Poetics of Character : Transatlantic Encounters 1700-1900 9781107703964, 9781107042407

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POETICS OF CHARACTER

This study of character in a comparative context presents a new approach to transatlantic literary history. Re-reading Romanticism across national, generic and chronological boundaries, and through close textual comparisons, it offers exciting possibilities for rediscovering how literature engages and persuades readers of the reality of character. Historically grounded in the eighteenth-century philosophical, political and cultural conditions that generated nation-based literary history, it reveals alternative narratives to those of origin and succession, influence and reception. It also reintroduces rhetoric and poetics as ways of addressing questions about uniqueness and representativeness in character creation, epistemological issues of identity and impersonation, and the generation of literary value. Drawing comparisons between works from Alexander Pope and Cotton Mather through Robert Burns, Jane Austen, John Keats, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Herman Melville, to George Eliot and Henry James, Susan Manning reveals surprising metaphorical, metonymic and performative connections. susan manning (1953–2013) was Grierson Professor of English Literature and Director for The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She published many books, book chapters and journal articles, including most recently Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660–1830, eds. Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning (Cambridge, 2012), and Character, Self and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment, eds. Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning (Palgrave, 2011).

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM Founding editor p ro f e ss or m ar i l yn b ut l e r, University of Oxford General editor p r o f e s s o r j a m e s c h a n d l e r , University of Chicago Editorial Board j o h n b a r r e l l, University of York p au l ha mi lt o n, University of London m a r y j a c o b u s , University of Cambridge c l a u d i a j o hn so n, Princeton University a la n l i u, University of California, Santa Barbara j e r o me m c g a n n , University of Virginia s us a n ma n n i n g, University of Edinburgh d a v i d s i m p s o n , University of California, Davis This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fields within English literary studies. From the early 1780s to the early 1830s a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what Wordsworth called those ‘great national events’ that were ‘almost daily taking place’: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanisation, industrialisation, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reform movement at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of comment or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of ‘literature’ and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded. The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere. For a complete list of titles published see end of book.

P O E T I C S OF C H A R A C T E R Transatlantic Encounters 1700–1900

SUSAN MANNING

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107042407 © Susan Manning 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Manning, Susan, 1953–2013 Poetics of character : transatlantic encounters 1700–1900 / Susan Manning. pages cm. – (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism ; 102) Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-1-107-04240-7 1. Romanticism. 2. Character in literature. 3. English literature – 18th century – History and criticism. 4. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 5. American literature – Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775 – History and criticism. 6. American literature – 1783–1850 – History and criticism. 7. American literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 8. Comparative literature – English and American. 9. Comparative literature – American and English. I. Title. PN751.M26 2013 820.90 384–dc23 2013013359 isbn 978-1-107-04240-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

page vii

Foreword by James Chandler Acknowledgements Prologue part i 1

x xi

transatlantic literary history and the poetics of character

‘But is analogy argument?’

1 3

part ii reading character in comparison

55

2

Transatlantic contagion and the seductions of allegory

57

3

‘Choice flowers’ and characterless women

88

4

Characters and representatives: ‘floating fragments of a wrecked renown’

122

5

Literary friendship and transatlantic correspondences

152

6

Subjects and objects: ‘always joined, never settled’

183

7

Historical characters: virtue ethics and the limits of Romantic biography

208

8

Poetics of character

238 270 288 309

Notes Bibliography Index

v

Foreword

Susan Manning died of a massive stroke, suddenly and shockingly, on January 15, 2013, not long after she submitted a completed draft of this book for Cambridge Studies in Romanticism. Her death was a terrible blow, felt far and wide, by family and friends, students and colleagues. She was both dignified and unpretentious, at once smart and learned and wise, energetic even in the face of illness. Her presence graced any gathering she joined and elevated any enterprise to which she lent her great gifts. Our loss is enormous, but Poetics of Character is some small consolation. The seeds of this remarkable book can be found much earlier in her work, especially in her comparatist-transatlantic study of 2002, Fragments of Union. Poetics of Character, however, is a much more ambitious book, in both its range and approach. To use a term that Susan herself deploys for the work of Burns and Emerson, the brilliantly coupled writers in whom her argument culminates, Poetics of Character is ‘provocative’. Its challenge derives from the fact that she is trying to think something quite unusual in this book, and to think it in an unusual way. One might say that she seeks to produce an account of transatlantic literature in the decades that follow the first stirrings of the Romantic period, but without relying on the historicist and philological methodologies that were themselves generated in that period. She relies instead, very self-consciously, on a pre-Romantic conjuncture of moral topics and comparative procedures that she rightly associates with two large discursive constellations of the Scottish Enlightenment: the discourse of analogy and the discourse of character. These two concepts, analogy and character, may not seem intuitively to go hand-in-hand. Susan integrates them by reference to a broader framework of Scottish Enlightenment moral thinking, where, as she persuasively shows, they are powerfully imbricated. In particular, she invokes a vii

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Foreword

Scottish Enlightenment notion of human character as a formation that takes shape in relationships of sympathetic correspondence, a notion elaborated by thinkers from David Hume to Dugald Stewart. These sympathetic correspondences, she shows, ultimately depend on relationships of similarity, what Hume called ‘resemblance’, and thus are necessarily involved in processes that she wishes to call ‘analogical’. To solidify this connection, she further mobilises the considerable resources amassed by the field of rhetoric in its glorious Scottish Enlightenment heyday, especially the contributions of Adam Smith and Hugh Blair, who became so important for what we might call the development of ‘humanities’ on both sides of the Atlantic. Thinking of literary relationships in a rhetorical field, rather than in a historicist chain of causation, proves to be productively revelatory for the writers she discusses in these pages, and this is partly so because of their own residual commitments to the Scottish Enlightenment paradigm she excavates here. In recent years, many scholars (and not just in Scotland) have been pressing for the Scottish-Enlightenment origins of this or that feature of modernity, and of literary modernity in particular. Susan herself notes more than once that Hugh Blair’s course in rhetoric and belles lettres became standard for the educational formation of many of the authors she considers here, especially the American ones. No less a self-reliant American than Emerson is a recurring case in point. The importance of this underlying argument about the cultural influence of her Scottish Enlightenment paradigm in Britain and America probably means that her method ultimately shares something of the historiographical impulse that she polemically dismisses. But the fact of Emerson’s reliance, as it were, on Blair is only part of this book’s story. Its deeper purpose is to establish a large-scale field of reference among her writers in which the ‘poetics of character’ seems to trump all other considerations: the ‘original character’ of Melville’s elusive Confidence Man, Keats’ account of the chameleon poet as a figure of ‘no character’, the ‘characterless women’ in Margaret Fuller’s problematically transcendentalist writings, the redoubled character of Poe’s William Wilson, the emblematic characters of Emerson’s own ‘representative men’. Susan’s notes and observations from this constructed field of reference energise this book, and they will fuel new work for years to come. Further, studying nineteenth-century transatlantic literature as a massive rhetorical field this way, with character centrally at stake, including and especially ‘national character’, she has remapped this

Foreword

ix

enormous body of writing by the logics of contagion, sympathy, correspondence and analogy. The result is not just a different map, but a different kind of map, and a different kind of book, one we ought to be very grateful that Susan completed.

james chandler general editor, cambridge studies in romanticism

Acknowledgements

Many people have helped me to understand Character, the Scottish Enlightenment and Transatlantic literary history. At points when I was doubtful, Ian Duncan and James Chandler believed that this could be a book; their guidance, lightly offered, has consistently sharpened my attempts to understand connections. Eve Tavor Bannet, Tony La Vopa and Deidre Lynch have read drafts at various stages and offered invaluable suggestions. I’m lucky to have readers with such patience and insight. Discussions with Nicholas Phillipson, Thomas Ahnert and the Science of Man in Scotland group were always exciting, and helped to focus my sense of intersections between philosophy, intellectual history and literary criticism. Rick Sher, Nigel Leask and Will Christie have been generous sources of information, and good friends. I thank Russell Goodman for conversations on American philosophy. Colleagues in Edinburgh’s English Department have contributed more than they perhaps know. In particular, Andrew Taylor and Penny Fielding have been supportive friends and critics whose judgment I always know to trust. Working with colleagues and Fellows at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities has been an education and a pleasure. I owe a great deal to Anthea Taylor, Donald Ferguson, Pauline Phemister and Jolyon Mitchell. Erin Atchison, Jim Peacock, Deirdre Shepherd, Maria Filippakopoulou, Lise Sorensen and Linda Anderrson Burnett have all given resourceful and efficient research assistance at different points in the making of this book. I’m particularly grateful to Linda for heroic help with the final stages of preparation. Linda Bree and Anna Bond have offered patient, expert guidance from the earliest to the latest stages of the publishing process. Earlier versions of some parts of Chapters 3 and 4 appeared in Symbiosis and Partial Answers. Part of Chapter 7 was published as a chapter in Scotland and the World, eds. Gerald Carruthers, David Goldie and Alistair Renfrew (2012). The book is dedicated to all my women of character, aged three to eightythree. x

Prologue

‘Is analogy argument?’ The challenge is issued by a character in Melville’s novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade to a representative from the ‘Philosophical Intelligence Office’.1 His scepticism is based on a suspicion that analogy may be no more or other than a form of punning with ideas. Likeness – of the present to the past, and the future to the present; of our experience of assessing a new object, event or feeling in relation to something familiar – was the predominant form of induction throughout the eighteenth century in the Anglophone world. Theological and epistemological arguments from analogy flourished, broadly, in the period between Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736) and William Paley’s Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature, published (1802), where the celebrated ‘watchmaker analogy’ was expounded as a stage in a teleological argument for the existence of God. Though he disputed fideist conclusions derived from such reasoning, David Hume’s sceptical epistemology established empirical understanding of the world on principles of correspondence and analogy. Describing our knowledge of personal identity as dependent on principles of association and contiguity, Hume announced in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) that ‘[a]ll kinds of reasoning consist in nothing but a comparison, and a discovery of those relations, either constant or inconstant, which two or more objects bear to each other.’2 His was an approach to knowledge based on probability rather than a priori reasoning: the likely resemblance of the future to the past in our predictions of where the sun will rise (for example) determines our capacity to construe connected experience; personal identity is a product of associations produced by memory and imagination. Arguments from analogy have fallen into disfavour, as has the explanatory value of associative thinking. Recovering the philosophical and rhetorical understanding of the principles of analogy that form the basis for comparative study is my prelude to identifying ‘likeness’ in the verbal xi

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Prologue

texture of prose and poetry in Anglophone transatlantic writing. Transatlantic literary studies have blossomed in recent years, but we still lack a sufficiently complex comparative poetics to describe the literary dimensions of a situation (documented by studies of the internationalism of nineteenth-century print culture) where the ‘network of influences’, as Edward S. Cutler has put it, ‘becomes so interlaced as to be almost indeterminate’.3 From its eighteenth-century coinage ‘trans-Atlantic’ has itself been a term with complex rhetorical associations from the Greek crossing trope ‘metaphor’ to the cultural baton-passing implied by the Latin translatio studii et imperii. Invoking versions of a ‘transatlantic dynamic’ across pairs and groups of texts, I propose forms of comparison not driven by sequential narrative and nation-based assumptions that have predominated since the early nineteenth century. The argument is not historical or philosophical in a disciplinary sense; I argue rather that ‘history’, ‘rhetoric’, ‘poetics’ and ‘nation’ were mutually imbricated in postEnlightenment (that is, ‘Romantic’) literary history, and that historically and philosophically informed close reading may elicit forms of comparison submerged in predominantly chronological analysis. Poetics of Character aims, then, to explore the potential of an alternative (perhaps complementary) literary history alert to nuances of connection and comparison. Rhetorical forms of analogy such as metaphor, metonymy, simile, repetition and prosopopoeia current in eighteenth-century pedagogical texts offer a new approach to comparative literary history. Character is at the centre of my concern with representation because character was at the nexus of Enlightenment epistemology, ethics, pedagogy and understanding of social relations; recovering the range of its continuing allegorical implication with writing (the ‘character’ as letter or textual mark) and the comparative force of its rhetorical assumptions, literary-historical practice is able to re-engage analysis with affect. Character itself needs in literary contexts to be read as a rhetorical figure, by which I mean that literary character reveals itself in patterns of textual relationship; these may be articulated as much through a poetics of correspondence in the prose as through narrative acts of comparison. I argue for the value of recovering underlying structures of connection in character and correspondence as, respectively, ethos and practice. Arabesque patterning, metaphorical chains and networks of analogy may, that is, be revitalised as forms and expressions of ethical judgment. Though it draws on all of them, Poetics of Character is not a history of literary character, a history or sociology or psychology of reading practice, or an investigation into the construction of the modern self. The intention, combining the resources of literary theory and the

Prologue

xiii

history of rhetoric, is rather to argue that character as allegory and metaphor – intrinsically relational forms of ethical representation – may shape literary comparison in a transatlantic context. Analogies are by their nature not identities: similarity necessarily also implies difference, as correspondence implies distance. Both causation and coincidence are reductive pseudo-explanations that foreclose critical comparison. Literary criticism offers instead the opportunity to ask questions about the nature of the bridge which similitude offers between two or more works: if all judgment is comparative, as Samuel Johnson put it, what is the ‘texture’ of likeness in a particular case? How is it compounded of similarity and difference, and what are the rhetorical markers of resemblance? When and how is analogy an effective critical tool, and how may we judge? In literary terms significance depends on establishing meaningfulness in conjunctions that might otherwise be dismissed as random or fortuitous; such meanings themselves involved and involve issues of probability, but also of the conviction a critic’s particular reading can carry with another reader. That is to say, they are necessarily contingent rather than absolute: imagination and memory of previous instances are as involved in their formation as reasoning or the kind of information that history may supply.

Editorial Note In the very sad circumstances of Susan Manning’s sudden death, I agreed to steer her volume through the production process. Fortunately she had revised the manuscript in response to peer-review reports, and hence the copy-editing required hardly any changes in her prose and none in her intended meaning. The greater share of the work on the copy-edited manuscript was done by my colleague Linda Andersson Burnett, who generously persisted in getting the endnotes and bibliography in final shape at a time when she had much else to do. Eve Tavor Bannet provided indispensable advice on the copy-editing of the entire manuscript. To improve on my own proofreading, four people kindly proofread parts of the book: Betta Adams, Catherine Jones, Sophie Manning, and Eve Tavor Bannet. Tony La Vopa

part i

Transatlantic literary history and the poetics of character

chapter 1

‘But is analogy argument?’

Literary texts are historical products organized according to rhetorical criteria. The main problem of a literary criticism that aims to be in all respects a historical discipline is to do justice to both aspects of its objects: to work out a system of concepts which are both historioFranco Moretti, ‘The Soul and the Harpy’ graphic and rhetorical. [A]ll judgment is comparative.

Imlac, in Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

I never regarded literature merely as a collection of exquisite products, but rather as a means of mutual interpretation. Margaret Fuller, Letters

‘Comparisons are odorous’, Dogberry retorts to Verges’ complacent assumption of personal integrity. But Verges’ self-justification – ‘I am as honest as any man living that is an old man, and no honester than I’ – points to how difficult it is to dispense with comparison, odious or otherwise.1 Throughout the Anglophone eighteenth century, indeed, it was the dominant mode of reason in all spheres of inquiry. In Samuel Johnson’s oriental fable about the choice of life, Imlac’s declaration to his young protégé Rasselas regarding the acquisition of knowledge offers both the basis for this study and the largest problem it confronts. Maxims readily descend to truisms and lack purchase, and Rasselas as a whole seems to indicate that for Johnson the practical benefits of such knowledge were limited. Imlac’s confidence that ‘[t]he present state of things is the consequence of the former’ commits him to believe in ‘the progress of the human mind, the gradual improvement of reason’ – an inference scarcely borne out by the findings of the travellers from the Happy Valley as they wander across the globe in search of the good life.2 In this sombre fable of personal growth, teacher and pupil learn that the past cannot teach the present to be good, or wise, or even resigned; the sum total of all their experience is a determination to return to Abyssinia. Perhaps the most that can be said of their venture into comparative judgment is that they learn that progress may offer 3

4

Poetics of Character

change but cannot deliver contentment. Somewhere in the course of their wanderings, though, the flat figures of oriental fable become characters. Recent scholarship by Deidre Lynch, Alex Woloch, David A. Brewer, Nicola Lacey and Blakey Vermeule collectively offers rich insight into the history of character in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and other forms of cultural practice. Without these works, and inquiries into changing concepts of identity and selfhood by philosophers and cultural historians such as Jerrold Seigel, Charles Taylor, E. J. Hundert and Dror Wahrman, the present study would not have been possible; I draw on them gratefully throughout. However, this is not a history of literary character, a history or sociology or psychology of reading practice, or an investigation into the construction of the modern self. Nor is it an anti-academic tract about the disengagement of the Ivory Tower from how readers experience texts. Character matters, in other words. It is the business of this book to suggest how and why, in poetic as well as historical terms. ‘Character’ rather than identity is the lens of analysis: firstly, because this is a study of representations rather than of essences, that is, a literary rather than a philosophical inquiry (although I shall show their concerns frequently folding into one another); secondly, because both in terms of inscription and legibility character is such a pervasive index of representation, relationship and analysis across a broad generic spectrum throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and thirdly, because at the dawn of modern literary history, and its corollary Comparative Literature, personal and national character so readily, potently and treacherously substitute for one another. The implications are of more than academic interest: both historically and today the literary figuration of personhood in the form of character seems an inescapable ingredient of literature’s ability to make readers attentive. Character was and remains, that is, one of the most effective figures of rhetoric. The popularity of biographies and the terms of discussion in book clubs remind academics (sometimes to their chagrin) that discussions about the textual marks we call characters ‘as though’ they were ‘real people’ continue to draw readers to literature. Their enjoyment and concerns as readers and the activities of literary historians sometimes seem barely to connect. The experience of reading and the practice of analysis are mutually alienated when criticism fails to take seriously the persuasive power of character. I argue that character was at the nexus of Enlightenment epistemology, ethics, pedagogy and understanding of social relations; recovering the range of its continuing allegorical implication with writing (the ‘character’ as letter or textual mark) and the comparative force of its rhetorical assumptions, literary history may re-engage analysis and affect.

‘But is analogy argument?’

5

This chapter explores how language use engages the emotions of a reader, and in particular how character as personification, as allegory and as metaphor – intrinsically relational forms of ethical representation – may shape literary comparison in a transatlantic context. History, rhetoric, poetics and nationhood were mutually implicated in post-Enlightenment Anglophone literary history; I argue for the critical and comparative value of recovering underlying structures of analogy in character and correspondence in relation to ethos and practice, in particular how tropes of analogy and their narrative extension in allegory contribute to an aesthetic of ‘correspondence’ between texts that enables comparison in contexts not driven by models of influence. Current modes of scholarly argument are typically sequential and temporal in structure, and tend to institute or at least imply relations of cause and effect. This kind of historical narrative would traduce both the complexity and the transverse logic of simultaneous connections. The following sections unapologetically pursue a dynamic strategy of embodiment and reflection analogous to the multi-layered system of allegory, metaphor and metonymy at work in the poetics of character. In a historical frame stretched between the Enlightenment and current literary theory the sections test the critical purchase of a cluster of associated terms which are rhetorically cognate but have different ideational contexts and significations in relation to character and nationality: these include analogy, comparison, correspondence as fitness, correspondence as sympathy, correspondence as exemplum or allegory. This is a study of literary character, in a comparative context. It is a form of literary history that is also therefore necessarily a study of rhetoric, of how language works to evoke persons and to involve readers in their fictional business. Character and nation (and their permutations) were formulated within a poetics of performance and comparison; the history of literary history since the mid-eighteenth century has obscured and subsequently neglected the centrality of style and persuasion to the ‘New Rhetoric’ of the Enlightenment from which modern literary studies emerged. Suggesting that these offer particular exegetical and aesthetic possibilities in a comparative transatlantic context, I reconnect ‘sequential’ literary history (the ‘history of literature’) with the ethical and epistemological imperatives of eighteenth-century rhetoric. The intention is not to slight the value of historical readings of literature, but to supplement these with a poetics of imaginative writing and reading in which the category of the ‘literary’ rediscovers itself as the rhetorically dense, complex medium through which the comparative underpinning of historical reading might itself be apprehended. Shifting the balance of attention from contextualism and

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sequence towards the terms of representation establishes the basis for a transatlantic literary history of character. This kind of comparative literary history offers a way to circumvent the conceptual and ideological problems associated with national literary history without succumbing to radical presentism, and it is seriously concerned with how written words engage the emotional responses of readers. Putting ‘literary’ and ‘history’ back into critical apposition will re-enliven a compound of mutually transformative elements in which ‘the transatlantic’ may become something more like a set of conditions or possibilities of relationship than – like the ‘literary’ in ‘literary history’ – a qualifier or particular case of a substantive. Rhetorical tropes manage ambivalences and the conjunction of opposites, across what Thomas de Quincey called the ‘immense range’ of human experience where ‘the affirmative and the negative are both true’.3 Mutual liability does not necessarily imply harmony or agreement; relationship is just as likely to assert itself in antagonism. Independent ‘America’ declared itself different, in writing whose very medium enforced similarity to and comparison with the ‘English’ it was like and did not want to be. Reciprocally, post-Revolutionary British writing reconfigured in an era intensely attuned to national stories within a comparative imaginary that acknowledged (and denied) its shared linguistic identity and literary inheritance with the erstwhile colony which from being an extension of itself had now to be thought of as its transatlantic other. As, ideologically, they separated, each literature became national, and liable to the newly constituted other. Pursuing the question of how readers imagine resemblance, this chapter outlines some parameters for a comparative criticism that supplements sequential historical narrative (with its implied linearity and progressive or regressive trajectory), with rhetorical structures able to hold competing or antithetical ‘truths’ in tense simultaneity. Recognising the verbal density of trope and its narrative extension in character enables a ‘thick’ form of transatlantic comparison in which literary considerations take equal place with the historical, and national intentions are supplemented by transnational effects.

I: Transatlantic If all judgment is comparative, a particular comparison may only be justifiable (perhaps even identifiable) in terms of its specialness: the features that mark it as unique or different. But ‘special relationships’ of all kinds have taken on a suspect air of political pleading. We have had good reason to question the rhetoric of uniqueness, ‘chosenness’ or ‘manifest destiny’. The

‘But is analogy argument?’

7

documented connectedness of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world is substantial and significant across intellectual, religious, educational, commercial and medical contexts; the texture of ‘likeness’ in its literature is less amenable to teleological narrative sequences. Equally, similarity is never identity; it also comprehends unlikeness, and acknowledges the uniqueness of the particular in context. Time and sequence in literary history are essential parameters in productive tension with the kinds of comparative poetics proposed here on the argument from analogy as a mode of rhetoric (understood as the study of the art of language use), and the special senses in which in literature analogy may become a form of argument. The distinctive field of the ‘transatlantic’ is historically, etymologically and semantically rooted in rhetorical trope. The earliest dictionary reference to the term comes from political history: The Oxford English Dictionary cites Thomas Jefferson in 1782, doubting ‘whether nature has enlisted herself as a cis- or trans-Atlantic partisan’, at a time when the Revolutionary war which would establish the separate existence of colonial America from metropolitan Britain was as yet undecided. In this early example, the definition is inseparable from rhetorical figuration. ‘Nature’ does not yet carry the full Wordsworthian freight of unchanging value; ‘she’ is a transitive force, whose endorsement will make history. Process, not state, is at issue. Jefferson’s ‘doubt’ embeds the political and moral questions surrounding the patriot case within much older rhetorical formulae: personification or prosopopoeia, and the classical trope of translatio studii et imperii, the rhetorical rationale for temporal or spatial translation of cultural and political legitimacy which assumed that virtues flee a decadent civilisation for a simpler, regenerate one. Norman kings invoked the trope of translatio imperii to explain and justify the transfer of power from the classical civilisations to the French, and thence to England. They devised the foundational myth of King Brutus of Troy, who instituted the kingdom of ‘Britain’ (Jefferson drew on this story when he sought an appropriate name and official seal for the new nation which embraced its destiny to inherit British imperial grandeur). The trope proclaimed the virtue of the new in transferring ethical authority from received to ‘natural’ or uncorrupted usage; it encompassed linguistic translation, too, understood as skillful weaving of recognised patterns and elements into a new web of relationships.4 In classical rhetoric the figure of metaphor traditionally embodied the handing across or over of meaning. The Latin trope of translatio is, in Greek, metaphora (meta: over, phereia: to carry). According to George

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Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), poets employ ‘the figure of transport’ either through need – a poverty in descriptive vocabulary – or for pleasure, the ‘transport of delight’; he regarded it as a particularly treacherous trope, an insinuator of covert implication, whose fulfilment is achieved in the compact between formal constraint and semantic possibility.5 James Fenimore Cooper deprecated Walter Scott’s ‘feudal’ style as a pernicious model for an American writer, as an influence which ‘pervades his writings, not in professions, but in the deep insinuating current of feeling, and in a way, silently and stealthily, to carry with it the sympathies of the reader’.6 This is a metaphor – in Puttenham’s sense – of hierarchical principles carried like a Trojan horse into the fabric of democratic American prose. Metaphor’s peculiar double status is an expression, and an embodiment, of transitivity: it is a form of connection which moves away from the centrifugal or hierarchical towards the relational. Mapping the temporal axis of historical destiny (the verticality of influence) onto spatial form, the transference that metaphors accomplished (the translatio) was available for national self-articulation. For Dugald Stewart, a Scottish Enlightenment professor whose work Ralph Waldo Emerson studied at Harvard, metaphors were ‘necessarily . . . transitive expression[s]’; they embodied contingency and latitude of connection in their very articulation.7 ‘Transference’ was Stewart’s term for the ‘perception of relations’ that metaphor embodied; his philosophical distinction between ‘responsible’ and ‘capricious’ transference addressed the problem of scepticism: the spectre of random relatedness raised by the absence of demonstrable causation.8 Stewart’s notion of the ‘transitive’ allowed for contingency of connection, not organic or intrinsic relationship – a distinction between the hierarchical form of linking preferred by what I provisionally term an English (‘Wordsworthian’) Romanticism and a transatlantic version embodied in Transcendentalism: the ‘going beyond’, over, which transformed as it translated. The immense impress of Wordsworth’s poetry notwithstanding, ‘America’ itself was ideologically construed in the nineteenth century as an emigrant, polyglot nation founded on transitivity and transference. Jefferson’s revolutionary ‘doubt’ as to whether ‘Nature’ had made the transatlantic crossing, to seal the victory for America and smooth the transport of Empire and cultural authority, retained the etymological and semantic link of the term to geographical adjectives and noun compounds with a spatial sense built in: ‘situated or lying beyond or on the other side of’, as The Oxford English Dictionary has it. ‘Transatlantic’ and ‘Transcendental’ are semantically entwined through the common crossing root ‘trans-’. A much older tradition of rhetorical analysis acquired new associations:

‘But is analogy argument?’

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because its referent was not primarily subject matter but a manner of rhetorical relation, ‘transatlantic’ had implications not only for the particular comparison of American and British Romanticism but also – given the post-Romantic cast of all American (as all modern) writing – for a wider stylistics of comparison based in figurative ways of perceiving and expressing relation, ‘thinking across’. Although comparative connections may, of course, be made across a rich linguistic range I limit myself here to Anglophone transatlantic writing, where the grounds for comparison are not primarily found in language difference, and verbal resonance can be traced with some exactitude. In their shared historical, genealogical and – above all – linguistic traditions, and in their lateral geographical situations, transatlantic texts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were at once distinctive and representative of other relational conditions that offered grounds for comparison. Comparison tends, however, to be an effective discriminatory tool in proportion to the proximity of the terms it brings into alignment; the greater the variables – of time, space, language, cultural reference and so on – the more uncertain must be any conclusions about particular causes and effects. The demonstrable closeness of Anglophone cultural expression and implicative reach on both sides of the Atlantic is, then, the primary rationale for the kind of comparison this book proposes. The Atlantic is a topographical feature; the term is also a representation of space, crossing, difference. With the addition of the prefix ‘trans-’ it becomes a trope, a metaphor for metaphor, a way of thinking about cognition through comparison. ‘Transatlantic’ reading in the senses I develop here may nonetheless take a number of forms. It may describe a literary work whose action takes place on both sides of the Atlantic, or as a consequence of an Atlantic passage (James Fenimore Cooper’s Home as Found, Herman Melville’s Redburn, Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit). It may also describe a way of reading: the process of textual comparison or correspondence between British and American writers (George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe; the poems of Robert Burns and his American avatars); or between a ‘British’ and a ‘North American’ work (Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’ and his Canadian nephew and namesake’s ‘The Rising Village’). And – most cautiously – I read Jane Austen’s Persuasion as exemplifying the possibility that at a more figurative level such poetics may be a fruitful form of reading character in a work which has no literal transatlantic content as a component of plot or theme. In all cases the claims of the approach are based not on extrinsic grounds of authorship, geographical placement or recovery of historical readers reading, but in the critical potential of a particular practice of comparison continuous with

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eighteenth-century thinking that expressed itself pre-eminently in relational modes of perception and understanding. Foregrounding a shared history in epistemology and rhetoric, this chapter traces the conditions for an ethic and aesthetic of comparison that loosens a ‘historical’ sense of the inevitable priority of the ‘English’ or ‘British’ over the American. Negotiations between ‘literary’ and ‘historical’ forms of understanding look rather different when literary relations are considered not in terms of documentary connections in historical sequence but as practices that perform an idea of character as represented in embedded acts of textual correspondence. Describing defensible relationships between national character (as representation rather than essence) and literary style in transnational contexts will involve, among other things, exploring issues of representation and performance in relation to specific character types, the association of character-building with nation-building, and how representations reach out to readers through character.

II: History and rhetoric However qualified by the encounters of his travels, Imlac’s faith in ‘the progress of the human mind, the gradual improvement of reason’ had a firm foundation in contemporary thought. The four-stage or stadialist theory of human society developed by Henry Home (Lord Kames), William Robertson and Adam Smith in the middle decades of the eighteenth century shaped narratives of progression not only in history, but across a spectrum of knowledge. It was committed to understanding conditions for the evolution of society and for the emergence and decline of nations, as part of a ‘science of man’ – the study of human life in all its aspects – which stimulated a range of new disciplinary frameworks built on an evolutionary model, from developmental psychology to literary history and comparative literature. What Stewart would retrospectively call ‘conjectural’ or ‘philosophical’ history posited that knowledge gleaned evidentially from one context might legitimately be transferred as a conjectural truth in relation to another historical situation observed at a similar point of societal development, without implying identity or causal connection between them.9 So a nation’s history might be read either vertically through the succession of ‘stages’ of development, or transversely in comparison with other societies in different geographical situations. After Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) had drawn a comparison between American Indians and Scottish highlanders as societies in similar primitive states of development, both would become favourite fantasy figures in Romantic transatlantic

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writing, with the generic character of ‘the’ Indian much discussed by writers who never came close to meeting a real one. Conjectural history effectively mapped history and geography onto one another, generating imagined correspondences perceived across a universal succession of time. ‘Civil society’ was a historiographic construct designating the final stage in the ordered sequence through which all societies were presumed to pass in progression from savagery to maturity; only in this state would human activity display its most complex characteristics and potential, including individual distinction and the collective identity represented by nation and nationality. Character became something of an ideological battleground in this historiography. Robertson’s celebrated The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769) attempted to explain the life of the monarch largely in terms of the prevailing historical pressures he saw confronting sixteenth-century Europe. From the title of the panoramic first volume, A View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Sixteenth Century (devoted in its entirety to charting ‘the great steps by which [the peoples of Europe] progressed from barbarism to refinement’), to its sweep across a period when the fortunes of all the individual countries advanced in tandem following the collapse of the Empire, Robertson’s History was an exemplary instance of stadialist principles.10 The historian sharply distinguished his intention to ‘record only those great transactions in his reign, the effects of which were universal, or continue to be permanent’, from the efforts of Charles’ biographers to ‘describe his personal qualities and actions’ (Preface, p. iv). His friend Hume had hoped for something different: on reading the eagerly anticipated work, he complained in a letter to Hugh Blair that ‘[n]either the Character of Charles V, nor the Incidents of his Life are very interesting; and were it not for the first Volume, the Success of this work, tho’ perfectly well writ, woud [sic] not have been so shining.’11 When Hume’s own History of England appeared, on the other hand, readers faulted it for ‘novelistic’ delineations of character. Character had become the locus for a disciplinary boundary dispute. History and Literature emerged as subjects of instruction separate from moral philosophy in the modern university curriculum as a consequence of the reorientation of the province of rhetoric, whose primary purpose was to teach students to deploy an appropriate and effective style – written, spoken and in deportment – essential to their becoming participants in civil society. Rhetoric had enjoyed unbroken disciplinary prestige in medieval and Renaissance pedagogy. In the reformed Arts curricula of the Scottish universities (Oxford and Cambridge – the only two English universities until their monopoly ended in 1832 – did not reform their curricula until after 1858) study of the Aristotelian ethos and techne of persuasion attached to

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various professorial dynasties until the establishment in 1762 of the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in Edinburgh, with Blair as its first incumbent, registered a definitive shift from the orbit of Logic and Metaphysics to that of polite letters and principles of criticism. Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), based on the course he delivered to students for twenty years, systematically conscripted stadial historiography to shaping a new academic field. Dedicated to investigating the active relationships between mind and language and describing the interrelated history of their development, the ‘New Rhetoric’ of which he was the most prominent exponent began to claim both additional territory and scientific authority. Blair’s first lecture declared the study of ‘writing and discourse’ to be a necessary function of ‘nations in a civilized state’.12 Custom (a crucial term) authorised particular uses of language and enabled communication between users; more than that, it was the key to the reconstruction of human nature as manifest in social environments. Discussing the ‘Rise and Progress of Language, and of Writing’, he outlined a stadial history of poetical and rhetorical advance: ‘[t]he Progress of Language . . . resembles the progress of age in man. The imagination is most vigorous and predominant in youth; with advancing years, the imagination cools, and the understanding ripens. Thus Language, proceeding from sterility to copiousness, hath, at the same time, proceeded from vivacity to accuracy; from fire and enthusiasm, to coolness and precision’ (LRBL, v. i, p. 124). Descriptions of common language use rapidly encountered the inseparability of denotation from figuration. Stewart, whose philosophical work would also become an internationally prominent college text, fitted his account of the correspondences in primitive speech into a stadial frame: ‘In the language . . . of the rudest tribe, we find words transferred from one subject to another, which indicate in the mind of the individual who first made the transference some perception of resemblance or of analogy. Such transferences can hardly be ascribed to accident.’13 These ‘transferences’ were embodied in metaphor, which Blair described as a ‘figure founded . . . on the resemblance which one object bears to another’ (LRBL, v. i, p. 295). Tropes of comparison structured language at its earliest stages and were constitutively embedded in the processes of human understanding. Metaphor and metonymy – equally historically grounded in Enlightenment thought as were national narratives of origin and special destiny – were constituted the primary rhetorical tropes of correspondence. They offered potentially more responsive, less deterministic structures for a historical rhetoric of sympathy and comparison. They did, however, carry their own hazards of rhetorical simplification.

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Rhetoric codified individual and social principles of connection appropriate to civil society. Belief in the universality of human nature gave these principles a general claim, with teaching geared towards particular characterbuilding lessons for individual readers. Smith, Blair and their successors advised reading literature and history as opportunities for ethical, aesthetic and political education through the study of character. Character was the expression of taste and moral sentiment performed in an advanced civil state of society (lacking developed social relations, savages would not display selfcontrol or self-cultivation, and would be incapable of ethical judgment). Gender was assumed in these pedagogical texts as was the empirical base of this teaching in the needs of commercial society: their original audiences were young men equipping themselves to enter public life. In popular form in conduct and commonplace books, domestic manuals on how to bring up children, literary essays, poetry and novels, their ideas reached a much wider audience of women readers, self-taught artisans and educators equally anxious to attain and reap the material benefits of politeness. The issue of who possessed and who ‘owned’ character became a pressing concern of nineteenth-century English liberalism. ‘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’, wrote J. S. Mill in 1859; ‘one whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has a character.’14 The rhetoric had powerful purchase on the intersection of character projection with transatlantic politics and gender relations. Equally, as I suggest in an extended consideration of ‘characterless women’ in Chapters 3 and 4, the contextual constraints of gender held poetic possibilities for textual performances of character as figures of transatlantic textual and ethical negotiation, and the expression of nationhood. Alexander Pope associated ‘the characters of women’ with uncontrolled or uncontrollable semantic excesses of metaphor to inform a developing ethics and poetics of female characters in poetry and fiction. As Ellen Spolsky wittily puts it, metaphors ‘breed promiscuously in the brain, producing analogies among unconnected or incommensurable ideas’.15 As such, the woman of no character may represent simultaneously moral indictment and poetic possibility.

III: Character and correspondence Enlightenment teaching described a symbiotic relationship between ethos and character which amounted to a mutually constitutive correspondence of representation and response. Correspondence was a form of analogy that

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built propriety and proportion into human relations. To correspond, in Johnson’s definition, was ‘[t]o suit; to answer; to be proportionate; to be adequate to; to be adapted; to fit.’16 The sense of propriety – what is proper to a given situation – implied both responsiveness to and responsibility for the other. The modern etymology of correspondence declares that ‘the word was formed to express mutual response, the answering of things to each other’; at least since the 1630s when John Milton used it in this sense, ‘correspondence’ has compounded letter writing with a hermeneutics of conjunction: knowledge generated in a specifically dialogic rather than a scholastic framework, by comparing, bringing together.17 To answer, and to be answerable for, involves responsiveness, and – again – responsibility. A poetically founded notion of correspondence offers additional possibilities for correspondence as an issue of shared grammar from which moral inference is never distant, as in (again following The Oxford English Dictionary) ‘[a]nswering to or agreeing with something else in the way of likeness of relation or analogy; analogous, or having an analogous relation to’, for which the dictionary adduces the examples of, firstly, Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature: ‘every simple impression [has] a correspondent idea’, and secondly, Emerson: ‘the poet cannot see a natural phenomenon which does not express to him a correspondent fact in his mental experience’. In the interim, the aesthetics of correspondence was a lively matter of philosophical discussion. Francis Hutcheson described it in terms of ‘fit’ between subject and manner: ‘it is by Resemblance that the Similitudes, Metaphors and Allegorys are made beautiful . . . this is the foundation of the Rule of studying Decency in Metaphors and Similys as well as Likeness’.18 What kind of argument is able to persuade its reader of the truth of its position? Hutcheson notes that judgment is based on analogy and distinction, not on logical proof. Reasoning that carries conviction depends on the reader’s acknowledgement and recognition of the ‘probability’ of the likeness. Style shows character, which in turn may instruct in how to write character, how to perform character in writing. This always implies communication, an audience whose sympathetic understanding will be elicited by proper expression. Character, that is, is verbally and conceptually relational, whether we think of it in terms either of Aristotelian ethos or of pathos. Criticism, as Smith practiced it in his lectures on rhetoric, corresponded to Locke’s definition of reasoning in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding as the act of considering the agreement and congruity, or disagreement and incongruity, of ideas. Reasoning, like criticism, was comparative, analogical, even tropological, at its core. Thomas Reid’s

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account in 1764 of the origins of empirical inquiry, and the concept of ‘knowledge’ itself pursued a similar logic: ‘all natural philosophy’ springs ‘from the same root in human nature’, ‘an eager desire to find out connections in things’.19 Blair defined epistolary correspondence as ‘conversation carried on upon paper, between two friends at a distance’ (LRBL, v. ii, p. 297). Representation and reading of character were in all these contexts ethical practices of correspondence with others, pedagogical implementations of a Shaftesburian ideal of modern society as a cultured conversation between equals. Blair’s sermons, equally, preached a doctrine of character cultivation through improving social relations and personal discipline, as the function of our sojourn in what John Keats would later call ‘[t]he vale of Soul-making’ of this world in preparation for the next.20 Through the ethical pedagogy of Rhetoric, character-in-correspondence was established at the nexus of meaning and value in literary texts, and as the location of affect for the reader. The aspiration to correspondence (that self-confirming moment of connection) rebalanced ‘literary’ and ‘history’ as experiential categories in apposition. Literary correspondence differs from simple analogy in requiring attention to rhetorical mediation. It is the means or medium (or sometimes the figure of a medium) within which character is produced. Reciprocally, as an effect of correspondence, character returns and reproduces correspondent relations. Both as acts of writing and of reading, correspondence and character are, then, performative categories. They are seen at their richest, least stable and most elusive in Emerson’s essays, as much states of aspiration, as ways of being-in-writing. They emerge from the verbal flux of his notoriously shifting prose as fleetingly glimpsed moments of enacted identity, where each sentence is poetically rather than logically or causally related to those on either side; the prose’s encounter with an audience requires energetic, relational reading. Mobile, unfixed perceptions detach and repair to create new correspondences within (as Leon Chai puts it) ‘a kaleidoscope of endless possibilities’.21 Barbara Packer has stressed ‘the necessity and the precariousness’ in his work, ‘of “coincidence” of vision as mediation between self and world’.22 This sense of non-timebound but meaningful contingency, along with Emerson’s belief that symbolic correspondences are achieved with the mediating agency of mind, make the required imaginative act of realisation. As I consider them in the following chapters, Emerson’s notorious refusals of relation appear as characteristically transatlantic gestures of engagement, with the full measure of paradox that this implies. Stanley Cavell’s comment on Emerson’s ‘[c]haracter teaches above our wills’ in ‘[s]elf-Reliance’ sets a benchmark for the inextricable

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reciprocity of inscription and enactment: ‘the use of “character,” as always in Emerson, signifies human individual formation simultaneously with the forms of writing. So the whole statement of character as at every moment emitting breath contains a theory of writing that is the counter to a theory – or to a picture – of ‘intention.’23 Intention is born in expression, and concludes in it. That ‘character teaches above our wills’ is entirely contiguous with the ethical message Enlightenment Rhetoric aimed to inculcate in its students. Its embodiment in essay form enacts the lesson as a process of engagement.

IV: Literary history and nation As Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Robert Crawford, John Guillory and others have argued, literary history had from the outset a complex relationship with nations and nationality. Eighteenth-century criticism took on the ‘project of building a national culture’ through writing the history of the nation’s literature as a trajectory of antecedents and successors kept in order by identification of sources and influences.24 Praising Thomas Warton’s Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (1754; 1762), Johnson acknowledged his contribution to ‘the advancement of the literature of our native Country’. ‘You have shewn to all, who shall hereafter attempt the study of our ancient authors, the way to success; by directing them to the perusal of the books which these authors had read.’25 A canon based on a succession of writers and works, ancestors and descendants, with the later works more refined (and more rational, if less poetic) than the forebears on whose shoulders they climbed, was one development of progressive historiography that established a field of contention between source-hunting scholarship and the reprinting culture of the market. As histories of literature became preoccupied by concerns for origins and originality which we now describe as ‘Romantic’, they also began to ask regressive questions about the naturalness of a national literary voice at its source, and its degeneration through time from that purity. Opening up the conditions of the ‘historical situation’ as itself a product of Romanticism, James Chandler’s England in 1819 has shown how the distinction between ‘writings as marking and making history’ emerged from specific circumstances that combined to generate a ‘historicist’ concept of culture which still, broadly, pertains.26 Borrowing Chandler’s term, I shall argue that the literary-historical ‘case’ may signal a rhetorical enactment of relationship particularly appropriate to transatlantic comparison which retains both the particularity of any individual act of literary expression and the plurality of its connections.

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Textual exegesis using methods borrowed from biblical studies gained authority as an epistemological tool sensitive to historical context. From the end of the eighteenth century (according to Martin Thom’s argument about a Romantic period transition from cities to nations as focal points of affiliation) it consolidated the international framework that allowed national literary characteristics to be identified as dissimilar or particular. Stories of uniqueness were ratified, implicitly or explicitly, by comparison with other literary cultures at comparable, or indeed different, stages of development. Ideas about the natural or authentic voice of what the German admirer of ‘English’ literary tradition Johann Gottfried von Herder construed as an ethnically cohesive Volk became national stories in whose context individual works and writers expressed themselves. The first systematic work of ‘comparative literature’, Germaine de Staël’s De la Littérature (1800), derived its comparisons from strong differentiation of national characteristics: the English were humorous, the Italians passionate, the French specialised in ‘charm’, ‘taste’ and ‘levity’; in each case their literature reflected the characterisation.27 Literature was peculiar to the nation that supported it; the history of a literature revealed national character. Comparative Literature, a disciplinary product of Romanticism, invoked organic growth and succession, and tradition, as explanatory narratives established by study of sources and transmission in the form of library borrowings, citations, reviews or other externally documented forms of literary relation. In 1828 Thomas Carlyle pointed to a ‘remarkable increase of nationality’ in British literature of the previous half century.28 He attributed its accentuation in Scottish writing in particular to reaction against a period of assimilation following the parliamentary Union with England of 1707, during which a proud old independent national culture had been – so his argument went – systematically suppressed in favour of imitation and a spurious cosmopolitanism.29 Well before 1776 both colonial and British polemicists discussed what might constitute distinctively ‘American’ writing: topography, language, distinctive institutions, modern urban life and commerce, a Puritan inheritance, were only some of the possible loci in which it was found to reside. In the first half of the nineteenth century the ‘national’ credentials of different writers were a lively source of dispute: was Washington Irving too deferential to European prejudices, and too smooth a stylist? Did Cooper’s attraction to aristocratic mores and dislike of demagoguery disqualify him from the position of America’s first great national writer, notwithstanding the undisputed originality of his character Natty Bumppo?

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During a visit to England between 1824 and 1827 John Neal wrote a series of papers for Blackwood’s Magazine on the new American literature, and a novel of American character, Brother Jonathan, or The New-Englander (1825), in which American speech, manners and preoccupations are put on display. ‘Character’ or ‘Characters’ appear repeatedly in the by-lines of Neal’s chapters, but the attitude of the narrative voice is unstably poised on its transatlantic axis. The more overtly American character is on display in the characters’ idiom, the more intense the allusiveness to English literature: Jonathan Peters, in the first place, was an American; one of that singular people, who know a little, and but a little, of every thing . . . he was a Yankee, the very character of whom is, that he can ‘turn his hand,’ as he says, ‘to any thing.’ This was the character of a New Englander, half a century ago: it is perfectly true of him, now.30

There’s a quibble here with Scott’s Waverley, or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, whose chronological back-pedal stressed rapid changes to Scottish national sensibility wrought by the passage of time. The action begins ‘[o]ne Saturday night’ in the parlour of Abraham Harwood, shortly before the end of the colonial period, with a reference to Burns’ poem ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’. The narrator urges the reader to pay ‘particular regard . . . to the peculiarities of language’ as a display of ‘the Yankee character’ (i, p. 34). The subject of discussion is ‘the character of woman’ (i, p. 35). Pope cedes to Austen as ‘A few wise things, and a great many foolish ones, were said’ (i, p. 35).31 Brother Jonathan is indicative: nineteenth-century literary depictions of national character were always at least implicitly comparative and infected by the idiom from which they strove to differentiate themselves. It is an example of the common linguistic condition and referential range which so often frustrated the intentions of originality driving nineteenth-century American nationalist writing. Chapter 2 considers the metaphor of contagion as a hermeneutic aid to tracing dense webs of verbal connection that mutually implicate transatlantic texts. Neal had a particular ideological understanding of the priorities of ‘national’ writing when he chided Irving and Cooper – as others later would Henry James – for spending too long away from the literary raw materials offered by their native land. Cooper’s Gleanings in Europe (1837) registers his frustration with this strain of judgment: ‘There is a morbid feeling in the American public . . . which will even uphold an inferior writer, so long as he aids in illustrating the land and water, which is their birthright.’32 More aesthetically pointed was Edgar Allan Poe’s observation in the Broadway Journal in 1845 that ‘[m]uch has

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been said, of late, about the necessity of maintaining a proper nationality in American Letters; but what this nationality is . . . has never been distinctly understood. That an American should confine himself to American themes, or even prefer them, is rather a political than a literary idea – and at best is a questionable point.’33 In 1846 Margaret Fuller declared that ‘[b]ooks which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature.’34 A year or so later, her own letters from Rome to the New-York Tribune would qualify that absolute view.

V: Character, rhetoric and identity Progressive historiography and the stadial tracing of national literary origins were challenged on both ideological and literary grounds even before protoRomantic primitivism began to exalt savage over civilised perception. Twelve years after Alexander Pope’s death (and three years before Rasselas) Thomas Warton’s elder brother Joseph’s Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756) argued that the poet’s technical sophistication did not make him a greater poetic genius than his forebears Spenser, Shakespeare or Milton, whose works demonstrated imagination and passion beyond the reach of correctness. The question of genius troubled sweeping narratives of historical progress. Furthermore, within the pedagogical context in which it was delivered, the stadialist story of the history of literary succession was only a small part of the intention and impact of the New Rhetoric. Even in its novel conjunction with belles lettres, Rhetoric remained an ethical discipline of real moment, continuous with its classical function in the character formation of virtuous citizens, but reformed for a written culture. The Rhetorics of Aristotle and Cicero taught that speech created an impression of the speaker, and passionate style was a mark of conviction of character; conversely, becoming a character was a matter of acquiring a distinct style or persona. ‘Pathos’ (emotion) and ‘ethos’ (character) were complementary. New Rhetoric confronted the problem of ethos in print culture, where the presence of the speaker in person was no longer available to guarantee the character of his words. Smith’s lectures, given in Glasgow and then in Edinburgh and extensively circulated as notes, were heavily drawn on by Blair and through his influence passed on to generations of students in Britain and America in addition to being widely circulated in a variety of popular admonitory and pedagogical forms. In their insistence on rhetoric as the expression of character Smith’s lectures were indicative of wider cultural analysis: ‘When the characters of a plain and a simple man are so different we may naturally expect that the stile they express themselves in

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will be far from being the same’; or again, ‘as Lysias studied the Character of a Simple man, so his narration is altogether suitable to that Character’.35 Rhetoric was, then, about more than teaching self-presentation to relatively privileged young men. It took on a defining and stabilising function for personal identity in the context of contemporary shocks in epistemology. The empirical method of philosophical reasoning dominant since Locke indirectly brought about a philosophical weakening of the trajectory of cause and effect as an epistemological explanation of relationships between elements in chronological sequence. This brought with it a questioning of teleologically orientated narrative. Hume’s Treatise pointed to the impossibility of empirical certainty about the nature of connections between two successive observed events or phenomena; ‘[a]ll kinds of reasoning consist in nothing but a comparison, and a discovery of those relations, either constant or inconstant, which two or more objects bear to each other’.36 Succession and contiguity, Hume infamously concluded, do not require a productive or causal relation between the first term and the second. If, as Hume seemed further to suggest, personal identity and character were neither intrinsic nor causally formed, then the sense of self was contingent or even fictional, the product of an act – willed, semiconscious or unconscious – of deliberate self-articulation. Learning the art of self-expression therefore became a constituent part of the process of achieving selfhood. Character, thus produced, and sustained through ‘habit’ or ‘custom’ (p. 197), was a defence against scepticism in that it provided a rationale for consistent conduct and self-esteem, although (as I argue later) self-awareness might itself be a sign of the possibility of scepticism. Mitigated scepticism of this kind was – to borrow another of Hume’s terms – ‘conversible’: it believed in correspondence with others as a possible, though not exclusive, modus vivendum and the surest path to happiness in the world.37 The Treatise suggested that philosophy needed to adjust to the idea of knowledge as a process of mind in the act of manufacturing connections, with the concomitant possibility that the largest epistemological concerns may collapse into those of language: ‘All the disputes concerning the identity of connected objects are merely verbal, except so far as the relation of parts gives rise to some fiction or imaginary principle of union’ (p. 262). Edging back from metaphysics to something more like a philosophy of presence, Hume made the ‘character of the philosopher’ a matter of what the philosopher does rhetorically. The first book of the Treatise figured Hume’s intrepid but fearful narrative voice in an image with striking transatlantic resonance, ‘like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap’d ship-wreck in passing a

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small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weatherbeaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances’ (pp. 263–64). The empirical method takes its toll on the inquirer in a fashion that would later come to characterise a ‘Romantic’ sensibility: Hume’s thought experiments into his own identity induced disorientation akin to Humphry Davy’s inhalation of laughing gas half a century later. The attenuated resonance of this voice, brought back under navigational control, inflects Stewart’s metaphor for philosophical authority: ‘It is they alone who are acquainted with all the circumstances of a long voyage – with the variable winds and the accidental currents, according to which the pilot was forced, from time to time, to shape his course – who are able to pronounce on his attention and skill as a navigator.’38 Reliable observation and description of human nature depend on experience; as often in the Treatise, Hume’s use of language reveals how closely he must have been reading Pope; the authority of the shipwrecked philosopher-persona is that ‘He best can paint ’em, who shall feel ’em most.’39 The metaphoric chain is a useful tool for thinking with: there is, that is, no need to posit a causal connection (in the form of influence, for example) or a common source between Hume’s image of epistemological disorientation and Melville’s narrator describing his character Bartleby as ‘a bit of a wreck in the mid Atlantic’ for the image to resonate transatlantically to the enrichment of a reading of both texts. Voice, style and character all belong to what in a different context Timothy Gould has called an ‘interlocking network’ of performances.40 The conclusion to Treatise Book i refuses to allow a separation between philosophical propositions as ‘movements of thought’ and as ‘rhetorical gestures’; its meaning lies somewhere between metaphor and metaphysics.41 Indeed, the recovery from sceptical despair involves a change of voice rather than a philosophical argument (or, rather, the latter is the former), as through the assertion of ‘nature’ the melancholy self re-finds its character and anchorage in sociable exchange. Character mitigated the present possibility of scepticism uncovered by empiricism. It might even solicit, like the persona of the needy philosopher adrift with his fears of monstrosity, the poetic illusion of intimacy (an opportunity that will be explored in Pope’s ‘Epistle to a Lady’, and in the correspondence of Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James). At the fictional edges of realism (well practiced throughout eighteenth-century novels and revived in Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857)) writing inhabited the thought that character might be only a series of poses adopted and discarded over an insubstantial formal frame designated as

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biography or autobiography. It was a possibility (acknowledged or otherwise) always there after the mid-eighteenth century; sociability and legible character were at least in part compacts that dampened its realisation. ‘Character’ was a mode of self-projection as much as it was – or later became – a publicly performed mode of enacted selfhood within a prevailing ethos of empiricism; transparency could not be assumed between strangers, and careful reading of its appearances was essential (as Henry Fielding advised) in circumstances where hypocrisy was an ever-present temptation of self-fashioning.42 Paul de Man’s assertion that Rhetoric ‘is not in itself an historical but an epistemological discipline’ is manifest in eighteenth-century pedagogical organisation, which developed analytic disciplinary parameters for literary and historical writing in which character was both the vehicle of sympathy – what carried a speaker into relation with his audience – and its product.43

VI: Society and custom The philosopher Charles Taylor derives ‘[t]he modernist retrieval of experience’ from Hume’s ‘profound breach in the received sense of identity and time’. As a result of this, he argues: ‘the epiphanic centre of gravity begins to be displaced from the self to the flow of experience, to new forms of unity, to language conceived in a variety of ways – eventually even as a “structure”. Thus begins an age of “decentring” subjectivity . . . Decentring is not the alternative to inwardness; it is its complement.’44 In a seeming paradox this supported both the idea of innate ‘natural’ character, and character as the product of careful cultivation which enabled sociable relations in civil society. The rhetorical reading of character needs to be set in apposition to a set of historical circumstances. Widely expanded opportunities for social interaction afforded by better communications, improved mobility of wealth and increasing diversification of employment characterised British society in the eighteenth century. Always established by implicit or explicit comparison, ‘character’ was partly a means for designating terms of interaction between strangers, a possible solution to the puzzle of how to ‘read’ others in a rhetorical world in which criteria of legibility based in local relations and physical presence no longer pertained. In both textual and extra-textual worlds, ‘character’ was a product of the most developed form of human interaction and social expression. But it was also a means of reading, and the guarantor of ‘credit’ when the basis for social relations shifted from kinship or religious covenant to civil contract and market exchange. In an increasingly mobile environment the cultivation of personal

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qualities and their public display became, as Lawrence Klein has argued, a key to self-advancement.45 The ethical project of class consolidation within the Anglo-American culture of print capitalism was an essential aspect of what Thomas Augst has called ‘the moral economy of literacy’.46 Augst’s compelling account of character formation through self-cultivation and copying in the diaries and correspondence of clerks in nineteenth-century America is an exemplary case study in the capacity of writing to produce, transmit and valorise character between individuals and within a society. Through acquisition of rhetorical skills a young man of modest means might generate the kind of self-worth and social status previously associated with ‘family’ and connections. The literary contours of what we identify as (and with) in modern characters are inseparable from a crisis in moral authority brought about by changing social, political and economic terms of relationship. Even at its most ‘private’ in eighteenth-century writing, in diaries and commonplace books, ‘character’ was understood discursively, at points of transaction where projected identity encountered a social context. Never straightforwardly a textual mirror for some essential extra-textual reality of personal identity, character might be ‘produced’ in a reader by imitation of good models in literature. Eighteenth-century Rhetoric placed character at the juncture of social, political and ethical formations, rather as gender has more recently been construed: learned, performative and conditioned. As manifest in behavior character was typical and individual, unique and generic; it was repeatable and recognisable, but also what marked its possessor out as possessing differentiated and particular features. Hume’s enunciation of the principles of ethical character in his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals related morality to the consensual foundation of language that enacts its outcome. He showed that justice depends on custom and casuistry: Were the interests of society nowise concerned, it is as unintelligible why another’s articulating certain sounds implying consent, should change the nature of my actions with regard to a particular object, as why the reciting of a liturgy by a priest, in a certain habit and posture, should dedicate a heap of brick and timber, and render it, thenceforth and for ever, sacred.47

A long explanatory note advanced what amounts to a social theory of ethics and jurisprudence in terms of a rhetorical category of performativity. Hume resolved philosophical questions around intentionality and performance by appealing to social utility as the measure and arbiter of justice and of morality. Like many of their contemporaries Hume and Smith were

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fascinated by Jesuit casuistry, in particular the way its ‘subtilties of reasoning’ inculcated social morality from an entirely internal grammatical logic.48 Attempting to account for universal distrust of ‘these casuists’, Hume attributed it to the recognition that ‘every one perceived, that human society could not subsist were such practices authorized, and that morals must always be handled with a view to public interest, more than philosophical regularity’ (Enquiry, p. 200). What later exponents of performativity such as Jacques Derrida and J. L. Austin would refer to as the iterative or ritual aspect of discourse, Hume called ‘custom’: the shared conventions of language use that enable singularity. It is only in the context of similarity (the conditions of ‘common life’) that difference can be recognised. He described the relation of custom to the formation and refinement of character: Custom soon reconciles us to heights and precipices, and wears off . . . false and delusive terrors. The reverse is observable in the estimates which we form of characters and manners; and the more we habituate ourselves to an accurate scrutiny of morals, the more delicate feeling do we acquire of the most minute distinctions between vice and virtue . . . Experience being chiefly what forms the associations of ideas, it is impossible that any association could establish and support itself, in direct opposition to that principle. (Enquiry, pp. 217–18)

Throughout this discussion of justice and morality, as elsewhere in his epistemology, Hume discards the abstract formulae with which philosophy bolstered its mystique in favour of how words are used consensually, thereby relocating ethics at the junction of rhetoric and epistemology. The affinity of this modus operandi with the practices of twentieth-century ordinary language philosophy will become clear. Discussing the ‘origin and progress of language’, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo deployed similar logic in ways that clarify a principle of reciprocity rather than causality at work. Through language, he argued, ‘we can make ourselves, as it were, over again, so that the original nature in us can hardly be seen; and it is with the greatest difficulty that we can distinguish it from the acquired’.49 Rhetoric taught language as a skill whose proper acquisition would confer power on its user to affect and effect his relations with the world. Humans used language, but they were also known by it; to speak or write was to become the vehicle of expression from which others would infer significance. So an education in rhetoric was equally a matter of learning how its user is identified by language, in order to establish limits on the character thus projected into the world. Knowledge of the normative and

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conventional requirements of language use was essential to the projection of consistent character. Crucially – and this is a distinction from post-modern writing on the verbal construction of reality with which it shares important similarities – eighteenth-century writing also presupposed a rhetoric of the body (expressed in posture, dress, demeanour and so on) which contributed to the performance of character. As we can derive it from surviving lecture notes and his published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, for Smith ethical character was both a willed persona developed over a lifetime commensurate with a narrative of progressive refinement, and a product of unpredictable, unwilled moments in which individuals come into emotional simultaneity with the experience of another. It is how we react in this co-respondent moment, Smith asserted, that both demonstrates and refines the quality of our moral sensibility. The wider the range of correspondent experience in sympathetic relations, the more flexible will be our readings of the characters of others. If stadial theory construed a progressive and subordinating history (whether of literature, nations or emotions), like rhetoric, it actually worked by acts of imaginative sympathy that connected particular pieces of evidence across gaps of knowledge to produce a persuasive narrative with general applicability. Similarly, moral education took the form of directed acts of sympathy with the observed experiences of others that would expand the self’s capacity for judgment in a context of harmonious interaction known as sociability. Character was self-description and self-projection; necessarily, too, it was dialogical, involving (variously) correspondence, friendship, economic, legal or contractual relationship, and comparison – all forms of exchange in which both men and women might participate; an interpolated note in Smith’s Lectures suggests that the language of educated women in conversation may be the optimum medium for polite sociability (LRBL, p. 4). Richard Sennett has recently made an interesting connection with Smith’s theory of sympathy as an ‘eruption’ that pushes us out of linear chronology into a realm of ‘spontaneous time’.50 The reciprocal responsibilities of sympathy brought the emotions of actor (subject) and observer into imagined correspondence and were therefore intrinsic to the cultivation of character. Rhetoric was the medium for the performance of character that vivified the relation of comparison; as agent and vehicle of sympathy character implied different forms of connection between a moment in the historical past and the moment of reading, and between different literary texts. The mechanism (the techne) of sympathy was a form of connection that worked across the stadial structure of progressive history without contradicting its trajectory; readers of Hume’s History of England were

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invited to sympathise across time with the emotions of Mary, Queen of Scots as she bade farewell forever to France; later, Scott would enlist readers’ sympathies for the medieval Jewess Rebecca in Ivanhoe. The issue for rhetoric (as, I shall suggest, for modern comparative criticism) was how language might operate to engage a reader’s or a listener’s recognition of and fellow-feeling for the experience of a literary subject. Recovering this complementary hermeneutic rooted in correspondence and sympathy is an enabling (as well as a justifying) condition for the kind of analogical thinking involved in a comparative poetics of character.

VII: Writing character Quoting An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Joel Weinsheimer has adduced Locke’s conception of the mind ‘as a document, a charactered tablet’, to argue that ‘emergence of character . . . is not only allied to a documentary philosophy of mind but to the documentary genre’.51 ‘Representation’ and ‘character’ are semantically linked in English, as Smith acknowledged; the examples of The Oxford English Dictionary, dating back to Wyclif and to Caxton, make it clear that discussion of one almost necessarily implicates the other. In the course of the eighteenth century, ‘character’ had a dynamic range of active meanings, in which the literal became invested with the metaphorical; they had in common a concern with representation: either (or both) the printing tool or type, and the mark it inscribed. Noting the pun (‘as we say’), Locke described the mind of an infant at birth as ‘white Paper, void of all Characters’.52 Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language identified eight primary definitions of the word ‘character’, equally divided between personhood and representation: they include letters, marks, writing or forms of impression/inscription. The relevant ones are ‘a representation of any man as to his personal qualities’ and ‘an account of anything as good or bad’: the description one gives of another to get them a job, for example. Additionally, attribution of character to another implied a proprietorial or a patronage relationship, or an assumption of intellectual superiority.53 Typographically, ‘character’ is a replicable mark of composed meaning set by a printer and legible by any reader of the language; the authenticity of the stamp depends on every ‘a’ being recognisably the same in different iterations. The Declaration of Independence’s reference to the ‘distinguished die’ of George III’s iniquities in combination with the personal cruelties of the man would be a later emblematic instance of the doubleness of character as mark or stamp, and personality. As both inscribed letter and manifest identity, it has an

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essentially tropological nature. There is nothing in semantics to support the view that the American association of character with representation was peculiar, either pre- or post-‘print culture’. It appears, rather, that in AngloAmerican culture more broadly, character was a fluid association of selfhood and its representation. Character writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century followed an established exemplary pattern of classical origin, long pre-dating print culture. Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, wrote identificatory typologies of plants, and of people; a sixteenth-century edition by Isaac Casaubon of Theophrastan fragments prompted a revival in Samuel Butler’s satirical Characters of 1667–79, and the Caractères of La Bruyère, which leant more to depiction of ‘inner’ qualities. Many writers tried their hand at the genre, for satirical or hortatory purposes. In 1733 the first of Pope’s Moral Epistles took a broadly Theophrastan line, foregrounding diagnosis of personality over pedagogical efficacy: the ‘Argument’ prefaced to ‘Of the Knowledge and Characters of MEN’ discovered likeness in difference, ‘Some Peculiarity in every man, characteristic to himself, yet varying from himself.’ To ‘form Characters’, he claimed, ‘we can only take the strongest actions of a man’s life, and try to make them agree’.54 Such a character declared its place in the social narrative. To attribute it to another was to exert control over the representation of that position. In the Aristotelian spirit, character was functional, not essential to individuals; its possession and attribution were powerful counters of cultural politics. Hume’s ‘A Character of Sir Robert Walpole’, for example, was printed as the final piece in Essays Moral, Political and Literary a month before the resignation of the most powerful politician of the first half of the century. Its claim to ‘judgment and impartiality’, as Hume’s own ‘Advertisement’ to the volume acknowledged, was tainted by ‘the Antipathy, which every true born Briton naturally bears to Ministers of State’ – but he went ahead and published it anyway, admitting his own propensity to sympathise more with the man after his fall than at his zenith.55 ‘Impartiality’, as all Hume’s philosophy attested, was available only as an ideal to human beings, whose actions were directed always by feelings rather than reason. Smith conceded that the Theophrastan manner of objectivity may be more agreeable in its coherence and exemplary power, but it does not allow for individuality expressed through the accidents of time or individual subjectivity, reflectively created through more or less dramatised representations or impressions. Describing the extreme difficulty of direct description of character, he noted the shortcomings of the Theophrastan approach: ‘It is not so much the degree of Virtue or Vice, probity or

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dishonesty, Courage or Timidity that form the distinguishing part of a character, as the tinctures which these severall parts have received in forming his character’ (LRBL, p. 78). Smith’s concern with these metaphorical ‘tinctures’ conferred by different combinations and intensities of virtues and vices led him to separate narration of ‘Generall tenor of conduct’ from the ‘particular method’ which connected character and specific event. Pursuing this analysis through historiography, in subsequent lectures Smith clearly identified narrative progression, which he called ordering by ‘succession of time’, as the preferred mode of history writing (LRBL, p. 100). Distinguishing between ‘the didactick, oratoricall and the Historicall Stile’, Smith insisted that the methods they take are very different. The Rhetorician will not barely set forth the character of a person as it realy [sic] existed but will magnify every particular that may tend to excite the Strongest emotions in us. He will also seem to be deeply affected with that affection which he would have us feel towards any object . . . The Historian on the conterary [sic] can only excite our affection by the narration of the facts and setting them in as interesting a view as he possibly can. But all exclamations in his own person would not suit with the impartiality he is to maintain and the design he is to have in view of narrating facts as they are without magnifying them or diminishing them. (LRBL, pp. 100–1)

Progressive narration alone might be inadequate to convey the tinctures of complex character in motivation and action; Smith identified a supplementary narrative approach based on contiguity and an affect of sympathy, which he called ‘the Poeticall method, which connects the different facts by some slight circumstances which often had nothing [to do] in the bringing about the series of the events, or by some relation that appears betwixt them’ (LRBL, p. 100). Given Smith’s earlier assertion that ‘[t]he same methods that are proper to describe a Particular character are also applicable to that of a nation’ (p. 82), this distinction is worth pausing over. Ordering by ‘succession of time’ tends to produce national characters and national history; this was Smith’s preferred procedure, and it became the dominant historiographical mode throughout the nineteenth century. But these were lectures on rhetoric, lessons in how effects of character might be achieved in writing; Smith’s analysis concerned itself with bringing History and Rhetoric into alignment, their apparently antithetical aims notwithstanding. As he was well aware, his contemporaries Hume and Robertson were writing histories that overtly called on the affective responses of their readers towards their historical characters. Introducing the ‘Poeticall method’ into historically based discussion of how writing

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achieved its effects, Smith added a significant dimension to narrative comparison that enabled him (and after him Blair) to bring historical representations of character back into relation with the means by which these were conveyed to modern readers: analysis of the ‘flowers of rhetoric’. The readings of character through correspondence and trope offered in Smith’s lectures do not imply an alternative to the method of narrative progression, but a supplement to it which offers particular possibilities for comparative study and post-national historiography. Revisiting the origins of literary history in the context of epistemological and narratological dislocations that Taylor and others have seen as Enlightenment foundations of modern identity enables a significant reorientation in which the driving power of causation and sequence is attenuated in favour of recovering more associative tropic relationships. If Rhetoric, as Smith and Blair perceived, has a history, History has its rhetorics, modus operandi of figurative connection, correspondences between one culture and another realised in trope and analogy. As the new Rhetoric recognised, against the descending movement of influence and development narrative histories of the Enlightenment, an adequate account would identify movements of metaphor and analogy whose correspondences lie with a different kind of thinking, a mode contiguous with the revolutionary epistemology proposed by Hume that most of his contemporaries were at least overtly obliged to disown. Tropes of analogy like metaphor, metonymy and prosopopoeia offer modes of articulating the otherwise elusive process by which (as the historian J. W. Burrow puts it) ‘motifs in a culture float, adhere, and recombine in diverse ways’.56 They may also help to interrogate observed likeness in comparative literary criticism. Character became the category that brought together the literary and the historical. Drawing this kind of history into the realm of the novel, Scott (ever a student of Enlightenment) would later appeal metaphorically to ‘the great book of Nature, the same through a thousand editions’, while creating characters who in Romantic fashion typified the manners of their age and country.57 Chandler locates the ‘distinctive’ quality of this ‘Romantic historicism’ in its interest in ‘“comparative contemporaneities”’.58 In the project to establish the science of human nature Enlightenment epistemology and rhetoric proffered a rationale and a methodology for a comparative literary history of texts linked more by sympathy and imaginative correspondence than by chronological factors of succession or national exclusiveness. Scott’s European and transatlantic successors would develop his narrative model to articulate their own versions of national character within a universalist understanding of human nature. Synchronically juxtaposed

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tales of doubled and fractured identities would develop this tension, invoking correspondential rather than determinative relationships between cause and effect.

VIII: Probability and originality Probability controls our investment in comparisons. Noting its ‘absolute’ necessity in the ‘imagin[ation] of Resemblance’, Francis Hutcheson found that: ‘it is by Resemblance that the Similitudes, Metaphors and Allegorys are made beautiful . . . and this is the foundation of the Rule of studying Decency in Metaphors and Similys as well as Likeness’.59 History is an essential (though not defining) component of the ‘probability’ within which we ‘imagine resemblance’ and create character. Blair made clear that: ‘whether Comparisons be founded on the similitude of the two objects compared, or some analogy and agreement in their effects, the fundamental requisite of a comparison is, that it shall serve to illustrate the object, for the sake of which it is introduced, and to give us a stronger conception of it’ (LRBL, v. i, p. 346). The epistemology and historiography of identity and relation formulated for civil society are themselves enabling practices for reading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic texts in terms more sensitive to literary practice than cultural or political history. From about the mid-eighteenth century interest in character compounded elements of performance (expressing a unique self) that would come to constitute the heart of Anglophone Romanticism, with an interest in representation, inscription and legibility. In the writing of philosophical rhetoricians like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, and ordinary language philosophers such as Cavell, these issues have recently prompted some convergence of post-Romantic Anglo-American and continental philosophy. Counter-chronological correspondences are supplemental, rather than anti-temporal; they release comparative readings of stories and poems sensitive to verbal echo, allusion and figuration, readings that bypass inquiry into originality and influence, to ponder multiple points and modes of connection. Forms of analogy facilitated by historical contexts in their turn may encourage denser poetic understanding of how those contexts are generated. The rhetorical figures considered in this chapter all speak to a conviction – supported equally by eighteenth-century philosophy and contemporary neurosciences – that character emerges in combinations and in relationships, rather than emanating from unique locality, climate or moment in time. Literary character, that is, makes better sense not as a fixed

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concept but rather as a poetic metaphor generated in analogy and correspondence. History itself has never been an unchallenged medium in transatlantic writing. In 1844 Edgar Allan Poe described space and time, and their relationship to empirical mensuration as inevitably mediated by subjective experience.60 Countering Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s division of aesthetic and experimental fields into spatial and temporal, Poe’s tales employ tropes of repetition, recapitulation, variation, elision, amnesia and aporia to divert time’s arrow and multiply forms of relation – or disjunction – between past and present. More than points on a single line, the experience of reading compounds complex temporalities in de-localised spaces which are themselves forms of time-travel: gothic castles, dungeons, sea-going vessels or hot-air balloons. Poe’s reader is kept uneasily, and pleasurably, aware of space and time as human modes of ordering experience and enabling the kinds of comparison and distinction on which ethical judgment is contingent. His aesthetic practice sets out an explicit theoretical grounding for the kind of connections made between narrative and reader through the medium of language: unstable and relational, they may be prey to accidents of association. The implied ethical scepticism of Poe’s as of Hume’s thought notwithstanding (how would we begin to judge the moral character of action in such uncertain conditions?), their narrative practice checks the kind of chronological free-fall that would later be risked by Jorge Luis Borges, where writers seem to create their precursors – history is never quite reduced to the production of narrative. If post-modernism has to some extent succeeded in loosening the dominance of chronological sequence over critical comparison, it remains the case that post-Romantic perception of value in art seems irretrievably involved with a sense of priority and originality and the location of textual authority with an authorial source. Imitation, commentary and parody are secondary achievements in the canon. Were a contemporary composer to write a sonata exactly like the best of Beethoven’s, Milan Kundera suggests, it would be impossible to hear it as other than a masterpiece of pastiche: ‘it is only within the context of an art’s historical evolution that aesthetic value can be seen’.61 In what sense may a literary work be read outside its context of production? What is the fate of originality in an era of mechanical reproduction, and the mass reprinting of texts that characterised the print culture of antebellum America? In her study of this subject Meredith McGill cites a case of copyright infringement in which the judge ruled that ‘if by some magic a man who had never known it were to compose anew Keat’s [sic] ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, he would be an “author” and, if he

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copyrighted it, others might not copy that poem, though they might of course copy Keats’s!’62 More poignantly, Borges’ transatlantic story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ dramatises the heroic, absurd, impossibility of his protagonist’s dedication to re-creating exactly Cervantes’ great work in another place, at another time. The kind of objective historical ‘recovery’ of a past context which drives Pierre Menard’s life’s work is quixotic in its aspiration, and its futility. In what sense can we continue to ‘believe in’ character and in originality? Enlightened practices of writing and of reading character do survive in meaningful ways as a comparative mode of reading able to sustain ethical perspectives in the context of contingency. The difficult dialogues and dialogic failures of British and American literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries present particular opportunities for understanding and describing how this may work. Criticism is an activity carried out by a critic; there is no ‘view from nowhere’: readers’ judgments are informed by all sorts of extraneous factors, but – in the particulars of the comparison at the moment and in the form it occurs – unique in expression.63 This aspect of critical commitment was clearly recognised in Blair’s lectures, which identified three ways in which the act of comparison gives pleasure: first, through ‘that act of the mind by which we compare any two objects together, trace resemblances among those that are different, and differences among those that resemble each other’. Second, ‘[t]he pleasure of Comparison arises from the illustration which the simile employed gives to the principal object; from the clearer view of it which it presents; or the more strong impression of it which it stamps upon the mind’; and third, ‘from the introduction of a new . . . object, associated to the principal one of which we treat . . . new scenes being thereby brought into view, which, without the assistance of this figure, we could not have enjoyed’ (LRBL, v. i, pp. 343–44). For Blair and his contemporaries the value of comparison lay in the pleasurable activity that conjoined uniqueness and representativeness, with its consequent capacity to inculcate ethical judgment. In this light, retrospective comparison – reading forwards and backwards across time – may sometimes offer effective critical purchase obscured by a more conventional narrative trajectory. Identifying patterns of ‘dialectical interference’ between the performative painterly originality of Renaissance art and the substitutive stereotypy of medieval practice, art historians have coined the term ‘anachronic’ to characterise a critical practice able to mediate the ‘multiple temporalities’ of their relationship.64 In this spirit, in Chapter 7 I posit an anachronic transatlantic literary relationship between a character created in a story by

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Herman Melville and the projected poetic character of Robert Fergusson. Documentary evidence connecting an eighteenth-century poet who died in his mid-twenties without ever leaving Scotland to a well-travelled seaman of the nineteenth century who also became one of the greatest of American writers is slender. Conventional literary-historical, biographical, social or textual evidence of connection is rapidly exhausted: the writers never met; neither wrote about the work of the other. There were few common features in their social, educational, religious or cultural backgrounds. Documentary evidence of a connection between the two writers might be useful additional pieces in the jigsaw of nineteenth-century transatlantic cultural relations, but would not add materially to critical understanding of the work of either writer. Likeness would remain intriguing, but critically inert. The absence of a provable link between the two writers’ lives may be productive precisely because the restrictions it places upon historical-biographical narrative prompt reflection upon the comparative nature of critical evaluation and its implicit acceptance of multiple temporalities. Here distinctions between transatlantic cultural history and a literary history of poetic correspondences begin to emerge. In such an underdetermined context where material connection between two supposed facts is missing, and is unlikely ever to be unearthed, a ‘shared concern’ can only be determined at a textual level. Intertextuality seems an ineffectual critical card to play at this juncture: abandoning causality without reimagining the grounds for comparison, it may amount to ‘influence-lite’, without the ballast of documentary proof. As sceptics of pseudomorphism point out, such comparisons are risky: connections may be banal – the lowest common denominator of resemblance – and provoke a ‘so what?’ response. If unexpected, they may seem simply intriguing and ingenious: convergences might look gratuitous, or random, or be reassembled into a spurious narrative of resemblance, but they are at least suggestive, and invite further inquiry. Chapter 7 shows how attending to iteration of two verses from the Book of Job across Fergusson’s and Melville’s work may elicit transatlantic refractions of the evocation and performance of ‘poetic character’ and the forms of life-writing; fundamental issues in Romantic literary biography, and in comparative literary history, turn on their rhetorical relationship. Although they work as much against as with the grain of chronology, these anachronic comparisons mutually illuminate fresh aspects of both the retrospectively constructed literary character of Fergusson and of one of Melville’s most discussed tales. The conviction performative anachronism carries depends on this capacity to cast light both forwards and backwards: thinking through similitudes enables new readings

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that reimagine a familiar poem or tale in a fresh context of poetic analogy. This transatlantic comparison has the capacity to enlarge appreciation of the ramifying networks of relationships between language, character and ethical judgment. Syntactic echoes, allusions, metaphors and other forms of analogy elicit poetic connections that effectively – to advert to T. S. Eliot’s sense of the reciprocal relations that go to make up a tradition – reorientate critical reading of earlier works in the light of later: ‘The existing order is complete before the new work arrives . . . after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered.’65 It is not necessary to subscribe to Eliot’s notion of ‘tradition’ as an ‘ideal order’ to recognise that character is a dynamic compact between text and reader endlessly open to revision through additional perspectives brought by reading comparatively.

IX: Performances and personations The French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s discussion of the nature and function of language in Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 1746) asserted that the very notion of communication requires both a supposition of absence or distance, and the twin possibilities of repetition and recognition in the context of that absence. Drawing directly on Condillac’s description of humanly ‘instituted’ signs as integral to the ‘genius of language’, Derrida insists on the iterable nature of ‘every mark, spoken or written’.66 The philosophical grounding of Nietzsche and Derrida in Enlightenment philosophy and in Emerson’s Swedenborgian ‘nature iterates her means perpetually on successive planes’ are not of the essence here, although they remain of interest.67 The pragmatic usefulness for transatlantic comparison of thinking about literary performance in iterative and tropological terms is primary. Repetition is not the same as identity, as Pierre Menard found: its occurrence in a different time and a different place is transformational. Indeed, the reiterated mark or character is recognised as much by its differences from its type as by its similarities to it. Influence, allusion, parody are all modalities of iteration particularly active in self-consciously transnational contexts. Something similar seems to be true of literary character, as I argue in relation to the multiply refracted figure of ‘Margaret Fuller’ in nineteenth-century Anglophone writing. Derrida’s ‘mark’, only recognisable as such by virtue of being a repetition of an always absent prior occurrence, is a figure for a comparative practice that would take context, expression and re-expression as equally valid and current constituents of transatlantic literary history. Enlightenment

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epistemology and rhetoric had similarly shown how repeated practice (‘custom’) made character in its double sense of textual mark and projected identity visible to interrogation, comparison and critical judgment. Enlightenment ethical and rhetorical evocations of character in relation to customary behaviour (exemplified by Hume’s account of justice and intentionality, and Monboddo’s theory of the origin of language) enable a particular purchase, too, on the version of ‘ordinary language’ philosophy and performative language practice propounded by Cavell and J. L. Austin, who identified customary rhetorical occasions he called ‘illocutionary’ speech acts, in which a proposition might constitute or instantiate its object. His classic example was declarations such as ‘I pronounce you man and wife’, where the verbal statement that two people are joined in marriage becomes an event in the real world, in the act of being uttered by a priest in the context of a ceremony intended to accomplish this outcome. Performative speech is reproducible, in that it may achieve similar effects in different situations involving different participants (the same, or a different, priest may bring about a similar state of affairs with regard to many different couples on many different occasions), provided that all the appropriate conditions are in place: the person performing the ceremony must be authorised to do so, the persons being married must be eligible and so on. Austin claimed that such illocutionary acts cannot be true or false as such, though they may be ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ in bringing about the state of affairs intended.68 Practices of performativity and iterability advanced by Austin in philosophy of language have been tracked into literary contexts by Derrida, Cavell and Butler. Collectively, their writing formulates a critical practice with strong ethical implications that analyses the effect on the world of how words are used in specific circumstances. Describing it as ‘that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’, Butler has described the linguistic performance of identity in ways that resonate with eighteenth-century pedagogical development of character through the teaching of rhetoric, and of identity through sociability: ‘We do things with language . . . and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do . . . We could not imagine [human subjects] or they could not be what they are, apart from the constitutive possibility of addressing others and being addressed by others.’69 Literary character is an exemplary instance of such performativity, where writing stakes its communication with a reader on a recovery, through representation, of linguistically embodied voices that invite readers to engage with textual worlds. ‘Do what you know’, Emerson would write in his Journal, ‘and perception

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is converted into character’.70 The effect (‘happiness’) of character performed on any occasion in any context depends in both cases on acknowledgement of its conventionality: recognition of prior contexts that enable its interlocutor to assess its import. Just as an individual’s signature needs to be recognisably the same on a banker’s cheque and on a death warrant – assuming he has the power to issue such – to effect performance, or the ‘a’ in ‘ample’ and ‘animal’ enables us to put them close together in a dictionary but to distinguish between them semantically, so in Enlightened ethos character was understood and assessed as a series of reiterated performances by particular speakers in particular situations that were legible through their consistency and conformity to expectation. Butler advances gender as intensely performative in this respect, and therefore metonymic of all production of character. Refusal to privilege what Derrida calls the ‘order of succession’ may be read as partly constitutive of that order, in the relation I call performative anachronism.71 Chandler has pointed out that in its modern ‘historicised’ form, the idea of anachronism itself emerged as a Romantic concern.72 That is, the authority of chronology was at least partly instantiated in practices that pointed to or challenged it. As Hume’s epistemology and the passage from Poe’s ‘Marginalia’ quoted earlier demonstrate, well before Modernism as a historical ‘period’ or critical movement, Enlightenment writing rendered the complexities of experienced time by confusing, reversing and superimposing relations of sequence and chronology in ways that complicate and complement stadial models of historical progression.73 Performative anachronism also addresses the chronological refractions of geographically dispersed manifestations of Romanticism, for example the frequently noted ‘belatedness’ of transatlantic Romanticism, whereby American writing appeared to engage with texts, ideas and tropes at a noticeable time lag after its European counterpart. Uniqueness and originality are constitutive of a Romantic aesthetic articulated in Lyrical Ballads and furthered by Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s subsequent commentaries on their poetic project, which ran counter to the importance Enlightenment writers accorded to custom and authority as the parameters within which individual character was moulded. What Joseph Roach calls the ‘improvised narratives of authenticity and priority’ validated by Romantic models of agency and causality may ‘congeal into full-blown myths of legitimacy and origin’ in response to anxieties provoked by surrogation or substitution in the processes of cultural continuity.74 Faced with the spectre of their own obsolescence, cultures like individuals attempt to consolidate their position: ‘circum-Atlantic societies,

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confronted with revolutionary circumstances for which few precedents existed, have invented themselves by performing their pasts in the presence of others’ (p. 5). Roach’s comment that ‘performances . . . often carry within them the memory of otherwise forgotten substitutions’ (p. 5) suggests how textual analysis may elucidate and reconstruct a historical relationship in dynamic, comparative, form. The performance of the past in the presence of others implies, in a transatlantic context, a renegotiated relationship between the two terms of the compound – the history in the literary as much as the literary in the history. Transatlantic literary performances share at least one salient characteristic of Austin’s performative ‘speech acts’: they are enacted, and may be observed, in verbal correspondence: so a writer’s remarks about America or Britain, or being American or British, are less interesting than the ‘voice’ of Cotton Mather’s history or Emerson’s philosophy or Burns’ poetry, or Fuller’s and Fergusson’s biographers. The focus will be on writing that rhetorically enacts a transatlantic relation rather than a work that, like Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans and numerous nineteenth-century transatlantic travelogues, discusses it. Equally, the identification of a metaphor of connection such as ‘contagion’ is, as I discuss in the following chapter, of limited literary interest until we understand how it works to engage a reader in particular performances of character-incorrespondence. The efficacy of a performative reading is contingent on the context in which it is produced and received, but it is not equivalent to that context. As voice in performance, character is an illocutionary act and correspondence is its enabling context. Reframing a trajectory of historical flow in favour of comparisons or correspondence requires alertness to crossings, repetitions, allusions and substitutions; in a more technical sense it will involve looking at what happens to words, phrases and grammatical structures as they travel transatlantically. The convergence of eighteenth-century rhetoric and contemporary performative theory, then, enables an approach to transatlantic practice that appeals reciprocally from historical criteria to literary practice. What Smith called the ‘Poeticall method’ of correspondence between causally unrelated data elicits comparison, mutual self-definition and simultaneous reconsideration. Again, though, the point is not to de-historicise but to reorientate literary history: these mutually defining iterations of different characters can only be understood in relation to the conditions of earlier and later performances – in history, in other words. If the relationship between ‘old’ and ‘new’ is one of surrogation and exchange rather than origin and reception, how they perform – enact themselves in implied relationship and

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antagonism – in relation to one another should (as I suggest in relation to Mather and Henry James) yield richer comparisons. The transverse correspondences of character-as-performance examined throughout the book offer analogies that enact the transatlantic ‘argument’ between British and American writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Collectively, they also add a spatial dimension to the matrix in which literary-historical narratives may be read, and construed. Any literary character voices not only him- or herself, but also the past and prospective traces of other voices with which the work is stylistically in dialogue. Chapter 3 considers a transatlantic sequence of figurative ‘daisies’ (flowers of rhetoric) as characters and metaphors according to Derrida’s logic; every iteration is an impure performative of personhood that acknowledges previous instances, draws on and enriches their metaphoric range in the act of evoking its own unique figurative identity. Chapters 5 and 6 trace a particular nexus of metaphorical correspondences in transatlantic friendships involving the epistolary characters of Emerson, Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, Sarah Orne Jewett, James and Robert Louis Stevenson. Each of these clusters is not a unique but an exemplary instance of the transformative potential of the iterative ‘mark’ or character. When in some of these instances the textual mark is given metaphorical embodiment and extension as a ‘character’ – a fictional person with qualities of personhood – (in Daisy Miller, for instance) the ethical implications of both reading and figuration come into play. Rhetoric and poetic trope manage the imagination of resemblance and the performance of mutual comment through character in transatlantic literary history, in the figures of likeness: metaphor, metonymy, allegory and prosopopoeia. In 1741, David Hume’s four short pieces explicating the ethos of (respectively) Platonist, Epicurean, Sceptical and Stoic perspectives launched a collective inquiry into what ‘character’ may best pursue the good life. His ‘Advertisement’ noted that ‘in those Essays . . . a certain Character is personated; and therefore no Offence ought to be taken at any Sentiments contain’d in them’.75 Personation embodied a philosophical position (or ‘system’) in an imaginary person; relieving the narrator of the responsibilities of attribution, it also functioned as a powerful suasive tool. The etymology of ‘person’ derived from the Greek stage disguise or mask (prosopon); Hume’s image brought the philosophical and aesthetic elements of self-projection into alliance. He was perhaps also alluding to Thomas Hobbes’ use of the term in Book i of Leviathan, to introduce political implications of representation in a synecdoche (the sovereign personates the State).76

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Hanna Fenichel Pitkin has traced the issue of ‘personation’ within representation to Hobbes’ analysis of the principles of political representation in Leviathan. His interstitial chapter on ‘Person, Authors and Things Personated’ offered ‘to personate’ as ‘to act, or represent himself or another; and he that acteth another, is said to bear his person, or act in his name; . . . as a representer, or representative, a lieutenant, a vicar, an attorney, a deputy, a procurator, an actor, and the like’.77 Hobbes was fully alive to the potential for ontological confusion and political sleight of hand: ‘So that a person, is the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation; and to personate, is to act, or represent himself, or another.’78 Among rhetorical figures ‘which lie altogether in the thought’, Blair identified prosopopoeia or personification as pre-eminent, ‘its foundation laid deep in human nature’ (LRBL, v. i, p. 324). Richard Steele in the Spectator had declared that ‘[i]t is much more difficult to converse with the World in a real than a personated Character. That might pass for Humour, in the Spectator, which would look like Arrogance in a Writer who sets his Name to his Work.’79 The link between personation and ‘conversation with the world’ emphasises the essentially transactional nature of the term. Personation is a rhetorical act of assuming the style that characterises another.80 Bringing the feelings of observer (or reader) and actor (or character) into imaginative connection, personation evoked sympathetic responsiveness that engaged readers in a lively sense of what it might feel like to be (to take Hume’s examples) a Platonist, or a Sceptic, and thereby through comparison to evaluate the ethos personated. When a representation becomes a performance the authority vested in personation cedes to the epistemological and moral ambiguity of role-playing, with all the uncertainty of response that interaction with an audience implies. The slippage between political representation and acting would prove rhetorically liberating, if ideologically treacherous, terrain for writers on both sides of the Atlantic when the possibility of representing the views of another merged into performing his or her viewpoint. With its dense literary history of political and cultural commentary the figure of prosopopoeia or impersonation offered particular opportunities to transatlantic literary expression. Since the writing of Francis Hutcheson, sympathy has associated the moral and the aesthetic in character and style. The phenomenon of sympathy was a transnational as it was a trans-class and trans-racial channel of imagined and imaginative connection in the final quarter of the eighteenth century. Important explications by Jay Fliegelman, Julie Ellison and James Chandler of the Enlightenment’s major explanatory mechanism for ethical behaviour and the judgment of character in civil society have highlighted

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the ideological and fictional potential of rhetorical slippage and miscommunication in sympathy’s transatlantic passage. Jan Swearingen has distinguished between Classical Rhetoric’s taxonomy of ethos or ethopoeia as a practice of impersonating a projected character, and prosopopoeia as personification, ‘understood as speaking the words of another in order to learn, understand, persuade, or communicate’. The distinction is fluid and (as she points out) in the eighteenth century ‘the emergent notion of an inwardlooking self, concerned with its own identity and existence, promoted a growing awareness that authenticity itself could be an assumed character, a contrivance adapted for the purposes of persuasion and deception – of self, of others, or both’.81 Having a character for integrity or authenticity was understood to be a function of Classical Rhetoric. This is easier to recognise in political and theatrical contexts or in representations of ‘national character’ than in the fictional characters of novels, but both realism and character require the consent of a willing audience in order to function in context. Again, the history or phenomenology of ‘character’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is less germane to my argument than the poetics of representation: how personation is achieved syntactically, grammatically and rhetorically. Representation is linked with the creation and promulgation of a recognisable voice; but equally – as ‘identification with’ – implicated in how a reader responds to a character as represented in a text. In the sense of ‘identifying with’, representation is an act of correspondence that establishes connection; it is a reading practice stimulated by textual representation. Contemporary audiences knew exactly how to read novels as rhetorical performances – or if they didn’t, there were plenty of warnings available about the dangers to young ladies of uncritical imaginative immersion. It remains to reunite the rhetorical and poetic forms of sympathy as a trope of connection between reader and text in which the aesthetic medium directs the ethical message. The characterless characters of Melville’s The ConfidenceMan would personate the exploitative possibilities of the ubiquitous currency of sympathy to expose the inseparability of integrity and duplicity in virtue ethics. If character was no more than impersonation, the ‘reader’ for whose benefit the display was mounted would have no reliable way of distinguishing between the personification of virtuous character and its reality.

X: Tropes Prosopopoeia and performativity are both ways of thinking with character; tropes of likeness also play a constitutive role in cognition and meaning-

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making. The received view is that eighteenth-century poets and rhetoricians regarded figurative language as an embellishment rather than a constituent of meaning, and that the cognitive properties of metre, rhyme and trope were ‘discovered’ and debated by Romantics, notably Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley. A more nuanced version would recognise that metaphor and metonymy in particular presented a problem, and an opportunity, for eighteenth-century rhetoricians, who worried about how to manage figures of speech, and how to distinguish distracting adornment from a compression that would be functional in communication and comparison. Allegory was a form of verbal persuasion connected to metaphor by extension, of which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers were notably wary. Blair was particularly concerned about its capacity to engage the imaginative sympathies of the reader: ‘If the resemblance, on which the figure is founded, be long dwelt upon, and carried into all its minute circumstances, we make an allegory instead of a metaphor; we tire the reader, who soon wearies of this play of fancy; and we render our discourse obscure’ (LRBL, v. i, p. 313). With the open questioning of stable forms of religious equivalence such as that which underpinned Dante’s Divina Commedia or Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the narrative extension of allegory was disparaged as formulaic and therefore unable to evoke imaginative assent in a reader. Romantic poetics, as Theresa Kelley has shown, was notably ambivalent about the coercive implications of allegory on the imagination’s creative capacities. Allegory’s compressed form, metaphor, on the other hand, was assumed to invoke imaginative connection in simultaneous double perception; the trope emerged as Romanticism’s pre-eminent figure of transcendent correspondence. Shelley’s claim that the poet’s language is ‘vitally metaphorical’ is rightly read as a rejection of Locke’s strictures on the abuse of words; its direct connection to the theory of the figurative origins of communicative language advanced by Smith and Blair is less frequently acknowledged.82 Their rhetorics accorded notable respect to metaphor, which in the tradition of Hobbes and Locke suffered a bad press because it introduced ambiguity about meaning and endangered communication. There was consensus that the justness of a metaphor lay in the correspondence between tenor and vehicle; the difference in sameness introduced by figures of speech created meaning in negotiation of their common characteristics. This axiom was held to be true for all tropes – metonymy, simile, allegory and so on may all be judged by the same criterion. George Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1766) noted that ‘as metaphor in general hath been termed an allegory in epitome, such metaphors and metonymies as present us with

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things animate in the room of things lifeless, are prosopopoeias in miniature’.83 Tropes acted as compressed narratives of comparison; they vivified abstract ideas for readers; they characterised them, and offered terms for evaluation. Character and trope were reciprocal in writing. Smith, therefore, was consistent in being suspicious of trope as a marker of style as such; for him the true measure of style lay in the window it offered into the character of the speaker: ‘Figures of speech give no beauty to stile: it is when the expression is agreable [sic] to the sense of the speaker and his affection that we admire it’ (LRBL, p. 34). Style, that is, was character in performance; it was the embodiment of, and metonymy for, character. Smith followed Locke in instilling caution about trope as a marker of style without this guarantee; its ethical charge dominated evaluation. John Witherspoon, educated in Edinburgh with Blair before accepting the call to the presidency of the College of New Jersey, was ‘certain’ that ‘metaphor should be kept as much as possible out of definition or explication’.84 Like Smith, he was against the ‘flowers of rhetoric’ deployed as extraneous ornament, but (like his fellow student and ecclesiastical opponent) he conceded metaphorical or ‘poeticall’ writing as a particular stylistics with its own ends and characteristic force. For all of them, effective style was the vehicle and guarantee of, and metonymy for, virtuous character. Metaphor, Classical Rhetoric’s transitive figure, became ethos in the eighteenth-century New Rhetoric of self-performance and character reading. Blair was alert to the attractions of metaphor: ‘nothing . . . delights the fancy more, than this act of comparing things together, discovering resemblances between them, and describing them by their likeness’ (LRBL, v. i, p. 296). Registering its transformational and affective power, he identified metaphor as the figure which conferred ‘spirit and force’ on thought – that is, impressed the ideas of the writer or speaker on his audience (LRBL, v. i, p. 299). His ‘application of figures to sentiment’ developed an analogy of similitude that referred back to a celebrated line in Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (1711), ‘[f]or, as in life, true dignity must be founded on character, not on dress and appearance, so the dignity of composition must arise from sentiment and thought, not from ornament’ (LRBL, v. i, p. 300). More than ornament, though, for Blair metaphor was process; it had a constitutive role in cognition: It is a very erroneous idea, which many have of the ornaments of Style, as if they were things detached from the subject, and that could be stuck to it, like lace upon a coat . . . the real and proper ornaments of Style are wrought into the substance of it. They flow in the same stream with the current of thought. (LRBL, v. i, pp. 364–65)

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Legible embodiments of self-in-relation, metaphors exerted semantic force; preserving sympathy and critical distance in their proposition of relation between different objects, they were the preferred trope of connection and transference used by Enlightenment rhetoricians as a model for ethical social relationships. More recent discussion of the function of metaphor has pursued this possibility. For I. A. Richards, meaning emerged from ‘the co-presence of the vehicle and the tenor’: two thoughts are ‘active together’ in metaphor.85 Like a performative statement, a particular metaphor may be ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ in its effect or lack of effect in a particular context; it cannot be ‘true’ or ‘false’. Contemporary cognitive study of metaphor is continuous with this insight of Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-moral Sense’, in its claim that language structures thinking, and that our concepts are metaphorical and analogical. His definition of Truth as ‘a moveable army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration, and which, after they have been used for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical and binding’ insists that the cognitive operation of metaphor can only be described metaphorically.86 In The Literary Mind the critic Mark Turner describes how narrative generates meaning through a process of imaginative blending that ‘draw[s] together conceptual structures previously kept apart. As a consequence, the blend can reveal latent contradictions and coherences between previously separated elements . . . It can equally show us unrecognized strengths and complementarity . . . [b]lends yield insight into the conceptual structures from which they arise.’87 In this spirit, Chapter 3 will draw out transatlantic contradictions, coherences and complementarities in a sequence of poems and tales whose structuring metaphor is the daisy. Metaphor is, then, a structure of comparison; the truths it delivers are relational and blended rather than transcendent or singular. It offers what cognitivists describe as a ‘double-scope network’, where ‘both organizing frames make central contributions to the blend, and their sharp differences offer the possibility of rich clashes’.88 Potentially, that is, metaphor may itself be a metaphor of connectedness and comparison. ‘Character’, as die, stamp or impression, and projected or performed ‘mark’ of self, is a key instance. There is nothing exclusive or unique about transatlantic relations in this idea. It may nonetheless clarify how character and the transatlantic emerged in particular forms of relational thinking through analogy prevalent in eighteenth-century Anglophone philosophy, and demonstrate the value of thinking about both character and the transatlantic in similar terms

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of metaphorical relations. In their capacity to unite unlikes in simultaneous expression of concord and dissonance, metaphor and pun are the rhetorical equivalents of sympathy, offering themselves as interrogative tropes for transatlantic literary history. A pun is language used with dual or multiple valences; ‘character’ is a pun that enfolds a metaphor, embodying a transitive language between textual mark and personhood that is alive to incompatibilities and contradictions. But it also demands more of its reader than admiration for its verbal virtuosity. As Wayne Booth puts it, ‘[t]he metaphors we care for most are always embedded in metaphoric structures that finally both depend on and constitute selves and societies’.89 As an agent of refraction across semantic contexts, metaphor also became the figure of and for the transatlantic; it offered a ‘tropic’ reading of transatlantic literary relationships whose modes include translation, transformation, adoption and perhaps rejection. It shuns fixity of thought, and instantiates a flexible responsiveness or mental caprice Burns and Emerson would defiantly adopt into their poetic characters.

XI: National characters J. Hillis Miller has characterised a ‘species of metonymic transfer’ as ‘the basis of all narrative’, whereby the actions of agents are related to events by the assumption of causal results.90 It is a form of synecdoche in which the part stands in for the whole. In metonymy likeness is based on the continuity of the part with the whole to which it ‘belongs’; it implies the existence of a greater integrity or totality, the contained in the container. Wai Chee Dimock has recently written of the ‘[m]etonymic nationalism’ of ‘American Literature’ as a field of study, while Harry E. Shaw has suggested that ‘metonymical representation [is] characteristic of historicist realism’ which focuses on social relations.91 The cultural specificity prized by realism sets up characters representative of their place in time and culture. But realism has notoriously made character appear more, to its reader, than a representative metonym of his or her ‘state of society’; it courts recognition, identification, moral judgment and emotional transference between reader and scripted mark. Character is a particular textual hook for the audience, Aristotle’s Poetics suggests; the strong feelings that attach to it encourage an involvement with larger and abstract ideas that might otherwise seem rebarbative. Establishing the potential of character as a transitive category of sympathetic engagement, the comparisons in the following chapters offer something like a mode of metonymic transnationalism. Isabel Archer in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, for example, is a character who performs the

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double feat of ‘national’ and ‘personal’ embodiment. These terms need to be in inverted commas because they are illocutionary representations that explicitly signal the functions they enact. Isabel describes Henrietta Stackpole as ‘a kind of emanation of the great democracy – of the continent, the country, the nation. I don’t say that she sums it all up, that would be too much to ask of her. But she suggests it; she vividly figures it.’92 James’ language, as ever, is wily. Isabel’s recognition of Henrietta as a metonym of America is part of the characterisation of Isabel, whose misreading of the characters of others drives the novel’s plot. For – in her wealth, her generous ingenuousness and her avidity for ‘experience’ – she too represents ‘America’ to the European characters in the novel who variously attempt to understand, appropriate and exploit her. What evokes her individuality is also what constitutes her typicality, and her tragedy. The point here is not that she ‘is’ one or the other, or even both, insofar as these are conceived as binary opposites, but that it is in the character of Isabel that the difference the Atlantic might make is imaginatively realised, in a form that courts the reader’s emotional complicity in her plight. Her compounded personation makes both ‘America’ and ‘Europe’ available for judgment. Readers’ investment in character derives from its nature as a rhetorical figure for sympathy: at once the mark of writing (metaphor) and representative (metonymy), its inscription attracts readers into affective compact with the fiction. This relation allows the possibilities of character to resist and elude the solidification of transference conceived as one-to-one allegorical correspondence. Realism flourishes in narrative amplitude, where character has ‘space’ to be represented as unfolding over time. The transatlantic short story pioneered by Poe compressed narrative into dense metaphoric figurations in which representation and representativeness reveal themselves as marks of inscription and metonym emerges obliquely. Hieroglyphs, invisible writing, a ‘never-to-be-imparted secret’ held in a bottle thrown into the sea, the ‘dead letters’ of Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ are all characters – forms of inscription – torn from their contexts and rendered illegible.93 In the emblematic schoolroom of Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ [i]t was difficult . . . to say with certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be . . . the lateral branches were innumerable – inconceivable – and so returning in upon themselves, that our most exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not very far different from those with which we pondered upon infinity.94

So much (apparently) for allegory, a mode that Poe affected to despise even as he employed its resources. British Romantic critics like Coleridge, too,

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were impatient with exorbitantly artificial narratives of likeness irretrievably allied to outdated belief systems that placed naïve faith in possible recourse from false appearances to a plane of transcendent truth. In his 1840 lectures on heroic characters Carlyle dismissed allegory as ‘a sportful shadow, a mere play of the Fancy’, in comparison with ‘that awful Fact and scientific certainty, the parent of such a bewildered heap of allegories, errors, and confusions’.95 Recent criticism has rehabilitated the complexity of Romantic allegoresis as a form of resistance to character as fixed personal identity. Characteristically doubling truth and representation, allegory’s capacity to face both ways may readily encapsulate a transatlantic dynamic without insisting on the heuristic superiority of one level over another. Narrative rather than (like symbol) static, its same-different iteration invokes the passage of time, but without being driven by temporality or chronology. ‘William Wilson’ evokes ‘inseparable . . . companions’ (p. 343) yoked into an imitative relationship that is the antithesis of sociability. The identity of the narrating Wilson proves unable to respond to the reciprocal demands of sympathy or comparison. Failing to dominate, he veers towards fear that he might become ‘enslaved’ to the ‘elevated character, the majestic wisdom, the apparent omnipresence and omnipotence of [the other] Wilson’ (p. 355). Subordination drives him first to craven abjection, and then to murder which proves also to be self-murder. Cancelling iteration, he erases himself. The thwarted lines of the relationship between the two William Wilsons are materially inscribed in the school-room of their early encounters: Interspersed about the room, crossing and re-crossing in endless irregularity, were innumerable benches and desks, black, ancient, and time-worn, piled desperately with much be-thumbed books, and so beseamed with initial letters, names at full length, grotesque figures, and other multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have entirely lost what little of original form might have been their portion in days long departed. (p. 340)

This tangled scene is a metaphor for, and is metonymic of, not only the embroilment of the doubled protagonist(s), but also of Poe’s concern with the implications of mechanical reproducibility for original expression in print culture.96 ‘The Visionary’, Poe’s earliest contribution to an American monthly magazine, appeared in a sequence of Theophrastan character types in The Lady’s Book (1834). It projects a figure of Byron that unstably elides an image of the too-famous English Romantic with Poe’s transatlantic narrator. Neither is named, both characters remain disembodied, doubled and

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interchangeable figures for authorship. Set in Venice, this tale links originality and copying to literary figures as prosopopoeia for national literary authorship: ‘Byron’ and ‘Poe’ – ‘England’ and ‘America’ – respectively. Echoing Byron’s own self-performance, the tale opens in an apostrophe to the nameless ‘visionary’ who is not the ‘Byron’ of history or biography, but the idealised character of the Romantic poet as he ‘shouldst be’.97 Rhetorical figures multiply in the narrator’s culturally acquisitive consciousness: ‘the deep midnight, the Bridge of Sighs, the beauty of woman, and the Genius of Romance’ (p. 151). Prosopopoeia substitutes for erasure of origins: literary genre is the condition for reading Poe’s transatlanticism. Drifting reverie is interrupted by the single shriek of a female voice; terrified into a ‘spectral and ominous appearance’ (p. 153) of himself, the narrator is carried helplessly towards the Bridge of Sighs. If this is a figure for the American writer’s hapless resistance to European influence, it gestures equally to the resolute artifice of the tale’s construction. The incident that precipitates the story reiterates a scene from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, and the image of the bereaved mother as Niobe refers the reader not only to the classical myth of the woman perpetually grieving for her lost children, but also to the celebrated Florentine statue which embodied her grief in marble. The spectral spectator of the calamity is watched in turn by the ‘stranger’ (at once celebrated and unknown) whose countenance, ‘mirror-like, retained no vestige of . . . passion’ beyond the moment of its experience (p. 156). Invited into the stranger’s palazzo, the narrator is dazzled by the magnificence of his art collection. His host is dismissive, pointing out which parts are restorations, which copies, or ‘by no means original’ (p. 161). Even the bereaved mother of the previous evening has been reincarnated as a work of art. The visionary lives in an anachronic world of art, passionately devoted to an aesthetic of mixing: ‘Proprieties of place, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind . . . Like these arabesque censers, my spirit is writhing in fire’ (pp. 165–66). At which point he throws himself onto an ottoman, poisoned, as the narrator experiences a vision of ‘the entire and terrible truth’ (p. 166). In their setting and the repeated preoccupation with the past, both tales speak for and of a transatlantic dynamic. Their structural and stylistic entwinings might (as Chapter 4 suggests) be compared with Francis Jeffrey’s attempt to account for the effect of Keats’ poetic imagination: ‘an interminable arabesque of connected and incongruous figures, that multiplied as they extended’.98 The two William Wilsons are a pun, where verbal coincidence conflates subject and object; the distance between their nomination, as between their subjectivities, is collapsed, leaving the narrator

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nothing to resist or refract back as difference, other than a distortion of his own nascent but unformed self. ‘William Wilson’ both demands to be read as an allegory of Anglo-American relationships, or even some kind of analogy for anxieties surrounding American literary independence, and cannot be: the different dimensions of significance and the different models of reading they require fail to form stable correspondences. Poe’s crisscrossing irregularities warn the reader away from a process we may identify as ‘default’ recruitment of meaning: that is, relying on the recoverability of ‘original form’ as explanation. The two William Wilsons exist in a puzzling synergy of multiplied correspondences (they may indeed be figures for mechanical reproduction or iteration), and failures of correspondence. Each character attempts to assert the uniqueness of his identity against an other who refuses both his priority and integrity. Identity in this story seems to be parabolic. The William Wilsons are pathologised prosopopoeia for character itself. ‘William Wilson’ was published in the Christmas annual The Gift at the end of 1839. A historically driven reading might interpret its representation of frustrated self-expression as a reflection of gathering national feeling in the Democratic period of the late 1830s and 1840s, when large-scale immigration and a new kind of consciousness of regional differences began to replace a programmatic Republicanism. But the tale supplants models of agency and causality in character construction by images of metamorphosis and blending. It may stand as indicative of the possibilities opened up by changing the metaphorical structure of literary history from points on a line governed by priority and sequence to a dynamic matrix of performance and reception able to register the mutually modifying relationships between reader and ‘event’. It produces a pattern of metaphorical ‘interferences’ that complicate a trajectory of cause and effect with the contingent relations of metonymic and symbolic complexity, to confuse what Mark Turner calls the reader’s ‘schema’ of meaning-making (p. 109). The self-cancelling double death with which the tale ends might translate as something like ‘[a] plague o’ both your houses’: if this is an allegory in which the William Wilsons are prosopopoeias of American and English national pride, it crystallises out into an indictment of chauvinistic literary nationalism per se.99 As Poe himself would put it in the Broadway Journal in 1845, ‘the world at large is the only legitimate stage for the authorial histrio’.100 Nicholas Nardini has recently argued for the paradoxical appropriation of ‘Romantic “universality” ’ as a nationalist assertion of American literary independence. He identifies a process of ‘vampirism’ that aimed to ‘bleed English literature of its specifically English character, leaving behind a

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universal poetry, grounded in “nature”, that a young nation across the Atlantic could rightfully call its inheritance’.101 Tracing the rhetoric of Wordsworth’s Transcendentalist acolyte Henry Reed who reattributed the poet’s grandest insights from ‘Wordsworth’ (the English poet) to ‘eternal truth’ – thereby making them equally available and claimable by Americans – Nardini identifies this ‘representativeness’ as an aggressive, if covert, act of literary nationalism. Chapter 4 considers the implications of such a move for the poetics of character in the creation of national literary histories.

XII: Types and erasures Emerson’s and Poe’s German contemporary Johann von Goethe’s scheme for Weltliteratur, ‘marvelous things . . . brought forth through refraction’, contemporaneously offered an ideological alternative to literature as a manifestation of nation-state or national Zeitgeist.102 ‘No author’, wrote Octavius Brooks Frothingham in one of the earliest comparative literary histories of American writing, ‘occupied the cultivated New England mind as much as [Goethe] did.’103 Goethe’s own preface to Carlyle’s translation of his Life of Schiller described Weltliteratur’s possibilities for synthesising historical change and rhetorical representation for Europe in the postNapoleonic era, when ‘all nations, having been jumbled together in the most terrible wars, with each then thrown back on itself, had to realize that they had observed and absorbed many unfamiliar things’.104 His image correlates strikingly with the transatlantic chaos of Dr Bransby’s schoolroom: both speak to environments in which the confusion of events renders fantasies of self-containment or self-definition, whether individual or national, futile. Transnational cultural relations have been effectively conveyed in metaphors of exchange, masquerade and mimicry, journeys and crossings. Their bearing on the nature of imaginative engagement between the reader and the textual character created in these terms (or, to put it another way, between ideological expression and affective power) have emerged less clearly. Paul Giles has offered a suggestive account of metaphors of exchange in Franklin’s Autobiography, showing how this commercial principle is woven into the formal fabric of the self-construction: ‘Just as commodities change places in the marketplaces of Philadelphia and London, so hypothesis and induction, print culture and oral tradition, Britain and America all change places within the circumference of the North Atlantic Enlightenment.’105 Giles’ analysis of the constitutive interpenetration of

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character and nation in Franklin’s composition description deliberately depersonalises a procedure that was also responsible for the creation of one of the most distinctive voices in transatlantic literary history and reinvokes it as an analogy (‘just as’) for cultural history. What readers are drawn to, or find rebarbative, in the persona of Franklin lies in the way his printing metaphors create an exemplary self that became almost a brand. Imitated, parodied, loved and despised, this self-personification would come to metonymise a nation, or at least a ‘character’ of the nation that subsequent American writers would have to acknowledge and encounter, however deeply they resisted it. Mark Twain mocked, and accepted, the legacy: ‘he had a fashion of living wholly on bread and water, and studying astronomy at meal time – a thing which has brought affliction to millions of boys since, whose fathers had read Franklin’s pernicious biography . . . Anybody could have done it’.106 More to the point ‘nobody’ (to borrow Catherine Gallagher’s formulation) did it – it was because Franklin was, in his own self-characterisation, a ‘nobody’ at the time that he could make himself into a representative man and his autobiography a ‘how to’ guide for the acquisition of ‘character’ in the commercial Republic.107 Not its uniqueness but the possibility of typicality made his story exemplary and rendered him a quintessentially characterless character, in Melville’s punning words ‘the type and genius of his land’.108 The Autobiography is a conduct manual which is also a style guide: candour, perspicuity and abstention from moral obliquity are its presentational hallmarks. It is self-consciously national, and transatlantic. Franklin’s American self is defined and articulated in its social dimension; uninterested in interiority, it projects a self entirely bound by the transactions of civil society, able through the performance of credit-worthiness to confect the character of a gentleman from an initial condition of anonymity: ‘this Industry visible to our Neighbours began to give us Character and Credit’.109 Style was a product and a projection of character; character was formed through the study and imitation of style. The harmonious process of exchange between inscribed self and emergent trading nation enacted by Franklin’s life-story is only a partial rhetorical picture: the sheer disruption, at all levels from trade to personal trust to invocations of identity, that took place during the Revolution also permeates the transatlantic poetics of character. American Revolutionary and Romantic writing resonates with the consequences of what James called (in a thought attractive to an earlier generation of Americanists) the ‘sacrifice’ of relation.110 The principles of exchange that characterised the mutual entanglement of economic and cultural values in the transatlantic

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commerce of the mid-eighteenth century were in the later period perceived as multiply blocked, hindered or thwarted: by events like the AngloAmerican war of 1812–14; by the pressure of inadequate copyright protection; by the cultural misprision fomented by travellers’ accounts; and by increasing interest in representing the interior and individual rather than the ethically stable public face of character. Derrida’s reading of Austin, in which the failure of a performative (the ritual enactment of meaningful exchange) is ‘a necessary possibility’, and therefore a condition of its successful performance (perhaps on another occasion, perhaps not) (SEC, p. 324), offers a useful rhetorical formula for how relationship may manifest itself in figures of difference or disruption. Rupture or breach being supposed in the idea of communication, ‘failure’ is not an outside possibility on the margin of ‘successful’ communication, but part of what constitutes it. So the refusniks of influence or relationship – Melville’s Bartleby, for example, or Poe’s William Wilson – become part of the richer story of influence and mutual engagement, as they raise insistently the question of what, in a transatlantic context, would make a ‘good’ reader/rejecter, as distinct from repressed reading or simple refusal to acknowledge. In this case (as I discuss in later chapters) tropes of connection such as metaphor and metonymy are supplemented or supplanted by apotropaic figures such as occupatio (‘I do not speak of’) and the disjunctive verbal forms of character in transatlantic correspondence. Through repetition forms of traumatic dislocation make experience – and writing – available again in new contexts. Cavell comprehends this possibility in his concern with ‘acknowledgement’, which Gould has glossed as ‘the place in our network of everyday relationships and activities that would allow us to receive a genuine knowledge of others, and also to survive it’.111 Failure to survive the other may be the covert Romantic allegory concealed within the ostensible rejection of more obvious transatlantic parallelism in ‘William Wilson’. ‘Misreadings’, as Edward Said puts it, are an inevitable aspect ‘of a historical transfer of ideas and theories from one setting to another’.112 It has been Anglophone American critics, notably, who have counselled that appropriation and influence are also misappropriation and misprision: the immediate exemplars include T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Walter Jackson Bate’s The Burden of the Past on the English Poet and Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading. Recognition makes clear the limits of comprehension; correspondence is fraught, and partial, as I suggest in discussing the vicissitudes of transatlantic literary friendships in Chapter 5. The natural pleasures afforded by comparison and analogy as mental acts of association notwithstanding, ‘we must

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not’ (Blair warned) ‘take Resemblance . . . for actual similitude and likeness of appearance’ (LRBL, v. i, p. 345). Deriving the ‘character of the writer’ from the writing, or ‘reading’ the biographical character back into the quality of the writing may be an act of revenge or refusal as much as a ‘simple’ mis-reading. Nineteenth-century accounts by British writers about American ‘domestic manners’ or American descriptions of British class or political practices do more than reveal how partners in a transatlantic dance simultaneously nurtured fantasies of self-containment and defined themselves in terms of the other at a particular historical juncture; they bring into view the comparative framework that underlies the terms of selfidentification of both text and reader – national, individual or otherwise. What in these contexts is more or less explicit offers a window onto examples where comparison is implicit, submerged, or even disguised and may only be recovered in metaphor, grammar or syntax. Literary-historical stories about American writers’ encounters with Romanticism in Europe benefit from attention to the poetics of character embodied in figures like Fuller and Burns, as represented by the writers themselves and by those on both sides of the Atlantic who, like Emerson, Carlyle, Melville and James, found themselves repeatedly creating and then contending with that figure. Over several chapters I read episodes from their work as troubled (in the first case) by their encounter with a feminine transcendentalism that was self-declaredly transatlantic, politically engaged and modelled on a classical rhetoric of character reimagined in contemporary terms, and – in the second – with a biographically identified ‘Burnsian’ Romanticism of the self as and in performance that found a sharper, though later, expression in American writing than it did in England, where Romanticism derived from the programmatic language practices of Wordsworth and Coleridge accumulated a different set of associations. These latter have shaped the dominant discourse about transatlantic exchange; indeed, Cavell’s own thinking (for example about Emerson and Thoreau) is avowedly nourished by his reading in a British Romanticism almost entirely comprehended by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Cavell has repeatedly indicated the provenance of his thinking as a form of transatlantic Romanticism that conjoins Anglophone and continental responses to the post-Kantian problem of how to relate matter and mind. From this perspective America becomes a triangulation point from where the contradictions of Europe may be brought into a single view. The ‘task’ of literature, in this regard, may be to bring the Thoreauvian dreams of the night and the dead back into the ‘noon’ of communicable feeling through language.113 This juncture of literature and philosophy is the concern of my final two chapters.

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The transatlantic context that unites the textual comparisons I pursue and the time frame that contains them are particular and in that sense unique; if correspondences pervade the universe, as Emerson declares, then the point of writing is to give some shape to the confusion of connections. The method is meant to be exemplary rather than exceptional, its outcomes (at best) ‘happy’ rather than true. With due regard to the specificities of context many different literary histories of correspondences might equally well be explored in different ways across many different comparisons. ‘The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together.’114

part ii

Reading character in comparison

chapter 2

Transatlantic contagion and the seductions of allegory

Eve, whose eye darted contagious fire . . .

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Almost every man, in passion, is eloquent. Then he is at no loss for words and arguments. He transmits to others, by a sort of contagious sympathy, the warm sentiments which he feels . . . Hugh Blair, Lectures

. . . this AGE OF PERSONALITY, this age of literary and political Gossiping . . . in a Generation so transformed from the characteristic reserve of Britons . . . almost every Publication exhibits or flatters the Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Essay vii’ epidemic Distemper . . .

A strong rhetorical tradition stems from Aristotle’s treatment of emotions as persuasive mechanisms (pathos) for argument.1 In its classical context this implied a personal, physiologically mediated, conduit between orator and audience; it was essentially performative, with its efficacy dependent on the character (ethos) of the speaker. Later print culture sought to mimic immediacy in written language through engagement of sympathy. This substitution underpinned relationships between the ‘representative’ and the unique individual in Romantic literary history, as ‘ethos’ widened its range of implication to include the characteristic moral atmosphere of an era. In this rhetorical environment contagion operated as a theory of communication, a metonymy, and a metaphor for metaphor – that is, an image of the communication of thought through language – in writing where individual character substituted for (became representative of) nation. In a transatlantic context comparison structured around metaphors of contagion (touching together) rather than of influence (a flow from somewhere to somewhere else) suggests relations that are reciprocal rather than causal, charged as much with danger as with possibility. Contagion narratives point to the interconnectedness of the transatlantic worlds. This chapter begins by invoking the incidence and implication of contagion metaphors (exploiting 57

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a long medical association of character and pathology) in Anglo-American writing to construe a plausible narrative in the history of literature. I then give the argument a rhetorical turn, to show how the literary history of this metaphor across the same transatlantic range requires and illuminates readers’ imaginative responses. Historically, plague levelled social distinctions, and served to point out the fragility and permeability of boundaries (whether material or cultural); if the rhetoric of contagion helped to evoke and sustain that of nation, it might also be interpreted as a secret destroyer of containment, isolation or individual identity. For René Girard, one of the pioneers of literary anthropology, contagion is ‘a destruction of specificities’.2 It belongs to ‘a thematic cluster that includes various forms of undifferentiation and transgression, the mimetic doubles, and a sacrificial theme that may take the form of a scapegoat process’.3 The implicative range of contagion, encompassing moral and affective as well as physical disease, has interested anthropologists and psychoanalytic theorists; cultural critics have drawn attention to the rhetorical continuities between modern epidemiology and narratives of national identity and its applicability to the circulation of ideas: The metaphor, Priscilla Wald suggests, ‘offers a visceral way to imagine communal affiliations in national terms’.4 Sigmund Freud described how magical thinking works on two ‘principles of association – similarity and contiguity – . . . both included in the more comprehensive concept of “contact” ’.5 His adoption of J. G. Frazer’s distinction between ‘imitative magic’ and ‘contagious magic’ corresponds structurally to the rhetorical operations of metaphor and metonymy. Taboo embodies principles of likeness, and dissonance; it enacts fear and desire simultaneously. Its associations extend to community, and the death of singularity or difference. Relationship is potentially harmful, as well as potentially sustaining; resistance to contagion is the shadow side of sociability. This metaphor of ‘touching together’ (con + tangere) is also a medium for character in writing that explores the nature of transatlantic exchange; it points to the rhetorical interconnectedness of the transatlantic worlds, and to their differences. From the seventeenth century transatlantic history has advanced a strong rhetoric of contagion to address issues of cultural contact. This offers powerful but treacherous possibilities for literary history: metaphorical contagion readily places personal and national character in a straightforward relation of metonym or synecdoche, flattening out particularity and dampening character’s capacity to engage sympathetic emotional response. Both aesthetic pleasure and affective power are attenuated when figurative language is not permitted to play between the typical and unique properties of character.

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I Questions about the inborn or acquired nature of character – how it imprinted itself on Lockean tabulae rasae; how common traits were transmitted between individuals living in proximity to one another; the process whereby people developed a shared ‘national character’; and what might happen when two cultures came into contact – were widely debated in the eighteenth century. In Daniel Defoe’s poem in support of the Dutch Williamite dynasty newly settled on a throne long occupied by Stuarts, national character emerges as little more than the product of xenophobic gossip. An ‘Explanatory Preface’ enacts a mock-Creation in which devils confer slanderous characters on each nation: ‘Rage rules the Portuguese, and Fraud the Scotch.’6 United under the banner of the sardonic refrain ‘true born Englishmen’, the English character is to be ‘motley’, or mongrel: A True-Born Englishman’s a Contradiction, In Speech an Irony, in Fact a Fiction; A metaphor invented to express A man a-kin to all the universe.7

Peculiarities of character tended in the eighteenth century to be construed as a manifestation of incomplete civility; the perfect, ‘empty’ character of the gentleman, bleached of peculiarities, was the product of the ‘highest’ state of social evolution. ‘The vulgar are apt to carry all national characters to extremes’, declared David Hume; civility, on the other hand, facilitated the capacity of others to adopt a similar stance through sympathy.8 The English, in Hume’s view, have ‘the least of a national character’ of any nation, owing to the mixed mode of government which tends to mitigate singularities, and ‘the great liberty and independency, which every man enjoys, allows him to display the manners peculiar to him’; as a nation they exhibit a diffused heterogeneity of manners rather than a single national standard (p. 207). Sympathy was a kind of ‘good’ controlled contagious thinking, which established the parameters of a community of sociability while sustaining the prerogative of the civilised individual self to privacy. This style is explicitly reserved from print circulation in the marketplace, though it may be communicated through private correspondence. Almost a century later Thomas De Quincey expressed a similar sentiment when he located the ‘true English’ style in the unmarried female subject free from the textual ‘contagion of bookishness’.9 Factional contagion, on the other hand, was at once indiscriminate and divisive. The difference between ‘sympathy’ and ‘contagion’ was a matter of

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viewpoint; either way, the implication was that for good or ill, character is ‘catching’. This kind of thinking provided for a variety of arguments: habitual association with criminals might vitiate moral judgment; reading novels of sensibility might sharpen sympathetic responsiveness in real life (or might blunt it); a national crisis would awaken comradely patriotic feelings with countrymen; but patriotism without check would spiral into xenophobia, and so on. The metaphor caught the ambiguous ethical valence of contact and the evident uncertainty of the medium of transmission: Anna Aikin’s (later Barbauld) ‘Enquiry into Those Kinds of Distress Which Excite Agreeable Sensations’ posited a kind of negative contagion in physiological and economic terms: ‘sensibility does not increase with exercise. By the constitution of our frame our habits increase, our emotions decrease, by repeated acts . . . our sensibility is strongly called forth without any possibility of exerting itself in virtuous action, and those emotions . . . are wasted without advantage’.10 Eighteenth-century writing was recurrently troubled by the thought that the communication that developed character in sociability and made civil society possible might also create the conditions to destroy both social fabric and individuals. The medical associations of the metaphor always registered an incipient pathology of character. Characterological correspondence found political correlatives in discussions of representativeness and representation, but national character in these terms, too, no matter how positively endorsed, always contained within itself a potential symptomatology, as well as the possibility of confusion about where self ceased and nation took over. Society – human beings living together – was both the cause of contagion for an individual and, through the mechanisms of support that people living together develop, the only hope of containing it. Plague rendered people suspicious of, as well as dependent on, others. Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals described how people ‘catch . . . sentiment [from one another], by a contagion or natural sympathy’; this is pleasant to us when the communicated sentiments are agreeable, but amid ‘wrangling, and scolding, and mutual reproaches . . . we suffer by contagion and sympathy’.11 Customs and opinions, too, are transmitted by ‘irresistible contagion’; contiguity is the enabling medium of all.12 ‘If we run over the globe, or revolve the annals of history, we shall discover every where signs of a sympathy or contagion of manners, none of the influence of air or climate’.* The sympathy that determined personal character became metonymic of national character, to the extent that it is impossible ‘for any set of men to converse often together, without acquiring * Hume, ‘Of National Characters’, in Essays, p. 204.

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a similitude of manners, and communicating to each other their vices as well as virtues. The propensity to company and society . . . makes us enter deeply into each other’s sentiments, and causes like passions and inclinations to run . . . by contagion, through the whole club or knot of companions.’ Compatriots inevitably ‘acquire a resemblance in their manners, and . . . a common or national character’ comes to supplement ‘a personal one, peculiar to each individual’ (pp. 202–3). Hume’s contagion model was based on a presumption of sympathy between individuals as a consequence of likeness developed in proximity. ‘Habit’ or ‘custom’, which determined all behaviour and beliefs, was its reiterative medium. Monboddo took a similar view: ‘[habit] may be said to be [man’s] first and original nature . . . the nature of man is such, that he, by use and custom, acquires many faculties that other animals have from nature . . . Habit . . . in man is what nature is in other things’.13 The philosophical voice constituted itself as outside partiality and susceptibility to contagion, but looking inward the philosopher qua philosopher found not a unique but a representative character. Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments pressed harder on the equivocal and in places negative implications of the metaphor, with reference to national politics: ‘In a nation distracted by faction’, he conceded that there will be ‘a very few, who preserve their judgment untainted by the general contagion’, but ‘[o]f all the corrupters of moral sentiments . . . faction and fanaticism have always been by far the greatest’.14 The contagion of faction was a negative shadow of the sympathy that constituted the moral fabric of civil society. Only the ‘solitary individual’ who is ‘excluded’ from the party feeling that binds others is free of its taint; being free of contagion, he is equally without ‘influence’. Smith retains the persona of philosophical detachment, but elsewhere in The Theory of Moral Sentiments it is the criminal who occupies the position of social outcast – both the most pitied and the most intolerable of positions who ‘dares no longer look society in the face, but imagines himself as it were rejected, and thrown out from the affections of all mankind. He cannot hope for the consolation of sympathy in this his greatest and most dreadful distress’ (p. 84). However, Smith goes on, ‘solitude is still more dreadful than society’ to the outcast, who is driven back to solicit the protection of the ‘very judges, who he knows have already all unanimously condemned him’ (pp. 84–85). There is no inconsistency in Smith’s theory; it is clear that the criminal and the man of independent judgment bear quite different moral relations to their society. But there is a conundrum inherent in their structurally similar positions that theory cannot resolve: the ‘real, revered, and impartial spectator’ is emotionally distanced from the common feelings (which he can construe only in terms

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of the ‘violence and rage’ of disease) that bind others together. At the same time, like the criminal, he is both alienated from and drawn to the ‘fellowfeeling’ from which he is ‘shut out’. Contagion figured as the shadow side of sympathy in discussions of relationships of all kinds: between individuals, within society in medical, judicial, political and pedagogical contexts, and between different societies and nations. Its capacity to instantiate closeness-with-alienation and its ambivalent tonal implication made it a particularly resonant metaphor for colonists, and later the patriots of the American Revolution, as they attempted to register the emotional conjunction of similarity and separation in transatlantic experience. It could be played several ways: if national character was the product of sympathies between ‘like’ people in proximity, it might also be vulnerable to contagion through contact with another group.

II There is, then, a plausible literary-historical genealogy of contagion, of an exemplary transatlantic kind, to be written in the history of literature; contagion narratives occur from settler accounts through revolutionary statements, documents in conservative political science, poetry, international novels, and pedagogical tracts, from the Mathers to the Jameses, and from Enlightenment discussions of national character to pragmatist exhortations on the development of individual character. Discussions of character occur regularly in proximity to ‘sympathy’ and ‘contagion’ in early transatlantic fiction. Striking examples occur in Timothy Flint’s George Mason, The Young Backwoodsman (1829) and Susannah Rowson’s Sarah, or the Exemplary Wife (1813). This kind of connection is readily construed either within the ‘history of ideas’ (contagion as a means of discussing the relationship of individual and national characters) or abstract schema of allegory (contagion represents the danger of cultural contact to national character). Stephen Carl Arch describes early American historiographers as ‘exist[ing] at the intersection of history and rhetoric’; as history, their works ‘claim to chart New England’s past, present the truth of providential history, and encompass confusing historical events in a comprehensible, reassuring narrative; as rhetoric, they represent “visionary compacts” . . . [that attempt] to convince an audience of listeners or readers to accept the validity of a certain version of the past’.15 Since the seventeenth century contagion has offered American writers an opportunity for social and religious diagnosis; there is a rich secondary literature on its metaphoric

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potential from Cotton Mather and Charles Brockden Brown to Henry James and Susan Sontag. John Canup has pointed to the importance for early settlement narratives of ‘an imposing intellectual tradition that maintained – on the basis of a presumed organic correspondence between human beings, plants and animals – that a people could not leave their native environment and retain indefinitely their native culture’. He cites the seventeenth-century poet and geographer Nathanael Carpenter, who anticipated the infamous eighteenth-century French theories of Buffon and Raynal to the effect that men ‘being transported into other regions, though a long time retaining their native perfection, will notwithstanding in time by litle and litle [sic] degenerate’.16 The organic metaphor of transplantation developed into a rhetoric of settlement and colonisation, with an undercurrent of uncertainty about its physical and moral effects on its ‘deracinated’ proponents. One obvious danger – again I follow Canup – was that degeneration might take the form of ‘going native’; in a vivid image of the perils of cultural contact children of English settlers were known as ‘tame Indian[s], tainted with the vice of the climate’.17 Imitation was contamination. Cotton Mather, puritan minister of Boston’s Second Church, elaborated tropes of moral decline into a rhetorical cluster of biblical images involving plantation, harvest, disease and warfare: the moral effects of ‘American’ colonisation on ‘English’ character were accounted for in a doctrinally endorsed chain of association conjoining cultivation, transplantation and infection: ‘If we find these Indian-Vices to grow Epidemical among us, Oh! don’t wonder, that our God hath been, with Indian Hatchets cutting down the Tree, that brings forth Fruits thus disagreeable to Him that Planted it.’ Mather moved swiftly from self-indictment to exoneration, citing ‘many correspondences and other intentions’ to demonstrate his own continuing struggle against ‘Indian’ symptoms.18 Such language reminds us that the metaphor was deadly reality for colonised peoples: at every stage of exploration and colonisation, contagious disease tracked travel and revealed hidden currents of exchange across bodies and societies. ‘Disease narratives’, as Alan Bewell puts it, ‘provided a means of differentiating colonizers from the colonized, but these distinctions were often fragile and subject to change.’19 The Federalist Papers of Alexander Hamilton resolved Smith’s conundrum in political terms (with submerged class and educational inferences) as a matter of degree. Ideological positions stridently advanced, he argued, are a kind of egotistical indulgence that, making character ‘interested’, prevents the judicious judgment that would allow men to agree on universal truths. The sympathy in common cause which allowed the Confederation to

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cohere would not have strength to contain a populist discontent: ‘There is a contagion in example which few men have sufficient force of mind to resist.’20 To cement the Union speedy replacement of the States’ Confederation by a unilaterally binding Constitution was therefore necessary. But even central government, Hamilton acknowledged, would be unable to minister to a systemic invasion of the body politic by ‘mortal feuds’ which ‘spread a conflagration through a whole nation . . . [proceeding] from the contagion of some violent popular paroxysm’ and ‘commonly amount to revolutions and dismemberments of empire’.21 Hamilton’s enlightened solution was acknowledgement of diversity as the only antidote to the socially destructive forces of factionalism: being comfortable with difference was necessary if the new United States were to retain the harmonious and democratic character their declaration of independence had promoted. Picking up on the fear of faction, the conservative Federalist THE ECHO, WITH OTHER POEMS. A Poetico-Political Olio, by Lemuel Hopkins and others, and published in The Connecticut Courant, for 1 January 1795, invoked contagion to describe the poisoning of an already imagined American national character through fast-spreading seditious discontent among ‘men of sans-culotte condition’ by French Jacobinism.22 The concurrent spread of yellow fever through New England furnished a chilling allegory for popular revolution. American writers, Siân Silyn Roberts suggests, imagined a more diverse ‘community of difference’, in which what she calls ‘expedient sympathy’ introduced a possibility of nonconformity between the spectacle of an emotion and its actuality, thereby (potentially) disrupting reliable transmission of moral education across the sociable nexus.23 She shows how a particularly virulent outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia (at this time relatively unknown in Europe) provided Charles Brockden Brown with a structuring metaphor for Arthur Mervyn (1793): ‘Just as the disease invades people and changes the way they are constituted, so this social body invades and transforms other models of community.’ Mervyn’s ‘democratic approach to sociability’, as Roberts describes it, is a ‘medium’ that preserves his safety in the disease-ridden and conflicted community.24 Chapter 1 suggested that the difference between analogy and correspondence may lie in the rhetorical means or medium (or sometimes the figure of a medium) of character, as both an effect of (produced by, facilitated by) correspondence, and producing correspondence. If ‘contagion’ is the medium for correspondence, the ‘touching together’ achieved by Mervyn’s catalytic presence in the action has effects among the stricken populace of Philadelphia analogous to those of the fever.

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But this is not quite the story I want to tell here. The beguiling plenitude of examples tempts critics to simplify dense webs of connection in favour either of the accumulation of instances characteristic of cultural history, or of allegory and polarised equivalences in the form, ‘yellow fever epidemic represents moral degeneracy through promiscuous consorting with savages– French Jacobins–Europeans’. In such dualist frameworks, the metaphorical contagion places personal and national character in a straightforward relation of metonym or synecdoche. Correspondences between the constitution of individuals and of nations undoubtedly fostered an idiom of representativeness to match an ideology of representation, but the representative relation tends to bleach out both the individual idiosyncrasies and contradictions on which the affective relation between character and reader rests, and the rhetorical claims of metonymy as a means of persuasion, which depends on maintaining an illusion of choice and possibility. Paying attention to the performative dimension of literary language complicates tenor–vehicle binarism and helps to release a richer sense of relationship between personal and national character. The logic of impurity in repetition which sustains particular instances in performative rituals is inherent in contagious language, which seeps in mysterious ways into new contexts of expression; the contingencies of cross-contamination suggest that it may be helpful to read the contagion metaphor as a particular manifestation of citational grafting between texts and across the Atlantic. Contagion is, then, a particularly performative metaphor: it achieves its purpose (registering simultaneously ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of connection, contradictory impulses of desire and fear) in its expression. Roberts’ ‘just as’ closes down the ethical and ideological problems raised by a form of contact described as democratic and dangerous, embodying both human solidarity and its destructiveness. Iteration familiarises, but it encompasses differentiation and comparison as well; the literary voice works on explicit recognition of the already contaminated nature of language and – therefore – thought. Its ‘character’ is unique and particular, performed in complex rhetorical allegiances, rather than universally constituted. This being so, its capacity to persuade necessarily invokes the familiarity of custom and the contagion of sympathetic correspondence. It suggests that we need to look at how literary language ‘catches’ idiom from previous use, and in particular the effects of cross-contamination when character is at stake – how, in other words, contagion ‘works’ as metaphor and metonymy in more sustainedly ambivalent transatlantic play, where literary language ‘catches’ idiom from previous use; ‘contagious reading’ may reveal the verbal texture of transatlantic dynamics, in canonical texts by Cotton

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Mather, Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne and Henry James. The transatlantic relation will illuminate wider questions of how character is evoked in literary language.

III Cotton Mather was an early – and vilified – champion of inoculation against contagious disease. In the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721 he advanced the view that as the disease was spread by minute ‘animalculae’ (what we know as bacteria), there was ‘less of metaphor in our Account, than may at first be imagin’d’.25 His advocacy in this Account . . . of Inoculating the Small-Pox had a very practical purpose, but Mather’s sensibility was incorrigibly figurative: the contagion to which character is susceptible compounds itself as a theological, an ethical and a medical issue, in which the soul is construed as a ‘Citadel’ under attack from Satan, temptation and ‘miasm’: ‘The Enemy, ’tis true, gets in so far as to make some Spoil; even so much as to satisfy him . . . but the vital Powers are kept so clear from his Assaults, that they can manage the Combat bravely.’26 There is no separation between his empirical, meliorist interest in the mechanism of transmission, his championship of inoculation and his rampant metaphorical language. Why is excessive language contagious? Mather’s writing offers an example of metaphorical thinking in action, in which contagion is both the medium for the mutual implication of language and character, and the design it exerts on the reader. The full rhetorical resources of language are deployed to represent exemplary characters in such a way as to elicit corresponding exemplary effects in his readers. The story goes that on his deathbed Mather was asked by his son ‘what Sentence or Word . . . he would have me think on constantly’. The dying divine replied in two languages: ‘Remember only that one word Fructuosus.’27 It’s a wonderful word to roll around, and apt. Linguistically, typographically, in its reach of reference and the magnitude of its claims, Mather’s is a fruitful voice, delighting in its character of verbal excess: this is the rhetorical correlative of the condition of the colony of New England, ‘the Spot of Earth, which the God of Heaven Spied out for the Seat of such Evangelical, and Ecclesiastical, and very remarkable Transactions, as require to be made an history’ (p. 122). That ‘history’ was Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, a seven-book ‘Church-History of New-England’ published in London in 1702. Its ambitions were large, and transatlantic: ‘I WRITE the Wonders of the CHRISTIAN RELIGION, flying from the Depravations of Europe, to the American Strand’ (p. 89). Language is the thing Mather does,

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and what he does with it is America: in exclamations, superlatives, exhortations and prophecies. This epic history of God’s special colony contained a series of biographies to illustrate ‘the Exemplary Lives of those that Heaven employs to be Patterns of Holiness and Usefulness upon Earth’ (p. 97). Reading their stories would, Mather hoped, lead men directly to better ways in degenerate days, through the contagion of example central to humanist pedagogy. (The trope would become a familiar staple of eighteenth-century novel theory: Elizabeth Cooper wrote of a ‘kind of Contagion in Minds, as well as in Bodies’ that would fire a reader to emulate virtuous examples.28) Book ii of the Magnalia is a series of character studies of New England’s early governors and magistrates; their representativeness moralised. Character enters history here as part of an implied narrative of progress; reciprocally, history is created by the representation of character in time and action. The metonymic intention of these Theophrastan characters and exemplary lives ( John Winthrop, for instance, became ‘Nehemias Americanus’) is enacted in puns and metaphors through which Mather, their ‘remembrancer’, at the mercy of imperfect and incomplete sources, becomes himself a character. A bewilderment of proliferating pronouns mutually implicates the textual characters of subject, narrator and reader in the drama of shared historical meaning. Attempting to read a consistent character for Sir Henry Vane from the highly divergent opinions of his sources, Mather proclaims himself like an exegete lost in a maze of uncertain significations and competing authorities, ‘as much a Seeker for his Character, as many have taken him to be a Seeker in Religion’ (p. 235). Defiant self-justification promoted the usefulness of the Magnalia’s character studies in comparison with the ‘Subjects of many other Histories [such as] the [q]uestions about Z, the last Letter of our Alphabet, and whether H is to be pronounced with an Aspiration, where about whole Volumes have been written’ (p. 97). The collapse of character study into the study of ‘characters’ (alphabetical letters) is calculated bathos. (Ironically, when Mather received his first copy he was (as an English friend had predicted) grieved about its poor paper quality and the confused state of the ‘character’: it was riddled with errata.29) The relationship between character as person and character as alphabet is intrinsic to the design of the Magnalia. It invokes an analogy between the author’s creation of his text of exemplary New England characters (biographical men) and the cabbalistic idea of God creating the character of all things by inscribing, imprinting, engraving, characters (alphabets, letters) in the text of the universe. The correspondence between the text’s stylistic, typographic and allusive plenitude and the magnitude of its authorial ego

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combine to evoke a sense of the greatness and variety of God’s purposes for mankind, realised on ‘the American Strand’. This, it insists, is a world-historical not a provincial voice, and the flowers of rhetoric are its present concerns: altho’ I thus challenge, as my due, the Character of an Impartial, I doubt I may not challenge That of an Elegant Historian. I cannot say, whether the Style, wherein this Church-History is written, will please the Modern Criticks: But if I seem to have used . . . a Simple, Submiss, Humble Style, ’tis the same that Eusebius affirms to have been used by Hegesippus . . . [w]hereas others, it may be, will reckon the Style Embellished with too much of Ornament, by the multiplied References to other and former Concerns, closely coach’d, for the Observation of the Attentive, in almost every Paragraph . . . These Embellishments . . . are not the puerile Spoils of Polyanthea’s; but I should have asserted them to be as choice Flowers as most that occur in Ancient or Modern Writings, almost unavoidably putting themselves into the Author’s Hand. (pp. 100–1)

Verbal exuberance notwithstanding, the Magnalia’s author presents himself as only the amanuensis of truth and history, his manner called forth by the matter in hand; the pun on ‘digest’ brings together the two senses of character as inscription (making a digest of the printed sources) and the character of the writer, nourished by his mastery of the material. He is a ‘writer’ in the older sense of copyist, whose prose performs New England’s stylistic dilemmas in his own persona; the alimentary pun is only slightly submerged. Mather’s pun on the flowers of rhetoric rebuked a debased stylistic contagion that took the form of passive redaction: polyantheas were anthologies of extracts from earlier literature, to which I’ll return. Unsurprisingly, the work received a decidedly mixed reception: Mather’s fellow historian John Oldmixon admired the thoroughness of the Magnalia’s narrative, but complained of the stylistic heterogeneity of its ‘Puns, Anagrams, Acrosticks, Miracles, Prodigies, Witches, Speeches, Epistles, and other Incumbrances’ to plain understanding.30 Critics were distracted by such a contaminated voice; indeed, they seem to have found it catching. Picking up Mather’s own image of ‘the few Months in which this Work has been Digesting’ (p. 102), John Banister, writing in The Boston Courant in 1710, reviled him as a: . . . mad enthusiast, thirsting after fame, By endless volum’ns thought to raise a name. With undigested trash he throngs the Press; Thus striving to be greater, he’s the less . . . . . .Parkhurst says, Satis fecisti, My belly’s full of your Magnalia Christi.31

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The criticism addresses and confutes Mather’s own self-presentation in the character of Historian, in his ‘Prefatory Poem’ to the Magnalia: Allow what’s known; they who write Histories, Write many things they see with other Eyes ’Tis fair, where nought is feign’d, nor undigested, Nor ought, but what is credibly attested.

(p. 78)

So perhaps it was a mere polyanthea. If a historian is someone who digests the writing of others, his credentials to knowledge are at best secondhand experience. Such copying would give Melville’s Bartleby indigestion. The Magnalia’s mixed modes and verbal copia were no more palatable or digestible but remained equally contagious a century later. In an article for the North-American Review in 1818 its co-founder William Tudor described its 800 folio pages as ‘a chaotick mass of history, biography, obsolete creeds, witchcraft, and Indian wars, interspersed with bad puns, and numerous quotations in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, which rise up like so many decayed, hideous stumps to arrest the eye and deform the surface’.32 This offensive ‘rage for punning’ (p. 266) infected the reviewer’s language with its own colourful imagery. Tudor quoted at length the epitaph that encapsulated the life of Ralph Partridge as an outrageous example of how Mather’s characterology continually obtruded the rhetorical character of the biographer on the account of his subject, culminating in the outrageous coup de grace: ‘Mr Partridge was, not withstanding the paucity and poverty of his congregation, so afraid of being any thing that looked like a bird wandring from his nest, that he remained with his poor people, till he took wing to become a bird of paradise, along with the winged seraphim of Heaven. Epitaph; avolavit!’ (p. 267). Stretching the Partridge-pun much further than the reader’s compliance might reasonably extend, Mather transformed it from a trick of language to an instrument of exposition; its associative reach encompassed the biblical dove of peace and the imperious eagle, embodying the biographical subject in the typological correspondences that constitute Mather’s mode of thought. The flurry of elaboration condensed itself with a triumphant linguistic shift in the final ‘avolavit!’ (he flew away). If we are overwhelmed, we are meant to be. Metaphoric excess is a kind of contagion of language that implicates the reader in the analogising thought processes of the writer’s character creation. The impact of the passage depends on the reader’s complicit participation in combining the metaphoric and metonymic chains of association into a compound image of uniqueness and representativeness. This citational grafting reformulates the problem of sympathy and contagion into a paradox of richness and purity in

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a performative voice that makes no separation in its historical argument between the ‘movement of thought’ and ‘rhetorical gesture’.33 Was Mather simply a belated exponent of late baroque decorativeness, his Magnalia as ‘Rhetoric’ writing its own obsolescence in exactly the kind of gratuitous display of the ‘flowers’ that would be deplored by Adam Smith and John Witherspoon and their followers on both sides of the Atlantic as a form of verbal contagion relegated to a historical period before civil society had tamed language use to norms of propriety? Their rhetorics suspected reliance on (perhaps indulgence in) ‘flowers of rhetoric’ as a distraction from argument. We might rather read Mather’s method as congruent with the terms of Smith’s own account of ‘the difference betwixt the didactick, oratorical and the Historicall Stile’ cited in Chapter 1, in which the historian involves his reader in ‘the narration of the facts . . . without magnifying . . . or diminishing them’, by ‘setting them in as interesting a view as he possibly can’.34 This narrator is a sober figure whose authority depends on impartiality and self-withholding. The credentials of the ‘rhetorician’, on the other hand, derive from his own character projected into the writing and the sympathy this calls forth from the reader: a master of affective language, Mather was well aware that, ‘Patterns . . . may have upon [the reader] the force which Precepts have not.’35 Something of this vocative distinction was grudgingly acknowledged by Tudor: ‘for accuracy in historical occurrences [readers] will do well to rely upon other authorities; but if they wish to obtain a general view of the state of society and manners, they will probably no where find so many materials . . . as in the work of this credulous pedantick, and garrulous writer’ (p. 272). But the point was that Mather’s narrative, alternating between annalistic and baroque style, claimed both modes – or, rather, refused to separate them. The very intensity of his figuration challenged the reader’s involvement, and asserted that the veracity of history depended on the shaping mastery of the historian over his materials. Verbal paradox was a form of pun that might be used to squeeze richer possibilities of doctrinal and emotional meaning out of historical instance by turning it around in the reader’s view. The rhetorical character of the biographer was implicated in the medium for transmitting the virtuous example of his biographical subjects. So Edward Hopkins ‘bore the Affliction [of his wife’s madness] unto his Dying Day; having been taught by the Affliction to Die Daily, as long as he Lived ’ (p. 249). Mather’s love of paradox was matched by the paradox of Mather’s credulity (wonders of the invisible world, apparently limitless belief in the analogical method and biblical correspondences) and the sceptical possibilities at play in his language. His narrative exclamations,

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like his verbal copia, were designed to convey enthusiasm for his subjects, wonder at God’s bounty for New England and admiration for their historian. More than that, the copia offered a contagious example for readerly engagement. Only by being convinced by the authority of his character would a reader engage with the credit-worthiness of his History. To this end, he co-opted as a preface his venerable associate John Higginson’s quasilegal ‘Attestation’ that the story was told ‘according to truth’.36 Mather’s voice makes huge demands on its reader, simply by that direct address. He took particular, approving note of Hopkins’ ‘way to cause Attention in the People of his Family, which was to ask any Person that seemed Careless in the midst of his Discourse, What was it that I Read or Spoke last? Whereby he Habituated them unto such an Attention, that they were still usually able to give a ready Account’ (p. 248). Caveat lector. This preacher insists on his audience’s complete attention; the response he seeks recognises resistance as an element of submission. The narrative voice in Magnalia would become a model for Washington Irving’s Diedrich Knickerbocker. Where Knickerbocker is overwhelmed and ultimately defeated by his material, and represents himself as unable to establish the perlocutionary relation which requires a responsive ‘you’ to effect its utterance, his predecessor glories in rhetorical mastery of self-expression as a further manifestation of divine greatness and New England’s historical destiny, which is also an assertion of his own authority to represent. Mather’s metaphors, puns and allusive correspondences are the verbal embodiment of the transatlantic contagions his biographies invoke, in the form of analogy, re-enactments and renovations. Sacvan Bercovitch describes Mather as writing in a line of ‘public autobiographies . . . which are really hagiographies of the world-redemptive American self’.37 This describes the larger schema of providentialism but fails to catch how the paradoxical manner of Mather’s evocation generates a rhetorical contagion of alternatives. Winthrop was ‘a Governour in whom the Excellencies of Christianity made a most improving Addition unto the Virtues, wherein even without those he would have made a Parallel for the Great Men of Greece, or of Rome, which the Pen of a Plutarch has Eternized’ (p. 213). The tension between Winthrop’s representative function (in which the historical man metonymises the specific virtues of his nation) and the desire to gather him into a transnational, anachronic pantheon of analogous ‘Great Men’ is a hermeneutic battlefield: the first requires an allegorical reading, the second an analogical one. Allegory and analogy fight for dominance in the text at the level of rhetoric, ideology and affect. Allegory is a powerful tool for making sense, but it is a mode that does not readily accommodate the .

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contingencies of historical circumstance. Christian doctrine leads Mather towards a system of ahistorical correspondences in which his biographical subjects (like the rhetorical persona of their historian himself) are universal and typical re-enactions and exhibitions of virtues; they (and he) are at the same time unique, indicative of New England’s differentiation from the Old World, and further confirmation of the divine plan. The impurity of Mather’s performative iteration is intrinsic to his heroic struggle to enact, to memorialise and to make the world take note of the new dispensation of New England. One might speculate on why in 1818 Tudor and The North-American Review revived Mather’s own contemporaries’ strictures on his style. At the least, it indicates a continuing preoccupation with verbal propriety in the fraught environment of Anglo-American cultural politics following the War of 1812–14. Stylistic copia offended the taste of an era of rhetorical austerity which preferred its nationalism in politically uncomplicated form. Twenty years later Ralph Waldo Emerson’s language in his 1838 Address to the Senior Class at Divinity College in Harvard would provoke similar irritation in the Unitarian leader Andrews Norton, who found the ‘character’ of Emerson’s voice intolerable, and irresistible, in very similar terms to Mather’s critics. In both cases, the demands made by excessive figuration (‘excess’ defined as ‘abuse’ of the ‘common’ sense of language) seemed to hinder exposition (they can’t be paraphrased) but provoked sympathetic response in the critic’s involuntary echo of ‘anomalous combinations of words’.38 Norton’s critique exudes desire as it damns the ‘strange connexions’ generated in Emerson’s performance, elaborating his own contagious verbal chain of emotive response: ‘Float[ing] . . . swelling . . . forc[ing] . . . abusing . . . unmeaning’ are some of this rhetoric’s seductive abuses. This is a metonymic example of what Freud would later describe as the tendency in ‘customary prohibition’ for ‘the unconscious instinct . . . to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects’.39 ‘The magical power . . . attributed to taboo’ derives from its ‘capacity for arousing temptation; and it acts like a contagion because examples are contagious and because the prohibited desire in the unconscious shifts from one thing to another’ (p. 89). Fear of contagion registers the terror of unacknowledgeable desire; the common language that binds community may itself betray its customary norms. The invasiveness may be ‘coarse and violent’ like Norton’s experience of Emerson’s voice, or quietly insidious. I’ll return to this passage in the final chapter. The narrator of ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ has much in common with the critical persona of Norton. A man of habit, ‘prudence’ and ‘method’ are his

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salient characteristics; he makes his office arrangements so as to ‘conjoin’ ‘privacy and society’.40 A new scrivener seems a harmonious addition to the lawyer’s small community, until asked to verify copy against ‘original’ documents, a task which he ‘prefer[s] not to’ undertake. The first sign of the contagious impact of Bartleby’s apparently innocuous presence emerges as the narrator attempts to make sense of his employee’s digestive capacities: ‘Ginger . . . had no effect on Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none’ (p. 23). The narrator reflects that ‘Somehow, of late I had got into the way of involuntarily using this word “prefer” upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions. And I trembled to think that my contact with the scrivener had already and seriously affected me in a mental way’ (p. 31). The contagion spreads through the office; Bartleby’s private digestive problem begins to express itself through the other characters, as one after another adopts his ‘preferring not to’ phrase, inadvertently articulating a resistance to the constraining circumstances of the legal practice prohibited by the narrator’s relentlessly benevolist and quietly appropriative version of their lives.

IV The claims of the narrator of ‘Bartleby’ on his reader are attenuated and accommodating; they assume assent rather than insisting upon authority. A similar strategy infuses Nathaniel Hawthorne’s early fictional redaction of Mather’s Magnalia. Where the voice of Mather’s historian overwhelms, Hawthorne’s recedes; where Mather’s rhetoric soars and swoops and seeks to infect through example, Hawthorne’s self-abnegates. There would appear to be little to ‘catch’ from this narrative voice, and little to ‘prefer’ about it. The flattening of Mather’s rich rhetorical scenarios for character evocation into a series of silent pageants betrays a loss of faith in writing’s power to conjure the past in other than inertly allegorical terms. The manner in which Hawthorne’s ‘Legends of the Province House’ collectively create a history and a historian of New England could scarcely be more different from Mather’s. A representative relation is at their centre, too: the four tales all involve processions of ‘characters’ through the erstwhile Province House (‘now’ a tavern in a Boston commercial street) in masquerades that compound discrete episodes of provincial past, democratic present and a projected future. Like Bartleby, of whom no biography can be written, their bleakly demoralised pageants of history’s disenfranchised cumulatively propagate representative figures bleached of exemplary virtue. The compound connections between ‘puritan’, ‘Revolutionary’ and

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‘democratic’ sensibilities that collectively constitute the Legends’ analysis of American character emerge from an environment where Atlantic crossings are repeatedly remarked instruments of plot, and where contamination, infection and contagion are the metaphorical agents of transmission, with both generative and deadly effect. Contagion is subject, analogical indicator and verbal texture in tales which implicate allegories of colonial contact with the very processes of historical narrative. The present catches its character from the past. This genealogy, the ‘Legends’ cumulatively make clear, is their narrator’s construction; like the Magnalia, his ‘history’ is a metonym of the historian’s relation to language. But this is a far from heroic purveyor of ‘Legends’: his authorial disengagement from the tales he transmits is a guarantee not of historical truth but of a relationship at once uninterested and too interested in character. So far, it all sounds a little dreary, and not a little tawdry. Both are to an extent true – but as imputed to the narrator, rather than to Hawthorne’s reworking of Mather’s rhetoric of persuasion-by-contagion. The narrator becomes a conduit for information supplied by a slightly tipsy ‘storyteller’ ‘possessed of some very pleasant gossip’ about the past.41 In the absence of ‘literal and absolute truth’ the narrator has ‘not scrupled to make such further changes as seemed conducive to the reader’s profit and delight’ (p. 243). The reader is warned to expect that his characters’ stories will bear as much and as little relation to the ‘truth’ of the past as gossip usually confers on its subject. He avows and disowns; promises confidence without supplying enlightenment (‘there passed a scene which has never yet been satisfactorily explained’ (p. 243)); plays on trust, but betrays that of his informant (‘it seemed as if all the old Governors and great men were running riot above stairs, while Mr Bela Tiffany babbled of them below’ (p. 269)); most of all, he exempts himself from representation while insinuating judgment in his representation of others. One thing gossip delights in is cutting pretension, whether to heroism or virtue, down to size; it reassures us of the ubiquity of clay feet. Like contagion, gossip is ethically ambiguous: born of curiosity about the character of others, it creates conditions for sympathetic intimacy in the act of denigrating other sympathies, other occasions. Character – elevated, and reduced – is its medium, and its message. The gossip, like Smith’s Rhetorician, ‘will not barely set forth the character of a person as it realy [sic] existed but will magnify every particular that may tend to excite the Strongest emotions in us’.42 The Magnalia magnified character, both of the historian and of his biographical subjects: each conferred stature on the other. The parade of the same governors of New England in General Howe’s masquerade

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reduced these exemplars of the ‘Wonders of the CHRISTIAN RELIGION, flying from the Depravations of Europe, to the American Strand’ from divinely appointed agents of Providence to silent witnesses of ethical and political compromise with British power. The masquerade of Governor Belcher is an ‘awful mockery’ or a ‘tedious foolery’ (p. 250) depending on the perspective of the observer; the pageant’s onlookers voice ‘various emotions of anger, contempt, or half-acknowledged fear, but still [the] anxious curiosity’ of gossip to know what happens next, to whom (p. 251). Another ‘Legend’ emerges from the narrator’s desire to ‘kill the hours ’twixt [seven] and bedtime’ (p. 257). His ‘rare properties as a patient listener’ (and some more ‘whiskey punch’) encourage Bela Tiffany’s tongue to flow once again with ‘tales, traditions, anecdotes of famous dead people, and traits of ancient manners’; his offering to history this evening is ‘one of the wildest, and at the same time the best accredited, accounts’ of a mysterious portrait (pp. 257, 258, 260). This time the verdict of history turns on a configuration between regal authority and the contagious clamour ‘of a wild, misguided multitude’ (p. 263). Conflicting romantic and antiquarian versions of Randolph indict ‘Dr Cotton Mather’ as an arch-gossip who ‘has filled our early history with old women’s tales’ (p. 262). Shortly afterwards narrator and babbling Bela Tiffany are joined by a ‘venerable personage, whose own actual reminiscences went back to the epoch of Gage and Howe, and even supplied him with a doubtful anecdote or two of Hutchinson’ (p. 272). He may perhaps be Mather himself. But the life of this old Royalist had been of ‘such a scrambling and unsettled character’ that the narrator doubts ‘whether he would refuse a cup of kindness with either Oliver Cromwell or John Hancock; to say nothing of any democrat now upon the stage’ (pp. 272–73). The anachronic echo of Robert Burns’ ‘Auld Lang Syne’ (a poem of community beloved of transatlantic exiles in nostalgic mood) is a reassurance – though it is not clear whether of the narrator or by him to his reader – that the Old Royalist is a good fellow not above contributing to the tavern gossip. ‘Blood . . . warmed by the good cheer’, he offers to ‘add a few reminiscences to our legendary stock’ (p. 288). The cup of kindness duly uncorked prompts from Tiffany ‘one of the oddest legends which he had yet raked from the store-house, where he keeps such matters’ (p. 273). Here the gossiping mode evolves a tale in which the contagion metaphor slides between literal subject, implication and explication. ‘Suitabl[y] adorn[ed]’from the ‘fancy’ of the narrator, ‘Lady Eleanore’s Mantle’, a tale of the ‘Province House of a trans-atlantic colony’ (p. 273) is set in the same Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721 that engaged Cotton Mather’s advocacy of inoculation. It also plays on a more topical connection for Hawthorne’s readers of the transatlantic migration of Asiatic cholera ‘striding

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from shore to shore of the Atlantic’ to America in 1832 (p. 283). Michael J. Colacurcio has traced Puritan allegorisations of the relation between pestilence and pride (Lady Eleanore’s besetting sin); the historical connection is supplemented by the transatlantic metaphorics of the tale’s telling.43 Again the fictional occasion is a masquerade of assumed ‘characters’; again pestilential vocabulary masks Revolutionary ideology that ‘compelled rich and poor to feel themselves brethren’. More than this, the plague’s ‘wont to slay its hundreds and thousands, on both sides of the Atlantic’ (p. 282), is animated as a synecdoche of the connectedness of kingdom and colony, as of high and low, and a mode of reading transatlantic connectedness. In the tale the spurned lover who has followed Lady Eleanore to America finds his speech echoed by Dr Clarke, ‘a famous champion of the popular party’ (p. 275); the cause of common humanity crosses the Atlantic without translation, and both escape the plague, while Lady Eleanore, ‘insulating herself within a small and distinguished circle’ (p. 278) is both the agent of its transmission and its most prominent victim. She becomes the story’s personification of Pride, ‘seek[ing] to place herself above the sympathies of our common nature, which envelops all human souls. See, if that nature do not assert its claim over her in some mode that shall bring her level with the lowest!’ (p. 276). That mode is gossip. Telling tales about how people behaved is performative: it brings history into being and determines the relationship the present believes itself to hold to the past. Like the other ‘Legends’, ‘Lady Eleanore’s Mantle’ was first published in John Louis O’Sullivan’s progressive United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1839 following the disappointing reviews of the first edition of Twice-Told Tales. Reviewers had picked up a transatlantic affinity, certainly: treating Hawthorne as a Lamb-like stylist, imitative and genteel, they had discerned a ‘feminine’ sensibility that conveyed the spectre of insubstantiality. Hawthorne’s failure – or refusal – to give his flat allegorical personages satisfactory substance frustrated his readers. Writing in The American Monthly Park Benjamin longed for the vigour of a national literary voice and strong representative characters; several reviewers noted the ‘strain of allegory’ that would be deplored by Poe in his otherwise appreciative essay on Hawthorne’s work.44 The example of ‘William Wilson’ in the previous chapter indicates how Poe’s own stories tempted their readers towards allegorical correspondence, only to reject the stable transposition it would seem to require between the tale’s incompatible narrative implications. The effect is to demonstrate the author’s control over the reader’s hermeneutic vocabulary; character, it seems, is a gift to a reader, withheld at will by the writer.

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Poe was, or affected to be, a surprisingly credulous reader of Hawthorne’s tales, which deploy allegory neither to draw typological parallels, nor to instantiate historical fact in mythological or metaphorical terms of tenor and vehicle, but to generate complicity in chauvinist fictions of transatlantic history and national character, and scepticism about the truth value of history itself. One after another Mather’s royal governors and their putative aristocratic ladies are humiliated in tales which formulate a transatlantic dynamic essentially according to that classic and most satisfying formula of gossip, Schadenfreude. Like contagion, and like moralistic allegory, gossip flattens figurative complexity to fit a formula; the ‘real’ emotional event in every case is the recognition that takes place and the bonding between the parties to the story: ‘the reader can scarcely conceive’, says the narrator confidentially, ‘how unspeakably the effect of such a tale is heightened, when, as in the present case, we may repose perfect confidence in the veracity of him who tells it’.45 Of course we can. How satisfying. In this sense, indeed, the characters who process phantasmagorically through the ‘Legends of the Province House’ are – as they must be – classically ‘flat’, in E. M. Forster’s sense of ‘flat’, recently revived by Blakey Vermeule: ‘Flat characters are allegorical. All their features come from the idea they represent. They have no capacity to learn from experience. Round characters are open and complex, much more like real human beings in their inconsistency.’46 Hawthorne’s writing engaged its readers’ attention towards the function of character in the processes of national history-making. ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ is a highly wrought story about literariness that invokes contagion as a metaphor for textual imbrication. Presented as a translation of ‘Beatrice; ou la Belle Empoisonneuse’, ‘from the writings of Aubépine’, the tale’s Preface laments the author’s ‘inveterate love of allegory, which is apt to invest his plots and characters with the aspect of scenery and people in the clouds, and to steal away the human warmth out of his conceptions’.47 Set in Italy (whose literary associations immediately signal contagion, poison, fever and miasma) at an undefined moment ‘very long ago’ (p. 93), allegorical modes of reading assert themselves from the outset, as the young Giovanni looks out into the garden to see ‘the ruin of a marble fountain in the centre, sculptured with rare art, but so wofully shattered that it was impossible to trace the original design from the chaos of remaining fragments’ (p. 94). In Paradise Lost, Satan tempts Eve towards the Tree of Knowledge ‘Fast by a fountain’; but this is not a rewriting of Milton’s epic. Like another example of citational grafting, such as Poe’s crisscrossing marks on the desks in Dr Bransby’s school, the centrality and ‘ruin’

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of the fountain marks this out as a fable not of origins (Italy, or Europe, as the source of American culture) but of the over-determined processes of reimagination. The echoes of Milton’s Eve in the garden would have reached any early nineteenth-century reader of Hawthorne; the first sight of Beatrice ‘inhaling [the] various perfumes’ like Eve whom Satan first espies ‘Veil’d in a cloud of fragrance’, establishes Paradise Lost as an immediate textual referent in Giovanni’s response.48 The impressionable Giovanni is struck by Beatrice’s ‘expression of simplicity and sweetness; qualities that had not entered into his idea of her character, and which made him ask anew, what manner of mortal she might be’ (p. 102). At the same time, he is ‘haunted by dark surmises as to her character’ (p. 120). The moral ambience in which the story moves is poisoned by the young man’s allegorising habit; an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and fear pervades. Mather’s example and the resistance to it dramatised in the ‘Province House’ opens the possibility that the infection in the air may be as much rhetorical as religious. At one level this might be an admonitory fable for New England in which a ‘New World’ Protestant consciousness (whose medium is the plain style) battles for supremacy in the impressionable mind of Giovanni with the baroque seductions of ‘European’ sensibility (the ‘flowers of rhetoric’). Rappaccini’s rival Signor Baglioni voices ‘certain grave objections to [Rappaccini’s] professional character’ (p. 99) as a healer compromised by his compulsion for experimental knowledge; on a subsequent visit, after ‘chatting carelessly, for a few moments, about the gossip of the city and the University’ he sharpens Giovanni’s fears by recalling a story of a beautiful woman ‘nourished with poisons from her birth upward’ until it became ‘her element of life’ (p. 117). This ‘intimation of a view of [Beatrice’s] character . . . gave instantaneous distinctness to a thousand dim suspicions’ in Giovanni’s mind (p. 118). Readers of the story are confronted at every turn by the question of who is poisonous to whom, and in what manner; who is the source and what the propagator of the contagion; doubt settles successively on Baglioni, Rappaccini, Giovanni, Beatrice and possibly on the narrator too. Giovanni’s mind ‘rose at every instant to a higher fever-pitch’ (p. 105); in response to his observation of Beatrice among the poisonous plants in the garden he imagines himself Adam brought down by the temptress, and wonders self-righteously for a moment whether the plot might be a felix culpa in which he would play a starring role, culminating in his return ‘within the limits of ordinary nature . . . leading Beatrice, the redeemed Beatrice, by the hand’.49 But, with Baglioni’s toxic insinuations in his heart, he has transformed Dante’s Beatrice via Milton into the Eve of the Puritans. His ‘venomous scorn and anger’ (p. 124) and ‘fiendish scorn’ (p. 124) align him

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more closely with Milton’s Satan, whose characteristic style is ‘filled with scorn’.50 Unlike Milton’s Adam who ‘scrupled not to eat / Against his better knowledge, not deceived, / But fondly over come with female charm’,51 Giovanni prophesies the curse of Original Sin – ‘they that come after us will perish as by a pestilence’ (p. 124) – and allows her to swallow Baglioni’s presumably noxious ‘antidote’ without partaking himself. ‘To Beatrice . . . as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death’ (pp. 127–28). So what is the moral of the tale? Too much, or too little, might seem a flippant response. Persistent allegorising is the mode – we could call it Giovanni’s – which propels the narrative to its inevitable conclusion. But this is a form of figuration constrained by the circuitry of allusion that dominates the narrative. The over-determined trajectory of allegory also signals the arbitrariness of attribution where the verbal density of character is concerned: structurally similar but differently resonant versions of this analogical argument might be made using ‘Shakespeare’ or ‘Dante’ rather than ‘Milton’ as metaphoric ‘source’, for example. Every element reflects back, and is reflected into, a system of already established textual correspondence. For this reason, if no other, any attempt to explain the ‘meaning’ of the story or to interpret it as pertaining to ‘rounded’ character (for example, as a Freudian story of young Giovanni’s fear of sexual maturity, or a struggle between the father and the lover for possession of the beloved) would miss the point that the characters are ‘flattened’ as a provocation to the reader. Giovanni’s reading of the scene in the garden may be poisoned, and poisonous; but is any uncontaminated reading available? Perhaps allegory itself is the deadly form of contagious thinking that the story is ‘about’: this would make the tale an allegory of how allegory constrains possibilities of linguistic correspondence into a pas de deux of ascribed significance without nuance or connotation, ‘closed’ rather than freely associative. To wish for ‘pure’ language is to discover the fountain poisoned at its source. As Emily Dickinson would put it, Infection in the sentence breads We may inhale Despair At distances of Centuries From the Malaria52

Though his rhetorical claims are less insistent, Hawthorne’s sense of the mutual implication involved in transatlantic idiom is as uncompromising as Mather’s.

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V Why a reader should care about a character whose function is simply to be ‘American’ or ‘English’ or even ‘representative’ matters particularly in the case of writing in which content and the poetics of its evocation are clearly inseparable; it is a repeated issue in the contagion narratives which feature in this chapter. Hawthorne’s scenario of the self-withholding observer and the woman who finds in death the antidote to a life poisoned by others suggests a connection to Daisy Miller, another carrier of transatlantic contagion. ‘Coincidence’, however, does not quite account for the resemblance. Henry James’ novella exemplifies how metaphor compounds the ethics of character and the rhetoric of representation. To say that ‘Daisy’ Miller (it ‘ain’t her name on her cards’) is a flower of rhetoric in no way detracts from the ethical claims the story makes on its reader.53 But the connections the tale makes through metaphor and prosopopoeia complicate any reading of her (or the narrator’s) moral character. Daisy Miller was rejected by Philadelphia’s Lippincott’s magazine, perhaps (James speculated later) on national grounds as ‘an outrage on American girlhood’ (p. v). First published in the London Cornhill Magazine in 1878, it rapidly became James’ most popular tale, achieving a classic realist success in engaging readers with the personable figure of Daisy. The question of her character is immediately an issue, perhaps the issue, of the story: through the focalising figure of Winterbourne the narrative poses the mystery of who, or what, she ‘really’ is, and of whom or what she may be representative. Her actions stamp her as a type of the careless and fearless young American woman – but how deliberate is her flouting of the codes of European propriety? What of her moral character? These are questions that preoccupy Winterbourne; contemporary etiquette writers made Daisy’s fate an objectlesson to American mothers and daughters; James’ own friends debated her virtue in animated terms; and they have divided critical assessments in equal measure. What we might call the conundrum of realism – that character’s individuality is compounded from its representativeness and its poetic resonances – emerges when we consider the tendency among readers to appropriate representation by converting it to explanation. The tradition of virtue ethics descending from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics founds moral judgment on character as observed in action, rather than in rules (deontological arguments) or utility. Narrative is its mode of representation and analysis, based on the assumption that the structure of human life is sequential and developmental: lives gain meaning through temporality; ‘reading’ the events of a life-story, we are able to assess both the

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virtue of a character and the character of virtue. On similar assumptions James’ tale of Daisy has attracted varieties of ethical interpretation in proportion to its popularity: as a metaphorical story of the observer’s failure in moral perception, where Winterbourne’s frosty manner blights her spring bloom (numerous analogues in other Jamesian observers who believe themselves immune to passion support this one); or as an allegory of Daisy’s own failure (a reading that calls to witness James’ undoubted dislike of the comportment of American tourists in Rome). With an absent father and virtually absent mother and left to make her way in the world, on the other hand, Daisy would make an obvious fairy-tale character. Or, her journey as heroine from the comfort of the ‘excellent inn of the “Trois Couronnes” ’ to the Protestant cemetery ‘by an angle of the wall of imperial Rome, beneath the cypresses, and the thick spring-flowers’ (pp. 4, 91) might be a kind of Rake’s Progress from prosperity to grave. And when Daisy dies in Rome of the ‘Italian Fever’, the apparently symbolic deadly infection hints at the vulnerability of the New World to the miasmatic influence of the Old. It seems as though we read a fable about the dangers to the bright American of contagion from Europe. In this ‘romance’ of the deadliness of cultural contact Daisy has to die because of a symbolic miscegenation, the corruption of her American virginity by guilty Rome. Or again, her fate could be read in terms of a moral topography in which the commercial force of Schenectady and the old theological power of Geneva battle for the soul of modern womanhood in the seat of ancient imperial power. The readability of James’ most popular work does not, then, correspond to simplicity. All these ‘meanings’ (and others) find textual confirmation in the tale and support from James’ other writing – and from ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’. They share a flirtation with allegory, and a complex reinscription of it at the heart of transatlantic dynamics of character. Interpretations readily reconfigure into inquiries about the extent to which the tale’s individual characters may be metonymic of national character; to this extent Daisy’s flatness might seem indistinguishable from Beatrice’s. James seems to invite the comparison. Like ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ Daisy Miller operates at the juncture of several incompatible narrative modes and interpretative possibilities, all of which, individually, fail to account for the haunting effect of writing which hovers without settling between tragedy, irony and social comedy. The narrator’s own attempt to resolve this effect on his sensibility in terms of ‘meaning’ is exemplary in the way it ‘flattens’ ( James’ own term) the issue of Daisy’s character (p. v). But to make this move underplays the story’s apparent lack of scepticism ( pace Hawthorne) about personal moral agency and the ethical basis of relationships.

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Daisy and Winterbourne meet first in a Roman garden, in a hotel that gathers transient Americans; their encounter opens with a challenge. ‘Are you an American man?’ (p. 7), the ‘small sharp hard voice’ (p. 6) of Daisy Miller’s brother demands. His sister is ‘an American girl, you bet!’ (p. 7). How will these two national types hold up in a land of strangers? To Daisy there is a question of whether Winterbourne is ‘a real American’ – she might have taken him for a German; for him, the issue is how her American character, ‘composed of charming little parts that didn’t match and that made no ensemble . . . offer[ing] such a collection of small finenesses and neatnesses he mentally accused it – very forgivingly – of a want of finish’, will play out in a European arena (pp. 10–11). If invoking the association with ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ at the outset of Daisy Miller is not a deliberately mischievous move on the author’s part, it certainly complicates the issue of how character can contribute to the transatlantic dynamic in other than metonymic terms of schematic correspondence. Daisy’s ‘charm’ – that elusive quality that resists meaning-making but performs a seductive spell on its subject – warns the reader not to settle into the documentary comforts of realism. If ‘character’ is ‘charming’, its claim on our response may go beyond rational assent. One way of analysing this effect is to read Winterbourne as Daisy’s primary interpreter; the question of her character is inseparable from the story he creates. So we need to know about Winterbourne. He is introduced – it seems to be a significant aspect of his character – as having ‘an old attachment for the little capital of Calvinism’ (p. 5), the slightly jarring preposition offering the suggestion of a desired state rather than a simple matter of fact. At the end he comes to suspect, as he confides to the expatriate American hostess Mrs Walker, ‘that you and I have lived too long at Geneva’ (p. 65). What it means to live too long at Geneva emerges in the story Winterbourne creates from his reading of the mystery of Daisy’s character. His desire for knowledge in the form of certainty about her moral status is patently puritan, as is the scrutiny of her actions he undertakes. Narrowly studying Daisy’s carelessness, as Philip Horne has noted, he struggles to equate her apparent ignorance with ethical ‘purity’, while himself being accused of naïveté by his aunt.54 He may be either ‘too innocent’, or ‘too guilty’ (p. 26), to judge. What is clear is that his idiom is far from pure. The moral affinity between Winterbourne and his aunt is manifest in the mutual coloration of their descriptions of Daisy: their gossip transmits distorting inflections of character through multiple revisitings of the theme. Considering how shocked Mrs Costello purports to be by her nephew’s account of Daisy’s behaviour at their first meeting, the two of

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them spend much happy time dissecting her character. ‘By means of . . . sympathy and by some disinterested affections’, as the philosopher Francis Hutcheson had put it, ‘it happens, as by a sort of contagion or infection, that all our pleasures . . . are strangely increased by their being shared with others’.55 But gossip is far from ‘disinterested’. It is a form of contagion, and perpetuates contamination. Mrs Costello describes the young American as a prelapsarian creature who ‘romps on from day to day, from hour to hour, as they did in the Golden Age. I can imagine nothing more vulgar’ (p. 77). Trying to fathom the meaning of Daisy’s ‘national manner’ under his aunt’s tutelage, Winterbourne worries that ‘his instinct for such a question [as to whether Daisy is a coquette] had ceased to serve him, and his reason could but mislead’ (p. 17). He settles provisionally for the ‘formula’ of ‘a pretty American flirt’ (p. 17). Her nature seems at once completely self-possessed, and open to passing influences of all kinds; she is – to his eyes – a metonymic American particularly likely to be formed by contagion of example, and her sociability lacks sensibility. Enacting the concern for Daisy’s ‘character’ activated in the circulating gossip of the drawing room, Mrs Walker pursues her to the Pincio and attempts to persuade her into the carriage of convention: ‘It may be fascinating, dear child, but it’s not the custom here’, she protests when Daisy indicates her preference for continuing to promenade with Winterbourne and Giovanelli (p. 61). So Winterbourne gets into the carriage with her instead. But – as Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals had indicated – custom itself operates on the principle of contagion, both to unite and to divide: people catch sentiment from one another ‘by a contagion or natural sympathy’.56 The contagion metaphor which governs American Rome’s gossip ‘flattens’ character in the interests of speedy moral judgment, to limit the ramifying values of its allegorical potential. Daisy’s character remains inaccessible because Winterbourne’s own moral vocabulary is contaminated by the polarities of Calvinist double predestination; he pursues a ‘European’ tendency to ‘read’ her innocence or guilt narratively, against the grain of its poetic quiddity – that is, to resolve her charming behaviour into a teleological sequence of events. An initially comic realist juxtaposition of ‘American’ and ‘European’ manners opens into disorientation and illegibility as he tries to construe Daisy’s character by writing her story. National types crystallise out to Winterbourne’s observations: Daisy as ‘a pretty American flirt’ (p. 17) is balanced against Giovanelli’s national stereotypy: ‘he curled his moustaches and rolled his eyes and performed all the proper functions of a handsome Italian at an evening party’ (p. 69) (a gesture of worldly knowledge Winterbourne imitates when accused in his turn by his aunt of innocence). The crudity of his

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national ascription is inescapable; he is ‘deeply disgust[ed]’ that Daisy ‘shouldn’t have instinctively discriminated against such a type’ (p. 58) as he himself construes Giovanelli to be. Like Hawthorne’s Giovanni, his mindset is dualistic, and his plotting is figurative, its denouement triggered by an episode – construed as metonymy – in which American character reveals the fatal taint of its contact with corrupting foreign influence. In this fable the flower comes to seem the key to her character. ‘It was impossible to regard her as a wholly unspotted flower – she lacked a certain indispensable fineness; and it would therefore much simplify the situation to be able to treat her as the subject of one of the visitations known to romancers as “lawless passions” ’ (p. 59). It’s a tempting possibility for Winterbourne, but tantalisingly Daisy ‘continued . . . to present herself ’ as ‘an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence’ (p. 59). Attempting to describe their encounter to his aunt, he says ‘We simply met in the garden and talked a bit’ (p. 24). The thought infects his next encounter with Daisy: ‘He found her that evening in the garden, wandering about in the warm starlight after the manner of an indolent sylph’ (p. 27). Paganism and Paradise Lost come to shape Winterbourne’s response to her presence: Milton’s Eve, the ‘fairest unsupported flow’r’ wandering in the Garden alone at evening has a dangerously profane allure for him.57 Puzzlement and vexation ‘at his poor fallibility, his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her extravagance was generic and national and how far it was crudely personal’ (p. 81) come to a focus in an encounter at ‘that supreme seat of flowering desolation known as the Palace of the Caesars’, where Winterbourne is seduced (again like Hawthorne’s Giovanni) by ‘the softly humid odours and felt the freshness of the year and the antiquity of the place reaffirm themselves in deep interfusion’ (p. 81). He notices ‘a small pink flush in her cheek’ (p. 62) in response to his insinuations; perhaps the first feverish indication of her contamination (and a reference to ‘The Birthmark’, another Hawthorne tale in which a lover’s suspicions result in the death of his beloved) – though Winterbourne is only able to see the effect his words have created as ‘tremendously pretty’ (p. 62). On Daisy’s last appearance in ‘society’ it becomes apparent just how far her ‘character’ has become infected by the idiom of ‘American’ conformity (in the voice of Winterbourne, reinforced by Mrs Walker as the mouthpiece of the gossips’ chorus): ‘. . . we can’t dance,’ she remarked to Winterbourne as if she had seen him five minutes before.

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‘I’m not sorry we can’t dance,’ he candidly returned. ‘I’m incapable of a step.’ ‘Of course you’re incapable of a step,’ the girl assented . . . ‘[Giovanelli] would never have proposed to a young lady of this country to walk about the streets of Rome with him.’ ‘About the streets?’ she cried with her pretty stare. ‘Where then would he have proposed to her to walk? The Pincio ain’t the streets either, I guess; and I besides, thank goodness, am not a young lady of this country. . .’ ‘I’m afraid your habits are those of a ruthless flirt,’ said Winterbourne, with studied severity. ‘Of course they are!’ – and she hoped evidently, by the manner of it, to take his breath away. ‘I’m a fearful frightful flirt!’ (pp. 69–71)

Daisy evades his judgment in this encounter by anticipating and ventriloquising it, and Winterbourne has ‘a touched sense’ (p. 71) of her feelings; it is perhaps a turning point in his fear of becoming himself contaminated by her viewpoint. Their characters ‘touch’, their idioms become reflexive, but not in sympathy. This conversation, like their later, even more ominous exchanges, resembles more the thrust and parry of a duel than the mutual permeability of a ripening friendship. At their next meeting his words once again cause the flush to come to her cheeks (p. 72). At the fateful moment when Milton’s Adam chose rather to share Eve’s fate than to abandon her, Winterbourne, like Hawthorne’s Giovanni, turns his back. Casting Daisy out, the American community reaffirms its boundaries and fends off the contagious charm of Rome. She must be ‘made an example of ’. It’s one of the tale’s many ironies, for Daisy strikes Winterbourne from the first as ‘distinctly sociable’ (p. 15); this is what she desires: ‘There ain’t any society – or if there is I don’t know where it keeps itself. Do you?’ she asks Winterbourne. ‘I suppose there’s some society somewhere, but I haven’t seen anything of it. I’m very fond of society and I’ve always had plenty of it’ (p. 16). Sociability is her ‘medium’; her tragedy is that it is also the medium for contagion: driven to seek community, she will be ostracised by her choice. ‘Gentlemen’s society’ is where she performs herself best; through first Winterbourne’s and then Giovanelli’s attentions, she exposes herself – in the view of American ‘society’ – to their association. In so doing she ‘falls’ into the role of ‘characterless woman’, whose literary features I return to in the following chapter. Contagion is given significance – indeed becomes such – by virtue of its agency in the Fall Winterbourne imagines for his heroine. It takes place at the Colosseum, the quintessential public space of Rome, site of performances and fatalities and botanical associations.58 To ‘perform’ there in

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‘public’ at midnight, as Daisy in effect does, with Winterbourne her enthralled and appalled audience, is a form of self-exposure that courts, perhaps even seems to seek, death. In the metaphorical domain of Winterbourne’s plot, Daisy will clearly be susceptible to the Roman fever as neither he nor the Italian Giovanelli is. The scene is carefully prepared: passing the monument at night a few days previously, he is tempted by its poetic associations with English Romantic expression, ‘but before he had finished his quotation [from Byron’s Manfred] he remembered that if nocturnal meditation thereabouts was the fruit of a rich literary culture it was none the less deprecated by medical science. The air of other ages surrounded one; but the air of other ages, coldly analysed, was no better than a villainous miasma’ (p. 85). Daisy’s tryst (as it seems to be) in the shadows with Giovanelli fully resolves Winterbourne’s ambiguities and uncertainties, and aligns his perceptions conclusively with the ‘little American circle’ of expatriates from which she has already been definitively excluded (p. 89). By a process of magical thinking that the tale makes unattributable – it may be that shunned by the group, Daisy puts herself in danger and unconsciously seeks her own death; alternatively, Winterbourne perhaps resolves his own ambivalence by creating a narrative of cause and effect where only sequence is observable – whatever the source, the outcome is that Daisy succumbs to the ‘villainous miasma’ (p. 85) of the Colosseum she ventures into at night with her Italian escort. She is equally vulnerable to the contagion of tongues, the gossip that follows her and is caught up by Winterbourne on what he construes as his story’s defining occasion. We are back in a circuit of contagion whose origin is repeatedly sought but endlessly unattributable. To attempt to resolve the issue would be (in Poe’s terms) to ‘establish a fact . . . by dint of overturning a fiction’.59 More specifically, it would be to purify – and therefore ruinously to circumscribe – James’ demonstration of the rich potential of character to embody the transatlantic dynamic of criss-crossing relations. Daisy as unique and representative character, ‘Daisy’ as figurative flower and Daisy Miller as ‘international tale’ are overlapping and mutually permeable idioms of interpretative encounter. All these explanations are possible; to settle for any would reduce Daisy from the fictional person who bound, and binds, readers to the tale, to a textual function. It remains to account for the effect of this illusion of personhood. Thirty years later, in the Preface added to the revised New York edition, James recalled the genesis of the story from an anecdote about the ‘young daughter’ of ‘a simple and uninformed American lady’ meeting ‘a good-looking

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Roman, of vague identity’ (p. v). There is no mention of fever, contagion or indeed death, only ‘the occurrence of some small social check, some interrupting incident, of no great gravity or dignity’ (p. v). This apparently inconsequential anecdote told to him in Rome became the donnée for the literary performance that is Daisy Miller: ‘it must have been just their want of salience that left a margin for the small pencil-mark inveterately signifying . . . “Dramatise, dramatise!” ’ (p. v). The emphasis is at least as much on the tale’s literariness as its realism, in the inscribed character, the pencil mark in the margin, and the decision to cast the narrative into the form of a ‘nouvelle’ a ‘type, foredoomed . . . to editorial disfavour’ (p. vi). Pondering the implications of its subtitle, ‘A Study’, he recalls ‘a certain flatness’ in his ‘poor little heroine’s literal denomination’ (p. vi) – her ‘literal denomination’ is her name, her mark; James might be referring here to her ‘character’, to its representation in his tale or to the metaphoric significance of the name and the way in which as a kind of polyanthea Daisy reinstantiates Romantic sympathies between mind and nature – or indeed to all of these. A character without depth in the anecdote provided ‘an object scant and superficially vulgar – from which, however, a sufficiently brooding tenderness might eventually extract a shy incongruous charm . . . [a representation made] in no degree at all in critical but, quite inordinately and extravagantly, in poetical terms’ (p. vi). The Preface to the New York edition of James’ novels supplements the memory of the tale’s composition with a secondary anecdote located after the story’s publication (in Italy again, but Venice rather than Rome) in which the author was taken to task for softening and romanticising his central character, in the face of a pair of ‘real’, ‘attesting Daisy Millers’ – straightforwardly crass, vulgar little exhibitionists – observed capering on the ‘salient stage’ (p. vii) fronting on the Grand Canal. ‘Attesting’ is an arresting word: as with John Higginson’s ‘Attestation’ of the ‘truth’ of Mather’s Magnalia, its legalism calls to witness, and stands by the evidence. Is his ‘critic’ accusing James of literary perjury, of treating a real-world subject in the manner of romance, with a design of subverting the reader’s judgment in the case? These ‘Daisy Millers’ are character witnesses who simultaneously embody, and close down, interpretation. The author’s response begins by justifying the realism of his portrait, but ends in the protestation that his character was ‘pure poetry, and had never been anything else’ (p. viii). What it would mean to read Daisy Miller as ‘pure poetry’ and not as a historical and geographically specified character in a realist mode, or as an allegory of the deadliness of cultural contact between New and Old Worlds, is the subject of the next chapter.

chapter 3

‘Choice flowers’ and characterless women

These Embellishments . . . are not the puerile Spoils of Polyanthea’s; but I should have asserted them to be as choice Flowers as most that occur in Ancient or Modern Writings, almost unavoidably putting themselves into the Author’s Hand . . . Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana

I want force to be either a genius or a character. One should be either private or public. I love best to be a woman; but womanhood is at present too straitly bounded to give me scope. At hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle; as, on the other hand, I should palsy, Margaret Fuller, Memoirs when I would play the artist.

I The intertextual polyanthea of Daisy Miller gains specificity from the particular typicality of its heroine’s name and the prosopopoeic identity it suggests. The poetic destruction of her wilder namesake was lamented by Robert Burns in a poem whose metaphoric resonances ripple outwards from an eighteenth-century ethics of sympathy to the imagistic compression of modernist aesthetics: Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow’r, Thou’s met me in an evil hour; For I maun crush amang the stoure Thy slender stem: To spare thee now is past my pow’r, Thou bonie gem. ... Such is the fate of artless Maid, Sweet flow’ret of the rural shade! By Love’s simplicity betray’d, And guileless trust, 88

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Till she, like thee, all soil’d, is laid Low i’ the dust. Such is the fate of simple Bard, On Life’s rough ocean luckless starr’d! Unskilful he to note the card Of prudent Lore, Till billows rage, and gales blow hard, And whelm him o’er! ... Ev’n thou who mourn’st the Daisy’s fate, That fate is thine – no distant date; Stern Ruin’s plough-share drives, elate, Full on thy bloom, Till crush’d beneath the furrow’s weight, Shall be thy doom!1

‘Such is . . .’: this is a poem structured on the analogies that sympathy evokes, with flower and woman linked in frailty; flower and poet linked in lucklessness; flower and humanity linked in transience – and all the relations implied in their cross-connections. To read this poem alongside Daisy Miller is already to multiply the allegorical and symbolic reach of Henry James’ character. The paradoxical parallels between women ‘of no character’ and representative men are explored in this and the following chapter across elaborations of the daisy metaphor in a florilegium of iterations from Burns to James. Fifteen years after ‘To a Mountain Daisy’ Wordsworth relocated Burns’ hapless flower from Scottish mountains to the Cumberland landscape, as a ‘Bright flower! Whose home is everywhere . . . / Thou wander’st the wide world about / Unchecked by pride or scrupulous doubt . . .’.2 Following the death of his brother John at sea in February 1805, he wrote a final ‘Daisy’ poem beginning ‘Sweet Flower! Belike one day to have / A place upon thy Poet’s grave’ (p. 643). The ‘bright’ ubiquity celebrated in the earlier poem has sobered to a more affective – but also more possessive – ‘sweet’: the daisy’s general ‘concord with humanity’ is here claimed as a link to the poet’s dead brother and an intimation of his own mortality. Its proffered comfort, forlorn and partial at best, must be that ‘such a gentle Soul and sweet, / should find an undisturbed retreat / Near what he loved, at last . . . / And Thou, sweet Flower, shalt sleep and wake, / Upon his senseless grave’ (ll. 61–63, 69–70). The final ‘Daisy’ poem seems to insist on its own unsatisfactoriness. An elegy that brings scant comfort, it expends its narrative energy on recapitulating the events of the shipwreck. Retelling a story of futile heroism offers no relief; the swivelling between subjunctive mood and preterite tense in the final two stanzas keeps the conditional nature of

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any consolation hanging to the end. Formally, the poem hovers uneasily between narrative and lyric; the choice of the septet stanza, the internal staccato of qualifying clauses, and the aabcccb couplet–triplet rhyme scheme hold a kind of jumpiness in the verse. The contemplation of natural renewal represented by the daisy’s presence in the poem’s opening and final stanzas is suspended for eight intervening verses, enervating their connection. The grave is ‘senseless’ indeed; its refusal to respond – to ‘rise’ – to the poet’s art seems to negate the power elegy traditionally claims over circumstance. Three years after Wordsworth’s fourth ‘Daisy’ poem was published, John Keats travelled to Teignmouth in Devon to be with his brother Tom, who was suffering from tuberculosis. During his stay, Tom’s condition worsened markedly; he would die before the end of 1818, and Keats himself would be diagnosed with the same condition the following year. Most of Keats’ critics focus on his revisions to Endymion during this period; there seem to have been relatively few new compositions. Among these few are miscellaneous verses not published until 1848. ‘Extracts from an Opera’, as Richard Monckton Milnes grouped them in Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats, include the slight, but striking, ‘Daisy’s Song’. It has nothing of the verbal luxuriance of Endymion: naïvely egotistical, and selfless, this is a song of innocence, and of experience enigmatically poised. There is no ‘poet’ in the poem to address or to characterise the daisy; she speaks herself into being: I look where no one dares, And I stare where no one stares, And when the night is nigh, Lambs bleat my lullaby.3

The punning name (daisy/day’s eye) resolves in a lullaby – ‘when the night is nigh’ – that also suggests elegy; this fragment of poetry has nowhere to go, no context to explain or contain or preserve it. It lives ephemeral in its own self-created moment. ‘Daisy’s Song’ challenges Endymion’s appropriative fame-seeking with insouciant otherness: Many and many a verse I hope to write, Before the daisies, vermeil-rimm’d and white, Hide in deep herbage . . .4

Daring and staring, the defiantly prosopopoeic daisy refuses comfort to this poetic agon that seeks relief for its aloneness in the natural world. Keats’ ‘Daisy’ fragment was composed, like Wordsworth’s, as he measured his

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brother’s dissolution and anticipated his own – as all deaths do – in this case with the particular poignancy of proximity. Joseph Severn (who was with Keats when he died just over two years later) would speak of the poet near his end longing for ‘the cold earth upon me – the daisies growing over me’.5 After Keats’ death in Rome in 1821 Shelley fashioned his legend of a beautiful spirit fatally wounded by his reviewers; the Preface to Adonais described Keats’ burial place in the ‘romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants’ in Rome, ‘among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies’.6 (These daisies were apparently planted on the poet’s grave by his physician James Clark, following Keats’ wishes. They were repeatedly subject to predation by souvenir-hunters as the grave became an object of poetic and sentimental pilgrimage.) Andrew Bennett has recently written compellingly of how Severn’s obsessive promulgation of the image of the poet harried out of existence to untimely death created a Romantic afterlife, ‘an allegory of Keats’ anachronistic artistic vision which . . . takes on a haunting and enduring significance for Victorian and future generations’.7 Monckton Milnes’ memoir of Keats (in which Keats’ ‘Daisy’s Song’ was first published) remarked that ‘few strangers of our race omit to visit’ Keats’ grave as part of their sojourn in Rome.8 One traveller whose literary pilgrimage to the City was guided by the shades of Keats and Shelley was Melville, whose journal of 1857 notes a visit to the Protestant Burial Ground with its Pyramid of Cestius and epithets to the poets. On his first adult trip to Rome between October and December 1869 Henry James made the obligatory visit to the grave. His letters show that the suffering of his beloved cousin Minny Temple was much on James’ mind (the following year, in March 1870, she would die from tuberculosis). James owned the second edition of the memoir and his letters refer to it several times; as late as 1889 he advised his young friend Urbain Mengin to ‘[r]ead over again to yourself, but aloud, the stanzas of the Adonais . . . descriptive of the corner of Rome where they both lie buried, and then weep bitter tears of remorse.’9 Keats’ death had become almost a collective responsibility. Reflections on mortality, and the retributions of time, are ubiquitous, almost obligatory, in travellers’ journals and letters. Cashing in on the repertoire of reflective engagement, James recorded his visit to the Protestant cemetery: The past is tremendously embodied in the hoary pyramid of Caius Cestius, which rises hard by, half within the wall and half without, cutting solidly into the solid blue of the sky and casting its pagan shadow upon the grass of English graves – that of Keats, among them – with an effect of poetic justice. It is a wonderful confusion of mortality and a grim enough admonition of our helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time.10

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The ‘hoary pyramid’ of Caius Cestius reclaims a picturesque and essentially pagan version of Keats from the embrace of Victorian Christianity. The last sentence of the passage seems to be reaching for a more complex response. Is the subject of the sentence ‘Keats’ grave’, or the ‘hoary pyramid’, or the whole scene? Is mortality being ‘confused’ – that is, confounded – by poetic justice; or is it being confused with, or by, something else? Perhaps it is simply that in the cemetery all belief distinctions are eroded in the ubiquitous forms mortality can take. The second half of the sentence changes direction. An admonition can be a warning, or a reproof, or simply a ‘putting in mind’. The ‘promiscuity’ here must be imaginative: the mind’s capacity to inhabit and be infected by other times, other lives, other idioms; the helplessness conveys something of the unwilled quality of this shifting awareness – something indeed of the daisy. Or – to anticipate – of the characterless quality of Keats’ ‘camelion Poet’.

II Daisy Miller was composed during a period when the author was much involved with the literary circle around Keats’ memoirist Monckton Milnes (elevated to the peerage in the interim as Lord Houghton). Winterbourne, as we have seen, is perplexed by Daisy’s ‘inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence’; she appears to him, ‘wandering about in the warm starlight after the manner of an indolent sylph’, to possess a kind of pagan allure.11 Subject to polite society’s insinuations about her commonness, she ‘goes around everywhere’ – with the pejorative connotation of vulgarity absent from Wordsworth’s bright flower whose ‘home is everywhere’ because of her ‘concord with humanity’. Daisy is ‘bright’ but not, to the narrator’s view, ‘sweet’: her indiscriminate carelessness precludes that Wordsworthian humanising of the soul. When she becomes the scapegoat of the American expatriates’ desire to embody conformity, ‘Daisy’, like the flower she is, ‘turn[s] away, looking with a small white prettiness, a blighted grace’ (p. 73). Shelley’s Adonais seems to be implicated in the idiom here: . . . On the withering flower The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.12

Adonais and the ‘Keats’ of Byron (‘snuffed out by an Article’13) pervade the story’s lexicon of contagion, supplemented or contaminated, we must assume unconsciously, in Winterbourne’s language, by the feminised

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character of Keats, ‘not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful’, first invoked by the imagery of Adonais: ‘where cankerworms abound, what wonder if its young flower was blighted in the bud?’ (p. 431). The associations play against the pagan allure, for Winterbourne, of Daisy’s ‘charm’, and a tissue of associations around inspiration, aspiration, breath and atmosphere. The association by Byron and Hazlitt of Keats’ character with effeminacy and Matthew Arnold’s subsequent defence of the poet’s manly strength of character complicate the sexual currents of Daisy Miller. It’s worth noting that Winterbourne’s associates are all women (and gossips); his reaction to a possible male rival compounds fear with distaste. ‘Blotting out’ a character recalls the dual valence still alive in the term from Cotton Mather’s writing: inscription on the page, which can be erased or smudged; and the ascribed attributes of personhood. Winterbourne is frankly relieved when it appears that the ‘riddle’ has become ‘easy to read’ (p. 86). We next encounter him at her funeral where he gazes at the shape made by her body, brutally objectified as a ‘raw protuberance among the April daisies’ (p. 93). That the narrator does not register the grave’s ironic testimony to the figurative flower of America and the doomed Romantic poet makes this a chilling moment. Daisy’s story – or rather, her narrator’s determination to constitute an instructive narrative from the iterative ‘facts’ of the deceased girl’s life – is as I suggested in the previous chapter confirmation of Winterbourne’s moral and imaginative anaesthesia. For the reader, however, a chain of references connects Daisy, Keats and Romanticism: innocence, youth, loss, death, elegy – perhaps quotidian availability plus otherness; expressivity and ontological freedom confronting the constraints of consciousness. What James Chandler, following Lévi-Strauss, has termed the ‘discourse of chronology’ allows us to read James’ story as an echo chamber of the literary Rome of Romantic poetry; a palimpsest of texts as it is of civilisations.14 The afterlife of Keats, from Shelley’s Adonais through the pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne and T. S. Eliot, has been much canvassed. The complex of allusion and image in Daisy Miller with its reminiscences of Wordsworth’s bright and sweet flowers, and traduced Keats in the wilting bloom of Daisy’s fresh delight in Rome, enable a ‘thick’ literary reading of James’ story of transatlantic encounter as an additional case study in the construal of the posthumous ‘figure of Keats’. This chapter so far has pursued two orthodox literary-historical approaches: close reading, and the tracing of verbal allusion through a chronological sequence of texts. Each has its rewards, though neither would quite be practiced unflinchingly by a fully paid-up Romanticist de

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nos jours. It is time to put a little pressure on the daisy chain. I want to suggest that the transatlantic shift in consciousness James’ tale applied to its Romantic topoi transformed Romantic period discussions of poetic character in ways that made them available as a poetics of character. Of itself this sounds like another of those reductive teleological progressive trajectories that have yoked literary history to developmental national stories since Herder saw the potential of Ossian – except that James’ practice directs attention back to elements in Enlightenment rhetoric and epistemology implicated in the Romantic ‘Daisy’ poems but not readily elicited from either a synchronous or sequential reading of the poems themselves. A transverse triangulation offers a perspectival – and largely implicit – supplement to Romantic literary history; it opens some new questions about the texture of literary influence, and about James’ transatlantic engagements. Not anti-historical or defiantly anti-temporal, it is unapologetically anachronic; chronological sequence rather predicates a secure but provisional base for critical analysis whose implications may cut usefully across a linear story. Compounded attention to sequence, imagistic association and verbal structure informs James’ poetics; this operates on the strong and specific philosophical grounding in the metaphoricity of thinking about character established in previous chapters. Further, a heft not directly recoverable from the lyric compression of Burns’ or Wordsworth’s or Keats’ daisies (and which would indeed fatally overload them) manifests in the narrative expansion and characterisation of Daisy Miller to suggest poetic continuities between critical categories such as ‘Romanticism’ and ‘the Victorian novel’. Two views of character are in play in Daisy Miller; their epistemological derivation from Humean analysis is manifest in the verbal structure of the story. First, there is Winterbourne’s view: Calvinist, Manichaean, absolute; objectively discernable and narrative based. ‘He asked himself whether the defiance would come from the consciousness of innocence or from her being essentially a young person of the reckless class’ (p. 81; my emphasis). Then there is Daisy: unformed, elusive, teasingly protean in her responses, ‘composed of charming little parts that didn’t match’, always seeking ‘society’, evoking associations of youth, loss, expressivity, otherness and so on: this is the floral arabesque or daisy chain. Daisy Miller becomes a story of two versions of character – essentialist, and contingent – and about the conditions that determine it. Now here is ‘Z’ (aka J. G. Lockhart) delivering Blackwood’s Magazine’s indictment of Leigh Hunt in July 1818: There can be no radical distinction allowed between the private and public character of a poet. If a poet sympathizes with and justifies wickedness in his

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poetry, he is a wicked man. It matters not that his private life may be free from wicked actions . . . The public are justified in refusing to hear a man plead in favour of his character, when they hold in their hands a work of his in which all respect to character is forgotten. We must reap the fruit of what we sow . . .15

By a species of punning metonymy familiar to Enlightenment inquiry Lockhart derives the moral character of the writer from the written characters that constitute his art. In this reductively ethical aesthetic there can be no separation between them. Keats’ celebrated letter to Richard Woodhouse later the same year surely responds directly to this accusation. Along the way it suggests one possible measure by which to gauge the distance between Wordsworth’s ‘To the Daisy’ and ‘Daisy’s Song’, but its aim is quite a different understanding of character: As to the poetical Character itself, (. . . that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character . . . What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation.16

This is not the occasion to re-engage the debate between Wordsworthian and Keatsian poetics; I want rather to suggest, firstly, that Keats’ and Wordsworth’s daisies are embodied ‘flowers of rhetoric’, that is, they work tropically in their poems; secondly, that this account of poetic character points back, rather precisely, to a moment of crystallisation that happened to the side, as it were, of Keats’ poetic concern of the moment, to prepare his first long poem for publication. His Preface to Endymion, dated ‘teignmouth, April 10, 1818’, warned readers to expect ‘great inexperience’ and ‘immaturity’ of a ‘feverish’ ‘space of life . . . in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain’. Endymion wrestles with the plenitude of poetic allusion and the task of establishing a distinctive poetic character. It is a classic case of the anxiety of influence. On the side, unnoticed, the tiny diptych of ‘Daisy’s Song’ offers a different kind of solution: abandoning singular, reputational character altogether, it claims neither an anterior nor a posterior ‘self’. Where Burns’ poem establishes a sympathetic rapport between the doomed daisy, the poet, and – eventually – all humankind, and Wordsworth’s Daisy connects the poetic voice to nature, society (in her ‘concord with humanity’) and – later – the poet’s lost brother and his own mortality, Keats’ speaks her curiosity about the

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world directly, uncompromised by a Miltonic presentiment of sin. This ‘character’ exists in self-performance; it enters the quiddity of experience in a very Humean sense. Its kind of readiness, its evenly divided attention to the world, inscribes the poetic character as caught in the immediacy of the moment of expression. The ‘mawkishness’ which Keats attributed to this state of poetic nascence (like the ‘want of finish’ Winterbourne attributes to Daisy), ‘Z’ seized upon as effeminacy. Marjorie Levinson has suggested that the ‘deep insincerity’ of Keats’ poetry was its ‘great and largely unmet generic challenge’ to contemporary readers. ‘Where ego should be’, she paraphrases, impersonating the critics, ‘there is alienated, interested reproduction.’17 Failing to find a coherent poetic character projected in the verse, they attacked its author’s integrity. Keats’ friend Benjamin Haydon’s journal registered his belief that the poet fell ‘victim of personal abuse and want of nerve to bear it’.18 Entering the lists on Keats’ behalf, Francis Jeffrey’s review of Endymion rapidly recuperated this position for an affective poetics based on principles of analogy. Jeffrey declared Endymion an incomparable test ‘to ascertain whether any one had in him a native relish for poetry and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm’.19 His account of Poems of 1820 glosses ‘charm’ in its enthusiastic engagement with the associative processes of ‘a character undecided, [a] way of life uncertain’, carried along on currents of imagery and suggestion: Keats’ poems are full of extravagance and irregularity, rash attempts at originality, interminable wanderings, and excessive obscurity. They . . . are flushed all over with the rich lights of fancy, and so coloured and bestrewn with the flowers of poetry, that even while perplexed and bewildered in their labyrinths, it is impossible to resist the intoxication of their sweetness, or to shut our hearts to the enchantments they so lavishly present.20

Jeffrey’s characteristic suspicion of metaphor and arguments from analogy, his preference for indicative and propositional prose, succumb (as Winterbourne’s ‘cold analysis’ would not) to intoxicating associations. The contamination of the normally austere critical idiom of the Whig Edinburgh Review by the blushing flowers and enchanting prospects of promiscuous rhetorical association makes one kind of sense as a sally in the political and class-based battle over the ‘poetic character’ of this literary outsider ridiculed by the Tory establishment organs of Blackwood’s, and The Quarterly Review. More interesting for a poetics of character are the sustenance it draws from a Scottish tradition suspicious of and fascinated by the power of words to invoke alternative realities of the imagination, and the

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lexicon of enchantment Jeffrey invokes to register this ambiguous complexity. The prose enacts the performative nature of his critique: excessive tropic luxuriance is a demonstration of the power of poetic charm over its reader’s responses. Jeffrey was not alone in resorting to Keats’ own evocation of ‘charm’ to describe the effect of this poetry: The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany of the same year had noted in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ‘a charm . . . which we should find difficult to explain’, and judged the description of Endymion ‘very charming, and . . . quite in the spirit of that mythology which has invested the west wind and the flowers with such delicate personifications’.21 In both cases, the underlying logic was analogical: what Jeffrey in his earlier review of Archibald Alison’s Essays on Taste called the ‘connexion which we think may be established between external objects and the sentiments or emotions of the mind’.22 The basis of associationism is ‘resemblance’ – likeness – its effects on the mind and emotion are empirically undoubted, and powerful; their source remains mysterious: ‘whatever may have been their original, the very structure of language attests the vast extent to which they have been carried . . . The great charm . . . and the great secret of poetical diction, consists in thus lending life and emotion to all the objects it embraces . . . the force of imagination, by which the poet has connected . . . a variety of objects.’23 Jeffrey described how Keats’ poetic imagination confounded narrative ‘as if the author had . . . so wandered on, equally forgetful whence he came, and heedless whither he was going, till he had covered his pages with an interminable arabesque of connected and incongruous figures, that multiplied as they extended, and were only harmonized by the brightness of their tints, and the graces of their forms’.24 Poe’s collected stories (including ‘William Wilson’) of 1840 were titled Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. The conjunction is not fortuitous: Thomas Carlyle, attempting to characterise the works of Jean Paul Richter in The Edinburgh Review in 1827, described the writer’s ‘singular’ manner as ‘a wild, complicated Arabesque’, composed of ‘figures without limit . . . [a] tissue of metaphors, and similes, and allusions’.25 Poe’s use is continuous, and perhaps referential (Carlyle’s review also described Richter as ‘grotesque’): the allusion is to an interwoven pattern (often of flowers or fruit) in which beginnings and ends are obscured by repetition, variation and recursion. The ‘arabesque’ figured a kind of medieval exoticism; associated with Gothic notions of romance as originating in the east, it signalled a translational displacement across space and time espoused by Spenser and located in literary history by Warton. The trope seems to readily come to mind in relation to Italy; George Eliot’s journal, for example, noted ‘pillars

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embossed with arabesque and floral tracery’ in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.26 It was itself a figure for flowers of rhetoric that subjected narratives of agency and causality to a dis-orientating metamorphosis of analogical connections. Affectively construed, the arabesque brought its reader’s imaginative associations into play in a dynamic poetics of performance and reception. Mutually modifying relationships between reader and event emerge as a pattern of interferences that complicates temporality with contingent rhetorical relations of metaphor and metonymy. The ‘lines’ in this interwoven pattern have no beginning or end; new structures appear distributed across familiar patterns; allusion and influence are interwoven with newness. The ‘arabesque’ registers the kind of poetics of character under construction in these reviews, the term serving as a figure for the poetics of analogy and correspondence. Jeffrey’s account refers its readers directly back to the tropic, analogising function of language. What could be a more ‘ordinary’, more obvious, flower of rhetoric than the mountain daisy?

III James’ story and the Daisy poems suggest continuities between Romantic ‘poetical character’ and the poetics of character representation in fiction. James’ revisions inscribed new ambiguities back into the texture of the story. Daisy’s voice leaves Winterbourne ‘charmed’, but without means to assess its ethical import: ‘he had lost the right sense for the young American tone’ (p. 16). The revised edition reiterates the term to compound its confusing assault on Winterbourne’s sensibility: she is a ‘charming apparition’ (p. 17), her ‘charming smile’ (p. 36), ‘charming innocent prattle’ (p. 40) and later ‘the charming creature’ (twice; pp. 8, 42), who in turn is animated against the ‘special charmer’ (p. 43) she imagines Winterbourne to be rejoining in Geneva. Adrian Poole has suggested that ‘[t]o call someone or something “charming” . . . is to put them in their place, to locate and contain, and perhaps to diminish them, to acknowledge a possible risk and promptly deny it.’27 As James pushes it through this revision, reaching back through modern figurative to older senses, ‘charm’ belongs to the realm of magical thinking; it has that dangerous mixture of desire and repulsion characterising contagion, and taboo.28 Mrs Costello declares Daisy to have ‘that charming look they all have’, and imagines it as some kind of infectious condition: ‘I can’t think where they pick it up’ (p. 23). Like Bartleby’s opaque or obstructive preferring not to, it’s a contagious word in the tale. Winterbourne, it seems, can neither abide nor leave alone the complex allure of charm; his fascinated libidinousness towards her invokes a gallantry

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of questionable inclinations not recognised in his binary model of innocent flowers or inky blots. It functions in the tale to express the figurative life of language, and its erasure. Proud of his savoir faire, Winterbourne fails to recall, perhaps, the moment of the Fall in Paradise Lost when Adam knowingly allows his judgment to be ‘fondly overcome with female charm’.29 One source of contagion in Daisy Miller might indeed, as I suggested in the previous chapter, be Paradise Lost, which characteristically associates ‘charm’ with ambivalence: ‘joy and fear’, ‘respite or deceive’; ‘pleasing sorcerie’; ‘wakeful . . . drouze’; ‘weake / Against the charm of Beauties powerful glance’ (6,825–26). Serpents had the power to charm, as Keats would explore in ‘Lamia’ and Endymion, about which disorientated reviewers were notably savage. Young Randolph is indeed right that Daisy is ‘an American girl, you bet!’ (p. 7), and equally right to question Winterbourne’s nationality. If Winterbourne’s status is uncertain at the tale’s outset, by the close (or perhaps at the moment when he reduces Daisy’s character simply to a textual mark of sin), it has become clear that he and Mrs Walker have indeed ‘lived too long at Geneva’ (p. 65). Like the lesions characteristic of yellow fever, Daisy’s character is now to him clearly a ‘mere black little blot’ (p. 86); Winterbourne is frankly relieved when it appears that the ‘riddle’ has become ‘easy to read’ (p. 86). It puts Daisy, to his mind, beyond the reach of correspondence, and himself beyond the danger of contamination. Taboo is upon her, and we next encounter him at her funeral where he gazes at the shape made by her body, brutally objectified as a ‘raw protuberance among the April daisies’ (p. 93). That Winterbourne does not even register the grave’s ironic testimony to the figurative flower of America makes this a chilling moment for the reader; by this point he has become a ‘national’ character (typically a writer) of a narrowly moralistic type that James’ fiction deplores.

IV Winterbourne is characteristically ignorant of, or refuses, another aspect of the ‘mark’ inscribed in character: it is only recognisable as such by virtue of being a repetition of an absent prior occurrence. Winterbourne’s language is, after all the energy he expends on keeping it pure, both without origin and contaminated by citation. Acknowledged or not, he is part of the daisy chain. His idiom is continuous with that of British critics who struggled to accommodate their reactions to ‘new’ voices of a post-Augustan poetics that

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dispensed with neo-classical correctness in favour of a different set of rhetorical allegiances. The imagery of Shelley’s Preface to Adonais suggests that the presence of Keats’ poetry in Daisy Miller (in the pervasive ‘charm’, the tissue of associations around inspiration, aspiration, breath and atmosphere, for example) is supplemented or contaminated, we assume unconsciously, in Winterbourne’s language, by ‘the character of Keats’, a feminised Romantic free spirit crushed by masculine indifference: ‘these wretched men know not what they do. They scatter their insults and their slanders without heed as to whether the poisoned shaft lights on a heart made callous by many blows or one . . . composed of more penetrable stuff’ (p. 431). The ‘penetrable stuff’ of Keats itself alludes to Hamlet’s conjuration of Gertrude’s guilty sexuality in ways that perhaps exert a contagious echo through Winterbourne’s confusion of prudent and salacious intent towards Daisy.30 In the end it is the reviled Italian Giovanelli who as Daisy’s candid critic and elegist makes this point, when he attests at the graveside that she was ‘the most innocent’ of beings (p. 92). Winterbourne is outraged: ‘It came somehow so much too late that our friend could only glare at its having come at all. “Why the devil,” he asked [Giovanelli], “did you take her to that fatal place?” ’ (p. 92). It brings the reader back to the way Daisy Miller acts as an echo chamber of the literary Rome of Romantic poetry, a palimpsest of texts as it is of civilisations. Byron’s Manfred is acknowledged by Winterbourne, while he dissociates himself from its influence; the visit to that fatal place the Colosseum by moonlight pays mordant homage to de Staël’s Corinne, whose histrionic farewell to Rome made it an essential experience for the Romantic tourist; Adonais and the ‘Keats’ of Byron (‘snuffed out by an Article’) and Shelley pervade the narrative unannounced but integral to Daisy Miller’s lexicon of contagion.31 Like any form of infection the idiom is ethically indiscriminate: Winterbourne’s ‘black little blot’ carries over Shelley’s ‘nameless blot on a remembered name’;32 innocence and evil are distributed across the verbal surface rather than (as Winterbourne assumes) intransitively embodied in individuals. Invoking ‘Keats’ or Paradise Lost does not allow identification of sources or influences to foreclose interpretation; the point is rather to indicate the impossibility of a pure idiom in transatlantic writing, which is inevitably a literature of compound if unacknowledged affinities. If ‘Keats’, as I have been suggesting, lies in some sense embedded in James’ tale, it is as an imagined – and highly Romantic – amalgam of biographical and poetical characters, and as an allusive verbal homage (the ‘good’ contagion of creative influence) that

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takes in their shared absorption of Paradise Lost. Such connections are neither unidirectional nor chronologically determined; to describe them we need a model less focused towards origins and more like Poe’s endlessly re-crossing marks of connection.33 This compound of personification and figuration-inrelation engages the reader in the ‘reality’ of character; the density of tropic associations evokes an illusion of beyond-the-page dimensionality. Any literary character voices not only itself, but also the past and prospective traces of other voices with which the work is in dialogue. We might ask how ‘impure’ language can become without dissolving a character’s character into the tissue of intertextual reference. Why, amidst this dense weave of figuration, should a reader care about what happens to Daisy, as about a real person? What persuaded and persuades readers to take ‘her’ ‘seriously’ (that is, literally), to interpret the action and agonise about her fate, is an effect of style. ‘She’ has – as one finds oneself reminding each generation of students – no reality apart from the words on the page. But the situation is of course more complicated. In Chapter 1 I positioned character as the site of concentrated textual intensities, and the performative embodiment of rhetoric – that is, the vehicle of a moral meaning that is enacted in metaphorical and metonymic correspondences guaranteed by an implication of personal relation whose impact is affective rather than theoretical. To gauge the difference character makes we may compare Daisy Miller with another, later, story of transatlantic encounter in which James developed the image of gossip as infectious disease.

V The claim realism makes on its reader’s emotions rests on something like the Aristotelian compact between ethics, rhetoric and character which I set out at the beginning of the previous chapter, in which through character language engages sympathetic correspondence with ethical issues. Where moral philosophy asks how people should behave, the rhetoric of character evokes ‘people’ behaving well and badly in ways that attach the reader to the moral dilemmas they metonymically perform. James’ brother William caught the effect, if imprecisely, of the method of Henry’s ‘realist’ tales: ‘You expressly restrict yourself . . . to showing a few external acts and speeches, and by the magic of your art make the reader feel back of these the existence of a body of being of which these are casual features.’34 James’ art displays the densely transatlantic metaphoric texture that persuades readers to ‘feel’ the ‘existence’ of a character, and a human dilemma, with which they share, through sympathy, an ethical bond. In this sense Daisy

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Miller is ‘pure poetry’, and the ‘poetical character’ of Keats’ poet was to be characterless, because entering into every character. If we ask what is the ‘plot’ of transatlanticism that engenders the kind of character that is Daisy Miller, we should at this stage be able to say that it has something to do with how relationship, whether willed or inadvertent, wished-for or shunned, is inseparable from responsibility. Representation in language figures the inevitability of ethical implication. In Freudian terms, we could read her insouciant behaviour – that ‘dangerous attribute’ – as provoking such intolerable fear of contagion in the ‘society’ she seeks that through the mechanism of gossip it casts her out: ‘the power of contagion which inheres in the taboo [is] the property of leading into temptation, and of inciting to imitation’.35 Freud is helpful in identifying structural issues of metonymy and representativeness in taboo; there remains a difference, though, between a psychoanalytic and a literary reading that does not seek to ‘explain’ Daisy’s character, or Winterbourne’s, or their society’s, as though real people were at issue, but rather returns the reader to the verbal source of the affect. Bearing in mind James’ insistence on the ‘purely poetical’ nature of his study, I have suggested that the impression of her tragedy is generated by the subtle contagion of Miltonic and Romantic idiom that conveys the charm of her character as an openness to influences of all kinds, played against the deadly infective presence of public talk into the private that contaminates her ‘character’. The metaphorical density of James’ tale was substantially elaborated by his later revisions for the New York edition, but the elusiveness of Daisy’s character is if anything intensified in the changes, and the correspondences it generates continue to steer away from schematic resolution. The same cannot be said of the story originally published more than twenty years afterwards with which James paired it in Volume xviii of Novels and Tales, and which makes an instructive comparison in the evocation of character through contagion. An invective against the infection of publicity introduces the Preface’s discussion of a tale first published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1902, and links it explicitly with Daisy Miller. James’ account of the origin and occasion for the aptly named ‘Flickerbridge’ is no account, really, but rather a masterpiece of compositional occlusion: he ‘vainly give[s] up’ the trace, ‘so thoroughly does this highly-finished little anecdote cover its tracks’. The tale itself metonymises its unreadable subject, ‘with the fine inscrutability, in fact the positive coquetry, of the refusal to answer free-and-easy questions, the mere cold smile for their impertinence, characteristic of any complete artistic thing’.36 The retrospective Preface re-enacts the tale’s protagonist’s desire to reserve the character of

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his subject’s world from exposure. Explanation is suppressed in a riff on the ‘deadly epidemic of publicity . . . propagated and perverted, multiplied and diffused’; reiteration poisons and is ‘speedily fatal’ to ‘the figured interest’ (p. xxi) of the tale. In a neat apophatic turn, the editor simultaneously refuses and propagates the very ‘reverberation’ he claims to dread ‘more than the Black Death’ (p. xxi). All this is by way of introducing the protagonist Frank Granger, a young and (as his name suggests ingenuous) New York artist recovering from fever. Tempted to gossip, he is inhibited by a sense that sharing his ‘image’ would betray his prior sympathy with his hostess Miss Wenham, ‘so rounded and stamped [that it] expressed with pure perfection, it exhausted its character [of Englishness]’ (p. 451). Frank’s fiancée Addie is a journalist; he knows that she will dissect, amplify and broadcast the story for the delectation of her American audience. Symptomatic images creep in: Frank ‘turn[s] cold’ and shudders at his simultaneous desire to convey this priceless image to his beloved, and the imagination of what Addie would ‘do’ with the knowledge of Miss Wenham and her world (p. 453). Pondering how to prevent Addie from visiting, Frank thinks that if she believes ‘he stayed only for the attraction [of Flickerbridge] the sense of the attraction might be contagious’ (p. 466); there seems no possibility to prevent her arrival. Hearing in his mind ‘her and her ravings’ (p. 468), he determines to leave before she arrives, her analytic facility blowing like a pestilence through the atmosphere, contaminating the delightful misprision of his dreamy transatlantic encounter. ‘Flickerbridge’ works out its donnée precisely and effectively. This is a story about good gossip and bad gossip, good and bad forms of contagious language, and about how to speak as an artist puts one’s words in a domain beyond one’s own control. So far, so like Daisy Miller. Miss Wenham, the enigmatic woman at its heart, presented through Frank’s eyes, is touching in her way; but the story fails to move. The issue of character is at the heart of why Daisy Miller became and remained enduringly popular while ‘Flickerbridge’ languishes among James’ slighter work. There is an ethical dilemma here, too, but it is imagined in more-or-less abstract terms. The warmest emotion a reader is likely to register to this discussion of contagion is admiration at its ingenuity. The conformity of Daisy’s character to type was ( James’ Preface seems to lament) all too apparent to its audience; the irreducibility of her ‘pure poetry’ appeared to escape at least those friendly readers in whom the Preface personifies the reader. The difference between ‘an outrage on American womanhood’ and Daisy Miller is an effect of language. Character is a ‘poetical’ not a critical (in the sense of being subject to realist-historical analysis) matter. ‘Flickerbridge’ has no lack of verbal

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intensity, certainly: in fact, one might argue that the very density of its weave of allusion and metaphoric complexity put it beyond the reach of sympathetic reading, and therefore of character. But this is not quite adequate; admiration for the allusive technique of The Golden Bowl (1904) does not preclude sympathy for the characters’ dilemma or the appropriateness of ‘tragedy’ to describe its probing of the workings of desire and taboo. What may be at issue here is perhaps what Stanley Cavell calls the capacity to live between acknowledgement and avoidance, or accepting contagion as a good and an evil, the unavoidable price of social life. It is, as Daisy Miller shows, a tragic stance, this Aristotelian compact between ethics, rhetoric and character which language invokes through sympathetic correspondence. The transatlantic perspective which underpins Daisy Miller, not merely in setting and plot, but in the patterns of metaphor and image that connect the fate of Daisy with the Romantic ‘figure of Keats’, does not reduce to an allegory of the death of Keats. It may, though, as I have suggested, be profitable to consider it as a poetic allegory of Romantic revenance or ‘reverberation’: a tale about the haunting literary ‘memory of Keats’. The cognitive function of Romantic allegory allows us to posit a transatlantic triangulation of two kinds of reading or perception of the world as coexisting parallels rather than competitors or mutually cancelling negations, or as implying a hierarchy of transcendence. In James’ hands, in other words, Daisy Miller is a story about some of the things that may happen to Romantic daisies (flowers of rhetoric) in a transatlantic perspective. The question of character, then, is the site of concentrated textual intensities, and the performative embodiment of rhetoric – that is, the vehicle of a moral meaning that is enacted in metaphorical and metonymic correspondences guaranteed by an implication of personal relation whose impact is affective rather than narrative. The definition might equally describe the Romantic lyric. All these Americans in Rome would not be in Europe were it not for their desire to expose themselves to something America was assumed to lack. And yet the lexicon of contagion which describes that exposure is consistently dangerous, if not fatal. It is the impossible desire, enacted by taboo (and expressed in ‘charm’), to be in Italy without ‘touching together’. Preoccupation with the dangerousness of interaction erodes trust in character; proximity ceases to invoke social sympathies and instead generates fear. It is the predicament of the transatlantic character to be innocently embroiled, responsible for the consequences of unwilled actions. Like the infringer of taboo, Daisy might be blameless and culpable. Where she

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desires the society of Giovanelli as a positive opportunity to know the ‘society’ of Italy, her compatriots sense only the danger of such an association. For Winterbourne something ‘real’ can’t quite happen – or has happened elsewhere, out of reach, between Daisy and Giovanelli (or so he suspects). This girl who lived only for ‘society’ has been forced out of all relation but that of nature, ‘a raw protuberance among the April daisies’. Aligning Wordsworth’s ‘Daisy’ poems, Keats’ ‘To a Daisy’ and Shelley’s Adonais with Daisy Miller connects British Romantic concerns with the character of the poet, transatlantic issues of representing national character and a compressed poetics of character that anticipates Modernist representation. Although historical priority, the imputation of influence, and biographical factors might support a reading of the influence on Daisy Miller of Keats’ and Wordsworth’s daisy poems, none of these offers critical purchase on the poetics of comparison, and my argument does not depend on them. It does imply renewed acknowledgement of the mediating role of readers in making affective meaning from verbal connections in a transatlantic context. Tropes of analogy such as metaphor align, but they also defer: ‘likeness’ is not-quite ‘is’; it suggests connections while resisting identity and singularity. ‘America’ declared itself ‘itself ’ in writing whose very texture acknowledges sameness and simultaneously difference from the ‘British’ it is like and does not want to be. And the principle of reciprocity asserted itself as British writing reconfigured within a transnational imaginary that acknowledged (and failed to acknowledge) its shared linguistic identity with its transatlantic other.

VI Daisies, in French, are marguerites. The most European and cosmopolitan of American Romantic writers, Sarah M. Fuller, was hugely preoccupied by Goethe, whose work she promoted for a New England audience in The Dial. Aspiring to write his biography, she insisted from a young age on being known – perhaps in reminiscence of Goethe’s character Margarete (Gretchen) in the First Part of Faust – as Margaret. After two eventful years spent living and writing in Europe the self-designated transatlantic prosopopoeic daisy Margaret (‘not her real name’) Fuller died by drowning off Fire Island in 1850, on the point of return to the United States with her new Italian family. Within two years a group of her Boston friends organised her ‘life’ in a composite three-volume memoir which took pre-emptive control of the posthumous reputation. Scholars are still piecing together the extent to which Emerson, Channing and Clarke, so many Winterbournes to

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Fuller’s Daisy, collectively wrote Margaret’s story as a coherent character of an American woman, repatriating for a domesticated audience the suspect accretions acquired in Europe. But the resistant voice of this woman who had lost her New England character in Rome continued to trouble transatlantic writing. Many years later, trying to find a point of access to the expatriate community of artists grouped around William Wetmore Story in the Piazza di Spagna in the 1840s, Henry James recalled ‘the unquestionably haunting Margaret-ghost, looking out from her quiet little upper chamber at her lamentable doom’, and wondered to what ‘she [would] have corresponded, have “rhymed,” under categories actually known to us? Would she, in other words, with her appetite for ideas and her genius for conversation, have struck us but as . . . a culture-seeker without a sense of proportion, or . . . have affected us as a really attaching, a possibly picturesque New England Corinne?’37 Puzzling over the meaning of Margaret’s character, the biographer imagines her as a young woman, ‘a sparkling fountain to other thirsty young . . . She had bitten deeply into Rome, or, rather, been, like so many others, by the wolf of the Capitol, incurably bitten . . . there might be ways for her of being vivid, that were not as the ways of Boston.’38 How close this seems to Winterbourne’s voice, as he muses over the meaning of Daisy Miller’s ‘ways of being vivid’. The point is not to suggest that Winterbourne ‘is’, in any meaningful sense, ‘James’; it might rather be that the writer (in Rome himself as he put together his memoir of Story in 1902) recalled his Roman tale of 1878, and that Daisy Miller inflected his personification of the Margaret-ghost in the new work, whose final image is of the weeping monument Story erected for his wife in the Protestant cemetery. If this ‘Margaret’ is another Daisy, she is so by virtue of a Winterbournian observer. She may also, ‘looking out from her quiet window’ in the Piazza di Spagna, be a rhyming figure of ‘Keats’, a ‘character’ who is a flower of rhetoric – that is, a point of imaginative connection between the writer’s present of 1902 and a not-quite recoverable past. Like Wordsworth’s Daisy, in fact: a connecting figure to register and, perhaps, partially to overcome, loss. The self-advertised failure of the biographer to capture the character of either Story or ‘Margaret’ reinforces James’ first impression of the Roman cemetery: ‘our helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time.’ If ‘Keats’ lies in some sense embedded in James’ tale of Daisy Miller and his uneasy annexation of Fuller, it is as an imagined compound of biographical and poetical characters, and as an allusive verbal homage (the ‘good’ contagion of creative influence) that takes in their shared absorption

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of Romantic literary idiom. The textual ghost of Fuller found its way back three years later into the substantial verbal revisions James would make to Daisy Miller for the New York edition. The ‘sparkling fountains’ of his account are the literal landmarks of Rome: the Triton in the Piazza Barberini where Fuller stayed; the Fontana di Spagna in the piazza where Keats lodged and died and where Fuller visited her friends the Storys; the obligatory touristic destination of the Trevi Fountain, site of a climactic meeting in de Staël’s Corinne (echoed again in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun). But as the last of these references suggests, sparkling fountains are also allusions inseparable from their literary associations: fountains of youth, of artistic inspiration and – perhaps – of Miltonic assignation (Andrew Motion records Keats ‘reading and re-reading’ Milton’s epic39). In her dispatches to The New-York Tribune, Fuller had referred to an ‘illness’ (in fact, as would later emerge, her pregnancy by her Italian lover Ossoli) contracted in Rome. Winterbourne confidently asserts to his aunt that Giovanelli can’t hope to marry Daisy; ‘Giovanelli’s but too conscious that he hasn’t a title to offer. If he were only a count or a marchese!’ (p. 77). She is simply a ‘catch’ for an adventurer whom Winterbourne’s friend describes as ‘a little Italian who sports in his button-hole a stack of [such] flowers’ (p. 79). Winterbourne is preoccupied with the answer to what ought – in his moral universe – to be a simple question: has Daisy preserved, or lost, her character? It turns out, for the reader, to be not merely a more complex but an unanswerable question. A title (and therefore a public ‘character’) was something Ossoli did ‘have to offer’ Fuller – though (as James put it in William Wetmore Story) ‘much decaduto’ (impoverished, fallen) in status. It points to a poignant reprise of art by life in James’ allusion to Fuller’s story: she, like Goethe’s Margarete/Gretchen, bore a child out of wedlock, and suffered tragic death in sequence if not consequence. James explicitly refracted the ‘New England Corinne’ as his readers’ point of access to his ostensible subject, the transatlantic sojourners with whom Fuller associated in Rome. The contagion she carried into Hawthorne’s and James’ writing – and, I shall suggest, into Emerson’s – was stylistic: her performance of female character provoked anxiety and opposition in New England’s male writers. This imagined woman of questionable character served to display the figures James himself was struggling to bring into focus in his memoir of American artists in Rome. Pursuing these hints we might read the revised Daisy Miller in part as James’ symbolic assassination of the woman who had made herself transatlantic Romanticism personified, whose idealistic early and continuing attachment to heroic classical and contemporary models was manifest in public

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intervention with a substantial impact, and for whom ‘the genius of Rome displayed itself in Character’.40 Something more or other than misogyny was at issue in the contest to appropriate and control Margaret’s character: her posthumous rhetorical presence troubles, but also galvanises a surprising range of nineteenth-century writing, notably in contexts that explicitly constitute themselves as transatlantic. Returning to the homology between transatlantic relations and the transpersonal assumptions on which the poetics of character depends may clarify the issue as a particular form of Romantic expressiveness. The verbal texture of analogy takes particular forms in the gendering of character as a matter of national and transatlantic representation. The literary questions in the remainder of this chapter establish anachronic contexts for the biographical and historical issues around why the ‘Margaret-ghost’ haunted the transatlantic texts of American writers as a threat of denaturing. Their insistent gendering of the kind of argument her writing engaged in – her use of analogy and metonymy, taking the singular example to carry the whole, for example – reiterated conventional attribution of ‘feminine’ tendencies to argue from impressions and emotions rather than ‘facts’. Fuller’s own transatlantic ‘case’ frames the discussion as representative of the intricate tissue of transatlantic character and the involuted ways it personated, impersonated and explicated gender, nation and writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Character, and the special freedoms of ‘characterlessness’, were performative figures of representativeness that tested the limits of sympathetic correspondence, and opened up alternative modes of enacting character in terms of relation or difference.

VII Character was intrinsic to what Charles Taylor’s revealingly theatrical metaphor terms the ‘repertory’ of the ‘social imaginary’ of eighteenthcentury culture.41 In a social polity of inter-discursive sensibilities where affective economy stood in for commercial relations, character was a commodity equivalent to reputation – particularly for women. Enlightenment writing configured the relationship between the study of the human mind and the representation of ‘private’ character in striking ways: its public story of character was about persona and the process of personation; the communicative possibilities of ‘self’ as projection. The slippage between political representation and acting would prove rhetorically liberating, if ideologically treacherous, terrain for writers on both sides of the Atlantic when the

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possibility of representing the views of another merged into performing his or her viewpoint. The ‘characters of women’, a topos of intense figurative discussion, offered particular purchase on how transatlantic issues like ‘national character’ might be addressed in the texture of language use with a capacity to engage the reader differently from abstract argument. Considering the question of how to represent (‘paint’) women, Pope’s Second Moral Epistle, ‘To a Lady, of the Characters of Women’, provocatively summarised the gendered nature of public character, and enforced the semantic connotations of ‘character’ as inscription and impression, connecting its material and ethical dimensions: Nothing so true as what you once let fall, ‘Most Women have no Characters at all.’ Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, And best distinguish’d by black, brown, or fair.42

The women of this epistle (its dedicatee Martha Blount graciously and affectionately excepted) are labile creatures, driven by the conditions that constrain them to ‘impotence of mind’. Excluded from consequential action by a polity that permitted only men to develop the prudent, regulated public forms of ‘character’, expected instead to embody compliance and accessibility, they become wildly plastic, liable to unpredictable and uncontrollable metamorphosis. By virtue of their public roles, men enjoyed a metonymic or representative function that stabilised their metaphoric, transactional relation to their surroundings; seen ‘in private life alone’, in this ethos a woman was metonymically null, deprived of transactional value which defined ‘character’ as a property in which the self can claim ownership. If women were ‘seen’ in private, it was men who did the looking. The gendering of representation was constitutive: in Pope’s poem feminine characterlessness is the necessary supplement that enables the masculine poet to construct his own public character. ‘Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear’ would be given scientific standing in the physiological psychology of Dugald Stewart, who described women’s ‘muscular system’ as possessing ‘a greater degree of that mobility by which the principle of sympathetic imitation operates’, and thereby explained their ‘tendency to mimicry’.43 Women were at once the bearers and best expressers of sympathy, and creatures trapped in a mirroring relation to life as experienced by representative others.

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In Pope’s epistle, the addressed but unrepresented woman (‘Martha Blount’) who frames the catalogue of distorted types opens a textual space for the exercise of the poet’s art. She becomes the figurative ground on which representation itself is premised. Women in general become reflected objects of the man by whose permission the poem’s addressee (who has until the final lines occupied a kind of de-nominated space in the verse) comes into textual being – his own ‘character’ authorising the representation in the final word: The gen’rous God, who Wit and Gold refines, And ripens Spirits as he ripens Minds, Kept Dross for Duchesses, the world shall know it, To you gave Sense, Good-humour, and a Poet.

(p. 299)

In contrast, the ‘woman of character’ (Martha) is known by her reservation both from the body of the poem and from the public sphere. Her character as a lady depends – in this impersonation of her character by a man – upon neither representing herself, nor being represented, in marketplace or text. And yet here is the poet appropriating her representation as a marketable commodity in his poem. In the rhetorical rules governing prosopopoeia or personification ‘self’ is an empty category. Martha Blount is not a ‘person’ (an embodied identity) but a personated character of the poet’s representation; the idea of personhood is itself a textual projection. As objects of fascinating difference to the stable gaze of the male poetobserver, Pope’s characterless women transform rhetorical personation from the production and presentation of a public self to imply, paradoxically, both a realm of domestic, ‘private’ experience controlled by the formal constraints imposed by poetic decorum, and a mobile, anarchic world of surfaces and performances inimical to continuous or integral identity. With no representative or public ‘character’ to sustain, his women of no character were weathervanes of impulse. If this was their existential and ethical plight in a socialised world (such is the cultural critique of the poem; Pope’s appropriation was at once self-serving and intensely sympathetic), it equally made the rhetorical figure of ‘woman’ poetically available to register passing impressions of experience; they became the vehicles and the containers of the sensationist ethics and aesthetics of the later Enlightenment, and appeared to acquiesce in an emergent separation of spheres. Self-reflection in a private (construed in opposition to a ‘public’) sphere is one of the conditions on which nineteenth-century realist fiction would come to depend. In the history of literature women readers emerge as particularly associated with what Deidre Lynch has called ‘the new technologies of introspection purveyed by the book market and their association with the

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inner spaces of feeling’.44 In British eighteenth-century literature of sensibility the process of socialisation was also, for women, about self-reservation from public scrutiny, with the home becoming a symbolic location of moral formation. In the education of children as in the institutes of governance, socialisation demanded domestic inculcation of virtuous habits. The process implied ‘inner’ growth and development of personal resources; Smith and his fellow ethicists associated character with moderation, and selfcontrol over natural tendencies to excess. Above all, as Lynch has pointed out, the man or woman of character avoided marked or ‘eccentric’ manners and behaviour which would attract attention without engaging the sympathies of the onlooker. In eighteenth-century moral economies gender and class were both determinants of character representation: only those in a position to commodify themselves and others in the symbolic exchanges of the marketplace or social hierarchies were seen as possessing ‘character’. Pope’s characterless women share their representational fluidity with representatives of very different social status. Defoe’s Moll Flanders, who as Nicola Lacey has noted is ‘a thoroughly autonomous woman, brimming with agency and enterprise’, is also the character who, in polite terms, having lost her reputation, is a woman of no character at all. ‘If a man behave with cowardice on one occasion’, as Hume put it, ‘a contrary conduct reinstates him in his character. But by what action can a woman, whose behaviour has once been dissolute, be able to assure us, that she has formed better resolutions, and has self-command enough to carry them into execution?’45 In a gesture of rebellion signalling what would subsequently be regarded as a ‘Romantic’ re-evaluation of class and character representation, Robert Burns’ Jolly Beggars made the point that publicly accountable character was a privilege, and a burden, of status: ‘Let them cant about decorum, / Who have character to lose.’46 The Beggars are characters by virtue of having dispensed with ‘character’ as a marketable token of respectability. The ‘Variorum’ likeness reminds us not only of the conventional association between character and consistency, but also of the textual connotations of its representation. Reuniting concerns of class and gender, Burns’ contemporary Janet Little (denominated the ‘poetic milkmaid’) pointed out with some acerbity that the ‘characterless’ card was one a man could afford to play, as a woman simply could not. After all, it was precisely a masculine carelessness of ‘decorum’ that might bring about the permanent loss of a woman’s ‘character’. This was both the plight and the opportunity of Moll Flanders, who having lost her character could go anywhere but was nobody (until she refashioned her social standing and acquired another character in colonial

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America). A writing woman risked the double loss of personal and poetic reputation when she dared to project herself out of the closet: . . . Burns, I’m tauld, can write wi’ ease, An’ a’ denominations please . . . But then a rustic country quean To write – was e’er the like o’t seen? A milkmaid poem-books to print; Mair fit she wad her dairy tent . . .47

Compounding inequalities of class, gender and linguistic status (the modulation between Scots and standard English), the ‘poetic milkmaid’ Janet Little fashioned a poetic voice out of scepticism that a woman, and in particular a working-class woman, might be permitted to represent, rather than to be the object of representation. A repeated strategy of her poetry (like that of many eighteenth-century portrayals of lower-class and servant figures) is the withholding of private character from scrutiny, the preservation of identity from public function. The question of whether women were capable of reflection beyond the narcissism of the closet and the sympathetic mirroring of male projections was inextricable from their textual representation. It foregrounds the paradox that women are at once ‘characterless’, and have more ‘character to lose’ than men. At the same time, the performative aspects of female character seeking to escape its social constraints that resonate so jarringly with the poetic decorum of the heroic couplet suggest that public and private will not find stable alignment in a gendered dyad. If ‘character’ was a carefully crafted rhetorical product of society’s requirement for dependable exchange, it was equally an activity dependent on agreed conventions of representation. Character is the figure for sympathy in the novel and an invitation to a reader to identify with the fiction. The broad outlines of this narrative effectively account for the socio-ethical representations of women across a range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts. But it is not by itself able to discriminate between the kinds of attention and assent a reader – say Lydia Languish – might be expected to give to The Innocent Adultery compared with The Whole Duty of Man.48 It returns us to the question of why readers – no matter how self-aware (as sophisticated eighteenthcentury readers clearly were) about the conventions governing representation – care about fictional characters. Here again the narrative of literary ‘development’ needs to be supplemented by readings that look to the rhetoric and poetics of relationship as well as historical and cultural aspects of affect. As Pope’s epistle made clear excess was a response to being

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‘nobody’, nothing: women’s characters were, it seems, by definition deviant. To go beyond the bounds of character’s shared public quality was to denigrate the credit it claimed; paradoxically, this turning to idiosyncratic and circumstantial detail may be what renders the representation of women as the quintessence of realist character. As Catherine Gallagher writes, ‘character came into fictional existence most fully only when he or she was developed as nobody in particular ; that is, the particularities had to be fully specified to ensure the felt fictionality of the character’.49 Though appreciative of the character-forming qualities of novels for young readers, Henry Mackenzie warned of the perils of sentimental novels in which ‘a war of duties’ between ‘one virtue or excellence and another’ might lead untutored minds to prefer ‘the exertions of generosity, of benevolence, and of compassion’ to ‘the virtues of justice, of prudence, of economy’, when the skill of life is to be able to combine them.50 His point was that the sentimental novel had to be read differently from classical ‘characters’ which produced a moral calculus of virtues against vices. French novels, he noted, tended to be predicated on the complexity, even the murkiness, of character: a virtue in one context may be a vice in another, and ‘character’ is other than the sum of enumerated ‘characteristics’. Describing the social formation of character was one thing, but representations of consciousness posited an interiority that might overwhelm communicability and put a full stop to representation. Despite The Man of Feeling’s dismal ending with the death of its protagonist from an excess of feeling that he cannot communicate, the sensibility which defined his fictional function emerged neither as a ruling trait in the manner of a Theophrastan ‘character’, nor as an instructive product of sympathy. Harley demanded a more coercive form of ethical commitment: the book’s broken structure pinned its readers to repeated, non-educative iterations of emotion: immersion or exclusion seem the only alternatives. Readers could experience their own interiority in line with the protagonist’s responses, but they could not engage with Harley’s character as such. In 1779, Mackenzie’s co-editor William Craig’s paper on literary character in The Mirror argued that ‘a character may either be given by describing the internal feelings of the mind’, or ‘an account may be given of his external conduct, of his behaviour on this or that occasion, and how he was affected by this or that event’.51 It is this latter sense that seems more applicable to the feminised Harley, but his problem (if one can put it that way) is that because he is all subjective response, he neither has nor is a ‘character’; the episodes in which he appears stimulate a competitive response in the subjectivities of readers, inaugurating an ethical calculus: the more tears

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one sheds per episode, the finer one’s sensibility. This would seem continuous with Harley’s detachability from the text whose eponymous hero he is: by a process that David Brewer has called ‘character migration’ he became (as the ‘man of feeling’) a generic ‘character’ whose endlessly repeatable function is to perform ‘feeling’ in a perlocutionary transactional mode; that is, his textual tears and other enactments of sensibility lead the book’s readers to respond emotionally; the words in the fiction effect change in ‘real life’.52 Such a figure was representative in a different way: he voiced particular impulses within individuals which collectively constituted them as an imagined community (of sensibility, in the case of Harley; of bonhomie and carefreeness in a ‘Falstaff’; of social alienation or a sense of being misunderstood, wronged – a ‘Hamlet’, for example).

VIII The Man of Feeling, like a more durable novel of character from the following century, had no explicit transatlantic dimension. A ‘transatlantic’ reading of the comparative and figurative poetics of character nonetheless suggests itself. Mackenzie’s protagonist Harley was a kind of degree zero of character; his incapacity to set positive qualities between himself and the persuasive personations of others made him a more significant antecedent than is normally recognised of a British novel of personation whose protagonist experiences a classical anagnorisis. Jane Austen’s Anne Elliot in Persuasion (1817/18) learns to declare her independence from the conditions of her upbringing; so doing, she remakes the social sphere around her and finds a new relational and affectively integrated character for herself within it. Austen’s earlier novels construed social and empirically educated characters whom the reader encounters partly through other characters’ representations. Take Bingley, in Pride and Prejudice, described by the admiring Jane as ‘just what a young man ought to be . . . sensible, good-humoured, lively; and I never saw such happy manners! – so much ease, such perfect good breeding!’ Elizabeth adds with a modicum of gentle mockery, that being handsome as well, Bingley’s ‘character is thereby complete’.53 The exchange serves to characterise not only Bingley, but also the sisters who read him. The apparently anti-social Darcy, on the other hand, is initially opaque to the Bennets, then misread, before the denouement reveals his ‘true’ character in a frame of limited – discriminating – sociability. ‘All politeness’, as Elizabeth archly designates him, Darcy’s difficult-to-read ‘real’ character foreshadows the more complex representations of interiority

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in Austen’s later novels, which increasingly reserve an implied element of private identity or selfhood from the legible currency of social exchange.54 Persuasion’s Anne Elliot is a prosopopoeia for rhetoric itself, an embodiment in character of having been persuaded in the past. Paradoxically, the character of her expression in relation to the other figures in the novel is to be self-silencing. Her role as a woman of no character (‘She was only Anne . . . Anne is nobody’) and ‘no voice’ has been long predetermined by her acquiescence in subduing her passion for Wentworth to the persuasion of others.55 This is a kind of self-aversion; she has become estranged from the ‘true’ authentic self that the novel persuades us she has, and she must re-find that self, replace self-division with returned integrity. But her very lack of a voice is in the terms of the novel an indication of constant character; her passion has been silenced, but not erased. The novel’s plot turns on her awakening capacity to re-persuade herself back into ‘life’ through acknowledging her continuing love for him. Why should a reader care about a character who is a functional prosopopoeia? The rhetorical function is not irrelevant: Anne is a passionate embodiment of the novel’s demonstration of how persuasion drives social interaction to direct and shape individual lives. She is a study in its shaping force on character, and on character’s capacity to resist such pressure; her ‘self’ emerges in the tension between public acquiescence and private resistance that allows a reader to infer authenticity and integrity of being ‘behind’ the social events of dialogue. It is this inferred ‘self ’ – implied as much in what is not written as in what is – that engages a reader’s sympathetic response for her dilemma. In this sense the novel is justly regarded as a proleptic masterpiece of Victorian realism. The style of Persuasion departs from what A. Walton Litz has called ‘the Johnsonian norm’ of Austen’s earlier novels.56 Disrupting the lively flow of conversational exchange between characters, Anne’s internal dialogues register the embodied component of character in her reactions to the lively flow of conversational exchange around her; at moments her breath is literally stifled, precluding expression altogether. Her character is a product of a style that internalises voice as thinking ‘overheard’ by the reader. Anne’s style becomes the index of her moral value, her imagined identity projected through ‘elegance of mind and sweetness of character’ (p. 6). Dedicated to subduing her passion’s expression, Anne is a person without interest for the other characters in the novel, while the narrator gives the reader privileged access to those habits of character that would have been approved by eighteenth-century moralists: steadfastness in adversity, integrity, feeling for the misfortunes of others, and so on. She is (like Martha Blount in

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Pope’s poem) for most of the novel closeted, reserved from the public ‘view’ of other characters, but known to the reader through the conversational interactions of that represented space of shared subjectivity articulated by the narrative voice. Endowed by the narrative with a power of internal reflection, Anne suffers because she may not speak her feelings in the hearing of others. Her public character is to be characterless, in opposition to all she ‘is’ internally. The narrative created around this implication of something withheld propels Persuasion back towards social resolution through readers’ emotional engagement with Anne’s implied interiority. As becomes clear at the end, this is a story that might never have happened; would not, had either Anne or Wentworth not been persuaded, had either ‘expressed themselves’ to the other sooner. ‘Six years of separation and suffering might have been spared’ (p. 268), along with the story of their resolution. If one effective rhetorical act (Lady Russell’s persuading Anne to refuse Wentworth) impels the story into motion, another, more distributed between the protagonists, resolves it. Persuasion is the means and the end of rhetoric; throughout the novel Austen’s prose illuminates the word in all its moods and tenses. While Anne is at pains to persuade Wentworth, once they are reunited, that she was right to be persuaded against him then, it is a measure of the distance between ‘then’ and ‘now’ that consistency of character demands a new form of persuasion based not on adherence to social position but on self-determination. James L. Kastely has suggested that Austen ‘opens rhetoric as a philosophic problem by showing that the ethical difficulties of having a viable self are the rhetorical problems of constituting a community’.57 This had particular resonance as an ‘American’ problem as commentators pondered analogous implications of the new Republican polity; in this sense of illuminating shared concerns we might describe Persuasion as Austen’s ‘American novel’, rather as Leo Marx identified The Tempest as ‘Shakespeare’s American play’.58 But Persuasion suggests that questions of representation in relation to nationality are replicated in relation both to gender and ‘modernity’ itself. Austen’s novels do not open the question of how the woman of feeling might enter the masculine public sphere of agency and exchange where transaction and representation, metaphor and metonymy, reinforce one another. Nonetheless, her characters’ adventures in sympathy and self-definition reflected the public polity of eighteenthcentury civil society exemplified in the ‘prudent’ consumer of Smith’s Wealth of Nations: the moderate integrity of character was at once construed and reflected in the marketplace, responding creatively to changing attributions of creditable conduct. The transactional – that is, metaphoric –

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nature of this character both guaranteed, and was guaranteed by, the system of economic exchange that defined self and society: reflection is not internal, but interpersonal. The issue preoccupied Austen’s contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft, who in a chapter on ‘The Pernicious Effects which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society’, complicated the politics of gender representation with those of class. Their common point was a Lockean liberal consensus that ‘character’ is a possession, with a value attached, but whose natural operation is degraded by dependency. ‘It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are, in some degree, independent of men.’59 Her argument is structurally identical with that of the American Declaration of Independence, in which ‘American’ character is predicated on emancipation from oppression: ‘the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex’.60

IX The rhetorical tradition of prosopopoeia and the potentially duplicitous (doubling) rather than authenticating integrity of personation illuminate character in a transatlantic context. Annette Kolodny has conclusively established both Fuller’s proficiency in classical and Enlightenment rhetoric, and her interest in rethinking it for her own pedagogical and communicative purposes. Kolodny demonstrates the importance of Richard Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric (1828; Boston edition 1832) in Fuller’s stylistic education, as she exercised a strong discipline on her own powerful character as a means of teaching other women to find a personal voice, in a selfconsciously ‘feminine’ manner designed to persuade through other than adversarial forms of argument. Whately’s recommendation of the ‘Suggestive style’, which ‘shall put the hearer’s mind into the same train of thought as the speaker’s . . . and suggest to him more than is actually expressed’ was of particular interest.61 Creating the conditions for thought to act contagiously, by suggestion, exactly describes the insinuating complicity of gossip. It also represents the associative workings of the ‘poetical method’ of narration. Contagion, as I suggested with regard to Mather’s prose, might operate both as a feature of style and a description of a process of literary transmission that may be read across texts so as to release both their typicality and their uniqueness. The ethical neutrality of language (contagion both evoked a positive relation of proximity and embodied the dangers of contiguity; ‘charm’ might be sinister and admirable) took on moral valence through particular figurative conjunctions. Charles Capper cites Fuller’s view that her aim was not ‘to teach anything’, but ‘to call . . .

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out the thoughts of others’.62 This was to be education in its root sense. Hers would be a non-coercive rhetoric in which character, reserved from the public sphere, might transmit qualities of moral and intellectual independence without imposition of identity. As a position, it does not seem one with which Pope or Austen, or even Emerson or Hawthorne or James would be likely to disagree. But it led in some troubling directions. Fuller’s Dial papers on the character of an American national literature advocate and exemplify her idea of influence as a creative rather than servile relationship. ‘A Short Essay on Critics’ takes up Wollstonecraft’s desideratum of women as rational equal others: ‘we would know what [men] think, as they think it not for us but for themselves. We would live with them, rather than be taught by them how to live; we would catch the contagion of their mental activity, rather than have them direct us how to regulate our own . . . We wish that they should . . . treat us as if we might some time rise to be their equals.’63 The ‘thinking men’ whom ‘we’ might wish to meet would include Emerson with whose ‘American Scholar’ (‘Man Thinking’) this essay is in conversation. The exchange, like the scenario of gossip, is valorised by the activity and the associative intimacy (‘live with . . . rather than be taught by’) it engenders rather than the objective status of the ‘facts’ exchanged. The individual character ‘standing for’, or ‘standing in for’ the nation is metonymic and performative: s/he performs the nation in her/his actions.64 Like the ‘American Scholar’, another declaration of intellectual independence, ‘A Short Essay on Critics’ invokes their common foundational text in a structure of provisional collaboration: ‘We would . . . We wish that they should . . . we would . . . but if . . . we will not . . .’. The critic performs her character in the act of eliciting the reader’s power of exchange: this is a conjugation of intellectual exchange elaborated in associative verbal progression: co-habit (live with), contagion, converse, companion, [friend], confide, live with, meet, frank with, talk with – against taught by, adapt . . . to, direct . . . to, justice to and so on. Reviewing Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Poe opined that ‘her personal character and her printed book are merely one and the same thing’. Struck in particular by Fuller’s style, he commented that readers, ‘accustomed to look narrowly at the structure of phrases, would be willing to acquit her of ignorance of grammar . . . [and be] able to detect, in her strange and continual inaccuracies, a capacity for the accurate’.65 Across the Atlantic, George Eliot seems to have been responding to something similar in the distinctiveness of Fuller’s style when (comparing Woman with Wollstonecraft’s Vindication) she described it in prosopopoeic and representative terms:

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Margaret Fuller’s mind was like some region of her own American continent, where you are constantly stepping from the sunny ‘clearings’ into the mysterious twilight of the tangled forest – she often passes in one breath from forcible reasoning to dreamy vagueness . . . Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, is nothing if not rational.66

At the same time, Eliot admires the sheer range of Fuller’s classical and European references, and – even more – her insistence on the individuality of feminine forms of self-expression. We might not be surprised that George Eliot should warm to this view; but what is she doing in equating Fuller’s style with her nationality? And how does this correspond to Fuller’s own experiments with style? Why, moreover, should this style so provoke the transatlantic literary consciousness of Emerson’s circle, and of Eliot, and of James? We may be able to get further with this question of the literary ‘character’ of women (and this woman: Fuller) and national representativeness, by ‘looking narrowly at the structure of [her] phrases’ in terms of Cavell’s discussion of ‘passionate utterance’: his elaboration of Austin’s ‘perlocutionary act’. For Austin perlocutionary speech does not (as illocutionary utterance does) perform the effect in its expression but, under certain conditions, indirectly leads to a certain effect: it attempts to evoke a response.67 It is in that sense dialogic where we might regard illocutionary utterance as sovereign. Taking opera as his medium, Cavell develops a series of conditions for the felicitous performance of perlocutionary acts of passionate utterance corresponding to Austin’s illocutionary conditions. They include (firstly) the absence or failure of accepted conventional exchange, having the ‘standing’ (the right, we might say) ‘to appeal or to question’ the other, and the singularity of the address. ‘These conditions for felicity or say appropriateness’, Cavell notes, ‘are not given a priori but are to be discovered or refined, or else the effort to articulate it is to be denied’ (p. 18). Fuller’s quest to develop a personal style that might be at once personal, female, representative and effective in a more than local context (the cosmopolitan aspirations evident in her identification with Goethe and Beethoven, for example) is well described by these conditions. Cavell’s second triad of ‘further unshiftable demands, or rules’, for perlocutionary utterance point to the impediments to its efficacy, and may begin to account for the nagging resistance which the character of this writing that insisted on reciprocity or denial aroused in readers like Poe and Eliot, and (more tormentingly) Emerson and James: (fourth) the one uttering a passion must have the passion, and (fifth) the one singled out must respond now and here, and (sixth) respond in kind, that is

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The possibility that Fuller’s style sought to be at once singular, feminine and representative with an international reach allows us to posit that it was characteristic of this passionate utterance to make a demand on its auditor or reader or receiver to constitute an other, without constraining itself to the decorum of a single consistent voice. That is, its ‘calling out the thoughts of others’ sought immediate in-the-moment acknowledgement, in relationship – or, equally explicitly, in refusal. It neither simply let the other be, nor accepted a provisional response. (Emerson noted in the composite New England memoir of Fuller that ‘she made large demands on her companions . . . she could rarely find natures sufficiently deep and magnetic’.68) ‘Improvisation in the disorders of desire’ was a gesture that Emerson’s writing both courted and refused, finally, to endorse insofar as its fearless rhetorical embrace of characterlessness was radically committed to emotional expressivity. So, in a passage that might, depending on one’s point of view, earn praise for its range of reference or its individual voice, its representativeness and its advocacy, or its emotional redaction of Wollstonecraft’s arguments; or (in a Jamesian tone) dismay at its formidably boring display of ‘culture-seeking vulgarity’ and ‘dreamy vagueness’, we read If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls, after a while, into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only be cured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up. With a society it is the same. Many minds, deprived of the traditionary or instinctive means of passing a cheerful existence, must find help in self-impulse, or perish . . . Union is only possible to those who are units. To be fit for relations in time, souls, whether of man or woman, must be able to do without them in the spirit. It is therefore that I would have woman lay aside all thought, such as she habitually cherishes, of being taught and led by men. I would have her, like the Indian girl, dedicate herself to the Sun, the Sun of Truth, and go no where if his beams did not make clear the path.69

Those renovating fountains again. This expression of self-reliance simultaneously acknowledges in verbal echo both Wollstonecraft’s and Emerson’s arguments, and declares its independence from the rational or masculinist self-sufficiency of the ‘exemplary persona’ they implied.70 ‘Self-impulse’ is the condition (now) for ‘relations in time’. Effective speech is passionately

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propelled from ‘Minerva’s’ fountain of reflexive wisdom: character, if it is anything, is a non-negotiable aspect of self. The challenge issued in Woman in the Nineteenth Century was extended in the explicitly transnational letters Fuller contributed from Rome to Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. These evoked a puissant and rising European Romanticism that exposed the sterile caution of America. They could not but be unpalatable in the strongest sense both to her contemporaries (represented by Emerson, Channing and Clarke) and to James in the next generation, for whom her cosmopolitan life and Roman engagement with the radical revolutionaries of 1848 reproached their own cultivated detachment. The effect of Fuller’s stylistic character – the deliberate equivalent of a performance of characterlessness – was to antagonise (or disorientate) her male readers into embalming her continuing intellectual potency in controlled versions of the life-story which denying her a reputable feminine character made poetic justice of an untimely death – an act whose implications emerge further in Chapter 7 in relation to Bartleby’s and Fergusson’s biographers. Biographies of ‘representative men’ were (at least to an extent) well and good; women, whose sphere in civil society was defined domestically, were another matter. The moral drawn by Winterbournes to figures like Daisy Miller was that a woman entering the public sphere would lose, not find, her representative nature. Frank Granger’s fear, in James’ ‘Flickerbridge’, about the fate of Miss Wenham under the ‘raving’ glare of publicity, drew from an established idiom of the separate spheres of men and women in relation to character. Many women, as I shall suggest in the following chapter, did in fact play public roles that were a source of rhetorical complication, and sometimes confusion, for their own self-description and how others described them.

chapter 4

Characters and representatives: ‘floating fragments of a wrecked renown’

Daisy’s arm is small – and you have felt the horizon hav’nt you – and did the sea – never come so close as to make you dance? Emily Dickinson, Letters

In real life, a consistent character is a rara avis. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

Metaphors . . . are not called fertile or generative for nothing. They breed promiscuously in the brain, producing analogies among unconnected or incommensurable ideas. These analogies are not only illimitable in number, they cannot, in principle, be restrained semantically. It is hard to separate the legitimate offspring from the bastards.

Ellen Spolsky, ‘Cognitive Literary Historicism’

Discussions of the ‘characters’ of women and men alike took on overtly political overtones in the debates on rights and responsibilities that ensued from the American and French Revolutions. Romantic ideologies of nationalism described what John Wilson in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1820 called the ‘peculiar and specific character’ of nations and individuals as the product of ‘reflective consciousness’.1 Just as individual character is formed by ‘a reflection of the mind upon itself’ or an ‘internal repetition’, he opined, so the sympathy between people of the same nation ‘impresse[s] on them that [common] character, which the life of those millions has brought into being’. Indeed, there is a suggestion that individual character may itself be predetermined by a kind of national Zeitgeist: ‘We must look reflectingly, not on ourselves merely, but on generations that have preceded us.’2 This corresponded to a new conception of individual character as representative or metonymic of a nationality construed historically rather than as a transactional or metaphoric counter in a web of present socio-economic relationships. The ‘spirit of the age’ in Romantic terminology, and its representative figure, extends a long rhetorical tradition of prosopopoeia. It is manifest in a move away from an acknowledged rhetoricity in poetry (Pope’s ‘turn’ at the 122

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end of ‘Characters of Women’, for example) towards meditative and lyric modes in which the imagined relation of reader to language is ‘overhearing’ another’s revealed interiority. In the final chapter I return to poetry that resisted this move as well as that which embraced it. This chapter imbricates politics and gender with poetic correspondences to consider some of the paradoxes generated in the interactions between character and representation. Clifford Siskin has described personifications as ‘synecdochic affirmation[s] of community’, where ‘the parts personified stand for the uniformity of their wholes’. The consequence of pervasive prosopopoeia, he argues, is ‘a passive poetic voice in which the possibility of action is displaced from the speaker or character to the “figure” of speech . . . What happens to the individual in Augustan texts, his destiny, is thus determined by the action of those personified characteristics he shares with all men.’3 Representativeness was rhetorically produced as a transitive act; as Stephen Heath notes, it is ‘always of and to and for . . . Representation . . . names practice and understanding at the same time that it generates questions and difficulties regarding the nature and status of representational endeavour’.4 In this it is structurally and functionally identical to the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia. The persuasiveness of personation might be described in terms of the ‘perlocutionary’ invoked in the previous chapter: effective insofar as it evokes sympathetic response in an audience or reader. It is transactional, and it operates on iterative, echoic principles. In Aristotelian rhetoric, ‘character is almost . . . the controlling factor in persuasion’.5 The perlocutionary is transitive in that it requires another to register its effect, to acknowledge, or to refuse, the force of passionate utterance. Personation as performance might combine illocutionary and perlocutionary effect: to declare oneself (or one’s nation) independent was an act of collective personation designed to bring about that event in its hearers and readers. In Cavell’s terms, it was a passionate utterance that demanded a quite specific response from its readers, but – equally – was open-ended in that it knew that response could not be counted on. Politically, personification was a means of generalising from the particular, assuming that all hold similar values. The Declaration of Independence, to whose poetics I return in the following chapter, enacted rather than reflected the reality of state and nationhood. It was, in the event, a successful performance, but it might not have been.

I Civic humanism worked on the assumption that (in John Pocock’s words) ‘the integrity of the polity must be founded on the integrity of the

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personality’; despite its undoubted appeal for the founders of the Republic, America’s E Pluribus Unum, forced to accommodate both the epistemological shifts of sceptical thought and an ideology of progress and selfbetterment, entertained a more fluid view of the ‘national character’.6 On both sides of the Atlantic the question of whether the integrity of ‘private’ character defined by an individualist ethos could survive the demands of a national identity so resolutely located in the public sphere was pressing. Character was central to the Romantic aesthetics of William Hazlitt, as the binding point of artist, writer and audience. Citing Adam Smith, he described the diminishment of individual idiosyncrasy (the Theophrastan qualities close to caricature) as the inevitable product of the social selfreflexiveness that defined modern life: once we ‘[s]ee ourselves as others see us,’ – in proportion as we are brought out on the stage together, and our prejudices clash one against the other, our sharp angular points wear off . . . It is, indeed, the evident tendency of all literature to generalise and dissipate character, by giving men the same artificial education, and the same common stock of ideas; so that we see all objects from the same point of view, and through the same reflected medium; – we learn to exist, not in ourselves, but in books; – all men become alike mere readers – spectators, not actors in the scene, and lose all proper personal identity.7

Hazlitt’s analysis of the effects of commercial society on character is couched in notably theatrical metaphors of performativity and personation; the argument, however, seems to be that representation and consumption are themselves prejudicial to character: reading threatens self-containment by offering models of character that seduce us away from ourselves to a depersonalised model based on social expectation. What he diagnosed as a condition of modernity, Alexis de Tocqueville was inclined to view more particularly as a consequence of representative government. His observations of America in the 1830s led to the conclusion that the pressure of living entirely in public makes democracy inimical to ‘character’ in both sexes, and representation of individuals problematic: citizens never differ much from one another and naturally find themselves so close that at each instant all can come to be intermingled in a common mass . . . the effect of democracy is not precisely to give men certain manners but to prevent them from having manners.8

In Tocqueville’s view, the ostensible flattening out of the traditional class, professional and social distinctions which guaranteed ‘character’ combined with a theocratically generated habit of social surveillance to produce an

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ideology in which ‘character’ as rendered by stylistic distinctiveness was not simply inaccessible to American writing, but ‘un-American’. ‘Likeness’, the ideology of America, foreclosed the issue of character for Tocqueville. Somewhat earlier, in conditions of Revolutionary unsettledness, Hector St John de Crèvecœur famously defined American character as a function of displacement and metonymic identification with the New Land, and the embodiment of ‘collective abstractions’ or representative functions that constituted the American Republic’s articles of faith: He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great alma mater.9

The open ground for the inscription of character here is the ‘bounteous mother’, America herself. Even before the establishment of the Republic, this strikingly unspecified ‘national character’ conflates representation of the person with the public representative of the nation. At the interface of literary and political representation, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers of America such as de Crèvecœur and Tocqueville argued that mobility or even rejection of ‘character’ was a legitimate ideological option for self-representation in America, a means of turning away from the mirror of British identities based on social standing towards a unique national identity based on likeness: Americans were ‘a very great number of analogous objects under the same form’.10 Their views and those of American advocates of ‘national difference’ have been recruited by contemporary cultural critics such as Larzer Ziff, Michael Warner and Peter Jaros to claim that nineteenth-century American writing displays a special politically motivated concern with the relationship between representation and representativeness in which individuals readily, anonymously and interchangeably metonymise the ‘United States’. Warner in particular has developed the idea of ‘counterpublics’ to encompass multiple voices such as those of women, non-whites and non-literates excluded from the print-orientated public sphere.11 Ziff has described a ‘transition from a culture of immanence to a culture of representation’; he cites Timothy Dwight’s contrast between ‘established society’, where ‘influence is chiefly the result of personal character, seen and known through the period in which the character is formed and the conduct by which it is displayed’, and a ‘state of society recently begun’, in which ‘men make bold pretensions to qualities which they do not possess’.12 The ‘ways in which literary paralleled political expression and . . . both in turn related to a shift in the economic

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sphere from real to personal – or represented – property’, which Ziff’s influential reading sees as characterising the American literary sphere in the Revolutionary period, were as I showed in the previous chapter well instantiated in eighteenth-century British writing in relation to representations of lower-class and female figures as alternatives to gentlemanly character.13 They also give reason to question the exceptionalist analysis of the ‘feminization’ of culture analysed by Ann Douglas and others as specific to nineteenth-century America, or more recent studies of character and representation in early America such as Nancy Ruttenburg’s account of the formation of national character in fluid assumption and abandonment of personated roles. The transatlantic poetics of character suggests a more nuanced range of representational relationships. Reviewing a new edition of James Fenimore Cooper’s work in 1851, Francis Parkman criticised the ‘nerveless and unproductive’ character of the best educated American writers: ‘An educated Englishman is an Englishman still; an educated Frenchman is often intensely French; but an educated American is apt to have no national character at all.’14 The ‘Benjamin Franklin’ represented in Franklin’s Autobiography – ‘Printer, philosopher, scientist, author and patriot, impeccable husband and citizen, why isn’t he an archetype?’ as D. H. Lawrence commented sardonically – is, I suggested in Chapter 1, a ‘nobody’, perhaps the first character-less character to present itself in American literature; the rhetorical self-production of this specifically ‘American’ persona founded in performance, moulded to circumstances and readily discarded, whose value was extrinsic not intrinsic and determined by fitness to occasion, is explicitly construed by its transatlantic negotiations.15 Chapter 2 showed how the relationship between individual and national American ‘character’ manifests itself ambiguously in metaphors of contagion used by political philosophers to describe the nature and spread of collective sentiment. In a sermon preached at Princeton on 17 May 1776 on the occasion of a general fast appointed by the Congress throughout the colonies, John Witherspoon spoke of a gathering ‘national character’ exhibited by the people of America in resistance to British oppression.16 His enumeration of a universal ardour that has prevailed among all ranks for ‘the cause of justice, of liberty, and of human nature’ was in practice an exhortation intended to bring this collective being into existence, as he pointed out the care ‘every good man ought to take in the national character and manners’.17 The unspecified ‘every good man’ might be equivalent to Gallagher’s ‘nobody’: the American cause was inseparable from the collective character of those who upheld it; its success would depend on the moral

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integrity of its professors, which Witherspoon described in terms of the individual’s capacity to act in a representative function for his peers. Rhetorically, representation corresponded to metonymy (the king representing the State; the elected parliamentarian representing his constituency; Franklin representing ‘America’ but also ‘any American’). Personification, as a recent student of Mather and Franklin has put it, was ‘a real item in the itinerary of history, not just a handy illustrative trope’.18 It may help us to read transatlantic formulations of correspondence between the representative and the characterless.

II The usefulness of the characterless character as a vehicle for readerly involvement in fiction was as Gallagher points out already well tried by the beginning of the nineteenth century, in contexts without obvious ‘transatlantic’ reference. It might, in analogous ways to the previous chapter’s discussion of Persuasion, allow us to understand the representative function of a British characterless character like Walter Scott’s Waverley through a comparative poetics of character. Deidre Lynch has discussed ‘the problem of the promiscuous circulation and universal exchangeability that eroded the differences defining the self and its belongings’ in the ‘ebullient commercial society’ of eighteenth-century Britain.19 A discursive condition of economic modernity was a rhetorical opportunity for independent America to define national character in distinctive ways. Robert Montgomery Bird’s fiction of identity, Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself (1836), might be read as an allegory of social mobility in America, a catalogue of the social types of the new democracy, or a morality tale about the folly of dissatisfaction with one’s lot and wishing one’s self in another’s shoes; the questions it raises about representation and the transferability of character are more intriguing and less tidy. In terms of construction, Sheppard’s capacity to transfer ‘himself ’ into the newly dead bodies of others, revivifying them and thereby escaping the inconveniences of his prior self, enables a picaresque tale moving across scenes of society; in this sense, Sheppard’s adventures are like those of the eighteenth-century banknote – or like Waverley’s. Sheppard, by his own account, is ‘deficient . . . in all those qualities that are necessary to the formation of a great man’.20 The trajectory of his story is anti-Franklinian: improvidently squandering a large patrimony, he is reduced to poverty and friendlessness; desiring to recoup his fortunes he searches for treasure with what he believes to be the aid of necromancy, is surprised and murdered, but viewing his own body finds himself ‘two

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persons, one of which lives and observes, while the other is wholly defunct’ (p. 48): although I had acquired along with his body all the peculiarities of feeling, propensity, conversation, and conduct of Squire Higginson, I had not entirely lost those that belonged to Sheppard Lee. In fact, I may be said to have possessed . . . two different characters, one of which now governed me, and now the other . . .. I could not immediately shake off all my old Sheppard Lee habits. (p. 59)

As the philosopher Annette Baier puts it in describing a Humean sense of identity, ‘[o]nly impersonators claim another person’s past, and do not lose their own past even if they succeed in their impersonation. It will become a secret. Anyone with two separate pasts must be an impersonator, and one of the two pasts will be false.’21 The trouble, for Sheppard, is that it becomes increasingly difficult to know which is which. This duality continues to inform further transformations, but increasingly the first person voice speaks in the character of its current embodiment, aided by ‘a few words of conversation with any one known to my prototype; from which I infer, that the associations of the mind, as well as many of its other qualities, are more dependant [sic] upon causes in the body than metaphysicians are disposed to allow’ (p. 140). Even more pointedly, The spirit of Sheppard Lee was widely different from those of John H. Higginson and I. D. Dawkins . . . and yet, no sooner had it entered the bodies of these two individuals, than the distinction was almost altogether lost. Certain it is, that in stepping into each, I found myself invested with new feelings, passions, and propensities – as it were, with a new mind – and retaining so little of my original character, that I was perhaps only a little better able to judge and reason on the actions performed in my new body, without being able to avoid them, even when sensible of their absurdity [p. 140] . . . while recording my adventures in the body of Mr. I. D. Dawkins, I feel my old Dawkins habits revived so strongly in my feelings, that I cannot avoid giving some of the colouring of his character to the history of his body. (p. 146)

The narrative ventriloquises a sequence of voices to perform the characters of Sheppard’s metempsychosis; when ‘Sheppard’ enters the body of his latest incarnation, his opinions, manners and voice begin to mimic the character that belonged to it, though with some residual memory of his Sheppard-identity. The first person protagonist finds in himself ‘a confusion of characters, propensities, and associations’ (p. 108). His multiple personae and the ensuing events of his story may be madness (‘hallucination of mind’ p. 419) – the explanation that hovers around various episodes and

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is favoured by his family on the resumption of the Sheppard Lee identity that concludes the story – but this seems an unsatisfactory closing-down of the ‘ridiculous conceits of various transformations’ (p. 419) that propel the narrative. The novel’s implications are more intriguing than its explanations. Poe’s generally appreciative account of the novel criticised the ‘confused and jarring system’ in which ‘the hero . . . partially loses, and partially does not lose, his identity, at each transmigration’, and noted the incongruous levity of tone in the narration of distressing events.22 Sheppard Lee certainly transgresses the critic’s nostrum of unity of effect; its tonal instability repeatedly raises questions about where identity resides and the relation of character to embodiment. Sheppard’s character seems to migrate into new bodies, but only weakly; the author’s view of personal identity, as Christopher Looby has recently suggested, seems Humean, contingent and associative (though contrary to Looby’s suggestion, he is unlikely to have read A Treatise of Human Nature). The key point is not one of influence, however, but rather of affinity based on a common questioning of empirical knowledge about the nature of personality; Bird’s medical training may be relevant here. Again, however, it is insufficient as a way of accounting for the novel’s version of a partially mobile character; if Sheppard successfully personates each of the bodies he enters and revitalises, so that their associates are not able to tell the difference between it and the ‘original’, the book also suggests that it is not quite identity-transformation. Character as voice – and the novel repeatedly suggests this is all it is – rather emerges as something like a transferable idiom of self-articulation inflected by embodiment but neither reducible to it nor independent of it.

III I suggested above that for men characterlessness became an ideologically privileged position associated with and representative of American cultural independence. In relation to women the issue of political representation compounded their disenfranchisement by these representing, representative men. This was expressed directly by political reformers, and indirectly, through tropic forms of self-characterisation. While the characterless man is a recognised American icon within an American ideology of representation, less critical attention has been paid to the metaphor of the characterless woman who had no representation in the relentlessly public sphere of nineteenth-century America, but who, in Cathy Davidson’s argument in Revolution and the Word, was the representative figure of fiction. When

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Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple loses her character on the transatlantic crossing, she cannot like her contemporary de Crèvecœur simply assume another on entry to the United States. But, as Davidson puts it, ‘the literalization of the novel by myriad American readers [who went to pay their respects at ‘Charlotte’s grave’ in New York’s Trinity Churchyard] made Charlotte Temple real, just as it had made Charlotte Temple American’.23 The celebrated (and in her own way claimed by many interest groups as representative) nineteenth-century American fictional heroine Hester Prynne, in Hawthorne’s romance, is an English woman who has, some years before The Scarlet Letter begins, made the transatlantic crossing to Boston. Convicted of adultery, she is condemned to wear a scarlet ‘A’, an alphabetic token that represents the Puritan identification of her character with her crime. Hester repudiates the character ascribed to and inscribed on her, and rebelliously reinscribes it metonymically both in material terms as a baroque embroidered arabesque, and through actions that cause others to wonder whether in fact the ‘A’ represents ‘Able’, or even ‘Angel’. Setting up house with her illegitimate daughter Pearl (an emblematic figure of her socially uncontrolled fertility), at the boundary between the village and the forest, she becomes the object of many contradictory ascriptions: a representative ‘characterless woman’. In The Blithedale Romance (whose subject, notably, is a political experiment), Hawthorne doubles and divides the representative female roles as Scott had done with the counterpointing of Waverley and Fergus MacIvor: Priscilla, the domestic heroine, is characterised mainly by her timidity and compliance (though these prove dauntingly indomitable in their own way); the Margaret Fuller-figure Zenobia is an actress at once with no ‘character to lose’ and so full of character that she terrifies the male protagonists. The socially destabilising potential of the characterful woman remains highly charged throughout nineteenth-century women’s fiction. Cassandra, the strong-willed protagonist of Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons (1862), for example, unsettles those around her: her ‘candour’ is ‘called anything but truthfulness; they named it sarcasm, cunning, coarseness, or tact’. She and her sister make alarming ‘demonstrations of character’ in the colourless world of small town New England.24 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, forced by the failure of her husband’s investments in the late 1830s to become primarily responsible not only for raising their family but also for its subsistence, invoked admiration and alarm for her demonstrations of independent character. Like her British contemporary Margaret Oliphant, Oakes Smith published prolifically across more than half of the nineteenth century: articles, novels, poems, children’s literature, essays on women’s issues and on Native American culture, and an

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unfinished autobiography. Her poetry was favourably reviewed by Poe, and cited by him as a source for an accusation of plagiarism against Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She knew Emerson and Longfellow, Fuller and Horace Greeley, as well as Poe. She – or rather, one of her poems – even made a cameo appearance in Moby-Dick. The daughter of a merchant seaman, she was married at sixteen to literary editor Seba Smith. Following Smith’s losses in real estate, he speculated in ‘character’, creating a representative Yankee voice in the faux-naïf monologues of Jack Downing. Smith’s light political satires equated individuals with their representative function: ‘in a Government like ours, where the people is used for voting, and where every nose counts one, it is the number we are to stan’ about in annexin’ and not the quality, by no means . . .’.25 The generic Yankee, as Constance Rourke noted, is defined by likeness to type and devoid of ‘personal signs’.26 Beginning with essential copy for her husband’s Portland Courier and Eastern Argus, Oakes Smith’s phenomenal output between 1838 and 1890 fell into generic phases identifiable by shifts in her literary signature or ‘public character’: initially, novels, sentimental stories and poems published in places like The Ladies’ Companion and Godey’s Lady’s Book either anonymously or in her married name, Mrs Seba Smith; from the 1840s these were supplemented and eventually supplanted by literary and moral essays with initials, non-committal about gender, and an extravagant pseudonym, ‘Ernest Helfenstein’ (whom she killed off in 1848); and finally– her name having itself become a marketable commodity – political essays and reviews with popular social reach in The New-York Tribune and The Phrenological Journal of Science and Health, in the written character she had made her own, as ‘Elizabeth Oakes Smith’. This literary trajectory corresponded to shifts in focus of her life, from homemaker combining the domestic roles of wife and mother with those of breadwinner, to public figure: lecturer, feminist and essayist on issues like ‘Bankruptcy and Dress’ (1857); the serial self-naming achieved sequential correspondence between the author’s successive personations and the ‘character’ of her writing for different audiences. Where for Seba Smith politics existed to reflect a representative regional voice, Oakes Smith offered herself to the public arena as an embodied oxymoron: a fluidly performative identity whose persuasive power lay in the projected integrity of her womanhood. Her emergence as a political activist and reformer in 1851 exposed her writing to an exacerbated version of the double reflectiveness of character and representation in women, as this opened out in nineteenth-century America from the domain of literary to political representation, and from the domestic scene of reading or (reminiscent of

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that emblematic scene of hermeneutic ascription, the Puritan scaffold in The Scarlet Letter) to that of the public platform. Harriet Martineau’s account of her travels in America made a caustic note of the treatment accorded to female suffragists at public meetings, as reflecting the ‘political non-existence of women’ in the United States.27 In this version of marketplace economy men (through what Fuller – referring to, though not distinguishing between, the English Romantics Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge – called a ‘greater power of continuous self-impulse’) seemed secure in private life without loss of ‘character’.28 Women, on the other hand, being known in their relationships, might not indulge in self-absorption without losing their precarious footing in the public world. Oakes Smith was deeply ‘impressed’ by the ‘sense of dim solitude’ that confronted her in Emerson’s study: It seemed to have no outlook, to be isolated; and there was an aspect of solitude, an almost monastic simplicity fit for some austere anchorite. But when I saw Mr. Emerson softly move about the room, his arms not merely folded but hugged upon his breast, his head slightly inclined, leaving the introversive eyes under the brow, I understood that no outlook was needed.29

To her view, Emerson is all self-reflection, requiring no transaction or exchange. The self-withholding character is intransitive (recall Emerson’s ‘The face which character wears to me is self-sufficingness’), almost Bartleby-like in its refusal of passionate demand.30 In contrast, unable to be independently self-representing, a woman is dependent on the representations of others: ‘Perhaps one reason why we women achieve so little in the world of thought is because we covet too much an outlook’, Oakes Smith’s passage continues. In order to explore and express their own individuality, she suggests, women need to be freed from ascribed character which keeps them in domesticity and subjectivity; rejecting this, they expose themselves to the instabilities and uncertain reactions elicited by passionate performance, and ‘lose character’. This is the kind of response Martha Blount might have written to Pope. Oakes Smith’s essay ‘Characterless Women’ published in Graham’s American Monthly in October 1842 explores precisely this paradox, invoking the oppressiveness of socially ascribed character. Having a ‘character’, a leading trait, she argues, makes a woman vulnerable to being represented, ‘taken’ by an observer.31 ‘We talk of vain women, coquettish, masculine, sensible, dull, witty, &c., running through all the defective grades of character.’ It is ‘the crowning grace of womanhood’, on the other hand,

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‘that she is characterless’. A true woman, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra ‘a creature of infinite variety’ (I quote Oakes Smith quoting Shakespeare here), will perplex identification by her multiplicity of passionate self-representations; the Egyptian queen plays all character, ‘is’ none.32 The powerful contradictory responses Cleopatra’s performances arouse in Antony within the play evoke a corresponding response in the unspecified contingent body that is the theatre audience of any particular performance. ‘Character’ may be designated; ‘infinite variety’, by contrast, exceeds the capacity of representation and of representiveness.

IV In his essay on style of 1889 Walter Pater described the condition of contemporary writing as a ‘transcript’ of ‘fact in its infinite variety, as modified by human preference in all its infinitely varied forms’; an ‘allpervading naturalism’ reflecting ‘curiosity about everything whatever as it really is, involving a certain humility of attitude’. It requires a prose ‘varied in its excellence as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its latest experience – an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid’.33 Throughout the 1880s and 1890s (a period when as an aspirant writer for the theatre he was also peculiarly preoccupied with the performative nature of character as a key point of success with an audience on the historical stage) Henry James’ attention shifted from minute renditions of consciousness in operation to ‘study of the histrionic character’.34 In his ‘European’ novel The Tragic Muse the diplomat Peter Sherringham is fascinated and appalled by the idea – which James again refracts through his character’s own consciousness – that the representative identity of the actress Miriam Rooth ‘resided in the continuity of her personations, so that she had no moral privacy, as he phrased it to himself, but lived in a high wind of exhibition, of figuration’.35 She is ‘an embroidery without a canvas’, continual representation without continuous substance; her ‘character’ is not to have no character, but to have, as Sherringham puts it, ‘a hundred’ (pp. 138, 139). The point is emphasised by his later reflection on her ‘infinite variety’ (p. 359). Here is Oakes Smith’s ideal characterless woman, free in her commitment only to the roles she plays. Such a ‘creature’ exists performatively, while she is being observed and realised in the representations of another, a man (himself representative auditor).

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This kind of characterlessness represents the ability to escape the confines of ascribed identity; it seems to point to an idea of pure, ‘free’ being beyond societal confinement, at once independent and responsively related. A characterless woman, wrote Oakes Smith, is ‘equal to all contingencies’ and consummately representative; her ‘faculties or powers are developed by circumstances, rather than by spontaneous action; and this implies the possession of all that is peculiar to her sex, but all in harmonious adjustment’.36 Oakes Smith could not have known Keats’ letter to Richard Woodhouse quoted in the previous chapter about the ‘Shakespearian or poetical Character’ opposed to the Wordsworthian ‘egotistical sublime’, but in a striking correspondence here too Shakespeare is the point d’appui for character, and for characterlessness, implicitly opposed to a Wordsworthian or Emersonian ‘self-sufficingness’.37 Her essay distinguishes the expressive, metamorphic female character suitable to a representative democracy and personified in Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, from the Romantic interiority of ‘full’ selfhood that found its apotheosis in, for example, the introspective projection of Coleridge’s Hamlet. It proposes the fluidity of character-incontext, precisely not containable by a legible leading trait or ruling passion. The social reality recognised by Oakes Smith, however, was that female behaviour was bound by the constraints of class; required to sustain the ‘character’ of respectability in economic adversity, her language kept the revolutionary possibility of performative female character carefully contained within the universally acknowledged representations of ‘Shakespeare’, the accepted male authority on female character.38 The representation at issue is not political but theatrical. From a feminist perspective, this might seem like a failure of purpose; but there may be something more interesting going on. Finding her examples of ‘characterless women’ in Shakespeare’s plays, Oakes Smith emphasised the performative over the reserved nature of character and insisted on the dramatic exchange involved in its representation, as a transaction between performer and observer. Crucially, though, this did not involve reflection through male subjectivity. The characters she invoked were precisely not those like Hamlet whose interior self-wrestlings were empathised into self-expression by the Romantic critics of closet Shakespeare, but those like Cleopatra or Rosalind who play out their multifarious modes of being on a very public stage. Emphasising the existence of these characterless characters in the exchange of dramatic representation, performance – not reflection – becomes the scene of projected identity. The implication is that only a woman possessed of a strong private character (in the sense of integrated interiority) will recognise the value of ‘characterless’ representation, but that the projected, public nature of the dramatic spectacle

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allows this recognition to occur reserved from view (within the private response of the viewer) – that is, as a function of continuous interiority like that imputed to Austen’s Anne Elliot, discussed in the previous chapter. Public representation may mask private subversion. Oakes Smith herself did, indeed, have ‘a character to lose’, and her associates were afraid that she was on the brink of throwing it away: her desire to hear Fanny Wright lecture at Clinton Hall in New York in 1839 aroused scandal among friends and relatives, who didn’t object to her ‘progressive proclivities’, as long as these were not exercised in public.39 Her attendance explicitly flouted the warning issued by the General Association of Massachusetts on the occasion of her abolitionist colleague Angelina Grimké’s lecture tour in 1837: ‘We cannot . . . countenance any of that sex who so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character of public lecturers and teachers.’40 But her insistence on femininity as a positive aspect of feminism – that woman in a domestic context was not, simply, at best a ‘softer man’, but a being who could perform in several contexts – brought her into trouble with fellow suffragists. ‘To me a woman without shades of character – without the tenderness of sex, while she is endowed with passions akin to manhood is an anomaly’, she wrote.41 Performed oxymorons can be troubling. Her presidency over the platform at the Syracuse Convention for Women’s Suffrage of 1852 was vetoed by Susan B. Anthony when she turned up wearing a fancy low-cut white dress, rather than the obligatory maleimpersonating ‘bloomers’. Displaying herself on the stage in the candid – blank, uninterpretable – style of ‘private’ womanhood preferred by Emily Dickinson she made the conundrum of representation all too apparent – and avoided the caricatured representation of male cartoonists. But what, or who, therefore, was she, this being who sent out such confusing semantic signals, in a self-representation that set the spectacle of fashion into visual collision with its performative enactment of the right of women to self-representation? The apparent triviality of the issue masks its indication that Oakes Smith’s sense of the cultural politics of female character on the public stage may have been both more profound and more troubled than that of her peers. Representing female fashion in the marketplace, as it were, made visible the implication of women as women in the public world of consumer economics, and negated assumptions that a woman as representative was simply a denatured man. As Caroline Foley would note in an 1893 article on ‘Fashion’, ‘The dress of a “lady,” in Europe and America, is still expressive of her more leisured life and less diverted imagination. But now she also has girded up her loins to work’.42 In her confusing gesture, Oakes Smith uncompromisingly insisted on the preservation of feminine interiority within

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public representation. She challenged conventional category distinctions between the stage (the proper location of performance) and ‘the world’s stage’ – the domain of reality which required conformity of the performed to a different set of equally conventional expectations. To put it another way, her performance of ‘womanhood’ on the political ‘stage’ enacted a metaphor so as to force on her audience an unwelcome representation of how social and historical meaning were themselves determined by custom. ‘Representation’ became in Oakes Smith’s work an issue not of suffrage or appearance, but of conviction in character: ‘Whether we wear this or that costume, or go to the polls or stay away, seems of less importance than a radical understanding of our true selves.’43 To perform a female character in public might involve acknowledgement of its interior as well as staged dimensions: recognition, in other words, that ‘separate spheres’ were an untenable, if convenient, fiction.44 Her writing alternates between the conflicting imperatives of intransitive intransigence – withholding the interiority of character in order to reserve personal freedom – and the need to express it transitively: publicly to engage with the prospect of change in defiance of distorted representations. Woman and Her Needs (1851) describes how women, creatures of rich interiority, are ‘taken’ in marriage, the move to the passive form signalling the loss of agency they suffer in the ‘contract’. A chapter entitled ‘The Sanctity of Marriage’ exposed the sordid commercialism of the bargain whereby women are ‘bought with a price’ for the most menial household tasks. Here she explicitly refused the mirroring mode and insisted that the intersubjective activities of the marketplace should operate on a basis of equality: a woman ‘should be still honorable, not as a reflex of another’s glory, but as of herself, lending and receiving’.

V Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana reconfigured Plutarchan models of heroic leaders to institute a transatlantic tradition of the biographical subject as a proleptically Emersonian representative man, at once a political entity and a type. Before the twentieth century and universal suffrage (and arguably beyond) women were disbarred from ‘representation’ in this public sense. Fuller’s posthumous reputation among American contemporaries was as a female denatured by her appearance on the transnational political scene, and consigned to tropic characterlessness by (to return to Ellen Spolsky’s metaphor quoted in this chapter’s epigraph) her ‘promiscuous’ breeding. The issue of the literary character she might as a

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woman assume preoccupied her writing in life: in the ‘autobiographical romance’ incorporated in the New England Memoirs, Fuller described how the intense studies of her childhood robbed her own development of its emotional dimension: ‘The force of feeling, which, under other circumstances, might have ripened thought, was turned to learn the thoughts of others . . . I thought with rapture of the all-accomplished man, him of the many talents, wide resources, clear sight, and omnipotent will.’45 If Timothy Fuller sought to form a Popean ‘softer man’ in the education of his daughter, it must be said that to an extent he succeeded. Margaret’s successive Goethean self-realisations and personifications (as Mariana in Summer on the Lakes, Miranda in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Minerva, Muse, Mary – and of course Margaret/Margarete/Gretchen) would generalise the developmental dilemmas of her education and turn characterless womanhood to positive representativeness as prosopopoeia. Her desire for a life of heroic action led her initially to the role of author foreseen for her by friends. ‘I know not whether to grieve that you too should think me fit for nothing but to write books’, she wrote in response to Charles Freeman Clarke’s prophecy that ‘you are destined to be an author. I shall yet see you wholly against your will and drawn by circumstances, become the founder of an American literature!’ She yearned instead towards the ‘living and practical’ destiny of a character in the world.46 As a teenager she wrote to the great public hero the Marquis de Lafayette, ‘Should we both live, and it is possible to a female, to whom the avenues of glory are seldom accessible, I will recal [sic] my name to your recollection.’47 It was, as she perhaps knew but refused always to accept, a forlorn hope that a woman might, not by virtue of a borrowed manliness, but as woman, become a representative character: ‘That Roman duty so much a part of her character’, as Robert N. Hudspeth put it, ‘ran afoul of her gender.’48 Fuller mused in Rome that a century hence she might have been America’s ambassador, representing her nation in Europe – as it was she could only be its fly-on-the-wall informer about Italy, and a gadfly to American political and cultural complacency. Facing down in advance the deadly threat that James’ character Frank Granger sensed that newspaper publicity would pose to Miss Wenham’s ‘style’, her dispatches to Greeley’s The New-York Tribune were informed by intense intellectual selfcultivation, New England radicalism and developing personal commitments to Ossoli (an officer in the Roman Civic Guard defending the city against French siege during the Risorgimento) that confused the separation of spheres confining ‘women of character’ to domesticity. This is the biographical history of Fuller’s literary engagements, defensively organised by Emerson, Clarke and Channing in their posthumous

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biography, and recently much more fully (and sympathetically) reconstructed by Charles Capper and contemporary literary critics of her work. Returning to Fuller’s portrayal as characterless and representative woman we can establish some additional perspective on how the denatured presence of ‘the Margaret-ghost’ might become in James’ fiction a figure for reflection on the effect of transatlantic perspective on the performance of character. I then turn back to how Fuller’s own prose dispatches from Europe expressed a feminine rhetoric of engagement with the making of history in political events through the infusion of reimagined personal experience in representative genres. James described the ‘germ’ of The Portrait of a Lady as ‘a single character . . . an acquisition I had made . . . after a fashion not here to be retraced . . . familiar and yet not blurred in its charm’.49 The verbal link with Daisy Miller reverberates in the novel as Serena Merle explains to Isabel Archer the background of Gilbert Osmond and his sister the Countess Gemini. Their mother, she confides, had bristled with pretensions to elegant learning and published descriptive poems and corresponded on Italian subjects with the English weekly journals . . .. One could see this in Gilbert Osmond, Madame Merle held – see that he had been brought up by a woman; though, to do him justice, one would suppose it had been by a more sensible woman than the American Corinne, as Mrs. Osmond had liked to be called. (p. 235)

To appreciate the transatlantic dynamics of Merle’s allusive equation of Fuller (who by 1880 was regularly referred to as ‘the American Corinne’) with Osmond’s ‘mother’, we need to first note that all the characters in play here – Osmond, his mother (under discussion), Merle herself and Isabel – are Americans, transported to Europe. At their first meeting at Gardencourt (before the novel’s action has removed to Italy), Isabel is very taken by this woman who has ‘as charming a manner as any she had ever encountered’ (p. 151). Merle, in her turn, looks Isabel over ‘with a sort of world-wide smile, a thing that over-reached frontiers’. ‘A woman of strong impulses kept in admirable order’ (p. 152), Merle is evidently being set up as a temptress for the recently arrived heroine who is about to inherit a fortune. But Merle, as readers have noticed, is not a flat villain of romance, and her relation to Isabel is poetically complex. The reader learns that she was born in Brooklyn ‘under the shadow of the national banner’, the daughter of an American naval officer, but she hates the sea and having once ventured across the Atlantic does not intend to make the return passage (p. 151). By the end of this chapter Merle’s representative (and characterless) character and Isabel’s

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have been linked by a chain of nautical imagery, as Ralph Touchett attempts to persuade his dying father to settle money upon the young woman: ‘You say you want to put wind in her sails; but aren’t you afraid of putting too much?’ ‘I should like to see her going before the breeze!’ Ralph answered. (p. 159)

It is part of the inexorable logic of this book that thinks character through metaphor that Ralph’s rhetoric wins through against his father’s better judgment – his fear that Isabel’s wealth will (like that of a laden ship in mid-Atlantic passage) fall prey to piratical ‘fortune-hunters’ (p. 160). Before this state of affairs can come to pass, however, Isabel willingly renders her character – her metaphoric pearls – to Merle: ‘it was as if she had given to a comparative stranger the key to her cabinet of jewels. These spiritual gems were the only ones of any magnitude that Isabel possessed, but there was all the greater reason for their being carefully guarded’ (p. 161). The first in the catalogue of Merle’s ‘great merits’ that persuade her to this confidence are charm and sympathy. (The instinctive connection between the two women emerges in Isabel’s first impression of the reputedly childless Merle as ‘a Niobe’ – the classical representative woman and figure of unrestrained breeding perpetually weeping for her fourteen lost children evoked in Poe’s ‘The Visionary’ in relation to the adulterous ‘Marchesa Aphrodite’.) She too may have bred promiscuously. In conventional terms Merle is an archetypal woman of lost character. Before the accuracy of this instinct about Merle’s past is revealed to Isabel, however, they sally forth together against the English weather, and she willingly acknowledges herself ‘under an influence’ from the older woman (p. 163). At this point the dyad becomes a triangle, as Isabel wonders what her other American friend and companion the journalist Harriet Stackpole would say about ‘this perverted product of their common soil’ (p. 163). The metaphor stimulates a chain of reflection about Merle’s habits and the perfect cultivation of her character: if, for Isabel, ‘she had a fault it was that she was not natural . . . her nature had been too much overlaid by custom and her angles too much rubbed away . . . She was in a word too perfectly the social animal that man and woman are supposed to have been intended to be . . . [S]he existed only in her relations, direct or indirect, with her fellow mortals’ (p. 165). Merle has (re)invented herself entirely within the mould of social exchange. If James’ free indirect method reveals Isabel’s Romantic outlook in this passage, it equally suggests that Merle’s carefully sustained character as a woman of society is a reiteration of Pope’s Chloe, who has renounced passion for respectability: ‘She speaks, behaves and acts just as she ought; / But never,

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never, reach’d one gen’rous Thought. / Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour, / Content to dwell in decencies for ever’.* Serena Merle is a woman who has lost her ‘character’ and whose life is devoted to being (as Ralph puts it) ‘indescribably blameless; a pathless desert of virtue’ (p. 211) impermeable to the desires of others. Sustaining before the world a carefully composed character without a single ‘little black speck’ upon it is both the plight and the prerogative of ‘the general performance of Madame Merle’ (p. 212). She is another ‘study in the histrionic character’, her identity oscillating between metaphors of sea (swell and flow) and earth (cultivation and artifice). As Merle confides to a wondering Isabel: ‘What shall we call our “self”? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us – and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I’ve a great respect for things! One’s self – for other people – is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps – these things are all expressive.’ . . . Isabel was fond of metaphysics, but was unable to accompany her friend into this bold analysis of the human personality. ‘I don’t agree with you. I think just the other way. I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everything’s on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one. Certainly the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don’t express me; and heaven forbid they should!’ (pp. 172–73)

These are the materialist identity-questions evoked by the transmigrating character of Sheppard Lee, embodied in the furnishings of the social medium. The two women who lay claim to and become the victims of the American Corinne clash over the ownership and representation of character. The arch reference to the ‘clothes philosophy’ of Sartor Resartus reduces transcendental metaphysics to metaphor; the authorial irony here is dispersed rather than assigned, with the effect that the reader has to guess at the tone of both speakers, and to interpret the narrative force of their conversation accordingly. This is a book in which (as James Wood has recently put it) ‘all the characters flow in and out of their own metaphors’.50 It doesn’t seem right to attribute an ‘Emersonian’ ‘transparent eye-ball’ or a ‘Humean’ scepticism (‘Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return?’) either to Merle or to Isabel as character, any more than to ‘Emerson’ or ‘Hume’; the implications of Merle’s insistence that identity is a performance are perlocutionary: her words are a (disguised) passionate plea * Pope, ‘Epistle to a Lady’, in Pope Poetical Works, ll. 161–64.

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against Isabel’s own passionate insistence on her freedom for self-expression.51 Isabel’s tragedy will be her failure to recognise until too late the extent to which her capacity for choice was always compromised by the conditions of her existence. Impenetrable adherence to convention has become Merle’s route back to respectability. This renders her being performative; her life is a sequence of customary gestures to accomplish particular acts and responses. Both the Romantic (Isabel’s) and the disenchanted (Merle’s) viewpoints depend, in James’ representation, on character as hypostasis, which in its transitive form The Oxford English Dictionary defines as ‘[t]o make into or regard as a self-existent substance or person; to embody, impersonate.’ Isabel’s belief in spontaneous authenticity leads her to resist Merle’s delight at her ‘charming’ behaviour on first meeting Osmond: ‘ “That’s more than I intended,” she answered coldly. “I’m under no obligation that I know of to charm Mr. Osmond” ’ (p. 209). It is clear that Merle’s presentation of Osmond’s character to Isabel in relation to the American Corinne is of some significance: she puts a particular spin on an earlier description of his ‘great dread of vulgarity’ (p. 210). One possibility is that in advancing Osmond’s superiority to his mother’s vulgarity and lack of emotional restraint, Merle confirms Isabel’s already noted interest ‘not so much [in] what he said and did, but rather what he withheld’ (p. 220): his refusal to represent his character in the public realm. Another possibility, more covert, is that by rejecting the claims of a woman’s passionate speech (his mother’s, Merle’s own in the past, and – she implicitly warns – Isabel’s in the future) Osmond denies her right to utterance. In Cavell’s terms, Osmond is neither ‘moved to respond’ nor actively ‘resist[s] the demand’; simply ignoring the call, he effectively negates the woman’s existence.52 His own character is impervious to the claims of another: intensely self-scripted, Osmond’s life is antithetical to and the nemesis of the passionate utterance of the improvisatrice to which Fuller’s ‘feminine rhetoric’ aspired. The Portrait of a Lady distributed the Margaret-ghost into four aspects hypostasised as American characters inflected by their transatlantic encounters: ‘fallen’ Merle with an illegitimate child conceived in Rome; her foil (Osmond’s sister) the Countess Gemini, a ‘highly compromised character’ (p. 233) who made a bad European marriage and ‘had so mismanaged her improprieties that they had ceased to hang together at all . . . and had become the mere floating fragments of a wrecked renown, incommoding social circulation’ (p. 234); idealistic Isabel with her transcendental aspirations and disdain for material ‘things’; and pragmatic Harriet Stackpole with her journalistic eye for publicity, ‘a culture-seeker without a sense of proportion’. Each, in the novel, is a complement to the other; compositely

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they represent the challenge that transatlantic passage offers to the character of ‘American woman’.53

VI Fuller’s dispatches from Europe embody a composite inquiry into the relation of character to its surroundings and the making of history. Before she travelled to Rome in person, extensive reading had convinced her that ‘The genius of Rome displayed itself in character . . . Everything turns your attention to what a man can become . . . by a single thought, an earnest purpose, and indomitable will, by hardihood, self-command, and force of expression.’54 Initially the dispatches struggled to disentangle observations from stereotypes, and to find a voice for an engagement surpassing reiterated touristic platitudes. She identified three different representative American types in Italy, the first two being trivial dabblers, the third (with which, in objectifying gender disguise, she associated herself) was the ‘thinking American’, who, ‘recognizing the immense advantage of being born to a new world and on a virgin soil, yet does not wish one seed from the Past to be lost. He is anxious to gather and carry back with him all that will bear a new climate and new culture . . . He wishes to gather them clean, free from noxious insects’ (Dispatches, p. 163). This kind of American had a national identity by virtue of his openness to other cultures; the fear of contagion is there in the ‘noxious insects’ that may secretly inhabit the gathered flowers of this Italian garden, but the frankness of the American’s desire to know their value neutralises their potentially toxic effect. Contagion – of character, of war, faction and disease – is a structuring metaphor of these pages as Fuller’s writing found a register to convey the implication of her own experience in the revolutionary events she encountered in Rome. The writing undergoes a transformation from reportage to incarnation as ‘Margaret’ ceases to personate the magisterial male persona of the ‘thinking American’ and instead assumes metonymic embodiment of the turmoil around and within. The writer’s own projected person becomes the iconography of her political impressions: Though my thoughts have been much with the public in this struggle for life, I have been away from it during the Summer months, in the quiet valleys, on the lonely mountains. There, personally undisturbed, I have seen the glorious Italian summer wax and wane . . . Then swelled the fig, the grape, the olive, the almond; and my food was of these products of this rich clime. For near three months I had grapes every day; the last four weeks enough daily

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for two persons for a cent! Exquisite salad for two persons’ dinner and supper, a cent. All other products of the region in the same proportion. (p. 237)

Italy’s capacity to breathe new life into the American is also – events would reveal – a literal impregnation. ‘Rome that almost killed me with her cold breath of last Winter, yet still with that cold breath whispered a tale of import so divine. . . . every hour of absence or presence must deepen love with one who has known what it is to repose in thy arms’ (p. 238). Her ‘struggle for [new] life’ (p. 237) is metonymic of the Roman people’s; Ossoli and Rome become fused in the imagined embrace. Having given birth in Italy, she associates herself with ‘The Mother of Nations . . . now at bay against them all’ (p. 274). This is the ‘Suggestive style’ advocated by Whately, without inhibition. ‘Suggesting’ – in his words – ‘more than is actually expressed’, it conveys its meaning graphically to the reader’s sensibilities. No wonder Emerson ‘fancied [Fuller] too much interested in personal history’.55 America, ideologically, could not allow such fertility to the old world; the breeding metaphorises as infection, over-ripeness (decay), degeneracy in the posthumous assassinations of Margaret’s character.

VII ‘Tell me, sir, do you really think that a white could look the negro so? For one, I should call it pretty good acting.’ ‘Not much better than any other man acts.’ ‘How? Does all the world act? Am I, for instance, an actor? Is my reverend friend here, too, a performer?’ ‘Yes, don’t you both perform acts? To do is to act; so all doers are actors.’56

This much quoted passage from Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) is usually read historically or sociologically as a despairing or cynical (or even celebratory) anatomy of the conditions of mid-century America, or biographically as symptomatic of Melville’s own descent into epistemological scepticism: his loss of faith in democracy, God or his fellow men. Interpretations such as those of Walter Dubler or Helen Trimpi or Karen Haltunnen that locate the book’s concerns within American politics or cultural conditions in the 1850s, and numerous readings of particular episodes as manifestations of historical or biographical particulars may stand. It is also a literary text devoted to analysing the compact of trust that language creates in character, with exemplary accounts of its limitation, provisionality and moments of failure. Character is the basis of trust and credit, the social cement of civil society, and much is made of ‘familiar

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conversation’, ‘confidential sort of sympathetic silence’, ‘sociability’ and ‘unaccountable’ self-disclosures in this episodic narrative (pp. 70, 81, 83). The Confidence-Man elucidates the performative nature of character and the nature of sympathetic correspondence that constitutes social relations. Recall Hobbes’ definition of ‘personation’: ‘he that acteth another, is said to bear his person, or act in his name; . . . and is called in divers occasions, diversly; as a representer’.57 If, as critics have argued, the confidence-man is the representative American, his masquerade institutes characterlessness at the heart of character. The happy performative (to borrow Austin’s term) – that is, effective enactment of character projection to an interlocutor – always also implies the possibility of the unhappy or failed performative, confidence failing to happen, and the corresponding trust or credit withheld. Character is no more and no less than impersonation. It seems, however, that to know this is not enough. Readers complained, from the book’s first appearance in 1857 until the 1950s, that The Confidence-Man was unreadable, by which they meant, at least in part, that it contained no characters with which to identify. The protagonist (if indeed ‘he’ is ‘one’) is a character that cannot be read according to narrative expectations of consistency, continuity through time (across episodes) and inferred identity. His characteristics are transportable and transient: different attributes seem to accrue to more than one figure, and one figure is frequently given several attributes. A con man has no personal (in the sense of inalienable, essential) character, but a series of guises across episodic narratives within the story; the confidence-man’s character (the feature that remains consistent across ‘his’ different manifestations) is characterlessness: the capacity to assume and discard personae that convince (for the nonce) at least one interlocutor. In Theophrastan terms, his leading character is that all his characteristics are transitive; he is identified not by his boorishness, or miserliness (though these ‘characters’ do appear aboard), but by his capacity, or his attempt, to inspire confidence. It is in this sense that the confidence-man is an ‘original character in fiction’ as the book defines it: ‘while characters, merely singular, imply but singular forms, so to speak, original ones, truly so, imply original instincts’ (p. 282). The ‘singular form’ of the miser is unvarying with social context; no matter whom he speaks with he will ‘be’ miserly. This consistency across scenes is the compact instigated by realism, and the normal way a reader learns to identify character in fiction; the narrative insists that it is thereby more, not less, true to the conditions of ‘real life’: ‘while to all fiction is allowed some play of invention, yet, fiction based on fact should never be contradictory to it; and is it not a fact, that, in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis?’

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(p. 84). The reader’s experience of the confidence-man in the book, then, is more like actual experience, but less ‘realistic’: the compact of realism is breached. This is a comprehensive reimagining of Pope’s ‘Woman’s at best a contradiction still.’ The avatars of the confidence-man manifest themselves only as long as they are in dialogue with other passengers on the steamboat Fidèle. His successive appearances demonstrate the necessity of social context for character to emerge: he is the condition of sociability personified. And personation itself emerges, by implication, as a function of sociability. The confidence trick is performative, in both illocutionary and perlocutionary senses: when successful, it creates belief in the reality of a situation, and in that sense makes it real. For the duration of its success it also makes something happen to its interlocutor: s/he trusts, and acts accordingly. The inducement of confidence creates character (the trickster persuades his interlocutor that he ‘is’ who he says he is); character evokes a corresponding response in the gull. Proliferating allusions tempt the reader into allegorical interpretation predicated on a metaphorical separation of textual ‘surface’ and meaningful ‘depth’, but these tend to founder on grounds of internal consistency: does ‘Pitch’ for example, indicate blackness, perfidy of character, or a pitch for confidence? Are the Bunyanesque cognomens of Charlie Noble and Mark Winsome ironic, or meant to indicate probity? And in what realm? Alternatively, if Winsome ‘is’ Emerson, and Egbert ‘is’ Thoreau, is the book at least partially a satire on Transcendentalism, in which case how should Egbert’s success as a businessman or the ‘Increase in Seriousness’ of the final chapter be read? Symbolic readings, on the other hand, place particular hermeneutic weight on images such as the Drummond light of the final chapter, the white fleeciness and indeterminate character of the lamb-like man (perhaps a redaction of Charles Lamb’s recessive narrator in Essays of Elia) or the weed that adorns the hat of the confidence-man. Allegorical and symbolic readings are certainly ‘literary’ rather than ‘historical’ approaches, but the critical activity of reuniting language and meaning in each case presupposes both a transcendent level of reality in which confusing appearances ‘make sense’ and the critic’s privileged access to it. Though the text is endlessly interpretable, internal rhetorical circuitry prevents any ‘exit’ to meaning. The capacity of language to create confidence in character is a key issue for fiction, and for criticism. The silence of the lamb-like man at the beginning of the book sets a measure against which to judge the language games played by the successive figures who test the confidence of their interlocutors and the reader through the following episodes. The barber (he

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who fleeces the lamb-like man?) hangs up his ‘No Trust’ sign at the outset of the narrative. No trust = no character. These avatars are ‘like’ one another in seeking the confidence of their interlocutor, but there is no substance to their likeness, no identity in their similarity. The common thread is language: these characters exist only as long as they project their stories at another, and seek that other’s sympathetic acknowledgement. But to believe in another completely, it seems, is to be conned. Both character and relationship are contingent products of the fiction on circumstance. If indeed ‘in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis’ (p. 84), why are representations of inconsistency in character so disconcerting? One of the troubling aspects of The Confidence-Man is its wilful disruption of the Aristotelian reciprocity of character and plot, a disruption that itself seems to indicate how dependent on narrative a reader’s assessment of character is. To put it another way, one of the things that confers confidence in character is consistency across time – a consistency that Hume had demonstrated to be an epistemological fiction, and a psychological necessity. Expectation raised by custom is our only guide in deciding the truth but experience is partial and uncertain of repetition. What kind of confidence can be placed in a character not sustained either by the progressive flow of narrative, or (like Persuasion’s Sir Walter Elliot) a fixed position in a social network? This series of impersonations in a narrative which makes nothing happen connects with the poetic rather than propulsive dynamics of transatlantic character. One response apparently offered to its readers (the conditionals are inevitable) is to reconnect with the rhetorical roots of character as a form of self-representation and a rhetorically derived poetics in which the ‘meaning’ of character resides in the performative compact of literary language. The Confidence-Man repeatedly demonstrates how belief in character is something that happens as a result of language that persuades. If the persuasion is in Austin’s term ‘unhappy’, and fails to achieve its aim, the reader/interlocutor refuses the proffered compact, no character emerges and the narrative falters. The outcome in either case is the product of a transaction that involves projection and reception. Both a ‘creator’ and a ‘reader’ of character, the book makes clear, are implicated in the process, and its outcome; if sympathetic projection is a necessary precondition, so equally are judgment and comparison. This, as I suggested in Chapter 1 (and in referring again to Hume above), is an insight which itself has an important comparative genealogy in transatlantic intellectual history. The poetics of character that might ‘follow of this Masquerade’ remain in question (p. 298). ‘The doctrine of analogies recurs. Fallacious enough doctrine when wielded against one’s prejudices, but in corroboration of cherished

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suspicions not without likelihood’ (p. 157). How much trust may we put in ‘like’? Can likeness have substance? How would it be ascertained, being a relation and not an absolute (note the internal circularity of ‘analogies’ and ‘likelihood’)? Hume described knowledge of personal identity as dependent on principles of association and contiguity, on ‘comparison, and a discovery of those relations, either constant or inconstant, which two or more objects bear to each other’.58 The Treatise insisted that we attend to the relationship – or rather the inseparability – of philosophy and voice, and the concomitant possibility that the largest epistemological concerns may collapse into those of language: ‘All the disputes concerning the identity of connected objects are merely verbal, except so far as the relation of parts gives rise to some fiction or imaginary principle of union’ (p. 262). If all judgment is comparative there are no absolutes in experience. By the mid-nineteenth century arguments from analogy had lost ground to more idealistic Kantian and Hegelian logics. Reading The Confidence-Man from the transatlantic perspective of character as transitive and comparative makes clear that Melville’s sceptical narrative about the confidential basis for character is not a specifically ‘American’ phenomenon associated exclusively with demographic mobility and democracy, as critics such as Lindberg, Haltunnen and Lenz have argued. The novel reimagines the epistemological issue as a problem of fictional character. A ‘real character’ is shown to be a nonsensical construct, a fiction; equally, a fictional character may be ‘like’ a figure in the real world – Winsome and Egbert are ‘like’ Emerson and Thoreau, for example, and may in ‘the lasting condition of an untried abstraction’ (p. 227) ‘represent’ them in the fiction – without the analogy revealing any new information about either the fictional or biographical character. ‘But is analogy argument? You are a punster . . . [Y]ou pun with ideas as another man may with words’, barks the Missourian to the representative from the Philosophical Intelligence Office (p. 150), a figure who exists in the novel only (as Lindberg has pointed out) to provide a character reference to a sceptical inquirer. Like so many aspects of the book, the Confidence of the title is a pun. Character is repeatedly linked to pun and analogy: the notoriously enigmatic final chapter proclaims that: the original character, essentially such, is like a revolving Drummond light; raying away from itself all round it – everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is with Hamlet), so that, in certain minds, there follows upon the adequate conception of such a character, an effect, in its way, akin to that which in Genesis attends upon the beginning of things. (p. 282)

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Character is of course a ‘mark’; at the moment of origin, the written book of Genesis awaits God’s command to ‘let there be light’. Character is also an ‘effect’ of conception; a ‘revolution’ of enlightenment is at all beginnings. And so on. This play with language is of course no conclusion at all; the final dissolution of character and of the illusion of ‘character’ in the book is also a moment of origins. The chapter plays Apocrypha against biblical authority to raise the further question of who or what authorises character: in what rhetoric do we repose confidence? ‘Like the pun, analogy . . . sets up a circle of related but contradictory notions that can be broken only by prior opinions held by either character or reader.’59 In such an environment, a ‘Philosophical Intelligence Office’ might seem to offer some highly desirable relief, as ‘a business which must furnish peculiar facilities for studying mankind’ (pp. 138, 144). The man from the ‘Philosophical Intelligence Office’ – literally, an employment agency supplying ‘characters’ of would-be employees for employers, figuratively a repository of epistemologies, the ‘office’ of whose representative is to expound and effect connections (between employers and employees, between ideas) – has an altercation with the sceptical Missourian Pitch who discredits the argument from analogy and its verbal compression in pun. The principle of connection between phenomena that underpinned eighteenth-century philosophical procedures and critical judgment is discredited as a test of character. The problem of how to read the representation or self-representation of another human being in regard to oneself is reimagined in The Confidence-Man as an issue of language: how to interpret words whose ‘meaning’ may face more than one way. ‘Character’ and ‘confidence’ are mutually dependent, and dependent on the transparency of language to meaning – but language, as it appears in this book, is anything but transparent. A review in the London Examiner described the Masquerade as ‘consisting, not so much of a single narrative as of a connected series of dialogues, quaintly playing upon the character of that confidence of man in man which is or ought to be the basis of all dealing’.60 What kind of ‘character’ might be supplied by an agency dealing in philosophers? One answer is suggested by James Russell Lowell’s review of Emerson’s The Conduct of Life (1861) in which Emerson is described as ‘one of the pioneers of the lecturing system’: ‘the charm of his voice, his manner, and his matter has never lost its power over his earlier hearers, and continually winds new ones in its enchanting meshes. What they do not fully understand they take on trust’.61 What, Lowell asked rhetorically, ‘is his secret?’ ‘Is it not that he out-Yankees us all? That his range includes us all’ (v. i, p. 350). The Emersonian voice is the ultimate impersonation: the

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characterless character voicing all America and all American possibility. Its commitments are utterly impersonal, and its views cannot be paraphrased because their content is one with their delivery; its force is multi-vocal and perlocutionary in its capacity to arouse individual affect across a collected audience, and – Lowell surmises – connected to an iterative style that persuades us that we hear something both new and familiar, projecting a character at once consistent and ever-varying: ‘genius is one of the few things which we gladly allow to repeat itself, – one of the few that multiply rather than weaken the force of their impression by iteration? . . . For us the whole life of the man is distilled in the clear drop of every sentence, and behind each word we divine the force of a noble character’ (v. i, pp. 351–53). So ‘Charlie Noble’, we might say, is an effect of style, his textual appearances successive impersonations seeking trust. In his retrospective essay Lowell recalled the effect of Emerson’s first lecture (collected in The Conduct of Life) on its hearers: It was as if, after vainly trying to get his paragraphs into sequence and order, he had at last tried the desperate expedient of shuffling them. It was chaos come again, but it was a chaos full of shooting stars, a jumble of creative forces [evoking] flashes of mutual understanding between speaker and hearer . . . To some of us that long-past experience remains as the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. (v. i, pp. 353–54, 356)

I shall return to this style in Chapter 8 to ask how iteration as perlocution worked in Emerson’s lectures. One final thing to note from Lowell’s review: his sense that the effect of Emerson’s voice depended on the essential characterlessness of the performer: ‘what every one of his hearers felt was that the protagonist in the drama was left out’, and what they heard was a voice of ‘benign impersonality’ (v. i, pp. 357–58).

VIII Did the freedoms of ‘characterlessness’, then, seem the most effective mode of literary self-representation in a republic? I want to argue rather for a realignment of political imperatives to an already existing set of possibilities within literary representation. Nancy Ruttenburg’s argument that ‘Characterologically, the democratic subject has occupied the negative space visible only in the refracted light of the liberal subject’s fullness’ cannot betoken a specifically American or Republican development differentiating the cultural politics of the New World absolutely from the supposedly educative, stoic process of character acquisition conventionally

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described in Enlightenment writing.62 It was already inherent in the transactional economy (both financial and emotional) of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and, before that, in eighteenthcentury analyses of the mutually constitutive nature of gender relations in the ‘Character of Women’ and ‘of Men’. Bringing the two contexts into alignment allows us to inquire further into how the transactional nature of character may be inflected by a transatlantic rhetoric. Emerson passed from relative confidence in the capacity of ‘Representative Men’ to embody the highest traits of human nature to the sceptical voice of ‘Experience’ (1844) which oscillates between optimistic fluidity and bleak Theophrastan determinism: ‘There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In truth they are all creatures of given temperament, which will appear in a given character . . . but we look at them, they seem alive, and we presume there is impulse in them.’63 In an essay on ‘Character’ (1842), he elaborated the masculine and metonymic politics of representation as a form of symbolisation: true representatives ‘do not need to inquire of their constituents what they should say, but are themselves the country which they represent . . . The constituency at home hearkens to their words, watches the color of their cheek, and therein, as in a glass, dresses its own.’64 The essay establishes a disjunctive sequence of binaries: north and south, positive spirit, negative event, man and woman. The essay’s ‘natural place’ is firmly in the north, male, sphere. Another lectureturned-essay, ‘Politics’, declares that ‘[i]n our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy’, and predicts its coming era.65 As a prophecy of Victorian ethos this would prove remarkably accurate, but the tendency of Emerson’s own rhetorical personae was characteristically to define his philosophical character as a fluid practice that refused the prerequisite of ethical consistency. Emerson’s version of character was a manifestation of his ethical stance, but more in the performative essayistic habit of writing than in the fully embodied Victorian sense of the exemplary moral personality in action. I argued in Chapter 1 that character was both the vehicle of sympathy – what carried a speaker into relation with his audience – and its product: individuals were known in their relations with others. Russell Sbriglia has suggested that ‘the dialectic between Emerson’s sceptically imbued, performative revisionings of self and his sympathetic, passionate identifications with others . . . constitutes his ethics’.66 The ‘representative men’ of his 1850 volume are above all receptors of the conditions of their times: they embody the ‘spirit of the age’ to the extent that each ‘finds himself in the river of thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his

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contemporaries’.67 The tone of Emerson’s great men essays is notably dissociative: these exemplary figures are characterised by a detached observer whose analytic sympathies are evenly and judicially dispersed across Montaigne and Swedenborg, Napoleon and Shakespeare. This narrative voice seems to court characterlessness as it constitutes character. The scepticism embodied in Emerson’s performative account of representative character needs to be understood, as this chapter has shown, in the socially and historically contingent circumstances of its production, but its concerns are both philosophically and rhetorically continuous with those of Hume and Smith. The anthropologist Victor Turner argues that performance is ‘reciprocal and reflexive – in the sense that the performance is often a critique, direct, or veiled, of the social life it grows out of, an evaluation . . . of the way society handles history’.68 Eighteenth-century sociability presupposed that character is both stable and legible. Against its sceptical antithesis Stanley Cavell argues for the doubleness of character as both self-performance and selfpresence. The textual self-presentations of characterlessness and representation with which this and the previous chapter have been concerned sustain this doubleness. The idea that character embodies the compact of civil society does not (and did not for Smith or Hume) imply an essentialist belief in the existential or transcendent reality of the self represented: the compact is an agreement to sustain relations, not a tenet of faith. Characterlessness and performance, that is, are written into the inception of modern literary and fictional realist character articulation not as binary alternatives to belief in the reality of interiorised character, but as the sustaining metaphorical and metaphorising conditions of fictional currency. If ‘Mather’ was the first great transatlantic representation of characterless character, ‘Franklin’ was perhaps the second. ‘In order to secure my Credit and Character as a Tradesman’, as Franklin’s Autobiography has it, ‘I took care not only to be in Reality Industrious and frugal, but to avoid all Appearances of the Contrary.’69

chapter 5

Literary friendship and transatlantic correspondences

Friendship has no tendency to secure veracity. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of Poets

[T]he ease and simplicity . . . in Epistolary Correspondence, is not to be understood as importing entire carelessness. In writing to the most intimate friend, a certain degree of attention, both to the subject and the style, is requisite and becoming . . . The first requisite, both in conversation and correspondence, is to attend to all the proper decorums which our own character, and that of others, demand. Hugh Blair, Lectures

. . . the precious element of closeness, telling so of connexions but Henry James, The Aspern Papers tasting so of differences . . .

In Hume’s Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals character is produced in relation and stabilised by mirroring from others. The ‘constant habit of surveying ourselves . . . in reflection, keeps alive all the sentiments of right and wrong’, he writes. ‘[O]ur regard to a character with others seems to arise only from a care of preserving a character with ourselves . . . [we] prop our tottering judgement on the correspondent approbation of mankind’.1 The principle of likeness underlying processes of sympathy and comparison manifest in poetics of personation, metaphor and metonymy in Enlightenment character representation continued to trouble the cultural politics of literary nationalism in the post-Revolutionary period. When in the first decades of the Republic American writers declared their independence from ‘English Literature’, they did so, naturally enough, in terms of a Romantic aesthetic that refused likeness and the transference of authority embedded in the translatio studii et imperii in favour of originality. Writing to Joel Barlow, Noah Webster declared ‘we shall always be in leading strings till we resort to original writers and original principles instead of taking upon trust what English writers please to give us’.2 Almost half a century later, Emerson declared the birth of a new literary character in ‘The 152

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American Scholar’: ‘Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.’3 This voice would not derive its authority by association with familiar idioms but startle the English language into new forms of expression. In aggressive gestures of metonymic substitution, authors were exhorted to free themselves from familiar characters: ‘we want no American Goldsmiths, nay, we want no American Miltons’, as Melville’s ‘Virginian’ summering in Vermont famously declared.4 But such characterisation by stylistic duplication was a marketing asset in a publication environment that favoured the pre-established cultural authority of household names. Analogy sold books: it paid to be ‘like’ Goldsmith or Sterne or Scott. Any number of poetasters and their publishers benefitted from identification with Robert Burns’ hardy independent rustic muse; less acquiescent, James Fenimore Cooper struggled to free himself from the soubriquet of ‘the American Scott’, while British reviewers delighted to discover stylistic derivativeness to be the readiest means of insulting American writers’ literary claims. This struggle between the translation and the power of originality seems embedded in Edgar Allan Poe’s career as a magazine writer, editor and serial reprinter. In ‘William Wilson’, ‘inseparable’ companions bound by nominative identity meet at school near London.5 They discover that they share the same name, and perhaps something more. Each attempting to distinguish himself from the other, their friendship deteriorates into rivalry and increasing animosity. The self-cancelling conclusion of the story, I suggested, refuses to precipitate the narrative into an allegorical reading of American dependence on English idiom or of its author’s anxiety about the effects of unauthorised reprinting on his intellectual property; the tense dance of the mutually mirroring Wilsons offers a broader and more ambiguous version of the image most frequently invoked to describe British and American relations in the century between Independence and the American Civil War. For the narrating Wilson, fear that he might become ‘enslaved’ to the ‘elevated character, the majestic wisdom, the apparent omnipresence and omnipotence’ of the other Wilson’ (p. 355) transforms a friendship of equals into an intolerable rivalry. For Adam Smith, self-approbation was ‘the key both to seeing friends as other selves, and to linking friendship with virtue’; in psychological terms we might read the narrating Wilson’s arrogant posturing as rhetorically symptomatic of low (American) self-esteem.6 The poetic doubling that characterises their increasingly fraught relations is materially inscribed on the school desks that fail to provide a scene of learned differentiation at a figurative level. The quasi-abstract ‘special relationship’ between narrating and narrated characters itself refuses to

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connect in a reliable way with its reader’s expectations of consistency; it at once demands interpretation and resists it. Legibility contains illegibility, as reproduction cancels – by reiterating – originality. A literary-historical approach to the story might engage in sourcehunting. Some form of connection – it might be influence – between ‘William Wilson’ and the doubling tales of Blackwood’s and Fraser’s Magazine, of which Poe was a keen reader, seems evident. Take an epistolary communication from one ‘James Beatman’ to ‘Mr James Hogg, of Mount Benger’ (from Fraser’s Magazine, December 1830), which recounts his struggles with a ‘whimsical namesake and second self’, another James Beatman. Their experiences become so entangled that the letter writer begins to wonder whether he has ‘become two people’, or perhaps is ‘not the right James Beatman’.7 Confronted with one’s double, the issue of identity, it appears, can only be resolved by ascertaining priority. If the first in the field is the real thing (in Romantic terms, the ‘original’), the other becomes an imitator, a copy. But – as the narrating James Beatman concedes – in repeated situations of reciprocity and ‘endless counterfeiting’, it becomes unclear who is imitating whom.8 An apparently Smithian impartial spectator is unable to resolve the issue of identity or priority. The imitation (imitatio) which positively marked the Augustan poet has become the obsessive copying that negatively masks the lunatic. What kind of relationship may be reliably inferred between these doubling protagonists and German Romantic Doppelgänger remains opaque. Or indeed (to take a more biographical approach) between Poe’s own experience of childhood schooling at Stoke Newington under a historical Rev. Dr Bransby and this story. There’s also a suggestion that the tale may be a fictionalised literary biography of the young Byron.9 Poe seems to have trailed a series of transatlantic clues – or perhaps clues about reading transatlantically – that lead only back to themselves, that replicate rather than reveal ‘sources’. These Romantic tales of an ‘other’ that is no other, a self that by seeing itself in the mirror of imitation and analogy is persecuted into destruction brought about by ‘endless counterfeiting’ of likeness, seem to offer, that is, a deep scepticism about comparative literary history as any kind of progress narrative. Analogy and correspondence are clearly at issue, but we need to look for other ways in which comparison may deliver distinction. Poe’s tale offers something like a limit-case of character-asrepresentation. When the adolescent William Wilson (whose very name is self-echoing) encounters a friend who instead of acting as mentor and bolstering his self-esteem becomes a mocking double, the possibility of

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his becoming a unique character (an ‘individual’) whose education the reader may follow is shattered at a stroke. His being is concentrated and expressed in opposition to this eponym; attempting to reduce the iterative reciprocity of their apparently shared existence to undeniable singleness, he destroys them both: ‘In me didst thou exist – and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself ’ (p. 357; italics in original). William Wilson is a character who exists only for the duration of his performance of doubleness in the short story of that name: from the story’s opening nominative act – ‘Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson’ (p. 337; my italics) – to its closing accusative – ‘thou hast murdered thyself ’ (p. 357; italics in original) – it dramatises the duplicity of character as verbal representation. It does so, moreover, in the context of a school-room cluttered with ‘benches and desks’ so engraved with ‘initial letters, names at full length, [and] grotesque figures’ that they have ‘entirely lost what little of original form might have been their portion in days long departed’ (p. 340). This image of how character undoes origins becomes a figure for the conundrum of likeness and the treacherousness of the friendship relation in a transatlantic context. What might be the (written) conditions for believing in the existence of another, without appropriating that other to self, or becoming vulnerable to incorporation by it? This would be the condition of the transatlantic relation, and of literary friendship; it might also be a way to describe the relation of a reader to fictional character. Realism in theatre and drama invites its audience to ‘identify’ with characters as though they were autonomous beings with identities of their own. But to do so, as readers and audiences are generally well aware, is not (unless a Werther or a Bovary) to become them, but to enter a performative contract of ‘likeness’ or ‘as though’ that is no less well understood for being implicit. Scepticism about the nature of this relation between self and world is also – as Stanley Cavell points out – Kant’s ‘scandal of philosophy’.10 The performer in language is at once ‘in’ and ‘not in’ the character s/he represents, as the reader becomes and remains different from a character identified with; character is performed, but it is also who one ‘is’, and the inscription on the page: it is identity, and not-identity; like and notlike itself. This is to say that character shares something of the paradoxical doubleness that structures transatlantic correspondences, considered as performances of language. J. L. Austin pointed out that the communicability of grammatical language depends on it functioning as a series of ‘essentially mimicable, reproducible’ structures.11 ‘William Wilson’ illustrates what may happen when such mimicry becomes the purpose, object and extent of the language use; that is, when language ceases altogether to exercise a

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representational function and takes on an entirely self-reproducing function. One reason why the two William Wilsons cannot be friends is their mutual refusal to acknowledge each other’s right to the name. Successful perlocution, in Cavell’s terms, requires imaginative assent to, or simply allowing of, another’s autonomy, and recognition of the contingency of character in relationship. Friendship was a pervasive historico-literary motif in early American writing. In Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature Ivy Schweitzer has shown how questions about the equality or otherwise of the partners in dyadic friendship informed the domestic, religious and political contestations of Colonial and Revolutionary America. Her case for its significance in articulating the political and gender arguments that contemporaries used to define relationships in the Colonial and Founding periods is a notably subtle example of the history of literature. Though our starting points are similar, my aim is, considering likeness in character through the lens of transatlantic literary friendship, to examine the performative analogy between philosophic and aesthetic correspondence and letter writing. The binding seal or covenant of friendship and its rupture are (as Schweitzer also notes) enacted in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Considering the poetics of the covenant involved in nineteenth-century transatlantic friendship and its literary ramifications offers an opportunity to rethink some Romantic formulae in a comparative context; it enables us to ask, additionally, how transatlantic correspondence may reveal the texture of likeness in the transatlantic literary dynamic. Transatlantic letter writing embodied the poetic correspondence of what Martin Buber called the ‘I and Thou’ aspect of a friendship relation, and the obligation of reciprocity in social exchange. My question is how the likeness of the friendship relation described by classical writers (and central to Schweitzer’s argument about early Republican writing) inhered in the verbal texture of epistolary exchange, and as a corollary of this, how ‘the transatlantic’ became an intellectual and emotional category created in the enactment of literary friendship understood within an Enlightenment framework of personal relations, rather than a pre-existing condition or location to be described. In other words, friendship was an embodiment, and a figure, of a particular kind of sociability whose implications are evident in style and content. ‘Indeed’, wrote Charles Lamb in 1822 to a correspondent across a different ocean, it is no easy effort to set about a correspondence at our distance. The weary world of waters between us oppresses the imagination . . . It is a sort of

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presumption to expect that one’s thoughts should live so far. It is like writing for posterity . . . what security can I have that what I now send you for truth shall not before you get it unaccountably turn into a lie?12

Lamb’s meditation courts its own obsolescence in time; it corresponds with Theodor Adorno’s observation that ‘[t]he relevance of the essay is that of anachronism’.13 Chapter 1 looked at Hume’s and Smith’s accounts of how sympathy diminishes with distance; the question now becomes: how did friendship expressed across the Atlantic space keep in tension the sense of sympathetic correspondence while evoking mutually discriminative epistolary characters?

I In Dr Bransby’s school-house, though ‘[i]t was difficult . . . to say with certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be’, the building was by no means disarticulated. Its ‘lateral branches were innumerable – inconceivable – and so returning in upon themselves, that our most exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not very far different from those with which we pondered upon infinity’ (p. 340). For ‘lateral thinking’ The Oxford English Dictionary cites Edward de Bono’s 1966 taxonomy of thinking as either ‘vertical’ – that is, ‘using the processes of logic, the traditionalhistorical method’ – or ‘lateral’, which ‘involves disrupting an apparent sequence and arriving at the solution from another angle’.14 It conjoins two models for the practice of literary history. The ‘traditional-historical method’ which we associate with national literary history regards it as a chronological procession of writers and works, where ancestors and descendants succeed one another on the basis of influence. We might think of it as the ‘historical’ axis dominating the compound. Lateral thinking, broadly, replaces causal sequence with correspondence, as ‘William Wilson’ does here, in the punning ‘stories’ that, repelling inquiry into which is ‘original’, ask the reader to ponder the multiple points of connection that tie the tale into itself. Romantic doubling – ‘William Wilson’ and Hogg’s ‘Strange Letter of a Lunatic’ are paradigmatic – invokes the ‘reciprocity between cause and effect’ as intrinsic to the articulation of character in correspondence.15 The loosening of the trajectory of causality was, I’ve suggested, primarily the work of Hume, whose A Treatise of Human Nature advanced the idea that succession and contiguity do not require a productive or causal relation between a first term and a second. Smith’s Lectures identified an alternative

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mode of history very similar to de Bono’s lateral thinking, in his ‘Poeticall method, which connects the different facts . . . by some relation that appears betwixt them.’16 This proceeds by associative correspondences between one culture and another, and is performatively realised for a reader through trope and analogy. It allows us to use the motif of friendship to open up the issue of transatlantic character in terms of relationship and difference, in which reciprocity may be of as much interest as the ‘vertical’ reading of originality, dominance and (as in William Wilson’s case) abject succession. Rethinking temporality in a spatial frame more appropriate to transatlantic comparisons might involve changing the way we read a literary correspondence from a narrative governed by priority and sequence to a dynamic matrix of performance and reception able to register the mutually modifying alliances between an ‘event’ and its reader. This approach suggests something more like a pattern of interferences (Hogg’s ‘endless counterfeiting’, or Poe’s crossings and re-crossings) always open to mutual reconfiguration by the introduction of a new element. Confluences that a ‘vertical’ literary history would fail to notice or be forced to dismiss in a sequential narrative for lack of evidence of influence might emerge in a network of shared concerns and stylistic interlocution. Prosopopoeia (the ‘spirit . . . [of] Romance’ in ‘Ligeia’, for instance) substitutes for erasure of original; the presence of genre rather than the history of origins is the condition for reading these transatlantic tales.17 From the rhetorically based account of the process of transfer in correspondence outlined earlier (equally, note, historically grounded in Enlightenment thought as were national narratives of origin and special destiny) metaphor and metonymy emerge as more responsive, contingent structures for a comparative historical poetics of correspondence. Letters, as Elizabeth Hewitt puts it, ‘simultaneously articulate union (by connecting us to an other) and disunion (the letter is sent in lieu of presence)’. She makes the point that ‘correspondence’ is used by American Transcendentalists to describe ‘an analogy between soul and nature, but it also necessarily marks a separation’.18 Friendship, a category of relationship which became a live focus of attention in Enlightenment discussions of sensibility, has some of the features of metaphor: chosen relatedness, it is connection realised in the context of difference. As Hugh Blair pointed out, it brings two different verbal contexts into a proximity that enfolds the possibility of distance and the kind of differentiation unavailable to the two William Wilsons. Blair followed Smith, whose The Theory of Moral Sentiments insisted on the limited nature of human capacity for imagining oneself experiencing the interior feelings of another. In a passage that anachronically serves to rebuke

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the emotional incandescence of the Wilsons, Smith continued: only the ‘hasty, fond, and foolish intimacies’ of youth unformed to consistent character through practice of ‘good conduct’ imagine a passing likeness of taste into emotional identification with another: ‘those intimacies which a freak begins, and which a freak puts an end to, how agreeable soever they may appear while they last, can by no means deserve the sacred and venerable name of friendship’.19 Limited by prudence and punctuated by interruption, correspondence between friends had like metaphor a cognitive function: manifesting relationship in language that reflects back a projected self-image, it stabilised personal identity and character, without – and this was crucial to Hume’s and Smith’s reformulation of friendship within the parameters of commercial society – entailing obligation. Hume contrasted promissory (contractual) and affective relations between individuals, ‘to distinguish those two different sorts of commerce, the interested and the disinterested, there is a certain form of words invented for the former, by which we bind ourselves to the performance of any action. This form of words constitutes what we call a promise.’20 This was consistent with the proto-speech-act theory of language I showed him developing in relation to the centrality of custom in social life: a promise enacts its obligatory effect on the promiser. More specifically, it answered to the perlocutionary form discussed in the previous chapter, in which understood conventions enable certain indirect effects of communication whose ‘success’ requires (and implies) the passionate consent of an affectively conceived respondent. In the context of colonial mercantile and trading correspondence, for example, transatlantic letters exhibit (as a recent critic has claimed) ‘a tension between candor and what amounted to a counterethic of secrecy as standards for good character and conduct and for good writing itself ’.21 Adam Smith’s account of the workings of sympathy explicitly freed the friendship relations from this performative bond of ‘interest’; in civil society friendship shifted from the primarily instrumental relation characteristic of hierarchical kinship-based societies, to the reciprocity of private affective relations. As Edmund Burke described it, ‘by the contagion of our passions, we catch a fire already kindled in [the other]’.22 Thus liberated from the obligation implied in classical friendship, in what sense, then, might post-Enlightenment friendship relations be enacted in writing, and to what extent do we need to keep in mind the OED definitions of ‘private’ as meaning ‘concealed’ or ‘confidential’, in relation to character and the correspondences of friendship, in the nineteenth century?23 The discourse of friendship was central to the evolution of character as a means of articulating relationships of trust in civil society; by the later eighteenth

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century, Felicity James argues, ‘there was a movement away from the concept of kin as friends, towards a more modern meaning of the individually chosen, voluntary affective relationship – friends as kin’.24 Letters indicate, and perform, friendship: always, but exclusively so in the case of friends who never meet. Correspondence, like metaphor, involves re-cognition, knowing again differently. Cicero’s Exemplar is, Derrida points out, a portrait, a representation that aims to be ‘the same’ as the original, but is also essentially different. The friend as exemplar allows for difference in similitude, and the continuity of character over time and across instances, ‘as the exemplum, the duplicate, the reproduction, the copy as well as the original, the type, the model. The two meanings (the single original and the multipliable copy) cohabit.’25 Friends, as the philosopher Elizabeth Telfer puts it, have ‘a special claim on us’ – they are connected, in a more than arbitrary way.26 But (to return to Smith) friendships are concords, not unisons, of sympathetic imagination; good oceans make good friends. What we may call the ecology of friendship – the situations and circumstances in which it may germinate, the spaces in which it flourishes, the kinds of activity that will nourish it, the things that may endanger it – reveals something significant about its dynamics. Smith’s account, like Burke’s, was essentially Aristotelian: for Aristotle friendship was rooted in one’s relation to oneself; a ‘character-friend’ was ‘another self ’.27 But, as ‘William Wilson’ shows, the idea of ‘other self’ is an oxymoron, and untenable. What Poe’s tales crucially lack is an impartial spectator to ensure propriety in the relation between other and self, as a necessary tempering of sympathy that enables character to individualise itself. The cautionary example of the Doppelgänger ‘William Wilson’ or ‘James Beatman’ makes it clear that the friend cannot, must not, be, ‘another self’ in proximity – only in distance. The transatlantic epistolary friendships I consider in later sections of this chapter flourished in distance; they express a particular version of character in relation. In each of the cases I consider, the harmony of the relation required the Atlantic between the correspondents for ‘likeness’ to engender intimacy. It was a feature of expression rather than of proximity; absence was the enabling condition of the two characters who thereby inscribed themselves as friends.

II Buber’s philosophy of dialogue located a relational response at the heart of nationhood, as of individuals: ‘Every great culture that comprehends

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nations rests on an original relational incident, on a response to the Thou made at its source, on an act of the being made by the spirit’; he writes of the repeated enactment of this relation as the way man’s ‘dwelling in the world’ is ‘made possible again and again’.28 Responsive moments of self-definition emerge in repeated re-crossing of the threshold between self and other. Nation-building is a continual renewal of the moment in which repetition generates difference. The American Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the colonists’ decision to ‘dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station’ to which they are by natural law entitled, was the definitional document of the transatlantic relationship in this form.29 Justification lay in enumerated oppressions perpetrated by the father of the nation George III, an unnatural parent to the colonists. The Declaration appealed against the overbearing conduct of ‘our British brethren’ ‘deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity’, who deny the responsibilities of ‘our common kindred’ (pp. 431–32). The British had proved themselves, by their capricious behaviour towards their natural friends the Americans, not to be true character-friends or virtue-friends in an Aristotelian or Smithian sense. So what kind of friendship relation might be negotiated between them for the future? It would be contingent and responsive to occasion. ‘We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends’ (p. 432). So doing, the Declaration reconstrued the relationship between Britain and what were formerly her North American dependencies, as a voluntary contract. In Smithian terms, the Declaration of Independence’s rhetorical advance from figures of authority to chosen friends or enemies was a natural progression characteristic of the weakened kinship relations of modern commercial society; it was characteristic of a cosmopolitan world view and expressed optimism about human agency. There was, however, as I have described elsewhere, a melancholy undertow built into the rhetorical structure of the Declaration, which mourned the loss of kinship as it celebrates the freeing capacities of the newly asserted friendship relation.30 Choosing one’s friends was rather a contradiction (it would have seemed such, certainly, for Adam Ferguson, in view of the irresistible affective pull of the comrade), to the extent that it implied a hierarchy and precedence that the supposed reciprocity of friendship undermines. Imagining an ‘other’ in new socio-political circumstances, the Declaration was an affective transformation of thought moving from vertical to lateral processes, from statement to practice, and from a hierarchical

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structure to a field of possibilities. It rejected caprice but acknowledged contingency: what Derrida would call ‘the logic of the perhaps . . . [W]hat could happen, if hope for such a thing were possible, among friends, between two . . . who love each other.’31 In this sense it was a paradoxical point of origin which presupposed something prior: ‘We . . . the Representatives of the United States of America’ both brings the dispersed Colonies into conjunction and, claiming to represent ‘them’, implies ‘their’ prior constitution as a ‘People’.32 This shadowy composite was necessarily characterless: to bestow on it attributes of any specificity would, as Jefferson found when his draft was debated in Congress, be to risk the paradox of dissolving it before it came into existence. In this reading the new nation came into being in a performative statement (a written ‘Declaration’ whose ‘signature’ at once invented and exceeded the presence of its ‘signers’); its purpose was to dissolve one form of transatlantic relationship (the determinate hierarchical paternal– filial one), in the act of articulating another which would operate in contexts beyond the act of signification: the reciprocal relationship of equals in friendship or animosity. The signature was a written performance in which friendship and animosity mutually animated each other: ‘By definition, a written signature implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer.’33 The depth of affective negative feeling approximated to the kind of holistic engagement with the other that also constitutes love. A politics of exchange emerged in figurative language that characterised two voices in apposition, or opposition. It was also an optative statement: transformation of the vertical relationship of the colonial condition into the lateral relation of friendship would depend (as philosophers of friendship since Aristotle had agreed) on mutual acknowledgement. England was enjoined to recognise the voice of the American people. In this sense the founding act was also a co-founding of new national characters in relation. The relation advocated by Smith for its stabilising function was required also to encompass the possibility that, as C. S. Lewis put it, ‘Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion . . . a pocket of potential resistance.’34 Lewis had in mind resistance to all forms of established authority; his terms facilitate exploration of literary friendships’ amity and animosity within a specifically transatlantic dynamic, not as mutually exclusive alternatives but as mutually implicated conditions of possibility which – holding fast to the conditional imperative of the Declaration – reject what Emerson would decry as ‘rash and foolish alliances’, and meaningless ‘leagues of friendship’ with those whose reciprocal kindness cannot

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be counted upon.35 Schweitzer has written of a ‘deeply “American” ’form of friendship relation, a ‘historically situated, politically inflected cultural practice’ characterised as much by respect for difference as by sameness.36 Bryan Waterman, similarly, has analysed the dynamics of the Friendly Club as a model for social engagement and a generative forum for political, philosophical and literary discourse in the new nation. In this context, as Schweitzer puts it, ‘friendship requires freedom and vice versa’, and a Smithian form of sympathy governs the language of friendship.37 But the literary and philosophic grammars are complicated here. For understandable reasons, a paradoxical fantasy of self-sufficiency would come to characterise American commitments to friendship. ‘I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them’, as Emerson put it in his essay on the subject, an essay which enacted its own ‘Declaration’: ‘Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying “Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more” ’(p. 353). Such an ‘American’ character was constituted within a prior and subsequent constitution of the transatlantic. The Declaration asks how these separate beings may continue to be rhetorically and textually present to one another under new conditions of engagement; it declares a transformation, in other words, of the literary as well as the historical relationship between them. Transatlantic friends are not geographic neighbours, but inscribed ones – friends whose correspondence requires us to think about how a shared language translates between different loci of experience. We need to ask, how would the ‘likeness’ described by classical writers as the basis of friendship manifest itself in the style of transatlantic performance under these new terms of engagement? And what demands of reciprocity does the performance make on its interlocutor? The remainder of this chapter considers a series of literary friendships that collectively exemplify a poetics of character in relationship as a dynamic conjunction of history, rhetoric and space. Invoking selves imagined in their solitude and connected by writing, they enact sociability at a distance (and thereby – incidentally – qualify Hume’s and Smith’s algorithm of sympathy and fellow-feeling as dependent on proximity). Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, Emerson and Margaret Fuller, George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson corresponded across the Atlantic in terms that epitomise in miniature the transatlantic nature of their oeuvres at large. ‘Essays entitled critical’, wrote Fuller, ‘are epistles addressed to the public through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.’38

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III In October 1883 Matthew Arnold travelled to America to lecture on English and American cultural and literary topics. Among his subjects would be Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had died the previous year; in preparation, he studied on the voyage the recently published correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle, prepared by Charles Eliot Norton from copies supplied before death by the writers. At sea Arnold found the characters of both writers in their transatlantic correspondence; the vignette offers a metonym for the ambivalences and complexities that the English critic’s own transatlantic experience introduced into his previously theoretical apprehension of America as England’s correspondent other. Reminiscence of their first meeting at the Carlyles’ home in Craigenputtock during Emerson’s visit to England and Scotland in 1833 provided the occasion for his letter to Carlyle initiating their correspondence in May 1834. The twice-mentioned ‘joy’ of this encounter is oddly contained and held at arm’s length by the writer’s acknowledgement of months’ delay in accomplishing ‘my design of writing you an Epistle’ to follow it up.39 The literary friendship built on a single event that became iconic through repeated reference and recollection in their letters was subsequently cemented by their support of one another’s transatlantic literary interests. Between 1835 and 1847 each brokered deals with publishers on behalf of the other to circumvent the piracy that thrived in the absence of international copyright laws: ‘the republication of books in that Transoceanic England, New and improved Edition of England’, as Carlyle put it (p. 180). He construed the commercial relation as a positive element of their friendship: ‘why should not Letters be on business too? Many a kind thought, uniting man with man, in gratitude and helpfulness, is founded on business’ (p. 221). Emerson’s essay ‘Friendship’ (1841) offered a corresponding economics: ‘The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined’ (p. 348). The daily details of a letter stand in for the life that the correspondent wishes to communicate, establishing intimate connections across oceanic separation. Sending a (re)print of Guido Reni’s Aurora (an allegory of Dawn driving light over dark seas to distant lands) to Emerson and his wife, Carlyle gives instructions that ‘[i]t is to be hung up in the Concord drawing room. The two Households, divided by wide seas, are to understand always that they are united nevertheless’ by this reproduction (p. 220). This metonymy of the iterability embodied in print culture is the seal of the transatlantic relation. ‘Homeliness’ co-habits with intuitions of transcendence in an extraordinary evocation of

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correspondence whose early exchanges explore the rhetorical shape of a transatlantic version of Romanticism characterised by the correspondents’ excited, and sceptical, exposure to German thought. These were the years, too, of Emerson’s universal, intensely and self-consciously ‘American’ ‘Man Thinking’; both writers developed a fascination with the compound of uniqueness and typicality in human character that would permeate Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841) and Representative Men (1850), which later Carlyle praised as ‘portraitures full of likeness’.40 The materiality of the letter as both the metonymic and metaphoric ‘hand’ of the correspondent made it a welcome (perhaps even a preferred) substitute for the presence of the friend; a holograph effectively substituted for bodily presence: ‘Tho’ my hand is shaking (as you sadly notice), I determine to write you a little Note today’ (p. 543), Carlyle wrote to Emerson on 14 June 1865. Responding to the letter and Carlyle’s gift of Frederick the Great, Emerson rejoined, ‘[i]n the book, the hand does not shake, the mind is ubiquitous’ (p. 546). Another letter, apologising for long silence, begins, ‘You behold before you a remorseful man!’ (p. 459); in 1870 Carlyle wrote to Emerson, ‘Three days ago I at last received your Letter . . . Indeed it is quite strangely interesting to see face to face my old Emerson again, not a feature of him changed, whom I have known all the best part of my life’ (p. 561). Such exchanges of character evoke what Andrew Bennett has in another context recently called the ‘impossible presencing’ of a letter’s reader in the scene of its construction.41 As Lamb pointed out, ‘[t]his confusion of tenses, this grand solecism of two presents, is in a degree common to all postage.’42 The fiction sustained by correspondence inscribes both the ‘character-as-friend’ of the writer and of his correspondent in their engagement with the material letter, in the form of what we might describe as a grammar rather than a metaphysics of presence. A web of specificities establishes the rhythm and texture of the epistolary relationship; the historical document’s transfer of information becomes the vehicle for the appositional grammar of relationships whose intimacy is a product of style not proximity; ‘news from me must become history to you’.43 A shared lexicon of acquaintances, texts, literary and material concerns permeates the forty years’ correspondence, in exchanges of gossip, letters of introduction to friends, travel plans, business assistance and mutual critique. But always the burden of distance is to render communication provisional, partial and contingent on the conditions of transmission.

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From the outset the correspondence is permeated and conditioned by each writer’s questions about the other’s style. ‘I look for the hour with impatience when the vehicle will be worthy of the spirit when the word . . . will be one with things’, Emerson laments in his first letter (p. 99); Carlyle for his part found the first number of The Dial (to which – although he described it as ‘my friend Margaret Fuller’s Journal’ (p. 269) – Emerson had contributed ‘Thoughts on Modern Literature’) ‘too ethereal, speculative, theoretic’ (p. 280). The violent (but contained) association of Carlyle’s infamous likening of Emerson’s dispersed federative style to a ‘bag of duck-shot held together by canvas!’ (p. 371) makes clear his preference for a more unified idiom built on subordinating grammatical principles, while the conscious extravagance of his image robs it of offence. Mutual accommodation polarises their styles, under provocation, into a kind of complementarity of representative national characters: bluff, no-nonsense Scots peasant (no matter that Carlyle resided for much of the time in London, establishing his publishing career and developing a reputation as a Victorian Sage); cautious Yankee, or airy Transcendentalist, all soul and no body – Emerson’s effective negotiating skills with publishers on Carlyle’s behalf notwithstanding. Their accounts of life events and writing projects develop a kind of sympathetic apposition, a mutuality in diversity that sustains concord across years of disunion. As Slater notes (p. 89), when Carlyle tells Emerson that he is writing a ‘character study’ of John Sterling, the other responds with news of his memoir of Fuller. The letter’s recipient offers a point of location in an otherwise undifferentiated plain: ‘Judge if I am glad to know that there, in Infinite Space, you still hold by me’, Carlyle writes to Emerson (p. 101). The suspense of whether Carlyle would cross the ocean, stay with his friend and address America remains a trope of possibility remarkably effective over years of correspondence, given that the reader of the posthumous printed letters already knows that historically speaking he never did. In their fantasy of the subject Carlyle – reversing the usual pattern for their letters – tends to abstract it, where Emerson advances details and particulars of a possible visit. An image of a transatlantic home remained ‘a sure place in the sanctuary of the mind’ (p. 134). This rhetorical return crossing (what Carlyle in a late letter was still calling ‘potential welcome’, p. 574) was never to be realised in empirical journeying; it becomes, rather, a structural trope for evoking the character each correspondent imagines for the other, and a projection of the affection between them. Emerson imagines for Carlyle a pastoral idyll of restorative release from work: ‘you shall come into the meadows, and rest and talk with your friend in my country pasture’ (p. 149). Carlyle responds in a rougher register, ‘whenever I think of myself

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in America, it is as in the Backwoods, with a rifle in my hand; God’s sky over my head, and this accursed Lazarhouse of quacks and blockheads, and sin and misery . . . lying all behind me forever more. A thing, you see, which is and can be at bottom but a day-dream!’ (p. 159). From year to year the correspondence continued to entertain the idea that Carlyle would one day visit Emerson in America: ‘it is as you see distinctly possible that such a thing might be; we will keep it hanging to solace ourselves with’, wrote the Scotsman as early as 1835 (p. 118); three years later in November 1838 he reiterated, ‘I have not forgotten Concord of the West; no, it lies always beautiful in the blue of the horizon, afar off and yet attainable’ (p. 204). For his part Emerson declared, ‘Your study armchair, fireplace & bed long vacant auguring expect you. Then you shall revise your proofs & dictate wit & learning to the New World . . . Your genius tendeth to the New, to the West’ (pp. 184–85). Many years later, Emerson’s response to the knowledge that Carlyle would not after all visit Concord was, like Carlyle’s own, to circumscribe the limits of friendship a little more tightly: I am led on from month to month with an expectation of some total embrace & oneness with a noble mind, & learn at last that it is only so feeble & remote & hiant action as reading a Mirabeau or a Diderot paper . . . This is all that can be looked for. More we shall not be to each other. Baulked soul! . . . Man is insular, and cannot be touched. Every man is an infinitely repellent orb, & holds his individual being on that condition.44

The ‘baulked soul’ receives harsh consolation from a reserved consciousness that breathes its sigh of relief through flat censorious constatives. In the event, for both men, epistolary correspondence makes a highly satisfactory substitute for the only half-wished-for physical co-presence. The letters are the friendship. Anything else – so both seem to feel – threatens the correspondents’ integrity of character. Historically, it was a wise decision: when the original encounter on which their epistolary friendship had been formed was repeated in Britain, it strained the relationship almost to the point of rupture. After less than a week in each other’s company during Emerson’s visit of 1847, Carlyle was writing to Lady Ashburton, ‘gone to lecture in Lancashire; to return hither he knows not when: it is privately hoped he may go to Rome! I wish him honestly well . . . but Friends, it is clear, we can never in this world, to any real purpose be.’45 The few brief notes passed between them while Emerson shared his hemisphere are decidedly cool in tone; harmonious correspondence could not withstand personal proximity. Transmitting requests from Margaret Fuller just about kept the epistolary exchange

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going while Emerson lectured in Manchester by providing a narrative and subject matter focused on the character of the woman to whom both men construed such an ambiguous relationship. The significance of this second visit is explored later in this chapter; for now, its emotional reciprocity is notable: animosity on Emerson’s part, too, seems to have escalated following his return to Carlyle in London. Their relationship was not repaired until he was safely back on the other side of the Atlantic, at which point Carlyle wrote: ‘tho’ I see well enough what a great deep cleft divides us, in our ways of practically looking at this world, – I see also (as probably you do yourself) where the rock-strata, miles deep, unite again; and the two poor souls are at one’ (p. 459). Holding anger, aggression, rivalry, distrust – all at play in national as in personal transatlantic relations throughout the century – by controlling distance, friendship was able to contain reciprocally negative as well as harmonious aspects of character in relationship. Absences and gaps define the rhythm of exchange and control an epistolary momentum threatened by the possibility of presence: ‘Speak to me out of the wide silence’ (p. 142) Emerson pleads, following two letters without response; subsequently he opens a letter, ‘My Dear Friend’, declaring that he ‘should be most impatient of the long interval between one and another, but that they savor always of Eternity, and promise me a friendship and friendly inspiration not reckoned or ended by days or years’ (p. 147). Even in the act of reaching out, Emerson’s tragic recognition that the illocutionary contract offered by friendship can never perfect itself in unanimity registered also an impulse of relief that the self ’s singleness of purpose would not be breached. The time lag between writing and reception measured the physical separation; continuities were negotiated, and return of communication relieved a tension: Carlyle described himself as released from a ‘forced silence’ ‘which this kind Letter unforces into words’ (p. 150). The vicissitudes of their letters in transit become a vivid metonym of the turbulent rhythms of their friendship: ‘the Letter is probably tumbling on the salt waves at this hour, in the belly of the Great Western; or perhaps it may be still on firm land waiting’ (p. 201). The unique voices that emerge from the Emerson–Carlyle correspondence should not inure us to their exemplarity and formulaic antecedents: compare, for example, a letter in T. Goodman’s The Experience’d Secretary, quoted by Bannet: ‘After many Tossings and Roulings in the Deep . . . I have found the leisure to write to you these few Lines’.46 In little dramas of exchange, misprision and mischance these letters collectively craft a particular character for transatlantic correspondence from the familiar tropes of eighteenth-century letter manuals.

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IV Character was, as Julie Ellison has noted, at the heart of all Margaret Fuller’s ethical engagements; its manifestations pervade her writing, from assessments of her contemporaries and of national identities, to her self-representations in letters and essays.47 It is typically posited as a product of intersubjective exchange, whether in correspondence or imagined dialogue: ‘Character is higher than intellect; this I have long felt to be true; may we both live as if we knew it.’48 Fuller’s autobiographical memoir (cited by her Transcendentalist biographers) signalled the primacy of friendship in constituting her sense of her own identity and character development: ‘Should the first love be blighted, they say, the mind loses its sense of eternity. All forms of existence seem fragile, the prison of time real, for a god is dead. Equally true is this of friendship. I thank Heaven that this first feeling was permitted its free flow’ (Memoirs, v. i, p. 37). From this she went on to elaborate an idea of ‘circles’ of relationship from outer acquaintances to ‘a nearer group[,] . . . sharers of our very existence. There is no separation; the same thought is given at the same moment to both, – indeed, it is born of the meeting, and would not otherwise have been called into existence at all’ (Memoirs, v. i, pp. 41–42). This embraces the very fusion of reciprocities and simultaneity invoked to devastating effect by ‘William Wilson’; in Fuller’s yearning prose it became an ideal state of harmonised co-identity most fully realised in human failure to sustain its demands: ‘To this inmost circle of relations but few are admitted, because some prejudice or lack of courage has prevented the many from listening to their instincts the first time they manifested themselves. If the voice is once disregarded, it becomes fainter each time, till, at last, it is wholly silenced’ (Memoirs, v. i, pp. 42–43). Evoking the failure of relationship as an atrophy of personhood, Fuller seems to anticipate the death of character explored in Melville’s ‘Bartleby’. The personal friendship between Emerson and Fuller was briefer and more intense than Emerson’s relationship with Carlyle. It was, however, no less literary in its mode of apprehension and expression: their most fervid epistolary discussions about friendship occurred while Fuller was a houseguest of Waldo and Lidian in Concord. These letters substituted metaphorical for physical distance to explore the possibilities of sympathetic relation; like the Carlyle–Emerson correspondence they also took advantage of what Hewitt has called the metonymic ‘conceit’ of epistolarity: that the

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letter substitutes for the bodily presence of the writer.49 The erotic charge of the relationship became ever more intense as their letters explored the expressive capabilities of the written medium while observing the decorum that their corporeal co-presence in the Emerson family home would necessitate. In the confines of the page the boundary between concord and union becomes enticingly breachable. Gender was certainly, for Fuller, part of the problematics of individual character, to the extent that the intense correspondence conducted in proximity with Emerson may have been evoking an idealised masculine ‘other’ for the self as much as it expressed desire for the recipient. Personality and representativeness slide into and out of each other as the correspondence construes ‘Margaret’ and ‘Waldo’ into metonymic types of femininity and masculinity in relation, and begin to rehearse an idea Fuller would expound more theoretically a decade later in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (anticipating a position since associated with Virginia Woolf and Modernist androgyny): every person has within them the expressive possibilities of two ‘characters’, the male and female elements that make up their nature. Tensions reminiscent of Emerson’s and Carlyle’s correspondence emerge as the letters take into account, or ignore, the realities of the daily intercourse in person, and the ways in which characters may grate against one another rather than harmonise in correspondent reciprocity. The close proximity of Fuller and Emerson in Boston and Concord between 1836 and Fuller’s departure for New York in 1843 hardly seems to support a transnational reading. This, however, was the context the letters themselves evoked as a precondition of a correspondence whose purpose rapidly formulated itself as a quasi-philosophical exchange on the nature of friendship. Collectively they constitute an important document in the literary expression of character in relation: ‘we meet & treat like foreign states . . . whose trade & laws are essentially unlike’, wrote Emerson in 1840.50 Writing to Fuller on their friendship and the frontiers of mutual exchange he developed the conceit of international mis-communication: ‘We use a different rhetoric[.] It seems as if we had been born & bred in different nations. You say you understand me wholly. You cannot communicate yourself to me. I hear the words sometimes but remain a stranger to your state of mind’ (Letters, v. ii, p. 353). Some form of translation, Emerson implied, was required between their idioms for the friendship to be realised. This evocation of character in correspondence invents an ‘Atlantic’ space between them as a precondition not merely for personal revelation but for a more philosophical exploration of transcendental correspondences that define human relations as such. An early fancy of Fuller’s about friendship helps to explicate this:

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My English friend went across the sea. She passed into her former life, and into ties that engrossed her days. But she has never ceased to think of me . . . in the mind of the child she found the fresh prairie, the untrodden forests for which she had longed. I saw in her the storied castles, the fair stately parks, and the wind laden with tones from the past, which I desired to know. We wrote to one another for many years; – her shallow and delicate epistles did not disenchant me, nor did she fail to see something of the old poetry in my rude characters and stammering speech. But we must never meet again. (Memoirs, v. i, pp. 44–45)

This primal friendship lies in a perfect, closed, memory of transatlantic history. Returning across the ocean, the ‘English friend’ re-entered a national past of legend and song about which the dreaming American self could only dream yearningly. Fuller’s ‘storied castles’ recall the ‘storied and poeticall associations’ nostalgically invoked by Washington Irving’s transatlantic literary personation Geoffrey Crayon in Europe.51 Each has become nationally representative to the other. ‘But we must never meet again.’ Once Emerson and Fuller were actually separated by the ocean – she in Rome, he remaining in New England – his letters cease to push for distance and remind her instead about the closeness of their aspirations as Americans: ‘Shall we not yet – you, you, also, – as we used to talk, build up a reasonable society in that naked unatmospheric land, and effectually serve one another?’ (Letters, v. iii, p. 447). Appealing to a shared national character not dependent on storied associations, he sidestepped the issues of personality difference that preoccupied the Concord correspondence; the letters, as here, take on the vatic, hortatory tone of Emerson the orator and representative voice of the American future. Where this is characteristic of the tone of the early lectures (whose aversiveness I return to in the final chapter), Emerson reused sections of his more intimate letters to Fuller and others in essays on ‘Friendship’, ‘SelfReliance’ and ‘Love’. The first, in particular, returns repeatedly to versions of the idea that ‘Friendship . . . is too good to be believed’; scepticism is always one of its ingredients: ‘in the golden hour of friendship, we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief ’.52 In his writing the performance of friendship is always provisional, and partial; there are no ties that bind. ‘Friendship’ (particularly indebted to the intense epistolary discussions with Fuller on the subject) expresses it in terms of endless, ideal, oscillation between closeness and distance: ‘the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love’; the ‘instinct of affection revives the hope

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of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase’ (pp. 343, 344). Internally, the essay is structured as a sort of ‘Familiar Letters’ manual on how to write an epistle to a friend; in the process, both ‘self’ or writer and friend are characterised in co-respondence: ‘the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character . . . and now makes many one’ (p. 343). The ‘letter’ equivocates between ‘perfect [mutual] intelligence’ and the ‘delicious torment’ of incomprehension (p. 345). It is the paradox of character in relation. On a larger canvas, ‘Friendship’ as a whole tussles hither and thither with the dynamics of likeness and difference that elsewhere we have seen to characterise both interpersonal and transatlantic formulations of relation: ‘behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form’ (p. 348). Remembering later the first days of his acquaintance with Fuller, Emerson described how he ‘felt her to be a foreigner, – that, with her, one would always be sensible of some barrier, as if in making up a friendship with a cultivated Spaniard or Turk’ (Memoirs, v. i, p. 304). Both before and after her death Fuller’s character became a metonymic arabesque, an icon of sexually charged exoticism in American fiction. From Hawthorne’s Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance to James’ Serena Merle, male writers would embody otherness in feminine characters of transatlantic strangeness for which ‘Fuller’ became the stamp or die. Emerson’s lofty Cartesian position, with its sceptical implications for epistemology, confutes itself in powerful identification with another’s alterity: the power of the friendship relation convinces us that there is ‘nature’, a world outside, because there is another being, the ‘semblance’ of mine, ‘reiterated in a foreign form’. The analogical logic, and the poetics, of this friendship for the foreign are transatlantic; they embody repetition while asserting difference: ‘Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo’ (p. 350). He rewrites Montaigne’s essay in the rhetoric of independence: ‘Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them’ (p. 350). In a rather different but analogous way to Fuller, for Emerson epistolary friendship is a form of selfexpression and self-development. His lexicon of friendship invoked a contagion of language and ideas between two minds (writing themselves into accord), and required, concomitantly, a kind of inoculation against the other mind, which manifests metaphorically as a ‘foreign form’ (p. 348). For her, on the other hand, the feeling between two people itself enacted a kind of promise on which she felt entitled to call. It proved an infelicitous performative, in that it failed to evoke in its recipient one of the conditions

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of successful promising: the intention to redeem. Fuller’s view of friendship involved itself more closely with reflections of a contingent life lived in the world – ‘a mutual fitness of temporary character’ –– as well as recognition of the other’s ‘absolute worth’.53 Hewitt observes that ‘what makes the epistolary mode exemplary for Emerson is what makes it so problematic for Fuller’, as they ‘delve deeper into their discourse on friendship, Fuller presents a model of sociability and epistolarity as a strong alternative to Emerson’s’.54 Letters do, certainly, juggle with the otherness of the respondent (it is at least arguable that the ‘self’ to which a letter addresses itself is always part-projection). There is, on the other hand, a question as to how far Fuller’s ‘model of sociability’ might itself be an ideal projection that protects a self-conceived exceptionalism. As Emily Dickinson would put it, The Soul selects her own Society – Then – shuts the Door –55

The inextricability of Fuller’s personal ‘character’ (in the sense of a biographical memoir) from her friendships became a structuring trope in the collective biography Emerson, Channing and Clarke created from her posthumous papers after Fuller’s untimely death in 1850: A life of Margaret is impossible without [her friends], she mixed herself so inextricably with her company; and when this little book was first projected, it was proposed to entitle it ‘Margaret and her Friends,’ the subject persisting to offer itself in the plural number. But, on trial, that form proved impossible, and it only remained that the narrative, like a Greek tragedy, should suppose the chorus always on the stage, sympathising and sympathised with by the queen of the scene. (Memoirs, v. i, p. 273)

The Chorus’s humble function of commentary disguises its coercive power over the audience’s responses to the action; if Fuller is a drama queen in this story, it is because the narrators have decided that she shall be so. The selfeffacing sympathetic assistants to an agon produce the protagonist’s feelings for the audience. There is also, however, evident collusion: by her own account, in life ‘Margaret’ played her self-construed character rhetorically, with an audience as a necessary part of the performance. The experience could be uncomfortable. As James Freeman Clarke would put it in his narrated portion of Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, ‘[t]he difficulty which we all feel in describing our past intercourse and friendship with Margaret Fuller, is, that the intercourse was so intimate, and the friendship so personal, that it is like making a confession to the public of our most

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interior selves’ (v. i, p. 73). The collective power of the present-tense masculine ‘we’ places this embarrassingly public intimacy firmly with the characteristics of a dead feminine Fuller, to evade the actual exposure of private identity it seems to promise or threaten. For Clarke, ‘character’ was ‘Margaret’s business in life’ and her leading trait; ‘constant endeavour to see and understand the germinal principle, the special characteristic, of every person whom she deemed worthy of knowing at all’ (Memoirs, v. i, p. 79) constituted her character: ‘a few, like Margaret, study character, and acquire the power of exerting profoundest influence on individual souls’ (Memoirs, v. i, p. 80). This power to elicit the character of others is presented as intense and dangerously mesmeric: she possessed ‘the power of so magnetising others’ that ‘they would lay open to her all the secrets of their nature. She had an infinite curiosity to . . . understand the inward springs of thought and action in their souls’ (Memoirs, v. i, pp. 78–79). To clinch his case, Clarke recruits the Coleridgean Transcendentalist scholar F. H. Hedge, reporting Hedge’s summary ‘[h]er strength was in characterisation and in criticism’ (Memoirs, v. i, p. 122).

V George Eliot noted Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp sympathetically in the Westminster Review on its publication in Britain in 1856, announcing that she had ‘been too much moved by’ the story to concur with the universal scorn of British reviewers.56 On 8 May 1869, in response to an overture from Stowe (itself a response to Eliot’s indication to a mutual acquaintance, Annie Fields, that she would welcome communication with the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Eliot wrote a first letter to a ‘dear friend and fellow-labourer’.57 Though it established the literary terms that would control their friendship, the warmth of the written greeting belied the tentativeness and caution with which both women felt their way into epistolary relationship. The twentyfive letters Stowe and Eliot exchanged between 1869 and Eliot’s death in 1880 contain mutual admiration, critique and an exchange of views on professional practice. Stowe, in particular, understood the exchange in representative and comparative terms, invoking nation and gender to unite and to distinguish between them: having described herself as being embroiled with an ‘intensely American’ story (Oldtown Folks), she declared to Eliot, ‘[y]ou are by nature so thoroughly English – Your mind, has in the most airy play of its imagination that English definiteness that refuses to exhale in a mist & turn to a mere cloud . . . you are as thoroughly woman as

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you are English.’58 A few months later (having in the meantime read Oldtown Folks) Eliot elided their very different aspirations as writers to an appreciation of ‘affinities’ between its portrait of an ‘old-fashioned provincial life’ and ‘a contemporary life even all across the Atlantic’.59 Eliot’s gracious tribute to the huge international impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin – ‘I felt glad, for your sake first, and then for the sake of the great nation to which you belong. The hopes of the world are taking refuge westward, under the calamitous conditions, moral and physical, in which we of the elder world are getting involved’60 – invoked the translatio trope to configure their literary friendship within a broader metaphorical structure. As the senior literary partner in the relationship she was careful to convey her respect and admiration for Stowe’s achievement. Even more than Emerson’s and Carlyle’s, theirs was an intermittent correspondence, broken into by illness, domestic responsibility and family vicissitude. Lapses in communication were tolerated with respectful understanding, and differences of opinion tactfully addressed in a search for common literary ground. ‘Friend’ – perhaps with an equalising Quaker undertone – was from the outset their mutual designation, in letters that created epistolary intimacy by assuming it. ‘I know you very well without words . . . [y]ou have said so much in books that you need not to write me letters.’61 Their correspondence accommodated deep differences of opinion by filtering them through mutual expressions of a shared literary field of reference. On spiritualism, for example, despite her reverence for Eliot as a writer Stowe was robust in her own defence: ‘There we part – I say the facts are facts – . . . There my friend & I differ’.62 She sought to establish an exclusive understanding, an exceptionalism, between them: ‘You write too well my darling – altogether too well to be pitched into Harper[’]s Weekly along with Edmond Yates & Miss Braddon & the sensation mongers of the day.’63 A significant point of dissension emerged when Eliot’s grammar of community in Middlemarch struck Stowe’s ear as too elevated, in need of a dose of down-home informality and syntactic flexibility characterised as ‘jollitude’: ‘You write & live on so high a plane – it is all self abnegation – we want to get you over here, & into this house where with closed doors we sometimes make the rafters ring with fun – & say any thing & every thing no matter what & won[’]t be any properer than we’s a mind to be – I am wishing every day you could see our America –’.64 Opposed to such high seriousness, Stowe’s arch American idiom is an intriguing prolepsis of Gertrude Stein. The remedy she proposed for Eliot’s style was ‘travel . . . from one bright, thriving, pretty, flowery town [of New England] to

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another, [to] see so much wealth, ease, progress, culture, and all sorts of nice things’.65 Eliot’s sharp response confronted the affront in Stowe’s confusion of life and writing, making it abundantly clear that theirs would remain a literary not a personal friendship: ‘do not for a moment imagine that Dorothea’s marriage experience is drawn from my own’.66 From this point the inequalities in the epistolary relationship began to obtrude, as the British author systematically evaded her compeer’s increasing desire for personal reciprocity, and refused to acquiesce in a process of mutual fantasy about the solidarity of female authorship across boundaries. This had both national and personal dimensions: to an extent, as Jennifer Cognard-Black has noted, British authors in the second half of the nineteenth century simply thought less about their American counterparts; Eliot, that is, had less at stake as a writer in the correspondence than Stowe. Additionally, one should take into account the reticence as at least in part the expression of a personal preference exhibited more or less uniformly across Eliot’s correspondence. Epistolary credit had limitations; for Eliot these were precisely situated at a boundary between socially construed literary self-projection and fiercely protected personal privacy. Stowe was swiftly rebuffed (or punished by silence) when her overtures transgressed this line. The year after Eliot initiated the correspondence so eagerly and confidentially reciprocated by her American ‘fellow-labourer’, Melville’s characterless characters, the cosmopolitan ‘Frank’ and the transcendental disciple ‘Charlie Noble’, indirectly offered an intriguing reprise and commentary in their exploration of the ‘red-ink line’ between instrumental relationships of ‘commercial acquaintances’ and ‘friends social and intellectual’.67 Their dialogue dramatised the practical effects of Transcendental philosophy on the development of character; it is readily translated into critique of Thoreau’s application of his friend Emerson’s teaching. Re-reading it through the transatlantic lens of the Stowe–Eliot correspondence opens up additional possibilities that suggest wider terms of comparison between two forms (‘American’ and ‘British’) of Romanticism in relationship. As soon as obligation is incurred on one side, ‘enmity lies couched in the friendship’, declares the Idealist, refusing to come to the aid of the supplicant. ‘Charlie’, expounding the theory of his master’s ‘Essay on Friendship’, shows its practical expression in the development of character to be cold, calculating and the opposite of philanthropic. In fact, it seems, charity is antipathy to Transcendental friendship. This is a position to which neither Stowe (as a Christian) nor Eliot (from a more stoical perspective) would subscribe. What is at issue in a larger sense, in their letters as in Melville’s novel, is ‘confidence’ as a basis for relationship. Stowe, emboldened by the

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frank tone of Eliot’s address, seems to have wished to move their correspondence onto a confidential footing. The exchange of intimacies, and mutual exposure of vulnerabilities, was not something Eliot looked for in their friendship. On the publication of Daniel Deronda in 1876 American readers were particularly captivated by Gwendolen, Eliot’s performative characterless woman, who had ‘made a figure in tableaux vivans [sic]’ and delighted in ‘the preparation of costumes, Greek, Oriental, and Composite, in which [she] attitudinised and speechified before a domestic audience’.68 Eliding the textual character and the fictional person, Stowe’s letter of praise to the author exemplified a popular view: ‘infinitely the most interesting character to me is Gwendolen – Of the artistic vitality of the character I need no other proof than that I have been called at various tea tables to defend her as earnestly as if she had been an actual neighbor giving parties round the corner’.69 Stowe’s commitment to realism blunted her perception of the extent to which Eliot’s art, particularly in this final novel, engaged with the performative and assumed nature of character and its uncertain, fluctuating relationship with personal identity. Stowe and Eliot never did meet. In retrospect, this non-event looks to have been at least as much the condition under which their transatlantic sympathy was enabled as it was a real-life disappointment, offering as it did a safely virtual space in which their letters were free to develop a narrative of shared concerns: when my soul is walking as it often does alongside of your soul up & down paths of thought and suggestion, it speaks aloud in a sort of soliloquy – This knowledge of a mind purely from its writings when we have never seen the bodily presence is to me the purest expression of what disembodied communion may be.70

The geography, indeed the possibility, of friendship is expressed in metaphorical spaces written into correspondence which allow differentiation to emerge from the quasi-sacral state of ‘communion’ or identity. Where the failed relationship between the two James Beatmans or William Wilsons can receive only retrospective analytic narration, the friendships between Emerson and Carlyle, and between Stowe and Eliot, were performed in the writing. Letter writers create a kind of Utopia, an imagined ideal of sociability performed across spaces, nations and ideological oppositions. This no-place between the context of the sender and that of the recipient is a fiction which neither party inhabits but which is, for both, the boundary of their friendship and an opportunity for imaginative expansion of character. It might be

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invoked as a nostalgic location, such as the frequently recalled magical twentyfour hours of talk at Craigenputtock that inaugurated the friendship of Emerson and Carlyle. It might on the other hand be a subjective fantasy meeting in the future: ‘if you would come here I would take you in heart and house, and you should have a little room in our cottage’. In this idyllic space compounded of references to nursery rhyme, Shakespeare and the book of Solomon, a ‘place to forget the outside world, and live in one’s self’, they would ‘go together and gather azaleas, and white lilies, and silver bells, and blue iris’. It was really a textual congress that was being offered – ‘I want you to visit us in spirit if not personally.’71 Eliot’s response reciprocated the invitation, discerning its literary impetus and playing further on the tropes of cultivation and wilderness characteristic of Anglo-American comparisons of New World ‘nature’ since John Smith’s voyages or The Tempest: We too are in a country refuge, you see, and this bit of Surrey . . . is full of beauty of the too garden-like sort for which you pity us. How different from your lodge in the wilderness! I have read your description three or four times – it enchants me so thoroughly . . . We shall never see it, I imagine, except in the mirror of your loving words; but thanks many and warm, dear friend, for saying that our presence would be welcome. I have always had delight in descriptions of American forests since the early days when I read ‘Atala. . .’72

An inscribed conceptual terrain, the limited common ground of literary views and beliefs mirrored and exchanged in writing, sustained these transatlantic literary friendships. Consciously inscribed, these performances enacted different dynamics from the kinds of friendship to which philosophy has historically addressed itself. Aesthetic appreciation was (to appropriate Aristotle’s term) the proper ‘good’, mutually recognised, that enabled the transatlantic exchange. The particular friendship was in part construed as something like a metonymy for literary exchange as a more general category or practice. Temporally and personally contingent matters – the premise of the correspondence – were ravelled between the correspondents into a fiction of character in conversation sustained by the classical rhetorical resources of reciprocity. In his first letter, Emerson thanked Carlyle for the ‘message’ of Sartor Resartus – ‘a lecture upon these topics written for England may be read to America’ (Correspondence, 98); his essay on friendship made clear the advantage of the written over the physical relationship: ‘To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter . . . It suffices me . . . In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue’ (‘Friendship’, p. 351). Intimacy unthinkable face to face came readily to the pen. However they were configured, the space between and

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the connections across it evoked the friendship relation as metonymic of the transatlantic relation.

VI The same year as Arnold carried the Emerson–Carlyle correspondence with him across the Atlantic, Henry James reviewed it in Britain for The Century Magazine with some nostalgia for the passing of a noble literary generation, and much relish for its model of stylistic exchange. ‘Altogether the charm of the book is that as one reads it one is in excellent company. Two men of rare and beautiful genius converse with each other, and the conversation is a kind of exhibition.’73 He was entranced by the letters’ capacity to sustain a twohanded drama of literary character that all-but overwhelmed historical fact: To Concord he entreats Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle to take their way; their room is ready and their fire is made. The reader at this point of the correspondence feels a certain suspense: he knows that Carlyle never did come to America, but like a good novel the letters produce an illusion. He holds his breath, for the terrible Scotchman may after all have embarked, and there is something really almost heart-shaking in the thought of his transporting that tremendous imagination and those vessels of wrath and sarcasm to an innocent New England village.74

In 1883, the year of this review, James might have been peculiarly sensitive to a larger significance marked by the death of Emerson and Carlyle, with its subsequent gift to the world of their correspondence, as representing something of a changing of the literary guard. It came at a moment when the author confronted a series of personal losses, as well as acute professional uncertainty. Returning to London after the death of both his parents in the course of the previous year, James had to cope with the additional grief of losing his younger brother Wilkie and – towards the end of the year – his literary friend and mentor Ivan Turgenev. Amidst personal loss and relocation, James’ literary friendships took on new importance; he did not publish a novel this year, but expressed his decision to live henceforward a cisatlantic life in a series of key reviews, and sought to consolidate his literary reputation with fourteen volumes of Collected Novels and Tales published by Macmillan. The literary friendship between James and Stevenson arose from public disagreement over the terms of art. The two men had been introduced over lunch in 1879; neither took to the other personally, and each recorded sardonic comments on the other’s mannered self-presentation. John Lyon has recently made a case for their immediate mutual recognition as outsiders

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to the English literary establishment, whose aversion was perhaps a little too close to self-reflection;75 style was an issue between them from the outset. They were brought into correspondence by the debate on fictional craft in Longman’s Magazine stimulated by Walter Besant: James’ essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ of September 1884 elicited Stevenson’s ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ published in the same journal in December of that year. Their initial sparring turned on the relation of ‘character’ and ‘incident’ in literature’s engagement with experience. ‘What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end?’, James had asked rhetorically. Disputing Besant’s taxonomy of ‘the novel of incident and that of character’, his response has become a milestone in the history of prose style: What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character? . . . It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of character.76

When Stevenson responded with ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, James took the opportunity of their previous introduction to pursue their acquaintance, addressing ‘three words’, not of ‘discussion, dissent, retort or remonstrance, but of hearty sympathy, charged with the assurance of [his] enjoyment of everything’ Stevenson wrote.77 Responding quickly and enthusiastically, Stevenson declared his willingness to ‘pass my life in beating out this quarter of corn with such a seconder as yourself’.78 Their mutual engagement with the ‘adventure of style’ sustained the ensuing literary friendship, both in appreciation and in differentiation, across a brief period of physical proximity in Bournemouth and London between 1885 and 1887, the year Stevenson, with his new wife Fanny Osbourne and her son, departed for America. The friendship was warm, and close; by mid-1886, James’ letters addressed the younger writer by the name by which he was known to his close family, Louis. Thereafter their relationship flourished in letters truncated by Stevenson’s death in 1894. When Stevenson left Britain to travel across America, settling eventually in Samoa, nearly all his British friends felt dismayed, betrayed or under-valued, and prophesied doom to his work. The exception was the American, James, whose sympathy blossomed in absence. Referring to Stevenson’s ‘terrible far-off-ness’, James registers ‘a sort of delight at

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having you poised there in the inconceivable; and a miserable feeling, at the same time, that I am in too wretched a back seat to assist properly at the performance’.79 In the epistolary space, for James as for Carlyle, fantasies of togetherness may be indulged; the rhetorical complaint only underlines the fact that absence is necessary for the letters to enact the relationship. ‘You are too far away’, James reiterates, conjuring intimacy out of an arabesque he knew his correspondent would relish: – you are too absent – too invisible, inaudible, inconceivable. Life is too short a business and friendship too delicate a matter for such tricks – for cutting great gory masses out of ’em by the year at a time. Therefore come back. Hang it all – sink it all and come back. A little more and I shall cease to believe in you: I don’t mean (in the usual implied phrase) in your veracity, but literally and more fatally in your relevancy – your objective reality. You have become a beautiful myth – a kind of unnatural uncomfortable unburied mort. You put forth a beautiful monthly voice, with such happy notes in it – but it comes from too far away, from the other side of the globe, while I vaguely know that you are crawling like a fly on the nether surface of my chair.80

This letter is both strikingly conventional and intensely personal. Eve Bannet has shown how the rhetoric of eighteenth-century letters of absence ‘invariably underline[s] the necessity of continuing absence for the purposes of business’ or social necessity; James’ fantasy of closeness was enabled by a disruptive image of annihilation: the letter that lamented the petite mort of separation accomplished an ‘unnatural, uncomfortable’ exhumation, but one that raised the intensity of their literary friendship.81 For a time letters between them continued their dialogue about the reciprocal relations of character and incident (or ‘scene’) in writing, and prolonged the possibility of Stevenson’s return to Britain. The fantasy infused the transatlantic correspondence with dramatic tension: ‘without suspense, there can be little pleasure in this world’82 – before James ruefully accepted (with all the ironies of their respective nationalities implied) ‘the tragic statement of your permanent secession’.83 Lightness and charm, even a certain whimsy, create an acceptable, sustainable register for emotional attachment and loss of physical presence. The homely simile of the fly on the chair moving not on the ‘bottom’ but on the archly characterised ‘nether surface’ indicates a secret, perhaps forbidden, form of correspondence in the relationship, only expressed by drawing attention to a shift in the register of language slightly aside from the ordinary. ‘Implication’, as V. F. Perkins has put it in a different context, ‘is a form of expression, not of concealment’.84 The

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distance between the two men and the distance of writing made possible tropes of closeness that proximity would proscribe. Within the poetics of implication the possibilities of desire reorientated the emotional range of the epistolary relationship. James’ first essay on Stevenson, published in The Century Magazine in 1888, and reprinted in Partial Portraits the same year, was a ‘character study’ that stressed the romancer’s genius in eliciting this effort from a critic: ‘He gives us new ground to wonder why the effort to fix a face and figure, to seize a literary character . . . should have fallen into such discredit among us and have given way to the mere multiplication of little private judgment-seats.’85 The praise here resides in the critic’s (James’) recognition of the solidity, strength and consistency of the literary character – the ‘style’ – of his subject: ‘Character – character is what he has!’ These words may be applied to Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson: in the language of that art which depends most on observation, character – character is what he has. He is essentially a model, in the sense of a sitter; I do not mean, of course, in the sense of a pattern or a guiding light. And if the figures who have a life in literature may also be divided into two great classes, we may add that he is conspicuously one of the draped; he would never . . . pose for the nude . . . His costume is part of the character . . . it never occurs to us to ask how he would look without it. Before all things he is a writer with a style.86

The essay strategically conflates the style of the man with that of his writing in a literary ‘character’ to whose lightly affectionate banter its subject responded in kind: the later essay ‘R. L. S.’, wrote Stevenson, ‘is better yet. It is so humorous, and it hits my little frailties with so neat (and so friendly) a touch.’87 The quasi-fictional character of R. L. S. became a topic of discussion in their stylistic correspondence: ‘I felt, while I wrote’, responded James, adopting the persona of analytic critic, ‘that you served me well; you were really, my dear fellow, a capital subject – I will modestly grant you that, though it takes the bloom from my merit. To be not only witty one’s self but the cause in others of a wit that is not at one’s expense – that is a rare and high character, and altogether yours.’88 The neatly embedded allusion to Henry IV Part 2, with its assumption that the recipient will pick up the ironic mastery that compares the wraith-like Stevenson (whom James’ correspondence repeatedly likens to a ghost) with that quintessence of corporeality, Falstaff, is a mark of the literary confidence of the correspondence. Compliment and self-congratulation combine in mutual enjoyment of the adventure of style.

chapter 6

Subjects and objects: ‘always joined, never settled’

There is an immense chain of intermediation . . . which bereaves every agency of all freedom and character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Swedenborg’

My plea for ‘correspondences’ will perhaps . . . but bring my reader back to my having . . . owned to full unconsciousness of seed dropped here by that quick hand of occasion . . . the sense of something interchangeable, or perhaps even almost indistinguishable, between my own general adventure and the more or less lively illustration into which I was to find this experiment so repeatedly flower.

Henry James, ‘Lesson of the Master’

The ‘characters’ evoked in exchanges of letters between Emerson and Carlyle, Emerson and Fuller, Stowe and Eliot, and James and Stevenson were enactments of authorship, literary personae for the letter writers projected and reflected across the Atlantic space. Sensitised by these correspondences, this chapter explores some related cases of confluence assembled not by historical sequence or evidence of influence, but by the lateral logic of friendship. From a network of shared concerns and stylistic interlocution transatlantic fictions of character emerge to elaborate the poetic texture of these verbal connections, and explore the desired and feared and ultimately necessary limits to correspondence both for national and personal literary character. As Emerson’s lecture on Swedenborg made anxiously clear, when analogy is held as a ‘system of the world’ rather than enacted in performance, it may stifle originality; it ‘lacks power to generate life’.1 Frankenstein’s brave new creature was compounded of parts from the charnel-house; Romanticism’s fear that declaring independence from the past may not be matched by the possibility of achieving it took particular form in a transatlantic poetics of likeness. In a short story that remained unpublished until 1982, and was not mentioned in the author’s diaries or correspondence, Sarah Orne Jewett entertained the Jamesian fantasy that ‘the terrible Scotchman may after all 183

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have embarked’ for a visit to Concord.2 ‘Carlyle in America’ was probably composed, and substantially revised, between 1884 and 1890; it is presented as a posthumously discovered manuscript ‘like the informal beginning of a letter’, by a ‘defeated member of the legal profession’.3 In the course of a cosy post-prandial conversation, the narrator (an American disciple of Carlyle) gets wind of a previously unknown clandestine visit made by his British hero to Emerson, and subsequently covered up by both writers. Torn between the confidential licence of sociability (‘[t]he cheerful occasion was extremely favourable to story-telling’, p. 107) and the ‘impertinent ardour’ of his desire to grasp the significance of this oblique reference to some experience shared between his host and the host’s friend, the narrator is goaded by his exclusion from the ‘uncharacteristic . . . laughter’ (p. 106) his fishing evokes: Whatever vow they were bound by was their own bond, not mine; I was possessed by an intense curiosity and grew hungrier every moment for the bit of history they were concealing, but I was afraid I was not to be gratified and I mustered all my store of a detective’s shrewdness – ‘How easy it would be to supply such an experience to the history of a man’s life. I wonder that it has not been oftener tried,’ reflected my chief listener with singular zest. ‘What could be more simple. Think of it! A few weeks are sure to be left unaccounted for by the biographer, and any sort of uncharacteristic escapade might be invented and insisted upon’ – ‘There are lies enough told unavoidably in the honestest biography’ – answered the other.’ (p. 107)

Keeping him dangling, they offer further clues to a missing episode in Carlyle’s biography, impersonating the writer’s Scots accent as he supposedly articulated Emersonian principles of self-reliance at a Boston public meeting. The multiply refracted anecdote catches the ‘secret’s’ essence in style while the historical fact evades him: ‘He was very characteristic in his behavior and constantly stood on the verge of betraying himself ’ (p. 110) evokes the knowing echo, ‘“That sounds characteristic” – said I, and we laughed as heartily as if we had just come from the meeting itself ’ (p. 112). The narrator is both party to and excluded from the secret at this point. ‘Characteristics’, as the narrator’s companions and a knowing reader would pick up, was the title of one of Carlyle’s earliest published essays (1831), and one of the first works by which he became known in America.4 The sentence telescopes previous reception into present re-enactment within the frame of the story; the fictional Boston meeting dramatises the confluence of sympathies between Emerson and Carlyle and the pact of secrecy between them. The poetics of this little set of Chinese boxes would bear

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unpacking in detail: allusion, imitation, burlesque, variation, transformation, deformation, translation – even perhaps transmigration – all contribute to a richly layered performance of transatlantic textual crossing. The tale ends in high farce as Carlyle has to be smuggled out of the country, in danger of arrest for defamation of character. The Boston meeting did not – as a reader of the story would know – happen. The information on which the story is based (Carlyle’s expressed views on America) is largely taken from the Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle and – possibly – James’ review. Its texture is a wonderful web of recognition for Carlyleans – the old gentleman who tells the anecdote ruins ‘a new suit of clothes’ (p. 113; a reference to Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus) in the near-riot that follows Carlyle’s eloquent ventriloquism, for example, or the report that the visitor wrings the neck of local poultry who keep him awake in Boston. It even gestures to its own sources: ‘I can pick out a good many allusions in his letters to Emerson – to some pictures of Concord he had, and that sort of thing’ (p. 115), which is surely a sly reference to the ‘lithograph portrait of our Concord “Battle-field” ’ and another reprint sent by Emerson via his brother to Carlyle in 1840.5 It is not certain that Jewett knew James’ Carlyle–Emerson review; the tale’s editors point out that Carlyle is ‘barely mention[ed]’ in her own letters (‘Carlyle in America’, p. 101). The textual evidence nonetheless makes clear that she was very familiar with the literary friendship expressed in their correspondence. What did take place – does take place every time a reader reads it – is the enactment of the possibilities of reciprocity that characterise friendship, and transatlantic literary expression. The fantasy transatlantic encounter which ends in Carlyle’s escape from Boston under threat of imprisonment for ‘defamation of character’ of his American hosts (p. 114) exemplifies Derrida’s already quoted ‘logic of the perhaps . . . what could happen, if hope for such a thing were possible, among friends, between two . . . who love each other’.6 Letters conventionally simulate communication of intimacy. Jewett’s story obliquely enacts how character relations sustained in the controlled exchanges of transatlantic correspondence might break into threatening ventriloquistic doubling if brought into too close proximity, ‘over here’ (p. 114). Printed correspondence, as nineteenth-century reviewers noted, highlighted the paradoxical illusion of shared privacy. Generically, letters at once preserved and shared the confidence between correspondents; publishing them seemed to violate the particularity of the friendship relation. ‘Carlyle in America’ offers a commentary on issues of privacy and character raised in the transatlantic correspondences explored in the previous chapter. Its unsettling implications are evoked in further inquiry by the defeated

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member of the legal profession who ascertains that ‘Mr. Thomas’ was smuggled out of the country by his friends, their clandestine mission overlooked by ‘a few skulking fellows . . . as if we had been bent on murder’ (p. 115). Subsequently, these associates had ‘buried’ the incident, exhuming their shared knowledge only at the posthumous importunities of the narrator, who duly appropriates and transmits the ‘long kept secret’ as his own ‘faithful record of a most enchanting evening’, to an unknown reader (p. 115).

I The burden of Stevenson’s riposte to James’ ‘Art of Fiction’ had been to insist on the indissoluble difference between life and art: ‘Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt, and poignant; a work of art . . . is neat, finite, selfcontained, rational, flowing, and emasculate.’ He emphasised the essentially iterative nature of style: the well-written novel echoes and re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to this must every incident and character contribute; the style must have been pitched in unison with this; and if there is anywhere a word that looks another way, the book would be stronger, clearer, and . . . fuller without it.7

This was not, of course, a position with which the equally careful craftsman James disagreed; their ensuing literary friendship was grounded in mutual respect for stylistic seriousness. The affinity was not an identity. In his first published essay on the work of his transatlantic correspondent, sent to its subject in advance, James praised an early Stevenson story, ‘Will o’ the Mill’,8 for its ‘exceedingly rare, poetical, and unexpected’ quality, the mark of a writer who all at once had, as he put it, ‘jump[ed] before my eyes into a style’. ‘The story is in the happiest key, and suggests all kinds of things, but what’, he asked, does it in particular represent? . . . There are sagacious people who hold that if one doesn’t answer a letter it ends by answering itself. So the sub-title of Mr. Stevenson’s tale might be ‘The Beauty of Procrastination.’ If you don’t indulge your curiosities your slackness itself makes at last a kind of rich element, and it comes to very much the same thing in the end. When it came to the point, poor Will had not even the curiosity to marry; and the author leaves us in stimulating doubt as to whether he judges him too selfish or only too philosophic.9

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Stevenson’s prefatory note to The Merry Men, in which ‘Will o’ the Mill’ appeared, identified it (with ‘Markheim’ and ‘Thrawn Janet’) as the strongest in the collection. The two latter have consistently been among his most admired tales; ‘Will o’ the Mill’ was more or less ignored by reviewers and has been slighted since. James Pope-Hennessy, for example, calls it ‘an unsatisfactory allegorical tale’; Ian Bell describes it as ‘insubstantial’ and Jenni Calder refers to it as ‘puzzling . . . not perhaps the most promising indication of a career that would be chiefly remembered for its fiction’.10 Why did James single out this tale exclusively from the volume? The history of literature does not provide an answer. But James’ paraphrase matches with intriguing exactitude the subject of his own later tale ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ (1903), the story of John Marcher, who, keeping himself for the special fate that he believes is reserved for him, fulfils his own destiny to be the man to whom nothing would happen. Comparing one of James’ most-discussed works with one of Stevenson’s least considered tales presents a number of problems, not least because James’ story was published twenty years after Stevenson’s; there is no evidence to suggest that ‘Will o’ the Mill’ was in his mind in its composition (as far as I know he never referred to Stevenson’s tale again); and beyond a broad similarity of theme there is little in the way of allusion or verbal echo. But the practices derived from transatlantic correspondences can get some purchase on a comparative poetics of character inaccessible to the traditional literary history that has documented and sequenced the relationship between James and Stevenson. Influence studies can look for evidence of borrowings; intertextuality seeks out verbal confluences. Instead we may begin with the observation that in both cases, what animates the writing is a technical problem: how to engage the reader in the drama of a character to whom nothing happens – whose character is formed by a choice that nothing shall happen. What (to borrow a phrase from James’ essay on John Singer Sargent) ‘elevates and humanizes’ that technical problem is the discovery of an embodying form capable of conveying the ‘texture’ or ‘impression’ of what it would be to live like this.11 James’ analogy, as he mused on the meaning of Stevenson’s tale, with the letter that, finding no response out there, becomes its own answer, offers a clue that we may pursue from the epistolary exchanges discussed in the previous chapter. Lacking (or shunning) connection, consciousness ceases to feel its analogy with others, ceases to believe in them, and becomes possessed of its own difference, the specialness of its own destiny. This was the implicit warning in James’ warm letter to Stevenson of July 1888, whose ‘rich element’ is the insight that intimacy and distance can co-exist when there is trust that

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language can be read. The close relationship adverted to is at home in the letter, written at a distance from enactment, in a way that the two men, together in a room, might perhaps never have been. It is, I suggested, a touching example of how ‘the institution of friendship itself’ becomes ‘linked to absence and loss’.12 Friends know, but also know that they cannot know, each other. To write this is an expression of confidence in the power of language to overcome the isolation of identity, separateness. Correspondence exists to mitigate this disconnection, to carry on conversation at a distance; attempting to convey the experience of insulation, of minds unable to think beside themselves, both writers experimented with techniques that distance their protagonists’ experience from the reader’s capacity to grasp its meaning. The fabular style of ‘Will o’ the Mill’ which disconcerted Stevenson’s critics embodies the generality and self-enclosure that accompany Will’s disengagement and becomes, for the reader, the grounding of his character: All the light-footed tourists, all the pedlars laden with strange wares, were tending downward like the river that accompanied their path. Nor was this all; for when Will was yet a child a disastrous war arose over a great part of the world. The newspapers were full of defeats and victories, the earth rang with cavalry hoofs, and often for days together and for miles around the coil of battle terrified good people from their labours in the field. Of all this, nothing was heard for a long time in the valley; but at last one of the commanders pushed an army over the pass by forced marches, and for three days horse and foot, cannon and tumbril, drum and standard, kept pouring downward past the mill. All day the child stood and watched them on their passage – . . . and all night long, after he was in bed, he could hear the cannon pounding and the feet trampling, and the great armament sweeping onward and downward past the mill . . . Whither had they all gone? Whither went all the tourists and pedlars with strange wares? whither all the brisk barouches with servants in the dicky? whither the water of the stream, ever coursing downward and ever renewed from above? Even the wind blew oftener down the valley, and carried the dead leaves along with it in the fall.13

The insistently rhythmical prose invokes the ‘falling valley’ between ‘two splendid and powerful societies’ as an abstract, allegorical landscape of exclusion (p. 68). Incantatory repetition of the inclusive modifier ‘all . . . all’ is highlighted across several pages, with its tolling assonances ‘Will, mill, hill, bell, well . . .’. The disorientated whispering ‘whither’s’; the ‘parable’ (p. 79) without apparent moral, and the ambiguous ending of the story all enforce its resistance to a reader’s interpretative strategies. Verbal repetition both expresses the custom-bound nature of Will’s existence, and makes it

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strange; the incantation of the familiar which characterises his failure to move out of the past repeats without registering connections. Stevenson’s education (desultory as it appeared to be) in Enlightenment rhetoric and belles lettres resurfaces in a virtuoso tropic display of alliteration, assonance, parechesis, anadiplosis and anaphora that combine and alternate to evoke a landscape that metonymises the magical thinking of its detached focal subject. The story, alluding to the isolated world of Johnson’s ‘Happy Valley’ (from which Rasselas must escape to learn about relationship, comparison and autonomous action), enacts the passage through life of a protagonist who, unlike Rasselas, never ventures across the ‘pass into a neighbouring kingdom’ (p. 68). ‘Out of the way of gossip’ (p. 69), the inhabitants of Will’s valley don’t stir themselves to learn the fate of those who pass across their terrain; when Will is taken to view the wide world beyond, he ‘covered his face with his hands, and burst into a violent fit of tears’ (p. 71). Filled with ‘an ecstasy of longing’ (p. 72) for this marvellous landscape of the new, Will nonetheless finds himself unable to engage with it. His rhetorical world is what Stevenson would call in an essay a ‘changing labyrinth’ without origins or end.14 James’ story brings a similar ‘technical problem’ into his reader’s experience in an extraordinary way: he systematically replaces the subjects of sentences by an objectifying ‘it’ which refers to a proper noun but keeps it just beyond reach, so that the reader struggles to keep engaging with the sentences as a connected process: It led, briefly, in the course of the October afternoon, to his closer meeting with May Bartram . . . It affected him as the sequel of something of which he had lost the beginning. He knew it, and for the time quite welcomed it, as a continuation, but did n’t know what it continued, which was an interest or an amusement the greater as he was also somehow aware – yet without a direct sign from her – that the young woman herself had n’t lost the thread. She had n’t lost it, but she would n’t give it back to him, he saw, without some putting forth of his hand for it.15

The consequence is that the sentences, like (metonymic of) Marcher’s experience, seem to refer only inwards to themselves rather than corresponding to an external reality which might confirm or qualify them. The obvious reading would allegorise ‘it’ as ‘love’ (think Chaucer, March and May): as John Marcher and May Bartram wait together for the defining thing that will transfigure his (and, increasingly, her) existence, the secret they share is also the thing that keeps them apart; it may be their unacknowledged love for one another, but Marcher can only experience ‘it’ as

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‘the sequel of something of which he had lost the beginning’. The claustrophobic reciprocity of a conspiracy of silence both sustains and stifles the relationship; like the William Wilsons, they replicate too well for ‘relationship’ to flourish. They are characters who fail to find the register in which they can co-respond; the ‘it’ that stands between them corresponds to the virtual space of waiting and the style of a relationship that cannot be realised. After May’s death, Marcher finds himself ‘without a peg for the sense of difference’ that had sustained his life (p. 119). ‘It’ has gone, with May, the other who was no other. ‘[W]andering over the earth’, he is drawn back to May’s grave: ‘he had been separated so long from the part of himself that alone he now valued’ (p. 120). At the tomb of his friend, he is met again by ‘it’ (the indeterminate pronoun has largely been absent in the prose between her death and this point): ‘It met him in mildness – not, as before, in mockery; it wore for him the air of conscious greeting that we find, after absence, in things that have closely belonged to us and which seem to confess of themselves to the connection’ (p. 120). Comforted by ‘its’ return, he returns to waiting – he believes at this point – for his own matching death. The tight neat circle of total reciprocity continues to envelop him, until, like Winterbourne interrupted in his meditations at Daisy’s grave, a chance sight of another mourner – indisputably ‘other’ – startles him into outraged recognition: ‘It had n’t come to him, the knowledge, on the wings of experience; it had brushed him, jostled him, upset him, with the disrespect of chance, the insolence of accident’ (p. 125). Returning to James’ rhetorical question about Stevenson’s early story, ‘what does it in particular represent?’ Many things, and nothing: ‘It’ is an object without character, but it generates the characters who draw the reader into James’ story. Not being an event (something happening in history), it means nothing, though it is full of unrealised significance. The repeated non-happening of an event is a condition of Marcher’s existence as antagonist to the ‘Beast’ (the protagonist of the tale). ‘It’ is repeated precisely because it never becomes an event. ‘It’ is something ‘other’ that is so intimately interwoven with the literary character of Marcher as to make its otherness (personated in the sympathising May) unrecognisable by him. ‘It’ is the subject of the tale, and the characters of Marcher and May are its objects. Does Marcher’s falling on May’s grave register the end of possibility, the provisional made final, the ultimate teleology of a meaning realised in conclusion (‘You’ve nothing to wait for more. It has come’, she tells him at their last meeting) – or the much more provisional recognition of ‘no

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connection that any one seemed held to recognise’ (pp. 110, 115)? If the latter (and the tale’s gradual building of characters through repeated overtures never quite clinched might incline us this way), how might this unrecognised connection be described? Marcher dedicates his life to a ‘singular’ fate; the ‘it’ he and May reify as an obstacle between them pre-empts the possibility of correspondence. This reading of ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ offers the tale as an allegory not of meaning on two ‘levels’, but of that condition of syntactic unrelatedness experienced in failed transatlantic correspondence; of, in short, a negative transatlantic poetics like those exemplified in pilgrimages to the Romantic shrine of ‘Keats’ in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. This contention requires further unpacking. ‘It’ implies a transitive verb – I do something to, or with, something else that is not me. Distinguishing between ‘I–It’ and ‘I–Thou’ relations, Martin Buber claims that ‘[t]he life of human beings is not passed in the sphere of transitive verbs alone.’16 When ‘Thou is spoken’, on the other hand, ‘the speaker has no thing; he has indeed nothing. But he takes his stand in relation’ (p. 4). He posits repeated crossings-over between the worlds of ‘It’ and ‘Thou’; to attempt to experience ‘it’ is to reject the presence of ‘thou’. The self becomes individual only in relation. ‘All real living is meeting’ (p. 11). In both its verbal and nominative forms ‘meeting’ (and its failures) are important as the implied but impossible solution to the intransigent ‘it’ of ‘The Beast’. But to conceptualise, to abstract, or to interpret this meeting is instantly to terminate it. That would signify the breaking down of present, performative relationships and hence remove it to the world of objects (it) once more. The paradox of intransitive relation is worth pursuing in connection with the ‘it’ of James’ tale. Putting pressure on the oxymoronic friendship relation of ‘another self ’, Buber’s dialogic philosophy posits a place of liminality, often in spatial terms, which describes the self’s relationship not only with God but with the other. Human beings require an other in order to develop their own identity, but this is not an entity (an ‘it’) to which they have an objective or transitive relation; it is, rather, a dynamic performance of selfhood elicited in exchange: ‘relation is mutual’ (p. 8). Sticking with the grammatical and poetic dimensions of the relation rather than positing the metaphysical implications that are Buber’s subject, this describes quite exactly the process of character creation in the transactions of mutual incomprehension that structure James’ transatlantic tales, among which ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ should be numbered by virtue not of its subject but as stylistic correlative.

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II The Aspern Papers, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1888, was republished with a retrospective preface in the revised New York edition of James’ works in 1908. The story of English poet Jeffrey Aspern’s American biographer’s research trip to Europe in quest of original sources for his subject is incontrovertibly transatlantic. It is less obviously, but more interestingly, a tale about transatlantic literary history, in particular, about the fate of European Romanticism in American literary consciousness. The Preface projects ‘a final scene of the rich dim Shelley drama played out in the very theatre of our own “modernity” ’.17 With unusual specificity for James, the story’s historical donnée is located in the biographer’s intrusion into the sequestered post-Romantic afterlife in Florence of Shelley’s sister-in-law Claire Clairmont, one-time lover of Byron and mother of his daughter Allegra. James’ identification of Miss Juliana with Clairmont has been much discussed by critics; it is unexceptionable, if not self-evident, to link the story with Romanticism. But James’ Preface itself complicates the alignment. The setting (like that of Daisy Miller) is curiously displaced: where the donnée of Daisy – so its Preface specifies – occurred in Venice, the tale is set in Rome; The Aspern Papers’ origin in Florence, on the other hand, is relocated to Venice. If James made these transpositions merely to deflect the attention of source-hunters, it seems curious that he should subsequently, apparently gratuitously, reveal his hand and thereby quite unnecessarily court the kind of biographically driven association of the author with his tale that he elsewhere systematically deplored. The transatlantic poetics of literary friendship with which this and the previous chapter have been concerned offers alternative possibilities. Recalling Poe’s graffiti ‘crossing and re-crossing in endless irregularity’, and James’ own admission (in another of the ‘Prefaces’) that ‘[r]eally, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so’, we might note a much less remarkedupon passage that precedes the apparent satisfaction of the source-hunter in the Aspern Papers’ Preface, a passage that proleptically reopens the case it is about to close.18 Casting doubt over ‘any complacent claim to my having “found” the situation’ of the tale, the narrator ‘comes upon the interesting thing as Columbus came upon the isle of San Salvador, because he had moved in the right direction for it’, ‘just as’ (the analogy is James’) ‘history, “literary history” ’ had ‘in an out-of-the-way corner of the great garden of life thrown off a curious flower that I was to feel worth gathering as soon as I

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saw it’. Retrieving, to revise the tale, the memory of its origin releases only a sense ‘of things too numerous, too deep, too obscure, too strange, or even simply too beautiful, for any ease of intellectual relation. One must pay one’s self largely with words . . . one must induce almost any “Italian subject” to make believe it gives up its secret’. It is recoverable only in the arabesque of style, ‘which resembles the fashion of our intercourse with Iberians or Orientals’, courting likeness while refusing influence: ‘We thank them and call upon them, but without acting on their professions.’ ‘The pious fiction suffices; we have entered, we have seen, we are charmed.’ The revelation that refuses to deliver itself to the other evokes the ‘twinge’ of nostalgia and the ‘pang of exile’ from ‘presences’ that remain to haunt ‘this present revisiting, re-appropriating impulse’. This, the narrator claims, is the difference between ‘[t]he historian’ who ‘wants more documents than he can really use’ and ‘the dramatist [who] wants more liberties than he can really take’ (pp. v–vii). Complex triangulation of historical moments and memories, the things that haunt the mind and figure differently at different stages of a life, is the artist’s way of making links between past events and his individual creative use of them. The analogy between the American author’s discovery of a literary ‘source’ and Columbus’ happening on America allows him to ‘find’ his story ‘as’ the explorer ‘discovered’ the new land: by ‘mov[ing] in the right direction for it’ – the ‘it’ here being precisely the transatlantic ‘encounter’. There is the element of contingency; the happy confluence of time, place and intelligence; and the idea of poesis as a reciprocal relation of finding and making, recognition and discovery. Thus the repetition of event in story is also a transformation or a translation, analogised in the emblematic Atlantic crossing of Columbus. ‘Mov[ing] in the right direction for it’, he finds ‘it’ already there, and evokes a character for the questing transatlantic narrator in a wonderfully Romantic reprise of Keats’ sonnet about encountering Homer, personified in ‘stout Cortez’ facing the Pacific in wonder and recognition.19 The passage is explicit that that ‘interesting thing’, the connection, is a fact of ‘literary history’, whose syntactic relations are those of associative poetics, rather than the cause-and-effect ‘intellectual relation’ that underpins historical narrative. The ‘curious flower’ in ‘the great garden of life’ links this tale, then, both with the ‘strange’, ‘gem-like’ and ‘poisonous’ flowers of ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ (and the artist himself of course with the character who nurtures its ambiguous blooms), and with the emblematic aspects of the character Daisy Miller. Here it seems that James’ candid acknowledgement of a source for the tale simultaneously deflects attention

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from another, more problematic and perhaps transatlantic haunting, and adverts imagistically to it. Once again there is a prosopopoeic figure (in both senses) of Margaret Fuller haunting this prose; the contagion she carried into Hawthorne’s, Emerson’s, Poe’s and James’ writing was rhetorical and poetic. If authorial information about a ‘source’ is interesting (as it surely must be) from one point of view, a different kind of interest inheres in this other, also transatlantic, correspondence that this Preface does not explicitly acknowledge, but whose parallel drama appears to rehearse so many of its concerns, as did Poe’s ‘Visionary’ with its allusions to Byron’s liaison with Countess Guiccoli. The epistolary friendship of Emerson and Carlyle which James reviewed in 1873 suggests an additional refraction of these entwined rhetorical relationships. Carlyle’s account of his negotiations on Emerson’s behalf to retrieve from a pair of ‘guardian Ladies’ (Correspondence, p. 480) papers by Margaret Fuller for a memoir has not as far as I know been noted as a possible source for The Aspern Papers. Following the scent of the ‘curious flower’ new connections emerge to reveal how James’ tale of a transatlantic encounter between a would-be biographer seeking the doubling relationship of his Romantic ‘other self’ with the self-appointed keepers of his posthumous reputation discerns in the ‘predicament’ of distance and differentiation a literary subject and a condition of possibility. Infused with memories of the ghostly afterlife of Margaret Fuller in Europe, The Aspern Papers becomes a story about character and correspondence, the responsibilities of friendship, and the networks that cross time and space. Together these exemplify and reiterate the rhetorical sense of the typicality of literary character as always prosopopoeic and representative, here standing in and becoming the reader’s figure for, as it may be, ‘British Romanticism’, ‘Italian/European’ exoticism or otherness, and so on. At a point of strain in the Emerson–Carlyle correspondence, when under pressure from proximity cordial relations between the two men were under stress, the ‘hand’ of Margaret Fuller (in the form of her holograph request that one solicit the interest of the other on her behalf) kept a semblance of friendly relations alive between the two men. From beyond the grave, as it were, she helped to heal a discursive breach (possibly occasioned by Emerson’s distaste for Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets) when the American solicited his correspondent’s help in securing material for the projected memoir of Fuller. Emerson announced her death in a letter of 1850, as ‘in happy hour for herself ’ (p. 462). ‘Margaret’ could only be known to New England in her single state, through her literary friendships; ‘[h]er marriage would have taken her away from us all’ (p. 462). Carlyle responded

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promptly to Emerson’s request that he recover Fuller’s lost journal, deposited by her on the eve of departure for Italy, with a friend in England. The historical events were these: two sisters, attempting to be ‘true’ after her death to Margaret Fuller’s intentions, threatened to burn private papers entrusted to their care rather than releasing them for repatriation to America. At Emerson’s request Carlyle negotiated their recovery (ostensibly to restore them to Fuller’s mother, but presumptively for the memoirist’s use). His letter to Emerson announcing the outcome was self-congratulatory: ‘I flatter myself I have managed poor Miss Fuller’s Mss. with good success’ (p. 477). Playing up the suspense of the would-be biographer who was his friend and reader, and his own inquisitiveness as surrogate for the Romantic biographer, Carlyle’s letter continued: ‘I shall in few minutes have on the road a messenger to meet Miss Gillies at a given hour, and take delivery for me . . . of the ipsissimum corpus of the packet in question: and I hope to be able to tell you before the Post close . . . that it is actually in my possession here’ (pp. 477–78). The ‘self-same body’ of papers punningly metonymised the mortal remains of the dead writer in her literary ‘remains’, and became a metaphor for the transatlantic literary legacy he was attempting to get sight of on his friend’s behalf, to preserve for the archives of literary history. It was the ‘Margaretghost’ embodied in writing that – so far – eluded appropriation. Things did not go according to plan in this little body-snatching melodrama, and Carlyle was coerced (so the letter would have us believe) into face-to-face negotiation with the Misses Gillies in order to preserve the letters from the flames for his friend’s perusal. The narrator (for so Carlyle’s epistolary voice personated itself for its transatlantic reader hungry to know the outcome), finding his casuistical argument for their release rejected, switches tack to invoke the ghostly anguish of their author: ‘Miss Mary and I,’ I have urged, ‘can burn the Papers in 2 minutes or less; anybody can so easily destroy the Papers: but who of gods or men can destroy the melancholy Ghost (or wailing, suspecting, imagining Memory) of them, which will walk the world as goblin in a distracted manner till all memory of Margaret herself die?’ (p. 480)

The conduct of ‘Miss Mary’ (whom Carlyle describes as ‘a tall, serene . . . oldmaid of forty-and-five’) and her sister towards Margaret Fuller’s ‘Packet of Papers . . . has been that of Priestesses towards a sacred relic’ (p. 480). Carlyle’s exuberant letter continues, ‘I will try my best to bring it so about; and only yield to some absolute . . . Female Denunciation fronting me with arms a-kimbo. The Papers, I guess after all, are probably of little or no moment; but my thot is . . . that they shd be examined a little in order to annihilate the “ghost” of them

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too’ (p. 481). Carlyle’s spectral evocation of the ‘melancholy Ghost (or wailing, suspecting, imagining Memory)’ is itself revenant in the ‘resurgent’ past that dominates James’ story and the suggestion in it, not refuted, that the narrator might be capable of ‘violating a tomb’ (p. 134). ‘A narcissistic projection of the ideal image [of the friend]’, writes Derrida, ‘of its own ideal image (exemplar), already inscribes the legend. It engraves the renown in a ray of light, and prints the citation of the friend in a convertibility of life and death, of presence and absence, and promises it to the testamental revenance of more life, of a surviving’.20 Reviving an earlier connection in the Emerson–Carlyle correspondence, the lateral thinking embodied in the grave-robbing metaphor becomes an instrument of knowing in the later tale. The Greek theoria – ‘“looking at” or “viewing”’ – also encompasses reflection, a feature picked up in Smith’s writing on friendship.21 ‘No theory is kind to us that cheats us of seeing’, James wrote to Stevenson.22 Looking at his subject’s portrait, The Aspern Papers’ narrator conjures a relationship between observer and reflective image: ‘I but privately consulted Jeffrey Aspern’s delightful eyes with my own . . . He seemed to smile at me with mild mockery’ (pp. 130–31). Facing Miss Juliana in the flesh, as it were, for the first time, the narrator experiences a frisson of something ‘too strange, too literally resurgent’, ‘as if the miracle of resurrection had taken place for my benefit’ (p. 23). The guilt of seeing and being seen that is pivotal in ‘William Wilson’ is enacted in a climactic moment of The Aspern Papers, whose narrator seeks out the other self, the doubling relationship. As he attempts to force his way to the letters, he encounters the glare of ‘her extraordinary eyes’ ‘like the sudden drench, for a caught burglar, of a flood of gaslight; they made me horribly ashamed’ (p. 118). At this moment, he is known, by reflection, as the would-be American knower of European literary secrets, desperate to extract the long-desired letters which may tell the ‘true history’ of the relationship between his biographical subject Jeffrey Aspern and one of the women, before she ‘commits [the] dreadful sacrilege’ of burning them (p. 84). The Aspern Papers re-enacts the tension of whether the letters which embodied – contained the meaning of – the relationship between Aspern and Miss Juliana, may be destroyed (or perhaps have been already), before they can be converted by the biographer into the raw material from which his subject’s ‘character’ may be written (p. 74). When Miss Tina tells him that she has burned the correspondence that seemed to promise the narrator direct access to his subject, he reports that ‘a real darkness for a moment descended on my eyes’ (p. 143). Neither Carlyle nor James could have been familiar with Jewett’s narrator’s attempt to fathom the secret of a missing transatlantic episode in

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Carlyle’s biography. But as the unpublished tale of ‘Carlyle in America’ makes clear, this ‘hunger’ to fill in a ‘missing’ – missing because desired – episode in his hero’s history may be all-too-readily gratified, at one level, by invoking a ‘space’ in the biography and evoking a fiction to fill it: ‘How easy it would be to supply such an experience to the history of a man’s life. I wonder that it has not been oftener tried . . . What could be more simple’ (p. 107). Carlyle’s letters to Emerson concerning the Fuller papers convey his view that they are ‘after all . . . probably of little or no moment’, the point of examining them is to ‘annihilate the “ghost” of them’ (Correspendence, p. 481), to neutralise the power that, unredacted, they will continue to exert over the imagination. Carlyle’s letter depicting his vigorous engagement with the guardian Ladies is followed in the compiled narrative of their collected Correspondence by a mild confirmation from Emerson: ‘I have always thanked the good star which made us early neighbors, in some sort, in time and space. And the beam is twice warmed by your vigorous goodwill, which has steadily kept clear, kind eyes on me’ (pp. 481–82). Charles Eliot Norton’s text in the edition James read and reviewed is taken from a draft; the provisional dating of May 1852 suggests that this letter was not a response to Carlyle’s, but written, as it were, in apposition to the missive above. The clear kind eyes of the friend and the prying gaze of the seeker are mutually reflective viewpoints from different perspectives. Their correspondence at this point enacts a conspiracy to snatch that other correspondence from destruction, to control and preserve it for posterity – on the biographer’s terms. James unites the Carlylean and Emersonian conspiracy of acquisition in the narrator of The Aspern Papers, who – as he views himself – is Aspern’s greatest admirer, and to Miss Tina’s eyes is a ‘publishing scoundrel’ (p. 118). To realise his biographical aspirations (that is, to make his ‘name’ in the literary history of European Romanticism irrevocably associated with that of his hero and subject) the narrator evokes a doubling relationship, identifying his character with that he projects for Jeffrey Aspern; but its requirements (he must become the lover of Miss Tina in order to gain access to the secrets held by Miss Juliana) would involve ‘real-life’ implications to which he cannot commit himself. In a reprise of ‘William Wilson’, it seems that the success of the biographer might involve the symbolic death of the American author as independent agent.

III In Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale (serialised in Scribner’s Magazine from November 1888; published 1889) the lives of two

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Scottish brothers (teasingly named Henry and James) are dominated by a rivalry that drives a tense dance of attraction and repulsion. Their story is told by a family retainer, Ephraim Mackellar. The elder brother, James – known as ‘the Master’ – is the lawful heir to the estate, but does not inherit. A tempting allegorical reading of authorial characterisation is trailed before the reader; as with Poe’s tale, the narrative seems at once to insist on its dualistic implications and to resist their determinism. Thanking Henry James for his gift of a ‘magic mirror’, the Stevensons signed themselves ‘(Hen) Robert Louis Stevenson’.23 At the book’s opening a toss of the coin decides which of the brothers shall ‘go out’ in the Jacobite rising, and which remain at home to preserve the family name; later, the exiled Master navigates his way through North American forests by tossing a coin, in ‘scorn of human reason’; later still, the fate of his relationship with Chevalier Burke – whether they are to be friends in peace or enemies at war – is similarly decided.24 At each point the course of history is literally thrown in the air by a whimsical cast of character. James is chimerical and shapechanging; apparently killed in a fight with his increasingly unstable brother, he disappears from his grave and escapes to America to recover the treasure of his piratical adventures. At the denouement it appears that the Master is once more deceased, and reburied, an event which his surviving brother is determined to verify for himself. Henry assembles a party to search for the treasure buried by the Master, but finds James’ uncanny Indian servant Secundra Das opening the grave. The body is undecayed. After huge efforts by the Indian, it appears to come to life; for one moment, the ‘week-old corpse’ looks the narrator in the face (p. 218). In a reprise of the mutual suicide/murder of the two William Wilsons, Henry falls dead on the spot; the temporary reanimation having apparently fulfilled its fratricidal intention, the corpse returns to ‘discarded clay’ (p. 218). The novel concludes (like Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter) with the ambiguous epitaph chiselled by the narrator on the monument of their double (re)burial. Henry and his ‘fraternal enemy’ (p. 219) sleep in one grave. Their tale is narrated in Mackellar’s acquisition of a manuscript ‘history’; all that is required, as his legal confidant puts it, ‘is to work up the scenery, develop the characters, and improve the style’ (p. 8). Two brothers: friends, enemies, Doppelgänger, whose mutual fates turn, literally, on the stamp or die on two sides of a coin. Should Henry and James be regarded as separate characters and relations, or as a mutually dissoluble dyad, like William Wilson? There is in the end no story but the ‘history’ or annals of the Master’s finally self-defeating adventures. Mackellar’s version of the Master’s character is a ‘discredited hero of

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romance’ (p. 89); his adventures in Scotland, India, America and back are set against the more realistically conceived but uneventful chronicle of the family’s decline at home. The Master of Ballantrae concludes with a confrontation at the frontier in upstate New York – near Albany, the James family home – and its final scene is itself a doubled one, from a Scottish context to an American; the translation seems to allow the plot to move from stagnating familial hatred to a crisis in the new setting. But nothing, finally, is resolved. As in a work to which it bears a close affinity, James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), the protagonist’s grave at once preserves the text (it is in Derrida’s term the ‘place of consignation’ where signs are gathered) and resists its incorporation.25 Metonym for death, the grave is ‘archive-destroying, by silent vocation’; it marks an end to correspondence as the difference embodied in character annihilates itself in the simultaneous mutual murder of the fraternal protagonists.26 Considerable technical problems associated with narrating the novel’s climactic final episodes were, Stevenson reflected, embedded in the stylistics of character: ‘How, with a narrator like Mackellar, should I transact the melodrama in the wilderness? How, with his style, so full of disabilities, attack a passage which must be either altogether seizing or altogether silly and absurd?’27 The ‘technical problem’ addressed in the narrative of The Master of Ballantrae, that is, was how to entrust the limited voice of the narrator (domesticated in the realistic realm of Ballantrae rather than the fantasy world of the Master) with the task of involving the reader’s imagination in a romance ending. It is as though Autolycus had been entrusted with recounting Hermione’s reawakening at the denouement of The Winter’s Tale. In both cases, a character assumed dead is magically restored to life in order that a narrative extended across space and time may conclude. The term ‘romance’ was first applied to a group of Shakespeare’s late plays by Edward Dowden to indicate their affinity with the action of medieval tales dispersed across place and time. A canvas vastly expanded beyond the conventions of realism required of the writer, as Stevenson noted in an essay on Victor Hugo’s romances, a different technical repertoire: ‘It is most really important . . . to remark the change which has been introduced into the conception of character . . . It is this change in the manner of regarding men and their actions first exhibited in romance, that has since renewed and vivified history.’28 Once again, the allegory of character is poetically rather than nationally conceived – that is, not in terms of ‘English’ or ‘British’ vs ‘American’ – but as a technical question of genre developed to present identity relationally and performatively before the reader.

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Stevenson’s solution is effective, and paradoxical. The prosaic Mackellar is seduced by narrative and the thrill of the chase, but ruefully aware of his shortcomings as a creator of character: ‘My pen is clear enough to tell a plain tale; but . . . to translate the story of looks, and the message of voices when they are saying no great matter . . . this is what I despair to accomplish’ (p. 26). The paradox is that ‘a plain tale’ is what the narrative conspicuously fails to deliver: the history of the brothers’ relationship is chronologically disjunct, confused and partial, while the Master’s apparently posthumous ‘adventures’ across decades and continents are conveyed piecemeal and incompletely to Mackellar by others for whose veracity he cannot vouch. What emerges instead is a psychological drama of mutually mirroring characters each of whom can neither live with, nor without, the other. Through Mackellar, Stevenson’s narrative gives the reader an insight into the processes that transform memories of events into exhibitions of character creation, as the narrator struggles to accommodate the ambiguities of the Master’s behaviour and the ambivalence which he has always felt towards him, recording by turns visceral dislike, horror, fascination, daffing bonhomie and pity in his own reactions. At one point, he even becomes the Master’s ‘good friend’ (p. 169). ‘[S]ometimes I would draw away as though from something partly spectral. I had moments when I thought of him as of a man of pasteboard – as though, if one should strike smartly through the buckram of his countenance, there would be found a mere vacuity within’ (p. 156). The Master’s ‘real’ character remains for the reader opaque behind Mackellar’s own confused reactions. The clear allusion to Ahab’s rhodomontade in Chapter 36 of Melville’s Moby Dick (‘All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!’29) emphasises that, generically, the Master’s character belongs to romance rather than realism – and that it is a product of Mackellar’s attempt, like Melville’s Ishmael, to make sense of events in which he was at once observer and actor. The Master has no ‘depth’, no inner psychological consistency; his ‘buckram countenance’ denotes a series of staged performances realised in writing. ‘Buckram’ was a type of stiff cloth used to bind books; the Master’s character binds the episodic adventures that hold the narrative together. The term was also used proverbially, following Falstaff’s tale of being attacked by ‘four rogues in buckram’, to indicate a non-existent person.30 Its aural association to ‘swashbuckler’ (‘one who makes a noise by striking his own or his opponent’s shield with his sword’) insinuates the swaggering, piratical element in his character.31

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Stevenson’s foregrounding of Mackellar’s telling in the narrative of The Master of Ballantrae as ‘A Winter’s Tale’ follows his prescription in ‘A Gossip on Romance’ that ‘[t]he bony fist of the showman visibly propels [romances]; their springs are an open secret; their faces are of wood, their bellies filled with bran; and yet we thrillingly partake of their adventures.’32 The audience swallows willingly the unrealism of a sea-coast in Bohemia, as he notes in the essay on Hugo’s romances (p. 49).33 In Chapter 2 I described gossip, like contagion, as ethically ambiguous: born of curiosity about the character of others, like allegory, it is a relational form of magical thinking that flattens figurative complexity to fit a formula; the ‘real’ emotional event is the recognition that takes place, binding the parties to the story. This kind of correspondence agrees to suspend the rules of the ‘real’ for the shared pleasures of narrative. Gossip, like romance, voices vicarious desires and taboos through intensely sociable exchange of stories of other selves that defeat the decorum which keeps character in its social place. Stevenson’s essay regards this reflective flattening of character as a necessary condition for the reader to be able to identify with the story. ‘A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s’ establishes an illusion of intimate conversation, à deux, with the reader as confidant to disclosure of another, perhaps slightly clandestine, emotional attachment to a world of social irresponsibility: ‘no part of the world has ever seemed to me so charming as these pages, and not even my friends are quite so real, perhaps quite so dear, as d’Artagnan’.34 The attachment in question, of course, is generic: to the buckram characters of romance over the psychologised actors of realism. Perhaps because their story is narrated by the romancer Mackellar, the tale of the two brothers does not, then, seem to offer elucidation of Stevenson’s ‘real-life’ literary friendship with James (if indeed it is allegorised in this displaced relation) other than in unpromisingly banal terms of sibling rivalry within writers. But the resonance is unmistakable (in relation to The Aspern Papers it is worth noting that Stevenson dedicated his ‘Master’, in 1889, to ‘Sir Percy Florence [Shelley] and Lady Shelley’), and complicated further by a tale James himself published the same year, ‘The Lesson of the Master’.35 Coincidence of names and dates may suggest one kind of correspondence between these ‘Masters’ tales and the men who seek to know them. Stevenson’s novel is a study in ‘mastery’ of form whose composition lays out its engagement with the issues of realistic and romance characters that animated the literary friendship of James and Stevenson. We may read James’ tale – grouped in the New York edition with a sequence of

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stories about the transmission of literary power – in analogously ‘transatlantic’ terms. Internal evidence repeatedly links ‘The Lesson of the Master’ with the correspondence of James and Stevenson discussed in the previous chapter. Take this exchange, for example: to Henry St George’s (the ‘Master’) question as to why they have not encountered one another before, the young aspirant Paul Overt responds ‘I’ve spent many years out of England, in different places abroad.’ ‘Well, please don’t do it any more. You must do England – there’s such a lot of it.’ ‘Do you mean I must write about it?’ – and Paul struck the note of the listening candour of a child. ‘Of course you must. And tremendously well, do you mind? That takes off a little of my esteem for this thing of yours – that it goes on abroad. Hang “abroad”! Stay at home and do things here – do subjects we can measure.’36

The debate over whether or not Paul should marry Miss Fancourt is a kind of allegory: is this ‘literary’ young woman to be his muse, or will she prove his artistic nemesis? ‘She’s first-rate herself and she expends herself on the second-rate. She’s life herself and she takes a rare interest in imitations’, declares St. George in apparent warning to Overt (p. 42) – or is it perhaps allusion to himself? Doublings pervade the tale: James and Henry, the rival Masters of Ballantrae, replicate in St. George and Overt oedipal rivals in art and their admiration of Miss Fancourt. The lesson of ‘The Lesson of the Master’ appears to be that dedication to high Art precludes marriage and domesticity. This has been read as James’ allegorical warning to Stevenson about the kind of art to which he commits himself (as well, perhaps, as the more literal reading about taking a wife: most of Stevenson’s friends were deeply disturbed by his association with Fanny Osbourne). If we follow this line, though, the tale reveals its own moral to be as deeply disingenuous as the protestations of St George (who goes on to marry Miss Fancourt himself, thereby cutting out his younger rival). At another point, Paul Overt talks with Miss Fancourt of the trip made with his ailing mother ‘far away – a hideous journey – to Colorado’ (p. 25), in search of health. The double-edged rapier shaft here (if one imagines for a moment Stevenson in particular among the tale’s projected readership) is breathtaking. It is clear that such blunt allegorical correspondences – though they may be courted by the tale – travesty both James’ art and Stevenson’s, as well as the human intricacy of their literary relationship. If instead we read the two stories for correspondences of style, a denser, more interesting picture emerges: something else is evidently at stake in the poetic analogies

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proffered in the comparison. As with The Aspern Papers and Daisy Miller, reading against the grain of James’ own retrospective ‘literary history’ of its genesis (in the Prefaces to the New York edition), and in a transatlantic context, allows further correspondences to emerge. The Preface to Volume xv opens with an ambiguous image of unburial, as the Master notes the embalming effect of ‘association’ on ‘fond memory’ (p. v); in relation to ‘The Lesson of the Master’ he reflects on how the contingency of the tale’s ‘occasion’ crystallised something ‘general’ in his own artistic past into specific compositional corollary: My plea for ‘correspondences’ will perhaps . . . but bring my reader back to my having . . . owned to full unconsciousness of seed dropped here by that quick hand of occasion . . . the sense of something interchangeable, or perhaps even almost indistinguishable, between my own general adventure and the more or less lively illustration into which I was to find this experiment so repeatedly flower. (pp. xii–xiii)

The ‘seed’ – the specific source – of the story – has disappeared in the author’s failure to recover its origin, a failure essential to its rhetorical flowering. The Preface is the story of the story’s iterative nature: its particular features ‘interchangeable’ and ‘almost indistinguishable’ in their representation (and recovery) of the lost general truth of private experience. Denying knowledge or awareness of the ‘original’ of Henry St George, the author nonetheless (or perhaps therefore) claims ‘complete possession of him’, and an ‘active sympathy’ that ‘hangs about the pages [of the story] still as a vague scent hangs about thick orchard trees’ (p. xiii). A difficult sentence emanating Keatsian aura makes sense when read as a hint about the actual obliqueness of influence in relation to the historical casuistry of source-hunting. At an earlier point in the same Preface the narrator declared himself unabashed at his inability to produce ‘chapter and verse’ (p. ix) for the originals of the literary artists represented in the tales collected in this volume. James’ famous justification (much quoted out of context) that literary characters exist to embody ‘the possible other case, the case rich and edifying where the actuality is pretentious and vain’ (p. ix) embeds equally the possibility that there never has been or was an ‘original’ to defer to. He defiantly ‘plead[s] guilty’ to the charge of being ‘beguiled into citing celebrities without analogues and painting portraits without models’ (p. xi): Nothing then is at moments more attaching, in the light of ‘comparative’ science, than the study of just where and when, just how and why recognition denies itself to the appeal at all artfully, and responds largely to the appeal coarsely enough, commingled. (p. xiv)

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Keats’ ‘To Autumn’ haunts the Preface to ‘The Lesson of the Master’ (as Adonais haunted Daisy Miller) with displaced echoes that are extraordinarily hard to pin down but prime the story that follows with that slight sense of over-ripening and incipient decay that critics of Romanticism have identified in the prosody of the poem’s opening stanza: SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.37

Paul Overt visits the allegorically English writer Henry St George and his wife at their gracious country house ‘Summersoft’. A charmed and charming location conceals the declining powers of the Master and the bodily enfeeblement of his wife. Becoming his close friend, Overt seeks both to receive the secret of his power and to assume Mastery in his turn. The ‘technical problem’ to which this story addresses itself is the evocation of the protagonist through the perception of his deuteragonist or foil (Overt) to illuminate both characters in relation without resolving for the tale’s reader either the transference of imaginative power between older and younger generation (the translatio) or the mystery of perception and misprision in the way each ‘reads’ the other. On making his acquaintance, Overt likes St George ‘the better’ for his face not having told its whole story in the first three minutes. That story came out as one read, in short installments . . . and the text was a style considerably involved, a language not easy to translate at sight. There were shades of meaning in it and a vague perspective of history which receded as you advanced. (p. 18)

The ‘true story’ of St George’s past – the omniscient perspective that would reveal the moral truth of his present character – is, Overt recognises, not accessible by observing his countenance. On the other hand, he assumes no interpretative space or pre-judgment in his assessment (Overt by name . . .); a candid observer – he believes himself – he is drawn by affinity to Marion Fancourt’s ‘unclouded spirit’ and ‘open’ demeanour (p. 17). But the reader

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of his character has already encountered the formation of prejudice in Overt’s instinctive aversion to St George’s wife and what he takes to be her malign influence on the Master’s artistic genius, as well as his susceptibility to insinuations about St George’s own goatish attentions to Miss Fancourt. This heroine is frank and unconventional in the manner of Daisy Miller: ‘ “I’m free. I’ve always been like that – I can go about with any one. I’m so glad to meet you,” she added with a sweet distinctness that made those near her turn round’ (p. 46). But Overt, as his name suggests, is no Winterbourne. Returning to the contagion of Romantic idiom between Wordsworth’s and Burns’ ‘Daisy’ poems and Daisy Miller, I want to pursue the suggestion that the ghostly Romantic past that shadows ‘The Lesson of the Master’ invokes a Keatsian version of artistic endeavour. Again, the associative allusions assist the process of characterisation. When the two young people have an earnest conversation about Art, they do so in the terms of the Grecian Urn: ‘Their tone had truth and their emotion beauty; they were n’t posturing for each other or for some one else’ (p. 54).38 Overt is relieved to discover in Marion Fancourt after her artistic conversations with the Master no ‘reactionary nymph, with the brambles of the woodland caught in her folds and look[ing] as if the satyrs had toyed with her hair’ (p. 20), not least because his own poetic character is potentially that of a ‘faun’ (p. 20). The rhetorical praeteritio protests too much: if she’s not a nymph emerging from a bramble-soiled tumble in the woods with a satyr, who, exactly, thought she might have been? The febrile vocabulary of poetic imagination insinuates Keats’ romance of Endymion, the ideal youth who sought poetic perfection and was seduced from his quest by female beauty. Overt’s naïve desire for clarity betrays itself in the allegorical frame he creates around the story of their interaction, in which the budding romance of pastoral nymph and faun is thwarted by the sexual machinations of the aging satyr. The ethical charge of the acolyte’s anxiety of authorship is translated to a mythological plane mediated by the oedipal drama of transatlantic Romanticism. The subsequent maturing of the literary friendship between the two artists – established, settled ‘Master’ and roaming, readily un-settled disciple (the term is used by St George himself ) – recapitulates the transatlantic dynamic of reflected character. It is not necessary to posit schematic equivalence either on a personal (the Master = James; Overt = Stevenson, the roaming, questing romantic who has been on a hideous journey – to Colorado), or a national (Overt = naïve ‘American’; St George = worldly, cultured and perhaps corrupt European) formula, to appreciate the

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construction of iteration, antagonism, likeness, correspondence and difference that animates the narrative. The ‘real’ characters of both the Master and Overt are after all (as the story makes clear) textual representations only known in the comparisons that arise from their juxtaposed perceptions of each other.

IV The relation of ethics to the poetics of character evoked in transatlantic Romantic biography that will be the subject of the final two chapters may be anticipated here. ‘The Lesson of the Master’ is a further instance of transatlantic writing’s particular Romantic confrontation of the post-Kantian problem: the question of how to relate matter and mind is retranslated as a means of addressing the intra-linguistic issue of how to resist the imputation of cultural belatedness – how not, in other words, to accede to fictions of origin and models of influence. In an essay considered more fully in my final chapter, Stanley Cavell cites (and slightly misquotes) Emerson’s ‘Selfreliance is the aversion of conformity’ as ‘figur[ing] each side in terms of the other, declar[ing] the issue between them as always joined, never settled . . . [a]n unending turning away from one another . . . hence endlessly a turning toward one another’.39 This is the paradox performed in the Declaration of Independence; it is the plight of the two William Wilsons; as a conjunction it figures the transatlantic relation, ‘always joined, never settled’. Emerson thought of himself as a poet ‘in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondences between these and those’.40 The ethics – and poetics – of acknowledging difference and otherness are explored in the fiction as performative enactments of literary friendship. Like Will of the Mill, or John Marcher, the narrator of The Aspern Papers realises too late (if indeed he does realise) the responsibilities of intimacy and the secret that accepting the bonds of relationship would have at once revealed and required him – as a friend – to retain intact. The lesson of ‘The Lesson of the Master’ is in part that discipleship and betrayal go hand in hand; literary friendship incorporates rivalry, whether Overtly or in the lacunae of correspondence. ‘William Wilson’ enacts the failures of friendship based on dominance and priority in a transatlantic context, but hints at the possibilities of an alternative in the lateral arrangement ‘crossing and recrossing in endless irregularity’. As it is configured in all these tales, ‘correspondence’ is the desired metonym of transatlantic relations. Friendship’s ‘secret’, these protagonists discover (or fail to), is not

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transparent to inquiry; it can only be shared by willingness to experience the tension between proximity and distance, confidence and betrayal, in performance rather than in narration. This insight is embodied in the transatlantic correspondences traced in this and the previous chapter; like the figures of metonym and metaphor, these correspondences hold disparates together without either conflating or prioritising them. ‘To reduce matters to writing means that you shall know them, see them in their origins & sequences, in their essential lineaments, considerably better than you ever did before’, Carlyle reminded Emerson in their correspondence (p. 552). Performative verbs – knowing, and seeing – were important for both writers, as they continued to be for Stevenson and James: they invariably indicate presentness, immediate impression, sometimes a not altogether comfortable intimacy, as distinct from abstract opinion or the unbounded imaginings of a self in its solitude. Both, though, reinscribe the difference between the knower and the known in the act of effecting rapprochement. As Fuller suggested in her clear-sighted letters to Emerson on their friendship, friendship itself, enacted by the pen, belongs to this kind of performed cognition rather than to the ‘narratable facts’ kind of literary history. It is a practice that brings and renews responsibilities of relation in every enactment, even as it reinscribes the difference between the knower and the known in the process of effecting rapprochement.41 The psychoanalyst Wilfrid Bion suggests that in the observation by others of pairs within groups, the fantasy of fulfilment actually functions to stimulate hope in the observer. This, as Graham Little has put it, ‘is the template of friendship – a template built out of hope, drawn, in Bion’s reading, from the child’s rapt impression’.42 Bridging that gap, crossing that space, travelling that distance – however we want to realise it figuratively – between self and another, in the face of contingency, is what the hopeful act of correspondence does. It is what metaphor does, and how (to return to Adam Smith’s Rhetoric) associative or lateral thinking may – while insisting on the necessary limits of intersubjectivity in ‘concord’ – work in construing transnational relations as an issue of literary as much as of historical connections.

chapter 7

Historical characters: virtue ethics and the limits of Romantic biography

The more History approaches to Biography the more interest it excites. Where the materials are meager and scanty, the antiquarian and the chronologer may dwell upon the page; but it will seldom excite the glow of admiration or draw the delicious tear of sensibility. Anna Barbauld, Works

The author’s character is read from title-page to end. Henry David Thoreau, Journal

The Problem was chronology. Susan Howe, The Nonconformist’s Memorial

In Philosophy: The Day After Tomorrow, Stanley Cavell refers to Hume’s idea of the self as ‘a collection’ of attributes and experiences ‘requiring a narrative’.1 Biography and autobiography purport to be that narrative, as they evoke character from the collection of recorded facts about its subject’s existence. ‘Auto-Biography’, as the Edinburgh Magazine considered it in 1822, was a recent development of the science of man. As its concerns moved from representing the public face of character in society to more intimate areas of identity that Romantic critics would style ‘authentic’, the question of how these might be represented textually became one of pressing interest.2 In the first dedicated study of biography as a critical genre, the one-time actor and anti-slavery activist James Field Stanfield declared: ‘Letters are to biography what state-papers are to history . . . they are the very chart and compass of biography . . . When the instances and postulates of these documents are set in comparison with the known general tenor of a man’s disposition and conduct, the truth of their colouring will be estimated with probable accuracy.’3 Stanfield’s approach to the writing of historical character employed the familiar universalising prosopopoeia defined in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: ‘There is a general character, common to all men, which is stamped by nature . . . The diversity, arising from temperament, condition, situation, or accident, forms the individual distinction, which, though it may modify, 208

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cannot destroy the instinctive propensities or common characteristics which constitute the species’ (p. 277). His understanding of the self-projecting and self-concealing aspects of personal correspondence was less astute than Hugh Blair’s admonition to his students that ‘[i]t is childish indeed to expect, that in Letters we are to find the whole heart of the Author unveiled. Concealment and disguise take place, more or less, in all human intercourse’.4 However conservative in its references (and perhaps naïve in its critical acumen), Stanfield’s book seized an opportunity in the contemporary market. The cult of authorship and new forms of literary biography went hand in hand in the Romantic period, stimulated by the controversial phenomenon of James Boswell’s 1791 The Life of Samuel Johnson. Johnson had himself been a celebrated poetic biographer; his prefatory The Lives of the English Poets in ten volumes (1779–81) was a landmark in the history of character writing. He pursued a fairly static Theophrastan version of his subjects’ characters; each ‘life’ was tripartite: a narrative of the poet’s existence, followed by an account of his works (all were men), and finally a section of poetic criticism and analysis. In an ‘Advertisement’ to the third edition of the Lives, Johnson described how he had been led beyond his original purpose of supplying ‘a few dates and a general character’, by ‘the honest desire of giving useful pleasure’.5 These were moral essays in a neo-classical mode united around an Aristotelian virtue ethics: behaviour was the key to character and its representation instructed a reader to emulation or aversion. The critical account with which each ‘Life’ concluded did not relate poetic achievement back to the conditions of the personal existence: character was an assessment of the life lived, not a rhetorical projection. The persona of the biographer was not implicated with the life of his subject; he entered the narrative as a humble inquirer after truth, sifting information supplied by contemporaries, previous biographers and documentary evidence. Structurally, thematically and genetically, Johnson’s narrative biographies (with the possible exception of the early ‘Life of Savage’) looked to continuities, dispositions, essential qualities; they aspired rather to judicial review of character as being than to performative or character-based analysis. In contrast, sociability and intersubjectivity were the crux of Boswell’s understanding of character, and the key to its revelation. In his account of the tour to the Hebrides they took together Boswell captured the ‘being’ of Johnson by evoking the experience of ‘being-with’ him. The opening sketch of Johnson’s appearance tells the reader about both men: the solid, irreducible Johnson as biographical subject, and – more muted, but textually acknowledged – the complicated response of his companion and biographer to him. It also explicates the structure of the ensuing narrative. (Boswell’s

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Tour to the Hebrides, published in 1786, effectively served as an opening installment and methodological rationale for the project completed after Johnson’s death.) The concentration on vivid personal details (for which Boswell would be praised, and derided, by contemporary critics) became the hallmark of his celebrated biographical style and opened the essay form to new areas of associative personal detail that implied a personal relation between biographical subject and biographer: His countenance was naturally of the craft of an ancient statue, but somewhat disfigured . . . He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted hair-buttons of the same colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black worsted stockings, and silver buckles . . . This imperfect sketch . . . will serve to introduce to the fancy of my readers the capital object of the following journal, in the course of which I trust they will attain to a considerable degree of acquaintance with him.6

As biographer, Boswell represents himself as finding a hero, a father and a friend in Johnson; he also, in describing him – ‘setting him down’ right to the style of his shoes – places and fixes his mentor as subject, and offers him up to the ‘acquaintance’ of the reader, like one friend introducing another. Johnson has the nobility of an ‘ancient statue’, but clearly one in decay. If the Tour was not quite a symbolic oedipal murder of Johnson’s Journey (which beat it to publication by eleven years), Boswell’s homage nonetheless contrived to have the last word on their companionate journey in several respects. Reconstructing the hero-father (as Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907), conceived on a similar model, subsequently enacted) might represent a fearful challenge to a nascent filial self, but it offered peculiarly empowering possibilities in reciprocal character construction. Hero, mentor, fellow traveller, rival: as soon as ‘friend’ took in ‘father’, the relationship implicated the deepest insecurities at the foundations of psychological character. ‘Being-with’ begins to cede to a struggle for dominance that later critics would identify as the peculiarly Romantic agon of the ‘anxiety of influence’ or the ‘burden of the past’.7 Paternalist patronage generated resistance in the relation of filial attachment. Biographically speaking, for Boswell, it was precisely in the minutiae of a life being lived that the character of his subject might be discerned, displayed and assessed in dialogues and conversations with others. Tiny details of description are neither adventitious nor random. The Tour (a revised version of which formed a pivotal episode in the complete Life) took a mischievous sideswipe at his subject’s magisterial ‘Life of John Milton’, by recalling a different authority to justify Boswell’s revolutionary biographical method:

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Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars. Every thing relative to so great a man is worth observing. I remember Dr Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes, instead of buckles. (p. 168)

The reference to Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres reminded readers that Boswell had other literary masters closer to home than the Great Cham, and offered theoretical justification for his method of evoking character. Representation eschewed representativeness in the delivery of embodied idiosyncrasy to readers’ visual imaginations, and courted the biographical potential of literary friendship in a newly confidential authorial intimacy. Boswell’s characterology was scenic rather than developmental: his Johnson existed complete, formed, and himself, at every point in the biography, from the formal ‘character sketch’ that opened the early essay in method in the Tour to the Hebrides, to the final multi-volume illustration of Johnson in his extended social milieu. After Boswell, biography would never be textually separable from what The New Annual Review in 1817 was typical in terming ‘Self-biography’.8 The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., with its structural premise of the friendship between writer and subject, changed the shape of narrative biography in the nineteenth century. The literary memory of Boswell’s triumphant success in stage-managing the encounter of Johnson and Scotland was embedded in Henry James’ reading of the correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, as he savoured the possibility ‘that the terrible Scotchman may after all have embarked’ for a visit to Concord, as it was in Sarah Orne Jewett’s fantasy of what such a missing episode in the biography of their friendship might have provoked.9 The Aspern Papers’ narrator aspired to be a Romantic biographer; in James’ fiction, biographers, or would-be biographers, are either ‘publishing scoundrels’ (of which Boswell had been accused, and as Miss Juliana describes Jeffrey Aspern’s acquisitive disciple), or misguided, hapless critics – poor readers, the limitations of whose own characters become apparent in the enactment of their chosen vocation.10 Aspern’s protagonist strove to acquire the letters and material remains that he believed would enable him to reconstruct the character of his subject; his mismanaged relationship with the survivors of the European literary past he desired to possess deprived him not only of his primary sources, but also of his subject and his own ‘character’ as a biographer. Refractions in fiction and life-writing of literary friendship elucidate transatlantic performances of ‘poetic character’ (both biographical and autobiographical); they embodied dislocation as much as continuity: failure to communicate or to perform the symbiotic biographical act of character creation was one of the conditions of

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transatlantic comparison paradoxically premised on frustrated or incomplete correspondence. Self-confirming poses of benevolent ‘sympathy’ substitute for more demanding relations of justice and performative qualities of promise-keeping that acknowledge the different needs of another. This chapter, then, considers transatlantic dimensions of what James Treadwell calls the ‘translation of selves into texts’ in Romantic literary biography in relation to the poetics of comparative literary history.11 The argument allows us to trace tantalising transatlantic reverberations between ‘Bartleby’ and the posthumous reconstruction of the life and poetry of the eighteenthcentury Scottish poet Robert Fergusson by his biographers, overlaid in their turn by the constructions and self-construction of the biography of Robert Burns (self-declared ‘brother in the muse’ – and in misfortune – of his elder compatriot).

I ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ was part of Melville’s bid (following reviewers’ rejection of Moby Dick and Pierre) to win a readership through short fiction and periodical publication. The story of the ‘unaccountable’ clerk is told by his employer, a highly accountable, benevolent and complacent lawyer, by his own reckoning doing ‘snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title deeds. All who know me, consider me an eminently safe man.’12 The narrator has in his legal line of business known ‘very many’ ‘law-copyists or scriveners’, and might, did he choose, ‘relate diverse histories’ of this ‘somewhat singular set of men’, stories ‘at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep’. Renouncing such consolatory narratives at the outset of his story, he almost perversely ‘waive[s] the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby’, because While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small. (p. 13)

In the absence of authoritative ‘original sources’, the character of the biographical subject can only be built up from repeated observation of actions. Reaching for the stylistic features that would characterise Romantic essays, Stanfield’s Essay noted that ‘Obscurity and indistinctness will occur, when . . . there is eccentricity of character, running into

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desultory pursuits, without purpose, without system . . . In these cases, the biographer is reduced to give an uninteresting sketch of disjointed circumstances and transactions’.13 Under these circumstances, it would be difficult to apply ‘connecting principles of system’ to representation of character. Finding consistency – a story – is, in the case of Bartleby, the narrator’s task. Finally, it would be the very consistency of the scrivener’s being – he is so completely the creature of habit – that would deny Bartleby his character and the narrator his subject. Two different models of biography are in play in the narrator’s first paragraph: firstly, an exemplary, typifying tale whose aim is to educate the moral sentiments of a sympathetic reader; secondly, the quasiarchaeological discovery of ‘original sources’ for unaccountable actions, from which a unique interior self may be construed through a traceable process of maturation and development. The rhetorical presence of the biographical voice is as important as the character of his subject in both The Aspern Papers and ‘Bartleby’ (‘I’ occurs over 500 times in James’ tale, compared with just over 100 occurrences in ‘Bartleby’). This shaping ‘I’ is the representation (the ‘mark’) of character, and of self. It claims the ‘stamp’ of authentic experience. The biographer’s character is, from the outset, constitutive and – metaphorically speaking – given spurious authority by its commitment to self-representation: ‘The man who resolves to write of himself . . . is the reporter of his own cause; and, though he may seem, by publication, to refer his statements to popular decision, will, naturally, be inclined to extenuate his failings, defend his prejudices, and give a favourable turn to the whole tendency of his deeds and conduct’.14 Bartleby appears in answer to advertisement for a copyist in a law office whose view, the narrator admits, is ‘deficient in what the landscape painters call “life” ’ (p. 14). He embraces the task assiduously, embarking on ‘an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion . . . he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically’ (pp. 19–20). Copying is, the narrator fears, ‘a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair’ inimical to creativity: ‘to some sanguine temperaments it would be altogether intolerable. For example, I cannot credit that the mettlesome poet Byron would have contentedly sat down with Bartleby to examine a law document of, say five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand’ (p. 20). Refusing Romantic spontaneity, Bartleby writes impassively on, but when asked to verify the accuracy of his copy, he announces that he ‘would prefer not to’ engage in routine comparison with the work of others

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(p. 20). For this refusal he gives no reason, merely reiterating his negative preference to the increasingly anxious interrogatories of the narrator. Bartleby’s infective statement embodies absolute resistance within a verbal structure of accommodation to another viewpoint: the implied comparison (to ‘prefer’ is to posit a choice between two alternatives) is in fact no comparison at all. There is (as Gilles Deleuze has pointed out in Essays Critical and Clinical) a grammatical ambivalence between transitive and intransitive in this curious formulation: ‘I prefer not to . . .’ (with the object implied rather than stated), or/and, ‘In general, what I prefer is not to’ (intransitive). As time goes on, Bartleby prefers to do less and less, never, apparently, leaving the office to eat or even to sleep. Preferring ‘to be stationary’(p. 41) (with its implied pun on writing paper, the passive vehicle of inscription), he increasingly resists all efforts at relationship and exchange. The narrator struggles to assimilate this indigestible behaviour to his benevolent world view: Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the individual so resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the resisting one perfectly harmless in his passivity; then, in the better moods of the former, he will endeavor charitably to construe to his imagination what proves impossible to be solved by his judgment. (p. 23)

The narrator’s capacity to formulate an imaginative character for this deserving other rapidly hits a limit: ‘fraternal melancholy’ (p. 28) draws him to contemplate with sympathy the copyist’s appalling solitude amid the urban bustle of New York, ‘but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion’ (p. 29). The psychology revealed in this movement is a near-exact exemplification of Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments, in which the imagination’s sympathetic identification with the sufferings of another must be tempered by prudence in order for the observer to arrive at a just (ethical) assessment of the situation. This, it seems, would be an appropriate stance for a judicious biographer. And so the narrator presents himself. As he exhibits his benevolence, the texture of his account betrays this assurance: ‘Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval’ (p. 23). Isaac D’Israeli’s ‘Some Observations on Diaries, SelfBiography, and Self-Characters’ (1796) declared that the biographer ‘must possess a flexibility of taste, which, like the cameleon, takes the colour of that object on which it rests’.15 In this way, the biographer’s own textual character and the associative essay mode become aspects of the character creation of the subject; as a characterless self who takes on the characteristics

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of his subject, the biographical persona is a kind of confidence-man. Bartleby’s language becomes contagious, until the narrator catches himself and his other employees echoing the scrivener’s ‘prefer not to’; they too enact the negation of character as they reject the performative mode. This most characterless figure of Bartleby (adjectives used to describe him include ‘motionless’, ‘pallid’, ‘quiet’, ‘mild’ and ‘dimly calm’, in contrast to his fellow scriveners’ ‘florid hue’, ‘radiant countenance’, ‘piraticallooking’, ‘grinning irritability’ and ‘diseased ambition’) dominates the environment and eventually penetrates even the speech and thoughtpatterns of the Dickensian law office of ‘dependent Englishm[e]n’ (pp. 39, 28, 19, 27, 21, 15, 16, 17). The lawyer-biographer cannot legislate him into ‘life’ as the subject of his story. Returning to his office on a Sunday morning, the narrator finds it locked from the inside, and hears the voice of Bartleby: ‘I am occupied’ (p. 34). Intransigence is caught in the now unambiguous intransitivity of the scrivener’s verbal construction. The scene allegorises the problem of the narrator-biographer who, excluded from the inner life of his subject, conjures a textual surrogate of character fabricated from projection and inference. Acknowledging, while resisting, the ‘wondrous ascendancy’ (p. 35) of the copyist over him and finally unable to rid himself of this ‘intolerable incubus’ (p. 38), he changes his offices, leaving his successor to take responsibility for the disposal of Bartleby, who is ‘removed to the Tombs as a vagrant’ (p. 42).16 Taking charge again renews the narrator’s benevolence; he visits and tries to arrange good prison fare for Bartleby, but the scrivener with an insatiable appetite for copy now ‘prefer[s] not to dine’, and turns to face the wall (p. 44). On a second visit the lawyer finds him in the courtyard, ‘[s]trangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, and lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones’ (p. 44). A single page of an earlier manuscript version survives, in which the lawyer finds Bartleby dead not in the yard but in his cell, leaning on a tombstone that is written out of the published version of the tale. In the rhetoric of sympathy character is relational. When sympathetic imagination fails the biographer, he turns to ‘original sources’ to supplement the deficit. The only explanation – if indeed it can be called that – for Bartleby’s decline is occasioned by almost the sole ‘biographical fact’ (actually, only a posthumous ‘vague report’) offered in relation to Bartleby’s past – and as such seized upon by the narrator as the opportunity for a consolatory maxim at the end of his tale: that prior to his presentation as a scrivener Bartleby had been employed in the Dead Letter Office. Bartleby was the man who handled the letters that never made the crossing

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between sender and recipient, failed to reach their destination. ‘On errands of life’, as the narrator puts it melodramatically, ‘these letters speed to death’ (p. 45). Bartleby’s ‘life’ metonymises the dead end of correspondence and intersubjectivity. Historically the Dead Letter Office was associated with colonial resistance during the American War of Independence.17 Its ‘history’ (insofar as this can be reconstructed by the narrator-biographer) has involved traumatic dislocation that has jolted personality from its social context. At once the narrator has a handle to create a character for his subject and to give a trajectory to his story. The pen portrait has an air of insubstantiality reminiscent of one of Lamb’s Essays of Elia: Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring: – the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity: – he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity! (p. 44)

‘Conceive a man’: Bartleby’s ‘character’ is the amiable meeting-ground of narrator and the reader he invokes; each flatters the sensibilities of the other. A satisfying, collusive coda seems to have emerged from the unrewarding story of the unsatisfied scrivener. In the failures of correspondence, the narrator seems to find a connection between Bartleby’s mode of life and the manner of his death. The biographical fiction supports the sympathetic congress of narrator and reader. It tells the reader, of course, nothing about the ‘real’ meaning of Bartleby’s life, but a great deal about the narrator’s sensibility. His understanding of ‘humanity’ requires that he treat the helpless gently; his self-esteem rises through consciousness of his own benevolence in promoting the best interests of his subject. The fiction’s paternalism also delivers a kind of injustice; what Hume would describe as the ‘artificial’ virtue of promise-keeping (i.e. the contract of employment in the office) the narrator assumes not to be required of him in his relations to this being without rights or social status.18 At every stage, the blankness of Bartleby’s life to scrutiny, his defiance of sympathy, has thrown the focus back on the biographer’s shifting responses to his subject’s failure to compose itself into a story. It has become, in short, an autobiographical tale, the coherence and self-projection of whose first person voice is the product of its author’s rhetorical control of his own ‘character’ and his reader’s responsive

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sympathy. At this point tense and voice shift from the historical narration that has attempted to account for the unaccountable by offering the sequence of events that have connected biographer and his subject, towards a frankly imaginative reconstruction in a vocative mode that implicates the reader in the storytelling project. Bartleby’s right to ‘justice’ (in the Humean sense of a right to the property of his own character and the intersubjective respect of promise-keeping) is negated by the narrator’s refusal to accept his otherness. Like tales of Hawthorne and Poe discussed earlier, ‘Bartleby’ may be (and has been) readily construed as an allegory of transatlantic difference and resistance. Within its complex play of textual sympathies other symmetries are at work.

II The narrator’s concluding demonstration of paternalist benevolence allows him a brief moment of satisfaction as the pieces of his subject finally appear to cohere. That story – exemplary, biblically sanctioned and appropriate to the narrator’s range of reference – is a negative parable of redemption: in the image of Bartleby’s despair, the narrator is able at last to appropriate the subject who has eluded his narration, assimilating Bartleby’s death in a comforting biblical epitaph: ‘asleep . . . [w]ith kings and counsellors’ (p. 45). The allusion is oddly displaced: the narrator ventriloquises the voice of Job wishing he had never been born, a sentiment that (the reader must assume) the biographer attributes to Bartleby in his abandonment. The dislocation raises uncomfortable refractive echoes around an otherwise seamless moment of closure. These extend beyond the boundaries of the narrator’s tale: the same phrase occurs in Robert Fergusson’s posthumously published ‘Job, Chap. iii Paraphrased’, a poetic rendering of Job’s magnificent curse on the day of his birth: Why have I not from mother’s womb expir’d? My life resign’d when life was first requir’d? . . . For now my soul with quiet had been blest, With kings and counsellors of earth at rest. . .19

A certain kind of literary historical explanation for the parallelism readily offers itself in the Authorised Version’s translation of Job, Chapter iii, vv. 13–14, where Job wishes that he had died before birth, For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest, With kings and counsellors of the earth. . .

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It looks like coincidence: influence by a prior source known independently to both writers: a minimally interesting footnote in transatlantic literary history. Early accounts of Fergusson’s life and fate suggest other forms of connection that complicate the issue. Born in Edinburgh in 1750, he died there in 1774, aged just 24, having achieved modest fame as a poet in English and Scots. One of the few contemporary reviews of his 1773 Poems described his ‘muse’ as appearing ‘in the different characters of a Lady of Quality and a Scotch Moggy’.20 By the turn of the century, Fergusson was respectfully enough remembered to be the subject of a memoir by David Irving, a new edition of the poems, and a supplemental essay in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In 1800, Irving gave a particular spin to what was already the received version of Fergusson’s brief professional career in Edinburgh: he was employed in the Commissary Clerk’s Office, but being unable to submit to the tyranny of the deputy, he soon relinquished his situation . . . There is surely a very material distinction betwixt studying Law, and transcribing Law-papers, at so much a page . . . Poetry and Law, are things too heterogeneous in their nature, ever to unite in the same individual.21

In 1851 (two years before the publication of ‘Bartleby’) Alexander Grosart accentuated the pathos; the situation ‘was miserably inferior to his talents and acquirements, but his straitened circumstances – his utter want – compelled him to accept it . . . he spent in this lowly, machine-like employment, the remainder of his too, too brief and ill-fated life’.22 In this ‘too, too brief and ill-fated life’ we hear the voice of the sentimental biographer invoking the sympathetic collusion of his reader. The Commissary Court in Scots Law appointed and confirmed executors of deceased persons leaving property in Scotland – the clerks, figuratively, handled the possessions of the dead; they also dealt with the separating procedures in divorce. Fergusson’s first duty is said to have been to transcribe all testaments dating from 1767 – truly an exercise in dead letters (McDiarmid, v. i, p. 23). Twentieth-century biographies have typically followed this line of pathos: Allan MacLaine, for example, describes Fergusson’s occupation as ‘one of the most drudging and utterly dispiriting occupations imaginable – the endless copying of endless documents’.23 Fergusson’s earliest recorded period of despair appeared in the second half of 1773: a posthumously published verse letter carries the postscript, ‘Yours, in the horrors, R. Fergusson’ (McDiarmid, v. i, p. 68). By the end of that year he was forced to abandon his copying at the Commissary Office; the final document in his hand is a testament dated 30 December.

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‘Despairing of life and salvation he burned his manuscripts and ceased to write; latterly he refused food and drink’, as the modern historian Rab Houston has it in a study of ‘the social context of insanity in eighteenthcentury Scotland’.24 Fergusson’s death on 17 October 1774 was reported starkly in a Charity Workhouse minute-book as ‘Mr Ferguson [sic], in the Cels’.25 The biographies read his committal to the madhouse as a sorrowful, knowing betrayal on the part of friends who felt they had no other option; the analogy with the uneasy self-justification of the narrator whose actions indirectly consign Bartleby to the Tombs is striking. From the beginning, then, Fergusson’s ‘Life’ has been construed as a paradigmatic tale of doomed poetic talent destined for despair, premature death and the posthumous exercise of sympathetic feeling. Are these just typical stories of their period; or is there a significant connection here? If so, how might a transatlantic literary history construe it? Fergusson was not altogether unknown in America: selections from his poetry were first printed in 1788, by J. & A. McLean in New York, as an appendage to ‘Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect / by Robert Burns’. Imitative poems in Scots (often by emigrants) occur in American periodicals from early in the nineteenth century, and frequently invoke Fergusson’s name along with those of Burns and Allan Ramsay, prompting American literary visitors to Edinburgh like George Ticknor in 1819 to ask to see the home of the poet. A Philadelphia volume of 1815, Poems of Robert Fergusson: in two parts. To which is prefixed, the life of the Author, and a sketch of his writings; with a copious glossary attached, was the first edition prepared specifically for an American readership. It contained a brief, anonymous, introduction to the poet’s life which incorporates verbatim phrases both from David Irving’s 1800 account and from George Gleig’s entry on Fergusson in his Supplement to the Third Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.26 The ‘final episode’ of Fergusson’s incarceration – central to Melville’s tale – is not mentioned by Gleig or in the Philadelphia edition, though it gains emphatic pathos in David Irving’s 1800 version of the life, an edition which seems to find many verbal echoes in ‘Bartleby’. It is possible that Melville knew this edition; but I am unable to show that he did. It is also possible that prior to the composition of ‘Bartleby’, Melville could have come across Alexander Grosart’s 1851 ‘Life of Fergusson’, which took strong issue with Gleig. Grosart’s Preface noted his ‘special gratitude’ to ‘America’s favourite poets, W. C. Bryant, Esq., and Professor W. H. Longfellow’ for their assistance (Grosart, p. viii). Alluding to Washington Irving’s satiric portrait of unsentimental Anglo-American commercial morality, he described Fergusson as ‘an object of profoundest sympathy to all who feel

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the “frailty” of humanity. Your “honest, fair, worthy, square, good-looking, well-meaning, regular, uniform, straightforward, clock-work, clear-headed, one-like-another, salubrious, upright kind of people,” as the author of Salmagundi calls them, have no materials in their nature for ‘charity’ (p. xcii).27 Did Melville have Fergusson in mind when he composed the melancholy character of Bartleby through the voice of his sentimental biographer? Textual parallels and verbal echoes apart, some tantalising but inconclusive pieces of evidence (postdating, for the most part, the publication of the story) indicate the American writer’s interest in a relatively obscure Scots poet. Most tangibly, he acquired, on 17 February 1862 – as his own literary career was turning definitively away from prose towards poetry, much of which would remain unpublished in his lifetime – The Works of Robert Fergusson, ed. by A. B. G[rosart] (London, 1857), and marked his copy of the prefatory character sketch.28 I have not been able to find evidence that Melville read any of the earlier editions with their memoirs. Driven, like thwarted biographers, to ask what else, prior to 1862, he might have known of Fergusson’s poetry, and of the unhappy figure conjured by the poetic biographies, further frustration awaits. Melville spent about five days in Edinburgh at the end of October and beginning of November 1856, en route from New York to the Holy Land, but his sole journal record of this visit is a laundry memorandum. A long letter to his brother Allan written from Liverpool, which is otherwise more informative about Melville’s brief Scottish tour, says nothing more of the Edinburgh days than that he ‘was much pleased there’.29 He makes no reference to any books bought there, or to people he met. We can only conjecture, much in the manner of Bartleby’s narrator, that his habitual visiting of graveyards in places he travelled to would have taken him to both Greyfriars and Canongate kirkyards, and to Fergusson’s grave, with Burns’ inscription.30 Spending only one day in Glasgow immediately beforehand, for example, he noted ‘tombs, defaced inscriptions – others worn in flagging – some letters traced in moss’ at the ‘old cathedral’.31 It is possible that Melville was alerted to Fergusson’s work via the brief ‘character’ of the poet published in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in 1836, a periodical with which he was familiar.32 The article notes that Fergusson ‘spent the whole of his brief period of adult life in the humble office of a copyist of legal papers’, and ends with a poignant vignette of the poet’s final days and death in a cell of the madhouse, in the solitude of his cell, without a hand to administer to the comfort of his last moments, or a voice to whisper consolation to his parting spirit. He was

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interred in the Canongate churchyard, where . . . Burns afterwards reared a simple stone to –direct pale SCOTIA’S way To pour her Sorrows o’er her Poet’s dust.33

The epitaph from Burns fills a similar consolatory conclusion to the article as Melville’s narrator’s ‘Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!’, the virtuous character of the writer asserting itself in its creation of the biographical subject. We may conjecture: (a) that these images lodged in Melville’s mind and consciously or otherwise influenced his evocation almost twenty years later of the character of Bartleby, and (b) that, following this, desire to know more of the hopeless poet prompted him to buy Fergusson’s work in 1862. But it cannot be more than conjecture, and does not advance the issue of critical comparison; the origins of Melville’s interest in Fergusson remain mysterious. His acquisition of Grosart’s edition of the Works is, nonetheless, worth remark, given that his library was not notably extensive and (apart from a copy of Burns with Gilfillan’s memoir) Scottish literature is sparsely represented in both his library borrowings and the books he possessed. Neither was Fergusson’s poetry a casual acquisition: in his copy Melville scored the following passage from Grosart’s ‘Memoir’: Go, – moralist, light of heart and jovial in intercourse, living at ease, quiet and happy, writing as a recreation in thy study, surrounded with all the delicacies, and comforts, and securities of life, on thy gilt-edged, prim-folded sheet, – shut up the kingly eagle in the stancheoned cage of thy court-yard, and bid him ‘fly’, because his native hills are before him. (p. lxxvi)

Bartleby’s death in the courtyard is surely implicated. The passage occurs immediately after Grosart’s exclamation against the appalling drudgery of the copyist’s life; the apotropaic countering-while-mentioning of the ‘calumny’ that Fergusson was ‘utterly destitute’ of ‘mental vigour’ expressed equivocal sympathy with Fergusson’s revulsion at ‘the monotonous duties of perpetual transcription’ (p. lxxv). The ‘moralist’ with ‘dry and withered heart’ is Fergusson’s earlier biographer George Gleig, contrasted with the sympathetic biographer, ‘Mr Abercromby, [Fergusson’s] employer in the Commissary Office’, whom Grosart describes as: a worthy, precise, leal-hearted, fidgetty, fretful, per-nickety old gentleman: remarkable for hard-working assiduity in his profession: loveable for his patient, father-like ‘challenges and advices,’ which he gave the mercurial poet: and to be remembered in that he was not a-wanting in the evil day. (p. lxxvii)

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Paternalism reaches its most self-confirmingly benevolent complacency with Grosart’s own self-projection as biographer. This combination of decency and limitation, embodied in ‘Bartleby’s’ narrator, too, characterises the stance of ‘Moral Sense’ philosophy which became the ‘genteel tradition’ in nineteenth-century America. So in nearly all nineteenthcentury versions of Fergusson’s ‘Life’ there is a productive ‘lawyer’ figure able to tell the story of the thwarted copyist-poet doomed to unproductive labour. Andrew Knighton has made a cogent case for reading Bartleby’s unproductivity and subsequent death from despair and starvation through Weber’s association in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of Calvinist-capitalist interpretations of the value of labour. This may suggest another kind of transatlantic common ground between the Scottish biography of Fergusson and the ‘American’ tale of ‘Bartleby’.34 But what – to return to my initial question – does this ‘like’ amount to?

III That is about the extent of documentary connections that might support a mapping of story, life and ‘life’ onto one another. Materials appear not to exist for a ‘full and satisfactory account’ of this transatlantic conjunction. Changing tack, then, and working against the grain of historical priority, I want to consider what the story can alert us to in the ‘life’ (meaning the posthumous biographical construction) of Fergusson, and what further bearing these might have on the poetry, and, conversely, back onto ‘Bartleby’ as a transatlantic tale. Matthew McDiarmid has sensibly warned against reading Fergusson’s employment in the Commissary Office ‘in the spirit of a post-mortem investigation, as if it were a direct cause of the dreadful circumstances in which his life closed’ (v. i, p. 23). It is worth asking why, beginning with Burns, and developed by early biographers, this causal fallacy has been the approach of almost all Fergusson’s commentators: O Fergusson! thy glorious parts Ill suited law’s dry, musty arts! My curse upon your whunstane hearts, Ye E’nbrugh gentry! The tythe o’ what ye waste at cartes Wad stow’d his pantry!35

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The ‘E’nbrugh gentry’ were the Enlightened Establishment: Hugh Blair and Henry Mackenzie, the lawyers, divines and doctors, themselves antecedents of Melville’s well-meaning but essentially obtuse lawyer-narrator. ‘Fergusson the Scrivener’, Bartleby-figure to the Scottish Enlightenment, was the shadow self of sociability and sentiment, whose narrative, resistant to the Whig project of Enlightenment, can only be told negatively by that voice and by its descendants. Both figures embody something like the rhetorical figure of occupatio – that which being denied or negated has already left its trace in the reader’s consciousness. Remember Bartleby’s response ‘I am occupied’, to the narrator’s impatient inquiry (p. 34). If the biographer-narrator’s viewpoint is characterised by the ‘saying-not-saying’ of apophasis, as biographical subjects Fergusson and Bartleby embody the mirroring Latin rebarbative figure of occupatio, the pre-emptive seizing of the position under discussion. Such preoccupation leaves the biographer with no rhetorical ground on which to stand. Fergusson’s nineteenth-century poetic reputation was conditioned both in Britain and America by Robert Burns’ genealogical invocation O Thou, my elder brother in Misfortune; By far my elder Brother in the muse[.]36

Grosart’s Introduction requests American readers of his edition to let him know details of any early American editions of the works of Ramsay, Fergusson or Burns; Burns himself would assume the role of Fergusson’s ‘biographer’ as he projected a poetic character for himself through sympathetic evocation of the neglected poet-predecessor. A letter of 1789 to Peter Stuart apostrophised Fergusson’s shade as a kind of prosopopoeia of the poet in life: Poor Fergusson! If there be a life beyond the grave, which I trust there is . . . thou art now enjoying existence in a glorious world, where worth of the heart alone is distinction in the man; where riches, deprived of all their pleasurepurchasing powers, return to their native sordid matter; where titles and honors are the disregarded reveries of an idle dream.37

The self-identification in the characterisation of the Bard was unquestionably sincere, but it was only one mood among many; it left out completely, as we shall see in the next chapter, many of Burns’ other personae: the wildly sociable drinking partner, for example, whose poetic epistles that call on the sympathy of equals to mitigate the effects of individual misfortune are the opposite of ‘Dead letters’. Fergusson’s œuvre contains more examples of this kind of poetic influence than it does of melancholy sensibility. Burns’ Fergusson was the product of his own suspicion and distrust of the real comprehensiveness of the ‘E’nbrugh gentry’s’ benevolence; the sheer depth

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of the desolation reflected here rebuked the facility of their optimistic project. The mad, dissipated Fergusson-figure manifested Burns’ anxiety about the negation of the promise of Moderatism and Enlightenment. There was, therefore, both complicity and antagonism between Burns’ neglected elder brother genius and the flawed poet handed down to biographers by his contemporaries. Both figures were characterised by their resistance – negation, nay-saying or ‘preferring not’ – to ‘copy’ the approved practices of their culture; and for both the inevitable outcome was construed poetically as the failure of words (letters) to reach their destination in an appreciative audience, and biographically in the miserable, untimely death which functioned as both the apotheosis of gossip and its nemesis. But the source, and the significance, of that fatal resistance were differently attributed: Burns blamed the ‘gentry’s’ neglect of poetic genius; the ‘moralists’ would lay it at the door of Fergusson’s own dissipation, as a manifestation of weakness of character. From another perspective, dissipation might look more like simple conviviality. Robert Chambers’ account of the Cape and Poker Clubs in the Traditions of Edinburgh suggests that till the dark days of religious delusion at the end, to which I’ll come, Fergusson was known for highspirited sociability, good talk and good fellowship, rather than the dissipation and blackguardism hinted at by Henry Mackenzie’s Anecdotes and Egotisms. He was the first Scots urban poet, celebrant of city streets and the multifarious, anarchic, amoral life they support; the poems’ comic vitality sparks against the gathering gentility of polite Edinburgh society. They refuse to dwell in conscious pathos that might arouse the sympathetic feelings of its Enlightened readers: the physical frailty of the poet, his poverty, the hardness of his lot are all written out of the gleeful exuberance of verse that allows the life of the city to flow, like drink, uncensored through it. Burns, by comparison, was a much more ‘personal’ poet, whose verse courted personal identification with its author. This may, in fact, have been one of the grounds of the Mackenzie circle’s suspicion of Fergusson: a tavern existence, as described by his early biographers, was a measure of urban implication at odds with the domestic focus of sensibility and the Common Sense philosophy propounded in the Mirror and Lounger papers, in Hugh Blair’s sermons and the conduct books of James Fordyce. Certainly, a poem like ‘The Sow of Feeling’ who ‘With heavy heart . . . saunter[s] all the day; / Gruntle[s] and murmur[s] all [her] hours away’ (McDiarmid, v. ii, p. 130), because of man’s inhumanity to pigs, can have done nothing to endear Fergusson to a literary Establishment which in the 1770s and 1780s advocated domestic sensibility as a guide to individual and social morality, and a guarantee of virtuous character.

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In the early biographies Fergusson appears as a man without a ‘home’ to go to, whose life wore away not at the gentility of the tea-table or the sanctioned sociability of an upper echelon society like the Poker Club, but in low and dubious haunts, where excess and indiscipline rather than moderation and prudence were suspected of being practiced. We may suspect, at the least, a tacit tactic of accommodation at work in retrospective biographical summaries like Henry Grey Graham’s The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, whose single mention of Fergusson is in a mode of conscious pathos that sets the idleness of the poet against the bustling social milieu of Blair, Hume, Boswell and Kames: none of these aristocrats of literary society cast any regard on the poor, shabbily-dressed copying clerk that threaded his way through the High Street crowd with his law papers, who for but two years was to write Scots poems and songs . . . and after too fond carouses o’ nights, was to die in 1774 on the straw of a madhouse.38

Hints of dissipation apart, there are suggestive continuities with the neutering biography produced by Margaret Fuller’s friends Emerson, Channing and Clarke, in their attempt to kill off her continuing intellectual potency by memorialising her: embalming her inconvenient energies in a controlled version of the life-story they made poetic justice of an untimely death. For American and Modernist literary critics ‘Bartleby’ is a classic fiction of urban alienation: the narrator notes that his office, which becomes Bartleby’s home as well as his workplace, is in ‘a building entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations’ (p. 36). The copyist’s activities alienate thought from its production in writing, which furnishes the rationale for historicised Marxist readings of the tale. We might add nuance by noting that his singularity is, like James’ John Marcher, to have erased the character of his own experience by the completeness of his capitulation to habit (or custom). In February 1826 The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction published a ‘Monument to Robert Fergusson the Poet’ (the title in Gothic script appropriate to an epitaph or headstone). The brief article was prefaced by an image of just such a tombstone, semi-obscured, bearing Fergusson’s name and (inaccurate) dates. The only poetry quoted is Burns’ epitaph, and the information conveyed is drawn fairly directly from James Currie’s The Life of Robert Burns (1800). There is also the greater monument to Burns himself behind it with the inscription in verse, which is quoted at length. This comes as a last word to the matter of Robert Fergusson’s tomb, pointing out not Burns’ homage but his superiority. The second stanza runs: ‘Go to your

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sculptur’d tombs, ye great / in a’ the tinsel trash of state! / But by the honest turf I’ll wait, / Thou man of worth! / And weep the sweetest poet’s fate / E’er lived on earth.’ The biography of one poet was the ‘original source’ for posthumous commemoration of another: for Currie, Burns’ erection of the material memorial in the Canongate was the action of virtue that demonstrated the superior sensibility of his subject, who thereby (like Bartleby’s narrator) became the compiler of an authoritative narrative for Fergusson’s social recusance and abandonment. Currie praised ‘the sentiments of respect and sympathy’ with which Burns ‘traced out the grave of his predecessor Fergusson, over whose ashes he obtained leave to erect a humble monument, which will be viewed by reflecting minds with no common interest’.39 Currie’s proleptic association was itself pre-empted by the verse Burns wrote for inscription on this large, otherwise blank stone – a strikingly strange epitaph, from one comic poet skilled in mock-elegy to another: No sculptur’d Marble here, nor pompous lay ‘No story’d urn nor animated bust’; This simple Stone directs pale SCOTIA’S way To pour her Sorrows o’er her Poet’s dust.40

The immediate oddity of this verse is its grammar of remembrance: Fergusson’s life is commemorated in negation, couched in an impeccably plausible imitation of English neo-classical funerary verse, a Lawrentian ‘post mortem effect’.41 This is verse that prefers ‘not’, to explication; the negative rhetoric of apophasis complicates its claim to sincere simplicity. Surely, too, it is not the Fergusson of Burns’ admiration, the Fergusson whose own mock elegies gave a new stretch to the poetic repertoire of Scots: DEATH, what’s ado? the de’il be licket, Or wi’ your stang, you ne’er had pricket, Or our AULD ALMA MATER tricket, O’ poor John Hogg, And trail’d him ben thro’ your mark wicket, As dead’s a log.

(‘Elegy on John Hogg’, McDiarmid, v. ii, p. 191)

In contrast, Burns’ self-cancelling epitaph tells the story of Fergusson’s genius as one of pathos and neglect; the figure it commemorates is ‘Fergusson the Scrivener’, and its biographic effect demonstrates the refinement of Burns’ own moral sentiments while reproaching the unfeelingness of Edinburgh’s self-appointed ethical élite. There is a clear element of poetic

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self-identification. In his petition to the Bailies of the Canongate for permission to erect the headstone, Burns described Fergusson’s bones as lying ‘among the ignoble Dead unnoticed and unknown’; ‘the simple stone’ he proposed to erect would ‘remain an unalienable property to his deathless fame’.42 According to John Richmond (himself a clerk to an Edinburgh Writer to the Signet) with whom Burns stayed in Edinburgh, the poet’s initial visit to the unmarked grave took place during the early days when Burns wandered the city in a state of great depression. In 1796 he would rather self-consciously reinscribe two lines of Fergusson’s ‘Job, Chap. iii Paraphrased’ in a letter which pointed the parallel between the unhappy circumstances of both poets, and (in the current triangulation) putatively connects them to the fate of Bartleby: Say wherefore has an all indulgent Heaven Light to the comfortless & wretched given?43

The retrospective projection of melancholy does not seem wholly without foundation in Fergusson’s own self-conception. He reputedly found Hervey’s Meditation Among the Tombs particularly congenial during his late illness. An unsurprising gesture – and source of solace – perhaps, for an ailing man of sensibility in the early 1770s. Religious despair does appear to have engulfed Fergusson at the end. For a biographer not committed either to ethical exemplarity or the Romantic story of neglected genius, nothing is more puzzling about his life than his descent into religious mania. Unlike Burns’ poems, in which religion and the long arm of the Kirk are a constant presence, there is, in John MacQueen’s words, ‘virtually no hint of the religious and theological obsession of seventeenth and eighteenth century rural Scotland’ in Fergusson’s poetry.44 Did Fergusson consciously silence the force that finally claimed him? Did he ‘prefer not to’ speak out about the religious terrors which resisted all the taming efforts of Moderatism, or was he simply ignorant of their power over his own soul until too late? A Melvillian reading of Fergusson’s biography might see his end as the terrified psyche’s refusal to align itself with the anodyne comforts offered by Whiggish Enlightenment and a Moderate theology. In truth, the meaning of the life eludes posthumous articulation. However we deconstruct the implicit motives of successive biographers, they all gesture towards the poetry’s irreducible figure of Fergusson the Scrivener. ‘Possessing . . . almost unrivalled talents for mimickry’, like many poets he served a poetic apprenticeship as the copyist of English elegiac, sentimental and mock-heroic modes.45 Imitation appears to endorse the primacy of its models, but it characteristically sets a wedge between manner

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and matter. Mimicry, like copying, is sterile, an avenue which seems to promise possibilities that in the end, like dead letters, cannot be delivered. We know, if Gleig is to be trusted on this point, that Fergusson was sensitive about the imputation of copying: as a student he apparently composed two acts of a tragedy on Wallace, only to abandon it on encountering a similar work on the subject, ‘because (said he to a friend) whatever I publish shall be original, and this tragedy might be considered as a copy’.46 The relationship between copying and resistance as between discipleship and betrayal is close; there is perhaps a sense in which the imitator also always ‘prefers not to’, in which respectful homage to the dead letters of the past is also an aggressive gesture of appropriation which nullifies original content in borrowed manner. In preferring not to (copy insatiably, without measure), it might be that Bartleby learns prudence; arguably, it kills him. And his epitaph must be that he sleeps with kings and counsellors. ‘With’? The nature of that corresponding proximity remains suggestively elusive. The tale resolves the enigma of Bartleby’s character by likening him to Job; the narrator’s authority for such an audacious attribution lies in the display of his superior sympathetic capacities. The example of ‘Bartleby’ opens a way of reading a corresponding poetic death-wish that commentators have been troubled by at the heart of Fergusson’s celebration of life. The self-cancelling abstractions that structure his poetic exercises in English ode writing, for example, turn on characterless prosopopoeia of a kind that George Santayana, referring to the ‘Genteel Tradition’ in nineteenth-century American writing, would later call ‘digestion of vacancy’:47 Health is attendant in thy radiant train, Round her the whisp’ring zephyrs gently play, Behold her gladly tripping o’er the plain, Bedeck’d with rural sweets and garlands gay.

(‘Ode to Hope’ in McDiarmid, v. ii, p. 78)

With self-cancelling predictability, the zephyrs ‘whisper’, the garlands are ‘gay’ and Hope ‘trips gladly’. The poetic voice has bleached itself of identifying characteristics, to become merely an iterative mark of poeticism. Imitation and parody are never far apart; only a hair’s-breadth of intention separates this from the theatrical parody of sensibility in a poem such as ‘The Canongate Playhouse in Ruins’: Ye few whose feeling hearts are ne’er estrang’d From soft emotions: Ye who often wear The eye of pity, and oft vent her sighs,

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(McDiarmid, v. ii, pp. 59–60)

Bartleby’s narrator, too, has the voice elegiac to perfection. Christopher Whyte has recently suggested, following Northrop Frye, that ‘literary imitation’ is a form of ‘creative misunderstanding, which draws its meaning from the extent to which an original model is left behind, betrayed or superseded’.48 The puzzling thing about the verse Fergusson wrote as a ‘copyist’ of English poetic tradition (which has led his commentators, almost universally, to abandon it in embarrassment or disgust) is how little it seems to ‘leave behind, betray or supersede’ its models. ‘[W]orthless’, ‘pedestrian’, ‘vitiated’, ‘pretty bad’, ‘artificial’ are some of the kinder adjectives used by critics.49 Neither, however, is it quite pastiche, in Kundera’s sense. Its character is to be unexceptionably characterless; this is ‘gentlemanly’ poetry. ‘Apprentice-work’ is the more usual explanation: Fergusson after all was only about nineteen at the time. Alluding, perhaps, to their lack of originality, the biographers’ reconstructions of both Fergusson and Bartleby through the copyist’s occupation are heavily burdened with two separate though related strains of imagery indicative of constraint: first, prisons and tombs; second, nourishment and digestion (the vocabulary of absorption and transformation). Both metaphoric chains support an ideological version of Romantic literary history in which second-rate writers use the language and copy the literature of a ‘parent’ or colonising culture, but at an alienated remove; the original genius, by contrast, discovers the literary character of the nation as he forges the language anew. The story, as we might by now expect, is a little too neat; in both cases the imagery emerges from a semantic frame construed by a narrator whose self-presentation the reader has reason to take into account in assessing the biographical subject. That is, at least two characters are in play in any biography; the verbal tissue of their co-construction is as much a fiction of representation as a representation of historical reality. Digestion, the same metaphoric enunciation of imitatio controversial in the reception of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, recurs in both cases. Shortly before he composed ‘Bartleby’, Melville identified Hawthorne’s literary achievement in strongly national terms: ‘We want no American Goldsmiths, nay, we want no American Miltons.’ Declaring that ‘it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation’, he acclaimed

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Hawthorne’s capacity to say ‘No!, in thunder’ to genteel optimism, and to express the ‘blackness of darkness’ at the heart of experience. The story of ‘Bartleby’ and the stories of Fergusson suggest that in Romantic biography the power of digestion as much as what (in the review of Hawthorne composed shortly before ‘Bartleby’) Melville identified as a ‘blackness of darkness’ at the heart of experience may be what truly differentiates a national, independent, poet from a scrivener.50 Bartleby writes as if famished, ‘gorg[ing]’ himself on documents with no pause for digestion (p. 19); the matter of his work passes, as it were, straight through him, with no alteration in manner consequent on interaction with the copyist’s self. Passing words ‘mechanically’ (p. 20) from eye to hand at once sustains his existence and protects it from the threat of change or uncertainty. But his digestion is bad; he prefers not to eat dinner. Paradoxically, his famished copying marks an absolute resistance to contagion by ingestion. To ‘verify the accuracy’ of his copy, as the narrator requests, would simply confirm the nullity of his own creative life. This too Bartleby prefers not to do. Excess and idleness are equally opposed to prudent productivity, and to sociable exchange. It was the implications of this observation that his fictional biographer, like Fergusson’s historical ones, found hard to swallow. The metaphor was current: it had been a familiar image of reading since Francis Bacon declared that ‘Some Bookes are to be Tasted, Others to be Swallowed, and some few to be Chewed and Digested . . . Some Bookes also may be read by Deputy, and Extracts made of them by Others.’51 Foucauldian readings have teased out ‘the sociopolitical implications of the trope’ as it was used in American writing about fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century.52 Steven Mailloux’s Reception Histories offers a useful double focus on analogy (reading is like eating) and effective compression of the metaphor (reading and eating belong to the same activity of nurturing the self), to point out the rhetorical force of metaphor in disciplining character. Depending on whether we apply the thought to Bartleby’s activity (the scrivener is at once famished and starving himself; his refusal to be nourished through interaction with others is a protest against – for example – the material conditions of mid-nineteenth-century production); or to the narrator’s projection (Bartleby’s self-starvation is a symptom of a malaise, a weakness of character in the face of adverse fortune, and as such a source of moralistic reflection), this structuring metaphor of the story is able to illuminate the literary characters of both biographer and subject. Contrary to Romantic wisdom that Scottish writers wrote better in Scots because it came naturally to them while English was an alien idiom acquired

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by laborious study, the example of Fergusson suggests that as far as poetic diction is concerned the assumption should be reversed: having been educated in the study and imitation of classical and neo-classical models, his initial attempts at composition perhaps too readily framed themselves in Augustan English; it was not until he began to experiment with Scots forms that the intractability of form and idiom slowed up his absorptive facility sufficiently to allow the creative misprision which permanently expanded the poetic possibilities of the language. In other words, it was not the copying that was the problem, but the copyist’s digestion. Digestion implies transformation; to reiterate may be to regurgitate. Elaborating the metaphor, we might say that the need to chew on an idiom which presented itself, poetically at least, in a less pre-digested form – to work out his own resources of rhyme, rhythm and image – enabled Fergusson to reconnect and absorb the concrete particulars of the moment, not to pass too quickly over them on the way to a general reflection, as tends to happen in his English verse. In Scots, Fergusson was not only a thoroughly modern urban poet, he was a poet of the alimentary process, whose idiom returns expression to the body and its appetites: ‘. . . round they gar the bicker roll, / To weet their mouth’ (‘The Daft Days’, in McDiarmid, v. ii, p. 33). That the penitentiary was the appropriate end-point for both Bartleby and the biographers’ Fergusson must be seen as a function in both cases of the narrators’ need to discipline, control and place their subjects’ characters in relation to their own sociable sensibilities. In the days of desolation, Fergusson seems to have reverted to English as a poetic medium. The paraphrase of ‘Job, Chap. iii’ is of course a kind of copy – Cowper and Smart are reputed to have ‘imitated’ biblical and classical texts to keep their expression disciplined on the near side of sanity. But though the verbal echoes of the King James Version are pervasive, this is not ‘Fergusson the Scrivener’, blandly rendering the facile surface of a borrowed diction. ‘Paraphrase’ here ‘digests’ the strong biblical rhetoric, transforming and tempering it in the forge of Fergusson’s own experience. There are signs in these final poems that he might have become, if not a great poet in English, at least a considerable one, as Burns too could be on occasion. ‘Bartleby’ has been read as a parable of the alienation of the midnineteenth-century American author from the literary marketplace; Fergusson’s poetic trajectory as an exemplary instance of the suppression of Scottish literary idiom under the literary dispensation of Britishness. Thus far, the transatlantic correspondences between their stories suggest that nation-based readings of their stories require, at the least, qualification.

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IV It appears that material simply does not exist for a ‘full and satisfactory life’ which might supply the inwardness absent from the documentation. In the end, silence is only silence: nothing, as Bartleby’s narrator discovers, can be made of negation, unless the want be supplied by his own imagination. Similarly, evidence of a historical connection between Melville and Fergusson is inconclusive. Conventional literary history does not offer very much purchase on this intriguing parallel. Furthermore, it is not obvious that we should be greatly advanced if we knew that Melville had (or had not) visited Fergusson’s grave in the Canongate churchyard, or could ‘prove’ that he had the Job poem in his mind when he composed ‘Bartleby’. The absence of the confirming literary relation imposes explanatory restrictions that may send us back into methodological reflection. A pilgrimage by Melville to the grave of Fergusson would be a fact of cultural history; its implications for the textual conjunction would remain obscure. If some complex intertextuality between the fictional and biographical instances is (as I have been suggesting) at work, it seems to operate retrospectively as much as prospectively, in ways that mutually implicate both the fictional character and the biographical subject. A series of anachronic homologies connects the symbolic elaboration of Fergusson’s profession as a law copyist with Bartleby’s: the poet’s lonely death in a madhouse is strikingly recapitulated in Bartleby’s increasing alienation from life and eventual fate; Burns’ Fergusson reflects his disenchantment with the Edinburgh ‘gentry’ who took him up only on their terms, as Melville’s narrator may project the author’s own distaste for his family’s desire that he should join the legal profession which sustained their genteel status, and his increasing disenchantment with the milieu which welcomed his early nautical tales. In each case self-representation – the creation of the author’s own literary character – was the state of having been overwhelmed by the representations of others, and the substituted representation was characterised by its failure to articulate the subjective reality of its subject. A poetics-led comparison supplements the historical lacunae of connection. For Melville’s contemporary Emerson the perception of ‘correspondences’ legitimately conferred connection on disparate manifestations that preserved their uniqueness. His epiphanic experience in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, for example, of the connectedness of all life was driven by a conviction of the relation between words and things whose proximate source was probably Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), which Emerson studied at Harvard. It left pervasive traces in his writing:

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throughout the radical words of all Languages, there may be traced some degree of correspondence with the object signified. With regard to moral and intellectual ideas . . . in every Language, the terms significant of them, are derived from the names of sensible objects to which they are conceived to be analogous.53

Melville’s narrator, who links Bartleby’s ceasing to ‘copy’ (to replicate language) with a failure of sight (perhaps equating to loss of Emersonian vision), employs metaphors as dead as Bartleby’s letters; seeking to assimilate the passive scrivener into a sympathetic universe, he fails to ask why Bartleby’s passive resistance to correspondence is intolerable. Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’ – what Deleuze calls his ‘formula’ – drops all correspondent use of language into a black hole.54 His language is as starved as his life. It refuses both sympathy and transference, offers no metaphors or figures, is shorn even of the tonal inflections of irony. Something (historical) has happened in the narrator’s encounter with the scrivener, but the textually mediated nature of the reader’s encounter with that presumed event resists appropriation absolutely. The contradictions in the tale’s very precisely indicated internal chronology make it yet clearer that its meaning is not going to become available through recovery of a consistent sequence of events.55 Stanfield had accepted the usefulness of chronology in biographical reconstruction, but advocated different connecting principles to give the represented character the force of conviction with a reader. ‘The aim is to recommend a regular and uninterrupted detail of individual action, and a perfect and full delineation of individual character . . . action should be concatenated, and character developed’. It is the biographer’s ‘province not only to describe, but connect; not only to narrate, but philosophize’ (pp. 68–69). How, then, in the absence of evidence of influence, might critical literary history engage with manifest transatlantic correspondences without collapsing ‘likeness’ into ‘identity’? Job’s futile but emotionally potent anachronic desire to have died before he was born suggests that lateral connections of grammar and rhetoric may offer heuristic potential to the comparison. If – rather than pursuing an ‘original source’ for the verbal coincidence – we attend to the tense changes across the iterations from the pluperfect subjunctive (Job) to the imperfect subjunctive (Fergusson) to the present indicative (he is asleep ‘with kings and counsellors’) in ‘Bartleby’, and the transferred imputation from a first person experiential (Job) to a third person attributive voice (Bartleby’s narrator), a different sequence of association unfolds. Job’s curse is appropriated as a wished-for state by Fergusson’s narrator, then reappropriated as a description of the actual condition of Bartleby by his well-meaning narrator. With each iteration

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and each shift in context the phrase becomes more definite and present in tense, as it becomes more distant in attribution: it advances grammatically as it recedes deictically. The temporal sequence becomes part of a matrix of different kinds of relation. Sequence and chronology, that is, themselves emerge as functions of representation; textual presence and historical process are mutually modifying in the transatlantic literary relation so construed. In this frame appropriation is signalled by textual disruption. The ‘Authorised Version’, as it is termed, is a translation of a presumed ‘original’, and Fergusson’s poem is entitled ‘Job, Chap. iii Paraphrased’. Translation, as Walter Benjamin put it in a famous phrase, ‘issues from its original – not so much from its life as from its afterlife’.56 The aspect of belatedness, the ‘afterlife’, might seem to point back to the chronology of traditional history, but the multiplicity of possible translations does away with origins and finitudes of meaning (such as, for example, those instantiated in narratives of national origin). For Benjamin, translation ‘seems to be the only conceivable reason for saying “the same thing” repeatedly’.57 This, if anything, sums up Bartleby’s life: it is, after all, what he does for a living. A repeated concern through the different contexts of this chapter has been the relationship between transitivity and intransigence in correspondence: between the things that will ‘cross’ or transmit – of a life, of a literature, of a culture – and those that will not. Bartleby’s major characteristic seems to be that he is without connection of any kind; he is compared by the narrator to ‘A bit of a wreck in the mid Atlantic’ (p. 32) – a floating, unanchored self, bleached of character and therefore ‘unaccountable’. Without relation, he performs no publicly recognisable selfhood. The writing which defines this miserable being’s existence has no identifiable point of origin, either in America or Britain. In mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American cultural politics the absence of reciprocal international copyright agreement determined Melville’s publication strategies; across the Atlantic it also preoccupied Dickens (who makes a displaced metonymic textual appearance in ‘Bartleby’ in the pastiche characters Nippers, Ginger Nut and Turkey, whose faces ‘blazed like a grate of Christmas coals’ (p. 15)). Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut are eccentrics, ‘characters’ who have strayed into the narrator’s tale from a Dickensian novel. We know why they behave as they do. Bartleby’s own face, in contrast, is ‘white’ – unreadable – by comparison with their florid complexions. Leaving aside the complex political discussions around ‘representation’ in nineteenthcentury America touched on in an earlier chapter, we note also that the copyist has no copyright; he cannot control subsequent appropriation or impersonation by others. The Marxist historian of the novel Georg Lukács

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regarded character as always subject to the ‘forces’ of history. In this sense there is a conceptual continuum between Enlightenment stadial theory and classical Marxism. Biography in the form of character representation (as in Bartleby’s melancholic nature), and biography as contingency (adventures) both interfere with the progressive, forward momentum of conjectural history. Both subscribe to a view of history as narrative, forward-moving and progressive. Though it emerged from this ethos, Romantic biography tended to cast doubt on this trajectory, both in the recalcitrance of character to appropriation through representation, and in the residual contingency of events which it was the biographer’s business to connect. The resistances of the genre to its own accomplishment of character were ignored or disguised by Fergusson’s early biographers; they become the matter of Melville’s tale. Bartleby’s character is, quite literally, intransigent: it will not cross from existence to representation. Imitation appears to endorse the primacy of its models, but it characteristically divorces manner from matter. As Derrida made clear, iteration (and this is where it is anathema to Romantic transcendence and national literary history alike) does not transform or give context to singularity; in ‘Bartleby’ copying is the sequential, non-progressive mode that governs the passing of time. Its relationship to resistance is close; there is a sense in which the imitator also always ‘prefers not to’, in which his respectful homage to the dead letters of the past is also an aggressive gesture of appropriation which nullifies the uniqueness of the original. On ‘the logic which links repetition to alterity’, Derrida insists that ‘the iterability of the mark . . . does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchorage’.58 Melville’s tale realises this metaphorically in the image of Bartleby as ‘a bit of a wreck in the mid Atlantic’, as Henry James’ transposed version of Fuller, the characterless woman, would see her European avatar Countess Gemini as living on the ‘floating fragments of a wrecked renown’.59 The failure of correspondence rejects a whole approach to literary history, whose rationale is founded in evolutionary progression and development. One of the possible (in the event unrealised) characters sketched for Sheppard Lee by his author was ‘The genteel forger, counterfeiter, and bank robber.’60 One point that ‘Bartleby’ would seem to make very forcibly for nationbased American literature, and which concurs with Fergusson criticism in Scottish literary history, is that there is no future for an idiom which simply copies the output of inherited expression; more than merely stifling poetic creativity, it may reduce all of culture to the ashes of dead letters, or failures of correspondence, so many pious words inscribed on a tombstone.

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Iteration halts the teleological march of History. This returns us to mimicry at once subversive and subservient. The more perfect the copy, the more it throws into question the status of an original or the purposive narrative that might issue from such a sequence. As Borges’ Pierre Menard and his Don Quixote project imply, a perfect copy, like a perfect translation, would undo the relation of priority between the two manifestations, and therefore the categories ‘original’ and ‘copy’ that are presumed to relate, prioritise and temporalise them into a coherent story of procession. The copy, by virtue of being another, undoes singularity. In terms of Milan Kundera’s description of the necessarily contextual nature of our perception of art, something reproduced, even perfectly, is not only denatured, but, literally, unreadable: ‘[the] anachronism . . . would be spontaneously . . . felt to be ridiculous, false, incongruous, even monstrous’.61 Bartleby’s passive intransigence (he is all and only copyist, the inquiries of the well-meaning narrator notwithstanding) is equally intransitive: his life cannot be made to mean. The story constructed around this ‘irreparable loss to literature’ (p. 13) is supplementary (in Derrida’s sense) to the point of being de trop. But it is in keeping. For Bartleby’s narrator it is the singularity of the scrivener which requires the biographical attempt to assimilate the unaccountable ‘fact’ of Bartleby to a textual genealogy of suffering that may lean, finally, on the authority of a biblical original. It is not necessary to reach for a higher-order explanation in (say) Melville’s subversive intentions towards Transcendental optimism. By itself the verbal coincidence is helpful in exerting some leverage on how the Romantic biography of Fergusson seems to have been developed against the grain of the very limited evidence on which it was construed, and on the cultural hegemony it was designed to support. To elucidate this transatlantic comparison in terms of a simple analogy that might take the form ‘Bartleby’s narrator is like Fergusson’s biographers, as Bartleby is like Fergusson the poet’ seems unsatisfactory. But in the absence of traditional comparative literary history’s preferred term of influence, where do we turn? Bartleby’s narrator-biographer, finding himself excluded from the inner life of his subject, conjures a surrogate subject fabricated from projection and inference. Here Joseph Roach’s model for ‘circumatlantic performance’ in theatre, in which new renditions ‘often carry within them the memory of otherwise forgotten substitutions’, may be helpful.62 Arguing that, faced with the spectre of their own obsolescence, cultures like individuals attempt to reify their position in the accepted terms of their milieu, Roach describes also the ways in which resistance comes through as negation, a shadow occupation whose traces remain to trouble

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overt acquiescence. This seems accurately to describe the strategies of both Bartleby’s narrator and Fergusson’s biographers, and their textual characters, when viewed through the lens of transatlantic comparison. Copying itself, like mimicry, is a kind of surrogacy, a transposition or translation of the content of an original into the manner of imitation. The result is a kind of reciprocal haunting whereby for the reader ‘original’ and ‘copy’ bear the textual traces of one another and, so doing, mutually undermine, as they confirm, both the rationality and the uniqueness of character-in-context. If we reconstrue the performance of difference inherent in the deployment of character in apposition to earlier – and later – performances, ‘character’ emerges as a location for meaning and emotional investment capable of potentially limitless enrichment through association. To re-read ‘Bartleby’ through biographies of Fergusson is to emerge with a more poignant – sharper, more pointed – sense of the tragedy of character.

chapter 8

Poetics of character

To originate is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine.

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Magazine Writing – Peter Snook’

There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel: a rhetoric in which the feeling of one man is communicated to another . . . [A] poet manifests his personality . . . by his style. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel

In many ways, of course, character would appear to be the ideal pragmatic category. As opposed to identities conceived in terms of essence or nature, character is antifoundational, open-ended, and in process, the site of self-crafting and mediation between the individual actor and the wider social world. Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now

Event and form, history and fiction are at their most interwoven in biography, the story of character. It claims historical status as a true reading of a life, but reserves the right to imagine (or perhaps to allegorise) identity and relation from the fragmentary data that survive its chronological span. Bartleby’s life – or rather, the failure of the lawyer who narrates his story to constitute a viable biography from the iterative rather than progressive features of the deceased scrivener’s behaviour – makes the narrator uneasily aware that the correspondence and analogy on which his reading of character is premised depend on the willingness of the subject to be represented. Without human connection, and apparently desiring none, this ‘singular’ figure Bartleby is legible only as dis-placed from all relation; his history – if that is what it is – suggests he may also suffer temporal dislocation.1 The mild negation of exchange that refuses even to solidify itself into refusal renders him characterless, ‘unaccountable’, unwrite-able (p. 27). At the end, the hint of a previous life in the Dead Letter Office provides just a straw of comfort (in a possible metonymic allegory) for the narrator’s attempt to find a biography for Bartleby. 238

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I In his various attempts to map (and in his own poetic persona, to embody) a continuous afterlife for Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns became a ‘biographer’ of his ‘elder Brother in the muse’, in this case, a biographer who manifestly projected an autobiographical self into the neglected poetpersona’s record, to create a new kind of poetic character. It was, as I suggested in the previous chapter, only a partial self-projection, one among many; it left out of the account altogether many of his other rhetorical personae. But poetic character was an essential attribute of reputation, and from the Preface to his first published works in the Kilmarnock edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786 Burns was alert to the need to pre-empt and influence the readership he hoped to attract. The rhetorical control of the Preface was impeccable, and the voice gave the lie to its own claims of rusticity. Invoking the classical pastoral muses of Theocritus and Virgil, the poet at once claimed kinship and denied all knowledge of them: ‘To the author of this, these, and other celebrated names their countrymen, are, in their original languages, A fountain shut up, and a “book sealed”.’2 Misquoting the Song of Solomon, he appropriates and adds further layers to the densely figural biblical texture: his is a hallowed enterprise (the ‘sister, the spouse’ withheld from the speaker is usually understood as an allegory for the Church), and an erotic one. Additionally, in its new context, Burns’ reorientation of the Classical Pierian Spring as a fountain animates Miltonic echoes from Paradise Lost and Pope’s An Essay on Criticism and suggests more native sources of inspiration. Most daring, perhaps, is the implication that the ecclesiastical function may have been usurped by the textual one: the biblical source makes no mention of a ‘book’. The sealed book of the classics cedes to the open book immediately before the reader: something new is announced. Burns’ own voice was to be read more personally, as a series of private effusions brought bashfully into the list of publicity: Now that he appears in the public character of an Author, he does it with fear and trembling. So dear is fame to the rhyming tribe, that even he, an obscure, nameless Bard, shrinks aghast, at the thought of being branded as – ‘An impertinent blockhead, obtruding his nonsense on the world; and, because he can make a shift to jingle a few doggerel, Scotch rhymes together, looking upon himself as a Poet of no small consequence forsooth!’ (p. 175)

In the act of articulating its scepticism, the disclaimer anticipates and projects the voice of the scoffing reader away from the ‘Bard’ who seems

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both innocent of and fully cognisant of An Essay on Criticism and The Dunciad. The poet’s claim to the public character of his vocation is implied, and denied, with finely balanced assurance: If any Critic catches at the word genius, the Author tells him, once for all, that he certainly looks upon himself as possest of some poetic abilities, otherwise his publishing in the manner he has done, would be a manoeuvre below the worst character, which, he hopes, his worst enemy will ever give him: but to the genius of a Ramsay, or the glorious dawnings of the poor, unfortunate Fergusson, he, with equal unaffected sincerity, declares, that even in his highest pulse of vanity, he has not the most distant pretensions. These two justly admired Scotch Poets he has often had in his eye in the following pieces; but rather with a view to kindle at their flame, than for servile imitation. (pp. 175–76)

This is less false modesty than a declaration of Dionysian imitatio; it claims, effectively, that imitation of nature (mimesis) is achieved not through mimicry but by reframing the greatness achieved by poetic forebears. Within a page Ramsay and Fergusson are audaciously substituted for Theocritus and Virgil, a rhetorical move that effectively gathers them all into a composite harbinger of this new voice. Flummoxed by the apparently anomalous social position of such knowing ignorance, the critic James Sibbald asked rhetorically in The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany in October 1786, ‘Who are you, Mr Burns?’ Unconsciously perhaps (like Bartleby’s interlocutors), infected by the idiom of his subject, the reviewer echoed Burns’ rhetorical apophasis as well as his prosopopoeia, as he ventriloquised the poet’s response: I am a poor country man; I was bred up at the school of Kilmarnock; I understand no languages but my own; I have studied Allan Ramsay and Fergusson. My poems have been praised at many a fire-side, and I ask no patronage for them, if they deserve none. I have not looked on mankind through the spectacle of books. An ounce of mother-wit, you know, is worth a pound of clergy; and Homer and Ossian . . . could neither write nor read.3

The Romantic personification simplifies the issue and makes the critical assessment inevitable: ‘to those who admire the exertions of untutored fancy, and are blind to many faults for the sake of numberless beauties, his poems will afford singular gratification. His observations on human characters are acute and sagacious . . . Of rustic pleasantry he has a rich fund’ – and so on.4 This tendency to read the poetry through the projected ‘life’ of its author was formalised in James Currie’s hugely popular four-volume The Complete

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Works of Robert Burns; With an Account of his Life, and a Criticism of his Writings, to which is Prefixed, Some Observations on the Character and Condition of the Scottish Peasantry (1800). A shaping biographical framework prefaced the work, construing a poetic character at once unique in its personal flaws, and representative in its nationality. Similar assimilation of the ‘Life’ and the work would characterise nineteenth-century responses to Burns’ poetry; in Jane Austen’s Sanditon (unfinished novel 1817) the heroine confesses to having ‘read several of Burns’s poems with great delight’, but declares herself ‘not poetic enough to separate a man’s poetry entirely from his Character; and poor Burns’s known irregularities, greatly interrupt [her] enjoyment of his lines’.5 Currie’s work (which according to Nigel Leask went through twenty editions in as many years following its publication) set a sequence for readers of all subsequent nineteenth-century editions of Burns, culminating in the 1896 Chambers–Wallace edition of The Life and Works in which the poems are embedded in the biography. Reviewing J. G. Lockhart’s more censorious but equally influential selfstanding Life of Robert Burns in 1828, Thomas Carlyle noted that this was already the sixth biography to appear in the fewer than twenty-five years that had passed since the poet’s death, ‘miserable and neglected’ in 1795.6 Unsurprisingly (given his own interest in writing history as biography), Carlyle did not regard such attention as disproportionate, declaring ‘the character of Burns . . . a theme that cannot easily become either trite or exhausted’ (pp. 258–59). These biography-led editions of Burns’ poetry were carried by emigrants across the world; they were reprinted in Philadelphia, New York and Toronto, and then more widely. The image of Burns received by Emerson, Longfellow, Whitman and Margaret Fuller may be readily traced to Currie’s and Lockhart’s biographies and their successors, all of whose rhetorical parameters were set by Enlightenment debates on the character of genius and its relation to morality. Henry Mackenzie’s crucial review in The Lounger, heralded ‘Surprising effects of Original Genius, exemplified in the Poetical Productions of Robert Burns, an Ayrshire Ploughman’.7 This was the image of Burns which fitted the conceptual framework of Scottish Enlightenment rhetoric; it was scarcely surprising that it should also appeal to a generation of American writers brought up on Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and the criticism of The Mirror and The Lounger.8 One of the prized exhibits in the allegorical collection garnered by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘virtuoso’ was the metonymic ‘mountain daisy’ (discussed earlier, in Chapter 3) which personified the most anodyne version of Scotland’s ‘rural poet’ peddled for popular consumption. Since

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Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique in ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception’, of the merging of commerce and cultural spheres in the 1940s, material forces including the commodification of aesthetics in the Romantic period have attracted the attention of historians of literature. Similar processes were clearly at work much earlier in the Edinburgh literati’s ‘discovery’ of the ploughman poet.9 As Carlyle and Lockhart themselves pointed out, the representative and foible-driven model of character these early biographies were working with was inadequate for a readership already attuned to psychologised accounts of organic personalities: they ‘err[ed] alike in presenting us with a detached catalogue of his several supposed attributes, virtues, and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting character as a living unity. This . . . is not painting a portrait; but gauging the length and breadth of the several features, and jotting down their dimensions in arithmetical ciphers’ (Carlyle, p. 260). The result, Carlyle claimed, had been to portray Burns’ character as a hopelessly inconsistent and puzzling combination of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ features. Lockhart’s scenic method (based on his recent close rereading of Boswell’s Johnson) of revealing Burns’ character in action was an improvement, but even this did not meet Carlyle’s belief – itself founded on Boswellian authority – that true biography would reveal ‘all the inward springs and relations of [its subject’s] character’ (p. 261). Tracing the transatlantic editions and biographies of Burns suggests some measure of the popularity of the poet and the process by which his transatlantic character was acquired; it is a significant fact that people expended sometimes substantial sums from meagre resources to acquire a relic of the man who had become the national bard of a faraway land. Such records enable book historians to draw maps of migration patterns, the reading habits of emigrants, the material forms of tradition and transmission, and many other things. They cannot, however, tell us about the particular nature or quality of Burns’ impact on the character of American Romantic writing, or elucidate the likeness and difference embedded in the poetic practice of its greatest exponents. In this chapter I return to the relationships between the poetics of character writing in biography and performance, to argue that a ‘Burnsian’ Romanticism founded in the performance of poetic character received, through Emerson, particular expression in American writing which inflected transatlantic reception of the more theoretically articulated practices of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This distinctively compounded poetics is characteristic of what I have been describing as a ‘transatlantic dynamic’.

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Biography, in which the history of the poet’s life in the world (the poetic character) touches the character of the poetry – we should not, after all, have any biographies of Burns or of Fergusson had it not been for the prior interest of the poetry – clarifies a notably transatlantic poetics of character that in turn contributes to what we think of as a distinctively Romantic voice. The essays and poetry of Burns’ near-contemporary Coleridge became key texts for American nineteenth-century Romanticism; like Burns a would-be emigrant enthused by American freedoms, Coleridge planned emigration, intending to settle in the Susquehanna valley; his writing was subsequently read avidly by New England intellectuals and had a discernable impact on the formulation of Transcendentalism. Thus far, the historical record of the two poets’ reception in America displays quite similar features. But Coleridge (the ‘man’) did not become the subject of poems by emigrants, nor did his poems pervade popular verse. His American reception includes very little published interest in Coleridge’s character. This is – from the point of view of literary history – notably ironic, in that Coleridge’s writing was the major source for belief in the organic unity of ‘the one Life, within us and abroad’.10 Burns’ ‘life’ and character, on the other hand, were inseparable in the reception of his poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. Only the printed works and historical ‘personality’ of Byron were understood to be in comparably close relationship to one another. ‘Life’ and ‘personality’ have to be in inverted commas here, and should probably both be in the plural, because there were many versions, formal and informal, of the biographical-story-cum-poeticappreciation, answering in each case as much to the self-projection of the biographer as to the actual life of the subject. Burns (like Byron after him) was as I have indicated himself a significant agent of a poetry, and prose, of self-writing. Poetic ideas travel in different ways from intellectual ideas: rhythms, echoes, voices and images disperse influence beyond the reach of documentary trace but still available to that combination of memory and imagination which constitutes emotional familiarity and extended recognition. Some images and some lives seem to carry huge resonance for large numbers of people in a way that others do not. If we ask similar historical questions in the area of reading practice – how the poems were read to produce ‘the figure of Robert Burns’ for his transatlantic readers – it becomes clearer that American performances of ‘the poet as Burns’ suggest a different understanding of the correspondence between poet and poetry from that projected by contemporary readers for, say, either Wordsworth or Coleridge. Alternatively put, it appears that readers felt that in reading and

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appropriating Burns’ poetry they had absorbed Burns’ character into their own imaginative identities. Something similar seems to have been at work in American culture’s relationship to the projected poetic character of ‘Emerson’ as ‘Transcendentalism’ personified notwithstanding his own refusal to accept the association. Through Burns we may re-read Emersonian Transcendentalism as a consciously belated performance of Romanticism in person (through the medium of lectures) and in print, whose salient feature is a provocative courting of what Charles Taylor has called the elevation of ‘inwardness’ to the exclusion of the decentring reflections of otherness.11 Burns’ and Emerson’s projections of ‘poetic’ and ‘philosophic’ characters offer particular versions of writing the relationship between how language is used and the ideas it embodies, understood through the lens of individual identity. In this chapter the argument works towards Burns’ poetic engagement with epistemological scepticism, with a view to suggesting that questions about our human capacity as knowers (Emerson’s ‘ultimate reason . . . the highest spiritual cause’ of ‘the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan’ in ‘Nature’) may animate the language of the Scots poet and the American Transcendentalist, enriching influence with a description of dynamic affinity to show how poetic character illuminates the transatlantic texture – the ‘content’ – of likeness.12

II On the centenary of the birth of Burns, Ralph Waldo Emerson (the ‘worst Scotsman of all’, as he described himself) was called upon to respond to the toast at the Burns Club Dinner in Boston, Massachusetts. Burns, he said, has given voice to all the experiences of common life; he has endeared the farm-house and cottage, patches and poverty, beans and barley; ale, the poor man’s wine; hardship; the fear of debt; the dear society of weans and wife, of brothers and sisters, proud of each other, knowing so few and finding amends for want and obscurity in books and thoughts. . . He had that secret of genius to draw from the bottom of society the strength of its speech, and astonish the ears of the polite with these artless words, better than art, and filtered of all offence . . . how to take from fairs and gypsies, blacksmiths and drovers, the speech of the market and the street, and clothe it with melody.13

Making due allowance for the conventions of after-dinner speeches and commemorative occasions, and the élite constituency of his audience, Emerson’s tribute reads languidly now. Here is a ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’ identikit, indistinguishable from innumerable perorations from the

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platform of Burns suppers (a tradition that began in 1801) on both sides of the Atlantic before and since. By 1859 both men had become public institutions, the representative voices of their respective national literatures; the shared celebrity did nothing for the eulogist. America’s most celebrated and eloquent lecturer stumbled: ‘The memory of Burns, – I am afraid heaven and earth have taken too good care of it to leave us anything to say.’ The ‘Immortal Memory’ silenced the Emersonian voice. The context makes it clear that Emerson’s response was undertaken reluctantly, and accomplished without distinction. If that was the best America’s national sage could do for Scotland’s national poet perhaps we need to look elsewhere for comparative and mutual illumination. An established literary-historical genealogy of influence from Burns’ vernacular poetry through Wordsworth’s ‘real language of men’ and nature poetry to Emerson is well established, notwithstanding Matthew Arnold’s eagerness to distinguish the pre-eminence of his hero Wordsworth in the succession. There is, certainly, a case for noting that directly and indirectly ‘SelfReliance’ resonates with Burns’ addresses to the figural personifications of that ‘WEE, modest, crimson-tipped flow’r’ the mountain daisy, the ‘ugly, creepan’ blastet wonner’ the louse, or even his Muse ‘guid, auld SCOTCH DRINK!’14 Emerson’s insistence on the primacy and uniqueness of individual experience as the basis for writing – ‘Life is our dictionary’ – finds a ready proleptic echo in Burns’ poetic self-assertion: Then farewel hopes of Laurel-boughs, To garland my poetic brows! Henceforth, I’ll rove where busy ploughs Are whistling thrang, An’ teach the lanely heights an’ howes My rustic sang.

(v. i, p. 180)

We could, alternatively, ascribe the similarities and apparent echoes to such serviceable Romantic terms as the ‘spirit of the age’, or the Zeitgeist. But influence seems an unhelpful term in this context; parallels and analogies simply demonstrate that Emerson and Burns shared the interests of their time or thought along similar lines. Both approaches make for fairly predictable teleologically driven literary history. There is just enough of a different kind of echo in the ‘beans and barley’ and ‘the speech of the market and the street’ in Emerson’s rather tired 1859 toast to Burns, to suggest a connection with the much edgier speaker who in a lecture twenty years before had aggressively celebrated the advent of ‘The American Scholar’:

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As a demand, this begs to be set beside Burns’ ‘Epistle to John Lapraik, an Old Scotch Bard’: Gie me ae spark o’ Nature’s fire, That’s a’ the learning I desire; Then tho’ I drudge thro’ drub an’ mire At pleugh or cart, My Muse, tho’ hamely in attire, May touch the heart.

(v. i, p. 87)

‘Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous’, as Emerson declares in Nature.15 That aggressive imperative, that sense of entitlement – ‘Give me insight into today . . . Give me ae spark o’ Nature’s fire . . . Give me health and a day . . .’ – confer energy and authority on ideas which, paraphrased, reduce to convention and inert cliché. It is easy to see how, deprived of their rhetorical occasion, both Emerson and Burns became national treasures, their work repositories of pithy sentiment rendered anodyne as aphorism. In context, though, the immediacy of address and the challenging promise of return on investment, guaranteed by the poetic character, redeem and energise the thought. The contrast with Wordsworth’s characteristic stance of withdrawal from the literary marketplace is immediately striking. Such defiance holds out great hope. These declarations of poetic independence, like their political counterpart discussed in Chapter 5, enact their emancipation. This is writing with attitude. The ‘American Scholar’ passage inspired Stanley Cavell’s defence of ‘ordinary language philosophy’, a version of which he developed from Wittgenstein as a way of understanding the relationship between language and experience formulated by Cavell in (Coleridgean) Romantic terms as a seeking for unity. ‘What the ordinary language philosopher is feeling’, Cavell writes, is that our relation to the world’s existence is somehow closer than the ideas of believing and knowing are made to convey . . . this sense of intimacy with existence, or intimacy lost, is fundamental to the experience of what I understand ordinary language philosophy to be.16

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A more interesting literary relationship between Scotland’s bard and America’s favourite philosopher than national literary history has yet been able to see what lurks in Cavell’s ‘somehow’. What is at stake is the nature of the relation between thinking about the world and writing about it. And, Cavell claims (after Hume), this is a philosophical question as much as a poetic one. It is through language that abstract arguments carry conviction, or fail to. In both Emerson’s prose and Burns’ poetry, the quality of thought is a product of style. Being persuaded, for the hearer or reader, depends on a quality of voice. Literary criticism may bring us into closer proximity with the poetic character of the writing by attempting to describe Cavell’s ‘somehow’ rhetorically and stylistically, to think further about the relationship between how language is used and the ideas it embodies. Style turns matters of judgment from questions of knowledge into issues of value – literary value – guaranteed by voice. Emerson articulates this in a journal entry: A man’s style is his intellectual Voice only in part under his control . . . It has its own proper tone & manner which when he is not thinking of it, it will always assume. He can mimic the voices of others, he can modulate it with the occasion & the passion, but it has its own individual nature.17

This suggests that we should look for the philosophy not in abstract ideas that may be extracted from Emerson’s prose, but as effects of the stylistic exigencies of essays that were imagined into being as performances. Making his living from the lecture platform, for Emerson the question of style, as R. Jackson Wilson has put it, ‘translated itself into a question of oral performance . . . [N]o clear boundary could be drawn between the style of his performance and the style of his writing . . . The writing had to be an anticipatory echo of the public reading.’18 The suggestion is not that the oratorical style of the lectures as delivered survives into the published essays, rather that the voice which mesmerised Emerson’s lyceum audiences was a product of sedulously controlled and projected literary character which spread contagiously, as J. R. Lowell noted, across the faces of the lecturer’s audience until the critic suspended observation and ‘found [him]self caught up in the common enthusiasm’.19 Emerson’s chosen literary genre, as Lamb’s essays had recently shown, was performative in the sense later perceived by Theodor Adorno that it ‘disdain[ed] to begin by deriving cultural products from something underlying them’.20 Courting ‘profundity’, it risked ‘skillful superficiality’ (p. 154). Its effects exploited what Adorno called ‘the moment of irresponsibility’ (p. 154) in which ‘Man Thinking’ encountered man reading.21 Perhaps more than any other

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genre the essay makes available Adorno’s ‘arena’ of relational experience in language that is the domain of transatlantic exchange (p. 161).

III Stanley Cavell’s reassessment of Emerson’s writing, enabled by the ordinary language philosophy tradition derived from Wittgenstein and opposed to analytic abstraction, is itself characterised by a Romantic search for unity between perception and world and a desire to overcome the tyranny of ‘system’ over thinking. It trusts Wordsworth’s ‘common language of men’ (Burns’ ‘pleugh or cart’, Emerson’s ‘meal in the firkin’) to achieve it. Ordinary language philosophy is less interested in identifying essential qualities of abstract nouns like Faith, Truth or Life, than in how they function in actual use. It claims to solve – or rather dissolve – apparently intractable problems in philosophy (‘what is Love?’ for example) not by attempting to ascribe properties to the idea, ‘Love’, but by looking at how the word is used by real people on particular occasions. Cavell’s literary examples in this area of his work are drawn largely from the poetry and prose of Wordsworth and Coleridge; indeed, he takes it as axiomatic that insofar as the wrestling between idealism and scepticism which characterises his own philosophical stance is a fundamentally Romantic position or plight, it must be exemplified in their works, if anywhere. As such, his philosophical criticism takes the semantic transparency of the ‘real language of men’ for granted.22 It seems obvious that Wordsworth’s poetry and criticism approximate more closely to what we understand by New England Transcendentalism, than anything in Burns: One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.23

It is precisely the likelihood that Wordsworth was a source for the young Emerson that makes the conjunction for my purposes less interesting. Despite the impact of Lyrical Ballads in America the Wordsworth that Emerson encountered in the 1820s was no longer the uncertain, edgy Wordsworth of the Revolutionary years, but the poet of Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) and Yarrow Revisited (1825), already halfway to becoming himself a Victorian Sage (the kind of living public monument into which Emerson himself would metamorphose by stages) that a poem

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like this would seem to disparage. The first mention of Wordsworth in Emerson’s Journals is in 1826. Returning to my earlier claim that the transactional nature of character as a performed enactment of sociable exchange offers a model for a poetics of comparative literary history, I want to focus on a rather different meeting point of language, and of style: the nonsynchronous but strikingly similar words of two young iconoclasts for whom the instability of whim, the contingency, unreliability and perhaps transience of feeling were crucial, as it could never be said to be for Wordsworth, the solidity and reliability of whose impulses the reader is repeatedly invited to bank on. The performative poetic characters projected in Burns’ poetry and Emerson’s essays challenge this confidence. Describing performativity as ‘that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’, Judith Butler’s account of identity as a linguistic performance resonates with eighteenthcentury understanding of virtue ethics, in which character described the manner in which a person performed his or her life. ‘Self’ was always at least implicitly understood as ‘self performed in relation to another’; its accomplishment was always situationally dependent. Character was a performance that might be felicitous or infelicitous in achieving its end in particular contexts (which might, as Charles and Joseph Surface in Sheridan’s School for Scandal displayed, include duping their audience about their ‘real’ characters). In a literary context language was its essential medium. This was not only a product of formal rhetorical training such as that delivered in Smith’s or Blair’s lectures: Burns’ internalising of conduct book lessons in self-deportment and observation of others is evident throughout his letters to different correspondents, in the Preface to the first edition of his poetry discussed above, and in the two Commonplace Books that displayed the ‘rustic character’ both prior and in relation to his removal from Dumfries to Edinburgh. Burns began his second Commonplace Book in April 1787 on arrival in the city; his susceptibility to new manifestations of manners is demonstrated in an intention to record descriptions of character types he encountered, counterpoised with experiments in subjectivity. He was now ordering his life – ‘producing’ it as a story – not by the rhythms of the farming year, but as a man of social credit in a literary economy. A mere ten years later, the unpublished Commonplace Book was plundered and paraphrased by Currie, then Lockhart and other biographers as direct evidence to support their evocations of the poet’s character. Very soon after Burns’ death, treating the posthumously surviving manuscript as a failed exercise in characterology, Isaac D’Israeli’s The Literary Character made a curious comment:

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With the benefit of recent scholarship on the eighteenth-century commonplace books the task may be more confidently regarded as a literary exercise akin to that of the clerk whose formation through writing Augst analyses in nineteenth-century America. It is a crucible of character-making and literary voice in which personal projection, moral reflection and incidental description are melded through transcription of draft letters, Burns’ own poems and those of others that matched his mood of the moment. It is a composite polyanthea of poetic character. Resolving to ‘take down’ his impression of new characters ‘on the spot’, Burns confides to an unknown reader that ‘with me, making remarks is by no means a solitary pleasure. – I want some one to laugh with me, some one to be grave with me; some one to please me and help my discrimination with his or her own remark, and at times, no doubt, to admire my acuteness and precision.’25 Even in this work which Burns appears to have had no intention of publishing, a reader – a sociable other – is conjured into implied existence as necessary to the act of self-disclosure. In a letter of 19 April 1787 Burns described ‘tak[ing] to pieces rt. Honorables, Honorables, and Reverends not a few’ in the Commonplace Book.26 Satiric portraits are followed by song, a second tranche of prose characters, an account of the poet’s own situation in Ellisland, copies of letters to patronising correspondents and so on. This miscellany is not random jottings; the manuscript is fair copy with additional careful corrections, and its implied reader is the book itself. Expressing some scepticism about the capacity of even the most intimate friendship to sustain the outpouring of a man’s bosom, ‘his every thought and floating fancy, his very inmost soul’ without loss of respect or public character (CPB2, p. 9), he declared his determination ‘to make these Pages my Confidate [sic]’; ‘never did four shilling purchase so much friendship, since Confidence went first to market or Honesty was set to sale’ (p. 10). Well before Melville’s anatomy, character had for Burns the aspect of a literary friendship based on an ironic mix of confidential and commodified self-performance in a discontinuous register of modes. Private ownership turns out to be the best safeguard for character: ‘I think a lock and key a security at least equally secure to the bosom of any friend whatever’ (p. 10). In practice, these apparent anxieties of confidence are a rhetorical flourish: there is very little of a ‘confidential’ nature in the Commonplace Book’s pages,

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though it does contain a sequence of candid Theophrastan ‘characters’ of Edinburgh worthies such as Hugh Blair, Dugald Stewart and Burns’ own publisher William Creech. Returning to Cavell’s ‘somehow’ – and noting again in passing the centrality of Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to Emerson’s college education – we may begin to look for that close ‘relation to the world’s existence’, in the consciously manufactured contradictory rhetorical situation of writing ventriloquising speaking. This literary character is not, primarily, to be understood as a national or representative attribute, though others would subsequently suborn it to these ends. Emerson’s American Scholar is ‘Man Speaking’ rather than ‘a man’s speech’, or ‘an American’s speech’, because performance – rhetorical identity in the moment of utterance – is its essence.27 Burns uses it to arresting effect in the defiant assertion of presence against ‘Fortune’ in his second poetic epistle to John Lapraik, for example: But yet, despite the kittle kimmer, I, Rob, am here.

(v. i, p. 91)

Burns’ own reading in Enlightenment rhetoric and philosophy has been documented; well-schooled by John Murdoch, he was also throughout his life a voracious reader, as Robert Crawford has recently highlighted. The study this implies does not seem to square well with Carlyle’s description of the poems as ‘mere occasional effusions; poured forth with little premeditation; expressing, by such means as offered, the passion, opinion, or humour of the hour’.28 Or perhaps Carlyle simply had not read enough literary history: opining that Burns ‘never saw Philosophy’ (p. 278), he did not acknowledge that the poetic œuvre shows clear evidence of the influence of The Theory of Moral Sentiments on Burns’ thought: O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us !

(v. i, p. 194)

‘To a Louse, on Seeing one on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church’ is self-advertisingly versified Adam Smith; although it is a good joke, its quality as poetry depends less on its co-optation of advanced ethics to verse, than on the tone of scandalised relish with which the poem’s voice observes the advance of the insect in a situation which enjoins religious contemplation. So the turn in the final verse from the savoured moment to pious pronouncement is not a turn to philosophy – the point at which Burns the poet philosophises – but a turn to hypocrisy. In other words, as a reflection on human frailty, this poem’s

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subject and its voice are one. It should be read more like ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ than, say, Pope’s Essay on Man. To the extent that it is versified philosophy, ‘To a Louse’ is not a particularly interesting poem; to the extent that it projects a philosophy of character-as-performance, it becomes not only interesting, but challenging, and very funny as well. My second claim would be that this poem – or at least this reading of this poem – begins to suggest that Scottish Enlightenment ethics is a necessary but not (as it is usually taken to be) a sufficient philosophical framework in which to read Burns. Carlyle, poor preparation or not, was onto something, and it is related to Cavell’s ‘somehow’: to repeat, ‘our relation to the world’s existence is somehow closer than the ideas of believing and knowing are made to convey’. The poetics of this relation emerge not through the pursuit of ‘lines of influence’ culminating in Burns’ poetry, but by the reflective illumination of a transitive, transatlantic, comparison. Carlyle’s version of Burns living in the ‘humour of the hour’ was written in 1828, four years before Carlyle and Emerson would first meet at Craigenputtock, and begin their subsequent lifelong correspondence. It seems to anticipate the direct ‘insight into today’ that ‘The American Scholar’ would call for in 1837. If Emerson’s written style reflected the exigencies of performance as lecture, Burns’ friendly epistles to ‘brother poets’ like Lapraik enact a similarly paradoxical written record of thought itself as a ‘product of the hour’: thinking being performed in writing-as-speaking: My memory’s no worth a preen; I had amaist forgotten clean, Ye bad me write you what they mean By this new-light, ’Bout which our herds sae aft hae been Maist like to fight.

‘Epistle to William Simson, Ochiltree’ (v. i, p. 96)

The deictic ‘My’, reinforced by the alliterative ‘memory’, is the energetic self-presentation that propels the first stanza of a long ‘Postscript’ to a verse epistle to a ‘rhyme-composing brither’. The body of this poem that celebrates a national Scottish lineage from William Wallace to ‘Ramsay and famous Fergusson’ is a spirited account of the tasks and privileges of a modern Scots bard, a virtuoso performance which turns (in the manner of Pope) a compliment to the addressee into poetic self-assertion. Compare, for example, the mock heroic While Terra firma, on her axis Diurnal turns;

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with the ending of Pope’s ‘Epistle to a Lady, on the Characters of Women’: ‘. . . the world shall know it, / To you gave Sense, Good humour, and a Poet.’29 This is not, however, the end for Burns: his poem has a ‘Postscript’ whose allegory of sectarian feuding owes more to Swift – The Battle of the Books, perhaps, or the Little-Endians and the BigEndians in Gulliver’s Travels – with the additional insouciance of an afterthought that further belittles the importance of the doctrinal dissension that is its subject. The final lines reassert the tolerance achieved in sociable pleasures: I hope we, Bardies, ken some better Than mind sic brulzie.

(v. i, p. 98)

This is an intensely pleasurable moment of concord that also asserts the superiority of effusions of the poetic character to the theological niceties of religious bickering. There is always, too, something potentially insulting to a reader in thrown-off thoughts of a moment, particularly if these take the form of demands: for Carlyle, the ‘humour of the hour’ hardly seemed to supply sufficient gravitas as a poetic occasion. Nor did it for Emerson’s audience. In 1838 his Address to the Senior Class at Divinity College in Harvard provoked a famously furious response from the Unitarian establishment: He continually obtrudes himself upon his reader, and announces his own convictions, as if from their having that character, they were necessarily indisputable. – He floats about magnificently on bladders, which he would have it believed are swelling with ideas. – Common thoughts, sometimes true, oftener false, and ‘Neutral nonsense, neither false nor true,’ are exaggerated, and twisted out of shape, and forced into strange connexions, to make them look like some grand and new conception. To produce a more striking effect, our common language is abused; antic tricks are played with it; inversions, exclamations, anomalous combinations of words, unmeaning, but coarse and violent . . .30

The ‘humour of the hour’ indeed. The substance of Andrews Norton’s objections would take us into the deep waters of theological controversy; here we might recall the earlier discussion of Mather’s Magnalia; its critics felt oppressed by a ‘mad enthusiast, thirsting after fame’, who ‘By endless volum’ns thought to raise a name / With undigested trash.’31 Two aspects of Emerson’s, as of Mather’s, speech act that enrage the critic are the demand

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that the speaker’s convictions be accepted as true, and the violations of stylistic decorum, ‘antic tricks’ played with language. The criticisms seem to point in different directions, but Norton seems right to believe that they are elements of the same provocation. ‘Neutral nonsense, neither false nor true’ – Norton’s invocation of Christopher Smart’s satirical indictment of Grub Street discourse – might be another way of describing performative utterance: illocutionary act with an edge of aggression, a demand on the interlocutor, built in.32 The ‘latest form of infidelity’ was a rhetorical rather than a doctrinal outrage: others among Norton’s fellow Unitarians distinguished between the ‘poor taste’ of the Address (its bad manners) and the views expressed, which – rightly or wrongly – they felt to be in sympathy with their own.33 If by 1859 Burns’ poetry seemed ‘filtered of all offence’, it scarcely appeared so to his contemporaries. Francis Jeffrey’s review of Cromek’s Reliques of Robert Burns in The Edinburgh Review for January 1809 is often quoted for its perceptive praise of the poet; it is less frequently noted how disturbed he was by Burns’ writing: the leading vice in Burns’s character, and the cardinal deformity indeed of all his productions, was his contempt, or affectation of contempt, for prudence, decency and regularity; and his admiration of thoughtlessness, oddity, and vehement sensibility; – his belief, in short, in the dispensing power of genius and social feeling, in all matters of morality and common sense. . . . [I]t is a vile prostitution of language, to talk of that man’s generosity or goodness of heart, who sits raving about friendship and philanthropy in a tavern, while his wife’s heart is breaking at her cheerless fireside, and his children pining in solitary poverty . . . He is perpetually making a parade of his thoughtlessness, inflammability and imprudence, and talking with much complacency and exultation of the offence he has occasioned to the sober and correct part of mankind. This odious slang . . . [is] the chief, if not the only source of the disgust with which, in spite of his genius, we know that he is regarded by many very competent and liberal judges.34

The objections are strikingly similar: both critics are predominantly offended by the insouciant manner of the writing as rhetorical performance, its refusal of consistency and willful propensity to characterise itself through ‘antic tricks’ of language. In particular, they object to what appear to be unwarranted assumptions by Emerson and Burns that saying can make it so: Emerson’s ‘announcement’ of ‘his own convictions, as if from their having that character, they were necessarily indisputable’, and, even more offensively, Burns’ ‘raving about friendship and philanthropy in a tavern, while his wife’s heart is breaking’. These are strong criticisms, and they retain the power to trouble any reading of either writer. Andrews Norton and Jeffrey both saw the

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problem as residing in an alignment of the writer’s ‘character’ and their poetry, a punning metonomy analogous to Lockhart’s critique of Leigh Hunt noted in Chapter 3. The situation is clearly more complex than the early Burns biographers’ naïve assumption that the one is the direct expression of the other: Jeffrey’s reviews do not typically make this move, whether he approves or disapproves the matter under consideration (it was a critical ploy he deplored in Tory reviewers’ brutal handling of Keats’ poetry). There are clearly strong imperatives of cultural politics in play here, but the transatlantic comparison makes another dimension visible. Jeffrey is registering something in the quality of the writing – ‘a vile prostitution of language’ – that disturbs the decorum of aesthetic response presumed to guide neo-classical criticism, into something uncomfortably personal. A discomfort, interestingly enough with aesthetic pleasure, which would resurface in similar terms nine years later when he confronted Canto iii of Byron’s Don Juan.35 Attempting to characterise the stylistic irresponsibility of Burns and Emerson which so obnoxiously obtruded ‘self’ upon the reader, the most pejorative adjective the two critics could muster was identical: Jeffrey compared the insouciance of Tam O’Shanter to ‘the very slang of the worst German plays’; Norton detected ‘a strong infusion of German barbarisms’ in Emerson’s style. Both heard the contamination of the same ‘other’ nation. They measure the shortcomings of the utterance by its deviance from a national norm: Burns and Emerson are not merely disrespectful of their audience, they are un-British, un-American. A full consideration of the ‘Germanism’ of Burns and Emerson is beyond the scope of this book, but I shall return briefly to its implications. Despite the critics’ insinuating of the taint of something foreign in their subjects’ writing, what provokes in these utterances has nothing to do with nationality; indeed, a suggestive tonal (as distinct from topical) parallel between either ‘The American Scholar’ or Tam O’Shanter would be hard to find in contemporary German literature. But the epithet does register Norton’s and Jeffrey’s disorientated response to a kind of writing quite unfamiliar in the domestic context of its emergence. The provocation is a stylistic as much as a substantive one; or – to put it another way – the offence begins and ends with the projection of a poetic persona able to insist on his right to insult the ‘prudence, decency and regularity’ of his audience and who makes good that right in the act of ‘obtruding himself upon his reader’. Though the offence is primarily rhetorical, there is at this point limited measurable space in Jeffrey’s review between ‘the leading vice in Burns’s character, and the cardinal deformity . . . of all his productions.’36

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IV ‘Self-Reliance’ is probably Emerson’s most outrageous disruption of the acceptable claims of inwardness in relation to the requirements of otherness. The performance of this poetic character is ‘happy’ in proportion to its unacceptability. I follow Cavell in regarding Emerson’s offensiveness as inseparable from the originality and importance of his thought; the rebarbative, even repellent, aspects of his writing require especially close attention. Adapting a term from ‘SelfReliance’, Cavell describes ‘the relation of Emerson’s writing (the expression of his self-reliance) to his society (the realm of what he calls conformity)’ as an ‘aversive’ one: Emerson’s writing and his society are in an unending argument with one another . . . an unending turning away from one another, but for that exact reason a constant keeping in mind of one another, hence endlessly a turning toward one another . . . His prose not only takes sides in this aversive conversation, but it also enacts the conversation, continuously creating readings of individual assertion that mutually turn from and toward one another.37

Burns is an aversive poet in just this sense. Emphatically, though, this ‘aversiveness’ is not at all the same thing as radicalism, though it may be continuous with it (both being expressions of a personality that refuses to take anything as a ‘given’, and has no truck with ‘authority’ per se). Burns’ radicalism – about which much has been written well recently, to which I subscribe – is a matter of the beliefs of the man as these are recoverable from his writing and his life; his aversiveness on the other hand is a matter of rhetorical attitude, a challenge to settled ‘beliefs’ of all kinds. It simultaneously turns away from, and turns towards. ‘Decentring’, to return to Charles Taylor’s description, ‘is not the alternative to inwardness; it is its complement’.38 Aversiveness is defiant, and hopeful. It is why Burns was able to write successful – in the illocutionary sense of achieving the positions they voice – Hanoverian poems and Jacobite ones, poems devout and sceptical, sentimental and scurrilous; why he can express convincing outrage at the obscenity of slavery, while being able to contemplate a career move that might involve becoming a slave-driver in Jamaica. Expressing contrary views got him into trouble more than once, notably when as an exciseman in government service he could not desist from declaiming anti-Hanoverian sentiments which he was later obliged to disavow. It is simultaneously true that Burns has one of the strongest, most instantly recognisable poetic

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‘signatures’, and that in an almost Keatsian sense, he has no poetic self: aversiveness is the opposite of consistency; it is a function of restless language, and in that sense anti-philosophical. Formulae that begin ‘Burns believed in . . .’ or ‘Burns believed that . . .’ always mislead: individual poems and letters have an extraordinarily powerful capacity to evoke and enact what it might be like to believe something at a particular moment – but it is the immediacy rather than the immutability of such utterances that commands assent, and they resist generalisation. Aversiveness combines a high degree of sympathy (the capacity to enter fully, for the moment, into the experience of another) with its opposite: a stance which – equally for the moment – insists on the right to be other and to speak that otherness. We might express it as a peculiarly sharp version of the complex friendship relation discussed in Chapters 5 and 6: joining and separating, agreeing and arguing, sociable and self-insistent. Cavell describes the passage from ‘Self-Reliance’ I quoted above as setting ‘a certain scene of writing’ in which everything that can be known about the world is a function of the mood of the present moment – the moment performed in the writing (Etudes, p. 28). Perhaps it is more than whim, perhaps not – this present has no perspective (and wants none) from which to determine another truth. As Andrews Norton recognised so angrily, the young lecturer Emerson made ‘Whim’ a determining feature of his style; the word remained a hugely important one in his philosophical vocabulary throughout his writing. ‘Self-Reliance’, composed a year or two later than ‘The American Scholar’, elevated this kind of provocation into a positively insolent credo: The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.39

It is unnecessary to point out the rampant egotism performed by this essay; the hallmark of its character is its intention to aggravate. Declaring character in opposition to relationship and responsibility to another, its aggression strikes at the very roots of sociability. It uses second person address not to relate but to reject: like a weapon of intimidation, even now it jabs a metaphorical finger in the face of a nonplussed reader. What a threat – and a treat – it would have been to have experienced it in performance.

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The online concordance to Emerson’s essays alone records thirty occurrences of ‘whim’ which collectively reveal the suitably various semantic and emotive valences of his deployment of a marker of instability he made his own. This chameleon quality occurs in celebratory, valedictory and admonitory contexts, sometimes appropriated by the poetic character, sometimes projected onto others; personified and active, or unpredictably responsive and evanescent. Several instances in English Traits (1850) implicitly set British caution in respect to the indulgence of whim in contrast to that of the greater spiritual freedom of the American narrator who observes them: ‘It is not usually a point of honor . . . and never any whim, that [the English] will shed their blood for’, and ‘Every man [in England] . . . is guarded in the indulgence of his whim’, for example.40 It is, though I do not know that anyone has commented on it, an equally prominent word in Burns’ vocabulary at a particular period. What is more, he almost always uses it to characterise his own poetic persona. Whether in English-inflected Scots, as in ‘A Bard’s Epitaph’, the carefully chosen final poem in his first published volume, which itself performs a powerfully selfconfident parting challenge to the reader: Is there a whim-inspir’d fool, Owre fast for thought, owre hot for rule, Owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool, Let him draw near; And o’er this grassy heap sing dool, And drap a tear.

(v. i, p. 247)

Or Scots-inflected English, as in the self-deprecating pose of ‘The Brigs of Ayr’ from the 1787 Edinburgh edition of Poems: ’Twas in that season, when a simple Bard, Unknown and poor – simplicity’s reward! Ae night, within the ancient brugh of Ayr, By whim inspir’d, or haply prest wi’ care, He left his bed, and took his wayward route, And down by Simpson’s wheel’d the left about . . .

(v. i, p. 283)

The poet is Nature’s whimsical creature, in more than one sense, formed (in a draft poem of the Second Commonplace Book) of ‘spumy, fiery, ignisfatuus matter’ to catch the shifting senses of the moment (CPB2, p. 30).41 More than half a century before Emerson declared the literary independence of America, this is the ‘humour of the hour’ elevated to an aesthetic principle. Burns’ whimsical persona is itself an effect of rigorously controlled shifting of stylistic registers; the initial couplet, an unexceptionable

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Augustan iambic pentameter, immediately begins to modulate with the following ‘Ae night’ (where the reader is tempted by ‘Ae’ to pronounce ‘night’ as ‘nicht’), into the clearly Scots-inflected rhyme ‘. . . route / wheel’d the left about’ of the third couplet. The effect is very close to Emerson’s progression in that passage from ‘Self-Reliance’: ‘The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as it always does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature . . .’. For both writers, systematically mixed diction functions simultaneously as rhetorical self-characterisation and as a provocative disruption of received sociable relations between self and others embodied in violations of stylistic decorum. This is scandalous language: defiantly performative, challengingly dialogic. The figural is the instrument or agent of the personal voice. Apart from an early reference in a letter to his cousin James Burness on 3 August 1784, to ‘the whimsical notions of a perturbated brain’, almost all the usages of ‘whim’ in both Burns’ poetry and letters are clustered in the two years 1786–88 (Letters, v. i, p. 22). To Robert Aitkin in October 1786 he writes of himself ‘hunt[ing] fancy from whim to whim’, and to Wilhelmina Alexander the following month (in one of the phrases that would incense Jeffrey) that ‘[p]oets are such outré Beings, so much the children of wayward Fancy and capricious Whim, that I believe the world generally allows them a larger latitude in the rules of Propriety than the sober Sons of Judgment and Prudence’ (v. i, pp. 59, 63). A month later – with shameless self-exculpation – to Sir John Whitefoord, ‘I am, I acknowledge, too frequently the sport of whim, caprice, and passion’ (v. i, p. 68). In June of the following year he is in full rhetorical swing to William Nicol, declaiming the ‘thoughtless follies and hare-brained whims, like so many Ignes fatui, eternally diverging from the right line of sober discretion, sparkle with step-bewitching blaze in the idly-gazing eyes of the poor heedless Bard’ (v. i, p. 123). Burns was obviously pleased with the image, because he recycled it in the carefully composed account of his life as a poet to Dr John Moore, of 2 August 1787: ‘That Fancy & Whim, keen Sensibility and riotous Passions may still make him zig-zag in his future path of life, is far from being improbable’ (v. i, pp. 138, 146). The word is used repeatedly throughout this letter; it seems to have been a form of self-characterisation that appealed to Burns particularly strongly around this time. He reorientated it into a rapidly disavowable instrument of verbal seduction in letters to two

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women of whose social position and cultural attainments he was perhaps a little in awe. In his second letter to Agnes McLehose, he writes (8 December 1787), ‘You are a stranger to me; but I am an odd being: some yet unnamed feelings; things, not principles, but better than whims, carry me farther than boasted reason ever did a Philosopher’ (v. i, p. 182.). Following it up on the 28th, the correspondent as poet wonders I don’t know if you have a just idea of my character, but I wish you to see me as I am. – I am . . . a strange will o’ wisp being; the victim too frequently of much imprudence and many follies. – My great constituent elements are Pride and Passion: the first I have endeavoured to humanize into integrety [sic] and honour; the last makes me a Devotee to the warmest degree of enthusiasm, in Love, Religion, or Friendship; either of them or all together as I happen to be inspired. (v. i, p. 190)

The irony of ‘whim’ is manifest in the hesitations of tone as Burns tries to gauge the most promising character to assume in a kind of amatory situation that is new to him: ‘constituent elements’ is a conventionally Theophrastan formulation; the first ingredient tends to the ‘integrity and honour’, the ‘good character’ that was the goal of the Enlightened education of a Scottish gentleman (and the opposite of whim). The second, passion, undoes this integrity, rendering the poet once more victim to whimsical inspirations (maybe that’s what she will like about him . . .). Which is going to catch the lady? The confident performative self of the poetic epistles has evaporated into rhetorical posturing. I, Rob, am – where? Once the poetic consistency of inconsistency is established, biography may be of some help, even if it provides an insufficient explanation. The years of his self-performance as whim – 1786–87 – were perhaps the most eventful in Burns’ turbulent short life: overwhelmed with debt and farming failures he booked passage in the ship Nancy for Savannah-la-Mar (was there perhaps some association between the chosen vehicle for his transatlantic passage and the further refracted character in which he chose to address his farewell poem to Clarinda, ‘Ae fond kiss’?). In March, thwarted by Jean Armour’s father, he courted Mary Campbell; in July he went into hiding after Armour issued a writ against him, and Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published in Kilmarnock; the same month and again in August he did public penance in the kirk for fornication; by September he was postponing emigration as Jean gave birth to his twins and (shortly afterwards) ‘Highland Mary’ died; by November he was in Edinburgh with material for a new edition of his poems, which Henry Mackenzie celebrated in The Lounger. The following year was, in terms of celebrity at least, Burns’

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annus mirabilis: publicity fed by his own instinctive sense of selfpresentation made him the short-lived darling of Edinburgh literary society; he also toured the Borders and the Highlands, and his first three poems were published in Volume i of James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum. To understand why Burns repeatedly reached for this word ‘whim’ to characterise himself to others at the point when he found himself unexpectedly removed from the familiar environment that had generated the powerfully self-presentational assertions of the Kilmarnock volume, and transported to the brave ‘new world’ – his term – of Edinburgh, we need to return to the poetics of character (Letters, v. i, p. 145). Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary defines ‘Whim’ as ‘[a] freak; an odd fancy; a caprice; an irregular motion of desire.’ We may note first of all the unvarying proximity of poetry, poet and whim in Burns’ use: whim is what makes him a poet, and the kind of poet he is, characterised by lability and motility: less an everfixed mark than an illusion of language, a momentary assumption of attitude. It simultaneously enacts provocation and exoneration. More than this, its association with the ‘will-o’-the-wisp’, ‘wraith’ and their Latin cognate the ignis fatuus makes a connection between the literary character associated with Sterne, Goldsmith and the Sentimentalists, and the mischief-full folk tales of Ayrshire. It anticipates, too, Stevenson’s ethical point that ‘[t]imes and men and circumstances change about your changing character, with a speed of which no earthly hurricane affords an image.’42 Burns’ poetic character was – contradiction in terms though it may be – rooted in whim.43 It gave him rhetorical space, and room to maneouvre. A little dubiously, Johnson derived the etymology of ‘whim’ from ‘a thing turning round’; both as proclamation and as performance, Burns’ ‘whim’ enacts what the letter to Moore describes as a ‘zig-zag’ ‘scene of writing’, an aversive conversation with himself and with the world. It was a conversation about poetic character: Burns’ reaction to readers’, patrons’ and lovers’ ascription of character to him was to escape via the characterless character of the poet-as-whim. But whim’s claim to be permitted to keep language in this restless state of self-invention does not imply frivolousness about either the philosophic or the poetic vocation. On the contrary, this is the searching mode of its inquiry into how far into experience language can reach, and how reflective of experience it can be. For Burns the ‘character of the poet’ is at once full and empty, particular and universal, in its claims. There is a close correspondence here with Emerson’s characterisation of ‘The Poet’ as ‘man speaking’, constituted in the act of utterance. Despite their rejection of the sentimental locutions that guaranteed confidence in the sociable relations of eighteenth-century commercial

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society, in neither case is this a voice calling in the wilderness, or turned in on its own concerns. As the philosopher Timothy Gould has put it, ‘[a] “provocation” is . . . that which calls you out, in particular that which calls you out to respond, hence calls for your voice.’44 Whim is a provocative utterance in this sense, and quite contrary to solipsism.

V At issue is an active relationship between self-making and self-expression. In the writing of Burns and of Emerson this Romantic ‘Transcendental Subject’ (the Self) is not created in a single unfolding trajectory of Bildung, but through constant renewal and reversal, ‘self’ expressed in different moments and voices of performance. It is essentially sociable and dialogic, in the sense of implying an other for its articulation, but it chooses this other on its own terms. Burns’ ‘characteristic’ voice is realised, equally, in iconoclasm and in illocutionary moments of fraternity and community – ‘come to my arms, My friends, my brothers!’ (‘Epistle to J. Lapraik’, Poems, v. i, p. 89). His epistolary verse appears to realign the demands of inwardness with the claims of society; it draws on a poetics of sociability even as it reframes its boundaries. Mackenzie’s review immortalised the poetic character of the ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’; it was, as I’ve indicated, a phrase set up for him by Burns’ own poetic self-publicity in the Kilmarnock ‘Preface’, a stance that knowingly gestured towards the Enlightened ideals of the physiocrats, who advocated toil on the land as the basis for a stable and virtuous society. A different phrase from Mackenzie’s review is perhaps more perspicuous. Attempting to account for the extraordinary phenomenon of an untaught rustic who could produce Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, he described ‘that supereminent reach of mind by which some men are distinguished’, as an intuitive ability, nothing to do with education, that enabled Burns – like Shakespeare – to ‘discern the characters of men’ and catch ‘the many-changing hues of life’.45 One thing that both Burns’ writing and the early works of Emerson insist on is their literary right to perform inconsistently, whimsically, the ‘characters of men’. To declare whim as one’s operating principle is, precisely, to ‘know about’ character, while freeing oneself from its burdens. The Jolly Beggars is perhaps its supreme aversive enactment: Life is all a VARIORUM, We regard not how it goes; Let them cant about DECORUM, Who have character to lose.

(v. i, p. 208)

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Manuscript evidence suggests that Hugh Blair, whose celebrated lectures made him Edinburgh’s pedagogical proponent of belles lettres in the formation of consistent social character, was implicated in the exclusion of this celebration of characterlessness from the second (Edinburgh) edition of Burns’ poetry on the grounds that it would detract from the poet’s public character.46 Blair’s was one of the ‘characters’ sketched – not altogether flatteringly – in the second Commonplace Book. The ‘loss’ from the Mauchline years and the recovery of this ‘Cantata’ (according to Burns, in 1793 on the prompting of George Thomson) makes it a kind of bridge between the satirical, multiply ‘self-obtruding’ aversive Burns, and the collector and lyricist of the final years. I want to relate this back to Cavell’s ‘sense of intimacy with existence, or intimacy lost, [a]s fundamental to the experience’ that he finds in Emerson’s writing There is, I suggest, an active homology between Cavell’s ‘somehow’ that defines ‘our relation to the world’s existence’, and Burns’ ‘some yet unnamed feelings, things, not principles’, but ‘better than whims’ which ‘carry me farther than boasted reason ever did a philosopher’. The phases of Burns’ writing hinged around the Edinburgh years – the years of whim – engage performative language in two different ways. Matthew Arnold, who objected to the ‘hideous’ ‘squalor’ and ‘bestiality’ in The Jolly Beggars, could not deny it ‘a breadth, truth, and power . . . which are only matched by Shakespeare and Aristophanes’. Arnold’s abstract nouns struggle to capture his response to a series of performances so varied, so multifariously aversive, that Blair had felt the poet’s character and reputation would be ‘degrade[d]’ by their publication in Edinburgh.47 These songs turn feelings into ‘things, not principles’, embodiments not abstractions. Their ‘philosophy’ is that of ‘ordinary language’, not interrogated concepts, because too much interrogation, as Hume had shown, leads the mind into a maze of its own unknowing. Cavell has insisted on the performative nature of Emerson’s philosophy as less a matter of metaphysical or logical position and more of thinking philosophically; this is itself an ethical act, but one which subsequent philosophers have found provocative to the extent that Emerson has been excluded altogether from the philosophical (as distinct from literary) pantheon. There may be a way back from this to Francis Jeffrey’s charge of immorality against Burns. Countering the expressive cul-de-sac of epistemological scepticism, Burns’ poetry conducts an aversive, and sometimes elusive, conversation with the epistemological accommodation of Common Sense thought and the political quietude implied in the contract of sociability. I argued earlier that Smith’s Moral Sentiments repeated the trajectory of Hume’s Treatise

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Book i as it gestured towards the existential abyss opened by the prospect of social exclusion, only to emphasise the unavoidable necessity of coming back into society, even at the cost of its sharpest disapprobation – that is, on society’s terms The Theory of Moral Sentiments proleptically construed sympathy, with its cultivation of a dispassionate perspective on personal desires, as a form of aversiveness. The judging self does not necessarily correspond with the desiring one. Assuming an existence based on Smithian social relations, Blair taught rhetoric as a tool for forging good citizens; Thomas Reid based his philosophical defence of the existence of both personal identity and the external world on the assumption of a ‘common’ (shared) sense of these things, and language as social activity. Burns’ poetic epistles, the composed sociability of his letters, and his poetic guise as the ‘ploughman poet’ all seem to align his writing with these Enlightened norms of conversant character. In Edinburgh he wryly accommodated the expectations genteel society held of his poetic character: a letter to Gavin Hamilton 8 March 1787 recounts how ‘My two Songs, on Miss W. Alexander and Miss P. Kennedy were likewise tried yesterday by a jury of Literati, and found defamatory libels against the fastidious Powers of Poesy and Taste; and the Author forbid to print them under pain of forfeiture of character . . . I must submit’ (v. i, p. 98). Rhetorically more complex is a self-distancing, self-reflecting defence of his behaviour in ‘the Playhouse’, to Robert Graham of Fintry, when Burns was accused of radicalism that might easily have cost him his Excise job. The letter attempts to explain away his – at the least – failure to oppose riot. He defends his character by removing all agency from himself. The man of character could only be a spectator in a scene of riot, not an actor in it: ‘I looked on myself as far too obscure a man to have any weight in quelling a Riot; at the same time, as a character of higher respectability, than to yell in the howlings of a rabble. – This was the conduct of all the first Characters in this place; & these Characters know, & will avow, that such was my conduct’ (Letters, v. ii, p. 173). The more Burns came under pressure, the more he insisted on his character as a gentleman; his letter to Thomson in response to the editor offering him money for his songs positively monumentalises his poetic persona: ‘by that HONOUR which crowns the upright Statue of ROBT BURNS’S INTEGRITY! . . . BURNS’S character for Generosity of Sentiment, & Independence of Mind, will, I trust, long outlive any of his wants’ (Letters, v. ii, p. 220). The bombastic rhetoric winds into inflated, almost self-parodying, images. What happened to the Jolly Beggars with no ‘character to lose’? Why was ‘Burns’ so outraged by the editor’s wellmeaning offer?

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Returning to the homology between transatlantic relations and the transpersonal assumptions on which the poetics of character depend may help to clarify the issue as a particular form of Romantic expressiveness. Describing Emerson’s response to the problem of scepticism, Cavell notes that: Against a vision of the death of the world, the romantic calling for poetry, or quest for it, the urgency of it, would be sensible; and the sense that the redemption of philosophy is bound up with the redemption of poetry would be understandable: the calling of poetry is to give the world back, to bring it back, as to life. (Etudes, p. 77)

After the Edinburgh edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1787, in another act of aversion Burns turned away from projecting selves as rhetorical performance and from being caught ‘in character’ as the ploughman poet owned by the Edinburgh intelligentsia. Shunning the publicity on which his poetic reputation was floated, he began in earnest to collect and to write anonymous songs that perform their own subjects: age, death and love. O My Luve’s like a red, red rose, That’s newly sprung in June: O my Luve’s like the melodie, That’s sweetly play’d in tune. – As fair art thou, my bonie lass, So deep in luve am I, And I will luve thee still, my Dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry. –

(v. ii, p. 735)

It would be madness, and disaster, to submit a lyric like this to philosophical analysis. The song is an act in which saying makes it so, in quite a different way. What is love? Not an abstract idea with essential qualities, but a manner of speaking which is also a way of being. A few years before (1783), copying out one of his early songs, Burns described his ‘method’: ‘I never had the least thought or inclination of turning Poet till I got once heartily in Love, and then Rhyme & Song were, in a manner, the spontaneous language of my heart.’48 That ‘in a manner’ returns us again to Cavell’s ‘somehow’. If Burns was not an Idealist, this poetry suggests that he was no more a materialist. Neither was he a Transcendental philosopher in the Kantian sense; but a poem like this nonetheless comes remarkably close to what Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement (the Third Critique) – published contemporaneously with Burns’ Scots Musical Museum, his song collection with James Johnson – termed a ‘subjective universal’ aesthetic or judgment, in which the evocation of a personal response

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(purged of particularity) corresponds to a shared sense, founded not normatively but in analogical practice based on an assumption of recognition and agreement: If judgments of taste (like cognitive judgments) had a determinate objective principle, then someone who made them in accordance with the latter would lay claim to the unconditioned necessity of his judgment. If he had no principle at all, like those of mere sensory taste, then one would never even have thought of their necessity. They must thus have a subjective principle which determines what pleases or displeases only through feeling and not through concepts, but yet with universal validity . . . Thus only under the presupposition that there is a common sense (by which, however, we do not mean any external sense but rather the effect of the free play of our cognitive powers) . . . can the judgment of taste be made. Cognitions and judgments must, together with the conviction that accompanies them, be able to be universally communicated, for otherwise they would have no correspondence with the objects: they would all be a merely subjective play of the powers of representation, just as skepticism insists. But if cognitions are to be able to be communicated, then the mental state . . . must also be capable of being universally communicated.49

‘My Luve is like a red, red rose’: this is the ‘transcendental aesthetic’ of the Critique of Pure Reason. It is a kind of knowing removed from the representations of character and dependent on sensation, which ‘creates’ space and time not as external co-ordinates but as ways of ordering experience: Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun: I will love thee still, my Dear, While the sands o’ life shall run. And fare thee weel, my only Luve! And fare thee weel, a while! And I will come again, my Luve, Tho’ it were ten thousand mile! –

(v. ii, p. 735)

The lyric ‘gives’ enough to prompt recognition and communicate assent. It overcomes division between the psychological and epistemological subject; it is essentially relational rather than self-referential, but it subsumes personality in a more general sense of the contingencies of being. Here – to return to where this book began – Burns’ capacity to enact experience as a matter of style has transformed judgment, poetic and character, from a question of knowledge into something like a pure embodiment of value. The issue of whether the Kantian universal is actually operational is not germane here; the point is to illustrate the poetic assumption on which Burns’ lyric actually

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works. Like the aversive epistles but operating on a very different poetic plane, ‘A red, red rose’ is performative poetry; it is also, I suggest, in that sense philosophical poetry – which is quite another sense from the versified philosophy of ‘To a Louse’, and closer to William James’ declaration that ‘[a] philosophy is the expression of a man’s intimate character, and all definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it’.50 What if that intimate character turns out to be ‘whim’? This song cannot be paraphrased, its point of view cannot be usefully analysed or interpreted; it can only be re-enacted in responsive listening. So doing, like ordinary language philosophers the reader or hearer comes to know something new and familiar about what it (love) means, and that Burns also knew what it is. These words find ‘it’, for the moment and in context, embodiment in language that would not have carried cultural authority as poetry even fifty years previously: the literary embodiment of spoken language that might be described in Wallace Stevens’ term (in ‘Effects of Analogy’ (1948)) as belonging to ‘that large class of images of emotional origin . . . analogous to the nature of the emotion from which it springs; and when one speaks of images, one means analogies’.51 It is philosophy not as theory or as principle but as expression, whose truth is a felicity of language in place; utterly personal, and completely shared; ‘similar in kind’ (to borrow again from Stevens) ‘to the prismatic formations that occur about us . . . in the case of reflections and refractions’ (p. 109). In such songs Burns satisfies Milan Kundera’s conditions of aesthetic value: absolute specificity, and timelessness. The ‘Kantian’ Burns is not in opposition to or an alternative to the sceptical ‘Humean’ or Enlightenment Burns, but aversively continuous with it. Burns’ poetry makes tangible the connection that Kant recognised in his acknowledgement that Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers, in a way that is not amenable to philosophical paraphrase. The poetic meaning of this insight with respect to Burns’ poetry cannot be reached through conventional literary history, but is available through the transatlantic comparison with Emerson’s forging of aversive poetical character.

Coda Tracing the continuity and evolution of the concept of experience in Western thought, intellectual historians have noted a distinction made in the German language between Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Erfahrung ‘associates experience

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with a journey (from the German verb fahren), a learning process in which one gradually accumulates knowledge from encounters with others and with the natural world’, and which the self subsequently analyses into a consistent understanding of how things are in the world.52 In literary terms, one might see this model corresponding to the kind of historical narrative that seemed best fitted to express national tradition and national character, and which dominated literary history and comparative literature throughout the nineteenth century. ‘Where Erfahrung is concerned with experience as a gradual mediation of the self in its encounter with others and nature’, Martin Jay writes, ‘Erlebnis’ refers to a direct, unmediated experience, that ‘is sometimes translated as “lived experience” ’, indicating participation in some ‘primary unity’ located in an ‘everyday world (the Lebenswelt) of commonplace, untheorized practices’. It may also, though, manifest itself in ‘an intense and vital rapture in the fabric of quotidian routine’.53 This is, perhaps, the key philosophical issue that Kant and his German interlocutors indirectly transmitted to the English-speaking world. Commentators tend to appropriate the term ‘transcendental’ (following Kant) for the mediated Erfahrung (hence the after-the-fact nomination of Emerson and his American Romantic contemporaries as Transcendentalists). The argument of this chapter suggests, on the contrary, that Emerson’s style belies this and – like Burns’ – speaks of a commitment to Erlebnis. Once again, this observation from intellectual history in a sense merely serves to align both as ‘Romantic’ writers, and would not of itself enable us to distinguish either from the early Wordsworth, say, or Blake. How its implications may be conveyed in language is an issue of style as much as of statement. What does distinguish Burns and Emerson is the shared perception that the surest guide to experience is the ignis fatuus, the ‘will-o’-thewisp’ of whim that most dismayed their perceptive early critics. Emerson wrote to his wife Lidian, while on a lecture tour of New York, about his feelings of alienation from reformist companions who ‘fasten me in their thought to “Transcendentalism,” whereof you know I am wholly guiltless, and which is spoken of as a known & fixed element like salt or meal: So that I have to begin by endless disclaimers & explanations – “I am not the man you take me for.” ’54 Overcoming the post-Descartian distinction between the psychological and epistemological subject enables a voice that is essentially relational rather than self-referential, and subsumes personality in the modern sense into a more general sense of the occasions and contingencies of being. The performance of character assumes and enacts likeness. This might also be a way of aligning Romanticism and Pragmatism, whose ‘characterological

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appeals’ Amanda Anderson has recently subjected to scrutiny in the essay quoted in the epigraph to this chapter.55 Although his work is more frequently aligned with a neo-Idealist than a pragmatist aesthetic, Wallace Stevens’ writing on analogy (and the poetics it describes) strongly suggests something akin to pragmatism as the form of philosophy closest to poetry – and to literary criticism – in its commitment to contingent, comparative and provisional interpretation. ‘To say the same thing another way, the thing stated has been accompanied by a restatement and the restatement has illustrated and given definition to the thing stated. The things stated and the restatement have constituted an analogy’.56 Pragmatism and performativity are strongly linked in the way they connect ideas to forms of verbal practice; the reflexivity they pre-suppose illuminates character as a vital, mutually constitutive transaction between self and others. It suggests, too, a mode of conducting transatlantic literary history that implements the particular poetic sense in which analogy may be argument.

Notes

PROLOGUE 1 Melville, The Confidence-Man, p. 150. 2 Hume, Treatise, p. 73. 3 Cutler, Recovering the New, p. 11. 1 ‘BUT IS ANALOGY ARGUMENT?’ 1 Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, Act 3, Scene v, ll. 13–15. 2 Johnson, Rasselas, pp. 112–13. 3 De Quincey, ‘Elements of Rhetoric’, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (December 1828), p. 888. 4 Information in this paragraph is drawn from http://cla.calpoly.edu/~dschwart/ engl513/courtly/translat.htm 5 Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 149 (3.17). 6 Cooper, Gleanings in Europe, vol. ii, p. 153. 7 Stewart, ‘On the Beautiful. Part First’, in Collected Works, vol. v, p. 197. 8 Ibid., p. 195. 9 Stewart, ‘Life of Adam Smith’, in Smith (ed.), Essays on Philosophical Subjects, p. 293. 10 Robertson, History, p. 13. Subsequent references are in the text. 11 Hume, Letters, vol. ii, p. 197. 12 Blair, Lectures, Lecture 1, pp. 1–2. Subsequent references are in the text. 13 Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, in Collected Works, vol. ii, p. 138. 14 Mill, On Liberty, pp. 74–75. 15 Spolsky, ‘Cognitive Literary Historicism’, p. 161. 16 Johnson, ‘To CORRESPOND, v. n.’ (definition I), in Dictionary, vol. i. 17 Oxford English Dictionary, sv. ‘correspondence’. The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, www.oed.com. All subsequent references are to this edition. 18 Hutcheson, An Inquiry, Treatise 1, Sect. iv, iii, p. 43. 19 Reid, An Inquiry, p. 41. 270

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20 Blair, ‘On our Imperfect Knowledge of a Future State’, in Sermons, vol. i, pp. 96–97; Keats, Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, April 1819, in Letters, ed. Buxton Forman, p. 334. 21 Chai, Romantic Foundations, p. 67. 22 Barbara Packer, quoted by Chai, ibid., p. 64, fn. 5. 23 Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy, p. 150. 24 Kramnick, ‘Literary Criticism Among the Disciplines’, p. 357. 25 Quoted by Kramnick, Making the English Canon, pp. 139–40. 26 Chandler, Preface to England in 1819, p. xvi. 27 Staël-Holstein, Influence of Literature, vol. i, pp. 258, 266, 307. 28 Carlyle, ‘Burns’, in Works, vol. i, p. 257. 29 Ibid., p. 288. 30 Neal, Brother Jonathan, vol. i, pp. 12–13. 31 Austen, Emma, p. 403. 32 Cooper, Gleanings in Europe, vol. ii, p. 154 (italics added). 33 Poe, ‘From the Broadway Journal’, 4 October 1845, in Essays and Reviews, p. 1,076. 34 Fuller, ‘American Literature’, in Papers on Literature and Art, vol. i, p. 122. 35 Smith, Lectures, pp. 38, 184. Subsequent references are in the text. 36 Hume, Treatise, p. 73 (Hume’s italics). Subsequent references are in the text. 37 Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’, in Essays, p. 535. 38 Stewart, ‘Of the Varieties of Intellectual Character’, in Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, in Collected Works, vol. iv, p. 189. 39 Pope, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, in Pope Poetical Works, p. 119, l. 366. 40 Gould, Hearing Things, p. 2. 41 Ibid., p. 19. 42 Fielding, ‘Essay’, pp. 179–227. 43 De Man, ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’, p. 30. 44 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 465. 45 Klein, ‘Liberty, Manners, and Politeness’, pp. 583–605. 46 Augst, The Clerk’s Tale, Introduction. 47 Hume, Enquiry in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, p. 199. Subsequent references are in the text. 48 Smith dismissed Jesuit writing in The Theory of Moral Sentiments as the province of ‘grammarians’ rather than critics; quoted by Chandler, England in 1819, pp. 316f. 49 Burnett, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, vol. i, p. 25. 50 Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, p. 38. 51 Weinsheimer, ‘Theory of Character: Emma’, p. 191. 52 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk 2, Ch. 1 para. 2, p. 104. 53 The first definition in the American Merriam-Webster’s dictionary refers to ‘a conventionalized graphic device placed on an object as an indication of ownership, origin, or relationship’. See Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edn (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster). 54 Pope, ‘Epistle I’, in Pope Poetical Works, p. 283. 55 Hume, ‘A Character of Sir Robert Walpole’, in Essays, pp. 574–75, n. 1.

272 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Notes to pages 29–45

Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, p. 97. Scott, Waverley, Ch. 1, p. 6. Chandler, England in 1819, p. 107. Hutcheson, An Inquiry, Treatise 1, Sect. iv, iii, p. 43. Poe, ‘Marginalia’, p. 492. Kundera, ‘The Consciousness of Continuity’, in The Curtain, pp. 4–5. McGill, American Literature, p. 293. Nagel, The View from Nowhere. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 9. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), p. 38. Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, p. 320. Subsequent references are identified as SEC in the text. Condillac quoted by Thom, Republics, Nations, and Tribes, p. 244. 67 Emerson, ‘Swedenborg’, in Essays and Lectures, p. 668. 68 Austin, How to Do Things With Words, Lecture xi. 69 Butler, Excitable Speech, pp. 8, 30. 70 Quoted by Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision, p. 132. Emerson studied Blair’s Lectures at Harvard. 71 Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, p. 92. 72 Chandler, England in 1819, p. 107. 73 Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) is the canonical example of a ludic literary-philosophical practice that was both geographically and temporally widespread. 74 Roach, Cities of the Dead, p. 3. Subsequent references are in the text. 75 Hume, Essays, pp. 138f. 76 Kay, Political Constructions, p. 40. 77 Hobbes, Leviathan, as quoted by Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, p. 19. 78 Ibid., p. 24. 79 The Spectator, No. 555, Saturday 6 December 1712, p. 459. 80 Cf. OED, definition 5.b: ‘To exhibit or personate (a character) on the stage; to act the part or character of (someone)’ (1662). 81 Swearingen, ‘Ethos’, pp. 119, 120 quoted. 82 Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, p. 512. 83 Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, vol. ii, p. 210. 84 Witherspoon, ‘Lectures on Eloquence’ (vi), in Selected Writings of John Witherspoon, p. 259. 85 Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, p. 100. 86 Nietzsche, ‘On Truth’, p. 146. 87 Turner, The Literary Mind, p. 84. 88 Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, p. 131. 89 Booth, ‘Metaphor as Rhetoric’, p. 63. 90 Miller, ‘Narrative and History’, p. 459. 91 Dimock, ‘Deep Time’, p. 756; Shaw, Narrating Reality, p. 188. 92 James, The Portrait of a Lady, p. 130.

Notes to pages 45–61

273

93 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’, in Poetry and Tales, p. 198; Melville, ‘Bartleby’, in The Piazza Tales, vol. ix, p. 45. 94 ‘William Wilson’, in Poetry and Tales, p. 340. Subsequent references appear in the text. 95 Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship, in Works, vol. v, p. 6. 96 See McGill, American Literature, esp. Ch. 4. 97 Poe, Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. ii, p. 151. Subsequent references appear in the text. 98 Jeffrey, ‘Review of Endymion’, The Edinburgh Review, August (1820), pp. 204–5. 99 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene i, l. 108. 100 Poe, Broadway Journal, in Essays and Reviews, p. 1,076 101 Nardini, ‘Henry Reed’s American Wordsworth’, p. 158. 102 Quoted by Pizer, ‘Goethe’s “World Literature” Paradigm’, p. 217 103 Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England, p. 57. 104 Carlyle, Life of Schiller, in Works, vol. xxv, p. 336. 105 Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections, p. 86. 106 Twain, ‘The Late Benjamin Franklin’, p. 426. 107 Gallagher, Nobody’s Story. 108 Melville, Israel Potter, in The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. viii, p. 48. 109 Franklin, Autobiography, p. 119. 110 James, ‘Preface’ to Roderick Hudson, in The Art of the Novel, p. 6. 111 Gould, Hearing Things, p. 204. 112 Said, ‘Traveling Theory’, p. 236. 113 Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, p. 25. 114 James, Complete Notebooks, p. 15.

2 TRANSATLANTIC CONTAGION AND THE SEDUCTIONS OF ALLEGORY 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Aristotle, Rhetoric, Sect. 6. Girard, ‘The Plague in Literature and Myth’, p. 833. Ibid., p. 845. Wald, Contagious, p. 51. Freud, Totem and Taboo in The Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. xiii, p. 143. Defoe, The True Born English-Man. A Satyr, p. 9. Ibid., p. 22. Hume, ‘Of National Characters’, in Essays, p. 197. Subsequent references are in the text. De Quincey, ‘Style’ (Blackwood’s, 1840), in De Quincey as Critic, pp. 66, 67. Aikin and Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, p. 211. Hume, Enquiry in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, Sect. vii, pp. 251, 257, 258. Hume, Natural History of Religion, p. 76. Monboddo, Ancient Metaphysics, quoted by Davidson, Breeding, p. 132.

274

Notes to pages 61–77

14 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Pt iii, Ch. iii, para. 43, pp. 155–56. Subsequent references are in the text. 15 Arch, Authorizing the Past, pp. 189–90. 16 Nathanael Carpenter, Geography Delineated Forth in Two Bookes [1625] quoted by Canup, ‘Cotton Mather and “Criolian Degeneracy” ’, p. 22. 17 Canup, ‘Cotton Mather’, p. 27. 18 Quoted in ibid., pp. 24 and 27. 19 Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, p. 17. 20 Hamilton, Federalist Papers of Alexander Hamilton, no. 61, p. 375. 21 Ibid., no. 16, p. 118. 22 THE ECHO, WITH OTHER POEMS. A Poetico-Political Olio, http://archive. org/stream/echowithotherpoe1807also/echowithotherpoe1807also_djvu.txt 23 Roberts, ‘Gothic Enlightenment’, p. 313. 24 Ibid., pp. 315–16. 25 Mather, Method and Success of Inoculating the Small-Pox in Boston, quoted in Beall and Shryock, Cotton Mather, p. 113, fn. 59. 26 Ibid., pp. 116–17. 27 Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, Introduction, p. 21. All italics and other emphases are Mather’s. Subsequent references to this work are in the text. 28 Quoted by Eve Tavor Bannet, in The Domestic Revolution, p. 64. 29 Quoted by Kenneth Murdock, in introduction to Mather, Magnalia, p. 29. 30 Oldmixon, British Empire in America, vol. i, p. ix. 31 Quoted by Kenneth Murdock, in introduction to Mather, Magnalia, p. 31. 32 Tudor, North American Review, 6 ( Jan 1818), p. 256. Subsequent references are in the text. 33 The terms are Timothy Gould’s; see Hearing Things, p. 19. 34 Smith, Lectures, pp. 100–1. 35 Mather, quoted by Arch, Authorizing the Past, p. 186. 36 Murdock, ‘Clio in the Wilderness’, p. 221. 37 Bercovitch, ‘“Nehemias Americanus”’, p. 220. 38 Norton, ‘The New School in Literature and Religion’, p. 194. The passage is quoted in full in Chapter 8 below. 39 Freud, Totem and Taboo, in The Works of Sigmund Freud, pp. 62, 88. 40 Melville, ‘Bartleby’, in The Piazza Tales, vol. ix, pp. 14, 19. Subsequent references are in the text. 41 Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales, vol. ix, p. 243. Subsequent references are in the text. 42 Smith, Lectures, p. 101. 43 Colacurcio, The Province of Piety, pp. 426f. 44 ‘Historical Commentary’ in Twice-Told Tales, vol. ix, pp. 511–12. Poe, reviewing Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse in Essays and Reviews, pp. 577–88. 45 Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales, p. 666. 46 Vermeule, Why do we Care about Literary Characters?, pp. 81–82. 47 Hawthorne, ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’, in Mosses from an Old Manse, vol. x, pp. 91–92. Subsequent references are in the text.

Notes to pages 78–95

275

48 Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk ix, l. 425. 49 Cf . ‘The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and providence their guide: They hand in hand, with wand’ring steps and slow, (PL, Bk xii, ll. 646–49) Through Eden took their solitary way.’ 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59

Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk iv, l. 827. Ibid., Bk ix, ll. 997–99. Dickinson, ‘Poem 1261’, in Complete poems. James, Daisy Miller, in Novels and Tales, vol. xviii, p. 13. Subsequent references are in the text. Thorne, Henry James and Revision, p. 230. Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, http://find. galegroup.com/ecco/infomark.do?&contentSet=ECCOArticles&type=multi page&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&docId=CW3317421904&source=gale& userGr oupName=ed_itw&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE Hume, Enquiry in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, p. 251. Milton, paradise Lost, Bk ix, l. 432. In 1855, Richard Deakin’s Flora of the Colosseum of Rome claimed to have identified 420 species in the amphitheatre. See www.nerone.cc/nerone/archi vio/arch68.htm (accessed 25.10.12). Poe, ‘Hawthorne’, in Essays and Reviews, p. 582.

3 ‘CHOICE FLOWERS’ 1 2 3 4 5

Burns, Poems and Songs, vol. i, pp. 228–29 (ll. 1–5, 31–36, 37–42, 49–54). Wordsworth, Poems, vol. i, p. 537. Subsequent references are in the text. Keats, Life, Letters and Literary Remains, vol. ii, pp. 264–65. Keats, Endymion, Book i, ll. 49–51, in Keats, Complete Poems. Severn, writing to John Taylor, as quoted in Keats, The Keats Circle, vol. i, pp. 224–25. 6 Shelley, Adonais, p. 431. 7 Radford and Sandy, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. 8 Quoted in Bennett, ‘Dead Keats’, p. 44. 9 Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, p. 271. 10 James, Italian Hours, p. 172. 11 James, Novels and Tales, vol. xviii, pp. 59, 27. Subsequent references are in the text. 12 Shelley, Adonais, p. 439. 13 Byron, Don Juan, Canto xi, p. 412. 14 Chandler, England in 1819, p. 36. 15 ‘Z’, ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry, addressed to Leigh Hunt’, Blackwood’s Magazine, July 1818.

276 16 17 18 19

Notes to pages 95–113

Gittings (ed.), Letters of John Keats, p. 157. Levinson, ‘Keats and His Readers’, pp. 157–58, n. 15. Motion, John Keats, p. 302. Francis Jeffrey, The Edinburgh Review, vol. xxxiv (August 1820), p. 205 (italics added). 20 Ibid., pp. 203–4. 21 The Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany, vol. vii, p. 315; The Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany (August 1820), p. 109. 22 Francis Jeffrey, The Edinburgh Review (May 1811), p. 17. 23 Ibid., pp. 24–25. 24 Francis Jeffrey, The Edinburgh Review, vol. xxxiv (August 1820), pp. 204–5. 25 Thomas Carlyle, The Edinburgh Review, vol. xlvi (June 1827), pp. 185 and 190. 26 Eliot, Journals of George Eliot, p. 355. 27 Adrian Poole, ‘The Charming Edition of Henry James (Junior)’, lecture delivered in Edinburgh 3 October 2008. 28 The OED’s first definition (‘orig.’) gives ‘The chanting or recitation of a verse supposed to possess magic power or occult influence; incantation, enchantment; hence, any action, process, verse, sentence, word, or material thing, credited with such properties; a magic spell; a talisman, etc.’ 29 Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk ix, l. 999. 30 Cf. Hamlet, Act 3, Scene iv, l. 36. I’m grateful to Adrian Poole for this suggestion. 31 Byron, Don Juan, Canto xi. 32 Shelley, Adonais, l. 327. 33 Poe, ‘William Wilson’, in Poetry and Tales, p. 323. 34 William James in The Letters of William James, vol. i, p. 271, quoted by Horne in Henry James and Revision, p. 229 (italics in original). 35 Freud, Totem and Taboo, in The Works of Sigmund Freud, pp. 75, 86. 36 James, Novels and Tales, vol. xviii, p. xxi. Subsequent references are in the text. 37 James, William Wetmore Story, pp. 127–28. 38 Ibid., p. 129. 39 Motion, John Keats, p. 309. 40 Fuller, Dispatches, p. 31. Subsequent references are in the text. 41 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 115. 42 Pope, ‘To a Lady, of the Characters of Women’, in Pope Poetical Works, p. 291. 43 Stewart, Collected Works, vol. iii, p. 240. 44 Lynch, The Economy of Character, p. 242. 45 Lacey, Women, Crime and Character, p. 3; Hume, Enquiry, in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, p. 239. 46 Burns, Poems and Songs, p. 208. 47 ‘Given to a Lady who Asked Me to Write a Poem’ (1792), http://digital.lib. ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/Works/LittJPoeti.htm#p113 48 R. B. Sheridan, The Rivals, Act i, Scene 2, www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/ 24761/pg24761.html (accessed 14.12.12). 49 Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, p. 174.

Notes to pages 113–25

277

50 Mackenzie, The Lounger, no. 20 (18 June 1785), The Works of Henry Mackenzie, vol. v, pp. 181–82. 51 Craig, The Mirror and the Lounger, no. 31, p. 51. 52 Brewer, Afterlife of Character, p. 95. 53 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 15. 54 Ibid., p. 29. 55 Austen, Persuasion, pp. 6, 50. Subsequent references are in the text. 56 A. Walton Litz, ‘Persuasion’, p. 228. 57 Kastely, Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition, p. 157. 58 See Marx, The Machine in the Garden, Ch. 2. 59 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 213. 60 Ibid., p. 34. 61 Quoted by Kolodny, ‘Inventing a Feminist Discourse’, p. 372. 62 Capper, Margaret Fuller, vol. i, p. 296. 63 Fuller, ‘A Short Essay on Critics’, p. 10. 64 Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’, in Essays and Lectures, p. 54. 65 Poe, ‘The Literati of New York City – No. IV: Sarah Margaret Fuller’, in Essays and Reviews, pp. 1,173, 1,175, 1,176. 66 Eliot, The Leader 6 (13 Oct. 1855), pp. 988–89. 67 Cavell, ‘Something out of the Ordinary’, in Philosophy: The Day after Tomorrow. 68 Fuller, Memoirs, vol. ii, p. 77. 69 Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 70–71. 70 The phrase is from Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, p. 289.

4 CHARACTERS AND REPRESENTATIVES 1 Wilson, ‘On the Analogy between the Growth of Individual and National Genius’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 6 (January 1820), pp. 377–78. Attribution by Higgins, Romantic Genius, p. 155. 2 Ibid., pp. 378–79. 3 Siskin, ‘Personification and Community’, p. 377. 4 Heath, ‘Keywords’, p. 91. 5 Aristotle, On Rhetoric, quoted by Olmstead, Rhetoric, p. 16. 6 Quoted by Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting, p. 4. 7 Hazlitt, ‘On Modern Comedy’, pp. 11–12. 8 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 578, 580. 9 De Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer, p. 44. ‘Collective abstractions’ is John J. McWilliams’ phrase, in Hawthorne, Melville, and the American Character, p. 5. 10 Tocqueville, Democracy, p. 411. 11 See Gustafson, ‘American Literature’, p. 469. 12 Dwight, Travels in New England and New York (1821–22), quoted in Ziff, Writing in the New Nation, p. 17.

278

Notes to pages 126–38

13 14 15 16

Ibid., p. x. Quoted in Dekker and Williams, James Fenimore Cooper, p. 269. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 20. Witherspoon, ‘The Dominion of Providence’, in Selected Writings of John Witherspoon, p. 140. 17 Ibid., pp. 141, 140, 144. 18 Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, p. 1. 19 Lynch, The Economy of Character, p. 132. 20 Bird, Sheppard Lee, p. 11. Subsequent references are in the text. 21 Baier, Death and Character, pp. 33–34. 22 Poe, Essays and Reviews, pp. 402, 401. 23 Davidson, ‘The Life and Times of Charlotte Temple’, p. 168. 24 Stoddard, The Morgesons, pp. 59, 137. 25 Quoted by Rourke, American Humor, p. 24. 26 Ibid., p. 26. 27 Martineau, Society in America, vol. i, p. 148. 28 Fuller, Papers on Literature and Art, vol. i, p. 61. 29 Oakes Smith, Selections from the Autobiography, p. 139. 30 Emerson, Essays, Second Series, in Complete Works, p. 98. 31 Oakes Smith, ‘Characterless Women’, pp. 199–200. 32 Ibid. The allusion is to Enobarbus describing Cleopatra’s enthralling charm: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety: other women cloy The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies . . . (Antony and Cleopatra, Act 2 Scene ii, ll. 243–46) 33 Pater, ‘Style’, in Appreciations, pp. 7–8. 34 James, Complete Notebooks, p. 28. 35 James, The Tragic Muse, p. 126. 36 Oakes Smith, ‘Characterless Women’, p. 199. 37 Gittings, Letters of John Keats, p. 157. 38 Oakes Smith, Selections from the Autobiography, p. 56. 39 Ibid., p. 82. 40 Quoted by Gustafson, ‘Choosing a Medium’, p. 35. 41 Oakes Smith, ‘Excerpts from the Diary of Elizabeth Oakes Smith’, p. 540. 42 Foley, ‘Fashion’, p. 463. 43 Oakes Smith, Woman and Her Needs (1851), ‘Sanctity of Marriage’, www.neiu. edu/~thscherm/eos/w&n.htm (accessed 11.12.12). 44 See Bauer and Gould, ‘Introduction’ to Cambridge Companion, p. 7. 45 Fuller, ‘Autobiographical Romance,’ Woman in the Nineteenth Century, p. 149. 46 Quoted by Capper, Margaret Fuller, vol. i, pp. 118–19. 47 Fuller, Letters, vol. i, p. 150. 48 Hudspeth, ‘Margaret Fuller and the Idea of Heroism’, p. 47. 49 James, The Portrait of a Lady, p. 235. Subsequent references are in the text.

Notes to pages 140–57

279

50 51 52 53

Wood, ‘Performing the Money Issue’, p. 6. Emerson, Nature, in Complete Works, vol. iii, p. 16; Hume, Treatise, p. 269. Cavell, Philosophy: The Day after Tomorrow, p. 19. Miller (ed.), Margaret Fuller, p. xxvii. In a similar way ‘the Margaret-ghost’ would be distributed across several characters in The Bostonians (1886), James’ novel about how women might be represented, and represent themselves, in a post-Civil War ‘Reconstruction’ environment where the early democracy’s optative version of representative self-invention had come seriously into doubt. 54 Fuller, Memoirs, vol. i, p. 14; Dispatches, p. 31. 55 Emerson in Fuller, Memoirs, vol. i, p. 269. 56 Melville, The Confidence-Man, p. 41. Subsequent references are in the text. 57 Hobbes, Leviathan, as quoted by Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, p. 19. 58 Hume, Treatise, p. 73 (italics in original). Subsequent references appear in the text. 59 Blair, ‘Puns and Radical Ambiguity in Melville’s The Confidence-Man’, pp. 91–95. 60 The Examiner, 18 April (1857), n.p. 61 Lowell, ‘Emerson the Lecturer’, in The Works of James Russell Lowell, vol. i, p. 349. The first version of the essay was a review in the Atlantic Monthly, 1861. Subsequent references appear in the text. 62 Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality, p. 15. 63 Emerson, Complete Works, vol. iii, p. 55. 64 Ibid., ‘Character’, p. 91. 65 Ibid., p. 207. Augst, ‘Composing the Moral Senses’, pp. 85–120. 66 Sbriglia, ‘Revision and Identification’, p. 4. 67 Emerson, ‘Representative Men’, in Complete Works, vol. iv, p. 182. 68 Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, pp. 21–22. 69 Franklin, Autobiography, p. 25.

5 LITERARY FRIENDSHIP AND TRANSATLANTIC CORRESPONDENCES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Hume, Enquiry, in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, p. 276. Quoted by Spencer, The Quest for Nationality, p. 28. Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’, in Essays and Lectures, p. 53. Melville, ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’, in The Piazza Tales, vol. ix, p. 248. Poe, ‘William Wilson’, in Poetry and Tales, p. 343. Subsequent references are in the text. Den Uyl and Griswold, ‘Adam Smith on Friendship and Love’, p. 626. Hogg, ‘Strange Letter of a Lunatic’, in James Hogg, p. 160 (italics in original). Ibid., p. 165. Quinn, citing Washington Irving’s ‘Unwritten Drama of Young Byron’, Edgar Allan Poe, p. 286. Cavell, Philosophy: The Day after Tomorrow, p. 133. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 96. Lamb, ‘Distant Correspondents’, in The Works of Charles Lamb, pp. 412–13.

280

Notes to pages 157–71

13 Adorno, Hullot-Kentor and Will, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 170. 14 ‘[L]ateral thinking, n’, The Oxford English Dictionary. 15 Poe, ‘Marginalia’, p. 10. Quoted in Joswick, ‘Who’s Master in the House of Poe?’, p. 227, and n. 3. 16 Smith, Lectures, p. 100. 17 Poe, ‘Ligeia’, in Poetry and Tales, p. 262. 18 Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, p. 189, n. 8. 19 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 224–25. 20 Hume, Treatise, pp. 521–22. 21 Ditz, ‘Secret Selves, Credible Personas’, p. 222. 22 Burke, Philosophical Inquiry, p. 160. 23 Definition 7a, b; see also Bannet, Empire of Letters, p. 235. 24 James, Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth, p. 25. 25 Derrida, Politics of Friendship, pp. 4–5. 26 Telfer, ‘Friendship’, p. 262. 27 Aristotle, from Nicomachean Ethics, excerpted in Pakaluk (ed.), Other Selves, p. 31. 28 Buber, I and Thou, p. 54. 29 Jefferson, ‘The Declaration of Independence’, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. i, p. 429. Subsequent references are in the text. 30 Manning, Fragments of Union, Ch. 4. 31 Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 70. 32 See Loxley, Performativity, pp. 101–3. 33 Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, p. 20. 34 Lewis, The Four Loves, p. 75. 35 Emerson, ‘Friendship’, in Essays and Lectures, pp. 353, 352. Subsequent references are in the text. 36 Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship, p. 3. 37 Ibid., p. 4. 38 Fuller, ‘Short Essay’, p. 5. 39 Slater (ed.), Correspondence, pp. 98, 97. Subsequent references are in the text. 40 Quoted in Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’, in Essays and Lectures, p. 54 (italics in original). 41 Bennett, Wordsworth Writing, p. 87. 42 Lamb, ‘Distant Correspondents’, in The Works of Charles Lamb, p. 413. 43 Ibid., p. 413. 44 Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vol. v, pp. 328–29. 45 Letter of 3 November 1847, quoted by Slater, in Correspondence, p. 34. 46 Bannet, Empire of Letters, p. 132. 47 Ellison, Delicate Subjects, p. 218. 48 Fuller, Memoirs, vol. i, p. 101. Subsequent references are in the text. 49 Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, p. 62. 50 Emerson, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. ii, p. 336. Subsequent references are in the text. 51 Irving, Sketch-Book, p. 12.

Notes to pages 171–81

281

52 Emerson, ‘Friendship’, in Essays and Lectures, p. 343. Subsequent references are in the text. 53 Fuller, Letter to William H. Channing, July 1841, in Letters, vol. ii, p. 214. 54 Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, p. 67. 55 Dickinson, Complete Poems, Poem 303. 56 Eliot, ‘Three Novels’, Westminster Review, 66 (October 1856), pp. 571–78, reprinted in Essays of George Eliot, p. 326. 57 Letter to Stowe, 8 May 1869, reprinted in Eliot, George Eliot Letters, vol. v, p. 31. 58 Letter to Eliot, 15 April 1869. Correspondence reprinted in Cognard-Black and MacLeod Walls (eds.), Kindred Hands, p. 25. 59 Letter to Stowe, 11 July 1869, in Eliot, George Eliot Letters, vol. v, p. 48. 60 Letter to Stowe, 10 April 1879, quoted in Stowe, Life, p. 483. 61 Letter to Eliot, 3 August 1869, quoted in Cognard-Black, Narrative in the Professional Age, p. 45. 62 Letter to Eliot, 23 September 1872, in Cognard-Black and MacLeod Walls (eds.), Kindred Hands, p. 29. 63 Ibid., p. 28. 64 Letter to Eliot, 26 September 1872, in ibid. p. 30. 65 Letter to Eliot, 26 September 1872, in Stowe, Life, p. 471. 66 Letter to Stowe, October (?) 1872, in Eliot, George Eliot Letters, vol. v, p. 322. 67 Melville, The Confidence-Man, p. 238. 68 Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 84. 69 Letter to Eliot, 25 September 1876 in Cognard-Black and MacLeod Walls (eds.), Kindred Hands, pp. 31–32. 70 Letter to Eliot, 15 April 1869, in ibid., p. 26. 71 Letter to Eliot, 11 May 1872, in Stowe, Life, pp. 469–70. 72 Letter to Stowe, 24 June 1872, in Eliot, George Eliot Letters, vol. v, p. 279. 73 James, ‘Review of The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle’, The Century Magazine (June 1883), p. 267. 74 Ibid., p. 267. 75 John Lyon, ‘Stevenson and Henry James’. 76 James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, in Smith (ed.), Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. 65–66, 70–1. 77 James, Letter to Stevenson, 5 December 1884. Correspondence reprinted in Smith (ed.), Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 101. 78 Letter to James, 8 December 1884, in ibid., p. 103. 79 Letter to Stevenson, 12 January 1891, in ibid., p. 198. 80 Letter to Stevenson, 31 July 1888, in ibid., pp. 173–74. 81 Bannet, Empire of Letters, p. 122. 82 Letter to James, November 1887, in Smith (ed.), Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 165. 83 Letter to Stevenson, 12 January 1891, in ibid., p. 197. 84 V. F. Perkins, ‘Must We Say What They Mean?: Film Criticism and Interpretation’, Movie, 34/35 (1990), p. 4, quoted by Klevan, ‘Guessing the Unseen’, p. 129.

282

Notes to pages 182–96

85 James, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, in Smith (ed.), Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 124. 86 Ibid., pp. 125–26. 87 Letter to James, October 1887, in ibid., p. 162. 88 Letter to Stevenson, 30 October 1887, in ibid., p. 163.

6 SUBJECTS AND OBJECTS 1 Emerson, ‘Swedenborg’, p. 682. 2 James, ‘Review of The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle’, The Century Magazine (June 1883), p. 267. 3 Jewett, ‘ “Carlyle in America” ’, pp. 103, 104. Subsequent references are in the text. 4 See Edward Everett review, ‘Thomas Carlyle: Sartor Resartus’, The North American Review (1835), 481–82, and Vance, ‘Carlyle in America’, pp.363–75. 5 Slater (ed.), Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, p. 272. Subsequent references are in the text. 6 Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 70. 7 Stevenson, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, in R. L. Stevenson: Critical Essays, p. 85. 8 It was first published in the Cornhill Magazine in January 1878, later collected in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887). 9 James, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, in Smith (ed.), Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. 145–47. Subsequent references are in the text. 10 Pope-Hennessy, Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. 107–8; Bell, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 126; Calder, RLS, p. 116. 11 James, ‘John S. Sargent’, p. 691. 12 Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship, p. 116. 13 Stevenson, ‘Will o’ the Mill’, in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables, pp. 69–70. Subsequent references are in the text. 14 Stevenson, Lay Morals and Other Ethical Papers, in The Works, vol. xxvi, p. 12. 15 James, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, in Novels and Tales, p. 62. Subsequent references are in the text. 16 Buber, I and Thou, p. 4. Subsequent references are in the text. 17 James, Preface to The Aspern Papers, in Novels and Tales, p. ix. Subsequent references are in the text. 18 James, Preface to Roderick Hudson, p. 5. 19 Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, in Keats: Poetical Works, p. 38. 20 Derrida, Politics of Friendship, pp. 3–4. 21 Den Uyl and Griswold Jr., ‘Adam Smith on Friendship and Love’, p. 634. 22 Letter to Stevenson, 12 January 1891, in Smith (ed.), Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 198.

Notes to pages 198–211

283

23 Stevenson ( Joint Letter with Fanny Stevenson), Letter to James, 25 February 1886, in Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, vol. v, pp. 210–11. The reference is noted by Beattie, ‘ “The interest of attraction . . .” ’, p. 97. 24 Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae, p. 58. Subsequent references are in the text. 25 Derrida, Archive Fever, pp. 11, 27, 109. 26 Ibid. 27 Stevenson’s ‘Note’, Appendix ii, in The Master of Ballantrae, p. 226. 28 Stevenson, ‘Victor Hugo’s Romances’, in Stevenson, Familiar Studies, pp. 6–7. 29 Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 164. 30 ‘[B]uckram, n.’, definition 2a, The Oxford English Dictionary. 31 ‘[S]washbuckler, n.’, The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, http://www.oed.com. 32 Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on Romance’, p. 59. 33 Stevenson,‘Victor Hugo’s Romances’, in Familiar Studies, p. 49. 34 Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s’, p. 120. 35 Beattie notes that James began writing this tale at the same time as he and Stevenson were corresponding about the latter’s plans for The Master of Ballantrae. See ‘ “The Interest of Attraction . . .” ’, p. 104. 36 James, ‘The Lesson of the Master’, in Novels and Tales, vol. xv. Subsequent references are in the text. 37 Keats, ‘To Autumn’, in Keats: Poetical Works, pp. 218–19, ll. 1–11. 38 Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, in Keats: Poetical Works, pp. 209–10. 39 Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, p. 181. 40 Letter to Lydia Jackson, 1 February 1835, in Emerson, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. i, p. 435. Quoted (with slight alteration) by Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, p. 52. 41 Miller, Literature as Conduct, p. 13. 42 Bion discussed in Little, ‘Freud, Friendship, and Politics’, p. 152.

7 HISTORICAL CHARACTERS 1 Cavell, Philosophy: The Day after Tomorrow, p. 251. 2 Treadwell, Autobiographical Writing, p. 13. 3 Stanfield, Essay, p. 174. Subsequent references are in the text. Stanfield had a career as an actor before becoming first a mariner in the transatlantic slave trade, and then an influential opponent of slavery; he published the anti-slavery tract Observations on a Guinea Voyage in 1788, addressed to Thomas Clarkson. 4 Blair, Lectures, vol. ii, Lecture 37, p. 298. 5 Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, vol. i, Advertisement, p. 1. 6 Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, pp. 167–68. 7 Bloom, Anxiety of Influence; Bate, Burden of the Past. 8 Treadwell, Autobiographical Writing, p. 25. 9 James, ‘Review of The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle’, The Century Magazine (June 1883), p. 267.

284

Notes to pages 211–20

10 James, Novels and Tales, vol. xii, p. 118. 11 Treadwell, Autobiographical Writing, p. 6. 12 Melville, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, in The Piazza Tales, vol. ix, p. 14. Subsequent references are in the text. 13 Stanfield, Essay, p. 3. 14 Stanfield, Essay, p. 30. 15 D’Israeli, Miscellanies, p. 97. 16 The Central Prison of New York City, built in 1839, was styled after an Egyptian tomb, and named accordingly. Monroe Edwards, the ‘gentleman forger’ to whom Bartleby is likened by the gaoler near the end of the tale, was confined in the Tombs. 17 Its origins went back to the 1770s when Congress authorised Ebenezer Hazard to open undelivered letters that might assist in the prosecution of the Revolutionary War of Independence. In 1792, a Post Office Act in America prohibited post offices from opening letters, unless they had proved impossible to deliver. In this case, they were returned to the ‘Dead Letter Office’, opened and either returned to sender or destroyed. The annual burning of dead letters became a public occasion in Washington. 18 On problems associated with the separation of benevolence and justice in Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, see Michael Ridge, ‘David Hume, Paternalist’, forthcoming in Hume Studies. I am grateful to the author for sharing a copy of this article in advance of publication. 19 Fergusson, The Poems, ed. McDiarmid, vol. ii, p, 229. Subsequent references are identified by McDiarmid and page number in the text. 20 Monthly Review: or Literary Journal (December 1774), p. 483. 21 Fergusson, Poetical Works, ed. Irving, p. 8. 22 Fergusson, Works, ed. Grosart, p. lxxii. Subsequent references are identified by Grosart in the text. 23 MacLaine, Robert Fergusson, p. 20. 24 Houston, ‘Madness, Morality, and Creativity’, p. 138. 25 Quoted in Goodsir Smith (ed.), Robert Fergusson, p. 29. 26 Gleig’s Supplement first appeared in 1801, and with the main Encyclopedia was a widely used information source in America as in Britain. 27 Salmagundi was a collection of early American satirical periodical essays produced by Washington Irving, his brother and their friend James Kirke Paulding. 28 Sealts, Melville’s Reading, p. 60. By intriguing coincidence, 1862 was also the year in which Melville acquired Poems of James Clarence Mangan, to which Susan Howe has likened ‘Bartleby’ in a similar counter-chronological comparison. I am indebted to Deidre Lynch for drawing my attention to Howe’s The Nonconformist’s Memorial when this study was essentially complete. A triangulation of Melville’s, Fergusson’s and Mangan’s work (which had already in 1851 been compared to that of Poe) might cast additional light on the transatlantic poetics of character. 29 Melville, Correspondence, p. 302.

Notes to pages 220–36

285

30 Melville owned a copy of The Poetical Works of Robert Burns, with Memoir, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes, by the Rev. George Gilfillan, but as this wasn’t published until 1856, it’s not of much use to us here. 31 Melville, Journals, p. 49. 32 Sealts, Melville’s Reading, p. 48. 33 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 225 (1836), p. 133. 34 Andrew Knighton, ‘The Bartleby Industry’. 35 Burns, Poems and Songs, vol. i, p. 59. Subsequent references are in the text. 36 Robert Burns, ‘Apostrophe to Fergusson, Inscribed Above and Below his Portrait’, in Poems and Songs, vol i, p. 322. Burns wrote these lines in a copy of the second edition of Fergusson’s Poems, 1782. 37 Burns, Letters, vol. i, pp. 437–38; quoted in Hogg, Robert Burns, pp. 199–200. 38 Graham, The Social Life of Scotland, pp. 116–17. 39 Currie, as quoted in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, 11 February (1826), p. 89. 40 Burns, Poems and Songs, vol. i, p. 322. 41 Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 148. Lawrence uses the term of ‘classic’ American literature of the nineteenth century. 42 6 February 1787 in Burns, Letters, vol. i, p. 90. 43 Burns, Letters, vol. ii, p. 378. 44 MacQueen, Progress and Poetry, p. 120. 45 Gleig, ‘Fergusson (Robert)’, p. 648. 46 Ibid., p. 647. 47 Santayana, Genteel Tradition, p. 44. 48 Whyte, ‘Competing Idylls’, p. 47. 49 MacLaine, Robert Fergusson, p. 28; Goodsir Smith, Robert Fergusson, p. 18, for example. 50 Melville, ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’, in The Piazza Tales, vol. ix, pp. 248, 247, 243; Melville, Correspondence, p. 186. 51 Bacon, ‘Of Studies’ (1597), in Essayes, p. 153. 52 Mailloux, Reception Histories, p. 131. 53 Blair, Lectures, vol. i, Lecture 6, p. 103. 54 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 73. 55 Swann, ‘Dating the Action of Bartleby’, pp. 357–58; Meindl, American Fiction, pp. 63–103. 56 Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, p. 72. 57 Ibid., p. 70. 58 Derrida, Limited, Inc, p. 12. 59 James, Portrait of a Lady, p. 234. 60 Looby, ‘Introduction’ to Sheppard Lee, p. xxvi. 61 Kundera, ‘The Consciousness of Continuity’, in The Curtain, pp. 4–5. 62 Roach, Cities of the Dead, p. 5.

286

Notes to pages 238–51 8 POETICS OF CHARACTER

1 Melville, ‘Bartleby’, in The Piazza Tales, vol. ix, p. 13. 2 ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed’, The Song of Solomon 4:12. ‘Preface’ in Burns, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, p. 175. Subsequent references to this ‘Kilmarnock edition’ are in the text. 3 Sibbald, Review of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany (October 1786), p. 284. 4 Ibid., p. 285. 5 Austen, ‘Sanditon’, in Later Manuscripts, pp. 175–76. 6 Carlyle, The Edinburgh Review, no. 96 (1828), reprinted in Works, vol. i, p. 257. Subsequent quotations from this review are by page number in the text. 7 Mackenzie, The Lounger, 97 (9 December 1786). 8 Blair’s Lecture 38, ‘On the Origin and Progress of Poetry’, in Lectures, gave an account of poetry as the passionate utterance of natural man. 9 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 120–67. 10 Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’, in Poetical Works, vol. ii, p. 323, l. 26. 11 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 485. 12 Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’, in Essays and Lectures, p. 69. Subsequent references are in the text. 13 Emerson, ‘Burns’, in Complete Works, vol. xi, pp. 367–68. 14 Burns, ‘To a Mountain Daisy’, ‘To a Louse’ and ‘Scotch Drink’, in Complete Poems, vol. i, pp. 228, 193 and 173. Subsequent references to Burns’ poems are in the text. 15 Emerson, Nature, in Complete Works, vol. i, p. 23. 16 Cavell, ‘An Emerson Mood’, in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, p. 21. 17 Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, p. 56. 18 Wilson, ‘Emerson as Lecturer’, pp. 88–89. 19 Lowell, ‘Emerson the Lecturer’, in The Works of James Russell Lowell, vol. i, p. 360. 20 Adorno, Hullot-Kentor and Will, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 153. Subsequent references appear in the text. 21 Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’, in Essays and Lectures, p. 57. 22 Wordsworth and Coleridge, ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800 edn), vol i, pp. xxxvi–xxxvii. 23 Ibid., p. 5. 24 D’Israeli, On The Literary Character, pp. 77–78. 25 I am grateful to Nigel Leask for allowing me to quote from the first still unpublished complete transcription of the Second Commonplace Book; the quotation is taken from p. 9. Subsequently CPB2 in text. 26 Burns, Letters, vol. i, p. 106. Subsequent references to Burns’ letters unless otherwise identified are to this edition, and given in the text. 27 Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’, in Essays and Lectures.

Notes to pages 251–69

287

28 Carlyle, The Edinburgh Review no. 96 (1828), reprinted in Works, vol. i, pp. 266–67. 29 Pope, ‘Epistle to a Lady, on the Characters of Women’, in Pope Poetical Works, p. 299. 30 Norton, ‘The New School in Literature and Religion’, p. 194. 31 John Banister, Boston Courant 1710, Quoted in Mather, Magnalia Christi, p. 31. 32 Bertelsen, ‘Neutral Nonsense’, pp. 135–52. 33 See Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, p. 32. 34 Low, Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage, pp. 182–84. 35 The Edinburgh Review, vol. xxvii (1816), p. 293. 36 Low (ed.), Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage, pp. 182f. 37 Cavell, Etudes, p. 181. Subsequent references are in the text. 38 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 485. 39 Emerson, Essays and Lectures, p. 262. 40 Emerson, ‘English Traits’, in Complete Works, vol. v, pp. 87 and 291. 41 A later version of this poem was published as ‘Epistle To Robert Graham, Esq., Of Fintry’, see Burns, Poems and Songs, vol. ii, pp. 549–54. 42 Stevenson, Lay Morals and Other Ethical Papers, in The Works, vol. xxvi, p. 12. 43 See Crawford, The Bard, p. 20. 44 Gould, ‘The Names of Action’, p. 71. 45 Mackenzie, The Works of Henry Mackenzie, vol. vi, pp. 378 and 388. 46 See Ferguson, ‘Burns and Hugh Blair’, pp. 440–46. 47 Quoted in Low, Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage, p. 82. 48 Quoted in Crawford, The Bard, p. 134. 49 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, pp. 122–23 (from paragraphs 20 and 21). 50 James, A Pluralistic Universe, p. 20. 51 Wallace Stevens, ‘Effects of Analogy’, in The Necessary Angel, p. 111. 52 Mah, ‘The Predicament of Experience’, pp. 101–2. 53 Jay, Songs of Experience, p. 11. 54 Emerson, Letters, vol. iii, p. 18. 55 Anderson, The Way We Argue Now, p. 118 quoted. 56 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel, p. 129.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor 157, 242, 247–248 Aikin, Anna 60 Alison, Archibald 97 allegory 5, 41, 45, 46, 48, 71–72, 79, 81 in Hawthorne 77 James 191 Romantic 46, 91, 104 America see United States The American Monthly 76 anachronic relationships 32–33, 75, 158–159, 232 analogy 147–148, 183 correspondence and 15 Anderson, Amanda 238, 269 Anthony, Susan B. 135 apophasis 223, 226, 240 arabesque style 98 Arch, Stephen Carl 62 Aristotle 44, 80, 160 on emotion 57 Arnold, Matthew 93, 164, 263 Atlantic ocean 9 attestation 87 Augst, Thomas 23 Austen, Jane Persuasion 9–10, 114, 115–117 Pride and Prejudice 114–115 Sanditon 241 Austin, J. L. 155 autobiography 49–50 aversiveness 256 Bacon, Francis 230 Baier, Annette 128 Banister, John 68 Bannet, Eve 181 Bate, Walter Jackson 51 Bell, Ian 187 Benjamin, Park 76 Bennett, Andrew 91, 165 Bercovitch, Sacvan 71 Besant, Walter 180

biography 209, 211–212, 235, 243 Burns 240–241, 240–243, 260–261 Fergusson 219–220 Fergusson, Robert 224–225 fictional 184–186, 214–215 Fuller 137–138, 225 Mather 67–69 see also character writing Bion, Wilfred 207 Bird, Robert Montgomery 127–129 Blackwood’s Magazine 18, 94–95, 96, 154 Blair, Hugh 12, 30, 232–233, 263 Lectures 57, 232–233 on metaphor 42–43 sermons 15 Bloom, Harold 51 Booth, Wayne 44 Borges, Jorge Luis 32, 236 Boswell, James 210–211 Brewer, David 114 Britain 6 national character 127 Broadway Journal 48 Brown, Charles Brockden 64 Brutus of Troy 7 Buber, Martin 156, 160–161, 191 Bunyan, John 41 Burnett, James 24 Burns, Robert 111, 239–243, 250, 251 America and 243–246 ‘Auld Lang Syne’ 75 ‘A Bard’s Epitaph 258–259 ‘A Bard’s Epitaph’ 258 biography 240–243 ‘The Brigs of Ayr’ 258 Commonplace Books 249, 263 correspondence 259–260 Emerson on 244–246 on Fergusson 221–223, 239 The Jolly Beggars 111, 262–263 offensiveness 254–256

309

310

Index

Burns, Robert (cont.) Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect 260 private character 250–251 public character 239–241 Tam O’Shanter 255 ‘To a Louse’ 251–252 ‘To a Mountain Daisy’ 88–89, 95 whim 257–258, 261 Butler, Judith 249 Byron, Lord George Gordon 46–47, 100, 243 Calder, Jenni 187 Cambridge University 11 Campbell, George 41–42 Campbell, Mary 260 Canup, John 63 Capper, Charles 117–118, 138 Carlyle, Thomas 97, 241, 252, 253 Emerson and 164–168, 194 fictional 184–186 fictional version 179–186 friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson 207 Fuller and 194–196 on heroic character 46 on national literature 17 Sartor Resartus 140, 178, 185 Carpenter, Nathaniel 63 Casaubon, Isaac 27 Cavell, Stanley 30, 52, 119, 119–121, 151, 155, 206, 208, 265 on Austen 119 character as self-performance and self-presence 151 on Emerson 15–16, 248 ordinary language philosophy 246–247 The Century Magazine 179, 182 Chambers, Robert 224 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 220–221 Chandler, James 16, 39, 93 character as contagion 58–59 in Daisy Miller 94–95 enacted 37 ethos and 13–16 as expression of taste and moral sentiment 13 innate and cultivated 22 ownership 13 as self-projection 21–22, 38 transtemporal consistency 146 as unifying literary and historical 29–30 character migration 114 character writing 26–30 Poe on Byron 45–46 Smith on 28

subjectivity 27–28 see also biography characterlessness 110, 127–129 in Melville 144–148 men 127–129 multiple personae 128–129, 144–148 women 129–133, 133–134 see also Mather, Cotton charm 97, 98 Cicero 160 circumatlantic performance 236 civic humanism 123–124 civil society 11–12, 30, 143–144 contagion and 84–85 Clairmont, Claire 192 Clark, Charles Freeman 137 Clarke, James Freeman 173–174 Cognard-Black, Jennifer 176 Colacurcio, Michael J. 76 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 36, 45–46, 57, 242, 243 Columbus, Christopher 193 Commissary Court in Scots Law 218 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 34 confidence 176–177 Connecticut Courant 64 contagion 57–60, 117–118, 142 character as 58 charm and 98–99 cultural 104–105 custom as 83, 84–85 factional 60–62 gossip as 74–76, 77, 102–103 Hume on 60–61 moral decline and 63 performativity and 65 Smith on 61–62 symbolic 77–79, 81 sympathy and 62 transatlanticism as 58–59 Cooper, Elizabeth 67 Cooper, James Fenimore 8, 9, 17, 126 Gleanings in Europe 18 Cornhill Magazine 80 correspondence 13–16, 51, 158–159 epistolary 15 Burns 259–260 Carlyle-Emerson 164–168, 185, 194, 207 Eliot-Stowe 174–179 Fuller-Emerson 169–174 James-Stevenson 179–182 etymology 14 counterpublics 125 Craig, William 113 Crayon, Geoffrey 171 criticism 14, 32

Index Cromek, Robert Hartley 254 Currie, James 240–241 custom 24, 60, 83 Dante 41 Davidson, Cathy 129–130 de Bono, Edward 157 de Man, Paul 22, 30 de Quincey, Thomas 6, 59 Dead Letter Office 216 decentring 22 Declaration of (American) Independence 26–27, 156, 161–162 Defoe, Daniel 59, 111 Deleuze, Gilles 214 democracy 124–125 denotation 12 Derrida, Jacques 24, 30, 34, 34–35, 162 The Dial 166 dialectical interference 32–33 dialogic philosophy 160–161, 191 Dickens, Charles 234 Martin Chuzzlewit 9 dictionaries Johnson’s 26, 208–209, 261 Oxford English 7, 141, 157 Dimock, Wai Chee 44 D’Israeli, Isaac 214, 249–250 double-scope networks 43 Dowden, Edward 199 Eastern Argus 131 The Edinburgh Magazine 97, 240 Edinburgh Review 97, 254 Edinburgh University 12 Eliot, George 97–98, 119 Daniel Deronda 177 friendship with Harriet Beecher Stowe 174–179 Middlemarch 175 Eliot, T. S. 34, 51 Ellison, Julie 39 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 15, 72, 118, 150–151 ‘The Poet’ 262 ‘The American Scholar’ 152–153 Burns and 244–248 Carlyle and 164–168, 194 Cavell on 15–16 The Conduct of Life 148–149 ‘Friendship’ 164 Fuller and 169–174 great men essays 151 Heroes and Hero-worship 165 offensiveness 255 Representative Men 165

311

‘Self-Reliance’ 256, 259 Thomas Carlyle and 207 on Wordsworth 249 empiricism 20 English national character 59 epistolary correspondence see correspondence, epistolary ethics and character 24–26, 101–102, 206–207 Emerson on 150–151 virtue ethics 80–81 ethos 19, 39, 40, 42, 57 Examiner 148 exegesis 17 factional contagion 60–62 female character see women femininity 135–136 Ferguson, Adam 10 Fergusson, Robert 33–34, 217–220 ‘The Sow of Feeling’ 224 ‘Bartleby’ and 232 biography 224–225 Burns on 222–223, 239 epitaphs 225–227 ‘Job, Chap. III Paraphrased’ 217–218, 231 Melville and 220–222 see also Melville, Herman, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ Fields, Annie 174 figuration 12 flatness 77 Fliegelman, Jay 39 Flint, Timothy 62 Foley, Caroline 135 Forster, E. M. 77 Franklin, Benjamin 126 Autobiography 49–50, 151 Fraser’s Magazine 154 Freud, Sigmund 58 friendship 156, 188 Aristotle on 160 Carlyle-Emerson 164–168, 178 Eliot-Stowe 174–179 Fuller on 170–171 Fuller-Emerson 169–174 James-Stevenson 179–182, 196 Johnson-Boswell 209–211 as private affective relationship 159–160 Frothingham, Octavius Brooks 49 Frye, Northrop 229 Fuller, Margaret 19, 88, 105, 107, 117–118, 119–121, 136–137, 142–143, 163 biography of 194, 225 Dial 118 The Dial 166

312

Index

Fuller, Margaret (cont.) Emerson and 169–174 on 143 personal papers 194–196 Woman in the Nineteenth Century 118, 121, 170 Fuller, Timothy 137 Gallagher, Catherine 113, 125, 126 gender 13, 108–111, 118 General Association of Massachusetts 135 George III 161 The Gift 48 Girard, René 58 Gleig, George 221–222, 228 Goethe, Johann von 49, 105 Faust 105 Goldsmith, Oliver 47 Goodman, T. 168 Gosse, Edmund 210 gossip 74, 77, 86, 102–104 Gould, Timothy 21 Grosart, Alexander 218, 219, 223 Hamilton, Alexander 63–64 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 73–76 The Blithedale Romance 172 ‘Legends of the Province House’ 73–76 ‘Rappacini’s Daughter’ 77–79, 81–82, 193 Hazlitt, William 124 Heath, Stephen 123 Hedge, F. H. 174 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 17 Hervey, James 227 Hillis Miller, J. 44 history challenge to chronological sequence 31–32 Hume’s 20–21, 157 Mather’s 66–68 rhetoric and 10–11, 28–29, 29 stadialist account 10–11, 25 Hobbes, Thomas 38, 39, 144 Hogg, James 157, 199 Home, Henry 10 Hopkins, Lemuel 64 Horne, Philip 82 Houston, Rab 219 Hudspeth, Robert N. 137 Hume, David 11, 20–21, 24–25, 38, 59, 111, 146–147, 216 ‘A Character of Sir Robert Walpole’ 27 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals 23–24, 60–61, 83, 152 History of England 11, 25–26 A Treatise of Human Nature 20–21, 157 Hunt, Leigh 94–95

Hutcheson, Francis 14, 30, 83 hypostasis 141 identity 128–129 illocutionary speech acts 35 imitation 235 intention 16 intersubjectivity 209–210 Irving, David 218 Irving, Washington 17, 71, 219–220 James, Henry 91–92, 179, 185 ‘Art of Fiction’ 186 The Aspern Papers 192–197, 201, 206–207, 211, 213 ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ 187–190, 191 Collected Novels and Tales 179 Daisy Miller 80–87, 92–93, 98–99, 104–105, 193 New York edition 107 ‘Flickerbridge’ 102–103, 121 The Golden Bowl 104 Portrait of a Lady 44–45, 138, 138–145 Stevenson and 179–182, 186–188, 196, 201–202 see also Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Master of Ballantrae James, William 101 Jaros, Peter 125 Jefferson, Thomas 7 Jeffrey, Francis 47–48, 96–98, 254–255 Jesuit writing 24 Jewett, Sarah Orne 183–186, 211 Job 217–218 Johnson, Samuel Boswell’s biography 209–211 Dictionary of the English Language 26, 208–209, 261 Lives of the English Poets 209 Rasselas 3–4, 10, 189 on Warton 16 justice 23–24 Kant, Immanuel 155, 265, 267, 268 Kastely, James L. 116–117 Keats, John 15, 90, 92, 93 in Daisy Miller 100, 104–107 Endymion 95–96 letter to Richard Woodhouse 95 ‘to Autumn’ 204 Keats, Tom 90 Kelley, Theresa 41 Knighton, Andrew 222 Kolodny, Annette 117 Kundera, Milan 31, 236, 267

Index La Bruyère, Jean de 27 Lacey, Nicola 111 The Lady’s Book 46 Lamb, Charles 145, 156–157, 165 lateral thinking 157 Lawrence, D. H. 126 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 31 letters see correspondence, epistolary Lewis, C. S. 162 Lippincott’s magazine 80 Little, Graham 207 Little, Janet 111–112 Litz, A. Walton 115 Locke, John 20, 26, 41 Lockhart, J. G. 94–95 Longman’s Magazine 180 Looby, Christopher 129 The Lounger 260–261 Lowell, James Russell 148–149, 149, 247 Lukács, Georg 234–235 Lynch, Deirdre 110–111, 127 Lyon, John 179–180 McDiarmid, Matthew 222 McGill, Meredith 31–32 Mackenzie, Henry 113, 224, 241, 262 The Man of Feeling 113–114 MacLaine, Allan 218–219 MacQueen, John 227 madness 128 magical thinking 58, 86, 98 Mailloux, Steve 230, 230–231 Man, Paul de 30 Marx, Leo 116 Mather, Cotton 63, 65–66, 66–70, 229–230 Account . . . of Inoculating the Small-Pox 66 literary style 67–70, 71 Magnalia Christi Americana 66–70, 74–75, 88, 136 ‘Legends of the Province House’ and 73–76 Melville, Herman 9, 21, 50 The Confidence-Man 40, 143–148 ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ 72–73, 212–217, 221–222, 228–229, 231–232, 234–236, 238 The Confidence-Man 21 Fergusson and 220–222 Moby Dick 200 Redburn 9 Menard, Pierre 34 Mengin, Urbain 91 metaphor 7–8, 12, 21, 41–44, 140 in James 140 in Mather 69–70 in Romantic poetry 41–42 as structure of comparison 43

313

metonymy 12, 41, 44, 45, 83, 84, 127, 152, 156, 168 Mill, John Stuart 13 Milton, John 14 Paradise Lost 57, 77–78, 79, 84, 99 mind 26 The Mirror 113, 225 miserliness 144 misreading 81 Monckton Milnes, Richard 90–91, 92 Nardini, Nicholas 48–49 nation 5–6 national character 16–17, 40, 44–49, 83–85 American 17–18, 45, 48–49, 83–84, 99, 126, 126–127 in Franklin’s Autobiography 49–50 national and individual 25–26 British 127 English 59, 174–175 Italian 83 representation of 40 Scottish 17 Zeitgeist and 122–123 Nature 7, 8–9 Neal, John 18 New York Tribune 121, 131, 137 Nietzsche, Friedrich 43 Niobe 47, 139 North-American Review 69 Norton, Andrews 72, 72–73, 253–254, 257 Oakes Smith, Elizabeth 130–133, 133–134, 135–136 Woman and her Needs 136 Oldmixon, John 68 Oliphant, Margaret 130–131 ordinary language philosophy 246–247, 248 originality 36–37, 229–230 O’Sullivan, John Louis 76 Overt, Paul 204 Oxford English Dictionary 7, 141, 157 Oxford University 11 Packer, Barbara 15 paganism 84 Parkman, Francis 126 passionate utterance 119–120, 123 Pater, Walter 133 performance 30–31, 34–35, 123, 151 performativity 23–24, 35–36, 207, 249 anachronistic 36 characterlessness 133–134 contagion and 65 Perkins, V. F. 181–182 perlocutionary speech 119–121, 123, 141–142 personation 39, 144

314

Index

personification 7, 110, 115, 127 philosophy 20–21, 147–148 see also Hume, David, Hobbes, Thomas, Kant, Immanuel; Transcendentalism Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel 39 plague 58 Pocock, John 123–124 Poe, Edgar Allan 18–19, 31, 45, 118–119 ‘The Visionary’ 46–47 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque 97 ‘William Wilson’ 45, 46–48, 76–77, 153–155 Poe, Edgar Allen 192 Hawthorne and 77 ‘William Wilson’ 198 Poole, Adrian 98 Pope, Alexander 13, 27 An Essay on Criticism 42 Moral Epistles 109–110 Warton on 19 Pope-Hennessy, James 187 Portlan Courier 131 post-modernism 31–32 primitive speech 12 probability 30–31 prosopopoeia 39, 40–41, 47, 115, 117, 123, 194, 208–209 puns 44, 69, 147 Puttenham, George 7–8 Quarterly Review 96 realism 21–22, 45, 101–102, 155 reasoning 14–15 Reed, Henry 49 Reid, Thomas 14–15 Renaissance art 32 Reni, Guido 164 representation 136 representative men 150 reputation 239 rhetoric 7–8, 11–13, 19–22, 41–42, 251, 264 in Austen 115, 116 civil society and 11–13 development of character 19 history and 10–11, 29 Mather and 70 metaphor 12 Smith’s lectures on 19–20 translatio 7–8 see also prosopopoeia; Smith, Adam; trope Richards, Ivor Armstrong 43 Richter, Jean Paul 97 Roach, Joseph 36, 236 Roberts, Siƒn Silyn 64 Robertson, William 10

The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V 11 romance 199 Rooth, Miriam 133 Rowson, Susanna 62, 130 Ruttenburg, Nancy 149–150 St. John de CrŠvecoeur, Hector 125 Santayana, George 228 Sbriglia, Russell 150 Schweitzer, Ivy 156 Scotland nationhood 17 universities 11–12 Scots poetry 230–231 see also Burns, Robert; Fergusson, Robert Scott, Walter 8, 18, 29–30, 127 Waverley 18 Scribner’s Magazine 197–199 self 110 Sennett, Richard 25 sentimental novels 113 Severn, Joseph 91 Shakespeare, William 134, 182 Shaw, Harry E. 44 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 41, 91 Adonais 91, 92–93 preface 100 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 249 Sherringham, Peter 133 Smart, Christopher 254 Smith, Adam 10, 124, 153, 214 The Theory of Moral Sentiments 61–62, 150, 158, 214, 251–252 on character writing 28 on ethical character 25–26 on friendship 158–160 Lectures 157–158 The Theory of Moral Sentiments 263–264 on Threophrastan objectivity 27–28 on trope and literary style 42 Wealth of Nations 116, 150 Smith, Seba 131 social class 111–112, 127 Spectator magazine 39 stadialism 10, 25 civil society 11 Staël, Germaine de 17, 100, 107 Stanfield, James Field 208–209, 212–213 Steele, Richard 39 Stein, Gertrude 175 Stevens, Wallace 267 Stevenson, Robert Louis 186–188 James and 179–182, 201–203 The Master of Ballantrae 197–202

Index

315

James and 201–202 ‘Will o’ the Mill’ 186–189, 191 Stewart, Dugald 8, 12, 109 Stoddard, Elizabeth 130 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 174–179 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 174, 175 Swearingen, Jan 40 sympathy 25, 39–40, 59–60, 159, 215–216 contagion and 60–61, 62 Syracuse Convention for Women’s suffrage 135

in Brother Jonathan 18–19 civic and the individual 123–125 as state 8 United States Magazine and Democratic Review 76 universality 48

taboo 58 Taylor, Charles 22, 256 Temple, Minny 91 Theophrastan archetypes 27, 46–47, 67 Theophrastus 27 theoria 196 Ticknor, George 219 time 35–36 Tocqueville, Alexis de 124–125, 125 transatlanticism 7, 9, 58–59 Transcendentalism 8, 176, 244, 248 transference 8 transitivity 8 translatio imperii 7 Treadwell, James 212 trope 6, 41–42 Smith, Adam on 42 Tudor, William 69–70, 72 Turgenev, Ivan 179 Turner, Mark 43, 48 Turner, Victor 151 Twain, Mark 50 typographical character 26

Wald, Priscilla 58 Wallace, William 252 Walpole, Robert 27 Warner, Michael 125 Warton, Joseph 19 Warton, Thomas 16 Weber, Max 222 Webster, Noah 152 Weinsheimer, Joel 26 Weltliteratur 49 Whately, Richard 117 whim 258–260, 267 Whyte, Christopher 229 Winthrop, John 67 Witherspoon, John 42, 126 Wollstonecraft, Mary 117 women 13, 25, 108–111, 109–110, 118, 121, 172 characterlessness 129–133, 133–134 femininity 135–136 as foreign 172 in James 138–140 Woodhouse, Richard 95 Wordsworth, William 36, 242, 248–249 ‘Daisy’ poems 89–90, 95 Wright, Fanny 135

United States 6 character of writing 17 Civil War 63–64 Constitution 64 national character 45, 48–49

Vane, Sir Henry 67 Vermeule, Blakey 77 vertical thinking 157 virtue ethics 80–81

Z 94–95 Zeitgeist 122–123 Ziff, Larzer 125, 125–126

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM General Editor j a m e s ch a n d l e r , University of Chicago 1. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters mary a. favret 2. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire nigel leask 3. Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–1830 peter murphy 4. Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution tom furniss 5. In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women julie a. carlson 6. Keats, Narrative and Audience andrew bennett 7. Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre david duff 8. Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 alan richardson 9. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 edward copeland 10. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World timothy morton 11. William Cobbett: The Politics of Style leonora nattrass 12. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 e. j. clery 13. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 elizabeth a. bohls 14. Napoleon and English Romanticism simon bainbridge 15. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom celeste langan

16. Wordsworth and the Geologists john wyatt 17. Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography robert j. griffin 18. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel markman ellis 19. Reading Daughters’ Fictions, 1709–1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth caroline gonda 20. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 andrea k. henderson 21. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition: in Early Nineteenth-Century England kevin gilmartin 22. Reinventing Allegory theresa m. kelley 23. British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 gary dyer 24. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 robert m. ryan 25. De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission margaret russett 26. Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination jennifer ford 27. Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity saree makdisi 28. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake nicholas m. williams 29. Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author sonia hofkosh 30. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition anne janowitz 31. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle jeffrey n. cox 32. Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism gregory dart 33. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 james watt

34. Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism david aram kaiser 35. Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity andrew bennett 36. The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere paul keen 37. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 martin priestman 38. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies helen thomas 39. Imagination under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility john whale 40. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, 1790–1820 michael gamer 41. Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species maureen n. mclane 42. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic timothy morton 43. British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830 miranda j. burgess 44. Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s angela keane 45. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism mark parker 46. Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780–1800 betsy bolton 47. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind alan richardson 48. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution m. o. grenby 49. Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon clara tuite 50. Byron and Romanticism jerome mcgann and james soderholm

51. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland ina ferris 52. Byron, Poetics and History jane stabler 53. Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 mark canuel 54. Fatal Women of Romanticism adriana craciun 55. Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose tim milnes 56. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination barbara taylor 57. Romanticism, Maternity and the Body Politic julie kipp 58. Romanticism and Animal Rights david perkins 59. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History kevis goodman 60. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge timothy fulford, debbie lee and peter j. kitson 61. Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery deirdre coleman 62. Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism andrew m. stauffer 63. Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime cian duffy 64. Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 margaret russett 65. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent daniel e. white 66. The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry christopher r. miller 67. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song simon jarvis 68. Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public andrew franta

69. Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 kevin gilmartin 70. Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London gillian russell 71. The Lake Poets and Professional Identity brian goldberg 72. Wordsworth Writing andrew bennett 73. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry noel jackson 74. Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period john strachan 75. Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life andrea k. henderson 76. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry maureen n. mclane 77. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 angela esterhammer 78. Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, 1760–1830 penny fielding 79. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity david simpson 80. Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 mike goode 81. Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism alexander regier 82. Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity gillen d’arcy wood 83. The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge tim milnes 84. Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange sarah haggarty 85. Real Money and Romanticism matthew rowlinson 86. Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745–1820 juliet shields

87. Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley reeve parker 88. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness susan matthews 89. Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic richard adelman 90. Shelley’s Visual Imagination nancy moore goslee 91. A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829 claire connolly 92. Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 paul keen 93. Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture ann weirda rowland 94. Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–1840: Cockney Adventures gregory dart 95. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure rowan boyson 96. John Clare and Community john goodridge 97. The Romantic Crowd mary fairclough 98. Romantic Women Writers, Revolution and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826 orianne smith 99. Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820 angela wright 100. Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age jon klancher 101. Shelley and the Apprehension of Life ross wilson 102. Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters 1700–1900 susan manning