestling*"

The

time of his childhood he remembered with most pleasure was when it was "most regular and most solitary*"

3ven

the introduction of his cousin Mary meant change; tutors were employed, and while suoh developments often "in­ creased the Interest of the day," they "disturbed its tranquillity*"*®

feace with dullness was better than

exoltfRMnfe; for the novel might Jeopardise his serenity, so hardly won* The three Ruskins lived placidly in this ahut-up, hothouse world*

The boy did not even have a pet to enjoy#

12* Ibid., P* 19# 13* Ibid*, p* 112*

66 He knew hie Bible$ and he remembered the early account

of Eden; but "the differences of primal Importance which 1 observed between the nature of this garden, and that

of Eden* • .were that in thia one, all the fruit was for­ bidden; and there were no companionable b e a s t s B u t he also remembered from the Biblical account what happen­ ed when forbidden fruit was eaten; and he did not attempt to revolt against stern authority* Ruskln analyzes their manner of living as "regular and sweetly selfish."3^

Afternoon tea illustrator) all

of these qualitiest In the afternoons, when my father returned (always punctually) from his business, he dined, at half-past four in the front parlor, my mother sitting beside him to hear the events of the day, and give counsel and encourage­ ment with respect to the same;— chiefly the last, for my father was apt to be vexed If orders for sherry fell the least short of their due standard, even for a day or two* « • in summer time, we were all In the garden as long as the day lasted; tea under the whiteheart cherry tree* or in winter and rough weather, at six o'clock in the drawing room,— I having my cup of milk, and slice of breadand-butter, In a little recess, with a table in front of it, wholly sacred to me; and in

14. Ibid* p* 32. 15. Ibid, p. 33.

which X remained in the evenings ea an Idol in a niche, while my mother knitted, and my father read to her.--and to me, so far as X chose to listen**6 Ruskln announces that he "was not the aort of creature. • .that any human being could care for, except papa and mamma," because he was "nothing more than a conceited and unetertalningly troublesome little monkey,"

17

His parents were grave when his cousin Charles $eft for Australia, but not deeply concerned, because in their hearts they oared for "nobody in the world but me .**9 Thus the family group was completely self-sufficient* Ruskln might not be loved by anyone but hie parents, but he had their complete devotion, and was satisfied* When they traveled abroad, they tried to live as much as possible in the same kind of comfortable teaat-six life that they knew at Herne Hill*

They never

bothered to learn foreign languages; they traveled at slow easy speeds, enjoyed good meals, slept in rooms first floor front* X wish in general to avoid interference with the reader1s judgment on the matters which I endeavor serenely to narrate; but may, I think, here be pardoned for observing to him the advantage, in a certain way, of the

16. Xbid*, p. 34. 17. Xbid., p. 77. 18. Xbid., p. 116.

66

contemplative abstraction from the world, which, during this early continental travelling, was partly enforced by our Ignorance, and partly secured by our love of comfort. There la some­ thing peculiarly delightful— nay, delightful Inconceivably by the modern German-plated and French-polished tourist, in passing through the streets of a foreign city without under­ standing a word that anybody says I19 The gain, he continues in £raeterita, is in "con­ sistent tranquillity11; in contrast to certain people who travel in search of "adventure•"

He continues to

Justify their mode of existence in a passage that is very revealing (without apparently intending to be). He discusses the collection of sketches written by a olever girl describing the adventures of herself and her family while they were abroad.

They "meet with enchant­

ing hardships, and enviable misadventures! bind them­ selves with fetters of friendships, and glance into sparkings of amourette, with any sort of people in comical hats and fringy caps; 20 and condescending."

and it is all very delightful The undertone here is envious.

Ruskln listed as second in the calamities due to the kind of training he received from his parents that he "had 21 nothing to endure." At time* In his life he clearly

l9« Tb±ril.-g. 101. • 20. ibid*f p. 101. 21. Ibid., p. 39.

69 envied people who had misadventures; who coaid bind them­ selves with fetters of friendship, or flirt; he was sure it would be delightful, though he could not Imagine liv­ ing In this way without being condescending.

H’asaages

like the above reveal deep layers of sadness and frus­ tration to the student of Buskin; they make him want to attempt a new life of Euskln, much sadder, and much grimmer than any of the biographies yet written* In Italy, hie mother "knitted, as quietly as if she had been at home, in the corner of the great Roman room In which she oared for nothing but the cleanliness, as distinguishing it from the accomodation of provincial inns*"5*2

Homecoming gave them a "sick thrill of pleasure**

1 can scarcely account to myself, on any of the ordinary principles of resignation, for the undimmed tranquillity of pleasure with Which, after these infinite excitements in foreign lands, my father would return to his desk opposite the brlckwall of the brewery, and I to my niche behind the drawing-room chimneypiece* But to both of us, sacred customs of home were more precious than all the fervors of wonder in things new to us,pgr delight in scenes of imoomparable beauty* ^

Buskin listed such peace as the greatest of his blessingss

28* Xbll*i p« 220* 23* Ibid*, p* 11B*

70 And for boat and trueat beginning of all blessings, X had been taught the perfect mean­ ing of Feaoe in thought, act, and word* I never had heard my father*s or mother*0 voice once raised in any question with each other; nor seen any angry or even slightly hurt or of­ fended, glance in the eyes of either* t had never heard a servant scolded; nor even sud­ denly, passionately, or in any severe manner, blamed* I had never seen a moment*a trouble or disorder in any household matter; nor any­ thing whatever either done in a hurry, or un­ done in due time* 1 had no conception of suoh a feeling as anxiety*®4 This is Ruskln*s attempt to establish aesthetic surfaee; he says to the reader, "Here is the Ruskln flavors

see me as a member of this isolated but charm­

ing group*"

The artists who came to see him, he believed,

"sympathized with the partly quaint, altogether pure, strong, and always genial home-life of my father and mother; nor less with their anxious devotion to their son, and the hopes they entertained for him*"

His own

position was also "notable to men of the world,"

be­

cause he stayed quietly under his father’s authority, 25 and "did my utmost to please him*" Sven on the basis on Praetorlta this aesthetic aur-

24* Xbid*, p* 58* 25. Ibid., p. £26.

n

face will not hold*

Hu akin does not succeed In convincing

the reader that fchetr home life was genialj there are many sly ironic touches, some almost brutal revelations of the contempt in which he held his parents*

ftuekin continually

shifted ground between a determination to put a veneer of politeness over bitter hostility and a desire, perhaps unconscious, to tell the truth*

The evasion prevented

him from establishing successfully either world* Like any other autobiography, Fraeterlta does possess aesthetic surface, but it is poorly handled, and unreliable* We cannot trust it to walk o m each step must be carefully tested because the next is likely to send us crashing in­ to error*

Aesthetic surface breaks, first, if we read

**raeterlta carefully and see how Inconsistent and uncon­ vincing it iaj second, if we bring to bear the facts as we know them from letters and other accounts in which Huskin wrote very differently about his parents*

Let us

take this one strand of the autobiography— his relations with his parents, the attempt to establish a context for his personality— and see by both methods how subtly dis­ torted and paraodoxloal it is*

Such a detailed study will

show how closely truth and aesthetic surface in auto­ biography are tied together*

The truth breaks in some­

times at the most inconvenient points, and wrecks a page

72 In which Ruakin la on the verge of creating a convincing aesthetic surface*

Sometimea the revelation comes through

In veiled and indirect ways* A question might arises

Is the author*s personal­

ity as known by letters outside the autobiography a part of the surface of the autobiography*/ we may read ituskin*s letters, for example, and find him complaining bitterly about his parents; but la the personality whleh emerges from such letters part of the surface of fraeterita? The answer is; klot directly!

but the letters are exceedingly

useful to us, because by means of them we can Interpret and better understand the surface which Is present in the autooiography*

Ruakin describes his relationship

with his father In Fraeterita as "fatal"5 we begin to understand whet he means by that, first by reading the autobiography itself carefully and noticing how much actual hostility toward his father is there; later, by studying the expression of it in his letters# III fraeterlta was born in shadows#

When Ruskln was

sixty-six he soothed and amused himself by writing, or starting to write, the story of his life.

By that time

he had undergone four attacks of madness; he had wrestled naked with the Devil In the shape of a black oat; he had

73 seen his bedpost turn into a hideous old witch! (vivid / enough to be sketched afterwards); he had seen his ‘Turn­ ers glow with eolor which surpassed even their usual radiance*

he remembered his childhood*

Papa and Mamma,

and how they trained him thoroughly to behave (not to dance), how to sit still*

He did not recall it as cheer­

ful or delightful*

Husking relations with his parents are ^frequently characterized as "charming* and "touching*; Huskin him­ self once called the little drama an "exquisite tragedy;* and at least one biographer (Williama-Bllis) has taken him at his word and used the phrase as the title of a book*

Frederic Harrison in his study of Ruakin writes

that "the relations between John and his parents were amongst the most beautiful things that dwell in my memory*"26

(This, although earlier he had summarized them

in a brilliant phrase egoYsme-a-trols« which gets to the 27 kernel of the matter*)* Benson writes* Some one cnee said of him that It was the moat touching thing in the world to see Kuskln, when he was already a well-known man,

26m Frederic Harrison, John Ruakin* p* 95

27. Ibid,, p. 17.

being snubbed and bidden to hold his tongue by his old mother, and the gracious sweet­ ness with whieh he obeyed*^® It is very difficult to get an accurate picture of Buskin's childhood, because most of the biographers quote copiously from Fraeterlta without corrective or interpre­ tation*

It is, however, impossible to read carefully and

continue to apply such adjectives as "touching" or^ex­ quisite*"

There was a tragedy, tout It was grim.

Before

the play was over Ruakin’s wife had undergone years of suffering; Ruakin himself had gone made, and the two old people died knowing that in spite of all their efforts, they had not succeeded in completely capturing their son* It is necessary to proceed with care and subtlety in trying to read almost any paragraph of Fraeterlta* You soon learn that you cannot take anything at face value.

It is possible to find, for example, statements

about his parents whieh are completely false— say just the opposite of what we know he thought from his letters, his diaries, his conversations; there are statements which are neatly and deeply true; there are fine shades of distortion; there are attempts to toe Impersonal In

38* Arthur C. Benson, Ruakin, pp. 242-$$$,

?s describing them; there are significant omissions.

Iffie

is never mentioned, nor Ruskin’s own sure knowledge that his parents had wrecked their marriage.

There are soft-*

ening touches, in which after a paragraph of quite ac­ curate description of his parents he feels obliged to qualify what he had just said. One can hardly imagine an autobiography in whieh it would be more difficult to get at the truth; but it can­ not be dismissed as false.

One cannot say, "This is a

fictional creation; Ruskln is creating a fictional aesthetic surface here.

He is building a context which

is delightful, and consistent, if not based on the facts.” On© may be tempted into such a judgment after a page but not after a chapter.

Often when the reader has given up

all hope of finding an honest response he is startled by a burst of almost terrifying realism. After his father’s death he writes: My own principal feeling was certainly anxiety for her, who had been for so many years in every thought dependent on my father’s wishes, and withdrawn from all other social pleasure as long as she could be his companion. I scarcely felt the power I had over her, my­ self; and was at first amazed to find my own life suddenly becoming to her another ideal; and that new hope and pride were possible to her, in seeing me take command of my father’s fortune, and permitted by him, from his grave,

/> to earry oat the theories I had formed for my political work, with unrestricted and de­ liberate energy#*® Here we have a bewildering mixture of distortion* falsehood, and utter and devastating truth*

%

starts

out in an apparently unselfish way by stating that his principal concern was for his mother*

He writes quite

differently, the day after hi a father's death, to his friends, Mr# and Mrs* Burne-Jones* X am at this moment more anxious about the effect upon you of this thing, than about any­ thing else * * * The quite wonderful thing to me is the way that it cSanges one's notion of the past character# X had often measured my feeling to my father, as I thought but I never had any conception of the way that X should have to mourn— not over shat I lose, now, but over what X have lost until now#30 He wrote to H# W* Acland March 9th, 1864 (six days after his father's death) describing the relationship between himself and his father as *an exquisite piece of tragedy. • • in a ludicrous commercial way*"51 principal feeling was one of relief*

His

Cook points out

that "the three years which preceded the death of his

29* Ruekin, Fraeterlta. p. 438* 30* Cook, Life of John Ruakin. Vol. II, p. 68 * 31# Ibid*, p. 68 *

77 father were the least productive In Buskin*s literary life#

The three whieh followed it were among* the most

prolific**'58

It i» curious to note that the above

quotation from Praeterlta doea embody this feeling of blessed release; but it is worked In so quietly at the end that It is easily possible to miss the full force of it*

The technique Is a queer slanting one (of which

we shall

find other examples*) He is sayings

ed how X

should get on* because

on my father* • • I new life

X wonder­

Xhad been so dependent

began to feelpower* amassment at a

opening up for me* • •

Xcould take command of

my father*a fortune* . * I was permitted by him, now that he was in his grave, to write the political theories X wanted to express*

From the grave he could not restrict

me and cut down my energy as he had done when he was alive* The total picture of his father as we see It in Praeterita and as we see it In biographies of Buskin Is tantallzlngly the same and tantallslngly different* writes of him in the first chapter of Fraeterltai My father began business as a winemerchant, with no capital, and a considerable amount of debts bequeathed him by my grand­ father* He accepted the bequest, and paid

32. IMd», p. ©7*

He

78 them all before he began to lay by anything for hftftself, for which hi a beat friends eal^ted him a fool, and I, without expressing any opinion as to his wisdom, whieh X knew in such matters to be at least equal to mine, have written on the granite slab over his grave that he was "an entirely honest mer­ chant."^ This passage appears innocent enough, and is often quoted to show how much Ruskin respected his father. Certain phrases are curious even on*.a first reading. "His wisdom in business was.at least equal to mine"I but Ruskin took no Interest in the details of the business.

The underlying implication is that he, too,

thought his father an honest fool to pay off all the debts*

"Entirely honest* is a curious construction which

Ruskin was fond of.

He used the adverb "entirely* to

modify an adjective a dozen times in the book, often In a very patronising tone. father here as a merchant.

Furthermore^ he refers to his He quotes a long letter In

which Dr. Thomas Brown of Edinburgh told the older Ruskin what kind of study he might profitably engage in as "an honorable and distinguished merchant." hater he describes the dinners to which his father’s friends were Invited.

Very early he began to dislike

S3. Ruskin, op* cit., p. 15*

79 these gatherings| if the company talked about wine, they were intelligent enough, but if the conversation turned to any other subject, he found them stupid#

He formed

"an extremely low estimate of the commercial mind as such#*®*

He thus saw his father as unintelligent, need­

lessly honest and a tyrant* He selects in one passage in Hraeterita what he calls "the principal flaw in hie father*a mind"; The ohlef fault in my father*a mind, (I say so reverently, for its faults were few, but necessarily, for they were very fatal,) was his dislike of being excelled* He knew his own power— felt that he had not nerve to use or display It, in full measure % but all the more, eould not bear, in his own sphere, any approach to equality* He chose his clerks first for trustworthiness, secondly for— incapacity* X am not sure that he would have sent away a clever one, if he had chanced on such a person; but he assuredly did not look for mercantile genius In them, but rather for subordinates who would be subordinate forever* • • There was scarcely a day whan he did not come home in some irritation at something that one or other of them had done, or not done* But they stayed with him till his death*S5 The criticism here is very sharp (although he attempts to soften it with the statement, "I say this reverently*")

The word "fatal" is used again to des­

cribe a mi sunder st ending they had about one of Turner’s

34* Ibid* * p* 111*

80 pain tings *

The elder Buskin had never trusted Griffith,

the dealer, and was sure that he had added twenty p bunds to the price because John was going to buy the drawing* The mingled grief and scorn on his face told me what X had done } but X was too happy on pouncing on my "Rarl© chn to feel for him* All sorts of blindness and error on both sides, but, on his side, inevitable,— on mine, more foolish.than culpable} fatal every way, beyond words What does Huskin mean when he says "fatal" in these two passages?

He saw clearly the crippling effect his

father's insecurity had on his business and social re­ lationships, even though as his son he practiced much the same technique himself;

The misunderstanding between

father and son he regards also as "fatal"t

to the son*

He, John, may have been foolish, but the father was guilty* From a fatal blow one does not re cove#} Hus kin never lived an Independent life as long as h$w parents lived* He knew it and resented it* He wrote to his father} Men ought to be severely disciplined and exercised In the sternest way in d ally life— they should learn to lie on stone beds and eat black soup, but they should never have their hearts broken* • • The two terrific mistakes which Mamma and you involuntarily fell into were the exact

36* Ibid*, p. 208

81 reverse af this In both ways— you ted me effemin&tely and luxuriously "to that extent that I actually now could not travel In rough countries without taking a cook with me i— but you thwart­ ed me in all the earnest fire of passion and life*37 fo Horton he spoke of the "almost unendurable sol­ itude in my own home* only made more painful to me by parental love which did not and never could help me* and which was cruelly hurtful without knowing lt#*30 But he made little effort be stand on his own feet* He remembered the expression oh his father1* face when he rushed into a decision* and later waited for him to make purchases,

in I&J4.2 when he was twenty-three he

wanted a drawing by Turner called the "splugen," I waited dutifully till he should come. In the meantime It was bought* with the loveli­ est "Lake Lucerne" by Mr* Munro of Hover* • • I knew perfectly well that his drawing was the best Swiss landscape yet painted by man; and that It was entirely proper for me to have It, and inexpedient that anybody else should, 1 ought to have secured it instantly, and beg­ ged my father* a pardon, tenderly* He would have been angry, and surprised, and grieved; but loved me none the less* found In the end that I was right, and been entirely pleased, I should have been very uncomfortable and penitent for a while, but loved my father all the more for having hurt him, and in the good of the thing itself, finally satisfied and trium­ phant* As it was, the "Splugen" was a thorn in

37* Cook, op, cit*» pp, 65-66, 38* Ibid,, pm 29*

in both o u p aides, all our lives# My .father was always trying to get it* Mr* Munro, aided by deal* era, always raising the price on him, till it got up from 80 to 400 guineas* Then we gave it up,**with unspeakable wear and tear of best feelings on both sidea*3$ Much more than the purchase of one drawing is being talked about here*

The passage shows the sulky obedience

Ruskin gave and the basic hostility which he felt toward his father*

The reasoning is ohildish, petulant:

I

waited dutifully for him, like a good child, and X should have been rewarded*

"X would have loved my father

all the more for having hurt him** shows the emotional perversion of the relationship* In his father1s epitaph he described him as "an entinely honest merchant," hla memory as "dear and help­ ful*

His son, whom he loved to the uttermost and taught Af\

him to speak truth, says this of him*"

The curious

ambiguity of the wording is typical of the aesthetic surface with which we have to dealj it does not con* vinoe us that we have been given the real context*

The

phrase "entirely honest merchant" requires careful study to see all that he meant.

Such surface is thin enough

but doubly deceiving, because at intervals it appears solid and trustworthy*

39# Ruskin, Fraeterita, p. 848* 40* Cook, op* oit** p. 66*

83 v Both his father and mother took Intense pride In himj they cried over the pretty passages in hie books, shioh they tried hard to see were written their way and at their time*

Difficult and increasingly vexatious as

was his relationship with his father, that with his mother was much worse*

The mother was such a tyrant that she

ruled them both, and at times the father and son drew to* gather against her*

"My father. * * had the exceedingly bsd

habit of yielding to my mother in large things and tak­ ing his own way in little ones,1* Ruskin writes in Praeteria.4^ He describes a Sunday afternoon walk with his father in the "bolder scenery* of Wales as joyful, *dashed only with some alarmed sense of the sin of being so happy among the hills, Instead of writing out a sermon at home**

fven

his father's presence did not make him feel comfortable; for they both "had alike a subdued consciousness of be­ ing profane and rebellious characters,"42 Mrs* Ruskin*

compared with

His father did not share the mother's stern­

ly evangelical religion; he went to church "with a resign­ ed countenance•"45

41* Ruskin, fraeterlta, pi 22. 42. fbld*, P* Bl* 43. Ibid., p. 388

8h the "rebellious* aspect of father and son was pathetically feeble, however; Mrs* .Ruakin ruled them Inexorably, and to her death*

The picture of his mother

is less faithful and even more subtly distorted than that of his father*

Apparently he could not free himself of

her although he was new getting to toe an old man him­ self and she was dead* In ^yaeterlta he describes In detail how she drilled him in the Bible*

They read the book through from Genesis

to Revelations, reading alternate verses*

She was will­

ing to struggle three weeks to make the boy put the accent on the particular word she thought should be emphasised* Ruskin has praise for this method of Instruction; he describes this "maternal installation* as "the most pre­ cious, and on the whole, the one essential part of all my education."44 But he Is clear about the "hoWror of Sunday," a maternally managed day which used to cast a spell of gloom over the previous Friday and Saturday* portant particular he did rebels

In one im­

he refused to become a

clergyman, although Fapa shed tears in later life as he

85 exclaimedt

*tee would have been a bishop*"4®

He did not

hold to the evangelical principles which his mother had drilled into him, and one reason she was often very rude to his guests in late years was because she was convinced that it was his friends who had weaned him away from "the faith*" He is careful to explain the feeling of Inferiority which his mother had; he uses the same adjective, "fatal," to describe the effect it exercised on his mother's per­ sonality* All the family at Widmore would have been limitlessly kind to my mother and me, if they had been permitted opportunity; but my mother always felt, in cultivated society,— and was too proud to feel with patience,— the defects of her own early education; and t therefore (which was the true and fatal sign of such defect) never familiarly visited any one whom she did not feel to be, in some sort, her Inferior*"® Her evangelical beliefs kept her from regarding pleasure as a legitimate goal in life; Ruskin says that as a girl she fell In love with Henry V at Agincourt, and thereafter refused to expose herself to theatric temptation*

She was four years older than his father;

45* ^bid.* P* 25* 46* Ibid*, p* 2d*

86 the engagement lasted for nine years, after which they were secretly married*

Ruakin describes their "frank,

cousinly relation*** He had made up his mind that Margaret, though not the least an Ideal heroine to him, was quite the best sort of person he could have for a wife, the rather as they were already so well used to each other? and in a quiet, but enough resolute way, asked her If she were of the same mind, and would wait until he had an independent© to offer her* . • 'The relations between araoe Kugent and Lord Colambre in Miss Edgeworth’s'Absentee* ex­ tremely resemble those between my father and mother, except that Lord Colambr© I s a more eager lover* My father chose his wife much with the same kind of serenity and decision with which afterward he chose his clerks*4” hare is another frequently quoted passage which biographers sometimes find charming and affectionate* On close analysis the affection seems very unlikely*

It

is significant that the passage ends with a parallel to choosing clerksi

they had always been chosen for their

inferiority, and he had used the adjective "fatal" to describe such a personality trait* turned out very differently*

Of course, the choices

th© clerks he corrected

and dominated? but although Margaret Ruskin*a education was inferior to her husband’s, she managed both husband and son*

8? When we compared the tone here with the warmly passionate love letters which Ruskin wrote to Euphemia Gray during their engagement period, we realise that to such a relationship we would not be able to apply the adjectives "cousinly," "quiet," or "serene*" ence to The Absentee is very misleading also* Colambre is indeed a more eager lover*

The refer­ Lord

He admires Grace

for her goodness and unselfishness, but there is no sug­ gestion of selecting a life companion because hi is used to her and believes she would not get on his nerves*

He

is deeply downcast when he thinks for a time that he will not be able to marry her* rart of the unrelaxing severity of the home may have been due to his mother’s and father’s sense of in­ feriority, combined with her uncompromising evangelical principles* people*

She was unsparing with herself and with other

Ruskin relates in Eora that he had often seen

his mother ride all day long in a carriage without once leaning back and relaxing* Collingwood describes her severity in dealing with Johnt There la a story told as against her, that when her baby cried to handle the bright tea­ kettle, she forced the nurse to let him touch it? and dismissed b&n screaming* It seems that

she did not consider her child as a toy, hut as a trust? to he taught by experience, or, when that failed, to he punished into obedience, and into something like her own self-control*4® Only after his marriage did he escape his mother’s domination— and then not for long*

Slowly and carefully

the parents laid their plans to get their son away from Rffie? they seised every opportunity, and in the end they were successful*

But in 1869 we get the final proof— In

action— of how deeply Ruskin cared for his mother*

He

stayed home for three months with her? she was then eightyeight and nearly blind* Verona*

Then he left for Venice and

Me wrote later of this period*

"My simple duty

• • • was to have stayed with my widowed mother at Ben49 mark Hill doing whatever my hand found to do there*11 But he could not bring himself to do it, even thou^i he was suffering from strong feelings of guilt at the time* In one of the last and very rambling chapters of ^raeterlta propos of no particular action of his), he writes* "And I felt now that I had myself driven nails enough into my mother’s heart, if not into my father’s coffin*"

50

48* William 3* Collingwood, Life and Work of John Huskin, Vol. X, pp. 18-19. 49. Reginald H* Wilenakl, John Ruskin* p. 94. 50. Ruskin, op* clt** p. 404.

89 Mueh t6p late and in th© wrong way he thus declared hie independence from his mother* He seema to have made no aerious earlier attempts to esoape the really terrible domination by his parents* In one of the rare passages in Praeterlta in whieh he writes with a burst of honesty he describes his feelings when he graduated from Oxford* What should I be, or do* My utterly indulgent father ready to let me do any­ thing} with my room alw#£8 luxuriously fur­ nished in his house,— my expenses paid if X chose to travel* I was not heartless enough, yet, to choose to do that, alone* Perhaps it may deserve some dim praise that I never seriously thought of leaving my father and mother to explore foreign countries} and certainly the fear of grieving them was inter­ mingled more or less with all my thoughts} but then, I did not much want to explore foreign countries* • • thoiigE I had no rightly glowing or grateful affection for either father or mother, yet as they could not well do without me, so also I found that I was not altogether comfortable without them*®1 The boy had been well trained} he did not rebel* Their affection crippled terribly because it kept him on a tight leash, prevented him from ever reaching ©motion­ al maturity,

fraeterlta falls very short o/ showing

the absurd lengths to which his father and mother pushed their anxiety and their domination*

When Queen Victoria

was crowned in 1838, the parents made all the arrange­ ments for John, then nineteen, to see the event*

They

90 discussed which ticket he should accept, and whether he was strong enough to endure the long waiting* When he was twenty-*six he traveled on the oontinent for the first time without his parents*

He was served

by a trusted valet and by Joseph Couttet, an experienced Swiss guidej but that company did not keep the parents from continual fussing about hie welfare*

Buskin writes

from Florence i I am very cautious about ladders, and always try their steps thoroughly, and hold well with both hands* • * 1 will take great care of boats at Baveno, merely using them on calm afternoons for exercise* * • You needn’t be afraid of railroads; I shan’t trouble their dirty ironwork*®2 Ruskin does include in Praeterlta the fact that Turner tried to dissuade him from going; Every time Turner saw me during the winter, he said something to dissuade me from going abraOd; when at last I went to say good-by, he came down with me into the hall in Queen Anne Street, and opening the door just enough for me to pass, laid hold of my arm, gripping it strongly* ni®hy will you go to Switzerland— there’ll be such a fidge about you, when you’re gone**6® The passage shows still another way in which Ruskin handles the facts«

tell them, and then hide them, or

52* Cook, bife of John Ruakin» Vol* I, p* 172* 55* Ruskin, £raeterita, p* 274*

91 shift the emphasis#

He states that Turner was afraid

he might be going Into danger In Switzerland, "In the then disturbed state of the cantons#nS4

The fidge clear­

ly seemed to be at Denmark Hill, and not In the cantons* Effie1a evidence about the ©ver~anxlety (as well as the really terrible malice and slyness) of the Rusklns is very clear In her recently discovered letters*

These

have been published In a book called In the United States John Ruskin and If fie Gray:

but actually the subject

matter is muoh the same as th© heart of Praeterltas Ruskin and his parents#

John

Effie understood the problem

she faced but she was not strong enough to defeat the two of them and free her husband; he did not make enough of a struggle himself# After the marriage had been annulled, the Buskins were delighted to have their son all to themselves again# James describes the encounter between the older Buskin and David Roberts, the landscape painter* Roberts# « • meeting the trio at an ex* hibltion was amazed when Mr# Buskin launched into a stream of vituperation against Effie and said that his son had been entrapped into the marriage and might have married a French Countess, and then added: "Never mind we shall have to pay for it and w© shall at least have John all to ourselves#"^

64. Ibid.* P. 2^4. 56. William James, John Ruakin and Effie Gray# p. 254.

rj2 t*ne can only guess at John1a emotion &a he stood placidly by listening to hla father attack the woman whom he had once loved and whom he knew to be innocent# He must have aeneed what tights bonds would now be thrown around him now that hla parents had him "all to them* selves*"

The domination continued and became an increas­

ing burden to him*

He wrote to his friend bady Trevelyan

from Milan* I know my father la ill* but I cannot stay at home Just now* or should fall indubitably ill myself* also* which would make him worse. * « His whole life is bound up In me, and yet he thinks me a fool* • • This form of affection galls me like a hot iron, and I am in a sub­ dued fury whenever 1 am at home, which dries all the marrow out of every bone In me* He hates all my friends (except you) and Jjiave had to keep them all out of the house*00 How much of this hostility towards hfc parents

actu­

ally comes through in Praeterltaf

It is quiet, often

oblique, but some of It is there*

Ruakin developed sly

ways of dealing with his parentsj he was sly also in telling the truth to his readers* He describes his passion for Adele Domeeq* then he adds* With this one general note, concerning children*s conduct to their parents, that

56* Cook, life of John Ruskin, Vol* II, p* 28*

n a groat quantity of external and irksora* obedi­ ence may be shown them, which virtually is no obedience, because It is not cheerful and total* The wish to disobey ie already dis­ obedience; an*

The drama la built up by the careful ua© of aus*.

penes* illustrated by the end of the first ©hapter* when he la waiting to get back tc Kr^landj or by the use of auoh a phrase as "But before X proceed to describe shat happened to me in the summer of 1839* X must detain the reader for a while*"^followed by eight pages of the©** logical controversy* The second ©motional unit Is the journey to Rome} of course* the two units overlap * because from the first page of the Apologia to the last we know that we are making such a journey*

It is the best proof of the linear

power of Hemsan*a writing that although we know the con­ clusion before we begin we are breathless with anxiety for him to get there*

m

Houghton says* we see the

living* breathing m m and participate in his struggles* Xt la curious to note that in a book bare of emotional adjectives the word "flekce” is used eleven times*

His

phrasing is heavy with restrained excitement j "I trust that things are smoothing nowi great step is certain*"54 broke me*

and that we have made a

”X received three blows which

X had got but a little way in my work* when

53# Ibid** p. 115*

Sk. Ibid., p. lltf.

iks my trouble returned on me* tlffle*n®®

The ghoat had come a second

* I am haunted by the one dreadful whisper

repeated from so many qucTters* and causing the keenest distress to my friends**5®

*1 sobbed bitterly over his

coffin* to think that he left me still dark as to what the way of truth was* and what I ought to do in order to please God and fulfil His w 1 1 1 " I

had for days a literal

ache all about my heart**58 Jf Finally the long Journey is overj in a deep^'moving passage he describes the departure from Oxford,

The last

chapter is a plateau* without change or overt conflict* But the reader.** mind is back on the exciting journey* mentally retracing its steps* IV What were the markers in this pilgrimage?

How close

is the correlation between the world as Newman pictures it and the reality?

As Houghton points out* It would be

unreasonable to expect a one-hundred-percent correlation* He quotes a statement from Newman's sermon on "Explicit and Implicit Heason*t

55. Ibid.* p. 148* 56* Xbld** p* 827* 57* Ibid*, p. 231* 58* Ibid** p* 232*

Ho analysis la subtle and delicate enough to represent adequately the state of mind under which we believe, or the subjects of belief, as they are represented to our thoughts* The end proposed Is that of delineating, or, as it were, painting what the mind sees and feelsj now let us consider what it is to portray duly in form and colour things material, and we shall surely understand the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of representing the out* line and character, the hues and shades in which any intellectual view really exists in the mind, or of giving It that substance and that exactness In detail In which oonslsts Its likeness to the original . * • It la not hopeless, then, to expect that the most diligent and anxious investigation can end in more than in giving some very rude description of the living mind, and its feelings, thoughts, and reasonings?*8® We shall expect then, as he says, only a very rude description, for we realise that the living mind is one thing and the most exact of verbal expression something else*

But we have a right to expect that description to

be fundamentally sound*

However, we are put on our guard

by one statement which Newman makes in the preface* What I needed was a corresponding antagonist unity in my defence, and where was that to be found? We see, in the case of the commentators on the prophecies of Scripture, an exemplication of the principle on which X am insisting* vis* how much more

59. Walter E* Houghton, The Art of Newman1a Apologia, p. 12. Taken from John Newman* s^SxpXloIt ancTfmpi ic1fc fteason* in Sermons* Chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief Preached before the WnlversTty of Oxford*

1k& powerful even a false interpretation of the aacred text is than none at all}** how a certain key to the visions of the Apocalypse, for instance, may cling to the mind (X have found it so in the case of my own), because the view which it opens on us, is positive and objective, in spite of the fullest demonstration that it really has no claim upon our reception*^ "Even a false Interpretation of the fullest demonstration that upon

our reception.*

of the text”;"in spite it really has no claim

Even if the key presented

inthe

Apologia is false, Newman relieves we would have a power* ful interpretation of his life and oeliefs which would cling to the mind*

Just what is the key that Newman

presents? To try to answer that question in one sentence or one paragraph or one paper is to realise how complex Newman is*

Harrold relieves that this complexity Is

"the key to the problem of Newman*s integrity*

It is

this which onuses Sarolea and H* H* Coats to give up the gi •myster of Newman* in despair•* It may nevertheless be valuable to attempt a short formulations

There were

apparently many reasons for his joining the Cathollo Church*

Sometimes as we read we feel that he never was a

60* John Newman, Apologia* p* 14* 61* Charles F* Harrold, John Henry Newman, p* 572•

ll&

Protestant in any significant sense, but a misplaced Roman Catholic who *as always obliged to stretch and expand and twist in order to find what he had to find in his religion* He had always a deeply looted love of authority and tradition*

Hie brother Francis writess

"I have thought

that seal for authority, as in Itself sacred* was the main tendency perverting his

c o m m o n - s e n s e * " ^

Newman

says that Or* Hawkins helped to teach him the doctrine of Tradition! He lays down a proposition, selfevident as soon as stated, to those who have at all examined the structure of Scripture, vis* that the sacred text was never Intended to teach doctrine, but only to prove it, and that, if we would learn doctrine, we must have recourse to the formularies of the Church! for instance to the Catechism, and to the Creeds*6* Newman analyses his position during the Oxford Move­ ment by stating three propositions on which he took his standi The main principle of the movement is as dear to me now, as It ever was* 1 have changed in many things! In this X have not*

62* Francis Newman* Contributions Chiefly to the Early History of the L a t e I* II,---------63* John Newman, Apologia* p* 27*

150 From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion} X know of no other religion} Z cannot enter into the Idea of any other aort of religion} religion, aa a mere sentiment, la to me a dream and a mockery* Secondly, X was confident In the trutja, of a certain definite religious teaching, based upon this foundation of dogma} vis* that there was a visible Church, with sacraments and rites which are the channels of invisible grace* I thought that this was the doctrine of Scripture, of the early Church, and of the Anglican Church*®* We should have only to change Anglican to Newman here to make the Oxford Movement completely Catholic*

The

third point was of course opposition to Home, and belief that the Pope was the Anti**Christ*

But even then Newman

says that **I learned to have tender feelings toward her,*®^ and speaks of the conflict between reason and affection which we have already quoted* His theological studies also drove him towards Rome; he studied the Monophyslte, the Donat1st, the Arlan schisms, and observed the many parallels which existed between these groups and the Anglican Church.

He believed

that antiquity could oe used as a test of doctrine, and was drive to the conclusion that by this criterion the Homan was to be preferred to the Anglican Church.

64*

9

P* 64*

65. Ibid*, p. 69*

The

151 final stop was to solve tha problem of new doctrines, which he did in the leaay on the Development of Doctrine by using the hypothesis that the Gatholie Chur eh had not invented new doctrines but only developed truth already received* Tract 90 had of course aroused Intense opposition from the Bishops of the Anglican Church*

Newman writes

in a letter dated October 14, 1043, as follows} X would tell you in a few words why I have resigned St* Mary9a, as you seem to wish, were It possible to do so, But it is most difficult to taring out in brief, or even in extense, any just view of my feelings and reasons’* '" The nearest approach X can give to a general account of them is to say, that it has been caused by the general repudiation of the view, contained in No* 90, on the part of the Church* X could not stand against such an unanimous expression of opinion from the Bishops, supported, as it has been, oy the concurrence, or at least silence, of all classes in the Church, lay and clerical ♦ • • No decency has been observed In the attacks upon me from authority} no protests have been offered against them* It is felt}— •I am far from denying, justly felt,**that X am a foreign material, and cannot assimilate with the Church of England.66 However, he writes to the same friend on October 25 "that it Is not from disappointment, irritation, or impatience, that X have, whether rightly or wrongly,

66* Ibid*, p* 224*

152 resigned St* Mary 1s J but because X think the Church of Home the Catholic Church, and ours not part of the Catholic Church, because not in communion with Rome,*67 Disappointment, irritation, and impatience are all obvious in the previous letter^ and are presented as motivations*

Still later, January 8, 1845, Newman writes

to a nun of the Visitstlom This 1 am sure of, that nothing but a simple, direct call of duty is a warrant for any one leaving our Church} no preference of another Church, no delight In its services} no hope of greater religious advancement In it, no indignation, no disgust, at the persons and things, among which we may find ourselves in the Church of England* The simple question is, Can X (It la personal, not whether another, but can I,) be saved in the English Church? am I in safety, were % to die to-night?68 "The wretched Jerusalem Bishopric (no personal matter) revived all my alarms,"®® he also writes*

He

saw the spectacle of Anglican bishops "fraternising, by their act or by their sufferance, with Protestant bodies, and allowing them to put themselves under an Anglican ^Bishop, without any renunciation of their errors or regard to their due reception of. baptism and confirmation**7®

67. Ibid** p* 225. y 68*, Ibid*, pp. 234-255, r-'

69• jftjid*, p • 226* 70* Ibid*, p* 152*

153 What than, j£ the key to the living man?

It would

seem more acourate to say "keys" than "key," because Newman gives us not one explanation but many.

Several

of these, as the three just mentioned, seem inclusive and satisfying.

Certainly no one can find any other

reason and say, Here Is the real reason which Newman did not mention. The problem in evaluating aesthetic surface in the Apologia then remains}

If all the possible motivation

is presented, is it handled in such a way that certain elements emerge as more Important? the weight properly?

Boss Newman place

Xf aesthetic surface in autobiography

is made up of items which reveal to us the world of one man, then that surface will be good in the Apologia if we feel that we understand Newman and his decisions.

Is

he entirely fair, or does he sometimes, like the magician, c a l l our attention to one element while a more essential one may be disappearing up his sleeve?

All may transpire

before our eyes, but we may not be quick enough or subtle enough to follow. F. L« Cross criticises the book as follows! Apologia is prooably the greatest autobiography in the English language* But to grant this Is not to pronounce any opinion as to its historical aeouraey. Its claims as a work of literature rest upon a different set of considerations from succesafulness as

I5k as a mare chronicle * In fact, we believe It can be shown that the Apologia gives a distinctly misleading account of the chief motive® which led to the event to Justify which the work was written* For, whereas in the Apologia the predominating factors which led to Newman*a conversion are represented as being Intellectual in character, the oourse of events shows that the really power* tul motives were of a psychological nature and developed out of the actual circumstances connected with the publication of tract 90* Newman's temperament was far too distrustful of reason for him ever to have been led to such a radieal change on primarily intellectual grounds « * • In matters of fact, serious errors cannot be detected in the Apologia* In so far as the representation is In error-* and we are convinced that it la fundamentally In error»*lt is the way the whole drama la staged,7! Houghton points out that the Apologia "does contain what Cross considers a true picture, even though that is not the picture it presents,* but admits that "although Newman exposed all of his emotional drives, he laid major emphasis upon logical arguments and thus gave an impression of himself which is not strictly true.**78 Houghton's final conclusion, however, is that the picture is not very much out of focus* It is easy to understand why Newman failed to emphasise the psychological factors cited by Cross* Assuming they were true and that he was aware of them, and both assumptions are

71. Frank L, Cross, John Henry Newman, p. 11 S. 72. Walter S. Houghton, The Art of Newman's Apologia, pp. 99-100,

xss well grounded, nevertheless how could he be expected to come out In en apologia and say bluntly, "I left the English Church from resentment at the way X was treated after Tract 90* That was the deciding factor*" Could we expect anyone, however honest, to say that under the circumstances Perhaps we could not expect such honesty from any­ one; but Newman does set out to explain his actions. There is no denying the feeling of uneasiness which he has given many readers.

Fawkes writes;

*Never con­

sciously insincere, Newman constantly gave the impression of insincerity.1 1 Abbott writes of Newman’s "subtle and delicately lubricated illative rhetoric by which you are led downwards on an exquisitely elaborated inclined plane, from a truism to a probability, from a strong probability to a pious but most improbable belief.*75 Newman once wrote that "the edge of truth is so fine that no plain man can see It.*75

We are apt to feel at times

during the Apologia that he is grinding the edge very fine indeed. On the other hand, Sarolea writes that "precisely because Newman is scrupulous and honest, he leaves upon

73. Ibid.. pp. 101.108. 74. Quoted by Harrold in John Henry Newmans from "Newman,* Studies in Modernism. .p. W * 75. Quoted by Harrold, Philomythus, an AntItode Against Credulity I a Discussion of ^aa^ihain^ewman* s uEssay on tecciesias 11cal Miracle ST" p. M . . 76. John Henry Newman, Letters and Correspondence« Vol. XI, p. 97.

156 us the impression of a restless mlnd*n77

a«

we have

etated, Harrold concludes that Newman*a complexity la the quality which haa led to many accusation* of Insincerity* At first we may think that Newman*a la a simple mind, so candid it la, so naive and Ingenuous in some of its moods* But we soon find ourselves wholly lost in the labyrinthine ms sea of his complex personality* Here la an sees tic who la also an artist and a literary epicure; a mystic with the corrosive intellect of a skeptic; a solitary who has troops of friends and followers} a great religious leader and a controversialist, acorner of the world, yet shrewdly conversant with all its ways, and deft in using it as a tool to suit his purposes; a man who is timid and aggressive, deeply sincere and yet possessed of a subtlety which the greatest casuist might have envied, Intel* lectually hard, cold, glittering and analytical one moment, and meltingly sweet, rapturously adoring, womanlike in tenderness the next moment* We shall probably never be able to resolve all the paradoxes in Newman*a character and mind. But there are no valid grounds for questioning his sincerity and integrity.78 Houghton concludes his Art of the Apologia by saying; In the analysis of motive the Apologia Is not very successful* let such an edmia* slon is less detrimental, 1 think, than we might suppose* One recalls T» 3. Eliot** well-known passage on the artistic handling of character; "What the creator of character needs is not so much knowledge of motives as keen sensibility; the dramatist need not

77. Sarolea, Charles* Cardinal Newman and His Influence on Beliftlou* Life, p* 6§. ~~ 78* Harrold, oj>, clt*. pp. 372*373.

1S1 understand people $ but be must aware of them*” * * * Why he may be doubtful, and often is, douot that this man would have cisely that way.79

be exceptionally did this or that but we never aeted in pre­

And yet we are led consistently to believe that we are going to findi out why he did this or thaij we con­ stantly get the impression that if we did not find out in this section, we may in the next* graphs Newman does say*

Xn certain para­

X really cannot explain this*

Aesthetic surface is richest and best in such paragraphs, because the reader is convinced that Newman Is telling the truth and deeply revealing himself*

Newman shows

the reader in several passages that many of the deep motivations of his life were mysterious and unknowable* Xn other words, the reader feels that he can bring personal and empirical proof to Newman9a statement, "I cannot explain this**

We say, "This is very Newman,w not

beoause we have gone outside the Apologia to read what critics may have to say about Newman's submission to emotion, out oecause we have seen such submission demon­ strated*

V Newman himself describes his life as an. odysseys For years X must have had something of an habitual notion, though it was latent, and

79* Ibid*i PP* 111—112*

158 had never lad ma to distrust my own eon* victIons, that my mind had not found its ultimata rest, and that in soma sense or other X was on Journey, « * During the same passage aoross the Mediterranean in which 1 wrote Lead, kindly light, I also wrote the verses . / T H K ^ I S t n g "When X look back” , this was in 1833} and, since I have begun this narrative, X found a memo* randum under the date of geptemoer 7, 1889, In which X speak of myself, as 'now In my rooms in Oriel College, slowly advancing, &c. and led on by God's hand blindly, not knowing whither He Is taking me1 ♦ * • X had to make up my mind for myself, and others could not help me* X determined to be guided, not by my Imagination, but by my reason. And this X said over and over again in the years whloh followed, ooth in conversation and in private letters. Had it not been for this severe resolve, X should have been a Catholic sooner than X was,©0 this habitual notion, latent, but powerful, was the driving fores In Newman's life.

The passage is very eon*

fusing} first he states that he believed himself to be advancing with God's aid, going where God led him. he sayst but

Then

X determined to be guided not by imagination,

by reason.

Thedistrust of the Via Media caused in

him such ttdismay and disgust” that the "presentiment” was no protection against it,

Xn some vague way Newman

seems to be equating God with Imagination here) his terror la caused by the fact that he never wanted to

80* John Newman, Apologia, pp. 129*130,

159 acknowledge any such kinship.

His religious beliefs had

always been founded sesurely on dogma; yet he feels him* self being taken forcibly by the hand and taken down n6w and unappealing paths*

He fought against such guidance;

otherwise, he concludes, H I should have been a Catholic sooner than 1 was*" In Sartor we have Carlyle telling us the story of his young manhood in myth; choosing myth, revelling in it; in the Apologia

we have an account of a long struggle

against a myth, but

final surrender to it*

Newman

struggled against this myth because he did not want to believe that he was

owing led along on a mysterious

Journey; he wanted to believe that he was deciding each step he was taking on the basis of reason.

He was

determined not to let his emotions carry him away too rapidly,

Newman does not sufficiently acknowledge in the

Apologia what he did not sufficiently acknowledge or under* stand in his own life.

Aesthetic surface in Newman's

autobiography is not as convincing as it might be because we seem to see certain of his qualities only by developing clever eyes, so that we see the rabbit disappearing; but we need clever eyes to see it.

Certain revelation comes

out in spite of Newman's desire to tell us rather than because of his desire.

Surface is sometimes poor because

l6o it is thus blocked*

Much tension is crested; we have

seen that paradoxes, hard to live with, are present in the N e m a n personality*

We are not surprised* after

reading the Apologia* to learn that after he mode his confession to Father Dominic, "he could not walk*

His

friends • • • took him by the arms and helped him, stumbling and half fainting, to his oed,*8i We have seen passage after passage in which the conflict between reason and emotion comes out clearly* Others, still subtler, suggest that the actual conflict lay not so rauoh between reason and emotion as between two different sets of feelings*

In one of the early

tracts, he pictures the "strong claims of the Church of Home” and asks, "how could we withstand It, as we do, how could we refrain from owing melted into tenderness, and rushing into communion with It, but for the words of Truth Itself, which bid us prefer it to the Whole world?"82 What emerges here are two conflicting sets of feelings about Romes

a longing desire to be one with her, and a

fear of her as untrue*

At times in reading Newman one is

reminded of the fatal woman described so well in Romantlo

81* Harrold, Oj># pit** PP* 1-®* 82# John Newman, Apologia* p* 69*

161 Agony? like the lever of Medus*f Newman la attracted and repelled at the same time* Newraan*a handling^hc phrase from Augustinef "Securus Judicat orb Is terrarum" It highly paradoxical#

*fhese words

struck him# he aaye* "with a power which I never had felt from any words before"? he describee this Influence in very emotional terms i

"the Via Media was absolutely

pulverised"? "X became excited"?

then he adds?

"X had

to determine its logical value*"

If the Via Media were

already completely destroyed* how might one assess logical weight to a phrase— be cause of course It la a phrase* and not a formal argument* emotional responses? upon the wall*"

Then Newman returns to deeply "X had seen the shadow of a hand

"He who had seen a ghost* cannot be as

if he had never seen it"? "the heavens had opened and closed,"

He concludes the paragraph?

"My old convic*

tions remained as before"69 which simply does not fit in with the previous statements.

The heavens cannot open

and close on a human mind and pulverlpe certain ideas without changing * convictions *"

What Newman means to say

is* "X carefully tried to keep sty convictions unchanged*"

83, Ibid,, p. 128*

162 N e m a n himself admits this in a vary Important passage In the Preface* I shall account for that phenomenon which to so many seams So wonderful* that I should have left *my kindred and my father’s house’ for a Church from which once I turned away with dread; •»«*so wonderful to theml as if forsooth a Religion which has flourished through ao many ages, among so many nations* amid such varieties of social life, in auoh contrary classes and conditions of men* and after so many revolutions* political and civil* could not subdue the reason and over* come the heart* without the aid of fraud in the process and the sophlatftfes of the schools*8* "Subdue the reason and overcome the heart*"

Newman

is admitting a double submission here to the power of the myth*

It was against my reason and also against my

feelings; but it was so powerful that Z was finally obliged to give in to it*

Such a double surrender would

be hard to admit; most of the time he tells us only of the conflict oetween reason and emotion; he would like to have us oelieve that there was no surrender involved at all* because he reasoned his way there*

To try to

follow Newman through the Apologia is somewhat like run­ ning a mass in pursuit of a most elusive creature; you think he has turned here* only to discover him there*

163 In the first chapter of the Apologia we have the beginning of the his

myth#

flewman brings

sense of the mystery of life; man

unknown but powerful Influences#

out very strongly is surroundedby

He selects from his

•recollections two remarks which he says are *the most definite among them** and also "have a bearing on my later convictions*" X used to wish the Arabian Tales were trues my imagination ran on unknown influences# on magical powers, and talismans# * • X thought life might be a dream# or X an angel# and all this world a deception# my fellowangels by & playful device concealing them­ selves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world# • • The other remark Is this t X was very superstitious, and for some time previous to my conversion* • • used constantly to cross myself on going into the dark# He also relate^ that he drew a rosary In a school boy copy book; when b© saw It later# it almost took away his breath with surprise*

He cannot explain why he drew

the rosary# or where he got the idea in the first place; perhaps from some romance# Mrs# Radcliffe's or Miss Porter's*

Life was from the beginning for ftewman a

strange aftatr# In which things might not bo what they

85# Ibid#* pp, 19-20*

161; seemed* terms *

His conversion is described in interesting *1 fell under the Influences of a definite

Creed* and received into my intelleot impressions of dogma* which, through God's mercy# have never been effaced or obscured*"®®

This passage is usually and

correctly quoted to show how unevangellcal Newman*s con­ version was# end how dogmatic; but the wording (and Newman is always careful to select the precise word) suggests the emotional impact which the dogma raadet

1 fell under

the influence— as of a spell; I received Impressions of dogma*

Creeds and dogmas were never dull and mechanical

to Newman* but living realities* Also at fifteen* when he experienced this conversion* he came to believe that there were only two beings in the universe; when he became a Catholic# he did not allow the Blessed Virgin to come between his soul and his Creator*

Two deep imaginations took hold of the boys

that the Pope was the Anti-Christ* and that it would be the will of God that he should lead a single life; both dramatic* and not to be explained by logic# although in each case he tries jfco*

36*

p* 21*

165 The myth la than wall started; essential to it was the Calvinist stage setting, which Newman never materially cbnanged, although he tried in various ways, he tells us, to make the doctrine of eternal punishment *less terrible to the imagination*1,07

God is not only taking him on a

journey, but on a journey of breath*taking importance; a false step means eternal he11-fire* throughout the Apologia Newman seems half aware of the confusion he is creating*

He introduces Hurrell

Froude because Frauds had influenced his theological views; but it is apparent that we are meeting *the ©right and beautiful Froude,11 as Harriett Newman called him, and not the theologian*

When he concludes the description,

Newman admits his bewildermenti by Froude t

X was deeply influenced

but logically I do not seem to be telling

you how* It is difficult to enumerate the preelae additions to my theological creed which X derived from a friend to whom X owe so much* He taught me to look with admiration towards the Church of Home, and in the same degree to dislike the Reformation* He fixed deep in me the Idea of devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and he led me gradually to believe in the Heal Presence.88

87* Ibid.. p. 24. 88* Ibid., p. 41*

166 Xn a passage like this the aesthetic surface is very sharp and definite,

Xn fact, a whole cutting of

the Apologia might be made which would reveal the most about Newman— possessing the richest aesthetic surface — all relating to the great metaphor we have suggested! that we travel In this life, and may arrive*

He him*

self In two happy figures shows how deep the emotional currents of life were*

He writes of Clement and Origent

f,&ome portions of their teaching, magnificent in them­ selves, came like music to my inward ear, as if the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage them, X had cherished so long**89

He uses another figure

to describe what his study of the creeds was going to dos "It was to launch myself on an ocean with currents Innumerable | and X was drifted back first to the enteNleene history, and then to the Church of Alexandria The currents were powerful; he makes the idea perfectly clear by the use of the passive voice, not necessary here; n o t X drifted back; but X was drifted back; the ourrents pulled me there*

30*

p* 43*

90* IbijJ*, p* 42*

16? Xn Sicily the sense of mi Salon la strong in him* like the child Samuel, he hears the voice of e furnished, and it is not wonderful if, after buil& ng it, ooth 1 and others erred in detail in determining what Its furniture should be,

33** Quarterly Review, Vol. 116. p. 528.

202 what was consistent with the style of the building, and what was In itself desirable*®2 We see the series of houses which Newman carefully constructs for himself} an acceptance of the Anglican Church} the Via Media} the view that one must be content to oe with Moses in the desert, not quite in grace, not quite out of it; the submission to the Catholic Church* How he moves from one house to the other, or why, is often astonishingly difficult to follow— if we are judging by logical standards*

If we attempt to see Shat emotional

needs he is fulfilling, we are apt to read the arguments with more under standing*

*s wehaveseen, the sense

that

he was on a journey was very strong* and that he was led, and was following, blindly*

When we finish the Apologia *

he is, like the Professor, "more of an enigma than ever1*} \

but we have seen "little llght-lslets in a world of ha&e." Bven in Huskin we do get successive glimpses although with much greater difficulty than in the Apologia*

What

we see most clearly is a book of photographs of Huskin and his parents* although these are so frequently distorted, out of focus, trick shots as it were, say of Fraeterita that there is very

that it ishard to much light*

tainly know that there is a great deal of fog.

32* John Newman, Apologia, p. 83.

We cer­

The light

203 and shadow are both there, however; from certain passages we get a keen awareness of how deeply he resented his parents and how much he was ooseaaed with Rosie— as sharp a realisation as we do from any of the letters he wrote when he was not trying to "pretty up" the story. Perhaps the deepest revelation of Frceterita Is that the Ruakln of the childhood and the old man describing Rosie look very much alike; we do not sense the maturing of character that we do in TeufelsdrSokh or residency in a succession of various homes as we do in Newman.

Huskin

has tea with his parents, goes to Venice or Rome, studies at Oxford, climbs around the Alps, and remains the same; the fundamental insecurity of his personality prevented him from growth*

He was right when he said that as an

old man he was the same youth, disappointed and rheumatic* There are cryptic sentences in which you feel that he is telling the truth almost unconsciouslyt

nX never got the

slightest harm from Byron; what harm came to me was from the facts of life."®5

The sentoen.ce has a world of

illumination in it aoout Huskin* s fundamental maladjust­ ment*

Carlyle would call such sentences jewels;

33. Huskin, Praeterita, p. 122*

20k Over much Invaluable matter, that Ilea scattered, like jewels among quarry-rubbish, In those Paper-catacombs, we may have occasion to glance bae^ and somewhat will demand insertion at the right place} meanwhile be our tiresome diggings therein suspended. 34This study would tend to confirm Carlyle»s statement that “not our Logical, Mensur&tive Faculty, but our imagina­ tive on® is King over us."

At least when we come to ex­

plore a human personality, logical measurement does not seem

to be the answer.

Carlyle of course saw manas only

one mystery in a mysterious and

wonderful universe* He

compares him to a minnow. ♦System of Nature! To the wisest man, wide as is his vision, Nature remains of quite Infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion} and all Experience thereof limits Itself to some few computed centuries and measured square-miles. The course of Nature's phases, on this our little fraction of a Planet, is partially known to ust but who knows What deeper courses these depend onj what infinitely larger Cycle (of causes) our little Epicycle revolves on? To the Minnow every cranny and pebble, and quality and accident, of its little native creek may have become familiart but does the Minnow understand the Ooean Tides and periodic Currents, the Tradewinds, and Monsoons, and Moon's Eclipses} by all which the con­ dition of its little Creek is regulated, and may, from time to time (unmiraculously enough), be quite overset ancPr©versed? Such a minnow is Man} his Creek this Planet

34. Carlyle, sartor Resartus, p. 204*

205 Barth; his Ocean the immeasurable All; hie Monsoons and periodic Currents the mysterious Course of Providence through Aeons of Aeons. Nature is more than a book of recipes; man, as part of the world, cannot be fully explained by any type of recipe,

lb admit his mystery is to begin to

understand him, "Our Imaginative Faculty, ♦ , is King over us." We have noticed in our study of aesthetic surface the power of myth in the expression of human personality. Carlyle enjoys the greatest freedom of the three, because he can Interpret himself in the character of Diogenes Teufeladrockh, who is not obliged to be profound all the time, but who occasionally is Just dull afed obscure.

In Newman we have a boy

kindled by "deep imaginations"; when he tells us how God led him on a mysterious Journey, we are the closest to Newman and to understanding his% In Ruskin we have unsuccessful aesthetic surface; only now and then, and usually unwillingly, does he reveal himself to the reader. Our study would lead us to believe that aesthetic surface is a significant item in the whole autobiographic attempt.

35. Ibid., pp. 257-258.

In autobiography

206 there is content; there is style; but we have also a created world which is not to be identified with either of these*

It calls into being a realm, the

qorld of one man's personality*

This surface in­

volves more than a factual kind of accuracy; It en­ ables us to see the man behind the facts, who Is choosing and organizing them in a certain way. Aesthetic surface exists to function; that la, we do not say, when we read an autobiography, here is the aesthetic surface; but rather, here is the man Cellini or Rousseau or Newman.

We can, as we

have seen, break up such surface; but ordinarily we notioe it, not for Itself, but for what it accom­ plishes*

In a work of art every part is important;

all work together to produce the expressive whole* Some of the beauty of Carlyle's Sartor and Newman's Apologia lies in their surface.

At best, *uch

aesthetic surface may have a further value in expressing the personality and experience of the author.

f . 7

BIBLIOGRAPHY Books

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