Boundaries of Fiction 9781400876808

Table of contents :
Preface vii
CONTENTS
Introduction
I. Sartor Resartus and the Balance of Fiction
II. Macaulay: Progressand Retreat
III. Newman and the Threat of Experience
Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION: CA RLYLE MACAULAT NEWMAN

BY GEORGE LEVINE

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 1968

Copyright © 1968 by Princeton University Press ALL MGHTS RESERVED

L.C. Card Number: 68-11445 This book has been composed in Linotype Caledonia Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

To my father and mother and to their daughter-in-law, Marge, the most fruitful and best of my studies

PREFACE

THE idea of this book grew out of an even more ambitious

project, a project that entailed nothing less than an ex­ amination of the characteristic qualities of Victorian fiction from CarlyIe to Lawrence, and a description and coherent explanation of its characteristic kinds of failure. In a way, this book now stands as a preface to that study, which may never get written at all, but which will undoubtedly occupy a large part of my time this side of retirement. Underlying the idea of the book is an assumption which I have tried not to insist on in the book proper—that there is something to the notion of a "spirit of the age," and that however different the great Victorians were from each other (and they were obviously very different) they almost inevitably shared certain attitudes, ideas, feelings which are worth examining. These shared qualities might help throw light on the nature of their art and might help ex­ plain some of their characteristic flaws, which have so long either puzzled or deterred readers, depending on how ini­ tially sympathetic they have been. I have long believed that the best way to give the great Victorians their due would be to admit at the outset and then try to understand their grossest and apparently most unjustifiable failures— things like Little Nell and the conversion of Boffin, the wooden Felix Holt and the priggish Daniel Deronda, Carlyle's rant and hero-worship, Thackeray's inescapable sentimentality. I have nevertheless consciously labored to avoid impos­ ing synthetic theories on my subjects. I approached each with as open a mind as I could make it (obviously, there were profound limits) and tried to respond to the par­ ticular and distinctive qualities of his art. The assumption of shared qualities figures in the finished book only in that I have tried to read each writer in the light of the others.

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Perhaps it will be noticed that Carlyle, who is the subject of the opening and shortest chapter, is of central importance in each of the other chapters. But beyond the comparative method, I have tried to allow the book to stand separate from the initiating assumption and to draw analogies only when they seemed both credible and useful. A lateral development of the study has been to increase greatly my admiration of the prose of the great Victorians' nonfiction writing. The achievement of writers like Car­ lyle, Newman, Ruskin, and Arnold is second in the Vic­ torian years only to that of the very greatest novelists. History, autobiography, social criticism, philosophy and theology, art and literary criticism become in the hands of writers such as these genuine imaginative creations which frequently survive their subjects or the validity of their particular arguments. In this book I have tried to treat the nonfiction I discuss as I would treat professedly "crea­ tive" literature; and much of that literature survives in the same way great novels survive. Where the imaginative nonfiction fails, it fails in much the same places as the Victorian novel frequently fails—in the critical areas where a recogni­ tion and acceptance of what the new experiences of the time entailed would seem to require a rejection of all the traditional values of a hierarchical Christian and Western culture. I am grateful to the editors of the following journals for allowing me to use materials which appeared in earlier forms in their pages: Victorian Studies ("Sartor Resartus and the Balance of Fiction," VIII [December 1964], 13160), Texas Studies in Literature and Language ("Newman's Fiction and the Failure of Reticence," VIII [Fall 1966], 35974), and theVictorian Newsletter ("The Prose of the Apolo­ gia pro vita sua," No. 27 [Spring 1965], pp. 5-8). Most of the study of Newman was completed with the assistance of an ACLS grant-in-aid. The book itself was completed, except for the final typing, in England, with the aid of a research grant from Indiana University. The whole project would

PREFACE

have been impossible without the intellectual excitement generated in the offices of Victorian Studies, to all of whose editors—past and present—I owe an unpayable debt of gratitude. In particular, I want to thank Professors Michael Wolff, Philip Appleman, and William Madden, who took me into the operation when I was a fresh and very green Ph.D., and who have seen pieces of the book in manuscript. They are not, of course, responsible for what I have written, but much of what is worth saying in the book can be traced back to them in one way or another. I want to thank also Professor G.F.A. Best of Edinburgh University, Professor G. Robert Stange of Tufts University, Professor Carlisle Moore of the University of Oregon, and the Vic­ torian Studies group at the University of Leicester (led by Professors Philip Collins and H.J. Dyos), who listened patiently to my earliest ideas about Macaulay. Finally, I owe a special debt to one of my best students, Ann Hofstra, who has helped me see this book through galleys and pages and who has, with her uncanny eye and extraordinary dili­ gence and devotion, rescued me from more errors than I care—or now need—to acknowledge.

CONTENTS

Preface Introduction

vii 3

I. Sartor Resartus and the Balance of Fiction

19

II. Macaulay: Progress and Retreat

79

III. Newman and the Threat of Experience

164

Conclusion

259

Index

269

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

INTRODUCTION

IT IS NOW, happily, no longer fashionable to undervalue the achievement of the great Victorian writers and to insist on the damage done to their art by moralism, didacticism, ret­ icence, and all the sins that go along with excessive concern with audience. If anything, the fashion has gone the other way, and the proper recognition that the great Victorian achievement was in the novel has been accompanied by more or less convincing and salutary attempts to see in the Victorian novel values acceptable to the twentieth century. Dickens anticipates Kafka and Dostoyevsky; George Eliot recalls, on different occasions, Proust, Henry James, Tolstoy; Thackeray manipulates time and point of view in a startlingly modern way. The novels, moreover, are being sub­ jected to the kind of critical surgery originally devised for a very different kind of art—that of Flaubert and Henry James, or of Donne and T.S. Eliot. This has, for the most part, been to the good, insofar as it has helped us to the kind of reconsideration and revaluation of past literature necessary for every generation, and insofar as it has allowed us to leave behind the old stereotypes of the Victorian writer: earnest but blind to the full possibilities of art and to the complexities of human nature. The great danger, however, is that emphasis on modernity and preoccupation with modern-seeming techniques are as likely as simple critical apologetics to lead to blindness to certain obvious facts, to the fact, for instance, that British Victorian writers, however great, do seem strangely naive when we compare their novels with those of roughly con­ temporary writers like Stendhal or Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, or even Flaubert.1 They frequently bring us, to be sure, to 1 See Miriam Allott, Novelists on the Novel (London, 1959), p. 34. The case has been put in a more extreme, less judicious way by

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the brink of the modern vision, but they inevitably seem to retreat from the full and usually gloomy consequences of that vision, in which value is almost always personal and the individual and society are irreconcilably at odds.2 The point is more descriptive than evaluative: obviously the Victorian achievement in fiction was very great, but there is a curious way in which even the greatest masterpieces of Victorian fiction are flawed, in which they seem to draw back from the vision they have concretely and convincingly rendered. There is only one Wuthering Heights, only one novel which does not recoil from the full implications of the vision, only one daemonic Heathcliff whose behavior stands outside conventional moral placing. And Wuthering Heights achieves its extraordinary intensity, its rendering of the essential aloneness of man and of his amoral capacity for violence and love, by remaining outside the dominant traditions of Victorian fiction. It is as much a romance as a novel. Its achievement is great, but perhaps less than that of the larger, flawed masterpieces. Society intrudes into it in the person of Lockwood, and, to a certain extent, Nelly Dean, but largely in order to dramatize society's incapacity to cope with certain essential qualities of the private man. A few obvious examples of the "flawed" masterpiece should suffice to clarify my meaning. There is Vanity Fair, with its ambiguous handling of the angelically meek Amelia; Middlemarch, with its fortunate death of the impotent and quietly tyrannical Casaubon, which releases Dorothea, however complexly, into a fuller if still not quite satisfactory life; Our Mutual Friend, with its strange transformations of the generous Boffln and the complete reformation of Bella Wilfer into a totally self-denying and loving wife. Each of these extraordinary novels creates a world which George Steiner, "A Preface to Middlemarch," Nineteenth Century Fic­ tion, IX (1955), 270-75. 21 have attempted to explore this problem in essays on George Eliot. See, for example, my "Intelligence as Deception: The Mill on the Floss," PMLA, LXXX (1965), 402-409; and "Isabel, Gwendolen, and Dorothea," ELH, XXX (1963), 244-57.

INTRODUCTION

is, for the most part, cynically tough and very largely re­ gardless of individual needs. But in them things manage to fall out so that individual needs are in large measure fulfilled and so that the barrier between authentically human value and society is broken down. Of course, the books are not so simple as this crude summary suggests, but the summary does, I think, point to a genuine tendency in them. One wonders, while reading George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, how a writer so profoundly insightful into the nature of human behavior and relations could indulge in the sentimentality of the scenes in the Meyrick's household; or how Esther Summerson and her retreat to the new Bleak House could possibly be taken as a real alternative to the microcosm of the Chancery in Dickens' Bleak House; or how a novel so consistently anti-romantic as Thackeray's Pendennis manages, in spite of its assertions, to approach in the marriage of Laura and Arthur the romance it attempts to puncture. As in Thackeray's case, the novels frequently reveal a tension between the world created and the author's explicit statements. George Eliot, for example, is persistently antididactic but writes didactic novels; she abjures "favorable Chance" and yet turns her novels frequently on the actions of favorable Chance. Podsnap is satirized for insisting on the need to keep novels from offending innocent young ladies, yet Dickens does not dream of taking the chance of offending young ladies himself; and he defends his most powerful and unrealistic scenes on the grounds of their realism. The Victorian novel, largely traditionless as it was, became in a way an ideal form, insofar as it could sustain such tensions, and many others to which its practitioners seemed to be subject. Although I am largely concerned in this book with nonfiction writers, it is the fact of these tensions and "flaws" which was the initial impulse for writing it. I see it in one of its aspects as part of a continuing investigation of some of the central qualities of Victorian fiction. Underlying the discussions of Carlyle, Macaulay, and Newman is an

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

idea (perhaps an ideal) of fiction, related to the dominant traditions of the Victorian novel. As serious literary artists these men were subject to tensions very similar to those of the fiction writers themselves, and, in the case of Carlyle and Newman, they were directly or indirectly influential on almost all the great writers of the period. Macaulay, though not really "influential," was perhaps even more representa­ tive than the other two, embodying in his art the central prejudices of a middle class reading public and seeking in his own almost aristocratic way the kind of popularity the novelists themselves achieved. As nonfiction writers, all three made more directly explicit than the novelists them­ selves could do in their novels the nature of their peculiar difficulties as early and mid-Victorian writers. Thus this book is based essentially on two assumptions: first, that the greatest Victorian art tended toward fiction, which was somehow the form most capable of expressing and con­ trolling for writers and readers alike the peculiar problems of the time; and second, that the greatest Victorian art tended also to be seriously flawed, to reveal a curious com­ bination of great strength, intelligence, insight, alertness to complexity, and sympathy, with blatant inadequacies and naivete. But the separate studies of Carlyle, Macaulay, and New­ man are not merely means to an end. Each man was, in his own way, a great artist. The value of their work lies not only in their ideas but perhaps even more in the way they saw fit to embody those ideas. Frequently, the manner of the embodiment actually creates or at least alters the ideas. John Holloway has shown how the Victorian Sages, even when they were writing nonfiction, were compelled to create imaginative worlds as surely as novelists created them in order both to express their ideas and to bring them convincingly home to readers.3 I have tried, in any case, 3 John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (Lon­ don, 1953). Holloway's book is still the most important yet written on the study of nonfiction (or at least a certain kind of nonfiction) as art. His assumption that it can be so treated, that nonfiction can achieve the status of art, is also one of the key assumptions of my studies of

INTRODUCTION

to do justice to the art of these writers and not to bend criticism in the interests of the larger ideas underlying the book as a whole. I have found it important, moreover, to make clear the ideas on which the art of these writers is based because the ideas are frequently central to dominant Victorian attitudes toward art and experience and to their interrelation. Since, however, the idea of fiction so persistently under­ lies these studies and is so frequently used normatively it is essential here that I make clear what I mean throughout the book when I talk about "fiction" or "the novel." I must confess that my definition is in large part stipulative, but unless I specifically say otherwise, I have particularly in mind certain qualities which, though perhaps never uni­ formly present in any single novel, may reasonably be taken as qualities of Victorian fiction in general. I am quite deliberately not thinking of the minimal definition of the novel as an extended fictional narrative in prose. Nor am I trying to impose a single pattern on a body of literature as vast and various as the Victorian novel. I have in mind particularly the works of George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, and the Brontes, but I do not mean to suggest that even all their works fit the pattern. The idea I have in mind is perhaps more ideal than idea. To begin with, then, the idea of "the novel" in this book is largely the idea of the realistic novel of mid-nineteenthcentury England. An extraordinary variety of kinds of books have been called novels but traditionally, when we speak of the novel as a form, we refer, as Northrop Frye defines it, to a work which is governed by the demands of plot or character development, which constructs a realistic atmos­ phere, which presents character within the context of a society, and which is concerned with social modes or manCarlyle, Macaulay, and Newman. See also my "Nonfiction as Art," Victorian Newsletter, No. 30 (Fall I960), pp. 1-6; and George Levine and William Madden, eds., The Art of Victorian Prose (New York, 1968).

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ners.4

In particular, I mean to emphasize the portrayal of character and the related conventions of realism. The nine­ teenth-century novel tended to place character at the center of meaning. Indeed, the twentieth century has been widely and critically aware of the way in which nineteenth-century criticism tended to treat characters as living people rather than as creations. Certainly the great audiences of the Vic­ torian novel—like popular audiences today—were much less concerned with "themes" or structure than with what happened to hero or heroine. It should be noted that the notion of character as developing and changing is one of the notions that has typically distinguished the novel from the narratives of romance. And the great preoccupation with character, which is largely, I think, a moral preoccupa­ tion, is paralleled by the voracity of the Victorian reading public for biographies and autobiographies. Indeed, it is likely that the idea of the novel is closely related to the ideas of the biography and of the autobiography. The rise of the novel is, as Ian Watt has shown, closely connected with the rise of realism and with the develop­ ment of a middle class reading public.5 Traditionally, the novel was anti-romantic, and in the Victorian period among its most famous practitioners it tended to be consciously anti-heroic. George Eliot's insistence both in and out of her novels that she was inclined to the creation of imperfect characters is well known. Realism, to which she was abso­ lutely committed on moral grounds (which were, for her, aesthetic grounds as well), entailed a deliberately antiheroic, anti-romantic treatment of her characters, a de­ liberate mingling of good and bad qualities, a sympathetic treatment of the ordinary. In her first story she wrote that her hero, Amos Barton, was "in no respect an ideal or exceptional character, and perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was so very far from remarkable—a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast." 4Northrop 6Ian

Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957). Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London, 1957).

INTRODUCTION

"But, my dear madam," she goes on to say, "it is so very large a majority of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp." Here is one of the main objects of the anti-heroic conventions of the Victorian novel. The crucial obligation of art is to be faithful to the real because it is in the real that people must live. And art's function is to extend man's capacity to sympathize with the citizens of the ordinary world among whom he must live. "Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones."6 The final sentence of Thackeray's Pendennis combines a similar concern for the ordinary with a worldly wisdom directed at gently puncturing illusions: If Mr. Pen's works have procured him more reputation than has been acquired by his abler friend, whom no one knows, George lives contented without the fame. If the best men do not draw the great prizes in life, we know it has been so settled by the Ordainer of the lottery. We own, and see daily, how the false and worthless live and prosper, while the good are called away, and the dear and young perish untimely,—we perceive in every man's life the maimed happiness, the frequent falling, the bootless endeavour, the struggle of Right and Wrong, in which the strong often succumb and the swift fail: we see flowers of good blooming in foul places, as, in the most lofty and splendid fortunes, flaws of vice and meanness, and stains of evil; and, knowing how mean the best of us is, let us give a hand of charity to Arthur Pendennis, with all his faults and shortcomings, who does not claim to be a hero, but only a man and a brother.7 Such a conclusion is to take the place of the conventional β "The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton," Scenes of Clerical Life, The Works of George Eliot: Cabinet Edition (Edinburgh and London, 1878), I, ch. v., 66-67. 7 The History of Pendennis (London, 1850), II, 371-72.

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happy ending (yet manages, at the same time, to be happy), and by its position is even more obviously anti-heroic and anti-romantic, even more unflinchingly clear-headed about the ways of the world, than it would be in another context. The convention of realism is here closely allied with the anti-heroic, and that in turn to the aesthetics of sympathy: since we are all flawed, we ought to find sympathy for the flawed man. There are examples everywhere. Charlotte Bronte per­ sistently warns her readers that her books are not for pleasure, that they will be sternly faithful to a stern reality, and that their ideal is truth, not public taste. Shirley's second paragraph begins this way: If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid lies be­ fore you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.8 With Charlotte Bronte, too, the deliberately anti-heroic formulation is related to a moral impulse, as all her novels dramatize (and explicitly assert). Shirley attempts to move the reader beyond surface formulations, to help him better understand old maids, to sympathize with homely people, with working men, against whom the reader is expected to have sharp prejudices. The tradition of realistic antiromance is, as these three passages suggest, related very clearly to novelists' keen sense of audience. The reader, in each case, is invoked as a participant in the world of the novel and is addressed as someone to whom the writer is establishing a personal relation.9 The reader, though a pars Shirley, The Novels of the Sisters Bronte (Edinburgh, 1911), V, ch. i, 1-2. 9 See W. J. Harvey, The Art of George Eliot (New York, 1962), ch. in.

INTRODUCTION

ticipant, is also a student: the tone in each case is more or less greatly didactic and mildly superior. The reader, in fact, is asked to shed illusions by opening himself to realities that his narrow and egotistic vision would otherwise have disguised from him. The novel (as I use the idea of it in this book) tends, then, to cultivate a deliberate tough-mindedness. It con­ sciously rejects perfection and the romantic conventions of the unambiguous confrontation of good and evil, the tri­ umph of good, and the absolutely happy ending in which hero and heroine marry to live happily ever after. Fre­ quently, to be sure, from beneath the deliberately muddied waters, the essential outline of the romantic plot emerges; but, for the most part, the waters are muddied. Paradise needs first to be lost before it can be regained, and the Paradise regained tends to have little of the perfection of the original innocent Eden. The novel pretends to worldly wisdom, and the center of the hero's experience is likely to be disillusionment. The "iron" must enter his soul before he can be fully a man. The reader's sympathy is invoked for the imperfect since imperfection is the condition of this world. The novelist attempts to create sympathy in two ways: first, by exploring the hero's inner world—his motives, his sentiments, his feelings; and second, by placing him in the context of a larger world, of a society in which he must find a satisfactory place. The realism of the novel then ideally extends beyond the circumstantial to the psychologi­ cal and the social.10 The social world provides the perspec10 The word "realism" is itself so muddy and complicated that it would require another book to begin to define it adequately. Crudely speaking, however, it can be defined here as a commitment to a detailed description of the surface of experience as it is commonly recognized, of what things look like, of the physical setting in which characters move. Psychological realism requires a detailed analysis of the motives, feelings, thoughts of characters. Generally in the Victo­ rian novel it also implies a negative—the refusal to concentrate on extraordinary experience, on great men, on large and world-historical figures and events. Realism tends to entail treatment of a world recog­ nizable to ordinary middle class readers. See Allott, pp. 3-29.

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tive on the character, allows us to see him from the outside and to recognize him as an ordinary man much like ordinary men we know in the real world. The psychological brings us to a new insight into the ordinary man—allows us to see the "poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy" of his life. It attempts to give us, then, a new perspective which will allow us to see other people as we see ourselves, to value them, therefore, and to sympathize with them. The sympathy is meant to derive not from the attribution of impossible virtues to particular characters, but from the novelist's capacity to recognize in others the kind of reality we recognize in ourselves. The novel, then, entails a very large openness to experience—a rejection of prejudices, a comprehension of the not-self, a capacity to see without flinching and to place the reader inside the attractive and the unattractive as well. It does not necessarily entail either an absolute refusal to judge or the ideal of objectivity espoused, for example, by Flaubert. But the judgment must in some sense come after the experience and must not be allowed to shape that experience. The artist must keep his finger, in D. H. Lawrence's formulation, off the scales. It is this quality of openness to wide varieties of experience that seems to me the central value of the Victorian novel. It is this quality in particular that I have in mind when, in the course of this book, I use the term "novel" in a norma­ tive sense. I don't at all mean to suggest that the great Victorian novels always fully achieve an openness to experience. It is, after all (or ought to be), a commonplace that Victorian novelists flinch from certain kinds of experience, that they tend too frequently to the romantic resolutions they as­ sertively reject, that coincidence operates too frequently to save their creations from what seems an inevitable doom. All too often experience does seem to be manipulated in the direction of the almost universal Victorian need for order, stability, and poetic justice. But the point surely must be that the Victorians themselves created the stand­ ards which, on occasion, find them wanting. And the novel, as a Victorian form at least, has a peculiar capacity to with-

INTRODUCTION

stand (indeed to incorporate) tensions from contradictory impulses. Its range is so wide, its presentation of experience so richly concrete, its form so flexible, that the given ex­ perience frequently survives its incredible manipulations or its obvious omissions. At bottom, the best Victorian novels are the creation of a profoundly moral impulse; but for the Victorians a moral impulse was not necessarily incompatible with fidelity to the "real." On the contrary, a moral impulse can only be fruitful, the novelists might have argued, if it is based on a thoroughly honest and self-aware confrontation of reality. It is only at the absolutely crucial point, where the honest vision seems to lead to an inalterably bleak and morally debilitating conclusion, that the novelists tend to veer from that vision. And I would argue that in most cases the aspects of the Victorian novel that we tend now most frequently to reject are the products not of conscious infidelity to a toughminded vision, but of an attempt to reconcile conflicting and complicated attitudes toward experience. The easy ex­ planation is that the failure is at best the result of selfdeception, at worst, of pandering to public demand. But that may be a little too easy. We can recognize in the great Victorian novels certain persistent tensions which can tell us much about Victorian art. The novel itself, as I have earlier suggested, is related to the biography and autobiography. Frequently, it takes the shape of fictional autobiography, or, if it is narrated in the third person, biography. The novelist seems bent on confession, on publicly exploring the meaning of his own experience. At the same time, however, in writing fiction he deliberately disguises the confession and for various rea­ sons alters his own experience. Thus, running counter to the impulse to confess is the impulse to conceal, to sustain the dignity of the reticent gentleman, to keep from the public the dirty wash of the private life—at times to keep it from self. For many writers the two impulses must have seemed equally valid, and the novel, of course, provided the perfect form for allowing both public confession and privacy. The tensions between the two impulses are fre-

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quently central to the defects as well as the virtues of the novels. The obvious examples are David Copperfield and Great Expectations; The Professor, Shirley, Villette, and Jane Eyre; The Mill on the Floss and Dorothea's story in Middlemarch; Pendennis; and much later, Jude the Obscure. Several other tensions derive from the moral impulse underlying so much of Victorian fiction. This impulse moves the novel in the direction of the sermon; on the other hand, novelists knew that by writing direct sermons they would alienate their audiences and, as what I have already said implies, falsify experience. They needed, therefore, to sus­ tain a kind of balance between presenting the experience and drawing the moral. As in the case of George Eliot, this frequently led to didactic sermons attacking didacticism. Or again, the moral impulse fully understood led to an unflinching realism and fidelity to the facts of ordinary life. At the same time, as novelists, writers were drawn to the extraordinary in experience. They needed to be faithful both to reality (which is full of extraordinary occurrences) and to the demands of their form. The form was, again, traditionally popular and depended for its success partly on the handling of big and unusual events, so that the audience which demanded realistic art demanded also ex­ citement and wonder. It is not surprising, therefore, that the great novels are frequently punctuated by unusual (at times almost "unrealistic") occurrences. Moreover, the whole appeal to the ordinary was in line with the romantic tradi­ tion, made by Carlyle almost essential to spiritual health, of raising the ordinary to the level of the extraordinary, of reinstating wonder in a cynical and spiritually empty world. The ordinary deserves the kind of attention and enthusiasm traditionally given to the incredible in romance, and in receiving that attention is frequently elevated to the level of the extraordinary—of romance. Dorothea Brooke is to be seen as the St. Theresa of the midland flats, Joe Gargery in Great Expectations as a genuinely chivalrous figure; the early romantic illusions of Pendennis are not merely satir­ ized but admired in the context of a world in which every­ one must find out too soon that his brilliant visions are

INTRODUCTION

illusions. In a way, then, the Victorian novel is both ro­ mance and anti-romance. The movement to Paradise Re­ gained is more mundane, less exciting, less absolute than it would be in romance; but it is usually the movement of the novel, nevertheless. The tradition of the romance is, of course, deeply en­ grained in the novel, however amorphous the form. Cer­ tainly the romance, with its inevitable distribution of justice, with its satisfying confrontation of good and evil, with the excitement of its excesses, remained attractive to popular audiences. Obviously, the novel's roots are largely in antiromance—the initial parody in Don Quixote, the burlesque epic of Tom Jones, the glorification of the maid-servant in Pamela. But if the impress of the romance is negative, the pattern of the traditional novel is nevertheless similar to that of the romance. In many cases it appears as though the novel attempts to achieve for the real world what the ro­ mance achieved for the fabulous. And one of the peculiar fascinations of the Victorian novel is the tension established between the consciously anti-romantic treatment and the ultimately romantic solution. One reason the novel became an ideal Victorian form must certainly have been that, like the form itself, the Victorians were largely engaged in at­ tempting to reassert the old values in a new guise. The romance implies an ordered, stable, almost static universe; the novel implies a growing, changing, disordered one, or one in which order can be achieved only through change. The early Victorians were confronted with just such an expanding universe, were, in many cases, losing their moor­ ings in traditional Christianity, having doubts about tradi­ tional aristocracy, finding a stable agrarian culture trans­ formed into a complex and shifting industrial one. It is, undoubtedly, partly for this reason that Victorian novels tend so frequently to be preoccupied with the immediate past and with the tension established between the old and the new. They managed to express the tensions between past and present and successfully to embody the ambiva­ lence of feeling which led them to look nostalgically back on the past while recognizing its weaknesses, to look hope-

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fully forward to the future while feeling painfully the effects of its changes. These tensions are expressed (and frequently find their definitive formulation) in the writers who are the subject of this book. Usually they attempted to deal with them not in imaginative fiction, but in expository prose, in auto­ biography, or in history. For them, fiction was not sufiS­ ciently serious, not sufiSciently earnest to cope with the problems of the day. But their works are in fact imaginative, and they deserve the consideration that genuine art re­ quires. Their inadequacies as writers result, I would argue, from the same kind of imaginative lapses that mar the work of the great novelists. The adequacy of their analyses and of their responses to the difficulties of their time de­ pended on their capacity to face the tensions directly, to recognize their own powerful need and will to reestablish the lost order, and, in particular, to remain open to experi­ ence. If the emphasis in this book tends to be on their failures, its very existence implies the initial assumption that they were nonetheless great writers. Their failures are a clue to their successes; and might be seen, as well, as a clue to the peculiar qualities of Victorian literature in general and of the novel in particular. The juxtaposition of Carlyle, Macaulay, and Newman, though ostensibly strange, makes a good deal of sense. In their own ways they exercised enormous influence over public taste and over the dominant ideas of at least the literary culture of England for over a generation. Macaulay, to be sure, was neither an original or influential thinker; but he found a way to turn the reigning attitudes of middle class culture—its pride in country, in the products of its ingenuity, in its moderate domestic virtues, in its con­ stitution—into art. His style became the central mode of journalism and his collected essays remained one of the most popular books of the century. DifiFerent though he was from Carlyle and Newman, whose attitudes he would have dismissed as irrational enthusiasm, obfuscation, or hypoc­ risy, he nevertheless shared with them—as I shall try to demonstrate—certain preoccupations of the kind I have al-

INTRODUCTION

ready alluded to. Fundamentally, he was a conservative who cherished the traditions of order and stability he found in English politics even while he tried mildly to revise some of them. In his very popularity, in his insistence on common sense, he is, however, probably much more repre­ sentative of public taste than either Carlyle or Newman. He sustained his conservatism without asking the crucial questions about tradition which led both Carlyle and New­ man to their attempts to reformulate it. His particular charm and particular skill was in giving the impression of mo­ dernity while remaining essentially old-fashioned and ap­ pealing to well-established attitudes. The tensions between past and present, between secularism and a religious atti­ tude toward the world, between romance and realism, though present in his works and ostensibly resolved, are in fact skirted. His lucidity was achieved by failing to attend sufficiently to the complexities of human experience and perhaps by failing to make a genuine commitment, even to ambivalence. In this respect he makes a perfect foil to both Carlyle and Newman, whose attitudes and styles were genuinely formative and original because each had to find a new way to come to terms with the essentially new experience of the nineteenth century. Carlyle's importance can hardly be overestimated. His influence extends visibly from Dick­ ens and Ruskin to William Morris. In Sartor Resartus he established the pattern of the personal confrontation of the spiritual malaise of the century. His works in general form a primer of attitudes which were to become essential to social criticism down to the end of the century even while some of the people who inherited the attitudes rejected the man and his own extreme formulations of them. Carlyle attempted to shape a spiritual view of the world compatible with the new knowledge, and his essential value as a writer lies in his continuing reverence for the individual in spite of his blanket denunciations of society as a whole. In a way, Carlyle became a victim of his own rhetoric and his own commitment. His radical analyses of society were in the service of an essentially conservative impulse—a desire to

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

find again the stability and order of the world of Jocelin of Brakelond—which ultimately fell completely out of har­ mony with the spirit of his age. Unlike Newman, he could not rest in the peace of per­ sonal salvation because he could not accept the kind of personal salvation that Newman sought. Newman repre­ sents the other extreme of conserving Victorian attitudes. He was unwilling to sacrifice the traditions he inherited; rather his efforts were what John Stuart Mill would have called Coleridgean—to reexamine the old institutions and rediscover their essential value. When he had accomplished this, he could return happily to the very source of many Western institutions—Roman Catholicism. His influence was intense and crucial, although the nature of his commit­ ments and of his manner made it impossible that it be wide. His tone was personal, his style complex, varied, delicate, responsive to the subtlest nuances. He became for Matthew Arnold a kind of ideal of culture; his influence on Pater has recently been convincingly described.11 His manner of handling the typical Victorian tensions is perhaps the most subtle and to some minds the most successful that we know. And for this reason, if for no other, his presence in this book is justified. The works of the three writers with which this book is concerned do, moreover, merit close literary analysis in their own right. They are as clearly the works of imaginative genius as the masterpieces of the great novelists themselves. As writers of history and autobiography and social analysis their proximity to the writers of nineteenth-century fiction can be seen clearly. Language itself is art, R.G. Collingwood once said. In the hands of Carlyle, Macaulay, and Newman—at their best—language justifies Collingwood's assertion. 11 See David DeLaura, "Pater and Newman: The Road to the 'Nineties," Victorian Studies, X, 39-69; and "Matthew Arnold and John Henry Newman: The Oxford Sentiment' and The Religion of the Future," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Supplement to VI (1965), 571-702.

CHAPTER I

SARTOR RESARTUS AND THE BALANCE OF FICTION IN HIS 1832 essay on "Biography," almost two years before the serial publication of Sartor Resartus, Carlyle made one of his most famous attacks on fiction. Or rather, the author of Aesthetische Springwurzeln, Gottfried Sauerteig, made the attack: "Fiction," says Sauerteig, "while the feigner of it knows that he is feigning, partakes, more than we suspect, of the nature of lying."1 It is no accident that Carlyle placed these anti-fictional remarks in the mouth of a fictional character. His own attitude toward fiction was essentially ambiguous. His early readers, had they known that Sauer­ teig was a fiction, would have sensed the ambiguity. Although he turned increasingly through the years away from fiction, Carlyle never could entirely repudiate it. Some kinds of fictional devices, he thought, could safely be used without perverting the truth.2 Many writers have noted 1 "Biography," Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Centenary Edi­ tion (London, 1899), III, 49. All references to Carlyle's works, unless otherwise noted, will be to the Centenary Edition. 2 For complete discussions of Carlyle's attitudes toward fiction see Hill Shine, Carlyle's Fusion of Poetry, History, and Religion by 1834 (Chapel Hill, 1938); and Carlisle Moore, "Thomas Carlyle and Fic­ tion: 1822-1834," in Nineteenth Century Studies, ed. Herbert Davis, William C. DeVane, and R.C. Bald (Ithaca, 1940). I am particularly indebted to the latter, a remarkable and thorough study of Carlyle's uses of fiction up through Sartor. Moore quotes a letter of Carlyle to Mill which is relevant here: . . . yet there is a kind of Fiction which is not Falsehood, and has more effect in addressing men than many a Radical is aware of. This has struck me much of late years in considering Blackwood and Fraser·, both these are furnished as it were with a kind of

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

that Carlyle used fictional characters for the expression of his most radical ideas in order to protect himself from the public disapproval he expected.3 But this could hardly be the whole reason for his using Sauerteig in 1832 as the mouthpiece of his rejection of fiction. Fictions operate throughout his works in complex and devious ways, and at their best—as in Sartor Resartus—they are an extremely im­ portant part of Carlyle's full meaning. Like many other Victorians, Carlyle seems to have found that certain things could only be said through indirection and could best be expressed, therefore, through fiction. This need for indirec­ tion seems to me one of the most interesting phenomena of the Victorian experience; and one might be able to make some headway in explaining it by working out why (even to the end of his career, when his various disguises were well known) fictional devices were so attractive to Carlyle. Sartor Resartus, the book in which his fictions operate most persuasively and most successfully, though always regarded as one of the primary texts for tracing the shift from Romanticism to Victorianism, is only now beginning to receive the kind of attention it deserves as a work of theatrical costume, with orchestra and stage-lights, and thereby alone have a wonderful advantage, (p. 174) See Carlyle's Letters to Mill, Sterling, and Browning, ed. Alexander Carlyle (London, 1923), p. 93. For a clear sense of the difference between Carlyle in 1832 and Carlyle at the end of his career, see his undisguised statement about fiction as 'lying" in Shooting Niagara (V, 25). 3 See, for one famous example, R.W. Emerson, "Thomas Carlyle," in Natural History of Intellect and Other Tapers, Fireside Edition (Bos­ ton, 1909), p. 246: these fictional characters are "his expedient for expressing those unproven opinions which he entertains but will not endorse"; he summons "one of his men of straw from the cell,—and the respectable Sauerteig, or Teufelsdrockh, or Dryasdust, or Pictur­ esque Traveller, says what is put into his mouth, and disappears." Carlyle's own commentary confirms the view that the fictions may serve as protection. Writing to his brother about the state of his "Thoughts on Clothes," he says, "I fear perfect anonymity is now out of the question; however, swear every one to secrecy, for I mean to speak fearlessly if at all." (Letters of Thomas Carlyle: 1826-1836, ed. Charles Eliot Norton [London, 1889], p. 183)

SARTOR RESARTUS

art.4

If Carlyle had achieved, at the period of the writing of Sartor, a broader tolerance than he was ever again to have,6 he sustained it in that book by means of art. The art which went into the creation and manipulation of fic­ tions allowed him a richness of vision not yet impoverished by what appeared in his later years to be a myopic and often brutal secular Calvinism. Thus, although it may ap­ pear that for most of his writing life Carlyle merely repeated what he had already said in Sartor, the sheer literary bril­ liance of that book belies that notion. The manner pro­ foundly affects the matter so that in it ideas which emerge later, as in the Latter-Day Pamphlets and Shooting Niagara, bitterly interfused with Carlyle's increasing self-deception, need to be taken seriously. Sartor Resartus is, in fact, a work of fiction, although it can only be regarded as a novel in a very special sense. Until the appearance of G. B. Tennyson's book, considera­ tion of Sartor as a novel had almost inevitably led to mis­ reading. Mr. Tennyson rightly argues, however, that if we accept a minimal definition of "novel" as "an extended piece of prose fiction," there is nothing to hinder acceptance of Sartor as a novel, especially as Carlyle himself called it a "Didactic novel." Lying behind the refusal of readers to 4Morse Peckham, in his Beyond the Tragic Vision (New York, 1962), does begin his discussion of Sartor with a firm assertion of its value: "In style and thought Sartor Resartus is one of the most difficult books in English; it is also one of the most moving and beautiful" (p. 177). He goes on, however, to treat the book largely as a further development of romantic attitudes and, therefore, confines himself almost exclusively to its substance. Leonard Deen's "Irrational Form in Sartor Resartus," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, V (1956), 438-51, does attempt an interesting literary analysis. But since the completion and publication of an earlier version of this chapter, an excellent and important study to which I am much indebted has appeared: G.B. Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus: The Genesis, Structure, and Style of Thomas Carlyle's First Major Work (Princeton, 1965). This book certainly stands now as the best and most complete reading of Sartor. Its line of approach, however, is in many respects different from my own, and although Mr. Tennyson and I agree in many of our conclusions, we differ on some important problems. 5 For a discussion of Carlyle's "tolerance," see Hill Shine, pp. 29-32.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

accept Sartor as a novel is, Mr. Tennyson acutely perceives, "the tradition of the English realistic novel." He points out that "The real obstacle to seeing Sartor as a novel is, paradoxically, that portion of the book that critics have been willing to call a novel even while dispensing with the rest—Book Two."6 Early readers were able to delude themselves into thinking that Blumine had been so richly drawn that she was recognizable as a distinct human figure, worthy to join the ranks of the great romantic heroines of English literature.7 She is, however, barely a shadow. The point surely is, as Mr. Tennyson argues, that any attempt to see Sartor as a work fitting within the dominant tradition of the English novel, realistic, full of extensive characteriza­ tion, governed by a plot which issues in a satisfying de­ nouement, will inevitably fail. Sartor is a fiction whose form is not governed by the demands of either plot or character development. It is not concerned with verisimilitude, or with the construction of social modes or manners. Rather it is controlled thematically and by means of symbols and images; it is concerned exclusively with subjective states; and its aim is largely satirical and therefore didactic. I pre­ fer, therefore, in order to avoid the confusion that the word "novel" when used in this way inevitably brings with it, to 6 Tennyson, p. 174. Mr. Tennyson's whole discussion of Sartor's relation to the novel is relevant here (see Tennyson, pp. 173-85). A sure sign of how little precisely the word "novel" means is that although Mr. Tennyson argues vehemently that Sartor is a novel and I would argue that it is not, we agree on almost every point relating to how the Action affects the interpretation. Indeed, I would argue that Mr. Tennyson's insistence that Sartor is a novel is one of the most useful aspects of his book. Morse Peckham calls Sartor a novel, but such a novel as had never been written before. John Lindberg, in "The Artistic Unity of Sartor Resartus," VNL, No. 17 (1959), pp. 20-23, makes an elaborate argument that it is a novel, but bases the argument on the idea that on the whole, it is a biography—an idea that Mr. Tennyson and I both reject (see Tennyson, p. 188n). See also Daniel Deneau, "The Relationship of Style and Device in Sartor Resartus," VNL, No. 17 (1959). 7 I n t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n t o h i s p i o n e e r i n g e d i t i o n o f Sartor (Boston, 1896), Archibald MacMechan argues that "Blumine is fit to take her place among the Shining Ones of our literature, by the side of the Juliets and the Di Vernons" (p. xxxv).

SARTOR RESARTUS

consider Sartor as a fiction belonging to the complex class of "confession-anatomy-romance."8 Carlyle's incapacity as a novelist has been thoroughly demonstrated, and even the briefest glance at his abortive attempt at a novel, Wotton Reinfred, will confirm the view that it is of interest "if for no other reason . . . as evidence of Carlyle's entire unfitness for the writing of fiction."9 Nevertheless, the success of Sartor is largely the result of its fictions. I shall try to show that this suggests how power­ ful were the forces which went to the making of the novel as the supreme Victorian art (and which turned poetry so largely to the dramatic monologue and long narrative). These forces increasingly (though never entirely) lost their power with Carlyle, and for this reason Sartors success can help explain Carlyle's later failures; it can also throw light on certain special but universal kinds of failure in Victorian art. The usual criticisms of much Victorian fiction are that it is prudish or sentimental or pompously moralistic; each of these charges assumes that the novel ought to be faithful to ordinary experience and widely tolerant of it, and to re­ main sufficiently open to the harshness of reality not to be distorted by need or will. In almost every case I think it can be seen that these are Victorian assumptions as well; 8 I am using here the valuable distinctions worked out by Northrop Frye. See his Anatomy of Criticism, esp. pp. 303-14. Crudely sum­ marized, his views on the three "genres" are as follows: Romance deals with "stylized figures which expand into psychological arche­ types," and therefore "often radiates a glow of subjective intensity" and carries "a suggestion of allegory." "The romancer deals with indi­ viduality, with characters in vacuo idealized by revery, and, however conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable is likely to keep breaking out of his pages." Confession usually evinces "some theoretical and intellectual interest in religion, politics, or art," and like the romance is introverted and personal (though more intellectualized). The anatomy is a satire which "deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes," and has a tendency to be fantastic and moral. In his specific mention of Sartor, Frye calls it only a confession-anatomy, but according to his own definition it also has many elements of "romance," which is undoubtedly the ur-form of the Teufelsdrockh biography. 9 William Savage Johnson, Thomas Carlyle: A Study of His Literary Apprenticeship, 1814-1831 (New Haven, 1911), p. 77.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

and when the great Victorian novelists fail it is usually because they are unequal to their own assumptions. We can see through the example of Carlyle how fiction tended to open experience, not close it; to increase tolerance, not diminish it; to transcend moral conventions, not succumb to them. To reach these rather large conclusions, it will be neces­ sary to show, first, that the writing of Sartor occurred at that point in Carlyle's life when he was most fully equipped to write a novel; second, that his temperament and intellec­ tual position nevertheless operated for the most part against his writing fiction; and third, that temperament and in­ tellectual position notwithstanding, fiction was inescapably his best tool for handling the problems which became the unhappy property of almost all the early Victorians and which, unresolved but modified, remain ours.

I Carlyle's intellectual and spiritual development up to the writing of Sartor Resartus has been thoroughly studied by an army of scholars from his day to ours, and needs little rehearsing here.10 Their researches show that in the years roughly from 1830 to 1833 he had achieved what was for him a unique flexibility and enthusiasm.11 The period is roughly defined on the one side by his comment in his Note Books in 1830 that he was "almost done with the Ger10 Among the most valuable studies are R.S. Craig, The Making of Carlyle: An Experiment in Biographical Explication (London, 1908); Johnson; Louis Cazamian, Carlyle, trans. E.K. Brown (New York, 1932); Shine; and especially, C.F. Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought: 1819-1834 (New Haven, 1934); "The Nature of Carlyle's Calvinism," SP, XXXIII (1936), 475-86, and "The Mystical Element in Carlyle (1827-34)," MP, XXIX (1932), 459-75; and Carlisle Moore, "Sartor Resartus and the Problem of Carlyle's 'Conversion,'" PMLA, LXX (1955), 662-81, and "The Persistence of Carlyle's 'Ever­ lasting Yea,"' MP, LIV (1957), 187-96. Tennyson's discussion of Carlyle's literary development and some of the sources of his special kind of art is the best of its kind (see ch. n, 66-125). 11 See C.F. Harrold's edition of Sartor Resartus (New York, 1937), pp. lxi-Ixii. All references to Sartor will be to this edition.

SARTOR RESARTUS

mans,"12

and on the other by the beginning of serial pub­ lication of Sartor in Fraser's in October 1833. The Note Books entries for 1830 begin to suggest a man who is form­ ing his own ideas and needing to give them public ex­ pression.13 His "Signs of the Times" (1829) was itself a symptom of that need, which was also expressed in the passage which announces his being "done with the Ger­ mans": "Having seized their opinions," he says, "I must turn me to inquire how true are they? The truth is in them, no lover of Truth will doubt: but how much? And after all, one needs an intellectual Scheme (or ground plan of the Uni­ verse) drawn with one's own instruments" (my italics). Though at the age of thirty-five he still had no satisfactory "ground plan of the Universe," though his journals and letters frequently suggest gloominess, and though he had endured a long apprenticeship of poverty and disappoint­ ment, this was for Carlyle essentially a period of optimism. The later bitterness and disillusion had not made themselves felt. Both "Signs of the Times" and "Characteristics" (writ­ ten after the first draft of Sartor and published in 1831) conclude with strong affirmations. The conclusion of "Char­ acteristics," for example, though it recalls the image of the "night battle" so prominent in Victorian literature, projects not the faintest hint of melancholy.14 Despite the ignorance 12 Two Note Books of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (New York, 1898), p. 150. 13 Whereas much of the journal before 1830 was taken up with quotations from his reading and queries to himself about the meaning of the ideas which were impressing him, the entries for 1830 reveal a conscious effort to shape his own ideas, and many of the entries were incorporated into Sartor. Harrold's edition of Sartor carefully notes the relation between it and the Note Books. See esp. Note Books, pp. 160-66. 14 "Here on Earth we are Soldiers, fighting in a foreign land; that understand not the plan of the campaign, and have no need to under­ stand it; seeing well what is at our hand to be done. Let us do it like Soldiers; with submission, with courage, with a heroic joy. "What­ soever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.' Behind us, behind each one of us, lie Six Thousand Years of human effort, human conquest: before us is the boundless Time, with its as yet uncreated and unconquered Continents and Eldorados, which we, even we, have

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

of Carlyle's armies, the darkness is merely physical and the night-stars are sufficient guides for them. This conclusion parallels the strange disappearance of Teufelsdrockh at the end of Sartor. Variously assumed to be in France or Eng­ land, he is obviously fomenting the great social revolutions which will announce the Palingenesie—the rebirth—of society. This optimism, one might suppose, is the condition of Teufelsdrockh's "Everlasting Yea," a condition which CarIyle achieved only about the time he began to write Sartor itself.15 However much more complex and less grandly affirmative might have been Carlyle's own experience than that he describes befalling Teufelsdrockh, such an experi­ ence entailed dangers similar to those which confronted the earlier Romantics who relied heavily on sudden perceptions of the infinite. Later in the same crucial passage already quoted from the Note Books—a passage which may even correspond to his experience of the "Yea"—Carlyle remarks: I think I have got rid of Materialism: Matter no longer seems to me so ancient, so unsubduable, so certain and palpable as Mind. I am Mind: whether matter or not I know not—and care not.—Mighty glimpses into the spiri­ tual Universe I have sometimes had (about the true nature of Religion, the possibility, after all, of "super­ natural" (really natural) influences &c. &c.: would they could but stay with me, and ripen into a perfect view! (p. 151) These "Mighty glimpses" were not to stay with Carlyle any more than Wordsworth's "visionary gleams" stayed with him. They became, however, the foundation of his dogma, to conquer, to create; and from the bosom of Eternity there shine for us celestial guiding stars. 'My inheritance how wide and fair! Time is my fair seed-field, of Time I'm heir.' " (Essays, III, 43) 15 This point is argued convincingly in Moore, "The Problem of Carlyle's 'Conversion.'"

SARTOR RESARTUS

and all he had to fend off the crushing materialism and stupidity he saw around him. The "glimpses," indeed, hardened, and increased Carlyle's already powerful sense of his own superiority (a function, perhaps, of his equally powerful self-doubt). There is, moreover, considerable doubt about the authen­ ticity of Carlyle's religion and particularly of his mysticism. G.B. Tennyson has recently argued that in a very real sense Carlyle was a mystic; that his rejection of "Materialism" was so complete that he really did find the tangible world unreal, or real only as it was a manifestation of the ideal, that is, the truly Real world. Much of the argument is convincing, and it is crucial for an interpretation not only of Sartor but of Carlyle's entire oeuvre. The burden of the argument as it affects Sartor is that unlike the secular religionists of the nineteenth century and after, Carlyle looked for no earthly paradise, that the essence of the "message" of Sartor is the insistence on personal rebirth. As Carlyle said at the end of his "Signs of the Times," "To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will under­ take; and all but foolish men know that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself (Essays, II, 82). Undoubtedly, this is what Carlyle believed, and undoubtedly, his view of the world was essentially religious. But his contemporaries were not alone in feeling that a profound social impulse lay behind his work or in recogniz­ ing in the Teufelsdrockh of Sartor Resartus a prophet de­ manding a moral and social as well as a religious revolu­ tion. The great virtue of Sartor, as I shall argue at length later, is that the impulse to social reform does not in the work get the upper hand, but remains in a state of balance with the religious impulse. Mr. Tennyson concedes that Book Three "seems to promise some . . . apotheosis of mankind," but he dismisses this by saying that it indicates Carlyle "may have been more a 'Son of Time' than he realized" (Tennyson, p. 325). This, however, is surely the point. The book's ideas are

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

not (nor were they meant to be) altogether coherent, logi­ cally or theologically. Its profound concern for the moral and religious state of each individual man is as much social as religious. If one aim of the book is to reenact the way to belief, the other is to suggest the possibility of a way to earthly reform. That is the great virtue of the whole meta­ phor of clothes. On the one hand it brings home the reality of the "idea" beneath the garments, on the other it empha­ sizes the need for a retailoring of the garments themselves. All of Carlyle's work testifies to the fact that it is the im­ possibility of the present state of society that drives him to finding a new belief. If he knew the impossibility of the earthly paradise and recognized, like Dickens and the other great writers of his time, that true reform could only be within the self, he sought also (and for a while believed in) the possibility of what Mr. Tennyson calls "a moral new birth in the social order, the recognition of a true aris­ tocracy and new clothes for old truths" (p. 326). The danger of the later developments in Carlyle's hero-worship lay pre­ cisely in the fact that whatever the religious elements in his belief, Carlyle did seek for a hero in the here and now who would force upon society the rebirth from which it seemed deliberately to have turned.16 What happened seems 16 The authenticity of Carlyle's spiritual insight and faith was most widely questioned during the period when he was being associated with Fascism. See H.J.C. Grierson, "Carlyle and Hitler," Essays and Addresses (London, 1940); and Eric Bentley, A Century of HeroWorship (Boston, 1957). Bentley, the first version of whose book was published in 1947 as The Cult of the Superman, calls Carlyle's views Supernatural Naturalism. In his essay on "The Mystical Element in Carlyle," Harrold makes no claims for Carlyle having had authentic mystical experiences, but rather analyzes the elements in Carlyle's thought which are akin to the mystical. Moore, in his essay on Carlyle's "Conversion," treats Carlyle's experience very much in Harrold's terms, but attacks Grierson for denying any positive elements in Carlyle's beliefs. Moore, too, refuses to commit himself on the authen­ ticity of the "experience": "The question . . . has not yet been satis­ factorily answered." I would venture to argue, in the light of his essays, Sartor, and his journals, as well as of some of the letters, that Carlyle was certainly not a mystic, that he accepted the position of Sartor out of deep emotional need, and that the acceptance was as "authentic" as any man's could be. Obviously, one needn't have direct

SARTOR RESARTUS

at least partially to justify the view that the "Everlasting Yea" was "certainly a decided movement toward the certi­ tudes that action requires, but alas, it is also a movement toward the certitudes that develop into dogmas and preju­ dices. The Carlyle of The Everlasting Yea often makes us regret the extinction of the Carlyle of The Centre of In­ difference" (Cazamian, p. 118), Sartor, at any rate, represents Carlyle at his most flexible and undogmatic, and it will be useful for the sake of under­ standing how his fictions work to examine briefly here a few of the points on which his views had not yet hardened into dogma. From the outset of Sartor one discovers a ten­ sion between a commitment to speculative philosophy and a commitment to unself-conscious work. It would be a mis­ take to take the insistence on work as altogether unequivocal despite the argument against speculation in "Characteristics," and despite the fact that much of the irony of Sartor is directed against Germanic high level abstractions. One of the book's central purposes is, after all, to transplant "for­ eign thought into the barren domestic soil" (p. 80). Carlyle himself had just been through years of study of this thought and, despite his temperamental discomfort with it, he needed it to bring him out of the dead end of mechanism.17 Thus, though Teufelsdrockh is concerned to stand outside of time in order to perceive the underlying truth, he also recognizes that time is our "fair seed-field" and urges the necessity of work. The dualism is effectively presented mystical experience of God's presence to believe in it. The Idnd of experience Carlyle most characteristically had was a sudden flash by which he could discover the essential quality of a thing (Nature as the garment of God); in the period of Sartor this experience was intimately connected with the mystically oriented ideas of the Germans he had been reading, and seemed to afiord him those "mighty glimpses" which confirmed his German favorites. 17 Harrold shows in his Carlyle and German Thought how Carlyle used his German sources, and demonstrates that his anti-speculative and Calvinist temperament led him to misunderstand, simplify, or distort their ideas. It is interesting that although Carlyle seems to be much indebted to Kant, "it is certain that he never read the whole of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft." (p. 11 and n.)

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anecdotally and in a way that hints at the possibilities of fiction's contribution to meaning: "Glad would [Teufelsdrockh] have been to sit [in his cluttered garret] philoso­ phising forever, or till the litter, by accumulation, drove him out of doors: but Lieschen [his maid] was his rightarm, and spoon, and necessary of life, and would not be flatly gainsayed" (p. 24). Even in the nature of his commitment to God, Carlyle's position was unsolidified. Obviously, as is demonstrated in his answer to John Sterling's criticisms of Sartor, he was not willing to say anything about God except that one must stand in awe of him: "Wer darf ihn NENNEN?"18 After 1830 Carlyle increasingly moved from the notion of an im­ manent God (with its possibilities for gentleness and open­ ness to experience) to that of a remote and harsh Calvinistic one.19 Both conceptions of God are present in Sartor.20 This indecisiveness of view does not of course mean that Carlyle was seriously out of sympathy with Teufelsdrockh. It is, however, one of many things to suggest that a simple equation of the two would be misleading, especially since the Editor can also be taken as an aspect (more moderate, less sure of himself) of Carlyle. If Carlyle aspired to be a hero, he recognized in himself on occasion no more than the power to be a hero-worshipper. In this sense, Teufelsdrdckh at his best is the man Carlyle aspired to be rather than the man he was. One need only attend to the notions of 18 Letters to Mill, Sterling, and Browning, p. 193; reprinted as an Appendix in Harrold, Sartor Resartus, p. 317. 19 See Harrold, German Thought, pp. 478-79. 20 Note, for example, Teufelsdrocldx's exclamation, who can hinder it; who is there that can clutch into the wheelspokes of Destiny, and say to the Spirit of the Time: Turn back, I command thee—Wiser were it that we yielded to the Inevitable and Inexorable, and accounted even this the best. (p. 235) and compare this, Sweep away the Illusion of Time. . . . Then sawest thou that this fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed that star-domed City of God; that through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams, (p. 264)

SARTOR RESARTUS

Entsagen (Selbst-todtung or self-denial) and of work in opposition to self-consciousness, as they are articulated in Sartor, to recognize this fact. John Sterling argued that CarIyle was a man of "overpowering self-will and self-con­ sciousness."21 These were qualities which Carlyle every­ where explicitly attacked, but they were even at the time of Sartor fundamental to his character. For Paul West, Carlyle was a Byronic man, a man, that is, who felt powerfully the inadequacy of ordinary life and who insisted, therefore, on raising everything to the level of the heroic or the de­ monic. But whereas Byron fulfilled this demand by living intensely, Carlyle "lives through his prose."22 "In fact," says West, "Carlyle's hero-worship, intended to dramatize his pleas for a sensible, human England, is really self-indul­ gence. He wants reformers but also reform made glamorous" (p. 25). This, perhaps, takes the issue too far. It certainly assumes a kind of deliberate deceit and fails to take into account the effects Carlyle sought through his prose. But undoubtedly the prose of Sartor does suggest a real, even conscious tension between self-will and self-denial. The facts of Carlyle's private life seem to demonstrate his curious incapacity to understand that his ability to live abstinently became, when imposed on others, not self-denial but selfassertion. It is in Sartor that this tension is most clearly ex­ plicit and most precisely and dramatically achieved. Where it is conscious it shows Carlyle aware of the possible dangers of his own highly moral position, and his own best critic. Thus, after a moving and "strikingly autobiographical" passage (p. 99nl), the Editor cries out, "Beware, O Teufelsdrockh, of spiritual pride" (p. 100). 21 "Carlyle's Works," London and Westminster Review (American Edition), XXXIII (1839), 5. 22 Paul West, "Carlyle's Creative Disregard," The Melbourne Criti­ cal Review, No. 5 (1962), p. 21. An entry in the Note Books during the Sartor period suggests how close Carlyle was to Byronism: "The quantity of Pain thou feelest is indication of the quantity of Life, of Talent, thou hast: A stone feels no Pain.—('Is that a fact?')" (p. 169). See also C. R. Sanders, "The Byron Closed in Sartor Resartus," Studies in Romanticism, III (1964), 77-108.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

Carlyle s hatred of self-consciousness was also almost cer­ tainly a result of his own suffering from it. Part of what gives Teufelsdrockh his peculiar fascination is his powerful awareness of his own individuality, his Rousseauistic feeling that "I was like no other" (p. 107). And one of the passages that rings truest in the deliberately symbolic and unrealistic description of the romance with Blumine also confirms the power of self-consciousness (this time in its most painful and involuted form) over Carlyle: "Disbelieving all things, the poor youth had never learned to believe in himself. Withdrawn, in proud timidity, within his own fastnesses; solitary from men, yet baited by night-spectres enough, he saw himself, with a sad indignation, constrained to re­ nounce the fairest hopes of existence" (p. 142). This kind of self-doubt would lead naturally, in a man of Carlyle's pride, to a wildness of sarcasm which served as a defense against those "spectres." He never achieved Teufelsdrockh's ultimate control and silence, and he thus could both admire and subtly criticize his hero in Sartor. The balance of that period in Carlyle's life is reflected, moreover, by his attitude toward revolution, power, and that demonic world which lies beneath the thin crust of social and natural order. The grim Puritan terror of that world and an equally Puritanical commitment to the wielders of power turned Carlyle later to writing those works which have permanently alienated him from the twentieth century, oriented as it tries to be toward democ­ racy and social welfare. However conservative the political philosophy of Sartor may ultimately be, it is thoroughly radical in being persistently and forcefully directed against every group which actually held power in Carlyle's world. It reveals no awed reverential (and desperate) glance at captains of industry or landed aristocrats. Carlyle's optimism led him to believe in the coming new society, and thus he was not afraid of a "sanscullottist" hero committed to the overthrow of the old regimes. But despite Carlyle's occasional excitement with power in Sartor, it is largely a pacifist book seeking not to put

SARTOR

RESART [7 S

down revolution but to make the world such that the best ends of revolution might be accomplished without blood­ shed. Even the 1832 Reform Bill, as J.A. Froude remarks, did not seem utterly pointless to Carlyle at the time. He thought "it was a genuine effort of honourable men to clear the air of imposture. He had not realised, what life after­ wards taught him, that the work of centuries was not to be accomplished by a single political change, and that the Reform Bill was but a singeing of the dungheap."23 The language is Froude's, but it adequately reflects the kind of bitter disillusion that drove Carlyle from the balance of Sartor Resartus into what seems the almost hysterical re­ sponse of Shooting Niagara to the 1867 Reform Bill. The intensity of the disillusion certainly suggests, by the way, that the activities of Teufelsdrockh, if they were not to bring about an Earthly Paradise in a foreseeable future, were passionately directed at recognizable social reconstruc­ tion. Carlyle's recognition that England was not moving toward that reconstruction led him to turn, almost in de­ spair, to violence and power as the sole possible resolution. But the most violent revolution in Sartor is not social; it is personal. Carlyle carefully qualifies all of Teufelsdrockh's major positions so that his totally anarchic radicalism be­ comes in fact fairly conservative. Thus Teufelsdrockh is not a mere "Adamite," insisting on the return to nature; "the utility of Clothes is altogether apparent to him" (p. 60). Thus Teufelsdrockh, "though a sansculottist, is in practice probably the politest man extant" (p. 238); and thus, though he is "content that old sick Society should be de­ liberately burnt . . . in the faith that she is a Phoenix; and that a new heavenborn young one will rise out of her ashes" (p. 237), he is contemptuous of those who feel the con­ flagration must be rapid and totally destructive before the Phoenix can be reborn (pp. 244-45). The full unqualified violence comes in the language describing Teufelsdrockh's personal rebirth: the "Thought" that strikes him on the Rue 23 Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of His Life: 1795-1835 (London, 1882), II, 132-33.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

Saint Thomas de TEnfer, his reflections on suicide, his con­ frontation with the "thick Hyperborean," particularly his self-contempt: "Art thou nothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe seeking after somewhat to eat; and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee?" (pp. 191-92). In one aspect, Sartor is a dramatization in religious terms of the process by which Carlyle managed to master (though never fully escape) his sense of his own and everybody's evil. The style might be seen as a kind of escape valve for those inner forces he repressed by a continuing series of acts of will. The self-exhortations in his Note Books are not laughable or pretentious.24 His sense of the powers which lay beneath consciousness, though it pointed to later developments in the direction of tyranny, at this stage in Carlyle's career led rather toward humane and tolerant treatment of others. He knew that he could not be judged adequately on the basis of his actions and did not want to judge others on that basis. Morality is not, as he says in the next entry, "an object of consciousness" (p. 229). But man must by sheer force of will repress those inscrutable 2i In all solemnity on 29 December 1830 he writes, "the horrible feeling is when I cease my own struggle, lose the consciousness of my own strength, and become positively quite worldly and wicked" (p. 181). A more interesting self-revelatory note, although not intended to be about himself, comes in the journal for 17 November 1831: As it is but a small portion of our Thinking that we can articulate into Thoughts, so again it is but a small portion, properly only the outer surface of our morality that we can shape into Action, or into express Rules of Action. Remark farther that it is but the correct coherent shaping of it, and nowise the moral Force which shaped it, which lies under it, vague, indefinite, unseen, that constitutes what in common speech we call a moral conduct or an immoral. Hence too the necessity of tolerance, of insight, in judging of men. For the correctness of that same outer surface may be out of all proportion to the inward depth and quantity; nay often enough they are in inverse proportion; only in some highly favoured indi­ viduals can the great endowment utter itself without irregularity. Thus in great men, with whom inward and as it were latent morality must ever be the root and beginning of greatness, how often do we find a conduct defaced by many a moral impropriety. (p. 228)

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impulses toward evil and self-assertion. By an act of will (arrived at, it is true, by something like a mystically passive experience) Teufelsdrockh controls the satanic powers with­ in him. His revolutionary triumph over the evil within him is the most complete expression of Carlyle's rather narrow version of Goethe's self-culture (Bildung). Only when he is completely engaged in this exhausting exercise of will, un­ responsive to ilie qualities of man which make it necessary, or unalert to the dangers of the extravagance of his prose, does Carlyle's rhetoric ring false—and this is the condition of much of his later work. At the time, then, of the writing of Sartor, Carlyle's posi­ tion was particularly well-suited for his art, and one can find in his 1829 essay, "Signs of the Times," what Raymond Williams calls a "genuine balance as well as a fine, and now rare, unity of insight and determination."25 Aware of the brutality of his times, Carlyle held firmly to a faith in both the dignity of man and the ultimate triumph of justice. Fresh from a reading of the Germans, he held their notions on the scales: their reverence for art balanced his natural Calvinist antipathy toward it; their insistence on knowing and on the dispassionate pursuit of truth balanced his pas­ sion for working and for the determined exercise of will; their immanentism balanced against the remoteness and harshness of his Calvinist God. One writer has said that when Carlyle "thinks he is saving the world he is trying to save himself,"26 but the fears which were to convert his sermons and exhortations into what seems to modern ears so much like rant were, with the help of the Germans, still under control. He was, in short, still young enough and close enough to the initial religious experience of affirma­ tion to work out in Sartor what may seem the characteris­ tically Carlylean position, but to do it with a flexibility and tolerance which, his will hardened by fear and disillusion into insensitivity and intolerance, he would soon lose. 25 26

Culture and Society (Garden City, N.Y., I960), p. 82. Holbrook Jackson, Dreamers of Dreams (New York, n.d.), p. 73.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

II But the fact that Carlyle was ready in 1830 to produce something of his own and that his ideas and feelings had arrived at what was close to a fine state of balance is not suflScient indication that he would turn to fiction for selfexpression. Indeed, almost everything in his literary history prior to 1830 and many of the very ideas developed in Sartor suggest that fiction was the very last mode he should have used.27 Carlyle should have been what he essentially was—a preacher. That he turned to a kind of fiction is there­ fore significant, but the full significance cannot be under­ stood without first attempting to understand the powerful anti-fictional forces operating on him. The most obvious though not necessarily the most im­ portant force was Carlyle's incurable tendency to moralize and preach. This tendency and its usual effects on art are widely enough known not to require comment. It is useful to note, however, that for a while Carlyle was attracted by the Germans into contemplating the possibility that art is higher than religion. But his brief ruminations on this possi­ bility in the Note Books show that he considered it only on the good Romantic grounds that art is more moral than religion. His view here is perhaps not far from Matthew Arnold's that art represents the "best that has been thought and said," but it is a long way from the late Victorian ele­ vation of art over life.28 Like religion, Carlyle speculated, 27 His three direct excursions into fiction were "Cruthers and John­ son," written quite early (probably 1822), published in Eraser's in January 1831, and reprinted in Essays, V, 160-98; "Illudo Chartis," a fragment of a novel, probably written in 1825-26, discovered and published by Marjorie P. King in her " 'Illudo Chartis': An Initial Study in Carlyle's Mode of Composition," Modem Language Review, XLIX (1954), 164-75; and Wotton Reinfred, a novel Carlyle never finished and which he claimed to have burned, written in 1826 and unpublished until it appeared in The Last Words of Thomas Carlyle (London, 1892). Carlisle Moore has made an extensive study of "Cruthers and Johnson" and Wotton Reinfred in his "Thomas Carlyle and Fiction." Tennyson, pp. 45-60, considers all the fiction. 28 There is, however, in his essay on "The State of German Litera-

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art's function is to inculcate the "quite infinite difference" between Good and Evil but, unlike religion, "without hos­ tility, with peacefulness; like the difference of two Poles which cannot coalesce, yet do not quarrel, nay should not quarrel for both are essential to the whole" (p. 204). But even here he regarded such a view as "Sehr einseitig!" And although he did on occasion worry about his "art," and he described Sartor as "not Art," but his "closest approach to art thus far" (Note Books, p. 183), art for him was increas­ ingly not fiction. Even before his views on fiction began to harden into Sauerteig's, he went to it not so much for the fiction but for the moral truth which it bodied forth.29 Thus, while he was translating Wilhelm Meister he had grave doubts about its worth, and the parts that impressed him particularly, and that stayed with him, were usually wrenched out of context and almost always aphoristic and moralizing in nature.30 Although a moralistic impulse need not always be damag­ ing to fiction, some varieties of that impulse inevitably are, as, for instance, the belief that all fiction is lying. But this view, though latent in Carlyle from the start, was still in 1830 only potential, not actual. The damage caused by certure," a statement astonishingly like those one associates with the Art-for-art's-sake position: Art is to be loved, not because of its effects, but because of itself; not because it is useful for spiritual pleasure, or even for moral culture, but because it is Art, and the highest in man, and the soul of all Beauty. (Essays, I, 56) The passage goes on in a similar vein, but it is clear that Carlyle was merely experimenting with these notions and that even by the time of Sartor he had passed them by. 29 There is, of course, much evidence that he read fiction eagerly while young, but his Calvinist impulses constantly operated, as he grew older, to alienate him from fiction. For a detailed discussion of this development see Moore, "Carlyle and Fiction," esp. pp. 132-35. 30 For detailed discussions of his use of Wilhelm Meister see Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought, esp. p. 207; Susanne Howe, Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen (New York, 1930), pp. 82-125; Olga Marx, Carlyle's Translation of Wilhelm Meister (Balti­ more, 1925). The last though the least useful does suggest how in his translation Carlyle reinforced his biases.

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tain specifically religious forms of the moral impulse is more important for a study of fiction in Sartor Resartus. Carlyle was not only intent on preaching the doctrines of work, resignation, and faith, but, as a means to that end, on proving the ultimate unreality of the physical world. He did not, as I have already suggested, minimize the im­ portance of action, good government, or satisfaction of basic physical needs. One of his favorite quotations from Wilhelm Meister is Lothario's discovery quoted in Sartor, "'America is here or nowhere'? The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual" (p. 196). But the faith Carlyle was working out for himself entailed the belief that where man finds himself is a physical acci­ dent, and that what matters is the underlying spiritual reality. This view tends to a kind of reductivism in that it reduces the great variety of physical appearances into a single spiritual reality and transforms all physical reality into a dream (his favorite passage from Shakespeare was always, "We are such stuff/As dreams are made of [sic], and our little Life/Is rounded with a sleep!" (Sartor, p. 267) The famous vividness of Carlyle's prose is almost al­ ways, if one examines it closely, not the vividness of care­ fully realized particulars but of flamboyant language, mini­ mizing the thing itself for the emotional response to the thing. The novelistic insistence on the importance of the ordinary real has little place in his work, because the ordinary real matters in Carlyle only as it is symbolic of the extraordinary "supernatural." Even in the French Revolu­ tion, for example, where Carlyle gets some of his most powerful effects by suggesting the continuity of ordinary life under the holocaust, ordinary life in such a context seems absolutely extraordinary. The direction of this vision is poetic or satirical—it can have wonderful effects, as in the unforgettable vision of the naked House of Lords. But it is out of sympathy with the whole tradition of circum­ stantial realism in the English novel from Defoe to Scott, a tradition based on belief in the intrinsic worth of ordinary

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life—as ordinary life—and on a minute description of manners.31 Carlyle's respect for "Facts" was of a special, perhaps mystical, kind which is also essentially unnovelistic. He saw each fact as a meeting ground of infinite space and infinite time. But the novel employs "facts" prodigally, without ap­ parent immediate purpose, because they help to establish the density of background necessary for the desired veri­ similitude. And these facts have to take priority over any direct moral purposes; they imply an openness to experi­ ence which will at least appear to keep the author's hand off the scales. In the first place, Carlyle had no feeling at all for fictional "facts," that is, merely imagined ones;32 and in the second, however prodigally he may himself have used facts, he usually slipped them immediately within his moral framework.33 Another element of Carlyle's anti-fictional tendencies is expressed in his 1830 essay "On History": The most gifted man can observe, still more can record, only the series of his own impressions: his observation, 31 For the most thorough and useful study of the realistic tradition in the novel, see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel. Watt traces the connections between the novel as an art form and "realistic" philoso­ phy and the rise of the middle class. He shows that in the develop­ ment of their prose styles Defoe and Richardson had to pay the price of occasional awkwardness and prolixity for the sake of "achieving the immediacy and closeness of the text to what is being described" (p. 29). See Tennyson, p. 189: "if there is one thing Teufelsdrockh's biography is not, that thing is realistic." 32 See Moore, "Carlyle and Fiction," p. 148. 33 Paul West remarks that Carlyle's prose is oversaturated with facts which, in the long run, do not make things more precise, but rather leave them unsettled (p. 20). Grace Calder has argued con­ vincingly in The Writing of Past and Present (New Haven, 1949), that Carlyle does not manipulate or distort the facts he gets from history but presents them faithfully: "though he adds to Jocelin's narrative moral warnings for the behoof of his contemporaries, he does not alter the content of the historical picture as given by Jocelin" (p. 31). Nevertheless, the facts do fit Carlyle's preconceptions about heroism, and the full force of the narrative depends on the heroism. This reinforces a point I make later, that Carlyle's turn to history from fiction was, for temperamental and philosophical reasons, not so much a flight to fact as from the responsibility of invention.

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therefore, to say nothing of its other imperfections, must be successive, while the things done were often simul­ taneous; the things done were not a series, but a group. It is not in acted, as it is in written History: actual events are nowise so simply related to each other as parent and oifspring are; every single event is the offspring not of one, but of all other events, prior or contemporaneous, and will in its turn combine with all others to give birth to new: it is an ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from in­ numerable elements. (Essays, II, 88) This sense of the incompatibility between man's percep­ tions and the facts of history makes the conventional novel, with its neat plot lines and logical dramatic developments, impossible for Carlyle. Much of the effort of the great Vic­ torian panoramic novels was directed at solving the prob­ lem, and writers were frequently intensely conscious of the artificiality of the ordinary narrative sequence in time. But even such a book as Middlemarch, with all the complexity of its many interrelated plot lines and the richness of its background, still on this view tends to oversimplify. If Car­ lyle had a model in Sartor anywhere in the range of English fiction, it must have been Tristram Shandy, which deliber­ ately foregoes the virtues of the conventional novel in order to play comically (but with considerable serious intent) with time and cause and effect.34 In a way, Carlyle's atti­ tude toward time and the limits of man's possible knowl­ edge about the past, though it was out of harmony with the leading conventions of the Victorian novel, anticipated many late and post-Victorian developments in fiction. With­ in the traditions of the realistic novel, James (adding an especially subtle leavening of romance) later began those experiments with point of view which, theoretically if not actually, absolve the narrator from the overwhelmingly diffisi Outside of English fiction, the greatest influence was in all likeli­ hood the German Marchen, particularly Richter's. See Tennyson, pp. 76-79; 190-93, who discusses the relation of the Marchen to Teufelsdrockh's biography.

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cult responsibility of knowing all; he found a technical means to express the complexities of experience which make it impossible to categorize simply or to string out simply on a narrative line. Conrad's experimentation with the disloca­ tion of the ordinary narrative sequence suggests in another way the idea that "actual events are nowise so simply related as parent and offspring are." Both James and Conrad, more­ over, make extensive use of the symbol which at once com­ presses a good deal of experience that a novelist cannot conveniently narrate and expands the significance of the particular experiences that are narrated. The contemporary "nouvelle vague" attempts to dislocate experience entirely and would have represented to Carlyle a surrender to the difficulties which he thought it was possible—if only by reference to a reality beyond the tangible—to overcome. For his part, he was not directly interested in developing a new form, though a new kind of form inevitably resulted from his desire to express his vision. One of his central problems was to overcome the limitations of narrative. For him "all Narrative is, by its nature, of only one dimension; only travels forward towards one, or towards successive points: Narrative is linear, Action is solid." The tracking of '"causes and effects' . . . through certain handbreadths of years and square miles, when the whole is a broad, deep Immensity, and each atom is 'chained' and complected with all" (Essays, II, 89) is pointless and futile. This being the case (putting aside his distrust of fiction generally and the limitations of his own talents) whatever he wrote would be largely without narrative. And certainly there is a surface vagueness in his treatment of Teufelsdrockh which runs counter to what we expect a novel to be doing. By the device of the six paper bags laden with fragments of Teufelsdrockh's autobiography, he could eschew narrative even when the materials he presented were narrative in form. Conscious that he had to pick and choose among the facts in any case, CarlyIe was careful to let the reader know that he was not pretending to describe the full "cause-and-effect" sequence of his hero's life, but rather

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that he was treating the whole symbolically to help him express the extraordinary complexity of connections and the ultimate miracle of experience. The whole mode is outside the range of the English novel before him and can be com­ pared only to a few idiosyncratic works. Another aspect of Carlyle's artistic manner, the style he devised to match his vision of "solidity" and the underlying sole reality of the spiritual, places him, this time with al­ most no qualification, outside the stream of the novel.35 It is a commonplace that the novel as we think of it had to wait in England for its full development until a sufficiently flexible, nonaristocratic (indeed, middle class), and utili­ tarian language had been developed to allow it to get on with the business of narration and description. This style needed also to avoid forcing the reader to question veri­ similitude or to attend more to the virtuosity of the writer than to the substance. It would be absurd now, of course, to insist on the limits of possibility of prose style in the novel (as twentieth-century experiments demonstrate), but 35 The problem of Carlyle's style is an extremely complex one that has only in the past few years begun to receive the consideration it requires. This is not the place for a full-scale study of Carlylese, but it is important to determine how far the style was merely a rhetoric of deliberately contrived exaggeration, and how far an authentic expression of his vision. Tennyson provides the most detailed analyses and the most just estimate of many aspects of Carlyle's style. He argues convincingly that the style is a precise instrument for the expression of Carlyle's ideas and feelings. The point is similar to Francis X. Roellinger, Jr.'s, made in "The Early Development of Carlyle's Style," PMLA, LXXII (1957), that the style was a function of the vision. Roellinger argues that it is a "doubtful assumption that Carlyle was capable of the style before he was possessed of the ideas and attitudes of Sartor" (p. 937). But without denying the intimacy of the relation of manner and meaning Tennyson shows that Carlyle had used Carlylese before Sartor. Henry James once wrote that Carlyle's "extemporized, empirical style . . . seems to us the very substance of his thought. If the merit of a style lies in complete correspondence with the feeling of the writer, Carlyle's is one of the best. It is not defen­ sible, but it is victorious." See "The Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson," The Century, XXVI (1883), 265-72. Grace Calder's con­ vincing evidence that Carlyle willfully revised in the direction of Carlylese ought to be understood with the qualification she makes near the end of her study, that the first draft is not "ordinary prose: it is as genuinely personal as the Printer's Copy" (p. 197).

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by and large even now one expects from novelistic prose some kind of forward thrust, some kind of vivid attention to the details of the world being described as opposed to the language used to describe it. Carlyle's style, though perhaps not aristocratic, is as incompatible with the novel as we know it as Lyly's. An examination of Carlyle's style will show that it cor­ responds closely to the general notions about experience and the spiritual world outlined above, but also that it cor­ responds to certain fundamental and not always conscious elements in his character. Of course, he partly explained the style through the person of Teufelsdrockh in Sartor itself, defending himself by means of sarcasm and mockery both from others and from his own morbidly self-conscious un­ certainties. The intensity of his irony gives the prose such a prickly surface that it is impossible to move through it without finding one's attention shifting from the thing de­ scribed to the language itself.36 The notorious violence curiously enough slows the movement down, often without the justification of complexity. Instead, one finds frequently mere repetition through example, the use of dazzling vari­ eties of synonyms, or plain redundance. The second para­ graph of Sartor provides a useful example: Our Theory of Gravitation is as good as perfect: La­ grange, it is well known, has proved that the Planetary System, on this scheme, will endure forever; Laplace, still more cunningly, even guesses that it could not have been made on any other scheme. Whereby, at least, our nauti­ cal Logbooks can be better kept; and water-transport of all kinds has grown more commodious. Of Geology and Geognosy we know enough, what with the labours of our Werners and Huttons, what with the ardent genius of their disciples, it has come about that now, to many a Royal Society, the Creation of a World is little more mysterious than the cooking of a dumpling; concerning which last, indeed, there have been minds to whom the 36 See Tennyson's discussion of Carlyle's trick of "foregrounding," p. 118.

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question, Hoto the apples were got in, presented difficul­ ties. Why mention our disquisitions on the Social Contract, on the Standard of Taste, on the Migrations of the Her­ ring? Then, have we not a Doctrine of Rent, a Theory of Value; Philosophies of Language, of History, of Pottery, of Apparitions, of Intoxicating Liquors? Man's whole life and environment have been laid open and elucidated; scarcely a fragment or fibre of his Soul, Body, and Pos­ sessions, but has been probed, dissected, distilled, dessicated, and scientifically decomposed: our spiritual Facul­ ties, of which it appears there are not a few, have their Stewarts, Cousins, Royer Collards; every cellular, vascular, muscular Tissue glories in its Lawrences, Majendies, Bichats. (pp. 3-5) To annotate this passage Harrold requires fourteen foot­ notes. Beginning expansively enough, the pace quickens until it gives the impression of breathlessly futile circular haste. The references range from the most obvious to the most obscure of the scientific, political, and economic theories of the time, violently juxtaposing (with an ironic equation of importance) the notion of the social contract and the problem of the migration of the herring. The pas­ sage suggests a world in chaos, of values gone berserk, of incoherent and unintelligible multifariousness. Through it operates a mocking irony, both in mad juxtapositions and in constant belittling of the knowledge these various theories and theorists pretend to offer: the creation is reduced to the "cooking of a dumpling"; there seems little point (though the Editor does it anyway) in mentioning three or four of the theories; mock surprise is evinced at the fact that "it appears there are not a few" "spiritual Faculties." More­ over, Carlyle seems to feel a kind of pure joy in the sound of language, so that if he mentions "Geology" he must at once mention the more obscure subdivision of that science, "Geognosy." He moves easily from the relatively neutral term "dissected" to what follows for him both in sound and meaning, "dessicated." The whole alliterative series, "dis-

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sected, distilled, dessicated, . . . decomposed," allows CarIyle both linguistic sport and a rhythmical iteration of the notion of death, which is all these theories seem to be leading the world to. This peculiarly Carlylean density suggests immediately how very far from the ideal of novelistic prose he is. Critics have long remarked on the profusion of things to which Carlyle alludes and with which he gives body to his sen­ tences. As G. B. Tennyson says, "it would be hard to imagine a work richer in allusion to concrete everyday things" than Sartor. But, of course, the allusions are not only to ordinary but to unusual things, and they are frequently juxtaposed so as to force us to see them both in a new way. But, to quote Tennyson again, the "things" are not in Sartor "presented as part of the atmosphere of the real world, the backdrop or setting for action; they are not designed to create verisimili­ tude. The things in Sartor arrest our attention because of their presence in an alien atmosphere" (p. 232). The allu­ sions, moreover, function as much to call attention to them­ selves as to the things alluded to. By the simple device of accumulation Carlyle manages to make a comment on his subject, to undercut the importance of (in this case) the extraordinary proliferation of investigations of the physical aspects of the universe. It does not really matter what par­ ticulars Carlyle chooses to use. The response to the particu­ lars is what counts. Thus the clogged allusiveness does not actually make the passage difficult to understand. A reader could move through it satisfactorily without needing to catch more than one or two of the allusions. The larger meaning of the passage is, indeed, not a function of the particular meanings of the words but of the general rhetorical structure. The violence of the movement and rhetoric of the passage is self-enclosed. If Carlyle's style evinces a "wild, passionate energy . . . dis­ orderly and even chaotic, but leaving an indelible impres­ sion of life,"37 it is important not to be deceived into think­ ing that the style is dynamic in the sense of tending toward 37

John HoIIoway, The Victorian Sage, p. 26.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

change. All the energy circles about a still point of spiritual truth and never gets outside the circle. Whatever really moves on the surface of his prose is likely to be regarded contemptuously as ephemeral since all movement is in the physical world and therefore merely an "appearance." In­ stead of movement toward developing meanings there is repetition. The pluralization of the names and the absence of "and" in the final series (Lawrences, Majendies, Bichats) serve to suggest that the passage could go on endlessly. Typically, the passage functions as contrast to Carlyle's real point. It is reductivist in its ironies, and the whole incoherent cluster of theories is juxtaposed against the one theory which could incorporate and make sense of them all. The theory of "the grand Tissue of all Tissues, the only real Tissue, . . . —the vestural Tissue, namely, . . . wherein his whole other Tissues are included and screened, his whole Faculties work, his whole Self lives, moves, and has its being?" (p. 5). Both in style and meaning we have here Carlyle's characteristic position: the elaboration of multi­ fariousness to mere chaos so as to dismiss it more readily for the simple; the dismissal of the many for the one. Any study of the relation of Carlyle's style to fictional nar­ rative will also, however, require examination of a typical narrative passage. Although there are very few genuine scenes in Sartor, almost all of them show marked similarities to non-narrative passages. Here, for example, is Teufelsdrockh's parting from Blumine: 'One morning, he found his Morning-star all dimmed and dusky-red; the fair creature was silent, absent, she seemed to have been weeping. Alas, no longer a Morningstar, but a troublous skyey Portent, announcing that the Doomsday had dawned! She said, in a tremulous voice, They were to meet no more.' The thunderstruck Air-sailor is not wanting to himself in this dread hour: but what avails it? We omit the passionate expostulations, en­ treaties, indignations, since all was vain, and not even an explanation was conceded him; and hasten to the catas-

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trophe. ' "Farewell, then, Madam!" said he, not without sternness, for his stung pride helped him. She put her hand in his, she looked in his face, tears started to her eyes; in wild audacity he clasped her to his bosom; their lips were joined, their two souls, like two dew-drops, rushed into one,—for the first time, and for the last!' Thus was Teufelsdrockh made immortal by a kiss. And then? Why, then—'thick curtains of Night rushed over his soul, as rose the immeasurable Crash of Doom; and through the ruins as of a shivered Universe was he falling, falling, towards the Abyss.' (pp. 145-46) It is instructive, first of all, to examine the passages in Wotton Reinfred to which this is related. Trying there to work within the conventions of the novel, Carlyle succeeded only in being melodramatic, stilted, incredible.38 In Sartor, al­ though the rhetoric is largely similar, we are given no oppor­ tunity to apply such adjectives. The passage is deliberately stilted; its incredibility, insofar as there is sufficient informa­ tion to assert it, is part of the strategy; and the melodrama not only fits into the exaggerated tone of the whole work but renders with ambivalent irony the destructively roman­ tic spiritual condition of Teufelsdrockh at the moment. Fur­ thermore, whereas in Wotton the narrative is direct, in Sartor the reader is at several removes from the action. The Editor recounts Teufelsdrockh's words which recount an experience outgrown. Teufelsdrockh, moreover, is careful to talk about himself and Blumine in the third person, and about the whole incident in such an exaggerated and remote way that the melodrama is seen to be quite deliberate, and grotesquely inflated, and not the result of mere ineptitude. The passage has a serious meaning, of course, but it is—as Teufelsdrockh undercuts himself—comic as well. This passage certainly has more movement than the one earlier quoted. But the scene takes place in such vague circumstances, the reality of the characters is so played 38 See Last Words of Carlyle, pp. 36 and 129. The similarities are noted in Harrold's edition, and MacMechan quotes the relevant passages.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

down, that the movement is not really in the scene itself (which is almost perfunctorily dismissed), but in Teufelsdrockh's fall, which has no real physical referent. Absolutely nothing is visualized or given physical substance.39 Every­ thing is stylized and, as the earlier passage was clogged with proper names, this is clogged with literary allusions. The influence of Werthers parting from Charlotte is con­ firmed by the option given Teufelsdrockh in the next chap­ ter to blow his brains out.40 He is, in Marlowe's words, "made immortal by a kiss." Harrold points out at least two allusions to Richter's Quintus Fixlein, and the last line of the passage is probably indebted to the description of the fall of Satan (der Teufel) in Paradise Lost (cf. I, 11. 45-48), a poem which is drawn on heavily elsewhere in the book. The break-up of an ordinary love affair was obviously not sufficient material for Carlyle's apocalyptic imagination. He therefore attempted to convert it into something grand 89 Cf. West: Carlyle's "sentence is all discipline, emphasis, and spring steel. It has an aloof militant sound, and in fact it gives nothing to the eye. The words are precise, as is their combination; but the final effect is too general" (p. 19). In his historical works Carlyle manages, however, a good deal of pictorial vividness. Much of this vividness is achieved by a ruthless selectivity, and ultimately the effect of the great scenes in The French Revolution is similar to the effects I have described here. But the genre is different, and the style of the History demands a study of its own. 40Werthers farewell from Charlotte, though rather more sensual than Carlyle would have allowed himself to be, is in other respects quite similar to this passage: Her thoughts were confused: she held his hands, pressed them to her bosom; and, turning toward him with the tenderest expres­ sion, her burning cheek touched his. They lost sight of everything. The world vanished before them. He clasped her in his arms tightly, and covered her trembling, stammering lips with furious kisses. 'Werther!' she cried with choking voice, turning away. . . . He did not resist, released her, and threw himself before her. Charlotte rose, and with confusion and grief, trembling between love and resentment, she exclaimed, 'This is the last time, Werther! You shall never see me again!' Then, casting one last, loving glance at the unhappy man, she rushed into the adjoining room and locked the door. . . . [Werther's] hat was afterward found on the point of a rock overhanging the valley; and it is inconceivable how he could have climbed to the summit on such a dark, stormy night without losing his life. (Trans. Victor Lange [New York, 1949], pp. 129-30)

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by leaving out the ordinary (the "expostulations, entreaties, indignations"—the meat and potatoes of the novelist) by borrowing heavily from traditional apocalyptic literature, and by infusing it immediately with meaning not on the surface of the scene at all. Moreover, if we ignore, as we should, the artistically pointless effort of seeking autobio­ graphical allusions here, we can see that the whole concep­ tion is symbolic rather than representational. And in the context of the Marchen-Iike atmosphere of the second book, it is altogether successful. The extraordinary quality of Carlyle's style is that it manages to create so much excitement in the handling of essentially static conceptions. The explanation can be found, I think, in the meaning and manner of almost any paragraph in Sartor, but perhaps an explicit statement will make the point quickly. Here is a representative quotation from Teufelsdrockh: In the Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodi­ ment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By Symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched. He everywhere finds himself encompassed with Symbols, recognised as such or not recognised: the Universe is but one vast Symbol of God; nay if thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a Symbol of God; is not all that he does symbolical; a revelation to Sense of the mystic god-given force that is in him; a "Gospel of Freedom," which he, the "Messias of Nature," preaches, as he can, by act and word? Not a Hut he builds but is the visible embodiment of a Thought; but bears visible record of invisible things; but is, in the transcendental sense, symbolical as well as real. (p. 220) Here again is the circular movement, made to seem all the more circular because the whole paragraph is a reiteration of the central metaphorical idea of the book, that all visible

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

things are bodyings forth of the invisible, that Nature is the living garment of God, and so on. Once again we have the notion, central to Carlyle's whole way of seeing, that there is an underlying, unchanging reality, and that all the variety of nature is traceable to the one and the infinite. But the paragraph gives the impression of genuine movement even as it repeats itself because it attempts in various ways to bring home the reality of the idea, just as nature attempts in its variety to bring home the reality of the underlying invisible God. Once you have said that the "Universe is but one vast Symbol of God," everything else, logically speak­ ing, is repetition. But Carlyle insists on intensifying the shock even of that dramatic statement, and he brings the idea home further by coming down the scale, from the uni­ verse to man. Curiously, it is probably easier to think of the Universe as a symbol of God than to think of oneself— whose reality is too tangible to be symbolic—in that way. And then to increase wonder, Carlyle moves further down the scale, from man to a hut. Here the shock of finding that even the insignificant is symbolic, although the idea is implicit in the first assertion, is even stronger. And here we are brought back most fully to the statement at the start of the passage that a "Symbol" (all things, we have dis­ covered by now, are symbols) is an embodiment of the Infinite (an idea which is itself repeated in another way in the second part of the first sentence). Carlyle's style is of the theme-and-variations kind. The excitement comes from the variety of ways in which the Infinite can manifest itself; the justification for the excitement is that without it the full meaning—though logically comprehensible—would not be genuinely understood.41 41 Those interested in the problem of Carlyle's style should familiar­ ize themselves with Tennyson's arguments, which seem to lead to some conclusions different from my own. Tennyson's analysis is much more extensive and detailed than mine, and he seems to feel that there is a genuinely "dynamic" movement to Carlyle's prose. But much of what he says fits well with my interpretation. Carlyle, he says, "is always tantalizing the reader, leading him on through thicket

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Even when Carlyle was working in the eighteenth-century mode of fiction (as in his short story, "Cruthers and John­ son"), he remained largely abstract and failed, with some exceptions, to handle the details of the narrative movement with much vividness. His efforts in fiction even when most successful tend to be both abstract and static. He worked with moral types who do not move or have any solidity of being. Only in writing history can Carlyle be said to have transcended this limitation, but even the handling of history is symbolic and, in the perspective of a complete work like The French Revolution, static rather than dynamic. The marvelous forward thrust of particular passages grows from Carlyle's fidelity to an action which did, after all, move forward in time. Almost every aspect of Carlyle's style, as it was developed in Sartor, and many elements in his worldview, suggest his incapacity for fiction. This incapacity was demonstrated fully in the early work, and most critics would agree with Moore that Carlyle suffered from a "special inaptitude for fiction" (p. 148). Ill It is therefore doubly significant that when Carlyle used his mature ideas in an independent literary work, he did not altogether abandon fiction; indeed, this form grew naturally out of the idea with which he began (Moore, p. 149). What needs to be considered now is why, for a man of Carlyle's temperament and intellectual outlook, fiction provided the inescapable framework for his ideas. And to answer this question it will be necessary to consider carefully some of the ways in which fiction operates in Sartor.42 and.byway, so that the reader is both participant and pursuer. . . . We are always engaged in a movement forward; we feel that we are progressing to some momentous conclusion" (p. 249). 42 Moore's "Carlyle and Fiction" and Tennyson's 'Sartor' CaUed 'Resartus' do most that needs to be done with analysis of Carlyle's early fictional failures and of the particular variations he plays on the fictional relations between the Editor and Teufelsdrockh. For this

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

It will not do to answer the question simply by pointing to what Moore shows to be one of the few traits which CarIyle did not seem to recognize in himself—the love of hoax­ ing; for this itself requires explanation. Teufelsdrockh made his appearance on the English literary scene over a year before the publication of Sartor, in an essay called "Goethe's Works" (Essays, II, 391), although this essay was written after Sartor was completed. As far back as 1828, in another essay on Goethe, Carlyle had engaged playfully in quoting himself and treating the quotation with critical detach­ ment.43 Indeed, his commentary on himself falls into a style rather similar to later Carlylese, with its unnecessary syn­ onyms, its ironic and defensive self-deprecation. Even in his later more violent works, Carlyle insists on the hoax. So "The Nigger Question" purports to be a talk ("no speaker named") in the handwriting of the so-called "Doctor," properly "Absconded Reporter," Dr. Phelim M'Quirk, whose singu­ lar powers of reporting, and also whose debts, extrava­ gancies and sorrowful insidious finance-operations, now winded-up by a sudden disappearance, to the grief of many poor tradespeople, are making too much noise in the police-offices at present! Of M'Quirk's composition we by no means suppose it to be; but from M'Quirk, as the last traceable source, it comes to us;—offered, in fact, by his respectable unfortunate landlady, desirous to make-up part of her losses in this way. (Essays, IV, 348) reason I do not go into much detail on these points or concentrate as much as would otherwise be necessary on the notion of fiction as defense in Sartor. For details see Moore, esp. pp. 145-52 and p. 151n6. 43 He concludes those comments in this way: "Here, however, we must terminate our pilferings or open robberies, and bring these straggling lucubrations to a close" (I, 252). Moore also calls attention to a fascinating letter to Mill in which Carlyle proposes that he "pawn" the "Diamond Necklace" off "as a translation from the French of Potdevin (that is, pot of wine)." See Letters to Mill, etc., pp. 104-105. For a useful list of Carlyle's early "hoaxes," see D. L. Maulsby, The Growth of Sartor Resarttis (Maiden, Mass., 1899), pp. 30-31, and Tennyson, pp. 121-23.

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The hoax is perpetuated throughout by parenthetical nota­ tions of the audience's response. Once again, the drama­ tization of the response of his audience, the defensive selfconsciousness combined with an implicit sense of his own superiority, and the awareness of his own excesses are all characteristically Carlylean. And they do what little can be done to save that outrageously intolerant performance. Indeed, as a work of art, much might be said for "The Nigger Question." Carlyle's love of hoax was not merely paradoxically and inexplicably inconsistent with his Calvinist views. One can see in Sartor, his most extended hoax, that it relates to the difficulties of a sensitive and intelligent man in coming to terms with his times and working out the means by which he might most effectively communicate to them his sense of truth. Carlyle saw the age as one of crisis and revolution, the long world-historical process engaged in shucking off the husks of the old way. He felt passionately the injustice which allowed for the starving of thousands of workers in a world richer than ever before, an injustice condoned by the "gamekeeping" aristocracy and by respectable, rational­ istic, middle-class theory. Nothing was stable; nothing could be counted on. He had himself just emerged from a kind of crisis which would shortly be seen as typical of the period. Thrown back on his own resources by the disintegra­ tion of the old values under the shock of rational analysis, and finding the Calvinism of his father insupportable with­ out some new intelligent justification, he had worked his way through the Germans to rediscover the eternal verities in a new guise. Under the stress of near poverty and a sense of his own personal inadequacies he had tried to reshape the world by sheer force of will so as to make it meaningful and therefore inhabitable again. But the effort had cost him, as a similar effort had cost his times, dearly. However firmly he believed in the doctrines at which he finally arrived, he had too full a sense of the division of the modern world to expect—although he could not avoid hop­ ing—to succeed in making those doctrines universally ac-

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

ceptable. He could reassert wonder and reverence only by going through a stage which, after the effects of his conver­ sion wore off, came perilously close to reasserting itself— descendentalism; a stage, that is, in which all things, man included, are reduced to trivia in the face of a vast imper­ sonal world process. He could only reassert man's dignity and importance by renouncing the possibility of rationally understanding anything, by insisting on blind activity and the total renunciation of one's own desires. The alternatives to these views, as Teufelsdrockh suggests, are for the sensi­ tive man to "Establish himself in Bedlam; begin writing Satanic Poetry; or blow-out his brains" (p. 146). The times had made self-consciousness inescapable, had created "a fascination with and uncertainty about oneself"44 which reopened all the old fundamental questions—about the re­ lation of man to society, nature, God, and himself. Under these circumstances, Carlyle had shopped about to find an adequate mode of expression. Having failed as both poet and novelist, he had served one of the longest apprenticeships in English literary history. "I never know or can even guess what or who my audience is, or whether I have any audience," he explained to Mill, and thus he wrote Sartor on a "Devil-may-care principle" (Letters to Mill, p. 74). "Caring," in ignorance of what he might expect from his audience, would have been altogether fruitless. He had only two genuine certitudes: that England was danger­ ously close to violent revolution, and that he was obliged to promulgate those doctrines which might save her—and himself. Those doctrines were largely religious in nature. John Sterling, whose biography Carlyle was later to write, described movingly and precisely the position in which CarIyle found himself and how he responded to it: [Luther] could speak out heartily and devoutly in the full confidence of faithful, humble reception from his hearers; but in our days we find the no less fervid utterance of an 44 See Wendell Stacy Johnson, "Victorian Self-Consciousness," VNL, No. 21 (1962), p. 5. This interesting, brief, and general study raises a good many questions worth pursuing.

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equally practical and positive spirit turning back in irony upon himself, and by his tone of caustic rather than poign­ ant self-mockery giving the most peculiar and emphatic expression to all his teaching. Luther's irony, when he does resort to it, is all polemical—a sword to attack. The Englishman's is generally self-repressive—even more than self-defensive—as a mantle in which he would wrap his head, and shut out the images of his own zeal and in­ dignation." (p. 36) This is the mode, in the absence of confidence in a "faithful, humble reception," that Carlyle felt obliged to adopt in order to speak at all. Fiction was his only protection, and the only valid representation of his own uncertainties. Thus two people, not one, announce the doctrine of Sartor, and thus the Hteral surface of that book is never whole­ hearted and unambiguous. By and large the Editor does sympathize with Teufelsdrockh's views, but he does not, even at the end, express unqualified assent. Instead, he mock­ ingly dismisses his "irritated" English audience, and iron­ ically expresses his gratitude to William Maginn ("Oliver Yorke"), the real, though undesignated, editor of Fraser's. The whole structure of the book reveals a painful struggle against self-division and uncertainty about the audience (an uncertainty largely confirmed by the violent antagonism aroused by Sartors serial publication).45 In one aspect, the Editor is intended to represent the audi­ ence, and thus to mediate between Carlyle's ideas and the audience whose antagonism he could anticipate. The ma­ nipulation of the Editor is an attempt at the manipulation of the audience (like the manipulation later in "The Nigger 45 Carlyle's guess about the likely response Sartor would evoke was not far wrong. On 27 May 1833 he wrote to Fraser: My own conjecture is that Teufelsdrockh, whenever published, will astonish most that read it, be wholly understood by very few; but to the astonishment of some will add touches of (almost the deepest) spiritual interest, with others quite the opposite feeling. I think I can practically prophesy that for some six or eight months (for it must be published without interruption), it would at least keep the eyes of the Public on you. (Letters of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Norton, p. 366)

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Question"), and to achieve this Carlyle is forced to give the Editor an independent character. It is, however, an over­ simplification to insist that the Editor "serves as a model for the reader—British, bristlingly empirical, anti-meta­ physical and almost anti-German" (Peckham, p. 180). As the quotations which follow suggest, he is not representa­ tively English but rather begins with a recognition of the barrenness of English thought and goes as far in the direc­ tion of Teufelsdrockh as possible without alienating his audience. Then, though boasting himself "a man of con­ firmed speculative habits, and perhaps discursive enough," the Editor had never thought of the philosophy of Clothes until the arrival of Teufelsdrockh's book (p. 8). While insist­ ing on the usefulness of remaining anonymous, he tries to assure his readers that he is loyal to England, "animated with a true though perhaps a feeble attachment to the In­ stitutions of our Ancestors; and minded to defend these, according to ability, at all hazards" (p. 13). And for the sake of softening up the opposition, he is made to argue that he has undertaken the presentation of the Clothes philosophy "partly with a view to such defence" (p. 13). Interestingly enough for proof of the point that Carlyle uses him as a tool for manipulation of his anticipated audience, the Editor goes on to assure his readers that he will take up exactly the attitude he urges on them. To them he says, "strive to keep a free, open sense; cleared from the mists of prejudice, above all from the paralysis of cant; and directed rather to the Book itself than to the Editor of the Book" (p. 13). Of himself he says, "be it nowise appre­ hended, that any personal connection of ours with Teufelsdrockh . . . can pervert our judgment, or sway us to extenuate or exaggerate. . . . Teufelsdrockh is our friend, Truth is our divinity" (pp. 13-14). Although his attitudes are not always consistent, through the rest of the book he demonstrates his willingness to attack Teufelsdrockh, some­ times quite sensibly, and always maintaining the pose of the dispassionate judge, engaged in a difficult task not for his own sake but for the sake of England. In so doing he

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represents Carlyle sitting in dispassionate judgment on himself. The whole elaborate device may be taken as a symbolic expression of Carlyle's recognition of the foreignness of his ideas to English life. From this point of view it is clear why Carlyle's spokesmen are almost always foreign; their Germanness is, of course, a recognition of his debt to German thought. His usual fictional trick is to establish some kind of initial antagonism to this foreignness, here in the person of the Editor, hoping to show that if one sensible English­ man can profit from these foreign notions, so might any other Englishman. The problem Carlyle faced is put pre­ cisely in the Editor's words: "how could the philosophy of Clothes and the Author of such Philosophy, be brought home, in any measure, to the business and bosoms of our own English Nation?" (p. 10). The answer, Carlyle dis­ covered, was to dramatize his own experience with the Ger­ mans, he having initially shared an enthusiasm for Hume and eighteenth-century skepticism. The conflict, then, is be­ tween the apocalyptic vision he aspired to (in Teufelsdrockh) and the critical intelligence he could not escape (in the Editor). Carlyle's initial confusion about means, about self, and about audience thus turned him to fiction. But the tradi­ tional emphasis on Carlyle's merely defensive uses of fiction (see Sartor, p. xxx) does not adequately explain how it works, because in Sartor it offers the best method for ex­ pounding Carlyle's ideas. Indeed, as in all good fiction, many of the ideas could only have been precisely formulated in terms of fiction. This is especially true of his notion of the inescapably partial nature of man's perceptions and knowledge which, as Froude says, "lay at the bottom of all his thoughts about man and man's doing in the world."46 In his 1830 essay, "On 46Froude, II, 15. Froude prints (pp. 8-18) an interesting incom­ plete paper by Carlyle called "Spiritual Optics," written and cast aside as unsatisfactory in 1852. Froude sees this piece as a confirmation of Carlyle's absolutism and dogmatism, but it is not difficult to see pro­ foundly relativistic elements in it:

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History," Carlyle says that "The old story of Walter Raleigh's looking from his prison-window, on some street tumult, which afterwards three witnesses reported in three different ways, himself differing from them all, is still a true lesson for us" (Essays, II, 87). He continues later: Truly, if History is Philosophy teaching by Experience, the writer fitted to compose History is hitherto an un­ known man. The experience itself would require Allknowledge to record it,—were the All-wisdom needful for such Philosophy as would interpret it, to be had for asking. Better were it that mere earthly Historians should lower such pretensions, more suitable for Omniscience than for human science; and aiming only at some picture of the things acted, which picture itself will at best be a poor approximation, leave the inscrutable purport of them an acknowledged secret; or at most, in reverent Faith, far different from that teaching of Philosophy, pause over the mysterious vestiges of Him, whose path is the great deep of Time, whom History indeed reveals, but only all His­ tory, and in Eternity, will clearly reveal. (II, 89) Teufelsdrockh takes up nearly the same position, rejecting a "Cause-and-Effect Philosophy of Clothes, as of Laws," on the implicit Humean grounds that man cannot have the knowl­ edge to work out such a philosophy: "for inferior Intelli­ gences, like men, such Philosophies have always seemed to me uninstructive enough." Rather, "naked Facts, and De­ ductions drawn therefrom in quite another than that omnis­ cient style, are my humbler and proper province" (p. 36). A notable tendency of the human being in case of mutual motions on the part of himself and another object, is to misinterpret the said motion and impute it to the wrong party. . . . how the woods and houses, and all objects but the fixed blue of heaven, seem to be madly careering at the top of their speed, stormfully waltzing round transient centres, the whole earth gone into menadic enthusi­ asm, he himself all the while locked into dead quiescence! (pp. 11-12) Much of this view is incorporated already into Sartor, but the dog­ matic certainty of "Spiritual Optics" sharply separates it from Sartor.

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Leaving aside the question of his paradoxical certainty of the reality of God despite God's unknowability,47 this man­ ner of thinking had a curious result for Carlyle. It entailed a commitment to relativism, at least in the natural world, which, if followed out logically, would have led to a concern with the problems of "point of view." And Sartor certainly demonstrates an awareness of those problems in its total rejection of the omniscient stance. Carlyle was not willing, of course, to settle for all the logical implications of his view: he would not surrender God or the absolute, assert­ ing always that whether man knew it or not, the Infinite was there, beyond the limits of his knowledge. But Sartor un­ deniably has the surface ambiguity that the absence of an omniscient narrator creates. Indeed, what gives Sartor its peculiar status in the hierarchy of Carlyle's works is the extraordinary doubleness of vision it embodies. Carlyle's self-awareness, as dramatized in the Editor and Teufelsdrockh, extends not only to the recognition of his dual impulses (toward self-consciousness, self-righteousness, and self-assertion, for example, as well as toward work, humility, and self-denial); of the extravagancies and inadequacies of his style; but also, of the ultimate limitations of the whole work. Carlyle knew that there were likely to be better ways to promulgate his doctrine. He complained to his brother in October 1833, at about the time Sartor had begun to ap­ pear in Fraser s, "Alas, the thing I want to do is precisely the thing I cannot do. My mind would so fain deliver itself adequately of that "Divine Idea of the World"; and only in quite inadequate approximation is such deliverance possible."48 The last chapter of Sartor reveals how Carlyle's selfawareness operated at this stage of his career toward wider tolerance and flexibility. Without undercutting the elaborate 47 This extremely important and difficult question is handled clearly in Harrold, German Thought, esp. ch. v. See also pp. 116-19. 48 In the response to Sterling's letter of criticism of Sartor, Carlyle wrote, "A man has but a certain strength; imperfections cling to him, which if he wait till he have brushed off entirely, he will spin forever on his axis, advancing nowhither" (Letters to Mill, p. 191).

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notions worked out in the rest of the book, it makes, rhetori­ cally, concessions which later would be for him impossible. Perhaps were it not for his need for fictional spokesmen it would have been impossible for him then; but the effect, whatever the cause, is a softening of the hard moralizing impact of the book. The Editor apologizes again for Teufelsdrockh's style (and for his own) and regrets that such a brilliant man found it necessary to express his important ideas by "rummaging among lumber-rooms; nay too often [by] scraping in kennels" (p. 292). He then suggests what even the most unsympathetic reader should find attractive about Teufelsdrockh: "His attitude, we will hope and be­ lieve, is that of a man who had said to Cant, Begone; and to Dilettantism, Here thou canst not be; and to Truth, Be thou in place of all to me: a man who had manfully defied the 'Time-prince,' or Devil, to his face; nay perhaps, Hanni­ bal-like, was mysteriously consecrated from birth to that warfare, and now stood minded to wage the same, by all weapons, in all places, at all times" (p. 293). Carlyle did not, then, attempt to conclude his work by showing the Editor wholeheartedly asserting the truth of all Teufelsdrockh's views. There is no retraction, but there seems to be a willingness to settle for the cardinal virtue—sincerity— and let the rest take care of itself if need be. This acknowl­ edgment that only Teufelsdrockh's seriousness and not his mystifications need be taken seriously is part of what gives the book its undogmatic flexibility. His last words in Sartor typically emphasize the urgency of the battle: '"It is the Night of the World, and still long till it be Day: we wander amid the glimmer of smoking ruins, and the Sun and the Stars of Heaven are as if blotted out for a season; and two immeasurable Phantoms, HYPOCRISY and ATHEISM, with the Gowl, SENSUALITY, stalk abroad over the Earth, and call it theirs: well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Exist­ ence is a shallow Dream'" (pp. 294-95). Atypically, these remarks are prefaced by the gentlest solution proposed in the Carlyle canon—Love. "A man, be the Heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in

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Love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man." As has already been shown, no one knew better than CarIyle that beyond the universal limitations of man, he suffered from peculiar limitations as an artist. His apologies for and explanations of his mode of writing punctuate the book. "Perhaps," the Editor says, "Necessity as well as Choice was concerned" in Teufelsdrockh's writing as he did. "Seems it not conceivable that, in a Life like our Professor s, where so much bountifully given by Nature had in Practice failed and misgone, Literature also would never rightly prosper: that striving with his characteristic vehemence to paint this and the other Picture, and ever without success, he at last des­ perately dashes his sponge, full of all colours, against the canvas, to try whether it will paint Foam?"49 The "foam" might, of course, be Sartor itself. Such a passage as this is, perhaps, one of those in which Carlyle tries to turn "an inherent defect into a virtue," but it is important to see how thoroughly it succeeds. The explanation does not, of course, exempt the book from criticism of its wildness, but when seen in relation to the autobiographical passages, it does tend to put its whole structure "in character." It is part of the strategy by which we are made to test the validity of the ideas by examining character. If Teufelsdrockh is partly excused from the chaos of his manner by "Necessity," the Editor is largely excused by the constantly repeated idea that he is forced to wrestle with Teufelsdrockh's intractable material in order to win from it some shape and coherent meaning. This wrestling is re­ sponsible for a good part of the book's drama, since it is 49 P. 294. It is interesting for an understanding of the way Carlyle uses his fictions as defense to see how close this passage is to one that appears in a letter to Goethe, 10 June 1831, in Correspondence Between Goethe and Carlyle, ed. C.E. Norton (London, 1887). Strangely Harrold does not note the similarity: "Alas! it [Sartor] is, after all, not a Picture that I am painting; it is but a half-recldess casting of the brush, with its many frustrated colours, against the canvas: whether it will make good Foam is still a venture" (p. 285).

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analogous to the readers', and upon the Editor's success everything depends. Thus, the second chapter, "Editorial Difficulties," is given over to discussing how what is essential and valuable for the English reader might be distilled from the "boundless, almost formless contents" of Die Kleider (p. 10). Without biographical documents the Editor finds the difficulties compounded, and he has therefore for "some months" "read and again read" the book until it has become "in several points" "lucid and lucent" (p. 11). The wrestling grows more violent and even affects the Editor's health when Heuschrecke ships him material for a biography in six totally disorganized paper bags marked by the signs of the Zodiac.50 His difficulties here are deliber­ ately paralleled to those with the book itself: "Daily and nightly does the Editor sit (with green spectacles) de­ ciphering these unimaginable Documents from their per­ plexed cursiv-schrift; collating them with the almost equally unimaginable Volume, which stands in legible print. Over such a universal medley of high and low, of hot, cold, moist and dry, is he here struggling (by union of like with like, which is Method) to build a firm Bridge for British travellers" (p. 79). The struggle in the second part is more fruitful, but apologies for and reminders of the disorder are nevertheless profuse (see, for example, pp. 89, 119, 129, 134, and 148); it is even hinted that there is a latent in­ sanity in Teufelsdrockh. These reminders and apologies, however, are not all that go to justify the chaos. It is interesting that the very chaos out of which the Editor is attempting to bring meaning becomes in Sartor a symbol of one of its central ideas, just as the whole fictional structure becomes representative of the book's ideas in fairly precise ways. The idea of the physical world as apparent chaos which really bodies forth a single ultimate spiritual truth is an aspect of Teufelsdrockh's doctrine that all things are related ("There is not a red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipic, can quarrel 60 For

of

a delightful and illuminating explication of the significance the signs, see Tennyson, pp. 218-20.

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with his squaw, but the whole world must smart for it: will not the price of beaver rise?" [p. 246]). From his point of view the apparent incoherence of his six bags would be immaterial. All the facts and ideas ultimately connect and move toward the oneness of the infinite. The disorder of his works, moreover, parallels the notion that he (a representative of every man) is a whole bundle of transcendental-descendental oppositions. His works juxta­ pose the most extravagantly inappropriate facts and feel­ ings because he is their living embodiment. The fiction then becomes a justification for the peculiar disorder of the symbol. Grace Calder's discovery that Carlyle freely switched around chapters and paragraphs of Past and Present (see p. 107) tends to confirm the view that much of the material in the first and third books of Sartor is interchangeable. Although the book is not quite as chaotic as the Editor keeps insisting, from the point of view of logic much of it is mere repetition. The notions of wonder, of the infinite, of Palingenesie, of descendentalism and transcendentalism, are worked at from many different directions, with many different examples. Teufelsdrockh's magnificent vision of Weissnichtwo from his windows effectively introduces the reader to his peculiar modes of seeing, but it would have come equally appropriately in the chapter on "Organic Filaments," or "Natural Supernaturalism." Almost every­ thing Carlyle wants to say about man, nature, society, space, and time is announced in that passage (pp. 20-23). Teufelsdrockh's inscrutability, his "calmness and fixedness" of expression, are part of the fiction, operating to allow him to drive them home more and more forcefully. For the same reason, the Editor asserts his confusion about notions that are actually clear. He omits presenting much of Die Kleider on the grounds of unintelligibility, and in his first "pause" states that everything is still largely obscure to the reader except for a few flashes of meaning: "The Philosophy of Clothes is now to all readers, as we predicted it would do, unfolding itself into new boundless expansions, of a

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cloudcapt, almost chimerical aspect, yet not without azure loomings in the far distance, and streaks as of an Elysian brightness; the highly questionable purport and promise of which it is becoming more and more important for us to ascertain" (p. 70). What must be noted is that the Editor's mystifying ac­ tivities correspond also to key ideas of the book: first, to Carlyle's insistence on wonder, on the translation of the ordinary into the miraculous; this is, of course, effectively achieved by forcing the reader to puzzle even over things which ought not to produce uncertainty. Second, to Car­ lyle's rejection of system as inadequate to account for the complexity and wonder of existence. The Editor's troubles allow Carlyle to avoid setting down his ideas in a few clear axioms, as many of his commentators (for example, Sterling and Holloway) have been able to do quite easily. His ideas, he felt, should not have been amenable to systematic codi­ fication. "Our Professor's method," the Editor says, in a passage which might apply equally to the method of Sartor, "is not, in any case, that of common school Logic, where the truths all stand in a row, each holding by the skirts of the other; but at best that of practical Reason, proceeding by large Intuition over whole systematic groups and kingdoms; whereby, we might say, a noble complexity, almost like that of Nature, reigns in his Philosophy, or spiritual Picture of Nature: a mighty maze, yet, as faith whispers, not without a plan" (p. 52). Thus it is part of Carlyle's quite conscious and—given the nature of his ideas—justifiable plan that the details are not inevitably right in their placing within the whole work. Such a justification, however, might seem a lapse into what Yvor Winters has called the fallacy of imitative form; it is true that the justification needs more substance. The structure of Sartor is emotional, not logical. And the best justification comes from a recognition that the large move­ ment of the book, like the smaller movements of particular passages, is directed to some emotionally satisfying rather than to a logically unarguable conclusion. Morse Peckham

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sees such a movement in a regular slow progression in the direction of increased comprehension on the part of the Editor—a development by "psychological continuity" (Peckham, p. 181). The writing of the book corresponds in rough chronology to the Editor's receiving the volume on clothes and hearing from Heuschrecke that biographical informa­ tion about Teufelsdrockh is available (Book I); and "re­ opening the great Clothes-Volume" (Book III). In fact, however, at the start of the book the Editor is already in awe of Teufelsdrockh and fully impressed with the value of his ideas. In characteristic Carlylean double-negative fashion, he says at first mention of Die Kleider that it "has not remained without effect" for him (p. 8). The Editors first problem, it will be remembered, is not in comprehen­ sion but in determining "How might this acquired good be imparted to others, perhaps in equal need thereof" (p. 10). He is already convinced, and the tension between the Editor and Teufelsdrockh through the rest of the book is no further resolved. (The "resolution," if the book may be said to have one, is extra-literary—the 1830 revolution in Paris and the expected upheaval in England.)51 In this as in all things, Carlyle's method is essentially static. As he is not capable of developing character, of moving beyond the anecdote to the narrative, or of using the violence of his prose centrifugally rather than centripetally, so he is not capable of constructing his book ac­ cording to the principle of "psychological continuity," B1 It is probably a mistake to try to find any kind of fully detailed consistency in the fictional development of the book. The chapter "Prospective" comes close to supporting Peckham's notions, not only about the principle of "psychological continuity" but about the Editor's "bristling empiricism" as well. The irony of the passages, however, is so heavy that it is difficult to take the surface very seriously, especially when Uie Editor talks about his "feeble thinking" Faculty or the "union of like with like, which is Method" (p. 79). These notions do not appear importantly elsewhere and seem to contradict much of what the Editor has to say about the inadequacy of English thought. More important, whatever the particular statements here, the general development of the book is as I describe it above. But Tennyson has thoroughly explained, in terms of Carlyle's tripartite movement, the overall structure of the book. See ch. vn, 157-93.

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which implies real movement out from the center to a new position. The meaning of the clothes philosophy itself has no development: the center stands unchanged as the social garments are tattered and destroyed. From start to finish Ae relation of most of the characters to each other and to the audience remains the same. Teufelsdrockh remains the mysterious sage, Heuschrecke the model of what hero-wor­ ship ought not to be, and the Editor the model of what it should be. Heuschrecke is the fool who, like Sancho Panza, incredibly says intelligent things on occasion but who follows his master unquestioningly despite obvious differences in outlook (it should be remembered that he is a Malthusian). The Editor is awed by the great man, in­ ferior to him, but unwilling to follow him in utter blind­ ness. He remains certain also that most of his readers not only have failed to follow him but are actively antagonistic. The peculiarly static quality, once again corresponding to a central notion of the whole book, does not in fact diminish the dramatic tension. If the pattern is different from what one conventionally expects to find in fiction, it is still capable of producing its own kind of satisfaction. The book has an emotional structure—a set of repeated pat­ terns—and the literal surface of the book increasingly sub­ serves these patterns. Each Book begins at its most neutral and prosaic point and moves to a climax of faith and affirmation, each climax more powerful than the preceding. Thus the first chapter begins with a survey of the subjects of science and philosophy, preparing the way for the clothes philosophy. Chapter Ten, the climax of Book One, closes with the most distinctively violent Carlylean rhetoric thus far, affirming the universality of wonder and mystery and unequivocally preaching, mocking, reprimanding: —Armer Teufel! Doth not thy cow calve, doth not thy

bull gender? Thou thyself, wert thou not born, wilt thou not die? "Explain" me all this, or do one of two things: Retire into private places with thy foolish cackle; or, what were better, give it up, and weep, not that the reign

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of wonder is done, and God's world all disembellished and prosaic, but that thou hitherto art a Dilettante and sandblind Pedant, (pp. 69-70) To complete the pattern, the first Book ends with a retro­ spective and "Prospective" view, paralleling chapters at the end of Book Two ("Pause") and Book Three ("Circum­ spective" and "Farewell"). The second Book begins with the gentlest passages in Sartor, especially in the second chapter ("Idyllic"), but climaxes in the penultimate chapter with Carlyles most famous personal expression of faith, "The Everlasting Yea." The third Book is perhaps the least logically constructed of all, but the rhetorical pattern is the same, beginning as it does with examples from "Inci­ dents in Modern History" and reaching its climax in the chapter which at least in terms of doctrine is the real climax of the whole work, "Natural Supernaturalism." Here the notion of the power and pervasiveness of Spirit is most forcefully set down: Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped-in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence?— O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God. (pp. 266-67) The spiritual intensity of this passage reminds us that it is possible to see the structure of Sartor in another way, as akin to that of the traditional sermon. In terms of its own fictions it is, of course, a book review, much like, as G. B. Tennyson has shown, the book reviews Carlyle had been doing through the best part of his writing career. But the natural direction of Carlyle's reviews was toward some sort of spiritual revelation. And Sartors three parts

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fit the overall pattern of the mediaeval sermon. Sartor be­ gins with the announcement of a text (that is, Die Kleider) and with some genuine if obfuscating exposition of the text; it moves on, in Teufelsdrockh's biography, to a kind of exemplum (certainly the second section is more in­ telligible read this way than as a piece of novelistic fic­ tion); and then, in a complicated way—after a clearer restatement of themes—the third section concludes with a peroration and application. Teufelsdrockh's ideas are loose in the world; there is a revolution in Paris; great changes are coming in England; and Teufelsdrockh himself is where the old clothes of society are being torn away. But just as the traditional pattern of the sermon is continuous expan­ sion of a single idea, a set of variations on a text, so Sartor, even when read in this way, remains a giant elabora­ tion of a basic insight into the spiritual nature of the ma­ terial universe. Thus no matter how one attempts to explain it, the whole structure of the book parallels the style. It is a series of elaborate reflections circling about a central position. These reflections never move far beyond their first statement, but become increasingly violent and emotionally intense, in­ creasingly rich in exemplification, but always fundamentally simple. Each of the complicated fictions serves as a defense of this highly illogical structure against criticism, as a de­ fense of Carlyle himself, and as another mode of expression of the central ideas. We should be in a better position now to see how Sartor reflects both an idiosyncrasy and that broad general mood which tended to make fiction the dominating art form of the period. It marks the transition from the Romantics to the Victorians because it adds one quality to the Romantic vision which had not yet become dominant—desperation. Carlyle lived through the Romantics' period of greatness (having been born the same year as Keats) without ever having been of it, and he watched as the great Romantic ideals were shattered by history. Instead of a universe integrated by love and a nature harmonious with man,

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instead of the artist as legislator or hero, instead of great social reformations and a new reign of justice, of man dignified, unique, and honest, he found a mechanical world governed by outmoded laws, by mere respectability ("Dilet­ tantism"), by political economies and rational systems which seemed to attempt to justify the dehumanization of man he thought he saw all about him. He found himself instinctively at odds with the conservatism of a continent in rebound from the French Revolution and hypocritically, as he saw it, committed to a success morality dressed in the old clothes of Christianity. Despite his occasional fits of pantheism in Sartor, he found it difficult to perceive the harmony between man and nature which was indispensable to the Romantic affirmation. Through Teufelsdrockh, he tells us "what it was like to have arrived at the dead-end of the eighteenth-century, to inhabit the mechanical uni­ verse of the Newtonian world-view, a universe without so much meaning as would render it even hostile."52 He had for himself to work through the experience that would once again infuse meaning into life. At the time of writing Sartor that experience—a kind of triumph—was fresh to him, but he could not, as we have seen, unabashedly recount it with Wordsworth's solemn and epic confidence. He could not establish himself as a sage in Sartor because, though like the Romantics in having won through to a deeply personal affirmation and discovery of his identity, he was not able to see the experience as anything but personal in a world obviously inimical. If he had the temperament of the Romantic glorying in his own uniqueness, he saw that salvation was possible only by submerging that uniqueness. The historical moment for the possibility of Great Expectations had passed with the French Revolution, and though Carlyle grabbed desperately at every hint that history might confirm the tentative optimism of Sartor (note his response to the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, even to the repeal of the Corn Laws), the 62 Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York, 1957), p. 15.

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only good of which he was certain lay hidden behind his­ tory and himself. Thus every aspect of his thought which deals with man's temporal existence was negative: Entsagen, the worship of sorrow, silence, hero-worship. His theoretical position was that of the popular notion of Job: man cannot by his nature genuinely know; he must therefore renounce happiness, assume that Divine Justice is somehow in opera­ tion, and work. With the Romantic unwillingness to remain suspended in doubt, this kind of desperate affirmation is all that saved Carlyle; but only at a point of balance in which the despera­ tion does not hold the upper hand could he achieve that openness to experience and breadth of tolerance which is the distinctive characteristic of the great novelists of the century. Though even in Sartor Carlyle had Teufelsdrockh preach a doctrine fundamentally opposed to the Romantic notion of experience, the preaching is, as we have seen, muffled by the fiction, which shows how a man wins through by experience to affirmation and which therefore artistically justifies the preaching. But Carlyle was already attempting, out of desperation, to erect his subjective ex­ perience into dogma, though even this he had to do through the devices of fiction. It is the fiction which keeps Carlyle from a direct attempt to impose on his readers an affirma­ tion without requiring of them equally that they undergo their own experience in order to achieve it. Langbaum, who has discussed this point at length in a slightly different con­ text, has argued that in his later works Carlyle was unfaith­ ful to the "morality of Romanticism," best summarized in a speech by Faust: Yes! to this thought I hold with firm persistence; The last result of wisdom stamps it true: He only earns his freedom and existence, Who daily conquers them anew. (Langbaum, p. 20) This becomes the morality of the Browningesque mono-

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logue, and of the novel itself. But it is lost with the triumph of desperation. Carlyle's faith in experience is expressed in Sartor by his willingness, already noted, to keep both Teufelsdrockh and the Editor between him and the points he wants to make. In later works, he usually used a single fictional com­ mentator—much more closely identifiable with Carlyle— whose views he himself would "place." As Grace Calder points out, "when Carlyle uses the dramatic method of creating personages and allowing them to speak in the first person . . . he can scarcely restrain himself from interpret­ ing the actors' speeches directly to the audience" (p. 115). To a certain extent, the Editor does the same thing with Teufelsdrockh's speeches, but in this case the interpreter is not always meant to be right. The effect, then, though perhaps ultimately unambiguous, is genuinely dramatic. Had Carlyle's talents and religious background made it possible, this not altogether full commitment to experience would almost certainly have led to the creation of the kind of fiction which we regard as characteristically Victorian— full of authorial intrusions, omniscient treatment of char­ acter,53 complex plot lines, and a profound sense of human limitations. But as the balance shifted late in the century and experience itself became all that remained of the values passed on by the Romantics, the need for intrusion and omniscience diminished. Whatever the time, faith in experience is one of the con­ ditions of good fiction. George Eliot and Dickens go wrong 53 I t is curious to note, in keeping with the view expressed here, that Carlyle is usually incapable of rendering the immediacy of experi­ ence in novelistic ways, that even when working through die point of view of a single character (TeufeIsdrockh) he invariably stands a long way off, both physically and temperamentally, from what is being described. Note the description of Weissnichtwo, for example, or of the wanderings in the "Centre of Indifference." The vividness and power of The French Revolution result partly from the great distance Carlyle establishes between narrator and action juxtaposed against the sudden use of the present tense and the thrusting into the center of the experience.

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precisely where they lose their faith in it and force them­ selves to believe in things which everything else in their created worlds seems to contradict, as for example, the loving reunion of Maggie and Tom at the end of The Mill on the Floss, or the incorruptible moral beauty of Esther Summerson in Bleak House. Usually, however, these writers, even when they become most intrusive, do not interfere with the independence of the experience rendered. Sartor Resartus comes as close to this kind of freedom as any of Carlyles works, and his turn to history and the primacy of "fact" shortly after this was probably not so much an expression of willingness to trust experience as an escape from the need to trust it. Although he was too scrupulously honest a man to have been able to distort his sources consciously, he never wrote a history in which the facts had not already led him to his desired conclusions and in which they were not immediately turned into symbols. At best the turn to history was an expression of willed faith in the notion that the world and experience are under some supernatural moral control. Usually it represented a quest for an ideal of behavior and heroism essential to the salva­ tion of contemporary England. But with all the qualifications necessary, Carlyle insisted on fidelity to the facts, and was always impressive when attempting to capture the sense of what it really means to say that something exists or existed. This is, of course, most powerfully evident in the narrative of Jocelin s chronicle in Past and Present, but it is also evident in the constant evoca­ tion of wonder in Sartor. Carlyle had a rare ability to intensi­ fy experience by placing things in the largest possible context so that any "Drawing-room is simply a section of InfiniteSpace, where so many God-created Souls do for the time meet together" (p. 29). Although he was not capable of rendering the wonder of existence with the slow and unglamorous fictional precision of such writers as George Eliot, the allusive and anecdotal quality of his prose—the mad chaos of its surface—suggests, at least in Sartor, that he was not ready to reduce the complexity of appearances

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even while he was ready to assert that any particular mani­ festation is "simply" an aspect of the "Infinite." What draws him considerably closer to the area of fic­ tion, and particularly of the traditional novel, is the supreme value he attached to biography. "History," he said, "is the essence of innumerable Biographies" (Essays, II, 86), and as Harrold points out, Teufelsdrockh's slightly garbled Pope-like quotation from Wilhelm Meister, "Man is prop­ erly the only object that interests man," became "one of the two or three master-thoughts of Carlyle" (pp. 75-76). Thus the last chapter of Sartor concludes not with another asser­ tion of the doctrines but with a biographical fact—Teufelsdr6ckh has disappeared. The impulse to biography, it ap­ pears, becomes an impulse to drama since it led Carlyle to turn exposition into a battle among characters repre­ senting different positions, making one's relation to an idea depend on one's relation to a character: if he be sin­ cere and admirable so must be the idea. Everyone who comes into contact with Teufelsdrockh, despite his eccen­ tricities, loves him—from the bumbling Heuschrecke, to Blumine, to Lieschen, to his fellow drinkers at the Griine Gans, to the Editor himself. Carlyle had to show that it is difficult to get through to the idea (and thus the reader must work hard himself); and those who don't work at it must, of course, receive their proper epitaphs, as does Count Zahdarm literally, or the women at the "aesthetic tea." He needed, in other words, by whatever means he could con­ trol, to turn meaning into experience. The relevance of the biographical and autobiographical impulses to the achievements of Victorian literature is too well known to need rehearsing. But a comment by Northrop Frye suggests how closely the arts of autobiography and fiction are connected. "Most autobiographies," he says, "are inspired by a creative, and therefore fictional, impulse to select only those events and experiences in the writer's life that go to build up an integrated pattern" (p. 307). This is clearly true of Teufelsdrockh's story, but it is not difficult to see how directly it applies to other famous

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

Victorian autobiographies: Mill's, for instance, which Ger­ trude Himmelfarb has shown to have minimized the split between father and son and to have omitted an even worse breakdown than the one recorded in the chapter on his "Mental Crisis";54 or Newman's Apologia. And if, as Frye notes, "There is no Hterary reason why the subject of a confession should always be the author himself," the notion operates over the whole field of Victorian fiction. Carlyle's emphasis on "sincerity" is also related to the emphasis on biography (since what matters most is, as we have seen, Teufelsdrockh's good character rather than his ideas), and in another way to the fictional impulse. A fiction such as Sartor inevitably shifts attention away, at least in part, from the substance to the point of view from which it is being related. We need to attend to the quality of the character talking since, as we have seen, in Carlyle's view no man is capable of knowing the whole truth. We move here perilously close to relativism, as in the poetry of Browning, and stay clear of it largely in the same way as Browning: by belief in what can't be known, and by trusting in some fundamental values (like sincerity) to lead the reader out of the wilderness of conflicting and incom­ plete views. The obvious connection of elements of this vision with the later work of James and Conrad—indeed, with much of the modern novel—needs no emphasis. What is striking is that Carlyle was one of the first of the Vic­ torians to attempt to find some means for expression of this vision, and in so doing he anticipated many developments of the novel. Another important connection between Carlyle's vision and method and the novel in general can be discerned in Sartor. The fiction serves to help Carlyle express his views satisfactorily because "the prophet's sense of things is more readily expressed concretely and not abstractly." All the sages "insist on how acquiring wisdom is somehow an opening of the eyes, making us see in our experience what 54 Gertrude Himmelfarb, ed., Essays on Politics and Culture by John Stuart Mill (Garden City, N.Y., 1962), pp. xix, xx.

SARTOR RESARTUS

we failed to see before," and their problem then, as the Editor seems aware, is to quicken "the reader to a new capacity for experience" (Holloway, pp. 9-10). This applies to Carlyle in several ways: in the general fictional frame­ work which dramatizes the ideas; in the violence of his rhetoric, intended to shock the reader into a new kind of attention, and, hopefully, into a receptivity to a new kind of experience; and in the way his unsystematic mind per­ sists in breaking out into anecdote and allusions. Finally, Sartor suggests another crucial way in which the temper of the times moved inevitably toward fiction. Like many Victorian sages, Carlyle began with a view that made the position of sage logically impossible but emotionally in­ evitable. The desperation already noted made it imperative that someone speak out against the forces leading to what seemed inevitable destruction. But he had important doubts about his own powers which only force of will in his later years seemed to overcome on the surface of his conscious­ ness. I have attempted to show that this nervousness about self was one of the conditions of valuable art for Carlyle, committed to what the Editor calls "proselytizing"; and it clearly led Carlyle, as it led those who followed him, in the direction of fiction. Fiction—and, in the Victorian period with its emphasis on the "real," the "true," and the "ordinary," the novel— is the supreme form for creating disguises which keep the author from the kind of exposure that Carlyle feared. He was afraid of being discovered inadequate to the heroic task he had undertaken, and of leaving his personal and artistic inadequacies open to ridicule. Even before the un­ certainty about absolutes became so complete that omnis­ cience almost completely disappeared for a while from fiction, Victorian novelists had created a form which re­ duced the necessity for the author to speak out absolutely, which allowed experience itself to speak, and which re­ duced moral commentary to what credibly might be spoken by any intelligent and morally committed person (Thack­ eray's god-like stance in Vanity Fair is not at all typical).

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

Autobiography emerges disguised in a way not dissimilar from that in Sartor. The author like Carlyle could in such fiction assert his identity, demand sympathy for it, evoke moral meaning from it, and preserve without fear of ex­ posure his sense of limitations and uncertainty. Only through fiction could the serious artist, committed to some kind of radical moral reorganization of society, speak to an audience about whose values he could not be sure. He needed both to protect himself and to discover a mode that would somehow attract everyone. Disguise and a reliance on widely available experience were the answer. Partly for this reason, Carlyle was committed to demonstrat­ ing the miraculous nature of the ordinary, and in this re­ spect he was totally in accord with the whole "humanist" movement of the time, and especially with a writer like George Eliot, who also turned from her Byron to her Goethe. Much of the effect of Victorian fiction depended on the likelihood that readers would be fascinated by the details of comparatively ordinary life. Although Sartor seems altogether fantastic and outside the experience of that life, its doctrine entails reverence for ordinary life, and the whole book is engaged in attempting to domesticate an experience which, Carlyle believed, the British people have only mistakenly thought foreign. Thus the Editor is English and loyal to England (protesting too much his qualities of "Diligence and feeble thinking"); thus mad Teufelsdrockh, despite his mysterious god-born origins, had a rather pleas­ ant and ordinary youth, climaxing, as usual, with a painful love affair. In fact, what is new in Sartor is not the sub­ stance, but the new way of seeing that substance (see Holloway, p. 9). It is no accident that Sartor, like Tenny­ son's In Memoriam, became for people like Froude the work that saved them from moral and spiritual disintegration.55 55 Froude's tribute to Carlyle and Tennyson in Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London: 1834-1881 (London, 1885) is moving and bears repeating. It is interesting to note, however, that although Froude felt that these men spoke directly to the problems of his con­ temporaries, he regarded them largely as prophets, not artists; never­ theless, he also understood that one of the conditions of salvation was uncertainty:

SARTOR RESARTUS

It is possibly not true that all or even most of nineteenthcentury fiction had its source, like Carlyle's, in the need for self-defense and for the expression of a fundamental duality of vision. But these qualities in combination with a profound sense of the urgency of moral reform seem in­ evitably to find richest expression in fiction. Moreover, whether temperamentally or intellectually (though likely, as in Carlyle, a combination of both), the fiction writer usually finds assumption of a mask particularly comforting. It allows him a flexibility and openness to experience which formal suasion in his own person would tend to discourage, especially because it allows for the exploration of uncon­ ventional positions without explicit commitment. Carlyle's nervousness and uncertainty and the peculiar balance of his thoughts and feelings at the moment led him directly to fiction. That is not the only route to it, but like Carlyle's work, the Victorian novel and much of the work of the great essayists tends to weaken when the nervousness is disregarded and the will insists on finding meaning every­ where and confidence where there can only be hesitation. The bitterness of much of Carlyle's later work seems to have been a function of his desperation. He looked every­ where and instead of people found heroes and villains— Robert Peel, Governor Eyre, and Frederick the Great; St. Ignatius Loyola and the "Nigger" (Jew also). As he came to realize that people would never take him seriously In this condition the best and bravest of my own contemporaries determined to have done with insincerity, to find ground under their feet, to let the uncertain remain uncertain, but to learn how much and what we could honestly regard as true, and believe that and live by it. Tennyson became the voice of this feeling in poetry; Carlyle in what was called prose, though prose it was not, but something by itself, with a form and melody of its own. Tennyson's poems, the group of poems which closed with 'In Memoriam,' became to many of us what the 'Christian Year' was to orthodox Churchmen. We read them, and they became part of our minds, the expression in exquisite language of the feelings which are working in ourselves. Carlyle stood beside him as a prophet and teacher; and to the young, the generous, to everyone who took life seriously, who wished to make an honourable use of it, and could not be content with sitting down and making money, his words were like the morning reveille. (I, 291)

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

enough to reform themselves, he grew increasingly heedless of the dangers of self-exposure. His wounds were already too deep to be lacerated much more, and he became the victim of his own exaggerated rhetoric. Although he never entirely gave up the device of using spokesmen, the fictions became increasingly transparent. They were never again treated with the flexibility and richness one finds in Sartor. Driven by need, Carlyle began to mistake Teufelsdrockh and Sauerteig for himself, and the gentleness of much of his personal character was transformed in his prose into dogmatic abuse and violent denunciation. He willed the certitude of his fictions to be his own and was no longer, as he was in Sartor, his own best critic. F. R. Leavis has usefully suggested that George Eliot's fiction begins to weaken as soon as she blurs the distinction between herself and her characters. Analogously, Carlyle's art never again achieved the quality of Sartor because he never knew so clearly how different he was from his own creations. The complex (not always conscious) deception that grew out of need for self-protection was one of the main forces in the nineteenth century leading to the dominance of fiction as an art form. The even more complex self-decep­ tion that grows out of need for certainty and the absolute, out of the Sehnsucht nach der Unendlichkeit, was one of the main forces that led to the baffling intermixture of pap and nonsense in the great works of the time.56 Sheer (even if disguised) force of will carried Carlyle away from fiction, but the lesson of Sartor might well be that all Victorian art aspired to the condition of fiction, not music, and where it swerved from this condition it tended to fail. 56 It is important to take into account the usual notion about the Victorians that by and large they were dogmatists. See Walter Hough­ ton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven, 1957). He acutely observes that "the prophets insisted all the more positively that they were right because their readers, strange as it may seem, liked it that way [cf. the quotation from Froude in n. 55]; and because they them­ selves, as a matter of fact, were afraid that they were wrong" (p. 138). It seems to me that Houghton does not do sufficient justice, however, to the large areas of flexibility in the "Victorian frame of mind." See chs. Vi and vh, 137-82.

CHAPTER II

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT As THE Editor in Sartor Resartus was "struggling (by union of like with like, which is Method) to build a firm Bridge for British Travellers" (p. 79) across the Chaos of Teufelsdrockh's six paper bags and the rhapsodies of Die Kleider, he must surely have had in mind such a reader as Macaulay might have been. Here, if anywhere, was the British em­ piric who would, despite his attacks on utilitarianism, grind out virtue from the husks of pleasure and regard all of Carlyle's beloved German thinkers as obscurantists. "Mochte es," wrote Teufelsdrockh to the Editor, referring to his volume on clothes, "auch irn Brittischen Boden gedeihen" (p. 9). But Macaulay's would certainly have seemed "the barren domestic soil" on which the German thought neces­ sary to spiritual rebirth could not have thrived. While CarIyle and Newman were, in their different ways, battling for the souls of England, Macaulay seemed satisfied that Eng­ lish souls were fairly safe anyway. And it was he—whose soul the Sages would have thought most in need of saving— who won the largest audiences. He was, in a way, the per­ fect spokesman for the practical secular center of English opinion; if less influential than the Sages, he was, perhaps, far more representative of Victorian culture. And in his representativeness, he remains both interesting and im­ portant. Macaulay aimed at avoiding, not confronting, mystery; and whatever internal struggles he may have endured, they are not obviously reflected in his behavior or in his writing. Matthew Arnold suggested that Macaulay "belonged, in

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

many respects, to the eighteenth century rather than to our own";1 and it is certainly true that he remained faithful to many of the ideals of that century whose history he aspired to write. Carlyle and Newman transmuted their eighteenth-century inheritance. Carlyle's very style reveals a departure from the past, and in its passionate and obscure struggle with meaning, it is the antithesis of the gentlemanly ideal. Newman toned the weapons of the eighteenth cen­ tury against its own ideals until its intelligent, generous, decorous gentleman emerged irrevocably damned. But for Macaulay, practical common sense, clarity, decorum, a revulsion from excess of any kind, benevolence, empiricism, and a Johnsonian moral firmness (without Johnsonian eccentricity) were the guiding ideals of life and literature. His only conversion came at eighteen or so from a Toryism which was "never more than skin deep"2 to a mild sort of Radicalism which settled in a few years into Whiggery, the politics of compromise and expedience, of property and free trade, and of progress. Macaulay seems from the outset to have assumed that the world was wholly intelligible, and intelligible to the empiri­ cal-logical eye. He accepted his own success unquestionably. And he preserved to his death his commitment to the evangel­ ical ethos of his father's Clapham world while, with no fuss, he rejected its excesses. Walter Bagehot described Macaulay as a man with "no passionate self-questionings, no indomita­ ble fears, no asking perplexities."3 His art presents an impregnable, virtuous, self-assured, and knowledgeable "I" who makes glittering assertions, paints purple passages, and yet reinforces old prejudices. He differed from almost all of the major prose writers of his time in writing no autobiography, fictional or otherwise. 1 Johnson's Lives of the Poets, ed. Matthew Arnold (London, 1878), pp. xxvi-xxvii. 2 G.O. Trevelyan, Life of Lord Macaulay, 2 vols. (London, 1961) I, 72. All references to the biography will be to this "World's Classics" edition. 3 Walter Bagehot, Literary Studies, ed. R.H. Hutton (London, 1902), II, 20.

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

He kept no journal until after his return from India, and that journal does very little to penetrate the surface of his character: it is largely a record of the weather, of visits, of health, of reading, of charity, but it only occasionally slips into self-exploration.4 No man, it seems, was more in harmony with himself or with his times. He did not suffer from the disease of selfconsciousness that Carlyle described and attempted to com­ bat in himself; he was never thwarted in love (nor seems ever to have been tempted to it); he had no serious re­ ligious doubts (and probably only the most superficial kind of commitment). His credo seems to have been this: "If to live strictly and think freely; to practise what is moral and to believe what is rational, be consistent with the pro­ fession of Christianity, then I shall acquit myself like one of its truest professors." In the margin of the book in which this was written, Macaulay himself wrote: haec est absoluta et perfecta philosophi vita.5 The condition of England did not darken his vision or lead him to premonitions of catas­ trophe. The apparent complacency of his attitudes is reflected in the pleasant superficiality of so much of his writing, and this seems to place him outside the world of serious litera­ ture. Certainly, he is a difficult writer for critics to discuss. On the one hand he unquestionably had some of the quali4 The eleven volumes of the Journal are in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, and are to be edited by W. Robson of Trinity. I am grateful to Mr. A. Halcrow, the sub-librarian, for being allowed to examine the Journals in preparation of this section of my study. Occasionally in his Journals, Macaulay gives the impression that they might be self-revelatory: "Yesterday and today I have been reading over my old journals of 1852 and 1853—what a strong interest they have. No kind of reading is so delightful, so fascinating, as this minute history of a man's self." The next day he remarked, "Read my old journals with intense and even painful interest." These remarks, how­ ever, do not alter the fact that the Journals tell remarkably little about the "inner man." Macaulay's preoccupation with his own past is, as we shall see, characteristic of him and is more revealing, I think, than any explicit journal entries. Quotations from the Journals are from the Mss unless marked with page numbers, in which case they are taken from Trevelyan's Life. 5See Arthur Bryant, Macaulay (London, 1932), p. 153.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

ties of genius—a rich pictorial imagination, a firm control of tone, a sense of structure; on the other, he was largely anti-intellectual and insensible to nuances. It is no surprise therefore that serious critics were questioning the value of his works even at the height of their popularity. In some ways, Bagehot's essay of 1856, which accuses Macaulay of retreating from life, marked the limits of possible criticism of Macaulay as it marked Macaulay's limits as a writer. In the twentieth century, of course, MacauIay has alto­ gether fallen—like the first Whig, Satan—from critical grace, but there have been sporadic attempts at reconsidera­ tion. These, however, move little further than suggesting that perhaps, after all, the Philistine was an artist, too, and that, by some miracle—as Lytton Strachey described him— he sits, "squat, square and perpetually talking—on Par­ nassus."® MacauIay is paying the price of holding so firmly and deliberately to what he conceived of as the moderate center. He was convinced (and he was not altogether wrong, as we have seen) that the price one needed to pay for moving out to the extremes, as CarIyle moved, was too great. He complained in his Journal for 18 January 1850, How little the all important art of making meaning pel­ lucid is studied now. Hardly any popular writer—except myself—thinks of it. Many seem to aim at being obscure. Indeed, they may be right in one sense. Too many readers give credit for profundity to whatever is obscure, and will call what is perspicuous shallow. But Corragio—and think of A.D. 2850. Where will your Carlyle's and Emer­ son's be then? But Herodotus will be read with delight. We must do our best to be read too. And Macaulay's style does suggest, as G. S. Fraser has remarked, that Macaulay "accepted unquestioningly the surface forward flow of his age, and rejected, just as un6Lytton

Strachey, Portraits in Miniature (London, 1931), p. 177.

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

questioningly, its deeper undertow."7 Yet he struggled quite consciously to avoid the "deeper undertow." And if his career exhibits, as Gladstone remarked, "the wearisomeness of reiterated splendours, of success so uniform as to be almost monotonous,"8 he was nevertheless not exempt from the divisive and painful forces that ran through Victorian society. These forces manifest themselves in curious ways in his great work, the History of England. My concern here is not to consider Macaulay as a his­ torian, but rather as an imaginative writer who reflects in his writings struggles similar to those of the great Sages; whose failures—like theirs—are comprehensible as part of a defense erected against the pains of contemporary experi­ ence; and whose manner as a writer is deeply influenced by the almost universal attraction of the dominant Vic­ torian form, the novel. The History survives its own short­ comings, even as a work of literature, but it falls far short of its own ideals, which are close to the ideals of the midcentury novel. At first glance, however, it is difficult to see the relation between Macaulay's writing and the kind of experience Carlyle was grappling with in Sartor Resartus. It is true that the famous style, which dazzled Jeffrey and seemed so exciting and new to his Edinburgh Review readers, sug­ gests that large tracts of Macaulay's sensibility never entered the nineteenth century. The style was, after all, only an intensification of the balanced, antithetical style of late eighteenth-century journalism. Carlyle and Newman, whose early writing shows some affinities to this style, idiosyncratically broke down its hard outlines to make their language correspond to their new ways of seeing and think­ ing. Macaulay, on the other hand, hardened the outlines, made bolder antitheses, employed paradox more frequently, confidently intensified its assertiveness by a trick of writ7 G. S. Fraser, "Macaulay's Style as an Essayist," Review of English Literature, I (Oct. 1960), 9-19. 8 W. E. Gladstone, "Macaulay" in Gleanings, II (New York, 1879), 267.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

ing short staccato sentences, and diminished, in general, its power to qualify. The style, therefore, implies what must have been a dying view of the world: that there is nothing that cannot be adequately understood by good old English common sense, that mystery is a sham because it denies the validity of immediately given experience, and that theory is inade­ quate because it oversystematizes experience or ignores it altogether. Good writing, in Macaulay's view, should ap­ proximate the ideal of the gentleman: "I do not like Dickens' manner as well as Thackeray's," he wrote in his Journal on 4 December 1859. "Thackeray writes a better style, and is more of a gentleman and a scholar." Since clarity and decorum were his ideals in public life and in writing, he could never understand that Carlyle was any­ thing more than "an empty-headed bombastic dunce."9 In­ deed, the dogmatisms of Carlyle and Newman, when con­ sidered in the Hght of Macaulay's anti-dogmatism, fre­ quently seem open-minded and richly sensitive to alterna­ tive possibilities. All three writers were, curiously enough, great valuers of "experience." All were bred in the empirical school of philosophy, and all saw that an explanation which did not take into account "experience" was no explanation at all. Each of them, ultimately dogmatists all, insisted on the importance of openness to experience. Newman, we shall see, based his theory of belief firmly on what he saw the experience of belief to be; Carlyle rejected Christianity as not conformable to nineteenth-century experience, which demanded a new faith. But MacauIay took "experience" in a much simpler way, as what could be seen or felt or heard, and, verified by common sense. And thus, in his celebration of experience, he discovered no need for spiritual rebirth and nothing seriously wrong with a prosperous and gen­ erally free society. 9 For a pleasant summary of Macaulay's attitude toward Carlyle, see R.C. Beatty, "Macaulay and Carlyle," Phihhgical Quarterly, XVIII

(1939), 25-34.

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

The personal vision of his great contemporaries, the over­ whelming sense of the failure of traditional values and attitudes manifested in autobiographies, novels, and poetry, were incomprehensible to him. "The morbidity of Rous­ seau," as he called Rousseau's obsession with self, was absolutely repellent to him. Obviously Macaulay did not believe the world free from pain: every man must endure some pain, but his pain is his own affair. Strong feeling, "sincerity and passion,"10 are indispensable to great art; but there is nothing either mysterious or attractive in public self-examination and self-exposure. Rousseau's sensibility was diseased; so was Byron's. I Thus, in Macaulay's published writings there is at first view scarcely a hint of that universal Victorian skeleton in the closet—the buried life. Nobody labored more diligently to create a public self, or had a clearer notion of how to preserve the demeanor of the dignified gentleman. He was capable of boyish playfulness and deep affection, but only in a very small circle of friends and relations. Trevelyan's fine biography was particularly attractive to admirers of Macaulay because it revealed Macaulay as a man with deep domestic attachments. But read carefully, it also demonstrated how consciously Macaulay compartmentalized his public and private selves. "I have," he wrote to his father when he was only twenty, "a court dress for days of ceremony and people of ceremony. . . . But I would not willingly be frightened into wearing it with you" (I, 98). Even before his family, however, he was usually unwilling to wear his heart on his sleeve. Occasionally his Journals reveal the real dignity of the conscious restraint he placed on his feelings. When, in what was to be the last year of his life, he learned that his sister Hannah would be leaving for Madras, he was deeply pained, knowing that he would 10 See his essay on Byron, Miscellaneous Works of Lord Macaulay, ed. Lady Trevelyan (New York, n.d.), I, 479. All references to Macaulay's Essays will be to this edition.

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not live long enough to see her again. In his Journals he wrote, "To be angry with relations and servants because you suffer something which they did not inflict, and which they are desirous to alleviate, is unworthy, not merely of a good man, but of a rational being. Yet I see instances enough of such irritability to fear that I may be guilty of it. But I will take care. I have thought several times of late that the last scene of the play was approaching. I should wish to act it simply, but with fortitude and gentleness united" (II, 392). Characteristically, the lines in King Lear that apparently attracted him most were these: "O, let not women's weapons, water-drops, / Stain my man's cheeks!" Beside these lines he wrote, "Where is there anything like this in the world?"11 Few people knew that "women's weapons" ever stained Macaulay's cheeks. "Those who are least partial to him," Trevelyan remarked in his Life, "will allow that his was essentially a virile intellect. He wrote, he thought, he spoke, he acted, like a man. The public regarded him as an im­ personation of vigour, vivacity, and self-reliance; but his own family, together with one and probably only one, of his friends [i.e., T. F. Ellis], knew that his affections were only too tender, and his sensibilities only too acute" (I, 264). The firmness of Macaulay's judgments gave him an air of invulnerability which verged at times on cruelty. When Robert Montgomery, whose "Omnipresence of the Deity" Macaulay had helped to demolish in 1830, begged to be omitted from future editions of the essays, Macaulay re­ fused. The decision was likely the correct one, but Macaulay seems not to have hesitated a moment between the principle and the fact of Montgomery's prolonged humiliation. The mistakes Macaulay himself made were rare. His political career, from the days of agitation for the Reform Bill, through his sojourn in India, to his last days in Par­ liament, was uncompromisingly correct. His allegiance to his party grew from firmly held convictions, and he would 11 The Marginal Notes of Lord Macaulay, selected and arranged by G.O. Trevelyan (London, 1907), p. 27.

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

not pander to popular wishes on any issue, as he out­ spokenly (perhaps pompously) said about himself in his Edinburgh campaign speeches. Late in life he turned his back on high office for the sake of his art. To the applause of most he rejected immediate glory and power for the glory of posterity; and with a typically Macaulayesque bit of legerdemain, he won both. But this public aspect of himself, we can see now, came perilously close to mere philistinism, or worse. From his patriotism, his rejection of theory for a crude empiricism, his moral decisiveness, his inflexible faith in progress, it was only one step to jingoism, racialism, anti-intellectualism, and the smug self-righteous­ ness of the later years of the century. But the tender affections and acute sensibility noted by Trevelyan made for a very different Macaulay from the one the public saw. If Macaulay's life was the happy one it seems to have been, the happiness was bought at a great price; and frequently, of course, it was not happy at all. He fenced his life around with an elaborate series of protections and, in a way, he deliberately anaesthetized himself against the present. All his strongest feelings were narrowly concentrated on one friend and his sisters. In particular, his attachment to his sisters was notoriously and strangely intense. It replaced in his life the ordinary attach­ ments of marriage and children, which would have entailed a steadily growing group of commitments and, therefore, exposures. The history of his relation to his sisters is the surest evidence of the inadequacy, even for himself, of his general views on progress and human happiness. Totally self-assured as he seemed to be, without his sisters he was utterly bereft of hope and found the world meaningless. I do not think this is an overstatement. "How keenly Macaulay felt the separation from his sister," Margaret, on her marriage to Edward Cropper, "it is im­ possible," says Trevelyan, "to do more than indicate." Macaulay wrote manfully in regard to the marriage: "The attachment between brothers and sisters, blameless, amiable, and delightful as it is, is so liable to be superseded by

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other attachments that no wise man ought to suffer it to become indispensable to him." But by the end of the letter, philosophy deserted him: "I have still one more stake to lose [i.e., Hannah]. There remains one event for which, when it arrives, I shall, I hope, be prepared. From that moment, with a heart formed, if ever any man's heart was formed, for domestic happiness, I shall have nothing left in this world but ambition' (I, 265-66). A month later, at the end of the letter to Hannah announcing the certainty of his being reelected to his seat in the House of Commons he wrote, "Dearest, dearest sister, you alone are now left to me. Whom have I on earth but thee? But for you, in the midst of all these successes, I should wish that I were lying by poor Hyde Villiers. But I cannot go on ..." (1,266). When, near the end of his life, he was threatened with the loss of Hannah, his Journals pick up the motif of the wish for death in a lamentable and pathetic way. To be sure, one ought not to put too much weight on the lamenta­ tion in a private journal of a man chronically ill and be­ coming aware of impending death. But these entries do suggest how genuine was his remark of 1832 that but for Hannah he could wish himself "lying by poor Hyde Villiers." On October 25th, 1859 he wrote, "I am entering on a dark sad year. My health indeed is improved. My fortune is flourishing. I have rank, wealth, fame and what are they worth? I wish that I were dead—But I must not give way." There are several other entries in the same vein, but the nature of his feeling for his sisters can perhaps be inferred from an entry of April 19, 1856: "Home, and passed the day arranging papers. Some things that met my eyes over­ came me for a time—Margaret, alas, alas. And yet she might have changed to me. But no, that could not have been. To think that she has been 22 years dead; and I am crying for her as if it were yesterday." He adjures himself frequently to bear up: "I, who have very little indulgence for the morbidities of Rousseau, ought to correct my own" (11 Nov. 1859). At each loss or threat of loss in his family, either by

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marriage or death or departure (and the distinctions seem to have made little difference to the intensity of his feeling), Macaulay's comments become more extreme and painful. When Hannah was engaged, he wrote several letters to Margaret from India: "Wiat I have myself felt it is un­ necessary to say. My parting from you almost broke my heart. But when I parted from you I had Nancy [i.e., Hannah]: I had all my other relations: I had my friends: I had my country. Now I have nothing except the resources of my own mind, and the consciousness of having acted not ungenerously" (I, 357). He ended the letter by quoting some "foolish lines" which, he said, "contain the history of my life." There were two birds that sat on a stone; One flew away, and there was but one. The other flew away, and then there was none; And the poor stone was left all alone. Reading the Journals of the last months of Macaulay's life is a peculiarly sad experience. One thinks of his "rank, wealth, fame," of his insistence on the progress of society and the increasing happiness of mankind and finds that domestic affections provided the whole value of Macaulay's private world. He was altogether unequipped to cope with personal loss. The code of the gentleman made things worse: "I am too much inclined," he wrote, "to doubt the affection of those who are closest to me: and yet to receive proofs of affection which cost them anything is painful to me, and almost irritating." The gentleman must not display feeling, must not incur emotional debts; but the man needs the demonstrations which cause the debts. The price in either case was a deep and incommunicable unhappiness. These facts, which were not available to Bagehot in 1856, force a reexamination of Bagehot's view that Macaulay had an inexperiencing nature. Bagehot argued with much justice that Macaulay learned from books not experience; it is evident to the modern reader that his complacency about the condition of England was fostered by reading

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(and prejudices) which would allow him to discount any particular cases of suffering he might see. "We know," Bagehot said, "that there is a whole class of minds which prefer the literary delineation of objects to the actual eye­ sight of them. To some life is difficult. An insensible nature, like a rough hide, resists the breath of passing things" (p. 7). Macaulay's was a rough hide by choice because his own susceptibility to pain was great. In her Journal, Margaret Macaulay, who regarded her brother almost to the point of idolatry, compared him to Dr. Johnson. Tom, she said, though not as generous as Doctor Johnson, "is, however, extremely pitiful. The sight of pain puts him into an agony, but he is, I think, a little too fond of reasoning himself out of feeling, and tries too much to forget unpleasant things. I believe, however, he feels as much as other people in half the time."12 A good deal of Macaulay's life can be understood as an attempt "to forget" or to avoid "unpleasant things." The famous talker, the social success, the panegyrist of English life found it difficult to like anyone outside of his intimate circle or to admire the work of any of his literary contem­ poraries. Everything we know about his relation to his times suggests a deliberate attempt to avoid new commitments that would entail, at some inevitable future moment, the pain of loss. When William Wilberforce died in 1833 he wrote to Hannah: I was truly fond of him: that is, "je l'aimais comme l'on aime." And how is that? How very little one human being generally cares for another! How very little the world misses anybody! How soon the chasm left by the best and wisest men closes! I thought, as I walked back from Cadogan Place, that our own selfishness when others are taken away ought to teach us how Httle others will suffer at losing us. I thought that, if I were to die to­ morrow, not one of the fine people, whom I dine with every week, will take a cotelette aux petits pois the less 12

Recollections by a Sister of T. B. Macaulay (London, 1864),

pp. 23-24.

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on Saturday at the table to which I was invited to meet them, or will smile less gaily at the ladies over the cham­ pagne. And I am quite even with them. . . . There are not ten people in the world whose deaths would spoil my dinner; but there are one or two whose deaths would break my heart. The more I see of the world, and the more numerous my acquaintance becomes, the narrower and more exclusive my affection grows, and the more I cling to my sisters, and to one or two old friends of my quiet days. (I, 295-96) The tone of disillusionment that underlies the half-comic tone of the letter is a genuine reflection of Macaulay's feel­ ing that the world, by and large, is not to be trusted. He turned, as in 1833 he said he would, to his family and to old friends who could be trusted to share his feelings and to care for him enough to sacrifice at least one cotelette aux petits pois at his death. Trevelyan records that as the years went on Macaulay's distaste for society grew. He quotes his mother (Macaulay's sister Hannah) as saying that "few of those who met" Macaulay "and enjoyed his animated con­ versation, could guess how much rather he would have remained at home, and how much difficulty I had to force him to accept invitations and prevent his growing a recluse" (II, 143). Even Macaulay's dazzling conversational powers in so­ ciety can be regarded as more anti-social than social. If the anecdotes about the way he monopolized talk have any relation to truth, it is obvious that the talking—whatever other function it served—kept him from establishing any real personal contact with his listeners. The talk was in­ evitably conducted as a monologue, and there are startlingly few indications that Macaulay ever engaged in discussion which caused him to be influenced by other people's ideas and feelings. Charles Austin, Trevelyan remarks, "was the only man who ever succeeded in dominating Macaulay" (I, 71). The domination took place in Macaulay's first years at Cambridge and was responsible for his conversion from

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Toryism—a commitment he only tenuously held anyway. In later life Macaulay devised an impressive set of defenses against criticism or, apparently, even common exchange. Although he was willing, among friends and in his Journals, moderately to admit his own shortcomings, the argument frequently made that he was harshly self-critical is absurd. Although the standards he set himself were high, he utterly refused in almost every case to heed negative criticism. His attitude toward the critics of his History is the obvious example. He neglected the criticisms of his treatment of Penn and Marlborough, assuming an air of general superiority to all such petty niggling. At his most pleasant on the subject, he could say, "I could review myself better, whichever side I took, than any of my reviewers" (1 Feb. 1856). Usually, however, his tone was more in­ dignant and self-righteous: "The Athenaeum," he wrote on March 22, 1851 has fallen on me about Penn—how little most critics would understand the perfectly plain contempt with which I read such things when I have patience to read them." The day before, he had written in his Journal on seeing a book about Penn "with an attack on me— quite contemptible," that "A man who has had such success as mine may allow envy to indulge in a little impertinence." To almost all criticisms he responded with, "But it matters little." Richmond Beatty's biography of Macaulay probably overstates (and in a way reminiscent of Macaulay's own methods) the intensity of Macaulay's antipathy and sense of superiority to the world; but the Journals do record with alarming frequency his hostility toward other important people, and even toward the very people he was generously helping with funds. (It would be possible, I think, to argue that Macaulay's notorious softness in aiding the numberless band of more or less subtle mendicants who solicited him was a defense against personal engagement, a protection against the pain of being forced to witness pain. It is ob­ viously dangerous, however, to push this kind of argument very far.) Beatty cites several examples of Macaulay's hos-

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tility to the world, and in his essay on Macaulay and Carlyle, he demonstrates that in the mutual if largely unspoken animosity between the two, Macaulay was by far the more intolerant (an astonishing feat, if one remembers Carlyle's capacity for invective). Beatty's general view of Macaulay in this respect is crudely and decisively expressed: Macaulay did not grow mellow or charitable with the advancing years . . . he grew, if anything, even more savagely hostile and contemptuous toward all men whose opinions did not square with his own. Self-righteousness settled about him in marble and impenetrable folds. He never admitted to a fault or to a mistake. Rarely, if at all, did he admit even to a doubt. Such confidence in his own unswerving rectitude blinded him increasingly to many of the subtleties of human nature.13 Trevelyan recognized the same quality, although without anger and probably more fairly to Macaulay. "Macaulay," he said, "had a very slight acquaintance with the works of some among the best writers of his own generation. He was not fond of new lights, unless they had been kindled by ancient beacons. . . . In books, as in people and places, he loved that, and that only, to which he had been accus­ tomed from boyhood upwards" (II, 382). Of course, Macaulay rarely demonstrated his dislike publicly. "Noth­ ing," he said, "is so easy as to be civil where you despise." The split between Macaulay's inner and public lives seems to have been as absolute as the split in any other important writer of the time. The alter-ego of the eight­ eenth-century pragmatist and liberal is the early romantic who appears in Trevelyan's Life. Although he expressed a profound faith in progress, he spent his life in an intensify­ ing quest for permanence, stability, and order. The search could not, as in Newmans case, be systematically worked out in theological argument, or, as in Carlyle's case, publicly dramatized in fictions and symbols. It went on sporadically, 13 R.C. Beatty, Lord Macaulay, Victorian Liberal (Chapel Hill, 1938), p. 145.

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in the moments when pain was unavoidable, and mani­ fested itself more in retreat than pursuit. But most of the symptoms are recognizable in his writings once one has learned to look for them: the bourgeois-romantic love of domesticity; the sentimental affection for childhood; the tendency to dwell more in the unreal than in the actual, in the past than in the present; and a leaden despair when any aspect of his personal life failed him. Within the Christian scheme, the losses produced by death, the instability of worldly things, the sinfulness of man were painful; but they were recognized from the start as inevitable, and the religion itself made them mean­ ingful and gave consolation. But unlike Christianity, Macaulay's ethical system (if it can be called that) had little personal relevance. It depended for its values on the general improvement of mankind, on general rules applicable and meaningful only in the area where society had developed beyond the possibility of intimate personal relationships among its members.14 For his public self this ethic—funda14 There is, in this respect, a curious disparity between the way Macaulay talked and the way he worked. His attack on Mill's "Essay on Government" was an attack on what he regarded as the Utilitarians' tendency to argue a priori, on the basis of certain axioms about human nature. Macaulay insisted, as one might expect, on the necessity of basing one's general arguments not on such arbitrary axioms but on the evidence of common experience. In so doing, he not only deeply impressed John Stuart Mill, but showed how this common sense sort of empiricism makes possible a broad-minded openness to experience sharply in opposition to dogmatism. In his third essay on the subject, Macaulay wrote, Nothing can be more absurd than to suppose, like the West­ minster Reviewer, that thieves steal only because they do not calcu­ late the chances of being hanged as correctly as honest men. It never seems to have occurred to him as possible that a man may so greatly prefer the life of a thief to the life of a laborer that he may determine to brave the risk of detection and punishment, though he may even think that risk greater than it really is. There follows a supposititious dialogue between the thief and a utilitarian, with the thief, of course, winning out. "It is my humour," the thief concludes. "Are you answered?" ("Utilitarian Theory of Government," I, 383-84). But despite Macaulay's opposition to contemporary Utilitarians, his ethics were themselves firmly utilitarian—with, perhaps, an admixture

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mentally utilitarian—was adequate; but in his personal life he had only a decorous stoicism to sustain him, and this was largely inadequate. Religion provided for him no con­ solation: as we have seen, he seems to have shared none of the enthusiasm of his father's faith and to have settled early into a merely conventional religion. And beyond the conventional moral stands Macaulay regularly took there lay a strong antagonism to any kind of idealism. Certainly in political matters his morals were the morals of expedi­ ence as much as of Christianity: "An acre in Middlesex," he wrote, in a representatively assertive way, "is better than a principality in Utopia";15 and "A life of action, if it is to be useful [which was Macaulay's fundamental criterion], must be a life of compromise."16 His rhetoric, as one critic has said, "is emphatic," but "his philosophy ac­ tually is relativist."17 Perhaps "philosophy" is not quite the right word; but whatever it is called it kept Macaulay from placing faith in permanence of any kind—political, social, or personal. The essays and History are full of demi-sermons on the importance of understanding and judging the be­ havior of historical characters, not in absolute terms, but against the background of the commonly accepted morality of their times. "No man," he argued, "ought to be severely censured for not being beyond his age in virtue."18 Macaulay's position was essentially that of a Mr. Worldly Wiseman who has no illusions about the ways of the world and who therefore strikes attitudes of contempt toward of conventional Christian views. His acuity in finding exceptions to a priori theories did not, however, lead him to a full alertness to the multifariousness of the possibilities of experience. He was committed to a notion of utility—the greatest happiness principle—and to an instinctive morality of decorum and expedience. This in fact led him to a very stern sort of dogmatism which kept him from the capacity to understand or sympathize with the irrationality he affects to believe in in the example just quoted. 15 "Lord Bacon," II, 429. 16 "Lord Mahon's War of the Succession in Spain," II, 169. 17 W.G. Carleton, "Macaulay and the Trimmers," American Scholar, XIX (1949), 73. 18 "Horace Walpole," II, 195.

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those who insist on imposing impractical ideals on an in­ tractable reality: "Mr. Owen of Lanark," he wrote in his essay on Southey's Colloquies, "is more unreasonably and hopelessly in the wrong than any speculator of our time."19 At the same time, Macaulay prided himself justly on an unswerving integrity in his political life and on a rigid adherence to the principles of his youth. For a man as alert to the inevitability of change and compromise as Macaulay, he was through his life extraordinarily unchang­ ing. And for a spokesman for liberal principles, he was strangely conservative. It is a commonplace that, for the most part, his liberalism never extended much beyond the 1832 Reform Bill, which he supported so effectively by threatening another French Revolution in England if it were not passed. The Reform Bill was for him a conserving bill, a bill which gave support to private property and pro­ tected the true establishment. In his 1852 Edinburgh re­ election speech, he did concede the possibility of extending the franchise if it were possible "without the smallest danger to peace, law, and order," "to classes of the community which do not now possess it,"20 but his opposition to uni­ versal suffrage was complete and unambiguous. Macaulay increasingly clung to the past even in his public life, but in his personal life he held to it with a tenacity which, to the modern eye, looks suspiciously unbalanced. His Joiurnals suggest that he consciously maintained his balance by finding an area in which to play out the feelings which, as a gentleman and as a moral being, he could not play out publicly or even, with complete openness, among his family. The area had been available to him early, the world of books, and one of the leitmotifs of his Joiunals is literature as anodyne. A passage from the essay on Bacon, from which Bagehot quotes with contempt, can clarify this point: The debt which [a man of liberal education] owes to 19 "Southey's

Colloquies" I, 397. to Parliament," V, 492.

20 "Re-election

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[the great minds of former ages] is incalculable. They have guided him to truth. They have filled his mind with noble and graceful images. They have stood by him in all vicissitudes, comforters in sorrow, nurses in sickness, companions in solitude. These friendships are exposed to no danger from the occurrences by which other attach­ ments are weakened or dissolved. Time glides on; fortune is inconstant; tempers are soured; bonds which seemed indissoluble are daily sundered by interest, by emulation, or by caprice. But no such cause can affect the silent converse which we hold with the highest of human in­ tellects. That placid intercourse is disturbed by no jealousies or resentment. These are the old friends who are never seen with new faces, who are the same in wealth and in poverty, in glory and in obscurity. With the dead there is no rivalry. In the dead there is no change. Plato is never sullen. Cervantes is never petulant. De­ mosthenes never comes unseasonably. Dante never stays too long. No difference of political opinion can alienate Cicero. No heresy can excite the horror of Bossuet. (II,

332) It is important not to underestimate the seriousness of this passage, written while he was in India, discovering to the full the transience of things, but especially of the loves he had unself-consciously assumed to be permanent, or to dis­ count it as a simple piece of Macaulayesque rhetoric. Here was a kind of permanence Macaulay could believe in. It was, to be sure, the permanence of death, but that is the only kind of permanence of which a secular mind can con­ ceive, and the wish for permanence regularly becomes the death wish. Bagehot, violently angered by the passage, concluded his attack in this way: "The exclusive devotion to books tires. We require to love and hate, to act and live" (p. 8). But Macaulay would certainly have understood this attitude—perhaps too well. His essay on Sir William Temple centers on criticism of Temple for withdrawing from public life and maintaining his integrity by refusing,

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as it were, to act and live. Macaulay himself did not refuse to return to Parliament although he did turn down high office. But the temptation to withdraw was for him very great because the way he experienced life led him to know that it would always carry with it more pain than he could endure. The greater his feeling of loss, the more he turned to books. When it was decided that Hannah would marry, he wrote to Margaret: "I feel a growing tendency to cynicism and suspicion. My intellect remains; and is likely, I some­ times think, to absorb the whole man. I still retain, (not only undiminished, but strengthened by the very events which have deprived me of everything else,) my thirst for knowledge; my passion for holding converse with the greatest minds of all ages and nations; my power of for­ getting what surrounds me, and of living with the past, the future, the distant, and the unreal. Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment my choice of life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries that we saw together at the universities, and never pass a waking hour without a book before me" (I, 358-59). A month after he learned that his sister Margaret was dead, he wrote to his friend Ellis: "Even now, when time has begun to do its healing office, I cannot write about her without being altogether unmanned. That I have not utterly sunk under this blow I owe chiefly to literature. What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;—to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal" (I, 398). In another letter, later in the year, he wrote: "Even now, I dare not, in the intervals of business, remain alone for a minute without a book in my hand" (I, 408). Literature could relieve Macaulay, as he implied in the essay on Bacon, because it helped establish unchanging relationships. Dead writers could be trusted not to say anything but what they had already written, not to betray, not to intrude, and not to die again. They spoke from a past which was fascinating to dwell upon; they lived in and created unreal worlds far more satisfying than the

MACAULAY : PROGRESS AND RETREAT

present reality—not richer or more progressive or freer, rather the reverse, but emotionally stable and ultimately just. Macaulay believed that in the long run history would be just, but in the present world the true judgment of his­ tory was remote. Only in the worlds of fiction and of epic poetry could one count again on seeing immediately the justice and certitude unattainable in the short span of a lifetime. "The past, the future, the distant and the unreal" became increasing preoccupations for Macaulay,21 and he sought the comfortable certitude he had known (or thought he had known) in childhood. In the struggle to resist change, MacauIay had many weapons. His prodigious memory fastened with almost demonic power on his past, and what his memory did not supply he sought through a kind of research. "He positively lived," Trevelyan wrote, "upon the associations of his own past. A sixpenny print which had hung in a Clapham nursery or schoolroom gave him more real delight than any masterpiece of Reynolds. . . . But nothing caused him so much pleasure, (a pleasure which frequent repetition did not perceptibly diminish,) as a visit to any scene that he had known in earlier years" (II, 249). To hang onto the past he carried his sister Hannah with him to India. I have already indicated that what he believed as a youth, he believed as a grown man. "His political opinions," said Sir Charles Firth, "were fully formed at an extremely early date; they never altered; there is no sign of any gradual development or growth about them. . . . His historical opinions were mostly formed as early as his political opin­ ions, and he clung to the past with the same constancy."22 Even his famous style seems to have been formed at least by the time he was 21, as an essay, significantly on William III, reveals.23 The judgments in that essay are almost pre­ cisely the judgments of his History. Where Carlyle and 21 John Clive, "Macaulay's Historical Imagination," Review of Eng­ lish Literature, I (I960), 230. 22 C.H. Firth, A Commentary on Macaulay's History of England (London, 1938), p. 275. 23 Trevelyan prints two excerpts from the essay in his Life, I, 79-80.

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Newman (and Browning also comes to mind immediately) resisted the relativism toward which they were drawn by attempting to find permanence outside ordinary experience, Macaulay remained inside that experience. Permanence for him could thus reside only in the judgment of posterity, in the happiness of his childhood, and in the literature of the dead. Macaulay frequently remarked on his strange tendency to imagine different worlds and to live in them as though they were real. In her Journal, Margaret Macaulay recalled a conversation with her brother in which he explained how this tendency was related to his methods as a writer: "My accuracy as to facts," he said, "I owe to a cause which many men would not confess. It is owing to my love of castle building. History," he said, "is in my mind soon constructed into romance." He described in a very interesting manner the way in which from childhood his mind and imagination had been touched and filled by the study of history. "With a person of this turn of mind the minute touches are of as great interest and perhaps greater, than the most im­ portant events." He said, "spending so much time as I do in solitude, my mind would have rusted in gazing vacantly at shop windows. As it is, I am no sooner in the streets than I am in Greece, in Rome, in the midst of the French Revolution. Precision in dates, the day or hour in which a man was born or died, becomes necessary. A slight fact, a sentence, a word, are of importance in my romance!" For Macaulay the unreal world had to have the solidity of the real; it needed to satisfy, in a curious way, the demands of his skeptical nature even as he remained conscious of its unreality. Romance must be built on facts until the facts become dense enough to make the romance a kind of reality. The "unreal" thus became the world where Ma-

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caulay's private feelings could emerge and find the fulfil­ ment they could not find in the real present. Macaulay loved fiction for just this reason, and he didn't care much whether the novels were good or bad. But so intense was his re­ sponse to unreal worlds that even in fiction he could not long endure the intrusion of pain. After reading a novel of Bulwer's he remarked, "I generally avoid all novels which are said to have very much pathos. The suffering which they produce is to me a very real suffering, and of that I have quite enough without them" (I, 469). It was thus impossible for Macaulay to sustain, either in writing or reading, the kind of detachment necessary for wide-ranging sympathy. He projected himself into everything he read. In the margins of his copy of Plato, Macaulay noted: "I think that if I had been in the place of Polus, Socrates would hardly have had so easy a job of it." Later, he added, "I do not wonder that they poisoned him. A pest of a fellow—his delight in humbling everybody else, his mock humility, his quaker-like patience, more provoking than any insolence, would have driven me mad." Arthur Bryant's comment seems appropriate: Macaulay "shared all the irritation that the philosopher's contemporaries must have felt at his personality."24 The harmony of attitudes between the Macaulay who wrote these marginal notes and the Macaulay of the famous journalism does not belie the idea that there was a sharp division between the public and private man. In the "unreal" world Macaulay could be the man he wanted to be in the present, but without the threat of loss or betrayal. The man he tried to be in public was apparently constructed out of two ideals—the ideal of the honorable, moral, rational gentleman, and the ideal of a world in which honor, rationality, and morality are possible and justly rewarded. The tendency to dwell in the unreal must certainly have grown not merely from the natural playfulness of his youth, 24Bryant (p. 135) prints both passages, only the first of which appears in Trevelyan's Marginal Notes.

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but from his deeply pained awareness that his ideal of self was not in fact justified by the world. Trevelyan was probably right in insisting on Macaulay's affectionate na­ ture; but the real world is cruel to affection. And Macaulay turned with something like terror from the losses which time and human nature inflicted. In particular, he turned, as we have seen, to his own childhood, but also to other children. "The feelings with which Macaulay regarded chil­ dren," Trevelyan wrote, "were near akin to those of the great writer to whom we owe the death of little Paul, and the meeting between the schoolboy and his mother in the eighth chapter of David Copperfield. . . . In truth, Macaulay's extreme sensibility to all which appealed to the sentiment of pity, whether in art or in nature, was nothing short of a positive inconvenience to him" (II, 150). Images of child­ hood—of innocence uncorrupted, of naively direct feeling— represented to Macaulay an ideal of which the real world had largely deprived him. "Alas! Alas!," Macaulay sighed on seeing a woman he had known as a child, "that every­ thing beautiful must fade. How beautiful once" (Bryant, p. 129). To be sure, this is all sentimental enough, but it is obviously also an authentic expression of Macaulay's feel­ ings. Here as elsewhere he shared the prejudices, the emo­ tional self-indulgences, of his Victorian audiences. Like the reserved gentleman he was, however, he spoke of these feelings far more often to himself than to the general public, before whom he felt the need to preserve the English stiff upper lip. This sort of feeling and the awareness of the inevitable pain it must cause him was obviously incom­ patible with the ideals his public self implied. Those ideals survived whole only in literature and history as Macaulay accepted them. If life were to fail him at the moment he could turn to posterity; if pain and injustice seemed to deprive him of his reason for being, literature created a world in which pain and injustice were convincingly shown to be mere forerunners of the triumph of justice.

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II If one seeks a point of connection between Macaulay's art and the aspects of his life which I have briefly sketched, it is best perhaps to start with his attitudes toward litera­ ture. They do not develop into a systematic view, and the most notorious of them (those espoused, for example, in his essay on Milton) seem altogether consistent with his public self: arrogantly self-assured, insensitive to subtleties, de­ liberately paradoxical, and materialistic. "As civilization ad­ vances," he said in a famous Macaulayism, "poetry almost necessarily declines" (I, 16). It is not difficult, however, to see how even here the prejudices which were to drive him to the futile quest for permanence in his personal life were in operation. In his preface to the collected edition of his essays Macaulay said that his criticism of Milton, "written when the author was fresh from college . . . contains scarcely a para­ graph such as his matured judgment approves"25; but it is certain that Macaulay continued to feel throughout his life that "the earliest poets are generally the best" and that in­ tellectual progress increasingly limits the possibilities of poetic subjects. When he undertook to write the Lays of Ancient Rome it was, as he told his brother Charles, with the "idea of restoring to poetry the legends of which poetry had been robbed by history" (Life, I, 44). It can be seen, therefore, that Macaulay's usual praise of contem­ porary civilization implied praise of an order which had diminished the possibility of great art—of the literature he loved more than he loved most people. It implied, again, the other side of Macaulay—the romantic who clung with his feelings to things his intellect ought to have taught him to despise. Great literature presented the unreal as though it were 25 I, 12. Trevelyan quotes a letter in which Macaulay wrote: "I have never written a page of criticism on poetry, or the fine arts, which I would not burn if I had the power" (I, 437).

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real and made it possible for an intelligent man too sus­ ceptible to pity and loss to dwell in the unreal, and to be­ lieve in permanence (simply because over the centuries the great works had endured) and in the ultimate victory of beauty and justice. In all the paradoxes of the essay on Mil­ ton there is evident a tension between intelligence and art which, if it were (as it never could have been) carried out as far as it could go, would suggest that Macaulay found the "superior" world in which he lived emotionally and spirit­ ually barren. "Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind," he said, echoing Pope, "if anything which gives so much pleasure ought to be called unsoundness" (I, 18). And later: "He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child. He must take to pieces the whole web of his mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title to superiority" (I, 20). The reasons Macaulay gave for these assertions are well known: that change of language and advance in knowledge require generaliza­ tion, whereas "particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination" (I, 17); that "We cannot unite the in­ compatible advantages of reality and deception, the clear discernment of truth, and the exquisite enjoyment of fiction" (I, 20). It nevertheless became one of the goals of Macaulay's art, as we shall see more fully later, to unite truth and fiction, to make it possible to be a sophisticated modern and enjoy the works of the imagination as a childlike ancient. Macaulay went a step in this direction three years later, in his essay on Dryden in which he picked up the ideas he had set forth in the essay on Milton, but qualified them. Here too he was arguing that "Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the spring of life and the fruits of its autumn, the pleasures of close investigation and those of agreeable error" (I, 116). The rhetoric and the ideas are similar to those of the Milton

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essay, but Macaulay goes a step further in conceding that the success of poetry "depends not solely on the vigor of the imagination, but partly also on the instruments which the imagination employs," so that "Within certain limits . . . poetry may be improving while the poetical faculty is decaying" (I, 118). In less sophisticated days, that is, the "picture" in the poet's mind was likely to have been more vivid than the "picture" in the mind of a modern; but a modern may be better able—because more intelligent—to transfer the picture into langauge. But for Macaulay there were severe limits to what intelli­ gence might do for art. In a capsule history of English literature he argued that intelligence can refine the "in­ struments by which the imagination works . . . to perfec­ tion." In Dante's Florence or Shakespeare's England, "men have not more imagination than their rude ancestors. We strongly suspect that they have much less. But they produce better works of imagination" (I, 120). The progress of such refinement must, however, stop; and although for a "short period of splendid and consummate excellence" in­ telligence more than compensated for "the diminution of the poetical powers," poetry began immediately after to "decline" "from causes against which it is vain to struggle" (1,120-21). The rapid decline of poetry after its great period into a period of bombast was slowed by the triumph of good taste and intelligence in criticism and critical poetry, such as that of Dryden and later Pope. "The science of criti­ cism . . . is constantly tending toward perfection," though never, Macaulay conceded, perfectible. And it is possible, therefore, as he had seen in the work of the Romantic poets, to produce an interesting kind of art imitative of the great works of the period of "splendid and consummate excellence." But the second harvest, as he put it, grows on "a spent soil," and never will "Italy produce another Inferno, or England another Hamlet" (I, 121-23). The pros­ pect for nineteenth-century imaginative literature was, from this point of view, bleak indeed. Macaulay's later judgments of the post-romantic and Victorian writers suggest that he

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never found reason to change his ideas on the subject. To produce great art in the nineteenth century it would be necessary to work in a genre which allowed critical in­ telligence and a greater fidelity to the possibilities of real experience to combine with what remained of modern man's enfeebled imaginative powers. Many writers were to find such a genre in the novel; Macaulay, of course, found it in history. The assumptions underlying these strange reflections are simple but important to an understanding of Macaulay's art. The key assumption is one shared by a large proportion of the great Victorian writers—that art is mimetic. But Macaulay also assumed that art is most delightful when the progress of the intellect has not proceeded so far as to make it impossible for a serious artist to entertain his fancies and superstitions as realities. Macaulay did not share the sense of the numinous with Carlyle or Newman: he never considered the possibility of anything real existing beyond the immediate data of experience, or of a Coleridgean kind of imagination—"creative" rather than "re-creative." No esemplastic powers haunt his pages, no use of the old symbols to create new myths. Poetic imagination is the capacity to hold vivid images in one's mind and to recreate them for others: "Poetry produces an illusion on the eye of the mind" ("Milton," I, 20). What distinguishes poetry as a mimetic art from the other arts is its greater range: the objects of the imitation of poetry are the whole ex­ ternal and the whole internal universe, the face of nature, the vicissitudes of fortune, man as he is in himself, man as he appears in society, all things which really exist, all things of which we can form an image in our minds by combining together parts of things which really exist. The domain of this imperial art is commensurate with the imaginative faculty.26 But the empiricist psychology of Locke is evidently at work here, and not Coleridgean organicism. 28 "Moore's

Life of Lord Byron," I, 476.

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Margaret Macaulay's reflections on her brother's imagina­ tion can help explain the way Macaulay reconciled the imagination and intelligence. At one time, Margaret as­ sumed that as Tom's good sense came increasingly into play in his public life, he would lose his imaginative powers. "I had always confounded," she said, "that love of living in the ideal world, which I think I possess in a great degree, that power of depicting to myself things that are not as though they were, with a romantic disposition." But she learned that it was possible to be, as Tom and she were, "imaginative but not romantic." "Our imaginations might range for ever, but they would never make us do a foolish thing, or indulge very extravagant expectations, in which we should not be borne out by what we see passing in the world around us." Romantic people believe that such and such is their destiny, that their lovers are to be perfect, that their friendships are to be of a more pure and perfect order than the world ever yet saw. It is in vain that they can see nothing of this kind around them, they think that it will be so with them. Of all this, which is romance, I scarcely see a spark in Tom; the powers of his imagina­ tions, however, I can . . . most fully admit to increase instead of diminish.27 Such a pragmatic view of the function of the imagination fits Macaulay perfectly. It effectually divorces the real from the unreal, allows a full indulgence of one's weaknesses without imperilling one's position in the real world. It transforms the imagination into a faculty of escape by cutting it off from the present reality. There is no mystery to imagination—it is merely the manipulation of elements of the real into pleasant unreal shapes. The only mystery of art (what keeps criticism from perfection) is that the power to create such illusory shapes is inexplicable: "One element must forever elude its [criticism's] researches; and that is the very element by which poetry is poetry. . . . 27

Recollections by a Sister of T. B. Maeaulayi pp. 85-86.

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[The critic] will find it impossible to explain in what con­ sists the art of a writer who, in a few words, brings some spot before him so vividly that he shall know it as if he had lived there from childhood" ("Dryden," I, 111). What­ ever the mystery, it appears that for Macaulay the childish­ ness of imaginative life could be sustained in the modern world by utterly divorcing imagination from experience. Imagination provides no penetration into reality—rather, it is a means of escape. All the theorizing about literature in which Macaulay indulged in his early essays brought him back to where he started, to the point, that is, where criticism and intelli­ gence become largely irrelevant to art. What he sought from art was vividness. His inclination to dwell in the unreal led him, as we have seen, to admire those books which allowed him to accept the "illusion" so completely that he could feel himself to be in the world being imitated. In all other areas of life, he prided himself on his intelli­ gence and analytical powers; but he saw that intelligence and analysis applied to literature would deprive him of the rich consolatory worlds—intense as experiences acquired from childhood—which great literature could provide. He sought an ultimate childlike naivete, like that of Partridge in Fielding's Tom Jones, upon whose terror at the ghost in Hamlet Macaulay remarked, "none of those who laugh at [Partridge] possess the tithe of his sensibility to theatrical excellence. . . . We should act in the same manner if the grief and horror produced in us by works of the imagination amounted to real torture. But in us these emotions are com­ paratively languid" ("Dryden," I, 117-18). Macaulay him­ self confessed—and his critical essays will bear him out— that he was not much of a critic: "I am not successful in analysing the effect of works of genius. . . . I have a strong and acute enjoyment of works of the imagination; but I have never habituated myself to dissect them. Perhaps I en­ joy them the more keenly, for that very reason" (Life, I, 437). He read literature not to criticize it but to escape into it, and as he felt that most great literature was written in

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the childhood of humanity, so literature was for him a return to the experience of childhood and entailed a de­ fection from the ideals of common sense and general prog­ ress which are the province of the mature and practical man. If Macaulay had indulged his proclivity for the unreal with the thoroughness toward which he seemed at times inclined, he would in all likelihood have become a minor but popular novelist. But the public man could not have allowed it: a Victorian gentleman's duty was not to indulge his emotional weaknesses or to spend his life in elaborate explorations of self, but to do his best to improve the world he lived in. However liberated Macaulay was from the rigidly anti-fictional evangelical ethos of his father's Chris­ tian Observer, it is unlikely that the practical and morally committed young Macaulay could consciously have chosen imaginative literature as a vocation. When a very young man, he did argue with his father that literary employ­ ment could be "estimable or laudable" without leading "to the spread of moral truth or the excitement of virtuous feel­ ing." But, he added, "If my life be a life of literature, it shall certainly be one of literature directed to moral ends" (Life, I, 84-85). And with all Macaulay's love of great litera­ ture and willingness to insist upon it as good in itself, he could not overcome the feeling that for him at least litera­ ture was escape, was therapy. Nothing in his theorizing about literature suggests how imaginative literature might be useful except as it allowed escape from the real world. This could hardly be the main pursuit of a public gentleman. But there was a literature which might allow Macaulay to have the best of both worlds. He made a distinction between the kinds of imagination necessary for the writing of fiction and for the writing of history. He called the imagination necessary for history a "lower kind." In his essay, "History," he said that "the representation of an imaginary scene" requires faculties "of a higher and rarer order than those which suffice for [a portrait]. . . . He who is able to paint what he sees with the eye of the mind will surely be able to paint what he sees with the eye of the body" (1,160).

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The historian must rely for his material on the external world—on "a real model which he did not make, and which he cannot alter."28 With Macaulay's general attitudes toward imagination, it can be seen, however, that there is a real advantage to having an imagination of a lower order. Pre­ sumably, the lower the order of the imagination, the more intelligence and common sense might come into play. In­ deed, when in the essay on history he got down to talking seriously and at length about history he implied that good history, if not greater than good art, is more difficult to write and certainly more useful. "To be a really great historian," he said, "is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions" (I, 153). "We shall sooner see another Shakespeare or another Homer" than the kind of historian Macaulay desiderated (I, 198). The writing of great history entailed for him all the qualities which would allow a combination of the "unreal" and the real, of the imagination and of the intelligence. Great history is alone among the literary arts in at once creating an imaginative world and remaining faithful to the real and to the respon­ sibility of knowledge. The unreal world with which history deals was once real; the facts can be verified; the romance of its heroes is to be recognized either as legend and super­ stition (and thus discarded) or as that paradox lovely to Macaulay—true romance. History covers the whole range from the concrete (the province of imaginative literature) to the general (the province of advanced knowledge): "it begins in novel and ends in essay"; it is "philosophy teach­ ing by examples" (I, 153-54). A point that Macaulay made in characteristically para­ doxical form is that history can teach while fiction cannot. Thus history can be useful and can at the same time afford all the pleasures of fiction without sullying either the reader's or the writer's conscience: 28 "Sir James Mackintosh," II, 271. A recent essay by Ronald Weber, "Singer and Seer: Macaulay on the Historian as Poet," Papers on Language and Literature, III (Summer 1967), 210-19, appeared too late for use in this book. It treats the problem of how Macaulay assimilated his high regard for art to the historian's role.

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To append a moral to a work of fiction is either useless or superfluous. A fiction may give a more impressive effect to what is already known, but it can teach nothing new. If it presents to us characters and trains of events to which our experience furnishes us with nothing similar, instead of deriving instruction from it, we pronounce it unnatural. We do not form our opinions from it, but we try it by our preconceived opinions. Fiction, therefore, is essentially imitative. Its merit consists in its resem­ blance to a model with which we are already familiar, or to which at least we can instantly refer. Hence it is that the anecdotes which interest us most strongly in authentic narrative are offensive when introduced into novels; that what is called the romantic part of history is in fact the least romantic. It is delightful as history, because it contradicts our previous notions of human nature, and of the connection of causes and effects. It is, on that very account, shocking and incongruous in fiction. In fiction, the principles are given, to find the facts: in history, the facts are given, to find the principles; and the writer who does not explain the phenomena as well as state them, performs only one half of his office. Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which inter­ penetrates them, and lies latent among them like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value: and the precious particles are generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation is a task of the utmost difficulty. (I, 163-64) What could be more satisfactory to the moralist-lover of unreal worlds than to discover that "the romantic part of history is in fact the least romantic," and that only through the romantic is instruction possible? What in fiction would be incredible, in history is instructive; and childish imagina­ tion and modern intelligence are reconciled. Like most of his contemporaries, however, Macaulay was attracted to fiction; and it is no accident that his thoughts about history were bound up with thoughts about fiction. Ill

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It has been argued that one must not make too much of Macaulay's "recognition and profession of the likeness be­ tween his own art and that of the novelist,"28 but this warning is useful only if it means that one must recognize Macaulay's commitment to truthfulness and accuracy. The perfect historian, Macaulay said, must control his imagina­ tion "so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own" ("History," I, 154). History differs from fiction in that the one deals with the external world, the other with an invented one; the one has its end in general knowledge, the other in the particular. In other respects, however, they are very close. Unless one were told before­ hand, it would be difficult, as one were reading, to dis­ tinguish well-written history from well-written fiction: the difference, as Macaulay put it in another context, is "not in the mode of execution, but in the mode of concep­ tion" (I, 179). "A truly great historian," he said, "would reclaim those materials which the novelist has appropriated" (I, 195). The novelist, in his view, had appropriated the treatment of manners and morals, upon the development of which de­ pends "the happiness of mankind." The historian had hitherto satisfied himself with consideration of great events and great people. But "the majesty of history," as Macaulay ironically put it, "entails ignoring the details which con­ stitute the charm of biography," the softening down of "the most characteristic and interesting circumstances," the re­ jection of the kind of specific density which is essential to fiction in the tradition Macaulay knew. And this meant ignoring the very details which helped Macaulay turn his­ tory into romance. In his 1838 essay on Sir William Temple, Macaulay expanded some of these ideas in defending the historical importance of the correspondence between Tem­ ple and Dorothy Osborne: 29 Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Litera­ ture, H. D. Irvine, W. D. Maclnnes, and Louis Cazamian, trans. (Lon­ don, 1957), p. 1,103.

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To us, surely, it is as useful to know how the young ladies of England employed themselves a hundred and eighty years ago, how far their minds were cultivated, what were their favorite studies, what degree of liberty was allowed to them, what use they made of that liberty, what accom­ plishments they most valued in men, and what proofs of tenderness delicacy permitted them to give to favored suitors, as to know all about the seizure of the FrancheComte and the treaty of Nimeguen. The mutual rela­ tions of the two sexes seem to us to be at least as im­ portant as the mutual relations of any two governments in the world; and a series of letters written by a virtuous, amiable, and sensible girl, and intended for the eye of her lover alone, can scarcely fail to throw some light on the relations of the sexes; whereas it is perfectly possible, as all who have made any historical researches can attest, to read bale after bale of despatches and proto­ cols without catching one glimpse of light about the relations of governments. (II, 476) One of the most characteristic developments in literature during the period in which Macaulay was writing was, as we have seen, an exactly parallel concern for the ordinary. As the vogue of gothic and silver fork novels began to fade, a Wordsworthian kind of commitment to the recognition that the ordinary can be both fascinating and an object of wonder began to dominate the aesthetics of fiction. An anti-romantic, anti-heroic, and realistic impulse ran so vigorously through serious and popular fiction that it quickly transformed itself into a domestic sentimentality that we still tend to regard as characteristically Victorian. In Macaulay's personal life one can find many traces of this senti­ mentality. The deification of the virtuous, self-sacrificing, and domestically efficient woman, the celebration of do­ mestic bliss, the quest for childhood innocence. Macaulay was in this as in so many other respects a child of his times. Novelists certainly would have found what Macaulay said of the historian appropriate to themselves: "He must

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see ordinary men as they appear in their ordinary business and in their ordinary pleasures" (I, 194). Just as the great historian should defy the "majesty of history," the great novelist should defy the majesty of art. Macaulay was always contemptuous of the neo-classical rules which in the interest of decorum impose limits on all aspects of literature and "perpetually sacrifice nature and reason to arbitrary canons of taste" ("Dryden," I, 122). The decorum Macaulay espoused in literature was correct­ ness of representation, "the conforming to rules which have their foundation in truth and in the principles of human nature" ("Byron," I, 469). But this is simply another version of his strictly mimetic theory of literature, for under this scheme the only incorrect poetry is poetry which is "alto­ gether unlike the thing imitated." In the same way, Macaulay attacked the "conventional decencies," the dignity, the decorum, of traditional history. History, like literature, is obviously a mimetic art. Its dignity does not depend on censorship of crude or mean aspects of experience, but on the correctness with which the historian exhibits "the char­ acter and spirit of an age." And he can do this best by turning with fiction to the apparently trivial details of ordinary life and, with "judicious selection, rejection, and arrangement," by giving "to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction." He must reject no "anecdote, no peculiarity of manner, no familiar saying, as too in­ significant for his notice" if it "is not too insignificant to illustrate the operation of laws, of religion, and of educa­ tion, and to mark the progress of the human mind" ("His­ tory," I, 194). Macaulay sought in history what he sought in the novel— all the charm of memoirs, biography, and autobiography, with all the excitement and interest of a good story. These qualities were essential, he thought, for two reasons: be­ cause they are indispensable to making history attractive to its public; and because without them history would be false to the reality it attempts to recreate. He complained that modern historians had tended to falsify history not

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only by overlooking the details of ordinary experience, but by sacrificing the art of narration for the art of controversy. Good history cannot do without good narration, which, according to Macaulay, is "the art of interesting the affec­ tions and presenting pictures to the imagination" (I, 190). All the greatness of literary art, as we have seen Macaulay saying, lay in its capacity to image forth the concrete and the particular; and the "lower imagination" of history needed also to be engaged with the "image," even if its ultimate aim were to be the general. Both in theory and in practice, Macaulay emphasized the pictorial quality of his­ tory and literature. The "spirit of an age" he said, can only be exhibited "by appropriate images presented in every line" (1,194-95). Narrative, as the art of "presenting pictures to the imagination," becomes, therefore, the basis of good history. It was convenient for Macaulay, and is rather suspicious to the modern critic, that he found in pictorial narration not only the best way of getting at truth, but the best way of attracting an audience. But we cannot in fairness dis­ trust Macaulay without distrusting the great nineteenthcentury writers of fiction. Few great writers have been more conscious of audience than novelists like Dickens or Thackeray or George Eliot. Like Macaulay, they wanted to be popular; and they controlled their subjects and their treatment of them partly by reference to what would go down with their audiences. Like Macaulay, they sought also (despite Macaulay's argument that fiction can't teach) to make their books morally instructive and to teach people what the world was really like. And finally, like Macaulay, they tended to believe that they could only achieve their dual ends of faithfulness to audience and to subject by forsaking "the majesty of history" or of art for fidelity (through narratives filled with "appropriate images") to the reality of "ordinary men as they appear in their ordinary business and in their ordinary pleasures." And just as the "ordinary" in Victorian fiction tends to explode into melo­ drama and the extraordinary, so Macaulay thought, as we have seen, that the unusual was frequently the most delight-

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ful part of history. "If a man, such as we are supposing, should write the history of England, he would assuredly not omit the battles, the sieges, the negotiations, the sedi­ tions, the ministerial changes. But with these he would intersperse the details which are the charm of historical romances" (I, 195). A good historian, Macaulay thought, would hurry as rapidly as possible over the dull and dwell as long as possible with the exciting, but never at the ex­ pense of the truth. In any case, after a reading of the great Victorians, it is no longer possible to dismiss as mere pandering and hypocrisy an artist's eagerness to appeal to an audience and to serve it morally. The great Victorian Sages necessarily employed the techniques of fiction to dramatize their views and convince their audiences; and those techniques were not merely rhetorical tricks in a great argument but essen­ tial elements in the expression of a personal vision. The aesthetics of sympathy, which filtered through the period from several directions, made it appear to many writers that only by engaging the audience could the artist really tell the truth. Much of what has already been said here implies that Macaulay believed that a reader or writer could only achieve a true sense of the past by somehow managing to become part of the past and to see and hear and feel what people of the past experienced. Just as precisely realized details were essential to his daydreams—as they seem to have been to Victorian daydreams in general—so they were essential for a real understanding of history. Macaulay's comment, in his criticism of a poem by Dryden, on the cor­ rect stance of the poet could be a comment of George Eliot on herself as a novelist, or a comment by Macaulay on himself as a historian: "The poet should place his readers, as nearly as possible, in the situation of the sufferers or the spectators" (I, 134). Macaulay asks us to shift our perspectives into the past (although, as we shall see, in practice he was not always equal to his theory) in order to understand it, and he knew that this sort of shift would

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not be possible (as it was not apparently for himself) unless the past were rendered with such vividness that it could draw the reader into the experience. Like the Victorian Sages, who had much more radical doctrines to preach, Macaulay knew that instruction which came exclusively through the intellect could not have practical consequences, and that feeling and imagination were essential for true learning: The instruction derived from history thus written would be of a vivid and practical character. It would be re­ ceived by the imagination as well as by the reason. It would be not merely traced on the mind, but branded into it. Many truths, too, would be learned, which can be learned in no other manner. (I, 197) Thus, like so many other writers of his time, Macaulay was drawn in theory and, as we shall see, in practice toward the qualities which were essential to the fiction which became the dominant art of the period. Branding truth into the mind was, however, a very different business for Macaulay from what it was for Carlyle and Newman and George Eliot. Essentially, he admired clear and symmetrical art; his ideals were classical despite his love of fiction, that most unclassical of all forms. If he could have written a novel, he would have wanted it to have the classical pre­ tensions of Fielding and the symmetry and precision of Jane Austen. His experience of the world hardly paralleled these classical ideals, however; contemporary experience might have been richer than that of the past as he under­ stood it, but it was also far more complex and lacked the essential dignity and stability of the past. He thus sought a dignified and classical art where romance might be recon­ ciled to fact and the qualities of Dryasdust might be assimi­ lated to the style of the great novelists in the re-creation of a fantasy world which was at once true and morally enlightening. Here would be a form which, though not fiction, could enjoy the popularity of fiction and the dignity of truth.

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III Sir James Mackintosh, Macaulay once wrote, displayed in part of his fragment of a history "the diligence, the accuracy, and the judgment of Hallam united to the vivacity and the coloring of Southey. A history of England written throughout in this manner would be the most fascinating book in the language. It would be more in request at the circulating libraries than the last novel" (II, 271). And it is widely known that when Macaulay began seriously to work on his history, he wrote to Napier that he would not be satisfied "unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies" (Life, II, 52). He set to work then with a consciousness of the need to create a work like a novel; and the scrupulousness with which he went about writing and revising and structuring and supplying transitions and making every sentence trans­ parent and rich with images was the scrupulousness of a conscious artist. With a high sense of the dignity of his art, he saw himself in the line of Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon, and, when the first two volumes of the history were completed, thought his performance inferior only to that of Thucydides: At all events, I have aimed high; I have tried to do something that may be remembered; I have had the year 2000, and even the year 3000, often in my mind; I have sacrificed nothing to temporary fashions of thought and style; and, if I fail, my failure will be more honourable than nine-tenths of the successes that I have witnessed. (Life, II, 183) Macaulay's claim to literary immortality rests—as he would have had it rest—on his History. His essays and speeches were reprinted, against his better judgment of their worth, because of the piracies of unscrupulous Ameri­ can and English publishers. He himself made a clear dis­ tinction between the essays and what he thought should be

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

considered genuine literature.30 In defending himself against some of Napier's criticisms of his essay on Frederic the Great, he said, "I certainly should not, in regular history, use some of the phrases which you censure. But I do not consider a review of this sort as regular history. . . . But I never thought of denying that the language of history ought to preserve a certain dignity. I would, however, no more at­ tempt to preserve that dignity in a paper like this on Frederic than I would exclude from such a poem as Don Juan slang terms, because such terms would be out of place in Paradise Lost" (Life, II, 54-56). He was quite explicit about the way he worked when, in 1842, he decided not to republish his essays: on the whole, I think it best that things should remain as they are. The public judges and ought to judge, in­ dulgently of periodical works. They are not expected to be highly finished. Their natural life is only six weeks. Sometimes their writer is at a distance from the books to which he wants to refer. Sometimes he is forced to hurry through his task in order to catch the post. He may blun­ der; he may contradict himself; he may break off in the middle of a story; he may give an immoderate extension to one part of his subject, and dismiss an equally impor­ tant part in a few words. All this is readily forgiven if there be a certain spirit and vivacity in his style. But, as soon as he republishes, he challenges a comparison with the most symmetrical and polished of human composi30 See Life, II, 58-59. See also his comment on Brougham's essays for the Edinburgh Review. His late articles, particularly the long one in the April number, have very high merit. They are, indeed, models of magazine writing as distinguished from other sorts of writing. They are not, I think, made for duration. Everything about them is exaggerated, incorrect, sketchy. All the characters are either too black, or too fair. The passions of the writer do not suffer him even to maintain the decent appearance of impartiality. And the style, though striking and ani­ mated, will not bear examination through a single paragraph. But the effect of the first perusal is great; and few people read an article in a review twice. A bold, dashing, scene-painting manner is that which always succeeds best in periodical writing. (Life, I, 440)

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tions. . . . My reviews are generally thought to be better written, and they certainly live longer, than the reviews of most other people; and this ought to content me. The moment I come forward to demand a higher rank, I must expect to be judged by a higher standard. (Life, II, 58-59) With his History Macaulay consciously challenged com­ parison with the great historians and the most successful of contemporary novelists.31 He was attempting what he re­ garded as the most difficult of intellectual labors. But he managed to suppress all signs of labor so that the History remains a startlingly readable and exciting narrative, with all the fascination of a good Victorian novel: it not only managed to "supersede for a few days the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies," but despite its obvious shortcomings continues to make claims on the posterity with which Macaulay was so much concerned. Historians can still respect it while they recognize its many errors and faults in the use of evidence. Students of literature should find in it many of the virtues of midcentury fiction and an imposing architectural sense revealed despite its fragmen­ tary nature. The History has an intrinsic merit, which it is rather easy at the present to ignore largely because it is, in a way, a quintessential Victorian work of what I have called the Victorian center. The History accepts with great seriousness and embodies with extraordinary skill most of the fundamental prejudices of the majority of Macaulay's educated, novel-reading pub­ lic. The man who complained in his essay on Byron about the public's fits of morality, punctuated his History with such fits. It exhibits the now depressing optimism and all that emphasis on evangelical morality, on superficial piety, 31 It should be noted that the split between the Macaulay of the essays and the Macaulay of the History is not at all complete. Hugh Trevor-Roper, in the Introduction to his edition of Macaulay's Critical and Historical Essays (19Θ5), argues that the later essays are very close in manner to the History and that all the essays reflect a mind essentially the same as that which lay behind the History. "Studied critically, the difference between the Essays and the Historti is much less absolute than Acton and others have maintained" (p. 16).

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

on practicality, common sense, and business acumen, on domestic and sentimental detail, on pride in country, on pageantry and melodrama that has for a long time been unhappily associated with the word "Victorian." But the prejudices are not, in this case, borrowed. Macaulay, as it were, earned them and became their most articulate spokes­ man. He had the rare good fortune of being endowed with gifts of genius and the commitments of the majority. Most of these prejudices seem to operate to give the History the qualities of fiction. The fantasy world is created with extraordinary density of fact; we move from plot to plot confident that the various lines will all be drawn to­ gether; at one point we are engaged with the fate of kings, at another with that of peasants caught up in the movement of events; we are guided by a stern and sensible judge who persistently reminds us of moral distinctions that he wants maintained; and we are made to feel confident that despite temporary injustice, justice will ultimately pre­ vail. Clearly, the form Macaulay found was the best possible for his purposes. It allowed him to live his life in unreal worlds, to indulge his inclination to romance, and at the same time to remain faithful to the common sense and in­ telligence which he thought distinguished the present from the past. The effort of the History was to unite "the incom­ patible advantages of reality and deception, the clear dis­ cernment of truth and the exquisite enjoyment of fiction"; the re-creation of a past world was the way to do it. The past, moreover, could supply not only the pleasures of realistic novels but—if one found the right facts or con­ sidered people's illusions as a legitimate part of history— of romance as well. The "reality" of Macaulay's subject served as adequately for escape (and perhaps, self-decep­ tion) as the fiction of the novelists. Macaulay had the ad­ vantage of being able to believe that history ultimately con­ formed to personal needs while he was never for a moment, as his sister explained it, deceived into believing that con­ temporary experience did. In Macaulay's art, the realistic aesthetic of the midcentury novel came to govern the fan-

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

tasy world of the romance. Conversely, history is governed by a kind of daydream like the daydreams of fiction. I do not mean to suggest that Macaulay's art is all self-deception and complacency. But the complacency is obviously part of what made the work so popular, and without it, it would have been a narrative without a direction. Moreover, tend­ ing as we are to distrust all art based on satisfaction with what is, it is perhaps worthwhile to see how complacency and art can live together (as they did so regularly in Vic­ torian England), how the philistine can mount Parnassus. The famous opening of the History has all the solemnity and sweep of the announcements of subject and scope which begin the great epics Macaulay loved. The tone is deliber­ ately elevated and dignified, and it makes clear with what seriousness and attention to art the History was to be writ­ ten. To Macaulay's contemporaries, the opening paragraphs must have been exciting and satisfying: they certainly con­ stitute one of the most elaborate and exhilarating fanfares in our literature. No muse or holy spirit is directly invoked, but in other respects—in its proposal of a great subject relating to the fate of an entire nation, in elevation of tone, in rhythmic concentration, in sustained dignity of diction— the paragraphs might very well be out of a traditional epic in­ vocation. "I purpose," says Macaulay in bardic tones, "to write the history of England from the accession of King James the Second down to a time which is within the memory of men still living."32 Directly and economically Macaulay proposes for himself a task of great magnitude, such as befits a great epic theme and an epic subject. The opening announcement is followed by a series of gradually intensifying sentences and phrases within sen­ tences, which make plain that the History is intended, like the great epic poems of the past, to celebrate the heroic development of a great nation from crude and unpromising 32 The History of England, The Works of Lord Macaulay, ed. by his sister Lady Trevelyan, I (1873), 1. All references to the History will be to this edition.

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beginnings. The juxtaposition of past and present begins here, and honor is done to both—to the past because it so heroically struggled to transcend itself, to the present for its intrinsic greatness. The expansiveness of the diction is paralleled by the expansiveness of the subject, which is, as Macaulay saw it, the greatest and most powerful nation in the world. In the fourth sentence begins that famous series of parallel phrases which carries the nation from "a state of ignominious vassalage" through "troubled years" follow­ ing the revolution of 1688, to a point of unequaled pros­ perity, as the "umpire" among European powers, as a maritime power compared with which "every other . . . ancient or modern, sinks into insignificance," and as a ruler of an empire separate parts of which are "far mightier and wealthier than the realms which Cortes and Pizarro had added to the dominions of Charles the Fifth" and "not less splendid and more durable than that of Alexander" (pp. 1-2). It is all appropriately breathtaking and satisfying to loyal Englishmen, to businessmen who partook in the celebrated commerce, to civil servants who helped rule the empire, and to the lesser and hungrier people who could take pride simply in being part of such a country. The development of modern art and modern conscious­ ness has, significantly, made it difficult to see these splendid lines as the mature and classical celebration of great events they were obviously intended to be. They seem to imply a provincialism, a simple-minded optimism, an aggressiveness which is largely out of touch with the personal reality of lived experience with which Macaulay later says he is con­ cerned. It is very much a child's vision, the expression of a fantasy world: here are the "ignominious slaves" who, against all probability, by means of arduous and heroic struggle, are transformed into the most powerful and envied of people. Heroism is imported into the modern world, not, for example, as Carlyle imported it into Sartor Resartus, half ironically, in the grotesque if prophetic figure of Teufelsdrockh, but by solemn invocation of the most romantic and heroic figures of the past. Cortes, Pizarro, and Alexander

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are outshone. England outshines all other nations, maintains power, and yet inspires love in her people and in her neigh­ bors. The vision has much the appeal of the juvenile im­ perial literature that blossomed more fully somewhat later. It is in some ways a justification of Arnold's view that Macaulay's was a "beginner's style." But die passage is never­ theless both skillful and economical and even in its apparent exaggerations not inaccurate. Each phrase is intended to correspond to a theme to be developed in the History, and, so far as the History was written, Macaulay did treat each subject noted. Moreover, just as in an epic, this announce­ ment provides the form of the work to follow and establishes the standpoint from which all the events are to be judged. Following the praise, as is usual with Macaulay, there is a balance provided in a paragraph of criticism: "Nor will it be less my duty faithfully to record disasters mingled with triumphs, and great national crimes and follies far more humiliating than any disaster" (p. 21). England had its flaws and continues to have them. But behind the "chequered narrative" Macaulay descries a single overrid­ ing movement in one direction, and he announces it in that characteristic tone of astonishing self-confidence but apparent moderation and common sense that must have been largely responsible for his popularity; that common sense seemed always to point to the satisfying interpreta­ tion of things just as, in the History itself, most apparent de­ feats for England seem to become elements in its ultimate triumph: Yet, unless I greatly deceive myself, the general effect of this chequered narrative will be to excite thankfulness in all religious minds, and hope in the breasts of all patriots. For the history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physi­ cal, of moral, and of intellectual improvement. Those who compare the age on which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in their imagination may talk of degeneracy and decay: but no man who is cor-

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

rectly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present, (p. 2) After the colorful appeal to great romantic heroes, Macaulay makes here a stern appeal to the facts. He contemptu­ ously dismisses fanciful and soft-minded people who im­ pose their imaginations on the past, and implies that he, at least, is correctly informed, and will not be imposed upon in his History by the distortions of imagination. It is curious to find a passage so informed with imagina­ tive coloring and enthusiasm for great events terminating first with an implicit rejection of "imagination" in history and then with an insistence on the need to treat the ordinary at least as fully as the extraordinary. "I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history," Macaulay says with all the energy of his public self, certain that he in fact does not fall below that dignity, "if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nine­ teenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors" (p. 3). The epic celebrator of great events who has begun his History at the highest pitch of dignity and ceremoniousness turns now against dignity and ceremony for the sake of describing truthfully the morals and manners of past ages. In fact, the opening paragraphs give an idea of how Macaulay was able to achieve to his own satisfaction that reconciliation between the unreal worlds of childlike imag­ ination in which he loved to dwell and the new world of increased sophistication, more accurate generalization, and scientific knowledge which he celebrated. In style and form, the opening paragraphs are borrowed from the great epics Macaulay loved. The tone is almost Miltonic in its selfassuredness. Moreover, as Milton banished the classical world for the sake of the greater truth of Christianity and yet used both classical methods and subjects in his treatment of the greater truth, so Macaulay banished imaginative im­ positions on history for a newer and greater fidelity to the truth and yet used the methods of fictions and heightened

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

the reality he described with imaginative analogies and figures. The History is thus designed to yield all the pleas­ ures of fiction and all the satisfaction of knowing that one reads not fiction but fact. In a similar way, the opening paragraphs suggest how Macaulay s two attitudes toward the past can be reconciled. The History is built in part on a double vision: the vision of the past, evoked with vividness and sympathy, and the vision of the present, which serves several purposes: to suggest the inferiority of the past; to suggest how important the past is, in that it led to this great present; to help us to understand the past by giving us a point of reference from which to regard it. In Macaulay's life, as we have seen, there was a tension between past and present. The common sense pragmatist constantly belittled the past for the sake of the present; the sentimental brother and uncle loved the past as an unreal world of refuge from the present. In the History this tension is resolved while the two selves are kept from reconciliation. There is no explicit nostalgia for the past, anything but a suggestion that life might have been better in those days. Macaulay's usual strategy in the History, however, is not to criticize the past, but to praise the present which grew out of the past by the natural "tendency towards perfection" which time brings with it. Thus, there is apparently no false antiquarian love of the past; but there is an extraordinary, reverential evocation of it, an enormous accumulation of details, many of which are apparently irrelevant to the narrative, but which have the same relation to the History as the apparently inessential details in one of those—as Henry James called them—"loose, baggy monsters" have to the novel. He wants to place "be­ fore the Englishmen of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors" and it is in the apparently in­ essential detail that the past comes alive, becomes a romance and a comfortably unreal real world. The past and the present in Macaulay's History live together at peace. Both, in their own way, are objects of love. The love of the past is

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

in the form and method, of the present in assertion. But each, as an object of love, is essential to the History as art. The romantic and Victorian obsession with the past was as much related to fiction as to history. The novelist per­ sistently took his subjects from a more or less remote past, and Macaulay's was one of the first major histories to be influenced by fiction (particularly, of course, by Walter Scott). To be sure, Macaulay does not allow the ambiv­ alence to the past recognizable in so many of the great Victorian novelists to inform his explicit judgments. He por­ trays for us very little of that moral tension between past and present that we find in, say, George Eliot or Thackeray or Thomas Hardy. But the tension is there, as I have al­ ready suggested, in the very treatment of the subject. Not only is there a superabundance of detail, but the style implies a conscious rejection of contemporary prose, and the manner of treatment implies an occasional desire to transcend the common sense, realistic view of literature which dominated in fiction particularly. Macaulay may have felt that the epic was only possible in an unenlightened age—in the childhood of the race—and that the excitement of traditional romance could not be acceptable to the greater intelligence of contemporaries, but he found a way in his History to exploit the past and the traditions of the past to write what might be seen as part epic and part romance. Kathleen Tillotson has remarked that the nineteenth-century novel became a kind of epic which celebrated the ordinary instead of the conventionally heroic.33 Macaulay managed in his History to write a full-scale novel of manners and yet to include the old-fashioned kind of heroism. He imported fabulous or romantic elements into his nar­ rative in several ways and at the same time assimilated his world of childhood fantasy to that of the new realism. Macaulay's theory, discussed earlier, that history was freer than fiction to deal with extraordinary events comes into play frequently in the History. It allows him to have his 33

Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (1956), p. 13.

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cake and eat it too, to write a narrative with all the interest of fiction but to introduce into it attractive elements which his own and most contemporary literary theory would not have accepted. He can provide the instruction which grows from truth, and the childlike pleasure people take in reading about great men and large actions. History, according to this theory, could provide an even richer fantasy life than fiction. To take one example: After describing the attempt of Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester and Lord Treasurer, to win power over James II by increasing James' attachment to Catherine Sedley, Macaulay concludes: So much is history stranger than fiction; and so true is it that nature has caprices which art dares not imitate. A dramatist would scarcely venture to bring on the stage a grave prince, in the decline of life, ready to sacrifice his crown in order to serve the interests of his religion, indefatigable in making proselytes, and yet deserting and insulting a virtuous wife who had youth and beauty for the sake of a profligate paramour who had neither. Still less, if possible, would a dramatist venture to introduce a statesman stooping to the wicked and shameful part of a procurer, and calling in his wife to aid him in that dis­ honourable office, yet, in his moments of leisure, retiring to his closet, and there secretly pouring out his soul to his God in penitent tears and devout ejaculations. (I, 578-79) The pleasure produced by such a passage is considerable, beginning at the level of Believe It Or Not and rising to reflections about the complexity of human nature (and per­ haps of the total absence of relation between religion and morality). But at whatever level, Macaulay had struck a vein which could not fail to attract a wide audience. Leslie Stephen once noted that Macaulay "likes to represent a man as a bundle of contradictions, because it enables him to ob­ tain startling contrasts."34 This is a point to which it will 34Stephen,

"Macaulay," Hours in a Library, III (1879), 257.

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

be necessary to return later. But I would suggest that it was not so much a deliberate attempt to appeal to an audience that led Macaulay to treat characters in this way. It seems likely that it was also the way he saw things. Macaulay's analyses of characters and motives suggest over and over again, despite his early arguments against the Utilitarians, that he assumed all motives were intelligible to simple common sense, that, for example, nobody—especially no­ body Macaulay regarded as immoral—was likely to do any­ thing opposed to self-interest. When he finds people behav­ ing in inexplicable ways he is generally stunned. His failure to comprehend the irrational capacities of human character was related to his tendency—in opposition to Carlyle's kind of organicism—to see people and events not so much as single organic growths but as clusters of qualities. Curiously, this tendency allowed him to turn history into romance with great regularity. The multifariousness of experience necessarily entails apparent contradictions. "History is stranger than fiction" because good fiction, at least, sees character as coherent and can reconcile apparent opposites. But history in its raw state, without the artist's capacity to cut beneath the surface, must remain a "bundle of contradic­ tions." Macaulay managed also to find a way to introduce gen­ uinely fabulous elements into his History. He had written that Herodotus might be excused for his uncritical use of evidence because he wrote for a country "susceptible, curi­ ous, lively, insatiably desirous of novelty and excitement. . . . The first historians might . . . indulge without fear of censure in the license allowed to their predecessors the bards" ("History," I, 156). Macaulay could not so indulge himself because, although he shared the "first historians'" inquisitiveness and enthusiasm, he did not share their credulity. But the charm of Herodotus' narrative could be at least partly achieved without lowering critical standards. Concluding the exciting narrative of Monmouth's fatal re­ bellion, Macaulay notes that so strong "was the devotion of the people to their unhappy favourite that, in the face of the

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strongest evidence by which the fact of a death was ever verified, many continued to cherish a hope that he was still living, and that he would again appear in arms. . . . The vulgar long continued, at every important crisis, to whisper that the time was at hand, and that King Monmouth would soon show himself" (I, 489-90). There follows a series of anecdotes about counterfeit Monmouths who inspired the faith of the people, and the footnotes attractively pro­ vide two examples of contemporary ballads which show Monmouth promising to return to save his nation. The key word in the passage is "vulgar." The vulgar might believe anything, but Macaulay's job, as a dispassionate historian, was to reveal the truth; and the truth was that Monmouth was dead. Nevertheless, the recitation of these largely irrelevant stories gives to the narrative an added vividness, not unlike that of the discredited stories in Herodotus. And the irrelevance, it will be noted, is only to the larger narrative progression of the History; in fact, the stories help enrich our sense of the kind of impact Mon­ mouth made on the nation. The legends about Monmouth provide only a single example out of many. In the splendid set piece describing William's arrival in Exeter there is another: "Descriptions of the martial pageant were circulated all over the kingdom. They contained much that was well fitted to gratify the vulgar appetite for the marvellous" ( II, 258), and typically having his cake and eating it too, Macaulay provides more than enough to satisfy his own contemporaries' vulgar taste. He writes, for example, that it was rumored of the Swedish horsemen in the procession that they were "natives of a land where the ocean was frozen and the night lasted through half the year, and that they had themselves slain the huge bears whose skins they wore." Throughout the passage, Macaulay manages to mix with facts about the members of the proces­ sion legends that were believed of them. And the whole is rounded with a series of fabulous anecdotes cleverly in­ troduced: "The very senses of the multitude [the key word in another guise] were fooled by imagination. Newsletters

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

conveyed to every part of the kingdom fabulous accounts of the size and strength of the invaders. It was affirmed that they were, with scarcely an exception, above six feet high, and that they wielded such huge pikes, swords, and muskets, as had never before been seen in England" (II, 258-59). And so on. It is difficult to fault such skillful and entertaining nar­ rative. Macaulay not only found a way to introduce fabulous and epic materials into his History, but to do it so as to intensify the impression he tries to create of tenacious fidelity to the truth. Such passages assured the reader that Macaulay had read widely in contemporary accounts and had managed, with a modern critical eye, to discriminate the fabulous from the factual. But in one sense it all re­ mains fantasy on a very high level. The childhood dreams of heroism and pageantry are fulfilled despite (or, as Macaulay would probably have had it, because of) long hours of research in libraries. All the romantic elements in the History—as in much of the best of contemporary fiction—were carefully linked to details which give the romance an air of authority, of realism. Indeed, much of the strength of the History, as critics have recognized from the first, lies in its vividly pictorial quality. Macaulay was careful (as his essay on "History" implied he would be) to fill his lines with images and to make a vivid impression on the imagination of his readers. The History is rich with portraits. Every major character is described on the basis of contemporary accounts and of as many portraits as Macaulay was able to see; every battle is described with a visual precision possible only because Macaulay visited the sites and imprinted them firmly on his memory. Trevelyan's descriptions of Macaulay's labors in this direction are impressive and exhausting. To complete the narrative of William's reign, for example, Macaulay set himself to visit, among other places, "London­ derry, the Boyne, Aghrim, Limerick, Kinsale, Namur again, Landen, Steinkirk." In two days in Londonderry, he "pene­ trated into every corner where there still lurked a vestige of

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the past, and called upon every inhabitant who was ac­ quainted with any tradition worth the hearing. He drove through the suburbs; he sketched a ground-plan of the streets; alone or in company, he walked four times round the walls of the city" ( II, 157-58). In this way, Macaulay reconciled his yearning for romance with his commitment to truth and analytic rigor. The de­ scription of the siege of Londonderry amply justifies Macaulay's labor on these minutiae, which allowed him to bring home the experience with an excitement and engage­ ment impossible to anyone who did not have the image of the place firmly before him. Macaulay's ideal was to place the reader inside the experience and therefore to create in him an imaginative sympathy with his historical figures. The aim and his technique are very much those of the novelist. A single brief example will have to suffice to demonstrate Macaulay's marvelous control of his material, and the novelist's art with which he used his visits. The powerful narrative of the decisive battle in Monmouth's rebellion begins in this way: "The steeple of the parish church of Bridgewater is said to be the loftiest in Somersetshire, and commands a wide view over the surrounding country" (I, 469). Macaulay then places the reader in the position of Monmouth standing in the steeple, where Macaulay himself must certainly have visited. From this point of view he lays out the scene of the battle that is to follow while at the same time keeping a clear eye on the differences be­ tween the place as it was in Monmouth's day and as it was in the nineteenth century: "Beneath him lay a flat expanse, now rich with cornfields and apple trees, but then, as its name imports, for the most part a dreary morass." (The persistent contrast between past and present, to which I have already alluded, although it may seem here irrelevant to the narrative of Monmouth's rebellion, serves as a re­ minder of how the past which Macaulay describes was transformed into the prosperous present and of how, in order to understand the people and events with which the

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

narrative is concerned, it is necessary drastically to shift perspective. In fact, the effect of sharpening the distinction between past and present is to draw the reader more fully into the past.) At that time, Sedgemoor "was intersected by many wide and deep trenches which, in that country, are called rhines. In the midst of the moor rose, clustering round the towers of the churches, a few villages, of which the names seem to indicate that they once were surrounded by waves" (I, 470). What Monmouth saw and what, in all probability, he felt, are carefully and novelistically recorded: On the open moor, not far from Chedzoy, were en­ camped several battalions of regular infantry. Monmouth looked gloomily on them. He could not but remember how, a few years before, he had, at the head of a column composed of some of those very men, driven before him in confusion the fierce enthusiasts who defended Bothwell Bridge. He could distinguish among the hostile ranks that gallant band which was then called from the name of its Colonel, Dumbarton's regiment, but which has long been known as the first of the line, and which, in all the four quarters of the world, has nobly supported its early repu­ tation. "I know those men," said Monmouth; "they will fight. If I had but them, all would go well." (I, 470) If Macaulay's History were intended only as a record of indisputable historical facts, much of this paragraph would be irrelevant or worse. But it is in fact perfectly charac­ teristic of Macaulay's whole method in the History. For one thing, at this point Macaulay is not only concerned with describing the battle; he wants the reader also to feel as richly as he can the atmosphere of the battle and to share in the suspense of one of England's greatest failed heroes. The paragraph helps demonstrate what Macaulay meant when he argued that history should not be a mere record of events. Although it includes some hidden speculation (Monmouth "looked gloomily"; he "could not but remem­ ber") there is no real falsification. The speculations are obviously based on the recorded fact of Monmouth's quoted

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statement, and they serve to heighten the drama of the event by reminding the reader of the forgotten fact that Monmouth is leading the rebellion against the very troops he once led victoriously. It may be historically irrelevant, but it is central to an attempt to re-create the atmosphere of the past. The added details about "Dumbarton's regi­ ment," moreover, contribute directly to the tension while providing further information that links the present to the past. The whole passage is, like most other passages in the History, an appeal to popular interest, which approves of dramatization and of a good story for its own sake; at the same time, it is an expression of Macaulay's belief that his­ tory is more than a record of great events and needs to "reclaim the materials of the novelist." The irrelevance of art, moreover, becomes relevant to history. What we see with Monmouth's eyes from the steeple helps us to under­ stand the mistake that cost Monmouth the battle later. Macaulay indulges the fantasy of what it must have been like to be a rebel leader, and at the same time he enriches his history as history. The method, as Macaulay discovered, entailed a drastic revision of his original plans for the History. Writing history in this way forced him to regard every subject, however minute, as worthy in itself of almost reverently detailed at­ tention. It was impossible to complete a history of such sweeping ambitions and at the same time adequately to give readers "a true picture of the life of their ancestors." Not having Carlyle's kind of symbolic imagination, Macaulay could not, nor was he temperamentally inclined to do so anyway, take a single word or action or gesture, and allow it to stand for whole movements of mind and morals. The same tendency which allowed him to record with baffled delight the apparent contradictions in a character prevented him from poetic compression. It may be worthwhile here to pause and consider this tendency of Macaulay's to see in what Carlyle would have called a "mechanical" way. It will be convenient to do so

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

by turning away from his History to his essay, "Mirabeau." In that relatively early essay of 1832, Macaulay conceded that until he read Dumont's Souvenirs sur Mirabeau, Mirabeau had been to him "not a man, but a string of an­ titheses." Dumont, at last, had made Mirabeau "a real human being" (II, 119). But immediately afterwards Macaulay fell into the antithetical strain which had become an inevitable part of his style, and Mirabeau emerges from his mind as a set of antitheses. Mirabeau, Macaulay says, was half Wilkes and half Chatham. He had Wilkes' "sen­ suality," "levity," and "insensibility to shame." But "Re­ sembling Wilkes in the lower and grosser parts of his character, he had, in his higher qualities, some affinity to Chatham." In their oratorical strength and energy they were similar. Moreover, in Chatham's virtue, says Macaulay, there was something "a little theatrical." On the other hand, there was in Mirabeau, not indeed anything deserving the name of virtue, but that imperfect substitute for virtue which is found in almost all superior minds—sensibility to the beautiful and the good which sometimes amounted to sincere enthusiasm and which, mingled with the desire of admiration, sometimes gave to his character a lustre resembling the lustre of true goodness, as the "faded splendor wan" which lingered round the fallen archangel resembled the exceeding brightness of those spirits who had kept their first estate." (II, 121) It is instructive to compare this treatment of Mirabeau with Carlyle's, not in order to show Carlyle's superiority—the cir­ cumstances of the writing are too different—but to point up the differences of ways of seeing. Mirabeau emerges from Macaulay's treatment as a man divided in two, with great and ultimately irreconcilable dualities to be explained in Macaulay's typical commonsense way: "Men, except in bad novels, are not all good or all evil" (II, 121). Except in bad novels and Macaulay's History, one is tempted to add. But for Carlyle, the conven-

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

tional and mechanical judgment, the Macaulayesque bal­ ancing act, is dismissed by the larger, if less systematic, vision. Carlyle, in his handling of Mirabeau, conceded that Mirabeau did and said immoral things and led a good deal of his life wastefully. But he saw in Mirabeau's energy and in his detestation of hypocrisy a fusing power that destroyed all dualities. Carlyle constructed his whole por­ trait of Mirabeau around a phrase from a letter of Mira­ beau's father—that Mirabeau had "swallowed all formulas." In the energy with which Mirabeau battled against dying institutions and outworn conventions, he was transformed for Carlyle into a man beyond the reach of Macaulay's kind of analysis. Carlyle summarizes Mirabeau's whole contradic­ tory life in a sentence: "A man who 'had swallowed all formulas'; who, in these strange times and circumstances, felt called to live Titanically, and also to die so." Carlyle's distance from Macaulay is suggested by the next sentence: "As he, for his part, had swallowed all formulas, what Formula is there, never so comprehensive, that will express truly the plus and the minus of him, give us the accurate net result of him?"35 But Carlyle's treatment of Mirabeau, as of so much else in the French Revolution, is more poetic than novelistic. Although it is faithful to the facts as Carlyle diligently searched them out, it is compressed and allusive. The de­ tails of Mirabeau's life are more hinted at than described, although Carlyle knew them well enough. The reader who is to engage himself in Carlyle's French Revolution needs to work for his engagement; in fact, much of it is not entirely comprehensible without knowledge never directly presented in the book itself. In Macaulay's History, on the other hand, everything is lucid; everything that needs to be known is immediately on the surface (even if, as Thackeray sug­ gested, many literary allusions will escape the ordinary reader).30 Where Carlyle works by suggestion, synthesis, compression (and often reiteration), Macaulay works 35 The 36 W.

French Revolution, II, 145. M. Thackeray, "Nil nisi bonum," Roundabout Papers (1863).

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through analysis and accumulation. In the typical balanced style of the Mirabeau passage he cannot effectively achieve the reader's sympathetic engagement with his subject be­ cause analysis and accumulation of that sort are almost exclusively external. When Macaulay does achieve engage­ ment it is usually through the rapid and large accumulation of details which create particular scenes with great clarity and vividness. In some ways, then, Macaulay is closer to the mid-century novelists than Carlyle. Carlyle revered the historical fact, but he tended to transform fact into symbol. Macaulay's love of fact was of a different nature, much more closely akin to the circumstantial realism of the novel: a particular historical fact was not, for him, the crossroads of the infinite or a garment of God but simply part of the cumulative picture and narrative which he was engaged to present. The "fact" provided pleasure in itself, not by evoking wonder for the miraculous continuities of time and space, as Carlyle marvelously does at the end of the Jocelin passages of Past and Present,37 but more in the way that gossip is pleas­ urable. The "facts," moreover, allowed Macaulay to feel himself more fully in the "unreal" worlds in which he loved to dwell, while Carlyle always handled history not so much to emphasize the difference between past and present but the similarity and the relevance. For Carlyle, history was largely a miraculous exemplum in a great sermon; for Macaulay it was a good story with a happy ending. It was indeed a popular romantic novel. 37 Past and Present, p. 125. "And Jocelin's Boswellean Narrative, suddenly shorn-through by the scissors of Destiny, ends. There are no words more; but a black line, and leaves of blank paper. Irremediable: the miraculous hand, that held all this theatric-machinery, suddenly quits hold; impenetrable Time-Curtains rush down; in the mind's eye all is again dark, void; with loud dinning in the mind's ear, our realphantasmagory of St. Edmundsbury plunges into the bosom of the Twelfth Century again, and all is over. Monks, Abbot, Hero-worship, Government, Obedience, Coeur-de-Lion and St. Edmund's Shrine, vanish like Mirza's Vision; and there is nothing left but a mutilated black Ruin amid green botanic expanses, and oxen, sheep and dillettanti pasturing in their places."

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

The form of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, as we have seen, is symbolic and reiterative—essentially it comprises a set of variations on a single theme. Even in the handling of largescale narratives, Carlyle worked in this way. Although de­ termined in large part by a sequence of historical events, the French Revolution, for example, is thematically rather than narratively structured. Carlyle did not seek, in his conclusions, a satisfying denouement—a ringing down of the curtain on a completed action. The final chapter begins this way: "Homer's Epos, it is remarked, is like a Bas-Relief sculpture: it does not conclude, but merely ceases. Such, indeed, is the Epos of Universal History itself" (III, 321). Macaulay might well have agreed with this, but as a writer and as a man, he sought the satisfying conclusion, and had laid out the deaths of James and William even when he realized that he could not complete their histories. But the French Revolution depends for its forms on a central theme of which Mirabeau is the focal symbol. Just as Mirabeau is seen as a man who had "swallowed all formulas," so the French Revolution is seen as an event which burns up all Imposture. Recognizing that "the new Realities are not yet come" (III, 322), he nevertheless insists that in France, at least, "Shams are burnt up." And in the moving final paragraph of his work, Carlyle reverts in a personal way to the theme: "Man, by the nature of him, is definable as 'an incarnated Word.' Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely: thine also it was to hear truly. Farewell" (III, 323). The French Revolution becomes, then, a sermon and a prophecy, of which the events it describes are the crucial exempla. In simplest terms it can be summarized this way: if England does not swallow its formulas, burn its shams, it will suffer the fate of France in the Revolution. The shape of Macaulay's History is more conventionally novelistic. He made no attempt to reduce the multifarious­ ness of the experience he described to a set of parallel examples of an overriding imperative. Instead, he dwelled lovingly on the details for their own sake and did not at­ tempt to wring prophetic meaning from them. This is not,

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however, to say that the History is formless. But the form does not depend on moral meaning; rather, it grows from a view of experience which is partly political, partly per­ sonal. The action is given shape by Macaulay's commit­ ment to the goodness of life in the nineteenth century and by his love of the "unreal" (because no longer existent) worlds of the past. The form is narrative, rather than thematic, and pushes inevitably toward the happy ending. That the History has an excellent and immediately recog­ nizable form even in its fragmented state is undeniable. The overriding form—which can be attributed, perhaps, in Herbert Butterfield's words, to the "Whig Interpretation of History"—is the implicit, value-laden contrast between past and present.38 Even the few passages already quoted from the History reveal how Macaulay inevitably saw the past and the present juxtaposed: we see with Monmouth's eyes, but we also see with the eyes of a nineteenth-century observer; we learn what the vulgar of the seventeenth cen­ tury believed, but we are informed by the cool analytical mind of the nineteenth century what we should believe; the opening epic statement juxtaposes past and present in almost every phrase. In the first chapter Macaulay carefully and brilliantly summarizes English history from its be­ ginnings. His pace slows as he approaches the Restoration, slows yet more in the second chapter, devoted to the reign of Charles II, and then stops almost completely in the third chapter, the famous tour de force examination of the State of England in 1685. All this is designed, as Macaulay says, to make comprehensible the events that follow; it is a device paralleled by all those novels whose stories begin with careful presentation of the background, of the Iand38

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London,

1931): It is part and parcel of the Whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with reference to the present. . . . Through this system of immediate reference to the present day, historical person­ ages can easily and irresistibly be classed into men who furthered progress and men who tried to hinder it. (p. 11)

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

scape against which the events with which they are most concerned are to take place. The long childhood scenes of George Eliot's Mill on the Floss to which, she admitted, she gave too much attention, and the ominous first chapters of Hardy's novels provide representative parallels. But the first three chapters of the History serve also to portray the other side of the divide between past and present. The central action of the Revolution of 1688 is the moment in history, as Macaulay saw it, which turned England from its poor beginnings in the direction of the great achievements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His introduc­ tion to the second chapter makes this clear: The history of England, during the seventeenth century, is the history of the transformation of a limited monarchy, constituted after the fashion of the middle ages, into a limited monarchy suited to that more advanced state of society in which the public charges can no longer be borne by the estates of the crown, and in which the public defence can no longer be entrusted to a feudal militia. (I, 119) The Revolution of 1688 was the death of feudalism and the prologue to the modern world, the beginning of the inevitable progression toward the Reform Bill of 1832, which marked for Macaulay the high point in his country's history. And the revolution is seen largely from the per­ spective of the two men most centrally involved in it— James II (the last of the feudal kings) and William III (the first of the moderns). Their story becomes the focus of the contest between past and present, and Macaulay's treatment of them informs the shape of the remainder of the History. As he became aware that his great ambition to bring his History up "to a time which is within the memory of men still living" was impossible, his wish was that he would survive long enough to bring it up to the death of William. That event would satisfactorily complete the struc­ ture of his redesigned History, and that event, we know, he described before he had time to finish narrating the full

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history of William's reign. It is notorious that the whole weight of the History comes down on the side of William, but that is because Macaulay sees William as on the side of the future. James and the Jacobites are the last vestiges of the feudal past. The contest between them is a summary, as it were, of the contest between past and present, and the fate of their battle determines the whole course of England from servile ignominy to greatness beyond that of Cortes, Pizarro, and Alexander. But the History is far too complex to be reduced com­ pletely to such a simple formula. The experience of reading it is the experience of being drawn into an extremely various world, full of interesting people whose paths cross and diverge. "Beneath the smooth and polished surface," Cotter Morison remarked, "layer under layer may be seen of subordinate narratives, crossing and interlacing each other like the parts in the score of an oratorio."39 Moreover, every narrative "layer" is filled with details so rich that they bring the most minor figures and events into the sharp focus of the foreground for their little moments. The method is in many ways similar to the Homeric style, as Erich Auer­ bach has described it—that is, "of the foreground,"40 but it is also very like the manner of much of the large-scale fiction of the mid-century. Almost nothing is hastily sketched in. Whatever is being considered at the moment is boldly out­ lined and for the moment shifts attention away from the larger and more central concerns to which it is usually re­ lated. Many-skeined novels like Middlemarch have taught us both to appreciate the craftsmanship by which elaborate story lines are interwoven and to be wary of dismissing as 39 Cotter Morison, Macaulay, "English Men of Letters Series" (1882), p. 144. 40Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (New York, 1957), p. 9: The Homeric style is "'of the foreground' because, despite much going back and forth, it yet causes what is momentarily being narrated to give the impression that it is the only present, pure and without perspective." Macaulay, of course, is deeply concerned with context, and it would be absurd to push the analogy too far. But it is useful in focusing the distinction between Macaulay and CarIyle or Newman or the later more sophisticated realists in fiction.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

irrelevant to the whole scheme of the novel many of the apparently superabundant details which seem to have dis­ tracted the author from awareness of the unity of the whole work. In the History the problems are similar. Characters fill the stage, demanding attention, and then disappear back into their altogether minor roles. The long-range effect, however, is extraordinarily coherent, and the immediate effect of particular passages is inevitably dramatic and full of the fascination that the particularity of novels provides. Perhaps the most brilliant example of Macaulay's capacity to organize seemingly heterogeneous material, to sustain complicated narrative lines under a coherent and unified purpose, and yet to keep the volume rich in novelistic in­ terest and in variety of human behavior comes in the ninth chapter. Macaulay attempts there to lay out the difficulties which confronted William in his attempt to gain the crown from James and thereby to neutralize Lewis's power. But as in the passage describing Monmouth's view of the battle­ field, Macaulay does not handle the material impersonally. As Monmouth's view of the battlefield frames the coming events, so William's personal vision dominates the compli­ cated material Macaulay sets down. "Continental states­ men," Macaulay writes, "saw a part of those difficulties; British statesmen another part. One capacious and powerful mind alone took them all in at one view, and determined to surmount them all." William, then, dominates the whole narrative leading up to his invasion and the assumption of the throne: It was no easy thing to subvert the English government by means of a foreign army without galling the pride of Englishmen. It was no easy thing to obtain from that Batavian faction which regarded France with partiality, and the House of Orange with aversion, a decision in favour of an expedition which would confound all the schemes of France, and raise the House of Orange to the height of greatness. It was no easy thing to lead en­ thusiastic Protestants on a crusade against Popery with

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

the good wishes of almost all Popish governments and of the Pope himself. Yet all these things William effected. All his objects, even those which appeared most incom­ patible with each other, he attained completely and at once. The whole history of ancient and of modern times records no other such triumph of statesmanship. (II, 202) Here again is the heroic figure, here again are the Macaulayesque paradoxes and the noisy but lucid style. Instead of a simple narration of what happens, Macaulay begins with a summary statement under which all that occurs through the length of two impressive and exciting chapters is noted; and this statement is not in the form of a dry summary but of a characterization of William. The summary is further rounded by an extension and qualification of the comments on William. The success of the invasion can be explained largely by the character of Wil­ liam, but also by the character of his opponents: The task would indeed have been too arduous even for such a statesman as the Prince of Orange, had not his chief adversaries been at this time smitten with an in­ fatuation such as by many men not prone to superstition was ascribed to the special judgment of God. Not only was the King of England, as he had ever been, stupid and perverse: but even the counsel of the politic King of France was turned into foolishness. Whatever wisdom and energy could do William did. Those obstacles which no wisdom or energy could have overcome his enemies themselves studiously removed. (II, 202-203) There is, to be sure, nothing apparently subtle about the treatment of the "stupid and perverse" James. Indeed, there is very little subtlety of characterization anywhere in the History. There is considerable subtlety and skill, however, in the handling of the narrative. With this firmly estab­ lished pattern clearly before the reader, Macaulay can move off into elaborate and richly detailed narratives and yet hold them all together with an occasional transition.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

Immediately after this passage, for example, Macaulay returns to a narrative line he had interrupted, the conse­ quences of the Bishops' refusal to read the Order of In­ dulgence in their churches. James had had the Bishops arrested, but they had been acquitted. Reenter James: On the great day on which the Bishops were acquitted, and on which the invitation was despatched to the Hague, James returned from Hounslow to Westminster in a gloomy and unquiet mood. He made an effort that after­ noon to appear cheerful: but the bonfires, the rockets, and above all the waxen Popes who were blazing in every quarter of London, were not likely to soothe him. Those who saw him on the morrow could easily read in his face and demeanour the violent emotions which disturbed his mind. (II, 203) The return to the narrative is abrupt, but its relation to the generalizations about William's coming triumph is clear. It is easy to see how a less skilled artist might have placed this bit of narration in its natural sequence, following the first description of the celebrations of the acquittal. More­ over, while the careful tracing of James' moods may seem hardly relevant to the larger issues, it makes clear that we are about to watch James act stupidly and perversely and clear the way for William even further. Detail after detail accumulates out of a mass of appar­ ently unrelated actions to fill in Macaulay's summary of the difficulties William had to face and the way (with the aid of his enemies) he overcame them. The structural tour de force is sustained over almost two long chapters and en­ compasses in its first stages, the following actions: James' demand that all Chancellors of dioceses and all Archdeacons report to the High Commission "the names of all such rectors, vicars, and curates, as had omitted to read the Declaration" (II, 203); James' further persecutions of the Church, and the Church's increasingly animated resistance (II, 206); the resistance of the gentry and of the military (II, 207-208); the bringing of Irish troops into England (with a long

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

discursus on the history of the hatred of the English for the Irish) (II, 209-14). These details are followed by a char­ acteristically effective transition which reminds the reader precisely where he is: "While James was thus raising against himself all those national feelings which, but for his own folly, might have saved his throne, Lewis was in another way exerting himself not less effectively to facilitate the enterprise which William meditated" (II, 214). And then follow detailed discussions of the way Lewis alienated the party in Holland which was favorable to France by assailing "their religion and their trade," the "two subjects on which the people of the United Provinces were peculiarly sensi­ tive" (II, 215); of the way Lewis "was labouring with not less success to remove all the scruples which might have prevented the Roman Catholic princes of the continent from countenancing William's designs" (II, 217). Another of Macaulay's transitional landmarks then keeps the readers' eyes on the main subject while they are indulging in the pleasures of a myriad of details: "These faults [Lewis] com­ mitted at a conjuncture at which no fault could be committed with impunity, and under the eye of an opponent second in vigilance, sagacity, and energy, to no statesman whose memory history has preserved. William saw with stem delight his adversaries toiling to clear away obstacle after obstacle from his path" (II, 219). Again we are re­ minded that all the events take place under the eyes of William. The "stern delight" is, of course, Macaulay's inter­ polation, but it is part of the continuing attempt to hu­ manize the experience and to characterize William. By such means Macaulay makes it a pleasure to watch William at work. Every event the History touches in these stages comes under William's eye and heightens the readers' sense of his greatness. All that follows in the chapter shows him, then, actively engaged to accomplish his plans and to fulfill the prophecy of Macaulay's early summary. The de­ tails operate in almost every case to enrich our novelistic sense of the events. I shall take only one example here:

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

Churchill, in a letter written with a certain elevation of language, which was the sure mark that he was going to commit a baseness, declared that he was determined to perform his duty to heaven and to his country, and that he put his honour absolutely into the hands of the Prince of Orange. William doubtless read these words with one of those bitter and cynical smiles which gave his face its least pleasing expression. It was not his busi­ ness to take care of the honour of other men; nor had the most rigid casuists pronounced it unlawful in a gen­ eral to invite, to use, and to reward the services of de­ serters whom he could not but despise. (II, 222) Again, there is much here that appears irrelevant to the narrative movement of the History, but for the lay reader it is thoroughly satisfying. We are confronted not with the abstract movements of history (although a sense of a kind of providential direction is present behind much of the passage I have been discussing here as it lies behind the whole movement of the History) but with the play of per­ sonalities. Two great men—one base, one noble—are seen to be toying with one another. Marlborough, whom Macaulay attempts to show as utterly two-faced in his al­ legiances to William and James, tries to win William's favor, having seen in which direction the wind was blowing. Wil­ liam, thoroughly aware of Marlborough's hypocrisy, is perfectly willing to use his assistance, if warily. Macaulay's detailed acquaintance with portraits of William and with contemporary descriptions of him allows him to conjecture about the "bitter and cynical smiles." Whether he smiled or not, was alert or not to Marlborough's motives, doesn't matter except as we are being asked to see history not, as Cotter Morison puts it, centering "round the growth and play of social forces," but "round human characters" (p. 151). William's success depends not only on his personal dignity and nobility, but also on his worldly wisdom, his willingness and capacity to exploit the faults of others for his own ends, and his constant repression of personal feel-

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT

ing in the interests of his public role. Yet centered on char­ acter as the narrative is, there is also plenty of evidence that Macaulay did not think character alone could shape the course of history—as, for example, his assertion, quoted earlier, that even William's greatness as a statesman would have been unequal to his task if his enemies had not blundered so conveniently.41 41 It is not at all clear that Macaulay himself was consistent in his ideas about the way history happens. History is eminently the history of personalities—as we have seen, the great battle between past and present is worked out in terms of the conflict of two men, William and James. On the other hand, it is well known that Macaulay felt very strongly that the treatment of history in terms of great events and great men is altogether misleading, that to understand history one must understand the quality of ordinary life. He argued in 1828 that "Those who have read history with discrimination know the fallacy of those panegyrics and invectives which represent individuals as effecting great moral and intellectual revolutions, subverting estab­ lished systems, and imprinting a new character on their age. . . . For, in fact, it is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age" ("Dryden," I, 108-109). For this reason, he argues that one can only understand great men by understanding their times. His essay on Machiavelli clears Machiavelli of particular moral guilt because his morality was consistent with the morality of his time: "Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure." For this reason, Macaulay says, "He alone reads history aright who, observing how powerfully circumstances influence the feelings and opinions of men, how often vices pass into virtues and paradoxes into axioms, learns to distinguish what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essen­ tial and immutable" ("Machiavelli," I, 85, 83). The tension between Macaulay's theory—that individual men can­ not greatly influence the course of history—and his practice would be much like the tension one finds in novelists like Thackeray and George Eliot, but for one thing. The characters in their novels do not manage to play important roles in historical events even when, as in the case of Felix Holt or Dorothea Brooke, they very much want to. The novels show them overcome by impersonal or communal forces which are simply too large for them. But in the History Macaulay gives us two characters who do dramatically influence the course of history by virtue of their personal qualities—William by his personal strength and genius, James by his perversity and stupidity. Thus, despite his theory—which is indirectly reiterated through much of the History— Macaulay does seem to suggest that history is governed by personali­ ties. If pressed, Macaulay would have been led by his theory to the kind of determinism generally accepted by the secular intelligentsia

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

Thus one finds here, as one usually finds, that the novelistic treatment of history is relevant to Macaulay's larger conception of his work. The whole section we are considering grows from Macaulay's initial statement of Wil­ liam's special strengths in overcoming great difficulties. And no matter how far he seems to move from a discussion of these difficulties, he persistently brings his narrative back to William's character, to his "bitter and cynical smiles," to his apparently "icy tranquillity" which kept the depths of his feelings from "common eyes" (II, 226), to the inward smile with which he greets news of his enemies' mistakes (II, 232), to his "iron stoicism" (II, 247). The quiet and cynical battle between William and Marlborough, touched on quickly here, becomes, moreover, the prelude to a long and important struggle between the two that moves increas­ ingly toward the center of the narrative as Marlborough's power grows and William, because of his "icy tranquillity" and the foreignness of his manners and his friends, loses control over his own fate. Despite the essentially nondramatic structure of this sec­ tion, beginning as it does with a general summary and punctuated as it is with summary transitions; and despite the burden of apparently excessive detail, Macaulay man­ ages to give the whole series of events an extraordinary forward movement with what John Clive has called a of his day. But it is characteristic of Macaulay that he did not feel obliged to wrestle with the problem very long. His anti-theoretical inclinations led him to avoid large questions about whether man makes history or history makes man: that is precisely the sort of questioning he scoffed at in his essay on Bacon. His essay on history is much more about how to write history than how to think about it. In all likeli­ hood, he took as his principles certain common sense attitudes: that you can't know what the past was like unless you know what people other than kings and courtiers were like; that it doesn't much matter whether, in theory, man is free and responsible or determined, since history reveals itself in terms of people who behave and need to be judged as if they were responsible; that, on the other hand, history reveals a natural tendency to improvement which nothing great men can do will ultimately alter, and thus history seen from a distance gives the impression of having a super-personal direction.

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"propulsive imagination." Macaulay demonstrates, says Clive, "an instinctive ability to propel inert facts into mo­ tion" (p. 25). William's rise and James' fall proceed with a compelling inevitability, emphasized by Macaulay at every possible moment. One of the leitmotifs of the whole se­ quence, for instance, is James' remark that "concession had always ruined princes," generally accompanied by Macaulay's refutation of the notion; another is the assertion that James "was bent on ruining himself; and every attempt to stop him only made him rush more eagerly to his doom" (II, 229). James' perversity, his apparently uncanny knack for doing the wrong thing at the right time becomes the focus of Macaulay's entire treatment of him. It is simply an expansion of the blunt assertion of James' stupidity and perversity in the opening summary. So, when the Bishops were acquitted, James from a heart hardened by "defeat and mortification," says, "So much the worse for them" (II, 203), and proceeds to alienate the Tories even more; so, after alienating "the hearts of his people by violating their laws, confiscating their estates, and persecuting their re­ ligion," James, "as usually happens when a weak man tries to avoid opposite inconvenience . . . took a course which united them all. He brought over Irishmen, not indeed enough to hold down the single city of London, or the single county of York, but more than enough to excite the alarm and rage of the whole kingdom, from Northumberland to Cornwall" (II, 210, 209). Again, in his behavior toward Lewis, James made a fatally perverse mistake: When his throne was secure, when his people were sub­ missive, when the most obsequious of Parliaments was eager to anticipate all his reasonable wishes, when for­ eign kingdoms and commonwealths paid emulous court to him, when it depended only on himself whether he would be the arbiter of Christendom, he had stooped to be the slave and the hireling of France. And now when, by a series of crimes and follies, he had succeeded in alienating his neighbours, his subjects, his soldiers, his

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sailors, his children, and had left himself no refuge but the protection of France, he was taken with a fit of pride, and determined to assert his independence. That help which, when he did not want it, he had accepted with ignominious tears, he now, when it was indispensable to him, threw contemptuously away. (II, 229) Part of the propulsive thrust here depends—as does so much else in the History—on a style which reads everything in paradox. There are almost always, in Macaulay's world, only two terms—right and wrong, or good and bad. The oversimplification which is an inevitable result of that kind of vision contributes to most of Macaulay's great successes. Clive has suggested that Macaulay's "propulsive imagina­ tion" is "closely akin to his private daydreaming and fantasy life in which he was able to propel himself into imaginary situations" (p. 25). It certainly has the power of engaging the reader, and it does so in exactly the way that good melodrama engages. That is, it aligns the reader's feelings firmly on the side of the good and creates in him an excited eagerness to see the bad destroyed. Moreover, the form of melodrama (the daydream embodied), in its inexorable movement toward the defeat of evil and the triumph of goodness is peculiarly satisfying. And when, as in the hands of Macaulay, the good and the bad are delineated with a vividness almost irresistible, with a kind of childlike com­ mitment reflecting his own engagement in the fantasy world, every progress in the inevitable but extremely slow move­ ment impels the reader on to the next step. The experi­ ence of reading the History is similar to the experience of watching Odysseus as, after a long succession of terrible sufferings, he avenges himself in the delicious, violent slaughter of the suitors. Here, in the very form of the History, through all its complications and beyond the mass of details which give to the narrative its vividness, is the fullest expression of the other side of Macaulay—of the daydreamer and of the man who, for all his love of "reality," retreated at every possible moment from the real to the unreal.

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But if, on the one hand, this mode of seeing is akin to the epic mode, it is even more akin to the mode of realistic fiction-cum-romance which was the staple of the nine­ teenth-century novel-reading public. Great though William is shown to be, he is no heroic Odysseus, but a hero of a world recognizable to nineteenth-century man, and a hero whose triumph comes not in murderous vengeance but in the transformation of the political structure of a country. The world of the History is a world of justice. If there are a good many injustices which never get righted, the full movement is toward a righting of wrongs, toward the ful­ fillment of something like George Eliot's "Nemesis." The great satisfaction of the world, both for Macaulay and for his readers, lies in the fact that virtue is ultimately rewarded and stupidity and perversity punished. The inevitable com­ plications of life at the moment, when the just rewards and punishments do not at all seem inevitable, are banished at the same time that Macaulay can feel himself rigorously faithful to reality. Here, if anywhere, the apparently irrecon­ cilable enemies—fiction and fact—are reconciled, and, as usual, Macaulay has his cake and eats it, too. The pattern of virtue rewarded and vice punished is another element that unifies the whole narrative structure of the History. In the battle between past and present, Wil­ liam and James, England and her enemies, the loyal and the faithless, the honest and the charlatans, the right side always wins, no matter how long it takes. To take just one minor example of the way Macaulay makes this pattern part of the explicit significance of his narrative: James had agreed to have the Bishop of Winchester restore the ejected members of Magdalene College, but the Bishop was sud­ denly called back to Whitehall. To the public, it looked as though James had gone back on his word, and the retrac­ tion was imputed to the fact that James knew that "the Dutch armament had put out to sea, and had been driven back by a storm." Macaulay acknowledges that James couldn't have known about the mishap to the Dutch fleet, but he thinks it just that historians and many of James' con-

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temporaries thought he retracted his concessions because he believed himself safe. "If they sometimes, without severely examining evidence, ascribed to his dishonest policy what was really the effect of accident or inadvertence, the fault was his own. That men who are in the habit of breaking faith should be distrusted when they mean to keep it is part of their just and natural punishment" (II, 244). Here is a marvelous example of Macaulay having his cake and eating it, too. He himself obviously feels and allows his reader to feel great pleasure in the injustice of the judgment of James. This kind of Nemesis satisfies particularly because for a moment at least James is not to blame. On the other hand, Macaulay remains the scientific historian who has weighed the evidence, who can tell us—against the imputa­ tion that he has been unfair in his treatment to James— what many previous historians didn't know, that James was not guilty. He becomes also the irrefutable moralist, standing as it seems above the whole event, and explain­ ing how moral effects emerge from moral causes. On a larger scale, the course of justice is traced in the whole career of James, from his first speech to the Privy Council, when he won its "delight and gratitude" (I, 346) and assuaged the uneasy feelings of his people, through his two ignominious flights from England, through his final flight from Dublin to Saint Germains, and through his futile exile. During this long and painful sequence James is de­ scribed as continuing his perverse pursuit of his own defeat. On his deathbed, he is shown insensible to Lewis's promise (a fault into which Lewis had been "hurried by pity, by the desire of applause, and by female influence" [IV, 545]) to be to James' son what he was to James. The death, sketchily as it is drawn, reminds us of the heights from which James had fallen by his own perversity. On the other hand, William's career follows an upward curve, complicated only by the reluctance of England to take him to its heart. His death is movingly described. Here again is stoicism, as he turns to his physician and says, "I know that you have done all that skill and learn-

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ing could do for me: but the case is beyond your art; and I submit" (IV, 555). William maintains his dignity to the end, and is reconciled to his dearest friend, Bentinck: "the lips of the dying man moved; but nothing could be heard. The King took the hand of his earliest friend, and pressed it tenderly to his heart. In that moment, no doubt, all that had cast a slight passing cloud over their long and pure friendship was forgotten" (IV, 556). Macaulay then falls into the clipped, staccato style of much of his narrative, a style which here implies William's firmness in the face of death. And the last words Lady Trevelyan transcribed from Macaulay's notes give William's death the quality of many of the great, sentimental deathbed scenes of Victorian fic­ tion: "When his remains were laid out, it was found that he wore next to his skin a small piece of black silk riband. The lords in waiting ordered it to be taken off. It contained a gold ring and a lock of the hair of Mary." The contrast implied between WilKam and James is complete. The effect is appropriately muted, but there can be little doubt about the direction in which William's soul moved off. Here, if anywhere, is virtue rewarded, and the fit end of the struggle between past and present, between hypocrisy and truth, disloyalty and fidelity, absurdity and dignity. There is one narrative sequence, however, which is even more satisfying to those who admire the very attractive melodrama of the History, and that is the story of Jeffreys, the hanging judge. Within the first two volumes of the History, which, aside from the now excessive claims of the opening, have a unity in themselves, Jeffreys figures as one of the most important characters. He is introduced with Macaulay's characteristic boldness, and he is treated in the terms of his introduction throughout his story: "The depravity of this man has passed into a proverb" (I, 350). And then, in a way that we have already seen as typical, Macaulay attempts to preserve his reputation for impar­ tiality and justice at the same time he indulges in the pleasures of active participation in the past—here by at­ tacking one of the villains of his piece: "A diligent and

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candid enquiry will show that some frightful stories which have been told concerning him are false or exaggerated. Yet the dispassionate historian will be able to make very Httle deduction from the vast mass of infamy with which the memory of the wicked judge has been loaded" (I, 350). The portrait of Jeffreys which follows is pure melodrama, although it is obviously based on careful study of the facts. Jeffreys, we learn, "became the most consummate bully ever known in his profession. Tenderness for others and respect for himself were feelings alike unknown to him. . . . The profusion of maledictions and vituperative epithets which composed his vocabulary could hardly have been rivalled in the fishmarket or the beargarden" (I, 351). But the kinship to melodrama appears most clearly in the de­ scription of Jeffreys' appearance: "Impudence and ferocity sate upon his brow. The glare of his eyes had a fascination for the unhappy victim on whom they were fixed. Yet his brow and his eye were less terrible than the savage lines of his mouth. His yell of fury, as was said by one who had often heard it, sounded like the thunder of the judgment day" (I, 351). The portrait darkens even from this point. Early in his career "might be remarked in him the most odious vice which is incident to human nature, a delight in misery merely as misery. There was a fiendish exultation in the way in which he pronounced sentence on offenders" (I, 351). The pleasures of the portrait of Jeffreys for reader and writer are thoroughly characteristic of the History. It is a portrait which Macaulay himself might have conceded to be inappropriate to fiction because it is too extreme and therefore not credible. But happily, MacauIay has the facts, and thus evil can be personified and we can take great pleasure (as we do in melodrama) in being frightened and appalled by its acts even as we are aware that retribu­ tion is inevitable. Moreover, despite Macaulay's insistence on his own position as dispassionate historian, his whole presentation is designed to engage us in the events in which Jeffreys participates and to make us judge him rather than

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT understand him, just as we judge our living enemies, being too much engaged in self-defense or indignation to try to understand them. The case of Alice Lisle is presented with the strength of an advocate. "Lady Alice," as she was called, had been found harboring two men who had taken part in Mon­ mouth's rebellion. Macaulay dwells affectionately over the details of her case, partly because it is fascinating in its own right and partly because it provides that striking and happy melodramatic contrast between the gentle woman and the villainous bully. He begins by informing us that she had "deeply regretted some violent acts in which her husband had borne a part" against the government of Charles I, that "she had shed bitter tears for Charles," "and that she had protected and relieved many Cavaliers in their distress" (I, 497). He proceeds to discuss at great length the state of the English law which punishes the harboring of traitors as violently as the traitorous acts themselves. His rhetoric here verges on the bathetic: "The feeling which makes the most loyal subject shrink from the thought of giving up to a shameful death the rebel who, vanquished, hunted down, and in mortal agony, begs for a morsel of bread and a cup of water, may be a weakness; but it is surely a weakness very nearly allied to virtue, a weakness which, constituted as human beings are, we can hardly eradicate from the mind without eradicating many noble and benevo­ lent sentiments. A wise and good ruler may not think it right to sanction this weakness; but he will generally con­ nive at it, or punish it very tenderly" (I, 497). (Here, both Jeffreys and James are judged.) And Macaulay finds that no governments but James' have "treated with rigour per­ sons guilty merely of harbouring defeated and flying in­ surgents. To women especially has been granted, by a kind of tacit prescription, the right of indulging, in the midst of havoc and vengeance, that compassion which is the most endearing of all their charms" (I, 498). Macaulay regularly treats women with the reverence of Dickens and of the lesser gynolatrous novelists of the day. Then, having

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set the stage for the trial, having shown even its illegality by revealing that the conspirators themselves had not yet been tried and convicted, Macaulay proceeds to describe Jeffreys' behavior, his bullying, his speech-making, and his outrageously cruel sentence that Alice should be burned alive that very afternoon. From that point the reader waits eagerly for Jeffreys' comeuppance. And in the last chapter of what was orig­ inally the second volume Macaulay relates with relish the beginning of the end. His language is again the language of the melodramatist. JeflFreys is discovered fleeing by a scrivener whom he had once bullied in court. After his trial, the scrivener, "sent . . . away half dead with fright," had said, "While I live . . . I shall never forget that terrible countenance" (II, 315). With poetic justice that Macaulay obviously relished, the scrivener's memory of that "terrible countenance" helped him to recognize Jeffreys through his disguise. "And now the day of retribution had arrived" (II, 315). Jeffreys is mauled by the mobs who have learned to hate him, begs to be sent to prison, and is conveyed to the tower by two regiments of militia: "It was repeatedly necessary for them to form, as if for the purpose of re­ pelling a charge of cavalry, and to present a forest of pikes to the mob. The thousands who were disappointed of their revenge pursued the coach, with howls of rage, to the gate of the Tower, brandishing cudgels, and holding up halters full in the prisoner's view" (II, 315). But if the mob was disappointed of their revenge, neither Macaulay nor his readers are. He dwells luxuriously on Jeffreys' suffering: The wretched man meantime was in convulsions of terror. He wrung his hands: he looked wildly out, some­ times at one window, sometimes at the other, and was heard even above the tumult, crying "Keep them off, gentlemen! For God's sake keep them off!" At length, having suffered far more than the bitterness of death, he was safely lodged in the fortress where some of his most illustrious victims had passed their last days, and where

MACAULAY: PROGRESS AND RETREAT his own life was destined to close in unspeakable igno­ miny and horror. (II, 315-16) The ironies and the indignities are precisely what reader and writer want. They bring to a close one of the major narrative strands of the first two volumes, reminding us how, in the end, justice does triumph, and how past sins return upon the head of the evildoer. And yet with all the obvious indulgences in the pleasure of seeing evil punished, Macaulay has carefully kept his eye on the struc­ ture of his History as a whole. He summarizes in a few lines the death which it was more appropriate that he describe in another place. He needed the rounding off of the narrative for volume II, but he postponed the full de­ scription of Jeffreys' life in the tower and ignominious death until the third volume. There is no need here to dwell on the later details. But there the satisfaction is com­ plete. "In the whole history of the English bar," Macaulay concludes, "there is no other instance of so rapid an eleva­ tion, or of so terrible a fall" (III, 121). And then the final irony, for the man who brutally persecuted the supporters of Monmouth: "The emaciated corpse was laid, with all privacy, next to the corpse of Monmouth in the chapel of the Tower." The boldness of the outlines of Macaulay's prose makes it too easy to be condescending toward it, especially when one views it in excerpts. But the great quality of the History is its capacity to sustain, as I have tried to show, a great number of narrative lines and a heavy weight of detail with perfect clarity, and yet always to push forward the central narrative movement. Within the context of such a complex narrative, the episode of Jeffreys is not so glaring as it would be by itself; and it has resonances beyond itself, some of which are picked up in the "poetic ironies" I have already alluded to. Jeffreys becomes the central example of what happens to justice under a ruler like James; his relation to James is implicitly contrasted with the relation of William's aides to him, as his weak and cowardly be-

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havior at his death is contrasted with the manner of the death of many of his victims; the ferocity of his injustice helps account for the revulsion from James felt throughout the country (so even the story of Alice Lisle, who had earned the admiration of the Tories and was defended, as Macaulay notes, by James' brother-in-law, has its relevance to the larger narrative). There is, moreover, no point in undervaluing the attractiveness of Macaulay's treatment, which, in the full sweep of the History, can engage the reader and carry him forward. In the hands of a Dickens this kind of story, in its sheer intensity, acquires a value which, on the surface, it seems altogether to want. The scrupulous care with which Macaulay unearths the pictorial fact to bring the past alive combines with his "propulsive imagination" in a way directly akin to the mode of many Victorian novelists. Melodrama, more or less refined, is a central element in almost all of the great Victorian fiction. If Macaulay's History did supersede for a while the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies it was because it managed, with a surface realism that has its own attraction, to engage the reader in its "unreal" world as great fiction manages; because, like great nineteenthcentury fiction, it told an extremely good story very well; and because the world in which it engaged its readers was, despite occasional aberrations, a marvelously just world. He converted history into romance without violating any of the canons of truthfulness, and he dwelled in the unreal world all the time he argued the superiority of the real world from which he was retreating. The History is written so as to make the past real and present, and Macaulay dwells in the past as though it were reality, presents it to the reader with the immediacy of his journalism. But the virtues of this kind of immediacy, if it is not qualified by the great writer's capacity to be at once en­ gaged in the experience and yet to have it under his control, have their corresponding vices. C. H. Firth has remarked that Macaulay "had little insight into men's motives and very little sympathy or imagination. He made

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no serious attempt to appreciate the beliefs and ideas of men from whom he differed—to put himself in their place. Though he describes characters at great length the hardness of the lines and the crudeness of the colouring give most of his portraits the air of caricature."42 Despite Macaulay's desire to place the reader in the action, the criticism is obviously just and falls in line with the criticisms of Arnold and almost all of Macaulay's serious critics. But the failure of sympathy came not, I think, for lack of trying. G. M. Trevelyan has criticized Macaulay's History for attempting too often to find motives for actions, when the motives can only be guessed.43 But there was a great barrier between Macaulay and the inner worlds of characters of whose actions he did not approve; that barrier was his style and the view of the world of which the style was a reflection. The style, as I have suggested, is Macaulay's strongest defense against contemporary experience. Its clarity, assertiveness, resistance to nuance, allowed it to present experi­ ence with extraordinary vividness and at the same time to classify it comfortably.44 The retreat to the past which was so much a part of Macaulay's mode of life was, it should 42 Firth, p. 262. Trevor-Roper is the most recent writer to make the point, accepted by almost every commentator on Macaulay, that Macaulay was incapable of handling character: "Macaulay was one of the worst judges of men who has ever written about them." (p. 18) 43 G. M. Trevelyan, Clio: A Muse (London, 1919), p. 170. 44John Morley, "Macaulay," Critical Miscellanies, II (1886). Morley's comments on Macaulay's style, though general, are largely accurate. "His whole mind runs in action and movement; it busies itself in eager interest in all objective particulars. He is seized by the external and the superficial, and revels in every detail that appeals to the five senses" (p. 262). Later, Morley writes: "It is a great test of style to watch how an author disposes of the qualifications, limita­ tions, and exceptions that clog the wings of his main proposition. The grave and conscientious men of the seventeenth century insisted on packing them all honestly along with the main proposition itself, within the bounds of a single period. Burke arranges them in tolerably close order in the paragraph. Dr. Newman, that winning writer, dis­ perses them lightly over his page. Of Macaulay it is hardly unfair to say that he despatches all qualifications into outer space before he begins to write, or if he magnanimously admits one or two here and there, it is only to bring them the more imposingly to the same murderous end" (pp. 277-78).

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be remembered, a retreat from uncertainty and from the possibility of the unexpected. The style is the fullest ex­ pression of that retreat. When, in the early essays, it is used for discussion of contemporary problems it reveals Macaulay at his weakest: strong rhetorically, to be sure, but out of touch with the real complexity of experience, as in his mauling of Southey's Colloquies. But when in the History he uses the style—tempered and less prolix—to describe the past, its divorce from the full complexity of experience is not so obvious; and the power it has of bringing the past into the present with the immediacy of a contemporary struggle largely redeems it. But Macaulay does treat his subject as though he were living in it, and the result is that he sees his characters without detachment, as though they were objects of attack in a contemporary review, or in a parliamentary debate; he brings to his discussion of the events of the past all the emotional and moral armory he brought to the present. The result, to be sure, is that everything is bright lights and deep shadows and that the reader always knows (as he never can know in life) where he stands in relation to every character. No character can enter the narrative with­ out being immediately placed; and no matter how fair Macaulay tries to be in his judgment (and I think it grossly unfair to suggest that he consciously allowed his prejudice to shape his judgments), he felt judgments ab­ solutely essential. Jeffreys never outgrows Macaulay's intro­ ductory judgment of him; it would be difiBcult to find any character who did outgrow the introductory judgment. All complexity of characterization is reduced (as we have seen) to the presentation of a man as a "bundle of con­ tradictions." Being so much engaged with the characters of the past, Macaulay could not penetrate beneath the surface of their action; and like a judge, he was more concerned with the quality of the actions than with a full understanding of the complexities of the character which produced them. He tended to attribute to each of his characters one overriding

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motive, and although he usually recognized that the motive did not adequately encompass all the character's actions, he would do no more than remark on the incomprehensi­ bility of complex behavior. Truth is stranger than fiction. Another related reason for Macaulay's tendency to see characters as bundles of contradictions is that he tried very hard to avoid being taken in by them. His desire to get at the truth, to be the clear-headed nineteenth-cen­ tury historian who could not be hoodwinked, must have been crucial, as was his deep need to judge the bad man, to place him safely. The effect of this wariness of being corrupted or taken in is sometimes salutary, I think, as, for example, when he argues that the domestic kindness of Charles I and Charles II did not make them good kings or even good men. Unlike Carlyle, Macaulay could compartmentalize; and he was able thus to treat a man in fragments and see two terms of a paradox without somehow fusing them. He tended to avoid the nineteenth-century tendency to see the man and the works as one, so that only a good man could do a good thing, and only a bad man, a bad thing. The most striking example of this, of course, is his treat­ ment of Bacon. Of Charles I he writes, that it "would be unjust to deny" in him some of the "qualities of a good, and even of a great prince. He wrote and spoke, not, like his father, with the exactness of a professor, but after the fashion of the intelligent and well-educated gentlemen. His taste in literature and art was excellent, his manner dig­ nified though not gracious, his domestic life without blem­ ish." But he was, so Macaulay argues in a sentence which governs the rest of his treatment of Charles, "impelled by an incurable propensity to dark and crooked ways" (I, 66). Yet if Macaulay justly avoids the temptation to sentimen­ talize Charles' domestic affections, he does nothing to try to understand how it was that such an instinctively bad man could have done good things. "It may seem strange that his conscience, which, on occasions of little moment, was sufficiently sensitive, should never have reproached

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him with this great vice" (p. 66). It may seem strange. It does seem strange. And that is that. What is clear to Macaulay is that what Charles I did made him an enemy of Parliament and thus of the future revolution of 1688. The uncertainties of contradiction never enter as evidence that the primary formulation might need to be altered, or that it might be dangerous to make such sweeping formulations at all. It is in this area, it seems to me, that Macaulay's History diverges furthest from the ideals of the midcentury novel as they were formulating themselves and developing, and it is in this area that it falls short of the greatness to which its artistry and its impulse to re-create fully the life of the past seem to entitle it. Macaulay simply "did not possess," as John Clive has said, "the capacity for Einfuhlung that would have enabled him to treat all personages . . . with equal respect and understanding."45 He was so much en­ gaged in protecting himself from the reality of the "unreal," so much a part of his own "romance" that he could never penetrate beneath the surface and could never open him­ self to experience. Other great writers, of course, have felt the reality of their imaginative worlds with great force; but Macaulay differed from these in that his fantasies seem to have been controlled by the notions of the public self which he had created. In the History, Macaulay takes up the same relation to the past that he took to his own time. One could no more expect him to have projected himself 45 Clive, pp. 26-27. It seems to me, however, that there is one char­ acter in the History who emerges with something of the complexity of a real human being—William III. Of course, Macaulay greatly exaggerates William's virtues and underplays his vices; but the fact is that Macaulay seemed capable of understanding William—at least the William he created—to a far greater degree than he understands any other figure in the History. I would argue that this is because Macaulay recognized in the tension between William's private desires and public obligations a tension similar to that which he himself persistently felt. William is just the tough guy with a heart of gold— and with a touch of genius—Macaulay recognized himself to be. And it should be noted that although Macaulay underplays William's extra­ marital affairs and argues away his responsibility for Killiecrankie, he does not attempt to suggest that William's character was unflawed.

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into Brougham's or Croker's inner self than into James' or Charles'. All four are enemies; a full understanding of the enemy would have shattered Macaulay's confidence be­ cause it would have raised complexities he did not want to face and therefore, apparently, refused to believe existed. The sternly confident public man came irrevocably between Macaulay and the highest art. The retreat into the past from his own excessive sensibility to pain and fear of un­ certainty must surely have been part of Macaulay's impulse to the writing of history. But the impulse to write—because it was a retreat rather than an attempt to explore through the re-creative imagination some of the meanings of the ex­ perience which frightened him—was also an impulse to self-censorship. What the public gentleman disapproved of, the historian could not sympathize with. MacauIay could not finally achieve the distance from his immediate experi­ ence which the writing of fiction allowed great writers. Always the gentleman with his defenses up, he could not expose himself to the possibility of pain or to the thought that his public might find in him a weakness he did not wish to reveal. Thus in his History he creates an imaginative world with great vividness but reinforces the prejudices of the moment. Sharing an enthusiasm for many of the qualities that made the novel popular, he lacked the ca­ pacity for self-surrender, for coping with the varieties of human possibility, which raised the great Victorian novels to the level of high art. Literature remained for him a retreat from life rather than an extension of it.

CHAPTER III

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE MACAULAY'S solution to the problems raised by the extraor­ dinarily rapid transformation of his society—given, of course, his very special skills as a writer—was inevitably popular. Instead of fearing change, he praised it; instead of looking anxiously back to a society based on a universally acceptable religious faith, he praised, in his essay on Von Ranke, the new empirical philosophy which provided a new kind of certainty: "There are branches of knowledge with respect to which the law of the human mind is progress" (II, 616), he said: mathematics and the inductive sciences, for instance. But theology and religious belief go around in circles. The man of the nineteenth century, he thought, was no better off in these than the man of the fifth century, but since he was so much better off in the conditions of his day to day life, theology and related branches of learning came to seem irrelevant. Macaulay therefore avoided the difficulties of the present while prais­ ing it. At the same time, he lived in the past and gave his readers the best of both worlds. Newman's solution, because it was a genuine attempt at a solution and not an attempt to escape, was inevitably special. The distance between him and Macaulay is the distance between the imagination that divorces itself from the world and the imagination that permeates the world, that creates it. Like Macaulay, Newman tended to live in the "unreal": "my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers, and talismans. . . . I thought life might

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

be a dream."1 But for Newman the "unreal" became an aspect of the real, became more real, in fact, than the tangible world. Like Carlyle, he confronted mystery. Unlike Macaulay, he did not allow himself to think of his art as something separate from his life in this world. His art, if that it might be called, was single-mindedly directed at practical ends. He spoke not to a wide and anonymous audience for the purpose of entertainment or enlighten­ ment, but to this man and that woman whose individuality entailed special needs: cor ad cor loquitur. Though perhaps the most artful and brilliant prose writer of the nineteenth century, he could not please as Macaulay pleased. It is difficult to be popular when one insists on probing to the heart and on questioning all of the most popular and im­ portant moral and religious prejudices. Newman's refusal to divorce imagination from experience of the present made it impossible for him to write so con­ sciously for posterity as Macaulay wrote his History. In a way that became characteristically Victorian, he combined "predilections . . . strongly literary and dramatic"2 with a sense of urgency that precluded art as a career. Although he always remained what he called "a literary man," his art was primarily propagandist. Imaginative literature as such, though he always admired it, was for him the expres­ sion of man's fallen nature and would remain so until the world became a world of saints;3 then, one might infer, literature as we understand it would disappear.4 Totally committed to the reality of the "invisible" world and of the Christian revelation, he surrendered worldly things or put them to the service of God. But for all his rarely religious feeling, Newman was—as 1 Apologia pro vita sua, ed. A. Dwight Culler (1956), pp. 21-22. All references to the Apologia will be to this edition. 2 A. Dwight Culler, The Imperial Intellect (New Haven, 1955), p. 3. 8 The Idea of a University, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (New York, 1960), pp. 174-76. 4 Wilfrid Ward, The Life of John Henry Newman (London, 1912), I, 229-30.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

much as Macaulay—a man of his time. As an isolated saintly figure, he is one sort of writer; as a characteristic Victorian man doing characteristic Victorian things, he is another.5 It may be true that "all Newmans loyalties were impossible, if only because they ran counter, directly and advisedly counter, to the spirit of the age" (Culler, p. 98). But this sort of counterattack against the spirit of the age—indeed, against the very things that Macaulay has come to stand for—is itself an important aspect of that spirit, recognizable in most of its great writers. Macaulay, perhaps, did stand at the center of the Victorian experi­ ence, but Carlyle and Newman, Arnold and Ruskin, Pater and Morris, represent more sophisticated and critical re­ sponses to that experience. Moreover, it is possible to see in Newman's very opposi­ tion to most of what was happening religiously, politically, and socially certain attitudes and dispositions he shared not only with the great objectors but with the very people and things he opposed. If it was not, for example, charac­ teristic for Victorians to convert to Catholicism, conversions from or to various forms of or substitutes for Christianity were commonplace. And if Newmans particular activities for reform were special, recognition of the need for reform and of the inadequacy of art for the enormous moral, social, and political changes that were necessary was characteristic, as was his individualism, and distrust of the rationalism of 5 One of the major difficulties of this section has been to find a way to talk about Newman without oflFending people for whom Newman remains a religious authority and great spiritual leader. A good deal of extremely fine scholarship in the past has been hampered by the writer's excessive reverence for Newman as a man. That Newman was a great man nobody would deny, and I share some of the feelings of admiration which he evokes from his coreligionists. But a study of this kind should not be influenced in its treatment of Newman as a great Victorian figure by such considerations. It is no part of the purpose of this study to "debunk" Newman. But it is a part of the purpose to attempt to understand him from the secular point of view of the literature he so much loved and distrusted at once. On the problem of the hagiographical treatment of Newman, see David Newsome's review of Meriol Trevor's biography, "Newmania," Journal of Theological Studies, XIV (October 1963), 420-29.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

the enlightenment (notwithstanding its influence on his thinking). It was characteristic also for public men or men largely out of sympathy with the literary ethos to try their hands at fiction, as witness, among others, Carlyle, Maurice, Kingsley, Froude, Lewes, and Disraeli. Even Macaulay, it will be remembered, wrote some dramatic dialogues.® And Newman's efforts at renunciation of self may be seen as characteristic—though more saintly and traditionally Chris­ tian—of behavior recognizable in one form or other in the characters and works of such different sorts of people as Newman's brother, Francis, Carlyle, George Eliot, Henry James, even D.H. Lawrence. There was something also in the very "ethos" of his time— as Newman would have called it—which helped to produce his attitude towards art. His poetry, for example, was largely a species of spiritual autobiography, and as such, despite much of its eighteenth-century diction, a religious continua­ tion of a romantic mode. Interesting as some of this poetry is, it fails for the most part to render with the subtlety and complexity of his prose the states of mind and feeling which lead to genuine belief. Moreover, largely as a result of the development of romantic poetry, the growth of the read­ ing public, and the enormous changes in the social and eco­ nomic structure of England, poetry was becoming increasingly a private affair. Certainly it was capable of attracting large audiences, but for the most part it was moving out­ side the mainstreams of Victorian development (or remain­ ing within it by assuming some of the qualities of the novels), as its late-century manifestations make clear. John Stuart Mill's analysis became prophetic: "when the act of utterance is not itself the end, but a means to an end— viz., by the feelings he himself expresses, to work upon the feelings, or upon the belief or the will of another . . . then 6 See especially his "A Conversation Between Mr. Abraham Cowley and Mr. John Milton, Touching the Great Civil War," IV, 422-43. In this dialogue, although his bias toward Milton is clear, Macaulay manages to bring out sympathetically the attitudes of both Puritans and Loyalists.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

it ceases to be poetry, and becomes eloquence."7 This view tends to make poetry an exclusively personal enterprise, with no direct moral or public relevance. And the Victorians in general, as well as Newman in particular, were not ready for this kind of art. The problems of contemporary life had a pervasive relevance to their activities, and this fact, combined with the unwillingness of the early and mid-Victorians to retreat into a "Palace of Art," forced even the most sophisticated of them to work out a moral aesthetic to justify their art or to turn from art altogether. Art in its purest form, then (a form which probably has little relation to any contemporary reality before the twen­ tieth century), is among the Victorians a kind of accident, a by-product of works which, in R.G. Collingwood's ter­ minology, are works of "craft" not "art proper."8 They were less interested in art proper than in discovering a way by which they could explore and affect their age most thor­ oughly. Even Macaulay, it will be remembered, could not directly and publicly indulge the romances of his inner life. And the form in the Victorian period which allowed for the fullest range of "realistic" exploration and moral suasion, which could move from the hortatory to the personal, was the novel, since it had not yet achieved that respectability which removed it from the interest of a general reading public and had not yet worked out principles sufficiently demanding to require any special form beyond prose and— more or less—a story. The central requirement of Victorian fiction was "truth," realism, fidelity to ordinary experience. But for Newman even this form was inadequate: lacking a classical tradition, it wasn't, for one thing, sufficiently seri­ ous. For another, it didn't operate directly or unambiguously enough on moral action. Even "certain religious novels" are 7 John Stuart Mill, "Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties," Dis­ sertations and Discussions, I (New York, 1874), 71. 8 R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford, 1938). Colling­ wood's whole book is an exploration of this distinction, which itself can be traced back to the kind of distinction Mill makes between poetry and eloquence. Expressionist aesthetics find that the defining characteristic of art is expression of self, regardless of audience or object.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

harmful, he said, because they tend to "cultivate the reli­ gious affections separate from religious practice."9 Moreover, the novel or any secular art was at best only the embodi­ ment of fallen human nature. Right Reason, as Newman de­ fined it, might lead man to faith and to God. "But Reason, considered as a real agent in the world, and as an operative principle in man's nature, with an historical course and with definite results, is far from taking so straight and satisfactory a direction. It considers itself from first to last independent and supreme; it requires no external authority; it makes a religion for itself."10 Certainly, then, the novel, traditionally no more than a product of "mere mental acuteness, and mere experience of the world" could be of little help in the central quest of Newman's career. But if the pressures of the time, in combination, of course, with Newman's own idiosyncrasies, moved him away from art proper, they conspired for him as for others to move him in the direction of fiction, if not to lead him directly there. Newman was a preacher, an apologist, a theologian, but he was successful at all of these things in large measure be­ cause he was also a historian and an autobiographer. There is no need here to do more than point at how the Oxford Movement depended on an examination of tradition through history,11 and thus partook in its own way in a historicism that is, if not directly learned from Coleridge and the Coleridgeans, entirely in keeping with the tendencies of their thought. Historicism, obviously, was an almost universal 9 Parochial and Plain Sermons (London, 1896), II, 373 (henceforth PPS). See also Alvan S. Ryan, "Newman's Conception of Literature," in Critical Studies in Arnold, Emerson, and Newman (Iowa City, 1942), p. 139. 10 The Idea of a University, pp. 137-38. Literature, of course, is never, as Newman understood it, mere reason. But Reason, as dis­ tinguished from Right Reason, is like literature in being entirely dependent on the experience of this world. 11 "The school . . . of which Newman is the chief leader owes what philosophical interest it possesses chiefly to its sense of the continuity of history." (Leslie Stephen, "Newman's Theory of Belief," in An Agnostic's Apology [London, 1903], pp. 182-83). The Oxford Move­ ment's view of history really tends to be static; however, Newman's developmental theory grew as he moved toward Catholicism.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

tendency of the Victorian mind. Combined, however, with this historicism (and, I would guess, in part producing it) was Newman's overpowering sense of self, a sense that allowed him to talk of every man containing, isolated within himself from all other men, "an infinite abyss of existence."12 Of all the great egoists of the nineteenth century, few were more deeply concerned with the nature of self (one of those "two and two only absolute and luminously self-evi­ dent beings") than Newman. That Newman scholars have so much to go on is largely the result of the scrupulous care with which he preserved his own letters and kept journals and running autobiographies. At the same time, Newman's whole life was a valiant and in large part successful attempt to subdue his pride and egoism; if his early insistence on this fault of his character as he understood it was excessive, it was nevertheless largely justified.13 The Apologia is evi­ dence of the egoism and also of the restraint he exercised over it. One of the distinctive characteristics of autobiography, one present though in a distinctive way in the Apologia, is the imposition of a pattern, unperceived at the time of the actions, on the multifariousness of experience, the discovery, by way of viewing a man's conflicts, of that man's "peculiar shape."14 Such patterning and such discovery are also, of course, characteristic of the novel. The connection between autobiography and fiction has already been established in other ways, and we have seen that the fictional middle sec­ tion of Sartor Resartus is, though certainly not novelistic, as close to the novel as it is to autobiography. The Apologia is obviously not a novel, nor, for many reasons, does it have as much in common with the novel as many autobiographies; but it is as artfully controlled as any novel, and in the limits 12 PPS, IV,

82-83. find my pride, vanity, haughtiness, know no bounds," he writes in his journals; again, before his college examination, "How active still are the evil passions of vain glory, ambition &c in my soul." Auto­ biographical Writings, ed. Henry Tristram [New York, 1957], pp. 175, 177. 14Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 9. 13 'T

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

imposed on it both deliberately and unconsciously by the book's central intelligence it certainly has much in common with fiction. Indeed, I would argue that Newman's mode of thought outside the invisible world (which turns him from em­ piricist and nominalist to idealist and mystic) is for the most part in keeping with the temper of the times that went to make fiction the most important of the literary forms. Newman's commitment to the concrete, his thoroughgoing nominalism, the derivation of his philosophical position (he would have been annoyed at being regarded in any way a philosopher) from the tradition of Locke and Hume,15 suggest the kind of commitment we find in the novel, a commitment to "particular people in particular circum­ stances" as opposed to "general human types against a back­ ground primarily determined by the appropriate literary convention."16 Indeed, it has long been noted that New­ man's insistence on the particular and the minute—espe­ cially in relation to the workings of the mind—is one of the distinguishing marks of his whole attitude toward experi­ ence. John Holloway notes that "a vivid impression of the multifariousness, energy, and incessant changes of human life everywhere on earth runs through most of his work, and is so distinctive and so deeply felt that to minds that are not religious it may well seem the most profound and valuable of his insights" (p. 177). The multifariousness Newman discovers is a function of his extraordinary power of making fine—Kingsley might have called them "Jesuitical"—dis­ criminations. His comments on what he considers the pe­ culiar charm of St. Chrysostom are particularly revealing. [This charm results in particular, from] the interest which he takes in all things, not so far as God has made them 15 See J. M. Cameron, "The Night Battle: Newman and Empiri­ cism," Victorian Studies, IV (December 1960), 99-118. Cameron's survey of Newman's debt to eighteenth-century empiricism is impres­ sively documented; his conclusions about how thoroughly Newman worked within the "empiricist myth" reinforces certain of my later arguments about the eighteenth-century quality of Newman's vision. 16 Watt, p. 15.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

alike, but as He has made them different from each other. I speak of the discriminating affectionateness with which he accepts every one for what is personal in him and un­ like others. I speak of his versatile recognition of men, one by one, for the sake of that portion of good, be it more or less, of a lower order or a higher, which has severally been lodged in them; his eager contemplation of the many things they do, effect, or produce, of all their great works, as nations or as states . . . I speak of the kindly spirit and the genial temper with which he looks round at all things which this wonderful world contains; of the graphic fidelity with which he notes them down upon the tablets of his mind, and of the promptitude and propriety with which he calls them up as arguments or illustrations in the course of his teaching as the occasion requires. Possessed though he be by the fire of divine charity, he has not lost one fibre, he does not miss one vibration, of the complicated whole of human sentiment and affection; like the miraculous bush in the desert, which, for all the flame that wrapt it round, was not thereby consumed.17 It will be one of the concerns of this study to discover how and why Newman's commitment to this sort of particularity of discrimination led so rarely in his works to genuinely novelistic exploration of experience. Obviously—given his total commitment to the "invisible" world—Newman's temperamental interest in the particular and in fine discriminations could not have led him to the novel. The point here, however, is that Newmans attitude toward what could be known of this world, and his par­ ticular interests, are in line with the attitudes and interests which helped to produce the novel and the modern auto­ biography. Moreover, he writes about "earthly things as if they were real."18 And Newman's view of truth about the 17

"St. Chrysostom," Historical Sketches (London, 1897), II, 286-87. Tillotson, ed., Newman: Prose and Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 18. Reprinted in Mid-Victorian Studies (London, 1965). 18Geoffrey

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

physical world is very close to what has been described as the view that lies behind the modern autobiography: the empirical "view that Truth, instead of being already known in its essentials, could be discovered only by the slow ac­ cumulation of particulars."19 It was no accident that Newman turned in part from the Catholic tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (al­ though he relies on Aristotle a good deal, especially as Aristotle encourages empiricism and as his idea of "phronesis" can be used as a forerunner of the illative sense). "Formal logical sequence," Newman says, "is not in fact the method by which we are enabled to become certain of what is concrete." Rather, he argues, one must study "the cumulation of probabilities, independent of each other, aris­ ing out of the nature and circumstances of the particular case which is under review."20 The truth becomes clear inexorably and slowly: "Wonderful it is to see with what effort, hesitation, suspense, interruption,—with how many swayings to the right and to the left—with how many re­ verses, yet with what certainty of advance, with what pre­ cision in its march, and with what ultimate completeness, it has been evolved."21 In Newman's world, as the history of his own conversion testifies, nothing that happens sud­ denly is trustworthy. His views on these matters are, of course, special; they nevertheless, when seen in perspective, fall quite neatly into a pattern recognizable through the early Victorian years. Even Leslie Stephen, who begins his brilliant and not al­ together unsympathetic review of the Grammar of Assent with a convincing argument about the impossibility of talk­ ing about a dominant spirit of the age, goes on to find ways in which Newman and John Stuart Mill—and, for that matter, the whole secular development of Victorian thought 19Wayne

Shumaker, English Autobiography (Berkeley, 1954),

p. 29. 20 See Stephen, p. 210 and Grammar of Assent (New York, 1955), p. 230 (henceforth GA). 21 Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford (Lon­ don, 1896), p. 317 (henceforth OUS).

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

—can be seen as related.22 This does not in any way mini­ mize the particular quality of Newman's gift of character and art. It should suggest, however, how Newmans history and his beliefs can be seen as relevant to a whole range of problems raised by Victorian cultural history and, for the purposes of this book, to the problems of fiction and Victorian literary failure. I To carry this point further, I should like here to examine ways in which Newman and Carlyle, two of the most highly idiosyncratic of all the idiosyncratic Victorians, can be seen as working out of the same difficulties and developing at­ titudes which go a long way together before they diverge dramatically and irrevocably. The differences between Carlyle and Newman are so obvious that there is little point in an extended discussion of them; but in the comparison which follows—emphasizing, as it will, similarities—it is important that the differences be kept firmly in mind. A passage from one of Newman's Anglican sermons helps to make clear how far apart the two ultimately were. Talking of "sudden conversions," New­ man says, Men who change through strong passion and anguish become as hard and as rigid as stone or iron; they are not fit for life; they are only fit for the solitudes in which they sometimes bury themselves; they can only do one or two of their duties, and that only in one way; they do not indeed change their principles, as the fickle convert, but, on the other hand, they cannot apply, adapt, accom­ modate, modify, diversify their principles to the existing state of things, which is the opposite fault. They do not aim at a perfect obedience in little things as well as 22 Stephen, see esp. 178-81. See also F.W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (London, 1906): "Some day," Stephen wrote on 20 Jan. 1889, "I shall remark upon the extraordinary phe­ nomenon that Mill and Newman and Carlyle all lived in the same century" (p. 397).

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

great; and a most serious fault it is, looking at it merely as a matter of practice, and without any reference to the views and motives from which it proceeds; most opposed is it to the spirit of true religion, which is intended to fit us for all circumstances of life as they come, in order that we may be humble, docile, ready, patient, and cheer­ ful,—in order that we may really show ourselves God's servants, who do all things for Him, coming when He calleth, going when He sendeth, doing this or that at His bidding. So much for the practice of such men; and when we go higher, and ask why they are thus formal and un­ bending in their mode of life, what are the principles that make them thus harsh and unserviceable, I fear we must trace it to some form of selfishness and pride.23 It is of course true that those words can't be applied in an unqualified way to Carlyle's career, but if we conflate Teufelsdrockh with Carlyle (which, as I have tried to suggest, is probably not far from what Carlyle himself did in his later writings), the appropriateness of the quotation is striking. Teufelsdrockh's passionate and anguished con­ version to what Newman would have called, using the lan­ guage of the same sermon, "some novel form of faith or worship," was, as Newman described such conversions in the same sermon, a case of a man who "takes a great disgust to his present course of life, and suddenly aban­ dons it for another. This is the case of those who rush from one to the other extreme, and it generally arises from strong and painful feeling, unsettling and, as it were, revolutionizing the mind" (pp. 221-22). The effect of this "revolution," not so much in Sartor Resartus but in later works of Carlyle, was exactly the hardening Newman de­ scribes, and the general inapplicability of the new state of mind to the complexities and difficulties of Victorian life. Even Carlyle's most passionate supporters began to recog­ nize that the value of his doctrine lay almost exclusively in its negative elements. Newman, on the other hand, had 23

PPS, VIII, 223-24

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

almost notoriously the ability to make any fact fit his re­ ligious views. Of course, Carlyle's own conversion was less dramatic than Teufelsdrockh's, more the product of long reflection and inner development than the story of Teufelsdrockh lets on. Nor was he personally so unfitted for the world as the rage of Shooting Niagara or of the Latter-Day Pamphlets implies. But there is nothing in Newman's life to parallel Carlyle's perpetual discomfort, his sense of failure, his un­ consciously brutal egotism, as these are manifested in Froude's much maligned Life. Insofar as Newman's descrip­ tion represents an attack on sudden actions, extreme posi­ tions, excesses of passion and wilfulness, it represents an appropriate criticism of a temperament which was almost a polar opposite of his own. In contrast to Carlyle, Newman was from the first con­ cerned with respectability, as his silence about his father's bankruptcy manifests.24 And although like Carlyle he felt evangelical influences early, he absorbed from the outset his parents' revulsion from enthusiasm.25 His gentlemanly manner, reticence, sense of decorum, and assimilation of many eighteenth-century habits of mind all make him the least romantic of all the later romantics and set him closer to Macaulay than to Carlyle. When Carlyle's reputation grew with the publication of the French Revolution in 1837 he became one of the forces directly opposed to Newman's influence at Oxford. In The Nemesis of Faith J. A. Froude has his hero, Markham Sutherland, move toward the notion of the relativity of truth by discovering that Carlyle was 24rSean O'Faolain, in Newman's Way (London, 1952), provides a subtle and sympathetic (though not hagiographical) study of the way Newman responded to his father's bankruptcy and to some of the black-sheep behavior of his brother, Charles. 25 Newman notes in his "Autobiographical Memoir" how his father said to him in 1822: "Take care; you are encouraging a morbid sensi­ bility and irritability of mind, which may be very serious. Religion, when carried too far, induces a mental softness . . . do nothing ultra" (Autobiographical Writings, p. 82).

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

equally as sincere and intelligent as Newman and yet was altogether opposed to what Newman stood for.26 But the similarity between the two extends beyond their influence over many of the most interesting minds of the time. Their differences disguise similarities so fundamental that it would be possible to construct a generalized descrip­ tion that would apply equally to both men. Such a descrip­ tion runs the risk of oversimplification and would certainly need to blur many distinctions, but it might be useful in raising problems that will have to be discussed later, and in illuminating some of the underlying similarities which reveal both men as distinctly of their time. The eldest sons in large families, both Newman and CarIyle felt early the pressures of pious and conservative par­ ents who required of them that they assume a large proportion of the financial responsibility for their families and particularly for their brothers. At the same time, they were looked up to and aided by their families in the ex­ pectation that they had great talents worth developing. Each was early and deeply influenced by the rationalism and scepticism of eighteenth-century English literature, and particularly of David Hume; by the romantic reaction against rationalism and mechanism; and by the new Evan­ gelicalism. For each the world was darkened by the Calvinist vision, which, though formally rejected by both, remained to color their views permanently. Recognizing in the rationalism they inherited a source of the violence of the decades around the turn of the century and almost a fatal threat to traditional religion, they both moved in­ stinctively toward a theory of unconsciousness. For Carlyle, the answer to rationalism—temporarily at least—was the German idealism he only partially understood. This al­ lowed him to reject his religion formally without losing 26 Froude, The Nemesis of Faith (London, 1849), p. 126. Kathleen Tillotson notes that "in the early 1840's, at Oxford, the two voices [Carlyle's and Newman's] were felt to harmonize." See "Matthew Arnold and Carlyle" in Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson, Mid-Victorian Studies, p. 221.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

the moral support he believed it to give.27 For Newman, the answer became the traditions inherited by his church; these turned him from a religion of enthusiasm and private judg­ ment—to which he was attracted as a boy—toward a re­ ligion which was from his point of view intellectually respectable and yet beyond the reach of rationalism. The center of meaning in both their Uves lay in the great Victorian experience: conversion. And their conversions are carefully (if reticently and selectively) recorded in auto­ biographical works which are widely accepted as their greatest. These conversions entailed for them an ambivalent attitude toward their families, and, while seeming to push them outside the mainstream of Victorian thought and win­ ning for them both many enemies, also helped to establish them as the spiritual leaders of their time. The most interesting similarities, however, extend beyond the fact of their conversions, into matters of idea and tem­ perament. These similarities are all the more striking be­ cause the two men are separated by class and by the in­ superable barrier which divided Oxbridge training from any other kind of education. Both men were profoundly egoistic and in their different ways needed to find a means of ex­ pression for their intense sense of selfhood compatible with renunciation of pride and of self-will. It may be that, for both, the overpowering demands of self—combined with a remarkable sensitivity to the way in which wilfulness operates as a moral and spiritual, a social and personal disease—led them to a quest for authority which extended throughout their careers and alienated them from their times. Both turned to the past for precedents which might make sense out of the present, and although they differed in method, both were essentially dogmatic thinkers whose egoism allowed them to construct their own special modes of thinking into dogma. There are, in particular, three related points of contact between the thought of Carlyle and that of Newman: the 27 See Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought and "The Nature of Carlyle's Calvinism," SP, XXXIII (1936), 475-86.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

distrust of reason; the emphasis on the unconscious; and the belief in a spiritual reality behind the material world.28 Out of these grow almost all the other correspondences. Newman's distinction between reason as exercised rightly, and reason as a mere syllogistic and empirical instrument, parallels Carlyle's distinction between Reason and Under­ standing, Vernunft and Verstand,. Right Reason, according to Newman, is "a personal act, instinctive, unconscious, pre­ sumptive, and having, as its condition a certain ethical char­ acter, but as an appreciation of explicit evidences.29 This definition, although more drily articulated, will almost stand for Carlyle's Vernunft, and certainly agrees with it in the in­ sistence on instinct and the unconscious. Moreover, it helps explain both Carlyle's and Newman's belief in the impossi­ bility of achieving conviction by general, logical, impersonal argument.30 It sets them both, moreover, apart from Macaulay, whose rhetoric is based on faith in the validity of com­ mon sense, although he too realized that conviction must 28 See Tillotson, Mid-Victorian Studies, p. 221. "The genuine affinity between Carlyle and Newman lay in their common ground of antimaterialism." See also, Jefferson B. Fletcher, "Carlyle and Newman: An Unrecognized Affinity," Atlantic Monthly (May 1905), pp. 669-79. Fletcher argues that the "unrecognized affinity" is the commitment to the unconscious: "faith in the spontaneous, the unapperceived part of us; courage to let that spontaneous self work itself out freely and fully; worshipful submission to those in whom the spontaneous part has proved itself by its works potent." The whole essay, itself neglected, is an insightful and intelligent exploration of the similarities between Carlyle and Newman. 29 OUS, p. 237n. 30 See Fletcher, p. 675: It follows from the fact of the unconscious growth of ideas in individual minds that these ideas are but partially communicable in speech; and this communicable part is but the dead schema of the living thought. Or, to use the symbolism of Sartor itself, the words by which we intercommunicate are but the old clothes which our ideas have for a while worn, but continually outgrow, and in any case, loaned to another mind, may seem to fit a live idea quite alien. Therefore it is a true paradox that the idol of the eighteenth cen­ tury, Common Sense, is, Hterally considered, no organon of conviction at all; since precisely in so far as sense is common, it fails to reach the real springs of action in any individual, which are not precisely the same for any two individuals in the world.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

grow from feeling as well as reason. For both Newman and Carlyle, the distinction between Reason and reason, what­ ever the actual sources, grew from a need to withstand the corrosive effects of Humean rationalism and the oppressive force of appearances. And appearances, in their terms, pretty much equalled contemporary reality. It was clear that secular intellect was unequal to the greatest needs of the time, as Carlyle and Newman understood those needs. Carlyle saw intellect engaged in constructing new poor laws, reform bills, machinery, and inhuman ethical systems, where what seemed to be needed was a new society, organi­ cally and hierarchically ordered, dependent on the indi­ vidual's sense of Duty and respect for superior power— physical, intellectual, and spiritual. Intellect can provide us with a "Morrison's Pill," political reform; but what needs to be done, as Carlyle put it in Past and Present, is to descend into thy inner man, and see if there be any traces of a soul there; till then there can be nothing done! O brother, we must if possible resuscitate some soul and conscience in us, exchange our dilettantisms for sincer­ ities, our dead hearts of stone for living hearts of flesh." (p. 26) The emphasis on the unconscious can be seen to be related to Carlyle's organicism, as well. As Newman saw it, intellect seemed to be engaged in raising doubts about every important religious belief and in interfering with the Church, God's vicar on earth, while what was needed, simply, was a reconstructed church and a concentration on individual salvation. Rationalism was the source of Newman's bete noire, liberalism. For him as for Carlyle, liberalism was out of touch with the realities of the human heart. But the attitudes of Newman and Carlyle to the uses and the possibilities of reason get their shape from the nature of their conversions, which, though apparently different in every respect, took their starting points from positions al­ most existentially reductive. For both, an overpowering

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

sense of self, cut loose from any certitudes or any connec­ tions with a world apparently spiritless and dead, was the beginning. Teufelsdrockh looks out at a world "all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb" (p. 164). To this world, whose negation "pealed authoritatively through all the recesses" of Teufelsdrockh's "Being," his "ME," his whole ME stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest" (p. 168). Beginning then with an existential affirmation of selfhood and freedom against an absurd world Teufelsdrockh was to go on to work out his clothes philosophy and foment revolutions against the dying order. Newman, who had noted how each "self" is alone in an "infinite abyss of existence," more quietly, but no less passionately, looked out at the "living busy world" and could "see no reflexion of its Creator." To him, "The sight of the world is nothing else than the prophet's scroll, full of 'lamentations, and mourning, and woe'" (p. 230). What gives the world meaning and his life purpose is the un­ deniable reality of God—but this is bound up completely with the reality of self. There are "two and two only ab­ solute and luminously self-evident beings—myself and my Creator." Similarly for Teufelsdrockh, unbelief is "unbelief in yourself." He saw no "mirror" reflecting his "Strength" or even his presence (p. 163). So also for Newman, "If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflexion of its Creator" (p. 230). For both men, the self was at least in part the source of faith, but self had no reality divorced from a greater self. The threat of individualism was all the more profound for each of these men because they knew themselves to be temperamentally so self-willed. And the effects of their two conversions are deeply divergent because while both saw faith as a means of controlling self and denying will its capricious and potentially violent actions, Newman (con-

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

sciously and with a penetrating awareness of the psycho­ logical complexities of man) linked his faith in the Creator with a visible and external embodiment of Him. Carlyle urged Duty and Entsagen, but his very language was a forceful and capricious expression of self, and the self looked desperately about the external world for authorities to which to submit. Thus even Robert Peel looked for a moment to Carlyle like a "Hero" because of his role in getting the Corn Laws repealed. But the explanation of the failure and the extravagance of Carlyle's ethical and re­ ligious system must indeed be that it provided for no per­ sistent external authority to curb the excesses of self. New­ man, once the act of Will to submit was complete, had always before him the external, dogmatic embodiment of his faith so that his self was always under curbs. But disregarding the subtlety and efficacy of their com­ mon pursuits, we can see that for both Carlyle and Newman the discovery of self in the world becomes the discovery of God. And the discovery of God led to a sense of purposefulness, to their fundamental belief in the presence of spirit behind the motions of time. By finding a place for self in an apparently meaningless world, they moved to the view that the physical world and the world of time had less reality than the world of spirit, the former being recog­ nizable by mere Understanding or the rational, the latter only through "Reason" or faith. Both writers were, or at­ tempted to be, consistently empirical in matters of the visible world. Behind the visible world, however, there is a purpose which only Faith or Right Reason can interpret, so that, for example, Newman saw his failure to get firsts on his college examinations as a punishment of his pride; Carlyle saw the French Revolution as a great explosion of past sins: "sin was, is, will be, the parent of misery" (I, 53). The human analogy is pervasive, and the purposiveness of the universe implies also an organic coherence, a world ordered, self-consistent, interdependent, and hierarchical. Clearly, the notion of a world interconnected at all points, like a kind of spider web, pervades Victorian thought. It

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

is recognizable, of course, in Coleridge, but also, in different ways, in Mill, Dickens, George Eliot, and down to White­ head. For Newman, no man is genuinely educated whose education does not form a coherent body of thought rather than a collection of disparate facts. He insisted on em­ bracing a system of ideas so large that all new facts would be assimilable: at the same time he recognized the profound limitations of human knowledge. He had a supreme faith in the possibility of reconciling every fact with his own initial intuitions into the nature of self and God.31 Carlyle, equally, argued that all things are interconnected by "or­ ganic filaments," as in the famous example of the poor Irish woman dying of typhus in Past and Present. His violent dis­ like of "logic-chopping" is a function of his sense of the in­ completeness of logic and of its fragmentary quality. For both writers, a commitment to irrationalism is related to a realization both of the complex unity and order of all things and of the inability of man—as a merely rational creature—to discover empirically and rationally this total order. The meaning and purposiveness of experience is in­ telligible to man, in a limited way, but can only be clearly seen, as Carlyle noted, in his essay "On History," from the perspective of "all History, and in Eternity" (II, 89). One of the most important ideas in Newman's theory of belief is that people do and should give unconditional assent on matters which can never logically be proven. Assent is to be achieved by virtue of a will to believe. Recognizing the limitations of his own reason, a man should combine strength of will with submission to an authority which, by virtue either of tradition or superior personal qualities, can be trusted to recognize the truth. In this way, both men display that difficult combination: powerful individualism, and dogmatism and reverence for authority. Carlyle's prose, even as it preaches renunciation, is an assertive expression of self. Correspondingly, it has been argued that for New­ man "authority" presupposes "a form of Private Judgment," 31 See

47.

OUS, pp. 309, 232, and The Idea of a University, pp. 346-

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

and "in the last resort the individual conscience is all im­ portant, since authority means rightful power, implying a duty on the part of the individual to respect it, and of this duty, in his own individual case, the individual person must be the final judge."32 If in the Anglican Church Newman was regarded as too conservative, in the Catholic Church he was feared as too radical and independent. For both Carlyle and Newman, the will—ultimately an expression of the nonrational and unconscious self—was central to belief and action; for both it was to become an instrument making possible submission to authority, al­ though it is naturally directed towards self-interest and selfassertion. Newman was to argue persistently that belief de­ pends finally on one's desire to believe. Charles Reding, the hero of Newmans novel, Loss and Gain, speaks to a priest about the problem of how, in a civilized country where "reason has been cultivated to the utmost, and argu­ ment is the test of truth, revelation can be accepted. What," he asks, "is to make" a man, the product of such a civiliza­ tion "believe?" The priest answers: "the will, the will."33 The problem of the "will" is central to Victorian thought. As in the case of Carlyle and Newman, it tends to take on at least two distinct, though related, meanings. The curious thing about both writers is that they believed it required an act of will to deny will. One cannot have faith, as we have seen Newman saying, unless we will to have it. But from the moment of that single act of will, one's will must forever after be reduced, perhaps extinguished. The real dis­ tinction then is between self-will and the act of will which moves one toward Carlyle's Entsagen. The one is for the serious nineteenth-century man morally reprehensible, the other the culmination of a personal ethic. In fact, these two kinds of will are the same—conscious acts on the part of self, although Newman and Carlyle would have insisted on their sources in the unconscious or irrational. It seems 32 Terence Kenny, The Political Thought of John Henry Newman (London, 1957), p. 107. 33 Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (London, 1896), p. 384.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

to me, however, that many of the Victorians (and this be­ comes powerfully clear in, for example, Dickens' novels) instinctively saw that conscious acts of self-will were very closely related to irrational and unconscious sources of desire; and the threat of these dark areas of the soul to Victorian order and stability was terrifying. Self-will out of control is forcefully symbolized, as we shall see, in the character of Juba in Newman's novel, Callista. That char­ acter might reasonably stand for a fundamental Victorian attitude toward will. The threat to authority posed by self-will—with its hypo­ critical supporter, rationality—was clear to both Carlyle and Newman. They watched the breakdown of authority and hierarchy all about them. At the same time, they were the inheritors of a commitment to the aristocratic tradition of hierarchy as the foundation of order. For both writers, hierarchy was a reflection of an organically coherent and meaningful world, stable, purposive, inherently value-filled. The inadequacy of the hierarchy Carlyle saw around him was demonstrated to him by its progressive weakening amidst the disorder and violence of the time, and especially by the French Revolution, whose fires flickered portentously for him over England. Newman's disillusion grew in a different way as he came in retrospect to discover that the spiritual hierarchy of Oxford and the church had left him unguided, and that unguided he became the victim of in­ tellectual disorder and self-will.34 The hierarchy, then, needed to be revivified (there was never any question of doing without it) especially in the face of attacks from the liberals and utilitarians whose apparent disrespect for dogma and established authority challenged the stability of the whole world, social and spiritual. Newman, there­ fore, regarded his Bishop as a Roman Catholic would his Pope. CarIyIe, on the other hand, rejecting for a long time any of the traditional sources of authority, sought new ones with growing despair. In any case, they could not allow themselves to be disen34 See

the account of Newman's views of his failure in Culler, p. 22.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

gaged, to retreat. And this accounts for the similarity of some of their attitudes towards literature. "Life is for action," Newman said.35 Both would have agreed to Aris­ totle's assertion quoted so frequently by Carlyle, that "The end of man is action." With full Victorian moral energy they were "occasional" writers, Newman even more than Carlyle, dedicated to the notion of the superior importance of right action over argument, and distrusting the merely literary ethos. Writing was for both of them, in part at least, a defensive action against the forces of the day which they saw to be corroding all the old values—for Newman "lib­ eralism," with all its complex implications, for Carlyle utilitarianism, scientism, and shallow faith in progress. While Carlyle rhapsodized over the virtues of silence and Newman was temperamentally bound by a respectability which required reticence and by a sense of mystery which demanded silent awe, both produced volume after volume which are both self-revelatory and, in their different ways, passionate. They demanded of themselves and of their readers the will to act and, in most cases, that meant as well the will to submit. For both writers, respect for hierarchy and authority and dogma—or at least dogmatic assertion—had its con­ verse in their attitudes toward change, which were not fundamentally different from Macaulay's real attitude. On the one hand, Carlyle and Teufelsdrockh felt powerfully the need to change the institutions which, though once responsive to the real spiritual needs of their time, had become hollow and corrupt: time entails change, and human beings and institutions must change their clothes if they are not to be destroyed by time. On the other hand, despite his recognition of the need for external change, Carlyle almost always regards change and rapid movement as evil or, at best, as representing a necessary convulsion to bring back stability; such phrases as "swift-travelling" or "swift-rolling" are immediately recognizable as derog35 "The Tamworth Reading Room," in Discussions and Arguments (London, 1897), p. 295.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

atory or ominous. Permanence and stability are signs of moral health and the central symbol of value for Carlyle was the "Pole Star," which represented for him stability in a moving universe. Newman, similarly, recognized change as an essential quality of the visible world: "In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."36 But like Carlyle, Newman insisted on change only to get as close as possible to the unchanging. His theory of development, though it would seem to have been in harmony with theories of biological evolution that were developing at the time, was in fact a quest for permanence. Development of Christian doctrine is not change, at least not innovation; it is rather a spelling out for fallen man in the visible world of what is already given in Revelation, of what is permanent and unchangeable: "From the time of the Apostles to the end of the world no strictly new truth can be added to the theological information which the Apostles were in­ spired to deliver. It is possible of course to make number­ less deductions from the original doctrines; but as the con­ clusion is ever in its premisses, such deductions are not, strictly speaking, an addition" (Idea, p. 331). The respect for hierarchy and permanence, which had social and spiritual significance for both men, was allied to two other attitudes they shared. First, a characteristically Victorian fear of the "mob." This fear was not incompatible with genuine humanity and with a commitment to the moral and spiritual salvation of the suffering poor. But the fear was there, even in Newman's vigorous parochial efforts to help them personally. The fear is especially intense when the poor become a mob, as they seem always threatening to do, when the uncouth, irrational, passionate, disordered, and slovenly proletariat joined together for action: "the mass of men consulted at hustings," Carlyle wrote in his Latter-Day Pamphlets, "upon any high matter whatsoever, is as ugly an exhibition of human stupidity as this world 36

An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (New York,

1960), p. 63.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

sees." One expects this sort of thing from Carlyle, and remembers the violence and bigotry of "The Nigger Ques­ tion." On the other hand, there are scenes in Newman's Callista which, though perhaps more reserved and careful, have a Carlylean ring. The mob scenes in which "the miserable population of Sicca" riots, "half-famished, seized with a pestilence which was sure to rage before it assuaged, perplexed and oppressed by the recoil upon them" of plague-ridden emigrants from the country, is the best ex­ ample. As the respectable pagan religious close their doors, the mob proceeds: The hungry and idle rabble, the filthy beggars who fed on the offal of the sacrifices, the drivers and slaughterers of the beasts sacrificed; the tumblers and mountebanks who amused the gaping market-people; dancers, singers, pipers from low taverns and drinking-houses; infamous creatures, young and old, men and boys, half naked and not half sober; brutal blacks, the aboriginal race of the At­ las, with their appetites written on their skulls and features; Canaanites, as they called themselves, from the coast; the wild-beast keepers from the amphitheatre; troops of labourers from the fields, to whom the epidemic was a time of Saturnalia; and the degraded company, alas! how numerous and how pitiable, who took their nightly stand in long succession at the doors of their several cells in the deep galleries under the Thermae.37 It is easy enough to explain the lack of sympathy in the very tone of this passage—these are, after all, pagans, and the lowest kinds of pagans. But religion aside, the language suggests that only those who are not respectable riot, and conversely, that those who riot are detestable, if pitiable. In context, and especially considering the fate which be­ falls the mob on its return to the city after capturing Callista, it displays a kind of callousness towards the rioters which could only result from an almost constitutional inability to sympathize with the elements of society which 37

Callista: A Tale of the Third Century (London, 1898), p. 191.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

threatened the old order. Like most Victorians Newman feared the mob because he feared the disorder the mob would bring. Few statements in literature more fully and unselfconsciously confirm Marx's view of religion than New­ man's own comments in his "Primitive Christianity": "Now some reader will here interrupt the narrative, perhaps with something of an indignant burst about connecting the cause of religion with mobs and outbreaks. To whom I would reply, that the multitude of men is always rude and intemperate, and needs restraint,—religion does not make them so. But being so, it is better they should be zealous about religion and repressed by religion, as in this case, than flow and ebb again under the irrational influences of this world. A mob, indeed, is always wayward and faith­ less; but it is a good sign when it is susceptible of the hopes and fears of the world to come."38 In keeping with this revulsion from the mob and from the majority, both Newman and Carlyle tended to be what one might call exclusivist. Carlyle, of course, was a secular Calvinist very early. He was obviously at odds with society, and in the tone of his criticisms of others seemed to number himself among the elect. Newman always distrusted popular religion: "I am suspicious of any religion that is a people's religion, or an age's religion. Our Saviour says, 'Narrow is the way'" (PPS, I, 61). One of the "notes" of the church for him was that it embodies a religion, "the doctrines of which, be they good or bad, are to the generality of men unknown," whose converts are regarded "with curiosity, suspicion, fear, disgust, as the case may be," which the majority of men "cast out as evil" (Essay on Development, pp. 242-43). Even now, Newman says, "no one can give his mind to God, . . . but he will incur the dislike and opposi­ tion of the world" (PPS, VIII, 145). For both men, the feeling of exclusiveness and alienation was related to their belief in the difBculty of penetrating the veil of the visible world. But from the secular point of view, the position of the good or religious man in Carlyle and Newman's world 3B

Historical Sketches, I, 347.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

is not much different from the position of the artist and Hellenist in Arnold's world, or of the genuinely self-abnegating and duty-bound heroines of George Eliot's fiction. The attitude which the exclusivism of Carlyle and Newman reflects is the not inhumane but fearful anti-democratic position of most of the leading thinkers of the time. Finally, both resolved an apparent contradiction between the implications of the notions of a purposeful universe and of an exclusivist one. A purposeful and benevolently ordered universe gives to every natural fact a moral force; an exclusivist position, on the other hand, suggests that only certain aspects of the natural world can be Hnked to the moral. But for both Newman and Carlyle, in widely dif­ ferent ways, the natural world did in the long run reflect a moral order. Carlyle's view as he stated it in Past and Present is widely known: "Mights . . . in the long-run, and forever will in this just Universe in the long-run, mean Rights" (p. 190). All good actions of the past survive, but "paper constitutions," and actions out of harmony with the underlying order of things must die. Newman, of course, with his strong views of the way in which the true Church has always been persecuted, would never have put the matter so simply, but he did rest heavy emphasis on the judgment of the "orbis terrarum." Moreover, while he be­ lieved that human nature in general would not change, he also believed strongly in the ultimate triumph of religious truth in this world: "The truest wisdom is to stand still and trust in God . . . God fights for those who do not fight for themselves."39 Again, the ultimate test of a belief, according to Newman, is its ability to sustain itself,40 just 39 Sermons on Subjects of the Day (London, 1891), p. 303 (hence­ forth SSD). See GA, p. 181: There are right and wrong convictions, and certitude is a right conviction; if it is not right with a consciousness of being right, it is not certitude. Now truth cannot change; what is once truth is always truth; and the human mind is made for truth, and so rests in truth, as it cannot rest in falsehood. When then it once becomes possessed of a truth, what is to dispossess it? but this is to be cer­ tain; therefore once certitude, always certitude. If certitude in any

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

as one of the notes of the true Church is its "chronic vigour."41 A false development of doctrine will inevitably corrupt and die. A Grammar of Assent, as most of its critics have stated or implied, is a description of how people do come to be­ lieve, but there is a good deal of controversy about whether it adequately explains how they should come to believe. Just as "Might makes Right" is an example of the funda­ mental philosophical error of translating "is" into "ought," a description into an imperative, so Newman's theory of belief is guilty of the same error, although Newman would not call it in this case an error: "Assent on reasonings not demonstrative," he says, "is too widely recognized an act to be irrational, unless man's nature is irrational, too familiar to the prudent and clear-minded to be an infirmity or an extravagance. . . . If our nature has any constitution, any laws, one of them is this absolute reception of propositions as true, which lie outside the narrow range of conclusions to which logic, formal or virtual, is tethered; nor has any philosophical theory the power to force on us a rule which will not work for a day" (Grammar, p. 150). The effect of views such as these was not as simple as one might expect. They tended to make both men see human experience in terms of moral patterns and occasionally to force experience into patterns which did not clearly de­ scribe it. But the patterns, especially in Newman's case— as the Apologia demonstrates—could be extremely com­ plex and subtle. Nor was the acquiescence in what is, which these views imply, total for either man. Obviously the large part of their lives was spent in doing battle with matter be the termination of all doubt or fear about its truth, and an unconditional conscious adherence to it, it carries with it an inward assurance, strong though implicit, that it shall never fail. 41 Essay on Development, p. 411. Of course Newman recognized that there are many kinds of life, and that heresies have a kind of life, and may survive for centuries. On the other hand, real life implies univer­ sality and "fecundity," and "growth." And thus while evil may triumph for a day or a century, that which survives it has genuine life and is the true Church. See Newman's "Note on Essay VIII" in Historical Sketches, I, 380-86.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

what is, and this because of their awareness of the in­ evitability of "short-run" injustices. But this very awareness tended at times also to allow for a wide tolerance of cer­ tain unpleasant aspects of contemporary life. Carlyle's at­ titude in the Governor Eyre case is a painful example. Certain kinds of pain were part of the necessary order of things, indeed part of the divine plan. In Newman's case, although there was nothing even obliquely as brutal as some of Carlyle's more violent attitudes, there was cer­ tainly a willingness to accept not only his own pain but the pain of people close to him where it seemed an out­ growth of the providential scheme. We must, of course, always come back to the differences. Ultimately, Carlyle had considerably less control over his egotism and self-will than Newman did, both in his writ­ ings and in his life. Moreover, Carlyle's natural supernaturalism tended to fade. The elaborate German idealist framework that supported his conversion was replaced by a more outspoken secular Calvinism. His interests had al­ ways been much more directly social and moral than Newman's, whose concerns grew almost exclusively from a religious vision. And Carlyle, it should be remembered, described Newman (with characteristic excess and in­ tolerance) as not having the "intellect of a moderate-sized rabbit."42 Newman, for his part (with characteristic reti­ cence) saw that Carlyle "has settled the wrong way."43 But the point should by now be clear. The two were equally wrestling for the soul of England, and the attitudes they shared go deep into the details of their systems. From the perspective of a century they can be seen as fighting on the same side in the battle against the effects of change, democracy, and industrialism. They came, indeed, to repre­ sent two alternative responses to these effects, but in their quest for stability, order, and ultimate coherence and mean­ ing, they seem to have been engaged in a struggle to sus42 Froude,

Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, II, 247. Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman, ed. Anne Mozley (New York, 1897), II, 268. 43

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

tain an aristocratic mode—even though their aristocracies are spiritual rather than (or as well as) social—against the trial of mere popular consensus on values. They smuggled, in particular, to find a way to curb the chaotic influence of the individual, who, on his own and without authority to pay deference to, was asserting his own rights at the expense of social stability and personal salvation. The struggle of CarlyIe and Newman was the more intense because they were both—again characteristically—intensely egoistic: they recognized in themselves the very corrosive forces they struggled against in others. Like Macaulay, they accepted the inevitability of change and in their separate ways in­ sisted on its value; but their hearts belonged to a time which posed no threats. II Ultimately, of course, Newman's attitude toward experi­ ence diverged widely from Carlyle's. Without challenging the validity of Carlyle's religious commitment, one can recognize that Newman's engagement in the invisible world was more pervasive than Carlyle's. Carlyle, finally, was a moralist, and saw men working out their salvation through good works in this world; Newman, though obviously com­ mitted to moral action, was essentially concerned with the nature of belief and faith. Both found the scepticism which must grow from Humean empiricism dangerous to spiritual well-being, but Carlyle could not reject Hume's position so completely as to achieve a coherent and intelligible affirmation of spiritual reality. The facts of experience frightened him, as they did not frighten Newman. New­ man's irrationalism, on the other hand, was related to a supreme faith in the reality of spiritual mysteries beyond man's understanding. The facts of experience seemed not to frighten him because they were irrelevant to the ultimate truth of God and the invisible world. Investigation of the material world will never move one beyond phenomena to the world of final causes; and any attempt to apply the

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

methods of investigation of the physical world to investi­ gation of the "invisible" world is chimerical: "What can be more sacred than Theology? What can be more noble than the Baconian method? But the two do not correspond; they are mismatched. The age has mistaken lock and key. It has broken the key in a lock which does not belong to it" (Idea, p. 337). The attitudes here implied have a fundamental relevance to the problem of how open to experience Newman was. This is the problem with which we shall here be concerned, because one of the central tests of great writing is how fully it does justice to elements of experience which may seem to run counter to the theoretical impulses which direct the writing. Carlyle achieved his finest art in the moments when, disguised as various fictive characters, he allowed freest play to possibility and met directly the chal­ lenge of experience; when need and will triumphed, his writing lost much of its richness and became too often a parody of itself. Victorian fiction itself, as its persistent "realism" shows, is in part a product of the great discovery of possibility which the dominant mode of empiricism helped produce. Although its practitioners were usually un­ willing to confront fully the implications of the new knowl­ edge and the great social revolution and tended always to make their art subservient to the moral energy with which they hoped to withstand the "corrosive" force of human reason, their great triumphs transcended the limitations of their moral conventions. The fictive pose allowed them to ex­ plore more fully than any art hitherto the problems of ordi­ nary existence: They could examine the complexities of hu­ man behavior and social organization without fear of com­ mitting themselves to the revolutionary chaos they de­ scribed; indeed, they could do this while feeling their art was a bulwark against that chaos. They could enter into the minds and hearts of creatures thoroughly flawed and dan­ gerous to the established order; they could observe noncommittally the forces of disorder which threatened all the

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

old values; and they could demonstrate the corruption of the established order while remaining part of it. These achievements in fiction were dependent on a capacity to accept the challenge of what Morse Peckham calls "disorientation," and this depends in good measure on the writer's capacity to keep himself open to experience and free of local commitment. That Carlyle was incapable of sustaining this kind of negative capability is a truism; but Newman's case is a little different. On the one hand, it is obvious that everything he wrote was aimed at pro­ ducing an effect, or, to use Mill's terms, at working "upon the feeling, or upon the belief, or the will of another." On the other hand, he has, for the most part correctly, been described as a great psychologist, as a man who knew the workings of the human mind with unparalleled thorough­ ness. A reviewer of A Grammar of Assent, for instance, wrote that "Never, we believe, have the manifold and all but contradictory complexities of the human mind been treated with such unscrupulous reality."44 And his style is universally praised for its concreteness, for the way in which it transforms abstract argument into a concrete appeal to the full human imagination. Moreover, it is possible to say of Newman that "he proves to have had the most comprehensive, detailed and integrated view of things . . . of any English writer in his century" (Holloway, p. 159). Newman was, then, both a propagandist and an artist, a man committed to influencing action and at the same time to expressing as richly as possible the full com­ plexity of experience as he understood it. And it seems to me that any investigation of his qualities as an artist will need to come to terms with this double nature of his art, and particularly with the problem of how far he did in fact remain open to the complexities of lived experience. In order to work out this problem it is useful to retreat to a brief consideration of some of the fundamental tenets 44 Quoted in C.F. Harrold, John Henry Newman (New York, 1945), p. 143.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

of his philosophy, and, to begin with, of what has been unsympathetically described as his "pure nominalism, in its crudest form."45 Few nineteenth-century writers outside of another great Catholic convert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, had a richer feeling for the individuality of things than Newman. We have already seen how he was particularly attracted to St. Chrysostom because of that saint's "interest in all things, not so far as God has made them alike, but as He has made them different from each other." Similarly, Newman disapproved of the logician, who necessarily ab­ stracts because his symbols are themselves abstractions from a concrete reality. The "clearness and hardness of head, which is the characteristic talent" of the logician, necessarily drains words "of that depth and breadth of associations which constitute their poetry, their rhetoric, and their historical life." Each word comes to "stand for just one unreal aspect of the concrete thing to which it properly belongs, for a relation, a generalization, or other abstraction, for a notion neatly turned out of the laboratory of the mind, and sufficiently tame and subdued, because existing only in a definition" (Grammar, pp. 214-15). Logical con­ cepts are unreal because, for Newman, "all existing things are individual."46 There is no better starting place for the novelist than this kind of nominalism. Equipped with it, he can freely penetrate the elaborate network of conventions by which man conducts his daily affairs, and he can make distinctions the idealist—or philosophical realist—is at least theoreti­ cally incapable of. He is not likely to be trapped into con­ ventional condemnation of the "bad," but will be ready to make the subtlest kind of distinctions between people who are conventionally regarded as being of the same kind, or between actions to which are ascribed the same labels. Of course, as Newman would have been the first to recog­ nize, a theoretical commitment to nominalism is no guar45William

Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays (London, 1920), p. 189. A.J. Boekraad, The Personal Conquest of Truth According to John Henry Newman (Louvain, 1955), p. 156. 46

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

antee that a man will work out the implications of nominalism in his behavior or in his writing; and it is certainly true, as we shall see when we come to consider Newman's two novels, that in his most direct attempts at art, the commit­ ment did not always operate. At the same time, one of the distinctive qualities of Newman's style is its subtlety in making discriminations, its insistence on facing an op­ ponent's strongest arguments and of eventually enlisting them into its own service (Holloway, p. 169), his habit of breaking down assertions and, as he might say, of "realizing" them by long parallel series of examples which work out fully the implications of the idea. Moreover, his psychological perceptiveness does seem to have been related to his unwillingness to take things uncritically according to their conventional acceptance, as when he wrote, for example, that "we must never say that an individual is right, merely on the ground of his holding an opinion which happens to be true, unless he holds it in a particular man­ ner: that is, under those conditions, and with that particular association of thought and feeling, which in fact is the interpretation of it" (OUS, p. 101). The subtlety of his discriminations has led some critics to argue that Newman was fundamentally a sceptic and that he converted to the Catholic church, like many before him, because he needed desperately to find some external authority which would give his world stability and mean­ ing. Huxley's remark that a primer of scepticism might be compiled from Newman's works is widely known. On the other hand, even unsympathetic critics usually agree that Newman could do such justice to the sceptical position pre­ cisely because his faith was so strong he never felt it en­ dangered. Either explanation is psychologically plausible. And despite all of Newman's autobiographical writings (which are surprisingly uninstructive psychologically) and the large volume of his letters, all written with Newman's profound sense of audience and not likely to be revelatory of the most intimate secrets of his soul, the question cannot be resolved and we must let it rest. There is, however, no

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

evidence that Newman ever doubted, and it makes little difference whether his nominalism is seen, in the develop­ ment of his thought, as cause or effect of his deep and finally undeniable faith. In any case, Newman, quite correctly, would not have seen it as a mark against his faith that he leaned upon it for spiritual security and that it gave him a peace he could not find outside the church. That, he would say, is precisely what faith ought to be: "like coming into port after a rough sea" (Apologia, p. 227). The Church, he wrote, "is the earnest and the beginning of the repose of heaven" (Ward, I, 201). But Newman could not have been as comfortable as he was in his nominalism if he had had no faith in that final "repose" in the invisible world of which the Church is a visible reminder. Even as a Catholic he was widely dis­ trusted because of his refusal to minimize the arguments of the sceptical. He noted in his Journal, for example, that the Jesuits think his "line too free and sceptical," and that he "made too many admissions &c" (Autobiographical Writings, p. 270). For anyone less sure of his faith than Newman, he might well have been "too free." J.A. Froude records how, as an Anglican, Newman's willingness in one of his sermons to concede Hume's argument against miracles helped hurry Froude on to scepticism.47 That concession was made in terms of the distinction between the visible and invisible worlds which we have been discussing. Hume, Newman said, "speaks of 'those dangerous friends or disguised enemies to the Christian Religion, who have undertaken to defend it by the principles of human Reason.' Our most holy Religion,' he proceeds, 'is founded on Faith, not on Reason.' This is said in irony; but it is true as far as every important question in Revelation is concerned, and to forget this is the error which is at present under con­ sideration" (OUS, p. 60). As, in this example, Newman demonstrated a rare capacity to put to use the arguments of his enemies, to live 47 "The Oxford Counter-Reformation," Short Studies on Great Sub­ jects, IV, 228.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

comfortably with paradoxes, and to face the strongest possi­ ble objections to his arguments, so his writings are every­ where marked by these qualities. In his great University Sermons, for example, he made concessions strong enough to satisfy the firmest critic of Christianity: at one point he said that "It is indeed by no means clear that Chris­ tianity has at any time been of any great spiritual advantage to the world at large" (OUS, p. 40); in another sermon he said confidently, "It is indeed a great question whether Atheism is not as philosophically consistent with the phe­ nomena of the physical world, taken by themselves, as the doctrine of a creative governing power" (OUS, p. 194). In perhaps the most famous passage in his writing he conceded that when he looked out of himself "into the world of men" he saw a sight which "seems simply to give the lie to that great truth, of which my whole being is so full," "the being of a God." Characteristically, however, he had already said that "Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt" (Apologia, pp. 228-30). It will be seen, I think, that almost all the large conces­ sions Newman made are based on an otherworldliness, fre­ quently incomprehensible to secular-minded or even con­ ventionally Christian people, which posits an infinite and intellectually unbridgeable gap between the visible and the invisible, between man and God: "Nothing .. . can be more certain, if we go by Scripture, not to speak of experience, than that the present nature of man is evil" (PPS, V, 134). Man is fallen, and thus between God and "His creatures there is an infinite gulf" (Idea, p. 27). In his grandeur, im­ mensity and mystery, God is inaccessible to unaided human reason. At the same time, God's reality is immediately given to man by means of conscience, not reason:48 "we actually feel His presence in our consciences bidding us obey him" (PPS, I, 200), and by exercising our intelligence on this 48 See A.J. Boekraad, The Argument from Conscience to the Exist­ ence of God According to J.H. Newman (Louvain, 1961), which publishes Newman's manuscript "Proof of Theism," an incomplete attempt to prove the existence of God through conscience.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

revelation, which is both personal and historical, Chris­ tianity becomes not only an experienced fact but a rational system. At the same time, to anyone who does not accept this revelation and the necessity of working out its full im­ plications for living man, what is rational for Newman seems mere superstition and bigotry (and it is to dis­ tinguish faith from these two things, and from the mere emotionalism of much Evangelicalism and dissent, that he wrote both his Oxford University Sermons and the Gram­ mar of Assent). Newman's arguments in favor of the reality of miracles have frequently, for example, been rejected as mere superstition; but they depend again on his feeling for the vivid reality of the invisible world. "The Miracles of Scripture," he said, "are irregularities in the economy of nature, but with a moral end; forming one instance out of many, of the providence of God, that is, an instance of occurrences in the natural world with a final cause. Thus," and here is the crucial point, "while they are exceptions to the laws of one system, they may coincide with those of another."49 The freedom to discount arguments made on rational and empirical grounds was strengthened by Newman's belief that the world is ultimately harmonious, ordered, and uni­ fied, although not in its fullness comprehensible by man's limited and fallen reason. Thus he insisted that miracles can be seen as part of "another system" which comprises and transcends the order and system of the natural world. In the same passage on miracles just quoted, he went on to criticize the usual view of miracles "as mere exceptions to physical order." To see them in that way is to "degrade them from the station which they hold in the plans and provisions of the Divine Mind, and to strip them of their real use and dignity; for as naked and isolated facts they do but deform an harmonious system." This sort of view of the world allowed him not only to insist on the indi49

Two Essays on Biblical and on Historical Miracles (London,

1892), pp. 4-5.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

viduality of everything (since no matter how apparently eccentric, each will find a place in the divine system) but to recognize how complex and multifarious even the simplest thing or idea may be. "There is no one aspect," he said, "deep enough to exhaust the contents of a real idea, no one term or proposition which will serve to de­ fine it" (Essay on Development, p. 58). Knowledge for Newman was only real insofar as it could be seen as part of the system, coherent in all its principles; important as individual facts are they only become knowledge when their relations to other things are understood: "All that exists," he said, "as contemplated by the human mind, forms one large system or complex fact, and this of course resolves itself into an indefinite number of particular facts, which, as being portions of a whole, have countless relations of every kind, one towards another. Knowledge is the ap­ prehension of these facts, whether in themselves, or in their mutual positions and bearings" (Idea, pp. 33-34). All of this makes for interesting theory; Newman's strength, however, lay in his ability to translate theory into experience, to make it flexible and complex enough to correspond to the quality of life itself. It might even be more accurate to say that the strength of his theory was an outgrowth of his own intense experience of self. Newman's very Victorian rage for order was accompanied by an equally Victorian recognition both of a demanding self which tends toward disorder and requires constant control, and of personal isolation. Although our views of the Vic­ torian period have been increasingly complicated so that old stereotypes no longer operate, we still think of one aspect of the times as a profound individualism. "Self-help," "laissez faire," "liberty," are the catch phrases. And the moral and business energy of the times created a largely inner-directed society. Newman, in his idiosyncratic great­ ness, stands outside the cruder limitations of the period's ethos, but he too learned early, in part because of the Evangelicalism of his youth, in part because of his naturally

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

imaginative and introspective inclinations, that "God in­ tends me to be lonely."50 The other side of the coin of Vic­ torian individualism was solipsism, latent or actual. In New­ man it was latent, and he was redeemed from it only through faith. Conscience, which led him to God, was the only thing that could open the outside world for Newman. He was constitutionally isolated from the reality of others, and it is no accident, I think, that when he suffered from "dejection from solitude," he could say, "I never feel so near Heaven as then" (Letters and Correspondence, II, 175). The morbid self-consciousness of which his father accused him was a typical disease, one of what Carlyle saw as the "Signs of the Times." God led him out of it. When the world discovers that the various rational arguments for the existence of God, like the impressions of phenomena we receive, are only economies, "it seems to itself at the moment to have cut all the ties which bind it to the uni­ verse, and to be floated off upon the ocean of interminable scepticism, yet a true sense of its own weakness brings it back, the instinctive persuasion that it must be intended to rely on something, and therefore that the information given, though philosophically inaccurate, must be practically cer­ tain, a sure confidence in the love of Him, who cannot de­ ceive, and who has impressed the image and the thought of Himself and of His Will upon our original nature."51 The "infinite abyss of existence" Newman recognized in every man was a reflection of his own deep sense that he was "in a great measure beyond the sympathies of other people" (Letters and Correspondence, II, 176). And his acquiescence in the most sceptical elements of empirical theory was therefore probably less philosophically than emotionally directed. The only given realities are our own 50 Letters and Correspondence, II, 176; see also the discussion of Newman's loneliness by Henry Tristram in Autobiographical Writings, p. 143. And here is Newman's comment on one of the effects of "Real Assent": "Real assent, then, as the experience which it presupposes, is proper to the individual, and, as such, thwarts rather than promotes the intercourse of man with man" (GA, pp. 82-83). 61Boekraad, Argument, pp. 120-21.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

sensations: one sees, one feels, one thinks, and it is absurd to say that one has "faith in consciousness, sensation, memory, thought, reason."62 These are not beyond self; they are self. Reason and faith only begin when one steps beyond impressions to believe in the reality of something "out there" creating the impressions. "Sentio ergo sum" is not a rational argument but a conventional human form for expressing an undeniable and superrational sensation. But faith and reason begin when one translates, for example, one's impression of a table into a statement like, "there is a real table here." One's existence is "luminously self-evident." If it were not that part of one's existence is conscience, upon which God has impressed the "image and thought of Himself," man would be hopelessly trapped in solipsism and scepticism. Self then became the inexhaustible and, however indi­ rectly, almost single subject of Newman's writings, and their great power often emerges from his ability to identify his own feelings and thoughts with those of others or to recognize universal psychological truths because of his own introspection. A few brief examples will have to suffice here. We know how rigorously Newman kept journals and ana­ lyzed each of his activities, searching for signs of spiritual failure or improvement. In a sermon preached in 1835 on "Self-Contemplation," Newman attacked excessive con­ cern with examination of one's own spiritual condition. And one passage must certainly be a piece of autobiography raised to the level of general comment on the difficulties of sustaining spiritual honesty: I believe persons find great difficulty, while recording their feelings, in banishing the thought that one day these good feelings will be known to the world, and are thus insensibly led to modify and prepare their language as if for a representation. Seldom indeed is any one in the practice of contemplating his better thoughts or do­ ings without proceeding to display them to others; and hence it is that it is so easy to discover a conceited man. 52 Boekraad,

Argument, p. 106.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

When this is encouraged in the sacred province of re­ ligion, it produces a certain unnatural solemnity of man­ ner, arising from a wish to be, nay, to appear spiritual, which is at once very painful to beholders, and surely quite at variance with our Saviour's rule of anointing our head and washing our face, even when we are most self-abased in heart. Another mischief arising from this self-contemplation is the peculiar kind of selfishness (if I may use so harsh a term) which it will be found to foster. They who make self instead of their Maker the great object of their contemplation will naturally exalt themselves. (PPS, II, 172) The force of these reflections is in part due to their felt reality. This sermon was written by the same man who, having been criticized by his father for excessive religious zeal, prayed in his Journals: "O God, grant me to pray earnestly against any delusive heat, or fanatic fancy, or proud imagination of fancied superiority, or uncharitable zeal. Make me and keep me humble and teachable, modest and cautious" (Autobiographical Writings, p. 179). Again, in the sermon on "Wisdom and Innocence," which so offended Kingsley, much of Newman's language has its effect for the modern reader because, whatever Newman's conscious intention, it speaks so directly of his personal con­ dition. The language reveals, by the way, how thoroughly Newman accepted his own alienation from much of his society, and how readily he used paradoxes and (unlike Macaulay) showed them not to be paradoxical at all: "Chris­ tians were called crafty, because 'they were, in fact, so strong, though professing to be weak.' And next, in mere consistency, they were called hypocritical, because 'they were, forsooth, so crafty, professing to be innocent.' And thus whereas they have ever, in accordance with our Lord's words, been wise and harmless, they have ever been called instead crafty and hypocritical. The words 'craft' and 'hypocrisy' are but the version of 'wisdom' and Tiarmlessness,' in the language of the world" (SSD, p. 298). Here

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

he accepts the charge of "Priestcraft" and turns it around by falling back with utter certainty on the traditional Chris­ tian view of things which, like himself, Newman regarded as fundamentally outside the sympathy of unguided human nature, though always through grace available to it. Newman's extraordinary capacity to deal with paradoxes is clear again from his attitude toward his own experience. We have noted that he saw signs of Providence everywhere; this was particularly so when things went badly for him. God intended him to be lonely. So also, his failure on his examinations was good for him, a punishment for his sins of pride. His mind seemed to work in paradoxes. Thus we have the Journal entry for 25 June 1869: The Providence of God has been wonderful with me all through my life . . . my troubles have come from those whom I had aided, and my successes from my opponents. Without me Hawkins would not have been Provost, and he from 1830 to 1843 was my great trial. Without me Golightly would not have come to Oxford, and he was my chief slanderer. . . . Then on the other hand, whom am I so indebted to as the Heads of Houses, and the Anglican Bishops, and Hawkins and Golightly, when they became my opponents, for having done so much towards making me a Catholic? . . . And now lately the Archbp of Westminster, W G Ward & others have suc­ ceeded in keeping me out of Oxford, the only place where I could be of service to the Catholic cause; but is it not abundantly for my private comfort, for my tranquility, and for my length of life? (Autobiographical Writings, pp. 267-68) It would seem then that nothing that happened in this world could disturb the stability of Newman's faith. His mind could remain open to complexities and difficulties which would have baffled and dismayed many of his con­ temporaries; and it could do so because of the way he built his own unique perceptions of self into a vision which transcended this world for the next. His center of values

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

could move outside of self, and even of the self's society, to a world where that society had no genuine reality, and thus "True philosophy admits of being carried out to any extent; it is its very test, that no knowledge can be sub­ mitted to it with which it is not commensurate, and which it cannot annex to its territory" (OUS, p. 309). If there are difficulties, "let us own them," he said, "Let us fairly meet them: if we can, let us overcome them" (OUS, p. 232). That Newman held this view of the world suggests, then, that he was indeed "negatively capable," and open to ex­ perience in ways one would expect only from moral ex­ plorers and seekers of experience of the type of Keats and Shakespeare. Perhaps the finest critic of the Apologia thus far makes the point explicitly: Newman's concern with what lies beyond "fact and reason," so characteristic of romanticism, demands what Keats called "Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." The advantage? For Keats, the sense of beauty was pre­ served; for Newman, the sense of divinity. Protesting against a rationalism which would limit revelation to what is clear and logical and so rob religion of all that is awesome and mysterious, Newman pled for the value "of half views and partial knowledge, of guesses, sur­ mises, hopes and fears, of truths faintly apprehended and not understood."53 At this point, however, it is necessary to look at the other side of the picture. Many of his contemporaries saw New­ man as narrow, dogmatic, and closed-minded. The young J. A. Froude, it is true, was awed not only by the depth but by the breadth of his knowledge: "He seemed always to be better informed on topics of conversation than any one else who was present."54 This seems to be in keeping with 53 Walter Houghton, The Art of Newmans Apologia (New Haven, 1945), p. 33. 54 "Oxford Counter-Reformation," p. 282.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

the picture we have been building of a man willing to face experience directly. On the other hand, the admittedly an­ tagonistic John Tulloch, in his review of the Grammar of Assent in the Edinburgh Review, took as the central symbol of Newman's attitude toward experience his behavior in Paris on the way back from his Mediterranean voyage. Newman was "fierce" against France, the home of the Revolution and the source of the liberalism of the day against which he had "fierce thoughts." "A French vessel was at Algiers; I would not even look at the tricolour. On my return, though forced to stop twenty-four hours at Paris, I kept indoors the whole time, and all that I saw of that beautiful city was what I saw from the Diligence" (Apologia, p. 52). Tulloch saw Newman as maintaining this insularity from beginning to end: "Whenever a view is distasteful to him he refuses to look at it. He may not deliberately misinter­ pret what is out of harmony with his own mental feeling; but he never tries to understand it."55 To say this of a man who in 1854 could write as penetrating and far-seeing an essay as "A Form of Infidelity of the Day" is obviously to be one-sided and closed-minded oneself. But there is something in Tulloch's analysis that goes beyond mere con­ ventional anti-Catholicism, something which might be dis­ regarded if one allowed oneself to become so deeply in­ volved with Newman that one could see nothing except from his point of view. The subtle and brilliant perception of complexity that so antagonized Kingsley and made him feel that Newman's "wisdom" and "harmlessness" were in­ deed "craft" and "hypocrisy" operated for Newman in the service of certain fundamental premises about the nature of the world; if—as Newman himself would have been the first to say—one disagrees with those premises, Newman may have a good deal to give one in the matter of occasional insight into the natural world and into the way men find it possible to believe; but one can never accede to his conclusions, and Newman's unwillingness to accept the 55 John Tulloch, "Dr. Newman's 'Grammar of Assent,' " Edinburgh Review, CXXXII (1870), 198.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

possibility of any other premises may very well look like what Tulloch described as "insularity." In Newman's imperviousness to this sort of charge—for of course he antici­ pated it and went on to use it as a sign that the Catholic faith is the true one—we find what must have been most irritating about him to equally honest, serious, and moral contemporaries whose solutions to the problems Newman faced were based on different initial assumptions. It is, moreover, difficult to believe that Newman's ability to assimilate into his faith the facts of the complex social, psychological, and industrial revolutions which were chal­ lenging all the old values and traditions was complete. His "personal efforts to counter the new scientific scepticism," Sean O'Faolain notes, "are amazingly feeble."58 He did not know German, the language in which almost all the pro­ found criticism of the Bible was being written; he had never even studied philosophy; and, "in his unpublished letters, we find no discussion of any of the six or seven major events in 19th century England between the Reform agitation and the Crimea—neither of Slavery, nor the New Poor Laws, nor the War with China, nor the War in Afghanistan, nor the Repeal of the Corn Laws, nor the Chartists, nor of the Crimea itself."57 He had the respectable Englishman's reserve and discomfort at mingling with the poor, although in the pursuit of his parochial duties he did his best. His Oxford life was, by and large, insular; certainly it was outside the mainstream of development and change both by deliberate choice and by the special traditional nature of Oxford training and daily living. And if one expects to find in the great and representative writers of the time a new "realism," a fidelity to the facts of ordinary Be O'Faolain, p. 115; see, however, Culler's discussion of the reasons for Newman's failure to be disturbed by the new developments in sci­ ence (The Imperial Intellect, pp. 264-70). 57 O'Faolain, pp. 116-17; but see also Newman's essay on the weak­ nesses in the conduct of the Crimean War, "Who's to Blame," Discus­ sions and Arguments, pp. 306-62, which shows that he continued to take some interest in public affairs, and Kenny, passim, who shows that although politics were not a central concern of Newman's his ideas about them did develop through the years.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

experience, how does one account for O'Faolain's apparently accurate view that "From the whole range of his books and letters one cannot extract a single graphic image, not to speak of a general picture, of the common life of the century he all but spanned"?58 The answer, it seems to me, lies not in the theories we have just examined, which are not untypical, but in the peculiar use to which he put those theories. Without questioning the sincerity and brilliance of Newman's ideas about the relation of this world to the next, one can see that in their application to the ordinary life of the times they operated just as would a deliberately conceived system of attempted restraints on the unrest and turbulence of the times, on the new demands being made by the "lower orders." It is not that Newman was different from his contemporaries in feeling powerfully the need for such restraints. The novelists, who more than Newman were willing to face in detail these demands and the con­ ditions out of which they arose, established their own varie­ ties of restraint. It is rather that Newman's concern for the invisible world allowed him, in an ultimate sense, to reject as "unreal" everything that went on in this world and, if not to distort, at least to exclude much experience. He need not consider extensively the fact of the multitude, which is always "rude and intemperate," since what concerned him was not social redress but spiritual salvation, not the re­ form of society, but the reform of the individual soul. He could then concede, sometimes with great insight, that severe challenges to the old order were being made without investigating at length the nature of those chal­ lenges or worrying as Carlyle worried about the general indignity of the life of the poor. The important thing out­ side of salvation, the important thing in this world, was for Newman as for Carlyle and most of his articulate contem­ poraries, to keep the lid on. Newman could give "most 58 See Tillotson, Mid-Victorian Studies, p. 264. He argues that New­ man "preferred action that remained as private as possible, and there­ fore when it could not but be public affected the few rather than the many, the 'set' rather than the crowd."

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generously in charity" because "it was charity" (O Faolain, p. 173); and we know by the grim experience of the last hundred years how little philanthropy does to cure the social disease it treats. It would be almost another century before serious writing in England could represent without fear the "upsurge from below," and could affirm "the naturalistic and instinctive ways of life of the lower class, as against the theoretical and restrictive moral preconcep­ tions of the middle class."59 Newman's openness to experience was then restricted, as even the greatest Victorian art frequently was, by atti­ tudes towards social order ingrained in the very meaning of the word gentleman, and made even more intense by an otherworldliness which saw all the activities of this life as secondary to that of the next. Moreover, the analysis which attributes negative capability to Newman so as to make it parallel to that of Keats is, it seems to me, mis­ leading. It is one thing to say that negative capability al­ lowed Keats to preserve his "sense of beauty"; it is quite another to say that it allowed Newman to preserve his "sense of divinity." If "beauty" was a moral conception for Keats, it was a conception whose very morality was open­ ness, a willingness to accept experience in all its variety and with whatever consequences. This is hardly the case for Newman's "sense of divinity," which depended on nothing so much as an initial and total commitment of self to which all else became subservient. Newman's negative capability was one of many things he placed in the service of God. Negative capability itself is a radical notion; it is an ideal power to sustain doubt, to maintain the attitude of disengagement and impartiality, even while engaged, to avoid allowing one's perceptions to be influenced by need or desire. Full possession of such a power would argue a negative sort of sainthood. And if Newman was a saint, he was a saint of a different kind; his distinguishing quality is not suspension of disbelief but absence of doubt. Newman 59 John Henry Raleigh, "Victorian Morals and the Modern Novel," Partisan Review, XXV (1958), 245.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

turned always, when doubt was insuperable, to his invin­ cible faith which entailed also a belief in man's inability to comprehend in its fulness not only his God but his world. The capacity to sustain this sort of doubt is what Newman saw as the mark of the "representative" of the "imperial intellect." The philosophy of this representative is based "not so much on simplification as on discrimination. . . . He aims at no complete catalogue, or interpretation of the subjects of knowledge, but a following out, as far as man can, what in its fulness is mysterious and unfathomable. . . . He takes things as they are; he submits to them all, as far as they go." Such extraordinary restraint would seem a sign of negative capability, but the difference lies in the necessity of discovering what "in each particular case are the limits of a rational scepticism, and what the claims of a peremptory faith. . . . It is the very immensity of the system of things, the human record of which" the repre­ sentative of the imperial intellect "has in charge, which is the reason of this patience and caution; for that immensity suggests to him that the contrarieties and mysteries, which meet him in the various sciences, may be simply the con? sequences of our necessarily defective comprehension. There is but one thought greater than that of the universe, and that is the thought of its Maker" (Idea, pp. 346-47). And the thought of its Maker not only resolves all doubts but makes all doubts possible; it also entails limitations on one's receptivity to experience where experience poses a threat or seems irrelevant to one's faith in his Maker. "Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt." Per­ haps the way to put it is that Newman's openness to ex­ perience went far enough to leave him content with difficulties, never with doubts. It is not then that Newman's negative capability made possible the preservation of his sense of divinity, but rather that his sense of divinity made possible his negative capability. Again, it is a matter of which came first, the chicken or the egg; and in some ways it is an unreal question. Newman's rich imagination was part of his temperament from the first and developed easily

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into his recognition that people's behavior and beliefs were not controlled by syllogisms but rather by complex and inarticulable motions of the whole being. The rich psycho­ logical perceptions which these tendencies—along with his tendency to introspection—developed came to be important to him in his working out of the problems of belief. He needed to be able to show how people in fact come to be­ lieve before he could show how they should believe. This is the translation of is into ought to which I have already re­ ferred; and the sense of richness of psychological insight, fine discriminations of experience, and multifariousness which his style often suggests frequently emerges in pas­ sages where he is engaged in just such descriptions. Take, for example, this passage: The mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out, and ad­ vances forward with a quickness which has become a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which bafBe investigation. It passes on from point to point, gaining one by some indication; another on a probability; then availing itself of an association; then falling back on some received law; next seizing on testimony; then commiting itself to some popular impression, or some inward instinct, or some obscure memory; and thus it makes progress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends how he knows not himself, by personal endowments and by practice, rather than by rule, leaving no track behind him, and unable to teach another. It is not too much to say that the stepping by which great geniuses scale the mountains of truth is as unsafe and precarious to men in general, as the ascent of a skilful mountaineer up a literal crag. It is a way which they alone can take; and its justification lies in their success. And such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, com­ monly reason,—not by rule, but by an inward faculty. (OUS, p. 257) Such a passage is in its very style evidence of the way in

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

which for Newman "faith and thought are so intimately combined that it is seldom possible to say which has the lead."60 It is possible to see, however, how thought is put to the service of faith, how a remarkable freedom of insight into man's nature is possible because Newman can use it in harmony with his faith. As Yngve Brilioth remarks, to Newman "the play of thought with destructive suppositions was a spending of time without danger, which could never disturb the sovereign repose of faith" (p. 114). That is, all the time Newman's mind was playing with possibilities it was made up on the only subject that could make those possibilities fundamentally important to him. What C. F. Harrold says about his limitations as a historian goes a long way towards summarizing his short­ comings as a writer in the great empirical tradition that goes back to Locke and that leads, in the way of art, to the novel, in the way of increased understanding of self, to the modern autobiography: "Newman always approaches history with his mind made up and solidly established on principles which, for him, throw light on everything and are indeed truer and more real than historical facts. Thus he explains the facts in accordance with a philosophy which appears to him much clearer than the facts themselves."61 Of course, Newman was no more guilty of conscious dis­ tortion than Carlyle or MacauIay—perhaps less. Each, in a different way, remained open to some of the complexities of experience, but each tended to shape the experience into a pattern which existed before he knew the facts. Thus Macaulay's History reaffirms the attitudes Macaulay had developed as an undergraduate, and Carlyle's French Revolution takes the shape of a vast sermon on the text of Sartor Resartus. Newman, for his part, saw all things mov60Yngve

Brilioth, The Anglican Revival (London, 1925), p. 114. p. 225; this view accords with that of Brilioth, p. 117, and Josef Altholz, "Newman and History," Victorian Studies, VII (1964), 285-94. But J. Derek Holmes, in his reply to Altholz in Victorian Studies, VIII (1965), 271-77, argues that Newman's view of the personal nature of truth requires that Altholz's views be modified. 61Harrold,

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ing in accordance with a providential order, and as a his­ torian, novelist, or autobiographer, his office was primarily to discover what the providential order was. He could, while so doing, make very large concessions to the secularist vision. He could concede that unaided human reason might lead logically to Atheism and he could allow himself to understand the processes by which Atheism became a possi­ bility, but only because he believed so firmly in the ultimate reality of providence. His belief seems to me to have been the source of New­ man's strength as a writer and a partial explanation of his superiority, as a writer, to Carlyle and to many of his other more socially conscious contemporaries. The very qualities of his prose suggest a wide variety of possibilities, while CarIyles prose, brilliant as it sometimes may be, tends to be regular in its eccentricity, tends to blur dis­ criminations which for Newman were the source of all the world's charm. He could be freer because he was more con­ fident, and more confident, whatever the psychological reasons, because he was not constantly threatened. Finally, however, the determinants for him as for Carlyle and the other great Victorians, even for those who—like Mill and Arnold—urged greater flexibility and freedom of intellectual pursuit, were the necessity for action, and the right exercise of the will. Attempting to persuade Mrs. William Froude to follow him into the Catholic church he put the case strongly, and it is a case, we shall see, which is the source both of his great strength and of his limitations as a writer: "Faith then is not a conclusion from premisses, but the result of an act of the will, following upon a conviction that to believe is a duty. The simple question you have to ask yourself is, 'Have I a conviction that I ought to accept the (Roman) Catholic Faith as God's word?' if not, at least, 'do I tend to such a conviction?' or 'am I near upon it'? For directly you have a conviction that you ought to believe, reason has done its part, and what is wanted for faith is, not proof, but will.We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe; if we be-

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

lieve lightly, or if we are hard of belief, in either case we do wrong."62 Newman's theory of belief is perhaps the most consistent, direct, and conscious manifestation of an attitude which is discernible in almost every important Victorian writer. The attitude I would describe as a will to order, an unwillingness both understandable and at the time inescapable to remain at ease amidst the decay of old values, old hierarchies, old traditions of behavior and thinking. Of all the great Vic­ torians Newman most unashamedly embraced the old traditions and most directly did battle with the new scepti­ cism. His insistence on the importance of the will and the repression of those elements of the self—and, therefore, of society—that tend toward disorder was not obscurantist or anti-intellectual as, for example, Carlyle's tended to be. He tried to discover elements in the natural man himself, perceptible to anyone—Catholic, Protestant, or Atheist— that suggest the inevitability of faith; and if his analogy between the act of faith that makes man, say, believe in the roundness of the earth, and the act that makes him believe in God and the Catholic Church, is not convincing to the secularist, Newmans exploration of the necessarily irrational elements in man's belief is both convincing and salutary. It follows from Newman's thoroughly pragmatic notion that "Life is for action," that the will must be dominant; and it seems to me that one important objection to New­ man's theory is not that it is excessively irrationalist but that it is not irrational enough. Newman's irrationalism is curi­ ously rational; he seemed to assume, though in a peculiarly complicated way, that man's nature is rational. "Tho' faith is the result of will," he said, "itself ever follows intellectual judgment" (Ward, II, 591), and is followed by intellectual judgment, one might add. He assumed that even though reason in its crudest form is incapable of arriving at any 62 The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. C.S. Dessain (Birmingham, 1962), XII, 228; Ward, I, 24:2, leaves out the sentence, "We can believe what we choose."

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but deductive proof, man's belief can and should be thor­ oughly rational, in his larger sense of the word. Man can, through the accumulation of probabilities, arrive at in­ tellectually respectable conclusions about matters of faith and morality which are no more irrefutable yet no more doubtable than the logical conclusion that all men are mortal. Up to now all men have died, but what irrefutable evidence is there that men will always die? As Newman rightly pointed out, it is hardly irrational to believe in such things as man's mortality; but we do not have that con­ clusive proof for the fact which some men seek in matters of religion. It takes an act of faith to make the leap from the enormous probability to the total assent which everyone gives to the fact. "Nothing concrete," he wrote, "admits of demonstration, and there is always a residuum of imper­ fection in the proof." It is, therefore, "always possible, per­ haps even plausibly to resist a conclusion, even tho' it be one which all sensible men consider beyond question" (Ward, II, 591). Newman thus drew on Hume to resist scepticism; and like Hume he was a thoroughly rational and sensible man who was repelled by all kinds of enthusiasm and who dis­ trusted suddenness of action and violence of feeling. In a way, then, Newman was another Victorian who managed to have his cake and eat it too. The world is both rational and irrational; we must recognize its irrationality while remaining rational; we must use the irrational to sustain the rational. Will, for Newman, never extends beyond ego, is never regarded from that frightening standpoint to which Freudian psychology and its developments have driven the twentieth century. The will, though dangerous and capable of leading man into the waywardness of pride, self-interest, and private judgment, usually operates as a conscious restriction on the irrational. The dark, romantic will of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Lawrence is swept under the carpet, and thus, while we can talk about Newman's extraordinary psychological perceptiveness, we must recog­ nize that his psychology is, finally, only a brilliant extension

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

of the rationalist introspective psychology of the British empiricist tradition. This should not operate to Newman's discredit since it is extraordinary how far beyond the limitations of that rationalist psychology he moved; and it would be absurd to expect to find in his writings a willingness to confront fully the irrational forces which have been so frighteningly forced upon the twentieth century. Despite Newman's talk about the irrational, he tended to an almost formal equa­ tion of consciousness with man's full psychic life; this is especially clear in his insistence that biographies should be written through letters since "contemporary letters are facts, and as such they reveal the true life of a man" (Auto­ biographical Writings, p. 22). Newman did not mean, of course, that only what a man says about his actions and intentions are relevant to his life; he saw a man's thoughts and actions as reflections of an inward life which gives coherence to everything he says and does. Newman's nom­ inalism and his sense of order are here once again combined. In some ways, it would seem, this is an extreme version of a form of negative capability, since Newman explicitly re­ jected any external imposition of order on the biographical facts and would allow the facts to speak for themselves. But he assumed that the facts would produce their own order, that the consciousness and will of his subject would be sufficient. Once again, that is, Newman manifested an irrationalism altogether confident of the triumph of ration­ ality. Consistent with his nominalism and his ideas of notional and real assent, he rejected any theorizing on another man's experience because that theorizing necessarily comes from the outside and is an abstraction, starved and colorless and divorced from the only reality, which is individual and experienced. Fortunately for Newman's theory, the chaos of the individual and the experienced is no cause for worry: like all the irrational Newman recog­ nized, it is a reflection of the ultimate divine rationality and order.

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III The extraordinary quality of Newman's art has long been recognized to grow from his capacity to give the impression of speaking as a complete human being to other human beings, with deep sensitivity to their thoughts and feelings: cor ad cor loquitur. But Newman's sense of self—at least of the self he made public—complex and rich as it is, was restricted by his notion of will just as his ex­ perience of the irrationality of the world was controlled by will itself. This is one of the reasons, I think, that Newman's apologetic, argumentative, and expository writing is, by and large, so much superior to his direct efforts at imaginative art. However sensitive to the concrete he showed himself to be in his nonfictional work, he tended to operate on very high levels of abstraction which are redeemed from dryness largely by the impression of self Newman managed to give in metaphor, analogies, and examples, in highly subtle and convincing rhetorical forms, in expressions which suggested his own deep engagement—tactfully and delicately re­ strained—with the problem and with his audience. But when in his novels he attempted to create full human beings, he tended to create characters whose reality is in­ volved in no more than the sorts of intellectual difficulties which characterize Newman's public life and which were the subject of his other writings. It is, of course, pointless to make large demands on Newman's fiction or to overemphasize its place in his work as a whole. Telling tales was for him a distinctly minor occupation, a diversion from his more serious religious duties. Moreover, his novels are essentially apologetic works in fictional form, one of their purposes being not much different, say, from The Difficulties of Anglicans or the Apologia. But Newman was never careless about his writ­ ing, and he was particularly serious about countering the effects of other propagandist novels, like the anonymous From Oxford to Rome (really by Elizabeth F. S. Hams), "a tale, directed against the Oxford converts to the Catholic

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

Faith," whose "contents were as wantonly and preposter­ ously fanciful, as they were injurious to those whose motives and actions it professed to represent" (Loss and Gain, p. ix), and Hke Kingsley's Hypatia. Moreover, both his novels seem to have engaged Newman deeply as explorations of conversions close in kind to his own. There is no likelihood of Newman's having felt an irresistible attraction to fiction; his preoccupation with "ac­ tion" and religious concerns precluded such a possibility. But Newman's potentialities for fiction were great, and even in his argumentative works he felt early the usefulness of casting his ideas into dialogue among fictional characters.63 But what is most important from the point of view of this study is that the novels can provide insight into the nature of Newman's art as a whole and that his failures in fiction— as well as his minor successes—are not merely idiosyncratic. They are representative, for one thing, of the way in which fiction and autobiography tended so frequently to run together during the nineteenth century, and of the way writers took advantage of the disguises of fiction. It has been argued, for instance, that in his novels Newman availed himself "of the greater freedom that fiction and anonymity can bestow" by giving us "not only the intellec­ tual but the emotional elements in his conversion."64 But for Newman, the disguises of fiction did not work completely in this way; it is hard to believe, for example, that the emotional elements of his conversion are more fully revealed in Loss and Gain than in the Apologia. Newman's powerful sense of discretion and tact did not allow him to break through his usual reticence on personal matters, even in fiction. More important, then, is the way the novels become representative in failure: serving a propagandist cause even while pursuing the truth as honestly as possible, they limit and narrow human experience and with all integrity sacrifice it to need and will. There is no point, however, in examining the technical 63 See

"How to Accomplish It" in Discussions and Arguments. Maison, The Victorian Vision (New York, 1961), p. 140.

64 Margaret

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deficiencies of Newman's fiction. Newman was no master of the novelist's craft. He was not profoundly concerned with the complexities of "point of view," but then neither were most of the great Victorian writers; indeed his authorial intrusions, though frequently abrupt and awk­ ward, are less frequent and distracting than one might expect. Again, the obvious deficiencies of form are not nearly as serious as some critics have suggested. If, for example, we examine the leisurely, seemingly desultory, and certainly unexciting opening dialogues in Loss and Gain, we find that although they have no obvious and immediate relevance, they are part of a careful preparation: they show some of the wide variety of religious views to which the hero, Charles Reding, was exposed, and they prepare for that development of his mind which was to move him slowly towards Catholicism. "By means of conversations such as those," Newman says, Reding "had now come, in the course of a year, to one or two conclusions, not very novel, but very important" (p. 65). Nor is there much to complain of in the lack of the conventional attractions of the novel: of love interest or the excitements of melo­ dramatic moments. Loss and Gain, after all, is a novel of manners, though it relates not to the usual problem of how hero and heroine but of how hero and Church get together. There are three aspects of Loss and Gain, however, which deserve attention in a study concerned with the quality and representativeness of Newman's art: first, its psychological insight; involved with this is, second, its use of personal experience; and third, its fidelity to experience. Newman's psychological insight is one of his qualities which seem to qualify him as a novelist. Curiously, how­ ever, we find that although in Loss and Gain most of the perceptions which we recognize as distinctively Newman's are present, we get no portrait of the "whole man" Newman was so much concerned with. None of the characters is created "in the round."65 There are several reasons for this, but one of the most important is the nature of Newman's 65 See

Harrold, John Henry Newman, p. 288.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

psychology. Just as in theory Newman's view of Catholic truth should have allowed him a total openness to experi­ ence, but did not, so his notions of the way men make decisions should have led him to a detailed view of the minute but important causes which operate on the mind and feelings, but did not. We find particularly admirable about Newman's thought that it seems to have relied so persistently on the individual and the concrete; but his novels suggest what is largely inferable from his other writings, that the particular and concrete were very largely for Newman an idea itself, perhaps only a theory. F. D. Maurice noted that one of the difficulties with the argu­ ments in A Grammar of Assent is that in trying to estab­ lish the difference between notional and real assents Newman failed to take into account the fact that any perception, even of the particular, is necessarily an ab­ straction itself, an idea not very different in kind from the general ideas or notions which Newman wanted to get around.66 While arguing forcefully for the concrete and using brilliantly selected images and metaphors to enforce his ideas and realize them, Newman talked in general terms about the vast and incomprehensible variety of details that influence decisions. The novel, as a form, requires detail, and should be the ultimate test of a theory of the "con­ crete"; what is lacking in Loss and Gain is precisely the "realization" through detail, at which Newman seemed consciously to be aiming, of Charles Reding's conversion. We might be willing to say that there is too much about Newman's inner life we don't understand, but we would not therefore be led to deny his reality or his greatness. 66 F.D. Maurice, "Dr. Newman's Grammar of Assent," Contemp. Re­ view, XIV (1870), 159: "apprehensions, when they are contemplated simply as the raw material of propositions, must be notional, cannot, in Dr. Newman's sense, be real. Not only the scents and the taste, but the music—not only the music, but the hopes, the fears, the memories of joys and deliverances, of which he speaks with such a glow and with such pathos—all becomes the lean spectres at which he shudders after they pass under the school regimen, after they are subjected to its 'starving' processes. They can only be fitted into propositions when they have undergone this terrible metamorphosis."

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But there is so much we don't know about Reding that we cannot accept him as a "realized" character. Newman s ret­ icence and tact seem to have kept him, even in letters, from revealing those profound psychic experiences which led him to behave as he did. It is even possible that he never himself fully knew what they were. But we demand of a novelist committed to an exploration of a character's inner life that he attempt to face these experiences. In Loss and Gain we get no more than the barest hints of them. It is true that Newman in some ways went further in the novel than he does in the Apologia, but the distance he traveled was only from his public autobiography to his letters and journals, from consciousness to consciousness. It is something, to be sure, and the disguises of fiction allowed Newman to become more explicit on delicate personal matters than he would otherwise have been; but it is not enough. It is perhaps too much to ask in a novel whose religious propagandist purposes were paramount that Newman attempt an exploration of the labyrinths of self, but such exploration combined with intimations of the connection between self and society are in fact what is missing from the Apologia and from almost everything he wrote. Its absence makes him no less great as a writer; it does, however, diminish the value of his fiction as fiction and suggests the limitations of his art. Take, for example, Newman's treatment of his own tendency towards celibacy. In the Apologia we get one moving paragraph on the subject, which is worth quoting: I am obliged to mention, though I do it with great reluctance, another deep imagination, which at this time, the autumn of 1816, took possession of me,—there can be no mistake about the fact; viz. that it would be the will of God that I should lead a single life. This anticipation, which has held its ground almost continuously ever since,—with the break of a month now and a month then, up to 1829, and, after that date, without any break at all,—was more or less connected in my mind with the

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

notion, that my calling in life would require such a sacrifice as celibacy involved; as, for instance, missionary work among the heathen, to which I had a great drawing for some years. It also strengthened my feeling of separa­ tion from the visible world, of which I have spoken above, (p. 28) Newman makes us feel that this paragraph was torn from him painfully, as no doubt it was. His sense of decorum was violated by the need to talk about such deeply personal matters, and he set down his views as briefly, as feelingly, and as objectively as possible. He must have recognized that Kingsley's attack on his truthfulness was allied to a more general distrust of Newman's otherworldliness. It was Newman's objection to the ordinary "marriage and giving in marriage" of this world that provoked the attack on his subtlety. Newman represented for Kingsley some­ thing essentially unhealthy, unmanly, and therefore casuisti­ cal and deceitful. But Newman was not obliged in the Apologia to respond to the implied attack on his virility. He well understood, as this passage makes clear, that his feelings about celibacy helped alienate him from the world, and he recognized the delicacy and centrality of the subject. But the manly thing for him to do (as well as the thing most consistent with his aim in the Apologia) was, simply, to face the problem directly, describe his attitudes briefly, and terminate the discussion without fuss. The tension be­ tween the impulse to confession and the impulse to ret­ icence—so characteristic of the novel itself—is here quite evident. Yet the whole thing is handled with tact and moderation and conveys the sense of unique moral strength and dignity that won the Apologia so much favor when it appeared. But precisely what is striking about the Apologia passage is weak about the corresponding passage in Loss and Gain: Newman's reticence about intimate personal mat­ ters is understandable; but his unwillingness to move beyond that reticence in the novel is clearly a defect. In the autobiography the balance might appropriately be in

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the direction of reticence, but in the novel, which thrives on the exploration of character and which provides through the device of fiction quite elaborate personal defenses, the balance should certainly be in the direction of confession. The parallel passage in Loss and Gain is a dialogue ex­ tending over two chapters after Carlton discovers from Reding's close friend SheflBeld, that Reding felt a "kind­ ness for celibacy" (p. 191). The effect on Carlton suggests how thoroughly Newman recognized the irrational intensity of dislike which the notion of celibacy evoked from most people: "it could not be denied that for the rest of the day Carlton's manner was not quite his own, as if something had annoyed him" (p. 201). There is a good deal of implied criticism of Carlton's behavior, which is otherwise for the most part amiable and intelligent, and there is a subdued emotion through the whole passage which implies an un­ spoken intensity not only on the part of Carlton and Red­ ing, but of Newman as well. Reding's attitude is precisely Newman's. His feeling came upon him when he was a "boy at school," and though it had "intermitted," "it is," Reding says, "the habit of my mind" (p. 192). Moreover, Reding is not used to arguing on "such subjects with others" (p. 194), and he pleads with Carlton, "Don't let us talk any more . . . I shall go on making a fool of myself. Let well alone, or bad alone, pray do" (p. 195). But though the dialogue continues because Reding is forced, like Newman later, to talk the matter out, the whole thing is peculiarly unrevealing. The discussion comes down to arguments about Biblical texts, theological traditions, the possibility of sinfulness in marriage, the need for penance, the "perfect joy of the Gospel" (p. 200). No link is made to Reding's life as a whole. What is revealed is a feeling of sin but most important a general discomfort in speaking on the matter at all. It is as though Newman felt that it was as painful an obligation to talk on this subject in the novel as it was to be in the Apologia. Newman not only felt no temptation to explore the depths of Reding's feelings, he positively avoided making connections with

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

possibilities suggested earlier in the novel. We learn earlier, for example, that Reding, like Newman, strongly feels that "everything is . . . uncertain here below" (p. 104), and that he has a fear almost of Hfe itself: "we can rely on nothing here," Reding says, "and are fools if we build on the future" (p. 103). This in itself would not make a satis­ factory explanation of Reding's inclination to celibacy, since we would like to know as well how this fear was produced by the experiences of his childhood or by his family life or by what have you; still, it is a possible con­ nection. Newman concluded, on another occasion, his description of his "Illness in Sicily" with a comment that is more hon­ est than that in Loss and Gain in facing the connection: "I could not take that interest in this world which marriage requires. I am too disgusted with this world—And, above all, call it what one will, I have a repugnance to a clergy­ man's marrying. I do not say it is not lawful—I cannot deny the right—but, whether prejudice or not, it shocks me" (Autobiographical Writings, p. 137). In the novel, Newman skirted the responsibility of seeing the connection. It is not the sort of thing that a gentleman talks much about pub­ licly. Moreover, the main justification Newman was con­ cerned to supply was rational and intellectual. Celibacy of the clergy is encouraged by St. Paul, it decreases the danger of sin, and promotes a total love of Christ, and it makes the attractions of this world less formidable. The conversation about celibacy seems even more inade­ quate in the light of a rather pleasant and apparently in­ nocuous bit of satire on the Anglican clergy which comes fairly late in the novel. Reding overhears a discussion in a bookshop between an old colleague, White, now a con­ ventional clergyman, and his young wife. The satire is com­ prehensible in terms of the major themes of the novel, but again there is an intensity of distaste undisguised by the lightness of the satire. As Reding looks on he sees White enter with his wife: "Love was in their eyes, joy in their voice, and affluence in their gait and bearing. Charles

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had a faintish feeling come over him; somewhat such as might beset a call for pork-chops when he was sea-sick" (p. 349). But comic as this is intended to be, there is real nausea implied, and although it can be understood as re­ vulsion against the altogether unreligious behavior of his former friend, it seems that there is more at stake. When the couple leave, Reding breathes more freely, and "a severe text of Scripture rose on his mind, but he repressed the uncharitable feeling and turned himself to the anxious duties which lay before him," that is, to his conversion, which will make his celibacy formal and final. But New­ man makes no explicit connection between this episode and Reding's views on celibacy, and despite our interest in Reding's inner life, we find it sacrificed to satire and comedy. Throughout the book we are asked to take intellectual explanations where we look for the kind of description which would create the full sense of a human being. We are offered a few glimpses of Reding's life outside the in­ tellectual discussions that consume so much of the book: his love of the scenery around his home; his feelings, con­ nected with the scenery, of the evanescence of life and the inevitability of change; and his affection for his family— which, as with the death of his father, is treated very cur­ sorily though with implicitly deep feeling. But even these things come almost as interludes or at best as quite con­ scious suggestions of the loss Reding will have to suffer in order to make the ultimate gain. But there is no detailed accumulation of experiences such as would cause the crucial change in Reding's inner life. The only kind of accumula­ tion we get is, once again, intellectual. The center of Reding's personality as the book develops is lopsidedly intellectual; sufficient attention is not paid to emotional growth. He is, moreover, described in terms that would equally describe Newman himself: "Some persons fidget at intellectual difficulties, and, successfully or not, are ever trying to solve them. Charles was of a different cast of temper; a new idea was not lost on him, but it did not distress him, if it was obscure, or conflicted with his habitual

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

view of things. He let it work its way and find its place, and shape itself within him, by the slow spontaneous action of the mind" (p. 65). And Loss and Gain dramatizes the way in which Newman's theory, so profoundly important and insightful, about how people decide on grounds not conventionally regarded as rational, is essentially directed at the rational and conscious, though what is rational and conscious may not be conventionally articulable. One of the novel's important conversations reveals some of the central insights of Newman's theory of belief, but shows also how the book's drama is primarily intellectual, and concerned with the problem of how, given the impossi­ bility of conclusive empirical proof and the absence of any infallible authority in the natural world, a man can achieve faith. The scene is taken up by a conversation among Willis, a recent convert to the Catholic Church who is trying to persuade Reding to join him; Morley, a long-time Catholic; and Reding himself. Mr. Morley clearly can be seen as an example of a man who has achieved certitude. He is ab­ solutely certain "that the Catholic Church is the only true Church" (p. 110), and his conviction has withstood the test of time and is impervious to difficulties. But against this conviction Reding undoubtedly argues—with Newman's approval—that he is only a boy and cannot be expected to "defend my Church, or to explain her faith. I am con­ tent to hold that faith, to hold what she holds, without professing to be a divine." That is, the mysteries of faith are inexplicable to the layman, though he is quite right in accepting them, and he must rest on authority until that authority is proven inadequate (Reding later discovers, of course, that the Anglican Church professes to have no such authority). Moreover, Reding insists, as Newman would have insisted, that "God wills us to be guided by reason," and reason for Reding leads to the Anglican not the Catholic Church. On the other hand, Reding distrusts the merely rational and any attempt to regard a single thought or action out of the larger context of which it is a part. Thus, when Willis accuses him of not having faith

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

in his Church, Reding says, "ten thousand thoughts pass through the mind. . . . You must be alluding to some halfsentence or other of mine, which I have forgotten, and which was no real sample of my sentiments." But again, in keeping with Newman's theory, Reding concedes that his persisting in inquiry is a sign of doubt, and doubt is inconsistent with real assent. Moreover, he rejects Willis's impetuous attempt to convert him on the spot, and utters what must have been one of Newman's watchwords: "Not so fast" (pp. 110-12). A close analysis of the whole scene would show that it depends not on profound psychological aware­ ness of the characters, but on a theory which, though antirationalist, is thoroughly intellectual. We come to under­ stand, furthermore, that the conversation operates in the direction of Reding's conversion as one subtle intellectual influence, the beginning of his understanding that inquiry implies disbelief, and that inquiry is the condition of the Anglican. The criticism here implied of the limitations of Newman's psychology is, it must be admitted, a secularist one. It depends on an assumption which Newman himself would have admitted—within what he understood to be its proper sphere—that "nothing happens, nothing goes on in this world, but may be satisfactorily traced to some other event or fact in it, or has a sufficient result in some other events or facts in it, without the necessity of our following it into a higher system of things in order to explain its existence, or to give it meaning."67 The novel, as a genre, by and large depends on just such a secular view, on providing sufficient details to explain a character's behavior without reference to "a higher system." It is so firmly grounded in the realities of this world that it can only achieve the slightest hints and intimations about the other. Thus Dostoyevsky, who was probably the most profound of all religious novelists, is successful because his belief that the human soul was a battleground between the forces of God and the forces of the devil could be assimilated to a rare sensitivity to the 67

Essays, Critical and Historical (London, 1897), II, 190-91.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

nature of human psychology; his novels can be read both as deeply convincing explorations of the psychology of disturbed but characteristic minds and as documents of a hard won faith. But for Newman, as we have seen, the divorce between the human and the divine is so complete that even the greatest literature can do no more than express the condition of the natural man. This being his view, it is all the more surprising that he turned to fiction at all. Newman's empiricism was sustained by belief in this divorce. Human history read by the human mind may be rationally and empirically intelligible, but to attempt to read human history as a direct summons to faith is to at­ tempt to put the wrong key in the lock. On the other hand, Newman read his own personal life as a demonstration of the reality of God and the inevitability of faith so that there was something for Newman in the facts of this world which might direct man beyond it, and this something, of course, is internal and personal. His fiction, then, could not rely on any external experiences. The emphasis on the external is a convention of fiction to which Newman, with his sense of tact and decorum, adhered; but Reding's story makes little sense on the human level. Since Loss and Gain is concerned with the achievement of the true faith, which is a matter of divine grace not natural occurrence, Newman makes almost no attempt to connect the external events of the story—the long walks, the death of Reding's father, the love of family, the bad behavior of Reding's superiors, even White's silly behavior in the bookstore—with the final con­ version. These are simply the human and natural accidents which accompany Reding's internal, rational, and spiritual progress towards God. As one critic has pointed out, "the most important influence of Newman's religious beliefs upon his technique grows out of his conviction that the progress of a soul is ultimately not due to its surroundings nor to the individual himself, but to God. The novel of Hardy and of Zola, under the sway of 'scientific' determinism, was to become a study of the influence of environment upon

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

character. Newman in each of his novels gives us a plot based on the opposite assumption, a picture of a character acting in a certain way in spite of heredity, environment, and self-interest."68 We see then that the empiricism which gave such strength and singularity to Newman's religious thought could be sustained because it is irrelevant, except on occasion by analogy, to the major problems of man's spiritual life. Curiously, the refusal to take external ex­ perience very seriously parallels the refusal to probe the mind much below consciousness. Our profound unconscious tendencies are usually reflexes of important external events, and both tendency and event are manifestations of the natural world. Thus they are not really relevant to the spiritual change, which always operates up near the level of consciousness. We come back then to the initial act of will towards which Reding is urged by the priest he meets on the train. The will forces the leap beyond the empirical into faith and reason as Newman defined reason, and curbs future inquiry into the central problems of faith. It does not actually distort experience, but it does lead to the omission of a good deal of it, since experience will henceforth be seen as irrelevant and leading only to difficulties and temp­ tations. The will also reinforced Newman's natural reticence so that although he was freer in fiction to explore the lower depths out of which his attitudes arose, he went only so far as to give his character predispositions—like the fear of committing himself to anything of this world—which he shared. It led to the fulfillment of Reding's wish for an authority he can trust so that he might "be saved this eternal wrangling" (p. 118). Despite Newman's recogni­ tion of the pervasiveness of doubt in his own time, because of the need to end this "wrangling" and to come to port after stormy seas, we cannot expect from him that full exploration of doubt which would have made his final con­ viction even more persuasive than it already is. 68 Joseph Ellis Baker, The Novel and the Oxford Movement (Prince­ ton, 1932), p. 62.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

One of the least persuasive and most unattractive things about Loss and Gain is Newman's treatment of kinds of experience different from his own. All the sympathy and understanding in the story is, naturally, concentrated on Reding and those close to him. The most emotionally charged parts of the story come when we feel the overlap between Reding and Newmans life most strongly. We recognize Newman's arguments, we feel him impelled towards celibacy, sensitive to the changeableness of the visible world, questing for authority, alienated from his Oxford and from his family, rushing to his "Mighty Mother." And although we get no fully coherent sense of a human being thinking and feeling all these things, we find New­ man doing some justice to each aspect of the experience. But his novel never rises to the condition of the great fiction of the period, seeking other "equivalent centers of self"; there is no Bulstrode here, hypocritical and corrupt but suddenly emerging as a human being who needs and in part deserves our sympathy. The range of the human experience here is the range of Newman's conscious experience; the fiction allowed him an intolerance which in the Apologia he showed only to Kingsley, and then almost exclusively in the 1864 edition. Loss and Gain is particularly interesting because it shows how naturally Newman's sense of his own experience could be assimilated to satire. And this satire grew in part from the exclusivist implications of his re­ ligious position. Reding is both alienated from the natural world—and right. Those who oppose him turn into unsym­ pathetic buffoons. Since Newman was not properly disengaged from his subject this is understandable. Too much of it arose out of his recent painful and melancholy experiences at Oxford. But the reduction of the enemy goes beyond the necessity of showing how inadequate the alternatives were for Red­ ing. For although it is pleasant and a relief to watch New­ man enjoying himself in almost frivolous hyperbolical humor and we know that he was found laughing to himself over the manuscript and that it wasn't as important to him as

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

most of his nonfictional works, we ask of a novelist as novelist a sympathy for things human that Newman was unwilling to give in Loss and Gain. It is not only the mem­ bers of the absurd Evangehcal party, led by Freeborn, who suffer Newman's irony here. But they are reduced to mere ciphers: "No. 1," "No. 2," and "No. 3" (see Book I, ch. xvii). The Vice-Principal, the Rev. Joshua Jennings, who interviews and removes Reding from residence in Oxford, is only just redeemed by a clause: "though he really was a kind-hearted man at bottom" (p. 235). This clause, though a relief, is never made dramatically real. What is most pain­ ful, however, is the comico-satirical tour de force which precedes Reding's conversion at the end of the book—the parade of crackpots who attempt to bring Reding over into their peculiar sects. There is Jack, the kitchen boy, representing "The Holy Cathohc Church, assembling in Huggermugger Lane," and his friend Mr. Highfly (p. 390); there is a little lady with a parasol intending to set up a new religious body, whose name "is not fixed" (p. 396); there is Zerubbabel, the convert to Judaism, who is floating a loan for a Temple on Mount Moriah, and will have "Temple stock, yielding, I calculate, at least four per cent" (p. 401); there is Mr. Batts, the member of the Truth Society, whose emblem was "the moon under total eclipse, surrounded, as by cherub faces, by the heads of Socrates, Cicero, Julian, Abelard, Luther, Benjamin Frank­ lin, and Lord Brougham" (p. 403); and finally there is a man with "much the look of a farm-yard turkey-cock," who recommends that instead of converting to "Popery," Reding "set up" for himself, and that he "form a new denomina­ tion, sixpence will do it; and then you may have your sur­ plice and candlesticks to your heart's content, without deny­ ing the gospel, or running into the horrible abominations of the Scarlet Woman" (pp. 407-408). It is with such a reductio that Newman clinches his argu­ ments against sectarianism and the intolerance and stupidity of Englishmen in regard to Catholicism. Even in directly polemical works he never let himself go in this way. Thus

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

the marvelous passage in The Present Position of Catholics in which Newman compared the attitude of Englishmen towards Roman Catholicism to the attitudes of a hypo­ thetical Russian towards the English constitution is sus­ tained intellectually throughout by close and convincing parallels, and has the virtue of not reducing to absurdity religions other than his own. It is only fair to say that the case of Callista is consid­ erably different, but I do not think the general inferences to be made from Loss and Gain are affected by it. Callista is a more genuinely imaginative and a far freer novel than Loss and Gain. It has moments in it of real power unlike anything in the earlier novel, and it suggests a much wider tolerance of human behavior as well. It required an act of historical imagination to "bring out the ethos of the Heathen from St. Paul's day down to St. Gregory," as Newman said he wanted to do (Ward, I, 245). But he despaired of finding the facts and he felt "as if an imaginary tale could alone embody the conclusions to which existing facts lead." But whatever the "existing facts" might have been, the pagan world in which Callista is set evoked almost none of the narrow satire which characterizes Loss and Gain. In fact, Newman seems to have been more at east among the pagans, where the issues were clear-cut and the dangers were over. He achieved in Callista a much higher degree of disengagement than in Loss and Gain, and therefore the disguises of fiction operate in it much more in the way they do in Carlyle. He can set his own conversion in the pagan world with a freedom he could not feel amidst the Protes­ tantism of his own time. The freedom manifests itself in a richer exploration of the lower depths of the mind and of the experience of doubt. It is true that neither Callista nor Agellius are probed psychologically as far as one would like, and Callistas con­ version, in particular, is unexplained and relatively undramatized. But there is a good deal of action throughout the novel which suggests some of Newman's deepest feelings, and action accounts for far more of the book's meaning than

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

does conversation. Once again, for example, we have an examination of the problem of celibacy, but this time it is not merely an intellectual exploration of a theological argu­ ment. Agellius, contemplating his proposed marriage to Callista under pagan rites, becomes frightened at the pros­ pect: "It is undeniably a solemn moment, under any cir­ cumstances, and requires a strong heart, when any one deliberately surrenders himself, soul and body, to the keep­ ing of another while life shall last; and this, or something like this, reserving the supreme claim of duty to the Creator, is the matrimonial contract. In individual cases it may be made without thought or distress, but surveyed objectively, and as carried out into a sufficient range of instances, it is so tremendous an undertaking that nature seems to sink under its responsibilities" (p. 122). Here the connection with what we have seen of Reding's fear of putting one's lrust in anything in the natural world becomes clear. The essential distrust of the living busy world, of self, and of anything outside of self, is much more to the point than theological arguments about what St. Paul meant, and ap­ proaches far more closely to the source of the attitudes. This distrust of self is reiterated by Callista herself, who is repelled by Agellius as soon as it becomes clear that he feels towards her what men usually feel towards women: "You have thrown me back," she cries, "upon my dreary, dismal self, and the deep wounds of my memory" (p. 132). The revulsion from the flesh and the fear of self in New­ man are so deeply rooted that the very texture of Callista renders the sense of it. The early banquet scenes described with so much relish, the plague of the locusts described with such horror and with a sense of divine intervention, Callista's revulsion from human love, the lust of the poor pagans for bread and the violence which follows—all of these things give imaginative expression to some of New­ man's most deeply felt attitudes towards human experi­ ence. There is a fear of life in Callista which receives its full symbolic expression in Agellius's desire to save her from death only if she is not a Christian, and in her unreserved

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

martyrdom, which is described with uncharacteristic par­ ticularity so as to intensify the horror: "'Dash some water on her,' said one. 'Spit in her face, and it will do,' said a second. 'Prick her with your spike,' said a third" (p. 369). But "the joints were drawn out of their sockets, and then snapped in again," and Callista was dead. It is martyrdom for God which gives her life its mean­ ing; the obverse of this is commitment to self, and in the story of Juba, perhaps the most "daemonic" thing in New­ man's writing, we get a symbolic working out of what private judgment and self-reliance really mean. Juba, who has the makings and the instincts of a Christian in him, is kept from Christianity by self-will. But his mother, a witch, puts a curse upon him, throwing "an animal of some wonderful species" at him. The effect is to drive him mad, to turn him into a gibbering animal himself: In an instant up he started again with a great cry, and began running at the top of his speed. He thought he heard a voice speaking in him; and, however fast he ran, the voice, or whatever it was, kept up with him. He rushed through the underwood, trampling and crushing it under his feet, and scaring the birds and small game which lodged there. At last, exhausted, he stood still for breath, when he heard it say loudly and deeply, as if speaking with his own organs, "You cannot escape from yourself!" Then a terror seized him; he fell down and fainted away. (pp. 264-65) The plot may be incredible, the incident out of gothic fiction, but the intensity of feeling is undeniable and the symbolic function of the animal is precisely realized. The solipsism with which Newman was threatened without the will to accept the evidence of one's conscience that there is a God is made comprehensible here with the terrible force of a nightmare. And Callista as a whole has just the quality of nightmare and daydream, mixed with farce. If it does not itself move much to second causes from

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final69

in the matters of conversion, there is a basis of feel­ ing so intense that whatever we feel about the rational progress towards faith which Newman lays out for us, we must be utterly convinced of the inevitability of the alternatives of faith or madness in a world such as is created here. There is no doubt that in Callista Newman was thor­ oughly aware of how this emotional intensity fed the faith towards which the whole action moves. We are probably closer in this novel to the genuine psychic pressures which turned Newman toward dogmatic theology—excluding, of course, final causes for "secondary" ones—than we are in anything he published, and this precisely because Newman was here much less obviously engaged with his subject. Callista, however, does not take us nearly as far as we should like to have been taken because it succeeds too well in disguising the precise autobiographical nature of the stories from the prying eyes of the public. We never can catch Newman with his guard down, with his will in abeyance. He could be open to experience, but only as far as he felt he might at the moment appropriately go. The movement of Newman's time toward a secular open­ ness to the facts of the visible world would always repel him, and thus he could not become a writer of fiction, except on occasion and as a kind of sport. All the impulses of his mind which tended toward fiction—his insistence on fact, his alertness to the subtleties of the human mind, his openness to alternative possibilities—are limited in an artistically debilitating way by the need and the will which we see operating in his novels. His battle against the spirit of the age as he understood it was total; except in its extreme nature, it was also typical; and the novels suggest how, though it may have won Newman heaven, it lost him that total triumph of art which his genius might have earned him: loss and gain. 69 Newman seems dissatisfied with needing to speak of second causes. See Callista, p. 352.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

IV Even in the area of art it was not all loss. Newman cer­ tainly felt no loss in his inability—or unwillingness—to write great fiction. More important, however, at least one of his works is or gives the appearance of being a com­ plete triumph of art and of the great Victorian virtue, sin­ cerity. And it is to the Apologia as a characteristic Victorian document and as quintessential Newman that I should like finally to turn. So much has been written about the Apologia70 so well, with yet more to come, no doubt, that it will be unnecessary to attempt to recapitulate the various ways in which it achieves its successes. The concern here will be simply to examine certain aspects of the book, largely through selected passages, as they reveal the limits of the flexibility and scope of Newman's vision. Its importance to this study rises in part from the way it can be seen as drawing together all the most powerful elements in Newman's art, not simply for propagandist purposes but for the revelation of the ex­ perience of being John Henry Newman. The book is argu­ mentative; strictly speaking it is not even autobiography but apologetic; not a disinterested pursuit of the qualities of experience but a piece of controversy. It is nevertheless supremely about Newman himself, and it allows Newman to avoid very much traffic with the outside world and to focus on the inner experience, of which he is in so many ways the master. It reveals to us the way in which his psychological perceptions work and suggests very strongly their limits as well as their great strengths. It demonstrates how thoroughly he translates experience not merely into 70 See for example the following: Leonard W. Deen, "The Rhetoric of Newman's Apologia," ELH, XIX (1962), 224-38; Martin J. Svaglic, "The Structure of Newman's Apologia, PMLA, LXVI (1951), 138-48; Robert A. Colby, "The Poetical Structure of Newman's Apologia," Journal of Religion, XXXIII (1953), 47-57; and "The Structure of Newman's Apologia in relation to his Theory of Assent," Dublin Review, CCXXVII (1953), 140-56.

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impressions but into conscious intellectual forms. What Newman had said about the mind generally many years before is clearly applicable to the Apologia: "when the mind reflects upon itself, it begins to be dissatisfied with the absence of order and method in the exercise, and attempts to analyze the various processes which take place during it, to refer one to another, and to discover the main prin­ ciples on which they are conducted" (OUS, p. 257). The experience of the Apologia is this kind of highly in­ tellectual experience—and it is rather of Newman's mind in the present, having imposed order on the past (or having discovered the providential direction of his life), than of his mind past and growing. The intellectual preoccupations of the Apologia—rich as they may be with the feelings that accompany belief—seem to lead to a curious lack of concreteness about the immediate experiences being described. The force and vitality of these experiences tend to come from the style as an embodiment of the author's attitudes, rather than from the detail of directly presented activity. The style of the Apologia is the test of its greatness, of the extent to which Newman's art is genuinely expressive of the experience of self and faithful to that experience. The Apologia is a unique book among Newman's works for much the same reason that Sartor Resartus is among Carlyle's. Although for Newman language when used by a writer of genius was always "the faithful expression of his intense personality," here was a unique occasion when the expression of his own intense personality might have be­ come the center of the argument itself. We have seen that Sartor was the exploration of the experience of reaching a position which demanded renunciation of self and submis­ sion to authority and which became, in Carlyle's later works, an insistent dogmatism. The exploration was selfprotectively worked out in disguise and the disguise is one of the major reasons for Sartor's success. In the Apologia, too, we have an exploration of the experience of reaching a position which, having been achieved, demands renun­ ciation and the end of future curiosity. And although New-

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

man was forced by circumstances to speak out as Newman rather than as a Charles Reding, he created a character who reflects only one or two aspects of himself and thus sus­ tained his gentlemanly sense of decorum and reticence about which he talked so much in the book. He was, in fact, creating a disguise, though perhaps a more subtle one than Carlyle's. The character Newman created is, typically for the Vic­ torians, introspective and gentlemanly. Gentlemanliness became a strategy which allowed Newman to proceed, without offending the kind of sensibility which deplores egotism and self-absorption. He assumed the good will of Englishmen and their rejection of the ungentlemanly tactics of Kingsley. We watch Newman transform Kingsley from an enemy who must be put down into a divine instrument by which Newman was forced (or, rather, forced himself to be forced) to relate his experience and justify himself. But we are allowed to hear no echo of Newman's complaint seventeen years before (all the more intensely justified in 1864): "I have not yet been done justice to."71 Thus the Apologia is like Sartor in being what might be called a novelistic anti-novel. It is a book that demands minute fidelity to experience in order to allow the reader to gain imaginatively a belief in the reality of the John Henry Newman, its subject. It requires fine psychological perception, a restraint from didacticism, a capacity to establish a coherent and credible disguise, and a concern for human personality. Indeed, its success depends in large part on the bias, intensified by the romantic writers and almost apotheosized by the Victorian novel—and biographyreaders—that, as Newman himself put it, "The exhibition of a person, his thoughts, his words, his acts, his trials, his features, his beginnings, his growth, his end, have a charm to every one" (Ward, I, 207). Thus, while the Apologia gathers its strength from the biases and qualities which helped make the novel the supreme Victorian art form, it dramatizes how these very things were necessarily, in 71

Letters and Diaries, XII, 32.

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Newman's case at least, allied to a sensitivity to the limits of man's understanding and to a distrust of self which led away from the perilous balance of fiction. The right end of Private Judgment is renunciation;72 the right end of inquiry is the end of inquiry; the right end of incomplete and fallen man is faith in an all-knowing God through his vicar on earth. The analogy with Sartor might be carried further. New­ man's journey towards dogmatic truth may seem to have been more direct, clear, and final than Teufelsdrockh's (we do not, after all, see the hero's experience and thoughts, as the Editor of Sartor must, "through a glass darkly"). But quietly, without proclaiming the confusion through sacks of fragments and a deliberately distracting prose style, Newman makes us aware of the absence of connections, of the fragmentariness of the very experience which he so carefully and sequentially narrates. In fact, both books imply that the beginning is different from the end only in that what was initially implicit is by the end spelled out. Newman, Hke the editor of Sartor, begins and ends the Apologia holding and expounding the same principles. The character Teufelsdrockh differs from the subject John Henry Newman (as opposed to the writer of the Apologia) in that he is described as having undergone a radical change— a change which took place long before the book was written. Newman, on the other hand, undergoes only a develop­ ment: "I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any change, intellectual or moral, wrought in my mind" (p. 227). And just prior to the final dedication, he writes, "These are the principles on which I have acted before I was a Catholic; these are the principles, I trust, which will be my stay and guidance to the end."73 In both books, then, we have achieved belief spelled out with the appear­ ance of change and activity, but with, in fact, no drastic changes from beginning to end. 72 See Newman's essay, "Private Judgment," in Essays, Critical and Historical, II. 73 Apologia, p. 264. For an excellent discussion of the way Newman uses the "developmental" method, see Deen.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

In accordance with the arguments so far advanced in this study, one would expect that as the Apologia was more con­ fident in its dogmatic principles it would be correspondingly less open or sympathetic to alternative positions. But that seems not to have been the case. It is, I think, narrow in the scope of its subjects, confining itself exclusively to impressions made on Newman and internal developments, while Sartor moves from social analysis (of which there is almost nothing in the Apologia), up through personal ex­ perience, to Carlyle's rather obscure God. But within the narrower limits of its concerns the Apologia is equally as flexible as Sartor and much less dogmatic in appearance because the speaker can never have the freedom Carlyle gives to Teufelsdrockh. Carlyle assumed his elaborate dis­ guises, among other things, to allow himself to preach; for Newman preaching would only have offended the public he sought to win over, and it would have been far less central to the concern of his book. "This," Newman seems to be saying, "is what I believed; here are my very words at the time. And this is what I believe now. I don't ask you to believe it yourself. Mere words cannot of themselves make you believe in any case. All I ask is that you see that I did believe this, I do believe that, and for these reasons and in this way." Newman's apparently less intense dog­ matism corresponds to reduced claims, but the dogmatism is perhaps more firmly at the root of the Apologia than it is at the root of Sartor. While he makes the bold declaration that his book is "true" and therefore autobiographical, he needs to use more complicated—because less obviously elaborate—disguises than Carlyle. For example, as the reader discovers that Newman is both well-meaning and in­ telligent, and as he sees that his arguments and develop­ ments at every point make sense and were sympathized with by people who could be admired, he finds that a strong prima facie case is being made for what Newman believed as well as for the fact that he believed it. As Newman well knew and frequently argued, belief grows not from ideas and logical arguments but from the influence

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of man upon man, heart upon heart. One assents in difficult matters not because one has resolved all difficulties oneself but because some person or institution one can trust assents. Newman therefore becomes the most effective as a proselytizer when he abjures proselytizing. Such a disguise is simply a dramatic embodiment of Newman's beliefs and a reflection of his special psychological insight. We cannot experience Newman's world without his describing it, and he could not describe it without in some way creating it. The firmness, coherence, and yet flexibility of the Apo­ logia derives largely from the nature of the persona given the task of narrating the history of his religious opinions. There is no doubt that it is John Henry Newman whose voice we hear; the mark of his personality is on every word. But it is, as we have noted, Newman with a difference. Walter Houghton, for example, remarks that "Newman's 'Autobiographical Memoir,' written with no apologetic in­ tention, reveals by contrast a strain of egotism and conceit; and the implication that he toned down the Apologia is borne out by parallel passages."74 Part of Newman's task was to create himself in his book so as to keep from the public eye elements of himself which he tried throughout his life, with great success in action if not in thought, to repress. An autobiography must be about self and nothing else; unless it insists on a false modesty incompatible with the genre, it inevitably will evoke charges of egotism, as the Apologia did. If Newman were to win the confidence of his public, to make them, believe him, he needed to avoid distracting them by qualities which were not really relevant to his point. At the very outset of the revised edition, he is obliged to explain "how I came to write a whole book about myself, and about my own most private thoughts and feelings" (p. 3), because he was aware of the way personal and seemingly irrational attitudes influence belief. However egotistical Newman was, he would probably not have published an autobiography in his lifetime without provocation; his egotism was balanced by that reticence 74 Houghton,

The Art of Newman's "Apologia," pp. 78-79.

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

which has often been noted. He presented himself as the man he wanted his beliefs to make him, as the man he tried always to be no matter what his feelings spontaneously were. The rhetoric by which he minimized his egotism can be seen as part of his constant effort actually to minimize it in life. The rhetoric then is again not merely a trick for playing on the feelings of the readers, though it certainly is that as well, but a reflection of certain real elements of his being. For example, after printing some sentences from Charles Marriot, attesting to Newman's loyalty to the Church of England, Newman says, "I quote them for the love which I bear him and the value that I set on his good word." We are not likely, as Mr. Houghton says we are, to think that Newman successfully "hides his real purpose behind a compliment and completely forestalls the appearance of egotism certain to arise" (p. 80). But what else was Newman to do? For the sake of his argument he had to use evidence which proved what a good fellow he was, and to be constantly patting one's own back is necessarily to seem a coarse egotist. We recognize these words of Newman as a gesture of tact, as an attempt to avoid the embarrassment of having to do this sort of thing—which everything in the Apologia, and in Newman's life, for that matter, argues is real. It may be regarded as dishonest, but at worst it is only an economy, since New­ man's whole mode of thought and behavior was an at­ tempt to accommodate the truth to the actual difficulties of the human condition. And to quote words of praise with­ out any attempt to disarm would misleadingly detract from his argument. After all, isn't what is at stake here precisely whether before 1845 Newman was loyal to the Church of England, and not whether he was egotistical? But if we come to consider the limitations of the Apologia as autobiography, we can find it in just such a fact as that Newman's egotism is largely irrelevant to the central pur­ pose of the book—which is to prove the honesty of his actions, not the goodness of his being. In fact, despite the very personal qualities of the Apologia, it is not always of

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more help in allowing us to understand Newman than his novels or essays. He was determined not to tell more than was required by the moment. Nevertheless, one might have expected from a man with such awareness of the irrational and personal sources of belief that he would push further back into his own consciousness to discover the ultimate sources of belief. He stops, however, at external signs— signs which he quite consciously refuses to interpret or explain. The foreshadowing quotations from his youth, showing his inclination towards superstition and imagina­ tion, are flatly recorded with no glosses whatsoever. We discover that he experienced a crucial conversion but learn nothing of the experience itself. He takes so literally the idea that the book is a history of his religious opinions that we barely know that he had a mother and father, no less sisters and brothers: "We do not know whether he had any ordinary temptations; we do not know whether he ever fell in love. But the texture of his mind and the growth of his opinions have been laid bare for us with the candour of a saint and the accuracy of a dissector or analyst" (Inge, p. 182). Teufelsdrockh's symbolic biography tells us at least as much about Carlyle as the Apologia does about Newman. The argument that the Apologia gives us a full sense of the man must be understood not to mean that it explains why he developed the attitudes which influenced his beliefs or what were the most important emotional and psychological influences on him, or, except where he is demonstrating the consistency of apparently inconsistent behavior, what he was as a social being. The Apologia is a revelation of Newman's being, not because of what he tells us about himself, but because of the way he tells us. Just as in Loss and Gain we find Reding an incomplete character because Newman ignores natural causes for final; so in the Apologia we know much of what Newman consciously believed, but we know nothing of those epochal moments of his life, like his youthful conversion, which would give us a sense of his development as a human being. I have already suggested the curious paradox of New-

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

man's writing, that his commitment to the particular and concrete as opposed to the theoretical and general is itself strongly theoretical. His prose does, to be sure, give one a sense of the concrete and particular, but the "sense"—at least in the Apologia—is not a product of a highly par­ ticularized world. An examination of the various styles of the Apologia suggests that the particular and the concrete rarely appear except as internal impression. We do not experience the outside world in which Newman moved; what we do experience is the feeling, evoked through the prose itself, of Newman's response to the outside world as it relates to the development of his religious opinions. The density and particularity of the book comes largely from the many documents Newman prints in evidence or ex­ planation, and which themselves are generally abstract in nature. Instead, then, of surveying generally aspects of his prose already well surveyed, I want to concentrate on its concreteness or particularity. When we call Newman's prose concrete and particular, we don't, I think, mean to suggest that it is like the prose conventionally associated with the traditions of the realistic novel (akin, as I have suggested, to the conventions of modern autobiography). That is to say, it is not attentive to the minute surface details of experience. The concreteness we descry in Newman seems to be altogether of a different tradition. He may have ad­ mired St. Chrysostom for the interest that saint took "in all things, not so far as God has made them alike, but as He has made them different from each other," and for his capacity to mark all things with "graphic fidelity"; but an examination of the Apologia suggests that the particular and concrete rarely appear except as internal impression transmuted from thing into idea or feeling. And this leads to the problem of how Newman's style appears to create a living, felt reality while at the same time it remains largely abstract, echoing qualities associated with neo­ classical prose, not only in its rhythms and diction but in the generalizing force of its language.

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Perhaps the fairest place to begin an examination of this problem is at one of the least generalized and abstract passages in the book, that which concludes the first chapter of the autobiography proper: When we took leave of Monsignore Wiseman, he had courteously expressed a wish that we might make a second visit to Rome; I said with great gravity, "We have a work to do in England." I went down at once to Sicily, and the presentiment grew stronger. I struck into the middle of the island, and fell ill of a fever at Leonforte. My servant thought I was dying, and begged for my last directions. I gave them, as he wished; but I said, "I shall not die." I repeated, "I shall not die, for I have not sinned against light, I have not sinned against light." I have never been able quite to make out what I meant. I got to Castro-Giovanni, and was laid up there for nearly three weeks. Towards the end of May I left for Palermo, taking three days for the journey. Before start­ ing from my inn in the morning of May 26th or 27th, I sat down on my bed, and began to sob violently. My servant, who had acted as my nurse, asked what ailed me. I could only answer him, "I have a work to do in England." I was aching to get home; yet for want of a vessel I was kept at Palermo for three weeks. I began to visit the Churches, and they calmed my impatience, though I did not attend any services. I knew nothing of the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament there. At last I got off in an orange boat, bound for Marseilles. Then it was that I wrote the lines, "Lead, kindly light," which have since become well known. We were becalmed a whole week in the Straights of Bonifacio. I was writing verses the whole time of my passage. At length I got to Mar­ seilles, and set off for England. The fatigue of travelling was too much for me, and I was laid up for several days at Lyons. At last I got off again, and did not stop, night or day (except a compulsory delay at Paris,) till I reached England, and my mother's house. My brother had arrived

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

from Persia only a few hours before. This was on the Tuesday. The following Sunday, July 14th, Mr. Keble preached the Assize Sermon in the University Pulpit. It was published under the title of "National Apostasy." I have ever considered and kept the day, as the start of the religious movement of 1833. This is a remarkably forceful passage, especially when one considers how studiously unrhetorical it seems to be. It is also a perplexing passage. It would be difficult, for example, to say of it that it was not concrete. Indeed, in some ways it confirms the general view and Newman's own that he was fascinated by the particular and concrete, since it is full of names of places, people, and things; we have some dia­ logue, some dates, and a carefully developed narrative sequence. Moreover, we have not only one detail which Newman himself says he cant explain, but several other details whose relevance to the passage is at best indirect and at worst unclear; it is almost as though Newman's attraction to the particular wins out in a novelistic sort of way over his immediate intention. Why, for example, are we told that he "struck into the middle of the island"; or that, before leaving Castro-Giovanni he sat down on his "bed" and "began to sob violently." Newman does not ex­ plain why and gives the impression that he probably does not know. He also gives the impression, however, that the details are felt to be important and that it is an act of sincerity and trust blindly to report them. Again, why are we told that he gets off on an "orange boat" or that he is becalmed in the Straights of Bonifacio or that he wrote verses the whole time or that his brother had arrived from Persia a few days before Newman himself arrived at his mother's house? All of these random facts do give a feeling of particularity to the passage. At the same time, if one looks carefully one is struck by the absence of the kind of particularity one would expect from a climactic passage in a novel or an autobiography. The illness in Sicily, which Newman's journals show he thought extremely

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important for so many reasons, is treated cursorily. There is the implication of delirium and that is all. We find no nota­ tions of Newman's own feelings except that he was "aching" to get home because (and even that connective is an inter­ polation) he has "a work to do in England." If Newman had been concerned with the details of the episode, he might have made much fuller use of his journal. But the places have no particularity beyond their names, and the actions themselves are generalized, no one of them being rendered in careful detail. It becomes clear that the passage's power derives not from the particularized description of experience, but from the shape that experience is given in the style. The direct experience is mediated by a controlling intelligence who carefully selects a very few details and then imposes on the selection a pattern controlled by a central notion: that there is something beyond the personal which directs the action and that Newman becomes here an instrument of God at the inception of a great work, beginning with the "religious movement of 1833" and ending in his turning to Catholicism. The strangely selected details serve to suggest Newman's passivity: he says things he doesn't fully understand; he receives strength from the Church although he doesn't understand its true efficacy; he is at the mercy of the winds and the vagaries of shipping; even his writing poems gives the impression of being compulsive; he is laid up again; and then there is the strange concatenation of events whose connections are not explained: his arrival, his brother's arrival, Keble's preaching of the Assize sermon. The brother's arrival, though not apparently relevant, intimates some mysterious and large action coming to which Newman is related, but for the moment only passively. But the full trance-like force of the passage comes from its unusual (at least for Newman) sentence structure. Only the first sentence of the passage runs over twenty words. All but two of the rest of the sentences are simple or com­ pound (except those which include short quotations) and run at longest to about sixteen words. They create a sense

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

of rapidity of movement guided in a single direction by the compulsive refrain, "I have a work to do in England." The most unusual aspect of the prose for Newman is the almost total absence of conventional transitions. The pas­ sage has some of the quality of Biblical prose in this respect. It gives a sense of a strong controlling direction, but that direction depends not on logic or on humanly imaginable connections; rather it depends on a power outside the passage—or in the Blessed Sacrament, which Newman was not ready to understand. The passage, then, is more useful autobiographically in its style than in the facts it presents. Of the immediate experience itself, there simply isn't enough information to give a sense of the lived reality; but the language captures the feeling of the passivity, speed, and disconnectedness of delirious movement. The immediate experience becomes secondary to the mediate and retrospective. Looking back, Newman sees the experience as part of a pattern and we are allowed by the style to enter into the way it feels to see such a pattern, in other words, to be not the John Henry Newman who suffered from delirium so much as the John Henry Newman who sees himself and all things as moved by a force beyond his own control. Even this apparently detailed passage, then, is far more a presentation of a state of mind than of past experience. And this, of course, is really in keeping with Newman's ideas and with what it was he wanted his readers to be­ lieve about himself. His feeling for the particular and the concrete was inescapably allied to his awareness that every particular is for the human an impression, not a Ding an sich. And impressions cannot really be conveyed through direct description. Objects in the external world, Newman said elsewhere, "are whole, and individual; and the im­ pressions which they make on the mind, by means of the senses, are of a corresponding nature, complex and manifold in their relations and bearings, but considered in themselves integral and one" (OUS, p. 330). The "manifold and com­ plex" relations of the experiences of his illness and voyage

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home could only be shadowed forth because language is not sufficiently subtle an instrument to convey lived experience. In this passage, as in many others, Newman bypassed the conventional realism—associated with fiction—which en­ tails minute description of facts, for a new kind of psy­ chological notation of experience. He surrendered particu­ larity in order to create the feeling of the experience of the particular (although it should be repeated that we are given not the feeling of the original experience so much as the feeling of that experience viewed retrospectively as part of a pattern). This passage, of course, is anything but typical of the Apologia; indeed, it would be difficult to find any single passage that is typical, since one of the most striking things about Newman's prose, and this in direct opposition to Sartor Resartus, is its extraordinary variety. Where Carlyle's prose can be characterized as centripetal, tending to reduce all variety and motion to singleness and stasis, in Newman's prose we find a persistent (at least apparent) willingness to face and reflect variety and change. Thus it is not safe to say on the basis of the passage just discussed that Newman always in the Apologia surrenders particu­ larity for the feeling of experience of the particular. But in a book like the Apologia every detail must be regarded pri­ marily in the light of the way Newman feels toward it; at the same time, within the limits of his attempt to vindi­ cate himself against the charge of not believing that truth is a virtue for its own sake, Newman does include much detail. I am not talking here about the detailed intellectual analysis of his changing religious positions, but rather about description of his behavior or of his friends. Such details, however, are usually extremely selective and sparing, in­ tended to pump some blood into the large generalizations with which he was always dealing. If one is looking for a rich presentation of the character of other human beings, Newman is frequently very dis­ appointing in his descriptions of the many people who influenced his beliefs. This is understandable, in that too

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

much attention to the external world would distract from the main point of the book. We usually find out more about what Newman felt toward them in general than about what they were like. Of Dr. Hawkins, who was what Newman called his "great trial from 1830 to 1843" (Auto­ biographical Writings, p. 267), Newman writes, "I can say with a full heart that I love him, and have never ceased to love him; and I preface what otherwise might sound rude, that in the course of the many years in which we were together afterwards, he provoked me very much from time to time, though I am perfectly certain that I have pro­ voked him a great deal more" (p. 29). He then goes on to list two or three ways in which Hawkins influenced his thinking. The sentence characteristically combines restraint with an almost inexplicable power of communicating New­ man's dignity and strength: so much is packed into the word "provoked" that it cannot even approximate the antagonism that arose between the two men; but again, reticence and decorum interfere with any total revelation of what New­ man was like no less of what Hawkins was like. And again, the bare almost mathematical Ust of ways in which Haw­ kins influenced Newman, a list which is paralleled in de­ scriptions of other men, seems altogether inadequate even to Newman's own views of how people relate to one another. On the other hand, there are passages which seem more attentive to surface details. There is, for example, a de­ lightful paragraph in the second chapter in which Newman discusses how he behaved at the outset of the Tractarian Movement with a mixture of "fierceness and sport." In it, with a typical use of carefully spotted colloquialisms—de­ signed to give a sense of the particular and real as well as of Newman's personal presence—he carefully selects examples of his behavior in leading people on to profess ideas they did not know they held: "I was amused," he says, "to hear one of the Bishops, who, on reading an early Tract on the Apostolical Succession, could not make up his mind whether he held the doctrine or not. I was not dis-

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tressed at the wonder or anger of dull and self-conceited men, at propositions which they did not understand. When a correspondent, in good faith, wrote to a newspaper, to say that the 'Sacrifice of the Holy Eucharist,' spoken of in the Tract, was a false print for 'Sacrament,' I thought the mistake too pleasant to be corrected before I was asked about it. I was not unwilling to draw an opponent on step by step, by virtue of his own opinions, to the brink of some intellectual absurdity, and to leave him to get back as he could. I was not unwilling to play with a man, who asked me impertinent questions" (pp. 62-63). And so on. Even here, however, it should be noticed how gen­ eralized the examples are, and how readily they skip over particulars for the general formulation. The sense of par­ ticularity and concreteness again comes from the style. Newman introduces this paragraph by noting that he is not "defending" his behavior, but merely describing it. And the sense of fierceness and sport which he creates is a function of the style, here most particularly the diction: Newman was "amused" at a Bishop; he was not distressed by "the wonder or anger of dull and self-conceited men"; he thought the mistake was "too pleasant" to do anything about it; he liked to "play" with men who asked "impertinent" ques­ tions. The whole series works out Newman's state of mind: it reflects a fierce joy, a real strength, a perhaps arrogant feeling of superiority. The language tells us a good deal more about Newman's strength as a man—for we feel it in the speaker, not merely in the young John Henry Newman being described—that Newman himself is willing to ad­ mit to. But it is clear that even in his most flexible and detailed prose, Newman, like Carlyle, tended to reduce variety to unity. Like many Victorians, Carlyle attempted to work out solutions to the problems of this world, socially and morally. He, no more than Kingsley, could accept Newman's view— it seemed not to be a rational view—that a filthy, lying beggar woman might be closer to salvation than a true gentleman. And thus they had to take the terrible facts of

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

change and corruption and make them humanly compre­ hensible. But for Newman little that mattered could be humanly comprehensible. The mysteries of human experi­ ence could remain for him humanly unresolved because they fit into a divine pattern which is incomprehensible to man. We can see this attitude in operation at the end of the passage we have been examining. As he describes how on his return from Italy he was "fierce in act" and how he amused himself at the intellectual discomfort of his enemies of the time, Newman notes also that he remained, with all this fierceness, tolerant and moderate in his reasonings. "All this," he remarks, "may seem inconsistent with what I have said of my fierceness. I am not bound to account for it" (p. 76). The strength of this last assertion relates again to the whole method of the Apologia. In a way it might be seen simply as another firm refusal to discuss his most private feelings, but it is not certain that Newman could have "accounted for it" if he had thought it appropriate to do so. In the text he appeals to the past and says, "there have been men before me, fierce in act, yet tolerant and moderate in their reasonings; at least, so I read history." Aside from asserting his usual reticence, that is, Newman seems to be appealing to experience as superior to any human capacity to establish connections by means of reason. But experience by itself is an accumulation of fragments not humanly ex­ plicable. (It should be noted how very different in effect Newman's assertion of paradox is from Macaulay's. The two writers were alike in making an ultimate appeal to experience beyond apparent logic and formal consistency. In Macaulay's handling of, for example, Bacon, the para­ doxes remain unresolved and paradoxical—it is difficult to imagine how Bacon could have been personally so vicious and yet so great a man as Macaulay claims. Bacon re­ mains a cluster of paradoxes, and Macaulay makes no real effort to convey a sense of unity. Newman's assertion of paradox here, however, rests on an unasserted background

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of divine coherence and gentlemanly reticence. The effect of the assertion is not to make the young Newman an in­ explicable bundle of contradictions, but a complex and coherently imagined human being whose complexities are comprehensible in the light of the whole work Newman is creating.) Newman's nominalism ends in mystery and what appears to be scepticism; and the resolution of the mystery is God himself (and in this world his visible Church). The commitment to the particular and the concrete, then, leads in Newmans world—contrary to its effect on, say, Huxley or George Eliot—to mystery and an awareness of the irrational. But unlike modern psychology, which moves from a recognition of irrationalism through curiosity to a scientific exploration of the irrational, Newman's aware­ ness of the irrational leads him on the one hand to Christian faith and on the other, in things of this world, to a kind of Humean rationalism. Yet, if Newman was not bound to account for incon­ sistency, he was bound to face it; and much of the Apologia shows him facing, if not exploring and accounting for, irrational experience. There is one point—perhaps the climax of the book—where he does attempt to account for it, and in accounting for it he demonstrates both in his style and in his meaning the full range and the nature of the limitation of his view of experience: To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achieve­ ments and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the

NEWMAN AND THE THREAT OF EXPERIENCE

disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, "having no hope and without God in the world,"— all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is ab­ solutely beyond human solution, (p. 230) This is one of the passages, it seems to me, on which de­ pends Newman's reputation for richly particular and con­ crete prose, but we find here again the same tendency to minimize the particular for the response to it that we have already noted. The force of the passage lies in the intensity, rhythm, and music of the catalogue, and on Newman's rare capacity to break down a single feeling into innumerable subdivisions, which are sometimes misapprehended as par­ ticularities. Instead of the particular we get language of the highest generality gaining force by sheer accumulation: it speaks of man's "greatness and littleness," of "evil," "pain," "anguish," "corruption," "irreligion," of "the progress of things," of "ways, habits, governments." We learn how it feels to have such a vision of the world, but we do not really know what that world is like unless we can ourselves translate the generalities into particulars. The energy, the diction, the sonority, even the meaning of the passage might fruitfully be compared to those of Dr. Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes," where in the opening lines we see a world as irrational as Newman's and in the closing lines we find ourselves guided through this world, as we are led through Newman's, by what might be recognized as faith and providential direction. The comparison suggests not only that Newman's style is indebted to the eighteenthcentury classics (that is widely known), but that his per­ ceptions are equally of the generalized kind that we find in Johnson's sort of poetry. To talk about the "living busy world" is to translate less formally but in an equally gen-

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eralized way the perception embodied in Johnson's "busy scenes of crowded life." The form Newman gives to his perceptions, the brilliantly varied rhythms, and the move­ ment to the climactic quotation from the Bible are a more vivid reflection than Johnsons of the state of mind that sees the world as incomprehensible and apparently divorced from God. But we get in Newman—as in Johnson—none of the autobiographer's or novelist's superflux of detail.75 The horror is faced, as it were, remotely, without dwelling on particular catastrophes, particular sins and injustices and frustrations. The direct experience here as before is me­ diated and patterned, even if the pattern is humanly un­ recognizable. Once again, and here explicitly, we are turned from the mystery to God. The vision of the world Newman gives us here is the Victorian vision, but the capacity to face it with restraint is a rare one. Compare Carlyle or Dickens or Ruskin look­ ing at the contemporary world and raging. Their rage is unquestionably a result of their seeing the catastrophes as particular and socially remediable—not traditional and per­ haps inevitable—and of their consequent attempt to find relief in this world. Stylistically, Newman's patience with injustice in this world because of his faith in the next is reflected in his generality. He faces the unintelligible world by accepting its unintelligibility; but, I would suggest, his prose can sustain that acceptance only by avoiding the direct horror of particular anguish, by the patterning (into a long Christian tradition) of the sins and terrors which, humanly speaking, force us into action or retreat. Newman's view of the world, then, combined a romantic intensity of feeling, an alertness to the corroding force of empiricism and reason, with fundamentally classical, tradi­ tional, aristocratic, and rationalist attitudes. Aware of the irrational, like Dr. Johnson, Newman combatted it with will, and, where it could be assimilated to a rational view of 75 O'Faolain remarks that when Newman describes men he is "al­ ways the abstract intellectual" (p. 97). See his portraits of the other important figures in the Oxford Movement in the Apologia and his Autobiographical Writings.

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the world, he enlisted it in the service of faith. Sensitive to the particular and concrete, he instinctively subsumed it under the general. Experience comes through Newman's prose in the Apologia as through a filter. Explicable and inexplicable alike reveal themselves as under the direction of Providence, which alone can account for everything. We live not the experience described but the feeling of a reserved, sensitive, and dignified man, whose mind is made up and who can, therefore, transmute the particular into generalized language which itself becomes a principle of providential order. Newman avoided the romantic commitment to the par­ ticular which had its fullest working out in the novels of his contemporaries, basically anti-classical both in form and style. The commitment to raw experience and to the minute investigation of particular injustices and sufferings was essentially a secular kind of commitment, as the modern novel and autobiography are essentially secular forms. The threat of this kind of realism is made explicit in a comment of George Eliot's in Middlemarch: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life," she says, "it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."76 Newman's reticence, his gentlemanly sense of decorum, and his commitment to the next world keep him a long way from the heartbeat of the squirrel or the number­ ing of hairs on the head. This is God's province; and literature, as Newman argued, necessarily operated against religion. But again it is a matter of loss and gain, for the virtues of fiction are secular virtues, and if they move toward reform it is secular reform. With his traditional and Christian view, Newman turned—like the eighteenthcentury Tory satirists before him—to a superhuman solu­ tion because human nature is ever the same. It is not, he argued, "irreclaimable": it has "the promise of great things, and even now, in its present state of disorder and excess, has a virtue and praise proper to itself." But it 76

Middlemarch, Book II, ch. 20.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

can only be redeemed by an "inward spiritual power or grace imparted directly from above." The church must be the "channel" of that grace. Unaided human nature is doomed to its present condition. The mystery Newman faced but could not explain is thus part of the full Christian vision. But the division be­ tween God and man is absolute and incomprehensible; the division between man fallen and man redeemed is absolute and incomprehensible. The particular contem­ porary conditions with which fiction and autobiography are concerned are ultimately irrelevant to man's salvation: that depends on his part in the Christian tradition under which all particular experience can be organized and pat­ terned. Experience can do no more than point to the need for superhuman intervention and create the will to transcend this world for the next. Newman's prose in the Apologia attempts to see experience in this way, and through it he described faithfully an experience which is of no time and no place. Newman would have understood it as every­ where and eternal.

CONCLUSION

MATTHEW ARNOLD called it "Doing as one likes." John Stuart Mill called it "Liberty." But for them, as for Carlyle, Macaulay, and Newman, the central problem of their times was finding an adequate authority which might legitimately restrain uncontrolled self-will and yet allow the fullest possible development of self. In a way, they were all threatened by experience, by the empiricism from which they all learned and to which some still adhered. If faith in some supreme authority is withdrawn, if the Church is replaced by the individual conscience, if the king is re­ placed in effect by an elected parliament, if intellectual authority passes from the logician to the scientist, the individual is increasingly thrown back on himself. The great art forms reflect this in the shift from traditional and ritual­ istic epic and tragedy to epics of the mind like Faust, on the one hand, and The Prelude on the other. It became in­ creasingly clear that for the Victorians the supreme art form would be the Bildungsroman, imported in large measure by Carlyle, who translated Wilhelm Meister, from Germany and Goethe. Insofar as Sartor Resartus is a novel, it belongs in the tradition of the Bildungsroman: both the Editor and Teufelsdrockh are shown acquiring a sense of their own identities and becoming educated by experience. The Vic­ torian obsession with children in fiction is obviously related here: Maggie Tulliver, David Copperfield, Philip Pirrip, Arthvir Pendennis, Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe, Jude Fawley. They all must grow up in a world they never made, find out who they are, carve for themselves a place in a threaten­ ing and uncertain society. But though all these children suffer much before they grow up, their stories represent also an aspect of Victorian exuberance. Carlyle may have determined with Teufels-

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

drockh that man has no right to happiness and should make no demands on the universe, but Victorian heroes and heroines frequently demonstrate a kind of honorable tough­ ness which insists on making demands. Maggie Tulliver's fate results in large part from her persistence in reaching after a fuller life than was attainable in the provincial St. Ogg's. Even Jane Eyre, who sometimes seems the most insipid and priggish of Victorian heroines, is a woman of strong will and great inner certitude. The logical extension of Jane and Maggie's careers is the career of Lawrence's Ursula Brangwen. To be sure, the Victorian heroines must learn to moderate their demands, to curb self-will with strong will; but the insistence on the right to self-fulfillment is as much an aspect of Victorian fiction as the submissiveness of the good little girls of Dickens' fiction. The central statements of Mill's On Liberty need to be read alongside Carlyle's insistent negations: It will probably be conceded that it is desirable people should exercise their understandings, and that an intelli­ gent following of custom, or even occasionally an in­ telligent deviation from custom, is better than a blind and simply mechanical adhesion to it. To a certain extent it is admitted that our understanding should be our own; but there is not the same willingness to admit that our desires and impulses should be our own likewise, or that to possess impulses of our own, and of any strength, is anything but a peril and a snare. Yet desires and impulses are as much a part of a perfect human being as beliefs and restraints; and strong impulses are only perilous when not properly balanced, when one set of aims and in­ clinations is developed into strength, while others, which ought to coexist with them, remain weak and inactive. It is not because mens desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak. There is no natural connection between strong impulses and a weak conscience. The natural connection is the other way. To say that one persons desires and feelings are stronger

CONCLUSION

and more various than those of another is merely to say that he has more of the raw material of human nature and is therefore capable, perhaps of more evil, but certainly of more good. . . . A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character.1 In some ways, to be sure, this is simply another Roman­ ticism, an expression of the Rousseauistic commitment to the uniqueness of the individual. It implies also some deference to Goethe's insistence on Selbst-Bildung. But whatever the sources (Mill probably came by them all through Carlyle), Mill's insistence on the fulfillment of one's individual "nature" comes to the heart of the Vic­ torian crisis. Mill himself retreats a good way from the unqualified assertion of the value of individuality. He urges education and strongly developed will power to cope with impulse and deep feeling; but his horror of any sort of repressive tyranny over the individual persists. "Pagan self-assertion," he says, quoting John Sterling, "is one of the elements of human worth, as well as 'Christian self-denial'." Just such a tension between self-will and self-denial is central to the works of Carlyle, Macaulay, and Newman that we have investigated; and it is a reflex of the other tension between tradition and reform, past and present. Reform en­ tails a formal recognition of the demands of contemporary experience; tradition entails a conserving faith in the validity of the old ways. Just as Mill was discovering the inadequacy of an ahistorical approach to contemporary problems in his classical essays on Bentham and Coleridge, so Carlyle, Macaulay, and Newman, with their great contemporaries among the novelists, were attempting to sustain the values and the order of the old traditions while making the changes neces1 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Currin V. Shields (New York, 1956), ch. in, pp. 72-73.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

sary to meet the demands of experience. Carlyle argued for social reform based on a complete overhaul of dying institutions; Macaulay settled for a political reform that would conserve the old political structures; Newman fought for a reform within the Church which would return it to its original form. Along with Mill, these three carved out perhaps the four dominant forms of Victorian response to the threat of experience. Mill's response, because it was sustained so largely on the grounds of theory and rigor­ ously logical argument made little impression on the imag­ inative writers of the time. Liberalism at all times tends to seem to great imaginative writers as too shallow and abstract, although George Eliot obviously shared many of Mill's attitudes. Macaulay's response was that of the middle ground: that is, he spoke eagerly enough of the great con­ tribution to human progress that empiricism was making, but he retreated inconsistently into the pleasures and the traditions of the past. Carlyle spoke out with a ferocity that many writers found contagious, and one can find in the exaggerated rhetoric of Dickens and in his brilliant assaults on the emptiness of contemporary politics and institutions a good many echos of Carlyle. But Carlyle, like Dickens, was half-radical and half-reactionary; ultimately he seemed —to most of the people who looked to him for spiritual leadership in the bewildering movements of the time—to have failed: he had led men like Clough into the wilder­ ness and left them there. Newman remained the most con­ sistent, and he failed no one who understood him. From the start he rejected almost every aspect of contemporary ex­ perience. By insisting on spiritual salvation through an established religious authority, he moved in an area irrele­ vant to the larger movements of the time, although his explorations of the nature of faith will remain perpetually relevant. Had the attraction of Coleridge been more pervasive for Mill, it would have been extremely interesting to follow his literary career from the point of view of the problems raised in this study. Of the four great early Victorian prose

CONCLUSION

writers, Mill was the only one who insisted on following out the consequences of contemporary social experience without retreating to a dogmatic reassertion of the values of tradition. But Mill rarely faced experience imaginatively, in the way that Carlyle, Macaulay, and Newman did; even his autobiography has a rigorously systematic and jour­ nalistic quality which doggedly pursues the development of his ideas with only brief (if occasionally revealing) glimpses of the life out of which the ideas grew. It would be in­ teresting to speculate on the kind of novel or history Mill might have written. But for Carlyle, Macaulay, and Newman, the imagina­ tive confrontation of experience was essential. Each, in his own way, found a means to accommodate large areas of experience, but the man who could accommodate the largest areas—Newman—could do so because experience was largely irrelevant to his major concerns. He could do so because unlike Carlyle and Macaulay, he had found an actually constituted authority upon which he might lean in the crises of self-will and private judgment. But for Carlyle and Macaulay, as for most of the other great Victorians, the thwarting of selfhood that Newmans kind of submis­ sion to authority demanded was ultimately not only im­ possible but almost physically sickening. And yet, without some genuinely constituted authority—something other than Duty, Culture, Conscience, Humanity—no writer was likely to have the strength to face so many of the possi­ bilities of experience as Newman. Newman's art, and the Apologia in particular, force a revision or at least a qualification of some of the assump­ tions on which this whole study has been based. The ideal of negative capability is unattainable, and it is there­ fore absurd to attempt to use it unqualified as a kind of measuring instrument against which the achievements of serious artists can be viewed. To leave oneself completely open to experience in all its terrifying and disordered concreteness is utterly to destroy one's own identity, in fact,

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

that is, to disable one for experience. To be without any notion of permanence and order according to which one can begin to make sense of experience is to be reduced at best to the state of animals for whom, except perhaps as it threatens their food supply or their life, everything is particular and nothing has relevance to anything else, and there are no concepts. For the human being an ex­ clusive commitment to the particular and concrete would destroy all concepts, disintegrate self, and end in lunacy. It was with just such a threat to identity and to the possi­ bility of order that the Victorians thought they were faced, and the difficulties of their art cannot be described simply as a function of their cowardice at the threat. They knew that if the old principles of order were collapsing, they needed, for their psychic and social survival, to establish new ones. As we have seen, Newman's nominalism is a more complete concession than one can find anywhere in early Victorian England that there is nothing in the natural world as such to protect the individual human being from the ultimate disorder. The idiocy of Juba is a deliberate symbol of the human condition when it relies on its own nature—on self and private judgment. And it was just such a reliance on human nature that Mill wanted to assert. Moreover, when Carlyle argues that all reform must begin with self, he is in fact assuming that man is capable of controlling his nature—although his quest for a hero, as I have suggested, implies that he did not really have the faith in human nature that his argument implies. Juba is a symbol of contemporary experience as well; because of his total and explicit distrust of man's nature, Newman could construct an unambiguous symbol of a condition everybody seemed to fear. And to cope with that condition Newman could not go forward into the sprawling disorder of Victorian art and fiction. He re­ treated to the certain order of the Christian tradition and therefore to classical art. The attempt to establish a new kind of order, as Carlyle, Macaulay, and Mill desired, was not a cure for the disease, as Newman would have it, but a

CONCLUSION

symptom of the disease. Thus, even in his own fiction he could not allow his great talents, which might have been developed in the way of fiction, to serve the interests of this world, to explore publicly the heat and darkness of the irrational sources of our actions or to accept as important the accidental conditions of time and place. Amidst the distraction and confusion of ordinary experience, Newman s characters, like the Newman of the Apologia himself, move in a steady, unhurried, ordered way, to their God. Given the experiences of the twentieth century, the Vic­ torian rage for order that followed from the threat is not only comprehensible but inescapable. The difficulty was not in the quest for order, but in the ways even the great Victorians' need drove them to modes of order which could not be assimilated to the full human experience. The re­ action to the art and culture of the nineteenth century that became most articulate at the fin de Steele, and a condition of twentieth-century art in its early decades, is a cultural recognition that Victorian ideas of order were, at least in part, inadequate to human experience. They repressed or disguised or ignored areas of experience which needed to be comprehended in any conception of order that might work. The test of any adequate conception of order, as Newman himself argued for most of his life, is its capacity to assimilate the widest range of experience; and the test of that is its capacity to survive the onslaught of new per­ ceptions and new experience.2 Probably, however, no no­ tion of order can entirely survive its own time: this idea is at the root of the argument of Sartor Resartus, which shows Carlyle attempting to create a new order out of the ashes of the old. It is also one of the sources of Newman's faith, since his Essay on Development recognized the need to find new ways to articulate the old order. For him, if the idea of order was to be meaningful, it had to be con­ nected with permanence; if there is nothing permanent in 2 See Peckham s important discussion in his second chapter of the effects of disorientation and the need to establish a balance between the orientative and disorientative impulses.

THE BOUNDARIES OF FICTION

this world we must look to the next, and if there is, we must attach ourselves to it. The great Victorian writers were great in large measure because their ideas were connected with the new and in­ tense perception of change and because they confronted directly the opposition between the old and the new: like Newman they knew that to be human was to change. But with Carlyle, as for most Victorians, the rejection of the old entailed a simultaneous attempt to reestablish the old in new dress. Insofar as they moved beyond Carlyle in the recognition both that they were arguing for tradition and that the tradition was not equal to the changes and the convulsions of the new world, they speak most directly to the modern world. Newman, however, stands as perhaps the most intelligent, if not the most persuasive spokesman for the old order. As such, he remains outside the new tradition of art which was developing around him; and by standing outside of it he comes closest to being a flawless artist. The great nineteenth-century fiction was a per­ sistently flawed art precisely because it attempted in an ambivalent way to do what Newman was at once too intelligent and too religious to attempt. It attempted, that is, to grapple with the new world while sustaining a pro­ found emotional bias towards order and tradition, a belief in the capacity of man to reform himself, and an, at times, overwhelming desire to understand and work moral reforms upon the terrible complexity of human nature. In the case of a writer like Macaulay the attempt was only possible by virtue of a double self-deception: his assertions that the modern world was by and large a satis­ fying one and his unwillingness to admit into his own conscious formulations the strength of his instinctive love of the past. However brilliant, Macaulay's art could not, therefore, open a genuinely fresh vision of experience. But Carlyle and writers who followed him willingly sacrificed perfection to engagement—to a total commitment to mak­ ing this life possible. The engagement necessarily brought them too close to the experience they described to allow

CONCLUSION

them fully to understand or to deal with it. Newman—by virtue of the nature of the faith he constructed—was one of the few who managed to keep engagement and detach­ ment in balance. But Newman expected an ultimate re­ dressing of balances which secular writers could not wait for or would not believe in. Their defects are the vices of their virtues and that they could not learn from Newman is only a dubious shortcoming.

INDEX

Acton, Lord, 120n Allot, Miriam, 3n Altholz, Josef, 213n Aquinas, Thomas, 173 Aristotle, 173, 186 Arnold, Matthew, viii, 18, 36, 7980, 124, 159, 166, 189-90, 214, 259; ed. Johnson's Lives of the Poets, 79-80 Athenaeum,, 92 Auerbach, Eric, 141 Austen, Jane, 117 Austin, Charles, 91 Bacon, Francis, 194, 253-54 Bagehot, Walter, 80, 82, 89-90, 96; "Thomas Babington Macaulay," 97 Baker, Joseph Ellis, 229-30 Bald, R. C., 19n Beatty, R. C., 84n, 92-93 Bentley, Eric, 28n Boekraad, A. J., 196, 199, 202, 203 Brilioth, Yngve, 213 Bronte, Charlotte, 7, 10; Jane Eyre, 14, 259, 260; The Profes­ sor, 14; Shirley, 10, 14; Villette, 14, 259 Bronte, Emily, 7; Wuthering Heights, 4 Brougham, Heniy Peter, Baron, 119n, 163 Brown, Ε. K., 24n Browning, Robert, 70-71, 74, 99-100 Bryant, Arthur, 81n, 101, 102 Bulwer Lytton, Edward George, Earl, 101 Burke, Edmund, 159n Butterfield, Herbert, 139 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 31, 76, 85; Don Juan, 119

Calder, Grace, 39n, 42n, 63, 71 Cameron, J. M., 171n Carleton, W. G., 95 Carlyle, Alexander, 20n, 59 Carlyle, Thomas, vii, viii, 5-6, 17, 19-78, 167; and Macaulay, 16-18, 79, 81, 82, 83-84, 93, 99-100, 106, 117, 123, 129, 134-39, 141n, 161, 179-80, 193, 259-67; and Newman, 1618, 79, 83-84, 141n, 165, 17495, 209-10, 213, 214, 215, 233, 238-50, 252-53, 256, 259-67; Romanticism, 14, 26, 31-32, 36, 68-71, 177; conservatism, 17-18, 32-33, 190, 192-93, 262; quest for authority, 1718, 178, 183, 185-87, 192-93, 238, 259, 263-65; on art and literature, 19-20, 36-40, 5152, 186; fiction as defense, 1920, 57, 61n, 73-74, 233, 23839; need for defense, 19-20, 55-56, 77-78; and Mill, 19n20n, 52n, 54, 174n, 214, 26061, 262-63, 264; Calvinism, 21, 29n, 30, 32, 35, 37, 53, 177, 189, 192; failure, 23, 7778; relation to Germans, 2425, 29, 35, 36, 40n, 48, 49, 53, 57, 61n, 70, 73, 79, 17778, 192, 259, 261; develop­ ment, 24-25; disillusion, 25-33, 77-78; optimism, 25-27, 69-70; religion and mysticism, 27, 28n, 29-30, 35, 39, 53-54, 59, 63-64, 67, 69, 76, 178-79, 18990, 193; self-doubt, 27, 55; so­ cial concern, 27, 53, 252-53, 262, 264; hero-worship, 28, 3031, 39n, 70, 137n, 182, 264; doctrine of work, 29-31, 35, 70, 186; self-consciousness, 29-

INDEX

30, 32, 34-35, 43, 59-61, 75, 77-78, 81, 180-82; Byronicism, 31; repression, 31, 35, 70, 75, 215, 238, 261, 264; self-will, 31, 35, 55-56, 181-82, 192, 259, 261; and Reform BiD of 1832, 33; didacticism, 36-38, 137; moralism, 37-38, 77; translates WiIhelm Meister, 37, 259; realism, 38-39, 76, 141n; on history and narrative, 3941, 58, 72-73, 137; openness to experience, 39, 59-60, 7073, 74, 77, 84, 164-65, 19495, 263; and the eighteenth century, 51, 69, 80, 177, 179n; self-quotation, 52-53; concern for audience, 54-57, 76, 136; empiricism, 57, 65n, 182, 193, 259; and Hume, 57, 58, 177, 180, 193; dogmatism, 57n-58n, 77n, 84, 178, 183, 186, 238; and repeal of the Corn Laws, 69, 182; and the French Revo­ lution, 69, 138, 182, 185; rela­ tivism, 74; succumbs to personae, 78, 175; organicism, 129, 180, 182-83; and imagina­ tion, 134; tension between past and present, 137, 261; charac­ terization, 161; and conver­ sion, 175-76, 180; egotism, 176, 178, 192-93; Evangeli­ calism, 176-77; family back­ ground, 177; and the uncon­ scious, 177-79, 183-84; on rea­ son, 178-80, 183; individual­ ism, 183; and will, 184, 21415; and Utilitarianism, 185-86; attitude toward change, 18687, 192-93; fear of the mob, 187-89; exclusivism, 189-90; faith in justice, 190 WOBKs:

"Biography," 19, 73; "Char­ acteristics," 25, 26n, 29; "Cruthers and Johnson," 36n, 51; "Goethe," 52; "Goethe's Works," 52; "On History," 39-

41, 57-58, 183; "Illudo Chartis," 36n; journal, 25n; The Last Words of Thomas Carlyle, 36n, 47n; Latter-Day Pamphlets, 21, 176, 187-88; "The Nigger Question," 52, 55-56, 77, 188; Note Books, 24-25, 26, 28n, 31n, 34, 36, 37; Past and Present, 18, 39n, 63, 72, 137, 180, 183, 190; Shooting Niagara: and After?, 20n, 21, 176; "Signs of the Times," 25, 27, 35; "Spiritual Optics," 57n-58n; "The State of German Literature," 37n38n; Wotton Reinfred, 23, 36n, 47 The French Revolution, 38, 48n, 51, 71n, 176, 182; com­ pared to Macaulay's "Mirabeau," 134-39; form, 138; rela­ tionship to Sartor Resartus, 213 Sartor Resartus, 19-78, 79, 175, 186, 265; as fiction, 2124, 51-78, 170, 259; as auto­ biography, 25n, 170, 244; clothes philosophy, 28, 33, 56, 57, 58, 63, 66, 179n, 186; fic­ tion as defense, 52-55, 57, 6In, 68, 70, 76; realism, 76; rela­ tionship to The French Revo­ lution, 213; compared to Apo­ logia pro vita sua, 238-50 form: 41-42, 49-51, 61-68, 138; narrative form, 41-42; static quality, 49-51, 62-63, 6568, 138; personae, 55-57, 59, 60, 63-64, 65n, 71, 74, 241; parallel structure, 65n; parallel to book-review, 67; parallel to sermon, 67-68 style·. 17, 31, 34, 38, 42-52, 66-67, 72-73, 80, 83, 134-38, 183; symbolism, 38, 42, 49-50, 138; as defense, 43; redun­ dance, 43, 46, 49-50, 52; al­ lusion, 44-45, 48-49, 75; den­ sity, 44-45; static quality, 4547, 49, 50n-5ln, 250; plurali-

INDEX zation, 46; abstraction, 47-51; exaggeration, 47 Cazamian, Louis, 24n, 112 Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quix­ ote, 15, 66 Chatham, Wilham Pitt, Earl of, the younger, 135 Christian Observer, 109 Clive, John, 99, 148-50, 162 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 262 Colby, Robert Α., 237n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 18, 106, 169, 182-83, 262 Collingwood, R. G., 18, 168 Conrad, Joseph, 41, 74 Contemporary Review, 221n Cooper, Edward, 87 Corn Laws, repeal of: and Carlyle, 69, 182; and Newman, 208 Craig, R. S., 24n Croker, John, 163 Culler, A. Dwight, 165n, 166, 185n, 208n Dante Alighieri, 105; The Infer­ no, 105 Deen, Leonard, 21n, 237n, 240n Defoe, Daniel, 38, 39n DeLaura, David J., 18n Deneau, Daniel, 22n Dessain, C. S., 215n DeVane, William C., 19n Dickens, Charles, 3, 7, 17, 28, 71-72, 84, 115, 155, 158, 18283, 184-85, 256, 260, 262; The Old Curiosity Shop, vii; Our Mutual Friend, vii, 4, 5; Bleak House, 5, 72; David Copperfield, 14, 102, 259; Great Ex­ pectations, 14, 259; Dombey and Son, 102 Disraeli, Benjamin, 167 Donne, John, 3 Dostoyevsky, Feodor, 3, 227-28 Dryden, John, 105, 116 Dumont, Etienne, 135 Edinburgh Review, 83, 119n, 207 eighteenth century: and Carlyle, 51, 69, 80, 177, 179n; and Ma-

caulay, 79-80, 83-84, 93, 114; and Newman, 80, 166-67, 17In, 176, 177, 245, 255-56, 257 Eliot, George, 3, 5, 7-9, 14, 7172, 76, 78, 115, 116, 117, 127, 140, 147n, 151, 167, 182-83, 189-90, 254, 262; Daniel Deronda, vii, 5; Felix Holt, the Radical, vii, 147n; Middlemarch, 4, 14, 40, 142, 147n, 231, 257; "The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton" (Scenes of Clerical Life ), 8 9, 12; The Mill on the Floss, 14, 72, 140, 259, 260 Eliot, T. S., 3 Ellis, T. F., 86, 98 Emerson, R. W., 20n, 82 empiricism, 173, 193-94; and Carlyle, 57, 65n, 182, 193, 259; and Macaulay, 79-80, 84, 87, 94n, 106, 147n-48n, 164, 259, 262; and Newman, 16667, 171, 173, 179, 182, 19394, 200, 202-203, 213, 216-17, 229, 230, 253, 256, 259 Evangelicalism: and Carlyle, 176-77; and Macaulay, 80, 109, 120-21; and Newman, 176-78, 200, 201 expressionism, 168n Eyre, Edward John, 77, 192 Fielding, Henry, 117; Tom Jones, 15, 108 Firth, C. H., 99, 158-59 Flaubert, Gustav, 3, 12 Fletcher, Jefferson B., 179n Fraser, G. S., 82, 83 Fraser, James, 55n Frasefs Magazine, 25n, 36n, 55 Frederick the Great, 77 French Revolution: and Car­ lyle, 69, 138, 182, 185; and Macaulay, 96; and Newman, 185, 207 Freud, Sigmund, 216 Froude, J. A., 33, 57, 76, 77n, 78n, 167, 176, 192, 198, 206; The Nemesis of Faith, 176-77;

INDEX "The Oxford Counter-Refor­ mation," 198, 206 Froude, Mrs. William, 214 Frye, Northrop, 7-8, 23n, 73, 74 Gibbon, Edward, 118 Gladstone, W. E., 83 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 35, 61n, 76, 261; Wilhelm Meister, 37, 38, 73, 259; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 48; Faust, 70, 259 Grierson, H.J.C., 28n Halcrow, Α., 81n Hallam, Henry, 118 Hams, Elizabeth F.S.: From Ox­ ford to Rome, 218-19 Hardy, Thomas, 140, 229-30; ]uae the Obscure, 14, 259 Hanrold, C. F., 24n, 25n, 28n, 29n, 30n, 37n, 44, 47n, 48, 59n, 73, 178n, 195n, 213, 220 Harvey, W. J., IOn Hawkins, Edward, 251 Herodotus, 82, 118, 129 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 74 Holloway, John, 6, 7n, 45, 64, 74-75, 76, 171, 195, 197 Holmes, J. Derek, 213n Homer, 141; Odyssey, 150, 151 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 196 Houghton, Walter, 78n, 206, 242, 243 Howe, Suzanne, 37n Hume, David: and Carlyle, 57, 58, 177, 180, 193; and New­ man, 171, 177, 193, 198, 216, 254 Hutton, R. H., 80n Huxley, T. H., 197, 254 Inge, William Ralph, 19Θ, 244 Irvine, H. D., 112 Jackson, Holbrook, 35 James, Henry, 3, 40-41, 42n, 74, 126, 167 Jeffrey, Francis, 83 Johnson, Samuel, 80, 256-57;

"Vanity of Human Wishes," 255-56 Johnson, Wendell Stacy, 54n Johnson, William Savage, 23n, 24n Kafka, Franz, 3 Kant, Immanuel, 29n Keats, John, 68, 206, 210 Keble, John, 247, 248 Kenny, Terence, 183-84, 208n King, Majorie P., 36n Kingsley, Charles, 167, 171, 204, 207, 223, 231, 239; Hypatia, 219 Langbaum, Robert, 69, 70 Lange, Victor, 48n Lawrence, D. H., vii, 12, 167, 216; The Rainbow, 260 Lea vis, F. R., 78 Legouis, Emile, 112 Lewes, G. H., 167 Lindberg, John, 22n Locke, John, 106, 171, 213 Luther, Martin, 54-55 Lyly, John, 43 Macaulay, Charles, 103 Macaulay, Hannah (Lady Trevelyan), 85-86, 88-91, 98, 99, 122n, 153 Macaulay, Margaret, 87-89, 90, 98, 100, 107, 121 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 56, 79-163; and Carlyle, 16-18, 79, 81, 82, 83-84, 93, 99-100, 106, 117, 123, 129, 134-39, 141n, 161, 179-80, 193, 25967; and Newman, 16-18, 79, 83-84, 93, 99-100, 106, 117, 141n, 159n, 164-67, 176, 17980, 193, 204, 213, 253-54, 25967; concern for audience, 6, 115, 116, 120, 123, 128-29, 130-31, 133, 137, 150, 152, 154, 156-57, 165; and middleclass culture, 16; conservatism, 17, 96, 122, 262; and the eighteenth century, 79-80, 8384, 93, 114; empiricism, 79-

INDEX 80, 84, 87, 94η, 106, 147η48η, 164, 259, 262; and Utili­ tarianism, 79, 94-95, 129; and progress, 80, 87, 93, 94, 103, 148n, 262; complacency, 8081, 82, 85, 89-90, 92-93, 103, 122; Evangelicalism, 80, 109, 120-21; ideal of a gentleman, 80, 84, 85, 89, 96, 101, 102, 109, 161, 163; moderation, 80, 82; Christianity, 81, 94, 95; love of the past, 81n, 94, 96, 99-100, 106, 116, 121, 126-27, 132, 153, 158, 163; optimism, 81; need for defense, 83, 9192, 121-22, 155, 162, 266; openness to experience, 83, 84, 87, 89-92, 94n, 97-98, 159, 162-63, 164-65, 263, 266; dog­ matism, 84, 94n, 95; relation to family, 85-91, 98-100, 102; repression, 85-86, 101, 261; and Reform Bill of 1832, 8687, 96, 140; love of literature, 89-90, 93, 96-99, 101-104, 108; conversation, 91-92; dis­ taste for society, 91-93, 97-98; quest for authority, 93-94, 9899, 103, 259, 263, 264-65; Ro­ manticism, 93, 103, 107, 113, 127; relativism, 95; attitude to­ ward change, 96-100, 102, 103, 186, 193; and the French Revolution, 96; on history and fiction, 100, 104-106, 109-22, 125-26, 128, 129, 137, 147n, 148, 151; love of the unreal, 100, 101, 103-104, 107, 109, 110, 121, 150, 162, 163, 168; on poetry, 104-107, 116; and imagination, 106-10, 134, 15859, 162-63, 164; on heroism, 113, 123-24, 147, 148n; real­ ism, 106, 113-16, 121-22, 141n, 151, 158; didacticism, 117, 152; tension between past and present, 126, 137, 158, 160, 261; characterization, 147n-48n, 159, 160-61; para­ dox, 161, 204, 253-54; com­ pared to William III, 162;

failure, 163; self-will, 259, 261; and Mill, 262-63; social concern, 262 WORKS:

essays, 118-19, 120n, 160; preface to collected edition of essays, 103; speeches, 87, 96, 118; "Bacon," 95, 96-97, 98, 148n, 161, 253-54; "Byron," 85, 106, 114, 120; "A Con­ versation Between Mr. Abra­ ham Cowley and Mr. John Milton, Touching the Great Civil War," 167n; "Dryden," 104-105, 107-108, 114, 116, 147n; "Frederic the Great," 119; "History," 110-18, 129, 131, 148n; Journals, 81, 82, 84, 85-86, 88, 89, 92, 96; Lays of Ancient Rome, 103; "Lord Mahon's War of the Succession in Spain," 95; "Machiavelli," 147n; "Sir James Mackintosh," 109-10; "Milton," 103-106; "Mirabeau," 134-39; "Ranke's History of the Popes," 164; "Southey's Colloquies," 96, 160; "Sir William Temple," 97-98, 112-13; "Utilitarian Theory of Government," 94n; "Horace Walpoie," 95; unpub­ lished essays on William III, 99 History of England from the Accession of James II, 83, 92, 95, 99, 118-63, 165, 213; epic style, 122-24, 125, 127, 141; realism, 125, 127, 158; hero­ ism, 127; as fiction, 127-34, 142, 151, 153, 158, 162; char­ acterization, 128-29, 131, 143, 146-47, 148; narrative, 13031, 142-44; method, 131-34, 141; tension between past and present, 132-33, 134, 139-41, 151, 153; form, 138-57; poetic justice, 140, 146, 147n-48n, 151-57 historical figures of the His­ tory: Charles I, 155, 161-62;

INDEX Charles II, 139, 161; John Churchill, Duke of Marlbor­ ough, 146, 148; Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, 128; James II, 128, 138, 140-49, 151-53, 155, 157-58, 163; George Jeffreys, 153-58, 160; Lewis (Louis XIV), 142-45, 149, 152; James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, 129-30, 132-34, 139, 142, 155, 157; Catherine Sedley, 128; William III, 131, 138, 140-49, 151-53, 157, 162n, 163 style·. 17, 82, 84, 119-20, 125, 136-38, 151, 153, 157, 159, 160; balance and antith­ esis, 83-84, 124, 135; deco­ rum, 84; development, 99-100; exp„nsiveness, 123; parallel­ ism, 123; allusions, 136; para­ dox, 143, 150; as defense, 159, 160 Macaulay, Zachary, 80, 109 Maclnnes, W. D., 112 Mackintosh, Sir James, 118 MacMechan, Archibald, 22n, 47n Madden, William, 7n Maginn, William, 55 Maison, Margaret, 219 Maitland, F. W., 174n Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of, 92. See also Macau­ lay, History Marlowe, Christopher, 48 Malthus, Thomas, 66 Marx, Karl, 189 Marx, Olga, 37n Maulsby, D. L., 52n Maurice, F. D., 167, 221 Mill, James, "Essay on Govern­ ment," 94n Mill, John Stuart, 18, 74, 94n, 195, 262; and Carlyle, 19n20n, 52n, 54, 174n, 214, 26061, 262-63, 264; on poetry, 167-68; and Newman, 173-74, 214, 262-63, 264; and Macau­ lay, 262-63; organicism, 18283; and will, 214; openness to experience, 259-63; self-fulfill­

ment, 259, 261-64; historicism, 261; repression, 261; Romanti­ cism, 261; "Bentham," 261; "Coleridge," 261; On Liberty, 260-61; "Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties," 167-68 Milton, John, 125, 167; Paradise Lost, 48, 119 Mirabeau, Honore Gabriel Victor Riqueti, Comte de, 135, 138 Montgomery, Robert, 86 Moore, Carlisle, 19n-20n, 24n, 26η, 28η, 36n, 37n, 39n, 51-52 moral aesthetic, 8-12, 14, 116, 168 Morison, Cotter, 141, 146 Morley, John, 159n Morris, William, 17, 166 Mozley, Anne, 192n Napier, Macvey, 119 negative capability, 195, 206, 210-11, 217. See also open­ ness to experience Newman, Charles, 176 Newman, Francis, 167, 246-47, 248 Newman, John, 176n, 202 Newman, John Henry, viii, 5-6, 18, 164-258; and Carlyle, 1618, 79, 83-84, 141n, 165, 17495, 209-10, 213, 214, 215, 233, 238-50, 252-53, 256, 259-67; and Macaulay, 16-18, 79, 8384, 93, 99-100, 106, 117, 141n, 159n, 164-67, 176, 179-80, 193, 204, 213, 253-54, 25967; conservatism, 18, 190, 19293, 262; and tie eighteenth century, 80, 166-67, 171n, 176, 177, 245, 255-56, 257; dogma­ tism, 84, 178, 182, 183, 186, 206-207, 236, 241; openness to experience, 84, 164-65, 194, 195, 201, 205-206, 210-11, 213-14, 217, 221, 234, 236, 240, 241, 258, 259, 262-64; realism, 141n, 168, 208-209, 250, 257; on art and literature, 165, 167-69, 174, 186, 19697, 209, 218, 220, 224, 228-29,

INDEX 236; concern for audience, 165, 195, 197, 218, 238, 243; and imagination, 165; invisible world, 165, 171, 172, 178-79, 182, 189-90, 193, 198-200, 209, 210, 214, 223, 231, 253, 254, 256-58, 262; and conver­ sion, 166, 173-75, 178, 180, 196, 197, 220, 240, 248; em­ piricism, 166-67, 171, 173, 179, 182, 193-94, 200, 202203, 213, 216-17, 229, 230, 253, 256, 259; individualism, 166, 183-84, 202, 204-205, 257-58; on reason, 166-67, 169, 178-80, 182, 193, 196, 203, 215-16, 217, 230, 244, 254, 256, 265; repression, 167, 201, 215, 235, 238, 240, 261; Romanticism, 167, 176, 177, 256, 267; as historian, 169, 170, 213; self-consciousness, 170, 201-204; power of dis­ crimination, 171,172, 212, 214, 255; and Hume, 171, 177, 193, 198, 216, 254; nominalism, 171, 195-98, 216, 217, 221, 244-45, 254, 264; and psychology, 171, 181-82, 195, 197, 212, 216-17, 220-21, 227-29, 233, 236, 23739, 242; and Mill, 173-74, 214, 262-63, 264; Evangelicalism, 176-78, 200, 201; ideal of a gentleman, 176, 178, 186, 210, 225, 229, 239, 254, 257; reti­ cence, 176, 186, 219, 220, 22224, 230, 242-43, 251, 253, 254, 257; Calvinism, 177; family background, 177; and the un­ conscious, 177-84; egotism, 178, 192, 193, 239, 242-43; tension between past and pres­ ent, 178, 261; self-will, 18182, 192, 235, 259, 261; organicism, 182-83, 201, 265; quest for authority, 183-87, 192-93, 201, 215, 227, 231, 259, 26266; theory of belief, 183-84, 190-91, 193, 198-200, 202203, 212-13, 215-16, 227-30, 235-36, 241-44, 254; and will,

184, 185, 214-16, 230-31, 236, 256-58; and the French Revo­ lution, 185, 207; and Utilitari­ anism, 185; doctrine of work, 186; fiction as defense, 186, 219, 222, 224, 233, 237-40; attitude toward change, 187, 192-93, 231; evolutionism, 187; fear of the mob, 187-89, 209-10; exclusivism, 189, 190, 209n; faith in justice, 190-91, 200, 213-14, 257; paradox, 198-99, 204-205; solipsism, 202-203, 207-208, 235; and Kingsley, 204, 207, 223, 231, 239; on the Crimean War, 208; and repeal of the Corn Laws, 208; and Reform Bill of 1832, 208; relation to Ger­ mans, 208; social concern, 209, 262; celibacy, 222-26, 231, 234; intolerance, 230-33; char­ acterization, 230, 256n; satire, 231-33; and Oxford Move­ ment, 251-52, 256n; compared to Samuel Johnson, 255-57 WORKS:

autobiographical writings and letters, 170, I76n, 192, 197, 198, 202, 203, 204, 205, 217, 222, 225, 248, 251, 256n; "Au­ tobiographical Memoir," 242; The Difficulties of Anglicans, 218; An Essay on the Develop­ ment of Christian Doctrine, 187, 189, 191, 201, 265-66; Essays, Critical and Historical, 228; Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Ox­ ford, 173, 179, 183n, 197, 198, 199, 200, 206, 212, 238, 249; "A Form of Infidelity of the Day," 207; A Grammar of As­ sent, 173, 190n, 191, 195, 196, 200, 202n, 207-208, 221; His­ torical Sketches, 19 In; "How to Accomplish It" (Discussions and Arguments), 219n; The Idea of a University, 165, 169, 183n, 187, 194, 199, 201, 211;

INDEX "Lead, kindly light," 246; Pa­ rochial and Phin Sermons, 168-69, 170, 174-75, 189, 199; The Present Position of Cath­ olics, 233; "Primitive Christi­ anity" (Historical Sketches), 189; "Private Judgment," (Es­ says, Critical ana Historical), 240; "Proof of Theism," 199n; "St. Chrvsostom," 171-72, 196, 245; "Self-Contemplation" (Pa­ rochial and Plain Sermons), 203-204; Sermons on Subjects of the Day, 190; "The Tamworth Reading Room," 186; Two Essays on Biblical and on Historical Miracles, 200; "Who's to Blame" (Discus­ sions and Arguments), 208n; "Wisdom and Innocence" (Sermons on Subjects of the Day), 204-205 Callista, 185, 188, 233-36, 264; compared to Loss and Gain, 233; gothic quality, 235 Loss and Gain, 184, 218-19, 220-34, 239, 244; characteriza­ tion, 222; non-dramatic quali­ ty, 226-28; caricature, 230; satire, 231-33; compared to CalUsta, 233 Apologia pro vita sua, 74, 164-65, 170, 191, 198, 199, 206, 207, 218, 219, 222-23, 224, 231, 237-58, 263-64, 265; as Action, 170, 237-40; com­ pared to Sartor Resartus, 23850; dogmatism, 239-41; narra­ tive structure, 240; rhetorical strategy, 241-43; as autobiog­ raphy, 243-44; John Keble, 247; Monsignore Wiseman, 246 style: 17, 212-13, 218, 23858; particularity, 172, 195, 238, 245, 247-52, 255, 256, 257; power of discrimination, 197; as self-expression, 238, 249, 252; generalized, 245, 257; sentence length, 248-49; patterning, 248, 256; Biblical

quality, 249, 256; mediates ex­ perience, 249, 257; transitions, 249; psychological notation, 250; colloquialism, 251; flexi­ bility, 251-52; diction, 252; paradox, 253-54; compared to Samuel Johnson, 255-56 Newsome, David, 166n Newton, John, 69 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 216 Norton, Charles Eliot, 20, 25n, 55n, 61n O'Faolain, Sean, 176n, 208, 20910, 256n openness to experience, 7, 1213, 16, 23-24, 236, 262-65; Carlyle, 39, 59-60, 70-73, 74, 77, 84, 164-65, 194-95, 263; Macaulay, 83, 84, 87, 89-92, 94n, 97-98, 159, 162-63, 16465, 263, 266; Newman, 84, 164-65, 194, 195, 201, 205206, 210-11, 213-14, 217, 221, 234, 236, 240, 241, 258, 259, 262-64. See also negative ca­ pability Osborne, Dorothy, 112-13 Owen, Robert, 96 Oxford Movement, 169, 251-52, 256n Pascal, Roy, 170 Pater, Walter Horatio, 18, 166 Peckham, Morse, 21n, 22n, 56, 64-65, 195, 265n Peel, Robert, 77, 182 Penn, William, 92 Plato, 101 Pope, Alexander, 73, 104, 105 Proust, Marcel, 3 Raleigh, John Henry, 210 Raleigh, Walter, 58 realism, 7-12, 14, 38-39, 76, 106, 113, 115, 121-22, 141n, 168, 194, 208-209, 257; and Car­ lyle, 38-39, 76, 141n; and Ma­ caulay, 106, 113-16, 121-22, 141n, 151, 158; and Newman,

INDEX 141η, 168, 208-209, 250, 257 Reform Bill of 1832; and Carlyle, 33; and Macaulay, 86-87, 96, 140; and Newman, 208 Richardson, Samuel, 39n; Pame­ la, 15 Richter, Jean Paul Friedrieh, 40n; Quintus Fixlein, 48 Roellinger, Francis X., Jr., 42n Romanticism, 7-11, 14-15, 20, 26, 36, 68-71, 113, 127, 167, 177, 261; and Carlyle, 14, 26, 3132, 36, 68-71, 177; and Ma­ caulay, 93, 103, 107, 113, 127; and Newman, 167, 176, 177, 256, 267 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 32, 85, 88, 261 Ruskin, John, viii, 17, 166, 256 Ryan, Alvan S., 169n St Chrysostom, 171-72, 196, 245 St. Ignatius Loyola, 77 Sanders, C. R., 31n Schopenhauer, Arthur, 216 Scott, Sir Walter, 38, 127 Shakespeare, William, 105, 206; Hamlet, 105, 108; King Lear, 86; The Tempest, 38 Shine, Hill, 19n, 21n, 24n Shumaker, Wayne, 173 Socrates, 101 Southey, Robert, 118 Steiner, George, 3n-4n Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), 3 Stephen, Leslie, 128, 169n, 173, 174n Sterling, John, 30, 31, 54-55, 59n, 64, 261 Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shan­ dy, 40 Strachey, Lytton, 82 Svaglic, Martin J., 165n, 237n Tacitus, 118 Temple, Sir William, 97-98, 11213 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 76n77n; In Memoriam, 76, 77n Tennyson, G. B., 21-22, 27, 28, 36η, 39η, 40n, 42n, 43n, 45,

50n-51n, 51n-52n, 62n, 65n, 67 Thackeray, William Makepeace, vii, 3, 7, 84, 115, 127, 136, 147n; Fendennis, 5, 9, 14, 259; Vanity Fair, 4, 75-76 Thucydides, 118 Tillotson, Geoffrey, 172, 177n, 179n, 209n Tillotson, Kathleen, 127, 177n Tolstoy, Leo, 3 Trevelyan, G. M., 159 Trevelyan, G. O., 80n, 81n, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 93, 99, 101η, 102, 103n, 104, 108, 109, 118, 119-20, 131 Trevelyan, Hannah Macaulay, Lady, see Hannah Macaulay Trevor, Meriol, 166n Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 120n, 159n Tristram, Henry, 170n, 202n Tulloch, John, 207-208 Utilitarianism; and Carlyle, 18586; and Macaulay, 79, 94-95, 129; and Newman, 185 Victorian fiction, 40-41, 167-68, 209; failures, vii, viii, 4, 16, 23-24, 77, 85, 266; concern for audience, 3, 8, 10-11, 115-16, 151, 168; didacticism, 3, 5, 14; as defense, 3, 13-14, 75; modernity, 3-4; normative standard, 5-6, 7-16, 39, 77-78, 162, 236; reconciles opposites, 5, 12-16, 127; realism, 7-12, 14, 38-39, 76, 106, 113, 115, 121-22, 141n, 168, 194, 208209, 257; Romanticism, 7-11, 14-15, 26, 36, 68-71, 113, 127, 167, 177; importance of char­ acter, 8, 11-12, 147n, 229-30, 239; heroism, 8-10; moral aes­ thetic, 8-12, 14, 116, 168; openness to experience, 7, 1213, 16, 23-24, 236; back­ ground, 15, 38-39; point of view, 40-41, 71, 75-76; form, 141-42; melodrama, 158; em­ piricism, 194; and religion,

INDEX 228-29; excess of detail, 256; Bildungsroman, 259; and will, 260; and disorder, 264 relation to nonfiction: viii, 5-6, 16; autobiography, 8, 13, 18, 76, 170-71, 219, 245, 258; biography, 8, 13; history, 18, 40. See also Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, as autobiography; Macaulay, history and fiction, and History, as fiction; Newman, Apologia, as autobiography Victorianism, vii, 18, 113, 256; openness to experience, 7, 13, 262-65; quest for authority, 12, 16, 18, 185, 194-95, 201, 259, 265; ideal of a gentleman, 13, 239; need for defense, 20, 83; obsession with the past, 127; social concern, 168, 256; historicism, 169-70; and conver­ sion, 178; organicism, 182-83; and will, 184-85; fear of the

mob, 187-89; self-control, 201; individualism, 201-202; laissezfaire, 201; self-will, 259; re­ pression, 265 Villiers, Hyde, 88 Ward, W. G., 205 Ward, Wilfrid, 165n, 198, 215, 216, 233, 239 Watt, Ian, 8, 39n, 171 Weber, Ronald, IlOn West, Paul, 31, 39n, 48n Westminster Review, 54-55, 94n Whitehead, Alfred North, 182-83 Wilberforce, William, 90-91 Wilkes, John, 135 Williams, Raymond, 35 Winters, Yvor, 64 Wordsworth, William, 26, 69, 113; The Prelude, 259 Zola, Emile, 229-30